sky-blue dreams and blood-orange ice cream (6/7)
title: sky-blue dreams and blood-orange ice cream (6/7)
rating: R
word count: 2238
pairings: arthur/eames, cobb/mal
summary: Arthur dreams in black and white, Eames dreams in technicolor. They meet in a dream, aged fifteen and eighteen, amidst white snow and black lampposts. This is a story detailing their lives, together and apart, since that day.
Darling, I can barely remember you beside me
You should come back home, back on your own now
- Fleet Foxes, “Ragged Wood”
Arthur learns to compartmentalize. He envisages his mind as a sleek, sterile room filled with purposefully-bland file cabinets. Each seemingly unremarkable metal drawer contains secrets: secrets about military life and machine guns, about assault and assassination, about infiltration and intelligence, about sex and suits, about theft and therapy.
And in a dusty and unused corner are the files that contain memories of childhood and adolescence, systematically and dispassionately tucked away; methodically alphabetized with color-coded tabs for potential future reference.
He does not believe in censuring history, in obliterating every speck of evidence pertaining to that skinny, gullible, whimsical boy with dark floppy hair and Buddy Holly glasses. After all, he is what he is due to a various and indeterminable number of factors and influences; some genetic, some environmental, others acquired with age and experience. He is certainly not ashamed of those formative years.
But neither does he believe in wallowing in the past.
Because he is no longer that person.
The Arthur of here and now is feared and respected and fucking loves what he does; loves it in a fiercely possessive way. Indeed, Cobb may have the reputation for being eccentric and overzealous and slightly cracked. But what does it say about Arthur that he would probably follow the man down to the depths of insanity, if that was what was required?
They create, they destroy, they rebuild. They are kings or, presumptuous as it may be, gods.
Come what may and despite not knowing whether his lifestyle is curse or intoxication, death wish or deliverance; he never tries to walk away.
Arthur sleeps with a slim stained SIG Sauer under his pillow and slowly, ever so slowly, he thinks that he might be healing, forgetting, accepting.
***Eames leaves the army after four years and three months. He takes with him an exemplary service record, twelve scars, three new tattoos and one creased, grimy photograph that has been folded and unfolded many times.
A soldier, face streaked with mud and fading camouflage paint, faces away from the camera; unknowingly caught in the act of removing a helmet to wipe at his brow. Sunlight illuminates the smattering of freckles across his nose, a small jagged scar on his cheek and damp red-gold hair.
Having superb references, there is never any trouble finding work. After various, haphazard stints - a travelling salesman, a roadside caricaturist, a kitchen hand, a park ranger, a Santa Claus - he turns to theft.
He excels at it. After all, he thinks humourlessly, he has been invading other people's dreams since he was eighteen.
The pay is fanfuckingtastic, the perks are better, the nightmares are manageable. He never uses his name or anything that can identify him during jobs. He never sticks with one team. He is always prepared to cut his losses and run. He never becomes too attached. For it is best that way.
He adopts a lazy, mocking drawl that his mother would have hated, smokes far too much and paints furiously into early hours of the morning, brush strokes sloppy and colours vibrant. He does not use black or white. Initially cathartic, it eventually becomes essential.
Canvases fill every possible space and half-empty bottles of Jack and Jim line the scuffed paint-splattered floor; silent bystanders.
Once a week, religiously, he walks into an art gallery (wherever he may be) and immerses himself in Géricault, Vermeer, Constable, Pissarro, van Gogh. Those are the days worth waking up for.
Over the years he flirts with everyone, sleeps with a handful, but doesn't fall in love. Each fledgling attempt at something more than a drunken fuck is transient and bittersweet, ending in a mess of raised voices and tears and stormy accusations of unfaithfulness that are not true, but perhaps not completely false either.
Because Eames dreams of coarse dark hair entwined in his fingers and elusive dimples, but wakes up to find slender waists and lipstick lips.
***Once. Just once, he slips.
He dreams unaided by Somnacin, for the first time in years.
Arthur dreams in black, white and silence.
