The man who had none of the luck 4/6
Title: The man who had none of the luck part 4
author: Black Gem
pairing: Arthur/Eames
characters: Arthur, Eames
rating: R
warnings: violence, torture, allusions to rape and other dark themes
disclaimer: I own nothing, I'm just playing with them.
Summary: Arthur isn't going to wait around like some damsel in distress to be rescued.
Author's note: This part is long, very long, and was somewhat painful to write. I almost broke it up like part 3 but there wasn't a really good break point.
Author's note 2: I have moved the fic to my journal to keep it all in one place and hopefully make it easier to read.
?: 29th August, sometime in the am
The first thing Arthur becomes aware of as he swims back to consciousness is the smell; damp mildew in the air, with a metallic undercurrent of salt and rust. Resisting the urge to open his eyes immediately, he ensures his breathing steady. He has, through years of dreaming, more than enough practice in waking up without letting any ticks or tells gives his renewed awareness away. There was, after all, no point giving away even a minor advantage to any possible watchers.
He was slumped up against a wall, cold, hard and metallic. He could feel the rough surface through the thin shirt he was wearing, his jacket and waistcoat having disappeared to who-knows-where, and the cold surface leached heat from his body. He shivered almost involuntarily and he could hear a clink as the chain linking his handcuffed wrists moved along with his involuntary movements. He resisted to urge to hold his breath, contenting himself to merely listening out to see if the sound was attracting any attention, but all he could hear was his own breathing and a steady drip drip of water in the distance.
He took a deep breath, and regretted it immediately as sharp shooting pains emanated from his chest, his ribcage specifically. At a guess he would say he had at least two cracked ribs, maybe more. Other pains started making themselves known too, a twisted wrist, probably not broken, an eye swollen shut, no doubt from too many blows to the head, and bruises on pretty much every available surface of skin. After carefully opening his eyes, wincing in reaction to even the dim light in the room, he felt around his mid-section as best he could given the length of chain available to him. No internal bleeding thankfully, but that was about the only good news going. He had to choke back a bitter laugh, it really was a stark testament to his life, that he was so familiar with being shot, stabbed or beaten that he was able tell the extent of the damage through sensations alone.
Looking around, his eyes now open, he took in serroundings. The room was small, barely long enough for a man to lay down full length, with only a single flickering florescent light in the ceiling which did little to chase away the shadows and served predominantly to give him a headache. There were pipes running across the roof and along the sides of the walls, along with strong rivets and handholds at regular intervals. All in all it gave the impression of disused industriality that so often characterised the workspaces of dreamers..
He toyed with the notion that this may be a dream but, even without his totem, Arthur had always had a good sense of reality and this it had little of the feel of a dream. In any case, if this was a dream he would have probably managed to come up with something a bit less filthy.
With nothing else to do, he settled down to contemplate his options for escape, it didn't take him long. The chain seemed pretty solidly attached to a large metal ring higher up the wall with a hefty looking pad-lock. Even if he had something with which to pick the lock, assuming he even could given how rusty his skills in that area where, there was no way for him to actually reach it The chain itself was just long enough to allow him to sit down comfortably, but no where near enough slack to let him get anywhere near the door and the room itself, despite the damp and the rusting walls, was surprisingly clear of any convenient heavy metal objects he could use to attack or overpower any guards. Assuming any of them came at all.
He apparent options boiled down to 'wait for an opportunity to present itself'. It was a good thing that patience was one of Arthur's virtues, no matter how sorely this was tested on many an occasion by a particularly persistent forger.
It took what felt like several hours for the door to the room to open. During this time Arthur had managed to catalogue every single spot of rust on the walls and was just starting on counting the bolts riveted on the walls holding various pipes and vents in place. He was saved from that particularly onerous task by the sounds of footsteps in the corridor outside and he drew himself up to standing, stifling a groan as the movement caused stabs of pain to run from his aching, battered body.
The door creaked open and two men come in, they looked like locals, nothing at all like the men who had trailed him through Singapore, in battered jeans and t-shirts. One of them had a crude metal tray in his hands, the other had a gun pointed in his direction. He didn't bother wasting his breath on asking questions, these weren't the ones behind his captivity, these men were clearly the hired help. A fact confirmed by broken English mixed in with what sounded like Thai as the one with the gun tried to communicate with him the importance of not moving from the wall whilst the other placed the tray of food down by his feet.
“I can't eat like this” Arthur told them calmly, not making any move that could be interpreted as a threat. At their bemused looks, he shook the chain, stretching it taunt to show the limited movement length he had. “Please,” he looked up at them with sincerity.
They conferred with each quickly. Definitely Thai, not a language Arthur spoke unfortunately but one he'd heard often enough to distinguish for the other dialects spoken in the region. Despite his lack in linguistic skills, he could guess the argument, letting him starve was clearly not on the menu, but neither was letting him loose. Finally feeding him won out and the gun was pointed pointed directly at him with a heavily accented “No move!”, and the other approached him cautiously, moving to release his cuffed hands from the chain on the wall. Idiots.
He was moving as soon as his wrists were released, throwing himself towards the man with the gun, forcing his arms up. A shot went off, hitting the roof harmlessly, and he was grabbing and twisting the arm holding, a swift blow to the gut and the man was on the floor curled around himself in pain, with the gun now in the point man's very capable hand. The other man, key still in hand, cowered in the corner as soon as the gun was pointed at him. Arthur pushed past him out the room and into an equally dark, narrow and damp corridor. He could hear shouts coming from the room behind him and even without the shot, it was clear that his escape was neither as quiet nor as subtle as he would have preferred..
So Arthur did the only thing he could, he ran, dodging blows and men as he did. Up through tiny corridors, steep stairways and rusting ladders. Bullets pinged around him, going wide, warning shots more than anything else. He ran until he couldn't run any more, and when he stopped he had to bite back a bitter laugh, because looking out in the distance, over the dark and rolling sea, he really should have expected this. He was, it appeared, going nowhere since he was on a fucking boat.
++++
He awoke back in the small room. His arms were not longer chained, though this hardly added to his escape options, it did allow him the opportunity to effectively catalogue any new additions to his collection of bruises. There were in fact surprisingly few, the principal of which was an additional lump on his head where someone had cold-cocked him with the butt of a pistol. It was during his ginger investigation of the bruise, an attempt to ascertain its seriousness, that the door creaked open and a tray was pushed in quickly prior to the slamming of metal and a grinding of bolts indicating that that exit both shut and locked. All he'd managed to see through the doorway was the glint of dim light off guns, a clear indication that they were no longer willing to take any chances with him. He was almost flattered by the level of precautions taken, after all, where would he actually go?
Arthur had no idea how much time he spent in the tiny room, they'd taken from him any ability to tell the hour, or even the day. It was that, more than the bruises, the cracked ribs or the mind-numbing boredom, that was hard to deal with. He tried to tell the time by the drip drip of water, but that gave him the seconds, not the minutes or the hours and he lost track whenever he drifted off into a fitful, uncomfortable sleep. He tried keeping track of the days by the food they delivered, but he had no way of knowing how often that was, once a day, twice maybe but he doubted it, not given the racking hunger pangs he was starting to feel. He picked the lock on his cuffs on the second day, using a sliver of metal from the mangled fork they'd given his to eat with, it didn't help though, the door was barred from the outside and no one came in, not since that first attempt. All he saw of his captors now was the glint of guns and the trays of food sliding in.
It was the fifth time they fed him, the fifth day maybe, that they drugged him. He wasn't certain how he noticed, not given the already foul taste of whatever it was they were feeding him, but something tasted bitter, more so than before. In truth he didn't notice it at first, the hunger was so overwhelming that the strange stew was half gone by the time his taste-buds caught up. He fumbled the bowl and spilling the food on the floor in what he hoped was a convincing manner to avoid eating the rest of it, to avoid indicating that he knew what they were doing. Not that it required that much faking, whatever they had slipped into his food seemed to be working quickly and he was having trouble making his limbs respond to the commands his brain was given them.
Arthur was holding onto awareness by his fingertips when they came through the door. Different from the men who'd brought him food, different still for those who'd chased him down in Singapore, despite the similarity in cheap suits. Part of his mind, strangely detached from proceedings, wondered if they shopped at the same place. He struggled when they grabbed him, but his limbs had long since given up being under voluntary control and felt more like they were made of lead. It was like he was moving underwater, sinking down, unable to get a purchase. He bit out at a hand that reached to cover his man and heard a cursing, as if from far away, before there was the familiar pin-prick of a needle and then nothing.
++++
“It's amazing when you think about it, some of the most impressive pieces of architecture in Europe were built for World Fairs, the Atomium in Brussels, the Eiffel Tower in Paris” she gestured at the building they were standing on and then laughed at herself, “actually those are the only two I can think of. They used to be such a big deal, you never really here of the World's Fair anymore do you?” She smiled at him and then leaned out on the balcony of the upper level of the Eiffel Tower, admiring the cityscape below.
Arthur made a small sound in his throat, not really agreement but she took it as encouragement enough. He half listened as she babbled excitedly about the architecture behind the Tower, how avant guard it was in 1881, nothing quite like it existing anywhere else. He knew all this, of course,, but he let her talk, let the sounds wash over him, a pleasant background noise as he learned over to admire the view below with a small smile. He'd never understood how people could be afraid of heights, to him being up high always made him feel safe, unreachable. Ariadne was not, under most circumstances, the sort of person he would have chosen for a friend, but somehow he enjoyed the other girls company. Her enthusiasm and zest for life, for architecture, for dreaming, was like a breath of fresh air in a profession so filled with jaded souls.
