jonquil in december
.jonquil in december
arthur and eames tell stories about how they first met. eventually, they tell the truth.
notes: written for eleveninches as part of the dream_holiday exchange.
thanks go to gelbwax for beta-reading and support.
r . 11840 words . AO3
There are stories that don’t happen in real life. Arthur calls his sister sometimes and they talk about it; she has a boyfriend she might marry. They live together in the same city they’ve both lived in for some time, the same city where they met at a bar when she went out with her friends from work and she hit on him ostentatiously, which was how Martha does most things.
Martha is Arthur’s inroad to ordinary, and he likes to put the phone on speaker and lay it flat on the cabinet in his hotel rooms while he sits on the bed and cleans his Glock. It’s nice to know there’s something ordinary in the world. That doesn’t mean he wants it for himself.
That’s what he tells himself when he and Eames are in the Zurich airport discussing where to go next. Discussing, heatedly, and then Arthur has the brief flash of a thought that if he and Eames were like Martha this wouldn’t be happening; he and Eames would probably live together already, and they wouldn’t be sniping about Prague and Mombasa like this because they wouldn’t need to, and the question of where they’d be flying to would already have been settled.
“You know,” Ariadne says, looking up from her book. “Most of us bought our tickets online and could be halfway through customs already.”
“Contrary to what you seem to think ‘one third of the team’ does not constitute ‘most,’” Eames says.
“I like flying standby,” Arthur contributes, and Ariadne whiffs out a small snort.
“You would,” she says. “You know, you could both come to Vermont with me.”
“Vermont?” Eames asks. “And why would we want to go there?”
“Because then you can delay this conversation for at least a week,” Ariadne says. “And it’s almost solstice.”
“You would celebrate solstice,” Arthur says, and Eames and Ariadne both pause to look at him.
“That was weak,” Ariadne says.
“It was weak when you said it, too,” Arthur mutters. “That was the point.”
Ariadne nods, as if to herself, then continues.
“I have access to a place in Vermont. It would be like a retreat. Team building.”
“We aren’t a team,” Arthur says, looking past Ariadne to the travelers swimming across the terminal behind her, caught in a sea of small black suitcases.
“We aren’t a team like you two aren’t dating,” she says, glancing between Eames and Arthur. “Just because no one ever calls it that doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t know.”
“I think there was a double negative in there somewhere,” Arthur says.
“Arthur used to copy edit,” Eames supplies. They tell Ariadne these things all the time: Eames has a forgery in the Louvre, Arthur worked for Steve Jobs for a year after inception, Eames once shared pot brownies with a Prime Minister. This is the first time in his recent recollection that Eames has said something true.
“So,” Arthur says. “Vermont, you say?”
“I already invited the Cobbs. I know you want to give your godson a Christmas present,” Ariadne says, grinning. “And Yusuf’s coming.”
That’s how they wind up in some part of Vermont Arthur couldn’t peg on a map--there’s a flight from Zurich to Logan International by way of someplace else, and then an extremely nondescript rental car that careens down winding, snow-covered roads with Ariadne behind the wheel, shouting along to Christmas music despite the fact that she claims not to celebrate Christmas. Eames takes shotgun so Arthur can sleep in the back, sideways on the bench seat with his knees cribbed into the back of Eames’ seat. The conversation hums around him, bordering on inanity but never quite reaching it. It’s like being on a job, but without a purpose, and it’s warm in the car and Arthur’s thoughts sink away a little.
This could be any one of a number of things, if Ariadne doesn’t drive them into a ditch first.
The cabin turns out to be larger than Arthur had expected, a post and beam with high ceilings and a big stone fireplace at the center. Ariadne glances back at them when she’s unlocking the doors using a key she retrieved from beneath a table out back.
“My family’s old money,” she says. “But I was kind of disowned. Except, you know, no one uses this house.”
“I don’t know, actually,” Eames says, and Arthur catches his eye and shakes his head slightly. If Eames is going to be touchy about family money, now is not the time.
“It’s lovely,” Arthur says, and Eames narrows his eyes because ‘lovely’ is a word Arthur only uses when he doesn’t know what else to say.
“Pick a room, boys,” Ariadne says when they’re standing in the great room. “Plenty of space for everyone.”
Eames quirks his eyebrow at Arthur and starts up the stairs, and Arthur glances at Ariadne in a way he hopes is apologetic before following.
“I’ll start a fire,” she says. “Take your time.”
“Thanks for this,” Arthur says, and Ariadne shrugs, grins a little.
“I’ll put on some loud music, too.”
“Shut up,” Arthur says. “We aren’t going to have sex if you’re down here expecting us to.”
“That’s funny,” Ariadne says. “Because I expect you two are having sex whenever I can’t see you.”
“Your voyeurism is disturbing.”
“I would call it a paranoia, really. I find it pays to be aware of things like this,” Ariadne replies. “But whatever, schematics, I’ll leave you to it.”
“Semantics,” Arthur corrects, and Ariadne just ignores him in favor of slumping a little lower on the couch, like she’s on the brink of falling asleep.
Arthur continues up the stairs, taking them a couple at a time, to a long hall eventually locating Eames in the room at the end. There’s a big bed with a thick, bright quilt and a picture window looking out over the peaks of spindly trees. The scene eventually fades into low clouds, low mountains, a wash of grey.
“Is Ariadne going to be a pain in the ass?” Eames asks. He’s sitting on the bed with his hands on his thighs, his back to the window.
“Probably no more than usual,” Arthur says, sitting down on the other side of the bed and beginning to remove his shoes. “I like her.”
“I don’t dislike her,” Eames says. “She’s just young sometimes.”
“She’s the same age we were when we ran inception,” Arthur says. “She just came of age in a different sort of dreamsharing, that’s all.”
It’s true--when Ariadne entered dreamsharing it was still a wilderness, but at least it had been mapped. It was different, earlier on; at once more cautious and more reckless. Between the pair of them Arthur figured they had the best and worst of that particular culture represented, and Ariadne was a refreshing break from it all, because even though now she had been in the business plenty long it still seemed like it was new to her, and the things she was afraid of--residuals of Mal, and limbo, and something that happened on a job in South Africa that she refused to talk about--were not the things Arthur and Eames were afraid of.
“We agreed that we’d avoid attachments,” Eames continues. And Arthur skirts along the edge of the bed until they’re sitting side by side.
“We did,” he agrees. “And yet we seem to have become attached.”
“And Ariadne is?” Eames asks.
“A good architect,” Arthur says. “Better than I ever was, better than Nash could ever hope to be. It’s not like I’m suggesting we have sex with her.”
“Mm,” Eames acquiesces. “And I do appreciate that. You know how I feel about sharing.”
“It’s like you didn’t learn anything in kindergarten,” Arthur says, putting his hands behind him on the bed. They’re both leaning back and their thighs are pressed together, and there’s a beat of silence and warmth. “Did you even go to kindergarten?”
“They didn’t teach me anything, and they didn’t teach you anything, either,” Eames replies, and then one arm is snaking around Arthur’s waist.
“I told Ariadne we wouldn’t do this,” Arthur says, and Eames just laughs into his mouth, a quick burst of breath that’s replaced by tongue. They fall together so easily, now, that Arthur slides into Eames’ lap with scarcely a thought, and Eames’ hands on his hips feel so familiar that it’s hard to believe they were ever absent.
“Don’t even pretend,” Ariadne says when they’re back downstairs. She’s awake, wrapped up under a blanket made of heavy wool, and the book she had at the airport has reemerged. There’s a fire in the grate, bright and blazing, and Arthur can feel the heat from across the room.
“We weren’t going to,” Eames says, sitting down on the couch besides her.
“So are you going back to the airport to get the others tomorrow?” Arthur asks.
“Nah, they’ve got their own rental and Yusuf has my cell number and directions. It’s a bit of a hike down there, though you slept through it.”
“I was tired,” Arthur says, stretching until his shoulder cracks. “You would be, too, if you’d just finished a job, but you two were just dicking around.”
“And you two were just fucking around,” Ariadne replies easily.
“It’s amazing we get any work done at all,” Eames adds, and the three of them sit together as if measuring that comment, but really their silence has more to do with the heat, which is at once stifling and comforting, dry and crackling though it is.
Yusuf and the Cobbs arrive the next afternoon, throwing the door open and letting in swirls of snow. They’ve brought gifts, which Arthur didn’t expect, but Cobb is almost tottering under the weight of a pile of wrapped presents. His expression shades guilty when Arthur looks at him askance, but then he nods towards Pippa and James as if to excuse himself.
By that time, James is more than halfway to throwing his arms around Arthur’s legs, and within the minute he’s squeezing him tightly around the waist.
“James, god,” Pippa drawls. “How old are you?”
“Arthur’s my godfather,” James says, turning and sticking out his tongue. “Don’t be jealous.”
“It’s good to see you both,” Arthur says, patting James on the back. “No hugs, Pippa? Would you rather we shake hands?”
