mr. eames &
.mr eames &
eames obsessively tracks a young adult series that may or may not be based on his life. written for this prompt.
notes: thanks to the ever lovely gelbwax for the beta! all remaining errors are, like usual, mine.
pg13 . 13735 words . AO3
When it comes to light that the title for the fourth book in the Dreamers quartet is Inception, Eames knows within the hour. When Anthony Ruske sells the film rights for the quartet to Warner Brothers for an undisclosed amount, Eames knows immediately.
Because Eames does not have a Google alert on the name Anthony Ruske, except that he totally, completely does. Also an alert on the phrase “Dreamers quartet.” And on the name Eagen Grey, though that mostly brings up blogs about how likely it is that Grey will sleep with the prickly (but hot) Oliver Lawrence before the series is up, whether that relationship will have any longevity, and how scorching their potential sex will be, regardless.
Eames usually reads the blogs both critically and with too much investment, but in his defense, he does avoid the fanfiction. Only because it makes him somewhere between uncomfortable and jealous, because he was not that good at sex when he was seventeen. And, also, these characters are seventeen and he’s twice their age.
There are times, when he’s trawling (and trolling) message boards (dreamwalkers.com is decidedly the best) that Eames wonders if he has some sort of problem. He usually writes that off.
He especially writes it off when he finds out, fifty-six minutes after the information is leaked, that the fourth book will be titled Inception. Ariadne sends him an e-mail seven minutes later with a series of exclamation marks for the subject line, because Ariadne is the person second-most invested in figuring out who, precisely, Anthony Ruske is.
Eames is the person first-most invested, but that’s only because the books are obviously about him, if he had gotten involved in dreamsharing when he was sixteen years old and had been rather a doormat and a twit.
That might be getting ahead of the story, though. Eames is not Anthony Ruske; neither is he a writer, nor a historian. So no one should expect him to get the pacing or even the chronology quite right on this. If pressed, though, he would say that it began with the publication of the first book in the international sensation the Dreamers quartet would become.
The first book in the series was published by Viking, released in America in July of 2010. It was set somewhere between the present and the future, called Ignition, and traced the development of something called dreamwalking, a novel technology which enabled individuals to invade the dreams of others. This was all viewed through the eyes of one Eagen Grey (that’s Grey to you), an ordinary bloke from Oxford, the son of a professor and a librarian, who was not, unlike the protagonists of many such novels, orphaned at a young age. Instead he became involved with dreamwalking research one afternoon when he was skulking around the university where his mother worked, trying to get her to give him money for fish and chips. Instead of getting fish or chips, he had encountered a mysterious psychology professor who immediately recognized Grey as uniquely gifted and enlisted him for an experiment. In addition to eventually giving Grey money for dinner. It should have been morally dubious--it probably was morally dubious--but maybe because the professor was eccentric and had a long white beard, it mostly worked.
Eames did not read Ignition for at least a year and a half after its British release. By that time the sequel (Transformation) had topped the bestseller lists of both sides of the pond, and also on several sides of other bodies of water, both with and without quaint nicknames (the ditch, the Indian Ocean, etcetera). It was, in the popular vernacular, an international bestseller.
But Eames had been busy. His father had sent him a copy of the first book almost immediately after the British release, wrapping in butcher paper with a little note written in illegible scrawl--“you might like this one.” And Eames had put it at the bottom of a pile of books, wrapped in butcher paper and festooned with similar notes, that he had a vague intention of reading.
Then he had flown to Israel for an extraction, and from there he’d gone to Japan, and from there to Washington, D.C., and by the time he got back home he had an inkling that his father had, in fact, mailed him the very book that was causing a shimmering wave of gossip to ripple across the dreamsharing community--in Israel it was a rumor, in Japan, a confirmed rumor, and in Washington, something slightly more than that. Someone in the know had written a novel about dreamsharing. They had peeled back the veil. It was, perhaps not inexplicably given the success of the likes of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Twilight, targeted at young adults.
Mostly people were pissed because whoever it was, they were getting rich. There was a betting pool about who Anthony Ruske might be. Eames had it on good authority that there were at least five hundred U.S. dollars, one thousand Euros, seven hundred pounds, and ten thousand rupees on it being him, and he didn’t have the energy to figure out who had bet the money so he could either thank or taunt them. But copies of the book were hard to come by, because no one wanted to support the author by actually buying one, so Eames had to wait until he got home to read it.
He had been feeling rather smug about being suspected by so many until he actually read the book, and then he called Ariadne--Ignition’s most ardent advocate--immediately.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me it was about me?” he hissed when she answered the phone with her own name, groggy.
“What?” she said.
“Ignition,” he said. “British kid, from Oxford, professor mum, librarian dad--what the fuck.”
“Eames?” she said. “I didn’t know your mom was a professor. And, incidental piece of information here, but it’s two in the morning.”
Eames was actually aware of that. Ariadne was in Paris, he was in Mombasa, there was something dripping from his ceiling and his copy of Ignition was splayed open at the foot of his bed. His father would’ve told him to use a bookmark.
“Who the fuck is Anthony Ruske?” he asked, because although he could apologize, that didn’t mean he wanted to. Or would. Or any of that shit.
“I think I only answered my phone because I was sleeping,” Ariadne continued. “And vulnerable.”
“You can’t be a vulnerable sleeper in this business,” Eames said idly “But that’s not the matter at hand.”
“Right,” Ariadne said. “Anthony Ruske. How about we discuss that in the morning.”
“I don’t want--” Eames started, but by then Ariadne had already hung up.
He spent the rest of the evening (which was already, if he was frank with himself, over) reading the Wikipedia article about Anthony Ruske sixteen times, and then he fell asleep knowing precisely the same amount of information has he had when he started. Namely, that there was no useful information about Anthony Ruske available. Ignition was his first book. He lived in New York City. All of that was probably bullshit, but even lies could reveal something of the truth, if they were told in any volume. Anthony Ruske apparently knew that, and so the only source Eames had to draw from were his books.
In Transformation, published in late 2011, Grey learned to change shape in dreams and joined forces with the mysterious American Oliver Lawrence, who had been introduced passingly in the first novel when he crashed a faculty mixer Grey was attending at the university and got thrown out for looking like a hobo. Together with Lizbet Godoy they began to uncover a plot by World Corps to use dreamwalking to influence consumer habits and bring about a new world order.
In Extraction, 2012, Oliver and Grey stole information from the dreams of the president of World Corps, only for Grey to discover that said president was Oliver’s father. This information was revealed in the frantic aftermath of the extraction, when Oliver and Grey are clearly about to kiss out of desperation and joy. At the end of the novel it looked like Grey and Lizbet would be continuing their mission alone. The Greybet shippers let out a roar of joy heard ’round the world wide web, but Eames refused to read their improbable manifestos. Even when they popped up on his Google alert.
And now, Inception. The publication is slated for late 2013; in time for the Christmas shopping season, although Eames has serious doubts about whether any right-minded child will be willing to wait until Christmas. He certainly won’t.
And, judging by the exclamation marks dashing across the subject line of Ariadne’s e-mail, neither will she. Eames dials her number.
“You think it was someone on the job?” he asks as soon as she picks up.
“How could it not be?” Ariadne is practically shouting. “No one else has--”
“That’s not strictly true,” Eames says.
“What do you mean, ‘strictly true’?” Ariadne says. “Superior fucker.”
Eames would not actually argue with the description of himself as a superior fucker, but that’s besides the point.
“There are pockets in the dreamsharing community,” Eames continues. “Isolated populations, so to speak. A military team attempted inception years ago, but since the criminal side of dreamsharing isn’t entirely drawn from military sources--”
“But you know about it, blah, blah, blah,” Ariadne mutters.
“Also,” Eames says, pretending he didn’t hear her. Because he’s the better man. “Also, the military inception didn’t work, but only because they planted the wrong idea.”
“And you were on this team, double-oh-seven?” Ariadne asks, and if they were face to face Eames would try to look coy. As it is, he doesn’t.
“Yes,” he says. “Of course I was.”
“So, what, five other people could’ve written this, and all of them are in the military and tight assed as shit and probably wouldn’t.”
“Do you think I’m a tight ass? It’s also possible one of the corporate teams has achieved inception and we don’t know.”
“Stop it,” Ariadne says. “Do you seriously think Ruske is a corporate stiff or a military lackey? Because it takes cojones to potentially out an entire industry in a novel, or a series of novels, let alone bestsellers--”
“And you think it could only be someone who already has the feds on their back,” Eames finishes for her.
“Precisely,” Ariadne says, enunciating the word carefully.
“Or, consider this, maybe it was been someone who just heard about the inception job,” Eames says.
“Did you tell anyone? Because I didn’t.”
“It’s not a completely unique idea, Ariadne.”
“And it’s so hard to believe it could’ve been Cobb, or Arthur, or Yusuf?”
“Yes,” Eames says. He pushes his chair back from his desk and looks down at his toes, spreads them out. Arthur is too close-mouthed, Cobb too serious, Yusuf doesn’t give enough shits about anything outside his chemistry. Honestly, the only people on the team he could imagine actually writing Dreamers are himself and Ariadne, and they--didn’t.
“Cobb could’ve written it for his kids,” Ariadne continues.
“Can you seriously see Cobb writing a book about dreamsharing without including a Mal doppelganger?” Eames asks. “Because I can’t.”
“Lizbet?” Ariadne asks, but even she sounds skeptical.
“Even if you take into account sex organs, Lizbet has more in common with Yusuf than Mal. Up to and including being perpetually high.”
