Based on a prompt on the Inception kink meme.
From Cabinet 6, Drawer 3
There was a two story house, somewhere in London. There wasn't anything special about the area where the house was, there wasn't anything exceptional about the house itself and there was nothing remarkable about the rooms within that house.
The house was a two story, red bricked townhouse. It was surrounded by a wrought iron fence and assorted shrubbery. The small lawn was well manicured, the shrubs trimmed neatly. It was very plain, a house that passing eyes would glance over and forget in the next instance.
There are stories that linger within the house, stories that start only four years previous. The stories follow the lives of two men, follow a story that started when they opened the front door and realized that it was possible for them to make a home. Four years wasn't long, but it was enough time for them to leave their trace.
The first memory is stained into the cement ground of the garage, the first instant that everything went wrong.
Underneath the layer of oil and dirt are the bloodstains of a man shot down. The man had been five foot eleven, slicked back brown hair and a simple black suit. He had broken in the side door, gun held between his steady hands. He had been unprepared for the whip thin man with the crowbar; a man protecting the safety of his home. There was a pause from both men, a moment of recognition, just before the crowbar swung out again.
Two guns went off that night, two bullets cutting through the air and finding home in the soft skin of their targets. The first to be shot fell with a surprised grunt, crowbar slipping from his slack hands. The other collapsed shortly after, dead before he hit the ground. Blood pooled outwards, sinking into the ground, later to be washed away with bleach soaked rags.
One of the pools was disrupted, leading a path out of the garage and through the main hallway. It wove down the hall, black against the hardwood flooring. It pooled again in the middle of the living room, seeping from between fingers and cloth.
There are whispered words in the living room, desperate pleas curling into the empty air. 'Don't leave me. It's not that bad, you've survived worse. I need to grab the kit, just keep your hands pressed down. Oh Christ, I need to go grab it. You just- fucking keep breathing.'
Upwards the trail goes, spiraling up the stairs on heavy footsteps and panting breath. It passed closed door, through a hall with no landmarks, aside from a handful of paintings on the walls; three Francis Bacon's, a Monet, and an Escher. It followed on the heels of a desperate man, to a bathroom, where everything blurred in his panic to get back to his partner.
The story spun off, branching off in many directions that tapered out into the world, but always ending back within the house. The trails flew off to Paris, São Paulo, and Milan; they branched off to Toronto and New York, to Chicago and Osaka.
They always came back to the house, two wandering souls pulled by invisible strings. Their need to leave, to go out into the world was unexplainable. They would leave with nothing and find themselves with a vague sense that there was something that they were missing. And so they returned home, time and time again, sometimes after days and sometimes after months.
Sometimes the returns were quiet, the two missing each other by only hours. Other times they fell perfectly in sync, returning within minutes of each other. Sometimes the returns were messy; a three month separation ended in the living room, where one wrong push into a wall resulted in a shattered picture frame upon the floor. Separations and meetings, and separations again. It was the work of two criminals leaving their marks upon the face of the world, and on the floors and on the walls of their home.
There was a scratch along the banister leading upstairs, from a lamp thrown in anger. It was a reminder, how when someone cared, they'd yell and cry, not sit in quiet devastation. There had been fear and anger, a growled 'and what if you hadn't come back?' A life without the other was always a large possibility, one that was sometimes hard to handle.
And there had been an attempt of consoling as the two men stood at the foot of the stairs. A murmured 'shh, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I only got hit once and it was only a graze.'
'You son of a bitch, you got shot.' There was the squeak of shoes on the floor and then the smaller of the two men was heading upstairs on heavy feet. He didn't hesitate, just walks down the hall of closed doors and paintings. It wasn't the first time that the rooms had rung with hollered words, following footsteps and then whispered apologies. Apologies pressed into the smooth line of a collar bone, into the scar of a bullet wound and the curve of a hip.