Pippa gives him a withering look before sidling over to Ariadne. Somewhere in her early teens Pippa began to idolize Ariadne, dislike Eames, disparage James. Her response towards Arthur is general ambivalence. Cobb says it’s a teenage phase, probably one that’s closely tied to her deep rooted desire for a nose ring.
“New shoes,” Cobb says, sounding tired. “She made me give her an early Christmas present.”
“Pippa’s a b--” James starts, but Cobb cuts him off with a glare and a barked “James.”
“I got the new Call of Duty,” James says. “Everyone else had it already, so I beat it really quick. Want to see? I brought my Playstation.”
“You did, did you?” Eames is looking pleased, and that’s probably because of the copy of Skyrim in his suitcase. “Let’s get it connected, then.”
They withdraw to the living room, and Arthur is left standing with Cobb in the foyer.
“So,” Arthur says, slipping his hands into his back pockets. The stance feels awkward, but it’s been some time since he and Cobb last spoke, and their conversation was strange. “What have you been up to?”
“I actually wanted to discuss that with you,” Cobb says. “I think I may have found a backer for my business.”
“Of course you did,” Arthur mutters. “Is it Saito?”
Cobb lifts his shoulders in a way that loosely translates into yes, then sits down on the bench in the foyer to take off his shoes.
“We hired a friend of Yusuf’s--Maxwell--to do some tech development, and it’s going well,” Cobb continues. “I was thinking we could do a test run while we were all here.”
The business plan Cobb proposed to Arthur involved using dreamsharing for entertainment, like a videogame or something. Cobb, of all people, thought he could tone down the addictive elements, make dreamsharing as seemingly benign as turning on the television.
Cobb was not an unintelligent person, and he had, for nine years after inception, given up dreamsharing altogether. But he hadn’t been working at all, and he’d gotten restless, and he’d been talking to one of the other parents when he was waiting to pick up James after school, about L.A. and Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and then this.
“Janet thinks she’s figured out a way to cut some of the addictive properties,” Cobb says. “With a Somnacin alternative that’s not as immersive.”
“Janet?” Arthur asks.
“Janet Maxwell?” Cobb says, like Arthur should know this. It’s a sign of how little they’ve been in touch lately, because there was a time when Arthur would have known anyone involved in Cobb’s life simply because they ran in all the same circles, and Arthur was supposed to know everyone in Cobb’s life. “I mentioned her before--Yusuf worked with her a little, she’s great.”
Arthur will probably need to ask Pippa about this later, if she deigns to speak with him.
They spend that day inside, mostly, everyone settling into place. It reminds Arthur of holidays with his family when he was younger: he and Martha skirting around their older siblings and their parents, trying to determine how to navigate the new relationships that had suddenly descended upon their house. This is a lot like that, and so when Eames suggests they take a walk and Ariadne just shrugs and tells them to take the snowshoes instead of suggesting everyone go with, Arthur is quietly grateful. It’s good to get out with Eames. The air is pleasantly bracing, and everything smells like snow and pine, and there no demands on their attention or time, just trees and snow and the misting swirls of their own breath.
“Think we can make it to through this?” Eames asks. They’ve traipsed some distance on the slender track of a path leading into the woods that Ariadne pointed out to them from the doorstep.
“No worse than family Christmas,” Arthur says.
“You hate family Christmas,” Eames says. They reach the top of a small rise, and pause to consider the trees spread out before them.
“That’s not true,” Arthur says. It isn’t--there are some parts he hates. But he likes seeing Martha.
“I saw you talking to Cobb. He still working on that project?”
Arthur glances over at Eames, who is pointedly not looking at him, instead focusing on some unseen thing off in the distance.
“Yeah, I guess,” Arthur says. “He wants to test it with us.”
Eames nods.
“Yusuf implied as much. You okay with being a guinea pig?”
“I usually am,” Arthur says with a shrug. They’re avoiding the conversation they could be having, about Mombasa and Prague and what happens next, and the conversation--the beginning of it, the question--is on the tip of Arthur’s tongue when Eames grins at him unexpectedly, on the brink of laughter.
“Race you,” he says, and then takes off in a burst of laughter and powdered snow. Arthur catches him and tackles him eventually, and when they come back with their cheeks burnished red and snow in their hair the comments aren’t really more than Arthur expected.
He’s kind of surprised at how pleasant it is, actually, to have Ariadne waggling her eyebrows at them, Yusuf blatantly amused, and Pippa looking miffed, like she thinks they’re behaving like children.
“What, did you have a snowball fight?” Ariadne asks.
“Arthur was questioning my aim,” Eames says. “Said I didn’t know how to do anything without a scope.”
“Of course,” Ariadne says wryly, pouring them mugs of hot chocolate. “You know, I’m not sure if what you have is a relationship, or a long-form disagreement. Bailey’s?”
Arthur and Eames both nod, and Ariadne pours out shots and tips them into the mugs before handing them each one.
“It’s disturbing, is what it is,” Pippa says. “Dad, this is my only model for a stable long-term relationship, I think you should be concerned.”
“You have other models,” Dom says. “And I don’t think a sixteen-year-old needs to be worrying about stable long-term relationships, anyway.”
“Just because you hate Bret--” Pippa mutters.
“Bret,” Eames says, setting down his drink. “Tell your uncles about him, then.”
“You’re not my uncle,” Pippa says. “Bret’s a girl.”
“Well tell us about her, then,” Eames says, settling down at the bar with his elbows on the counter.
“It’s my life,” Pippa says, slapping her hands on the table. “And it’s none of your business.”
“Pips,” Ariadne says. “Come on,
Pippa looks annoyed.
“I know Bret!” James says. “When she comes over Pippa locks her door and they make out in her room.”
“We do not,” Pippa says. “We just talk and listen to music, Dad.”
Cobb rubs is temples.
“They just talk and listen to music,” Eames echoes, quirking and eyebrow at Arthur. “Sound familiar?”
“No,” Arthur says.
“How long have you two been not-dating?” Ariadne asks. “Because sometimes your little winks and nods imply that it’s been disturbingly long.”
“Not that long,” Arthur says, shooting a glare at Eames.
“You should tell that story,” Ariadne says. “The one about how you two first hooked up or whatever. This.” She waves her hand vaguely in their direction. “I’ve never heard it.”
“Nor have I,” Yusuf says, coming down from upstairs, and now everyone is looking at the pair of them, Eames with his elbows still on the bar, cupped around the mug Ariadne gave him, and Arthur leaning back against the counter behind. Pippa mostly seems pleased to see that the attention has shifted off her, but the rest of them look genuinely interested. Cobb arches an eyebrow like this is a challenge.
“It’s not an interesting story,” Arthur says, kicking Eames in the ankle.
“You wound me,” Eames says dryly, then looks around at the room at large. “He wounds me.”
“You know,” Cobb says, falsely thoughtful. “This would be as good a time as any to try out our new tech. It works for storytelling.”
“Not if no one wants to tell the story,” Arthur says. “It’s not an interesting story.”
“You said that already,” Ariadne points out. “It just makes it sound like you’re trying to hide something.”
“We’ll do it,” Eames says. “It is a boring story, though.”
When they’re moving to the living room, Arthur gives Eames a look he hope translates to ‘you’re doing it,’ and Eames nods succinctly.
Their love story is a two-man con, and if one of them doesn’t protest a bit then the story, when told, seems more questionable than it already is, and it’s always questionable because it’s always false. It’s easier this way.
Cobb’s device looks more like James’ Playstation 3 than a PASIV, which Arthur suspects is the point: make innocuous, make it familiar, make it sell. It is, he supposes, Cobb’s prerogative--but there’s something about this situation that seems more criminal than the actual criminal work they do. Arthur realizes his priorities may be out of whack.
He allows himself to be plugged in anyway. First it’s just the five of them gathered on chairs and couches around the coffee table, and then Pippa and James insist on joining because neither of them wants to be left with only the other for entertainment.
“Keep it PG,” Cobb says.
“Dad,” James hisses. “I’m thirteen.”
“PG-13,” Cobb amends. “Keep it PG-13.”
James still looks put-out when they go under.
They wake in an empty room, a sort of void.
“We’re working on a better user interface,” Cobb mutters.
“So what do I do?” Eames asks.
“If you can dream it, you can do it,” Cobb says. Then adds as an aside: “That’s our slogan.”
“I think it’s been used before,” Arthur mutters.
“You’re a forger,” Cobb says to Eames. “You should be able to figure it out.”
It takes a few moments for the dream to coalesce, but walls fall into place around them, and they’re looking into a hotel room. The bedspread is done in pastels, gauche, artificial brush strokes spread across a poly-blend canvas. Eames is in the room, staring at the wall, and running a poker chip along his fingers.
Arthur catches Eames’ eye, not sure if he likes the story that’s going to be told. Eames just winks.