“Yusuf isn’t--” Ariadne starts, and then she lets out an exasperated sigh.
“Yeah,” Eames says. “Valiant effort though. A+.”
“Oh, shut up,” Ariadne says. “I suppose you know who wrote Dreamers, then.”
“Me,” Eames replies. “In my sleep.”
And then he hangs up the phone, because it’s absolutely not fair that Anthony Ruske stole details of his life, wrote a book about it, somehow twisted it so it’s extremely likely Grey will get laid whereas Eames hasn’t gotten any for months, and then Ruske doesn’t even have the grace to at least admit who he--or she, for that matter--is. Except, you know, a creep.
Eames tried to anagram the pseudonym, once or twice or fifteen times. It didn’t help.
He decides that Anthony Ruske might be Robert Fischer primarily because he’s run out of tea and has eliminated all the other individuals involved with the inception job. It’s worth a try, anyway; Fischer shouldn’t remember the inception, but he could, and who knows what ridiculous career path he selected for himself after dismantling his father’s empire. With that as evidence, Eames tries and fails to locate Fischer, and then he calls Arthur.
“Eames,” Arthur says when he picks up, voice dry. “To what do I owe the dubious pleasure?”
“Dubious--” Eames starts. There’s not really anything to say. A dubious pleasure still could be a pleasure.
“Sorry,” Eames continues. “I was wondering if you’d been keeping tabs on Robert Fischer?”
“Upstate New York,” Arthur says. “Surprisingly wholesome commune.”
“Wholesome?” Eames says, and Arthur releases a low chuckle. Eames imagines him at the other end of the line--he doesn’t know where Arthur lives, but he imagines someplace neat but quirky, immaculately clean but not lacking character. Arthur might be sitting at a desk, tipping back on his chair in the way he’s prone to do, on the verge of dimpling.
“They make soap,” Arthur replies.
“And is there any chance that he’s been in touch with someone from Viking?” Eames says, and Arthur groans.
“You and Ariadne think--”
“Actually it’s just me, cheers,” Eames says. He opens his refrigerator to a surge of cool air and studies the contents. Perhaps he should’ve blamed Ariadne.
“There’s no chance Fischer remembers what went down,” Arthur says. “Not to mention that where he’s currently living is off the grid. And there’s at least seventeen other reasons why Robert Fischer couldn’t have written those shitty books.”
“Sounds like you’ve been counting,” Eames says, tucking the phone under his chin and grabbing a jar of gherkins.
“Don’t project,” Arthur says. “It’s only permissible in dreams.”
“Guess what I’m eating?” Eames replies, crunching into a gherkin.
“Fuck you, I hate this game,” Arthur says. And then, momentarily, “Potato chips.”
“No,” Eames says, and takes another bite.
“Tomato?” Arthur asks.
“How do you go from crisps to tomatoes?” Eames asks, and Arthur grumbles.
“This is a fucking impossible game, dumbass. If I got some food--right now--and I don’t have any but if I did--if I got some food and ate it you wouldn’t have a clue.”
“Bet me on that?” Eames asks, crunching on his gherkin. He likes it when he can get Arthur entangled in insipid arguments, and he has a feeling that Arthur enjoys it, too, because otherwise he would’ve hung up as soon as Eames started eating. Arthur doesn’t suffer fools gladly, except, apparently, when he does.
That was one of Eames’ more searing insights for the evening.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “Yes I will. I’ll call you in the future, and eat food at you, and if you can’t guess, you’ll owe me--something--”
“Deal,” Eames replies. He’s not overly concerned with the terms of the bet, so long as it exists. Arthur will probably try to pull something stupid with kale chips or seaweed, but Eames is totally on to him and his penchant for disgusting green foods.
“It’s a pickle,” Arthur says, and then he hangs up the phone.
Eames looks at the jar on the counter and shrugs. Then he calls Ariadne.
“Arthur says it’s not Fischer,” he offers.
“Oh, brilliant,” she says. “That’s so helpful. I totally thought Fischer was Anthony Ruske.”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor,” Eames says, and hangs up on her.
Ariadne calls him back.
“I don’t understand why you trust Arthur, anyway,” Ariadne says. “It could be him.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Eames says. “I’m sure Arthur wrote a kids’ book.”
“It’s not a kids’ book,” Ariadne says. “It’s a young adult series with huge crossover potential. And I thought sarcasm was the lowest form of humor?”
“It is when you use it,” Eames snipes. He returns the gherkins to the fridge and takes a moment to stare at it again: milk, gherkins, meat, leftover curry from Yusuf, if he doesn’t get a job soon he’ll need to go grocery shopping, and he has a policy against being at the house for more than three trips to anything that might constitute a grocery store, and that includes corner shops and markets.
“Besides,” Eames continues. “If Arthur did write it, he’d have every reason to encourage me to continue pursuing false leads.”
“Eh,” Ariadne says. “Point to you, Mr. Eames.”
“Thank you, m’dear. Now, I assume you’ve been following the speculation about Inception, so I’m thinking we make a bet about how explicit our friend Ruske will make the sex.”
“Ugh,” Ariadne says. “They’re kids.”
“They were kids,” Eames says. “They’re all at least eighteen now, yeah? So it’s all squared away, even in the most prudish of nations. And isn’t this a young adult series with huge crossover potential? Nothing says crossover like sex.”
“You really need to get laid,” Ariadne says. “If you just pop north a bit, I know a place--”
“Not going clubbing with you,” Eames says. “Ever again.”
The last time Eames went clubbing with Ariadne, Ariadne went home with the bartender. Eames woke up in a dumpster with a mouth full of rotten banana peel, a searing headache, and a slow tidal wave of memories he would rather forget.
Ariadne harrumphs, probably blowing out her lower lip.
“You know that bartender thought she was saving me from you?” Ariadne says. “Best sex of my life.”
“Don’t rub it in,” Eames mutters. He’s heard this story before--it’s not quite as unfortunate as what he did that night, but it’s about as depressing.
“I was trying to cheer you up,” Ariadne says. “Apparently I suck at it.”
“Yeah you do,” Eames starts to say, but then Ariadne cuts him off.
“I’ve got an incoming call from Arthur, I’m going to take it, alright?” she says, and then she puts Eames on hold before he has a chance to respond. He considers going to the washroom to make morose faces at himself in the mirror.
He resists the urge, barely. When he had had flatmates they had called his propensity for making faces at himself in the mirror narcissistic. Their exact words had been “something--something--why didn’t you fuck that bird, she was hot--something--something--I need to use the loo,” but it was the thought that counted.
Eames had already been forging then. His affinity for mirrors was more a way to keep track of himself than anything else, but it wasn’t always worth the bother of explaining.
Ariadne comes back on the line, “Arthur--he’ll probably be calling you in a sec--”
And then there’s a call from Arthur, like clockwork, and Eames says, “I’ve got an incoming call from Arthur, I’m going to take it, alright?” and puts Ariadne on hold before she has a chance to respond. Because she deserves it.
Prezioso wants them for an inception.
“I thought we were done with them?” Eames asks. “Since Cobb got what he wanted and all.”
“The price is right,” Arthur says. In his mind’s eye, Eames can see him shrugging, a smooth motion of the shoulders that ripples down his back. Prezioso--Eames has worked for him before, and he oils the gears of every machine he encounters with money
“Who’s the extractor?” Eames asks.
“Nelson, actually,” Arthur replies after a moment.
“Nelson--” Eames says. Nelson was the only extractor Arthur had worked with other than Cobb. She was also one of the best, before she formally retired. They gave her rather a nice crystal picture frame. Nelson had said she wouldn’t go into the field again; she hadn’t. And now she was coming back after two years out, and doing an inception. “How did you get her?”
“I imagine Jones made her an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Arthur says. “You know how it goes.”
Eames does, actually, and even though he doesn’t need the money, he says he’ll do it. Maybe Prezioso knew, or Yusuf told him, but if Arthur’s on the team Eames will go along with very nearly anything. It’s a stupid weakness, though at least he knows he has it and he knows it’s stupid. Eames likes to think that counts for something, but he supposes Achilles knew that his heel was a bit of a weak point.
“What am I eating?” Arthur says, after the business end of things is taken care of.
“What?” Eames asks, because it barely sounds like anything. Maybe Arthur is moving his jaw.
“I think your phone is shitty,” Eames says, but the noise on the other end continues to be soft and muffled.
“Give up?” Arthur says when he returns to the line, speaking around a mouthful of--something.
“Nothing,” Eames says.
“No,” Arthur replies.
“Cheese?”
“Nope.”
“Fucking kale chips, I don’t even care,” Eames says.
“Marshmallow,” Arthur says. “Dumbass.”
“I was going to guess that next,” Eames says, and earns himself a bright laugh. “What do I owe you?”
“I’ll let you know,” Arthur replies.
“So you took it?” Ariadne asks when she’s back on the line.
“Of course,” Eames mutters. “Not like I really had any choice.”
“See you in Stockholm,” she says, and Eames has to pause and wonder why Prezioso wants to steal a vote on the Nobel committee. A single vote won’t make a difference, but there it is: that’s the job.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Arthur had said, when Eames asked. The words had floated across their tenuous mobile connection, somewhere between nonsense and not. It reminded Eames of when they had first met. Arthur liked to talk about principles, then, although the principles never made complete sense, and he walked with the lazy gait of someone who had studied philosophy at university and didn’t give a fuck whether or not it was useful.
