[fic] Letting go
Title: Letting go
Author: korvazor
Rating: PG-13
Pairing(s): Arthur/OC, Arthur/Eames
Disclaimer: Inception does not belong to me at all, be glad.
Summary: Fill for the prompt "Five times Arthur went crazy and one time Eames was there to stop it" over at inception_kink .
Notes: What is this I don't even
I.
It’s late spring, the sun already unbearably hot and bright at the middle of the day. It makes him irritable, he’s never quite liked being out when its so hot out. Momma says it’s because he was too used to the dreary city of Seattle, where he was born, and that kind of thing isn’t good for nine year-old boys, they need sunshine and dusty playgrounds. Arthur doesn’t need the sunshine though, he wants to go back to the cloudy days and the light drizzle of rain that he found comforting when he’d sit on the window seat and read. But Momma wanted him to play out in the sun, so he did, if only just because it made her worry a bit less.
“Oh, look everybody, the ghost is outside,” said a loud voice, followed by a chorus of snickers. And that was another reason he didn’t want to be outside, because outside Thomas could find him. Arthur didn’t bother to look at the older boy, instead watching the patterns his shoes dragged in the sand as he sat in the swing. Next thing he knows someone runs into his back, sending him sprawling out of the swing and into the sand, landing hard enough there would be scrapes on his knees and stains on his khaki shorts. The boys are laughing at him again, two other fifth graders like Thomas; he thinks their names are Derrick and John, but he can’t remember.
“Looks like he hasn’t burn up in the sun after all,” Thomas sneers, and he kicks sand at Arthur as he’s picking himself up and dusting off his shorts.
“Leave me alone, Thomas,” Arthur tells him, but as always Thomas doesn’t back down. He never does.
“Try and stop me,” the older boy taunts, giving Arthur another shove backwards for good measure. Arthur glares at him and tries to brush the dirt off his clothes.
“Oh no, poor little Arthur’s gotten the clothes his momma dresses him in all dirty,” Thomas says, his voice mocking and it sets the boys behind him snickering again.
And that’s when Arthur snaps.
Because it’s hot. Because he’s tired of the older boy bullying him. Because he just wants to leave this place of too much sunshine and heat and go home.
His fist connects with Thomas’s left cheek, and vaguely Arthur thinks that his hand hurts but he forgets it and hits Thomas again. And again. And again. His nose is all bloody, maybe even broken, making the fifth grader wail in an uncharacteristically high-pitched voice. His buddies had run off to get a teacher when Arthur was reeling back for his second punch, neither boy wanting to be the focus of Arthur’s rage.
The adults finally come running, the PE teacher grabbing Arthur by his shoulders and yanking him up, dragging him through the playground and to the office, sternly telling him to clam down and they would be calling his mother and step-father about this.
And Arthur doesn’t care.
II.
Arthur is fifteen when he first kisses someone.
It’s right before Christmas break on a cold, snowy day. Everyone is shifting restlessly in their seats waiting for the bell to ring, wanting to run outside and start throwing snowballs at their friends. Arthur won’t join them, of course. There is something else on his mind.
The bell rings, and no one listens to their teacher as she yells at them to put on their jackets before going out in the cold. Arthur collects his things and leaves, skirting his classmates all yelling and screaming in wild abandon while balls of snow fly through the air. He’s walking towards the art building, the butterflies in his stomach long turned into a writhing knot of nervousness. He can see someone waiting at the door, rubbing snowflakes from his hair and off his glasses as he waited. Arthur has to work to keep his breathing even, to keep from shaking and looking like the nervous wreck he was inside.
It’s when they’re finally inside the hallway, pressed into the corner so no one would see them, that Arthur thinks that he’s finally gone mad. Arthur, straitlaced, collected, always-follows-the-rules Arthur slides his shaking hands through corn silk-fine hair and kisses the boy, Ben, with all the skill and grace of a hormonal teenager.
III.
“Mail,” Sean calls, moments before the corner of an envelope hits him in the back of the head. Arthur sighs and looks up from the pages of calculus problems he’d been working on as Sean is shoving textbooks, papers, graphs, and calculators off the table to make room for a pizza box. Arthur stacks his own papers and books neatly and sets them to the side, to avoid the dangers of grease and tomato sauce ruining hours of calculations, and retrieves a napkin from the small kitchen before picking up the aforementioned piece of mail.
