Eames is charming.
Ariadne was curious, but Arthur drew a mental line through that and replaced it with ambitious. Cobb is loss, Yusuf is clever, and Saito is business.
There are, of course, a thousand words that on any given day could lend themselves to describing a person, complex and strange as people are.
But Arthur looks at Eames, and decides that charming is probably the safest.
/
"The third level will be hard to control," Cobb says, adding another square to the diagram on the blackboard. "It's going to require -"
"What about a fourth level?" Ariadne interrupts.
Cobb turns. "What?"
"Sorry, but - what about a fourth level? Has anyone ever tried?"
"Impossible," Arthur says. "Far too unstable." He gets up to fetch himself a cup of coffee.
Eames laughs. "You'd think you'd know by now that nothing is impossible, darling."
Ariadne gives him a closed little smile and Cobb turns and stares at them, perplexed, as Arthur returns to his seat.
"Anyway," he says, shaking his head. "It's going to require planning for every step of the mission. We can't leave anything to chance."
Ariadne gets an odd look on her face. "What about M -"
"Anything," Cobb says loudly.
Eames wraps his hand around the paper cup in Arthur's. Their fingers brush as he takes a sip.
"Ow," says Eames, wincing. "That is very, very hot."
Yusuf steeples his fingers. "It will have to be a strong sedative."
"As we're aware." Cobb turns back to the blackboard.
/
"It's going to have to hold longer than that, Eames," Cobb says.
"I know," Eames replies. "Damnit..."
He had abruptly transformed back to himself. The two of them were sitting in the middle of a cafe that Ariadne had created, watching Eames turn red with the effort of keeping the Browning illusion in place.
"You'll be with Fischer for at least twenty minutes, maybe more," Cobb says, lips set in a familiar scowl. The crease between his eyes deepens.
"I know," Eames repeats. He stands, hands laced behind his head.
"We have time, Dom," Arthur says.
The cafe patrons are looking at them, shifting in their seats.
"Shit," Cobb mutters.
Ariadne appears at their table. "Sorry. I accidentally blew up a fire hydrant, and the projections got... antsy." She sits, and the mindless chatter of the cafe returns and rises.
"Accidentally?" Cobb's crease becomes a full-out furrow.
"She's still learning," Arthur reminds him.
"Why the sudden leniency, Arthur?" Eames asks, putting his feet up on the table.
Arthur likes the way his name sounds coming out of that mouth. Ah-thuh. It sends a chill down his spine, like a mini-kick.
"No reason," he mutters, fiddling with his tie clip.
/
"Not a real hotel."
"I know, Cobb."
"Not based on -"
"I know, Cobb."
"Let me take a look at your other sketches," he says, gesturing for Ariadne to hand them over.
She does.
"Paradoxes," Arthur says, looking over Cobb's shoulder. "Nice work."
"Thanks."
He feels warm hands on his shoulders.
"Eames," Arthur says.
"You're awfully tense," Eames murmurs into his ear, squeezing his arm and waltzing off. Arthur aims a kick at him and misses.
/
"It's good," Cobb says, surveying the hallway of the hotel Ariadne had dreamed up and running a hand through his hair. "The final levels will ha -"
"Have to be much different?" Ariadne says. "You're a broken record, Cobb."
"He's just broken," Arthur tweaks.
"Arthur and Eames, you'll be upstairs. Arthur's going to keep watch and start the kick while Eames tries holding the Browning form. Ariadne, Yusuf, you'll be with me in the second level."
There's a murmur of assent and Arthur goes to work setting up the PASIV.
"Hey," Cobb says softly as Arthur bends over him, the last person to enter the dream.
"Yeah, boss?"
"If this doesn't work out... If Saito doesn't come through..."
"It'll be fine, Cobb."
Cobb lays back, jaw tense, grief-hardened face softening as he drifts off into the second layer of the dream world, eyelids closing.
"How do you like this one?"
Arthur turns and sees a strangely beautiful woman standing in front of him, with wide-set eyes and cascading blonde hair.
"I like you better," he says simply.
The illusion drops.
"You mustn't think me forward, Arthur," Eames says, "but has anyone ever told you have lovely eyes?"
"Has anyone ever told you you're a shameless flirt, Mr. Eames?"
Ariadne stirs in her sleep.
They close the gap between themselves and Eames slides his hands over Arthur's waist, drawing him in. Goosebumps wash across his skin and blood rises to his cheeks as Eames comes closer, closer, closer, his stubble brushing Arthur's lips.
