wake us in the valley of the sun
wake us in the valley of the sun
inception: arthur/eames/robert
pre-film and post-film
pg13, 6839 wc
wanting is hunger. these men are the starving.
a/n basically i wrote this because i was thinking about what would have happened if 1. arthur and eames were the ones who trained robert fischer and have nothing to do with cobb or the team, and 2. the inception essentially failed in that the 'subject's mind traced the genesis of the idea', in arthur's words.
this is also the longest piece of writing i've done in almost three years by far, and it was quite fun to write. i hope you enjoy it, lovelies.
edit: it's been brought to my attention that there has been a misunderstanding regarding the pairing label on this fic. i realize that i have misslabelled the pairing twice- once on another comm, and once on this one in the tags of this post. i did this due to a misconception- i sincerely believed that 'a/e/r' and 'a/e, a/r, e/r' were the same, and thus interchangeable. in retrospect i see how this can be misinterpreted.
i apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. the misslabelled posts have been edited accordingly.
Arthur is in Georgia when he hears. He’s in a hotel room. The blinds are drawn and the television is on. Maurice Fischer has just died in Sydney, where it is already morning. He watches, waiting: finally, Robert emerges from a car, filmed from afar, but even from the distance Arthur can see the sleepless bruises under his eyes. As Robert turns away from the camera, one can make out the sharp wings of his shoulder blades. You’re too fucking thin, Eames always said. He’d lost more weight over the last month, caved into himself, like he was going hollow inside.
The fluorescent lights overhead flicker. Moths drawn to the pale luminescence gather in clumsy clouds. Only half of the hotel’s rooms are occupied, the vacant spaces pushing at the walls. The building feels like it’s about to fold inwards, tight and claustrophobic, submerged in something denser than water.
Arthur turns off the television. He lies down on the bed. He thinks of Robert, alone, an ocean away. He thinks of Eames, arriving tomorrow. The two of them are men who move with the tides, coming, going, returning, leaving. They are unable to stay, and all he can do for them is wait.
He sleeps.
Arthur doesn’t dream anymore. The closest he can get to them are repetitions of things he knows from skin to bone, more memory than dream. On the night in Georgia mere hours after Robert Fischer’s father dies in Sydney, he remembers in his sleep an experiment, or the beginnings of one, in Venice, Piazza San Marco, post-acqua alta.
Eames had invited them to dinner on the square. It had been flooded quite recently, and the cafés had only reopened a couple of days before they’d flown in for the extraction job. Business was good, swelling to its peak come evening, tourists and natives alike coming to eat dinner and listen to the night musicians. It had been difficult finding a table. The sun was more or less gone, only just clinging to the edges of the square. Waiters with boxes of long matches lit candles in fixed holders or in dishes filled halfway with clear water. Clusters of mosquitoes hovered near the pools of light, drunkenly pursuing the exposed necks of men, the bare arms of women in evening dresses.
They sat by the bulk of the Basilica, Eames drinking tea and Arthur coffee and Robert nothing. None of them had ordered a course, their tableware sitting untouched. They cut an odd figure- not as three men, but seemingly as one whole, somehow each one indiscernible from the next. Like one man sitting before two mirrors for so long that his reflections detach themselves from him, like shadows pulling away from one’s feet. All will draw blood if they need to. They bite. They have the scars to prove it.
The three men sat.
Presently, the one called Eames put down his teacup and his newspaper, which was three days old and imported from England. The humidity had caused the paper to shed the ink onto his skin, like he was about to be fingerprinted at an airport. ‘I have a proposition,’ he said, without preamble.
Robert absently ran the edge of a nail down his butter knife. ‘Harebrained, no doubt,’ he drawled.
Frowning, Arthur looked across the square. A throng of late tourists had just arrived, most of them wearing sunglasses and the plastic wristwatches that souvenir mongers sell for only a couple of euros on the vaporetti. They stood about throwing birdseed into the air and feeding pigeons and taking pictures. A woman tossed a handful of birdseed into the dying red light, laughing as a dozen pigeons converge in a cloud of gray. It was growing dark.
Arthur watched, struggling, thinking: the airport, the smoke room, the rooms they’d checked into, his shoulder blades shoved against the door, a clash of teeth, and suddenly, Venice.
‘We’re dreaming,’ he said, slowly.
Robert looked at Eames, leaning back. ‘I thought as much.’
Eames laughed. ‘How well do you two trust me?’
Arthur smiled, shaking his head. ‘Not very much at all.’
‘I’m surprised, though,’ said Robert, reaching over to take a cigarette from the open box Eames had left on the table. He only ever smoked within dreams. ‘That you got fooled at all, Arthur. You must be losing your touch.’
Eames blew a smoke ring with his own cigarette as Arthur scowled. ‘Don’t be cruel, Mr Fischer.’ He reached over the table, humming to the muzak as he cupped Arthur’s jaw in one hand. The burning end of the cigarette hovered close to his skin, almost enough to burn. Robert watched; Eames scraped a rough thumb under Arthur’s eye, like he was painting a picture and it was the last stroke. Arthur exhaled, a quiet rush of air. ‘Your proposition,’ he said. The taste of tobacco, rough and bitter on his tongue.
Eames chuckled. ‘Always business, aren’t we.’
There is a strange sound filtering through the air, like low whispers against a curved wall. Then, between the flagstones of the square come white flowers, growing unnaturally fast, sprouting and arching. The flowers are asphodel and the dream is no longer the San Piazza Marco but a field, the sun boring through them. Pigeons take flight, in a gray cloud that surges past the three men still seated at a single round table amidst thousands of white flowers. They are ankle deep within seconds, the asphodel still rising.
Eames had a small dark handgun shoved under Arthur’s chin. As Arthur watched, Eames’ face flickered, merged, shifted, until Arthur was looking at his own self.
‘I’ll tell you both about my proposition,’ Eames said quietly, pulling the gun away from Arthur and pressing it to his own temple, ‘Once we’re awake.’
In Eames’- his- eyes, Arthur saw twin Roberts surrounded by white, smiling, smoking.
A cicada shrilled. Then there was a bang, and Eames was dead. The gun was left behind, an invitation.
The dream of asphodel is something to be said about these three men. Between them, one must always die first. The others follow.
What the experiment leaves them with is this: not each other, but the impression of them as guards. Where Arthur dreams of being chased by his own projections, faceless men running him down in narrow alleyways that turn into fine mazes of unshorn wheat fields. He’s always dead by the end of them, a bullet to the skull, a switchblade to the stomach. The last thing he always sees is Eames, or Robert, or both, lit from different sides with the candlelight of the Piazza San Marco, five years ago. It’s his own projections of them that come to him through the labyrinths, and they defend him from himself better than any other security.
Arthur knows what Eames fears: someone pulling him open, reading him like a book. It’s a simple fear. They rarely dream with Eames’ subconscious, because the first few times they’d been killed so quickly that barely a minute had passed above. Trust lets them live longer, but too often destroys them before they can wake.
None would have guessed what would happen to Robert. A single flight in transit from Sydney to Los Angeles will flood him, his hair like seaweed, his mouth full of water. He’ll go to limbo and back, the Pacific Ocean beneath him, somnacin in his veins. A man named Dominic Cobb will sit behind him. Two weeks ago the same man said, on the rooftop of a café in Mombasa: the seed that we plan in this man’s mind will grow into an idea, this idea will define him. It may come to change everything about him.
Arthur will look at Robert Fischer and understand.
Robert Fischer will drown.
Arthur idles away the day in the hotel, toying with the idea of calling Robert. He knows it won’t be something that he’ll be expecting, or hoping for, or wanting, at this point in time. The phone stays untouched.
In the evening, Arthur signs out of the hotel, and checks the address jotted on his palm. He’d come to Georgia on a whim, chasing a rumour that Eames was in the area looking for a chemist. The information had unsettled him: a combination of curiosity and desire, thick enough to choke on. Arthur’s familiar with the area- he knows the nearest chemist is on the outskirts of Atlanta, stationed in the back room of a rare books shop. Eames had left an order, which he was due to pick up today. Shit timing, Arthur thinks. He backs his rental car out of the hotel parking lot. The blue ink on his skin bleeds onto the steering wheel.
The bookshop is nearby. He stops the car a block away from it and walks over. It’s getting dark, quite quickly. The restaurants are filled, the light spilling out from their windows like splayed yellow hands across the frosted ground. A garbage truck with snow tyres grinds past, throwing up crushed ice in sprays of gray. The streetlamp outside the shop flickers every couple of seconds, trading the dusk for a deeper dark in alternating stammers of luminescence.
