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mirabellafic2010-09-15 09:50 pm
mirabella) wrote in mirabellafic2010-09-15 09:50 pm
Entry tags:
Akallabêth, Arthur/Eames, PG-13.
Title: Akallabêth
Fandom: Inception, Arthur/Eames, PG-13.
Summary: Ariadne knows their point man has his eccentricities. She just doesn't know where they come from. Neither does Eames, until it's too late.
Warnings: Prior character death. Ends rather miserably.
Notes: The following strip of highlighting contains spoilers for the fic. Some people want to be warned about stuff like this in advance (me, for instance), and some people like to figure things out as they go (which I do too on occasion), so I've blacked it out. I recommend reading it, but it all depends on whether or not you want to see the iceberg coming.
Way back in (I think) round 1 of inception_kink, somebody posted a prompt for a fic where Arthur was actually dead, having been killed by Mal as part of her whole process of severing Cobb's ties to the world. I've lost the link now, and at any rate someone else said they were going to fill it, but I wanted to give it a shot.
There are now sort-of-epilogues here and here.
When Ariadne meets him, she's screaming. Wake me up, wake me up, wake me up, and it doesn't work, it never works in dreams, and there's a knife so close to her now that she can't even see the woman holding it, so it's no wonder that the sound of breaking bones doesn't register at first. Then she's suddenly, miraculously free and the knife is missing her by inches, and strong hands haul her out of the homicidal pile-up like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and hurl her toward Cobb.
Cobb grabs her and they run, down a flight of stairs that she didn't put there and into some sort of control room with a door they can slam shut and lock with a lock that looks like it belongs on a bank vault. She's just opened her mouth to tell him exactly what she thinks of his fucking subconscious when she notices that there's another piece of it in there with them. Jolted into terror again after she'd just dug her way out of it, Ariadne shrieks and slams backward into metal shelving and grabs the first thing off the shelves she can use as a weapon. Cobb holds his hand out and steps between them, facing the projection more than her.
"Hey, it's okay, it's fine," he says, and Ariadne doesn't know which of them he's talking to. By the way the projection is glaring at Cobb, it could be either of them. He's more reasonable than the last one, though, or at least less homicidal, and suddenly Ariadne wonders if he's a projection at all, if it's possible for one part of Cobb's subconscious to hold onto sanity while the all the rest has turned into a murderous mob.
"Fine," the maybe-projection snorts, then shakes his head. "Cobb, get this under control."
"Get what under control?" Ariadne demands.
The maybe-projection turns his attention back to her and gives her a frustrated half-smile. He's younger than Cobb, maybe a few years older than Ariadne, all slicked-back hair and dark eyes and a suit that looks like God created it to wrap him in when he stepped off the half-shell. "I see you've met Mrs. Cobb," he says wryly.
"That's your wife?" Ariadne snaps at Cobb. "Exactly how many people are down here with us? Because we were… we were at the café, and then we were… but I thought it was just us at the warehouse, the two of us and Miles." It's so hard to remember, why is it so hard?
Cobb rubs a hand wearily over his eyes. "Ariadne, this is Arthur," he says. "Arthur, this is Ariadne, our new architect. Ariadne, Arthur is my point man."
"It's nice to meet you," Arthur says, holding out a hand. Belatedly, Ariadne puts down the incomprehensible piece of metal she picked up to bash his head in with and shakes his hand instead. He feels warm and real, not like the people outside who'd tried to tear her apart. His voice sounds like he's tried hard to suppress New York's switchblade vowels and not been entirely successful, strange to Ariadne's ears after Paris and Miles. "Sorry your introduction to the team wasn't more congenial."
"Arthur," Cobb warns. Arthur shoots him an unrepentant look.
"If you think," Ariadne says, and stumbles over the ten thousand things she wants to say right that second, "if you think I'm doing this again, if you think for one minute I'm going to just – open my mind to whatever you have buried and festering down here –"
Cobb flinches, and Arthur's face closes. Well, good. Ariadne just almost got stabbed, almost got torn apart, and someone's damn well going to hear about it. "If you think… I'm leaving. Get me out of here. Make me wake up."
"The timer will go off in a few minutes," Arthur says, and he doesn't sound angry, just subdued. "You can only wake up before then if you die, and I don't think you want Cobb or me shooting you on top of everything else."
"Oh," Ariadne says. "Wonderful."
Cobb and Arthur exchange glances, carrying on a silent conversation. Then there's a door in the wall beside Ariadne, where one hadn't been before. Something heavy hits the outside of the door they came in through.
"I need time with the intel," Arthur tells Cobb, and opens the new door. There's a hallway behind it, long and sterile like a hospital or a morgue, dimly lit by fluorescent lights too far apart.
"You'll have it, but not long. We're heading to Mombasa after this."
Arthur's face goes blank in a way that, paradoxically enough, is very expressive. "Mombasa," he says in the tones of someone trying not to say You utter moron. "That's Cobol's backyard. What's in… Eames? Eames is in Mombasa."
"We need a forger," Cobb says.
"What do you need a forger for?" Ariadne asks.
Arthur straightens his cuffs and gives her a brief, professional smile. "Since you're not going to be working with us, you don't really need to know," he says apologetically, and closes the door behind him. It vanishes without a trace, Arthur and hallway and all.
And then she's opening her eyes to the warehouse, startling with the transition. Miles touches her lightly, sympathetically, on the arm as he removes the needle, but she's too angry with him, with Cobb, with Arthur and strange women and everything to even look at him. Grabbing her things, she storms out of the warehouse and into the bright sun, and she's going to run as far away from here as Paris can take her and she is never, ever, ever coming back.
It's not until she's on the Metro that it occurs to her that she didn't look to see how many lines had been run out of the machine, and she should have. She wonders how Arthur got out of the dream and out of the room before she did, then remembers what he said about getting shot and decides that she never wants to know the answer to that question.
But when she dreams, after that, she doesn't remember the dream in the morning; she only remembers that she wasn't awake in them, and that she's opened her eyes to one more day where she can't spin bridges from mirror glass or make Paris' streets fold in on themselves like a flower closing in the dark.
"There's nothing quite like it, is there?" Arthur says kindly when she goes back to the warehouse.
Rain splatters against the windows, soft and grey. Ariadne glances at it, surprised. "Huh. It sure started raining fast."
Arthur shifts a little to the side, exposing the PASIV device, and Ariadne finds herself eyeing it in wary fascination. "Springtime in Paris," he says ruefully, with a smile so unexpectedly adorable that Ariadne's actually a little sorry he's the wrong sex. "Cobb said I should tell you about mazes while he was gone. Shall we?"
"Do you ever get used to this?" she asks as he slides the needle into her wrist. "The needles, I mean. It's a little scary."
Arthur shrugs and pats her on the wrist. "You can get used to just about anything," he tells her. "Sometimes the needles aren't the worst part."
"Thank you for that reassurance, Arthur," she tries to say, but her eyes are slipping closed already.
He talks to her about Penrose steps, about folding reality in on itself; about Achilles and the tortoise, about the Munchhausen Trilemma, about Escher and Dali. Ariadne watches and learns, her brain racing with the possibilities, and then she asks about Mal.
"She –" Arthur says, stumbling a little in his speech in a way he hasn't all day; and then he says, "She died," as if it's something he doesn't want to remember. There's something shadowed in his eyes now, unease or guilt or anger or something, and Ariadne wonders.
"What was she like when she was alive?" she asks.
"She was lovely," he says; but the shadow doesn't leave his eyes, and Ariadne's almost sorry she asked.
Eventually Arthur says he needs to check something in the stairwell and sets her a paradox to solve, a fountain that runs uphill in apparent defiance of gravity. She means to solve it quickly and follow him; but it's entrancing and she plays with it like a child with soap bubbles for so long that before she knows it the timer has run out on the PASIV and her eyes are opening to the warehouse. The rain stopped in those few minutes, she sees, leaving watery sunlight dripping in through the windows, and to her surprise it's Cobb rolling up the lines and powering down the device.
For a minute, she's confused. She remembers walking into the warehouse and finding a waiting PASIV device and a note from Arthur. She remembers walking into the warehouse and finding Arthur busy with papers and diagrams, humming Mozart under his breath. But she remembers walking into the warehouse, remembers where she was before and how she got there, and remembers how Cobb taught her to tell whether something was a dream. She's groggy from the sedative still, that's all, and she rubs her eyes to try to clear them.
"Learn anything new?" Cobb greets her, flashing her a brief smile. She wonders if any of his smiles ever reach his eyes.
Ariadne wriggles upright, stretching muscles that feel like they should be as stiff as if she'd slept all night. "A lot. Where's Arthur?"
"We have new people flying in," he tells her, which doesn't really answer her question. "And Saito, later. Arthur's gone to set some things up."
Ariadne just looks at him, waiting for whatever's coming next.
"Arthur doesn't do very well with the person end of the business," he says finally. "That's why he's a point man. He's great with information – and with running security in a mark's head – but he's got his quirks. He can't handle having other people around when he's going under or coming out. I think it makes him feel too vulnerable."
There's something sitting next to Cobb on the table. It looks like a child's top; a present for his kids, maybe. "What's that?"
"Nothing," he says, and scoops it into his pocket, out of sight. "Just a good-luck charm."
When Ariadne comes back to the warehouse two days later, it's full of accents and new people. Yusuf is handsome and sweet, and Ariadne can see Oxford's stone arches in his voice as surely as if he were standing in front of them; she loves him a little, and trusts him not at all. Saito knows as well as anyone else that he's the power behind the operation, but he listens carefully to what he's told for all that, and when he thinks no one is looking his sober shell cracks a little to show a quiet little boy with a brilliant new toy to play with. Eames flirts with her disgracefully, in that awful platonic way that men who aren't interested flirt with pretty little girls; Ariadne spends the entire morning hating him, only to be distracted every time he says something insightful, and finally she settles on exasperated tolerance as a happy medium.
There's something different about Cobb, now, with his team around him. He stands straighter, looks people in the eye when he talks to them, and if his smile still doesn't quite reach his eyes, it at least doesn't look painted on by an indifferent puppetmaker. Ariadne watches him, curious, and sees Eames watching him too.
"Where's Arthur?" she asks Cobb after Eames disappears for a while and returns bearing pizza for lunch.
"Australia," Cobb says, distracted by his attempts to keep the toppings from sliding off his pizza slice as he pulls it out of the box. "He's flying back in two days for the initial run-through, but he won't be here long. I need him finding out everything he can about Fischer."
"Arthur?" Yusuf asks curiously around a mouthful of cheese and pepperoni. He's eating the toppings off his pizza and leaving the denuded bread on his plate.
"Our point man," Cobb says.
"And quite a competent one, all things considered," Saito says. "I was sorry to have missed him, in the real world."
"About that," Cobb says, sitting back to clean his fingers fastidiously with a paper napkin. He's not quite looking at any of them. "Arthur… has certain aversions to real-world interactions."
"But I've met him outside of dreams," Ariadne argues. "He was the one who set me up with the PASIV and went down with me the second time I was here."
"I didn't say he never deals with people face to face," Cobb tells her. "But… he was in the military for a while, and things were different after that. He won't tell me what it is exactly."
"What did he do in the military?" Eames asks, setting his pizza down and turning an uncomfortably piercing attention on Cobb.
Cobb shakes his head. "I didn't ask. I know it had to do with the PASIV technology but he's never told me and I don't push him. He'll be there for the run-throughs and with us for the job. He just doesn't want anyone but me around and conscious when he goes under or comes out, and even me he doesn't tolerate very well or very often. He's the best point man in the business, so I don't argue with his eccentricities."
Eames shifts his attention to Ariadne, smiling with genial casualness. She isn't fooled. "But you've met him outside dreamspace? Do tell us about him."
"He's very well-dressed," Ariadne says, then reaches for her drink and changes the subject.
Cobb gives her a small, grateful smile. Ariadne wants to tell him that she didn't do it for him, but it wouldn't be entirely true.
She puts together the first level in a day. It's easier than she thought it would be, and more satisfying. It's only a few blocks, alleys that wind in on themselves and a warehouse in the tight center of a maze, then a bridge along a road that slips out of the maze and hits a straightaway that, at eighty miles an hour, will take exactly fifteen minutes to drive from one end to the other. Yusuf looks a little dubious when she tells him, like he's not sure he can make any promises about obeying a speed limit that low.
The first run-through is the next day, and Arthur nearly misses it. Ariadne has just almost slipped under when the sound of the door grating and quick footsteps snaps her nearly awake again; Arthur leans over to say something to Cobb, nods to the group of barely-conscious people assembled in lawn chairs and struggling to keep their eyes open long enough to peer blearily at him, then settles himself into one and rolls up his sleeve. Then the world shifts around Ariadne and she's standing in the middle of a city street, outside a liquor store, and there are twenty or thirty projections around her but no one familiar.
"Crap," she says aloud. "Where is everyone?"
"They'll be along," Eames says affably, strolling down the sidewalk toward her. "There are only so many places they can get to, no?"
Ariadne sighs and settles in to wait.
"So that was Arthur," Eames muses, leaning against the plate-glass window behind her. "You were right, he dresses very well. Dior, unless I'm mistaken – last season, to be sure, but with a cut like that, who the hell cares?"
Ariadne turns curiously back to him. "You figured that out in a two-second glance when you were barely conscious and your system was full of drugs?"
Eames tilts his head and looks at her. "Well, yes," he says finally. "It's my job to take in details like that. In this business, my life can depend on it. But I'll tell you a secret, do you want to hear it?"
"Sure," Ariadne says.
"Pardon me for saying this, my dear, but if you've ever a day in your life given more thought to menswear than the relative merits of an Ed Hardy sweatshirt, I'll eat Arthur's exquisite Bill Blass tie. I could have told you it was vintage Prada from 1953, and if I'd said it with enough confidence, you'd have believed me. That's the secret. Whatever you say, say it with confidence and people will believe."
