Fic: On Tilt (Inception) 1/2
Credit: Various sappy movies, New York Times scent notes, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, WSJ (toasted ice cream ftw), The Economist on crappy Russian hotels, and finally, Phil Gordon & team-inspired poker writing.
Beta: Thanks so much to writteninhaste.
*
The dreamsharing project was shared by the military and the CIA, but Cobb had agreed to look into some domestic subconscious security for an international firm. LVMH wanted company-wide subconscious security, and their team was given a makeshift office on Madison Avenue while they were working, only a few streets down from the department store.
One afternoon, Cobb dropped two envelopes on his desk, prompting Arthur to look up. "What are these?"
"Invitations to the designer event at Bergdorf Goodman tonight," Cobb said. "Their office is expecting us, so come by with me, at least for charity?"
Arthur leaned back in his chair. "And you knew I'd be dying to," he checked the invitation, "see an exhibition on Beauty in Vogue, instead of data mining 500 pages of financial trade data looking for what you've told me to?"
"You admit that when you put it like that, it sounds oddly appealing," Cobb said.
At the store that evening, Arthur accepted a champagne flute and had just donated a few nice and gently-used scarves to the NYC WTC Memorial foundation, standing in front of the Vogue exhibition. He had seen many executives in the company walking around that evening, mingling with design celebrities, and some of the SVPs had pulled Cobb aside to compliment his work.
It was held inside a department store; perfumes surrounded them, and the boxes on display looked beautiful enough to be in a museum. Arthur walked out of the Chavret aisle, just as a voice behind him asked, "Excuse me, did you lose something?"
Arthur looked up. A man walked up next to him; he had placed a wallet on the counter. Arthur checked his pocket.
"I think that's my wallet. " He reached for it, but the other man moved his hand. "How did you find that?"
"I'm an international pick pocket," he answered seriously, and then his lips quirked upwards at Arthur's unimpressed look. "So how do I know this is yours? You'll have to tell me your name first, stranger."
Arthur gave him a cool look. "Arthur," he said mildly.
The man leaned against the counter and checked the wallet briefly for identification, glancing up at Arthur, then handed it back to him. "Guess it's you after all," he said lightly.
"Thanks," Arthur said, but the man was already smiling distantly at him and walking away; he disappeared into the mingling crowd of executives and design celebrities. Arthur put it in his wallet slowly in his pocket, and then walked towards the crowd, saying polite hellos to people he recognized from various security meetings. He found him again near the cocktail tables, chatting with one fo the SVPs of strategy that he had been briefly introduced to. Arthur hesitated, looking away; but the man noticed him and met his eyes.
"What's the matter?" he said, and grinned suddenly, infectiously. "Did you lose it again?"
Arthur was going to say something inane like I didn't catch your name, but fortunately the executive next to him recognized him and nodded. "Arthur, hi. You two have met? Eames, Arthur is liaising on one of our technology initiatives."
"Nice to meet you," Arthur said.
Eames leaned back. "So you'll be with our executive office for the next few weeks?" he said, glancing away.
"I-yes," Arthur said, just as the SVP excused himself to talk to Cobb, who was walking in their direction, presumably to talk quietly about the schedule next week where they would work on building the militarization. "We're studying some chemical effects on the perfumes, actually, by one of the LVMH developers." Scent forgeries were notoriously hard in dreams.
Eames' mouth twitched a little in amusement. "That's Nil by Hermes and Versace's signature last year, wasn't it?" he said, leaning away to take copy and putting it carelessly on the counter. Amazing, he did know the perfume industry-but there was an undercurrent of insolence in his tone, like he was used to people boring him terribly; condescension and cynicism twisted at the corner of his mouth.
Arthur looked up at him as he turned away. "Thanks," he said, and his heartbeat jumped a little as their hands brushed; he looked at him more sharply, feeling the jump of-adrenaline? attraction? mystery. Eames' shirt was unbuttoned slightly, and there was a dark corner of a tattoo on his collarbone, a shadow of rough stubble on his jaw. Eames looked away impersonally, his eyes mocking and amused, and wow, Arthur couldn't believe they'd let someone this rude onto the sales floor of a luxury department store.
*
He went back twice to Bergdorf Goodman that week, at the same time in the afternoon. Perfume sales girls smiled at him and said, "oh, this just transports you with loveliness, doesn't it?" Arthur bought a plush, crushed-roses scent for Mal. He didn't see Eames again.
*
The next Monday, Arthur ducked out of the pouring rain and stepped into the elevator in the lobby of the LVMH offices, 7:15AM sharp; the doors were about to close when someone dashed in and jarred them.
"Oh, sorry, hold on-" Arthur said, grabbing the elevator doors, and then Eames closed his umbrella in a rather obnoxious shiver of water. "Sorry about that, terribly late for a meeting, thanks," he said. His hair was slightly damp and his tie was slightly sloppy and his eyes were very, very bright. He was impossibly handsome.
He probably doesn't remember me, Arthur thought, about to look away. Eames tilted his head at him and said, "It's Arthur, right?"
"Yes," Arthur said, slowly. "I didn't know you worked in this building."
"The strategy office is on the 23rd floor," said Eames lightly. He was holding a large packet of perfume industry copy. He caught Arthur's glance and said, "this is for the new Dior line."
Arthur took the copy. The byline read, She can't wait to taste him like a Hershey's kiss. "Must be nice," he said.
"I've actually become increasingly certain the marketing departments of Dior, Guerlain and Yves Saint Laurent have all got the intelligence of a single mollusk at low tide," said Eames in a neutral tone, looking up at the numbers in the elevator, hands in pockets.
Arthur looked at some point on the wall and bit his lip, suppressing a smile. The elevator slowed. "I thought the copy you gave me last week was nice," he said, sneaking a glance at Eames. "Thanks."