He walks miles on asphalt roads, consoling in their familiarity. He reaches a half-remembered somnolent city, and there are his projections, no longer faceless or nameless. They watch on curiously as he walks past, some smiling tentatively, others frowning. Tattoos glimmer under the pallid sun. Crooked teeth and stubble. Broad shoulders and full lips.
They are all Eames.
He shoots them.
Each and every one.
Between the eyes. In the chest. In the leg.
Arthur wakes up screaming, the SIG Sauer biting into his clammy, trembling palm. The hastily stitched up gash on his arm has torn open, oozing and wine-colored in the gloom. He throws up five times and even when his throat is parched and raw and inflamed he can't stop the dry retches that rack his frame and obscure his vision with sweat.
Cobb finds him later that morning, fitfully asleep on the cold tiles of the hotel bathroom, dried blood caked down one arm and fingers still wrapped around the slim stained pistol. He pries the gun out of Arthur's grip and finds, dread gnawing at his skin, that it is fully loaded.
The safety catch is off.
When Arthur wakes up groggily two days later, nestled in downy blankets, he doesn't remember any of it. A heavily pregnant Mal alternately fusses over and berates him; forcing scalding, bland soup down his protesting throat.
Listening from the other side of the door Cobb exhales once, long and deep, and offers a simple grateful prayer to someone (anyone) somewhere.
***Though it barely registers at the time, Eames turns twenty-eight on a cold, drizzling September day- a day worth waking up for. He brushes his teeth, shrugs into a shabby overcoat, answers the ringing telephone (a long-time informant, congratulating him on another year survived and ordering him to come and visit her in Mombasa sometime, twat) and feeds the fish before leaving his apartment, not bothering to lock the door.
There is the habitual itch in his veins, the ache for nicotine, the pounding headache beneath his eyelids, the tightness in his chest and the restless agitated flurry of his thoughts. He wants a cigarette, badly.
These days, Eames gambles to stave off the need. Both in dreams and reality, easily exchanging one vice for another. His pockets overflow with cracked poker chips, counterfeited or stolen. He toys with them constantly, incessantly, over and over and over between his fingers. It helps, but not much.
The Tate is comforting in its light and warmth. As he steps briskly through its rooms (each well-known and well-loved), he idly recognises the regular, familiar faces amidst the tourists and employees. There is the bearded man with vacant red-rimmed eyes hovering about the gift-shop, the petite teenage girl in a printed scarf sketching absently in room 22, the beautiful woman with dark curls and smoky eyes who traipses behind him into room T7.
He is standing in front of Fuseli's The Shepherd’s Dream, from Paradise Lost, not really concentrating, when he becomes suddenly, acutely, aware of someone standing beside him - close but not unsettlingly so.
“I have always liked this one,” the beautiful woman with dark curls and smoky eyes announces quietly, seemingly to no one in particular. She has an accent, throaty and lyrical. Eames thinks of Paris and, oddly, a Cambridge professor from another life.
The painting is magnificent, irrefutably, but he finds there to be something innately ominous about the supernatural creatures clustering about the slumbering shepherd, shrouded in the nightmarish darkness.
Well. To each his own, he supposes meditatively.
“How does it go again? ‘Fairy elves, whose midnight revels by a forest side, or fountain some belated peasant sees-‘”
She pauses significantly, turning to Eames with an appraising, almost challenging, tilt of her chin.
“‘Or dreams he sees’,” he concedes, with a small smile.
Her answering smile is radiant.
Later (it had been impossible to refuse her) Eames meets her at the little gallery café for strong black tea and gloriously warm scones.
It should be awkward or strange, but isn't. They discuss weather, psychology, Paris, Fuseli, children - she has a daughter, he has a godson. Though her dark eyes never drop their steady gaze; her fingers abstractedly fiddle with the complimentary toothpicks and sachets of sugar, constructing walls and shapes and, bloody hell, Eames should have known, mazes.
He takes out the silver lighter from his overcoat pocket slowly, fingers mapping dents and scratches and intricate filigree working. He flicks the thumbwheel once, twice. It doesn't light and the relief that bleeds into his skin is like salvation.