Her curiousity still sometimes got the better of her, but thankfully she had learned from her experience with Cobb, and took the rebuffs to her none-too-subtle enquiries as to his personal life with good grace. Not that there were many, it was apparent that Arthur didn't project the aura of having many dark secrets or a mysterious past. He was, to Ariadne, just plain, boring, reliable, safe Arthur, it was an image he'd worked hard to perfect.
“You're not listening are you?” she had a pout on her face.
“To your speech about the origins of the Atomium, I wasn't listening to a word” he replied drily and then moved out the way as she punched his arm gentle in mock annoyance an indulgent smile threatening to twitch the corners of his mouth.
She went to thread her arm through his, and because he was a gentleman, he let her. Although the gesture somehow didn't feel natural, they'd never been that physically intimate, not really, despite her tentative forays towards intimacy after the Fischer job. He only tuned back into what she was talking about towards the end, and as he did he felt somewhat lost in the conversation, as if there was an important piece he was missing.
“...you're not going to go on a job without me again are you?” She asked, a whine threatening at the edges of her voice. She moved around as she spoke to face him, grabbing his other arm so that both his hands here in hers.
“What are you talking about?” He asked, genuinely confused now, because he took a lot of jobs that didn't involve the young architect. In fact the only real constant in his jobs since Cobb's semi-retirement was Eames, and it was a rare job in dreamscape nowadays where the two would not be found together.
He tried to pull away from her embrace as he spoke, but she move to follow, leaning in to try and capture his lips for a kiss. The move caught him off-guard, and as her lips met his, the first thought that occurred to him was 'How did I get here?'.
He came up blank, a lurching realisation deep inside that this was not reality and he pushed her roughly away from him. Now he was aware of it, the irregularities within the dream became clearer, as if a fog lifting. The strange way Ariadne had been acting, the inconsistencies in the view from the tower, a Paris constructed from imagination not reality. As awareness emerged, his projections turned fast, they always did, his mind militarised as it was even for an extractor, and they descended en mass on Ariadne.
No, not Ariadne, that much was clear as the form flickered under the assault from the projections, revealing a young Asian man before he was ripped to shreds under the onslaught. A forger then. Even as the dream collapsed Arthur couldn't help being somewhat disappointed it took him so long to spot it.
“... and since you oh so usefully got yourself killed and collapsed the dream, I imagine sleeping beauty here should be waking up about now.”Arthur awoke as he always did from a dream, all at once and with little outward sign. But if the heavily accented voice was anything to go by there was little point in keeping up pretence of sleep.
He opened his eyes, taking in the barren surroundings and had to suppress the urge to roll his eyes. He was handcuffed securely to what must have once been an office chair in a run-down abandoned warehouse. Debris of furniture were strewn around the place and sunlight dripped through cracks in the windows. After the almost timeless nature of the ship's hold he'd been kept in, he was glad to have some outside point of reference to keep track of the time, as crude as it was.
This had to be reality, because no one would make up a dream world which was so horribly clichéd.
The owner of the voice was straddling a chair in front of him and gave him a wide smile when he saw the point man had awoken. “Take it me lad Charlie's dreamscape wasn't to your liking then?” Arthur tried to place to accent as he spoke, Irish definitely, Belfast maybe, he wasn't overly au fait with that part of the world.
“The architecture was passable enough, shame it had to be filled with a second-rate forger,” the point man allowed condescension to drip from every word, because he was in no mood to make it easy for anyone. But in truth, the forger was good, no where close to Eames of course, but good enough. And he had clearly done his research, a fact which was almost more worrying than the rest of the situation put together..
“Aye, I told the lad using the lass wouldn't work, but between you an' me,” the man leaned forward conspiratorially, “I think he had a bit of trouble accepting that the great point man Arthur was a poof.” The forger, the same man he saw in the dream as the disguise failed, scowled at this as he got up from the chair he'd been sleeping in, but was clearly unwilling to say anything to contradict the Irishman's comments. There was no mistaking who was in charge.
Arthur scowled at the term, and responded coldly, “I'm sure he'll get over his disappointment.”
“Touchy, touchy, I'd heard that about you. Boring, predictable, reliable, but oh so good at your job. Tell me Arthur, may I call you Arthur? I'd call you by something more formal but I'm afraid I don't know your last name...” he let the phrase trail off, the question hanging.
“Smith” Arthur answered promptly, and received a backhand for his trouble.
“Now, now Arthur, if you're not going to cooperate, we're going to have some problems you and me.”
Arthur's jaw felt on fire thanks to the beatings he'd received over the previous few days, but he still managed to spit out a dry, “And we were getting on so well.”
The other man ignored that one, continuing instead, “I only have a couple of questions for ya, should be easy for a man of your obvious talents. After you give me what I'm wanting you can go on your merry way and we'll speak no more of this.” Arthur had to repress a snort at that, the lie so obvious given the trouble they'd already gone to get hold of him. “All I want to know is, who hired you for the Quan Son job a year ago, and, of course, absolutely everything you found out from the man.”
Arthur kept his face impassive as he replied, “you must have faulty information, I don't recall a job involving a Quan Son.” Only he did remember it, all too clearly and suddenly he knew he was in even more trouble than before. Because given who the mark was working for and who their, no his, he was the only who'd dealt with them, so his clients were, there was no way they were going to let him walk out of here alive.
He braced himself for a blow that never came, instead his questioner sighed and got up, “Ah I figured you'd go for the hard way still it was worth a try. You see laddie, I know you think you can take what I'm going to throw at you, but I've broken better men than you, and I have all the time in the world on my side. There's no rush after all, so I'll just leave you in the capable hands of my friends here until you change your mind,” he gestured to the guards stationed around the room, the same men in cheap suits who'd dragged him out the ship. He recognised the type, had seen them enough times, both in dreams and out, to know that whatever these men were going to do to him, he was not going to enjoy it.
The light was fading by the time they uncuffed him from the chair and dragged him towards a small cot in the corner of the warehouse. He was barely conscious, every muscles, every bone hurt. The men were, at the very least, professionals, causing the maximum amount of pain for the minimum amount of permanent damage and some part of him almost had to admire that. It wasn't an easy task, whatever the movies would have you think.
Despite Arthur's best efforts it took them barely an hour before they dragged out a cry of pain, and now, hours later, his throat now felt sore from screaming. Through it all the Irishman just watched, not even asking question's, that clearly wasn't the point of this particular exercise, just ensuring that the job was carried out as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Arthur could feel the depths of unconsciousness calling to him, dulling the pain as if smothering him in cotton wool and it was tempting, oh so tempting to give in. But he forced himself to stay awake, bringing himself back to the world of reality and pain, so he could observe his captors. He watched how they were when they thought he was out for the count, watched how the Irishman and Charlie left once the light started fading, how the other guards sat around and played poker, the evening drawing on, their gun holsters ending up draped over the backs of chairs and their eyes glanced over to him at less and less frequent intervals. He watched all that and started trying to plan his escape. It was difficult, his head felt cloudy, unable to focus, the pain distracting him and so eventually, despite his best efforts, he drifted off.
+++++
They're sitting on the kitchen steps sharing a beer, just the two of them, as they've done many times before, an easy friendship born out of years of working together. Arthur watches Cobb smile as he in turn watches his children play. The point man can't help but feel the smile twitch the corner of his mouth too as he does. It's a relief to see his friend is happy again, that the broken, lost man is replaced with something more complete, more relaxed. The Dominic Cobb he first met, who brought him into the grey world of extraction after the country, the Corps, he'd once been so proud to served had decided it wanted nothing more to do with him.
The moment, the dream, is shattered however as soon as Cobb tries to slip an arm around him and Arthur is forced to kill the forger with a kitchen knife to avoid seeing the man with Cobb's face being torn apart by his projections of the extractors own children.
He's back in the warehouse, attached back to the same chair, with the same smiling face in front of him. The smile seems somehow sharper, more vicious this time, or maybe that was just the memory of the enjoyment the other man seemed to take from watching Arthur get beaten to within an inch of his life.
Unlike the point man, 'Charlie' is half choking in the corner as he awakes, trying to get air into his lungs, to even out the breathing. A common reaction of someone unused to dying in their dreams, Arthur on the other hand has had a lot of practice.
The Irishman looked over at his colleague with an edge of amusment before turning back to Arthur. “Ah, laddie, you ever been told you have a vicious little mind in there?” he asked conversationally.
And Arthur can't help but retort back, “It's been mentioned once or twice.”
The Irishman snorted, “you see, me and Charlie have a bit of a bet going on. I say I can break you first out here, in the real world an' all, he thinks the dreams are going to have a better go.” Even as he said it, Arthur knew it was a lie.
He recognised the technique they were using, he could see in his mind how the next few days would pan out. Pain in reality, moments of joy and comfort in the dream. It was an old trick, an effective one even, especially, against trained minds. Make the real world so horrifying, so painful, that the mind wants the dream to become reality, it starts doing all the hard work for you until the mind is losses itself voluntarily in the dream, all thoughts of reality lost and secrets free for all to see. It takes time, but eventually everyone breaks, Arthur just hoped he would have the chance to escape before that moment came from him.