“Wuzzat,” Sean asks around a mouthful of pizza. On most occasions Arthur would give his roommate a glare for talking with his mouth full, but the pizza was smelling so damn good. He remembers that he hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, and tosses the envelope to the side to grab a piece from his half of veggie pizza. It still surprises him when Sean remembers little things like how Arthur will only eat veggie pizza, and that Arthur will go on a near murderous rampage if they run out of coffee. It’s what made him not only a great roommate, but also his best friend. He makes a mental note to invite his sister down once finals were done, since not only did she cook wonderfully but he knows Sean has a thing for Lizzy.
Halfway through his third slice he slows down enough to look at his mail. He tosses the half eaten pizza aside when he sees it’s from the government, the military to be precise, and wipes the grease from his fingers before tearing open the envelope. He skips past all the cut-and-pasted generic introduction to the actual subject of the letter, going still as he reads. Sean notices how Arthur tenses up and pushes the pizza box aside to lean across the table to try and read the paper.
“What’s it say dude,” he asks, unable to read the small type from that far away.
“You remember that seminar the other week,” Arthur asks, eyes still glued to the paper.
“Yeah. About dreams and some other kind of bullshit,” Sean remarks, opening another jolt cola and leaning back in his chair.
“The military is funding a major project on it; they’re inviting me to join.”
“Oh, how nice of them,” Sean scoffs. “Asking you to drop a full ride to MIT for some crazy idea about creating worlds in dreams and getting inside peoples heads. Yeah, that sounds like a great deal to me.” Arthur ignores the thick sarcasm and reads through the paper one more time. He’d been skeptical of the idea when it was first presented to them at the seminar, but soon he was dragged in. The mere thought of being able to control dreams, his, anyone’s, was staggering. He was hooked by the end of the seminar, and had spent a few hours talking excitedly to one of the specialists that had spoken them, a beautiful French lady named who insisted he call her Mal.
“You can’t be serious, man,” Sean says, watching him intently. He can see the corner of Arthur’s mouth quirk up just slightly, and he rolls his eyes.
“Fuck, you’re serious,” he groans, and leans his head back to look at the ceiling. Arthur folds the letter up and slides it back into the envelope, then folds that and slips it into his pocket. They’re quiet for awhile, both lost in their thoughts. Sean breaks the silence first.
“Dude, your parents are going to go fucking ballistic.”
Arthur only smiles.
He’s gone three days later.
IV.
It wasn’t all the glitz and glamour that it was said to be. Not for long anyways. And really, what else would he expect from a government-funded research project.
He regrets dropping out of his physics degree at MIT. But only a little.
He’s had a taste of dreaming, of pure creation, and there was no way he could live without it. It was more addictive than any drug though just as destructive, but he doesn’t know that. Yet.
It’s when a small group of soldiers, army men he thinks, join the researchers that things started to go wrong. They were naturally more prone to violent tendencies that reflected back into the dreams. He was more often than not having to dodge projections armed with guns. On one run they were fighting Arthur’s subconscious, Arthur staying back to observe. One soldier, by the name of Mark, was stabbed by one particularly sneaky and vicious projection in the shoulder. Arthur apologized to him, but the man was in a pain-induced rage. He yelled something at Arthur, who had tried to comfort him in some way as to not feel useless, pulled out his gun, and shot Arthur in the head.
Arthur jolts awake, tears the IV from his arms, then throws up. And that’s how they learn that dying in the dream wakes you up.
It’s a couple of weeks later when they’re testing out other types of sedatives and how they affect each layer of the dream, it gets worse. They’re three dreams down when things go wrong. Another soldier, by the name of Keller, falls and breaks his neck. They assume he’s woken up, but when the kick comes they find him still sleeping. At the next kick, he’s still out. And when they wake up, he’s still sleeping. He sleeps for hours before waking up, raving mad and screaming that nothing is real, he wants to wake up. He puts a bullet through his head in the early hours of the morning, trying to wake himself from a dream that wasn’t real.
It’s when the directors want to explore this phenomenon they call limbo when Arthur begins to get scared. Mal argues against it, but they ignore her and tell him they’re sending him down to see what this limbo actually is, and how it works. Arthur tries to refuse, but they just stare him down, and he knows in his gut that even if he didn’t want to go, they’ll make him. They’ll catch him when he’s not paying attention and send him under without him knowing it. And that terrifies him.