“This was two years before Inception,” he starts.
The job was in Ottawa. It was winter and cold, and Eames spent more than half of it in his motel room watching political TV, because it was easier than tailing anyone and there was a reason Eames lived in Mombasa and not fucking Prague, for example.
“Uncalled from,” Arthur murmurs.
“I’m telling,” Eames says. “When you’re telling, you can gripe about humidity all you like.”
“This story is going to be boring, isn’t it?” Ariadne interjects.
They, as a group, have all gone slightly wallpaper-coloured.
“Yes,” Arthur says.
So it was cold in Ottawa, right? And Eames spent half the job, more or less, in this motel room with its pastel bedspread, figuring out the mark, because it was cold outside and easier to watch CBC and CPAC than to go skulk around Parliament every day.
He was working with--shit--Jess and Manuel, back when they were still dating. Maybe this job was longer ago than he thought.
The job went well, anyway.
“This is boring,” Pippa interjects. Arthur suspects that, if she had gum, she would be snapping it.
“Fine,” Eames says. “We’ll skip this part.”
They’re still in the hotel room, where the projection of Eames is throwing something at the wall, a tennis ball. Arthur wants to point out that there’s really no point to have visuals for this story, and therefore Cobb’s device is stupid, but then the scene shifts slightly to a blank expanse of highway, with Eames behind the wheel of a nondescript green station wagon.
What you need to know about the job in Ottawa, if we’re going to skip that bit, is that they pulled it off, and then Jess and Manuel headed due south and told Eames to go anywhere but.
The other thing you need to know about the job in Ottawa happened after, when Jess and Manuel were heading south they ran into some interested parties and sang like birds. Actually, it was probably Manuel who did the singing, and that was probably why they broke up, but that is another story and one that Eames would probably need to falsify if he told it, because he doesn’t know it.
Regardless, they sang like birds, which brings us back to Eames, on a stretch of highway somewhere in the Yukon. He’d made plans to go west to British Columbia, angle up across the mountains towards the Yukon and meet a bush pilot he knew to hop north to Alaska and then across the Bering Strait to Russia. He had a job waiting in Japan, and Alaska was one of those places people were supposed to want to go, and so he figured he’d make the stop, but it all went to hell before he got there.
Eames has actually never been to Alaska, still.
It was cold and dark, to start, which maybe explained why Eames started to suspect he was being tailed.
There was only one road, really, and the pair of headlights jangling along behind him probably wasn’t a tail. That’s what he told himself when the lights sluicing through the cab first became disturbing, and he pulled over to let the car pass only they didn’t.
Which was something, wasn’t it? There was something a bit off about that, which is the only explanation as to why Eames actually swerved his car off the road at the next opening of flat land, figuring he could make a break across the tundra. The rental was, after all, a Subaru. It had four-wheel drive.
It was not his finest decision, but it was enough to make his pursuers shoot the rearview window, which made it apparent that Eames’ paranoia wasn’t entirely unwarranted. He would tell Yusuf about this when he got back to Mombasa, just to show him that he wasn’t as paranoid as Yusuf seemed to think.
The rear window shattered, crumbling like crushed ice. There are not many people who can make that shoot--hit a window precisely at the fracture point that makes the whole thing dissolve--and if that hadn’t been luck than Eames himself was--
In a bad place. If that wasn’t luck, Eames was in a bad place, especially since the terrain seemed to be giving the Subaru more trouble than he would’ve liked, and the headlights, high beams on, were giving shape to a landscape that wasn’t entirely hospitable.
There was the snow, for one thing. It was dry and powdery and gave way easily, but further ahead it had been sculpted into small dunes by some sharp knife of wind, and it didn’t look auspicious.
Which is why Eames threw the car into park and crawled from the frontseat towards the boot. The gearshift jabbed him sharply in the stomach as he went, but once he was there he had the rifle that he had bought for bears on the way up.
Well, it wasn’t really for bears.
And with the window out, at least he had something to shoot through.
The car behind him was a Landrover, or something like that--taller and blockier than Eames’ own, and it too had parked. Eames had rather hoped that his swift stop would’ve sent them spiraling into a donut, but that had been too much to hope for.
No one showed any signs of emerging, but the headlights were trained firmly on Eames’ tailgate, which meant the advantage was entirely on their end, and Eames figured he had about one shot.
Maybe more.
Probably just the one, though. He was considering this, trying to figure out if he could break the window or if it was possible it was bulletproof glass, when the doors opened, both at once, and two people emerged from the car.
They could’ve been siblings: both slim and dark haired, neatly dressed despite the fact that one of them had just shot out Eames’ window and they were on the tundra in December.
Of the pair, Eames recognized one of them.
“Mallorie Miles, as I live and breathe,” he called, and she met his gaze evenly.
“Mr. Eames, you know I prefer Mal,” she said, her voice pitched so it could barely be heard above the wind. “We’d like to offer you a job.”
“You shot out my back window,” he said, sitting up and peering out at them more fully. “To offer me a job.”
“We couldn’t have you get away,” she said mildly. “This is my pointman, Arthur.”
“Pleasure, I’m sure,” Eames said. Arthur smiled thinly.
“That I doubt,” he said. “Sorry about the window.”
“You aren’t really,” Eames said.
Arthur wasn’t, really.
“We can discuss the details in the car,” Mal said, shivering. “It’s frigid out here.”
“And my car?” Eames asked.
“Leave it,” Mallorie said. “I’ll pay for it.”
She didn’t.
Eames wound up in the backseat, leaning forward without his seat belt on so he could talk to both of them at once.
“Jess and Manuel said you had something in Japan,” Mal started. “I can make you a better offer.”
Arthur was looking staunchly ahead, along the southbound stretch of highway they’re driving. It was fairly apparent that he wasn’t as invested in getting Eames on this job as Mal was, and Eames was trying to place the name and the resentment in context, but he couldn’t, quite.
Arthur did not--the name felt like it should ring some bells, but it didn’t. And the face wasn’t familiar at all, didn’t even look like a projection he’d seen in someone else’s dreamscape.
“Why?” Eames asked, instead. “What do you need?”
“Too many honest men in this business,” Mal said. “AWOL soldiers and the like. I need someone who hasn’t done a day of honest work in his life.”
She met his eyes in the rearview mirror.
“I know all about you, Mr. Eames,” she said. “You’re a liar and a thief.”
“She really knows how to turn the charm on,” Eames said, more at Arthur than at Mal. Arthur nodded, eyes firmly fixed on the road. It occurred to Eames that he probably didn’t trust Mal’s driving.
“I’ll need more than that,” Eames said finally.
“You’ll get it,” Mal said. “We have two motel rooms a bit south. I imagine you and Arthur can share?”
She quirked and eyebrow, lips pressed firmly together.
“Of course you can. We’ll discuss it there.”
The hotel wasn’t much of a hotel--it was actually a bar with rooms upstairs, and it smelled like Eames’ grandmother’s house if it smelled like anything, which--it certainly smelled like something. The beds were all doubles that sagged in the middle, and there was a single washroom at the end of the hall. As soon as they arrived Arthur went to take a shower and Mal sat down in the single, stiff-backed chair in the room, and looked evenly at Eames.
“Okay,” she said. “Simple extraction, one level.”
“Here, or someplace warmer?”
“Prague,” Mal said. “So only slightly warmer. But I’ll pay you twice whatever the job in Japan paid, even if you lie about it.”
Eames lied about it. He took the job.
“And that was how I met Arthur,” Eames finishes. “And then we fucked.”
“Eames,” Cobb hisses. “PG-13.”
“I think it isn’t until you say ‘fuck’ more than once that it’s knocked up to R,” Eames says. “Under the MPAA. So I conserved, yeah?”
“That was a terrible story,” Ariadne says. “I don’t think Arthur even said anything. You just objectified him.”
“Just because he didn’t include all the details for your voyeurism kink--” Arthur starts.
“I don’t believe it,” Pippa says suddenly. She’s standing slightly apart from them, in the space that has no faded from the second dingy motel to white void.
“You don’t, do you?” Eames asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Mom said you’re a liar and a thief,” Pippa says, challengingly.
“Your mom said he’s a liar and a thief in his story,” Arthur points out, because if they’re going to go down it’s not going to be at the hands of a sixteen-year-old girl.
“Well, I think that was the only true bit,” Pippa says. “Eames is a liar and a thief, and that story is bullshit.”
“Pippa,” Cobb says. He looks like he’s starting to get a headache. Arthur needs to talk to Eames about using a story that included Mal, though it is true that Arthur and Mal once found Eames in the Yukon--though that had been summer, not winter, in the brief flash of time when flowers were blooming on the tundra, and he and Eames had known each other already.
Arthur had enjoyed shooting out Eames’ back window, though. It proved a point he’d long been trying to make. Honestly, anytime someone told him he could demonstrate his marksmanship to Eames Arthur was there with bells on.