“What no comment on how we're doing, I'm disappointed in you. So, you going to save me having to get the boys to work you over again and tell me what I want to know or are we going to have a repeat of yesterday?” The Irishman asked with the air of one who already knew the answer and so didn't seem particularly surprised when Arthur told him to kindly fuck off.
They'd given up on the fists this time and had moved on to knotted ropes and belts, occasionally the Irishman would ask him a question during the proceedings, but it seemed a formality more than anything, something to do to pass the time in between the blows and the screams. Arthur could feel welts building up on his back from where they'd broken the skin, blood making the tattered remnants of his shirt stick to his back. It was a painfully familiar feeling, evoking memories of childhood home, dark rooms and muffled cries where no one could see. .
He waiting until the Irishman had gone and the men were settled into their poker game before he set to work, fingers moving clumsily from the manacles and the pain, trying to work free the small spring of metal from one of the joints of the cot. He'd noticed it yesterday, a testament to the beds poor construction and a godsend for a desperate man looking for a lock-pick. It took him most of the evening, drifting in and out of awareness, born by the pain, but eventually he got it free. A final effort to tuck it in between the folds of canvas on the cot, secreting it away before exhaustion overcame him.
++++
He wakes up slowly, languidly. The bed underneath him was soft and Arthur wanted nothing more than to bury himself back into the cocoon of blankets and pillows he'd made for himself during the night. Would have too if not for the kisses being pressed up his spine, the oh-so-familiar scratch of stubble across his back. He turned around contently and moved forward to capture Eames in a kiss.
“Morning, love” the forger purred once they'd pulled away for air, “I took the liberty of ordering room service,” he said in between kisses along his jaw and around his throat. With a final brief kiss on the lips, Eames moved away from the bed, towards the laden trolley, filled to the brim with coffee, tea, plates of bacon, eggs and bowels of oatmeal. Arthur pulled himself up in bed, lazily watching the other man move around the cart. He was wearing loose linen shirt, boxers and little else, it looked good on him, more stylish than his usual riot of colour and clash of fabrics, but still more than he would usually wear on a lazy morning. Possibly he was learning to avoid traumatising the hotel staff when they delivered to the room, one could hope after all.
He was admiring the planes of his lovers body as the other man walked back towards the bed, coffee cluched out in one hand, the other held behind his back. Arthur reached out to grab the coffee off him, but the other man moved it away with a grin, forcing the point man to sit up properly, moving forwards to grab it off him. As he did so, the forger moved forwards to capture his lips as he did so, before finally relinquishing the cup of coffee.
Arthur gave his a playful glare, “Never stand between a man and his morning coffee.”
“I shall try to remember that in future darling.” he replied with a grin before laying down besides him on the bed, lazily watching him drink.
It was only once the coffee was down the final dregs that Eames leaned over to take the cup off him smiling as he said, “Now I'm not risking life and limb by separating you from your caffeine,” he moved his other hand around, the one which had been until now hiding behind his back. It took Arthur a moment to notice what he was holding out to him, his attention otherwise engrossed the curve of his neck, the small v of flesh peeking out between the shirt, a hint of a tattoo sneaking out between the material.
He was surprised when he did see what the other man was holding out in front of him and he frowned as he took the rose off him. “What's this for?”
Eames pulled back with a bemused smile at his reaction, “I love you of course.”
Arthur went cold, memory rushing back. He calmly reached behind him, to the gun he always kept under his pillow, no matter where they were staying, and shot the fake Eames between the eyes. He took a moment to look at the other man's corpse, looking at the coiling snake tattoo visible even under the shirt, the tattoo which was unknown to him despite the hours spent mapping the other man's body in exquisite detail. Satisfied he hadn't made a mistake, he lifted the gun to his own head.
“Not the romantic type then is your boy?” The Irishman had commented afterwards, crouching down to where Arthur was lying on the floor, the chair haven fallen over at some point during the afternoon, and whilst Arthur was desperately trying to get air back into his lungs in between his cries of pain. The Irishman had a nasty, knowing smile on his face that caused a coil of dread to appear in Arthur's chest, because if nothing else, it had shown them where his affections lay.
It was the memory of that smile that got him moving that evening, after the Irishman had left and the guards had settled down either to their poker game. Despite the pain, the aches in his hands and his overly uncooperative fingers, he nonetheless managed to ease of the make-shift lockpick out from the canvas and set to work. He went to work first on his wrists and there were several instants where he almost dropped the lockpicks, his fingers seemed to lack any sort of co-ordination and it took him far too long the get them open. Before curling in on himself, as if in pain, a reaction not entirely faked, so as to disguise his attempts to remove the manacles around his ankles
Eventually he did so managed it and he slowly uncurled, chancing a look up at his tormentors. He tried to judge the distance between his cot and the table they were playing poker on and more to the point the chairs over which they had casually slung the guns. It would be more of a gamble than he was comfortable with, but even the chance to success was something to grab at. He gingerly sat up, taking care not to cause a sound, not to draw their attention to him. He managed to suppress a hiss of pain as he did so and held his breath, but no, they were still playing poker, oblivious to his movements. Bracing himself, he launched up towards the table. Or at least that was what he tried to do, but his limbs were like lead, his legs failing respond to the signals his brain were trying to give them and he crashed to the ground.
“Didn't I forget to tell you laddie,” the Irishman told him later, whilst breaking his foot in retaliation for the attempt, “we've been giving you a special something just to stop you doing stupid things like trying to escape. Think you'll find your weak as a kitten, so best to stop trying eh?” But at that point Arthur had stopped listening to him, his vision going black from the pain of the bones in his foot grinding together.
++++
Eames was pushing Arthur up against the wall as he attempted to suck his lungs out through his mouth. There was no pretence of gentleness in the act, this was a battle for dominance pure and simple. Hot and hard and the point man gave back as good as he got.
But then it turned wrong, the touches got harder and cruel. Holding him in ways that Arthur could never stand, in ways that Eames never do, not after that one time in which drink and hot tempers had resulting in a near dislocated jaw. And certainly not with everything he seemed to understand about Arthur without needing to be told.
Arthur pushed away from the grasp, twisting the arm holding him until he heard a satisfying crack before throwing the fake Eames through a window of the penthouse suite that had been dreamed up for the occasion.
“Rough but not to rough then laddie?” The Irishman had commented later on, as the other men dragged Arthur's head up out the water for air, before forcing him under again. Arthur telling him to fuck off had by this point become a formality.
It seemed however that their forger was a quick learner, because the next time it was only once they were lying together, entwined in bed, Arthur's fingers tracing the inked lines on Eames' back, that the awareness of the dream came to him. He trailed his fingers up tattoos that shouldn't have been there, over empty spaces on his shoulders, bereft of the swirls and figures the characterised his lover, up towards the neck. His fingers closed around the windpipe, crushing it and as the man was suffocated he had the satisfaction of seeing the form flicker into the now familiar shape of Charlie before he died.
They were trying out electricity today, Arthur's muscles continued to shake and tremble even after they had dumped him back on the cot. The Irishman knelt down besides the cot, stroking his hair in a parody of gentleness and Arthur wanted nothing more than to be able to move, to bat the hand away but his muscles had ceased responding hours ago. He felt an almost perverse resentment that the man had changed the routine of the previous few days, throwing him off balance.
“Now, me and Charlie are going to have to go away for a couple of days, business you see. But don't worry, laddie, we'll leave you in my friends capable hands. Picked this lot up in prison see, they spent a lot of time there figuring out how much pain they can cause, you can of course appreciate their handiwork. They also got a bit of a taste for the pretty boys, well any boy really if they screamed loud enough. I told em they couldn't have their fun during working hours, but seems like this is going to be the week-end, so they can let loose.” He gave Arthur the news in a conversational tone and it took the point man a few seconds for his mind to catch up with exactly what he was implying.
“Still not up for talking then laddie?” he asked and Arthur barely managed to spit out a curse at him, his throat raw from screaming and his jaw muscles clenched so tight he could feel his teeth grinding. “Ah, pity. Oh well, I'll be giving you an extra dose before we go, don't want a repeat performance of before now do we.” The last sensation Arthur remembered before the blackness reached up to claim him was the prick of the needle and a heaviness flooding his limbs.
++++
Arthur had always prided himself on his memory, his attention to details, the little things that others missed. It was what made him a good point man. Maybe that was why what he remembered most from that 'week-end' was the scuffs on the men's shoes, the cracks in the window opposite the table where they'd tied him down or the drip of rainwater from the drains outside. He remembered struggling too, to begin with, but true to the Irishman's word the drug seemed to have removed all control he had over his body. It didn't remove the sensations however, the pain, the humiliation. No, it was his mind which detached him from that, focusing, of all things, on the number of cracks in the window, twelve, or the number of drips of water, an average of five drips a minute..
He almost felt glad to wake up handcuffed to the chair again, the Irishman's grinning face in front of him. 'Maybe that was the point of the exercise,' the clinical part of his mind, the one which had counted drips of water, supplied. “Enjoy your week-end did you laddie?” Arthur had to suppress a flinch, and tried to turn it into a glare instead. He suspected by the other man's smile that he wasn't very successful.
