quick as dreams

[wldnst]

Apparently, I want to burn off all my half-finished kinkmeme fills before the month is up. Or something. This is an odd one, and more pre-slash than slash. Title is swiped from a Slaid Cleaves song.

.quick as dreams
if you want to get out of this town, it's gonna be a long slow burn. (or, the one where arthur grew up in the circus.)
written for this prompt.
pg13 . 5365 words

1.

Eames’ mother told him to stay away from the circus because you never knew what gypsies might do, but Eames himself had never been particularly good at doing what he was told.

So that was the beginning of a lot of things. Not of doing things his mother disapproved of, because at that time Eames had already started skiving off class on sunny afternoons to smoke cigarettes under the bridge with Henry Danfield. They’d cough quite a bit, and talk about stealing Mr. Miller’s rowboat for a turn around the pond. They never quite got around to doing that, which was probably for the best, because Henry still hadn’t learned to swim at that time; Eames isn’t sure if Henry ever learned to swim, come to think of it, and the last he heard Henry Danfield was fixing up a vintage Indian motorcycle from the States and was probably going to crash it into a tree if he ever got it running.

That was the kind of person Henry Danfield was. Eames couldn’t say he was too different. A little brighter, maybe, and a little luckier, certainly, but the cut from the same cloth, otherwise.

The day the tent went up Eames and Henry were under the bridge. They smoked under the bridge because it felt like a good hiding spot; it wasn’t, though, because the river opened up to the pond on the other side, and the pond unfurled into the hill, and if they could see the pond and the hill anyone on the fringes of the pond or walking on the hill could see them, by extension. That was why Eames and Henry Danfield saw the circus tents going up that afternoon. Eames remembers it was early spring--which can’t be right, because he knows the circus always came in September. It felt like early spring, anyway: a little crisp, a little cool, but all undercut by the freshness of anticipation. The circus tents rose to their feet like ungainly young animals, and Eames elbowed Henry in the side.

“Hey,” he said, pointing.

“Circus,” Henry grunted. “Haven’t you been?”

Henry laughed a little, though there was no joke.

“Oh, right, your mum.”

“Shut up about my mum,” Eames had muttered, because his mum was terrible but Henry wasn’t allowed to say so, and that had been the end of that conversation. Their cigarettes were almost down to the quick and it was almost the end of the school day besides; soon they would grind the butts beneath their heels and go home to lie to their parents about what they had learned.

The circus tent stuck in Eames’ head, though. It wasn’t often that something new was in town; it wasn’t often that something came to town, stayed and moved on. Mostly things and people either rolled through without stopping or stayed and became stuck--they said perpetually pimple-faced Jeremy at the gas station had stopped one day to fill up on petrol and then, three years later, found himself the owner. They said Mrs. Miller had knocked on Mr. Miller’s door to ask for directions years ago and they’d been married within the week. They didn’t even take a honeymoon--they just shifted from living their lives apart to living them in parallel.

He asked his father, because his father could not lie when faced with a direct question and found out that, yes, the circus came every year. He found out that the circus had acrobats, contortionists, illusionists, animals--or at least that’s what it used to have, last time Eames’ father heard. He found out that, no, he could not go.

He, Eames, wanted to be petulant about it, but he, Eames, wasn’t allowed to petulant either, because his mum was ill and his dad was tired.

So instead he lied. It was easier that way--his mum was ill and his dad was tired, they never checked up on him, anyway.

He got Etta to invite him along the first night, because Etta had a crush on him and everyone knew it. She thought their names sounds nice together--Etta and Eames. Eames would later learn that was called alliteration, but he hadn’t been going to school much, and maybe they didn’t teach that to fourteen-year-olds, anyway.

So Etta’s family took him the first night, and Eames was polite and careful with them, went to buy popcorn and brought it up to the stands, barely watched the show because he was so worried they might catch on his poverty and send him home. The next night he managed to weasel himself in with Henry Enfield’s family, which was better, and the third night he went alone, which was best.

It wasn’t until the seventh and last night that everything changed. Mallorie Miles had invited him.

“I hear you’re looking for families to take you to the circus,” she said. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

Eames hadn’t asked her because he was trying to be subtle about it, and even then Mal had eyes that seemed to see past, to another plain, and reject subtlety altogether. He hadn’t realized she’d noticed him, skulking around the other students and their families, slowly ingratiating himself with them in exchange for invitations.

