#20 - If I Faltered Slightly Twice, for missy7280
Title: If I Faltered Slightly Twice
Recipient: Missy7280
Author: chibi_lurrel
Rating: PG
Pairing: Arthur/Cobb
Word count: 3,600
Warnings: None
Author’s Note: Thanks to acidpop25 for the beta!
The first months after the Fischer job are harder than Dom ever imagined.
What he imagined was this: his children running, overjoyed, into his open arms, with Miles and Marie standing together and smiling behind him. His presence is enough to soothe their hurt and fears and the in-laws disappear and their family is whole once again.
This doesn’t happen.
What does happen is this: Miles drives him home from LAX and his children run to him, but after that initial moment of perfect, sunlit grace, he is left with wreckage again.
Phillipa is angry and resentful, James quiet and wide-eyed. Marie and Miles stay, to help, to guide him, and he feels absurdly grateful even as they nag and grate against him. The kids have grown into small people, with wills and desires and fears, and he hasn’t met them before, doesn’t know them.
Dom relearns what it is to be home. He’s not sure if he loves it. He is a little scared.
He feels very alone.
-
He doesn’t dream any more. When he’d started in dreamshare, with Miles, what seems like eons ago, he’d held on to natural dreaming for months. They didn’t disappear completely until after Mal’s -
Well, he only skirts around that thought, the wound still raw, needing stitches. He can’t give James a satisfactory answer when he inevitably asks, again and again, where mommy is, will she come back just like daddy? Because grandma said he wouldn’t come back either.
But the hardship of Mal’s legacy is not unexpected. The dreams, the dreams are.
-
Cobb goes to bed and wakes up on a beach. And Arthur’s never been to Limbo, so Cobb doesn’t understand why he’s somehow trapped in the collective subconsciousness that populates his brain at night.
But there Arthur is, standing in front of him, pants cuffed at the ankles to reveal bare feet. He’s wearing dark gray slacks and a pale blue shirt, open at the collar, tie loose. There’s a cigarette in his hand, but Cobb knows he quit smoking a year and a half ago after being jumped outside a bar while enjoying a Dunhill.
“Hey,” he says, seemingly unfazed by the panic Cobb is sure is gripping his face, the panic that is causing his hands to dig through his pockets to find a totem that isn’t there. “You’re in a dream, Dom.”
His fist relaxes in his pocket and Arthur knocks ash off his cigarette. “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, though.”
Dom just stares and Arthur takes another drag, letting the smoke lowly curl out of his mouth.
“I think your subconscious thinks I’m symbolizing something important.” He smiles, all white teeth in the sun. “I’m probably your ego. The rational one.”
“Maybe I just miss you,” Cobb says as his muscles begin to relax, as his panic ebbs away. Natural dreaming shouldn’t be this jarring, but he hasn’t seen Arthur since the Fischer job.
Not to mention, this isn’t actually Arthur.
Because. This Arthur, he wants to touch, and that’s almost as jarring as not having his totem in a dream. It’s not a new feeling, but there was never time, never the correct moment to try, and this Arthur is looking at him, lips curved in the hint of a smile.
“If you missed me, you’d call more,” Arthur says.
Dom wakes up in a cold sweat and tries not to think of the cigarette dangling between pale fingers, pink lips.
-
Upon his triumphant return, Dom tried to quit PASIV-aided dreaming cold turkey. It wasn’t planned, per say, but his first time under sedation post-Fischer had been enough to make him want to kick the habit.
He’d spent his two years on the run carefully constructing a cage for Mal every chance he had, creating each room, each detail perfectly. Each button on the elevator was an apology he’d never get to give.
Cobb’s first week in California, he’d borrowed some sedative from Miles, telling him he was undergoing some Somnacin withdrawal. He awoke in a train, and had wandered for hours until he found his elevator door, gate closed in the middle of a wheat field. He started at the top and worked down.
Each level of his cage was abandoned, ripped apart, glass and torn cloth and stains in each. The elevator screeched and sparked. He couldn’t reach the basement.
-
Time passes, and Cobb tries to ignore everything that isn’t immediate. It works in the sense that he doesn’t die, and his children don’t starve, but he hasn’t made any friends in the neighborhood and his joints ache with perpetual exhaustion. He’s never felt more his age.
Eames shows up for Phillipa’s ninth birthday, carrying a large wrapped box and smiling through the peephole.
“Eames,” Cobb says, trying to not seem too surprised. He tries to remember if he should know that the man was in California, in the United States. He doesn’t like that every new week brings a reminder of just how dependent he had been on his pointman.
Phillipa’s friends haven’t arrived yet so she rips gleefully into the bright red package the moment Eames sets it on the living room coffee table.