It was one of those things Arthur preferred to leave unexamined.
“Pippa,” Cobb continues. “They did run a job like that with Mal.”
Everyone goes silent, and Ariadne looks at Arthur and Eames a little uncertainly, like Cobb saying Mal’s name is going to bring the dream crashing down around them. It doesn’t any more than Eames’ projection of Mal went rogue and tried to shoot the observers, and that’s more of a surprise and a relief than Arthur would care to admit.
“I don’t believe you,” Pippa says. “That didn’t sound like a story about people who were going to fall in love, anyway. The first time they met? Doesn’t happen.”
“God, Pippa, be a teenage girl for once,” James says, crossing his arms. He adds as an aside to everyone else: “She does this with Disney movies. She says she’s never going to have a princess complex. She says no one needs a prince to save them.”
“It’s not a fairy tale,” Arthur says, surprising himself. “No one saved anyone.”
Eames has found his way to Arthur’s side somewhere in there, closer than Arthur thought he was, and suddenly his arm is around Arthur’s waist.
“Except for that time in Buenos Aires,” he whispers into Arthur’s ear. His voice is pitched low and humming. “But I won’t tell.”
Pippa is watching them with her eyes narrowed.
“I bet you guys met in some really embarrassing way like on OkayCupid or something,” she says. “Eames acts like such a badass--”
“Pippa, stop swearing,” Cobb sighs.
“Everyone else does,” she says, then continues: “But I bet he was actually a hacker, and he hacked Arthur’s account and then wooed him with the information he stole. And then he didn’t want to meet up, because of his terrible, terrible acne.”
“That makes no sense,” Arthur says. “That makes exponentially less sense than the story Eames just told, which you said was unrealistic.”
“There was a tundra car chase in the story Eames just told,” Pippa says, putting one hand on her hip. “You should’ve hit a reindeer. Eames should’ve been run over by a reindeer, like grandma in that awful song--don’t sing it, James.”
“That really happened,” Arthur says, and he can hear his own voice straining. It did. He got frostnip on his trigger fingertips from hanging out the LandRover window with the stupid gun.
“I want to hear Pippa’s version,” Ariadne says from where she and Yusuf have been standing, both watching bemusedly, and Pippa beams at her.
“Fuck this,” Arthur says.
“Arthur,” Cobb says. “Everyone. Stop swearing. Pippa, you can tell your story if you keep it PG.”
“Dad,” James says. “I know swear words. Seriously, how old do you think I am?”
“That’s not the point,” Cobb growls.
“He thinks that I drink soda fountains at the sockhop,” James mutters. “Or whatever.”
“Did you base this on the Matrix?” Eames asks, looking around the white space again. “Do you come in here and pretend to be Morpheus?”
Cobb actually does rub his temples now, squinting at an indeterminate location near the ground.
“Okay, okay,” Pippa says. “I’m going to tell this story, because Eames’ was obviously a dumb lie and my version is way better.”
“And more false,” Arthur says.
“More false implies the first version was false,” Pippa says triumphantly. “Ha.”
Eames gives Arthur a little squeeze at the waist.
“Go on, then, Pippa,” he says. “Show us what you got.”
“Don’t distract me,” she says.
Pippa closes her eyes and furrows her brow in a way that bears an uncanny resemblance to her father, and then a room slowly begins to take shape. It’s a disaster--a terrible cave of a room, with posters peeled from the walls and a computer surrounded by the entrails of meals. Arthur wants to ask Pippa who she thinks they are, that one of them would live in this place, but then she blinks slightly and the scene shifts.
“I changed my mind,” she says. “You aren’t telling a story?” Eames asks, and Arthur can tell he’s trying not to betray his relief.
“No,” she says. “I’m telling a different one.”
They’re in what appears to be Pippa’s imagined vision of a TV studio now, judging by the cameras wheeling around and the fact that Eames is standing on a makeshift stage, wearing some sort of safari outfit.
“Pippa,” Arthur says. “I like the shorts.”
“Oh god, shut up, I don’t want to know,” Pippa mutters, and Eames raises and eyebrow at Arthur.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “So Eames is like a TV personality, right? Like Jack Hanna or Steve Irwin or the Kratt brothers.”
And Arthur was in Africa studying lions or something like that. Or--not lions, actually. Uh, monkeys. In South America.
So Arthur was in South America studying monkeys. Spider monkeys, the skinny ones at the zoo with tails as long as their arms, and arms as long as their legs. He was doing something inside, DNA analysis, but he had to be in the Amazon because otherwise the DNA would degrade or something. So Arthur was in the Amazon, actually, studying spider monkey DNA, and he had a lab in the middle of the rainforest and spent all of his time complaining about how hot it was, because Arthur hated it when it was hot out and stuff.
The lab was climate controlled, and Arthur spent most of his time there centrifuging DNA samples. There was someone else--a woman named Mal--doing most of the work outside, in the rainforest, and then Eames and his TV show decided to do a special about her research, because it was really interesting.
Eames brought a film crew with him, a proper one with several people whose names are completely irrelevant to this story. What is relevant is that Eames did his one video editing, and he also appreciated the climate controlled climate of Arthur’s lab. He’d go there at night to parse through the footage he’d taken with Mal during the day, and Arthur would go to the lab then, too, because he didn’t trust Eames not to mess with his monkey genetic material. They had a conversation about it, actually, but it pretty much went like--Arthur said Eames couldn’t use the lab, and Eames said he needed it, and then the field station director or whomever said they needed to let Eames use it, blah, blah, blah.
The field station director was named Dom, actually. Dominic Cobb. He was married to Mal, and they were expecting their first child. She was going to be born in the Amazon, and have a pet monkey before she was five--
“Pippa,” Ariadne says, which makes sense because no one else will and yet someone needs to say something. “This isn’t about Arthur and Eames, is it?”
“It could be,” Pippa says primly.
“And it doesn’t have anything to do with reality, does it?” Ariadne asks.
“It does,” Pippa says. “If this is all a dream, and when we think we’re awake it’s a dream, too.”
She looks around the dream space, and there’s something sharp and challenging in her eyes, a fragment of her mother’s ice.
“Who’s to say what’s real?” she says. “Maybe we’re three levels deep, right now. Maybe we actually live in Limbo.”
“Philippa,” Cobb says softly. “Pippa. We’ve talked about this.”
“Maybe totems only work because we think they do,” she says, sinking the white ground. “Because you dreamt them. Maybe mom’s alive, and you’re all scientists, and Eames is a TV personality.”
It’s Ariadne, who’s watching Pippa with close, sharp eyes, who drops to the ground beside her and places a hand on her back, holds it steady, and waits. Arthur feels like he should turn away, or do something, though he isn’t sure what. He finds himself looking across the circle at James, who looks quietly stricken--he hadn’t been aware, then, though Arthur isn’t entirely sure of what: whether he wasn’t aware of the reasons for his mother’s death, or of Pippa’s quiet conviction that maybe Mal was right, and so Arthur goes to him, sliding across the void dream space until he’s standing in between James and Eames, and Ariadne is still on the ground with Pippa, who is crying, now.
“Pippa,” Ariadne says. “Pippapippapippa.”
“I know she’s probably not,” Pippa says through a hiccupy sigh. “But what if she was?”
“Pippa,” Eames says, and he sounds both quieter and more thoughtful than he sometimes is. “You have to trust us, Pippa. Sometimes you know what’s real, and sometimes you trust your totem--your mum, things changed for her. An accident happened.” Eames glances at Cobb. “But we try to find something real and hold on to it.”
Eames glances at Arthur, here, and Arthur can feel a blush rising in his cheeks, because, yeah, okay, his totem got compromised so he started using Eames, who is so mutable in dreams, and who Arthur knows well enough to catch any permutation.
It doesn’t entirely fit with their model of avoiding attachments, and Arthur has a new die, weighted differently, that he keeps it around in case they’re separated, but mostly--he uses Eames.
Pippa is wiping at her eyes, now, and they’re drippy and red.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I don’t--we were just talking about mom, and Eames mentioned her first, and this whole thing--I’ve never really seen her like that, you know?”
Cobb offers her a hand, pulls her to her feet, and hugs her.
“Never apologize,” he says. “I’ve missed her too--” he laughs, slightly self-deprecatingly, “--you don’t need to apologize. You know you can talk to me about this anytime you like. You too, James.”
He reaches out to James and spools him in, and it’s a quiet, warm moment, and it occurs to Arthur that maybe this should be taking place on firm ground instead of in a dream, but maybe it doesn’t matter.
“I still want to know what really happened,” Pippa says when the family pulls apart, squinting her puffy eyes. Cobb glances down at her, and then up at the group at large.
“I wasn’t going to do this,” he says after a moment. “Let the record show that I wasn’t going to do this.”
“What, dad?” James asks.