That was a long time ago, when Arthur was sapling-green and Eames had just made the jump to criminal from the military dreamsharing community. It had been a sort of scrambling leap, and he was still trying to catch his footing when Arthur showed up. Arthur hadn’t yet taken to dressing in suits; the first day he appeared at the warehouse in a t-shirt and jeans with holes in them. He looked like a scrawny kid, his dark hair curling around his ears.
Eames thought he was eighteen, maybe less. When he asked Cobb if he was some sort of prodigy, Cobb had thrown back his head and laughed, and then he’d called over Arthur and told him the story, and Arthur had just shrugged one shoulder up, which made him seem even younger.
“Does it matter?” he said. “I was a prodigy once. I can do the job.”
Arthur had turned out to be the same age as Eames. Arthur had turned out to be slightly overconfident, as twenty-three-year-olds are wont to be, at least based on the following evidence: Eames was the same.
They did the job, but not before Cobb got grazed by a bullet while Arthur was fiddling with his gun, not before Eames lost control of his forgery and wound up with his own eye on the mark’s wife’s face.
“No one gets it quite right the first time,” Cobb said when they reconvened at a dingy bar afterwards. He was not looking at Eames so much as he was looking at Mal, and Eames wondered idly what their sex life was like, spinning the toothpick of olives through his martini.
He was sucking the olives off the toothpick when Arthur showed up.
“What, do you think you’re James Bond?” he said, settling on a stool next to Eames at the bar. He was wearing an Oxford and a waistcoat; his hair was slicked back; he looked like he would look, later, but at the time it was some kind of revelation.
“I could say the same of you,” Eames said, instead of offering one of the compliments buzzing around his head. The compliments were, frankly, embarrassing, and the harder he tried to come up with a suave one they closer they got to pick-up lines of the most unfortunate sort. Cobb had glanced between the pair of them, plainly amused, and then returned to his conversation with Mal. “Why didn’t you wear that on the job?”
Arthur held up a slim white finger, then called over the bartender and ordered a scotch. It was oddly charming, like he expected Eames to somehow be offended if he paused the conversation for a moment without acknowledging.
“I figured it didn’t matter what I wore to the warehouse, because it’s a warehouse and we sleep for work. Apparently, I was mistaken,” he replied. He was chewing on his lower lip, a habit he eventually either outgrew or controlled; Eames looked away, to the scratched mirror behind the bar.
“Think he’ll hire us again?” Eames asked, nodding at Cobb.
“Me, of course,” Arthur said. “Not so sure about your chances.”
Eames had laughed at that, then, but now it seems like one of those jokes that was only funny given the circumstances--lukewarm beer, lights with lampshades the color of Coca-Cola, the quick glint of Arthur’s teeth when he grinned, waking up with the skin on his knuckles intact, in-dream and out.
He never worries about the skin on his knuckles, now. It was scarred white and hard after a certain job in Pompeii that isn’t ever worth discussing.
Eames visits Yusuf before flying out, even though he hates visiting Yusuf. Yusuf’s den is always a stark reminder of the facets of dreamsharing, which glitters with the harshness of a diamond. Eames knew a diamondfence, once, who said that the trick of the best jewelers was to make the hardest stone on the planet look soft.
Yusuf has no interest in softness of any sort. He is one of the only honest men Eames has ever met in dreamsharing.
“You still think Grey is you?” Yusuf asks when their conversation circles around to the Dreamers quartet, as most conversations with Eames tend to these days.
“Who else could it be?” Eames counters. They’re in Yusuf’s shop, leaning side-by-side with elbows on the counter, watching the light filter through bottles of chemistry. Yusuf has made them both tea: too strong, so strong that Eames can feel it doing terrible things inside him as he drinks it.
“You do realize that Grey only resembles you in the superficial details, don’t you?” Yusuf says. “He doesn’t act anything like you.”
“But he resembles me in way too many superficial details,” Eames says, trying to keep his voice level. He has noticed that Grey isn’t like him, but it’s a detail he chooses to disregard more often than not. Grey is a forger, but he doesn’t act like one, he runs the job like an extractor. And he’s Eames, but he doesn’t act like Eames, either.
Yusuf shrugs.
“I just thought I’d remind you,” he says. “Maybe it has nothing to do with you.”
Which is bullshit. It clearly has something to do with Eames.
“Or maybe whoever wrote those books just thought your backstory was interesting,” Yusuf continues. “It doesn’t need to be a big deal.”
Eames doesn’t say what he’s thinking.
He’s thinking that of course it has to be a big deal. Even if Grey doesn’t resemble him, it’s his life--details of his life that are, in large part, his business and his alone--tacked onto a character in a storybook. At the very least, he deserves some royalties. At the most, though, he deserves an explanation.
A customer comes in, signaled by a clanging bell on the door, and when Yusuf returns to the conversation he glances at Eames with lazy, hooded eyes and changes the subject.
When Eames is getting ready to leave and Yusuf is closing up the shop, Yusuf gives him another long glance, assessing.
“You know which character you remind me of?” Yusuf asks, and Eames starts to reply: “If you say Lizbet I will--”
“Oliver,” Yusuf interjects. “Think about it.”
And then he swings the door shut so Eames is on the outside and flicks the padlock into place, shaking his head at the scowl furrowing Eames’ brow.
Maybe he should consider it immediately, but instead Eames files that piece of information away for later, neatly ensconcing it in his head with the other incongruities of his life: why french fries taste good dipped in milkshakes (Arthur taught him that--on a job in Ohio, at a Wendy’s on the cusp of the highway, eating Frosties and french fries in a parked car while the moon wheeled across the sky), the number of times Ariadne has beaten him at cards (“Unlucky in love,” she always says, frowning, and each time Eames wonders if that means his luck in love is good), why Dom Cobb is unashamed to admit that the third Matrix is his favorite movie.
Eames takes enough Tylenol P.M. to knock out a horse for his flight to Stockholm, because when he told Ariadne you couldn’t be a vulnerable sleeper in this line of work he was kind of lying. Also because without the drugs he knows he won’t sleep at all, and then he’ll just dwell on things when he’d rather not.
During the layover in Amsterdam he spends ten minutes staring at a display of the Dreamers quartet in an airport bookshop, until the shopkeeper comes out to ask him if he needs any help.
“No,” he says, and then when she looked at him with one painted brow raised expectantly: “Just a fan.”
“Ah,” she says, her lips peeling back to reveal teeth. “Then you’ll have heard about Grey, yes?”
“No,” Eames says, feigning disinterest. “I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“They want to cast Zac Efron,” she says, like this is some delicious secret. “For the film.”
Eames tries to school his face into something that’s not complete horror.
“That’s interesting,” he says, and when the intercom crackles to life and a bland woman’s voice starts to say something Eames says “I think that’s my flight” and rushes off.
Zac Efron for Grey what the fuck. He texts that to Ariadne when the plane is taxiing, and makes enough muffled noises of disapproval that the man in the seat next to him glances at Eames not once but three times with an expression on his face that suggests he doesn’t like something he smells.
But that may just be his face.
The flight to Stockholm is shorter, but Eames is awake the entire time so it feels longer. He flips through SkyMall, considers and then nixes purchasing a giant crossword for the unembellished wall in the room he might call an office if he ever did anything in it. He counts by threes, and looks at the book he brought but doesn’t read it. When he finally lands in Stockholm Ariadne is there to meet him, holding a cardboard sign coloured flat grey.
“Funny,” he says when he sidles up to her. “Hilarious.”
“I thought so,” she replies, tossing the scrap of cardboard into a rubbish bin. “But you know, different strokes for different folks.”
“Right,” Eames says, and Ariadne grins and reaches for his carry-on. She hales a taxi to the warehouse, humming tunelessly to herself.
“You’ve met Annelise, right?” she says.
“If you have of course I have,” Eames says dryly. “I’ve been in the business for eleven years.”
“And you get around like the town bicycle,” Ariadne mutters. “No reason to act superior about it.”
Eames snorts and Ariadne glances at him.
“Annelise and Arthur are pretty close,” she says slowly.
“Are they?” Eames asks. “I don’t recall.”
Ariadne shrugs, glances out the window, then shoots him a grin.
“And we’re starting a club but you aren’t invited because you’re the only one on this job whose name doesn’t start with ‘A.’”
“I’m distraught,” Eames says. “Or I would be, if my first name weren’t Aaron.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” Ariadne says. “You look nothing like an Aaron.”
“Two ‘A’s,” Eames continues. “I should be the king of your little club.”
“It doesn’t have a king because Arthur and I are both American and believe in democracy. In fact, I’m Greek, I practically invented democracy,” Ariadne says haughtily, ignoring Eames’ scoffing protest. “We’re here.”
Ariadne pays the cabbie while Eames inspects the warehouse, which looks like every warehouse ever: stamped with the name of some business it no longer contains, too much wall for too few windows.
“Did you get my text?” he asks as he trails Ariadne inside.
“So, Efron huh?”
“It’s terrible,” Eames says. “Disney isn’t even involved with the movie, and why the fuck would you involve Efron if not because Uncle Walt made you.”
“Uncle Walt isn’t even alive,” Ariadne says. “And I thought the Disney Channel did quite a nice job with that Pride and Prejudice adaptation.”
“The Disney Channel didn’t do a Pride and Prejudice,” Arthur calls from a dim room to the right of the entranceway. “But I thought their version of Persuasion was quite good.”
“Arthur!” Ariadne crows. “You made a funny!”
“I make funnies,” Arthur says. “But usually my humor is too refined for the likes of you.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, shielding her eyes. “I’m a peon unworthy to be in your presence.”