“Forget to mention you were an Architect, darli-”
Eames fumbles with his tea and bites back a curse as it slops heavily into the saucer. He is startled at how easy it was to say to her and irritated that he is still (will always be) invariably defeated by that one fucking word.
She laughs, rich and musical and apologetic. Eames is enchanted and mercifully distracted.
“I apologise for my rudeness, but it was hard enough locating you that I was worried you would slip away if I revealed my true intentions. You are known for your elusiveness in our circles.”
Her eyes are sharp, bright and satisfied, a genuine smile curling on pale pink lips.
It turns out to be the best day he has had in a long while, even though he knows that she is a highly-accomplished professional and simply objectively evaluating his suitability for a job
So he is nonplussed when they stand up to leave, chair legs scraping on tile, for she kisses his cheek and murmurs, statement not question, “Until next week then, Mr. Eames.”
***The windows are thrown open and the cool, jasmine-fragrant night air whispers through the house. Mal is singing along to Edith Piaf on the gramophone as she stirs the simmering Bolognese sauce while Miles tosses a simple green salad. They converse quietly, affectionately, Mal's laugh pealing out once or twice over the music.
Arthur is seated on the couch, barely awake. Lately he has been practically living at the warehouse, functioning on sparse handfuls of half-sleep and bitter sugary coffee. When they had found out, Mal had scolded and Cobb had squinted and before Arthur knew it, he was being bundled back to their home for a proper meal and decent night's sleep in the spare bedroom.
Phillipa (ten months, fair-haired, gorgeous) is sleeping nestled in the crook of his arm, small fists clutching at his shirt. She is also undoubtedly drooling on his inordinately expensive tie, he realizes despairingly, but kisses the top of her head quickly when no one is looking.
Cobb wanders over, glass of red wine in hand, leaning over to tousle the impossibly soft, baby-fine hair upon her head, smiling and relaxed.
Sometimes Arthur forgets how well Cobb has taken to married life and domesticity. This Cobb; a Cobb that jokes, albeit badly, and takes days off and makes stupid faces at his baby daughter; is much more content than the intense, slightly unhinged man who had approached Arthur that seemingly ordinary summer day and whispered of dreams and ideas and pure creation.
“Mal’s pleased about something,” Arthur notes with a sideways glance at Cobb.
It is good to hear her laugh.
They've all been particularly strained over the past few weeks, what with the search for a team member (rather, a team member capable of keeping up with them) yielding only incompetence, inefficiency and idiots.
Arthur frowns. It is an unnecessary disadvantage to be short on resources for this job, one that they can't afford. Not when one mistake, one slip up, one flicker of doubt in the mark's mind, can cost months of painstaking research, progress and their sanity - which is tenuous to begin with.
Cobb shrugs, “Something about paradise, British accents, surprises and ‘figured it out because of the toothpicks.’”
Seeing Arthur's eyes narrow, he grins. “I know, I know: you'd like a bit more specificity. As would I. But that's all I could get out of her. And I had to bribe her with chocolate for even that much.”
He seems particularly disgruntled about that.
Arthur's frown intensifies. It is uncharacteristic for Mal to be vague or secretive.
Cobb, sure, but not Mal.
Before he can say as much, Phillipa begins to stir fretfully, her chubby arms winding around his neck. Sighing, he rocks her gently and sings softly in French, as Mal has taught him, until drowsy eyes close again and her grip slackens.
He resolutely ignores Cobb's bewildered, delighted smirk and thankfully escapes into the kitchen when he hears Miles call out that dinner is ready.
***Three weeks later, Mal turns to him as they walk through cloudy puddles; his umbrella red, her umbrella blue. The early morning sky is lacerated with strips of pink and yellow and maybe even (blood) orange.
Much later (after her death), he will remember this fleeting moment in disjointed fragments: the white jasmine blossoms weaved into her dark hair, the salty scent of fish and chips on the wind, the awakening bruise kissed into the pale column of her neck and her soft smile as she had said; “Would you consider working with us, Mr. Eames?”
