inception: this love is a brutal one
this love is a brutal one
inception: arthur/eames, hinted arthur/mal
pg13, 2560 wc
syrian airfields, bars with sawdust on the floorboards, the smoke of burning poppies, the scrape of one unshaven jaw against another, all the times they watch each other die and the times they’re not there to.
a/n: apologies for the lack of updates. i realise it's been seven months since my last fic, an entire year since my last dbsk fic. i've been very busy lately and have a whole folder of wips that i just can't seem to finish right now, but i will sometime. thank you all for being so patient and supportive ♥
join/watch
this love is a brutal one
1. These days Arthur’s dreams are strange and hollow, in round rooms with square windows, a wooden chair. Ariadne dreams of art galleries and museums, glass boxes in narrow files, yellow letters and postage stamps placed in rows. Cobb dreams of train track sleepers, and the ghost of a wife. Yusuf dreams of dust storms and dark, bitter plants growing under fluorescent lights. Saito dreams of paper doors and the long aisles of libraries.
Eames dreams of dirty cities at the mouths of rivers, outdoor souqs where the air is almost too thick to breathe, and the smoke-stained interior of opium dens, dreams that Arthur knows like they’ve been carved into the back of his hand.
Arthur craves these dreams. In his own, he suffocates on the silence, and always wakes before he can die.
2. The reason why they hate and love: they’re on a job, in a three year old dream of Eames’, seated in a dingy bar with propaganda posters taped and peeling from the walls, cigarette butts overflowing from every ashtray, small moths and oil lamps on the ceiling. Arthur is drinking a chilled beer from a low glass. He’s watching the mark, and Eames, who is wearing the face and clothes of an Italian businessman. Eames hands the mark a card. Arthur takes a sip of the beer, feels the room swim. An overhead fan stutters and rotates slowly to a stop. Eames catches his eye from across the room, through a haze of grey smoke, and winks.
The mark is holding the card, frowning. He leans forward to ask Eames a question, not yet noticing the earthquake beneath them, shuddering through the floorboards and Arthur’s wrists. Arthur gets to his feet and picks his way towards Eames, who is smoking his tobacco pipe impatiently. He taps a blunt fingernail on the formica table, clenches a fist when the bar trembles. ‘Hurry up,’ he mouths, and Arthur closes a hand over his gun.
The projections shift, some of them getting up to block his way, drawn towards him with glasses still in their hands and cigarettes clenched between their teeth. Arthur shoves his way through them, glimpses Eames, no longer forging, just Eames, fights through the crowd, elbows a projection in the stomach and raises his gun. ‘Shoot,’ Eames shouts.
Arthur hesitates. A projection slams him to the floor in the moment he waits, and his gun skitters out of his hand, out of reach. There’s a knife hilt-deep in Arthur’s chest that kicks just once with a heartbeat before he wakes, out of breath.
The curtains of their hotel room are drawn, the heat stifling. Eames is still asleep. Their mark’s head lolls against the back of his chair. Arthur takes a shuddering breath, scraping his hands through his hair. He waits, he always waits, and Eames always takes too long.
3. They have a fight, just outside the warehouse, in the late afternoon when everyone else has already left. Eames throws the first punch, always hits first. Arthur just lets him. It’s like he’s watching this fight, from somewhere else, two young men in a small street, one of them with his back against the dirty brick wall and the other beating the shit out of him. One doesn’t know what to do with himself and the other isn’t even angry, but it’s what he does. It’s what they do. It’s what they do, when one shoves the other’s shoulders against the same wall he’d just beat him against, and kisses him until neither can breathe. It’s nothing new for them when one pulls away and straightens his clothes and wipes the blood from his mouth and walks away.
4. Eames hates the way Arthur’s shoulders look when his back is to him, the way the sunlight swallows them first.
5. Three days before Fischer boards the plane: Arthur is studying his maze from a book of sketches that Ariadne had made, alone in the warehouse. It’s raining outside, the temperature is low, and his jacket is too thin. His fingers are pale in the light filtering through the windows.
A door opens behind him. ‘Just you, love?’
Arthur pauses, turns a page. ‘Good morning, Eames.’
Eames circles around his chair and seats himself in the one opposite. The window to their lift, just higher than their heads, is slightly ajar and the rain is coming through the gap, wetting the floor. Neither of them move to close it.
‘Can I ask a question?’ says Eames. His eyes look darker in the early morning light.
‘Go ahead.’ Arthur closes the book, sets it on the coffee table between them.