The doors opened. Eames looked at Arthur and began to smile, small, slow, suggestive. Then he winked at him and left, walking quickly through the glass office doors to catch his meeting.
What a flirt, Arthur thought. He was so obvious. Arthur usually hated when people acted like that.
*
It had started maybe two years ago when the military really started putting resources into dream technology. Mal and Dom were in academia then, starting research into third and fourth-level high-depth dreaming, but placed it aside when the networking technology projects had gained some success. The office was constantly bustling with activity now, and Arthur would spend hours with Mal talking about kicks, circuits and thresholds and paradoxes, before working with Cobb on architecture.
"So that gorgeous British strategy associate who has been ignoring us all as we sit in on company meetings," Mal said to him, smiling. "I think he has a bit of a soft spot for you."
"Don't say those things," Arthur said, "Can you hand me those kick equations?" except it was a little true, and the next day when they were getting coffee across the street Mal made an excuse to go back to the office; she had forgotten her purse. The door opened and Eames and another man walked out.
"I'll talk to her about the build then," Eames was saying to him, then, "Oh, hi, Arthur," almost reflexively.
"Hi, excuse me," Arthur said, stepping back. The other man glanced at Arthur, touched Eames' elbow briefly and said, "Talk to you tonight, then," and walked away.
"A friend of yours?" Arthur said, leaning against the outside of the building wall.
"Colleague," Eames said. "How are you?" He took a sip of coffee and settled in companionably next to him.
"Just waiting for a coworker," Arthur said.
"It's a nice place to wait," Eames said. He leaned against the building, looked out onto the street, and began folding a few crumpled dollar bills. Arthur asked him a few leading questions about his work and the office, which he answered politely while interjecting amused commentary about the daytime New York streets; Eames watched a guy on a cellphone fidgeting, streetworkers bantering, read the states of the markets in the eyes of the businessmen walking outside, as if New York was a sitcom just for him. Then he glanced at Arthur and looked a little thoughtful.
"So tell me, Arthur," he said, slouching, "Are you determined never to smile again?" His voice was low and amused and attractive. He was flirting with him. Arthur looked out onto the street.
"Tell me, do you make a habit of being so casual about work all the time?" he said, "and fidget with notes? Or is this just for fun?"
"These?" Eames said, indicating the dollar bills he was folding and unfolding in his hands. "This is definitely just for fun, at least between my colleagues. A decision resolving game, really.
"How do you play?" Arthur paused as Eames explained the rules, which appeared to be a mixture of statistical reasoning and inference. "Oh. That sounds straightforward. That's um. Two players, that's-binomial cumulative probability or something similar, isn't it?"
"Math was never my strong suit," Eames said. "Want to try it then?"
"What stakes are we playing for?" Arthur said, pulling a dollar bill out of his pocket.
"What stakes would you prefer?" Eames said reasonably.
"Winner for a drink tonight?"
"You're a bit confident aren't you," Eames said, smiling, and then he beat him five times in liar's poker. "Better be nice," he added archly, as he walked away.
Mal came back a few minutes afterwards. "Miss me?" she said lightly.
"I'm $5 poorer thanks to you," Arthur said. "Plus opportunity cost," he added, but without heat.
That evening, he met Eames at a bar close to his apartment, a bar where a jazz band played some weekday nights. They didn't talk about work. They talked instead about places they had been and wanted to go, about things they had done. They talked about art, and Eames talked about a brief stint helping a curator identify art forgeries abroad; Arthur told him about visiting endless amounts of museums for work. He heard himself saying more about himself than he had in a long time, as Eames looked at him, asked questions and talked away quite pleasantly about nothing at all. Arthur slowly noticed their proximity; the tension slowly drained out of him, the jazz combo sound seemed to flow a little richer. He licked the salt on his drink and felt the sharp warm sting.
They talked, for hours, mathematical easy beats winding in his head, before getting out and walking along the bright crowded streets; they talked quietly, bantering about the jazz-age music, Eames bringing everything he said to its ridiculous end, goading and kidding. He loved hearing gossip, social, political, sexual, loved looking at all the passersby on the streets and in the shifting light of the streetlamps his eyes looked hazel-gray, then blue.
Eventually Arthur put his hand on the railing of a brownstone in a small side street in a different residential neighborhood. "so thanks for telling me about that place," Eames joked as he leaned against the railing, "they weren't half bad," and Arthur smiled at him and walked two steps down and kissed him.
"what the hell is that?" he added, laughing, breaking the kiss upstairs as he unlocked the door to his apartment
"Versace," Eames said, ducking his head and feigning embarrassment, "had to wear it for work." The scent was all over the place. It was like walking through a French pastry shop next to a Thai spice market-gunpowder, hot cocoa, blood orange peel, marshmallows, a little bit of DDT. It was mesmeric.
*
Two weeks later.
So it turned out that being in the executive office of a international luxury goods conglomerate, even while undercover while sneaking around doing other slightly illegal things, was boring as all hell, and Eames got his amusement where he could.
"I can't believe you actually ended up taking the LVMH job," Yusuf said, as they were smoking outside a pizza-joint place in a colorful section of Harlem. "How was it? I assume all went well, since you're still in one piece?"
"It was mind-numbing," Eames said, as Yusuf laughed at him. "We finished the last of the extractions last week and the guy on point, Lewis, had heat for not finding the militarization they had. Dumb luck no one got caught in that one, really."
"And you're going to be travelling again?"
Eames shook his head. "Can't. Spence wants me in New York for a political extraction in a month."
"Ah, Spence," Yusuf said. "You still working with that man?"
"He has a new rather brilliant architect apparently."