Mal shows up at his room in the dead of night and tells him she’s leaving, and he should come with her. She has one of the PASIV devices, one of the portable units they’ve just developed for sending people into other’s dreams, locked up in a metal briefcase. He tells her it’s crazy, stealing and trying to run from the United States military, hell it’s fucking suicide.
If that happens, she tells him with a small, sad smile, at least you’ll die knowing this is reality.
He’s packed up in five minutes. Half an hour later, they’re boarding a flight to France with Mal’s fiancée, Dom.
V.
It was three years after his escape for America that he gets the news.
They’re in the Netherlands, having just finished a successful extraction job, the four of them clearing out the warehouse they used as their base. The forger they had for this job, an Englishman by the name of Eames, spends more time teasing Arthur and joking with Mal than actually helping. Just like during the job, like the whole time he’d been with them since stepping off the plane from Monaco. He annoyed Arthur to death, and Arthur had wished on many occasions that this job didn’t need a forger.
He’s stacking the rest of his files into a cardboard box to be shipped to his flat in France, where he’ll throw them into storage. Eames (a little too gleefully) wanted to burn them, get rid of the evidence he says, but Arthur was not about to let nearly a months worth of gathered information be set on fire. Once he has the box all taped up and labeled he stands up straight, eyes closed, and stretches till his back pops. When he opens his eyes he sees Eames, the forger crowding into his personal space and Arthur realizes that the desk is at his back, keeping him from moving away. Eames is talking to him, saying something like you’ve gone and got dust on your waistcoat, love, let me brush that off for you, and the man is so close Arthur can smell the musk of his cologne, the lingering scent of cigarette smoke as he reaches out and brushes at the waistcoat. Arthur goes rigid, and at that moment, with Eames so close, he’s not sure whether his mind wants him to kill Eames or fuck him.
His cellphone saves him from a potentially embarrassing decision.
He slips past Eames as he pulls his phone from his pocket, looking at the number on the screen before answering it. The number is familiar, and after a second he recognizes it as his sister’s. He swears and wonders where the hell she got this number from, then answers the phone.
She’s hysterical. He could barely make out what she was saying through the sobs, and it takes a good five minutes of him talking to her softly till she had calmed enough to tell him what happened.
His mother’s funeral was in three days. He was on a plane two hours later.
On the flight over, he worries briefly over the fake identity he was using. But it’s been three years, and the Arthur that was bookish and shy and wore clothes that seemed perpetually wrinkled and too large for him was buried under confidence and sharp, three-piece Armani suits. And as he suspects, he goes through immigration without a hitch.
He can’t attend the funeral proper, he waits till everyone is long gone and the coffin had been let down into the earth. He stays there for half an hour, staring at the headstone, before turning and leaving. He hails a taxi and has it drop him off two blocks from his sister’s home, not wanting to leave any trail that could easily trace him to his sister. The house is dark but for a light in the kitchen, and he jumps the low fence easily to walk up and tap on the glass door. Lizzy looks up from where she was slumped over the table, sees Arthur and nearly trips over her chair in her rush to open the door for him. She nearly collapses around him once he’s over the threshold, and he’s left holding her while she sobs on his ridiculously expensive suit. Her husband shuffles in to collect her, pausing only to give Arthur a cryptic look before extracting the crying woman and usher her to sleep. Then Arthur leaves.
Three days later, he’s picking the lock on the back door of the house his mother and step father lived in. He’s fitted a silencer to his gun, and has checked enough schedules to know that his step father would be alone at the moment. He’s up the stairs quickly and quietly, checking the hallway just to be safe. It was empty, and there was a light coming from the room at the end that was an office. His footsteps make no sound on the carpet, the door makes no sound when he pushes it open, his step father doesn’t have time to say anything till the muffled shot calls out and his left knee is reduced to a jumbled mass of blood and wrecked bone. Then the man is gasping, staring at Arthur in horror, cursing him worse than when Arthur was younger. Arthur shoots again, this time hitting the right shoulder, the older man unable to make a sound louder than pathetic groans of pain.
A minute later, Arthur puts a bullet in his step father’s brain.
Five minutes later, there’s no trace that Arthur was ever there.
