Fic: We Used to Wait [2/3]
2022 AD
Cobb catches them fucking on a job in Morocco. Eames commandeered himself an office, and Cobb noticed that Arthur made excuses about not going to lunch with him for a week.
Eames has Arthur naked and bent over the desk. He has a rough hand in his hair, but Arthur is grinning. He looks positively blissed out, making contented noises as Eames thrusts and Arthur rolls back into it, starting from the shoulders, meeting Eames at the juncture of ass and thigh. Cobb blanks hard at the sight - Arthur naked and unfettered. His mind is stuttering.
Eames catches Cobb’s eye and stops, causing Arthur’s eyes to snap open. “Eames?” His voice is low, rumbling, and Cobb flees before Arthur notices.
---
2020-04-09
Re: Subject 0015 Tracking:
Subject 0015 appears to have traveled from Los Angeles to Boston using a complex system of buses and rail lines, and numerous aliases.
No residence has been pinpointed for him, which leads us to suspect that he is entrenched with an underground group of dissidents.
---
Cobb realizes they fuck throughout the duration of the job, but he’s sure it’ll end once the job does. He looks for work that doesn’t need a forger.
Eames isn’t that easily deterred. He makes excuses, shows up unexpectedly at the Cobb’s house in California for family dinners, knowing somehow when Arthur will be there. Dom doesn’t spend much time at Arthur’s because he and Mal are both so skittish that neither needs the temptation of an escape or a reprieve.
Arthur keeps his own hours and friends and time, though he’s always preternaturally there when right before Cobb needs a hand. He tries not to interfere for a little while, but he can’t help himself. He starts seeing Arthur drunk, a few times, grinning. Dressed down.
He sees an Arthur there that he thought had been trained out by rote, by discipline and dreaming. It makes something in his chest hurt, and he just wants to lock him away until a hard shell grows.
-
Cobb shows up and cuts Eames off on the fourth date, takes him out and leaves Arthur squinting at them in the doorway. He drags Eames to the nearest dive bar, a place with a loud jukebox and terrible rail drinks.
“I don’t really like this,” Cobb says, his mouth set in a hard line. “You don’t. You don’t know what he’s like.” Eames is wearing an expression of suspicious amusement, and Cobb doesn’t like that either.
He shrugs, leaning against the wooden bar. “We had a few Gargoyles over in Project Morpheus across the pond. None as old or as lovely as him, though,” he says with a wink.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
Eames leers like he can’t help it. “Well, I think you’ve gotten the gist of it.”
“I can’t. I can’t let everyone he knows just use him like this, alright. What is it you’re doing with him?”
“Apparently, bothering the shit out of you, Mr. Cobb,” Eames says, taking a long drink of his beer. “I don’t really know what you’re driving at. Do you want to know if I plan on making an honest man out of him? Because I’ll level with you: probably not.”
Cobb scowls and Eames laughs. “He’s a nice young man. He’ll get over it if and when it stops being fun, alright?”
“Then, I think,” Cobb says slowly, “I think you should stay the fuck away from him.”
Eames smiles with half his mouth. “You’ve got a treasure with that one, you know. Be a shame if you kept him on such a short leash he escaped.”
“He’s working with us, and that’s not likely to change. You think he’ll go running to you?” Cobb almost smirks when Eames’ face darkens a little, eyebrows furrowing in anger.
But Eames is a canny opponent. “And what claim do you really have now that you and Mal have gotten yourselves engaged?”
“What do you mean by that.” Dom’s eyes narrow dangerously. He doesn’t like where Eames is taking this, where he’s pushing him.
“What, Mal Miles and Dom Cobb take a four month sabbatical from the seedier side of dream share and then show up, not only with a gorgeous new point, but engagement rings?
“Doesn’t take a lot of skill to recognize a pattern,” Eames continues, and takes a long draw from his beer. “It’s good that you cut it off before he started to hate you.”
Dom doesn’t respond.
“I mean, if he can still feel that,” he says easily. “But I’m happy to take the little slut off your hands,” he says, smirking, fingers still curled around the bottle. Dom knows he means it to hurt and he rises to it, can’t help the way his hands turn to fists.
“Don’t you think for one fucking second that -“
“That what, Cobb? I know you, you remember that. I know Mal even better, and your bullshit doesn’t cut it here. Just because Mal thinks sex solves everything doesn’t mean -“
Cobb cuts him off. “He wasn’t. Don’t talk about him like that.”