"Well. At least you came out LVMH with a few decent shirts then," Yusuf yawned. "Though to be honest I can't believe the bouncer didn't kick you out of that place-hey," as Eames rolled his eyes and sprayed some of the perfume samples he still had left on his neck as a joke. Yusuf ducked.
"Guerlain's Mitsuoko-it's a classic female fragrance, lemony florals," Eames teased.
Yusuf made a face and said, "Ugh."
That evening, the door slammed open and Yusuf burst in. "Eames. Hey. Where can I get this shit?!"
In the afternoon, in his chemistry research lab uptown, he'd no less than five girls murmur delightedly in his ear as they leaned in to smell his neck.
*
A month passed. The first time Eames spent the night with Arthur, he accidentally moved his arm underneath Arthur's pillow, and Arthur rolled over and, still half-asleep, knocked him unconscious and almost dislocated his shoulder.
*
In the dark evening light under the sweep of bridges and industrial warehouses, the doorman eyed Ariadne. "Can I see your ID?" he said. Past him, in a darkened corner of the room, a beautiful woman stripped off her jeans to reveal black lace panties and leaned over to play pool. Ariadne fumbled with her purse.
Inside, the cards club had scuffed floors, scarred tables and walls that were dark and papered over with dozens of local signs; the atmosphere was relaxed and disreputable. There was no sunlight. It looked like a bar, like a place for thieves and poets and slumming traders. Ariadne passed a table, picked up a poker chip and tried to flip it, almost dropping it.
She had tumbled into the dreamsharing business a few months ago with an entirely accidental encounter with a young extractor, and he had been amused when he heard of her move. "So you talked to Spence's team?" he had said. "Take the job; they're the best-pulled off some giant heist from the Indian government a few months back, I think. They've got a forger. Don't imagine it'll be any fun, though; the extractor's very serious."
"What's a forger?" she had asked. But he had only grinned. "you'll find out, won't you? good luck and don't get hurt."
She waited for a while and watched the tables, then leaned into the railing and checked her watch. It was past ten; her contact should be here by now, and then she saw him across the room.
"Ariadne," Zaytsev said, walking over and shaking her hand. "Thanks for waiting. We just need a few minutes for the lead to come in." He glanced over, leaning to watch. "This the 5-1 game?" Ariadne nodded.
The players were the same. Around were several men with army demeanors, a man in a banker's tie, a slightly drunk player whom she was pretty sure worked in the dreamsharing business, and a slouching grey-eyed man who had said nothing about himself and had the best memory for tells among them. Now he was carelessly doing chip tricks from his stack, idly backspinning and riffling chips one-handed, in a way that spoke of countless hours at a poker table trying to stave off boredom watching other hands play. He was watching his opponent in the hand now, a strange combination of slouching laziness and watchfulness in his eyes.
The flop had been A-A-2, the turn 2, the river 2. In every round, he had raised. The banker had re-raised and the man had always called, except for the river, when he had raised again. The banker was now looking at the board, thinking about what to do next.
The man broke the silence in a slow, relaxed tone. "You have an ace? I thought so. I started 3-2 off."
The banker looked up at him, startled, and frowned. He didn't believe him.
The man leaned back and smirked. "Oh, that frown is a tell. I put you at Ace-King or Ace-Queen then."
"Excuse me, this is a live hand," the banker said tightly, "and we don't talk about the cards on the table here."
"You know," the man answered breezily, "I just won a side bet. I pegged you for straight-laced attitude just by looking at you. I could tell when I sat down I'd be locked. Are you going to fold? Good laydown."
The banker went red as he raised.
"I should probably stand off but," and the other man raised him again, aggressively. "I guess you want to donate. Raise if you've got pocket aces."
"I raise, asshole."
The other man called him immediately.
The banker flipped over Ace-King, the other man flipped over 3-2.
"Nut flush no good on backdoor quad deuces," he said breezily, and the banker lost it and shoved the table, jarring the other players, as he stood up,.
"What the hell were you doing betting and raising me the entire way with that absolute fucking trash, you fool?!" He winged his cards violently at the man, who ducked. The floorman, hearing the commotion, came in and escorted him out, causing a scene and swearing all the while the man played with his pot, ducked his head and laughed and laughed.
"Don't you know? I've got good karma," he called after him. "I've got adjusted odds to win with 3-2 offsuit. I can't believe you just called me with only Ace-King suited," as the other man was dragged out screaming profanities at him.
"Jeez," he said to the rest of the table, flipping a chip from his pot with an easy and casual movement, "that guy should really take it easy, he could pop a blood vessel or something."
*
Zaytsev walked over to the table, looking annoyed. "Seriously, Eames, do you ever get your face punched in or do you want to?" he said.
"Not enormously, no," the dark-haired man-Eames- said, "but carry on. Who's this?"
"This is our new architect, Ariadne," Zaytsev said with gritted teeth.
"Pleased to meet you," Ariadne said, as Eames glanced at her diffidently.
"Are you older than 17?" he said. "This isn't a bloody picnic." He cashed in his chips and they walked over to the booth, where another man was already sitting with a suitcase.
What a jerk. "I'm 23," Ariadne said defensively. Eames side-eyed her, slouching even further at the table.
"Well, I assume you've met Spence then, who is chronically late," he said.
Akua Spence was the lead on the project, in his mid-thirties, dark-haired and handsome in a reserved way. "Sorry I got held up," he said carelessly, nodding at Ariadne. "Nice to see you, Ariadne. You've met Eames? I'd like you two to work together on the build doing the run-throughs."
"Great," Eames said tightly. "What are we doing, then?" he said, as Zaytsev handed him an unopened deck of cards. He snapped it with a clean practiced motion, broke it, put the two halves flat on the table and executed what appeared to be a flawless Scarne shuffle. Then he handed it to Ariadne to cut.