“Got another little surprise for you since you enjoyed the last one so much.”
“You...” Arthur croaked then spat, and how did his throat end up quite so bruised. He tried again, “You shouldn't have.” It was barely more than a whisper, but it conveyed the message.
That smile again, cruel, vicious, knowing. “Now, now, that's no way to treat someone who's brought you a playmate.” It was only then that Arthur realised there was someone else there, a figure handcuffed to the chair, same as him, in a perfect mirror.
“Eames...” he managed to find his voice to protest, struggling to keep it strong, calm, no hint of a waiver, “He doesn't know anything, he never deals with clients. Let him go.”
“You're missing the point laddie, he's not here to talk, he's here to get you to talk,” as he spoke the forger seemed to be regaining consciousness, groaning as he did so, “course, since as ye say, the boy doesn't know anything, don't need to be so careful keeping him alive now do I?” With that he pulled out a knife, slicing through the buttons on the Brits shirt, exposing his bare, vulnerable chest, a dark red line of blood welling up where the knife had been..
It was too bare. The dark swirl of a tattoo which should have been covering his left pectoral was missing, as were the hints of Latin script further down by the waistline. Arthur had to stop himself from breathing out a sigh of relief at the realisation that this was not real, that Eames was probably still safe and sound in London and that the man being tortured was nothing more than a fake, or a projection.
It didn't make it easy to endure though, the screams of pain, the the cries of “Arthur, love, please” as the other man's skin was sliced open piece by piece and he had bite his tongue to stop himself from crying out for them to stop, blood filling his mouth as he did. It was only when the other forgers' form started to flicker from the pain the Irishman stopped, a noise of disgust in his throat before drawing out his gun and putting both of them out of their misery.
The days seemed to flow into each other, with little way to tell the passage of time except through the gradation in light filtering through the dirty cracked windows. Hours of imaginative and inventive ways to cause extreme pain whilst avoiding long-term damage, the same questions over and over again, the same reply from the point man, or at least variations on the theme, there were only so many ways you could tell someone to go fuck themselves, so Arthur rotated them for variety.
In a detached part of Arthur's mind, he almost admired their professionalism, they knew what they were doing in causing pain, they knew more what they were doing with the dreams, the hours of pain punctuated by dreams of charged, joyful moments lying in Eames' embrace. The scenery changed each time, the scenarios were different, but they always ended the same, Arthur peeling away the layers of clothing to reveal the ever-changing tattoos on the fake Eames' chest. It was as good as a totem the one thing consistently differentiating between dream and reality, the one thing keeping him from sinking into the dreams and giving up his secrets.
It seemed as if the Irishman had come up with his own explanation for why the dreams kept on failing to take, and he leaned conspiratorially over Arthur one day to share it with him, “I reckon the reason our lad Charlie t'aint as good in bed as you boy is his a bit homophobic. Bit of a shite trait in a forger really. But don't you worry, soon enough even Charlie's piss poor attempts at a blowjob will seem like heaven compared to what I'm doing to ya on the outside.”
Arthur couldn't help but think he was right. He could feel his will slipping every time he went under and it was only clinging onto the certain knowledge that giving them what they wanted would result in his death, in never seeing his true lover, never tracing the real tattoos that swirled over his body, that kept him going. Trouble was, he wasn't certain how much longer it would be before death really did start seeming like the preferable option to his current existence.
After what felt like a lifetime, but, if the light changes were anything to go by must only have been five or six days, the Irishman left again. “Going to have me a bit of a week-end off, methinks. Don't worry, I'll bring you back something special” he'd thrown over his shoulder at him as he'd departed through the warehouse doors. The threat might have been more effective if the man wasn't leaving him to a nightmare far worse than any of the methods of dealing pain he'd so far concocted.
It was the details, always the details, he remembered. His mind's own special way to numb him from reality, the little things he noticed even as he shied away from remember the big things. Like what was happening to him, no to his body, not him.
He'd moved on from cracks in windows and instead had started to catalogue the lax security practices the men seem to have gotten into during their 'down time'. Guns lying discarded, near enough to grab, ropes loosely attached, over-confident in the drugs ability to prevent movement, drinking, celebrating, over-confident in their victims helplessness. All things he could exploit, but not in his drugged up state, not with the sedative in his veins trapping him in his own body, making him as weak as a kitten. Somehow contemplating escape options he had no way, no ability to take was almost worse than the violation of his body he was using said contemplations to try and distract himself from. Almost.
++++
The Irishman was true to his word, he did bring back a surprise, a particularly unpleasant one. Hallucinogens.
They caused dreams to turn into nightmares, horrific visions of death and destructions or bright mad worlds filled with colour and joy. They causes the tattoos on the forged Eames' chest to swim and mutate into strange and unexpected shapes. Worse was their impact on the warehouse, causing walls to bleed and objects to twist and a sick blending reality with dreaming until Arthur could barely tell which was which. He had to remind himself to focus on the ever-changing tattoos on his lovers body, the keep hold on the only indicator of reality he had left, even as he wanted nothing more than to embrace the dream of Eames presence, be it the passionate interlude in some nameless hotel or the forgers arrival like a knight in shinning armour to rescue him from the hell that was his every waking hour. Every day he could feel his mind starting to slip further and further away, his control broken, shot to hell and it was that more than anything which terrified him.
He vowed to himself to make one last bid for freedom, one last attempt during from which either success or death were the only possible outcomes. And he believed he knew how. The hallucinogens for all their terrifying properties, had one distinct side-effect, an advantage he could almost love them for. They negated to effect of the sedative they'd been pumping him full of, giving him a strength back to his body he hadn't felt for weeks, despite the pain, the hunger and the fever setting in from too many untreated, infected wounds. He just had to keep his mind intact, held together by spit and hope, until the Irishman left, until the guard became complacent and the opportunity was there.
Somehow putting that idea into practice seemed far more difficult that it had any right to be.
++++
The Irishman knew he was winning, that much was clear. He seemed almost regretful when he waved Arthur good-bye on the fifth day, keeping to his schedule like clockwork. Arthur barely noticed, he was curled up in the corner, trying to convince himself that the tingling, crawling sensations all up his arms were just a by-product of the drugs, not the result of thousands of tiny spiders crawling all over him, under what was left of his clothes and into his mouth and eyes.
It was only once the other men started dragging him over to the table, divesting themselves of belts and holsters as they did so, that Arthur regained some semblance of reality. The knowledge of what needed to be done gave him a sharpness of thought he hadn't realised he'd lost, cutting through the fog of pain that had covered his mind and dulled his senses. He knew exactly what he had to do, he just hoped his battered body would be able to do it.
He used his injuries to his advantage, stumbling over his broken foot, the stab of sharp pain helping to focus him even as the movement caused the two men dragging him to loosen their grip slightly, trying for a better hold. It was all he needed, a sharp jab with his elbow caught the man on his left in the groin and Arthur took considerable satisfaction from the cry of pain that emanated from the man. The pain from his own body was dulled now, supplanted by the adrenaline flooding his senses and the knowledge that this was his last, final chance. He twisted as his left arm was let go, the man more concerned with trying to breath through the pain in his groin than keeping hold of the point man, and he yanked his right arm out of the second man's grasp reaching for the gun in his loosened, low-hanging shoulder holster as he did so.
He shot him as he fell away, a gut shot guaranteeing a long, slow death. He sent a second bullet towards the one with the groin injury for good measures before rolling to come up in a crouch, seeking another target. He felt more than heard a man come up behind him and he twisted out the way, kicking back with his uninjured leg feeling a sense of satisfaction as he heard a crack from the others ribs. A movement to his right and he whirled, his shot catching one of the guards even as he reached down to pick up his own gun. He shot him again for good measure, before catching his companion as he came out from the small kitchen at the back of a warehouse, a bottle of whiskey in his hand.
He kept moving, despite the pain in his foot, in his ribs, hell in his whole body, knowing that his only chance was surprise, that standing still would result in his untimely and no doubt very painful death. He dived behind one of the now upturned tables for cover, knocking over the hated tray of chemicals over as he did so. He heard bullets slam into the wood, two guns from the sound of it. He waited until they went to reload, emptying their clips far too quickly given the lack of effect, and it was clear that as professional as they were about inflicting pain, they were unaccustomed to someone who could shoot back. He didn't give them a chance to learn the correct procedure. shooting them both as they tried to reload, barely even seeking out their own cover as they did so.
It was all over in what could not have been more than a few minutes, the only sound left in the warehouse his own harsh breathing. He could already feel the adrenaline start to recede and the pains all over start to make themselves known. Spots danced in front of his eyes, visual artefacts left over from the last of the hallucinogens and he knew he had to get out of here before the pain started to overwhelm him again.
He ran, or tried to, limping away from the scene as fast as his broken body would carry him, trying desperately to find a bolt hole, somewhere, anywhere he could go to ground and let himself heal. His only thought as he ran, repeated over and over again,a mantra as if it could convince his mind of the truth, was 'let this be reality'.
++++
Part 5
Author's note 3: The idea for the tattoos came after seeing a pic of Tom Hardy topless. The man has a lot of ink, alas I have no idea what all the tattoos are, so the tattoos as described probably have little to do with those Tom has in real life. On the other hand, since we've never seen Eames barechested on screen, I think I'm allowed a bit of poetic licence.
author: Black Gem
pairing: Arthur/Eames
characters: Arthur, Eames
rating: R
warnings: violence, torture, allusions to rape and other dark themes
disclaimer: I own nothing, I'm just playing with them.
