Disclaimer: Just building in Nolan's sandbox.
Warning: No spoilers, but... rambliness.
The Sea Inside A Shell
I can't seem to make you mine
Through the long and lonely night
And I try so hard, darling
But the crowd pulls you away
Through the rhythm and the rain
And the ivy coiled around my hands
- Make You Mine, The Clientele
Kazakhstan. The Starving Steppe. Over and over, Arthur recreates this in his dreams.
This dream is like a totem in itself - a reminder of a particular truth. A memory. (He doesn't keep to Cobb's rules any more than the man himself.)
Though, in time, it became associated with more than the nothingness (cold silent nothing, nothing without end) that a nineteen year old boy had seen when he gazed upon the landscape, had felt settle in his bones.
Something - almost of peace.
"That you, is it, darling? Satisfied your masochism adequately? Maybe if you lose your toes..."
He ought to know better than to dream in the workshop.
What are you doing? (and where are you going, your ponies need shoeing etc.)
After the Fischer job, Arthur goes. He walks out of the airport, and into another. He catches a plane. A second plane. He goes on an airport kick. He winds up at the bottom of the world: Sydney.
And for a while, he stops, and he looks out at the harbour. He stands on what Eames would say was the proverbial map's outline of a continent - the deceptive black line itself. And he thinks that he could sleep a solid seventy-two, brown thumbprints under both eyes.
What made me think of you? There's a particularly irreverent gull nearby.
In the airport lounge, he drinks too much gin (Gin, pet? Tastes too much of drug-store perfume), gets on the QANTAS flight to Seattle, to home. Where arms meet shoulders in circumstantial agreement, alcohol has loosened tendons. He sleeps.
The city is drenched in rain. Arthur goes to ground.
It might surprise some who think they know him to learn that in addition to a flat filled with yellowing penguin classics, he is in possession of a siamese aristocrat named Tiberius (now retrieved from his sister).
"A coffee machine, books, and a cat. What more does one need, in order to live?" Arthur asks the cat, who meows back in admittedly biased agreement.
You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
Hello. (Get out of the rain. Here we go again.)
Of course, Eames shows up. As he does, the moment Arthur stands still. He's too large in Arthur's space, but this also is not new.
He's not angry, not impatient. Not exactly. But when Arthur turns his head slightly and (finally) kisses him back, Eames gathers up his hands, pinning his wrists in one of his own hands, pulls back and looks.
"Come to London with me."
The question is as familiar as that guttural pitch of his voice, faint edge of violence. Arthur watches the ceiling, till Eames makes a noise between a growl and a sigh, grips him by the hip and rolls him on his belly.
In the mornings Eames is at his most expansive, smoking his awful Turkish cigarettes and talking, to Arthur, and to Tiberius about Arthur, when Arthur ignores him. In the mornings, Arthur watches the light pick out the faint creases on Eames' forehead, the red in his hair, bring the stubble on his cheek out in gold.
Arthur wants. He hates it.
He plugs into the PASIV device, sprawled across his own bed, the cat watching him accusingly from the top of the dresser, Eames singing in French in the next room. Of course Eames follows him down. He looks around - which basically constitutes looking at 360 degrees of nothing. Frozen wasteland, grey and silver.
He raises an eyebrow at Arthur, much as he had three months before.
"Really, pet? I could go to town with psychoanalysing this. I mean - just the name. The Starving Steppe?"
He doesn't say anything this time. And Arthur feels the wrongness of him there. Bigger and warmer than most people, as though expanding outwards through the confines of his own skin, as though he ran a permanent fever. And horribly (wonderfully) bright. The shirt was lime. And in Arthur's own dream too.
Arthur turns, he looks. Away.
What are you looking at, darling?
Nothing.
Nothing.
He doesn't see the gun in Eames' hand. He's blinking at the wallpaper when Eames sits up, takes his wrist in a way that makes the bones ache, removes the needle.
He gives Arthur a look that makes his skin burn. But he's gentle, gentle when he moves over Arthur, careful with Arthur's buttons. There's not an option No but there's gentleness in his touch and heat in his eyes. It makes Arthur shake.
Arthur doesn't come to London. But Eames doesn't leave Seattle.
Tiberius changes allegiance and follows Eames around the apartment. And the PASIV device disappears.