Two hours later, he’s on a plane to Paris to meet back up with Mal and Cobb. He finds himself sighing, staring out the window at the clouds while thinking he’d past that final line, lost that last little bit of his old self, perhaps even his sanity. He knows this because he’s cold, and hasn’t felt a thing, not since he left the warehouse in Rotterdam nearly a week ago. Not at his mother’s gravestone, not while holding his crying sister, not while putting three bullets in the man that had made a large portion of his life hell.
He rolls a loaded die in his hand, and doesn’t care one bit about it.
VI.
Mal is dead.
Dom is running for his life.
Arthur is holding on to Phillipa and James’ hands at the funeral.
He knows Dom is on a plane to Hong Kong, had promised Dom he’d be there for the kids. And there he was, gazing forlornly at the coffin of the most beautiful, intelligent, charismatic women to grace the Earth. It wasn’t till little James had pulled on his hand and asked him where Mommy was, why isn’t she there, it’s cold and wet and he’s tired and where’s Mommy why isn’t she...., that he begins to break. He doesn’t know how to tell a child that his mother is dead, what dead meant, and that she can’t come back. He’s choking back sobs, trying his damnedest to hold it in, if just for the children, and is saved by Miles. The old man gathers the children and gives Arthur a nod, and Arthur leaves.
Solace comes in the form of a bar a few blocks down the street and a large amount of cheap whiskey. He’s content to sit at the dimly lit, slightly sticky bar and glare into his glass, as if he were blaming the whiskey for everything before downing it and waving for another. He’s not sure how long he is there for, just that it was around midday when he arrived and now the streetlamps were clicking on to push back the gloom of night outside.
He’s jarred from his bubble of sorrow when a group of loud college kids, all dressed for a night out on the town, come in and take over the back corner of the bar. They’re all laughing and joking at each other, all having fun. It angers him how they can be happy. How could anyone be happy right now, how could anyone dare to be happy, with Mal gone? Rage pools in his stomach, churning with all the whiskey till he’s shaking and not able to see all that straight. He reaches to the small of his back and clutches his gun, turning to pick out which one he’d shoot first.
And then there’s a calloused hand gripping his wrist, the scent of must and cigarettes enveloping him, that familiar British accent whispering calming words into his right ear. He snarls something back at the Forger, something biting and malicious that he didn’t really mean but it felt right to say at the time. Somehow Eames has pried his hand away from his gun, the familiar weight of it disappearing from the small of his back. He’s pulled from the barstool, only just managing to not trip over it thanks to the arm around his back that’s keeping him upright, and dragged from the bar. The world spins as he tries to stumble along, every now and then trying to pull away from Eames because he could walk on his own and didn’t need that goddamn Brit babysitting him. He just wanted to go back to his hotel room and bury himself in the bottle of… whatever kind of alcohol it was that he bought before going out to the funeral.
When Eames has to loosen his hold to fish out the room key from his coat pocket (Arthur notes that Eames didn’t pick the lock or have magically found a key just for himself, and thinks that in itself is so strange he should ask about it, but then he’s swaying again and it isn’t important anymore) he’s able to yank his arm away from the forger and tries to stumble away from him. Eames mutters a curse and grabs his shoulder, trying to drag Arthur into his hotel room. He whips around and his fist catches Eames right on the left side of his jaw, splitting his lip and knocking him backwards. They tumble through the door as Arthur hits Eames again, this time on his right shoulder, and he reels back for another. Eames catches this one, and before he could tell what happened Eames has his wrists held in a vice grip at his back. They're pressed chest to chest, with Eames resting his chin on Arthur's right shoulder.
His pulse is racing. He's gasping for air and his legs feel week. His head is swimming, his vision blurry.
Just let go, darling, Eames whispers in his ear, and as if it's some kind of code there's tears welling in his eyes, sobs choking his throat. Eames' hands let go of Arthur's wrists, letting him clutch at Eames' shirt as his shoulders shake.
Arthur cries and Eames holds him tight, as if to keep all the pieces he's fallen to together.
--
I can't believe that 1) I wrote this and 2) I'm actually posting it. Um, not sure if it even really filled the prompt that well (if it didn't, apologies to the prompt's OP). I've spent so much time on this, it's sad.
This fandom is fucking wonderful. There are sooo many talented artists and writers, and I feel all small and self-conscious posting this. I can only hope that one day I'll write half as well as all those other godly fanfic writers...
I'm going to, uh, go and... hide in a corner.... yeah, that sounds good.
edit: oh yeah, this is my first Inception fic btw. Now back to hiding.