Curious now, Ariadne turns to face him. "Cobb said you're a forger. What do forgers do? In this context, I mean."
"Ah," Eames says, looking pleased. "Wait a moment and I'll show you."
He turns to the window and examines his reflection, appearing to carry on some sort of silent conversation with himself. A car backfires a few streets away; Ariadne glances toward it, then back, and –
Eames' reflection, oddly enough, is still Eames. It's odd because the person casting it is a woman, dark-eyed and sultry, wearing a clinging black dress and a pair of shimmering spike heels that even Ariadne lusts after without shame. The woman turns to give Ariadne an oddly Eames-like smirk.
"Like her?" she says in Eames' accent but not his voice.
Ariadne swallows. "…Yes," she manages.
"Ariadne?"
She turns to see Arthur round the corner on her other side, looking a little concerned. His eyes are focused past her, on Eames, and she wonders if he thinks Eames is a projection about to turn hostile. He's wearing a long black trench coat over his suit here, the kind that looks like it might have an arsenal hidden underneath it. Somehow, Ariadne wouldn't be entirely surprised if it did.
"Arthur, did you –" See that, she's about to say; but Eames is walking past her – or maybe there's a better word, like sidle or slink or why yes, I am perfectly okay with public sex – and moving right into Arthur's personal space.
"I am very pleased to meet you, Arthur," Eames croons in a flawless Southern drawl, raising one delicate hand to turn Arthur's face toward him. Arthur's face turns obediently, until his mouth is entirely too close to Eames' to be acceptable in polite company; but his hands are in his pockets, his eyes on the reflection of real-Eames' back in the liquor store window, and he looks more amused than anything else.
"It's a pleasure to meet you too, Mr. Eames," he says, close enough that Eames must be able to feel Arthur's breath on his mouth. "Your reputation precedes you."
Eames laughs, and the skin he's wearing falls away – faster than his hand does. Arthur looks at him, then looks again, sober and arrested, as if Eames wasn't quite what he was expecting to see.
"Observant, aren't we?" Eames says, stepping back.
One of us is, Ariadne doesn't say. But she takes it back when Eames doesn't move back any further than that one step, when they stand there, still in the middle of the thin stream of projections parting to pass them, silently taking each other's measure.
A projection bumps hard into Eames, knocking him back away from Arthur a step. Ariadne looks around worriedly, her heart beating faster at the glares the projections are aiming at them.
"What's setting them off?" she asks nervously. "I'm not changing anything."
"Someone else is," Arthur says. "Probably Cobb."
Eames turns a little, putting his back almost against Arthur. "What can he possibly be changing, the daft bastard? He knows better than that."
"Well, it's that or it was you changing shape in the middle of the street in full view of fifty projections," Arthur says dryly.
"Arthur, I'm wounded," Eames reproaches him. "These are Yusuf's projections. I've changed shape in front of them more often than his girlfriends have changed their clothes, they must be used to me by now."
"There are six of us down here, two of whom aren't experienced dreamers. There's no telling whose projections they are," Arthur corrects him. A burly teen with a septum piercing shoulder-checks him hard, nearly knocking him off-balance. Ariadne edges closer to him and Eames.
"We should find Cobb," she says.
Eames touches her elbow lightly and herds her in between them. "Stay between us," he says softly, his eyes on the projections around them. "Arthur, shall we?"
Somewhere back behind his habitual reserve, Arthur's glance at Eames is lit with appreciation and humor. Ariadne is a little sorry Eames didn't see it. "After you, Mr. Eames."
In a few blocks they've reached the corner where Fischer will be, when they do this for real. The projections around them are still sullen but not threatening, not yet. This street will loop back in on itself within half a block, a dead end, though you wouldn't know it to look; Ariadne's proud of that, and just about to point it out when a white van pulls up with Yusuf at the wheel. Cobb rolls the side door open and gestures them in behind him and Saito. Gentlemanly to the last, Arthur and Eames hand Ariadne into the second row of seats and cram themselves onto the bench at the very back.
Cobb looks tense and tired, like there's some strain here Ariadne's not feeling. Arthur catches his eye and gives him a brief, reassuring nod, and Cobb relaxes a little. "Okay, guys," he says. "We're going to time the straightaway to the bridge."
"From here?" Ariadne asks, leaning forward.
"From the edge of the maze," Cobb corrects. "I don't want to know where the garage is in relation to where we are now."
Behind her, barely audible, Arthur gives a sharp, frustrated sigh.
"At what speed?" Yusuf asks, pulling back out into the stream of cars. It's LA traffic, all right. Ariadne doesn't even think the six of them, putting in all their effort in a world that theoretically should bend to their wills, could clear up Los Angeles midtown traffic, let alone the perpetual gridlock of the 405.
"Eighty," she tells him.
"Ninety," Cobb corrects. "Let's see how short our time gets cut on the second level if you have to speed it up here."
"Ninety it is," Yusuf says, more gleefully than Ariadne is really comfortable with, and turns right at the light with a sharp jerk that throws Arthur and Eames into each other in the back.
"Ow! Careful with that elbow, darling, I like that part of my anatomy."
"Then you should be a little more careful about putting it in harm's way. Where it will be if you wrinkle this suit any more than you just did."
"Ooh, feisty," Eames says happily.
Ariadne hides a grin and glances at Cobb to share the amusement. But the expression on Cobb's face is indecipherable as he shoots a look back at them, and whatever emotions he might be feeling right now, it doesn't look like any of them are good ones.
"Well, bollocks," Eames says ten miles down the stretch of highway leading to the bridge. "Who invited them to the party?"
"Not me," Yusuf says. "Their sirens don't sound right."
"Down to Cobb and Ariadne then, I should think," Eames observes, pulling a gun out of his jacket and checking it in some way that makes it produce a short burst of metallic clicks.
"The projections were already cranky when we left the maze," Arthur warns, one hand inside his own jacket. "These will probably shoot first and ask questions later."
"Oh, wonderful." Ariadne wonders what getting shot feels like. She'll probably know well enough in a few minutes. Amazingly, she's not particularly looking forward to it.
"How are we handling this?" Yusuf asks.
"Keep going," Arthur says. "We'll get rid of them."
A bullet shatters the safety glass in the back window. Ariadne gives an undignified yelp and ducks down to the floor of the van. Arthur swivels around in the back seat, folds his knees neatly up against his shoulders, and kicks the safety glass out and into the road behind them in one sharp, efficient move. Eames' sidelong look in response has more than a little interest in it; but his gun is already coming up, and he fires just as Arthur does, two bullets winging out with a stereo crack that makes metal scream against the road in back of them.
Eames says something to Arthur, too quietly for Ariadne to hear with the wind in her ears. Arthur says it back, whatever it is. They don't quite smile at each other, but she doesn't think they need to.
Huh, she thinks, and smiles for them.
"For the real thing, you'll be out in the middle of the bridge," Cobb tells Yusuf, shading his eyes against the brilliant sun. "You can just back right off it."
"I still don't like this part," Arthur says from where he's sitting on the railing with his trench coat hanging tidily behind him and his back to a hundred-foot drop. There's a breeze coming in off the water, fluttering the tails of his coat a little but not daring to disturb his hair. "Too much can happen in twenty miles. If Yusuf can't get to the bridge…"
Ariadne's going over the drive in her head, trying to figure out where she can put in alternate routes. Designing the dream level was one thing, but walking it, driving it, is opening the design up to her in all new ways. "Yusuf, we should talk when we wake up," she says, and he nods at her.
Yusuf tilts his head at Arthur. "I have to test out the new sedative," he says. "Would you be willing to test it for me? You have a good body weight for it, I think."
Arthur shakes his head, looking a little wistful. "I wish I could," he says.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ariadne sees Cobb give him an odd look.
"Whyever don't you?" Eames asks, leaning against the railing by Arthur. "Not leaving us again, are you?"
"I have a plane to catch, Mr. Eames. Soon, as a matter of fact."
"But you just got off a plane." Eames sounds mock-wounded. Ariadne wonders how much of it is really mocking.
"And now I'm getting back on one," Arthur says with good-humored patience. "I'll be back for the Level 2 walkthrough."
"Do you need to cut out of the dream early?" Cobb asks.
"It wouldn't hurt," Arthur says. "I'll leave the dossiers from this trip in your briefcase."
Cobb nods, hesitates. "I wish you could stay longer," he says quietly.
Arthur looks away, narrowing his eyes against the sun. "Yeah," he says simply. "So do I."
The moment's uncomfortable, at least for Ariadne; she doesn't understand what's going on, but that heavy melancholy that settles between them like a cloud, that's clear enough.
Then Arthur looks back, and it's… not gone, but tidied away, pushed under the table out of sight where everyone can pretend they don't see. "I'll be back in a few days," he tells everyone, briefly, and tips backward off the railing. The wind catches his trench coat and bells it out, but through the fluttering material and the railing bars Ariadne sees half a second where Arthur's body arches like a diver's, all slim straight lines and arrow-sharp precision. And then he's gone, a hundred feet down and back to the lawn chair in the warehouse.
Eames stares off the bridge for a while after Arthur disappears, watching the sunlight dance on the water. "He's something, your Arthur," he says finally, with a small smile tugging at his lips and not-so-grudging respect in his voice.
"Yeah, he is," Cobb answers, looking out over the water as well. There's fondness in his face, and humor, and a little exasperation, and all of it's overshadowed by something else.
For a moment, it almost looks like grief.
By the Monday before the Wednesday of the second-level walkthrough, Ariadne's getting nervous. The level itself is fine, but small; the projections will be crowded into a more compact place, fewer places to hide or duck into, and Ariadne's pretty sure that getting attacked by projections isn't ever going to be her favorite part of dreaming. And as if that weren't enough, Cobb is forever going under after hours, testing out the new compounds or just… doing something. Ariadne doesn't know what, and she wants to, so that she can put some sort of Managing Cobb's Addiction failsafe into her plans if addiction is what it turns out to be.
When she has the chance, she grabs a line and goes under with him; and that's how she finds out that Mallorie Cobb, Mal who was "lovely" once, is the most terrifying projection she's ever met.
"These are memories I have to change," Cobb tells her; but he can't, you can't change memories like you can change dreams, because the past is untouchable. Ariadne wants to tell him that, remind him because he's clearly forgotten… but before she can, he's looking out into the grass at his children and she knows he won't hear anything she says. In fact, it's entirely possible that he's forgotten she's there.
She takes a step back, then another. Cobb's still talking, but she doesn't know right now who he's talking to, and he turns too late to catch her. Ariadne slams the wrought-iron door closed and stabs her finger at the B button.
Her finger hits the back of someone else's hand. Startled half out of her skin, she whirls to see Arthur smiling ruefully down at her.
"What the fuck," she says, pressing her hand over her chest. Her heart is racing underneath her fingertips. "When did you get back to the warehouse?"
He tilts his head and looks at her quizzically. "Warehouse?"
Ariadne backs up flat against the wall. There's nowhere further for her to go. "Shit," she says. "You're one of Cobb's projections. You're not the real Arthur."
Arthur-the-projection spreads his hands. "Hey, I'm not going to hurt you."
He's a good imitation – almost perfect, in the quality of his voice and the thin planes and lines of his face – but she can see differences when she looks closer. This Arthur holds himself a little more rigidly, speaks more flatly, doesn't look at her with any interest at all and precious little recognition. "Then what are you doing down here?" she snaps. "Why does Cobb have an Arthur projection in this, this place?"
The elevator is moving, going nowhere, passing idly by one empty warehouse floor after another. The buttons on the panel light up and fall dark at random. "I'm Cobb's chief of security, down here," he says.
"Security? So what, you're like a prison guard?"
"Not exactly," the projection says, still giving her that affable, vaguely creepy smile.
"So where's the real Arthur?"
The projection lifts an eyebrow. "Right now? Los Angeles."
Ariadne blinks a little, derailed. "LA? Why? What's he doing there?"
"Who knows?" the projection replies with an oddly philosophical shrug. "Resting, I hope."
Ariadne sucks in a breath. "Look, you have to let me down there," she says. "You're supposed to take care of him, right? Well, Cobb's not okay right now. He's not even on the same planet as okay. And whatever he's got buried down there, if he doesn't pull it up into the light and deal with it, it's going to kill him and it might take all of us with him –"
"Ariadne," the projection cuts her off, not unkindly. "I told you – here, I'm Cobb's chief of security."
"And?"
"And you're not going down to the basement. I'm sorry."
Apologetically, he shoots her between the eyes.
"The last time I saw you, you shot me in the face," she says two days later.
Arthur stops ambling up to her and blinks a little, looking amused. "…My bad?"
"How ungentlemanly of you, darling," Eames says, reaching out to give Arthur that casual guy-hello handshake. They can look straight into each other's eyes right over Ariadne's head without even craning their necks.
"Shooting a lady in the face can be very gentlemanly," Arthur says primly. "Under the right circumstances."
"True," Eames concedes, slinging his arm around Ariadne's shoulders. "What was it, love? Were the two of you backed hopelessly into a corner with ravening zombies closing in?"
"I have never in my life seen zombie projections," Arthur tells Eames.
"Consider yourself lucky," Eames says tersely.
"Arthur," Saito says, not shaking hands but nodding. "Will Mr. Cobb be joining us?"
Arthur shakes his head. "Not for the walkthrough. Cobb prefers not to know the layout."
Because if Cobb knows, Mal knows, Ariadne thinks.
"Is that unusual?" Saito asks, looking a little dubious.
"Yes," Eames says.
"It doesn't mean it's not a good precaution," Arthur tells him. "Even I don't want to know the entire layout; just my part of it. It's too risky."
