The first time it happens, Eames doesn't even notice. No one else does, either. They assume he's a projection—whose, they don't know—and they walk around him like he's a ghost.
"Don't leave me behind," he says, and Cobb flinches, he can tell even from the back, and Saito stands still, and Ariadne puts a hand over her mouth. Yusuf is the only one who turns back. All he does is look: he has a chemist's way of observing everything as if he can commit it to memory in its discrete and essential parts. Eames doesn't say anything, because he heard his voice, and he knows, by now, what he has done without even meaning to.
Yusuf turns away so he won't turn into a pillar of salt.
Eames already has.
Cobb says, "Where the fuck is Eames?" and his voice is rough. Poor Cobb, always snagged on the past and left bleeding.
Eames steps behind a pillar and changes his skin.
()
The second time, he does it on purpose, but Ariadne turns around a second later and sees him.
She slaps him so hard his ear rings even after he turns back into himself.
Her hands are shaking. "If you do that again," she says, "I'll tell Cobb. And he'll kill you."
"You can't die in a dream," Eames says, but he says it to her back, because she's already gone.
()
Eames doesn't always carry a token. He doesn't need one: no halfway decent forger ever does, not to know if he's awake or asleep, at least. When he's awake, he can't hold someone else's hands up in front of his face or run someone else's hair through his fingers. Sometimes he slips a poker chip with an odd number of notches around the side into his pocket and into his dream, but sometimes he doesn't; it really just doesn't bother him very much anymore, being a little muddleheaded about whether he's in his own dream or someone else's. Any dream will do.
Sometimes he takes a loaded die into his dreams. He never does it on purpose.
He doesn't know what happened to the real one. But real's relative: the waking world now is like a ship with no way to reach a shore. In dreams, he slips the die into his pocket, someone else's pocket, and it always comes up on the same number as it jostles around. The number, though, is different in every dream. He doesn't know why it works that way.
()
"When you were in limbo—" Eames starts, and it's a mark of how much less mad Cobb is that he says, "Which time?" with what would have been, in a more relaxed man, an actual smile.
"Either. Were your projections—more vivid?" He knows that Saito had an entire staff of them under his command. Normally projections are just an unbelievable pain in the ass. But they also ordinarily belong to the subject, and in limbo, the subject is meaningless, without referent: limbo is a series of disconnected verbs all happening at once, time collapsed, and nouns skittering about untethered to their actions, like marbles on glass. Or so he has always suspected.
"It's more like in a real dream," Cobb says. He rubs a hand over his face. "From what I remember of them, anyway."
Eames remembers real dreams: the way they can seem impossibly vivid when you're in them only to splinter apart into nonsense when you wake. It isn't just the obvious question—how did I get here, and why is my old roommate working as a barrista in a Starbucks on the moon?—but everything, really. Real dreams label the figures in them and it's only once you're awake that you realize the dream itself was thin as onionskin paper, and just as easy to tear to pieces. Still, it's been years since he's dreamt, and he doesn't remember lucid dreaming, so he thinks, for the moment, that limbo sounds damned good, actually, because it's a dream that you don't know is a dream, a dream that your mind never pulls apart. No one ever dies in dreams.
And then Cobb dashes it to the ground. "Only you know they're—flat. Mal and I had each other. And I think Saito—I think Saito was inexperienced enough that he could forget, sometimes, that they weren't real."
Eames has nothing but experience. Most of it is bitter.
"Why do you want to know?" Cobb asks, but even if he's awake, and can't turn into someone else, Eames can still turn away.
()
The third time, he does it in the basement, hooked up to the PASIV running quietly in the background, and he's all alone. He keeps the architecture to a minimum.
He walks through a hall of mirrors, looking at a face that isn't his reflected back and back and back. Sometimes he fucks it up and it's his own face he's looking at, but mostly he does it right.
Then he shrugs himself on again wearily and starts blowing up the mirrors until the projections come and tear him apart.
You can't die in dreams, but sometimes Eames tries anyway.
()
It's Saito, of all people, who corners him. They're in a dreamscape that's all Wal-Marts and Burger Kings and Eames can't even remember what the fuck they're doing there or what his job is, who he's supposed to be, and probably the only reason Saito comes to talk to him is because Saito, who is all lacquered elegance and tasteful acquisition, hates this version of America almost as much as Eames does. Looking at, he can't believe he knows Americans, let alone likes a handful of them. Saito eats a fish sandwich and, with a look on his face that is really the Platonic ideal of disgust, wipes his greasy fingers off one by one on the wrapper. He reminds Eames very much of things he doesn't want to think about. He turns himself blonde and busty to provoke Saito into leaving, but Saito will not be turned away.
"You shouldn't do that when people are looking," Saito says.
Eames takes some of his French fries and turns back into himself to eat them: things always taste strange on someone else's tongue. It's a waste of a switch though, as it turns out, since they're soggy and under-salted anyway.
A few projections turn their heads, but they aren't really interested in him.
He hopes he isn't the dreamer. Surely he has more taste than this, no mater what some people think of him.
"There's always someone watching," he says.
Saito sighs. "Do you even know that you're not yourself right now?"
He looks down at his hands. They're more angular than his own.
They're still familiar, though.
With some effort, he changes back. It takes longer than he would like. The hands go last, because he can see them, and he doesn't want to give them up.
"Why are we here, anyway?" As if it's America's problem that he can't keep himself together these days. It could be yet another thing the fast food franchises get sued over, really, his inability to stop these little incomplete, insufficient resurrections. He adds, with more anger than he thought he was capable of lately, "I fucking hate this country anyway." America is where you go to lose things: your virginity, your dignity, your money, your solid ground. There's nothing he wants to take out of it, not now that he knows it will all just turn to ashes and leaves like fairy gold as soon as he feels safe.