The bookshop is dark. Arthur lingers at the window front, peering at the rows of ancient books on display, first edition Freud, Kant, Nietzsche. He squints; he can just make out the faint outline of a door behind the counter, sketched in the dense sodium vapour lamplight preferred by chemists in their storerooms. Arthur fists his hands against the cold, feels the stickiness of the last smudges of ink on his palm. It’s going to snow tonight.
He stays, wondering how long Eames is going to take. He glances at the private hospital across the road, larger than most, a hulking mass of a building. Its presence is one of disquiet. Arthur always feels like looking over his shoulder in places like hospitals, where it seems like there are more corners and turns than there are walls, the ceiling too low, the doorways too narrow.
He hasn’t visited a hospital in years- he has run on a system of self-medication on drugs purchased from convenience stores and small-time pharmacies ever since the beginning of his career in mind crime. It’s the kind of life he leads: one with weight, but seemingly without. He’d seen a picture illustrating individual connections once- a web of lines, running from point to point, stitching people together. For him, the lines are thin, barely visible, clandestine. To pin a sensation to them would be like the dry feeling of dust settling on you as you enter an unvisited room, or the waxy, wick smell of burned-down candles, or the slick, wet taste of a man after a shower. The dust is ash. The candles are Italian. The man is anonymous, but also known- he approaches.
He opens the door of the bookshop, steps out. The streetlamp goes dark, comes back on. He looks no different beneath it.
‘Arthur,’ he says hoarsely. ‘It’s been a while.’
They don’t go far. The traffic is light, and they pass only a few vehicles on the street. The smell of rain and ice slithers into the car, somewhat stale, like the memory of a shiver scratching down the spine.
Eames stops the car by the side of a park reserve. Some late crocuses are still in bloom along the edge of the green, but their heads sag under their own damp weight. They sway in the white wind, almost imperceptively.
It’s been over a month since they’ve last met. They’d changed the fortnightly appointments with Robert to bimonthly ones when his father had taken a turn for the worst, and between the last and the next- tomorrow- Eames had gone south after a forging commission.
Arthur says presently, ‘Did you finish your job?’
There’s a creak of upholstery. Eames undoes his seatbelt, curling his body over to Arthur’s. Their faces are inches away, Eames with one hand carding through Arthur’s hair, the other against his headrest. His breaths are long, slow, the nicotine having compressed his lungs. The waiting is a challenge. Arthur is the weaker, and breaks first, bringing his mouth to Eames’ in a rush. When he pulls away, he runs his tongue over his lower lip. ‘It was a simple yes or no question,’ he says.
Eames chuckles, withdrawing back to his own seat. He rummages around in his coat pockets, finds a crumpled box of cigarettes. ‘Last week. But I’m running low on the compound, and we’ve got Robert tomorrow. Hence the somnacin.’ He lights up.
‘Have you heard from him?’ Arthur removes the cigarette from Eames’ hand, sucks on it. The lit end flares briefly. He doesn’t normally smoke, but bare minutes after meeting Eames again brings all the bad habits to the surface.
Eames barks out a laugh. It comes out as gray smoke, bitter. ‘From him? What do you think?’
Arthur passes the cigarette back. ‘I’m just not sure dreamsharing with him right now is the healthiest option for any of us.’
It begins to snow, very lightly. They melt as they touch the ground and crawl down the windshield, icy. The radiator in the car is off, or broken, and Eames reaches over to fiddle with the dials. He gives up after a minute, and slumps back in his seat. Arthur watches as he digs into his pocket for his totem, bringing it out and flicking it into the air. The poker chip turns, blurring, the red running into the white and becoming almost pink, like red dye or blood in clean water. Eames catches it. It rests across his lifeline, stationary. ‘I don’t think we have much of a choice,’ he says.
He remembers meeting Eames for the first time, sunk deep in a dream. He was in Detroit, looking for a forger because the extractor he was working with was inept and had gotten their last one killed and for their next job they needed one. The forger, this time, found him.
Arthur dreamed, walking in circles down boulevards lined with dark ferny trees, listening for the sounds of traffic where there were none. There were some shops, along the badly-lit streets, but in all the doors the ‘closed’ signs had been flipped. People meandered like him around parked cars and gathered under streetlamps, drawn to the light.
The dream shifted, reformed; a café appeared. A waiter pulled the upside-down chairs from an outdoor table and set them on the ground and placed a menu on the table. Arthur paused, watching: the dream shed the ferny trees and the dim streets like a second skin, folding back into an open square. Piazza San Marco, unfamiliar, neat rows of round tables and canvas chairs, salt and pepper shakers and packets of sugar in copper tins.
‘This isn’t my dream,’ Arthur said out loud. A passing projection eyed him, dark-eyed and curious. A man stepped around it and seated himself opposite Arthur, pulling a box of matches out of a pocket.
‘Arthur,’ he said. He struck a match. The firelight hissed in his cupped hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you.’
Arthur did not shake the proffered hand. ‘Mr. Eames?’
The match sputtered. Went out. ‘Yes.’
(Later on a job in Italy they had ditched the rest of the team and gone to the Piazza and kissed in the shadow of the Basilica, sharp and brutal.
Looking back, Arthur is not sure what he had said when he’d pulled away for a breath. It could have been ‘harder’, or ‘again’. It could have been.
Even later, he’s not sure if it ever happened at all.)
Los Angeles International Airport is bright at night. Arthur stands at one of the floor length windows watching planes take off whilst he waits for Eames to find his second suitcase at the baggage handling belt. The airport is busier than usual, incoming passengers exhausted by the flight, outgoing frustrated with the long queues. There are delays because of the snow, aircraft struggling to find purchase on the tarmac runways. The sound of them coming down is muted through the thick glass windows of the airport, but watching them, Arthur will always imagine the noise of engines forcing the air apart.
He thinks of Robert, waiting for them in his office an hour’s drive away. They’d spent the majority of the last year training his mind to defend itself, and halfway through the meetings had dissolved into something more like casual dreamsharing, lucid and sordid on their tongues. The first time had been impulsive on Robert’s behalf, winding his hand around the nape of Arthur’s neck and kissing him, hot, heavy, in the dense dark dirt of an asphodel field. The next time was in the hands of Eames, deliberate, premeditated. Arthur had woken gasping for air, with the humid taste of Eames on the roof of his mouth; underneath that, Robert; and underneath that, white flowers, crushed.
Arthur presses a hand flat against the glass. Between his fingers, the strobe lights of a runway shiver, hazy through the falling snow. A hand folds itself over his, blots out the lights; Eames has found his luggage. ‘Time to go,’ he says.
Arthur turns his back on the runways. Later, as they hail a taxi outside the airport, he wonders: what are we really doing here? What are we looking for?
Robert Fischer’s office is in a high rise, close to the top, folded into a corner of the building. Arthur carried the PASIV device to the thirtieth floor. The corridor is empty but for them; Arthur rests his knuckles against the heavy wooden door. ‘Ready?’ he says.
Eames leans over, presses his mouth to Arthur’s temple. ‘Ready.’
Arthur knocks, and opens the door.
Robert’s at his desk, sifting through piles of watermarked paperwork. He looks older, different, a shadow of his father etched over his features. The familiar grandfather clock ticks behind him, pendulum rocking from side to side.
‘Long time no see,’ says Robert. ‘I suppose you’ve heard the news.’
Arthur locks the door. ‘How are you?’
Robert rolls up his sleeve as Arthur and Eames sit down, the PASIV between them. On Robert’s skin, the tiny bruised marks left behind from their last meeting are just barely visible, the same blue as the veins that stretch to his elbow. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says slowly. The gravity of the words flickers for a second behind his eyes, but he straightens and smiles, somewhat thinly. ‘But I’ll let you two see.’
Eames flicks the lid of the PASIV up, drawing out the IV lines. ‘You want to be both the dreamer and the subject?’ he asks.
Robert just pushes his wrist forward. ‘If you would.’
The dream is Los Angeles. It’s raining heavily; storms in central Los Angeles overflow the gutters easily, flooding the streets with refuse. The heat of the city keeps the rain from turning to snow, but Arthur knows that in another two weeks the cold will be too much for even the city to keep out.
Even though it’s too early for rush hour, the streets are densely crowded, cars and buses skidding across the wet asphalt. The rain comes down in sheets. Eames is across the road, shielded from the rain by a plastic umbrella. He raises a hand as a wave. Arthur responds, less enthusiastically. He hates this kind of weather, but he braces his shoulders against it and crosses the street over to Eames.
‘This is new,’ he says. He doesn’t add what they’re both thinking: that it’s too close to reality for comfort.
Eames goes to the curb and hails a cab. ‘Get in,’ he says, holding the door open. ‘He’s got to be around here somewhere.’
Arthur slides into the back seat with Eames. ‘Where to?’ asks the driver.
