waking up to life is never worse
waking up to life is never worse
Eames/Robert. Some day they'll go down together.
Note: For this prompt in the kinkmeme: "Post-Inception. Eames and Robert hook up. BAMF-ery ensues. Robert realises all he's ever wanted to be is an international wanted criminal and Eames is more than happy to help him along." Minor edits were made.
In your dream he is a blonde bombshell from the 50s. "I remember this one, I think--" you say. With a careless shrug of her shoulders, she's gone, and he laughs. The sound is a little ugly, like a dog's low-throated grumble, a thing that expressed dangerous displeasure and was not quite a growl.
"You have no idea, pet," he muses, chewing on his cigarette before lighting it. You hate the smell, but at least they're not cigars. He'll want to fuck afterward, and cigars remind you too much of your father, and you hate telling him you're not in the mood. It makes you sound vulnerable. You don't like being vulnerable.
You feel so easily vulnerable these days, as if your skin's been rubbed off. Especially in the places where his stubble has rubbed against the inside of your thigh. That is how you feel, raw and breaking out all over.
"You're going to need a totem," he says. When he sees the look on your face, he rubs a knuckle down your back, like he's stroking a cat. "It's a good thing," he reassures you. "It means you're picking it up too fast."
-
In a bar in Valparaiso, Chile, you are drinking viognier and he is eyeing you over his glass of Scotch. "Forgive me for stating the obvious, Fischer," he tells you, his voice low and textured, cutting straight through the stifling noise of the other customers, "but there's no reason for me to believe you are who you say you are."
"Look at me," you say. You gesture vaguely at yourself, glass in hand, and if your voice is more sardonic than you mean for it to be, it's only because you haven't slept since the night before. You used to sleep well on planes, but since your father's funeral, you haven't been able to handle it. "Who else would be stupid enough to come in here, ask for you, and not even give you a fake name? Do you want ID?" You fumble in your pocket for your wallet, your fingers clumsy with too many glasses of wine on an empty stomach. You almost let it fall to the floor, but you catch it just in time.
The look he gives you is dripping with condescension. You set the wallet in front of him. He doesn't touch it. After a minute, you start to tear at your nails, a habit your father found filthy. "This is an easy enough con to play--" he begins.
"I'm not smart enough to play cons," you tell him firmly. But you are well aware that sometimes the honest truth is the best con of at all.
-
In his dream he is Sherlock Holmes and you are dressed in the neatest, most English suit known to man.
"Am I Watson?" you ask him with your eyebrow quirked, grinning. "I know your ego is huge, but you didn't have to make yourself into a genius with a cocaine habit."
"It's exactly what I need to be," he tells you absently. He taps the desk with his pipe and the whole thing disappears, shifts; he is dressed in his ill-fitting paisley and you are cross-legged on a soft armchair as if you've been there always. "Robert," he says, and stops.
"Yes?" you prompt. The room smells warm, and old, like a tearoom in a novel.
"This is not very subtle," he warns you.
"You are not a very subtle person," you joke.
This is the wrong thing to say. He leans down towards you, arms gripping the back of the armchair on either side of your face, towering over you, a shadowed mass of a man, almost too oppressive, too close, breathing a smell of tobacco smoke and old fashioned eau de cologne and library books, and you want to claw at his shoulders to make him leave you alone, but you don't. You need to be brave now, like you've never been brave before in your life.
He is teaching you all sorts of things, about bravery and yourself.
"You don't know me, Robert," he growls. "You don't know me at all."
-
In your dream, you are running in a maze. You can see the walls on either side of you, but you can barely avoid running into dead ends. It starts to snow, in great powdery drifts, as if someone were ripping tissue above your head and letting the pieces settle. You need to get out. Something is collapsing. Something is happening. Something is exploding, silently, in an acrid draft of grease fire and dirty ashes. You need to get out. You don't know how you know this, only that you do.
Eventually the walls open up into what your dream logic tells you is the center of the maze. There is a large statue of your father standing there, half buried to the waist in the tissue snow. Also, bunches of pinwheels, like bouquets of flowers, lying at his feet.
When you wake up you are in a hotel in Mainz where you've fallen asleep, fully dressed, on the bed. There's a text message, from a private number. If you're looking for the best, it says, you'll want Eames.
Where's this Eames? How do I find him? you text back.
The answer is almost instantaneous, almost automatic, as if the caller already had the answer typed out and was simply waiting on a hair trigger for your response.
Try South America. Good luck.
-
In your penthouse in Sydney, a week or so after that night in Valparaiso, he rolls up his sleeves and you strip your blazer off to reveal your wrist, slender and white laid out next to his.