"One game of no-limit for chemist duty rotation. Ariadne, you're out, but can you hand me the designs you've started?"
"Oh, sure," Ariadne said, handing the cards back and ducking under the table to grab her notebook. Eames leaned over to look, riffling the cards again neatly and then in an sloppy overhand shuffle with easy assured movements of his hands. When he gave them to Ariadne they were in the same original order. She glanced up, startled; fixing the deck through a cut was one of the hardest gambits in card-sharping.
"You lousy bastard," Z said, shoving Eames and doing a real shuffle of the cards. "Will you ever be serious?"
They started talking about the job as they dealt cards. Ariadne watched as they raised and re-raised each other aggressively: check, bet, check-raise, Spence re-raised to all-in and Eames immediately folded on the river.
"What did you have, Eames?" Spence said, gloating a little, tossing up double aces and marking the remaining dates off the calendar. "Tens? Queens?"
"No," Eames said, leaning forward and flipping his cards. "Kings. Come on, let's go see if you're as good as he says you are, shall we?" he said to Ariadne. They walked up the stairs to the apartment above the club. A few chairs were set up, and Ariadne unlocked the closet and set up the PASIV.
They started doing runthroughs the next week. Ariadne carefully showed Eames the train that she built on the tracks outside the building, providing a convenient escape route near the station.
"There's a secret planted here and we should be able to find it within the parameters of the maze," she said, pulling out her notebook uncertainly.
"It's on the train," Eames said immediately, and then she saw it-a thin red envelope, taped onto the second car of the train as it whipped around the building. "Race you there," he added before she could respond, and she was chasing him up the stairs. "Ready?" He grabbed her and jumped off the building and they both landed on the speeding train.
"Are you crazy?" Ariadne yelled as she stumbled. A low tunnel approached and he laughed and pulled her down in the space between the cars as the wall blurred inches from them. Eames was up, almost instantly, and Ariadne glared and concentrated hard enough so that the earth rippled beneath him and her car slammed into Eames' in front of her; in response, Eames slammed them harder so that the rear grates were locked and she was knocked off balance between the cars.
"Touch me there again and you'll have to marry me, darling," Eames said, walking onto the grass as the train slowed to a stop, not looking at her as he opened the envelope.
*
It was very different from the first extraction team she had worked with, which had done semi-legal mind-sharing for children's hospitals and needed neat, stable architecture. Spence did deeply illegal political extractions mostly; the first time Eames had started casually shifting shapes in the dream she had jumped in surprise.
That business was a game of variance, psychology and deceit, and it showed in skill at the poker table and in gambling bugs. The team had a rotating bevy of pointmen and architect-consultants and they bet on everything that moved. One of the new favorite betting subjects was the dreamscape-whether the maze would be in this design or that, how long it would take to run through it, loser picks up bottle service, winner gets a punch to the shoulder, constantly playing cards for anything, insults, gossip, constant angling.
They were mind thieves, but it was hard for the longest time for Ariadne to admit she was in a boy's club.
In the real world they tried to find the most elegant structural solution, favoring sleek strong minimalist designs. In the dream world, daring imaginative beautiful designs didn't matter. She didn't have to compromise about cost or aesthetics; she could be as conservative as she liked. She could build skyscrapers with expensive structural bracing all the way up. She could punch out windows and warp the topology and over-engineer the bridges in shaky dreams.
Eames would come in to help with the architecture and extraction work a few times a week when he wasn't in the office, always later in the evening. His dreams were whimsical and imaginative, full of small charming details like hummingbirds or potholes, colors popping in random saturated bursts; wind that matched all of her bridges' internal resonance vibrations at once and promptly collapsed them. It was terribly unstable, but that was the architect's dream-giving her room for pure creation.
Their run-throughs were so good that they always had a few extra minutes before the timer, which they spent on the grass, looking out onto rivers and bridges. Eames began to coach her in poker, which mostly involved mocking her until she made the numbers on his cards flicker out of sheer frustration.
Now, she mucked her cards and thought with sudden clarity that this was an excuse for him to make fun of people and satisfy a compulsive lying habit. "How did you know I was bluffing?"
"You wriggled your ears," Eames said, smiling very slightly at her as the timer ran down and they woke up.
Over the next few days, the dreamshare world was buzzing with news about new government crackdowns on PASIV devices, warped architecture and trained dreamsharing professionals after teams during the extraction. When she joined them one Wednesday afternoon, Eames was already talking to Zaytsev and Spence at the booth about the next extraction and the subconscious and physical security.
"Eames and Yusuf can go to Washington this weekend and try to rewire the office like we did on the last job so we can bypass the security and get her schedule," Spence said. "We've handled subconscious security before."
"And it's not like," Zaytsev said, "there's actually the government sponsoring development of-"
"Remote dreamsharing?" Eames said. "With their team and whatever military special ops they're using? I'd rather sit it out."
"It's just a rumor."
"Right," Eames said, putting down a glass, "Let's see the research on the next target."
Wednesdays were poker nights and that evening, casually playing a limit game early, she drew an inside straight after an early raise on a 7-9 runner with one of the other architects. She stacked her chips into neat towers and across the railing, Eames grinned at her. He was standing next to a man in a blue blazer, a, Ariadne thought, cute and rather dreamy-looking guy with dark eyes, and she looked away, blushing a little.
When Eames met her at the bar afterwards, she asked him who the man he was standing next to was.
"The chemist that Spence just hired, Yusuf," Eames said. "Ah, he's heading over here. you'd like him," and with a brief smile he was gone, of course.
Yusuf walked over and Ariadne reached for a drink at the same time; they bumped hands. "Oh, excuse me," he said. He had a mellow faintly British accent.