Arthur catches Eames’ glance and grins until his eyes crinkle at the corners, and Eames allows himself a returning grin, probably too big and goofy, exposing his snaggleteeth.
“Hey,” he says.
“Been awhile,” Arthur says back.
“Is that Eames?” calls a woman from the same room that produced Arthur, and Annelise Nelson comes to the fore.
Annelise has always intimidated Eames because there’s something about her that seems almost challengingly wholesome, like she drinks whole milk straight from the cow and spends her spare time rescuing hikers lost beneath avalanches, and she expects the same of everyone she meets. Her cheeks are round and rosy, but her eyes are like shards of ice.
Also, she’s taller than Eames by a good several inches.
“Annelise,” Eames says, proffering a hand. “I expect you’ll want to brief me?”
“Arthur can,” she says, waving him off. “Though you should know that I’ve heard some rumors about you, and I won’t stand for discussions of those stupid books.”
When Eames looks at Ariadne, she shrugs apologetically, and slips off down the hall. Arthur glances at Eames, and gestures for him to follow.
They wind up in the vast, empty room on the top floor of the warehouse, where the light is better. There are desks in each corner, the plain, cheap kind made of fake wood that weigh more than they ought to. Arthur extracts some files from the drawer of one desk, and the leans back against it and indicates that Eames should take a chair.
“So Annelise isn’t my biggest fan, eh?” Eames asks.
“The mark--” Arthur starts.
The mark is a professor who has a clipped mustache and bovine eyes. He wears sweaters that seem better suited to a fisherman or a shepherd, and is married to a woman with a face like the moon. It is expected that Eames will tail him and find something sufficiently offensive for the forge to say, something that will sway the mark away from voting for the forge and into voting for someone else.
“Simple,” Arthur says, flopping the file closed and handing it to Eames.
“We really need a pointman for this?” Eames asks, and Arthur shrugs.
“We always need a pointman,” he says. “Someone needs to make sure the rest of you don’t get shot.”
“This man is militarized?” Eames asks, glancing at the file in his hands.
“Of course,” Arthur says. “You thought simple meant easy?”
It has been awhile. Eames forgot how neatly Arthur severs his professional life from his personal one, shifting from a crinkle-eyed grin to clipped vowels and a flat face as soon as the word job enters the equation.
“Remember when we went for drinks after the inception job?” Eames asks, just to rile him.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “Ariadne went home with the bartender.”
Eames remembers that part, too. It’s the rest that he’s forgotten.
“Yes,” Eames echoes. “She did.”
“This is your desk,” Arthur tells him, and leaves.
Eames had rather thought it was Arthur’s desk, but when he slides open the bottom drawer he finds it contains only the most basic files, and the top drawer contains a row of the cheap stick pens of the sort Eames favors and a series of blank tapes for recording.
“Thanks,” he calls after Arthur, because it’s typical, really, that Arthur would have gotten the right sort of pens, and would have thought to pick up fresh tapes, and wouldn’t ask him why he can’t use a digital recorder like everyone else.
There’s no reply.
Eames sets to work almost immediately after unrolling his bedroll in the room Ariadne indicates he should sleep in. The mark doesn’t actually know the forge that well, so it should by all rights be easy, but trying to pass off a low quality forgery is the worst sort of unprofessionalism, and there are all sorts of things Eames does do, in life, but that isn’t one of them. He stamps his forges with craftsmanship, always.
And so he spends most of his time tailing the forge and recording observations, schedules, significant interactions. It’s dull, a marathon of dullness, and so Eames can hardly be blamed if his record of the forge’s activities occasionally spills over into comments about the Dreamers quartet, which Annelise apparently does not want to discuss, and Arthur persists in claiming he hasn’t read.
Arthur continues to be infuriating in his singular way. He occasionally catches Eames’ eye and grins like they share something secret. He occasionally treats Eames like he’s slightly less than the dirt scuffing the toe of Arthur’s wingtips. Sometimes his eyes crinkle, and sometimes they’re flat and opaque; it seems to change with the day, or with some subtle cue that Eames can’t pick up. On the bad days, sometimes Eames will make an attempt at riling Arthur and receive a grin; other days his attempt will be met with a frown or, at worst Arthur will disappear altogether, into Annelise’s room or out into the streets of Stockholm.
“What is the deal with Arthur and Annelise, anyway?” Eames asks after the fifth time this happens. Ariadne is fiddling with the Lego set she uses to unwind.
“I heard he set her up with James Bailey,” Ariadne says, glancing up. “Not that that relationship has any staying power.”
Annelise and James Bailey are infamous for the way their relationship oscillates between intense hatred and cloying affection, though Eames thought they had started dating on a job in London, when Arthur was in Belize. Not that he keeps tabs on Arthur or follows industry gossip with any particular attention.
Regardless, Arthur being besties with Annelise is definitely new.
“Maybe he’s trying to find a new extractor,” Ariadne offers. “Now that Cobb’s out.”
“He could just go back to being an architect,” Eames mutters, and Ariadne shrugs.
“How do you feel about the casting for Lizbet?” she says, instead, and Eames pretends not to notice she’s changing the subject because he has opinions about this that no one on the internet seems to care about so he’ll take any ear he can get (he hopes they cast an unknown for all the leads, for what it’s worth, because having a twenty-year-old play fifteen is always awful, and even if the acting isn’t great it’ll be nice not to have to think of Lizbet as “that chick from Skins” or whatever).
Ariadne seems to be listening, but she goes back to her Legos. Eames finds he doesn’t mind--he sits down on the spare stool next to Ariadne’s work table and lets everything spill out, and Ariadne hums assent whenever she deems it necessary.
“Doesn’t he have veto power on the casting?” Eames says. “I feel like I read that somewhere.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear on the internet,” Ariadne says. “If a Nigerian prince--”
“Worked with anyone recently who’s taking calls from Warner Brothers?” Eames continues.
“No,” Ariadne says. “But I doubt they’d be obvious about it if they were.”
“You know,” Eames says idly. “Someone has to know who Anthony Ruske is.”
“What?” Ariadne asks.
“I mean, he has an editor, and an agent. Someone has to know him, if they’re in touch on things like that,” Eames continues. It probably should have been obvious, but he’d never considered approaching Anthony Ruske sideways before. He always figured he could work it out be observing the candidates, but thus far no one was revealing a thing.
“So we ask his editor?” Ariadne says. “One does not simply walk into Mordor.”
“Shut up,” Eames repeats. “We extract it, of course.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Ariadne says flatly, squinting one eye at the city she’s slowly building out of blocks of primary color.
“What’s a terrible idea?” Arthur asks, and where he came from Eames doesn’t know, but he’s carrying a bag of what smells like fries, and hamburgers, and a cardboard caddy of cups.
“Is that what I think it is?” Eames asks, and Arthur lifts the bag incrementally.
“Yes,” he says.
“Annelise let you buy that?” Eames asks, because Annelise likes her food to be made where she can see it.
“What Annelise doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” Arthur says, and pulls a paper-wrapped burger and a sheaf of fries from the bag. “For you.”
“Thanks,” Eames says, snatching for the food. “I take back everything I ever said about kale chips. If I had to eat oatmeal for dinner again I was going to cry.”
“What about me?” Ariadne asks, and Arthur pulls too more greasy bundles from the bag before sitting down himself, ripping the bag down the middle to make a sort of placemat for his own portion. He’s perched on a stool, like Eames, with his feet resting on a bar and his knees wedged up too far, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. His thirty-fourth birthday must have passed recently, though Eames doesn’t really keep track anymore. But it’s nice to see Arthur like this. He used to perch on stools like that when he was working architecture on jobs without Cobb, and he and Eames would meet up late at night when Eames was done tailing marks, just to get hamburgers and fries and milkshakes.
“Milkshake?” Eames asks, and Arthur barks a laugh.
“You would think you hadn’t eaten,” he says, handing Eames a cup.
“I haven’t,” Eames says. “I’ve been hiding my food in a napkin and dropping it out the window after you all go to bed.”
“That does explain the globs of oatmeal on the sidewalk,” Ariadne says. “But not the paunch around your middle.” She jabs pincered fingers at him.
“There’s no paunch,” Eames says, shifting his shirt upwards to look at his torso. “It’s blubber, to keep warm.”
Arthur glances at Eames’ stomach disinterestedly.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “There’s no paunch.”
“See?” Eames says, smoothing down his shirt and turning to Ariadne.
“Or no more than usual,” Arthur continues, and it’s Eames’ turn to laugh.
“Who do you think Anthony Ruske is, Arthur?” Ariadne asks when the conversation lulls. Eames looks up, because he knows Arthur never answers this question.
“I haven’t read the books,” Arthur says carefully, dipping a fry in his milkshake.
“But you have to have a suspicion,” Ariadne presses, and Arthur shrugs.
“There are people in dreamsharing I don’t know,” Arthur says.
“So you don’t think they’re about Eames?” Ariadne asks, and Arthur looks up for the first time, at Eames, not Ariadne.
“Maybe they’re about all of us,” he says, holding Eames’ gaze. “But if we’re living it, why do we need to read about it?”
“Because the books are tidier,” Eames replies.
“They’re not over yet,” Arthur says. “How’s the forge coming?”
“I’m ready to run this thing when you have a time,” Eames says. “And when Ariadne’s done with her Legos.”
“Don’t let me hold you back,” Ariadne mutters.