"But you're the point man," Saito points out. "Isn't it your job to know everything?"
He's not challenging, only asking, but Arthur's face tightens a little anyway. Ariadne wonders how much of his opinion on the subject is his own and how much of it is based purely on loyalty to Cobb. "Ideally, yes, Mr. Saito. But not here. Here you take your chances."
"Well, let's get on with taking them then," Eames says cheerfully. "No one wants to live forever, right?"
"Almost everyone wants to live forever. It's a great weakness," Saito says, and smiles.
Ariadne likes Eames very much, now that she's gotten used to the meaningless flirting. She just hates his subconscious.
This is the last part of the run-through: seeing how long it takes to get everything prepared under duress. "Under duress" in this case means riling up Eames' projections until they attack, which is surprisingly easy to do: one improbable fountain appearing in the hotel lobby was all it took to bring what looks like the entire MI5 running. And not only is Eames' subconscious heavily populated, it's full of snipers and black belts.
"You couldn't have told us your subconscious was militarized?" Arthur snaps over his shoulder.
"It's not!" Eames protests, tossing a grenade down into the lobby below. "Not really. It's just… very efficient."
Ariadne glares at him and scrunches herself in closer to Yusuf and Saito behind the planter. She's the only one who doesn't have a gun. "We're stuck up here, you know!" she hisses. "For another fifteen minutes. How long is it going to take them to find the right set of stairs?"
On cue, there's a mighty crash against the barricaded door at the end of the hall.
Eames looks thoughtfully at Arthur. "That'll be a problem if Fischer's projections come up too soon, or trap us between the inner shaft here and the hallways where the rooms are." he says.
"It's a problem now!" Ariadne says between her teeth.
"Nonsense, love, you've got Arthur and me here. We can create a diversion down below and draw them off."
He is not listening. Ariadne sort of wants to beat him to death, but it looks like in another few minutes his projections will have done it for her. "You can't get down below!"
"Oh ye of little faith," Eames says with cheerful scorn, and pulls a pack out of the depths of the planter. Ariadne's pretty sure it wasn't there before. Eames rummages in it and tosses a mass of black leather and buckles to Arthur, who catches it and begins efficiently stripping off his jacket and waistcoat.
"Is that what I think it is?" Saito asks dubiously.
"Probably," Eames answers, stripping down to his undershirt and pulling on a harness of his own. He pulls out a bundle of rope and pulleys, tosses it to Arthur, then hooks himself up to one while Arthur retrieves a duffel bag full of weaponry out of what appears to be thin air.
There are D-rings set into the walls on either side of the planter, a few yards apart. Ariadne didn't put them there. Incredulous, she watches as Arthur and Eames hook themselves up and divide a handful of machine guns of some sort between them.
"God, they're like children," Yusuf mutters fondly.
"I heard that," Eames reproves him, sighting at the ceiling down the barrel of his gun.
Something slams against the door again, nearly breaking it. "Diversion!" Ariadne reminds them.
"Ready, darling?"
"When you are, Mr. Eames."
"On three, then," Eames says, and jumps the railing with Arthur half a step behind him.
The gunfire is deafening. Ariadne gives it three seconds before Arthur and Eames wake up in the warehouse; but it goes on longer than that, and keeps going, and then it's reduced to sporadic shots, and then everything is silent again.
If Eames dies, the dream will collapse. Keeping a weather eye on the glass ceiling arching overhead, Ariadne crawls to the railing and looks down through the shattered glass, expecting to see Arthur and Eames dangling limply in space like gory piñatas.
They're dangling, but not limply. Arthur's revolving slowly, making sure the coast is clear, and Eames is rotating to cover Arthur's blind side as best he can. Apparently satisfied, Eames laughs and swings over to catch Arthur's rope a foot or so above Arthur's head. The movement leaves Eames' legs swimming through thin air to propel the push; before they can pull him back, he locks his ankles lightly around Arthur's lower back.
Arthur shifts his gun out of the way and looks up at Eames to say something smug. Eames laughs again and doesn't let go, and doesn't let go, and the two of them hang there with the setting sun shining on them through half-broken twenty-story windows, drifting slowly through the air and watching each other.
Ariadne grins a little and crawls back to lead Saito and Yusuf to the inner rooms.
On the third level they separate, Ariadne with Cobb, Arthur with Eames, Saito with Yusuf, who's playing Fischer's role.
Everyone makes the rendezvous on time. Ariadne pretends not to notice that Arthur's usually immaculate hair looks like someone dragged their fingers through it, or that there's a bite mark almost hidden under Eames' collar. Or that they both look dazed and a little smudged, and far too sleepy and content to have spent the last two hours pretending to outrun projections.
Cobb goes white when he sees them, though, and for the rest of the time they're down there he snaps at both of them when he speaks to them at all. He sends Arthur topside first, like a little boy being sent to his room; when the rest of them come out, Arthur has already cleared out of the warehouse, headed for God knows where.
He's left without so much as leaving a note for Eames. Eames is pissed off and frustrated and, Ariadne suspects, a little hurt. She doesn't know how things are between Cobb and Arthur, if they're even in contact with each other, but it's days before Eames and Cobb can look at each other without bristling, and longer than that before every word Eames says to Cobb isn't dipped like quills in poison.
None of this makes things any easier, of course, when everything goes to hell.
Ariadne's never been nearly run over by a train before. She thinks, incredulously, that she might actually throw up.
Cobb recovers faster than she does, which is lucky because he's behind the wheel. While her whole body is still reverberating crazily with the echo of steel on steel, Cobb throws the car into reverse and speeds off to catch up to Arthur's taxi. The taxi is throwing itself against the wall of other cars like a pissed-off bull, slamming them out of the way; Cobb throws their car into the fray, helping to clear a path, and Ariadne has never, ever been so glad that dying in dreams doesn't mean dying in reality. She just wishes she could get the message across to her half-in-shock body.
"What the fuck is happening?" she demands when they break free of the traffic. "Where did all these people with guns come from?"
"Fischer's subconscious is militarized," Cobb says between his teeth. "Someone's taught him how to fight off attacks like this."
"And Arthur didn't find that out in all his research?" That doesn't seem like him.
"I don't know what the fuck happened, can we just drop this until we get to the warehouse?" Cobb shouts. Ariadne sits back, fuming.
When they get to the warehouse, though, Saito's been shot, and it looks an awful lot to Ariadne's unpracticed eye like he's dying, and Cobb is so furious that Ariadne doesn't even want him near her in case she winds up having to shoot him in the face.
"How the hell did this happen? You're supposed to know this!" he's screaming.
She waits for Arthur to apologize, to try to calm the situation down, because it is his fault, and how could you miss something like this? But Arthur comes off the ground like a prizefighter at the first bell and gets right in Cobb's face.
"I fucking well couldn't have known it, Cobb, as you are goddamned well aware!"
Cobb looks like he wants to shout something back and it's killing him that he can't. He settles for glaring at Arthur instead, but there's something other than anger there now. With sinking despair, Ariadne identifies it as guilt, and oh God, what more can there possibly be, but even as she opens her mouth Eames gets there first.
"Why couldn't he have known, Cobb?" he asks, too quietly, his eyes traveling back and forth between Arthur and Cobb.
"Let's get Saito into the back room," Cobb says tightly.
"He's unconscious, leave him where he is for a moment," Eames snaps. "Cobb? Why couldn't Arthur have known?"
The silence in the garage is far too loud. Arthur shifts uneasily and won't quite look at anyone.
"Arthur?" Eames asks. Pleads.
When realization hits Ariadne, driven by something in their faces she can't even identify, it doesn't feel like thunder or lightning or anything else she's heard it compared to. It feels like suffocation, like fast-sinking quicksand. Arthur, always the last to enter the dream and the first to leave. Never in the warehouse with the rest of them even after he and Eames became whatever they were. Vanishing without a word left behind in the real world for the man he looked at in dreams like he was the sun in the east. Making an error that precise, perfectionist Arthur would never have made except under graver stress than she'd ever seen him.
Arthur, the head of security in Cobb's unconscious.
"He couldn't have known because he's not real," she says, silently begging Cobb to contradict her. "Because he only knows what Cobb knows, and he can only put together the information Cobb already has."
"Are you bloody serious," Yusuf breathes.
Cobb's silent. So is Arthur, and Ariadne's eyes sting with tears.
"You're a fucking projection," Eames says, and he sounds so betrayed that the tears spill down Ariadne's face after all. "You're not real."
"That's not true," Arthur protests, staring at Eames with a look on his face that pleads openly for understanding, for forgiveness, for something. "I mean – not in – I'm as real as I need to be, here. I'm as real as that bullet that took Saito down –"
"Which is to say, my love, you're not real at all," Eames whispers. "Just very, very good at making us think you are."
Cobb is staring back and forth between them, blinking incredulously like he understands what's going on, he just can't quite figure out how.
"You lied to us," Ariadne tells him. "Both of you. I don't – I don't know how you even pulled this off."
Cobb gives a short, humorless laugh. "There's nothing more resilient than an idea. Once it's planted, nothing's harder to shake. It can shape the whole way you see the world. It can even be a folie a deux, it can spread to other people, under the right circumstances. Well, here's me giving Patient Zero an idea. It's a very simple idea: Arthur's real, and you've met him."
"Fucking brilliant," Yusuf says in a tone that suggests that Cobb's brilliance has a lot to answer for. "I was completely fooled."
"Why?" Ariadne demands.
"Because I'm still the best point man in the business," Arthur answers, but he's looking at Eames, not at her. "I'm the only one he could trust with something like this."
"Still?" Eames asks. "So am I correct in assuming that you did exist at one point?"
"Yes," Arthur says. "I did."
Cobb slides his jacket off, moving like an old man, and kneels down beside Saito to put pressure on his wound. "When Mal died," he says.
Arthur watches him, dark eyes full of grief.
Cobb pauses a moment, takes a deep, shuddering breath. "When Mal killed herself, she wanted to make sure I went with her. That there was nothing tying me here anymore. She had herself declared sane by three different psychiatrists and then left a letter with our attorney saying that she was afraid of me, that I'd threatened to kill her, so if she turned up dead the kids would be taken away from me. And she…"
Ariadne almost, almost, doesn't want to hear what's coming. Not with Arthur standing right there, solid and capable and full of grace.
"I met Arthur when he was sixteen and his name wasn't Arthur yet," Cobb says, lifting a hand to examine the fingertips stained red with Saito's blood. Gently, he puts his hand back down and presses on the wound. "He had a summer internship at a sleep research lab I was working with. He was brilliant, sharp as a fucking tack, the most organized teenager I'd ever met in my life. When the summer was over he was offered a job, and then when he was seventeen his parents were killed in a pile-up on an icy freeway. He hid out at my house for a few months until he turned eighteen and couldn't be put in foster care, and then he stayed a while longer. Took over running the place, too. I never paid another bill late and my lawn was the greenest one on the block. I'd tell him he didn't have to and he'd just give me this look, like he was sorry for me for being too dumb to take care of myself."
Arthur's mouth quirks in a small, wistful smile. Not looking at Arthur, or at any of them, Cobb raises his hand and wipes at his face, leaving diluted red streaks across his cheek.
"God, I loved that kid. We loved him, me and Mal. We fought like cats and dogs over him joining the military, but then the PASIV technology came around and we were right back working together like he'd never left. Mal… Mal knew I'd never do that to him, I'd never kill myself and leave him behind to hate me for it."
"I'd never have hated you," Arthur whispers. Cobb doesn't hear him.
"So she killed him," Cobb says, and stops to swallow whatever's in his throat. "She called him up to our suite before I got there and shot him with my gun and she just… just left him there on the floor. Just left him there with a hole between his eyes and the back of his head spread all over the sheets like – like she was just waking him up, like it didn't matter because she'd open her eyes and he'd be right there taking the needle out of his arm."
"My God," Eames says. He's so white that Ariadne wants to make him go and sit down, but she can't move.
Cobb drops his head over Saito's still form, hiding his face. He's crying now, dropping tears tinged with Saito's blood down onto his shirt. "It wasn't her fault," he says. "She didn't know. She didn't think he'd really die. But he did. He did."
There's silence for a long time before Eames clears his throat. "Fucking hell," he says finally, and pulls his gun. "I'm out of this, and I'm taking Saito with me, poor bastard."
Arthur's hand closes on Eames' wrist and twists the gun out of it before Ariadne even realizes where he's going. "You can't – Eames! You can't."
Eames punches him dead in the face. "And why not?" he shouts when Arthur trips a step backward. "Because you need a forger? Well, fuck you, Cobb. Fuck you and this job and your fucking stupid, beautiful unconscious and your point men who don't bloody exist. I'm out."
"You can't," Yusuf says bleakly. "We're too heavily sedated. If you die here, you won't wake up."
"You'll just drop into Limbo," Cobb says, making himself look up at Eames.
Ariadne stares at them. She'd wonder what the fuck else was going to happen, but right this second she almost doesn't want to know. "What does that mean? What's in Limbo?"
"Nothing but pure, raw unconscious," Arthur tells her. "And whatever was left behind by anyone else sharing the dream who's been in Limbo before. Cobb, in this case."
"You son of a bitch, you knew about this?" Eames snaps at Yusuf.
"Well, I didn't know our point man wasn't real, did I?" Yusuf demands.
"I told you," Arthur says, but his eyes are on Eames and the back of his hand is pressed against his jaw where Eames punched him. "Down here, I'm as real as you are."
"We don't have time for this," Cobb grates out. "The only way out is forward, okay? We finish the job as fast as we can and we get out. Arthur, let's go talk to Fischer. Eames, you and Yusuf get Saito in the back and find a first aid kit, and hurry. You've got an hour to get Fischer prepped for the next level."
"An hour? I was supposed to have –"
"You want out of this? Then move."