Eames leans forward, pressing his fingertips to the glass of the table. ‘Share a dream with me.’
‘That’s not a question,’ says Arthur. His mouth has gone dry, and his bones are suddenly aching. It’s not a question, but it’s not a command either. It’s been years since they’ve last shared a dream, choked with sand and the fumes of slowly burning plants.
‘Five minutes,’ he says, and Arthur swallows.
6. Within the dream, it’s hot and dusty, the heat sinking under Arthur’s skin the way the coldness of the warehouse didn’t. Eames is three years younger, holding a long ribbed pipe that smells of something bittersweet. Arthur’s clothes pull at him, chafe at his shoulders. They’re in a space between buildings, folded between thick draped carpets that shimmer red under the sunlight that seeps through the threads. Arthur takes the pipe from Eames’ fingers and sucks on it, tastes opium. ‘I know this place,’ he says slowly. His words float away from him, ghostly white.
Eames slumps against the wall, wrinkling the stretch of fabric pinned to it. ‘Of course,’ he says.
7. They walk around in circles, winding around tiny stalls set up on wooden poles that sell boxes upon boxes of dark spices and nuts and herbs, westward where the sun crosses the river and hits them in the face. The river is always at high tide in this dream, crowded with clusters of houseboats with lanterns that Arthur has never seen lit. It circles the island, a ring of dirty brown water to separate them from the rest of the world. There’s nothing else out there, just the long desiccated plains of Eames’ mind and memories.
They find a boat. The electric motor sputters, but it works, and Eames pushes them away from the filthy bank of the river, where children selling wooden beads in strings around their necks look at them but don’t speak. Arthur drops a hand into the water. It doesn’t feel like anything.
‘Why are we here?’ he asks.
Eames rolls up his sleeves, cuts the engine. The water is still around them. ‘Do you still dream?’
Arthur sucks in a breath. He looks at Eames, but sees only the dusty Syrian airfield where Cobb had introduced them, bars with sawdust on the floorboards, broken overhead fans, the smoke of burning poppies, the scrape of one unshaven jaw against the other, all the times he’s watched Eames die and the times he wasn’t there to.
‘Sometimes,’ he says.
‘I dream of this place,’ Eames says, staring out at the empty desert. ‘I haven’t been able to dream of anything but this city for years.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ says Arthur. He feels sick, like someone has punched him and left him bruised inside. He looks in the water and sees the sky like a framed window, or a painting, like a dream with a chair where Arthur walks for hours searching for an exit and finding none. The water clenches in his hand.
‘I don’t know,’ Eames says, and Arthur turns back to him. For the first time since he’s known him, Eames looks defeated, like he’s been hunted and chased across half the world and come home only to be shot in the stomach. His hands are open, the nails dirty. ‘I don’t know,’ Eames says, and leans forward to fist a hand in Arthur’s hair and draw him closer.
They stay like that, two men in a boat on a river with no current, faces only inches apart, just watching each other, the sun dragging the desire out of their bodies and into the open of the dream as though desire was two weeds rooted between their ribs, stretching out for the other.
Give them a minute, these two men. Give them a minute and their desire will swallow each other.
8. The morning they leave for the airport: Eames is in the next room, number 256, packing a suitcase. Arthur can hear him through the walls, folding clothes and closing wardrobes. They haven’t spoken since the dream. He shuts his own suitcase, straightens his tie in the narrow bathroom mirror, and leaves the room.
9. Arthur kisses Ariadne because it’s nothing like kissing Eames.
10. Midflight: Arthur is the one to put Eames under. ‘Have a good sleep, Mr. Eames,’ he says. Eames just smiles.
A minute later they’ll all asleep, Ariadne fitted into a hotel chair, Cobb against the bed and Saito at the foot of it, Eames on the floor. Arthur’s alone, in a dream that was designed by Ariadne but lined with his own- in the picture frames, the shape of the ceiling, the carved wooden chair. The way his shadow spills on the floor.
He fixes the tableau in his mind, steps into the corridor, and locks the door behind him.
11. The hotel room stays with him even after they finish the job. Cobb goes home, Saito signs them each a cheque, Yusuf goes on holiday, and Ariadne says that she’ll stay with Cobb for a while. ‘Take care,’ Arthur tells her. She shakes his hand and says, ‘I’ll try.’
Eames and Arthur check into the same roadside motel. It’s small and clean, but either the architecture or the remnant of a moment in the Fischer job makes Arthur think of oil paintings of doorless rooms, the ghost of a woman drinking champagne and teaching him how to dream.