“What’s his favorite band, then?”
“What?” Dom’s off guard, on uneven footing and he hates that.
“What does he like best for breakfast?”
“French toast. Too much powdered sugar.”
“Sure,” Eames says easily, “okay. Is that what Mal makes him?” He leans over toward him, “You know his hobby is sound engineering. Forged himself a right pretty degree from MIT.”
Cobb swallows hard and is suddenly not sure what he’s even doing. His right hand fidgets, spinning his engagement ring. Mal insisted. A new totem.
“After this upcoming job, I’ll be out of your sight,” Eames says as he gets up. “But don’t think I won’t be back. Don’t think he’ll always be yours.”
He saunters out, bounce in his step as though he’s already won the game.
Sticks Cobb with the tab.
-
Eames stops swinging around, and this makes Arthur brood.
Cobb tries not to notice, of course, that Arthur’s not wearing cufflinks one day, or that he shows up to dinner at Mal’s without a tie. That’s not his job anymore, he’s decided. But Mal fusses over him, unable to lay down any boundaries for her hands.
“You look pale, mon petit,” she says as she ladles more soup into his bowl.
“Eames is missing,” Arthur says without preamble, and slumps back in his chair, the front legs lifting.
Mal gives Cobb a look.”Oh?”
“Normally he’s real easy to find,” Arthur continues, dropping his chair back to the floor with a thud. He fiddles with his spoon.
“But right now I. I can’t track him down.” He sighs. “I don’t like not being able to find something I need.”
Arthur’s attention moves to the soup, leaving Mal and Cobb to continue their silent conversation.
Mal arches an eyebrow.
---
Date: 07-25-2022
Packaging: unmarked envelope, no stamp.
YOUR MOST POWERFUL WEAPON IS YOUR MIND
Dear Arthur XXXXXX:
The Army Special Forces would like to add you to their ranks on the recommendation of Stephen Miles.
[…]
The pay is $XX,XXX.XX as a trainer in PASIV use for military purposes.
Please respond promptly.
---
2023 AD
They invite Arthur for Christmas at their new house, and he stays in the guest room and none of them touch. It’s still warm, though, and Cobb thinks it feels alright. It feels normal.
Mal put together a lovely Christmas tree, and Christmas morning they all sit together on the carpet drinking hot chocolate and exchanging gifts.
They get him a laptop for Christmas, because the machine Arthur uses is held together with tape and hopes and dreams. Arthur’s smile falters.
“Oh, uh.”
Mal looks at him expectantly.
Arthur blinks.
“I appreciate it,” he says and his voice is completely flat.
Mal frowns and inhales sharply.
“I mean, like, I really appreciate it, don’t get me wrong, it’s really thoughtful and sweet and I feel like a dick here, but I can only use my rig.”
“Your computer is a piece of shit,” she says and that’s when Dom knows to wait it out.
“It looks like a piece of shit, I guess. But I just.” Arthur’s eyes are wide and he’s fidgeting, pulling at his left ear and he looks frustrated.
“Arthur,” Cobb says softly, “what’s so important about your laptop?”
“It’s the only thing I can jack into, okay?” Arthur’s voice is desperate, high pitched. “I didn’t want to tell you but sometimes I still do it, Dom, Mal, you couldn’t know and now they’ll kill you too. Fuck.”
Mal laughs. “No one’s killing anyone, alright. What do you mean, jack into?”
Cobb’s mouth is a thin line and he isn’t sure if he’s appalled or proud that Arthur would take the risk to make sure a job runs more smoothly. Arthur, though, he’s sweating a little, nervous. Wide eyed.
“You know, Project Gargoyle.” Arthur’s voice lowers a bit when he says it. “And. Your dad knows, Mal.”
At this she frowns. “Knows what, Arthur? What does my father know?”
Arthur bites his lip and it’s not something Cobb’s seen in months, so he reaches out and touches his shoulder, lightly.
“He knows I’m still alive.”
When there’s no response, Arthur starts talking faster. “That’s how I got William Mercier III’s service files for that job, and how I could get blueprints for the Hawaii job, and that first job, Cobb, that one I did it too because I thought it’d impress you, but maybe they’re watching or something and know when I jack in now, but -”
Dom clicks his tongue and Arthur stops. “You know you don’t have -“
“I want to!” Arthur nearly shouts, “I love it - it’s pure data, pure knowledge, you just have to know how to look and I can, I know what to do with it.”