“Uncle Arthur always gives the best gifts!” she exclaims as she unwraps, and pulls out a carefully carved horse, painted black and dotted with bright colours.
“It’s from Peru,” Eames supplies as she cradles it in her small hands. Dom personally thinks the thing looks bleak, like an animal from the land of the dead, but she looks enraptured and runs to put it away in her room.
Eames winks at James, who is hiding behind Dom’s leg, and hands him a small wrapped package. “Just because it’s her birthday doesn’t mean Arthur’s forgotten about you.”
James clutches it and runs upstairs as well.
The horse and what later appears to be a clay ocarina are typical Arthur fare. His gifts to the children are delicate and had they been from anyone but Arthur, they would have been destroyed instantly.
Eames has a sort of half-smile on his lips as he looks at Cobb’s kids. “Arthur misses them,” he says, and Cobb sighs.
“I miss him,” he says, and it’s too honest. The admission hurts, and Eames snorts.
“Well. He did keep you on a short leash.”
Dom smiles at that. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”
Eames shrugs and rolls his eyes. “Leaving soon, I think. I was in the area, and Arthur called in a favor.”
“Ah,” Dom says and hopes he doesn’t look disappointed. He feels cut off from everything he once was, and Eames’ appearance sparked that little thrill of adventure in his chest.
Instead of saying anything like that, he asks “Do you have any of Yusuf’s Somnacin with you?”
“I do,” he says. “But I thought you were out of the business.”
“I just have some things to sort out.”
“That isn’t particularly persuasive when the last time you had the stuff, you also almost caused us all to lose our minds, mate,” Eames says, but Cobb knows he’ll give it up. He changes topics.
“Is Arthur alright right now?”
Eames smirks. “You mean, now that he’s not your lapdog? He seems to be doing well enough to bloody call me to come to a birthday party.”
Cobb laughs, but he thinks Eames makes a poor substitute.
-
Cobb dreams naturally that night, opening his eyes to his house in LA four years ago. It’s familiar only because Cobb knows it is from his old dream, a floor he’d built to house regrets, but there’s something different.
Arthur’s sitting at his kitchen table talking with Mal.
Cobb can’t get a gun to appear in his hand so he listens. They’re speaking French, or at least the approximation of French supplied by his mind.
He feels more right than he has in months, and he watches them talk with their hands.
-
The second time he goes under with the Somnacin, James and Phillipa are at school.
He feels guilty as he hits the button on the PASIV, thinking about them coming home to a father lost to Limbo, and almost shoots himself awake the instant his eyes open. But he’s still in the elevator, and he’s looking at Arthur through the grate. Arthur’s just sitting on his living room sofa, reading. It’s from when they’d first met, and his hair is longer and falls in small waves around his temples.
Mal breathes into his ear and he jumps, banging into the gate.
“You’re replacing your regrets with hopes, one by one, aren’t you?”
“I -“ Dom starts to say but she puts a finger over his lips.
“It’s alright,” she says and she smiles, a little mischievously. “It’s alright.”
“I won’t forget you,” he says, and she sighs.
“Don’t forget him,” she says before she disappears.
-
Dom finally calls.
“Cobb,” Arthur says when he answers, and there’s the sound of machine gun fire in the background, a roar.
“Arthur,” Dom says and his tongue feels swollen.
“Look, this isn’t the best time,” Arthur says and then Cobb has to jerk the phone away from his ear as the sound of return fire volleys into it.
“I can tell, but -“
“I’ll call you back.”
“You won’t,” he says.
There’s a pause.
“Come home, Arthur.”
Arthur hangs up.
-
There was a time, in Cobb’s life, when he probably would have disappeared into nothing without Arthur there to anchor him. He stopped eating once the police investigation began, forced out of the house he and Mal built together and into a hotel, his mother-in-law telling the children that he might not be back and that they’d be orphans and she’d take them to Paris.
Arthur knocked on his hotel room door a day after he became a person of interest, and his face was angry, more heat in his glare than Cobb had ever seen. Arthur wasn’t emotionless, but this. This was fury.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Arthur snarled as he shoved his way into the room, rolling suitcase and a PASIV - a PASIV - in his hand.
“Tell you what?” Dom hadn’t moved from the bed, from the whiskey in his hand and the gun in the other. Arthur knew how to get in if he wanted to badly enough, and anyone else was welcome to putting a bullet in his head. But Cobb didn’t have as many enemies back then.
Just Arthur, tight gazed and white knuckled Arthur.
“We’ll get you out of this,” he said, “I’ll pull some strings at the Agency, I’ll -“
“So you don’t think I did it, then?”
At that, Arthur stopped, his hands falling from the locks on his hotel room. He turned and just stared, and Cobb could only imagine. Here was his mentor, the man who had taught him half of what he knew of dream share, and he was a sad, drunken sack.