Struggling with his wet jacket, Eames shrugs. ‘Griffith Observatory, please.’
The cab rejoins the lane. Rain strikes the roof of it, the noise of it so close that Arthur feels that if he raised his hand, his fingers would get wet. He looks out of the window, searching for the familiar figure of Robert.
It takes longer than usual. It’s difficult to find subjects in traffic; individual projections have a way of circling, like ocean currents, moving in patterns that suggest an epicentre, but it’s harder to see these when there are nothing but high rises and moving vehicles around.
Finally, Eames spots him at an intersection, by a traffic light, barely five metres away. ‘Stop here,’ he tells the driver.
Arthur rummages in his pockets for loose change, throws a handful of bills at the driver and gets out of the car. Eames is ahead of him, but he lingers, frowning. ‘Something doesn’t seem right,’ he mutters.
Robert sees the taxi that they’d just vacated, and holds out a hand to hail it. As he does, he sees them, freezing mid-motion. Arthur approaches slowly, biting his lip. Robert backs away until his back is against the traffic light pole, eyes darting from Arthur to Eames and back.
‘Robert.’ Arthur reaches for him, touches his shoulder. Robert recoils, jerking away from him as though burned.
Arthur stops, hand still raised. Behind him, Eames says, so quietly that he can barely be heard over the sound of the traffic, ‘Careful.’
‘Robert,’ Arthur tries again. ‘It’s us.’
A flash of recognition. Robert stumbles backwards, to the edge of the gutter. ‘Wake me up,’ he cries. ‘Please.’
There’s a click behind Arthur that he recognises as a pistol slide racking back. He whirls around, grabbing the muzzle of the gun and forcing it down. ‘Wait, Eames-’
There’s a thud, a sound of tyres on wet ground. Arthur turns around, letting the gun go. The bonnet of the taxi is crumpled. A man lies dead in the rain.
Eames walks to the body, still holding onto the pistol. He kneels by the body and hisses through his teeth. ‘I’m going after him,’ he says, standing.
Arthur pushes past the meandering projections that are clustering around them. ‘Go.’
Eames looks at him, shaking his head, raising the gun. There’s a bang, and he’s gone.
Arthur stays a minute longer, eyes shut, listening. He thinks: what if I took a step each second, and at every step there was a clock, running a second slower than the last, so that no matter how many steps I take it will be like living the same moment over and over and over? He is suddenly exhausted. Already he has walked a hundred miles, and with every step Robert Fischer dies and Arthur remembers the look on his face, how he stared at the car, and waited.
Above. By the grandfather clock behind the desk, they were only under for three minutes. Across the table, Robert is trembling, almost imperceptibly, the shakes running up the IV line wrapped around his arm. ‘I don’t know,’ he saying, as Arthur rubs his eyes. ‘I don’t know what happened to me.’
Eames says quietly, ‘Did you dream recently?’
Robert rubs at his temples with his knuckles, anxiously, fervently. ‘That dream, just then. And a hotel, and snow, but I can’t remember…’
Arthur leans forwards, pulls Robert’s wrist towards him. His skin is clammy as though he’d just walked through the weather from the dream that they’d surfaced from, the muscles taut underneath. The tendons in his arm jump, fight for a second, before he relaxes and lets Arthur remove the tape and needle. Yellow oily drops of somnacin and blood smudge across the desk as the IV line pulls out of Robert’s vein.
‘I think that’s enough for today,’ he says. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’
Eames silently winds the IV lines back into the PASIV device, shutting the briefcase. Robert has stilled, regained his composure. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mutters. ‘Same time?’
‘We’ll come back for you,’ says Eames. ‘We’ll come back.’
Robert only nods. He says nothing as they leave.
His eyes are those of deer and foxes. He wears these eyes as both the hunter, and the hunted.
Mid-lesson. Six months ago they taught Robert how to dream within a dream; Eames dreamed the first level, a fjord referenced from a couple of pages of Milford Sound that they’d torn out of the National Geographic. They’d set up the PASIV device on the peak of a cliff, the water hundreds of metres below them. Eames kicked a pebble over the edge and it took almost ten seconds to reach the surface of the sound. ‘I’ll wait for you here,’ he said.
Robert had dreamed the next level, taking Arthur with him. It was a French studio apartment, lightly furnished, the shutters flung wide open to let in a cool breeze. It was about half past three in the afternoon. The floor wasn’t carpeted, just smooth floorboards that smell of beeswax and polish. There were dark purple flowers on the kitchen counter. ‘Irises,’ Robert said absently.
(It was the apartment of an old girlfriend, he said later. From his college days in Europe. It made Arthur kiss him harder, to see if he could find someone else inside Robert, if they’d left their taste behind with him. All he found was Eames, rough and heavy and saturated with the scent of tobacco. And something darker, simpler, a taste he could put only to himself.)
Robert put his totem on the table. It was a double-sided coin; a Peace silver dollar minted in 1921, two identical Lady Liberties on both sides. Arthur had a sudden urge to touch it, turn it over, look at both heads of the coin. It was one of those unreasonable desires, like jumping from high balconies, or eating poison or touching fire. I want to know what it’s like, he once told Eames. Eames had leaned in and licked a hot line from chin to mouth and they didn’t talk about it.
In this dream of a Parisian studio, Robert found a baguette and a jar of thick raspberry jam in the pantry whilst Arthur turned his red die around in his hand, rolling it across the counter. Robert tore the end of the baguette off and spread red jam across it, the color darker than what Arthur expected of raspberry jam. ‘When will we know?’ Robert asked. His teeth were stained red. As Arthur watched, he swallowed the last of the bread and his teeth were once again white. ‘Music?’
‘Edith Piaf, to be exact,’ Arthur said. He touched one of the irises, pulled it out of the vase. ‘You’ll know it once you hear it.’
Robert took the iris from him, as well as the rest from the vase. He bunched them together and folded them in half, snapping the stems. Sap ran over his fingers as he wrapped the flowers in a sheet of newspaper and threw them in the trash. He licked the sap off delicately, chlorophyll leaving traces of green on his skin like veins. Music began to play.
‘Non je ne regrette rien,’ said Robert, after a second.
Arthur reached over and took Robert’s hand, raising it to his mouth. ‘That’s our cue,’ he said.
Robert dragged a thumb over Arthur’s lips, still sticky with jam and sap. ‘Let’s not keep Eames waiting.’
After they all woke, when he thought Robert wasn’t looking, Eames took Arthur’s hand and pressed his mouth to the bloodied pinpricks left by the IV lead. He sucked, hard, and Arthur shuddered, arching.
Over Eames’ shoulder he caught Robert’s gaze.
Arthur thinks that in the eyes of some, they must seem to treat each other badly. Eames plays favorites without trying to hide it, not touching one or the other for weeks on end. Sometimes, he once said, I’m so fucking tired of people. Eames throws shit when he’s pissed and that time he’d thrown an ashtray. It had broken a window. Arthur didn’t see him for a week after that, and when he’d finally came back his lip was split and his hands wrecked from fighting. Arthur kissed his knuckles and let him be.
In the case of Robert; he is a man who pushes the other two around as though he’s trying to make them into what he wants. He needs them the most and they give him what he wants because, perversely, they want the same thing. He pulls at their skin, bites down, shapes them like they’re made of clay. They want this. He wants it more. He does this like he’s getting his hands dirty.
‘After all,’ he hissed once, hot and ragged against Arthur’s throat, ‘you were both mine to begin with.’
A habit of Robert’s is stamping his name on his possessions. Arthur caught Eames in the hotel bathroom once, damp hair, steam clouding the air like a warm fog. They kissed for minutes, until the mirror cleared and Arthur opened his eyes and saw a small dark bruise on Eames’ right shoulder.
He left an identical one on his left.
They try again.
As they fasten their leads Robert asks, ‘Do you still dream?’
Arthur hesitates, about to push the needle of the IV line into his skin. The mottled mark of yesterday is vivid against the older scars. ‘No,’ he says, answering for both of them. It had been over two years for him, more for Eames. Eames meets his eyes; they both remember. In one of their first dreamsharing session Arthur had uncovered Eames’ last dream and had been killed for it; but when they’d woken Eames had curled over, their IV lines tangling, and kissed him for the first time, languid and drunk on sleep.
Robert’s gaze is steady as he looks at them. ‘I see,’ he says.
The dream is a hotel- long anonymous corridors, dark furniture, dried flowers. Arthur enters the dream near a flight of stairs in the lobby. He scans the faces of the projections, looking for Robert and Eames; with a chime, the elevator doors across the lobby open and Eames steps out. He nods at Arthur.