Mal sighs and ruffles his hair. “We can return the laptop, you know,” she says as she moves to touch his other shoulder. “And you’re safe with us, from my father.”
Dom looks thoughtful. “Well, you haven’t brought anyone down on our heads before, but you need to be careful.”
Arthur nods. “I know, I will be. I always am.”
-
Subject Update: 0015
Date: 2015-12-03
Miles -
Subject 0015’s surgery appears to be a complete success. The modifications implemented appear to have at least off-set the temporal damage seen in Subjects 0012 and 0013, as there have been no problems with speech or facial recognition. Subject 0014’s unfortunate results have led to a truly promising development. The tissue itself seems to be adapting quite easily.
There have been a few troubling incidents of memory loss, and it remains to be seen whether the creation of new long-term emotional memories has been upset with the addition of the Gargoyle device, but they have passed quickly thus far. Regardless, it has not seemed to impair his ability to control the device’s functionality when connected to the limited Network we have set up. In a few weeks we believe he will be ready for tests on the larger databases and external data networks. Already he has surpassed all but Subjects 002 and 007 in speed and autonomous location creation.
Your question about the emotional issues that you’ve noticed in Subjects 0010 and 0011 is still being studied, but I think you are correct about the inappropriately heightened feelings of attachment and empathy. I’ll let you know as soon as we learn something.
Yours,
Dr. M
-
The end of the year brings a fast job, and it goes bad fast.
And it’s brutal, the first time Cobb watches Arthur jack in. Arthur is calm as ever and pulls an X-ACTO blade out of his coat’s breast pocket as he heads to the bathroom in the dingy Motel 6 room they’re hiding in.
The U.S. government doesn’t exactly pay premium per diem. Arthur leaves the door open and Dom watches his reflection as he carefully cuts away a rectangular strip of flesh behind his ear, and pulls it out. Blood pours into the white towel stuffed around Arthur’s neck and he pats some of it away to reveal gleaming titanium.
There are holes there, within the bloody clearing Arthur’s made, holes fit for various wires. Plugs, Dom thinks, and remembers they go straight to Arthur’s brain.
Figure 5
His laptop hums loudly as Arthur sets up the appropriate cables, and plugs himself in. His body jerks a little on the bed, and the screen is dark. All in all, the scene lacks any of the wonder and beauty present when Cobb first witnessed this ritual of dark science.
It only takes two minutes and Arthur gasps a little as his eyes flutter open, and he wrenches the cable out. He’s still bleeding.
“They don’t know who we are, and they don’t know where we went, but they know where we were, so it’s good that we switched hotels.” Arthur’s jaw tilts back a little with pride - it was his idea to ditch their first hideout.
-
2023-11-30 -
YOUR MOST POWERFUL WEAPON IS YOUR MIND
Dear Arthur Cohen:
The Army Special Forces would like to add you to their ranks on the recommendation of Stephen Miles.
[…]
If you think being around Mal and Cobb is what’s keeping you safe, you should reconsider - what you’re really doing is making her life, and her husband’s, more dangerous. It’s only a matter of time before the US Government gets a hold of you. I’m just giving you the option of going willingly, rather than making them take you by force. She’s going to have a family to consider soon, after all. - Miles
-
2024 AD
It’s barely March when Cobb finds himself saying, incredulously, “You’re joining the Army?”
Arthur shrugs, long and sinuous and full of young adult fuck you. “Mal knows.”
Cobb stares. “And you didn’t think you should tell me because?”
“Well, you never fucking asked, did you?”
Cobb’s mouth is open to deliver a stinging retort but none comes out.
Arthur’s tugging at his ear, his fingers skittering around the spot that Cobb thinks but doesn’t know feels slightly different than the rest.
“Who talked you into this?”
“What?”
“Was it Eames? I’m going to kill him.”
“Cobb.”
“If you think this is some way to prove you’re not just some experiment, Arthur, you know you’re more than that, we love you.”
Arthur sighs and softens a little. “I know. But. I’m leaving. You’ll find another pointman.”
“No one’s going to be you, Arthur.”
And at that Arthur shrugs. He’s still worrying the skin behind his ear, tracing the places where wires went to make his brain run faster than quicksilver. “No, no one as good as me.” It’s almost a hushed breath of air, and when he says it the rest of the sharpness ebbs out of his body.