(six + epilogue)
rating: R
word count: 2238
pairings: arthur/eames, cobb/mal
summary: Arthur dreams in black and white, Eames dreams in technicolor. They meet in a dream, aged fifteen and eighteen, amidst white snow and black lampposts. This is a story detailing their lives, together and apart, since that day.
Darling, I can barely remember you beside me
You should come back home, back on your own now
- Fleet Foxes, “Ragged Wood”
Arthur learns to compartmentalize. He envisages his mind as a sleek, sterile room filled with purposefully-bland file cabinets. Each seemingly unremarkable metal drawer contains secrets: secrets about military life and machine guns, about assault and assassination, about infiltration and intelligence, about sex and suits, about theft and therapy.
And in a dusty and unused corner are the files that contain memories of childhood and adolescence, systematically and dispassionately tucked away; methodically alphabetized with color-coded tabs for potential future reference.
He does not believe in censuring history, in obliterating every speck of evidence pertaining to that skinny, gullible, whimsical boy with dark floppy hair and Buddy Holly glasses. After all, he is what he is due to a various and indeterminable number of factors and influences; some genetic, some environmental, others acquired with age and experience. He is certainly not ashamed of those formative years.
But neither does he believe in wallowing in the past.
Because he is no longer that person.
The Arthur of here and now is feared and respected and fucking loves what he does; loves it in a fiercely possessive way. Indeed, Cobb may have the reputation for being eccentric and overzealous and slightly cracked. But what does it say about Arthur that he would probably follow the man down to the depths of insanity, if that was what was required?
They create, they destroy, they rebuild. They are kings or, presumptuous as it may be, gods.
Come what may and despite not knowing whether his lifestyle is curse or intoxication, death wish or deliverance; he never tries to walk away.
Arthur sleeps with a slim stained SIG Sauer under his pillow and slowly, ever so slowly, he thinks that he might be healing, forgetting, accepting.
***Eames leaves the army after four years and three months. He takes with him an exemplary service record, twelve scars, three new tattoos and one creased, grimy photograph that has been folded and unfolded many times.
A soldier, face streaked with mud and fading camouflage paint, faces away from the camera; unknowingly caught in the act of removing a helmet to wipe at his brow. Sunlight illuminates the smattering of freckles across his nose, a small jagged scar on his cheek and damp red-gold hair.
Having superb references, there is never any trouble finding work. After various, haphazard stints - a travelling salesman, a roadside caricaturist, a kitchen hand, a park ranger, a Santa Claus - he turns to theft.
He excels at it. After all, he thinks humourlessly, he has been invading other people's dreams since he was eighteen.
The pay is fanfuckingtastic, the perks are better, the nightmares are manageable. He never uses his name or anything that can identify him during jobs. He never sticks with one team. He is always prepared to cut his losses and run. He never becomes too attached. For it is best that way.
He adopts a lazy, mocking drawl that his mother would have hated, smokes far too much and paints furiously into early hours of the morning, brush strokes sloppy and colours vibrant. He does not use black or white. Initially cathartic, it eventually becomes essential.
Canvases fill every possible space and half-empty bottles of Jack and Jim line the scuffed paint-splattered floor; silent bystanders.
Once a week, religiously, he walks into an art gallery (wherever he may be) and immerses himself in Géricault, Vermeer, Constable, Pissarro, van Gogh. Those are the days worth waking up for.
Over the years he flirts with everyone, sleeps with a handful, but doesn't fall in love. Each fledgling attempt at something more than a drunken fuck is transient and bittersweet, ending in a mess of raised voices and tears and stormy accusations of unfaithfulness that are not true, but perhaps not completely false either.
Because Eames dreams of coarse dark hair entwined in his fingers and elusive dimples, but wakes up to find slender waists and lipstick lips.
***Once. Just once, he slips.
He dreams unaided by Somnacin, for the first time in years.
Arthur dreams in black, white and silence.