Summary: Arthur isn't going to wait around like some damsel in distress to be rescued.
Author's note: This part is long, very long, and was somewhat painful to write. I almost broke it up like part 3 but there wasn't a really good break point.
Author's note 2: I have moved the fic to my journal to keep it all in one place and hopefully make it easier to read.
?: 29th August, sometime in the am
The first thing Arthur becomes aware of as he swims back to consciousness is the smell; damp mildew in the air, with a metallic undercurrent of salt and rust. Resisting the urge to open his eyes immediately, he ensures his breathing steady. He has, through years of dreaming, more than enough practice in waking up without letting any ticks or tells gives his renewed awareness away. There was, after all, no point giving away even a minor advantage to any possible watchers.
He was slumped up against a wall, cold, hard and metallic. He could feel the rough surface through the thin shirt he was wearing, his jacket and waistcoat having disappeared to who-knows-where, and the cold surface leached heat from his body. He shivered almost involuntarily and he could hear a clink as the chain linking his handcuffed wrists moved along with his involuntary movements. He resisted to urge to hold his breath, contenting himself to merely listening out to see if the sound was attracting any attention, but all he could hear was his own breathing and a steady drip drip of water in the distance.
He took a deep breath, and regretted it immediately as sharp shooting pains emanated from his chest, his ribcage specifically. At a guess he would say he had at least two cracked ribs, maybe more. Other pains started making themselves known too, a twisted wrist, probably not broken, an eye swollen shut, no doubt from too many blows to the head, and bruises on pretty much every available surface of skin. After carefully opening his eyes, wincing in reaction to even the dim light in the room, he felt around his mid-section as best he could given the length of chain available to him. No internal bleeding thankfully, but that was about the only good news going. He had to choke back a bitter laugh, it really was a stark testament to his life, that he was so familiar with being shot, stabbed or beaten that he was able tell the extent of the damage through sensations alone.
Looking around, his eyes now open, he took in serroundings. The room was small, barely long enough for a man to lay down full length, with only a single flickering florescent light in the ceiling which did little to chase away the shadows and served predominantly to give him a headache. There were pipes running across the roof and along the sides of the walls, along with strong rivets and handholds at regular intervals. All in all it gave the impression of disused industriality that so often characterised the workspaces of dreamers..
He toyed with the notion that this may be a dream but, even without his totem, Arthur had always had a good sense of reality and this it had little of the feel of a dream. In any case, if this was a dream he would have probably managed to come up with something a bit less filthy.
With nothing else to do, he settled down to contemplate his options for escape, it didn't take him long. The chain seemed pretty solidly attached to a large metal ring higher up the wall with a hefty looking pad-lock. Even if he had something with which to pick the lock, assuming he even could given how rusty his skills in that area where, there was no way for him to actually reach it The chain itself was just long enough to allow him to sit down comfortably, but no where near enough slack to let him get anywhere near the door and the room itself, despite the damp and the rusting walls, was surprisingly clear of any convenient heavy metal objects he could use to attack or overpower any guards. Assuming any of them came at all.
He apparent options boiled down to 'wait for an opportunity to present itself'. It was a good thing that patience was one of Arthur's virtues, no matter how sorely this was tested on many an occasion by a particularly persistent forger.
It took what felt like several hours for the door to the room to open. During this time Arthur had managed to catalogue every single spot of rust on the walls and was just starting on counting the bolts riveted on the walls holding various pipes and vents in place. He was saved from that particularly onerous task by the sounds of footsteps in the corridor outside and he drew himself up to standing, stifling a groan as the movement caused stabs of pain to run from his aching, battered body.
The door creaked open and two men come in, they looked like locals, nothing at all like the men who had trailed him through Singapore, in battered jeans and t-shirts. One of them had a crude metal tray in his hands, the other had a gun pointed in his direction. He didn't bother wasting his breath on asking questions, these weren't the ones behind his captivity, these men were clearly the hired help. A fact confirmed by broken English mixed in with what sounded like Thai as the one with the gun tried to communicate with him the importance of not moving from the wall whilst the other placed the tray of food down by his feet.
“I can't eat like this” Arthur told them calmly, not making any move that could be interpreted as a threat. At their bemused looks, he shook the chain, stretching it taunt to show the limited movement length he had. “Please,” he looked up at them with sincerity.
They conferred with each quickly. Definitely Thai, not a language Arthur spoke unfortunately but one he'd heard often enough to distinguish for the other dialects spoken in the region. Despite his lack in linguistic skills, he could guess the argument, letting him starve was clearly not on the menu, but neither was letting him loose. Finally feeding him won out and the gun was pointed pointed directly at him with a heavily accented “No move!”, and the other approached him cautiously, moving to release his cuffed hands from the chain on the wall. Idiots.
He was moving as soon as his wrists were released, throwing himself towards the man with the gun, forcing his arms up. A shot went off, hitting the roof harmlessly, and he was grabbing and twisting the arm holding, a swift blow to the gut and the man was on the floor curled around himself in pain, with the gun now in the point man's very capable hand. The other man, key still in hand, cowered in the corner as soon as the gun was pointed at him. Arthur pushed past him out the room and into an equally dark, narrow and damp corridor. He could hear shouts coming from the room behind him and even without the shot, it was clear that his escape was neither as quiet nor as subtle as he would have preferred..
So Arthur did the only thing he could, he ran, dodging blows and men as he did. Up through tiny corridors, steep stairways and rusting ladders. Bullets pinged around him, going wide, warning shots more than anything else. He ran until he couldn't run any more, and when he stopped he had to bite back a bitter laugh, because looking out in the distance, over the dark and rolling sea, he really should have expected this. He was, it appeared, going nowhere since he was on a fucking boat.
++++
He awoke back in the small room. His arms were not longer chained, though this hardly added to his escape options, it did allow him the opportunity to effectively catalogue any new additions to his collection of bruises. There were in fact surprisingly few, the principal of which was an additional lump on his head where someone had cold-cocked him with the butt of a pistol. It was during his ginger investigation of the bruise, an attempt to ascertain its seriousness, that the door creaked open and a tray was pushed in quickly prior to the slamming of metal and a grinding of bolts indicating that that exit both shut and locked. All he'd managed to see through the doorway was the glint of dim light off guns, a clear indication that they were no longer willing to take any chances with him. He was almost flattered by the level of precautions taken, after all, where would he actually go?
Arthur had no idea how much time he spent in the tiny room, they'd taken from him any ability to tell the hour, or even the day. It was that, more than the bruises, the cracked ribs or the mind-numbing boredom, that was hard to deal with. He tried to tell the time by the drip drip of water, but that gave him the seconds, not the minutes or the hours and he lost track whenever he drifted off into a fitful, uncomfortable sleep. He tried keeping track of the days by the food they delivered, but he had no way of knowing how often that was, once a day, twice maybe but he doubted it, not given the racking hunger pangs he was starting to feel. He picked the lock on his cuffs on the second day, using a sliver of metal from the mangled fork they'd given his to eat with, it didn't help though, the door was barred from the outside and no one came in, not since that first attempt. All he saw of his captors now was the glint of guns and the trays of food sliding in.
It was the fifth time they fed him, the fifth day maybe, that they drugged him. He wasn't certain how he noticed, not given the already foul taste of whatever it was they were feeding him, but something tasted bitter, more so than before. In truth he didn't notice it at first, the hunger was so overwhelming that the strange stew was half gone by the time his taste-buds caught up. He fumbled the bowl and spilling the food on the floor in what he hoped was a convincing manner to avoid eating the rest of it, to avoid indicating that he knew what they were doing. Not that it required that much faking, whatever they had slipped into his food seemed to be working quickly and he was having trouble making his limbs respond to the commands his brain was given them.
Arthur was holding onto awareness by his fingertips when they came through the door. Different from the men who'd brought him food, different still for those who'd chased him down in Singapore, despite the similarity in cheap suits. Part of his mind, strangely detached from proceedings, wondered if they shopped at the same place. He struggled when they grabbed him, but his limbs had long since given up being under voluntary control and felt more like they were made of lead. It was like he was moving underwater, sinking down, unable to get a purchase. He bit out at a hand that reached to cover his man and heard a cursing, as if from far away, before there was the familiar pin-prick of a needle and then nothing.
++++
“It's amazing when you think about it, some of the most impressive pieces of architecture in Europe were built for World Fairs, the Atomium in Brussels, the Eiffel Tower in Paris” she gestured at the building they were standing on and then laughed at herself, “actually those are the only two I can think of. They used to be such a big deal, you never really here of the World's Fair anymore do you?” She smiled at him and then leaned out on the balcony of the upper level of the Eiffel Tower, admiring the cityscape below.
Arthur made a small sound in his throat, not really agreement but she took it as encouragement enough. He half listened as she babbled excitedly about the architecture behind the Tower, how avant guard it was in 1881, nothing quite like it existing anywhere else. He knew all this, of course,, but he let her talk, let the sounds wash over him, a pleasant background noise as he learned over to admire the view below with a small smile. He'd never understood how people could be afraid of heights, to him being up high always made him feel safe, unreachable. Ariadne was not, under most circumstances, the sort of person he would have chosen for a friend, but somehow he enjoyed the other girls company. Her enthusiasm and zest for life, for architecture, for dreaming, was like a breath of fresh air in a profession so filled with jaded souls.
