Disclaimer: I own no part of Inception. This is all in good fun.
I wrote this story to the song "Cold" by Aqualung & Lucy Schwartz. The song is searchable on YouTube for listening.
Arthur stared out the warehouse window. He wasn't looking at the snow. Not really. His thoughts were elsewhere. They were back with the family he had created in limbo.
It was another job gone wrong. Jobs went wrong all the time. The only way to survive them was to adapt, think quickly, and escape the dream without losing yourself in the process.
In that, he had failed.
Militarized projections had been waiting for him on every layer of the dream. He couldn't blend in among them and he couldn't adapt to his rehearsed role before they recognized him as an intruder. Hell, he couldn't even pull his gun before they killed him. Once. Twice. Three times. It happened so quickly that he was certain not one moment had passed in reality.
Was it because he'd known the subject as a boy? Was it because he'd been tagged as a Point Man before the day of the job? Whatever the reason, he'd found himself trapped in limbo until the sedation wore off.
The other members of the team knew he'd been trapped in limbo only after they'd discovered his body on the first layer of the dream. But what were they to do? Years had passed for him in the time it took them to find him there. By the time they had dropped into the third dream layer and completed the job, he had already created a new life.
Somewhere within him, he'd known it wasn't real. But what good was that knowledge when the dream had become his reality? To keep telling himself that his world wasn't real, to keep rolling his totem as he sat beside his wife and their daughter… it made little difference. He was still living inside a dream lasting decades upon decades. He still courted his wife, married her in a Parisian courtyard, shared the joy of her pregnancy, watched his daughter come into the world, and raised her in their home.
Not real. What good were two little words against another lifetime of memories?
He could have shot himself at any point. Indeed, he seriously considered it many times. The consequences of dying in limbo whist under sedation, however, were largely untested. Would he have woken as alive and bewildered as Cob had on the Fischer job? Or would he have pulled the trigger too soon, burying himself alive in a sea of darkness that went beyond the existence of dreams?
Arthur had been too cowardly to find out.
Eventually, the gentle fingers of his wife no longer needed to caress his pistol-welding hand to get him to relax his grip. They no longer needed to drag the weapon away and place it out of sight. Her soft lips no longer needed to kiss him to distract him from he'd almost done.
Because he stopped doing it. With a kind whisper and a kiss on her forehead, Arthur had instructed her to hide the gun. He locked the doors leading to each roof. He created a world in which one would need to work very hard to commit suicide.
Wait it out, he told himself over the years. Just wait it out.
He learned to be happy while waiting, although he could see the look of hurt in his wife's eyes when he chose to remain distant at times. These times were punctuated by a cold air, lack of affection, and sometimes an utter disregard for her presence. But as time wore on, he couldn't deny his need for companionship, his need to be touched and loved. It was years before he gave in completely.
And as they built a life together, the knowledge that he was dreaming – the knowledge that his world wasn't real – well, somewhere along the line, that knowledge became irrelevant. It no longer mattered. He had lived a longer life in limbo than in reality. If time was any measure of what was real over what wasn't, then limbo was more real than reality had ever been.
It was only when he'd been rushing to the hospital for the birth of his third grandchild that Arthur had been torn from the life he'd created and thrust back into what everyone else called reality.
Faces from long past had surrounded him, impossibly young and untarnished. Their gazes had been questioning, their voices soft and gentle.
He hadn't said a word. A look at his own hands and a look around at the warehouse confirmed what he'd known in his heart all along.
None of it had been real.
He had lost his family.
He felt empty and alone. The team would never understand what he'd been through. Not even Cobb, who had returned to reality with Mal.
Arthur hadn't returned to reality with anyone. They were just gone.
He shook off the hand Eames rested on his shoulder and rose, walking to the warehouse window.
Now he stared out at the snow, feeling just as cold.
There were voices behind him, but he didn't care to hear what they were saying. More questions, more answers. Probably sorting out the complications of the dream.
And it was a little late for that.