He walks miles on asphalt roads, consoling in their familiarity. He reaches a half-remembered somnolent city, and there are his projections, no longer faceless or nameless. They watch on curiously as he walks past, some smiling tentatively, others frowning. Tattoos glimmer under the pallid sun. Crooked teeth and stubble. Broad shoulders and full lips.
They are all Eames.
He shoots them.
Each and every one.
Between the eyes. In the chest. In the leg.
Arthur wakes up screaming, the SIG Sauer biting into his clammy, trembling palm. The hastily stitched up gash on his arm has torn open, oozing and wine-colored in the gloom. He throws up five times and even when his throat is parched and raw and inflamed he can't stop the dry retches that rack his frame and obscure his vision with sweat.
Cobb finds him later that morning, fitfully asleep on the cold tiles of the hotel bathroom, dried blood caked down one arm and fingers still wrapped around the slim stained pistol. He pries the gun out of Arthur's grip and finds, dread gnawing at his skin, that it is fully loaded.
The safety catch is off.
When Arthur wakes up groggily two days later, nestled in downy blankets, he doesn't remember any of it. A heavily pregnant Mal alternately fusses over and berates him; forcing scalding, bland soup down his protesting throat.
Listening from the other side of the door Cobb exhales once, long and deep, and offers a simple grateful prayer to someone (anyone) somewhere.
***Though it barely registers at the time, Eames turns twenty-eight on a cold, drizzling September day- a day worth waking up for. He brushes his teeth, shrugs into a shabby overcoat, answers the ringing telephone (a long-time informant, congratulating him on another year survived and ordering him to come and visit her in Mombasa sometime, twat) and feeds the fish before leaving his apartment, not bothering to lock the door.
There is the habitual itch in his veins, the ache for nicotine, the pounding headache beneath his eyelids, the tightness in his chest and the restless agitated flurry of his thoughts. He wants a cigarette, badly.
These days, Eames gambles to stave off the need. Both in dreams and reality, easily exchanging one vice for another. His pockets overflow with cracked poker chips, counterfeited or stolen. He toys with them constantly, incessantly, over and over and over between his fingers. It helps, but not much.
The Tate is comforting in its light and warmth. As he steps briskly through its rooms (each well-known and well-loved), he idly recognises the regular, familiar faces amidst the tourists and employees. There is the bearded man with vacant red-rimmed eyes hovering about the gift-shop, the petite teenage girl in a printed scarf sketching absently in room 22, the beautiful woman with dark curls and smoky eyes who traipses behind him into room T7.
He is standing in front of Fuseli's The Shepherd’s Dream, from Paradise Lost, not really concentrating, when he becomes suddenly, acutely, aware of someone standing beside him - close but not unsettlingly so.
“I have always liked this one,” the beautiful woman with dark curls and smoky eyes announces quietly, seemingly to no one in particular. She has an accent, throaty and lyrical. Eames thinks of Paris and, oddly, a Cambridge professor from another life.
The painting is magnificent, irrefutably, but he finds there to be something innately ominous about the supernatural creatures clustering about the slumbering shepherd, shrouded in the nightmarish darkness.
Well. To each his own, he supposes meditatively.
“How does it go again? ‘Fairy elves, whose midnight revels by a forest side, or fountain some belated peasant sees-‘”
She pauses significantly, turning to Eames with an appraising, almost challenging, tilt of her chin.
“‘Or dreams he sees’,” he concedes, with a small smile.
Her answering smile is radiant.
Later (it had been impossible to refuse her) Eames meets her at the little gallery café for strong black tea and gloriously warm scones.
It should be awkward or strange, but isn't. They discuss weather, psychology, Paris, Fuseli, children - she has a daughter, he has a godson. Though her dark eyes never drop their steady gaze; her fingers abstractedly fiddle with the complimentary toothpicks and sachets of sugar, constructing walls and shapes and, bloody hell, Eames should have known, mazes.
He takes out the silver lighter from his overcoat pocket slowly, fingers mapping dents and scratches and intricate filigree working. He flicks the thumbwheel once, twice. It doesn't light and the relief that bleeds into his skin is like salvation.