"Fuck you," Eames snarls, but he moves to grab Saito's shoulders anyway, nodding at Yusuf to grab his feet. Watching them go, Arthur opens his mouth like he wants to say something that wouldn't be loud enough to Eames to hear anyway; but in the end, he stays silent.
Then Arthur and Cobb are gone too, leaving Ariadne standing alone in the middle of the garage with the rain beating against the windows outside.
Eames doesn't look at Arthur the whole time he's putting Browning on like a costume. Arthur looks at him, though, like he can't keep his eyes away, keeping just out of sight of Eames' reflection so he can watch without being seen. Ariadne watches him watch, and watches the gentleness in his hands when he and Cobb pretend to drag Browning into the room where Fischer is being held.
Ariadne likes Fischer. Any man who reacts to being kidnapped by rolling his eyes and throwing promised money to his kidnappers like they were little boys asking for an advance on their allowance is someone worth knowing, she thinks. Not that she'll ever be able to know him, ever be able to so much as speak to him in passing in the real world. It's a shame, like so many other things about this miserable situation.
When they come back, Arthur pulls off his ski mask and drops it on the floor, settling down into Eames' abandoned chair to wait. "Saito was supposed to take Fischer into the bunker while Eames held the second level," he says to Cobb. "Even with me holding off security on Level 3, I don't think Saito's going to be able to cover Fischer's back and set the charges for the kick, not in the condition he's in."
Cobb runs a hand through his hair, tossing his own discarded ski mask to land on a metal bench. "Change of plans," he says. "Ariadne, does Eames know the third level?"
"He helped me design it," Ariadne says, a little grudgingly. His suggestions were good ones, there's no arguing with that, but she's still annoyed that she didn't come up with them herself.
"Does Saito know the second?"
"Not as well as Eames does, but he knows it. We walked through it a few times."
"And you," Cobb says to Arthur. "Would you be able to keep him alive until the kick?"
Arthur stares at him for a minute. "Without you as either the dreamer or the subject? Cobb, I won't even exist on that level. As soon as you go under, he'll be…" He trails off abruptly, looking chagrined.
Cobb gives him a wry look. "Defenseless except for that small army of militarized projections who'll take out Fischer's security as fast as they got the drop on you, exactly. As long as he stays alive, the second level is probably safer with him than it would be with any of us. And if the charges are already set for the drop he only has to push a button."
"It's too risky."
"He might live until the kick," Yusuf says. "If he's very still and very careful, and stays calm."
"Then let's make it so he doesn't have to move," Cobb says. "Once you give the signal, do not go off that bridge a second earlier than we timed it. The explosives won't cut it if there's no gravity."
"The explosives won't go off if he dies," Arthur says. "Maybe isn't good enough when you're talking about being trapped in icy nowhere for ten years."
"Give me some other options," Cobb says. Arthur's silent for a long moment, thinking, then shakes his head slowly. Ariadne can't think of any either, and she bites her lip in frustration.
Yusuf nods, resigned, and gets up to check on Saito.
Cobb moves a few steps closer to Arthur; close enough that maybe they think Ariadne is out of earshot. She's not.
"You know, I don't think I'm in love with Eames on any level of my brain," he says, trying for teasing and only managing strained and unhappy.
Arthur gives him a smile to match. "You're not," he says. "But you know that I would have been, in time."
There are projections shooting at Arthur, making his forehead crease in increasing frustration. Even as pissed off as he is, Eames can't let that go, though Ariadne can tell he's tempted to. It takes him a while, furtive glances cast in Arthur's direction as he argues with himself; but in the end he goes to help, as she figured he would.
"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."
Eames' voice breaks a little on the last word; whether from the sheer weight of the irony in his voice or for other reasons, Ariadne isn't quite sure. But he's talking to Arthur again, even if he's not looking at him, and Arthur watches him go until he catches Ariadne's eye and has to look away.
Saito dreams the second level. He's not pleased about this, but even he concedes the logic of it. And he trusts Cobb, even now, even after Eames pulls him aside and talks to him for a few minutes where no one else can hear. Or if he doesn't trust Cobb, exactly, he at least trusts his own ability to find out if Cobb lies about performing the inception.
In his subconscious, they're all dressed crisply, professionally, a little unimaginatively, like a bullet train full of salarymen. (Except for Eames, who is dressed like nothing on Earth, but exceptions have to be made for Eames. Ariadne figured that out within five minutes of meeting him.) They blend in well with Fischer's projections. Ariadne's grateful for that; she feels too exposed, sitting here on the stairs, even with Arthur right beside her.
"What happens to you?" she asks, keeping her eyes on the door to the bar. "Is it just… like dreaming, all the time? You only exist when Cobb's under, so you just open your eyes in one dream after another?"
Arthur gives her an enigmatic smile. "Something like that."
"What's going to happen to you when he dies? Dies for real, I mean."
He shrugs, glancing idly back up the stairs. "You know, a lot of cultures believe that you're never really dead until the last person who remembers you dies. Basically it's like believing that as long as you're a projection in someone's subconscious, anyone's subconscious, you're immortal."
"But," she says helplessly. "Do you know? I mean, if I went home tonight and had a dream about you, would it really be you?"
"Ariadne," he says gently. "The worst thing that could have happened to me already has."
"And losing Eames, that won't be worse?"
Arthur flinches a little and doesn't look at her. "Than having a woman I loved like a sister shoot me between the eyes?" he asks.
It's a rhetorical question. That doesn't mean there's no answer. Or that Ariadne knows what the answer is.
Eames walks by them, heels clicking sharply on the tile, wearing his forgery like a shield. His eyes flick up to Arthur anyway, just once, before he turns away again with the forgery's chin firming in an oddly Eames-like gesture.
When Ariadne turns back, Arthur is watching Eames go, and the look on his face makes her turn quickly away.
Fischer's projection of Browning feeds the idea of the will back to him so flawlessly that Ariadne's amazed, and a little undone with vicarious pride at how well Eames' plan is working. But she doesn't have time to bask in success for long before it's time to transition to the next level. She's already slid the needle into her arm and is blinking sleepily against the drug when Arthur kneels down next to Eames and takes his needle away from him.
"So you're finally going to be here when I go under," Eames says, trying for bitter and only managing tired. "That's a great gesture of trust, I hear."
Arthur swabs the inside of Eames' wrist, fingertips trailing along Eames' skin where they don't, strictly speaking, need to. "You have no idea how much I wanted to tell you," he said quietly.
"Do you need the drugs? Or do you just follow bloody Cobb wherever he goes?"
"I follow Cobb," Arthur says, and slips the needle into Eames' wrist. "Do you need me to tell you that I wish I didn't?"
The drugs are fast-acting. Eames blinks sleepily up at Arthur, struggling to stay awake. "I'm babysitting Fischer, so the security's all yours," he says. "They're going to run you down hard."
Arthur smiles at him. "And I will lead them on a merry chase."
Eames' answering smile is the first real one Ariadne's seen from him in a while. "Just get back to the hospital before the kick."
"Go to sleep, Mr. Eames," Arthur says.
When Ariadne opens her eyes to the snow, the first thing she sees is Eames' hand sliding around the back of Arthur's neck. They kiss once, hard and desperate, before Eames pulls back.
"You feel so real," he whispers. "So fucking real."
"I could be real enough for you, if you'd let me," Arthur whispers back, so softly Ariadne can barely hear him; and then he's gone, off down the mountain with Eames watching after him.
Fischer waits for a minute, then puts a hand on Eames' shoulder. "We should go," he says kindly.
"Yeah," Eames says after a moment. "Right. Let's get on with it, then."
Ariadne watches them ski away, and then watches Cobb watch them. "You should have told us," she says. "Why didn't you?"
"I should have done a lot of things," Cobb answers, which isn't really an answer at all.
They're so close, so fucking close, when Mal drops out of the ceiling behind Fischer. Cobb sucks in a breath, finger frozen on the trigger, unable to pull it, and –
– Arthur steps out of nowhere, moving between Mal and Eames, who turned around at the last second and put himself between Fischer and Mal. Arthur's gun is raised, pointed dead at Mal, unwavering. Ariadne can't hear what he's saying.
Mal smiles, bitter and unutterably sad, and raises her own gun, and so many things happen at once:
"Not this time," Cobb whispers, and fires. Mal, firing while Cobb's bullet is in flight. Eames, taking Arthur down to the floor and out of its path. Blood sprays onto the wall behind them as Mal drops, and Ariadne's scream freezes in her throat and almost chokes her.
"Arthur," Cobb says, and runs.
It takes them seconds to reach the saferoom. By the time they get there Arthur has stripped Eames' jacket open and is leaning on him hard, putting pressure on a gory chest wound, bent down so his forehead almost touches Eames'. There's a pool of red spreading slowly underneath them, soaking the knees of Arthur's pants.
"You stupid bastard," he's chanting raggedly. "Eames, you stupid fuck. If you die here…"
Eames looks fondly up at him and touches Arthur's white-knuckled hands, smearing blood over them both. "Steady on, love. Just a scratch."
But it isn't. Ariadne can hear the sucking whistle of a lung wound even from where she is.
"She wouldn't have killed me," Arthur says. "I'd just… Eames, I'd just reboot."
"She'd have hurt you," Eames whispers. "You can't tell me being shot in a dream doesn't hurt like buggery."
"You fucking idiot," Arthur says desperately. "I'm not real."
Eames smiles. "Down here, darling, you're as real as you need to be," he says. "As real as the bullet that just took me down."
Ariadne can't watch anymore. Whirling on Fischer, she shoves him toward the blast doors. "Open the room. Hurry! We don't have time!"
Fischer moves toward the doors, and Ariadne turns on Cobb. "You find a way to fix him," she hisses. "You find a way, because Eames is holding this level and if he dies it'll collapse and we'll lose everything, including Eames."
"If he dies," Arthur says, looking up at her. Ariadne takes an involuntary step back. "If he dies here, we're going down to Limbo after him."
"Arthur –" Cobb begins.
"You thought Mal was a pain in your ass," Arthur says. "Cobb, if anything happens to him you will never be able to go under again. Because I will find you, wherever you are, whatever precautions you take, and I will rip you the fuck apart."
"Arthur," Eames says, tightening his hand.
"How long can you live without dreaming, Cobb?" Arthur asks.
Cobb strips off his gloves and kneels down beside Arthur and Eames. "Hey," he says gently. "Stop. It's a few more minutes, that's all. Eames can hold out that long."
Ariadne looks back over her shoulder. Fischer is talking to his father, the safe forgotten by the bedside, and Ariadne is very happy he's reconciling himself to his father's memory but if he doesn't get a move on she is going to start screaming.
"Right, Eames?" Cobb asks, lifting Arthur's hand a little to look at the wound.
"I was… rather counting on it, yes," Eames says, trailing off in midsentence to take a pained, whistling breath. "And on your…. wife being a worse shot, to tell the truth…"
He coughs, sending a fine spray of blood over Arthur's white sleeve. Behind her, Fischer's father is gesturing, pained but urgent, toward the safe. Oh, come on, come on, Ariadne pleads silently.
"Go tell Fischer to hurry up," Arthur snaps at her.
"No," Cobb says. Eames is shaking his head, eyes drifting closed. "It has to be all him or it won't take and this will all have been for nothing."
Outside, Ariadne can hear shouts and snowmobiles getting closer by the second. A bullet shatters the glass over her head, going wide. In a minute they'll find the tunnel. "We can't wait much longer," she warns, staring back into the hospital room.
Fischer opens the safe.
"Eames," Arthur says tightly.
They've found the tunnel, now; Ariadne can hear them. They're coming in cautiously, not knowing what's waiting for them, but they're coming. Cobb scrambles past her, out of sight of the tunnel opening, his bloody hands slipping on a grenade.
"Eames!" Arthur says.
"…believe you're needed elsewhere, darling…" Eames manages, not opening his eyes.
Cobb pulls the pin out of the grenade and throws it into the tunnel. In the room, Fischer's father is dead. A second wave of projections is coming into the tunnel, scrambling right over the bodies of their comrades, and Fischer bends his head over his father's hand and cries.
"He's done, we have to –" Ariadne begins, and a spray of gunfire cuts her off, throwing sparks from the metal over her head.
"My cue, I think," Eames says hoarsely, then presses the button on the detonator just as bullets shear through the heavy lighting fixture above him. Sparks rain down on him and Arthur; Arthur rolls onto Eames, shielding him as the fixture falls and the floor drops out from under Ariadne's feet and she's –
Waking. Waking. Waking.
Her heart is about to pound out of her chest, and her hands shake so hard that she can barely keep her grip on her armrests. The inside of the plane is the most unreal thing she's seen today – Cobb, surfacing with a gasp; Yusuf, blinking his eyes open; Saito, sleepy and satisfied, reaching for his phone. Fischer still asleep.
Eames, one hand on his ribs, watching the empty seat across from him without an ounce of hope in his eyes.
Arthur's not there. He never was. He's gone back to his grave in Los Angeles like an unquiet ghost at daybreak, and without knowing his real name, Ariadne couldn't find him if she tried. She wonders if Eames will.
"Hot towel?" the stewardess asks. Ariadne says yes because she doesn't know what else to say.
"Where will you go?" she asks, after.
Eames leans on an empty luggage trolley and looks out the window at the bright California sun. He's not making any move to go through customs. "Back to Mombasa, I think," he says.
"What are you –" Ariadne begins, then stops, not sure what she wants to ask, only that she wants to know the answer.
Eames gives her a bright, fond smile. It might look real if she didn't know him. "Goodbye, my sweet. Get hold of Yusuf if you need me. I fancy he'll know where to find me."
He walks off, past Fischer looking dazedly down at his Blackberry, past Dom headed for customs and his children, past Saito with his slim designer suitcase, vanishing into the crowd. Ariadne watches him go until she can't see him anymore.