“I know how they met,” Cobb says. “I know how Arthur and Eames met, and I’m going to tell you, right now, because my daughter just cried.”
part 2
arthur and eames tell stories about how they first met. eventually, they tell the truth.
notes: written for eleveninches as part of the dream_holiday exchange.
thanks go to gelbwax for beta-reading and support.
r . 11840 words . AO3
There are stories that don’t happen in real life. Arthur calls his sister sometimes and they talk about it; she has a boyfriend she might marry. They live together in the same city they’ve both lived in for some time, the same city where they met at a bar when she went out with her friends from work and she hit on him ostentatiously, which was how Martha does most things.
Martha is Arthur’s inroad to ordinary, and he likes to put the phone on speaker and lay it flat on the cabinet in his hotel rooms while he sits on the bed and cleans his Glock. It’s nice to know there’s something ordinary in the world. That doesn’t mean he wants it for himself.
That’s what he tells himself when he and Eames are in the Zurich airport discussing where to go next. Discussing, heatedly, and then Arthur has the brief flash of a thought that if he and Eames were like Martha this wouldn’t be happening; he and Eames would probably live together already, and they wouldn’t be sniping about Prague and Mombasa like this because they wouldn’t need to, and the question of where they’d be flying to would already have been settled.
“You know,” Ariadne says, looking up from her book. “Most of us bought our tickets online and could be halfway through customs already.”
“Contrary to what you seem to think ‘one third of the team’ does not constitute ‘most,’” Eames says.
“I like flying standby,” Arthur contributes, and Ariadne whiffs out a small snort.
“You would,” she says. “You know, you could both come to Vermont with me.”
“Vermont?” Eames asks. “And why would we want to go there?”
“Because then you can delay this conversation for at least a week,” Ariadne says. “And it’s almost solstice.”
“You would celebrate solstice,” Arthur says, and Eames and Ariadne both pause to look at him.
“That was weak,” Ariadne says.
“It was weak when you said it, too,” Arthur mutters. “That was the point.”
Ariadne nods, as if to herself, then continues.
“I have access to a place in Vermont. It would be like a retreat. Team building.”
“We aren’t a team,” Arthur says, looking past Ariadne to the travelers swimming across the terminal behind her, caught in a sea of small black suitcases.
“We aren’t a team like you two aren’t dating,” she says, glancing between Eames and Arthur. “Just because no one ever calls it that doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t know.”
“I think there was a double negative in there somewhere,” Arthur says.
“Arthur used to copy edit,” Eames supplies. They tell Ariadne these things all the time: Eames has a forgery in the Louvre, Arthur worked for Steve Jobs for a year after inception, Eames once shared pot brownies with a Prime Minister. This is the first time in his recent recollection that Eames has said something true.
“So,” Arthur says. “Vermont, you say?”
“I already invited the Cobbs. I know you want to give your godson a Christmas present,” Ariadne says, grinning. “And Yusuf’s coming.”
That’s how they wind up in some part of Vermont Arthur couldn’t peg on a map--there’s a flight from Zurich to Logan International by way of someplace else, and then an extremely nondescript rental car that careens down winding, snow-covered roads with Ariadne behind the wheel, shouting along to Christmas music despite the fact that she claims not to celebrate Christmas. Eames takes shotgun so Arthur can sleep in the back, sideways on the bench seat with his knees cribbed into the back of Eames’ seat. The conversation hums around him, bordering on inanity but never quite reaching it. It’s like being on a job, but without a purpose, and it’s warm in the car and Arthur’s thoughts sink away a little.
This could be any one of a number of things, if Ariadne doesn’t drive them into a ditch first.
The cabin turns out to be larger than Arthur had expected, a post and beam with high ceilings and a big stone fireplace at the center. Ariadne glances back at them when she’s unlocking the doors using a key she retrieved from beneath a table out back.
“My family’s old money,” she says. “But I was kind of disowned. Except, you know, no one uses this house.”
“I don’t know, actually,” Eames says, and Arthur catches his eye and shakes his head slightly. If Eames is going to be touchy about family money, now is not the time.
“It’s lovely,” Arthur says, and Eames narrows his eyes because ‘lovely’ is a word Arthur only uses when he doesn’t know what else to say.
“Pick a room, boys,” Ariadne says when they’re standing in the great room. “Plenty of space for everyone.”
Eames quirks his eyebrow at Arthur and starts up the stairs, and Arthur glances at Ariadne in a way he hopes is apologetic before following.
“I’ll start a fire,” she says. “Take your time.”
“Thanks for this,” Arthur says, and Ariadne shrugs, grins a little.
“I’ll put on some loud music, too.”
“Shut up,” Arthur says. “We aren’t going to have sex if you’re down here expecting us to.”
“That’s funny,” Ariadne says. “Because I expect you two are having sex whenever I can’t see you.”
“Your voyeurism is disturbing.”
“I would call it a paranoia, really. I find it pays to be aware of things like this,” Ariadne replies. “But whatever, schematics, I’ll leave you to it.”
“Semantics,” Arthur corrects, and Ariadne just ignores him in favor of slumping a little lower on the couch, like she’s on the brink of falling asleep.
Arthur continues up the stairs, taking them a couple at a time, to a long hall eventually locating Eames in the room at the end. There’s a big bed with a thick, bright quilt and a picture window looking out over the peaks of spindly trees. The scene eventually fades into low clouds, low mountains, a wash of grey.
“Is Ariadne going to be a pain in the ass?” Eames asks. He’s sitting on the bed with his hands on his thighs, his back to the window.
“Probably no more than usual,” Arthur says, sitting down on the other side of the bed and beginning to remove his shoes. “I like her.”
“I don’t dislike her,” Eames says. “She’s just young sometimes.”
“She’s the same age we were when we ran inception,” Arthur says. “She just came of age in a different sort of dreamsharing, that’s all.”
It’s true--when Ariadne entered dreamsharing it was still a wilderness, but at least it had been mapped. It was different, earlier on; at once more cautious and more reckless. Between the pair of them Arthur figured they had the best and worst of that particular culture represented, and Ariadne was a refreshing break from it all, because even though now she had been in the business plenty long it still seemed like it was new to her, and the things she was afraid of--residuals of Mal, and limbo, and something that happened on a job in South Africa that she refused to talk about--were not the things Arthur and Eames were afraid of.
“We agreed that we’d avoid attachments,” Eames continues. And Arthur skirts along the edge of the bed until they’re sitting side by side.
“We did,” he agrees. “And yet we seem to have become attached.”
“And Ariadne is?” Eames asks.
“A good architect,” Arthur says. “Better than I ever was, better than Nash could ever hope to be. It’s not like I’m suggesting we have sex with her.”
“Mm,” Eames acquiesces. “And I do appreciate that. You know how I feel about sharing.”
“It’s like you didn’t learn anything in kindergarten,” Arthur says, putting his hands behind him on the bed. They’re both leaning back and their thighs are pressed together, and there’s a beat of silence and warmth. “Did you even go to kindergarten?”
“They didn’t teach me anything, and they didn’t teach you anything, either,” Eames replies, and then one arm is snaking around Arthur’s waist.
“I told Ariadne we wouldn’t do this,” Arthur says, and Eames just laughs into his mouth, a quick burst of breath that’s replaced by tongue. They fall together so easily, now, that Arthur slides into Eames’ lap with scarcely a thought, and Eames’ hands on his hips feel so familiar that it’s hard to believe they were ever absent.
“Don’t even pretend,” Ariadne says when they’re back downstairs. She’s awake, wrapped up under a blanket made of heavy wool, and the book she had at the airport has reemerged. There’s a fire in the grate, bright and blazing, and Arthur can feel the heat from across the room.
“We weren’t going to,” Eames says, sitting down on the couch besides her.
“So are you going back to the airport to get the others tomorrow?” Arthur asks.
“Nah, they’ve got their own rental and Yusuf has my cell number and directions. It’s a bit of a hike down there, though you slept through it.”
“I was tired,” Arthur says, stretching until his shoulder cracks. “You would be, too, if you’d just finished a job, but you two were just dicking around.”
“And you two were just fucking around,” Ariadne replies easily.
“It’s amazing we get any work done at all,” Eames adds, and the three of them sit together as if measuring that comment, but really their silence has more to do with the heat, which is at once stifling and comforting, dry and crackling though it is.
Yusuf and the Cobbs arrive the next afternoon, throwing the door open and letting in swirls of snow. They’ve brought gifts, which Arthur didn’t expect, but Cobb is almost tottering under the weight of a pile of wrapped presents. His expression shades guilty when Arthur looks at him askance, but then he nods towards Pippa and James as if to excuse himself.
By that time, James is more than halfway to throwing his arms around Arthur’s legs, and within the minute he’s squeezing him tightly around the waist.
“James, god,” Pippa drawls. “How old are you?”
“Arthur’s my godfather,” James says, turning and sticking out his tongue. “Don’t be jealous.”
“It’s good to see you both,” Arthur says, patting James on the back. “No hugs, Pippa? Would you rather we shake hands?”
