Fic: Siberia (When Will It Rain) ~ Inception: Arthur/Eames
Title: Siberia (When Will It Rain)
Rating: PG
Words: 1700
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Arthur doesn't build because he can't. His subconscious is empty with snow and ice and howling wind with his heart buried deep under age old ice. And then, Eames makes it rain.
Notes: This is something that came up when I was having a small bout of depression. Real life sucks and some things have been spiraling downwards that don't seem to be done soon. Anyway, writing this helped clearing up some unhappy thoughts, so it's pretty much a piece of self-indulgence.
Comments are greatly welcome! Friending is greatly welcome!
It is cold. The Russian wind cuts to the bone, and your teeth chatter and your legs shake and your hair escapes from your studious styling to whip around your face.
You knuckles are too white from folding in on themselves and you can no longer feel your nails cutting into your palms.
The snow is too white, the ground an endless stretch into the abyss. There is nothing and you can see nothing through the blizzard so you let the howling of the wind take up your mind and closed your eyes.
You stop thinking. And do you still know who you are? Can you recall your favourite suit or your most trusted gun? Without thinking.
You can no longer recall who you are. Without thinking.
Nothing about your life comes to you and you don’t know what you have spent your time doing, where your time has gone as if a dark hole has swiped clean of your mind and left it blank. Like the white white snow. Like the endless ground you are standing on.
You are too void to even feel scared, and watch as the emotions you are supposed to feel with the onslaught of each excruciating realism freeze under the glacier you are standing on.
You never understood why people cry when they are sad, why people can laugh until tears rolled down their cheeks. You know that you are not normal and you don’t know why and people start to envy you for your calm and collected stance. They don’t know better.
You feel like laughing at them but laughter doesn’t bubble up from your chest. You barely twitch your lips at that and their eyes shine as if their point has been proven. Maybe it has.
Mal had said, before she went deep down, that you didn’t feel real. Her eyes glittered with grief like stardust in the night sky and they were beautiful, the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.
Mal had said, after she came back up, that you were not real. Her eyes glistened with barely contained joy and took the knife to your throat. She drew blood, but Cobb appeared and yelled that she was mad, delusional and why didn’t you stop her. You shrugged.
Maybe she could be right, you said.
Without thinking, you forget who you are. Your knuckles are white and you see the bruising crescents in your palm but it doesn’t hurt.
You wish it can. You wish your blood is real. You wish your life can start once you pull the trigger against your temple, your heart pulsing again after the hibernation in a neverending dream.
You wish for someone to look at you and say, I know who you are.
I know who you are, he said, his ripe lips curving around crooked teeth, a standard expression to every pedestrian in his life. You are Arthur, the best point man in the world. Your reputation exceeds you.
You acknowledged and ducked your head. You wanted to object because that cannot define who you are, but what objection could you give when the answer was even lost to yourself? What would he care?
I’m Eames, he said. You nodded.
If identification were as simple as a name.
Mal jumped, and Cobb’s heart crashed open with her. You looked on, waiting for your own heart to stir.
You put on the black suit, clipped on the plainest pair of cufflinks and knotted the black silk tie. You were waiting for your hands to shake but they held on steady as the smaller ones of the children trembled in yours, flapping with their clothes in the harsh autumn wind.
Were they too young to understand sorrow? Were you too old to feel grief?
You were waiting for your tears to come but Dom had cried your share.
He told you a riddle. You were waiting for a train.
Mal had her reason. Mal had her excuse. She was waiting for her train.
You wondered where your train was and tried digging for the rails but your hands became stuck solid to the frozen ground.
You look at the blueprints and are struck by a sudden wave of unrecognition. What are these lines and what are you doing looking at them? And then your brain kicks back from the freeze and feel a pair of eyes on you.
You alright? Eames asks and you tighten your knuckles hoping the pain will bring you back. It is in vain as always and your answer is stuttered. You shouldn’t do that, Eames continues and takes up your hand, unfurling each finger like skinning an orange and you feel your heart being sliced with it. I still need these hands to shoot me awake, you know, he smiles around his crooked teeth and you think you’ve never seen a smile more perfect. Your hands warm under his but he has to go, has to go so you rip your hands away and feel them freeze over again, your diced up heart functioning in a mutilated mess.