"Not in front of them."
"They're dreaming, darling."
"Not in front of Cobb," Arthur insists, and pulls him out of the room into the hallway. Eames's tongue is already in Arthur's mouth by the time he's finished his sentence, hand at the junction between his jaw and throat.
There's a sudden yell from behind the door. Their eyes lock, and Arthur bursts into the hotel room, Eames on his heels.
Ariadne is sitting bolt upright, gasping for air.
"What happened?"
"Mal, it's Mal -"
"What happened?" Arthur repeats.
"He brought her to the beach," she chokes out. "We were setting up the kick and - and - she shot me, I didn't have time to react... they're still in there with her."
Eames's hand is on Arthur's back, stroking him through the silk of his waistcoat.
"Send me in," he says. "Arthur, send me in."
"They'll be fine," Arthur says, but he rigs the music. "What if you'd been on the third level?" he mutters as Non, je ne regrette rien begins playing. "The sedatives..."
Ariadne shakes her head. "He can't control it. He can't control her, Arthur."
"I know," he replies grimly.
Eames swears under his breath.
/
Arthur is pacing, loaded die clutched in his palm.
"Why are you here?" Eames asks him.
Arthur turns. "Excuse me?"
"Why are you on this job?"
"Cobb."
"It must be more than that, Arthur."
"It's not. He needs me." He can't articulate much more right now.
Eames just looks at him, a sly smile on his lips.
"What?"
"Are we having an affair?"
"I don't know," Arthur says honestly.
Eames loosens his tie. "Don't blame yourself for Dom Cobb's shortcomings."
"Easy for you to say."
Eames drags him down onto the beat-up sofa, daylight streaming through the high windows of the Parisian warehouse, and cups Arthur's face in his hands. His eyes are dusky and soft.
"Where'd you learn forgery?"
"I've always had a bent for the nefarious," Eames says.
Arthur leans in to kiss him. Eames responds eagerly, biting his lip, one hand unbuttoning Arthur's freshly starched shirt and teasing his left nipple. Arthur slips the die into his pants pocket.
Eames breaks the kiss. "Let me try something."
/
The dream is set in a well-lit bar populated by the subconscious of Eames. Arthur is so wrapped up in his thoughts that when Ariadne sits across from him, he takes it at face value.
"Where did you -"
Ariadne just smiles at him, in a manner very unlike herself. Arthur's eyebrows knit.
"You like her, don't you?" she says. "She's an attractive girl."
A few of the projections turn in their seats.
"Clever," replies Arthur.
Ariadne - no, Eames - holds up a poker chip. "Not quite right, Arthur. And your sarcasm is unbecoming."
Arthur smirks.
"What time was it?"
"Two twenty. Ten minutes until the meeting, that gives us maybe twenty in here."
"You're a bit of a stiff, you know that?"
Arthur lets this go.
"I think this is all you have," says Eames. "I think Cobb is your means to an end. I think you're less worried about him and more worried about him ruining the perfect heist."
"You think a lot."
"He'd be lost without you, Arthur."
"I know."
"Ariadne is... petite, isn't she? I hadn't realized before." He stares at her hands.
Arthur says nothing.
/
They work on Browning for a while, until Eames feels he's fully captured his mannerisms, and then tires of waiting for the dream to end and pulls Arthur out a window. The wind catches in his throat as they fall together and then he's jerking awake, hands clenching the arms of his chair.
"Quite the rush," says Eames.
"Beats getting shot," Arthur agrees.
"I had the kick set up, you know," complains Yusuf. "Let's go, Cobb's getting impatient."
When they walk into the corner office of the warehouse, Saito is sitting there, arms folded.
Cobb looks like he hasn't slept for weeks. His footsteps echo as he walks back and forth.
"What happened the other day won't happen again."
Ariadne's mouth opens and closes.
"We have a limited amount of time to prepare," Cobb says. "Maurice Fischer could go any day now. How's the Browning illusion coming?"
"Splendidly."
"I should hope," Saito murmurs.
Eames cuts a look at Arthur, who says softly, "Everything's in order, Dom."
Cobb nods, but Arthur can tell he's light-years away. The furrow between his eyes is deeper than ever.
/
From the safety of the warehouse they penetrate the third level of Ariadne's dreams, a beach house of sleek and modern design.
"Good," Cobb says, looking around. "This is nice... the attention to detail..." he runs his hand over the arm of a sofa.