Pippa gives him a withering look before sidling over to Ariadne. Somewhere in her early teens Pippa began to idolize Ariadne, dislike Eames, disparage James. Her response towards Arthur is general ambivalence. Cobb says it’s a teenage phase, probably one that’s closely tied to her deep rooted desire for a nose ring.
“New shoes,” Cobb says, sounding tired. “She made me give her an early Christmas present.”
“Pippa’s a b--” James starts, but Cobb cuts him off with a glare and a barked “James.”
“I got the new Call of Duty,” James says. “Everyone else had it already, so I beat it really quick. Want to see? I brought my Playstation.”
“You did, did you?” Eames is looking pleased, and that’s probably because of the copy of Skyrim in his suitcase. “Let’s get it connected, then.”
They withdraw to the living room, and Arthur is left standing with Cobb in the foyer.
“So,” Arthur says, slipping his hands into his back pockets. The stance feels awkward, but it’s been some time since he and Cobb last spoke, and their conversation was strange. “What have you been up to?”
“I actually wanted to discuss that with you,” Cobb says. “I think I may have found a backer for my business.”
“Of course you did,” Arthur mutters. “Is it Saito?”
Cobb lifts his shoulders in a way that loosely translates into yes, then sits down on the bench in the foyer to take off his shoes.
“We hired a friend of Yusuf’s--Maxwell--to do some tech development, and it’s going well,” Cobb continues. “I was thinking we could do a test run while we were all here.”
The business plan Cobb proposed to Arthur involved using dreamsharing for entertainment, like a videogame or something. Cobb, of all people, thought he could tone down the addictive elements, make dreamsharing as seemingly benign as turning on the television.
Cobb was not an unintelligent person, and he had, for nine years after inception, given up dreamsharing altogether. But he hadn’t been working at all, and he’d gotten restless, and he’d been talking to one of the other parents when he was waiting to pick up James after school, about L.A. and Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and then this.
“Janet thinks she’s figured out a way to cut some of the addictive properties,” Cobb says. “With a Somnacin alternative that’s not as immersive.”
“Janet?” Arthur asks.
“Janet Maxwell?” Cobb says, like Arthur should know this. It’s a sign of how little they’ve been in touch lately, because there was a time when Arthur would have known anyone involved in Cobb’s life simply because they ran in all the same circles, and Arthur was supposed to know everyone in Cobb’s life. “I mentioned her before--Yusuf worked with her a little, she’s great.”
Arthur will probably need to ask Pippa about this later, if she deigns to speak with him.
They spend that day inside, mostly, everyone settling into place. It reminds Arthur of holidays with his family when he was younger: he and Martha skirting around their older siblings and their parents, trying to determine how to navigate the new relationships that had suddenly descended upon their house. This is a lot like that, and so when Eames suggests they take a walk and Ariadne just shrugs and tells them to take the snowshoes instead of suggesting everyone go with, Arthur is quietly grateful. It’s good to get out with Eames. The air is pleasantly bracing, and everything smells like snow and pine, and there no demands on their attention or time, just trees and snow and the misting swirls of their own breath.
“Think we can make it to through this?” Eames asks. They’ve traipsed some distance on the slender track of a path leading into the woods that Ariadne pointed out to them from the doorstep.
“No worse than family Christmas,” Arthur says.
“You hate family Christmas,” Eames says. They reach the top of a small rise, and pause to consider the trees spread out before them.
“That’s not true,” Arthur says. It isn’t--there are some parts he hates. But he likes seeing Martha.
“I saw you talking to Cobb. He still working on that project?”
Arthur glances over at Eames, who is pointedly not looking at him, instead focusing on some unseen thing off in the distance.
“Yeah, I guess,” Arthur says. “He wants to test it with us.”
Eames nods.
“Yusuf implied as much. You okay with being a guinea pig?”
“I usually am,” Arthur says with a shrug. They’re avoiding the conversation they could be having, about Mombasa and Prague and what happens next, and the conversation--the beginning of it, the question--is on the tip of Arthur’s tongue when Eames grins at him unexpectedly, on the brink of laughter.
“Race you,” he says, and then takes off in a burst of laughter and powdered snow. Arthur catches him and tackles him eventually, and when they come back with their cheeks burnished red and snow in their hair the comments aren’t really more than Arthur expected.
He’s kind of surprised at how pleasant it is, actually, to have Ariadne waggling her eyebrows at them, Yusuf blatantly amused, and Pippa looking miffed, like she thinks they’re behaving like children.
“What, did you have a snowball fight?” Ariadne asks.
“Arthur was questioning my aim,” Eames says. “Said I didn’t know how to do anything without a scope.”
“Of course,” Ariadne says wryly, pouring them mugs of hot chocolate. “You know, I’m not sure if what you have is a relationship, or a long-form disagreement. Bailey’s?”
Arthur and Eames both nod, and Ariadne pours out shots and tips them into the mugs before handing them each one.
“It’s disturbing, is what it is,” Pippa says. “Dad, this is my only model for a stable long-term relationship, I think you should be concerned.”
“You have other models,” Dom says. “And I don’t think a sixteen-year-old needs to be worrying about stable long-term relationships, anyway.”
“Just because you hate Bret--” Pippa mutters.
“Bret,” Eames says, setting down his drink. “Tell your uncles about him, then.”
“You’re not my uncle,” Pippa says. “Bret’s a girl.”
“Well tell us about her, then,” Eames says, settling down at the bar with his elbows on the counter.
“It’s my life,” Pippa says, slapping her hands on the table. “And it’s none of your business.”
“Pips,” Ariadne says. “Come on,
Pippa looks annoyed.
“I know Bret!” James says. “When she comes over Pippa locks her door and they make out in her room.”
“We do not,” Pippa says. “We just talk and listen to music, Dad.”
Cobb rubs is temples.
“They just talk and listen to music,” Eames echoes, quirking and eyebrow at Arthur. “Sound familiar?”
“No,” Arthur says.
“How long have you two been not-dating?” Ariadne asks. “Because sometimes your little winks and nods imply that it’s been disturbingly long.”
“Not that long,” Arthur says, shooting a glare at Eames.
“You should tell that story,” Ariadne says. “The one about how you two first hooked up or whatever. This.” She waves her hand vaguely in their direction. “I’ve never heard it.”
“Nor have I,” Yusuf says, coming down from upstairs, and now everyone is looking at the pair of them, Eames with his elbows still on the bar, cupped around the mug Ariadne gave him, and Arthur leaning back against the counter behind. Pippa mostly seems pleased to see that the attention has shifted off her, but the rest of them look genuinely interested. Cobb arches an eyebrow like this is a challenge.
“It’s not an interesting story,” Arthur says, kicking Eames in the ankle.
“You wound me,” Eames says dryly, then looks around at the room at large. “He wounds me.”
“You know,” Cobb says, falsely thoughtful. “This would be as good a time as any to try out our new tech. It works for storytelling.”
“Not if no one wants to tell the story,” Arthur says. “It’s not an interesting story.”
“You said that already,” Ariadne points out. “It just makes it sound like you’re trying to hide something.”
“We’ll do it,” Eames says. “It is a boring story, though.”
When they’re moving to the living room, Arthur gives Eames a look he hope translates to ‘you’re doing it,’ and Eames nods succinctly.
Their love story is a two-man con, and if one of them doesn’t protest a bit then the story, when told, seems more questionable than it already is, and it’s always questionable because it’s always false. It’s easier this way.
Cobb’s device looks more like James’ Playstation 3 than a PASIV, which Arthur suspects is the point: make innocuous, make it familiar, make it sell. It is, he supposes, Cobb’s prerogative--but there’s something about this situation that seems more criminal than the actual criminal work they do. Arthur realizes his priorities may be out of whack.
He allows himself to be plugged in anyway. First it’s just the five of them gathered on chairs and couches around the coffee table, and then Pippa and James insist on joining because neither of them wants to be left with only the other for entertainment.
“Keep it PG,” Cobb says.
“Dad,” James hisses. “I’m thirteen.”
“PG-13,” Cobb amends. “Keep it PG-13.”
James still looks put-out when they go under.
They wake in an empty room, a sort of void.
“We’re working on a better user interface,” Cobb mutters.
“So what do I do?” Eames asks.
“If you can dream it, you can do it,” Cobb says. Then adds as an aside: “That’s our slogan.”
“I think it’s been used before,” Arthur mutters.
“You’re a forger,” Cobb says to Eames. “You should be able to figure it out.”
It takes a few moments for the dream to coalesce, but walls fall into place around them, and they’re looking into a hotel room. The bedspread is done in pastels, gauche, artificial brush strokes spread across a poly-blend canvas. Eames is in the room, staring at the wall, and running a poker chip along his fingers.
Arthur catches Eames’ eye, not sure if he likes the story that’s going to be told. Eames just winks.
“This was two years before Inception,” he starts.