"Shall we begin?" he says, and you nod. You give him a smile that is 75% borrowed from him, and he recognizes that, throwing back his head in a bark of laughter.
Then you go under.
-
In his dream he is in your father's office and you know you shouldn't have followed him, you know you shouldn't have bribed the front desk for his hotel key, you know you shouldn't have used what little knowledge you scavenged from a pilfered manual about the PASIV device to plug yourself in, decompress the controls, let the Somnacin take you to him, to where he really is.
His dream is a shockingly accurate representation of your father's office, and you almost gag at the recollections, at the number of mind-numbing hours spent sitting on your side of his heavy mahogany desk, saying nothing, thinking nothing, letting your father flow through you like a ghost possessing a house.
He's seated in your father's leather chair, fingers steepled against the surface of the table, lost in thought. You can't help but make a little noise, at how wrong it is to see him, anyone really, in that chair, and it makes him jump.
"Fischer--?!" he snarls, and before you can say a word, he picks up a gun from the polished, empty shine of the table and shoots himself in the head.
The pain is unbearable. At first you think it is a thing of dreaming, that maybe when a dreamer dies you feel the pain. Then you realize it is just the imagined pain of being crushed by thousands of cement blocks. It is what your subconscious thinks being buried by your father's office building might feel like.
-
In a hotel room in Valparaiso, he wakes up and slams you against a wall. "Is this what it comes down to?" he hisses, his hand fisted in the collar of your shirt and almost choking you. "Stalking me, invading my privacy, following me around the world?" He smiles then, a smile that doesn't touch his eyes at all, sharing a joke he no longer found funny with himself. "Tell me," he breathes against your face, "what is it you want from me?"
"I told you--" you gasp out. "Shared dreaming-- someone said me you were the best--"
He groans, a tortured, frustrated sound that to you, approximates the words, "Fuck, Arthur, you shit." You probably heard it wrong. It makes no sense otherwise.
He doesn't say anymore until he takes you to a bar and you drink almost a full bottle of viognier while he tosses back Scotch like it's water. Three hours later you end up with your pants on the floor of his hotel room, frantically trying to rub off on his knee while he murmurs all sorts of dark, filthy things in your ear, urging you on, touching the corner of your mouth where there's still a spot of his cum left from where you blew him. You don't know how else you expected this to go, but this is as good a way as any, you suppose. He wakes you up in the morning, mocks you for your hangover, presses a string of names and addresses and contact information into your palm.
"Never mind about this one," he says, scratching a hurried line through one of them. "I'll talk to him. I need to drop by his place anyway."
"Eames--" you say, your voice hushed and a little scared and miserable from the alcohol and dry mouth.
He gives you a clouded look. "You can chicken out any time you like," he tells you, too eagerly, and you shake your head, and when you look up, he's already gone.
-
In your dream he has his head on your lap, a copy of Einstein's Dreams spread-eagled on his chest. "Hullo," he says, smiling hesitantly.
You realize you've dreamed yourself to the park where you last remember being outside with your mother. The tree is real enough, but the hill is fake, as are the endless rolling green plains stretching out in front and behind of you. In reality, it was the courtyard of the Fischer-Morrow compound, and there were well-manicured gardens all around.
"Hey," you smile.
"Lovely place," he says. "Did you build it?"
"Partially from memories." He frowns, and you stroke your hand across his forehead, still surprised by how real it feels. "Don't worry. I’m being safe."
"Everyone always says that," he says, rolling off your lap and dropping the book unceremoniously onto the grass, crushing the pages. "No one sets out to be unsafe--"
"Don't nag," you tell him. You're not sure if he's real, or if he's just one of your projections. Projections-- that's a word you learned from him. Things that were real but weren't quite real. Dreams are full of little traps like this, he told you. People could get lost in projections. And at that he had stopped, mouth open, unable to go on.
You've brought in plenty of projections to his dreams, of course, but you've yet to actually summon one and mold it. This is how you know he's real and not your imagination. He's done it once or twice just to show you how you can summon a friend or a mother or even a international political figure or the man you saw buying coffee the other week, simply because you weren't careful. Be careful, be careful. His constant motto. Which was funny, you told him, because he was a gambler and a criminal and he was telling you-- but he hadn't found it funny in the least.
"Fischer, sometimes I think, you have no bloody clue what you're digging yourself into," he says, tearing up handfuls of grass and throwing them absently in front of him. One or two blades blow back in his face, catching in his mouth, and he spits them out with the same abandon. "You have no idea--"
"I'm not as sheltered as you think," you snap."I know what I want."