He’s just a boy in a suit that Dom once picked out. His tie is a little crooked.
“Is Mal okay with this?”
“Mal’s pregnant.” Arthur says, his voice clipped.
Dom’s mouth is still hanging open when Arthur leaves.
-
Arthur has never seen war, so they send him into the field first.
“If you survive, then you make special ops. Special Forces. The Mind Crimes division.” The man telling him all this can’t keep the ugly smile off his face, as though Arthur is the least likely candidate for survival he’s ever seen.
Arthur finds this is both fair and necessary while being unfair and terrible. He isn’t a soldier at first - he’s a loner, he uses small arms and no armor, and has he ever really killed? Ended a real life?
That’s a question he supposes he will have to leave to the philosophers. Boot camp pushes those questions out of his mind and he has to focus on the body. It’s hard work until it’s not any more, until his shape changes.
He gets better at looking people in the eye, at smiling in the right places. At keeping his mouth shut. At falling in line.
-
“You’re letting him?” Eames asks over the phone. He’s in Bali, where’s it hot and he can stay hidden.
“I can’t just dictate his actions, Eames.”
“Only mine, then, is that right, Cobb?”
“I’m just worried.”
“So you thought you’d call me up, because my former lover who you warned me off of is enlisting and is being sent straight to some kind of secret Special Forces mission for the US government, and you needed to vent?”
“Yes.”
Eames hopes his frown is audible, and he moves to hang up.
Cobb sighs. “Mal made me call you. She said she’d do it herself but that I have to pay penance for letting anything get this out of hand. She’s pretty sure they know. About him.”
And Eames thinks, hell. The best way to learn a new language is through total immersion. He writes Arthur a letter.
---
Dear Mr. Eames -
I hope the documents were up to your usual impeccable standards. I know you’d rather deal with fakes, but I thought this time that the real deal would get the job done faster.
Yours,
Arthur
--
A -
God, even your writing sounds like you’re doing it for some prissy school assignment. Could’ve done the papers myself, thanks, but guess you saved me time. They worked like a charm. How’s the Army?
- E
--
Mr. Eames -
Iraq is hot. Shooting heavy artillery is less fun than you made it out to be. How’s the Eastern Bloc?
- A
--
Dear Stick-in-the-Mud:
Your letter’s a bit too terse to warrant a reply.
- E
--
Dearest Mr. Eames:
Right now I’m stationed in XXXXXX, Iraq. It’s dreadfully hot and sandy here, and the locals all speak Kurdish, which means that I only have a rudimentary understanding when XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
They have me here mostly to do background research so I can build them realistic dreamscapes upon my eventual return, fate willing. Currently we are working with the locals to build a police force made up of Iraqis, but it’s hard to get them to stop accepting bribes. The IEDs don’t help, and we’ve already lost one HumVee, though no one was killed.
I’ll be lucky if I make it back to the states with all my limbs intact, to be honest. It’s quite up in the air now, though. My return should be swift but I don’t know where I’ll be stationed.
I hope this manages to satisfy your insatiable curiosity, Mr. Eames.
- Arthur XXXXXXXXXXXX
--
Good to know you’re still a prick. Back in the UK - they’ll take anyone in the MI5 these days, I reckon.
- E
--
E -
You are impressively credentialed, I must say. In Afghanistan now. More sand.
- A
---
There’s a firefight. It’s not his first, and his battalion has some cover as the Humvee continues to roll toward their destination.
But it’s an IED that takes Arthur out of the field, flipping his unit’s vehicle six times until the windshield is covered in the driver’s blood. Everything sounds underwater, a dull roar pounding in his ears as he and the others riding with him scramble for their weapons, to get away from the giant beast of metal and gasoline that they’re ensconced in. His vision is swimming with bright dots of light and everything is slow.
Arthur tries to stand, and that’s when the pain starts to flood his senses. He glances down to catch a glimpse of metal gone straight through his thigh and closes his eyes and thinks about breathing.
“Fuck, Lieutenant,” one of his troop members shouts, must be shouting at him, and he drags himself out, M-16 a crutch to get himself to stand. He shoots until he can’t.
He’s lying on his back in hot sand and staring up at the sun when a helicopter arrives.
His platoon tells him he’s shot three men and they clap him on the shoulder before he’s taken away.