The job was in Ottawa. It was winter and cold, and Eames spent more than half of it in his motel room watching political TV, because it was easier than tailing anyone and there was a reason Eames lived in Mombasa and not fucking Prague, for example.
“Uncalled from,” Arthur murmurs.
“I’m telling,” Eames says. “When you’re telling, you can gripe about humidity all you like.”
“This story is going to be boring, isn’t it?” Ariadne interjects.
They, as a group, have all gone slightly wallpaper-coloured.
“Yes,” Arthur says.
So it was cold in Ottawa, right? And Eames spent half the job, more or less, in this motel room with its pastel bedspread, figuring out the mark, because it was cold outside and easier to watch CBC and CPAC than to go skulk around Parliament every day.
He was working with--shit--Jess and Manuel, back when they were still dating. Maybe this job was longer ago than he thought.
The job went well, anyway.
“This is boring,” Pippa interjects. Arthur suspects that, if she had gum, she would be snapping it.
“Fine,” Eames says. “We’ll skip this part.”
They’re still in the hotel room, where the projection of Eames is throwing something at the wall, a tennis ball. Arthur wants to point out that there’s really no point to have visuals for this story, and therefore Cobb’s device is stupid, but then the scene shifts slightly to a blank expanse of highway, with Eames behind the wheel of a nondescript green station wagon.
What you need to know about the job in Ottawa, if we’re going to skip that bit, is that they pulled it off, and then Jess and Manuel headed due south and told Eames to go anywhere but.
The other thing you need to know about the job in Ottawa happened after, when Jess and Manuel were heading south they ran into some interested parties and sang like birds. Actually, it was probably Manuel who did the singing, and that was probably why they broke up, but that is another story and one that Eames would probably need to falsify if he told it, because he doesn’t know it.
Regardless, they sang like birds, which brings us back to Eames, on a stretch of highway somewhere in the Yukon. He’d made plans to go west to British Columbia, angle up across the mountains towards the Yukon and meet a bush pilot he knew to hop north to Alaska and then across the Bering Strait to Russia. He had a job waiting in Japan, and Alaska was one of those places people were supposed to want to go, and so he figured he’d make the stop, but it all went to hell before he got there.
Eames has actually never been to Alaska, still.
It was cold and dark, to start, which maybe explained why Eames started to suspect he was being tailed.
There was only one road, really, and the pair of headlights jangling along behind him probably wasn’t a tail. That’s what he told himself when the lights sluicing through the cab first became disturbing, and he pulled over to let the car pass only they didn’t.
Which was something, wasn’t it? There was something a bit off about that, which is the only explanation as to why Eames actually swerved his car off the road at the next opening of flat land, figuring he could make a break across the tundra. The rental was, after all, a Subaru. It had four-wheel drive.
It was not his finest decision, but it was enough to make his pursuers shoot the rearview window, which made it apparent that Eames’ paranoia wasn’t entirely unwarranted. He would tell Yusuf about this when he got back to Mombasa, just to show him that he wasn’t as paranoid as Yusuf seemed to think.
The rear window shattered, crumbling like crushed ice. There are not many people who can make that shoot--hit a window precisely at the fracture point that makes the whole thing dissolve--and if that hadn’t been luck than Eames himself was--
In a bad place. If that wasn’t luck, Eames was in a bad place, especially since the terrain seemed to be giving the Subaru more trouble than he would’ve liked, and the headlights, high beams on, were giving shape to a landscape that wasn’t entirely hospitable.
There was the snow, for one thing. It was dry and powdery and gave way easily, but further ahead it had been sculpted into small dunes by some sharp knife of wind, and it didn’t look auspicious.
Which is why Eames threw the car into park and crawled from the frontseat towards the boot. The gearshift jabbed him sharply in the stomach as he went, but once he was there he had the rifle that he had bought for bears on the way up.
Well, it wasn’t really for bears.
And with the window out, at least he had something to shoot through.
The car behind him was a Landrover, or something like that--taller and blockier than Eames’ own, and it too had parked. Eames had rather hoped that his swift stop would’ve sent them spiraling into a donut, but that had been too much to hope for.
No one showed any signs of emerging, but the headlights were trained firmly on Eames’ tailgate, which meant the advantage was entirely on their end, and Eames figured he had about one shot.
Maybe more.
Probably just the one, though. He was considering this, trying to figure out if he could break the window or if it was possible it was bulletproof glass, when the doors opened, both at once, and two people emerged from the car.
They could’ve been siblings: both slim and dark haired, neatly dressed despite the fact that one of them had just shot out Eames’ window and they were on the tundra in December.
Of the pair, Eames recognized one of them.
“Mallorie Miles, as I live and breathe,” he called, and she met his gaze evenly.
“Mr. Eames, you know I prefer Mal,” she said, her voice pitched so it could barely be heard above the wind. “We’d like to offer you a job.”
“You shot out my back window,” he said, sitting up and peering out at them more fully. “To offer me a job.”
“We couldn’t have you get away,” she said mildly. “This is my pointman, Arthur.”
“Pleasure, I’m sure,” Eames said. Arthur smiled thinly.
“That I doubt,” he said. “Sorry about the window.”
“You aren’t really,” Eames said.
Arthur wasn’t, really.
“We can discuss the details in the car,” Mal said, shivering. “It’s frigid out here.”
“And my car?” Eames asked.
“Leave it,” Mallorie said. “I’ll pay for it.”
She didn’t.
Eames wound up in the backseat, leaning forward without his seat belt on so he could talk to both of them at once.
“Jess and Manuel said you had something in Japan,” Mal started. “I can make you a better offer.”
Arthur was looking staunchly ahead, along the southbound stretch of highway they’re driving. It was fairly apparent that he wasn’t as invested in getting Eames on this job as Mal was, and Eames was trying to place the name and the resentment in context, but he couldn’t, quite.
Arthur did not--the name felt like it should ring some bells, but it didn’t. And the face wasn’t familiar at all, didn’t even look like a projection he’d seen in someone else’s dreamscape.
“Why?” Eames asked, instead. “What do you need?”
“Too many honest men in this business,” Mal said. “AWOL soldiers and the like. I need someone who hasn’t done a day of honest work in his life.”
She met his eyes in the rearview mirror.
“I know all about you, Mr. Eames,” she said. “You’re a liar and a thief.”
“She really knows how to turn the charm on,” Eames said, more at Arthur than at Mal. Arthur nodded, eyes firmly fixed on the road. It occurred to Eames that he probably didn’t trust Mal’s driving.
“I’ll need more than that,” Eames said finally.
“You’ll get it,” Mal said. “We have two motel rooms a bit south. I imagine you and Arthur can share?”
She quirked and eyebrow, lips pressed firmly together.
“Of course you can. We’ll discuss it there.”
The hotel wasn’t much of a hotel--it was actually a bar with rooms upstairs, and it smelled like Eames’ grandmother’s house if it smelled like anything, which--it certainly smelled like something. The beds were all doubles that sagged in the middle, and there was a single washroom at the end of the hall. As soon as they arrived Arthur went to take a shower and Mal sat down in the single, stiff-backed chair in the room, and looked evenly at Eames.
“Okay,” she said. “Simple extraction, one level.”
“Here, or someplace warmer?”
“Prague,” Mal said. “So only slightly warmer. But I’ll pay you twice whatever the job in Japan paid, even if you lie about it.”
Eames lied about it. He took the job.
“And that was how I met Arthur,” Eames finishes. “And then we fucked.”
“Eames,” Cobb hisses. “PG-13.”
“I think it isn’t until you say ‘fuck’ more than once that it’s knocked up to R,” Eames says. “Under the MPAA. So I conserved, yeah?”
“That was a terrible story,” Ariadne says. “I don’t think Arthur even said anything. You just objectified him.”
“Just because he didn’t include all the details for your voyeurism kink--” Arthur starts.
“I don’t believe it,” Pippa says suddenly. She’s standing slightly apart from them, in the space that has no faded from the second dingy motel to white void.
“You don’t, do you?” Eames asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Mom said you’re a liar and a thief,” Pippa says, challengingly.
“Your mom said he’s a liar and a thief in his story,” Arthur points out, because if they’re going to go down it’s not going to be at the hands of a sixteen-year-old girl.
“Well, I think that was the only true bit,” Pippa says. “Eames is a liar and a thief, and that story is bullshit.”
“Pippa,” Cobb says. He looks like he’s starting to get a headache. Arthur needs to talk to Eames about using a story that included Mal, though it is true that Arthur and Mal once found Eames in the Yukon--though that had been summer, not winter, in the brief flash of time when flowers were blooming on the tundra, and he and Eames had known each other already.
Arthur had enjoyed shooting out Eames’ back window, though. It proved a point he’d long been trying to make. Honestly, anytime someone told him he could demonstrate his marksmanship to Eames Arthur was there with bells on.
It was one of those things Arthur preferred to leave unexamined.