They find Robert in the bar. It’s half-filled with projections, seated at the tables and eating. Arthur wants to halt and watch them, but Eames is impatient. Arthur’s desire is one of curiosity; projections fascinate him. For some people they are weak, merely going through the same motions as the rest. If Robert’s were as such they would merely be putting the food in their mouths and turn to watch the two men enter the bar, impassive. For all his inexperience, barely a year of dreamsharing, Robert’s projections are complex, highly aware. Their eyes fix on the two men entering the bar, and they are anything but passive until Robert looks up and recognises them. He smiles.
They sit down on either side of him. Robert is drinking water from a low glass. It’s raining outside. Arthur wets his lips. ‘Why did you bring us here, Robert?’
Robert takes a pen from his pocket and a napkin from the neat pile on the bar and writes: 528-491.
‘What is it?’ asks Eames. ‘Like a phone number.’
Robert shakes his head. ‘No. A combination.’
Arthur asks sharply, suddenly, ‘Where’s your totem, Robert?’
The champagne glasses hanging over their heads shiver, clinking against each other as though inhabited by small ghosts. Robert bites his lip; the glasses still. He reaches into his pockets, brings out nothing. ‘My wallet’s gone,’ he says. ‘They stole my wallet.’
Eames places his elbows on the bar. ‘Who were they?’
He says: ‘I think they wanted me to think my father loved me.’
Arthur stirs, focussing. He reaches for the napkin and Robert withdraws his hands as though he does not want to be touched. Robert continues, ‘I went to my father’s safe this morning.’
A pause. Arthur runs a finger over the numbers, feels the grooves in the thin folded paper. Eames prompts: ‘And?’
Robert smiles. It’s empty on his mouth. ‘Wrong combination.’
Robert says he has one more dream. He asks them to come back next week.
Arthur doesn’t touch him. He doesn’t touch Eames, either, back in their room in the hotel. He’s not who Eames wants right now, and he can’t be until Eames feels like it. Eames plays favorites and Arthur lets him. It’s easier for them both.
Neither of them say, ‘it isn’t our fault.’ The fault is undeniably Robert’s. Projections are mirrors. They give you yourself. Robert dreamed that two men who love him and whom he loves, brutally, would save him. In the end they are still him, and Robert Fischer is not strong enough to save himself.
Arthur sits on his bed and cleans his gun.
That night he dreams for the first time in years. It’s vague and blurred, an aberration that lasts only for minutes. It’s a dream of bodies shoved in a space between cloisters, a red-dyed evening pressing against their backs. It’s tight and airless and silent and involves two mouths clashing in a way that is feverish, needy, filthy. It’s only when he wakes that he remembers that Robert is a mile away and Eames is in the next bed, and wonders which one of them he had been dreaming of, or if it hadn’t been them at all.
They go back on a Tuesday night.
All throughout the week there have been constant reports in the news; speculations about Robert Fischer taking the helm of Fischer Morrow Enterprises, moving to Australia, selling the company’s shares. Eames is always the one to turn the television off. He and Arthur haven’t talked about inception; by now they’ve realized that the flight between Sydney and Los Angeles was more than merely transit. A look into the other passengers turns up blank.
In Robert’s office, the grandfather clock ticks. Before they go under, he says, ‘I’m going to dissolve the company.’
Arthur sucked on the skin inside his mouth, bit down. Eames asks, ‘Is that why they wanted?’
Robert looks at him steadily. He reaches over the desk, touches the trigger with a fingertip. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s what I want.’
The PASIV hisses. They sink back, veins flooding. Sleep draws them under.
The dream is of winter. They emerge in a hospital built like a fortress, in a valley between unnaturally high peaks. The place is empty of projections; Robert had requested a different sedative, one that allowed a higher level of consciousness and control. Projections rarely exist in such dreams where they are so close to the surface, nose and mouth just inches away from air.
Robert leads them to the hospital vault in the strongroom. The windows have been blown inwards; Arthur finds a spent bullet on the floor. The cold is numbing.
The vault is shut behind a pair of doors twice the width of a man, set into the wall of the strongroom. Robert is holding his chest, over his heart. His breathing is unsteady. ‘What is it?’ Arthur asks.
Robert drops his hand, shaking his head. ‘Nothing.’
He touches the doors. They crank open, parting with a pneumatic hiss. Behind them is a strange tiled room, but the contents are familiar; furniture from Maurice Fischer’s room, a hospital bed, IV drip hanging loosely. The bed is empty. There is a safe in the cabinet beside it, and it’s this safe that Robert walks towards and kneels before.
Eames rests a hand on Robert’s shoulder. Arthur lingers behind them.
What they both know: Robert Fischer will not open the safe.
They wait. Eventually there’s a small tug behind Arthur’s ribs, and he feels lighter, as though the vault around them has just shivered and a touch could dissolve it. The somnacin has run out. Robert doesn’t stir, but he touches the keys on the safe gently. His fingertips tremble.
He doesn’t open the safe.
An avalanche buries them.
All three are silent as they pack up the PASIV device. Arthur doesn’t look back when the door shuts behind them, but Eames does. ‘He’ll be alright,’ he says.
Arthur says, ‘I know.’
Inside the elevator, Arthur looks at an infinite number of Eames and himself. He keeps his eyes open; when Eames tilts his face towards his an infinite number of them kiss. They kiss for want of something more than what they can have. There is want and there is need and both are interchangeable. Two men kiss in an elevator. When the doors open again, they’re still kissing.
It’s what they want.
The hotel, five days after. Robert calls Arthur. Robert calls him, but does not call Eames, and asks him to come with him to go somewhere. He doesn’t say: it’s important. He doesn’t say: I need you. He says: please, Arthur.
Arthur says yes.
They drive for hours out of Los Angeles. Arthur doesn’t ask where they’re going because if Robert hasn’t told him yet, he isn’t planning to.
They drive until the skyscrapers have given way to suburbia which gives way to shorn white fields. Neither breaks the silence that you can find only when there are horizons staring from every side. It’s a harsh, aching silence. It drives right into the core of you.
Robert stops the car arbitrarily. There’s a country house in the distance, along with a few small trees laden with snow. The road is frozen over and the gravel and ice crunches under Arthur’s shoes as he gets out of the car after Robert.
‘What,’ he starts, then cuts off. Robert is holding his totem, turning it over with his thumb. Heads. Heads. Heads. It catches the dull winter light, more gray than silver. Robert draws his hand back.
Arthur reaches for him. ‘Don’t-’
Robert throws the coin, as hard as he can. It’s gone within seconds, disappearing into the field.
They both stare out into the empty field. The memory of the asphodel flowers of an old dream clenches and unclenches like a heartbeat, overlaid upon the field, bringing the unreal and the real together and wrenching it apart. White flowers in a hot summer field growing from white snow in the longest winter the west coast has seen in years.
The only sound is of Robert’s breathing. His shoulders heave.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.’
Arthur sighs, slipping a hand into his pocket, to remind himself that his red die is still there. ‘Too late now.’
A flock of winter wrens flies over them, headed the way they had come. Robert watches them go, and it’s only when they’re too small to be visible that he reaches inside his jacket and retrieves a gun. He holds it out to Arthur. ‘I was going to,’ he says quietly. ‘But now I’m not so sure.’
Arthur grips his red die harder, shaking his head. He doesn’t take the gun. ‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘I trust you.’
Robert laughs, shortly, bitterly. ‘The question is, can I trust myself?’ He drops the gun into the snow at their feet. It barely makes a sound. Already it is half-buried.
‘He didn’t love me,’ he says. ‘He never loved me.’ Then, softer, touching Arthur’s cheek, ‘Don’t let me dream,’ and again, ‘don’t let me dream,’ his fingers cold and bare and blue.
In three months time when the snow has melted, a farmer will find a small handgun lying by the side of the road. He’ll take it home and show his wife. He’ll never know that the new owner of a major energy conglomerate had stood here with a man who was neither friend nor foe and cried. My father loved me. My father did not love me. This, too, will never be known.
Halfway back to Los Angeles, Arthur asks Robert to stop the car and kisses him. Before they’d left the city this morning, he’d kissed Eames just as he kisses Robert now. When they return Robert will kiss Eames. They will all kiss. The horizons will be far off by then but they will cut into them like they are now. Out here time stretches, flows differently. This is a moment in time where two men kiss in a car in the middle of a country road. Perhaps this moment has already passed and is already a memory and all they are doing is remembering the same thing at the same time; perhaps they are already standing in a hotel room, three of them, kissing and fucking and turning, turning each other over as though they will find something new and interesting on the other side. Perhaps this moment will never end and they will be frozen here, or frozen there, one or two or three men doing something stupid and frantic and clumsy out of some raw craving, like hunger, like they are starving.
Give us this, they are saying, as they press their mouths together. Give us this one thing, and we will hunger no longer.