She doesn't think she'll see him again.
Fandom: Inception, Arthur/Eames, PG-13.
Summary: Ariadne knows their point man has his eccentricities. She just doesn't know where they come from. Neither does Eames, until it's too late.
Warnings: Prior character death. Ends rather miserably.
Notes: The following strip of highlighting contains spoilers for the fic. Some people want to be warned about stuff like this in advance (me, for instance), and some people like to figure things out as they go (which I do too on occasion), so I've blacked it out. I recommend reading it, but it all depends on whether or not you want to see the iceberg coming.
Way back in (I think) round 1 of inception_kink, somebody posted a prompt for a fic where Arthur was actually dead, having been killed by Mal as part of her whole process of severing Cobb's ties to the world. I've lost the link now, and at any rate someone else said they were going to fill it, but I wanted to give it a shot.
There are now sort-of-epilogues here and here.
When Ariadne meets him, she's screaming. Wake me up, wake me up, wake me up, and it doesn't work, it never works in dreams, and there's a knife so close to her now that she can't even see the woman holding it, so it's no wonder that the sound of breaking bones doesn't register at first. Then she's suddenly, miraculously free and the knife is missing her by inches, and strong hands haul her out of the homicidal pile-up like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and hurl her toward Cobb.
Cobb grabs her and they run, down a flight of stairs that she didn't put there and into some sort of control room with a door they can slam shut and lock with a lock that looks like it belongs on a bank vault. She's just opened her mouth to tell him exactly what she thinks of his fucking subconscious when she notices that there's another piece of it in there with them. Jolted into terror again after she'd just dug her way out of it, Ariadne shrieks and slams backward into metal shelving and grabs the first thing off the shelves she can use as a weapon. Cobb holds his hand out and steps between them, facing the projection more than her.
"Hey, it's okay, it's fine," he says, and Ariadne doesn't know which of them he's talking to. By the way the projection is glaring at Cobb, it could be either of them. He's more reasonable than the last one, though, or at least less homicidal, and suddenly Ariadne wonders if he's a projection at all, if it's possible for one part of Cobb's subconscious to hold onto sanity while the all the rest has turned into a murderous mob.
"Fine," the maybe-projection snorts, then shakes his head. "Cobb, get this under control."
"Get what under control?" Ariadne demands.
The maybe-projection turns his attention back to her and gives her a frustrated half-smile. He's younger than Cobb, maybe a few years older than Ariadne, all slicked-back hair and dark eyes and a suit that looks like God created it to wrap him in when he stepped off the half-shell. "I see you've met Mrs. Cobb," he says wryly.
"That's your wife?" Ariadne snaps at Cobb. "Exactly how many people are down here with us? Because we were… we were at the café, and then we were… but I thought it was just us at the warehouse, the two of us and Miles." It's so hard to remember, why is it so hard?
Cobb rubs a hand wearily over his eyes. "Ariadne, this is Arthur," he says. "Arthur, this is Ariadne, our new architect. Ariadne, Arthur is my point man."
"It's nice to meet you," Arthur says, holding out a hand. Belatedly, Ariadne puts down the incomprehensible piece of metal she picked up to bash his head in with and shakes his hand instead. He feels warm and real, not like the people outside who'd tried to tear her apart. His voice sounds like he's tried hard to suppress New York's switchblade vowels and not been entirely successful, strange to Ariadne's ears after Paris and Miles. "Sorry your introduction to the team wasn't more congenial."
"Arthur," Cobb warns. Arthur shoots him an unrepentant look.
"If you think," Ariadne says, and stumbles over the ten thousand things she wants to say right that second, "if you think I'm doing this again, if you think for one minute I'm going to just – open my mind to whatever you have buried and festering down here –"
Cobb flinches, and Arthur's face closes. Well, good. Ariadne just almost got stabbed, almost got torn apart, and someone's damn well going to hear about it. "If you think… I'm leaving. Get me out of here. Make me wake up."
"The timer will go off in a few minutes," Arthur says, and he doesn't sound angry, just subdued. "You can only wake up before then if you die, and I don't think you want Cobb or me shooting you on top of everything else."
"Oh," Ariadne says. "Wonderful."
Cobb and Arthur exchange glances, carrying on a silent conversation. Then there's a door in the wall beside Ariadne, where one hadn't been before. Something heavy hits the outside of the door they came in through.
"I need time with the intel," Arthur tells Cobb, and opens the new door. There's a hallway behind it, long and sterile like a hospital or a morgue, dimly lit by fluorescent lights too far apart.
"You'll have it, but not long. We're heading to Mombasa after this."
Arthur's face goes blank in a way that, paradoxically enough, is very expressive. "Mombasa," he says in the tones of someone trying not to say You utter moron. "That's Cobol's backyard. What's in… Eames? Eames is in Mombasa."
"We need a forger," Cobb says.
"What do you need a forger for?" Ariadne asks.
Arthur straightens his cuffs and gives her a brief, professional smile. "Since you're not going to be working with us, you don't really need to know," he says apologetically, and closes the door behind him. It vanishes without a trace, Arthur and hallway and all.
And then she's opening her eyes to the warehouse, startling with the transition. Miles touches her lightly, sympathetically, on the arm as he removes the needle, but she's too angry with him, with Cobb, with Arthur and strange women and everything to even look at him. Grabbing her things, she storms out of the warehouse and into the bright sun, and she's going to run as far away from here as Paris can take her and she is never, ever, ever coming back.
It's not until she's on the Metro that it occurs to her that she didn't look to see how many lines had been run out of the machine, and she should have. She wonders how Arthur got out of the dream and out of the room before she did, then remembers what he said about getting shot and decides that she never wants to know the answer to that question.
But when she dreams, after that, she doesn't remember the dream in the morning; she only remembers that she wasn't awake in them, and that she's opened her eyes to one more day where she can't spin bridges from mirror glass or make Paris' streets fold in on themselves like a flower closing in the dark.
"There's nothing quite like it, is there?" Arthur says kindly when she goes back to the warehouse.
Rain splatters against the windows, soft and grey. Ariadne glances at it, surprised. "Huh. It sure started raining fast."
Arthur shifts a little to the side, exposing the PASIV device, and Ariadne finds herself eyeing it in wary fascination. "Springtime in Paris," he says ruefully, with a smile so unexpectedly adorable that Ariadne's actually a little sorry he's the wrong sex. "Cobb said I should tell you about mazes while he was gone. Shall we?"
"Do you ever get used to this?" she asks as he slides the needle into her wrist. "The needles, I mean. It's a little scary."
Arthur shrugs and pats her on the wrist. "You can get used to just about anything," he tells her. "Sometimes the needles aren't the worst part."
"Thank you for that reassurance, Arthur," she tries to say, but her eyes are slipping closed already.
He talks to her about Penrose steps, about folding reality in on itself; about Achilles and the tortoise, about the Munchhausen Trilemma, about Escher and Dali. Ariadne watches and learns, her brain racing with the possibilities, and then she asks about Mal.
"She –" Arthur says, stumbling a little in his speech in a way he hasn't all day; and then he says, "She died," as if it's something he doesn't want to remember. There's something shadowed in his eyes now, unease or guilt or anger or something, and Ariadne wonders.
"What was she like when she was alive?" she asks.
"She was lovely," he says; but the shadow doesn't leave his eyes, and Ariadne's almost sorry she asked.
Eventually Arthur says he needs to check something in the stairwell and sets her a paradox to solve, a fountain that runs uphill in apparent defiance of gravity. She means to solve it quickly and follow him; but it's entrancing and she plays with it like a child with soap bubbles for so long that before she knows it the timer has run out on the PASIV and her eyes are opening to the warehouse. The rain stopped in those few minutes, she sees, leaving watery sunlight dripping in through the windows, and to her surprise it's Cobb rolling up the lines and powering down the device.
For a minute, she's confused. She remembers walking into the warehouse and finding a waiting PASIV device and a note from Arthur. She remembers walking into the warehouse and finding Arthur busy with papers and diagrams, humming Mozart under his breath. But she remembers walking into the warehouse, remembers where she was before and how she got there, and remembers how Cobb taught her to tell whether something was a dream. She's groggy from the sedative still, that's all, and she rubs her eyes to try to clear them.
"Learn anything new?" Cobb greets her, flashing her a brief smile. She wonders if any of his smiles ever reach his eyes.
Ariadne wriggles upright, stretching muscles that feel like they should be as stiff as if she'd slept all night. "A lot. Where's Arthur?"
"We have new people flying in," he tells her, which doesn't really answer her question. "And Saito, later. Arthur's gone to set some things up."
Ariadne just looks at him, waiting for whatever's coming next.
"Arthur doesn't do very well with the person end of the business," he says finally. "That's why he's a point man. He's great with information – and with running security in a mark's head – but he's got his quirks. He can't handle having other people around when he's going under or coming out. I think it makes him feel too vulnerable."
There's something sitting next to Cobb on the table. It looks like a child's top; a present for his kids, maybe. "What's that?"
"Nothing," he says, and scoops it into his pocket, out of sight. "Just a good-luck charm."
When Ariadne comes back to the warehouse two days later, it's full of accents and new people. Yusuf is handsome and sweet, and Ariadne can see Oxford's stone arches in his voice as surely as if he were standing in front of them; she loves him a little, and trusts him not at all. Saito knows as well as anyone else that he's the power behind the operation, but he listens carefully to what he's told for all that, and when he thinks no one is looking his sober shell cracks a little to show a quiet little boy with a brilliant new toy to play with. Eames flirts with her disgracefully, in that awful platonic way that men who aren't interested flirt with pretty little girls; Ariadne spends the entire morning hating him, only to be distracted every time he says something insightful, and finally she settles on exasperated tolerance as a happy medium.
There's something different about Cobb, now, with his team around him. He stands straighter, looks people in the eye when he talks to them, and if his smile still doesn't quite reach his eyes, it at least doesn't look painted on by an indifferent puppetmaker. Ariadne watches him, curious, and sees Eames watching him too.
"Where's Arthur?" she asks Cobb after Eames disappears for a while and returns bearing pizza for lunch.
"Australia," Cobb says, distracted by his attempts to keep the toppings from sliding off his pizza slice as he pulls it out of the box. "He's flying back in two days for the initial run-through, but he won't be here long. I need him finding out everything he can about Fischer."
"Arthur?" Yusuf asks curiously around a mouthful of cheese and pepperoni. He's eating the toppings off his pizza and leaving the denuded bread on his plate.
"Our point man," Cobb says.
"And quite a competent one, all things considered," Saito says. "I was sorry to have missed him, in the real world."
"About that," Cobb says, sitting back to clean his fingers fastidiously with a paper napkin. He's not quite looking at any of them. "Arthur… has certain aversions to real-world interactions."
"But I've met him outside of dreams," Ariadne argues. "He was the one who set me up with the PASIV and went down with me the second time I was here."
"I didn't say he never deals with people face to face," Cobb tells her. "But… he was in the military for a while, and things were different after that. He won't tell me what it is exactly."
"What did he do in the military?" Eames asks, setting his pizza down and turning an uncomfortably piercing attention on Cobb.
Cobb shakes his head. "I didn't ask. I know it had to do with the PASIV technology but he's never told me and I don't push him. He'll be there for the run-throughs and with us for the job. He just doesn't want anyone but me around and conscious when he goes under or comes out, and even me he doesn't tolerate very well or very often. He's the best point man in the business, so I don't argue with his eccentricities."
Eames shifts his attention to Ariadne, smiling with genial casualness. She isn't fooled. "But you've met him outside dreamspace? Do tell us about him."
"He's very well-dressed," Ariadne says, then reaches for her drink and changes the subject.
Cobb gives her a small, grateful smile. Ariadne wants to tell him that she didn't do it for him, but it wouldn't be entirely true.
She puts together the first level in a day. It's easier than she thought it would be, and more satisfying. It's only a few blocks, alleys that wind in on themselves and a warehouse in the tight center of a maze, then a bridge along a road that slips out of the maze and hits a straightaway that, at eighty miles an hour, will take exactly fifteen minutes to drive from one end to the other. Yusuf looks a little dubious when she tells him, like he's not sure he can make any promises about obeying a speed limit that low.
The first run-through is the next day, and Arthur nearly misses it. Ariadne has just almost slipped under when the sound of the door grating and quick footsteps snaps her nearly awake again; Arthur leans over to say something to Cobb, nods to the group of barely-conscious people assembled in lawn chairs and struggling to keep their eyes open long enough to peer blearily at him, then settles himself into one and rolls up his sleeve. Then the world shifts around Ariadne and she's standing in the middle of a city street, outside a liquor store, and there are twenty or thirty projections around her but no one familiar.
"Crap," she says aloud. "Where is everyone?"
"They'll be along," Eames says affably, strolling down the sidewalk toward her. "There are only so many places they can get to, no?"
Ariadne sighs and settles in to wait.
"So that was Arthur," Eames muses, leaning against the plate-glass window behind her. "You were right, he dresses very well. Dior, unless I'm mistaken – last season, to be sure, but with a cut like that, who the hell cares?"
Ariadne turns curiously back to him. "You figured that out in a two-second glance when you were barely conscious and your system was full of drugs?"
Eames tilts his head and looks at her. "Well, yes," he says finally. "It's my job to take in details like that. In this business, my life can depend on it. But I'll tell you a secret, do you want to hear it?"
"Sure," Ariadne says.
"Pardon me for saying this, my dear, but if you've ever a day in your life given more thought to menswear than the relative merits of an Ed Hardy sweatshirt, I'll eat Arthur's exquisite Bill Blass tie. I could have told you it was vintage Prada from 1953, and if I'd said it with enough confidence, you'd have believed me. That's the secret. Whatever you say, say it with confidence and people will believe."