---
[2026: The video is grainy, black and white.
[Two men in uniform walk up to the Cobb’s house. Mal Cobb opens the door]
Man 1: We’re sorry to have to tell you this, ma’am.
[Mal’s face looks blank, and then angry. She leans inside, yelling. A man appears.]
Man 2: Your friend Arthur listed you as his familial contacts. He’s been killed in combat.
[Mal slams the door in their faces.]
It opens to just Dominick Cobb, staring and then inviting them inside]
---
Dom calls Eames, and calls and calls and calls. There’s no answer, and on the third day out, the line is cut.
-
Time passed slowly in the desert, but it shuffles just as slowly when he returns.
He’s taken to Walter Reed first, and his leg isn’t ruined, and it wasn’t chopped off in a Belarusian hospital. They give him medication and IVs and schedules for physical therapy, all of which he takes in dully and dutifully.
The nurses don’t talk to him like they talk to the other patients in the ward, and he starts to feel like a ghost. He asks for a phone, he needs to know what day it is, does Cobb know where he is? He wants to know what Mal named the baby. And they tut over him and adjust his medication until he stops asking questions.
Arthur gets moved to a private room, and he’s dosed with Somnacin almost immediately after they pull him off the Vicodin. It’s just as well - his neighbors still complain because he wakes up screaming and lucid and shuddering with the aftershocks of nightmare.
Men with clipboards come in periodically and plug into the PASIV with him.
“I want to call my family, please,” Arthur tells the first one when they wake up. Arthur’s panicking because he can’t remember the dream, all the images and sounds and touches are blurring and sliding away. He thinks he has someone to call, someone who would remind him how to dreamwalk again.
The man shakes his head. “You don’t have one. Least not anymore.”
The second man who comes holds up a small plastic bag when they wake, after he’s clicked the case of the PASIV shut. “You want this, or should we mail it somewhere?” he asks.
Arthur snatches it. Inside is a little red die.
He asks for a notebook, and he’s given a little black composition book and a stub of a pencil. Rounded, non-lethal. He keeps it hidden in his clothes, in a sock or his boxers when the clipboards come, but the rest don’t talk to him at all.
He wears the paint off his totem with his fingers.
-
They put him through his paces until his recall is perfect again and he can walk short distances topside. No one ever shows him a watch or a calendar, and he’s blindfolded when he gets transferred to another facility.
He’s being disappeared but he isn’t sure how to fight it. He’s been out of the Middle East for almost exactly nine weeks, and he only knows because the computer in his brain keeps perfect atomic time. He recognizes the technique though. It doesn’t matter how long he’s been gone, because he’s never going to leave.
His room feels like something he can’t quite focus in on the memory. He knows what it is, why it’s so familiar, but he can’t remember what his room as 0015 looked like or if it even looked similar.
It takes weeks before his dreamscape is approved - they insist on recreating every detail of each town Arthur has visited, making him pour over his own photographs and videos.
“Never create from memory,” is one of the cardinal rules of dream work, taught to Dominick Cobb by Stephen Miles and then passed along to Arthur, a whole lifetime ago. But his superiors are insistent, so he clutches his totem and grits his teeth and builds villages, sand dunes, IEDs.
It’s a surprise when Miles comes into a planning session and insists on visiting the dreamscape. When his eyes open after the drug kicks in, he’s standing in a dessert near Ar Ramadi wearing his full gear, sunglasses and helmet on. Miles looks perfectly at ease in a suit, his squint the only thing out of place.
“It’s certainly hot here,” Miles says easily. “This where you were?”
Arthur shrugs, body armor bulky and familiar. He’s holding an M-16. “I was here for a while, yeah.”
“It looks quite realistic.” Miles spits out sand.
“I know. I think it might be too realistic.”
“And how is that a problem?”
“You…you once said never to build from memory. You could get lost.”
Miles raises his eyebrows. “Your superiors asked for this, didn’t they?”
“Yes, sir,” Arthur replies, maybe a little sarcastically.
“The United States government built you, boy, and I think it might be time that you understood exactly what that means.”
“I been figuring it out, sir,” he snaps. “Been trying to work out how to get transferred to Gitmo. Those guys have lawyers now.”
Miles snorts. “Now you’re being insolent. There, you’d just be locked away. Here, you’re a god.”