“We don’t have the right situation yet,” Arthur says. “Give me a week.”
part 2
eames obsessively tracks a young adult series that may or may not be based on his life. written for this prompt.
notes: thanks to the ever lovely gelbwax for the beta! all remaining errors are, like usual, mine.
pg13 . 13735 words . AO3
When it comes to light that the title for the fourth book in the Dreamers quartet is Inception, Eames knows within the hour. When Anthony Ruske sells the film rights for the quartet to Warner Brothers for an undisclosed amount, Eames knows immediately.
Because Eames does not have a Google alert on the name Anthony Ruske, except that he totally, completely does. Also an alert on the phrase “Dreamers quartet.” And on the name Eagen Grey, though that mostly brings up blogs about how likely it is that Grey will sleep with the prickly (but hot) Oliver Lawrence before the series is up, whether that relationship will have any longevity, and how scorching their potential sex will be, regardless.
Eames usually reads the blogs both critically and with too much investment, but in his defense, he does avoid the fanfiction. Only because it makes him somewhere between uncomfortable and jealous, because he was not that good at sex when he was seventeen. And, also, these characters are seventeen and he’s twice their age.
There are times, when he’s trawling (and trolling) message boards (dreamwalkers.com is decidedly the best) that Eames wonders if he has some sort of problem. He usually writes that off.
He especially writes it off when he finds out, fifty-six minutes after the information is leaked, that the fourth book will be titled Inception. Ariadne sends him an e-mail seven minutes later with a series of exclamation marks for the subject line, because Ariadne is the person second-most invested in figuring out who, precisely, Anthony Ruske is.
Eames is the person first-most invested, but that’s only because the books are obviously about him, if he had gotten involved in dreamsharing when he was sixteen years old and had been rather a doormat and a twit.
That might be getting ahead of the story, though. Eames is not Anthony Ruske; neither is he a writer, nor a historian. So no one should expect him to get the pacing or even the chronology quite right on this. If pressed, though, he would say that it began with the publication of the first book in the international sensation the Dreamers quartet would become.
The first book in the series was published by Viking, released in America in July of 2010. It was set somewhere between the present and the future, called Ignition, and traced the development of something called dreamwalking, a novel technology which enabled individuals to invade the dreams of others. This was all viewed through the eyes of one Eagen Grey (that’s Grey to you), an ordinary bloke from Oxford, the son of a professor and a librarian, who was not, unlike the protagonists of many such novels, orphaned at a young age. Instead he became involved with dreamwalking research one afternoon when he was skulking around the university where his mother worked, trying to get her to give him money for fish and chips. Instead of getting fish or chips, he had encountered a mysterious psychology professor who immediately recognized Grey as uniquely gifted and enlisted him for an experiment. In addition to eventually giving Grey money for dinner. It should have been morally dubious--it probably was morally dubious--but maybe because the professor was eccentric and had a long white beard, it mostly worked.
Eames did not read Ignition for at least a year and a half after its British release. By that time the sequel (Transformation) had topped the bestseller lists of both sides of the pond, and also on several sides of other bodies of water, both with and without quaint nicknames (the ditch, the Indian Ocean, etcetera). It was, in the popular vernacular, an international bestseller.
But Eames had been busy. His father had sent him a copy of the first book almost immediately after the British release, wrapping in butcher paper with a little note written in illegible scrawl--“you might like this one.” And Eames had put it at the bottom of a pile of books, wrapped in butcher paper and festooned with similar notes, that he had a vague intention of reading.
Then he had flown to Israel for an extraction, and from there he’d gone to Japan, and from there to Washington, D.C., and by the time he got back home he had an inkling that his father had, in fact, mailed him the very book that was causing a shimmering wave of gossip to ripple across the dreamsharing community--in Israel it was a rumor, in Japan, a confirmed rumor, and in Washington, something slightly more than that. Someone in the know had written a novel about dreamsharing. They had peeled back the veil. It was, perhaps not inexplicably given the success of the likes of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Twilight, targeted at young adults.
Mostly people were pissed because whoever it was, they were getting rich. There was a betting pool about who Anthony Ruske might be. Eames had it on good authority that there were at least five hundred U.S. dollars, one thousand Euros, seven hundred pounds, and ten thousand rupees on it being him, and he didn’t have the energy to figure out who had bet the money so he could either thank or taunt them. But copies of the book were hard to come by, because no one wanted to support the author by actually buying one, so Eames had to wait until he got home to read it.
He had been feeling rather smug about being suspected by so many until he actually read the book, and then he called Ariadne--Ignition’s most ardent advocate--immediately.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me it was about me?” he hissed when she answered the phone with her own name, groggy.
“What?” she said.
“Ignition,” he said. “British kid, from Oxford, professor mum, librarian dad--what the fuck.”
“Eames?” she said. “I didn’t know your mom was a professor. And, incidental piece of information here, but it’s two in the morning.”
Eames was actually aware of that. Ariadne was in Paris, he was in Mombasa, there was something dripping from his ceiling and his copy of Ignition was splayed open at the foot of his bed. His father would’ve told him to use a bookmark.
“Who the fuck is Anthony Ruske?” he asked, because although he could apologize, that didn’t mean he wanted to. Or would. Or any of that shit.
“I think I only answered my phone because I was sleeping,” Ariadne continued. “And vulnerable.”
“You can’t be a vulnerable sleeper in this business,” Eames said idly “But that’s not the matter at hand.”
“Right,” Ariadne said. “Anthony Ruske. How about we discuss that in the morning.”
“I don’t want--” Eames started, but by then Ariadne had already hung up.
He spent the rest of the evening (which was already, if he was frank with himself, over) reading the Wikipedia article about Anthony Ruske sixteen times, and then he fell asleep knowing precisely the same amount of information has he had when he started. Namely, that there was no useful information about Anthony Ruske available. Ignition was his first book. He lived in New York City. All of that was probably bullshit, but even lies could reveal something of the truth, if they were told in any volume. Anthony Ruske apparently knew that, and so the only source Eames had to draw from were his books.
In Transformation, published in late 2011, Grey learned to change shape in dreams and joined forces with the mysterious American Oliver Lawrence, who had been introduced passingly in the first novel when he crashed a faculty mixer Grey was attending at the university and got thrown out for looking like a hobo. Together with Lizbet Godoy they began to uncover a plot by World Corps to use dreamwalking to influence consumer habits and bring about a new world order.
In Extraction, 2012, Oliver and Grey stole information from the dreams of the president of World Corps, only for Grey to discover that said president was Oliver’s father. This information was revealed in the frantic aftermath of the extraction, when Oliver and Grey are clearly about to kiss out of desperation and joy. At the end of the novel it looked like Grey and Lizbet would be continuing their mission alone. The Greybet shippers let out a roar of joy heard ’round the world wide web, but Eames refused to read their improbable manifestos. Even when they popped up on his Google alert.
And now, Inception. The publication is slated for late 2013; in time for the Christmas shopping season, although Eames has serious doubts about whether any right-minded child will be willing to wait until Christmas. He certainly won’t.
And, judging by the exclamation marks dashing across the subject line of Ariadne’s e-mail, neither will she. Eames dials her number.
“You think it was someone on the job?” he asks as soon as she picks up.
“How could it not be?” Ariadne is practically shouting. “No one else has--”
“That’s not strictly true,” Eames says.
“What do you mean, ‘strictly true’?” Ariadne says. “Superior fucker.”
Eames would not actually argue with the description of himself as a superior fucker, but that’s besides the point.
“There are pockets in the dreamsharing community,” Eames continues. “Isolated populations, so to speak. A military team attempted inception years ago, but since the criminal side of dreamsharing isn’t entirely drawn from military sources--”
“But you know about it, blah, blah, blah,” Ariadne mutters.
“Also,” Eames says, pretending he didn’t hear her. Because he’s the better man. “Also, the military inception didn’t work, but only because they planted the wrong idea.”
“And you were on this team, double-oh-seven?” Ariadne asks, and if they were face to face Eames would try to look coy. As it is, he doesn’t.
“Yes,” he says. “Of course I was.”
“So, what, five other people could’ve written this, and all of them are in the military and tight assed as shit and probably wouldn’t.”
“Do you think I’m a tight ass? It’s also possible one of the corporate teams has achieved inception and we don’t know.”
“Stop it,” Ariadne says. “Do you seriously think Ruske is a corporate stiff or a military lackey? Because it takes cojones to potentially out an entire industry in a novel, or a series of novels, let alone bestsellers--”
“And you think it could only be someone who already has the feds on their back,” Eames finishes for her.
“Precisely,” Ariadne says, enunciating the word carefully.
“Or, consider this, maybe it was been someone who just heard about the inception job,” Eames says.
“Did you tell anyone? Because I didn’t.”
“It’s not a completely unique idea, Ariadne.”
“And it’s so hard to believe it could’ve been Cobb, or Arthur, or Yusuf?”
“Yes,” Eames says. He pushes his chair back from his desk and looks down at his toes, spreads them out. Arthur is too close-mouthed, Cobb too serious, Yusuf doesn’t give enough shits about anything outside his chemistry. Honestly, the only people on the team he could imagine actually writing Dreamers are himself and Ariadne, and they--didn’t.
“Cobb could’ve written it for his kids,” Ariadne continues.
“Can you seriously see Cobb writing a book about dreamsharing without including a Mal doppelganger?” Eames asks. “Because I can’t.”
“Lizbet?” Ariadne asks, but even she sounds skeptical.
“Even if you take into account sex organs, Lizbet has more in common with Yusuf than Mal. Up to and including being perpetually high.”