Curious now, Ariadne turns to face him. "Cobb said you're a forger. What do forgers do? In this context, I mean."
"Ah," Eames says, looking pleased. "Wait a moment and I'll show you."
He turns to the window and examines his reflection, appearing to carry on some sort of silent conversation with himself. A car backfires a few streets away; Ariadne glances toward it, then back, and –
Eames' reflection, oddly enough, is still Eames. It's odd because the person casting it is a woman, dark-eyed and sultry, wearing a clinging black dress and a pair of shimmering spike heels that even Ariadne lusts after without shame. The woman turns to give Ariadne an oddly Eames-like smirk.
"Like her?" she says in Eames' accent but not his voice.
Ariadne swallows. "…Yes," she manages.
"Ariadne?"
She turns to see Arthur round the corner on her other side, looking a little concerned. His eyes are focused past her, on Eames, and she wonders if he thinks Eames is a projection about to turn hostile. He's wearing a long black trench coat over his suit here, the kind that looks like it might have an arsenal hidden underneath it. Somehow, Ariadne wouldn't be entirely surprised if it did.
"Arthur, did you –" See that, she's about to say; but Eames is walking past her – or maybe there's a better word, like sidle or slink or why yes, I am perfectly okay with public sex – and moving right into Arthur's personal space.
"I am very pleased to meet you, Arthur," Eames croons in a flawless Southern drawl, raising one delicate hand to turn Arthur's face toward him. Arthur's face turns obediently, until his mouth is entirely too close to Eames' to be acceptable in polite company; but his hands are in his pockets, his eyes on the reflection of real-Eames' back in the liquor store window, and he looks more amused than anything else.
"It's a pleasure to meet you too, Mr. Eames," he says, close enough that Eames must be able to feel Arthur's breath on his mouth. "Your reputation precedes you."
Eames laughs, and the skin he's wearing falls away – faster than his hand does. Arthur looks at him, then looks again, sober and arrested, as if Eames wasn't quite what he was expecting to see.
"Observant, aren't we?" Eames says, stepping back.
One of us is, Ariadne doesn't say. But she takes it back when Eames doesn't move back any further than that one step, when they stand there, still in the middle of the thin stream of projections parting to pass them, silently taking each other's measure.
A projection bumps hard into Eames, knocking him back away from Arthur a step. Ariadne looks around worriedly, her heart beating faster at the glares the projections are aiming at them.
"What's setting them off?" she asks nervously. "I'm not changing anything."
"Someone else is," Arthur says. "Probably Cobb."
Eames turns a little, putting his back almost against Arthur. "What can he possibly be changing, the daft bastard? He knows better than that."
"Well, it's that or it was you changing shape in the middle of the street in full view of fifty projections," Arthur says dryly.
"Arthur, I'm wounded," Eames reproaches him. "These are Yusuf's projections. I've changed shape in front of them more often than his girlfriends have changed their clothes, they must be used to me by now."
"There are six of us down here, two of whom aren't experienced dreamers. There's no telling whose projections they are," Arthur corrects him. A burly teen with a septum piercing shoulder-checks him hard, nearly knocking him off-balance. Ariadne edges closer to him and Eames.
"We should find Cobb," she says.
Eames touches her elbow lightly and herds her in between them. "Stay between us," he says softly, his eyes on the projections around them. "Arthur, shall we?"
Somewhere back behind his habitual reserve, Arthur's glance at Eames is lit with appreciation and humor. Ariadne is a little sorry Eames didn't see it. "After you, Mr. Eames."
In a few blocks they've reached the corner where Fischer will be, when they do this for real. The projections around them are still sullen but not threatening, not yet. This street will loop back in on itself within half a block, a dead end, though you wouldn't know it to look; Ariadne's proud of that, and just about to point it out when a white van pulls up with Yusuf at the wheel. Cobb rolls the side door open and gestures them in behind him and Saito. Gentlemanly to the last, Arthur and Eames hand Ariadne into the second row of seats and cram themselves onto the bench at the very back.
Cobb looks tense and tired, like there's some strain here Ariadne's not feeling. Arthur catches his eye and gives him a brief, reassuring nod, and Cobb relaxes a little. "Okay, guys," he says. "We're going to time the straightaway to the bridge."
"From here?" Ariadne asks, leaning forward.
"From the edge of the maze," Cobb corrects. "I don't want to know where the garage is in relation to where we are now."
Behind her, barely audible, Arthur gives a sharp, frustrated sigh.
"At what speed?" Yusuf asks, pulling back out into the stream of cars. It's LA traffic, all right. Ariadne doesn't even think the six of them, putting in all their effort in a world that theoretically should bend to their wills, could clear up Los Angeles midtown traffic, let alone the perpetual gridlock of the 405.
"Eighty," she tells him.
"Ninety," Cobb corrects. "Let's see how short our time gets cut on the second level if you have to speed it up here."
"Ninety it is," Yusuf says, more gleefully than Ariadne is really comfortable with, and turns right at the light with a sharp jerk that throws Arthur and Eames into each other in the back.
"Ow! Careful with that elbow, darling, I like that part of my anatomy."
"Then you should be a little more careful about putting it in harm's way. Where it will be if you wrinkle this suit any more than you just did."
"Ooh, feisty," Eames says happily.
Ariadne hides a grin and glances at Cobb to share the amusement. But the expression on Cobb's face is indecipherable as he shoots a look back at them, and whatever emotions he might be feeling right now, it doesn't look like any of them are good ones.
"Well, bollocks," Eames says ten miles down the stretch of highway leading to the bridge. "Who invited them to the party?"
"Not me," Yusuf says. "Their sirens don't sound right."
"Down to Cobb and Ariadne then, I should think," Eames observes, pulling a gun out of his jacket and checking it in some way that makes it produce a short burst of metallic clicks.
"The projections were already cranky when we left the maze," Arthur warns, one hand inside his own jacket. "These will probably shoot first and ask questions later."
"Oh, wonderful." Ariadne wonders what getting shot feels like. She'll probably know well enough in a few minutes. Amazingly, she's not particularly looking forward to it.
"How are we handling this?" Yusuf asks.
"Keep going," Arthur says. "We'll get rid of them."
A bullet shatters the safety glass in the back window. Ariadne gives an undignified yelp and ducks down to the floor of the van. Arthur swivels around in the back seat, folds his knees neatly up against his shoulders, and kicks the safety glass out and into the road behind them in one sharp, efficient move. Eames' sidelong look in response has more than a little interest in it; but his gun is already coming up, and he fires just as Arthur does, two bullets winging out with a stereo crack that makes metal scream against the road in back of them.
Eames says something to Arthur, too quietly for Ariadne to hear with the wind in her ears. Arthur says it back, whatever it is. They don't quite smile at each other, but she doesn't think they need to.
Huh, she thinks, and smiles for them.
"For the real thing, you'll be out in the middle of the bridge," Cobb tells Yusuf, shading his eyes against the brilliant sun. "You can just back right off it."
"I still don't like this part," Arthur says from where he's sitting on the railing with his trench coat hanging tidily behind him and his back to a hundred-foot drop. There's a breeze coming in off the water, fluttering the tails of his coat a little but not daring to disturb his hair. "Too much can happen in twenty miles. If Yusuf can't get to the bridge…"
Ariadne's going over the drive in her head, trying to figure out where she can put in alternate routes. Designing the dream level was one thing, but walking it, driving it, is opening the design up to her in all new ways. "Yusuf, we should talk when we wake up," she says, and he nods at her.
Yusuf tilts his head at Arthur. "I have to test out the new sedative," he says. "Would you be willing to test it for me? You have a good body weight for it, I think."
Arthur shakes his head, looking a little wistful. "I wish I could," he says.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ariadne sees Cobb give him an odd look.
"Whyever don't you?" Eames asks, leaning against the railing by Arthur. "Not leaving us again, are you?"
"I have a plane to catch, Mr. Eames. Soon, as a matter of fact."
"But you just got off a plane." Eames sounds mock-wounded. Ariadne wonders how much of it is really mocking.
"And now I'm getting back on one," Arthur says with good-humored patience. "I'll be back for the Level 2 walkthrough."
"Do you need to cut out of the dream early?" Cobb asks.
"It wouldn't hurt," Arthur says. "I'll leave the dossiers from this trip in your briefcase."
Cobb nods, hesitates. "I wish you could stay longer," he says quietly.
Arthur looks away, narrowing his eyes against the sun. "Yeah," he says simply. "So do I."
The moment's uncomfortable, at least for Ariadne; she doesn't understand what's going on, but that heavy melancholy that settles between them like a cloud, that's clear enough.
Then Arthur looks back, and it's… not gone, but tidied away, pushed under the table out of sight where everyone can pretend they don't see. "I'll be back in a few days," he tells everyone, briefly, and tips backward off the railing. The wind catches his trench coat and bells it out, but through the fluttering material and the railing bars Ariadne sees half a second where Arthur's body arches like a diver's, all slim straight lines and arrow-sharp precision. And then he's gone, a hundred feet down and back to the lawn chair in the warehouse.
Eames stares off the bridge for a while after Arthur disappears, watching the sunlight dance on the water. "He's something, your Arthur," he says finally, with a small smile tugging at his lips and not-so-grudging respect in his voice.
"Yeah, he is," Cobb answers, looking out over the water as well. There's fondness in his face, and humor, and a little exasperation, and all of it's overshadowed by something else.
For a moment, it almost looks like grief.
By the Monday before the Wednesday of the second-level walkthrough, Ariadne's getting nervous. The level itself is fine, but small; the projections will be crowded into a more compact place, fewer places to hide or duck into, and Ariadne's pretty sure that getting attacked by projections isn't ever going to be her favorite part of dreaming. And as if that weren't enough, Cobb is forever going under after hours, testing out the new compounds or just… doing something. Ariadne doesn't know what, and she wants to, so that she can put some sort of Managing Cobb's Addiction failsafe into her plans if addiction is what it turns out to be.
When she has the chance, she grabs a line and goes under with him; and that's how she finds out that Mallorie Cobb, Mal who was "lovely" once, is the most terrifying projection she's ever met.
"These are memories I have to change," Cobb tells her; but he can't, you can't change memories like you can change dreams, because the past is untouchable. Ariadne wants to tell him that, remind him because he's clearly forgotten… but before she can, he's looking out into the grass at his children and she knows he won't hear anything she says. In fact, it's entirely possible that he's forgotten she's there.
She takes a step back, then another. Cobb's still talking, but she doesn't know right now who he's talking to, and he turns too late to catch her. Ariadne slams the wrought-iron door closed and stabs her finger at the B button.
Her finger hits the back of someone else's hand. Startled half out of her skin, she whirls to see Arthur smiling ruefully down at her.
"What the fuck," she says, pressing her hand over her chest. Her heart is racing underneath her fingertips. "When did you get back to the warehouse?"
He tilts his head and looks at her quizzically. "Warehouse?"
Ariadne backs up flat against the wall. There's nowhere further for her to go. "Shit," she says. "You're one of Cobb's projections. You're not the real Arthur."
Arthur-the-projection spreads his hands. "Hey, I'm not going to hurt you."
He's a good imitation – almost perfect, in the quality of his voice and the thin planes and lines of his face – but she can see differences when she looks closer. This Arthur holds himself a little more rigidly, speaks more flatly, doesn't look at her with any interest at all and precious little recognition. "Then what are you doing down here?" she snaps. "Why does Cobb have an Arthur projection in this, this place?"
The elevator is moving, going nowhere, passing idly by one empty warehouse floor after another. The buttons on the panel light up and fall dark at random. "I'm Cobb's chief of security, down here," he says.
"Security? So what, you're like a prison guard?"
"Not exactly," the projection says, still giving her that affable, vaguely creepy smile.
"So where's the real Arthur?"
The projection lifts an eyebrow. "Right now? Los Angeles."
Ariadne blinks a little, derailed. "LA? Why? What's he doing there?"
"Who knows?" the projection replies with an oddly philosophical shrug. "Resting, I hope."
Ariadne sucks in a breath. "Look, you have to let me down there," she says. "You're supposed to take care of him, right? Well, Cobb's not okay right now. He's not even on the same planet as okay. And whatever he's got buried down there, if he doesn't pull it up into the light and deal with it, it's going to kill him and it might take all of us with him –"
"Ariadne," the projection cuts her off, not unkindly. "I told you – here, I'm Cobb's chief of security."
"And?"
"And you're not going down to the basement. I'm sorry."
Apologetically, he shoots her between the eyes.
"The last time I saw you, you shot me in the face," she says two days later.
Arthur stops ambling up to her and blinks a little, looking amused. "…My bad?"
"How ungentlemanly of you, darling," Eames says, reaching out to give Arthur that casual guy-hello handshake. They can look straight into each other's eyes right over Ariadne's head without even craning their necks.
"Shooting a lady in the face can be very gentlemanly," Arthur says primly. "Under the right circumstances."
"True," Eames concedes, slinging his arm around Ariadne's shoulders. "What was it, love? Were the two of you backed hopelessly into a corner with ravening zombies closing in?"
"I have never in my life seen zombie projections," Arthur tells Eames.
"Consider yourself lucky," Eames says tersely.
"Arthur," Saito says, not shaking hands but nodding. "Will Mr. Cobb be joining us?"
Arthur shakes his head. "Not for the walkthrough. Cobb prefers not to know the layout."
Because if Cobb knows, Mal knows, Ariadne thinks.
"Is that unusual?" Saito asks, looking a little dubious.
"Yes," Eames says.
"It doesn't mean it's not a good precaution," Arthur tells him. "Even I don't want to know the entire layout; just my part of it. It's too risky."
"But you're the point man," Saito points out. "Isn't it your job to know everything?"