"Hi," Ariadne said quickly, before he could go, "You must be Yusuf-I'm Ariadne." It was possibly the stupidest thing she could have said, and his eyebrows went up.
After a moment, he said, "You're the girl who called the early raise with an offsuit six and eight, aren't you?"
She flushed with embarrassment.
But he leaned back and said, "it's nice to meet you," and smiled at her, quirky and serene.
*
Yusuf's research group had won an NIH grant, and with it came new uptown labs that were downstairs and street-facing, with half-windows and long rows of black wiped tables. It was cramped and the chairs were a bit wobbly and they never seemed to have enough balances; eclectic magazines and research reports were tossed over the chairs, and Eames knew it probably gave Yusuf a huge release of dopamine every time he opened the door.
"As it should," Yusuf said primly, when Eames mentioned this. "Sharing labs are great; it's not the same as having your own."
There were other pros and cons to getting stuck with the majority of chemist duty. During the runthroughs, under the dream, Yusuf would call "Heads, heads, tails," as Eames flipped his poker chip, and he looked absurdly pleased at being able to do so before the landings happened. Eames threw the chip at him and Yusuf ducked. "Good, no?"
"You wasted 5 milligrams of that overclocking solution so we could do differential equations in your head?" Eames said.
"Pretty much, yeah."
The side effects were pretty awful when they woke up, though. They spent most of a half hour wincing at loud noises and the resultant headache, and then they were finally finishing up for the night, taking up notes on the second-level dreaming, when Eames turned around and almost fell out of the office chair. Arthur walked in and leaned curiously against the door.
Eames slowly got up. Arthur met his eyes and his lips quirked in a smile. "Hi," he said. "I was just in the neighborhood." It was possibly the most romantic thing Arthur had ever said to him in the something like three months since he'd met him.
Yusuf was smiling, professionally and friendly, and holding out a hand. "Hi, I'm Yusuf, I don't believe we've met."
"It's nice to meet you, Eames has told me a lot about you," Arthur answered, which was a lie-Eames had only told Arthur that he had evening meetings at a Columbia University lab with him, which apparently had been too much information.
"That's funny, Eames hasn't told me anything about you," Yusuf said.
"What kind of research do you do here?" Arthur asked, looking at the awards on the wall, the papers announcing breakthroughs in-something, human forebrain symptomatic narcolepsy. Yusuf launched into it though, telling Arthur about new research on the nervous system and pointing at the relevant data.
"How about you, Arthur, what do you do?"
"I work in military research."
"Really. That must be pretty interesting-"
"Well, we'd better be going," Eames interrupted. Yusuf didn't miss a beat as he grabbed his coat. "Yes, quite right, we'd better."
"Where are we going?" Arthur asked.
"I just promised Eames here we should grab drinks to celebrate some new work. You should join us. On me, even."
"Oh. Congratulations. That's nice of you."
"Yes," Yusuf said cheerfully, opening the door, "After you."
"Yusuf, this is not funny," Eames said dangerously, pitching his voice low as to not be heard as he walked past him to join Arthur outside.
"Not a problem, Eames, happy to do it," Yusuf said loudly.
To Eames' surprise, Yusuf was actually very earnest and polite once they were at the bar, and even told Arthur a little more about the actual research he was daylighting in, neurons in the hypothalamic orexin something something system. Arthur asked him about the mathematics of protein folding, which Yusuf could talk forever about, and Eames looked at the menu and considered the benefits of multiple extremely large drinks.
They had been talking for an easygoing hour when Arthur had to take a phone call from work, and as soon as he stepped outside Yusuf sipped his drink and said, "What a sweetheart. So how'd you scam him into dating you?"
"He lost a bet," Eames said. He changed the topic. "Do you think that girl in the corner has been making eyes at you since we've walked in?"
Yusuf turned to look at the pretty, slender blonde with big brown eyes at one of the booths. "Well, she's definitely looking at us." Eames met her eyes and smiled briefly at her; in any other person it would seem to be interest, but Yusuf knew at least half of it was curiosity, wondering if he could imitate her for a forgery, in the peculiar way Eames did.
The girl left her group of friends and walked over to the bar, smiling. "Hi," she said lightly to both of them. "Come here often?" She leaned against the chair at a nearby table. She had slender curves under the pencil skirt and shirt, and Eames huffed out a laugh and looked away. Arthur wasn't going to care, he thought, so he gave her a quick smile and said, "Yes, actually." He made small talk to her flirting while Yusuf checked a message on his phone, and she said lightly, "well, if you're around again," before sauntering away.
"Damn, one of my colleagues called," Yusuf said, putting down the phone. "He'll need me for the welcome event tonight for the PhDs-unfortunately less time for me to beat you at pool," he added, grinning, as he moved to pay the bartender.
Arthur met them back inside and they settled the bill and walked out; Yusuf chatted for a few more minutes before saying his goodbyes; he shook Arthur's hand and punched Eames in the shoulder. Arthur put his hands in his coats and they walked quietly along the waterfront; Eames crumpled the phone number on the slip of paper the girl gave him into the street recycling bin. Arthur watched him.
"So what were you doing while I was gone?" he said casually, but his amused expression belied his superior information.
"You aren't jealous, are you?" Eames teased him, and Arthur just rolled his eyes.
They walked quietly for a while; finally Arthur broke the silence. "I just got a call and need to spend Thursday and Friday in meetings at the Pentagon. This Friday you'll be in Washington for work as well, won't you? Why don't we meet and stay the weekend."
"Arthur," Eames said, a little amused. Arthur met his eyes, then followed his gaze out. "Because you think I'm so boring," he said, smiling with his eyes, and quickly moved to wrap a section of Eames' scarf around in the cold February air; it had begun to snow.