"Do you?"
Do you? This is what you want: You want to keep running. You want to stop running from your father. You want your life back. You want nothing more to do with Fischer-Morrow, with energy-companies, with the mountains and mountains of things your father left behind for you. You want to see Uncle Browning again, you haven't seen him in months. You want to spend the rest of your life somewhere where no one can find you. You want dreams, you want shared dreaming. You don't want the money, the notoriety. You only want to be free.
"I want this," you say firmly. You tear up a handful of grass with him and throw it just to watch the strands scatter. The tiny assumed laws of physics that you've brought into this world intact, a part and parcel of your subconscious. It still catches you sometimes, makes you take a deep breath. You find yourself repeating just a dream like a mantra.
For the first time since he's met you, he looks at you like he's actually seeing you, through some hazy, filtered smoke that you can just barely guess at, the smoke that keeps him from letting you get close. He looks scared, and that scares you. For once, you think, you might be the braver one.
"I want this with you," you say.
There is a long pause. Finally he shakes his head slowly, wondrously. "Your loss, then," he says, keeping his voice light, and summons a handgun. When he pulls the trigger, he is looking straight at you, smiling. You barely pick up on the fact that his forefinger is trembling before his body crumbles and blows away. The heavy metal of the gun falls with a dull thud on the grass.
One day, you think, I am going to find that gesture romantic.
The wind is fragrant and warm against your face. This is a good memory. You might want to return to it one day. You'll be careful, though, and try not to think too hard about your mother. You want to see her again, but the distortion of years have wrecked her in your memory. You don't know what you would summon up, and you don't want to find out.
You pick up the gun.
-
In reality, he is disconnecting you from the PASIV, and you wake up and he is kissing your forehead, soft and lush. "Let's do this," you say, and he grins and says, "Let's do it," and you tell yourself, you are not going to be sad. There are things between the two of you that you don't know, and sometimes he is more distant than anything else in your life, more distant than the thought of happiness or peace or returning to your life as you once knew it. But of the things between you, you won't let sadness be one of them. You are going to do this, and you are going to do this with him.
-
In your dreams you are free--
-
In his dreams you are free--
-
And in the future, you'll be in a dream, and you'll be running a maze, and he will be right there beside you.
Eames/Robert. Some day they'll go down together.
Note: For this prompt in the kinkmeme: "Post-Inception. Eames and Robert hook up. BAMF-ery ensues. Robert realises all he's ever wanted to be is an international wanted criminal and Eames is more than happy to help him along." Minor edits were made.
In your dream he is a blonde bombshell from the 50s. "I remember this one, I think--" you say. With a careless shrug of her shoulders, she's gone, and he laughs. The sound is a little ugly, like a dog's low-throated grumble, a thing that expressed dangerous displeasure and was not quite a growl.
"You have no idea, pet," he muses, chewing on his cigarette before lighting it. You hate the smell, but at least they're not cigars. He'll want to fuck afterward, and cigars remind you too much of your father, and you hate telling him you're not in the mood. It makes you sound vulnerable. You don't like being vulnerable.
You feel so easily vulnerable these days, as if your skin's been rubbed off. Especially in the places where his stubble has rubbed against the inside of your thigh. That is how you feel, raw and breaking out all over.
"You're going to need a totem," he says. When he sees the look on your face, he rubs a knuckle down your back, like he's stroking a cat. "It's a good thing," he reassures you. "It means you're picking it up too fast."
-
In a bar in Valparaiso, Chile, you are drinking viognier and he is eyeing you over his glass of Scotch. "Forgive me for stating the obvious, Fischer," he tells you, his voice low and textured, cutting straight through the stifling noise of the other customers, "but there's no reason for me to believe you are who you say you are."
"Look at me," you say. You gesture vaguely at yourself, glass in hand, and if your voice is more sardonic than you mean for it to be, it's only because you haven't slept since the night before. You used to sleep well on planes, but since your father's funeral, you haven't been able to handle it. "Who else would be stupid enough to come in here, ask for you, and not even give you a fake name? Do you want ID?" You fumble in your pocket for your wallet, your fingers clumsy with too many glasses of wine on an empty stomach. You almost let it fall to the floor, but you catch it just in time.
The look he gives you is dripping with condescension. You set the wallet in front of him. He doesn't touch it. After a minute, you start to tear at your nails, a habit your father found filthy. "This is an easy enough con to play--" he begins.
"I'm not smart enough to play cons," you tell him firmly. But you are well aware that sometimes the honest truth is the best con of at all.