“Yusuf isn’t--” Ariadne starts, and then she lets out an exasperated sigh.
“Yeah,” Eames says. “Valiant effort though. A+.”
“Oh, shut up,” Ariadne says. “I suppose you know who wrote Dreamers, then.”
“Me,” Eames replies. “In my sleep.”
And then he hangs up the phone, because it’s absolutely not fair that Anthony Ruske stole details of his life, wrote a book about it, somehow twisted it so it’s extremely likely Grey will get laid whereas Eames hasn’t gotten any for months, and then Ruske doesn’t even have the grace to at least admit who he--or she, for that matter--is. Except, you know, a creep.
Eames tried to anagram the pseudonym, once or twice or fifteen times. It didn’t help.
He decides that Anthony Ruske might be Robert Fischer primarily because he’s run out of tea and has eliminated all the other individuals involved with the inception job. It’s worth a try, anyway; Fischer shouldn’t remember the inception, but he could, and who knows what ridiculous career path he selected for himself after dismantling his father’s empire. With that as evidence, Eames tries and fails to locate Fischer, and then he calls Arthur.
“Eames,” Arthur says when he picks up, voice dry. “To what do I owe the dubious pleasure?”
“Dubious--” Eames starts. There’s not really anything to say. A dubious pleasure still could be a pleasure.
“Sorry,” Eames continues. “I was wondering if you’d been keeping tabs on Robert Fischer?”
“Upstate New York,” Arthur says. “Surprisingly wholesome commune.”
“Wholesome?” Eames says, and Arthur releases a low chuckle. Eames imagines him at the other end of the line--he doesn’t know where Arthur lives, but he imagines someplace neat but quirky, immaculately clean but not lacking character. Arthur might be sitting at a desk, tipping back on his chair in the way he’s prone to do, on the verge of dimpling.
“They make soap,” Arthur replies.
“And is there any chance that he’s been in touch with someone from Viking?” Eames says, and Arthur groans.
“You and Ariadne think--”
“Actually it’s just me, cheers,” Eames says. He opens his refrigerator to a surge of cool air and studies the contents. Perhaps he should’ve blamed Ariadne.
“There’s no chance Fischer remembers what went down,” Arthur says. “Not to mention that where he’s currently living is off the grid. And there’s at least seventeen other reasons why Robert Fischer couldn’t have written those shitty books.”
“Sounds like you’ve been counting,” Eames says, tucking the phone under his chin and grabbing a jar of gherkins.
“Don’t project,” Arthur says. “It’s only permissible in dreams.”
“Guess what I’m eating?” Eames replies, crunching into a gherkin.
“Fuck you, I hate this game,” Arthur says. And then, momentarily, “Potato chips.”
“No,” Eames says, and takes another bite.
“Tomato?” Arthur asks.
“How do you go from crisps to tomatoes?” Eames asks, and Arthur grumbles.
“This is a fucking impossible game, dumbass. If I got some food--right now--and I don’t have any but if I did--if I got some food and ate it you wouldn’t have a clue.”
“Bet me on that?” Eames asks, crunching on his gherkin. He likes it when he can get Arthur entangled in insipid arguments, and he has a feeling that Arthur enjoys it, too, because otherwise he would’ve hung up as soon as Eames started eating. Arthur doesn’t suffer fools gladly, except, apparently, when he does.
That was one of Eames’ more searing insights for the evening.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “Yes I will. I’ll call you in the future, and eat food at you, and if you can’t guess, you’ll owe me--something--”
“Deal,” Eames replies. He’s not overly concerned with the terms of the bet, so long as it exists. Arthur will probably try to pull something stupid with kale chips or seaweed, but Eames is totally on to him and his penchant for disgusting green foods.
“It’s a pickle,” Arthur says, and then he hangs up the phone.
Eames looks at the jar on the counter and shrugs. Then he calls Ariadne.
“Arthur says it’s not Fischer,” he offers.
“Oh, brilliant,” she says. “That’s so helpful. I totally thought Fischer was Anthony Ruske.”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor,” Eames says, and hangs up on her.
Ariadne calls him back.
“I don’t understand why you trust Arthur, anyway,” Ariadne says. “It could be him.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Eames says. “I’m sure Arthur wrote a kids’ book.”
“It’s not a kids’ book,” Ariadne says. “It’s a young adult series with huge crossover potential. And I thought sarcasm was the lowest form of humor?”
“It is when you use it,” Eames snipes. He returns the gherkins to the fridge and takes a moment to stare at it again: milk, gherkins, meat, leftover curry from Yusuf, if he doesn’t get a job soon he’ll need to go grocery shopping, and he has a policy against being at the house for more than three trips to anything that might constitute a grocery store, and that includes corner shops and markets.
“Besides,” Eames continues. “If Arthur did write it, he’d have every reason to encourage me to continue pursuing false leads.”
“Eh,” Ariadne says. “Point to you, Mr. Eames.”
“Thank you, m’dear. Now, I assume you’ve been following the speculation about Inception, so I’m thinking we make a bet about how explicit our friend Ruske will make the sex.”
“Ugh,” Ariadne says. “They’re kids.”
“They were kids,” Eames says. “They’re all at least eighteen now, yeah? So it’s all squared away, even in the most prudish of nations. And isn’t this a young adult series with huge crossover potential? Nothing says crossover like sex.”
“You really need to get laid,” Ariadne says. “If you just pop north a bit, I know a place--”
“Not going clubbing with you,” Eames says. “Ever again.”
The last time Eames went clubbing with Ariadne, Ariadne went home with the bartender. Eames woke up in a dumpster with a mouth full of rotten banana peel, a searing headache, and a slow tidal wave of memories he would rather forget.
Ariadne harrumphs, probably blowing out her lower lip.
“You know that bartender thought she was saving me from you?” Ariadne says. “Best sex of my life.”
“Don’t rub it in,” Eames mutters. He’s heard this story before--it’s not quite as unfortunate as what he did that night, but it’s about as depressing.
“I was trying to cheer you up,” Ariadne says. “Apparently I suck at it.”
“Yeah you do,” Eames starts to say, but then Ariadne cuts him off.
“I’ve got an incoming call from Arthur, I’m going to take it, alright?” she says, and then she puts Eames on hold before he has a chance to respond. He considers going to the washroom to make morose faces at himself in the mirror.
He resists the urge, barely. When he had had flatmates they had called his propensity for making faces at himself in the mirror narcissistic. Their exact words had been “something--something--why didn’t you fuck that bird, she was hot--something--something--I need to use the loo,” but it was the thought that counted.
Eames had already been forging then. His affinity for mirrors was more a way to keep track of himself than anything else, but it wasn’t always worth the bother of explaining.
Ariadne comes back on the line, “Arthur--he’ll probably be calling you in a sec--”
And then there’s a call from Arthur, like clockwork, and Eames says, “I’ve got an incoming call from Arthur, I’m going to take it, alright?” and puts Ariadne on hold before she has a chance to respond. Because she deserves it.
Prezioso wants them for an inception.
“I thought we were done with them?” Eames asks. “Since Cobb got what he wanted and all.”
“The price is right,” Arthur says. In his mind’s eye, Eames can see him shrugging, a smooth motion of the shoulders that ripples down his back. Prezioso--Eames has worked for him before, and he oils the gears of every machine he encounters with money
“Who’s the extractor?” Eames asks.
“Nelson, actually,” Arthur replies after a moment.
“Nelson--” Eames says. Nelson was the only extractor Arthur had worked with other than Cobb. She was also one of the best, before she formally retired. They gave her rather a nice crystal picture frame. Nelson had said she wouldn’t go into the field again; she hadn’t. And now she was coming back after two years out, and doing an inception. “How did you get her?”
“I imagine Jones made her an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Arthur says. “You know how it goes.”
Eames does, actually, and even though he doesn’t need the money, he says he’ll do it. Maybe Prezioso knew, or Yusuf told him, but if Arthur’s on the team Eames will go along with very nearly anything. It’s a stupid weakness, though at least he knows he has it and he knows it’s stupid. Eames likes to think that counts for something, but he supposes Achilles knew that his heel was a bit of a weak point.
“What am I eating?” Arthur says, after the business end of things is taken care of.
“What?” Eames asks, because it barely sounds like anything. Maybe Arthur is moving his jaw.
“I think your phone is shitty,” Eames says, but the noise on the other end continues to be soft and muffled.
“Give up?” Arthur says when he returns to the line, speaking around a mouthful of--something.
“Nothing,” Eames says.
“No,” Arthur replies.
“Cheese?”
“Nope.”
“Fucking kale chips, I don’t even care,” Eames says.
“Marshmallow,” Arthur says. “Dumbass.”
“I was going to guess that next,” Eames says, and earns himself a bright laugh. “What do I owe you?”
“I’ll let you know,” Arthur replies.
“So you took it?” Ariadne asks when she’s back on the line.
“Of course,” Eames mutters. “Not like I really had any choice.”
“See you in Stockholm,” she says, and Eames has to pause and wonder why Prezioso wants to steal a vote on the Nobel committee. A single vote won’t make a difference, but there it is: that’s the job.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Arthur had said, when Eames asked. The words had floated across their tenuous mobile connection, somewhere between nonsense and not. It reminded Eames of when they had first met. Arthur liked to talk about principles, then, although the principles never made complete sense, and he walked with the lazy gait of someone who had studied philosophy at university and didn’t give a fuck whether or not it was useful.