He eats dinner alone in the courtyard outside. The fresh air clears his head. He stays a little longer after he’s finished, just listening to the traffic from the nearby road, wondering if they’re being hunted. Cobol still wants him, Eames is wanted by half the corporations they’ve ever heard of, and of the three people Arthur has ever trusted, one has been dead for years, one has come home after years of wanting, and one is upstairs, with the lamp on, lying on his bed with his clothes still on and waiting to dream of a desert.
12. Eames lets him in. ‘What do you want?’
‘Five minutes,’ Arthur says. ‘Give me five minutes.’
13. They take five minutes. They’re in a small wooden boat, in the middle of a river, with an airfield in the distance by a souq containing a den containing the bodies of two young men who may or may not be sharing a dream, passing it between them like an illicit cigarette. Eames is wearing an Italian suit and smoking tobacco. The nearest projection is on the bank, and for the time being none of them are approaching.
‘Tell me why we’re here,’ says Eames.
‘We’re here because I want to dream again,’ Arthur says quietly. ‘When I sleep, all I can see is the room where I first learned how to steal things from the minds of other people.’
He slumps forward. The suit looks a size too big on him, like he’s twenty-one again and Cobb has just introduced him to Eames in the hangar of an airfield littered with the dry husks of locusts and rotted ears of wheat.
‘I just want to dream again,’ he says finally.
Eames is silent for a long time. Before he speaks, he reaches underneath the seat of the rowboat and pulls out a PASIV device, and rests it across his knees. He rolls his sleeve up to his elbow and bares his wrist. ‘One more,’ he says.
14. Another level down, Arthur dreams of a round room and a wooden chair and blank windows. Eames wanders around the dream, walking the circumference over and over with his hands in his pockets. The dream has never felt more like one; the only other person who had known about the room is long dead, and everything Arthur has ever known about this room is either carved with her memory or the emptiness it left. Eames runs a finger down the back of the chair and says, ‘You learned something beautiful in this room.’
Arthur remembers: cities that never existed, rivers like maps, hundreds of people walking down the roads of his mind, an ocean in a bowl, chandeliers clustered like bright fruit from the ceiling, opera stages.
Eames says: ‘Why do you dream of this room?’
Arthur says: ‘I dream of this room because I don’t want to dream of anything else.’
Eames says: ‘What don’t you want to dream of?’
Arthur is silent. What curls in his mouth, like the taste of cigar and gunpowder and the heat of a souq that never existed: I dreamed of you, and couldn’t stop. I don’t want to dream of you, but I’m still here with you, dreaming.
15. They’re down there for a long time. They talk.
16. When the somnacin runs out, they put a gun to their heads and fire. They wake up in a dark hotel room, with framed pictures on the walls and the bed not slept in. The PASIV is silent. They wrap the IV around their veins and dream again.
17. ‘Where are you off next?’ Arthur asks.
They’re in a Syrian airfield. To one side is a river, and sand, and fields of locust-ridden wheat. To the other is a city, carved with the memory of first meetings, a wooden boat, and a job gone wrong. Arthur never does know how Eames died that time, whether it was with a bullet to the skull or a knife in the stomach. All he knows is that they’re both alive, here, in the gap between the hangar door and its frame, Eames blowing smoke rings and the wind pulling them apart. Arthur thinks: I’m going to dream about this for the rest of my life.
He says: ‘Where are you going next?’
Eames shrugs absently. He waves cigar smoke away from his face. ‘I thought I’d hit the road. It’s been a while since I’ve been Stateside.’
‘When?’
Eames shields his eyes from the glare of the sun. ‘Tomorrow morning.’
Arthur says nothing.
Eames throws his cigar on the ground and stamps it out. ‘What? Aren’t you surprised?’ He pulls a revolver from his waistband and presses it to his head. ‘The somnacin’s run out. Excuse me, I’d better get packing. Are you coming?’
The hangar shudders. Its shadow wavers on the ground, sending a haze of dust into the air. Eames watches, gun still to his head.
The windows of the hangar explode outwards, one by one, smashing into the thick air. The walls are folding inwards, the metal crumpling. The hulls of nearby aircraft, wire ribcages, bend and snap, the planes turning inwards onto themselves. Eames still hasn't pulled the trigger, but his eyes are on Arthur and not the dream breaking down around them. Arthur reaches out and fists a hand in Eames’ shirt.
'Yeah,' he says. 'I'm coming.'
The ceiling caves in a minute later. It’s all they needed.