*
It was quickly apparent that Ariadne was the best career move Spence had made, with elegant and extremely efficient mazes that allowed them to spend only short amounts under and pull of successful extractions.
Ariadne was smart as hell, too, and brave. She learned fast. In the last few runthroughs, she would build skyscrapers casually, tugging buildings towards them, folding the world in topological formations, and once, memorably, tacking Eames to the roof of the train, grabbing the secret and winning the point just with her other hand. She had grinned sheepishly up at him.
When they had woken up, Yusuf had pocketed his bet with Eames and given her a thumbs up across the room.
*
"What's the research on the daughter? She works in the state department, maybe it could work as a forgery," Spence said, flipping through his notebook.
Zaytsev checked his notes. "She's been leading a number of additional sanctions against Korea recently."
"Coming down at a stroke against both a Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship and a fully functioning democracy, then," Eames said, closing his book with a snap. "Perhaps she's a Chomskyan anarcho-syndicalist. Can we get someone who can do actual research?"
Zaytsev's mouth was taut with anger.
"I can't believe you got our pointman fired," Yusuf said to Eames the next week.
"Spence has been disappointed in the level of research we've been doing anyway," Eames said. He was looking over Ariadne's mazes. "Who's the new hire?"
"Jason Keisler," he said. "He's supposed to be pretty good. I just met him, and i was wondering..."
"... who put the enormous stick up his arse?" Eames said distractedly, pausing over an elegantly designed loop.
"Well, if you put it like that. I thought you only worked with him once."
"Don't you hate it when people extrapolate wildly based on a small number of trials," Eames said with a straight face, mimicking. "We've played cards a few times."
"That'll be nice to watch," Yusuf said, "In which the perceived dead-drunk obnoxious 30-year-old gets more action than the quiet dangerous church boy who plays serious cards. Though if he beats you tonight, I dare you to vomit on his winning cards."
"If he beats you I dare you to eat the cards," Eames answered seriously in a low voice. Joking aside, they both quieted as Keisler approached, a stiff and dangerous looking man in dark, loose clothing.
"Yusuf," he said politely, inclining his head, then looked at Eames. "Eames. Shall we meet Spence and Ariadne upstairs?"
"Sure," Yusuf said cheerfully, getting out of the seat.
"Jase, how are you," Eames said in his trashiest accent as he walked next to him up the stairs, and then he couldn't resist adding, "So, planning to donate at all at the tables?"
Keisler glared at him. "I know Spence likes you because you have that interesting hat trick, Eames," he said, looking straight ahead, "and I know you don't take work seriously, but you are aware that this job has militarization beyond belief, so why don't you be careful?" Eames just bit back a laugh as Keisler pushed open the door with unnecessary force, and he followed him in.
Spence was on the ground, just back from a trip to India, setting up the PASIV. Eames stopped trying to angle Keisler and looked at him more carefully.
Spence's eyes were pinched and his tone was tense and clipped. His actions under the dreams were aggressive and slightly irrational-a skipped maze, a violent reaction to a group of projections, not using the kick. Eames would let it all roll off him, but the third time he got shot out of a dream he told Yusuf afterwards and they amused themselves by privately making bets and speculations on what kind of drugs he was taking that could make him act that way.
Eames thought it might have just been a cocktail of prescription amphetamines and barbiturates as well as the various PASIV chemicals they were using that was causing Spence's temper to be violent and intemperate, though he acknowledged that Yusuf did have an impressive knowledge of recreational drugs.
"And you're not doing anything about it?" Ariadne said uncertainly, the next evening, watching Yusuf grab his duffel in the corner to go; Yusuf and Eames were leaving for Washington that night.
"It's probably a side-effect of work and travel. It happens." Eames added seriously, "Besides, we'll be in Washington. As you and the others get all mushy building lovely representations of Paris, Yusuf and I are going to bust ourselves stealing some real life espionage secrets." He shrugged on a coat. "Do you want anything? Your own lobbyist," he teased, because Ariadne had already gotten a reputation for being curious and extremely argumentative.
"Maybe a plushie of the Washington Monument," Ariadne said, joking. "So you two are going to be working hard, hm?"
"Extremely hard," said Yusuf. That evening, while they waited for the plane at the terminal at JFK, he won $30 off Eames betting on the outcome of coinflips.
*
Arthur already had been in Washington for two days; Cobb came in and whistled when he saw the equipment that Arthur had just received from the office: a modified M40A1, a bolt action sniper rifle-almost four feet long, fifteen pounds, big and bulky, meant for a stationary shooter. He just came out of a few meetings with the State department, and he looked at him thoughtfully.
"They want us to develop the military technology under the dream," Arthur said distractedly. The rifle was obviously well-maintained, and had the newly developed whisper cartridges-the subsonic velocities eliminated the cracking noise of supersonic bullets, ideal for the shifting physics of the dreamspace. "How was your meeting earlier?" He moved to pack it up and set it to be shipped back to New York.
They walked outside in the fading twilight.
"It was fine. It was mostly reports on the remote dreamsharing program. They're looking at applications for enforcement and long-distance interrogation and extraction." He told Arthur about the new reports, and added, "They've been exploring the way people can forge in dreams-shapeshifting."
"It sounds destabilizing," Arthur said.
"No one's done it before-just a few eye colors here and there-but doesn't mean they can't," Cobb said cheerfully. "Anyhow." He squinted at a map. "How do you feel about oysters? I think I know a good restaurant nearby."
"Sure," Arthur said. "Let's go over what they talked about on the remote access."
*
After the job was done and they had successfully managed to rewire an office and copy off some data, Eames said his goodbyes to Yusuf, who was planning to take a flight back to New York to catch up on some time in the lab. Eames met Arthur at the lobby of his hotel in Virginia.