That was a long time ago, when Arthur was sapling-green and Eames had just made the jump to criminal from the military dreamsharing community. It had been a sort of scrambling leap, and he was still trying to catch his footing when Arthur showed up. Arthur hadn’t yet taken to dressing in suits; the first day he appeared at the warehouse in a t-shirt and jeans with holes in them. He looked like a scrawny kid, his dark hair curling around his ears.
Eames thought he was eighteen, maybe less. When he asked Cobb if he was some sort of prodigy, Cobb had thrown back his head and laughed, and then he’d called over Arthur and told him the story, and Arthur had just shrugged one shoulder up, which made him seem even younger.
“Does it matter?” he said. “I was a prodigy once. I can do the job.”
Arthur had turned out to be the same age as Eames. Arthur had turned out to be slightly overconfident, as twenty-three-year-olds are wont to be, at least based on the following evidence: Eames was the same.
They did the job, but not before Cobb got grazed by a bullet while Arthur was fiddling with his gun, not before Eames lost control of his forgery and wound up with his own eye on the mark’s wife’s face.
“No one gets it quite right the first time,” Cobb said when they reconvened at a dingy bar afterwards. He was not looking at Eames so much as he was looking at Mal, and Eames wondered idly what their sex life was like, spinning the toothpick of olives through his martini.
He was sucking the olives off the toothpick when Arthur showed up.
“What, do you think you’re James Bond?” he said, settling on a stool next to Eames at the bar. He was wearing an Oxford and a waistcoat; his hair was slicked back; he looked like he would look, later, but at the time it was some kind of revelation.
“I could say the same of you,” Eames said, instead of offering one of the compliments buzzing around his head. The compliments were, frankly, embarrassing, and the harder he tried to come up with a suave one they closer they got to pick-up lines of the most unfortunate sort. Cobb had glanced between the pair of them, plainly amused, and then returned to his conversation with Mal. “Why didn’t you wear that on the job?”
Arthur held up a slim white finger, then called over the bartender and ordered a scotch. It was oddly charming, like he expected Eames to somehow be offended if he paused the conversation for a moment without acknowledging.
“I figured it didn’t matter what I wore to the warehouse, because it’s a warehouse and we sleep for work. Apparently, I was mistaken,” he replied. He was chewing on his lower lip, a habit he eventually either outgrew or controlled; Eames looked away, to the scratched mirror behind the bar.
“Think he’ll hire us again?” Eames asked, nodding at Cobb.
“Me, of course,” Arthur said. “Not so sure about your chances.”
Eames had laughed at that, then, but now it seems like one of those jokes that was only funny given the circumstances--lukewarm beer, lights with lampshades the color of Coca-Cola, the quick glint of Arthur’s teeth when he grinned, waking up with the skin on his knuckles intact, in-dream and out.
He never worries about the skin on his knuckles, now. It was scarred white and hard after a certain job in Pompeii that isn’t ever worth discussing.
Eames visits Yusuf before flying out, even though he hates visiting Yusuf. Yusuf’s den is always a stark reminder of the facets of dreamsharing, which glitters with the harshness of a diamond. Eames knew a diamondfence, once, who said that the trick of the best jewelers was to make the hardest stone on the planet look soft.
Yusuf has no interest in softness of any sort. He is one of the only honest men Eames has ever met in dreamsharing.
“You still think Grey is you?” Yusuf asks when their conversation circles around to the Dreamers quartet, as most conversations with Eames tend to these days.
“Who else could it be?” Eames counters. They’re in Yusuf’s shop, leaning side-by-side with elbows on the counter, watching the light filter through bottles of chemistry. Yusuf has made them both tea: too strong, so strong that Eames can feel it doing terrible things inside him as he drinks it.
“You do realize that Grey only resembles you in the superficial details, don’t you?” Yusuf says. “He doesn’t act anything like you.”
“But he resembles me in way too many superficial details,” Eames says, trying to keep his voice level. He has noticed that Grey isn’t like him, but it’s a detail he chooses to disregard more often than not. Grey is a forger, but he doesn’t act like one, he runs the job like an extractor. And he’s Eames, but he doesn’t act like Eames, either.
Yusuf shrugs.
“I just thought I’d remind you,” he says. “Maybe it has nothing to do with you.”
Which is bullshit. It clearly has something to do with Eames.
“Or maybe whoever wrote those books just thought your backstory was interesting,” Yusuf continues. “It doesn’t need to be a big deal.”
Eames doesn’t say what he’s thinking.
He’s thinking that of course it has to be a big deal. Even if Grey doesn’t resemble him, it’s his life--details of his life that are, in large part, his business and his alone--tacked onto a character in a storybook. At the very least, he deserves some royalties. At the most, though, he deserves an explanation.
A customer comes in, signaled by a clanging bell on the door, and when Yusuf returns to the conversation he glances at Eames with lazy, hooded eyes and changes the subject.
When Eames is getting ready to leave and Yusuf is closing up the shop, Yusuf gives him another long glance, assessing.
“You know which character you remind me of?” Yusuf asks, and Eames starts to reply: “If you say Lizbet I will--”
“Oliver,” Yusuf interjects. “Think about it.”
And then he swings the door shut so Eames is on the outside and flicks the padlock into place, shaking his head at the scowl furrowing Eames’ brow.
Maybe he should consider it immediately, but instead Eames files that piece of information away for later, neatly ensconcing it in his head with the other incongruities of his life: why french fries taste good dipped in milkshakes (Arthur taught him that--on a job in Ohio, at a Wendy’s on the cusp of the highway, eating Frosties and french fries in a parked car while the moon wheeled across the sky), the number of times Ariadne has beaten him at cards (“Unlucky in love,” she always says, frowning, and each time Eames wonders if that means his luck in love is good), why Dom Cobb is unashamed to admit that the third Matrix is his favorite movie.
Eames takes enough Tylenol P.M. to knock out a horse for his flight to Stockholm, because when he told Ariadne you couldn’t be a vulnerable sleeper in this line of work he was kind of lying. Also because without the drugs he knows he won’t sleep at all, and then he’ll just dwell on things when he’d rather not.
During the layover in Amsterdam he spends ten minutes staring at a display of the Dreamers quartet in an airport bookshop, until the shopkeeper comes out to ask him if he needs any help.
“No,” he says, and then when she looked at him with one painted brow raised expectantly: “Just a fan.”
“Ah,” she says, her lips peeling back to reveal teeth. “Then you’ll have heard about Grey, yes?”
“No,” Eames says, feigning disinterest. “I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“They want to cast Zac Efron,” she says, like this is some delicious secret. “For the film.”
Eames tries to school his face into something that’s not complete horror.
“That’s interesting,” he says, and when the intercom crackles to life and a bland woman’s voice starts to say something Eames says “I think that’s my flight” and rushes off.
Zac Efron for Grey what the fuck. He texts that to Ariadne when the plane is taxiing, and makes enough muffled noises of disapproval that the man in the seat next to him glances at Eames not once but three times with an expression on his face that suggests he doesn’t like something he smells.
But that may just be his face.
The flight to Stockholm is shorter, but Eames is awake the entire time so it feels longer. He flips through SkyMall, considers and then nixes purchasing a giant crossword for the unembellished wall in the room he might call an office if he ever did anything in it. He counts by threes, and looks at the book he brought but doesn’t read it. When he finally lands in Stockholm Ariadne is there to meet him, holding a cardboard sign coloured flat grey.
“Funny,” he says when he sidles up to her. “Hilarious.”
“I thought so,” she replies, tossing the scrap of cardboard into a rubbish bin. “But you know, different strokes for different folks.”
“Right,” Eames says, and Ariadne grins and reaches for his carry-on. She hales a taxi to the warehouse, humming tunelessly to herself.
“You’ve met Annelise, right?” she says.
“If you have of course I have,” Eames says dryly. “I’ve been in the business for eleven years.”
“And you get around like the town bicycle,” Ariadne mutters. “No reason to act superior about it.”
Eames snorts and Ariadne glances at him.
“Annelise and Arthur are pretty close,” she says slowly.
“Are they?” Eames asks. “I don’t recall.”
Ariadne shrugs, glances out the window, then shoots him a grin.
“And we’re starting a club but you aren’t invited because you’re the only one on this job whose name doesn’t start with ‘A.’”
“I’m distraught,” Eames says. “Or I would be, if my first name weren’t Aaron.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” Ariadne says. “You look nothing like an Aaron.”
“Two ‘A’s,” Eames continues. “I should be the king of your little club.”
“It doesn’t have a king because Arthur and I are both American and believe in democracy. In fact, I’m Greek, I practically invented democracy,” Ariadne says haughtily, ignoring Eames’ scoffing protest. “We’re here.”
Ariadne pays the cabbie while Eames inspects the warehouse, which looks like every warehouse ever: stamped with the name of some business it no longer contains, too much wall for too few windows.
“Did you get my text?” he asks as he trails Ariadne inside.
“So, Efron huh?”
“It’s terrible,” Eames says. “Disney isn’t even involved with the movie, and why the fuck would you involve Efron if not because Uncle Walt made you.”
“Uncle Walt isn’t even alive,” Ariadne says. “And I thought the Disney Channel did quite a nice job with that Pride and Prejudice adaptation.”
“The Disney Channel didn’t do a Pride and Prejudice,” Arthur calls from a dim room to the right of the entranceway. “But I thought their version of Persuasion was quite good.”
“Arthur!” Ariadne crows. “You made a funny!”
“I make funnies,” Arthur says. “But usually my humor is too refined for the likes of you.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, shielding her eyes. “I’m a peon unworthy to be in your presence.”