“I might as well have pushed her myself,” he says, staring into his drink and refusing to meet Arthur’s eyes.
“I think you’re a fucking coward, Dominic Cobb,” Arthur said, “You’re going home tomorrow, and someone is going to meet you, and he’s going to give you a choice.”
“A choice,” Dom said dully.
“A choice,” Arthur said, firmly. “If you make the right one, I’ll see you again.”
-
“I miss Arthur,” Cobb finally, finally says out loud, putting the thought out in the universe.
“He’s restless,” Eames says over the phone. “And I don’t mind playing psychiatrist every so often, but I expect you to pay for the privilege.”
“No freebies for an old friend?” Cobb asks with a sigh, fingers on the bridge of his nose.
“Cobb, we’re not exactly friends. We’re certainly never working together again, so we can’t even be considered colleagues.”
“I just don’t know why he’s stayed away this long.”
“Your preference for dark, beautiful, and deadly creatures isn’t exactly a secret in this business,” Eames says, casually, and Cobb feels something suspiciously like want. “Maybe he doesn’t want to end up in your clutches.”
Dom doesn’t know how to say that Eames is right and wrong with one - that Dom has always been helpless without Arthur there to catch him.
-
At night, Dom eyes the PASIV. He thinks about the floors and floors of memories he’d built to house Mal and how empty they were, and how his brain is in shambles even without her shade.
He has enough Somnacin for about two hours of real time sleep. He’s calculated before how he could ration it out, but he’s stressed. James isn’t doing well at school, Phillipa punched a little boy that week, and retrieving his funds from off-shore accounts is proving to be a nightmare. He’d almost called Marie, begged her to come back, but he still wants to do this himself.
He plugs in instead.
The basement button on his elevator is already lit up when he opens his eyes in the dreamscape, and his stomach flips with the rush of movement. He almost doesn’t want to open the gate. He holds his breath as he does, the metal creaking as he steps into the hotel room.
There’s no familiar crack of glass under his shoe, and that’s because the glass is being held between Arthur’s slender fingers. The man is sitting on the white leather couch in the hotel room where he watched Mal fall. He’s not, thankfully, dressed in Mal’s evening gown, which means Cobb’s brain is being at least somewhat merciful.
He’s wearing a tuxedo instead, the way he was when he showed up at the Cobb’s house the night she fell, face flushed from wine and eyes wide with disbelief. He hadn’t cried, but he’d held Cobb as he slowly fell to pieces in the house he’d built with his wife.
“Hey,” Arthur says, and his voice is low.
Cobb has never actually seen the smile Arthur is employing in person. It lives in guilty jack-off fantasies, ones where Arthur shoves him against a wall and kisses him, or ones where Arthur’s on his knees and about to slide those lips over him.
Dom stares at his pale wrists instead of looking at that mouth, but the smile curls its way around his words.
“Is this a bad time, Dom?”
It’s the Dom that makes him shoot himself awake.
-
Arthur does call him back, which makes Dom reach for his totem. He feels shame creep up his neck, because Arthur calling shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be as natural as breathing.
“What do you need, anyway?” he asks, no hellos or anything else. All business.
It didn’t used to be this way, Cobb thinks, but he can’t be sure.
“I don’t need anything,” Dom starts, but it’s a lie.
“Then what is it?”
“I.” he starts, and thinks about making up something about the kids missing him.
“I want to see you,” Dom says. “It’s been seven months. We. That’s a long time, for us.”
There’s a long pause where he thinks Arthur has hung up, but then.
“Okay, Cobb. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
-
When Arthur arrives at his door he’s wearing the same pale blue shirt and slate grey pants he was wearing the first time Cobb saw him in his dreams.
It should be reassuring - Cobb had constructed his shade using things he already knew, rather than built an entirely fictional Arthur.
But it isn’t his dream Arthur, anyway. This Arthur has gauze taped to his forehead and three broken fingers on his left hand. The PASIV case is sitting on top of his familiar rolling suitcase. There’s bruising on his throat and under his right eye and he just stares at Cobb, barely blinking.
“I should punch you in the fucking face,” Arthur eventually says, and Dom is thankful the kids are at school.
Dom doesn’t really have an answer, but Arthur shoves past him and continues. “I should fucking shoot you, actually, is what I should do, but you’d just die here, and that’d be a big fucking mess to clean up.” His voice is flat, and there’s no heat there, and Cobb isn’t sure if he’s furious or just stating the facts.
“I don’t think I really deserve that,” Cobb finally offers, and Arthur is facing him, fast and in his space.