"What exactly are we doing here?" she asks.
"Practice."
"We know the sedatives work, Cobb," Arthur says. "What are we really doing here?"
"He wants to see if Mal will show up," Ariadne says, watching him. "He wants to know if he can control her."
Cobb's face darkens.
There's soft laughter from the doorway. Mal appears, flanked by projections, a pistol clutched in her hand.
"Dom, sweetheart."
Cobb flinches.
Eames steps forward.
"I'm trying," Cobb mutters.
Arthur glances at Ariadne and sees she suddenly has her hand on the grip of a gun. The projections stare at her.
"Is your little friend going to kill me?" Mal throws her head back and laughs throatily. She raises the gun, but aims it at Arthur instead of Ariadne.
"Don't," Cobb says. "Don't do it, Mal... we're too far under..."
"Too far under?" Ariadne mutters, without taking her eyes off of Mal.
"Limbo," Cobb says quietly.
"I don't understand." Saito looks between them.
"If you're killed in a dream and you're too heavily sedated... you go into a state of limbo. You spend decades waiting to wake up. You go insane. You can't tell the dream from reality."
"Jesus," Eames says. "Fine time to tell us, Cobb."
Mal doesn't take the gun off of Arthur.
"Don't do this," he tells her.
"I'm sorry, Arthur," she whispers.
And she squeezes off a shot.
Before Arthur can blink, Eames is shoving him out of the way, letting out a grunt when the bullet tears into his side. A split second later Ariadne jerks in his peripheral vision as she shoots once, twice, three times, and both projections collapse. Mal sways, a red hole through the center of her forehead, and falls onto the table in front of them.
Cobb cries out.
Arthur drops to his knees beside Eames, ripping his leather jacket off. Blood gushes through his fingers as he presses his hand to the wound. Eames laughs hoarsely.
"I just took a bullet for you, darling," he says. "I think a thank you is in order."
Arthur brushes Eames's hair off his forehead, leaving behind a smear of blood. "Don't die on me... damnit..."
Cobb is cradling Mal in his arms, sobbing quietly into her neck. Arthur can't seem to find any sympathy for him. This Mal, this broken, hollow projection - she's nothing to grieve. She'll be back. She always comes back.
"It's not a pneumothorax, yeah?" Eames asks, holding his sweater up while Arthur palpates his side.
"I don't think so," Arthur mutters.
But then Eames wheezes, and a dribble of blood trickles from his mouth. Arthur yells, "How much time do we have?"
"In here? Thirty minutes until we ride the kicks," Ariadne tells him. "Cobb, the projections are going to be after me, we need to move."
Cobb stands. "Is there -"
"Trapdoor to the roof," Ariadne tells him, and helps Arthur lift Eames to his feet.
They lock it tightly behind them and sit there under the stars. Cobb stares blankly at the distant sun rising over the ocean.
"She's just a memory, Cobb," Ariadne says.
Arthur slips off his jacket and begins tearing out the lining, pressing the strips of fabric to the bullet wound in Eames's side.
"Perhaps we should reconsider our deal, Dominic," Saito says quietly.
Cobb shakes his head. "I have it under control."
"That's a lie," Ariadne says, "and you know it -"
Eames grabs Arthur's hand and squeezes, tight. He's pale under the fevered flush in his cheeks.
"Cobb," Saito says briskly.
"Arthur, tell them," Cobb snaps, standing up.
"Yeah? Tell them what?" Arthur almost never talks like this, but here's Eames dying in his arms, a routine test of their abilities gone horribly awry because Cobb can't keep his past to himself. He checks his watch. Ten minutes.
"Stay with us," he murmurs. Eames nods slowly, like he's underwater.
"Just stop yanking our chains," Ariadne tells Cobb. Her voice is an octave lower than usual, and she's white-knuckling the gun as she stands guard over the trapdoor.
"I'm still in charge here, goddamnit," he bites out.
Arthur is quiet. His anger at Cobb is too multi-faceted and fresh to express, so he concentrates on waiting down the timer and listens to Eames breathe.
Clearly Ariadne knows something the rest of the team doesn't, has plumbed the depths of his twisted psyche in ways Arthur hasn't even had the displeasure of attempting.
Slow, haunting music echoes across the roof.
The projections are retreating.
Saito says something he can't quite hear. Arthur looks at his watch.
"One minute to go, Mr. Eames."
"Excellent," Eames says softly. "I'm sweating like Nixon here."