18. When they wake, Arthur can still taste the earthquakes on Eames’ tongue.
inception: arthur/eames, hinted arthur/mal
pg13, 2560 wc
syrian airfields, bars with sawdust on the floorboards, the smoke of burning poppies, the scrape of one unshaven jaw against another, all the times they watch each other die and the times they’re not there to.
a/n: apologies for the lack of updates. i realise it's been seven months since my last fic, an entire year since my last dbsk fic. i've been very busy lately and have a whole folder of wips that i just can't seem to finish right now, but i will sometime. thank you all for being so patient and supportive ♥
join/watch
this love is a brutal one
1. These days Arthur’s dreams are strange and hollow, in round rooms with square windows, a wooden chair. Ariadne dreams of art galleries and museums, glass boxes in narrow files, yellow letters and postage stamps placed in rows. Cobb dreams of train track sleepers, and the ghost of a wife. Yusuf dreams of dust storms and dark, bitter plants growing under fluorescent lights. Saito dreams of paper doors and the long aisles of libraries.
Eames dreams of dirty cities at the mouths of rivers, outdoor souqs where the air is almost too thick to breathe, and the smoke-stained interior of opium dens, dreams that Arthur knows like they’ve been carved into the back of his hand.
Arthur craves these dreams. In his own, he suffocates on the silence, and always wakes before he can die.
2. The reason why they hate and love: they’re on a job, in a three year old dream of Eames’, seated in a dingy bar with propaganda posters taped and peeling from the walls, cigarette butts overflowing from every ashtray, small moths and oil lamps on the ceiling. Arthur is drinking a chilled beer from a low glass. He’s watching the mark, and Eames, who is wearing the face and clothes of an Italian businessman. Eames hands the mark a card. Arthur takes a sip of the beer, feels the room swim. An overhead fan stutters and rotates slowly to a stop. Eames catches his eye from across the room, through a haze of grey smoke, and winks.
The mark is holding the card, frowning. He leans forward to ask Eames a question, not yet noticing the earthquake beneath them, shuddering through the floorboards and Arthur’s wrists. Arthur gets to his feet and picks his way towards Eames, who is smoking his tobacco pipe impatiently. He taps a blunt fingernail on the formica table, clenches a fist when the bar trembles. ‘Hurry up,’ he mouths, and Arthur closes a hand over his gun.
The projections shift, some of them getting up to block his way, drawn towards him with glasses still in their hands and cigarettes clenched between their teeth. Arthur shoves his way through them, glimpses Eames, no longer forging, just Eames, fights through the crowd, elbows a projection in the stomach and raises his gun. ‘Shoot,’ Eames shouts.
Arthur hesitates. A projection slams him to the floor in the moment he waits, and his gun skitters out of his hand, out of reach. There’s a knife hilt-deep in Arthur’s chest that kicks just once with a heartbeat before he wakes, out of breath.
The curtains of their hotel room are drawn, the heat stifling. Eames is still asleep. Their mark’s head lolls against the back of his chair. Arthur takes a shuddering breath, scraping his hands through his hair. He waits, he always waits, and Eames always takes too long.
3. They have a fight, just outside the warehouse, in the late afternoon when everyone else has already left. Eames throws the first punch, always hits first. Arthur just lets him. It’s like he’s watching this fight, from somewhere else, two young men in a small street, one of them with his back against the dirty brick wall and the other beating the shit out of him. One doesn’t know what to do with himself and the other isn’t even angry, but it’s what he does. It’s what they do. It’s what they do, when one shoves the other’s shoulders against the same wall he’d just beat him against, and kisses him until neither can breathe. It’s nothing new for them when one pulls away and straightens his clothes and wipes the blood from his mouth and walks away.
4. Eames hates the way Arthur’s shoulders look when his back is to him, the way the sunlight swallows them first.
5. Three days before Fischer boards the plane: Arthur is studying his maze from a book of sketches that Ariadne had made, alone in the warehouse. It’s raining outside, the temperature is low, and his jacket is too thin. His fingers are pale in the light filtering through the windows.
A door opens behind him. ‘Just you, love?’
Arthur pauses, turns a page. ‘Good morning, Eames.’
Eames circles around his chair and seats himself in the one opposite. The window to their lift, just higher than their heads, is slightly ajar and the rain is coming through the gap, wetting the floor. Neither of them move to close it.
‘Can I ask a question?’ says Eames. His eyes look darker in the early morning light.
‘Go ahead.’ Arthur closes the book, sets it on the coffee table between them.
Eames leans forward, pressing his fingertips to the glass of the table. ‘Share a dream with me.’