Ariadne is a great architect. She can control dreams and takes to paradoxes quickly and generously.
But she takes to the paradoxes too realistically, tracking down Cobb’s battles with himself, Mal’s distortion and striving for the unopened doors in his subconscious. It is only amendable until she turns the attention to you.
Cobb doesn’t build because of Mal. What’s your reason? She asks and you can’t say because there is nothing but Siberian wasteland and does she know that buildings can be eroded away by nothingness? You try and you try but structures crumble and dissolve into the whiteness and does she know that paradoxes are only good when existence gets too complicated that they start fighting themselves? Does she know that snow is never a good building material because it melts and freezes over and the more you try the more you can’t feel your heart anymore beneath layers of age old ice that you won’t be surprised to eventually find it fossilized to stone?
You end up with you not being a good architect, a feeble excuse that baits more interrogation but you really have nothing to give. Until Eames steals you away are you freed and you tried wearing gratitude but you cannot tailor it with emptiness.
You have nothing to give, but he doesn’t ask.
You dream alone.
Cobb dreams for guilt in the cage of an endless elevator ride. Ariadne dreams for creation in a world with no skies, no gravity, no laws, no politics as common sense is stripped away to unleash the rawest blueprints. Yusuf dreams for living, for understanding those dozens of men in his basement wondering when, not if, he will lie beside them.
Eames simply doesn’t dream.
You dream, hoping to find a meaning, a destination like all others do. It only seems fair, but you’ve seen enough of deception persuasion confusion illusion inception and Mal’s broken skull against the sidewalk to believe in the fallacy of fairness.
You are standing in the snow with no train tracks or skyscrapers. You fill your waking hours with contacts and information and knowing all there is to know in this world just hoping at least some of that knowledge will bear enough significance that it will accompany you into this Siberian landscape.
Yet the land is as devoid as when you were born, and you try not to think if this is a reflection of the life you have, what you have been doing who you have been meeting jobs you have been working people you have seen dying and if anything means anything at all.
You stare at the snow for so long you should have already been blind but you see this speck of dust in the distance that flickered and got bigger, flickered and came closer.
Why am I not surprised your subconscious is bloody freezing? The speck yells out and it’s Eames.
Eames.
Eames who should look ridiculous in the ten layers of duffle jackets he has on, turning his toned body into a round polysynthetic ball. Eames who is suddenly in front of him, bright eyes and sniffing nose. Eames who is impossible to be here.
You’re wearing awfully little, darling, he says and you become conscious of your own body for the first time, clad in white cotton pants and a threadbare shirt. You haven’t even realized you had a corporeal form at all when you dream, seeing no use in physicality when all you have is blank subconscious for company.
Eames struggles out of the outermost layer and draped it over you and it shouldn’t be and it couldn’t have been but you felt warm.
This jacket is waterproof too, you know, he said and you are on the verge of pointing out there can never be rain when the first droplet hit your forehead. It reminds you of how you imagined your first bullet shot would feel like and how it disappointed you when you just fell into numbness except this hurt, and hurt a lot more even without gunpowder, without penetrating your head. It hurts, as you see the droplets forming perfectly round imprints on the blanket of snow, pulverizing it to expose the dark hole beneath.
It hurts so much you clutch onto Eames’ arm and he smiles fond and gentle before he pulls out a gun and shoots you in the heart.
You wake up to Eames’ eyes on you, silent and indiscernible.
You run.
You dream again.
The barren landscape is white as always, unchanged, and you’re unsure if you should be relieved or upset until you take a step which is something you never attempted and your feet touches something soft. You sweep away the snow and see the black duffle jacket.
It is Eames’. It is too big for you but makes a good makeshift tent and you suddenly feel smaller than ever.
You sit down and cocoon the jacket around you, watching the wind and snow.
It starts to rain.