He wasn't sure how much time passed while he stood there, staring out the window. The smiling faces of his wife, daughter, and grandchildren flashed before his eyes, along with memories that would never be shared by anyone else.
His daughter when she was four, swinging on the swing set he had built.
His wife when she was thirty-three, blowing out the candles on her homemade cake.
His daughter's first date, her prom, her wedding… the detail with which he remembered his life in limbo haunted him. It wasn't something he could shake off and forget.
For him, it had been real.
He saw Eames out of the corner of his eye. The man was directly beside him. How long had he been there? With a start, Arthur realized there was only darkness beyond the window. He'd been standing there for hours. It was something he never would've done as the old man he'd become.
"Arthur," Eames said softly. "We should go. The subject's been moved, but that doesn't mean he can't be traced back here."
"Yes," he murmured absently. His voice sounded like it had over forty years ago. It was the voice of a much younger man, and it didn't belong to him.
Eames put a hand on his arm to guide him from the warehouse. His touch was light and gentle, as if he was leading a wounded animal.
Arthur's legs felt strange, as if they belonged to someone else. Their stride was much too smooth. Their joints were much too painless. At one point, he actually stopped and looked down at his legs in lines of shadow and moonlight. His tailored pants revealed little, if anything.
"Arthur."
He looked up to see Eames staring at him intently. Had they not been alone in the warehouse, he might have looked away.
But he didn't.
There must have been some portrayal of emptiness, confusion, and loneliness in Arthur's expression, because in the next moment, Eames' eyes were shining with tears. They didn't fall, and they looked strangely out of place coupled with such an intense gaze.
"Come on," Eames finally uttered. "We need to go."
He tightened his grasp on Arthur's arm and led him to the warehouse door.
The second they stepped outside, Arthur couldn't help but stop again. He looked up at the falling snow and closed his eyes.
A memory of walking through the park with his wife on a romantic winter night washed over him. Snowflakes had clung to her eyelashes and long auburn hair. That was the night they had huddled in the gazebo until it stopped snowing…
She never existed.
He opened his eyes. The loss was too much. It was like a weight on his chest, constricting his breathing. The crisp night air was too cold. He couldn't breathe it in, for fear of becoming just as cold. It would consume him and everything around him. Then he would be surrounded by the same darkness he'd been too cowardly to face by killing himself in limbo.
A distressed moan escaped his lips. Then his legs gave out.
Strong arms wrapped around his torso to slow his fall. Arthur sank to the ground, the snow melting against his knees. With another moan of distress, he bent his head low and struggled to regain control of his senses.
There was a hand rubbing the back of his vest in soothing circles. A voice whispered into his ear, the breath warm amidst the cold. He focused on the voice.
"Just breathe, darling," it was saying. "Take a deep breath."
Arthur touched his head to the pavement with a rock forward and then back. He allowed air to fill his lungs, the threat of darkness kept at bay by the voice beside him. The air escaped with a great whoosh.
"And one more. Just one more breath in."
He shook his head. His wife and daughter were gone. What difference did breathing make? No one could understand unless they were taken back to the day of their birth and were told the life they led was a lie. Snatched during a quintessential moment and forced to start over. Never to see loved ones again.
The hand moved from rubbing circles on his back to massaging his neck. "Come on, Arthur, you can do this. I know what you're capable of. Now breathe."
He heard a gasping sound as if from afar and realized it was his own desperate attempt to breathe in.
"Good. Take just one more breath for me, now. One more."
How long they were huddled there, Arthur would never know. The only thing he did know when he began to breathe on his own was that he would've fallen apart, had Eames not been there to help him. There's a fine line between sanity and losing yourself forever. And that night, Arthur came very close to crossing it.
Very, very close.
Reviews are appreciated. I will be continuing this after completion of my other story, Coming Clean. Continuation will focus on Arthur's emotional recovery (bromance), with a good dose of action thrown in as Arthur and Eames discover what exactly went wrong with the dream that trapped him in limbo.