They wake to a field of asphodel.
inception: arthur/eames/robert
pre-film and post-film
pg13, 6839 wc
wanting is hunger. these men are the starving.
a/n basically i wrote this because i was thinking about what would have happened if 1. arthur and eames were the ones who trained robert fischer and have nothing to do with cobb or the team, and 2. the inception essentially failed in that the 'subject's mind traced the genesis of the idea', in arthur's words.
this is also the longest piece of writing i've done in almost three years by far, and it was quite fun to write. i hope you enjoy it, lovelies.
edit: it's been brought to my attention that there has been a misunderstanding regarding the pairing label on this fic. i realize that i have misslabelled the pairing twice- once on another comm, and once on this one in the tags of this post. i did this due to a misconception- i sincerely believed that 'a/e/r' and 'a/e, a/r, e/r' were the same, and thus interchangeable. in retrospect i see how this can be misinterpreted.
i apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. the misslabelled posts have been edited accordingly.
Arthur is in Georgia when he hears. He’s in a hotel room. The blinds are drawn and the television is on. Maurice Fischer has just died in Sydney, where it is already morning. He watches, waiting: finally, Robert emerges from a car, filmed from afar, but even from the distance Arthur can see the sleepless bruises under his eyes. As Robert turns away from the camera, one can make out the sharp wings of his shoulder blades. You’re too fucking thin, Eames always said. He’d lost more weight over the last month, caved into himself, like he was going hollow inside.
The fluorescent lights overhead flicker. Moths drawn to the pale luminescence gather in clumsy clouds. Only half of the hotel’s rooms are occupied, the vacant spaces pushing at the walls. The building feels like it’s about to fold inwards, tight and claustrophobic, submerged in something denser than water.
Arthur turns off the television. He lies down on the bed. He thinks of Robert, alone, an ocean away. He thinks of Eames, arriving tomorrow. The two of them are men who move with the tides, coming, going, returning, leaving. They are unable to stay, and all he can do for them is wait.
He sleeps.
Arthur doesn’t dream anymore. The closest he can get to them are repetitions of things he knows from skin to bone, more memory than dream. On the night in Georgia mere hours after Robert Fischer’s father dies in Sydney, he remembers in his sleep an experiment, or the beginnings of one, in Venice, Piazza San Marco, post-acqua alta.
Eames had invited them to dinner on the square. It had been flooded quite recently, and the cafés had only reopened a couple of days before they’d flown in for the extraction job. Business was good, swelling to its peak come evening, tourists and natives alike coming to eat dinner and listen to the night musicians. It had been difficult finding a table. The sun was more or less gone, only just clinging to the edges of the square. Waiters with boxes of long matches lit candles in fixed holders or in dishes filled halfway with clear water. Clusters of mosquitoes hovered near the pools of light, drunkenly pursuing the exposed necks of men, the bare arms of women in evening dresses.
They sat by the bulk of the Basilica, Eames drinking tea and Arthur coffee and Robert nothing. None of them had ordered a course, their tableware sitting untouched. They cut an odd figure- not as three men, but seemingly as one whole, somehow each one indiscernible from the next. Like one man sitting before two mirrors for so long that his reflections detach themselves from him, like shadows pulling away from one’s feet. All will draw blood if they need to. They bite. They have the scars to prove it.
The three men sat.
Presently, the one called Eames put down his teacup and his newspaper, which was three days old and imported from England. The humidity had caused the paper to shed the ink onto his skin, like he was about to be fingerprinted at an airport. ‘I have a proposition,’ he said, without preamble.
Robert absently ran the edge of a nail down his butter knife. ‘Harebrained, no doubt,’ he drawled.
Frowning, Arthur looked across the square. A throng of late tourists had just arrived, most of them wearing sunglasses and the plastic wristwatches that souvenir mongers sell for only a couple of euros on the vaporetti. They stood about throwing birdseed into the air and feeding pigeons and taking pictures. A woman tossed a handful of birdseed into the dying red light, laughing as a dozen pigeons converge in a cloud of gray. It was growing dark.
Arthur watched, struggling, thinking: the airport, the smoke room, the rooms they’d checked into, his shoulder blades shoved against the door, a clash of teeth, and suddenly, Venice.
‘We’re dreaming,’ he said, slowly.
Robert looked at Eames, leaning back. ‘I thought as much.’
Eames laughed. ‘How well do you two trust me?’
Arthur smiled, shaking his head. ‘Not very much at all.’
‘I’m surprised, though,’ said Robert, reaching over to take a cigarette from the open box Eames had left on the table. He only ever smoked within dreams. ‘That you got fooled at all, Arthur. You must be losing your touch.’
Eames blew a smoke ring with his own cigarette as Arthur scowled. ‘Don’t be cruel, Mr Fischer.’ He reached over the table, humming to the muzak as he cupped Arthur’s jaw in one hand. The burning end of the cigarette hovered close to his skin, almost enough to burn. Robert watched; Eames scraped a rough thumb under Arthur’s eye, like he was painting a picture and it was the last stroke. Arthur exhaled, a quiet rush of air. ‘Your proposition,’ he said. The taste of tobacco, rough and bitter on his tongue.
Eames chuckled. ‘Always business, aren’t we.’
There is a strange sound filtering through the air, like low whispers against a curved wall. Then, between the flagstones of the square come white flowers, growing unnaturally fast, sprouting and arching. The flowers are asphodel and the dream is no longer the San Piazza Marco but a field, the sun boring through them. Pigeons take flight, in a gray cloud that surges past the three men still seated at a single round table amidst thousands of white flowers. They are ankle deep within seconds, the asphodel still rising.
Eames had a small dark handgun shoved under Arthur’s chin. As Arthur watched, Eames’ face flickered, merged, shifted, until Arthur was looking at his own self.
‘I’ll tell you both about my proposition,’ Eames said quietly, pulling the gun away from Arthur and pressing it to his own temple, ‘Once we’re awake.’
In Eames’- his- eyes, Arthur saw twin Roberts surrounded by white, smiling, smoking.
A cicada shrilled. Then there was a bang, and Eames was dead. The gun was left behind, an invitation.
The dream of asphodel is something to be said about these three men. Between them, one must always die first. The others follow.
What the experiment leaves them with is this: not each other, but the impression of them as guards. Where Arthur dreams of being chased by his own projections, faceless men running him down in narrow alleyways that turn into fine mazes of unshorn wheat fields. He’s always dead by the end of them, a bullet to the skull, a switchblade to the stomach. The last thing he always sees is Eames, or Robert, or both, lit from different sides with the candlelight of the Piazza San Marco, five years ago. It’s his own projections of them that come to him through the labyrinths, and they defend him from himself better than any other security.
Arthur knows what Eames fears: someone pulling him open, reading him like a book. It’s a simple fear. They rarely dream with Eames’ subconscious, because the first few times they’d been killed so quickly that barely a minute had passed above. Trust lets them live longer, but too often destroys them before they can wake.
None would have guessed what would happen to Robert. A single flight in transit from Sydney to Los Angeles will flood him, his hair like seaweed, his mouth full of water. He’ll go to limbo and back, the Pacific Ocean beneath him, somnacin in his veins. A man named Dominic Cobb will sit behind him. Two weeks ago the same man said, on the rooftop of a café in Mombasa: the seed that we plan in this man’s mind will grow into an idea, this idea will define him. It may come to change everything about him.
Arthur will look at Robert Fischer and understand.
Robert Fischer will drown.
Arthur idles away the day in the hotel, toying with the idea of calling Robert. He knows it won’t be something that he’ll be expecting, or hoping for, or wanting, at this point in time. The phone stays untouched.
In the evening, Arthur signs out of the hotel, and checks the address jotted on his palm. He’d come to Georgia on a whim, chasing a rumour that Eames was in the area looking for a chemist. The information had unsettled him: a combination of curiosity and desire, thick enough to choke on. Arthur’s familiar with the area- he knows the nearest chemist is on the outskirts of Atlanta, stationed in the back room of a rare books shop. Eames had left an order, which he was due to pick up today. Shit timing, Arthur thinks. He backs his rental car out of the hotel parking lot. The blue ink on his skin bleeds onto the steering wheel.
The bookshop is nearby. He stops the car a block away from it and walks over. It’s getting dark, quite quickly. The restaurants are filled, the light spilling out from their windows like splayed yellow hands across the frosted ground. A garbage truck with snow tyres grinds past, throwing up crushed ice in sprays of gray. The streetlamp outside the shop flickers every couple of seconds, trading the dusk for a deeper dark in alternating stammers of luminescence.