“Would you like me to accompany you to the circus?” Eames asked, and Mallorie’s face split into a thin, tight-lipped grin, which was the most that Mallorie Miles ever grinned.

“Of course,” she said. “Of course, Eames. What else are friends for?”

At the time, Eames wasn’t entirely sure. He figured that was why he didn’t have very many friends: he didn’t know what to do with them. Even he and Henry Danfield weren’t so much friends as cats trapped in the same cage.

i.

Arthur’s father was angular in a way Arthur didn’t think other people were capable of being, so much so that sometimes it seemed like he was an illusion himself: depending on how you looked at him, the angle and the light, he became a different person.

Arthur liked to think that maybe if caught every angle, every person of his father, he would be able to understand him.

The strange thing was that it seemed like his mother was supposed to be the angular one, the unrecognizable one. Through all his illusions, his father stayed the same, but Arthur’s mother twisted into herself, turned all her angles inside out, and yet she, and least, Arthur could depend on to lend some consistency to his life, to keep one wary eye on him when he helped with the horses, to ask him if he’d read his books and eaten his dinner and washed behind his ears.

Arthur helped his father with his acts during the Friday show in every town they went to. Every Friday, Arthur’s father sawed him in half.

It was a simple illusion--stupid, really. Arthur would curl his legs up in the top half of the box, his father would brandish the saw while the lights glinted off his eyes and the spangles in his costume, the saw would creak against the wood and the box would peel apart, and then Arthur’s father would toss a cloth across the box and bring Arthur together again. What struck Arthur was that his father only looked at him when half of him wasn’t there, and then the audience would cheer and Arthur would go back behind the tent to help with the horses.

It was Friday in another town, a small one in the hills with a pond at its center. It was smaller than the towns they usually stopped in, a little sleepier, but according to his mother enough people came in from outlying towns to keep them in an audience. Arthur hadn’t bothered watching--there was a point at which the circus wasn’t that interesting anymore, and most nights during the show Arthur kept to the caravan, catching up on his reading, or sleeping. If Jaime needed him he’d go help with the horses, but he avoided the main tent because there was a point at which--

It was all spectacle. Arthur had no interest in being part of a spectacle. Friday nights were more than enough for him.

But then it was Friday, and he was standing in the wings, his suit spangled to match his father’s, and then they were out under the tent, under the glare of lights and the glare of stars, and Arthur was climbing into the box to be sawed in half.

He knew how it would end. He’d done this a million times.

2.

Eames hadn’t been entirely sure the circus would come back. The older he got the smaller his town seemed, and the boundaries shrunk in like a tightening fist. It didn’t seem like they had enough to attract any sort of spectacle, anything bright and new.

It wasn’t so much the circus that Eames was waiting for--he suspected he was too old for it, anyway, and even at fourteen he had seen that the costumes were chintzy and the dogs looked like mongrels. He was waiting for, mostly, something that would come to town and leave, something to testify to the fact that that was possible. Mal found him down by the bridge, knit her brows together in consternation until Eames dropped his cigarette and ground it under his heel.

“I wasn’t done with that,” he said.

“Would you like to accompany me to the circus?” she said, and Eames had shrugged, and Mal had seen right through him to the things he didn’t say. He didn’t go every day this time--just once, the night before the circus was to leave. Mal’s parents gave them money and sent them on their own, and Eames told his parents that he was going out and they just blinked at him, like caring was too hard. It probably was--he had worn them out long ago. He and Mal had walked up the hill to the tents, knocking their shoulders together and not speaking words.

There had been a boy there on Friday night--only on Friday night--the year before. His father had sawed him in half, and then he had disappeared from the tent like he’d hardly existed. It wasn’t a big thing, it wasn’t like Eames was looking for him. But the other boy had stuck in his head, because they were about the same age, but this other kid looked like someone who didn’t stay somewhere he didn’t want to. He had disappeared as easily as if he had never existed, and Eames’ parents might not pay much attention to him--but whether he would stay or leave was never a question.

In this town, most people stayed.

ii.