“Forget to mention you were an Architect, darli-”
Eames fumbles with his tea and bites back a curse as it slops heavily into the saucer. He is startled at how easy it was to say to her and irritated that he is still (will always be) invariably defeated by that one fucking word.
She laughs, rich and musical and apologetic. Eames is enchanted and mercifully distracted.
“I apologise for my rudeness, but it was hard enough locating you that I was worried you would slip away if I revealed my true intentions. You are known for your elusiveness in our circles.”
Her eyes are sharp, bright and satisfied, a genuine smile curling on pale pink lips.
It turns out to be the best day he has had in a long while, even though he knows that she is a highly-accomplished professional and simply objectively evaluating his suitability for a job
So he is nonplussed when they stand up to leave, chair legs scraping on tile, for she kisses his cheek and murmurs, statement not question, “Until next week then, Mr. Eames.”
***The windows are thrown open and the cool, jasmine-fragrant night air whispers through the house. Mal is singing along to Edith Piaf on the gramophone as she stirs the simmering Bolognese sauce while Miles tosses a simple green salad. They converse quietly, affectionately, Mal's laugh pealing out once or twice over the music.
Arthur is seated on the couch, barely awake. Lately he has been practically living at the warehouse, functioning on sparse handfuls of half-sleep and bitter sugary coffee. When they had found out, Mal had scolded and Cobb had squinted and before Arthur knew it, he was being bundled back to their home for a proper meal and decent night's sleep in the spare bedroom.
Phillipa (ten months, fair-haired, gorgeous) is sleeping nestled in the crook of his arm, small fists clutching at his shirt. She is also undoubtedly drooling on his inordinately expensive tie, he realizes despairingly, but kisses the top of her head quickly when no one is looking.
Cobb wanders over, glass of red wine in hand, leaning over to tousle the impossibly soft, baby-fine hair upon her head, smiling and relaxed.
Sometimes Arthur forgets how well Cobb has taken to married life and domesticity. This Cobb; a Cobb that jokes, albeit badly, and takes days off and makes stupid faces at his baby daughter; is much more content than the intense, slightly unhinged man who had approached Arthur that seemingly ordinary summer day and whispered of dreams and ideas and pure creation.
“Mal’s pleased about something,” Arthur notes with a sideways glance at Cobb.
It is good to hear her laugh.
They've all been particularly strained over the past few weeks, what with the search for a team member (rather, a team member capable of keeping up with them) yielding only incompetence, inefficiency and idiots.
Arthur frowns. It is an unnecessary disadvantage to be short on resources for this job, one that they can't afford. Not when one mistake, one slip up, one flicker of doubt in the mark's mind, can cost months of painstaking research, progress and their sanity - which is tenuous to begin with.
Cobb shrugs, “Something about paradise, British accents, surprises and ‘figured it out because of the toothpicks.’”
Seeing Arthur's eyes narrow, he grins. “I know, I know: you'd like a bit more specificity. As would I. But that's all I could get out of her. And I had to bribe her with chocolate for even that much.”
He seems particularly disgruntled about that.
Arthur's frown intensifies. It is uncharacteristic for Mal to be vague or secretive.
Cobb, sure, but not Mal.
Before he can say as much, Phillipa begins to stir fretfully, her chubby arms winding around his neck. Sighing, he rocks her gently and sings softly in French, as Mal has taught him, until drowsy eyes close again and her grip slackens.
He resolutely ignores Cobb's bewildered, delighted smirk and thankfully escapes into the kitchen when he hears Miles call out that dinner is ready.
***Three weeks later, Mal turns to him as they walk through cloudy puddles; his umbrella red, her umbrella blue. The early morning sky is lacerated with strips of pink and yellow and maybe even (blood) orange.
Much later (after her death), he will remember this fleeting moment in disjointed fragments: the white jasmine blossoms weaved into her dark hair, the salty scent of fish and chips on the wind, the awakening bruise kissed into the pale column of her neck and her soft smile as she had said; “Would you consider working with us, Mr. Eames?”
(six + epilogue)