“James and Phillipa don’t deserve that,” Arthur says, half snarling, but the anger there fades as he leans away and looks him up and down. And then he smiles, small and without teeth. “You look like shit, Cobb.”
Dom laughs in spite of himself. “You’re one to talk.”
Arthur looks around the plush living room, at the scattered toys and books and shoes. The evidence of Dom’s new and tiny life is strewn everywhere.
“Not all of us had Saito’s magic wand to clear our records, you know. I had to settle a few debts.”
Cobb holds his breath as Arthur moves to the stairs.
“But I’m done with that now,” he says as he climbs up to the guest room.
-
Arthur cleans the living room without saying a word, and rearranges the fridge, and takes over dinner for the night.
Cobb just sits at the kitchen table and watches, feeling frayed, until it’s time to pick up the kids. He starts conversations in his head but he isn’t sure if he’ll say something that will cause Arthur to disappear. If he’ll wake himself up.
The kids are so fucking happy to see Arthur that Cobb feels like he’s been physically hit in the ribs with how obvious his absence in the house was. Arthur fills a hole Cobb never even saw, could never patch up no matter how hard he tried.
-
“I just wanted you to know that I didn’t come because you called me.”
Arthur’s shape is slim and dangerous in the doorway to Cobb’s bedroom. He’s not wearing a shirt and that little
“You didn’t?” Cobb asks, already helpless.
“I would have come anyway,” he says, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind him. The room is bathed in gray lights
“I told you I didn’t need you,” Cobb says, sitting up and squinting to adjust, making out Arthur’s face, which is soft instead of angry.
“And you’re shit at lying,” Arthur says, then amends, “to me, at least.” He sits down at the edge of the bed.
“That’s true,” Cobb says, and he’s tired of this even though it’s his fault, and he’s not sure if Arthur’s getting ready to leave or stay forever.
Arthur sighs and hunches over, and just looks at him.
“Do you ever dream?” Cobb asks. “Naturally, I mean.”
Arthur blinks in the dim light. “Cobb, you know I haven’t since the service.”
Cobb shrugs. “Sometimes it comes back.”
He gets a rather inscrutable smile from Arthur for the remark. “You’ve got a knack for that.”
Arthur stands up and looks at him in the bed. “Well, I’m here now, against my better judgment. Don’t think it’ll be easy now, but. I’m here.”
“I know,” Cobb says, because he’s always been terrible at saying ‘thank you.’
“Get some sleep, Cobb,” Arthur says as he walks out of the bedroom.
-
Cobb hadn’t noticed Arthur flipping off his alarm, and so he panics when he wakes up well past the time to take the kids to the elementary school. The smell of bacon hits him as he’s struggling into a pair of pants, reminding him that he’s not alone, that Arthur’s probably taken them to school with perfectly packed lunches with crustless sandwiches and the right servings of fruits.
He yanks on the pants anyway and pulls on a robe and heads downstairs, peering carefully into the kitchen.
Arthur looks as at ease there as he did six years ago, frying bacon in a pan. A bowl of scrambled eggs is already on the table, and Arthur’s in jeans and a plain grey v-neck, hair soft.
It’s been over a year since Dom has seen him this dressed down, and his hands clench with the need to wrap around his hips.
“I took the kids to school. You seemed exhausted,” Arthur says as he pats the bacon down with a paper towel and puts it on a plate.
“I am exhausted,” Cobb says, pouring himself coffee from the pot. It’s stronger than he makes it for himself but he drinks anyway and sits down.
Arthur lays the bacon down on the table and Cobb grabs his wrist, looks up at him.
“You could hate me now, and I think I’d understand it,” Cobb says
“I tried to,” Arthur answers, not quite meeting his eyes. “You put us at risk, you could have trapped us in Limbo.”
“So why are you here?” Cobb asks, because he wants to hear it, wants Arthur to say what every bone in his body is hoping for.
Arthur shrugs. “I was angry, but. Now I’m not.”
“I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d stop me.” Dom knew it was selfish then and almost flinches saying it now.
Arthur shrugs a second time but doesn’t pull away. “I probably would have. You’ve been wrong before,” he says.
At that, Cobb stands up. It’s too quick and they knock into each other and things take a moment to settle, but then he grabs at Arthur’s jaw and leans down. He keeps his eyes open as he kisses him, presses his mouth to those lips and laces his fingers with those fingers. Arthur’s eyes flutter closed, and he leans into it, just a little, but he doesn’t push or turn it sloppy.
When Dom pulls back, he gets to watch a smile work its way over Arthur’s face.
“I’m not wrong now,” he says as he lets go of Arthur’s hand, and Arthur sits down at the table. Dom follows suit, wary but sure, so certain of something that he’d never thought to reach out or touch before.