“I could build ‘most anything,” he says. “But what’s going to happen, is that you’re going to do is hook me to a feedback loop, keep me building deserts and jungles and submarines, and you’re going to let soldiers kill each other in my brain.”
Miles just looks at him, gaze calculating.
Arthur shoots himself.
-
Miles is waiting for him topside, in the real world. Arthur’s shackled to his chair, as though they expect him to run at any moment. There’re calluses forming on the inside of his wrists from where the metal rubs.
“Mal’s very sad about your passing,” Miles says, grim faced. “It’s a very unfortunate coincidence that one of my best experiments had to befriend my daughter.”
Arthur doesn’t say anything, his nostrils flaring and his teeth clenching. The fight’s back in him and he knows it’ll hurt when it gets ground out of him later, but he can’t stop himself.
“As though you’d have been allowed friends had you stayed.” The older man sighs, and then squints at Arthur. “I suppose you’d like to know then. Her first pregnancy was a miscarriage, but. I now have a beautiful granddaughter named Phillipa.”
He straightens up. “I think they named you godfather, though I doubt you’d legally be able to claim the title.”
“Fuck you,” Arthur says, because he doesn’t have anything else left.
---
2026
The letter is marked with two red stamps reading “CLASSIFIED,” and begins with “We regret to inform you of the death of Lt. Arthur XXXXXX.”
Written over this typing is: I’ve gone to find him
Sent to the Cobbs by courier
---
Eames shows up on their doorstep six weeks after the second letter comes. In his arms is Arthur, unconscious, bloodied, and still in his greens.
Mal yells for Cobb when she opens the door, her hands flying to her face and then to touch Arthur and then to her pocket, where a top sits out of habit.
“Arthur! Oh, my dear Arthur.” She starts to usher them inside when Cobb stops. He ends all movement.
“Eames,” he says, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” His voice is low, and Mal looks horrified.
“Trying to find a safehouse, mate, what’s it look like? If you can’t tell, dear Arthur here needs some rest.”
Cobb’s whole body radiates frustration, and he pinches his nose. “You can’t. This isn’t. We have a kid now, Eames.”
“So we’ll have to sleep in the living room, then,” Eames says as he steps through the doorway. Cobb blocks him.
“How could you bring him here? You’re putting my whole family at risk Eames.”
Mal puts her hand on his shoulder. “Dom, I think you are mistaken,” she says, softly, but there is hardness in her eyes. “Arthur is family.” She pushes Cobb back and Eames walks in.
“So this is how you repay loyalty, huh Cobb?” Eames asks quietly as he passes.
Mal glances back. “You should check on Phillipa, dear.”
-
They still have a guest room, so Mal puts them there. Arthur moans once, softly, when Eames deposits him gently on the bed.
“I think we have an air mattress somewhere,” Mal starts and Eames laughs.
“Don’t worry. Need to wake him up regularly - concussion. I’ll just catnap in the armchair.”
“Eames. Why don’t you try to sleep on the couch for a while. I can watch Arthur just fine.”
Eames shakes his head. “He won’t know where he is. Your husband’s right - we’re dangerous men now, Mal.”
She laughs, but backs down. “Let me get you some bandages and towels. I’ll have Dom bring up your bags.”
-
Cobb’s an earlier riser, but apparently not as early as his guests. He heads to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee only to find one already made. He spies Arthur and Eames through the glass door, smoking in his yard, and he tries hard to swallow back his anger that they’re in his house at all. Eames is in the most nondescript clothing he’s ever seen him wear - black t-shirt stretched over his chest and jeans. Arthur is out of his uniform and in some slacks, a white button up that hangs loose. The sleeves are rolled up.
He watches Arthur drop his cigarette butt and kick dirt over it, and Eames opens the door to let him inside.
Figure 6
“I’ve got a little girl, Arthur. Don’t leave that shit in my yard.”
Arthur doesn’t look him in the face. “Sorry.” His voice is hoarse; it sounds like it’s on its way to disappearing. His hands are shaking as he pours coffee into a mug. He has bandages that run up his left arm to the elbow, and the ditch of his right is swathed as well. Cobb has never seen Arthur like this.
Eames doesn’t have a problem meeting him in the eye and Cobb feels the whole weight of his glare. “Morning, Cobb,” he says cheerfully, raising his own mug.
“Morning, Eames. When do you think you guys can head out again?”