Author: korvazor
Rating: PG-13
Pairing(s): Arthur/OC, Arthur/Eames
Disclaimer: Inception does not belong to me at all, be glad.
Summary: Fill for the prompt "Five times Arthur went crazy and one time Eames was there to stop it" over at inception_kink .
Notes: What is this I don't even
I.
It’s late spring, the sun already unbearably hot and bright at the middle of the day. It makes him irritable, he’s never quite liked being out when its so hot out. Momma says it’s because he was too used to the dreary city of Seattle, where he was born, and that kind of thing isn’t good for nine year-old boys, they need sunshine and dusty playgrounds. Arthur doesn’t need the sunshine though, he wants to go back to the cloudy days and the light drizzle of rain that he found comforting when he’d sit on the window seat and read. But Momma wanted him to play out in the sun, so he did, if only just because it made her worry a bit less.
“Oh, look everybody, the ghost is outside,” said a loud voice, followed by a chorus of snickers. And that was another reason he didn’t want to be outside, because outside Thomas could find him. Arthur didn’t bother to look at the older boy, instead watching the patterns his shoes dragged in the sand as he sat in the swing. Next thing he knows someone runs into his back, sending him sprawling out of the swing and into the sand, landing hard enough there would be scrapes on his knees and stains on his khaki shorts. The boys are laughing at him again, two other fifth graders like Thomas; he thinks their names are Derrick and John, but he can’t remember.
“Looks like he hasn’t burn up in the sun after all,” Thomas sneers, and he kicks sand at Arthur as he’s picking himself up and dusting off his shorts.
“Leave me alone, Thomas,” Arthur tells him, but as always Thomas doesn’t back down. He never does.
“Try and stop me,” the older boy taunts, giving Arthur another shove backwards for good measure. Arthur glares at him and tries to brush the dirt off his clothes.
“Oh no, poor little Arthur’s gotten the clothes his momma dresses him in all dirty,” Thomas says, his voice mocking and it sets the boys behind him snickering again.
And that’s when Arthur snaps.
Because it’s hot. Because he’s tired of the older boy bullying him. Because he just wants to leave this place of too much sunshine and heat and go home.
His fist connects with Thomas’s left cheek, and vaguely Arthur thinks that his hand hurts but he forgets it and hits Thomas again. And again. And again. His nose is all bloody, maybe even broken, making the fifth grader wail in an uncharacteristically high-pitched voice. His buddies had run off to get a teacher when Arthur was reeling back for his second punch, neither boy wanting to be the focus of Arthur’s rage.
The adults finally come running, the PE teacher grabbing Arthur by his shoulders and yanking him up, dragging him through the playground and to the office, sternly telling him to clam down and they would be calling his mother and step-father about this.
And Arthur doesn’t care.
II.
Arthur is fifteen when he first kisses someone.
It’s right before Christmas break on a cold, snowy day. Everyone is shifting restlessly in their seats waiting for the bell to ring, wanting to run outside and start throwing snowballs at their friends. Arthur won’t join them, of course. There is something else on his mind.
The bell rings, and no one listens to their teacher as she yells at them to put on their jackets before going out in the cold. Arthur collects his things and leaves, skirting his classmates all yelling and screaming in wild abandon while balls of snow fly through the air. He’s walking towards the art building, the butterflies in his stomach long turned into a writhing knot of nervousness. He can see someone waiting at the door, rubbing snowflakes from his hair and off his glasses as he waited. Arthur has to work to keep his breathing even, to keep from shaking and looking like the nervous wreck he was inside.
It’s when they’re finally inside the hallway, pressed into the corner so no one would see them, that Arthur thinks that he’s finally gone mad. Arthur, straitlaced, collected, always-follows-the-rules Arthur slides his shaking hands through corn silk-fine hair and kisses the boy, Ben, with all the skill and grace of a hormonal teenager.
III.
“Mail,” Sean calls, moments before the corner of an envelope hits him in the back of the head. Arthur sighs and looks up from the pages of calculus problems he’d been working on as Sean is shoving textbooks, papers, graphs, and calculators off the table to make room for a pizza box. Arthur stacks his own papers and books neatly and sets them to the side, to avoid the dangers of grease and tomato sauce ruining hours of calculations, and retrieves a napkin from the small kitchen before picking up the aforementioned piece of mail.