Arthur catches Eames’ glance and grins until his eyes crinkle at the corners, and Eames allows himself a returning grin, probably too big and goofy, exposing his snaggleteeth.
“Hey,” he says.
“Been awhile,” Arthur says back.
“Is that Eames?” calls a woman from the same room that produced Arthur, and Annelise Nelson comes to the fore.
Annelise has always intimidated Eames because there’s something about her that seems almost challengingly wholesome, like she drinks whole milk straight from the cow and spends her spare time rescuing hikers lost beneath avalanches, and she expects the same of everyone she meets. Her cheeks are round and rosy, but her eyes are like shards of ice.
Also, she’s taller than Eames by a good several inches.
“Annelise,” Eames says, proffering a hand. “I expect you’ll want to brief me?”
“Arthur can,” she says, waving him off. “Though you should know that I’ve heard some rumors about you, and I won’t stand for discussions of those stupid books.”
When Eames looks at Ariadne, she shrugs apologetically, and slips off down the hall. Arthur glances at Eames, and gestures for him to follow.
They wind up in the vast, empty room on the top floor of the warehouse, where the light is better. There are desks in each corner, the plain, cheap kind made of fake wood that weigh more than they ought to. Arthur extracts some files from the drawer of one desk, and the leans back against it and indicates that Eames should take a chair.
“So Annelise isn’t my biggest fan, eh?” Eames asks.
“The mark--” Arthur starts.
The mark is a professor who has a clipped mustache and bovine eyes. He wears sweaters that seem better suited to a fisherman or a shepherd, and is married to a woman with a face like the moon. It is expected that Eames will tail him and find something sufficiently offensive for the forge to say, something that will sway the mark away from voting for the forge and into voting for someone else.
“Simple,” Arthur says, flopping the file closed and handing it to Eames.
“We really need a pointman for this?” Eames asks, and Arthur shrugs.
“We always need a pointman,” he says. “Someone needs to make sure the rest of you don’t get shot.”
“This man is militarized?” Eames asks, glancing at the file in his hands.
“Of course,” Arthur says. “You thought simple meant easy?”
It has been awhile. Eames forgot how neatly Arthur severs his professional life from his personal one, shifting from a crinkle-eyed grin to clipped vowels and a flat face as soon as the word job enters the equation.
“Remember when we went for drinks after the inception job?” Eames asks, just to rile him.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “Ariadne went home with the bartender.”
Eames remembers that part, too. It’s the rest that he’s forgotten.
“Yes,” Eames echoes. “She did.”
“This is your desk,” Arthur tells him, and leaves.
Eames had rather thought it was Arthur’s desk, but when he slides open the bottom drawer he finds it contains only the most basic files, and the top drawer contains a row of the cheap stick pens of the sort Eames favors and a series of blank tapes for recording.
“Thanks,” he calls after Arthur, because it’s typical, really, that Arthur would have gotten the right sort of pens, and would have thought to pick up fresh tapes, and wouldn’t ask him why he can’t use a digital recorder like everyone else.
There’s no reply.
Eames sets to work almost immediately after unrolling his bedroll in the room Ariadne indicates he should sleep in. The mark doesn’t actually know the forge that well, so it should by all rights be easy, but trying to pass off a low quality forgery is the worst sort of unprofessionalism, and there are all sorts of things Eames does do, in life, but that isn’t one of them. He stamps his forges with craftsmanship, always.
And so he spends most of his time tailing the forge and recording observations, schedules, significant interactions. It’s dull, a marathon of dullness, and so Eames can hardly be blamed if his record of the forge’s activities occasionally spills over into comments about the Dreamers quartet, which Annelise apparently does not want to discuss, and Arthur persists in claiming he hasn’t read.
Arthur continues to be infuriating in his singular way. He occasionally catches Eames’ eye and grins like they share something secret. He occasionally treats Eames like he’s slightly less than the dirt scuffing the toe of Arthur’s wingtips. Sometimes his eyes crinkle, and sometimes they’re flat and opaque; it seems to change with the day, or with some subtle cue that Eames can’t pick up. On the bad days, sometimes Eames will make an attempt at riling Arthur and receive a grin; other days his attempt will be met with a frown or, at worst Arthur will disappear altogether, into Annelise’s room or out into the streets of Stockholm.
“What is the deal with Arthur and Annelise, anyway?” Eames asks after the fifth time this happens. Ariadne is fiddling with the Lego set she uses to unwind.
“I heard he set her up with James Bailey,” Ariadne says, glancing up. “Not that that relationship has any staying power.”
Annelise and James Bailey are infamous for the way their relationship oscillates between intense hatred and cloying affection, though Eames thought they had started dating on a job in London, when Arthur was in Belize. Not that he keeps tabs on Arthur or follows industry gossip with any particular attention.
Regardless, Arthur being besties with Annelise is definitely new.
“Maybe he’s trying to find a new extractor,” Ariadne offers. “Now that Cobb’s out.”
“He could just go back to being an architect,” Eames mutters, and Ariadne shrugs.
“How do you feel about the casting for Lizbet?” she says, instead, and Eames pretends not to notice she’s changing the subject because he has opinions about this that no one on the internet seems to care about so he’ll take any ear he can get (he hopes they cast an unknown for all the leads, for what it’s worth, because having a twenty-year-old play fifteen is always awful, and even if the acting isn’t great it’ll be nice not to have to think of Lizbet as “that chick from Skins” or whatever).
Ariadne seems to be listening, but she goes back to her Legos. Eames finds he doesn’t mind--he sits down on the spare stool next to Ariadne’s work table and lets everything spill out, and Ariadne hums assent whenever she deems it necessary.
“Doesn’t he have veto power on the casting?” Eames says. “I feel like I read that somewhere.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear on the internet,” Ariadne says. “If a Nigerian prince--”
“Worked with anyone recently who’s taking calls from Warner Brothers?” Eames continues.
“No,” Ariadne says. “But I doubt they’d be obvious about it if they were.”
“You know,” Eames says idly. “Someone has to know who Anthony Ruske is.”
“What?” Ariadne asks.
“I mean, he has an editor, and an agent. Someone has to know him, if they’re in touch on things like that,” Eames continues. It probably should have been obvious, but he’d never considered approaching Anthony Ruske sideways before. He always figured he could work it out be observing the candidates, but thus far no one was revealing a thing.
“So we ask his editor?” Ariadne says. “One does not simply walk into Mordor.”
“Shut up,” Eames repeats. “We extract it, of course.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Ariadne says flatly, squinting one eye at the city she’s slowly building out of blocks of primary color.
“What’s a terrible idea?” Arthur asks, and where he came from Eames doesn’t know, but he’s carrying a bag of what smells like fries, and hamburgers, and a cardboard caddy of cups.
“Is that what I think it is?” Eames asks, and Arthur lifts the bag incrementally.
“Yes,” he says.
“Annelise let you buy that?” Eames asks, because Annelise likes her food to be made where she can see it.
“What Annelise doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” Arthur says, and pulls a paper-wrapped burger and a sheaf of fries from the bag. “For you.”
“Thanks,” Eames says, snatching for the food. “I take back everything I ever said about kale chips. If I had to eat oatmeal for dinner again I was going to cry.”
“What about me?” Ariadne asks, and Arthur pulls too more greasy bundles from the bag before sitting down himself, ripping the bag down the middle to make a sort of placemat for his own portion. He’s perched on a stool, like Eames, with his feet resting on a bar and his knees wedged up too far, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. His thirty-fourth birthday must have passed recently, though Eames doesn’t really keep track anymore. But it’s nice to see Arthur like this. He used to perch on stools like that when he was working architecture on jobs without Cobb, and he and Eames would meet up late at night when Eames was done tailing marks, just to get hamburgers and fries and milkshakes.
“Milkshake?” Eames asks, and Arthur barks a laugh.
“You would think you hadn’t eaten,” he says, handing Eames a cup.
“I haven’t,” Eames says. “I’ve been hiding my food in a napkin and dropping it out the window after you all go to bed.”
“That does explain the globs of oatmeal on the sidewalk,” Ariadne says. “But not the paunch around your middle.” She jabs pincered fingers at him.
“There’s no paunch,” Eames says, shifting his shirt upwards to look at his torso. “It’s blubber, to keep warm.”
Arthur glances at Eames’ stomach disinterestedly.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “There’s no paunch.”
“See?” Eames says, smoothing down his shirt and turning to Ariadne.
“Or no more than usual,” Arthur continues, and it’s Eames’ turn to laugh.
“Who do you think Anthony Ruske is, Arthur?” Ariadne asks when the conversation lulls. Eames looks up, because he knows Arthur never answers this question.
“I haven’t read the books,” Arthur says carefully, dipping a fry in his milkshake.
“But you have to have a suspicion,” Ariadne presses, and Arthur shrugs.
“There are people in dreamsharing I don’t know,” Arthur says.
“So you don’t think they’re about Eames?” Ariadne asks, and Arthur looks up for the first time, at Eames, not Ariadne.
“Maybe they’re about all of us,” he says, holding Eames’ gaze. “But if we’re living it, why do we need to read about it?”
“Because the books are tidier,” Eames replies.
“They’re not over yet,” Arthur says. “How’s the forge coming?”
“I’m ready to run this thing when you have a time,” Eames says. “And when Ariadne’s done with her Legos.”
“Don’t let me hold you back,” Ariadne mutters.
“We don’t have the right situation yet,” Arthur says. “Give me a week.”
part 2