Arthur’s grandmother had taken up quilting after she retired, and it was her blanket that Arthur wrapped around his shoulders after the Friday show, after his father had pulled him aside and told him that he was probably old enough to participate in more of the act, now. Arthur had nodded slightly, then gone out to feed the horses, because Jaime had already decided Arthur was old enough to be trustworthy.

Arthur pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and stared across the dark space. His parents would be home soon, slipping into their room in the back. They might want to talk--he really couldn’t predict. The only thing he did know was that he didn’t want to talk to them, not right now, but they’d be there in the morning, they’d be there tomorrow, and Arthur would have to practice his sleight of hand again, and while he’d always been good at that, he’d never been as good as his father would have liked him to be. And the truth was he didn’t care. He didn’t want to be an illusionist like this father, or a contortionist like his mother and grandmother. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, precisely, but it was neither of those things.

He fell asleep wondering where they were, anyway. He didn’t usually pay that much attention.

3.

Eames and Mal didn’t discuss going to the circus so much as they went, met up after school on Friday and walked out across the field to the tents without the benefit of parents. Eames’ mum had died and his father couldn’t see him. Mal’s parents trusted her.

He tried not to be too bitter about that.

It was a cool night for September and Eames gave Mal his jacket before she could turn it down, when they were walking across the field, which was soft and damp beneath their feet.

“It’s like a dream, isn’t it?” Mal said. “Gone in the morning.”

Mal said things like that sometimes. She’d raise her hand and say them in class, fixing the instructor with wide, dark eyes. “But perhaps the color I see as red you see as blue,” she’d said in class that morning, and everyone had rolled their eyes and Mal had dissolved back into herself. She had a way of it.

They watched the opening in silence. Eames almost wondered why they came anymore; they had to be too old, and things that had seemed bold were beginning to look tawdry around the edges. But Mal leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and watched like it mattered.

The boy who worked with the illusionist was there this year, looking older and thinner. He had to be the same age as Eames, or close. Under the lights his costume caught, reflected, refracted the light, like he, himself, was trying not to be seen. He had dark hair, dark eyes, a strange, delicate face.

If asked, Eames would not have been able to say what illusions he did. It was more than getting sawed in half.

After the show was over, Mal pulled Eames’ jacket close around her shoulders and they went out to the bridge over the pond. Mal hoisted herself up onto the rail of the bridge, swinging her legs.

“Come up,” she said, turning back to Eames. “You can see the moon in the water.”

Eames leaned forward, looking down.

“I can see it from here,” he said.

“So what did you think?” Mal asked.

“A lot like last year,” Eames said, and realized that was the problem: if even the circus didn’t change his life was even more entrenched in this dull town, where things didn’t change.

“The illusionist’s apprentice did more tricks this year,” Mal said, looking over at him.

“I didn’t notice.”

Mal laughed.

“Your lying could use some work,” she said.

iii.

After the show was over and Arthur brushed down the horses, he left the caravan and walked down the hill, towards the smooth, dark circle of water that passed for a pond. He thought he remembered this town, maybe, or maybe some other town with a pond. It didn’t matter, but it was good to get away. His parents would want to debrief. His father would want to tell him he’d done some indiscernible, wrong thing, and he’d have to repeat the illusion until his father deemed it done.

Arthur had started doing this, lately; leaving the caravan and walking the towns. In London he’d been beat up, but he’d also kissed a boy in the dim light that twisted down an alley. Other towns had other stories, and at least they were new. Here, the only thing he saw that might be a story was the pond. It was a smaller town than they normally visited, and with the circus over it was quiet and dark. From the edge of the pond Arthur could see two figures on the bridge, one sitting and one standing.

The one standing lifted a hand, and then a male voice came echoing across the water: “Oi, Henry, is that you? Spare a cig?”

The other figure slapped the boy who had shouted in light rebuff.

“No,” Arthur called back.

“Who is it, then?” came the reply, with the easy confidence of someone who knew everyone in their own small world. Arthur wanted--he didn’t know what he wanted.

“I’m from the circus,” he said, and then he turned around and went back up the hill.

4.

Eames and Mal had reached the consensus that the boy from the pond had to be the contortionist’s assistant, which was why he went back to the pond the last night of the circus that year. Mal and her family had moved--back to France, the way he had always suspected she would. They weren’t friends, exactly, except once a year when they went to the circus. But Mal was--Mal. She caught Eames before she left, patted him on the back and told him she knew he’d be fine.