He's not challenging, only asking, but Arthur's face tightens a little anyway. Ariadne wonders how much of his opinion on the subject is his own and how much of it is based purely on loyalty to Cobb. "Ideally, yes, Mr. Saito. But not here. Here you take your chances."
"Well, let's get on with taking them then," Eames says cheerfully. "No one wants to live forever, right?"
"Almost everyone wants to live forever. It's a great weakness," Saito says, and smiles.
Ariadne likes Eames very much, now that she's gotten used to the meaningless flirting. She just hates his subconscious.
This is the last part of the run-through: seeing how long it takes to get everything prepared under duress. "Under duress" in this case means riling up Eames' projections until they attack, which is surprisingly easy to do: one improbable fountain appearing in the hotel lobby was all it took to bring what looks like the entire MI5 running. And not only is Eames' subconscious heavily populated, it's full of snipers and black belts.
"You couldn't have told us your subconscious was militarized?" Arthur snaps over his shoulder.
"It's not!" Eames protests, tossing a grenade down into the lobby below. "Not really. It's just… very efficient."
Ariadne glares at him and scrunches herself in closer to Yusuf and Saito behind the planter. She's the only one who doesn't have a gun. "We're stuck up here, you know!" she hisses. "For another fifteen minutes. How long is it going to take them to find the right set of stairs?"
On cue, there's a mighty crash against the barricaded door at the end of the hall.
Eames looks thoughtfully at Arthur. "That'll be a problem if Fischer's projections come up too soon, or trap us between the inner shaft here and the hallways where the rooms are." he says.
"It's a problem now!" Ariadne says between her teeth.
"Nonsense, love, you've got Arthur and me here. We can create a diversion down below and draw them off."
He is not listening. Ariadne sort of wants to beat him to death, but it looks like in another few minutes his projections will have done it for her. "You can't get down below!"
"Oh ye of little faith," Eames says with cheerful scorn, and pulls a pack out of the depths of the planter. Ariadne's pretty sure it wasn't there before. Eames rummages in it and tosses a mass of black leather and buckles to Arthur, who catches it and begins efficiently stripping off his jacket and waistcoat.
"Is that what I think it is?" Saito asks dubiously.
"Probably," Eames answers, stripping down to his undershirt and pulling on a harness of his own. He pulls out a bundle of rope and pulleys, tosses it to Arthur, then hooks himself up to one while Arthur retrieves a duffel bag full of weaponry out of what appears to be thin air.
There are D-rings set into the walls on either side of the planter, a few yards apart. Ariadne didn't put them there. Incredulous, she watches as Arthur and Eames hook themselves up and divide a handful of machine guns of some sort between them.
"God, they're like children," Yusuf mutters fondly.
"I heard that," Eames reproves him, sighting at the ceiling down the barrel of his gun.
Something slams against the door again, nearly breaking it. "Diversion!" Ariadne reminds them.
"Ready, darling?"
"When you are, Mr. Eames."
"On three, then," Eames says, and jumps the railing with Arthur half a step behind him.
The gunfire is deafening. Ariadne gives it three seconds before Arthur and Eames wake up in the warehouse; but it goes on longer than that, and keeps going, and then it's reduced to sporadic shots, and then everything is silent again.
If Eames dies, the dream will collapse. Keeping a weather eye on the glass ceiling arching overhead, Ariadne crawls to the railing and looks down through the shattered glass, expecting to see Arthur and Eames dangling limply in space like gory piñatas.
They're dangling, but not limply. Arthur's revolving slowly, making sure the coast is clear, and Eames is rotating to cover Arthur's blind side as best he can. Apparently satisfied, Eames laughs and swings over to catch Arthur's rope a foot or so above Arthur's head. The movement leaves Eames' legs swimming through thin air to propel the push; before they can pull him back, he locks his ankles lightly around Arthur's lower back.
Arthur shifts his gun out of the way and looks up at Eames to say something smug. Eames laughs again and doesn't let go, and doesn't let go, and the two of them hang there with the setting sun shining on them through half-broken twenty-story windows, drifting slowly through the air and watching each other.
Ariadne grins a little and crawls back to lead Saito and Yusuf to the inner rooms.
On the third level they separate, Ariadne with Cobb, Arthur with Eames, Saito with Yusuf, who's playing Fischer's role.
Everyone makes the rendezvous on time. Ariadne pretends not to notice that Arthur's usually immaculate hair looks like someone dragged their fingers through it, or that there's a bite mark almost hidden under Eames' collar. Or that they both look dazed and a little smudged, and far too sleepy and content to have spent the last two hours pretending to outrun projections.
Cobb goes white when he sees them, though, and for the rest of the time they're down there he snaps at both of them when he speaks to them at all. He sends Arthur topside first, like a little boy being sent to his room; when the rest of them come out, Arthur has already cleared out of the warehouse, headed for God knows where.
He's left without so much as leaving a note for Eames. Eames is pissed off and frustrated and, Ariadne suspects, a little hurt. She doesn't know how things are between Cobb and Arthur, if they're even in contact with each other, but it's days before Eames and Cobb can look at each other without bristling, and longer than that before every word Eames says to Cobb isn't dipped like quills in poison.
None of this makes things any easier, of course, when everything goes to hell.
Ariadne's never been nearly run over by a train before. She thinks, incredulously, that she might actually throw up.
Cobb recovers faster than she does, which is lucky because he's behind the wheel. While her whole body is still reverberating crazily with the echo of steel on steel, Cobb throws the car into reverse and speeds off to catch up to Arthur's taxi. The taxi is throwing itself against the wall of other cars like a pissed-off bull, slamming them out of the way; Cobb throws their car into the fray, helping to clear a path, and Ariadne has never, ever been so glad that dying in dreams doesn't mean dying in reality. She just wishes she could get the message across to her half-in-shock body.
"What the fuck is happening?" she demands when they break free of the traffic. "Where did all these people with guns come from?"
"Fischer's subconscious is militarized," Cobb says between his teeth. "Someone's taught him how to fight off attacks like this."
"And Arthur didn't find that out in all his research?" That doesn't seem like him.
"I don't know what the fuck happened, can we just drop this until we get to the warehouse?" Cobb shouts. Ariadne sits back, fuming.
When they get to the warehouse, though, Saito's been shot, and it looks an awful lot to Ariadne's unpracticed eye like he's dying, and Cobb is so furious that Ariadne doesn't even want him near her in case she winds up having to shoot him in the face.
"How the hell did this happen? You're supposed to know this!" he's screaming.
She waits for Arthur to apologize, to try to calm the situation down, because it is his fault, and how could you miss something like this? But Arthur comes off the ground like a prizefighter at the first bell and gets right in Cobb's face.
"I fucking well couldn't have known it, Cobb, as you are goddamned well aware!"
Cobb looks like he wants to shout something back and it's killing him that he can't. He settles for glaring at Arthur instead, but there's something other than anger there now. With sinking despair, Ariadne identifies it as guilt, and oh God, what more can there possibly be, but even as she opens her mouth Eames gets there first.
"Why couldn't he have known, Cobb?" he asks, too quietly, his eyes traveling back and forth between Arthur and Cobb.
"Let's get Saito into the back room," Cobb says tightly.
"He's unconscious, leave him where he is for a moment," Eames snaps. "Cobb? Why couldn't Arthur have known?"
The silence in the garage is far too loud. Arthur shifts uneasily and won't quite look at anyone.
"Arthur?" Eames asks. Pleads.
When realization hits Ariadne, driven by something in their faces she can't even identify, it doesn't feel like thunder or lightning or anything else she's heard it compared to. It feels like suffocation, like fast-sinking quicksand. Arthur, always the last to enter the dream and the first to leave. Never in the warehouse with the rest of them even after he and Eames became whatever they were. Vanishing without a word left behind in the real world for the man he looked at in dreams like he was the sun in the east. Making an error that precise, perfectionist Arthur would never have made except under graver stress than she'd ever seen him.
Arthur, the head of security in Cobb's unconscious.
"He couldn't have known because he's not real," she says, silently begging Cobb to contradict her. "Because he only knows what Cobb knows, and he can only put together the information Cobb already has."
"Are you bloody serious," Yusuf breathes.
Cobb's silent. So is Arthur, and Ariadne's eyes sting with tears.
"You're a fucking projection," Eames says, and he sounds so betrayed that the tears spill down Ariadne's face after all. "You're not real."
"That's not true," Arthur protests, staring at Eames with a look on his face that pleads openly for understanding, for forgiveness, for something. "I mean – not in – I'm as real as I need to be, here. I'm as real as that bullet that took Saito down –"
"Which is to say, my love, you're not real at all," Eames whispers. "Just very, very good at making us think you are."
Cobb is staring back and forth between them, blinking incredulously like he understands what's going on, he just can't quite figure out how.
"You lied to us," Ariadne tells him. "Both of you. I don't – I don't know how you even pulled this off."
Cobb gives a short, humorless laugh. "There's nothing more resilient than an idea. Once it's planted, nothing's harder to shake. It can shape the whole way you see the world. It can even be a folie a deux, it can spread to other people, under the right circumstances. Well, here's me giving Patient Zero an idea. It's a very simple idea: Arthur's real, and you've met him."
"Fucking brilliant," Yusuf says in a tone that suggests that Cobb's brilliance has a lot to answer for. "I was completely fooled."
"Why?" Ariadne demands.
"Because I'm still the best point man in the business," Arthur answers, but he's looking at Eames, not at her. "I'm the only one he could trust with something like this."
"Still?" Eames asks. "So am I correct in assuming that you did exist at one point?"
"Yes," Arthur says. "I did."
Cobb slides his jacket off, moving like an old man, and kneels down beside Saito to put pressure on his wound. "When Mal died," he says.
Arthur watches him, dark eyes full of grief.
Cobb pauses a moment, takes a deep, shuddering breath. "When Mal killed herself, she wanted to make sure I went with her. That there was nothing tying me here anymore. She had herself declared sane by three different psychiatrists and then left a letter with our attorney saying that she was afraid of me, that I'd threatened to kill her, so if she turned up dead the kids would be taken away from me. And she…"
Ariadne almost, almost, doesn't want to hear what's coming. Not with Arthur standing right there, solid and capable and full of grace.
"I met Arthur when he was sixteen and his name wasn't Arthur yet," Cobb says, lifting a hand to examine the fingertips stained red with Saito's blood. Gently, he puts his hand back down and presses on the wound. "He had a summer internship at a sleep research lab I was working with. He was brilliant, sharp as a fucking tack, the most organized teenager I'd ever met in my life. When the summer was over he was offered a job, and then when he was seventeen his parents were killed in a pile-up on an icy freeway. He hid out at my house for a few months until he turned eighteen and couldn't be put in foster care, and then he stayed a while longer. Took over running the place, too. I never paid another bill late and my lawn was the greenest one on the block. I'd tell him he didn't have to and he'd just give me this look, like he was sorry for me for being too dumb to take care of myself."
Arthur's mouth quirks in a small, wistful smile. Not looking at Arthur, or at any of them, Cobb raises his hand and wipes at his face, leaving diluted red streaks across his cheek.
"God, I loved that kid. We loved him, me and Mal. We fought like cats and dogs over him joining the military, but then the PASIV technology came around and we were right back working together like he'd never left. Mal… Mal knew I'd never do that to him, I'd never kill myself and leave him behind to hate me for it."
"I'd never have hated you," Arthur whispers. Cobb doesn't hear him.
"So she killed him," Cobb says, and stops to swallow whatever's in his throat. "She called him up to our suite before I got there and shot him with my gun and she just… just left him there on the floor. Just left him there with a hole between his eyes and the back of his head spread all over the sheets like – like she was just waking him up, like it didn't matter because she'd open her eyes and he'd be right there taking the needle out of his arm."
"My God," Eames says. He's so white that Ariadne wants to make him go and sit down, but she can't move.
Cobb drops his head over Saito's still form, hiding his face. He's crying now, dropping tears tinged with Saito's blood down onto his shirt. "It wasn't her fault," he says. "She didn't know. She didn't think he'd really die. But he did. He did."
There's silence for a long time before Eames clears his throat. "Fucking hell," he says finally, and pulls his gun. "I'm out of this, and I'm taking Saito with me, poor bastard."
Arthur's hand closes on Eames' wrist and twists the gun out of it before Ariadne even realizes where he's going. "You can't – Eames! You can't."
Eames punches him dead in the face. "And why not?" he shouts when Arthur trips a step backward. "Because you need a forger? Well, fuck you, Cobb. Fuck you and this job and your fucking stupid, beautiful unconscious and your point men who don't bloody exist. I'm out."
"You can't," Yusuf says bleakly. "We're too heavily sedated. If you die here, you won't wake up."
"You'll just drop into Limbo," Cobb says, making himself look up at Eames.
Ariadne stares at them. She'd wonder what the fuck else was going to happen, but right this second she almost doesn't want to know. "What does that mean? What's in Limbo?"
"Nothing but pure, raw unconscious," Arthur tells her. "And whatever was left behind by anyone else sharing the dream who's been in Limbo before. Cobb, in this case."
"You son of a bitch, you knew about this?" Eames snaps at Yusuf.
"Well, I didn't know our point man wasn't real, did I?" Yusuf demands.
"I told you," Arthur says, but his eyes are on Eames and the back of his hand is pressed against his jaw where Eames punched him. "Down here, I'm as real as you are."
"We don't have time for this," Cobb grates out. "The only way out is forward, okay? We finish the job as fast as we can and we get out. Arthur, let's go talk to Fischer. Eames, you and Yusuf get Saito in the back and find a first aid kit, and hurry. You've got an hour to get Fischer prepped for the next level."
"An hour? I was supposed to have –"
"You want out of this? Then move."