"We're not anywhere," Saito says, and then Eames understands.
Icily, he says, "What's in my head? Is nobody's goddamned business but mine," and he draws a gun out of thin air, puts it to his head, and pulls the trigger.
He wakes up in the basement of whatever hotel they're in, in whatever city, and everyone is very carefully looking somewhere else, as if they slipped, accidentally, and hooked him up to the PASIV and Saito. He gathers himself up and shakes the wrinkles from his clothes. "Fuck all of you, then," he says, not looking, and goes up to the roof to stand in the rain until his skin feels like an unbreakable sheet of ice. When he changes, shifts, he can almost hear it crack. Two layers to this dream, then.
He must be driving them out of their minds with worry.
He goes to the edge of the roof and jumps; halfway down, his scream a laugh he can't stop, he flickers in and out of himself in shutter-flashes of flesh and bone.
When he lands, he doesn't know who he is.
()
They sit him down in a café in Paris, and he doesn't bother figuring out how he got there. He remembers the car and the concerned looks.
"Honestly," he says, "it's not a problem. I can stop whenever I want."
They don't seem to think it's very funny.
Cobb, the hypocrite, says, "You can't do this kind of work until you get your head back together, Eames."
"I'm a forger," he says. "I'm forging. It's what you pay me to do."
"You're confusing the counterfeit and the reality," Yusuf says.
He thought Yusuf didn't believe in reality. He thought Yusuf, of all people, would have been on his side.
He makes them uncomfortable. He's breaking their hearts. He doesn't care: he is worn out caring. He's exhausted by it. He stands up and pushes his spindly little chair back with a grating sound across the cobblestones and he tastes espresso on his tongue, in his mouth, and it's so narrow, so damnably fucking limiting, this reality, where he's only himself, where the dead are always dead, and he doesn't understand why they can't see that, why Yusuf can't see that colors are brighter and more vivid through someone else's eyes, why Ariadne can't understand the joy of recreation down to the most mundane detail, why Saito can't understand spending all your time and effort to such limited purposes in pursuit of excellence, why Dom can't fucking understand grief and guilt all of a sudden. They spend their lives in worlds that spiral up and down and turn in on themselves, mazes that they fill with their own minotaurs, and all Eames wants is to get lost in one. The least they could do is let him.
()
The hundredth time it happens, he doesn't even open his eyes.
He doesn't have to.
()
He catches up with them in Port-au-Prince. They're working with a forger he's met before, a skinny little chap named Colin, and when he rolls up his sleeves and tells Colin to bugger off, they let him.
"That was rude to him, all things considered," he says.
"He reminded Ariadne of a weasel," Yusuf says.
"It's the nose," Ariadne explains.
"And we already have a forger," Cobb says matter-of-factly. He holds out his hand and Eames shakes, wishing he didn't feel quite so much like he's just been forgiven and welcomed home.
"Silly of you to acquire a second, then." He understands, though, that Colin's presence in Port-au-Prince was a gesture that ought to tug at his heartstrings, assuming they were functional: it's understood that someone can fill in on the odd job or two, if need be, so long as it's only temporary. If he were dead, or really gone, it would have taken them longer to replace him, if they ever would have done it at all.
Yusuf and Saito split all the research between them, now, and Ariadne does detail-work.
When he volunteers to learn all the patterns of Turkish carpets that they need, she doesn't ask, and he doesn't tell, if this is forgery, too.
(In the dreams, he walks on the rugs barefoot, and his feet do not necessarily match.)
()
-running with Cobb through Cairo, up and down narrow staircases that do not ever loop around on themselves, he laughs, and he can't stop laughing.
These projections, absurdly well-trained, fire at them with automatic weapons. Pebbles and bits of shattered clay and brick skitter away from their feet.
Cobb laughs too, finally, and they dead-end into a wall that neither one of them has the energy to shatter, not at the moment. "Shit," Cobb says, wiping tears out of his eyes. "On three?"
"On three," Eames says. He puts the barrel up to Cobb's forehead and feels Cobb's against his own, like a kiss.
Cobb makes it to two before he says, "I can't do it with you like that," and Eames feels his hair, gelled so rigidly that not even a strand is out of place. He could change back, but he doesn't want to.
Beyond their alleyway, the city is burning.
He says to Cobb, shouting to be heard over the smoke: "You can't die in dreams." It's what he tried to tell Ariadne. It's what he tries to tell himself.
"I know," Cobb says, "but you can't live in them, either."
He nods. He knows.
"I'll be along in a minute," he says. "I just want—" He spreads his hands out as wide as they'll go. Somehow Cobb understands him.
Cobb gives himself the kick, and Eames is alone. The mob is coming closer: he can hear them.
He wasn't there. In reality, the waking world—he wasn't there. It was everyone but him: he was shit-faced on pina coladas in Cozumel, watching the water, not in America at all, let alone just outside of Los Angeles where all their sins caught up with them.
In dreams, especially their kind of dreams, you get to do things over again; you get to do them right.
He's himself and he isn't. The best forgeries are indistinguishable from the originals, and this is doubly, triply true in dreams—there are muscle memories and scars and bruises and birthmarks, if everything is done right, and the stories come with them, embedded in the skin. It doesn't matter whether they're true or not. You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger.
The projections at the end of the alleyway eclipse the sun.
"Come on, already!" He's either laughing or crying. He tastes salt, but it might be sweat: he's had a long way to get here, and he's been running the whole time. "I'm right here!"
They fire.
The bullet goes straight through Arthur's heart and Eames, of course, doesn't die.
It's just a dream.