The pub down the road released some dim light and conversation into the street, and Eames wondered if his father was in there--he probably was. He didn’t stop to check, just went off the road and around the pond, sitting on the grass and waiting for the circus to end.

He fell asleep.

When he woke up there was someone sitting next to him, a boy, knees rucked up to his body. The illusionist’s assistant.

“Hey,” Eames said, peering up at him. The boy didn’t turn, just stared out across the water, where the moon was caught in reflection.

“Hey,” he said. He looked a little older, a little sharper, than he had in the circus tent last year, but why that might’ve been Eames couldn’t tell.

iv.

“You were here last year,” Arthur said, as a statement of fact rather than a question.

“You’re American,” the boy said, sitting up. “I tried to bum a cig. Want one now?”

He fished something out of a pocket, shook a cigarette into his hand, held it out.

Arthur took it, just because no one was there to stop it, and the boy leaned forward and lit it for him. The flame flickered across the planes of his face.

“Eames,” he said.

“Arthur,” Arthur said.

And then he coughed so much that Eames had to thump him on the back several times and show him how to smoke properly.

5.

Eames was leaving after this year. He had decided that. He bought two pints to celebrate and brought them down to the pond, cops be damned, and let one sit in the cool water until Arthur appeared.

“Eames,” he said, nodding and sitting down.

“Brought you something,” he said, lifting the dripping glass. “Head’s gone down a bit, I’m afraid.”

Arthur looked at him, and a wrinkle creased his brow for a moment before he took it and took a swig.

“Thank you,” he said. It was strangely genuine, and Eames glanced over at him.

“If I were to leave town,” he said. “Where would you suggest I go?”

“What do you want to do?” Arthur asked.

“Anything,” Eames said. “Anything, really. Anywhere but here.”

“I’m going to Paris,” Arthur said.

v.

He didn’t know why he told Eames that. He was a stranger, or near enough; a guy who gave him cigarettes and beer down by a pond in a town whose name he wasn’t entirely certain of. The town they went to the first week in September; that was all he knew. If he had to get there on his own, he wasn’t not sure he’d make it. And now he had invited this town kid along to Paris.

Eames looked at him. The light was dull and burnished, and Arthur wondered when he’s going to pull out a cigarette and light up. The year before there had been something almost unbearably sexy about Eames with that lighter, the shadow of flames on his lips, puckered around the tight coil of paper and tobacco. Instead Eames just sat there, looking at Arthur in the dim, diffuse light.

“Paris might be alright,” he said. “I was thinking somewhere English, though.”

Arthur shrugged. It made no difference to him.

“I was accepted to a university there,” he said.

“I have a friend in Paris,” Eames said. “Her dad teaches at a uni.”

Arthur nodded, disinterested.

“Mallorie Miles,” Eames said. “She used to go to the circus with me. She was here with me, a couple years ago.”

“Miles,” Arthur echoed. The name sounded familiar, but it might just be one of those names.

“Yeah,” Eames said, taking another swig from his beer. “She’s one of the good ones, if you run into her.”

Eames took out a cigarette then, offered one to Arthur, and lit them both up. Arthur didn’t tell Eames he only smoked once a year. Eames could probably tell. They sat there in silence, watching their smoke mingle and drift into the air. Arthur thought about telling Eames about how his father had reacted, when he said he was going to university: how he had stared at him and asked him why he needed that, when he was a perfectly competent illusionist, how he had asked him if he was ashamed of his family.

Instead Arthur just kept watching the smoke, and waiting until their cigarettes burned down to stubs.

“Thanks,” he said, and got up to go.

“Thanks,” Eames echoed, and disappeared into the dark, going to the opposite direction, towards the town and the bridge and all the hard, rooted things.

Arthur didn’t look back.

6.

The first Friday of September the next year found Eames sitting at the bar in a pub in Wales, laughing uproariously at something that was only halfway to funny.

He picked that guy’s pocket without even thinking about it, and bought him another round with his own money.

vi.

“Oh, Eames,” Mallorie Miles said, and there was a smile buried somewhere behind her eyes. “Yes, I remember him.”

They were at a cafe, a quiet one on a dim side street that Arthur preferred.