“You’re not wrong now,” Arthur agrees, and his foot brushes Dom’s ankle under the table.
Recipient: Missy7280
Author: chibi_lurrel
Rating: PG
Pairing: Arthur/Cobb
Word count: 3,600
Warnings: None
Author’s Note: Thanks to acidpop25 for the beta!
The first months after the Fischer job are harder than Dom ever imagined.
What he imagined was this: his children running, overjoyed, into his open arms, with Miles and Marie standing together and smiling behind him. His presence is enough to soothe their hurt and fears and the in-laws disappear and their family is whole once again.
This doesn’t happen.
What does happen is this: Miles drives him home from LAX and his children run to him, but after that initial moment of perfect, sunlit grace, he is left with wreckage again.
Phillipa is angry and resentful, James quiet and wide-eyed. Marie and Miles stay, to help, to guide him, and he feels absurdly grateful even as they nag and grate against him. The kids have grown into small people, with wills and desires and fears, and he hasn’t met them before, doesn’t know them.
Dom relearns what it is to be home. He’s not sure if he loves it. He is a little scared.
He feels very alone.
-
He doesn’t dream any more. When he’d started in dreamshare, with Miles, what seems like eons ago, he’d held on to natural dreaming for months. They didn’t disappear completely until after Mal’s -
Well, he only skirts around that thought, the wound still raw, needing stitches. He can’t give James a satisfactory answer when he inevitably asks, again and again, where mommy is, will she come back just like daddy? Because grandma said he wouldn’t come back either.
But the hardship of Mal’s legacy is not unexpected. The dreams, the dreams are.
-
Cobb goes to bed and wakes up on a beach. And Arthur’s never been to Limbo, so Cobb doesn’t understand why he’s somehow trapped in the collective subconsciousness that populates his brain at night.
But there Arthur is, standing in front of him, pants cuffed at the ankles to reveal bare feet. He’s wearing dark gray slacks and a pale blue shirt, open at the collar, tie loose. There’s a cigarette in his hand, but Cobb knows he quit smoking a year and a half ago after being jumped outside a bar while enjoying a Dunhill.
“Hey,” he says, seemingly unfazed by the panic Cobb is sure is gripping his face, the panic that is causing his hands to dig through his pockets to find a totem that isn’t there. “You’re in a dream, Dom.”
His fist relaxes in his pocket and Arthur knocks ash off his cigarette. “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, though.”
Dom just stares and Arthur takes another drag, letting the smoke lowly curl out of his mouth.
“I think your subconscious thinks I’m symbolizing something important.” He smiles, all white teeth in the sun. “I’m probably your ego. The rational one.”
“Maybe I just miss you,” Cobb says as his muscles begin to relax, as his panic ebbs away. Natural dreaming shouldn’t be this jarring, but he hasn’t seen Arthur since the Fischer job.
Not to mention, this isn’t actually Arthur.
Because. This Arthur, he wants to touch, and that’s almost as jarring as not having his totem in a dream. It’s not a new feeling, but there was never time, never the correct moment to try, and this Arthur is looking at him, lips curved in the hint of a smile.
“If you missed me, you’d call more,” Arthur says.
Dom wakes up in a cold sweat and tries not to think of the cigarette dangling between pale fingers, pink lips.
-
Upon his triumphant return, Dom tried to quit PASIV-aided dreaming cold turkey. It wasn’t planned, per say, but his first time under sedation post-Fischer had been enough to make him want to kick the habit.
He’d spent his two years on the run carefully constructing a cage for Mal every chance he had, creating each room, each detail perfectly. Each button on the elevator was an apology he’d never get to give.
Cobb’s first week in California, he’d borrowed some sedative from Miles, telling him he was undergoing some Somnacin withdrawal. He awoke in a train, and had wandered for hours until he found his elevator door, gate closed in the middle of a wheat field. He started at the top and worked down.
Each level of his cage was abandoned, ripped apart, glass and torn cloth and stains in each. The elevator screeched and sparked. He couldn’t reach the basement.
-
Time passes, and Cobb tries to ignore everything that isn’t immediate. It works in the sense that he doesn’t die, and his children don’t starve, but he hasn’t made any friends in the neighborhood and his joints ache with perpetual exhaustion. He’s never felt more his age.
Eames shows up for Phillipa’s ninth birthday, carrying a large wrapped box and smiling through the peephole.
“Eames,” Cobb says, trying to not seem too surprised. He tries to remember if he should know that the man was in California, in the United States. He doesn’t like that every new week brings a reminder of just how dependent he had been on his pointman.
Phillipa’s friends haven’t arrived yet so she rips gleefully into the bright red package the moment Eames sets it on the living room coffee table.