"Fuck you," Eames snarls, but he moves to grab Saito's shoulders anyway, nodding at Yusuf to grab his feet. Watching them go, Arthur opens his mouth like he wants to say something that wouldn't be loud enough to Eames to hear anyway; but in the end, he stays silent.
Then Arthur and Cobb are gone too, leaving Ariadne standing alone in the middle of the garage with the rain beating against the windows outside.
Eames doesn't look at Arthur the whole time he's putting Browning on like a costume. Arthur looks at him, though, like he can't keep his eyes away, keeping just out of sight of Eames' reflection so he can watch without being seen. Ariadne watches him watch, and watches the gentleness in his hands when he and Cobb pretend to drag Browning into the room where Fischer is being held.
Ariadne likes Fischer. Any man who reacts to being kidnapped by rolling his eyes and throwing promised money to his kidnappers like they were little boys asking for an advance on their allowance is someone worth knowing, she thinks. Not that she'll ever be able to know him, ever be able to so much as speak to him in passing in the real world. It's a shame, like so many other things about this miserable situation.
When they come back, Arthur pulls off his ski mask and drops it on the floor, settling down into Eames' abandoned chair to wait. "Saito was supposed to take Fischer into the bunker while Eames held the second level," he says to Cobb. "Even with me holding off security on Level 3, I don't think Saito's going to be able to cover Fischer's back and set the charges for the kick, not in the condition he's in."
Cobb runs a hand through his hair, tossing his own discarded ski mask to land on a metal bench. "Change of plans," he says. "Ariadne, does Eames know the third level?"
"He helped me design it," Ariadne says, a little grudgingly. His suggestions were good ones, there's no arguing with that, but she's still annoyed that she didn't come up with them herself.
"Does Saito know the second?"
"Not as well as Eames does, but he knows it. We walked through it a few times."
"And you," Cobb says to Arthur. "Would you be able to keep him alive until the kick?"
Arthur stares at him for a minute. "Without you as either the dreamer or the subject? Cobb, I won't even exist on that level. As soon as you go under, he'll be…" He trails off abruptly, looking chagrined.
Cobb gives him a wry look. "Defenseless except for that small army of militarized projections who'll take out Fischer's security as fast as they got the drop on you, exactly. As long as he stays alive, the second level is probably safer with him than it would be with any of us. And if the charges are already set for the drop he only has to push a button."
"It's too risky."
"He might live until the kick," Yusuf says. "If he's very still and very careful, and stays calm."
"Then let's make it so he doesn't have to move," Cobb says. "Once you give the signal, do not go off that bridge a second earlier than we timed it. The explosives won't cut it if there's no gravity."
"The explosives won't go off if he dies," Arthur says. "Maybe isn't good enough when you're talking about being trapped in icy nowhere for ten years."
"Give me some other options," Cobb says. Arthur's silent for a long moment, thinking, then shakes his head slowly. Ariadne can't think of any either, and she bites her lip in frustration.
Yusuf nods, resigned, and gets up to check on Saito.
Cobb moves a few steps closer to Arthur; close enough that maybe they think Ariadne is out of earshot. She's not.
"You know, I don't think I'm in love with Eames on any level of my brain," he says, trying for teasing and only managing strained and unhappy.
Arthur gives him a smile to match. "You're not," he says. "But you know that I would have been, in time."
There are projections shooting at Arthur, making his forehead crease in increasing frustration. Even as pissed off as he is, Eames can't let that go, though Ariadne can tell he's tempted to. It takes him a while, furtive glances cast in Arthur's direction as he argues with himself; but in the end he goes to help, as she figured he would.
"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."
Eames' voice breaks a little on the last word; whether from the sheer weight of the irony in his voice or for other reasons, Ariadne isn't quite sure. But he's talking to Arthur again, even if he's not looking at him, and Arthur watches him go until he catches Ariadne's eye and has to look away.
Saito dreams the second level. He's not pleased about this, but even he concedes the logic of it. And he trusts Cobb, even now, even after Eames pulls him aside and talks to him for a few minutes where no one else can hear. Or if he doesn't trust Cobb, exactly, he at least trusts his own ability to find out if Cobb lies about performing the inception.
In his subconscious, they're all dressed crisply, professionally, a little unimaginatively, like a bullet train full of salarymen. (Except for Eames, who is dressed like nothing on Earth, but exceptions have to be made for Eames. Ariadne figured that out within five minutes of meeting him.) They blend in well with Fischer's projections. Ariadne's grateful for that; she feels too exposed, sitting here on the stairs, even with Arthur right beside her.
"What happens to you?" she asks, keeping her eyes on the door to the bar. "Is it just… like dreaming, all the time? You only exist when Cobb's under, so you just open your eyes in one dream after another?"
Arthur gives her an enigmatic smile. "Something like that."
"What's going to happen to you when he dies? Dies for real, I mean."
He shrugs, glancing idly back up the stairs. "You know, a lot of cultures believe that you're never really dead until the last person who remembers you dies. Basically it's like believing that as long as you're a projection in someone's subconscious, anyone's subconscious, you're immortal."
"But," she says helplessly. "Do you know? I mean, if I went home tonight and had a dream about you, would it really be you?"
"Ariadne," he says gently. "The worst thing that could have happened to me already has."
"And losing Eames, that won't be worse?"
Arthur flinches a little and doesn't look at her. "Than having a woman I loved like a sister shoot me between the eyes?" he asks.
It's a rhetorical question. That doesn't mean there's no answer. Or that Ariadne knows what the answer is.
Eames walks by them, heels clicking sharply on the tile, wearing his forgery like a shield. His eyes flick up to Arthur anyway, just once, before he turns away again with the forgery's chin firming in an oddly Eames-like gesture.
When Ariadne turns back, Arthur is watching Eames go, and the look on his face makes her turn quickly away.
Fischer's projection of Browning feeds the idea of the will back to him so flawlessly that Ariadne's amazed, and a little undone with vicarious pride at how well Eames' plan is working. But she doesn't have time to bask in success for long before it's time to transition to the next level. She's already slid the needle into her arm and is blinking sleepily against the drug when Arthur kneels down next to Eames and takes his needle away from him.
"So you're finally going to be here when I go under," Eames says, trying for bitter and only managing tired. "That's a great gesture of trust, I hear."
Arthur swabs the inside of Eames' wrist, fingertips trailing along Eames' skin where they don't, strictly speaking, need to. "You have no idea how much I wanted to tell you," he said quietly.
"Do you need the drugs? Or do you just follow bloody Cobb wherever he goes?"
"I follow Cobb," Arthur says, and slips the needle into Eames' wrist. "Do you need me to tell you that I wish I didn't?"
The drugs are fast-acting. Eames blinks sleepily up at Arthur, struggling to stay awake. "I'm babysitting Fischer, so the security's all yours," he says. "They're going to run you down hard."
Arthur smiles at him. "And I will lead them on a merry chase."
Eames' answering smile is the first real one Ariadne's seen from him in a while. "Just get back to the hospital before the kick."
"Go to sleep, Mr. Eames," Arthur says.
When Ariadne opens her eyes to the snow, the first thing she sees is Eames' hand sliding around the back of Arthur's neck. They kiss once, hard and desperate, before Eames pulls back.
"You feel so real," he whispers. "So fucking real."
"I could be real enough for you, if you'd let me," Arthur whispers back, so softly Ariadne can barely hear him; and then he's gone, off down the mountain with Eames watching after him.
Fischer waits for a minute, then puts a hand on Eames' shoulder. "We should go," he says kindly.
"Yeah," Eames says after a moment. "Right. Let's get on with it, then."
Ariadne watches them ski away, and then watches Cobb watch them. "You should have told us," she says. "Why didn't you?"
"I should have done a lot of things," Cobb answers, which isn't really an answer at all.
They're so close, so fucking close, when Mal drops out of the ceiling behind Fischer. Cobb sucks in a breath, finger frozen on the trigger, unable to pull it, and –
– Arthur steps out of nowhere, moving between Mal and Eames, who turned around at the last second and put himself between Fischer and Mal. Arthur's gun is raised, pointed dead at Mal, unwavering. Ariadne can't hear what he's saying.
Mal smiles, bitter and unutterably sad, and raises her own gun, and so many things happen at once:
"Not this time," Cobb whispers, and fires. Mal, firing while Cobb's bullet is in flight. Eames, taking Arthur down to the floor and out of its path. Blood sprays onto the wall behind them as Mal drops, and Ariadne's scream freezes in her throat and almost chokes her.
"Arthur," Cobb says, and runs.
It takes them seconds to reach the saferoom. By the time they get there Arthur has stripped Eames' jacket open and is leaning on him hard, putting pressure on a gory chest wound, bent down so his forehead almost touches Eames'. There's a pool of red spreading slowly underneath them, soaking the knees of Arthur's pants.
"You stupid bastard," he's chanting raggedly. "Eames, you stupid fuck. If you die here…"
Eames looks fondly up at him and touches Arthur's white-knuckled hands, smearing blood over them both. "Steady on, love. Just a scratch."
But it isn't. Ariadne can hear the sucking whistle of a lung wound even from where she is.
"She wouldn't have killed me," Arthur says. "I'd just… Eames, I'd just reboot."
"She'd have hurt you," Eames whispers. "You can't tell me being shot in a dream doesn't hurt like buggery."
"You fucking idiot," Arthur says desperately. "I'm not real."
Eames smiles. "Down here, darling, you're as real as you need to be," he says. "As real as the bullet that just took me down."
Ariadne can't watch anymore. Whirling on Fischer, she shoves him toward the blast doors. "Open the room. Hurry! We don't have time!"
Fischer moves toward the doors, and Ariadne turns on Cobb. "You find a way to fix him," she hisses. "You find a way, because Eames is holding this level and if he dies it'll collapse and we'll lose everything, including Eames."
"If he dies," Arthur says, looking up at her. Ariadne takes an involuntary step back. "If he dies here, we're going down to Limbo after him."
"Arthur –" Cobb begins.
"You thought Mal was a pain in your ass," Arthur says. "Cobb, if anything happens to him you will never be able to go under again. Because I will find you, wherever you are, whatever precautions you take, and I will rip you the fuck apart."
"Arthur," Eames says, tightening his hand.
"How long can you live without dreaming, Cobb?" Arthur asks.
Cobb strips off his gloves and kneels down beside Arthur and Eames. "Hey," he says gently. "Stop. It's a few more minutes, that's all. Eames can hold out that long."
Ariadne looks back over her shoulder. Fischer is talking to his father, the safe forgotten by the bedside, and Ariadne is very happy he's reconciling himself to his father's memory but if he doesn't get a move on she is going to start screaming.
"Right, Eames?" Cobb asks, lifting Arthur's hand a little to look at the wound.
"I was… rather counting on it, yes," Eames says, trailing off in midsentence to take a pained, whistling breath. "And on your…. wife being a worse shot, to tell the truth…"
He coughs, sending a fine spray of blood over Arthur's white sleeve. Behind her, Fischer's father is gesturing, pained but urgent, toward the safe. Oh, come on, come on, Ariadne pleads silently.
"Go tell Fischer to hurry up," Arthur snaps at her.
"No," Cobb says. Eames is shaking his head, eyes drifting closed. "It has to be all him or it won't take and this will all have been for nothing."
Outside, Ariadne can hear shouts and snowmobiles getting closer by the second. A bullet shatters the glass over her head, going wide. In a minute they'll find the tunnel. "We can't wait much longer," she warns, staring back into the hospital room.
Fischer opens the safe.
"Eames," Arthur says tightly.
They've found the tunnel, now; Ariadne can hear them. They're coming in cautiously, not knowing what's waiting for them, but they're coming. Cobb scrambles past her, out of sight of the tunnel opening, his bloody hands slipping on a grenade.
"Eames!" Arthur says.
"…believe you're needed elsewhere, darling…" Eames manages, not opening his eyes.
Cobb pulls the pin out of the grenade and throws it into the tunnel. In the room, Fischer's father is dead. A second wave of projections is coming into the tunnel, scrambling right over the bodies of their comrades, and Fischer bends his head over his father's hand and cries.
"He's done, we have to –" Ariadne begins, and a spray of gunfire cuts her off, throwing sparks from the metal over her head.
"My cue, I think," Eames says hoarsely, then presses the button on the detonator just as bullets shear through the heavy lighting fixture above him. Sparks rain down on him and Arthur; Arthur rolls onto Eames, shielding him as the fixture falls and the floor drops out from under Ariadne's feet and she's –
Waking. Waking. Waking.
Her heart is about to pound out of her chest, and her hands shake so hard that she can barely keep her grip on her armrests. The inside of the plane is the most unreal thing she's seen today – Cobb, surfacing with a gasp; Yusuf, blinking his eyes open; Saito, sleepy and satisfied, reaching for his phone. Fischer still asleep.
Eames, one hand on his ribs, watching the empty seat across from him without an ounce of hope in his eyes.
Arthur's not there. He never was. He's gone back to his grave in Los Angeles like an unquiet ghost at daybreak, and without knowing his real name, Ariadne couldn't find him if she tried. She wonders if Eames will.
"Hot towel?" the stewardess asks. Ariadne says yes because she doesn't know what else to say.
"Where will you go?" she asks, after.
Eames leans on an empty luggage trolley and looks out the window at the bright California sun. He's not making any move to go through customs. "Back to Mombasa, I think," he says.
"What are you –" Ariadne begins, then stops, not sure what she wants to ask, only that she wants to know the answer.
Eames gives her a bright, fond smile. It might look real if she didn't know him. "Goodbye, my sweet. Get hold of Yusuf if you need me. I fancy he'll know where to find me."
He walks off, past Fischer looking dazedly down at his Blackberry, past Dom headed for customs and his children, past Saito with his slim designer suitcase, vanishing into the crowd. Ariadne watches him go until she can't see him anymore.
She doesn't think she'll see him again.
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