“You weren’t, were you?” Mal asked him. “From the circus.”

“No,” Arthur said, not meeting her eyes. Mal looked past him.

“Oh, well then,” she said. “Last I heard he was heading towards Wales.”

They talked for some time, about school, mostly, drawing architectural dreams on napkins. Eames was right about her, Arthur thought.

“Arthur,” she said when they were leaving. “Let’s do this again. I have someone I’d like you to meet. His name’s Dominic Cobb.”

And Arthur nodded, shouldered his bag, and headed to the small room he rented for not very much. It never ceased to amaze him that it didn’t have wheels.

7.

Eames stayed in Kenya because it felt nothing like home, but he introduced himself to Yusuf because he sounded like home. Before Eames’ name was halfway out of his mouth, Yusuf looked at him and said: “Just so you know, I make an awful curry.”

Eames laughed, slapped him on the back, and bought him a drink.

“That’s alright,” he said. “I prefer fish and chips.”

vii.

Arthur dropped out of school half by accident.

When he enlisted in the U.S. Army, his father threatened to disown him and Arthur asked what he thought he’d lose.

8.

Yusuf’s jerry-rigged PASIV had come to him from the friend of a cousin or the cousin of a friend.

“Look,” he told Eames. “This is the future.”

“Sleeping?” Eames asked. “Sounds an awful lot like the past.”

They were sitting on the floor in a hollow shop Yusuf would eventually buy, watching the light filter in through boarded up windows. A rat skittered across the floor, and Yusuf chucked an empty bottle at it in a way that suggested he wasn’t overly concerned with whether it hit its target, and then he’d taken Eames’ arm in his large hand and injected the drug as smoothly as if he’d been doing it his whole life.

“You’ll like it,” he said. “Best high of your life.”

And then Eames had gone under and he had, for the first time, the power to go anywhere, be anyone he liked.

viii.

They told him it was just an experiment, but it felt like being back in the circus. If Arthur had wanted a world that was soft around the edges, that was accountable only to the mind, maybe we would’ve been a contortionist. Or an illusionist.

He started making plans to go AWOL within the week.

9.

Eames started forging as a party trick, and then after one party, when they were all awake and rubbing the sleepers from the corners of their eyes, someone had pulled him aside and offered him a job. Eames couldn’t even remember what his name was; just that his eyes were a strange color, almost unnatural, that looked a lot like orange.

“Okay,” Eames said.

“This is a wilderness,” the man said, trying to imbue that with some sort of warning or danger.

“Okay,” Eames said again.

ix.

Arthur couldn’t have told you how he wound up in Brazil, just that he found his way there. He took a job as a translator at a lodge along the Amazon. Sometimes he did illusions for the kids. He hated the bugs and the humidity, but he stayed because it seemed like somewhere no one would find him and no one asked him to stop carrying a gun.

Then Mal showed up, carrying a PASIV like a briefcase and a baby in a sling.

“I know you know what this is,” she said, and handed him a plane ticket to Beijing.

10.

Eames almost didn’t recognize him, and when he did he thought he was probably one of his own projections, until that projection took out a gun and held it to Eames’ head.

His hand was under Eames’ chin, a tight grip that could probably snap his neck if he tried. Or--it could snap the forges’ neck, more rightly. Eames was trying not to think too hard about this.

“You’re the forge,” he said.

“Forge-er,” Eames corrected, and let himself be shot. He didn’t drop the forge for anyone, especially not someone from another team. He was, after all, a professional.

He knew the other team must have spliced in from another location, but he couldn’t help wondering if he’d wake up with Arthur on a cot next to him. When he didn’t, he was halfway to disappointed and then he was unplugging and getting ready to leave, because he wasn’t sure he trusted his team, either, and he didn’t want to be there when they woke up.

x.

“The forge,” Arthur told Mal. “Said she was a forger.”

“Oh yes,” Mal said. “They aren’t puppets so much as--masks. Some teams use them more than others.”

“Do you know who they are?” Arthur asked, and Mal shrugged.

“There are only a couple, I don’t know any names,” she said. “Papa didn’t like them. Said they were thieves and liars.”

“That’s because they are,” Cobb said, running a spare hand through his hair. Mal looked past him, at Arthur, and there was something in the hollows of her eyes that Arthur couldn’t quite place.