‘That’s not a question,’ says Arthur. His mouth has gone dry, and his bones are suddenly aching. It’s not a question, but it’s not a command either. It’s been years since they’ve last shared a dream, choked with sand and the fumes of slowly burning plants.
‘Five minutes,’ he says, and Arthur swallows.
6. Within the dream, it’s hot and dusty, the heat sinking under Arthur’s skin the way the coldness of the warehouse didn’t. Eames is three years younger, holding a long ribbed pipe that smells of something bittersweet. Arthur’s clothes pull at him, chafe at his shoulders. They’re in a space between buildings, folded between thick draped carpets that shimmer red under the sunlight that seeps through the threads. Arthur takes the pipe from Eames’ fingers and sucks on it, tastes opium. ‘I know this place,’ he says slowly. His words float away from him, ghostly white.
Eames slumps against the wall, wrinkling the stretch of fabric pinned to it. ‘Of course,’ he says.
7. They walk around in circles, winding around tiny stalls set up on wooden poles that sell boxes upon boxes of dark spices and nuts and herbs, westward where the sun crosses the river and hits them in the face. The river is always at high tide in this dream, crowded with clusters of houseboats with lanterns that Arthur has never seen lit. It circles the island, a ring of dirty brown water to separate them from the rest of the world. There’s nothing else out there, just the long desiccated plains of Eames’ mind and memories.
They find a boat. The electric motor sputters, but it works, and Eames pushes them away from the filthy bank of the river, where children selling wooden beads in strings around their necks look at them but don’t speak. Arthur drops a hand into the water. It doesn’t feel like anything.
‘Why are we here?’ he asks.
Eames rolls up his sleeves, cuts the engine. The water is still around them. ‘Do you still dream?’
Arthur sucks in a breath. He looks at Eames, but sees only the dusty Syrian airfield where Cobb had introduced them, bars with sawdust on the floorboards, broken overhead fans, the smoke of burning poppies, the scrape of one unshaven jaw against the other, all the times he’s watched Eames die and the times he wasn’t there to.
‘Sometimes,’ he says.
‘I dream of this place,’ Eames says, staring out at the empty desert. ‘I haven’t been able to dream of anything but this city for years.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ says Arthur. He feels sick, like someone has punched him and left him bruised inside. He looks in the water and sees the sky like a framed window, or a painting, like a dream with a chair where Arthur walks for hours searching for an exit and finding none. The water clenches in his hand.
‘I don’t know,’ Eames says, and Arthur turns back to him. For the first time since he’s known him, Eames looks defeated, like he’s been hunted and chased across half the world and come home only to be shot in the stomach. His hands are open, the nails dirty. ‘I don’t know,’ Eames says, and leans forward to fist a hand in Arthur’s hair and draw him closer.
They stay like that, two men in a boat on a river with no current, faces only inches apart, just watching each other, the sun dragging the desire out of their bodies and into the open of the dream as though desire was two weeds rooted between their ribs, stretching out for the other.
Give them a minute, these two men. Give them a minute and their desire will swallow each other.
8. The morning they leave for the airport: Eames is in the next room, number 256, packing a suitcase. Arthur can hear him through the walls, folding clothes and closing wardrobes. They haven’t spoken since the dream. He shuts his own suitcase, straightens his tie in the narrow bathroom mirror, and leaves the room.
9. Arthur kisses Ariadne because it’s nothing like kissing Eames.
10. Midflight: Arthur is the one to put Eames under. ‘Have a good sleep, Mr. Eames,’ he says. Eames just smiles.
A minute later they’ll all asleep, Ariadne fitted into a hotel chair, Cobb against the bed and Saito at the foot of it, Eames on the floor. Arthur’s alone, in a dream that was designed by Ariadne but lined with his own- in the picture frames, the shape of the ceiling, the carved wooden chair. The way his shadow spills on the floor.
He fixes the tableau in his mind, steps into the corridor, and locks the door behind him.
11. The hotel room stays with him even after they finish the job. Cobb goes home, Saito signs them each a cheque, Yusuf goes on holiday, and Ariadne says that she’ll stay with Cobb for a while. ‘Take care,’ Arthur tells her. She shakes his hand and says, ‘I’ll try.’
Eames and Arthur check into the same roadside motel. It’s small and clean, but either the architecture or the remnant of a moment in the Fischer job makes Arthur think of oil paintings of doorless rooms, the ghost of a woman drinking champagne and teaching him how to dream.