“Wuzzat,” Sean asks around a mouthful of pizza. On most occasions Arthur would give his roommate a glare for talking with his mouth full, but the pizza was smelling so damn good. He remembers that he hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, and tosses the envelope to the side to grab a piece from his half of veggie pizza. It still surprises him when Sean remembers little things like how Arthur will only eat veggie pizza, and that Arthur will go on a near murderous rampage if they run out of coffee. It’s what made him not only a great roommate, but also his best friend. He makes a mental note to invite his sister down once finals were done, since not only did she cook wonderfully but he knows Sean has a thing for Lizzy.
Halfway through his third slice he slows down enough to look at his mail. He tosses the half eaten pizza aside when he sees it’s from the government, the military to be precise, and wipes the grease from his fingers before tearing open the envelope. He skips past all the cut-and-pasted generic introduction to the actual subject of the letter, going still as he reads. Sean notices how Arthur tenses up and pushes the pizza box aside to lean across the table to try and read the paper.
“What’s it say dude,” he asks, unable to read the small type from that far away.
“You remember that seminar the other week,” Arthur asks, eyes still glued to the paper.
“Yeah. About dreams and some other kind of bullshit,” Sean remarks, opening another jolt cola and leaning back in his chair.
“The military is funding a major project on it; they’re inviting me to join.”
“Oh, how nice of them,” Sean scoffs. “Asking you to drop a full ride to MIT for some crazy idea about creating worlds in dreams and getting inside peoples heads. Yeah, that sounds like a great deal to me.” Arthur ignores the thick sarcasm and reads through the paper one more time. He’d been skeptical of the idea when it was first presented to them at the seminar, but soon he was dragged in. The mere thought of being able to control dreams, his, anyone’s, was staggering. He was hooked by the end of the seminar, and had spent a few hours talking excitedly to one of the specialists that had spoken them, a beautiful French lady named who insisted he call her Mal.
“You can’t be serious, man,” Sean says, watching him intently. He can see the corner of Arthur’s mouth quirk up just slightly, and he rolls his eyes.
“Fuck, you’re serious,” he groans, and leans his head back to look at the ceiling. Arthur folds the letter up and slides it back into the envelope, then folds that and slips it into his pocket. They’re quiet for awhile, both lost in their thoughts. Sean breaks the silence first.
“Dude, your parents are going to go fucking ballistic.”
Arthur only smiles.
He’s gone three days later.
IV.
It wasn’t all the glitz and glamour that it was said to be. Not for long anyways. And really, what else would he expect from a government-funded research project.
He regrets dropping out of his physics degree at MIT. But only a little.
He’s had a taste of dreaming, of pure creation, and there was no way he could live without it. It was more addictive than any drug though just as destructive, but he doesn’t know that. Yet.
It’s when a small group of soldiers, army men he thinks, join the researchers that things started to go wrong. They were naturally more prone to violent tendencies that reflected back into the dreams. He was more often than not having to dodge projections armed with guns. On one run they were fighting Arthur’s subconscious, Arthur staying back to observe. One soldier, by the name of Mark, was stabbed by one particularly sneaky and vicious projection in the shoulder. Arthur apologized to him, but the man was in a pain-induced rage. He yelled something at Arthur, who had tried to comfort him in some way as to not feel useless, pulled out his gun, and shot Arthur in the head.
Arthur jolts awake, tears the IV from his arms, then throws up. And that’s how they learn that dying in the dream wakes you up.
It’s a couple of weeks later when they’re testing out other types of sedatives and how they affect each layer of the dream, it gets worse. They’re three dreams down when things go wrong. Another soldier, by the name of Keller, falls and breaks his neck. They assume he’s woken up, but when the kick comes they find him still sleeping. At the next kick, he’s still out. And when they wake up, he’s still sleeping. He sleeps for hours before waking up, raving mad and screaming that nothing is real, he wants to wake up. He puts a bullet through his head in the early hours of the morning, trying to wake himself from a dream that wasn’t real.
It’s when the directors want to explore this phenomenon they call limbo when Arthur begins to get scared. Mal argues against it, but they ignore her and tell him they’re sending him down to see what this limbo actually is, and how it works. Arthur tries to refuse, but they just stare him down, and he knows in his gut that even if he didn’t want to go, they’ll make him. They’ll catch him when he’s not paying attention and send him under without him knowing it. And that terrifies him.