“So they’re illusionists,” he said.

“I thought you weren’t from the circus,” Mal said.

Arthur shrugged.

11.

“Cobb’s team needs a forger.”

It was Sebastian, and how he had gotten this number Eames didn’t know.

“Cobb hates forgers,” Eames said. “Tell him to fuck off.”

“Actually, it’s his wife,” Sebastian said. “She says she’d like to take you to the circus.”

Sebastian was laughing, but it was a joke he didn’t get.

“Give me the number,” Eames said, and pulled a cigarette from his coat pocket.

Mal always hated it when he smoked.

xi.

Mal sent Arthur to go get the forger from the airport because she was pregnant.

When Eames saw him he said, “I see Mal hasn’t changed.” Then he offered Arthur a cigarette.

Arthur took it, just to see if the lighter maneuver had gotten less sexy since he was eighteen.

It hadn’t.

“You shot me, once,” Eames said, taking a drag. “I didn’t appreciate that.”

“I guess I owe you a beer,” Arthur said.

“I’d think you owe me more than that,” Eames said. “At least three cigarettes, for one.”

Arthur looked at the one in his hand.

“I don’t even smoke,” he said.

“I can tell, love,” Eames said, and when Arthur turned to scowl at him he just laughed, long and low and husky.

In that moment, Arthur wondered why he walked away and knew exactly why.

12.

When Mal died, Eames was running a job in Hong Kong, forging an escort.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when the job was done and he was burning off the tension with a game of high stakes poker, that he got the call from Arthur. Arthur didn’t call him.

“Cobb decide to lower his standards again, darling?” Eames asked.

“Mal’s dead,” Arthur said, and hung up.

Eames folded, went back to his hotel room, and bought a plane ticket he had never expected to buy again.

xii.

Arthur wasn’t sure if Eames would come. Arthur wasn’t sure if he would get there; if he knew the way. But the roads were more familiar than he expected them to be, and he had called Jaime for directions besides.

Eames was there, sitting on the bridge. He was too large for it--he looked like he was just on the edge of tipping forward. Arthur swung his leg over the rail and joined him, shoulders together.

At some point, Eames’ heavy leather jacket found its way around Arthur’s shoulders.

That night Arthur lit his own cigarette outside Heathrow before his flight to LAX.

The coat was too big.

13.

Eames was smoking a cigarette under the bridge, because it had been a long time since he’d done that. He figured Arthur might be there or he might not. As it was, the sky was blue and it was cool and dark under the bridge, and from here he could see the long, green slouch of the hill, and it was a little like being younger than he was.

The circus didn’t come to town anymore, though.

He let the smoke whistle out, watched it drift skyward. There were children playing on the bridge. He hoped they couldn’t see him. He was a terrible influence.

He wondered if they wanted to leave as badly as he had, once, and now his one regret was that he couldn’t go back and just be an idiot child who built the entire world on dreams but didn’t worry about what could happen in them.

Then, on the other hand, Eames hadn’t lost much and he wasn’t big on nostalgia, either. His childhood hadn’t been all that great. And now that he was back, he was waiting for a dream. Or maybe just a train to take him out of here.

He lit another cigarette.

xiii.

Arthur came down from the hill because that was the only way that it made sense to him to get there, even though driving to the center of town and walking off the bridge may have been easier. But when he had seen Eames in the baggage claim after inception Eames had half saluted him and said, “See you in September,” and that was as much of a promise as you got from Eames.

Ariadne had looked between them, blinked at them, and then gone up to the carousel to grab her bag.

The grass was soft and damp. The pond looked smaller and dirtier than Arthur remembered.

Eames was there, under the bridge. He dropped a cigarette and snuffed it beneath his heel, then raised a hand in greeting.

“Oi, Henry.”

“I thought I’d find you here,” Arthur said when Eames approached him along the shore.

“You thought right,” Eames said.

“I still have your coat,” Arthur said.

“Keep it,” Eames said.

“There’s half a pack of cigs in the pocket,” Arthur said, and Eames hummed a little.

“I think I’m trying to quit,” he said.

“You know, I don’t even know what this town is called,” Arthur said. Eames stopped and looked at him, and suddenly they were so close that Arthur could see each of his individual lashes.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let’s go.”