The bookshop is dark. Arthur lingers at the window front, peering at the rows of ancient books on display, first edition Freud, Kant, Nietzsche. He squints; he can just make out the faint outline of a door behind the counter, sketched in the dense sodium vapour lamplight preferred by chemists in their storerooms. Arthur fists his hands against the cold, feels the stickiness of the last smudges of ink on his palm. It’s going to snow tonight.
He stays, wondering how long Eames is going to take. He glances at the private hospital across the road, larger than most, a hulking mass of a building. Its presence is one of disquiet. Arthur always feels like looking over his shoulder in places like hospitals, where it seems like there are more corners and turns than there are walls, the ceiling too low, the doorways too narrow.
He hasn’t visited a hospital in years- he has run on a system of self-medication on drugs purchased from convenience stores and small-time pharmacies ever since the beginning of his career in mind crime. It’s the kind of life he leads: one with weight, but seemingly without. He’d seen a picture illustrating individual connections once- a web of lines, running from point to point, stitching people together. For him, the lines are thin, barely visible, clandestine. To pin a sensation to them would be like the dry feeling of dust settling on you as you enter an unvisited room, or the waxy, wick smell of burned-down candles, or the slick, wet taste of a man after a shower. The dust is ash. The candles are Italian. The man is anonymous, but also known- he approaches.
He opens the door of the bookshop, steps out. The streetlamp goes dark, comes back on. He looks no different beneath it.
‘Arthur,’ he says hoarsely. ‘It’s been a while.’
They don’t go far. The traffic is light, and they pass only a few vehicles on the street. The smell of rain and ice slithers into the car, somewhat stale, like the memory of a shiver scratching down the spine.
Eames stops the car by the side of a park reserve. Some late crocuses are still in bloom along the edge of the green, but their heads sag under their own damp weight. They sway in the white wind, almost imperceptively.
It’s been over a month since they’ve last met. They’d changed the fortnightly appointments with Robert to bimonthly ones when his father had taken a turn for the worst, and between the last and the next- tomorrow- Eames had gone south after a forging commission.
Arthur says presently, ‘Did you finish your job?’
There’s a creak of upholstery. Eames undoes his seatbelt, curling his body over to Arthur’s. Their faces are inches away, Eames with one hand carding through Arthur’s hair, the other against his headrest. His breaths are long, slow, the nicotine having compressed his lungs. The waiting is a challenge. Arthur is the weaker, and breaks first, bringing his mouth to Eames’ in a rush. When he pulls away, he runs his tongue over his lower lip. ‘It was a simple yes or no question,’ he says.
Eames chuckles, withdrawing back to his own seat. He rummages around in his coat pockets, finds a crumpled box of cigarettes. ‘Last week. But I’m running low on the compound, and we’ve got Robert tomorrow. Hence the somnacin.’ He lights up.
‘Have you heard from him?’ Arthur removes the cigarette from Eames’ hand, sucks on it. The lit end flares briefly. He doesn’t normally smoke, but bare minutes after meeting Eames again brings all the bad habits to the surface.
Eames barks out a laugh. It comes out as gray smoke, bitter. ‘From him? What do you think?’
Arthur passes the cigarette back. ‘I’m just not sure dreamsharing with him right now is the healthiest option for any of us.’
It begins to snow, very lightly. They melt as they touch the ground and crawl down the windshield, icy. The radiator in the car is off, or broken, and Eames reaches over to fiddle with the dials. He gives up after a minute, and slumps back in his seat. Arthur watches as he digs into his pocket for his totem, bringing it out and flicking it into the air. The poker chip turns, blurring, the red running into the white and becoming almost pink, like red dye or blood in clean water. Eames catches it. It rests across his lifeline, stationary. ‘I don’t think we have much of a choice,’ he says.
He remembers meeting Eames for the first time, sunk deep in a dream. He was in Detroit, looking for a forger because the extractor he was working with was inept and had gotten their last one killed and for their next job they needed one. The forger, this time, found him.
Arthur dreamed, walking in circles down boulevards lined with dark ferny trees, listening for the sounds of traffic where there were none. There were some shops, along the badly-lit streets, but in all the doors the ‘closed’ signs had been flipped. People meandered like him around parked cars and gathered under streetlamps, drawn to the light.
The dream shifted, reformed; a café appeared. A waiter pulled the upside-down chairs from an outdoor table and set them on the ground and placed a menu on the table. Arthur paused, watching: the dream shed the ferny trees and the dim streets like a second skin, folding back into an open square. Piazza San Marco, unfamiliar, neat rows of round tables and canvas chairs, salt and pepper shakers and packets of sugar in copper tins.
‘This isn’t my dream,’ Arthur said out loud. A passing projection eyed him, dark-eyed and curious. A man stepped around it and seated himself opposite Arthur, pulling a box of matches out of a pocket.
‘Arthur,’ he said. He struck a match. The firelight hissed in his cupped hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you.’
Arthur did not shake the proffered hand. ‘Mr. Eames?’
The match sputtered. Went out. ‘Yes.’
(Later on a job in Italy they had ditched the rest of the team and gone to the Piazza and kissed in the shadow of the Basilica, sharp and brutal.
Looking back, Arthur is not sure what he had said when he’d pulled away for a breath. It could have been ‘harder’, or ‘again’. It could have been.
Even later, he’s not sure if it ever happened at all.)
Los Angeles International Airport is bright at night. Arthur stands at one of the floor length windows watching planes take off whilst he waits for Eames to find his second suitcase at the baggage handling belt. The airport is busier than usual, incoming passengers exhausted by the flight, outgoing frustrated with the long queues. There are delays because of the snow, aircraft struggling to find purchase on the tarmac runways. The sound of them coming down is muted through the thick glass windows of the airport, but watching them, Arthur will always imagine the noise of engines forcing the air apart.
He thinks of Robert, waiting for them in his office an hour’s drive away. They’d spent the majority of the last year training his mind to defend itself, and halfway through the meetings had dissolved into something more like casual dreamsharing, lucid and sordid on their tongues. The first time had been impulsive on Robert’s behalf, winding his hand around the nape of Arthur’s neck and kissing him, hot, heavy, in the dense dark dirt of an asphodel field. The next time was in the hands of Eames, deliberate, premeditated. Arthur had woken gasping for air, with the humid taste of Eames on the roof of his mouth; underneath that, Robert; and underneath that, white flowers, crushed.
Arthur presses a hand flat against the glass. Between his fingers, the strobe lights of a runway shiver, hazy through the falling snow. A hand folds itself over his, blots out the lights; Eames has found his luggage. ‘Time to go,’ he says.
Arthur turns his back on the runways. Later, as they hail a taxi outside the airport, he wonders: what are we really doing here? What are we looking for?
Robert Fischer’s office is in a high rise, close to the top, folded into a corner of the building. Arthur carried the PASIV device to the thirtieth floor. The corridor is empty but for them; Arthur rests his knuckles against the heavy wooden door. ‘Ready?’ he says.
Eames leans over, presses his mouth to Arthur’s temple. ‘Ready.’
Arthur knocks, and opens the door.
Robert’s at his desk, sifting through piles of watermarked paperwork. He looks older, different, a shadow of his father etched over his features. The familiar grandfather clock ticks behind him, pendulum rocking from side to side.
‘Long time no see,’ says Robert. ‘I suppose you’ve heard the news.’
Arthur locks the door. ‘How are you?’
Robert rolls up his sleeve as Arthur and Eames sit down, the PASIV between them. On Robert’s skin, the tiny bruised marks left behind from their last meeting are just barely visible, the same blue as the veins that stretch to his elbow. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says slowly. The gravity of the words flickers for a second behind his eyes, but he straightens and smiles, somewhat thinly. ‘But I’ll let you two see.’
Eames flicks the lid of the PASIV up, drawing out the IV lines. ‘You want to be both the dreamer and the subject?’ he asks.
Robert just pushes his wrist forward. ‘If you would.’
The dream is Los Angeles. It’s raining heavily; storms in central Los Angeles overflow the gutters easily, flooding the streets with refuse. The heat of the city keeps the rain from turning to snow, but Arthur knows that in another two weeks the cold will be too much for even the city to keep out.
Even though it’s too early for rush hour, the streets are densely crowded, cars and buses skidding across the wet asphalt. The rain comes down in sheets. Eames is across the road, shielded from the rain by a plastic umbrella. He raises a hand as a wave. Arthur responds, less enthusiastically. He hates this kind of weather, but he braces his shoulders against it and crosses the street over to Eames.
‘This is new,’ he says. He doesn’t add what they’re both thinking: that it’s too close to reality for comfort.
Eames goes to the curb and hails a cab. ‘Get in,’ he says, holding the door open. ‘He’s got to be around here somewhere.’
Arthur slides into the back seat with Eames. ‘Where to?’ asks the driver.
Struggling with his wet jacket, Eames shrugs. ‘Griffith Observatory, please.’