Her curiousity still sometimes got the better of her, but thankfully she had learned from her experience with Cobb, and took the rebuffs to her none-too-subtle enquiries as to his personal life with good grace. Not that there were many, it was apparent that Arthur didn't project the aura of having many dark secrets or a mysterious past. He was, to Ariadne, just plain, boring, reliable, safe Arthur, it was an image he'd worked hard to perfect.
“You're not listening are you?” she had a pout on her face.
“To your speech about the origins of the Atomium, I wasn't listening to a word” he replied drily and then moved out the way as she punched his arm gentle in mock annoyance an indulgent smile threatening to twitch the corners of his mouth.
She went to thread her arm through his, and because he was a gentleman, he let her. Although the gesture somehow didn't feel natural, they'd never been that physically intimate, not really, despite her tentative forays towards intimacy after the Fischer job. He only tuned back into what she was talking about towards the end, and as he did he felt somewhat lost in the conversation, as if there was an important piece he was missing.
“...you're not going to go on a job without me again are you?” She asked, a whine threatening at the edges of her voice. She moved around as she spoke to face him, grabbing his other arm so that both his hands here in hers.
“What are you talking about?” He asked, genuinely confused now, because he took a lot of jobs that didn't involve the young architect. In fact the only real constant in his jobs since Cobb's semi-retirement was Eames, and it was a rare job in dreamscape nowadays where the two would not be found together.
He tried to pull away from her embrace as he spoke, but she move to follow, leaning in to try and capture his lips for a kiss. The move caught him off-guard, and as her lips met his, the first thought that occurred to him was 'How did I get here?'.
He came up blank, a lurching realisation deep inside that this was not reality and he pushed her roughly away from him. Now he was aware of it, the irregularities within the dream became clearer, as if a fog lifting. The strange way Ariadne had been acting, the inconsistencies in the view from the tower, a Paris constructed from imagination not reality. As awareness emerged, his projections turned fast, they always did, his mind militarised as it was even for an extractor, and they descended en mass on Ariadne.
No, not Ariadne, that much was clear as the form flickered under the assault from the projections, revealing a young Asian man before he was ripped to shreds under the onslaught. A forger then. Even as the dream collapsed Arthur couldn't help being somewhat disappointed it took him so long to spot it.
“... and since you oh so usefully got yourself killed and collapsed the dream, I imagine sleeping beauty here should be waking up about now.”Arthur awoke as he always did from a dream, all at once and with little outward sign. But if the heavily accented voice was anything to go by there was little point in keeping up pretence of sleep.
He opened his eyes, taking in the barren surroundings and had to suppress the urge to roll his eyes. He was handcuffed securely to what must have once been an office chair in a run-down abandoned warehouse. Debris of furniture were strewn around the place and sunlight dripped through cracks in the windows. After the almost timeless nature of the ship's hold he'd been kept in, he was glad to have some outside point of reference to keep track of the time, as crude as it was.
This had to be reality, because no one would make up a dream world which was so horribly clichéd.
The owner of the voice was straddling a chair in front of him and gave him a wide smile when he saw the point man had awoken. “Take it me lad Charlie's dreamscape wasn't to your liking then?” Arthur tried to place to accent as he spoke, Irish definitely, Belfast maybe, he wasn't overly au fait with that part of the world.
“The architecture was passable enough, shame it had to be filled with a second-rate forger,” the point man allowed condescension to drip from every word, because he was in no mood to make it easy for anyone. But in truth, the forger was good, no where close to Eames of course, but good enough. And he had clearly done his research, a fact which was almost more worrying than the rest of the situation put together..
“Aye, I told the lad using the lass wouldn't work, but between you an' me,” the man leaned forward conspiratorially, “I think he had a bit of trouble accepting that the great point man Arthur was a poof.” The forger, the same man he saw in the dream as the disguise failed, scowled at this as he got up from the chair he'd been sleeping in, but was clearly unwilling to say anything to contradict the Irishman's comments. There was no mistaking who was in charge.
Arthur scowled at the term, and responded coldly, “I'm sure he'll get over his disappointment.”
“Touchy, touchy, I'd heard that about you. Boring, predictable, reliable, but oh so good at your job. Tell me Arthur, may I call you Arthur? I'd call you by something more formal but I'm afraid I don't know your last name...” he let the phrase trail off, the question hanging.
“Smith” Arthur answered promptly, and received a backhand for his trouble.
“Now, now Arthur, if you're not going to cooperate, we're going to have some problems you and me.”
Arthur's jaw felt on fire thanks to the beatings he'd received over the previous few days, but he still managed to spit out a dry, “And we were getting on so well.”
The other man ignored that one, continuing instead, “I only have a couple of questions for ya, should be easy for a man of your obvious talents. After you give me what I'm wanting you can go on your merry way and we'll speak no more of this.” Arthur had to repress a snort at that, the lie so obvious given the trouble they'd already gone to get hold of him. “All I want to know is, who hired you for the Quan Son job a year ago, and, of course, absolutely everything you found out from the man.”
Arthur kept his face impassive as he replied, “you must have faulty information, I don't recall a job involving a Quan Son.” Only he did remember it, all too clearly and suddenly he knew he was in even more trouble than before. Because given who the mark was working for and who their, no his, he was the only who'd dealt with them, so his clients were, there was no way they were going to let him walk out of here alive.
He braced himself for a blow that never came, instead his questioner sighed and got up, “Ah I figured you'd go for the hard way still it was worth a try. You see laddie, I know you think you can take what I'm going to throw at you, but I've broken better men than you, and I have all the time in the world on my side. There's no rush after all, so I'll just leave you in the capable hands of my friends here until you change your mind,” he gestured to the guards stationed around the room, the same men in cheap suits who'd dragged him out the ship. He recognised the type, had seen them enough times, both in dreams and out, to know that whatever these men were going to do to him, he was not going to enjoy it.
The light was fading by the time they uncuffed him from the chair and dragged him towards a small cot in the corner of the warehouse. He was barely conscious, every muscles, every bone hurt. The men were, at the very least, professionals, causing the maximum amount of pain for the minimum amount of permanent damage and some part of him almost had to admire that. It wasn't an easy task, whatever the movies would have you think.
Despite Arthur's best efforts it took them barely an hour before they dragged out a cry of pain, and now, hours later, his throat now felt sore from screaming. Through it all the Irishman just watched, not even asking question's, that clearly wasn't the point of this particular exercise, just ensuring that the job was carried out as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Arthur could feel the depths of unconsciousness calling to him, dulling the pain as if smothering him in cotton wool and it was tempting, oh so tempting to give in. But he forced himself to stay awake, bringing himself back to the world of reality and pain, so he could observe his captors. He watched how they were when they thought he was out for the count, watched how the Irishman and Charlie left once the light started fading, how the other guards sat around and played poker, the evening drawing on, their gun holsters ending up draped over the backs of chairs and their eyes glanced over to him at less and less frequent intervals. He watched all that and started trying to plan his escape. It was difficult, his head felt cloudy, unable to focus, the pain distracting him and so eventually, despite his best efforts, he drifted off.
+++++
They're sitting on the kitchen steps sharing a beer, just the two of them, as they've done many times before, an easy friendship born out of years of working together. Arthur watches Cobb smile as he in turn watches his children play. The point man can't help but feel the smile twitch the corner of his mouth too as he does. It's a relief to see his friend is happy again, that the broken, lost man is replaced with something more complete, more relaxed. The Dominic Cobb he first met, who brought him into the grey world of extraction after the country, the Corps, he'd once been so proud to served had decided it wanted nothing more to do with him.
The moment, the dream, is shattered however as soon as Cobb tries to slip an arm around him and Arthur is forced to kill the forger with a kitchen knife to avoid seeing the man with Cobb's face being torn apart by his projections of the extractors own children.
He's back in the warehouse, attached back to the same chair, with the same smiling face in front of him. The smile seems somehow sharper, more vicious this time, or maybe that was just the memory of the enjoyment the other man seemed to take from watching Arthur get beaten to within an inch of his life.
Unlike the point man, 'Charlie' is half choking in the corner as he awakes, trying to get air into his lungs, to even out the breathing. A common reaction of someone unused to dying in their dreams, Arthur on the other hand has had a lot of practice.
The Irishman looked over at his colleague with an edge of amusment before turning back to Arthur. “Ah, laddie, you ever been told you have a vicious little mind in there?” he asked conversationally.
And Arthur can't help but retort back, “It's been mentioned once or twice.”
The Irishman snorted, “you see, me and Charlie have a bit of a bet going on. I say I can break you first out here, in the real world an' all, he thinks the dreams are going to have a better go.” Even as he said it, Arthur knew it was a lie.
He recognised the technique they were using, he could see in his mind how the next few days would pan out. Pain in reality, moments of joy and comfort in the dream. It was an old trick, an effective one even, especially, against trained minds. Make the real world so horrifying, so painful, that the mind wants the dream to become reality, it starts doing all the hard work for you until the mind is losses itself voluntarily in the dream, all thoughts of reality lost and secrets free for all to see. It takes time, but eventually everyone breaks, Arthur just hoped he would have the chance to escape before that moment came from him.