“Uncle Arthur always gives the best gifts!” she exclaims as she unwraps, and pulls out a carefully carved horse, painted black and dotted with bright colours.
“It’s from Peru,” Eames supplies as she cradles it in her small hands. Dom personally thinks the thing looks bleak, like an animal from the land of the dead, but she looks enraptured and runs to put it away in her room.
Eames winks at James, who is hiding behind Dom’s leg, and hands him a small wrapped package. “Just because it’s her birthday doesn’t mean Arthur’s forgotten about you.”
James clutches it and runs upstairs as well.
The horse and what later appears to be a clay ocarina are typical Arthur fare. His gifts to the children are delicate and had they been from anyone but Arthur, they would have been destroyed instantly.
Eames has a sort of half-smile on his lips as he looks at Cobb’s kids. “Arthur misses them,” he says, and Cobb sighs.
“I miss him,” he says, and it’s too honest. The admission hurts, and Eames snorts.
“Well. He did keep you on a short leash.”
Dom smiles at that. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”
Eames shrugs and rolls his eyes. “Leaving soon, I think. I was in the area, and Arthur called in a favor.”
“Ah,” Dom says and hopes he doesn’t look disappointed. He feels cut off from everything he once was, and Eames’ appearance sparked that little thrill of adventure in his chest.
Instead of saying anything like that, he asks “Do you have any of Yusuf’s Somnacin with you?”
“I do,” he says. “But I thought you were out of the business.”
“I just have some things to sort out.”
“That isn’t particularly persuasive when the last time you had the stuff, you also almost caused us all to lose our minds, mate,” Eames says, but Cobb knows he’ll give it up. He changes topics.
“Is Arthur alright right now?”
Eames smirks. “You mean, now that he’s not your lapdog? He seems to be doing well enough to bloody call me to come to a birthday party.”
Cobb laughs, but he thinks Eames makes a poor substitute.
-
Cobb dreams naturally that night, opening his eyes to his house in LA four years ago. It’s familiar only because Cobb knows it is from his old dream, a floor he’d built to house regrets, but there’s something different.
Arthur’s sitting at his kitchen table talking with Mal.
Cobb can’t get a gun to appear in his hand so he listens. They’re speaking French, or at least the approximation of French supplied by his mind.
He feels more right than he has in months, and he watches them talk with their hands.
-
The second time he goes under with the Somnacin, James and Phillipa are at school.
He feels guilty as he hits the button on the PASIV, thinking about them coming home to a father lost to Limbo, and almost shoots himself awake the instant his eyes open. But he’s still in the elevator, and he’s looking at Arthur through the grate. Arthur’s just sitting on his living room sofa, reading. It’s from when they’d first met, and his hair is longer and falls in small waves around his temples.
Mal breathes into his ear and he jumps, banging into the gate.
“You’re replacing your regrets with hopes, one by one, aren’t you?”
“I -“ Dom starts to say but she puts a finger over his lips.
“It’s alright,” she says and she smiles, a little mischievously. “It’s alright.”
“I won’t forget you,” he says, and she sighs.
“Don’t forget him,” she says before she disappears.
-
Dom finally calls.
“Cobb,” Arthur says when he answers, and there’s the sound of machine gun fire in the background, a roar.
“Arthur,” Dom says and his tongue feels swollen.
“Look, this isn’t the best time,” Arthur says and then Cobb has to jerk the phone away from his ear as the sound of return fire volleys into it.
“I can tell, but -“
“I’ll call you back.”
“You won’t,” he says.
There’s a pause.
“Come home, Arthur.”
Arthur hangs up.
-
There was a time, in Cobb’s life, when he probably would have disappeared into nothing without Arthur there to anchor him. He stopped eating once the police investigation began, forced out of the house he and Mal built together and into a hotel, his mother-in-law telling the children that he might not be back and that they’d be orphans and she’d take them to Paris.
Arthur knocked on his hotel room door a day after he became a person of interest, and his face was angry, more heat in his glare than Cobb had ever seen. Arthur wasn’t emotionless, but this. This was fury.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Arthur snarled as he shoved his way into the room, rolling suitcase and a PASIV - a PASIV - in his hand.
“Tell you what?” Dom hadn’t moved from the bed, from the whiskey in his hand and the gun in the other. Arthur knew how to get in if he wanted to badly enough, and anyone else was welcome to putting a bullet in his head. But Cobb didn’t have as many enemies back then.
Just Arthur, tight gazed and white knuckled Arthur.
“We’ll get you out of this,” he said, “I’ll pull some strings at the Agency, I’ll -“
“So you don’t think I did it, then?”
At that, Arthur stopped, his hands falling from the locks on his hotel room. He turned and just stared, and Cobb could only imagine. Here was his mentor, the man who had taught him half of what he knew of dream share, and he was a sad, drunken sack.