Mal shows up at his room in the dead of night and tells him she’s leaving, and he should come with her. She has one of the PASIV devices, one of the portable units they’ve just developed for sending people into other’s dreams, locked up in a metal briefcase. He tells her it’s crazy, stealing and trying to run from the United States military, hell it’s fucking suicide.
If that happens, she tells him with a small, sad smile, at least you’ll die knowing this is reality.
He’s packed up in five minutes. Half an hour later, they’re boarding a flight to France with Mal’s fiancée, Dom.
V.
It was three years after his escape for America that he gets the news.
They’re in the Netherlands, having just finished a successful extraction job, the four of them clearing out the warehouse they used as their base. The forger they had for this job, an Englishman by the name of Eames, spends more time teasing Arthur and joking with Mal than actually helping. Just like during the job, like the whole time he’d been with them since stepping off the plane from Monaco. He annoyed Arthur to death, and Arthur had wished on many occasions that this job didn’t need a forger.
He’s stacking the rest of his files into a cardboard box to be shipped to his flat in France, where he’ll throw them into storage. Eames (a little too gleefully) wanted to burn them, get rid of the evidence he says, but Arthur was not about to let nearly a months worth of gathered information be set on fire. Once he has the box all taped up and labeled he stands up straight, eyes closed, and stretches till his back pops. When he opens his eyes he sees Eames, the forger crowding into his personal space and Arthur realizes that the desk is at his back, keeping him from moving away. Eames is talking to him, saying something like you’ve gone and got dust on your waistcoat, love, let me brush that off for you, and the man is so close Arthur can smell the musk of his cologne, the lingering scent of cigarette smoke as he reaches out and brushes at the waistcoat. Arthur goes rigid, and at that moment, with Eames so close, he’s not sure whether his mind wants him to kill Eames or fuck him.
His cellphone saves him from a potentially embarrassing decision.
He slips past Eames as he pulls his phone from his pocket, looking at the number on the screen before answering it. The number is familiar, and after a second he recognizes it as his sister’s. He swears and wonders where the hell she got this number from, then answers the phone.
She’s hysterical. He could barely make out what she was saying through the sobs, and it takes a good five minutes of him talking to her softly till she had calmed enough to tell him what happened.
His mother’s funeral was in three days. He was on a plane two hours later.
On the flight over, he worries briefly over the fake identity he was using. But it’s been three years, and the Arthur that was bookish and shy and wore clothes that seemed perpetually wrinkled and too large for him was buried under confidence and sharp, three-piece Armani suits. And as he suspects, he goes through immigration without a hitch.
He can’t attend the funeral proper, he waits till everyone is long gone and the coffin had been let down into the earth. He stays there for half an hour, staring at the headstone, before turning and leaving. He hails a taxi and has it drop him off two blocks from his sister’s home, not wanting to leave any trail that could easily trace him to his sister. The house is dark but for a light in the kitchen, and he jumps the low fence easily to walk up and tap on the glass door. Lizzy looks up from where she was slumped over the table, sees Arthur and nearly trips over her chair in her rush to open the door for him. She nearly collapses around him once he’s over the threshold, and he’s left holding her while she sobs on his ridiculously expensive suit. Her husband shuffles in to collect her, pausing only to give Arthur a cryptic look before extracting the crying woman and usher her to sleep. Then Arthur leaves.
Three days later, he’s picking the lock on the back door of the house his mother and step father lived in. He’s fitted a silencer to his gun, and has checked enough schedules to know that his step father would be alone at the moment. He’s up the stairs quickly and quietly, checking the hallway just to be safe. It was empty, and there was a light coming from the room at the end that was an office. His footsteps make no sound on the carpet, the door makes no sound when he pushes it open, his step father doesn’t have time to say anything till the muffled shot calls out and his left knee is reduced to a jumbled mass of blood and wrecked bone. Then the man is gasping, staring at Arthur in horror, cursing him worse than when Arthur was younger. Arthur shoots again, this time hitting the right shoulder, the older man unable to make a sound louder than pathetic groans of pain.
A minute later, Arthur puts a bullet in his step father’s brain.
Five minutes later, there’s no trace that Arthur was ever there.