Arthur came out wearing a slim cotton Henley and dusty designer jeans and a casually slung gray wide-buttoned cardigan and he still looked like a thousand bucks. They walked over to a lowslung but otherwise unremarkable gray car that he hadn't noticed before in the parking lot.
"How was the office?" Eames said absently.
"It was fine. Ready to go?" The engine growled low and powerful and then jumped to life; Eames glanced over, startled. Arthur flipped on the radio and smiled at him.
Eames joked around as they left the city, flipping through the radio stations, but afterwards, it was easy to forget about work, too, about the myriad extractions and corporate research and just watch Arthur drive, watch the road whipping by-past the city, past the suburbs, until traffic evaporated, until the GPS went quiet and they reached the hills and its long empty sinewy stretches of blacktop.
"I'm going to move a little faster-think we can get to North Carolina by noon?" Arthur said; that was the only warning Eames got before Arthur dropped the throttle and the car rocketed forward explosively with what felt like the ferocious growl of twelve pistons, pressing Eames back into his seat.
And then-Arthur started driving like an aggressive maniac, doing some incredibly sharp and blistering moves around the road turns; he started cornering hard and accelerating out of them hard enough to spin rear wheels in shockingly fast 0-60 bursts. Through the taut suspension Eames could feel every last imperfection in the road, digging into the pavement like nothing could unseat his grip, and wonderful laser-precise handling. The gauge hit 8,000 rpm and Arthur said,
"You alright?" after one particularly sharp corner. Arthur suddenly smiled a little. "Look at you," he said.
"Please don't talk to me, I'm busy finding religion," Eames said. "Where did you learn how to drive like this?"
"Oh. Just around," Arthur said. There was a small dimple in his cheek. On a long flat stretch of road they started breaking a 100, 120mph while the engine purred beneath them.
Eames thought, he is not a fucking research assistant. He thought, stereotypical American fondness for fast cars. He bit his lip, slumping in his seat as they passed country roads and green fields, warm subtropical sunlight reflecting through the glass roof. Quarter-mile marks were whipping by in short breathless intervals, and Eames looked at Arthur. Their eyes met.
Arthur slammed the brakes, swerving to the side of the road. "Get out of the car," he said, grabbing his arm. The back of Eames' knees hit the fender and then they were kissing hotly and Arthur was unbuckling Eames' belt and pushing him down onto the hood and he could feel his pulse almost jumping out of his skin.
*
They got to North Carolina some indeterminate time in the early afternoon.
Arthur's family owned a very small and slightly quaint vacation home out on the shore of an obscure beach town, and while they had been casual before, dating, sleeping around, casually getting coffee and drinks together and kissing in twilight dark corners of the city, it felt oddly personal now to see Eames open stuck jam jars from his grandmother's age and wash dishes after lunch while telling him improbable stories of SAS busts he'd done.
Arthur took him to the gun ranges and great backroads, and in the late evening it was still warm enough to sit out on the beach and look at the stars, which seemed preternaturally bright in the deep blue sky. It would take the electrical death of three states to be able to see stars in New York City. He could see Eames looking at him, and he tilted his head back. "What?" he said, smiling a little. "Eames. Don't tell me you've changed your mind about me."
"You know," Eames said, sounding thoughtful. "The way people act around you, some of your colleagues... it's like they're scared of you."
Those last few days, Arthur had suckerpunched a man in the face during a military training exercise; he had become used to easy and cheap death in the dreamsharing program, had known dozens of ways to kill and maim people. He wasn't proud of it. He looked away. "Ex-military, I guess," he said. "It's hard to explain to some people."
"You've been around," Eames said.
"Technically, yeah," Arthur said. "And you, too, right?"
"What do you mean?"
"You travel often. And, well. You've done this a lot of times, haven't you?"
"This?" Eames hesitated.
"People," Arthur said. It was easy to say; he had known for a while.
"Let's just say it's not precise."
"Dozens?" Arthur teased him. "Perhaps you need a calulator?" Eames ducked his head, embarrassed.
"You're not scared of me, though," said Arthur; their hands, gritty with sand, met.
"Actually, I am a little," said Eames.
It was hard to imagine. Eames was deeply brilliantly cynical, with occasional darkness and shadows in his eyes, and Arthur didn't think he had ever been in love with anyone. But Eames fit so perfectly in the spaces he wanted; he was easy in his own body, easy to love. Maybe Arthur was a little scared too-he wanted to move him, wanted to surprise him, but somewhere in the middle he realized he was trying not to fall so hard and knowing this wasn't perfect but wishing it would go on forever.
*
Yusuf seemed busy now, trying to catch up with the rumors coming out of the latest government classified research, but he always had time for reading eclectic magazines and research reports. Once Ariadne came into his makeshift lab upstairs in their kitchen while he had an enormous industrial blow torch and a 5 quart canister of liquid nitrogen and a tub of pastry-shop sabayon.
Yusuf glanced up, said cheerfully, "oh, hey, just who I wanted to see," as the sabayon condensed to frozen mousse in the blender; he torched it, wrapped it in a waffle and handed it to her.
"What is it?" she asked cautiously, taking a bite."This is really good," she said faintly. "Wow. mmm."
"It's toasted ice cream," he said. He flopped back onto a beanbag chair and grinned at her. It wasn't like Eames' quick, ironical, scornful smile. It was sincere, mischievous. Toasted ice cream-she loved the witty delicious sound of it as much as he did. They ate it on the balcony, looking at the skyline, and later, much later, she told him how much she loved the bridges they overlooked. They never needed these things in the dream, but-seeing the city through the bridge, seeing forces through the structures, the parabola of the cables reaching up and up. It was a poem across a river.