The cab rejoins the lane. Rain strikes the roof of it, the noise of it so close that Arthur feels that if he raised his hand, his fingers would get wet. He looks out of the window, searching for the familiar figure of Robert.
It takes longer than usual. It’s difficult to find subjects in traffic; individual projections have a way of circling, like ocean currents, moving in patterns that suggest an epicentre, but it’s harder to see these when there are nothing but high rises and moving vehicles around.
Finally, Eames spots him at an intersection, by a traffic light, barely five metres away. ‘Stop here,’ he tells the driver.
Arthur rummages in his pockets for loose change, throws a handful of bills at the driver and gets out of the car. Eames is ahead of him, but he lingers, frowning. ‘Something doesn’t seem right,’ he mutters.
Robert sees the taxi that they’d just vacated, and holds out a hand to hail it. As he does, he sees them, freezing mid-motion. Arthur approaches slowly, biting his lip. Robert backs away until his back is against the traffic light pole, eyes darting from Arthur to Eames and back.
‘Robert.’ Arthur reaches for him, touches his shoulder. Robert recoils, jerking away from him as though burned.
Arthur stops, hand still raised. Behind him, Eames says, so quietly that he can barely be heard over the sound of the traffic, ‘Careful.’
‘Robert,’ Arthur tries again. ‘It’s us.’
A flash of recognition. Robert stumbles backwards, to the edge of the gutter. ‘Wake me up,’ he cries. ‘Please.’
There’s a click behind Arthur that he recognises as a pistol slide racking back. He whirls around, grabbing the muzzle of the gun and forcing it down. ‘Wait, Eames-’
There’s a thud, a sound of tyres on wet ground. Arthur turns around, letting the gun go. The bonnet of the taxi is crumpled. A man lies dead in the rain.
Eames walks to the body, still holding onto the pistol. He kneels by the body and hisses through his teeth. ‘I’m going after him,’ he says, standing.
Arthur pushes past the meandering projections that are clustering around them. ‘Go.’
Eames looks at him, shaking his head, raising the gun. There’s a bang, and he’s gone.
Arthur stays a minute longer, eyes shut, listening. He thinks: what if I took a step each second, and at every step there was a clock, running a second slower than the last, so that no matter how many steps I take it will be like living the same moment over and over and over? He is suddenly exhausted. Already he has walked a hundred miles, and with every step Robert Fischer dies and Arthur remembers the look on his face, how he stared at the car, and waited.
Above. By the grandfather clock behind the desk, they were only under for three minutes. Across the table, Robert is trembling, almost imperceptibly, the shakes running up the IV line wrapped around his arm. ‘I don’t know,’ he saying, as Arthur rubs his eyes. ‘I don’t know what happened to me.’
Eames says quietly, ‘Did you dream recently?’
Robert rubs at his temples with his knuckles, anxiously, fervently. ‘That dream, just then. And a hotel, and snow, but I can’t remember…’
Arthur leans forwards, pulls Robert’s wrist towards him. His skin is clammy as though he’d just walked through the weather from the dream that they’d surfaced from, the muscles taut underneath. The tendons in his arm jump, fight for a second, before he relaxes and lets Arthur remove the tape and needle. Yellow oily drops of somnacin and blood smudge across the desk as the IV line pulls out of Robert’s vein.
‘I think that’s enough for today,’ he says. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’
Eames silently winds the IV lines back into the PASIV device, shutting the briefcase. Robert has stilled, regained his composure. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mutters. ‘Same time?’
‘We’ll come back for you,’ says Eames. ‘We’ll come back.’
Robert only nods. He says nothing as they leave.
His eyes are those of deer and foxes. He wears these eyes as both the hunter, and the hunted.
Mid-lesson. Six months ago they taught Robert how to dream within a dream; Eames dreamed the first level, a fjord referenced from a couple of pages of Milford Sound that they’d torn out of the National Geographic. They’d set up the PASIV device on the peak of a cliff, the water hundreds of metres below them. Eames kicked a pebble over the edge and it took almost ten seconds to reach the surface of the sound. ‘I’ll wait for you here,’ he said.
Robert had dreamed the next level, taking Arthur with him. It was a French studio apartment, lightly furnished, the shutters flung wide open to let in a cool breeze. It was about half past three in the afternoon. The floor wasn’t carpeted, just smooth floorboards that smell of beeswax and polish. There were dark purple flowers on the kitchen counter. ‘Irises,’ Robert said absently.
(It was the apartment of an old girlfriend, he said later. From his college days in Europe. It made Arthur kiss him harder, to see if he could find someone else inside Robert, if they’d left their taste behind with him. All he found was Eames, rough and heavy and saturated with the scent of tobacco. And something darker, simpler, a taste he could put only to himself.)
Robert put his totem on the table. It was a double-sided coin; a Peace silver dollar minted in 1921, two identical Lady Liberties on both sides. Arthur had a sudden urge to touch it, turn it over, look at both heads of the coin. It was one of those unreasonable desires, like jumping from high balconies, or eating poison or touching fire. I want to know what it’s like, he once told Eames. Eames had leaned in and licked a hot line from chin to mouth and they didn’t talk about it.
In this dream of a Parisian studio, Robert found a baguette and a jar of thick raspberry jam in the pantry whilst Arthur turned his red die around in his hand, rolling it across the counter. Robert tore the end of the baguette off and spread red jam across it, the color darker than what Arthur expected of raspberry jam. ‘When will we know?’ Robert asked. His teeth were stained red. As Arthur watched, he swallowed the last of the bread and his teeth were once again white. ‘Music?’
‘Edith Piaf, to be exact,’ Arthur said. He touched one of the irises, pulled it out of the vase. ‘You’ll know it once you hear it.’
Robert took the iris from him, as well as the rest from the vase. He bunched them together and folded them in half, snapping the stems. Sap ran over his fingers as he wrapped the flowers in a sheet of newspaper and threw them in the trash. He licked the sap off delicately, chlorophyll leaving traces of green on his skin like veins. Music began to play.
‘Non je ne regrette rien,’ said Robert, after a second.
Arthur reached over and took Robert’s hand, raising it to his mouth. ‘That’s our cue,’ he said.
Robert dragged a thumb over Arthur’s lips, still sticky with jam and sap. ‘Let’s not keep Eames waiting.’
After they all woke, when he thought Robert wasn’t looking, Eames took Arthur’s hand and pressed his mouth to the bloodied pinpricks left by the IV lead. He sucked, hard, and Arthur shuddered, arching.
Over Eames’ shoulder he caught Robert’s gaze.
Arthur thinks that in the eyes of some, they must seem to treat each other badly. Eames plays favorites without trying to hide it, not touching one or the other for weeks on end. Sometimes, he once said, I’m so fucking tired of people. Eames throws shit when he’s pissed and that time he’d thrown an ashtray. It had broken a window. Arthur didn’t see him for a week after that, and when he’d finally came back his lip was split and his hands wrecked from fighting. Arthur kissed his knuckles and let him be.
In the case of Robert; he is a man who pushes the other two around as though he’s trying to make them into what he wants. He needs them the most and they give him what he wants because, perversely, they want the same thing. He pulls at their skin, bites down, shapes them like they’re made of clay. They want this. He wants it more. He does this like he’s getting his hands dirty.
‘After all,’ he hissed once, hot and ragged against Arthur’s throat, ‘you were both mine to begin with.’
A habit of Robert’s is stamping his name on his possessions. Arthur caught Eames in the hotel bathroom once, damp hair, steam clouding the air like a warm fog. They kissed for minutes, until the mirror cleared and Arthur opened his eyes and saw a small dark bruise on Eames’ right shoulder.
He left an identical one on his left.
They try again.
As they fasten their leads Robert asks, ‘Do you still dream?’
Arthur hesitates, about to push the needle of the IV line into his skin. The mottled mark of yesterday is vivid against the older scars. ‘No,’ he says, answering for both of them. It had been over two years for him, more for Eames. Eames meets his eyes; they both remember. In one of their first dreamsharing session Arthur had uncovered Eames’ last dream and had been killed for it; but when they’d woken Eames had curled over, their IV lines tangling, and kissed him for the first time, languid and drunk on sleep.
Robert’s gaze is steady as he looks at them. ‘I see,’ he says.
The dream is a hotel- long anonymous corridors, dark furniture, dried flowers. Arthur enters the dream near a flight of stairs in the lobby. He scans the faces of the projections, looking for Robert and Eames; with a chime, the elevator doors across the lobby open and Eames steps out. He nods at Arthur.