“I might as well have pushed her myself,” he says, staring into his drink and refusing to meet Arthur’s eyes.
“I think you’re a fucking coward, Dominic Cobb,” Arthur said, “You’re going home tomorrow, and someone is going to meet you, and he’s going to give you a choice.”
“A choice,” Dom said dully.
“A choice,” Arthur said, firmly. “If you make the right one, I’ll see you again.”
-
“I miss Arthur,” Cobb finally, finally says out loud, putting the thought out in the universe.
“He’s restless,” Eames says over the phone. “And I don’t mind playing psychiatrist every so often, but I expect you to pay for the privilege.”
“No freebies for an old friend?” Cobb asks with a sigh, fingers on the bridge of his nose.
“Cobb, we’re not exactly friends. We’re certainly never working together again, so we can’t even be considered colleagues.”
“I just don’t know why he’s stayed away this long.”
“Your preference for dark, beautiful, and deadly creatures isn’t exactly a secret in this business,” Eames says, casually, and Cobb feels something suspiciously like want. “Maybe he doesn’t want to end up in your clutches.”
Dom doesn’t know how to say that Eames is right and wrong with one - that Dom has always been helpless without Arthur there to catch him.
-
At night, Dom eyes the PASIV. He thinks about the floors and floors of memories he’d built to house Mal and how empty they were, and how his brain is in shambles even without her shade.
He has enough Somnacin for about two hours of real time sleep. He’s calculated before how he could ration it out, but he’s stressed. James isn’t doing well at school, Phillipa punched a little boy that week, and retrieving his funds from off-shore accounts is proving to be a nightmare. He’d almost called Marie, begged her to come back, but he still wants to do this himself.
He plugs in instead.
The basement button on his elevator is already lit up when he opens his eyes in the dreamscape, and his stomach flips with the rush of movement. He almost doesn’t want to open the gate. He holds his breath as he does, the metal creaking as he steps into the hotel room.
There’s no familiar crack of glass under his shoe, and that’s because the glass is being held between Arthur’s slender fingers. The man is sitting on the white leather couch in the hotel room where he watched Mal fall. He’s not, thankfully, dressed in Mal’s evening gown, which means Cobb’s brain is being at least somewhat merciful.
He’s wearing a tuxedo instead, the way he was when he showed up at the Cobb’s house the night she fell, face flushed from wine and eyes wide with disbelief. He hadn’t cried, but he’d held Cobb as he slowly fell to pieces in the house he’d built with his wife.
“Hey,” Arthur says, and his voice is low.
Cobb has never actually seen the smile Arthur is employing in person. It lives in guilty jack-off fantasies, ones where Arthur shoves him against a wall and kisses him, or ones where Arthur’s on his knees and about to slide those lips over him.
Dom stares at his pale wrists instead of looking at that mouth, but the smile curls its way around his words.
“Is this a bad time, Dom?”
It’s the Dom that makes him shoot himself awake.
-
Arthur does call him back, which makes Dom reach for his totem. He feels shame creep up his neck, because Arthur calling shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be as natural as breathing.
“What do you need, anyway?” he asks, no hellos or anything else. All business.
It didn’t used to be this way, Cobb thinks, but he can’t be sure.
“I don’t need anything,” Dom starts, but it’s a lie.
“Then what is it?”
“I.” he starts, and thinks about making up something about the kids missing him.
“I want to see you,” Dom says. “It’s been seven months. We. That’s a long time, for us.”
There’s a long pause where he thinks Arthur has hung up, but then.
“Okay, Cobb. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
-
When Arthur arrives at his door he’s wearing the same pale blue shirt and slate grey pants he was wearing the first time Cobb saw him in his dreams.
It should be reassuring - Cobb had constructed his shade using things he already knew, rather than built an entirely fictional Arthur.
But it isn’t his dream Arthur, anyway. This Arthur has gauze taped to his forehead and three broken fingers on his left hand. The PASIV case is sitting on top of his familiar rolling suitcase. There’s bruising on his throat and under his right eye and he just stares at Cobb, barely blinking.
“I should punch you in the fucking face,” Arthur eventually says, and Dom is thankful the kids are at school.
Dom doesn’t really have an answer, but Arthur shoves past him and continues. “I should fucking shoot you, actually, is what I should do, but you’d just die here, and that’d be a big fucking mess to clean up.” His voice is flat, and there’s no heat there, and Cobb isn’t sure if he’s furious or just stating the facts.
“I don’t think I really deserve that,” Cobb finally offers, and Arthur is facing him, fast and in his space.
“James and Phillipa don’t deserve that,” Arthur says, half snarling, but the anger there fades as he leans away and looks him up and down. And then he smiles, small and without teeth. “You look like shit, Cobb.”