Arthur presses his hand down harder. The blood is sticking to his fingers, dark and viscid. In his other hand, he clutches his totem.
/
When he jerks awake for the fourth time - falling down the layers of dreams like a slapstick comedian crashing through awning after awning - he finds himself staring at one of Cobb's helpmates. Tadashi?
"What happened in there?" he asks Arthur quietly, disconnecting the leads. "You were jerking in your sleep like crazy. And..." he jerks his head at Cobb, who's already awake and hunched over a table, watching the top spin.
It falls.
Ariadne disconnects her own and gets up, loosening the scarf around her neck. Her dark hair falls in waves around her face as she looks at Cobb, who ignores her.
Tadashi tends to Eames, and then Saito, who waves him away.
"Hell," says Eames, and starts to laugh as he stands up and stretches.
He slips a finger under Arthur's left suspender, pulls him to his feet, and kisses him soundly on the lips.
Ariadne makes a little noise of surprise. Everyone else lapses into silence.
"Cobb," Eames says, as he saunters away, "close your mouth, yeah? You look like a brain-dead goldfish."
Arthur grins in spite of himself.
/
"Strawberries in liqueur," Eames tells room service, "and bring some whipped cream, could you? Excellent. Thanks, mate." He hangs up and does a flying leap onto Arthur's bed, knocking the wine glass out of his hand.
"Are you five?" Arthur mutters, dabbing merlot out of the bedspread.
"Perpetually," Eames replies, unbuttoning Arthur's shirt with a practiced ease and slipping it open, then taking his tie off and tossing it over the bedside lamp.
"What's the whipped cream for?"
"Strawberries."
"I thought it was a kinky thing," he says frankly.
"Arthur, Arthur. You're so... kitten with a whip sometimes. I can hardly stand it."
"I do my best, Mr. Eames."
The hotel is very nice, as most Parisian hotels are, and it's a frequent tourist trap, so everyone speaks English. Eames does speak some French, but he has a hard time with the accent and makes some of the more complicated phrases sound like nonsensical come-ons, which no one seems to mind.
"I should tell you in advance I'm a bit of a screamer," Eames says, undoing Arthur's fly.
"I think you should tell that to the family in the room next door."
"They went out to dinner, darling, I saw them leave."
Arthur gives him a slow nod. Eames grabs him by the jaw and whispers, "I should also tell you in advance that I'm an amazing fuck," and Arthur's insides twist like balloon animals.
/
They start out kissing, Eames mixing dirty talk with pillow talk, and once they get into it the bed is forgotten completely. Arthur drops his sense of decorum and is shoved up against the door, the floor, the walls - for twenty minutes they roll around like two sub-equatorial jungle cats in heat, clawing, biting, and pinning. The whipped cream and strawberries sit forgotten on the silver dessert cart.
Eames is possessive, like someone's going to run in and snatch Arthur away the second he lets go. He grabs Arthur's wrists and holds him tightly, nails marking his skin, as he finally slides into him, Arthur's cheek grazing the carpet. Eames slams his hips forward and Arthur lets out a choked noise, something like a moan, but from the depths of his gut. His cock is throbbing like crazy.
Eames presses his lips to Arthur's neck and Arthur writhes under him, breath hitching. There's a sharp sting as he digs his nails into Arthur's ribcage and then just like that, it's over, and Eames is rolling submissively onto his back with a satisfied sigh. Arthur slips his knee over Eames's chest as he catches his breath, and straddles him with the kind of calm resolve that's kept his head above water all these years.
"Someone's being awfully forward."
"It's about time you put that mouth of yours to good use, Mr. Eames."
/
Eames lights a postcoitus cigarette and they lie there, entwined in the sheets, while Arthur sucks the brandy out of the strawberries.
"What are you thinking about?" Eames blows a ring of smoke at Arthur and he sneezes.
"Cobb."
Eames raises his eyebrows and clutches at his chest in mock jealous agony.
"You know, I liked Mal," Arthur mutters. "She was..." he sighs. "She wasn't whatever Cobb's made of her."
"The mind is a terribly complicated thing," Eames says, putting out his cigarette on the headboard. "And Cobb is a complicated man."
Arthur nods. He's getting sleepy from the brandy, and Eames's hand on his thigh is comfortably warm.
"We'll handle it," Eames adds.
There's an authoritative edge in his voice, and Arthur is starting to think that maybe charming doesn't cut it.
Not at all.
/
A/N: TBC, peut-être?