“What no comment on how we're doing, I'm disappointed in you. So, you going to save me having to get the boys to work you over again and tell me what I want to know or are we going to have a repeat of yesterday?” The Irishman asked with the air of one who already knew the answer and so didn't seem particularly surprised when Arthur told him to kindly fuck off.
They'd given up on the fists this time and had moved on to knotted ropes and belts, occasionally the Irishman would ask him a question during the proceedings, but it seemed a formality more than anything, something to do to pass the time in between the blows and the screams. Arthur could feel welts building up on his back from where they'd broken the skin, blood making the tattered remnants of his shirt stick to his back. It was a painfully familiar feeling, evoking memories of childhood home, dark rooms and muffled cries where no one could see. .
He waiting until the Irishman had gone and the men were settled into their poker game before he set to work, fingers moving clumsily from the manacles and the pain, trying to work free the small spring of metal from one of the joints of the cot. He'd noticed it yesterday, a testament to the beds poor construction and a godsend for a desperate man looking for a lock-pick. It took him most of the evening, drifting in and out of awareness, born by the pain, but eventually he got it free. A final effort to tuck it in between the folds of canvas on the cot, secreting it away before exhaustion overcame him.
++++
He wakes up slowly, languidly. The bed underneath him was soft and Arthur wanted nothing more than to bury himself back into the cocoon of blankets and pillows he'd made for himself during the night. Would have too if not for the kisses being pressed up his spine, the oh-so-familiar scratch of stubble across his back. He turned around contently and moved forward to capture Eames in a kiss.
“Morning, love” the forger purred once they'd pulled away for air, “I took the liberty of ordering room service,” he said in between kisses along his jaw and around his throat. With a final brief kiss on the lips, Eames moved away from the bed, towards the laden trolley, filled to the brim with coffee, tea, plates of bacon, eggs and bowels of oatmeal. Arthur pulled himself up in bed, lazily watching the other man move around the cart. He was wearing loose linen shirt, boxers and little else, it looked good on him, more stylish than his usual riot of colour and clash of fabrics, but still more than he would usually wear on a lazy morning. Possibly he was learning to avoid traumatising the hotel staff when they delivered to the room, one could hope after all.
He was admiring the planes of his lovers body as the other man walked back towards the bed, coffee cluched out in one hand, the other held behind his back. Arthur reached out to grab the coffee off him, but the other man moved it away with a grin, forcing the point man to sit up properly, moving forwards to grab it off him. As he did so, the forger moved forwards to capture his lips as he did so, before finally relinquishing the cup of coffee.
Arthur gave his a playful glare, “Never stand between a man and his morning coffee.”
“I shall try to remember that in future darling.” he replied with a grin before laying down besides him on the bed, lazily watching him drink.
It was only once the coffee was down the final dregs that Eames leaned over to take the cup off him smiling as he said, “Now I'm not risking life and limb by separating you from your caffeine,” he moved his other hand around, the one which had been until now hiding behind his back. It took Arthur a moment to notice what he was holding out to him, his attention otherwise engrossed the curve of his neck, the small v of flesh peeking out between the shirt, a hint of a tattoo sneaking out between the material.
He was surprised when he did see what the other man was holding out in front of him and he frowned as he took the rose off him. “What's this for?”
Eames pulled back with a bemused smile at his reaction, “I love you of course.”
Arthur went cold, memory rushing back. He calmly reached behind him, to the gun he always kept under his pillow, no matter where they were staying, and shot the fake Eames between the eyes. He took a moment to look at the other man's corpse, looking at the coiling snake tattoo visible even under the shirt, the tattoo which was unknown to him despite the hours spent mapping the other man's body in exquisite detail. Satisfied he hadn't made a mistake, he lifted the gun to his own head.
“Not the romantic type then is your boy?” The Irishman had commented afterwards, crouching down to where Arthur was lying on the floor, the chair haven fallen over at some point during the afternoon, and whilst Arthur was desperately trying to get air back into his lungs in between his cries of pain. The Irishman had a nasty, knowing smile on his face that caused a coil of dread to appear in Arthur's chest, because if nothing else, it had shown them where his affections lay.
It was the memory of that smile that got him moving that evening, after the Irishman had left and the guards had settled down either to their poker game. Despite the pain, the aches in his hands and his overly uncooperative fingers, he nonetheless managed to ease of the make-shift lockpick out from the canvas and set to work. He went to work first on his wrists and there were several instants where he almost dropped the lockpicks, his fingers seemed to lack any sort of co-ordination and it took him far too long the get them open. Before curling in on himself, as if in pain, a reaction not entirely faked, so as to disguise his attempts to remove the manacles around his ankles
Eventually he did so managed it and he slowly uncurled, chancing a look up at his tormentors. He tried to judge the distance between his cot and the table they were playing poker on and more to the point the chairs over which they had casually slung the guns. It would be more of a gamble than he was comfortable with, but even the chance to success was something to grab at. He gingerly sat up, taking care not to cause a sound, not to draw their attention to him. He managed to suppress a hiss of pain as he did so and held his breath, but no, they were still playing poker, oblivious to his movements. Bracing himself, he launched up towards the table. Or at least that was what he tried to do, but his limbs were like lead, his legs failing respond to the signals his brain were trying to give them and he crashed to the ground.
“Didn't I forget to tell you laddie,” the Irishman told him later, whilst breaking his foot in retaliation for the attempt, “we've been giving you a special something just to stop you doing stupid things like trying to escape. Think you'll find your weak as a kitten, so best to stop trying eh?” But at that point Arthur had stopped listening to him, his vision going black from the pain of the bones in his foot grinding together.
++++
Eames was pushing Arthur up against the wall as he attempted to suck his lungs out through his mouth. There was no pretence of gentleness in the act, this was a battle for dominance pure and simple. Hot and hard and the point man gave back as good as he got.
But then it turned wrong, the touches got harder and cruel. Holding him in ways that Arthur could never stand, in ways that Eames never do, not after that one time in which drink and hot tempers had resulting in a near dislocated jaw. And certainly not with everything he seemed to understand about Arthur without needing to be told.
Arthur pushed away from the grasp, twisting the arm holding him until he heard a satisfying crack before throwing the fake Eames through a window of the penthouse suite that had been dreamed up for the occasion.
“Rough but not to rough then laddie?” The Irishman had commented later on, as the other men dragged Arthur's head up out the water for air, before forcing him under again. Arthur telling him to fuck off had by this point become a formality.
It seemed however that their forger was a quick learner, because the next time it was only once they were lying together, entwined in bed, Arthur's fingers tracing the inked lines on Eames' back, that the awareness of the dream came to him. He trailed his fingers up tattoos that shouldn't have been there, over empty spaces on his shoulders, bereft of the swirls and figures the characterised his lover, up towards the neck. His fingers closed around the windpipe, crushing it and as the man was suffocated he had the satisfaction of seeing the form flicker into the now familiar shape of Charlie before he died.
They were trying out electricity today, Arthur's muscles continued to shake and tremble even after they had dumped him back on the cot. The Irishman knelt down besides the cot, stroking his hair in a parody of gentleness and Arthur wanted nothing more than to be able to move, to bat the hand away but his muscles had ceased responding hours ago. He felt an almost perverse resentment that the man had changed the routine of the previous few days, throwing him off balance.
“Now, me and Charlie are going to have to go away for a couple of days, business you see. But don't worry, laddie, we'll leave you in my friends capable hands. Picked this lot up in prison see, they spent a lot of time there figuring out how much pain they can cause, you can of course appreciate their handiwork. They also got a bit of a taste for the pretty boys, well any boy really if they screamed loud enough. I told em they couldn't have their fun during working hours, but seems like this is going to be the week-end, so they can let loose.” He gave Arthur the news in a conversational tone and it took the point man a few seconds for his mind to catch up with exactly what he was implying.
“Still not up for talking then laddie?” he asked and Arthur barely managed to spit out a curse at him, his throat raw from screaming and his jaw muscles clenched so tight he could feel his teeth grinding. “Ah, pity. Oh well, I'll be giving you an extra dose before we go, don't want a repeat performance of before now do we.” The last sensation Arthur remembered before the blackness reached up to claim him was the prick of the needle and a heaviness flooding his limbs.
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Arthur had always prided himself on his memory, his attention to details, the little things that others missed. It was what made him a good point man. Maybe that was why what he remembered most from that 'week-end' was the scuffs on the men's shoes, the cracks in the window opposite the table where they'd tied him down or the drip of rainwater from the drains outside. He remembered struggling too, to begin with, but true to the Irishman's word the drug seemed to have removed all control he had over his body. It didn't remove the sensations however, the pain, the humiliation. No, it was his mind which detached him from that, focusing, of all things, on the number of cracks in the window, twelve, or the number of drips of water, an average of five drips a minute..
He almost felt glad to wake up handcuffed to the chair again, the Irishman's grinning face in front of him. 'Maybe that was the point of the exercise,' the clinical part of his mind, the one which had counted drips of water, supplied. “Enjoy your week-end did you laddie?” Arthur had to suppress a flinch, and tried to turn it into a glare instead. He suspected by the other man's smile that he wasn't very successful.