Eames says, “Arthur needs at least a week,” at the same time as Arthur says, “We can leave today.”
Eames rolls his eyes. “I’m going to need to sleep eventually,” he says, and Cobb looks him up and down.
He looks leaner than Cobb remembers, and he’s injured as well. He has a butterfly bandage on his cheek that matches the one holding Arthur’s nose in place. There’s a bruise that looks fresh on Eames’ temple.
Arthur just looks into his mug. “You worry too much. I’m fine.” Arthur doesn’t look like he’s slept in days, bags under his eyes mixing with bright purple bruises.
Mal enters into the kitchen, holding Phillipa’s hands as she toddles in. Arthur smiles and it entirely transforms his face, taking Cobb back to their life before. But Arthur had missed her birth. The last thing they’d gotten from him was a present from Iraq, a mobile, and a long letter for Mal, and it was before Phillipa even existed. Mal didn’t let him read it.
Phillipa is smiling and she waves. “Who dem?” she asks, and Mal laughs and sweeps the girl up in her arms, kissing her on the cheek. “This is your Uncle Arthur. And this is our friend, Eames.”
The girl seems content with that, and Arthur peers at her small form, his eyes filled with some kind of astonishment. She grabs at his fingers.
“I suppose you two never really met, huh?” Mal asks, and Arthur shakes his head. Cobb realizes he’s been holding his breath when his vision starts to swim a little.
There’s Arthur in the kitchen, already falling under Phillipa’s spell, Mal is smiling and there are no worried creases in her forehead. And Eames is leaning against the counter, watching Arthur intently, a smile playing over his face.
It feels different. Cobb didn’t think he would ever feel quite like this again. He wonders why
Arthur doesn’t feel more like a ghost.
“I think maybe lady Phillipa would like her presents, right Arthur?” Eames asks, and Arthur nods, not looking up. Eames excuses himself and leaves the kitchen.
“Where have you been, Arthur, that you look like that?”
Arthur looks up at Mal and sighs. “You know I couldn’t answer that even if I wanted to.”
“We thought you were dead, Arthur,” says Cobb from behind him, and Arthur glances back, his eyes skimming over Cobb’s for a second.
“I might as well have been,” he says. “But I’m not now.”
“I need to call my parents, and let them know you’re okay. We named you godfather, you know.”
“Please don’t,” Arthur says with enough force that it startles the baby. “I just. We just need to lay low. Please don’t tell Miles.”
Mal searches his face but finds nothing there but emptiness, and then Eames appears with stuffed animals in hand. Phillipa giggles as he approaches, claps her hands.
-
Eames and Arthur spend the entirety of the next day asleep, curled around each other in the guest bedroom.
Mal watches from the doorway - that’s how she knows it’s a dead sleep, a real sleep. She opened the door and didn’t get a gun in her face. She doesn’t know if her Arthur still dreams. She thinks it might be better if he doesn’t.
She watches them, and it makes her a little sad. She’d planned this, of course, but never thought it would go so well, if Eames rescuing Arthur from government prison is going well.
Arthur’s eyes snap open and she gasps a little.
“Eames,” he says clearly. “Eames, we need to go.”
Eames stirs but doesn’t rise as Arthur moves out of bed, shoving clothes into their suitcase.
“Mal, how long have we been here?”
She blinks. “42 hours, give or take.” She’d waited exactly 36 hours to call her father, not to tell him anything, but to see if he would reveal himself. He had, but only a shadow. A shade of worry.
Arthur nods. “43, okay. Still ticking.” He scratches behind his ear.
“Eames!” Arthur’s voice is full of urgency, and Eames sits up.
“What is it?”
“We need to go. We need to not be here in an hour and then we can come back and you can sleep for two straight days but we have to move.”
Eames nods and gathers his things, small cufflinks and something else from the night stand.
“We’ll be back, I promise,” Arthur says, kissing Mal on the cheek. “You know better than to tell them anything. Just let Cobb be Cobb.”
Mal watches them go.
-
In exactly sixty minutes, riot police show up at their door.
Their guns are drawn, and they’re angry, ready to kill the two violent fugitives they’d been told the Cobbs were harboring.
Phillipa cries and Cobb goes red in the face with anger. “You think I’d put my family at risk like that? You think I’d put my child at risk like that? I told them to take a fucking hike and that I’d sell them out as soon as I could. They’re going to Morocco, and I told them I didn’t give a fuck. Now get out of my house.”