He eats dinner alone in the courtyard outside. The fresh air clears his head. He stays a little longer after he’s finished, just listening to the traffic from the nearby road, wondering if they’re being hunted. Cobol still wants him, Eames is wanted by half the corporations they’ve ever heard of, and of the three people Arthur has ever trusted, one has been dead for years, one has come home after years of wanting, and one is upstairs, with the lamp on, lying on his bed with his clothes still on and waiting to dream of a desert.
12. Eames lets him in. ‘What do you want?’
‘Five minutes,’ Arthur says. ‘Give me five minutes.’
13. They take five minutes. They’re in a small wooden boat, in the middle of a river, with an airfield in the distance by a souq containing a den containing the bodies of two young men who may or may not be sharing a dream, passing it between them like an illicit cigarette. Eames is wearing an Italian suit and smoking tobacco. The nearest projection is on the bank, and for the time being none of them are approaching.
‘Tell me why we’re here,’ says Eames.
‘We’re here because I want to dream again,’ Arthur says quietly. ‘When I sleep, all I can see is the room where I first learned how to steal things from the minds of other people.’
He slumps forward. The suit looks a size too big on him, like he’s twenty-one again and Cobb has just introduced him to Eames in the hangar of an airfield littered with the dry husks of locusts and rotted ears of wheat.
‘I just want to dream again,’ he says finally.
Eames is silent for a long time. Before he speaks, he reaches underneath the seat of the rowboat and pulls out a PASIV device, and rests it across his knees. He rolls his sleeve up to his elbow and bares his wrist. ‘One more,’ he says.
14. Another level down, Arthur dreams of a round room and a wooden chair and blank windows. Eames wanders around the dream, walking the circumference over and over with his hands in his pockets. The dream has never felt more like one; the only other person who had known about the room is long dead, and everything Arthur has ever known about this room is either carved with her memory or the emptiness it left. Eames runs a finger down the back of the chair and says, ‘You learned something beautiful in this room.’
Arthur remembers: cities that never existed, rivers like maps, hundreds of people walking down the roads of his mind, an ocean in a bowl, chandeliers clustered like bright fruit from the ceiling, opera stages.
Eames says: ‘Why do you dream of this room?’
Arthur says: ‘I dream of this room because I don’t want to dream of anything else.’
Eames says: ‘What don’t you want to dream of?’
Arthur is silent. What curls in his mouth, like the taste of cigar and gunpowder and the heat of a souq that never existed: I dreamed of you, and couldn’t stop. I don’t want to dream of you, but I’m still here with you, dreaming.
15. They’re down there for a long time. They talk.
16. When the somnacin runs out, they put a gun to their heads and fire. They wake up in a dark hotel room, with framed pictures on the walls and the bed not slept in. The PASIV is silent. They wrap the IV around their veins and dream again.
17. ‘Where are you off next?’ Arthur asks.
They’re in a Syrian airfield. To one side is a river, and sand, and fields of locust-ridden wheat. To the other is a city, carved with the memory of first meetings, a wooden boat, and a job gone wrong. Arthur never does know how Eames died that time, whether it was with a bullet to the skull or a knife in the stomach. All he knows is that they’re both alive, here, in the gap between the hangar door and its frame, Eames blowing smoke rings and the wind pulling them apart. Arthur thinks: I’m going to dream about this for the rest of my life.
He says: ‘Where are you going next?’
Eames shrugs absently. He waves cigar smoke away from his face. ‘I thought I’d hit the road. It’s been a while since I’ve been Stateside.’
‘When?’
Eames shields his eyes from the glare of the sun. ‘Tomorrow morning.’
Arthur says nothing.
Eames throws his cigar on the ground and stamps it out. ‘What? Aren’t you surprised?’ He pulls a revolver from his waistband and presses it to his head. ‘The somnacin’s run out. Excuse me, I’d better get packing. Are you coming?’
The hangar shudders. Its shadow wavers on the ground, sending a haze of dust into the air. Eames watches, gun still to his head.
The windows of the hangar explode outwards, one by one, smashing into the thick air. The walls are folding inwards, the metal crumpling. The hulls of nearby aircraft, wire ribcages, bend and snap, the planes turning inwards onto themselves. Eames still hasn't pulled the trigger, but his eyes are on Arthur and not the dream breaking down around them. Arthur reaches out and fists a hand in Eames’ shirt.
'Yeah,' he says. 'I'm coming.'
The ceiling caves in a minute later. It’s all they needed.
18. When they wake, Arthur can still taste the earthquakes on Eames’ tongue.