-
In his dream he is Sherlock Holmes and you are dressed in the neatest, most English suit known to man.
"Am I Watson?" you ask him with your eyebrow quirked, grinning. "I know your ego is huge, but you didn't have to make yourself into a genius with a cocaine habit."
"It's exactly what I need to be," he tells you absently. He taps the desk with his pipe and the whole thing disappears, shifts; he is dressed in his ill-fitting paisley and you are cross-legged on a soft armchair as if you've been there always. "Robert," he says, and stops.
"Yes?" you prompt. The room smells warm, and old, like a tearoom in a novel.
"This is not very subtle," he warns you.
"You are not a very subtle person," you joke.
This is the wrong thing to say. He leans down towards you, arms gripping the back of the armchair on either side of your face, towering over you, a shadowed mass of a man, almost too oppressive, too close, breathing a smell of tobacco smoke and old fashioned eau de cologne and library books, and you want to claw at his shoulders to make him leave you alone, but you don't. You need to be brave now, like you've never been brave before in your life.
He is teaching you all sorts of things, about bravery and yourself.
"You don't know me, Robert," he growls. "You don't know me at all."
-
In your dream, you are running in a maze. You can see the walls on either side of you, but you can barely avoid running into dead ends. It starts to snow, in great powdery drifts, as if someone were ripping tissue above your head and letting the pieces settle. You need to get out. Something is collapsing. Something is happening. Something is exploding, silently, in an acrid draft of grease fire and dirty ashes. You need to get out. You don't know how you know this, only that you do.
Eventually the walls open up into what your dream logic tells you is the center of the maze. There is a large statue of your father standing there, half buried to the waist in the tissue snow. Also, bunches of pinwheels, like bouquets of flowers, lying at his feet.
When you wake up you are in a hotel in Mainz where you've fallen asleep, fully dressed, on the bed. There's a text message, from a private number. If you're looking for the best, it says, you'll want Eames.
Where's this Eames? How do I find him? you text back.
The answer is almost instantaneous, almost automatic, as if the caller already had the answer typed out and was simply waiting on a hair trigger for your response.
Try South America. Good luck.
-
In your penthouse in Sydney, a week or so after that night in Valparaiso, he rolls up his sleeves and you strip your blazer off to reveal your wrist, slender and white laid out next to his.
"Shall we begin?" he says, and you nod. You give him a smile that is 75% borrowed from him, and he recognizes that, throwing back his head in a bark of laughter.
Then you go under.
-
In his dream he is in your father's office and you know you shouldn't have followed him, you know you shouldn't have bribed the front desk for his hotel key, you know you shouldn't have used what little knowledge you scavenged from a pilfered manual about the PASIV device to plug yourself in, decompress the controls, let the Somnacin take you to him, to where he really is.
His dream is a shockingly accurate representation of your father's office, and you almost gag at the recollections, at the number of mind-numbing hours spent sitting on your side of his heavy mahogany desk, saying nothing, thinking nothing, letting your father flow through you like a ghost possessing a house.
He's seated in your father's leather chair, fingers steepled against the surface of the table, lost in thought. You can't help but make a little noise, at how wrong it is to see him, anyone really, in that chair, and it makes him jump.
"Fischer--?!" he snarls, and before you can say a word, he picks up a gun from the polished, empty shine of the table and shoots himself in the head.
The pain is unbearable. At first you think it is a thing of dreaming, that maybe when a dreamer dies you feel the pain. Then you realize it is just the imagined pain of being crushed by thousands of cement blocks. It is what your subconscious thinks being buried by your father's office building might feel like.
-
In a hotel room in Valparaiso, he wakes up and slams you against a wall. "Is this what it comes down to?" he hisses, his hand fisted in the collar of your shirt and almost choking you. "Stalking me, invading my privacy, following me around the world?" He smiles then, a smile that doesn't touch his eyes at all, sharing a joke he no longer found funny with himself. "Tell me," he breathes against your face, "what is it you want from me?"
"I told you--" you gasp out. "Shared dreaming-- someone said me you were the best--"
He groans, a tortured, frustrated sound that to you, approximates the words, "Fuck, Arthur, you shit." You probably heard it wrong. It makes no sense otherwise.
He doesn't say anymore until he takes you to a bar and you drink almost a full bottle of viognier while he tosses back Scotch like it's water. Three hours later you end up with your pants on the floor of his hotel room, frantically trying to rub off on his knee while he murmurs all sorts of dark, filthy things in your ear, urging you on, touching the corner of your mouth where there's still a spot of his cum left from where you blew him. You don't know how else you expected this to go, but this is as good a way as any, you suppose. He wakes you up in the morning, mocks you for your hangover, presses a string of names and addresses and contact information into your palm.