They do.
It’s a fine performance.
Miles calls right after, and it’s Mal’s turn.
-
There are things that Dom is grateful not to know.
This is what Eames saw:
Arthur tied to a chair, strapped in, eyes closed, muscles twitching every so often, spasming up against his bonds. Even asleep, he wanted to run. His leg was covered in bandages.
“We’re feeding him the idea of being in an identical room to this, so we don’t have to bother with the first round of heavy sedation to keep him in a double layered dream,” said one man to another man in a lab coat as they shuffle around him, the PASIV device lying open. “If he dies, he’ll wake up to what he thinks is here.”
There was a cable, long and thick, snaking from behind Arthur’s ear to a computer. IVs led to his arm, and then they marched the soldiers in, who dutifully rolled up their sleeves to be sent into Arthur’s mind, so casually, so without permission. He watched as the screen lit up with mortar fire as they ran through the paces set up by Arthur in the desert, the screen projecting brightly.
One by one, the men died, and each woke with a start, some shouting. A few scrambled for rubbish bins to heave into, the drugs and the dying too much to handle.
This time, Arthur wasn’t there to talk them through it, and the commander whose projections were used wasn’t gentle enough to make the effort. Another group walked in.
“We’ve maximized his training efficiency now, I think,” said one man in a lab coat to the other. “We can keep him going for months like this.”
This is what Eames did:
Yanked the cord out of Arthur’s brain, threw him over his shoulder, and ran. It took a week of driving, shooting, fighting, brawling, to get to the Cobbs', as Arthur screamed and vomited and got the DTs and killed seven men. They went through eight different cars and slept in the woods, Arthur’s die cutting divots into his palm, the other hand wrapped in Eames’ shirt.
This is what Arthur never did:
Arthur never complained, not even when the blood fell out of his mouth, when he lost a molar, when his vision blacked with a crack to his skull. When the shakes happened as he detoxed, full of serotonin and gripping Eames’ shirt as his reality shifted. When he curled into himself, shaking, as poison came out his ears. When his leg gave out, still raw with disuse. Eames watched over him, and Arthur never asked why.
-
Arthur and Eames return, and even Dom seems relieved. He gives Arthur the hug that was missing from their first reunion, and they both ignore the wince caused by healing ribs.
“Sorry to be so rude, but I really must get Arthur to bed. We need to sleep,” Eames says, pushing Arthur toward the stairs.
“Hours and hours of it, apparently,” Cobb says.
“It’s the best medicine,” says Eames, grinning, but Arthur just slumps.
“It’s been a while,” he mumbles.
“Plus, we need to be well rested to dream.”
And for the first time, Mal notices the PASIV in Arthur’s hand.
Cobb watches them go up the stairs together, bodies bending in on each other, and he wonders if he ever made the right choice when it came to Arthur, because it’s come to this.
-
Mal checks on them periodically, and finds Arthur pulled into Eames’ lap, Eames’ fingers playing in his hair.
She waits in the doorway for a moment, hesitating.
He smiles. “Sorry about all this, Mal.”
She smiles back. “You have nothing to be sorry for, but I must ask when Arthur became such a heavy sleeper.”
Eames looks serious again, and his hands skid behind Arthur’s left ear, fingers tracing something hidden. Mal knows the sketches, has seen those blueprints, but has never touched. Never looked at Arthur there.
“They kept him under for a month. Every night, Mal, he’d be under for four, six hours a night, every day, for thirty days. That’s the sleep they gave him.”
The scientist in her stirs. She wants to know how, what did they give him, how he’s still walking and breathing and looking at things. She wants to scan his brain and pick it to little pieces, take blood samples and examine him under a microscope.
Instead, she purses her lips. “We’ll have to take him under tomorrow, or the detox process could be too much.”
Eames nods. “I know. We’ve been working on it.”
Arthur twists and Eames holds him down, and then his eyes pop open and Eames’ hand is on his mouth. There’s a muffled scream and Arthur’s eyes roll back.
“Hey, hush now,” Eames says and Arthur’s body shudders, then goes lax again. His eyes slide shut.
Mal doesn’t ask, but Eames answers anyway. “His brain. It records everything. He doesn’t dream anymore, obviously, but it does playbacks now. Memories in HD, looped every so often.”
And Mal doesn’t know what to after that, either.
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