*
Romantic attraction, Yusuf thought, opening the door to his uptown lab the next day. It wasn't that inexplicable.
A pleasant emotional feeling. A few neurochemical pathways, not even a feeling unique to normal interactions. It was not unlike the feeling of watching the sunrise over a clock tower in a new city, or hearing a long-forgotten favorite childhood song, or getting a really good snort of cocaine. Or possibly, he decided, that fuzzy warmth right after downing five really strong shots of alcohol and right before throwing up.
*
Months passed. Arthur and Cobb took a deep undercover job extracting under high security jails in a conflict zone. Eames spent one month in Dubai, stayed for a few weeks in New York and then left again for a long project in the Philippines. He came back every Thursday night, letting himself in with Arthur's key. Then one evening Eames came back late after a business trip to Monaco, taking off his shirt, and even from across the room Arthur could see the faint red mark on his collar.
It had been a lipstick stain. No, that was truly distasteful, Arthur thought, alone in his apartment late on Friday evening a few weeks later and closing the cabinets, except they had never really talked about what they had and except Eames was constantly and carelessly coming and going. He had to look away.
*
They were in Monaco running an extraction on a visiting politician, and it would have been pulled off almost perfectly if the foreign service hadn't been alerted to the presence of dreamsharing technology. Eames noticed it first, a man beginning to reach into his jacket behind Ariadne after they had finished the extraction and were walking away. She ducked at his startled motion, Eames disarmed the man with one efficient movment and smashed a gun into his face, shattering teeth and bone and spurting blood. The man slumped and he turned him over and yanked a gun out of his jacket, a powerful automatic with a perforated cylinder attached. A silenced weapon-a weapon for fulfilling threats, not making them.
Everything happened quite quickly after that: scattered gunshots in the hallway, plainclothes agents laced throughout the hotel. Eames got very close to getting shot; as it were, Spence killed four people, quite calmly; extraction teams had no stupid prejudices about murder.
On the plane, Ariadne was still speaking in shocked whispers; she brushed her thumb against the spot of blood on Eames' collar.
"It's too bad," Eames finally said, "I really wanted to have more time to figure out whether that guy was money laundering or not," and Ariadne shivered and wrapped her scarf around her.
"I don't know how you can snap out of it so quickly," she said, looking out the window. "Just like that."
It wasn't true, though. He went back to New York; he was spending three nights out of seven at Arthur's apartment, in his bed, but he felt a little dissociated, a little sick of all the people in his head that he had to be.
It took him unforgivably long to notice that Arthur was acting distant, brushing him off or tugging away when he touched his arm. He thought he angered him somehow and tried to be more reserved, tried his hardest to be someone that he thought Arthur wanted, but he was already feeling a little dissociated and sick of all the people he had to be, and now, looking at Arthur's shuttered expression across a crowded room made him feel exhausted.
He had been introduced to the Cobbs before, but they had invited Arthur to their apartment for an informal gathering and the room was filled with stylish academics and artists, people having a good time; Eames stayed around, asked questions, listened to small talk and gossip. It was late when he stepped out onto the balcony, smoking and looking at the New York skyline until a young man who was standing next to him smiled and asked him about it.
"It's really great, isn't it?"
The man was an architect friend of Mal's, and he had an impressive knowledge of the Art Deco era, pointing out the examples and the buildings visible from their floor. It was Mal's party and he knew it was important to Arthur, so he was resolved to be polite, and it wasn't that hard to ask a few leading questions when Arthur, who had been a little distant all evening, was at his elbow so quickly and suddenly that he jumped and stumbled.
"Hi," Arthur said.
"Erm, hi," Eames said. "John, have you met Arthur? Arthur, John is an architect for Siegel & Harmon."
"Oh, Mal mentioned you're one of Cobb's designers," John said, friendly. "Nice to meet you."
"Pleasure," Arthur said. "Your most recent project has been the addition to the Van Der Rohe building, right?" Eames coughed and excused himself to get a drink of water, and when he came back Arthur was alone.
"Do you want to go?" he said, putting his hands in his pockets. Eames nodded and Arthur hugged and kissed Mal and nodded at Cobb before they grabbed a taxi back.
"I left my keys in your apartment," Eames said shortly when Arthur asked him where to go. He nodded tightly. Back at his apartment, Arthur flipped on the lights.
"So when did you start smoking?" he said, finally, fumbling with the door.
"Always have," Eames said, a little incredulous. "Arthur, what's the matter? Will you tell me what this is about?" He grabbed his apartment keys from their place on the table. For the first time Eames noticed that the skin under Arthur's eyes were dark and shadowed. He looked brittle and exhausted.
"It's just," Arthur leaned against the counter and stared at the early copy of the newspaper, the finished sudoku puzzles and crossword puzzles with words and letters switched around. "I don't think this is what I want anymore," he said finally.
"Alright," Eames said slowly. "Will you tell me why?"
Eames travelled constantly, his hours were incredible, and he was closed off and inscrutable in the best of times; Arthur wanted to demand where he went, what he did, but he knew he was asking questions he didn't want to ever hear the answer to.
"Maybe," Arthur said, "I'm tired of being with someone who can't even bring himself to care about a single thing enough to introduce me to strangers--"
"I--what? I just wanted to-"
"I mean, was this just an angle for you, or did you even really like me," Arthur said, looking at him.
"I--of course I liked you, darling, don't you think that's really--"
"Please don't call me that," Arthur said. Eames leaned over and gave him a hot, frustrated look.
"Arthur," he said, and there was tenderness in his voice, still; Arthur couldn't look at him.
"Please leave," he said, and because Eames always knew exactly what he wanted--always knew what he was thinking with just one look at his face--he did. The door closed. Arthur put his head in his hands. His eyes stung, and after a moment he turned and punched the wall, hard.