"Never mind about this one," he says, scratching a hurried line through one of them. "I'll talk to him. I need to drop by his place anyway."
"Eames--" you say, your voice hushed and a little scared and miserable from the alcohol and dry mouth.
He gives you a clouded look. "You can chicken out any time you like," he tells you, too eagerly, and you shake your head, and when you look up, he's already gone.
-
In your dream he has his head on your lap, a copy of Einstein's Dreams spread-eagled on his chest. "Hullo," he says, smiling hesitantly.
You realize you've dreamed yourself to the park where you last remember being outside with your mother. The tree is real enough, but the hill is fake, as are the endless rolling green plains stretching out in front and behind of you. In reality, it was the courtyard of the Fischer-Morrow compound, and there were well-manicured gardens all around.
"Hey," you smile.
"Lovely place," he says. "Did you build it?"
"Partially from memories." He frowns, and you stroke your hand across his forehead, still surprised by how real it feels. "Don't worry. I’m being safe."
"Everyone always says that," he says, rolling off your lap and dropping the book unceremoniously onto the grass, crushing the pages. "No one sets out to be unsafe--"
"Don't nag," you tell him. You're not sure if he's real, or if he's just one of your projections. Projections-- that's a word you learned from him. Things that were real but weren't quite real. Dreams are full of little traps like this, he told you. People could get lost in projections. And at that he had stopped, mouth open, unable to go on.
You've brought in plenty of projections to his dreams, of course, but you've yet to actually summon one and mold it. This is how you know he's real and not your imagination. He's done it once or twice just to show you how you can summon a friend or a mother or even a international political figure or the man you saw buying coffee the other week, simply because you weren't careful. Be careful, be careful. His constant motto. Which was funny, you told him, because he was a gambler and a criminal and he was telling you-- but he hadn't found it funny in the least.
"Fischer, sometimes I think, you have no bloody clue what you're digging yourself into," he says, tearing up handfuls of grass and throwing them absently in front of him. One or two blades blow back in his face, catching in his mouth, and he spits them out with the same abandon. "You have no idea--"
"I'm not as sheltered as you think," you snap."I know what I want."
"Do you?"
Do you? This is what you want: You want to keep running. You want to stop running from your father. You want your life back. You want nothing more to do with Fischer-Morrow, with energy-companies, with the mountains and mountains of things your father left behind for you. You want to see Uncle Browning again, you haven't seen him in months. You want to spend the rest of your life somewhere where no one can find you. You want dreams, you want shared dreaming. You don't want the money, the notoriety. You only want to be free.
"I want this," you say firmly. You tear up a handful of grass with him and throw it just to watch the strands scatter. The tiny assumed laws of physics that you've brought into this world intact, a part and parcel of your subconscious. It still catches you sometimes, makes you take a deep breath. You find yourself repeating just a dream like a mantra.
For the first time since he's met you, he looks at you like he's actually seeing you, through some hazy, filtered smoke that you can just barely guess at, the smoke that keeps him from letting you get close. He looks scared, and that scares you. For once, you think, you might be the braver one.
"I want this with you," you say.
There is a long pause. Finally he shakes his head slowly, wondrously. "Your loss, then," he says, keeping his voice light, and summons a handgun. When he pulls the trigger, he is looking straight at you, smiling. You barely pick up on the fact that his forefinger is trembling before his body crumbles and blows away. The heavy metal of the gun falls with a dull thud on the grass.
One day, you think, I am going to find that gesture romantic.
The wind is fragrant and warm against your face. This is a good memory. You might want to return to it one day. You'll be careful, though, and try not to think too hard about your mother. You want to see her again, but the distortion of years have wrecked her in your memory. You don't know what you would summon up, and you don't want to find out.
You pick up the gun.
-
In reality, he is disconnecting you from the PASIV, and you wake up and he is kissing your forehead, soft and lush. "Let's do this," you say, and he grins and says, "Let's do it," and you tell yourself, you are not going to be sad. There are things between the two of you that you don't know, and sometimes he is more distant than anything else in your life, more distant than the thought of happiness or peace or returning to your life as you once knew it. But of the things between you, you won't let sadness be one of them. You are going to do this, and you are going to do this with him.
-
In your dreams you are free--
-
In his dreams you are free--
-
And in the future, you'll be in a dream, and you'll be running a maze, and he will be right there beside you.