“Pippa,” Cobb continues. “They did run a job like that with Mal.”
Everyone goes silent, and Ariadne looks at Arthur and Eames a little uncertainly, like Cobb saying Mal’s name is going to bring the dream crashing down around them. It doesn’t any more than Eames’ projection of Mal went rogue and tried to shoot the observers, and that’s more of a surprise and a relief than Arthur would care to admit.
“I don’t believe you,” Pippa says. “That didn’t sound like a story about people who were going to fall in love, anyway. The first time they met? Doesn’t happen.”
“God, Pippa, be a teenage girl for once,” James says, crossing his arms. He adds as an aside to everyone else: “She does this with Disney movies. She says she’s never going to have a princess complex. She says no one needs a prince to save them.”
“It’s not a fairy tale,” Arthur says, surprising himself. “No one saved anyone.”
Eames has found his way to Arthur’s side somewhere in there, closer than Arthur thought he was, and suddenly his arm is around Arthur’s waist.
“Except for that time in Buenos Aires,” he whispers into Arthur’s ear. His voice is pitched low and humming. “But I won’t tell.”
Pippa is watching them with her eyes narrowed.
“I bet you guys met in some really embarrassing way like on OkayCupid or something,” she says. “Eames acts like such a badass--”
“Pippa, stop swearing,” Cobb sighs.
“Everyone else does,” she says, then continues: “But I bet he was actually a hacker, and he hacked Arthur’s account and then wooed him with the information he stole. And then he didn’t want to meet up, because of his terrible, terrible acne.”
“That makes no sense,” Arthur says. “That makes exponentially less sense than the story Eames just told, which you said was unrealistic.”
“There was a tundra car chase in the story Eames just told,” Pippa says, putting one hand on her hip. “You should’ve hit a reindeer. Eames should’ve been run over by a reindeer, like grandma in that awful song--don’t sing it, James.”
“That really happened,” Arthur says, and he can hear his own voice straining. It did. He got frostnip on his trigger fingertips from hanging out the LandRover window with the stupid gun.
“I want to hear Pippa’s version,” Ariadne says from where she and Yusuf have been standing, both watching bemusedly, and Pippa beams at her.
“Fuck this,” Arthur says.
“Arthur,” Cobb says. “Everyone. Stop swearing. Pippa, you can tell your story if you keep it PG.”
“Dad,” James says. “I know swear words. Seriously, how old do you think I am?”
“That’s not the point,” Cobb growls.
“He thinks that I drink soda fountains at the sockhop,” James mutters. “Or whatever.”
“Did you base this on the Matrix?” Eames asks, looking around the white space again. “Do you come in here and pretend to be Morpheus?”
Cobb actually does rub his temples now, squinting at an indeterminate location near the ground.
“Okay, okay,” Pippa says. “I’m going to tell this story, because Eames’ was obviously a dumb lie and my version is way better.”
“And more false,” Arthur says.
“More false implies the first version was false,” Pippa says triumphantly. “Ha.”
Eames gives Arthur a little squeeze at the waist.
“Go on, then, Pippa,” he says. “Show us what you got.”
“Don’t distract me,” she says.
Pippa closes her eyes and furrows her brow in a way that bears an uncanny resemblance to her father, and then a room slowly begins to take shape. It’s a disaster--a terrible cave of a room, with posters peeled from the walls and a computer surrounded by the entrails of meals. Arthur wants to ask Pippa who she thinks they are, that one of them would live in this place, but then she blinks slightly and the scene shifts.
“I changed my mind,” she says. “You aren’t telling a story?” Eames asks, and Arthur can tell he’s trying not to betray his relief.
“No,” she says. “I’m telling a different one.”
They’re in what appears to be Pippa’s imagined vision of a TV studio now, judging by the cameras wheeling around and the fact that Eames is standing on a makeshift stage, wearing some sort of safari outfit.
“Pippa,” Arthur says. “I like the shorts.”
“Oh god, shut up, I don’t want to know,” Pippa mutters, and Eames raises and eyebrow at Arthur.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “So Eames is like a TV personality, right? Like Jack Hanna or Steve Irwin or the Kratt brothers.”
And Arthur was in Africa studying lions or something like that. Or--not lions, actually. Uh, monkeys. In South America.
So Arthur was in South America studying monkeys. Spider monkeys, the skinny ones at the zoo with tails as long as their arms, and arms as long as their legs. He was doing something inside, DNA analysis, but he had to be in the Amazon because otherwise the DNA would degrade or something. So Arthur was in the Amazon, actually, studying spider monkey DNA, and he had a lab in the middle of the rainforest and spent all of his time complaining about how hot it was, because Arthur hated it when it was hot out and stuff.
The lab was climate controlled, and Arthur spent most of his time there centrifuging DNA samples. There was someone else--a woman named Mal--doing most of the work outside, in the rainforest, and then Eames and his TV show decided to do a special about her research, because it was really interesting.
Eames brought a film crew with him, a proper one with several people whose names are completely irrelevant to this story. What is relevant is that Eames did his one video editing, and he also appreciated the climate controlled climate of Arthur’s lab. He’d go there at night to parse through the footage he’d taken with Mal during the day, and Arthur would go to the lab then, too, because he didn’t trust Eames not to mess with his monkey genetic material. They had a conversation about it, actually, but it pretty much went like--Arthur said Eames couldn’t use the lab, and Eames said he needed it, and then the field station director or whomever said they needed to let Eames use it, blah, blah, blah.
The field station director was named Dom, actually. Dominic Cobb. He was married to Mal, and they were expecting their first child. She was going to be born in the Amazon, and have a pet monkey before she was five--
“Pippa,” Ariadne says, which makes sense because no one else will and yet someone needs to say something. “This isn’t about Arthur and Eames, is it?”
“It could be,” Pippa says primly.
“And it doesn’t have anything to do with reality, does it?” Ariadne asks.
“It does,” Pippa says. “If this is all a dream, and when we think we’re awake it’s a dream, too.”
She looks around the dream space, and there’s something sharp and challenging in her eyes, a fragment of her mother’s ice.
“Who’s to say what’s real?” she says. “Maybe we’re three levels deep, right now. Maybe we actually live in Limbo.”
“Philippa,” Cobb says softly. “Pippa. We’ve talked about this.”
“Maybe totems only work because we think they do,” she says, sinking the white ground. “Because you dreamt them. Maybe mom’s alive, and you’re all scientists, and Eames is a TV personality.”
It’s Ariadne, who’s watching Pippa with close, sharp eyes, who drops to the ground beside her and places a hand on her back, holds it steady, and waits. Arthur feels like he should turn away, or do something, though he isn’t sure what. He finds himself looking across the circle at James, who looks quietly stricken--he hadn’t been aware, then, though Arthur isn’t entirely sure of what: whether he wasn’t aware of the reasons for his mother’s death, or of Pippa’s quiet conviction that maybe Mal was right, and so Arthur goes to him, sliding across the void dream space until he’s standing in between James and Eames, and Ariadne is still on the ground with Pippa, who is crying, now.
“Pippa,” Ariadne says. “Pippapippapippa.”
“I know she’s probably not,” Pippa says through a hiccupy sigh. “But what if she was?”
“Pippa,” Eames says, and he sounds both quieter and more thoughtful than he sometimes is. “You have to trust us, Pippa. Sometimes you know what’s real, and sometimes you trust your totem--your mum, things changed for her. An accident happened.” Eames glances at Cobb. “But we try to find something real and hold on to it.”
Eames glances at Arthur, here, and Arthur can feel a blush rising in his cheeks, because, yeah, okay, his totem got compromised so he started using Eames, who is so mutable in dreams, and who Arthur knows well enough to catch any permutation.
It doesn’t entirely fit with their model of avoiding attachments, and Arthur has a new die, weighted differently, that he keeps it around in case they’re separated, but mostly--he uses Eames.
Pippa is wiping at her eyes, now, and they’re drippy and red.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I don’t--we were just talking about mom, and Eames mentioned her first, and this whole thing--I’ve never really seen her like that, you know?”
Cobb offers her a hand, pulls her to her feet, and hugs her.
“Never apologize,” he says. “I’ve missed her too--” he laughs, slightly self-deprecatingly, “--you don’t need to apologize. You know you can talk to me about this anytime you like. You too, James.”
He reaches out to James and spools him in, and it’s a quiet, warm moment, and it occurs to Arthur that maybe this should be taking place on firm ground instead of in a dream, but maybe it doesn’t matter.
“I still want to know what really happened,” Pippa says when the family pulls apart, squinting her puffy eyes. Cobb glances down at her, and then up at the group at large.
“I wasn’t going to do this,” he says after a moment. “Let the record show that I wasn’t going to do this.”
“What, dad?” James asks.
“I know how they met,” Cobb says. “I know how Arthur and Eames met, and I’m going to tell you, right now, because my daughter just cried.”
part 2