“Got another little surprise for you since you enjoyed the last one so much.”
“You...” Arthur croaked then spat, and how did his throat end up quite so bruised. He tried again, “You shouldn't have.” It was barely more than a whisper, but it conveyed the message.
That smile again, cruel, vicious, knowing. “Now, now, that's no way to treat someone who's brought you a playmate.” It was only then that Arthur realised there was someone else there, a figure handcuffed to the chair, same as him, in a perfect mirror.
“Eames...” he managed to find his voice to protest, struggling to keep it strong, calm, no hint of a waiver, “He doesn't know anything, he never deals with clients. Let him go.”
“You're missing the point laddie, he's not here to talk, he's here to get you to talk,” as he spoke the forger seemed to be regaining consciousness, groaning as he did so, “course, since as ye say, the boy doesn't know anything, don't need to be so careful keeping him alive now do I?” With that he pulled out a knife, slicing through the buttons on the Brits shirt, exposing his bare, vulnerable chest, a dark red line of blood welling up where the knife had been..
It was too bare. The dark swirl of a tattoo which should have been covering his left pectoral was missing, as were the hints of Latin script further down by the waistline. Arthur had to stop himself from breathing out a sigh of relief at the realisation that this was not real, that Eames was probably still safe and sound in London and that the man being tortured was nothing more than a fake, or a projection.
It didn't make it easy to endure though, the screams of pain, the the cries of “Arthur, love, please” as the other man's skin was sliced open piece by piece and he had bite his tongue to stop himself from crying out for them to stop, blood filling his mouth as he did. It was only when the other forgers' form started to flicker from the pain the Irishman stopped, a noise of disgust in his throat before drawing out his gun and putting both of them out of their misery.
The days seemed to flow into each other, with little way to tell the passage of time except through the gradation in light filtering through the dirty cracked windows. Hours of imaginative and inventive ways to cause extreme pain whilst avoiding long-term damage, the same questions over and over again, the same reply from the point man, or at least variations on the theme, there were only so many ways you could tell someone to go fuck themselves, so Arthur rotated them for variety.
In a detached part of Arthur's mind, he almost admired their professionalism, they knew what they were doing in causing pain, they knew more what they were doing with the dreams, the hours of pain punctuated by dreams of charged, joyful moments lying in Eames' embrace. The scenery changed each time, the scenarios were different, but they always ended the same, Arthur peeling away the layers of clothing to reveal the ever-changing tattoos on the fake Eames' chest. It was as good as a totem the one thing consistently differentiating between dream and reality, the one thing keeping him from sinking into the dreams and giving up his secrets.
It seemed as if the Irishman had come up with his own explanation for why the dreams kept on failing to take, and he leaned conspiratorially over Arthur one day to share it with him, “I reckon the reason our lad Charlie t'aint as good in bed as you boy is his a bit homophobic. Bit of a shite trait in a forger really. But don't you worry, soon enough even Charlie's piss poor attempts at a blowjob will seem like heaven compared to what I'm doing to ya on the outside.”
Arthur couldn't help but think he was right. He could feel his will slipping every time he went under and it was only clinging onto the certain knowledge that giving them what they wanted would result in his death, in never seeing his true lover, never tracing the real tattoos that swirled over his body, that kept him going. Trouble was, he wasn't certain how much longer it would be before death really did start seeming like the preferable option to his current existence.
After what felt like a lifetime, but, if the light changes were anything to go by must only have been five or six days, the Irishman left again. “Going to have me a bit of a week-end off, methinks. Don't worry, I'll bring you back something special” he'd thrown over his shoulder at him as he'd departed through the warehouse doors. The threat might have been more effective if the man wasn't leaving him to a nightmare far worse than any of the methods of dealing pain he'd so far concocted.
It was the details, always the details, he remembered. His mind's own special way to numb him from reality, the little things he noticed even as he shied away from remember the big things. Like what was happening to him, no to his body, not him.
He'd moved on from cracks in windows and instead had started to catalogue the lax security practices the men seem to have gotten into during their 'down time'. Guns lying discarded, near enough to grab, ropes loosely attached, over-confident in the drugs ability to prevent movement, drinking, celebrating, over-confident in their victims helplessness. All things he could exploit, but not in his drugged up state, not with the sedative in his veins trapping him in his own body, making him as weak as a kitten. Somehow contemplating escape options he had no way, no ability to take was almost worse than the violation of his body he was using said contemplations to try and distract himself from. Almost.
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The Irishman was true to his word, he did bring back a surprise, a particularly unpleasant one. Hallucinogens.
They caused dreams to turn into nightmares, horrific visions of death and destructions or bright mad worlds filled with colour and joy. They causes the tattoos on the forged Eames' chest to swim and mutate into strange and unexpected shapes. Worse was their impact on the warehouse, causing walls to bleed and objects to twist and a sick blending reality with dreaming until Arthur could barely tell which was which. He had to remind himself to focus on the ever-changing tattoos on his lovers body, the keep hold on the only indicator of reality he had left, even as he wanted nothing more than to embrace the dream of Eames presence, be it the passionate interlude in some nameless hotel or the forgers arrival like a knight in shinning armour to rescue him from the hell that was his every waking hour. Every day he could feel his mind starting to slip further and further away, his control broken, shot to hell and it was that more than anything which terrified him.
He vowed to himself to make one last bid for freedom, one last attempt during from which either success or death were the only possible outcomes. And he believed he knew how. The hallucinogens for all their terrifying properties, had one distinct side-effect, an advantage he could almost love them for. They negated to effect of the sedative they'd been pumping him full of, giving him a strength back to his body he hadn't felt for weeks, despite the pain, the hunger and the fever setting in from too many untreated, infected wounds. He just had to keep his mind intact, held together by spit and hope, until the Irishman left, until the guard became complacent and the opportunity was there.
Somehow putting that idea into practice seemed far more difficult that it had any right to be.
++++
The Irishman knew he was winning, that much was clear. He seemed almost regretful when he waved Arthur good-bye on the fifth day, keeping to his schedule like clockwork. Arthur barely noticed, he was curled up in the corner, trying to convince himself that the tingling, crawling sensations all up his arms were just a by-product of the drugs, not the result of thousands of tiny spiders crawling all over him, under what was left of his clothes and into his mouth and eyes.
It was only once the other men started dragging him over to the table, divesting themselves of belts and holsters as they did so, that Arthur regained some semblance of reality. The knowledge of what needed to be done gave him a sharpness of thought he hadn't realised he'd lost, cutting through the fog of pain that had covered his mind and dulled his senses. He knew exactly what he had to do, he just hoped his battered body would be able to do it.
He used his injuries to his advantage, stumbling over his broken foot, the stab of sharp pain helping to focus him even as the movement caused the two men dragging him to loosen their grip slightly, trying for a better hold. It was all he needed, a sharp jab with his elbow caught the man on his left in the groin and Arthur took considerable satisfaction from the cry of pain that emanated from the man. The pain from his own body was dulled now, supplanted by the adrenaline flooding his senses and the knowledge that this was his last, final chance. He twisted as his left arm was let go, the man more concerned with trying to breath through the pain in his groin than keeping hold of the point man, and he yanked his right arm out of the second man's grasp reaching for the gun in his loosened, low-hanging shoulder holster as he did so.
He shot him as he fell away, a gut shot guaranteeing a long, slow death. He sent a second bullet towards the one with the groin injury for good measures before rolling to come up in a crouch, seeking another target. He felt more than heard a man come up behind him and he twisted out the way, kicking back with his uninjured leg feeling a sense of satisfaction as he heard a crack from the others ribs. A movement to his right and he whirled, his shot catching one of the guards even as he reached down to pick up his own gun. He shot him again for good measure, before catching his companion as he came out from the small kitchen at the back of a warehouse, a bottle of whiskey in his hand.
He kept moving, despite the pain in his foot, in his ribs, hell in his whole body, knowing that his only chance was surprise, that standing still would result in his untimely and no doubt very painful death. He dived behind one of the now upturned tables for cover, knocking over the hated tray of chemicals over as he did so. He heard bullets slam into the wood, two guns from the sound of it. He waited until they went to reload, emptying their clips far too quickly given the lack of effect, and it was clear that as professional as they were about inflicting pain, they were unaccustomed to someone who could shoot back. He didn't give them a chance to learn the correct procedure. shooting them both as they tried to reload, barely even seeking out their own cover as they did so.
It was all over in what could not have been more than a few minutes, the only sound left in the warehouse his own harsh breathing. He could already feel the adrenaline start to recede and the pains all over start to make themselves known. Spots danced in front of his eyes, visual artefacts left over from the last of the hallucinogens and he knew he had to get out of here before the pain started to overwhelm him again.
He ran, or tried to, limping away from the scene as fast as his broken body would carry him, trying desperately to find a bolt hole, somewhere, anywhere he could go to ground and let himself heal. His only thought as he ran, repeated over and over again,a mantra as if it could convince his mind of the truth, was 'let this be reality'.
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Part 5
Author's note 3: The idea for the tattoos came after seeing a pic of Tom Hardy topless. The man has a lot of ink, alas I have no idea what all the tattoos are, so the tattoos as described probably have little to do with those Tom has in real life. On the other hand, since we've never seen Eames barechested on screen, I think I'm allowed a bit of poetic licence.