They find Robert in the bar. It’s half-filled with projections, seated at the tables and eating. Arthur wants to halt and watch them, but Eames is impatient. Arthur’s desire is one of curiosity; projections fascinate him. For some people they are weak, merely going through the same motions as the rest. If Robert’s were as such they would merely be putting the food in their mouths and turn to watch the two men enter the bar, impassive. For all his inexperience, barely a year of dreamsharing, Robert’s projections are complex, highly aware. Their eyes fix on the two men entering the bar, and they are anything but passive until Robert looks up and recognises them. He smiles.
They sit down on either side of him. Robert is drinking water from a low glass. It’s raining outside. Arthur wets his lips. ‘Why did you bring us here, Robert?’
Robert takes a pen from his pocket and a napkin from the neat pile on the bar and writes: 528-491.
‘What is it?’ asks Eames. ‘Like a phone number.’
Robert shakes his head. ‘No. A combination.’
Arthur asks sharply, suddenly, ‘Where’s your totem, Robert?’
The champagne glasses hanging over their heads shiver, clinking against each other as though inhabited by small ghosts. Robert bites his lip; the glasses still. He reaches into his pockets, brings out nothing. ‘My wallet’s gone,’ he says. ‘They stole my wallet.’
Eames places his elbows on the bar. ‘Who were they?’
He says: ‘I think they wanted me to think my father loved me.’
Arthur stirs, focussing. He reaches for the napkin and Robert withdraws his hands as though he does not want to be touched. Robert continues, ‘I went to my father’s safe this morning.’
A pause. Arthur runs a finger over the numbers, feels the grooves in the thin folded paper. Eames prompts: ‘And?’
Robert smiles. It’s empty on his mouth. ‘Wrong combination.’
Robert says he has one more dream. He asks them to come back next week.
Arthur doesn’t touch him. He doesn’t touch Eames, either, back in their room in the hotel. He’s not who Eames wants right now, and he can’t be until Eames feels like it. Eames plays favorites and Arthur lets him. It’s easier for them both.
Neither of them say, ‘it isn’t our fault.’ The fault is undeniably Robert’s. Projections are mirrors. They give you yourself. Robert dreamed that two men who love him and whom he loves, brutally, would save him. In the end they are still him, and Robert Fischer is not strong enough to save himself.
Arthur sits on his bed and cleans his gun.
That night he dreams for the first time in years. It’s vague and blurred, an aberration that lasts only for minutes. It’s a dream of bodies shoved in a space between cloisters, a red-dyed evening pressing against their backs. It’s tight and airless and silent and involves two mouths clashing in a way that is feverish, needy, filthy. It’s only when he wakes that he remembers that Robert is a mile away and Eames is in the next bed, and wonders which one of them he had been dreaming of, or if it hadn’t been them at all.
They go back on a Tuesday night.
All throughout the week there have been constant reports in the news; speculations about Robert Fischer taking the helm of Fischer Morrow Enterprises, moving to Australia, selling the company’s shares. Eames is always the one to turn the television off. He and Arthur haven’t talked about inception; by now they’ve realized that the flight between Sydney and Los Angeles was more than merely transit. A look into the other passengers turns up blank.
In Robert’s office, the grandfather clock ticks. Before they go under, he says, ‘I’m going to dissolve the company.’
Arthur sucked on the skin inside his mouth, bit down. Eames asks, ‘Is that why they wanted?’
Robert looks at him steadily. He reaches over the desk, touches the trigger with a fingertip. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s what I want.’
The PASIV hisses. They sink back, veins flooding. Sleep draws them under.
The dream is of winter. They emerge in a hospital built like a fortress, in a valley between unnaturally high peaks. The place is empty of projections; Robert had requested a different sedative, one that allowed a higher level of consciousness and control. Projections rarely exist in such dreams where they are so close to the surface, nose and mouth just inches away from air.
Robert leads them to the hospital vault in the strongroom. The windows have been blown inwards; Arthur finds a spent bullet on the floor. The cold is numbing.
The vault is shut behind a pair of doors twice the width of a man, set into the wall of the strongroom. Robert is holding his chest, over his heart. His breathing is unsteady. ‘What is it?’ Arthur asks.
Robert drops his hand, shaking his head. ‘Nothing.’
He touches the doors. They crank open, parting with a pneumatic hiss. Behind them is a strange tiled room, but the contents are familiar; furniture from Maurice Fischer’s room, a hospital bed, IV drip hanging loosely. The bed is empty. There is a safe in the cabinet beside it, and it’s this safe that Robert walks towards and kneels before.
Eames rests a hand on Robert’s shoulder. Arthur lingers behind them.
What they both know: Robert Fischer will not open the safe.
They wait. Eventually there’s a small tug behind Arthur’s ribs, and he feels lighter, as though the vault around them has just shivered and a touch could dissolve it. The somnacin has run out. Robert doesn’t stir, but he touches the keys on the safe gently. His fingertips tremble.
He doesn’t open the safe.
An avalanche buries them.
All three are silent as they pack up the PASIV device. Arthur doesn’t look back when the door shuts behind them, but Eames does. ‘He’ll be alright,’ he says.
Arthur says, ‘I know.’
Inside the elevator, Arthur looks at an infinite number of Eames and himself. He keeps his eyes open; when Eames tilts his face towards his an infinite number of them kiss. They kiss for want of something more than what they can have. There is want and there is need and both are interchangeable. Two men kiss in an elevator. When the doors open again, they’re still kissing.
It’s what they want.
The hotel, five days after. Robert calls Arthur. Robert calls him, but does not call Eames, and asks him to come with him to go somewhere. He doesn’t say: it’s important. He doesn’t say: I need you. He says: please, Arthur.
Arthur says yes.
They drive for hours out of Los Angeles. Arthur doesn’t ask where they’re going because if Robert hasn’t told him yet, he isn’t planning to.
They drive until the skyscrapers have given way to suburbia which gives way to shorn white fields. Neither breaks the silence that you can find only when there are horizons staring from every side. It’s a harsh, aching silence. It drives right into the core of you.
Robert stops the car arbitrarily. There’s a country house in the distance, along with a few small trees laden with snow. The road is frozen over and the gravel and ice crunches under Arthur’s shoes as he gets out of the car after Robert.
‘What,’ he starts, then cuts off. Robert is holding his totem, turning it over with his thumb. Heads. Heads. Heads. It catches the dull winter light, more gray than silver. Robert draws his hand back.
Arthur reaches for him. ‘Don’t-’
Robert throws the coin, as hard as he can. It’s gone within seconds, disappearing into the field.
They both stare out into the empty field. The memory of the asphodel flowers of an old dream clenches and unclenches like a heartbeat, overlaid upon the field, bringing the unreal and the real together and wrenching it apart. White flowers in a hot summer field growing from white snow in the longest winter the west coast has seen in years.
The only sound is of Robert’s breathing. His shoulders heave.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.’
Arthur sighs, slipping a hand into his pocket, to remind himself that his red die is still there. ‘Too late now.’
A flock of winter wrens flies over them, headed the way they had come. Robert watches them go, and it’s only when they’re too small to be visible that he reaches inside his jacket and retrieves a gun. He holds it out to Arthur. ‘I was going to,’ he says quietly. ‘But now I’m not so sure.’
Arthur grips his red die harder, shaking his head. He doesn’t take the gun. ‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘I trust you.’
Robert laughs, shortly, bitterly. ‘The question is, can I trust myself?’ He drops the gun into the snow at their feet. It barely makes a sound. Already it is half-buried.
‘He didn’t love me,’ he says. ‘He never loved me.’ Then, softer, touching Arthur’s cheek, ‘Don’t let me dream,’ and again, ‘don’t let me dream,’ his fingers cold and bare and blue.
In three months time when the snow has melted, a farmer will find a small handgun lying by the side of the road. He’ll take it home and show his wife. He’ll never know that the new owner of a major energy conglomerate had stood here with a man who was neither friend nor foe and cried. My father loved me. My father did not love me. This, too, will never be known.
Halfway back to Los Angeles, Arthur asks Robert to stop the car and kisses him. Before they’d left the city this morning, he’d kissed Eames just as he kisses Robert now. When they return Robert will kiss Eames. They will all kiss. The horizons will be far off by then but they will cut into them like they are now. Out here time stretches, flows differently. This is a moment in time where two men kiss in a car in the middle of a country road. Perhaps this moment has already passed and is already a memory and all they are doing is remembering the same thing at the same time; perhaps they are already standing in a hotel room, three of them, kissing and fucking and turning, turning each other over as though they will find something new and interesting on the other side. Perhaps this moment will never end and they will be frozen here, or frozen there, one or two or three men doing something stupid and frantic and clumsy out of some raw craving, like hunger, like they are starving.
Give us this, they are saying, as they press their mouths together. Give us this one thing, and we will hunger no longer.
They wake to a field of asphodel.