Dom laughs in spite of himself. “You’re one to talk.”
Arthur looks around the plush living room, at the scattered toys and books and shoes. The evidence of Dom’s new and tiny life is strewn everywhere.
“Not all of us had Saito’s magic wand to clear our records, you know. I had to settle a few debts.”
Cobb holds his breath as Arthur moves to the stairs.
“But I’m done with that now,” he says as he climbs up to the guest room.
-
Arthur cleans the living room without saying a word, and rearranges the fridge, and takes over dinner for the night.
Cobb just sits at the kitchen table and watches, feeling frayed, until it’s time to pick up the kids. He starts conversations in his head but he isn’t sure if he’ll say something that will cause Arthur to disappear. If he’ll wake himself up.
The kids are so fucking happy to see Arthur that Cobb feels like he’s been physically hit in the ribs with how obvious his absence in the house was. Arthur fills a hole Cobb never even saw, could never patch up no matter how hard he tried.
-
“I just wanted you to know that I didn’t come because you called me.”
Arthur’s shape is slim and dangerous in the doorway to Cobb’s bedroom. He’s not wearing a shirt and that little
“You didn’t?” Cobb asks, already helpless.
“I would have come anyway,” he says, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind him. The room is bathed in gray lights
“I told you I didn’t need you,” Cobb says, sitting up and squinting to adjust, making out Arthur’s face, which is soft instead of angry.
“And you’re shit at lying,” Arthur says, then amends, “to me, at least.” He sits down at the edge of the bed.
“That’s true,” Cobb says, and he’s tired of this even though it’s his fault, and he’s not sure if Arthur’s getting ready to leave or stay forever.
Arthur sighs and hunches over, and just looks at him.
“Do you ever dream?” Cobb asks. “Naturally, I mean.”
Arthur blinks in the dim light. “Cobb, you know I haven’t since the service.”
Cobb shrugs. “Sometimes it comes back.”
He gets a rather inscrutable smile from Arthur for the remark. “You’ve got a knack for that.”
Arthur stands up and looks at him in the bed. “Well, I’m here now, against my better judgment. Don’t think it’ll be easy now, but. I’m here.”
“I know,” Cobb says, because he’s always been terrible at saying ‘thank you.’
“Get some sleep, Cobb,” Arthur says as he walks out of the bedroom.
-
Cobb hadn’t noticed Arthur flipping off his alarm, and so he panics when he wakes up well past the time to take the kids to the elementary school. The smell of bacon hits him as he’s struggling into a pair of pants, reminding him that he’s not alone, that Arthur’s probably taken them to school with perfectly packed lunches with crustless sandwiches and the right servings of fruits.
He yanks on the pants anyway and pulls on a robe and heads downstairs, peering carefully into the kitchen.
Arthur looks as at ease there as he did six years ago, frying bacon in a pan. A bowl of scrambled eggs is already on the table, and Arthur’s in jeans and a plain grey v-neck, hair soft.
It’s been over a year since Dom has seen him this dressed down, and his hands clench with the need to wrap around his hips.
“I took the kids to school. You seemed exhausted,” Arthur says as he pats the bacon down with a paper towel and puts it on a plate.
“I am exhausted,” Cobb says, pouring himself coffee from the pot. It’s stronger than he makes it for himself but he drinks anyway and sits down.
Arthur lays the bacon down on the table and Cobb grabs his wrist, looks up at him.
“You could hate me now, and I think I’d understand it,” Cobb says
“I tried to,” Arthur answers, not quite meeting his eyes. “You put us at risk, you could have trapped us in Limbo.”
“So why are you here?” Cobb asks, because he wants to hear it, wants Arthur to say what every bone in his body is hoping for.
Arthur shrugs. “I was angry, but. Now I’m not.”
“I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d stop me.” Dom knew it was selfish then and almost flinches saying it now.
Arthur shrugs a second time but doesn’t pull away. “I probably would have. You’ve been wrong before,” he says.
At that, Cobb stands up. It’s too quick and they knock into each other and things take a moment to settle, but then he grabs at Arthur’s jaw and leans down. He keeps his eyes open as he kisses him, presses his mouth to those lips and laces his fingers with those fingers. Arthur’s eyes flutter closed, and he leans into it, just a little, but he doesn’t push or turn it sloppy.
When Dom pulls back, he gets to watch a smile work its way over Arthur’s face.
“I’m not wrong now,” he says as he lets go of Arthur’s hand, and Arthur sits down at the table. Dom follows suit, wary but sure, so certain of something that he’d never thought to reach out or touch before.
“You’re not wrong now,” Arthur agrees, and his foot brushes Dom’s ankle under the table.