Two hours later, he’s on a plane to Paris to meet back up with Mal and Cobb. He finds himself sighing, staring out the window at the clouds while thinking he’d past that final line, lost that last little bit of his old self, perhaps even his sanity. He knows this because he’s cold, and hasn’t felt a thing, not since he left the warehouse in Rotterdam nearly a week ago. Not at his mother’s gravestone, not while holding his crying sister, not while putting three bullets in the man that had made a large portion of his life hell.
He rolls a loaded die in his hand, and doesn’t care one bit about it.
VI.
Mal is dead.
Dom is running for his life.
Arthur is holding on to Phillipa and James’ hands at the funeral.
He knows Dom is on a plane to Hong Kong, had promised Dom he’d be there for the kids. And there he was, gazing forlornly at the coffin of the most beautiful, intelligent, charismatic women to grace the Earth. It wasn’t till little James had pulled on his hand and asked him where Mommy was, why isn’t she there, it’s cold and wet and he’s tired and where’s Mommy why isn’t she...., that he begins to break. He doesn’t know how to tell a child that his mother is dead, what dead meant, and that she can’t come back. He’s choking back sobs, trying his damnedest to hold it in, if just for the children, and is saved by Miles. The old man gathers the children and gives Arthur a nod, and Arthur leaves.
Solace comes in the form of a bar a few blocks down the street and a large amount of cheap whiskey. He’s content to sit at the dimly lit, slightly sticky bar and glare into his glass, as if he were blaming the whiskey for everything before downing it and waving for another. He’s not sure how long he is there for, just that it was around midday when he arrived and now the streetlamps were clicking on to push back the gloom of night outside.
He’s jarred from his bubble of sorrow when a group of loud college kids, all dressed for a night out on the town, come in and take over the back corner of the bar. They’re all laughing and joking at each other, all having fun. It angers him how they can be happy. How could anyone be happy right now, how could anyone dare to be happy, with Mal gone? Rage pools in his stomach, churning with all the whiskey till he’s shaking and not able to see all that straight. He reaches to the small of his back and clutches his gun, turning to pick out which one he’d shoot first.
And then there’s a calloused hand gripping his wrist, the scent of must and cigarettes enveloping him, that familiar British accent whispering calming words into his right ear. He snarls something back at the Forger, something biting and malicious that he didn’t really mean but it felt right to say at the time. Somehow Eames has pried his hand away from his gun, the familiar weight of it disappearing from the small of his back. He’s pulled from the barstool, only just managing to not trip over it thanks to the arm around his back that’s keeping him upright, and dragged from the bar. The world spins as he tries to stumble along, every now and then trying to pull away from Eames because he could walk on his own and didn’t need that goddamn Brit babysitting him. He just wanted to go back to his hotel room and bury himself in the bottle of… whatever kind of alcohol it was that he bought before going out to the funeral.
When Eames has to loosen his hold to fish out the room key from his coat pocket (Arthur notes that Eames didn’t pick the lock or have magically found a key just for himself, and thinks that in itself is so strange he should ask about it, but then he’s swaying again and it isn’t important anymore) he’s able to yank his arm away from the forger and tries to stumble away from him. Eames mutters a curse and grabs his shoulder, trying to drag Arthur into his hotel room. He whips around and his fist catches Eames right on the left side of his jaw, splitting his lip and knocking him backwards. They tumble through the door as Arthur hits Eames again, this time on his right shoulder, and he reels back for another. Eames catches this one, and before he could tell what happened Eames has his wrists held in a vice grip at his back. They're pressed chest to chest, with Eames resting his chin on Arthur's right shoulder.
His pulse is racing. He's gasping for air and his legs feel week. His head is swimming, his vision blurry.
Just let go, darling, Eames whispers in his ear, and as if it's some kind of code there's tears welling in his eyes, sobs choking his throat. Eames' hands let go of Arthur's wrists, letting him clutch at Eames' shirt as his shoulders shake.
Arthur cries and Eames holds him tight, as if to keep all the pieces he's fallen to together.
--
I can't believe that 1) I wrote this and 2) I'm actually posting it. Um, not sure if it even really filled the prompt that well (if it didn't, apologies to the prompt's OP). I've spent so much time on this, it's sad.
This fandom is fucking wonderful. There are sooo many talented artists and writers, and I feel all small and self-conscious posting this. I can only hope that one day I'll write half as well as all those other godly fanfic writers...
I'm going to, uh, go and... hide in a corner.... yeah, that sounds good.
edit: oh yeah, this is my first Inception fic btw. Now back to hiding.