And the apologies continued into the morning; in the humming of a song from a long time ago, continued to a newspaper laid flat on the dining room table, a cup of coffee sitting beside it. The table was something that had scuffed the floors, scratched lines into the hardwood when it was pushed three inches to the right and then two to the left.
It was moved once to the rock of hips and scramble of hands, then the stumble of a man in a mad dash out of the house, a plane ticket in his pocket.
It was the small details that made this home what it was. From the unfortunate bend in the towel rack, where slippery hands had reached for something to hold on to as breathy moans filled the air, to the hole in the bedroom wall, the only reminder of a gun going off at a false alarm of an intruder.
There was a safe in the closet, filled with a single silver case; the most precious item the two men owned. An item picked up from a long time past that neither would give up; even though they hadn't touched the case since they found their house. It was put away with reverent hands, hidden and locked away. There was also the floorboards in the office that pull up, where handfuls of papers resided. The space was filled with passports, birth certificates and ID's. Some were forged by a meticulous hand, while others contain nothing but truth. And like the silver case, they remained untouched, but only because they'd been long forgotten.
But when the two men left, only four years after they made this place their home, they remembered and they emptied those secret places. They pulled the papers out from the floor, ran fingers over the scratches in the walls and traced hands over the sheets of the bed. They counted the pictures hanging in the halls under their breath and stood over bleached out blood stains. It was the memories and familiarity that gave them pause. It wasn't something that they could take with them, the markings that reminded. They were things that they needed to leave behind.
When they're finally gone, they leave it all behind; the familiarity and the majority of their things. What they leave behind wasn't who they were and what they were to each other and that was the important bit.
What they leave behind are the scratches in the walls, the scuffs on the floor, the cupboards filled with food and the cabinets filled with memories from a life before this. There was nothing that they needed to take with them, wanted to take with them. The memories packed away were ones that they could easily find again. There was no one else that could find them here, so there was no need to hide them further.
The cabinets were behind the closed door of the office, lined up against the wall. The first one had folders filled with sheets of papers covered in black blocks of text one only saw on classified information. The information that could be deciphered read about a time spent in the military, a job gone wrong, and a stolen piece of technology. There was mention of a man shot down, who's team continued in search of the thief, but returned empty handed and to find no body.
The second cabinet had detailed pictures of building plans, of city streets and mazes. Each drawer held more plans, each different and signed by a different hand. The top drawer was dedicated to a single man, who carefully signed all of his designs 'Cobb'.
Another cabinet, the third, is filled with journals, organized by date from the bottom drawer up. The first one had the name 'Delancy' etched onto the front page, the notes filling it sparse. There was an almost questioning tone to it, one that lacked confidence. It had the earliest date underneath the name. And in the top drawer, there was a handful of books, seven to be exact, with the name 'Rosenthal' written on the cover of each. There was more confidence in those books, a confidence that spoke of years of practice, of someone comfortable in the work they did.
The forth cabinet in, there was nothing but folders filled with pictures and personalities. There are pages of information on each person, basic information leading into more personal information. Each folder spanned the life of a single person, explored their personality and mannerisms. Each folder had its own person, some that had actually been and others who had come from the mind of a brilliant man.
The fifth was the one filled to the breaking point with the small details that made up their lives. From the moment they met, to the moment they swept each other up in themselves. There was details on how they stole from the government and then left on a whirl of lies and underground contacts. There were papers on the years they spent together and the time they spent apart. There were many words spent on the friends they met along the way and the ones they lost. There were even pages on the jobs that changed their lives as well. It was all in there, organized in an intricate labelling system that only one man understood.
The most important cabinet, the sixth cabinet, was all but empty. The top two drawers held nothing, but the third one, that was the one that had a single sheet of paper. It was flipped upside down, the words hidden until someone had the need to finally take a look. And after four years, curiosity finally begged the two men to do so. The paper had two words written on it in the neat scrawl from the journals in the third cabinet.
The paper simply read 'Wake Up'.