"This is a training exercise, Corporal."
"I don't see the point, sir."
"Interagency cooperation, for one: you'll each be paired with an officer from a different military branch. Learning to master time in dreamspace, for another. You've been there, son, you know how time slips around in there."
"And this will help us learn to manage time how, exactly, sir?"
"You'll see. And last thing, it's a handy psych eval, too. It'll reflect, according to the people running it, each man's strengths and weaknesses in dreamshare. And weed out," the burly man grinned at his own joke, "the crazies. So, Corporal, you'll go and smile and play nice. Get paid to sleep for a while, huh?"
The slender man would have shrugged if he hadn't been snapping to attention, recognizing a dismissal when he heard one. "Yes sir, thank you sir." He spun on his heel and left the room, a frown creasing his features only once no one could see him. "This is a waste of time," he muttered under his breath.
—-
As wastes of time go, it wasn't terrible, not on the surface of it. Arthur liked dreamwork, especially when he didn't have to be the dreamer. His subconscious sometimes bothered outside observers — it wasn't violent or frightening, but just a bit more orderly than most other subconsciouses he'd seen. He liked the sweet-sour bite of Somnacin as he fell asleep, liked the precision necessary to carry out operations in a space that was unreliable and unpredictable. He liked learning to make minor manipulations in dreamspace, but this exercise made no sense to him at all.
And the only thing Arthur didn't like about dreamwork was that it made no sense sometimes, not even the twisted sort of logic most dreams have at the root. Sometimes dreamspace spat up something ridiculous and improbable and proceeded to treat it logically, which Arthur enjoyed. Sometimes it took the mundane and twisted it into a shattered-funhouse-mirror version of reality, breaking the rules of logic and replacing them with new rules, and Arthur relished the challenge. But when dreamspace built impossibility around itself, made things that held no internal logic and brooked no external application of rules, well. Arthur didn't care for that as much.
Possibly he didn't care for it because he was far newer to that sensation — the dizzying free fall of a rule-free dream — than he was to anything else. His own dreams tended toward the "impossible things dealt with in a logical manner," with the added touch that Arthur's subconscious for some reason was fond of losing gravity, which the psych evals called a clear marker for his control issues. That was probably a fair assessment, really, but it felt too cut-and-dry for something as generally indefinable as the subconscious manifesting in dreamspace.
The point was, in short, that Arthur didn't care for pointless exercises in dreamspace. He liked running drills and operations and even using dreamspace to accelerate other learning — he'd happily been a guinea pig to see if working in the dream helped the dreamer pick up a language faster, and had walked away smiling and speaking two new languages to add to his first three. But this seemed frivolous and Arthur felt himself frown as the Somnacin tang hit the back of his throat.
—-
"Hello, darling!" The woman waving him over was…well, she was beautiful in the dream, which meant she was probably beautiful in real life, too. Everyone looked like themselves in dreams, and this woman was a knockout: wide eyes, a full red mouth, hair curling and thick. Her voice had been low and breathy, with an accent Arthur tentatively pegged as French.
"Ma'am." He hated the reflexive word that sprung from his mouth in greeting. This woman was as much "ma'am" as he was someone's darling.
The face she made at the word matched his own, he was sure. "Oh, please, never again. I'm far too young and beautiful to be ma'am, aren't I?" A teasing grin like a cat, and Arthur felt stupid and slow and sixteen again.
"Yes ma— um, Yes."
"Mal, that's my name, darling, and you'll be Arthur, no?"
"Yes ma— Mal. I'm Arthur."
She smiled then, not a teasing grin but a real smile, and Arthur felt himself smiling back. "Ooh, dimples! I love dimples," she said, pressing a delicate forefinger to his cheek. Where her skin touched his felt warmer, softer, and it was only then that he actually noticed the landscape around them.
"This is beautiful," he said, and meant it. They were on a grassy lawn, with a line of dark pine trees in the distance. The sky overhead was clear and blue, and a light breeze played merrily in Mal's hair. "Are you the dreamer?"
"Yes, of course." She smiled at him and began to walk toward the pine trees. "If this was your dream, we'd be indoors, somewhere with lots of light but still walled in. And if this was the other man's dream, well, we'd be somewhere much more exciting, for a start."
"The other man?" He trailed after her. "I'd forgotten. Is he over there?"
"Mmm." She took Arthur's arm and they sidled up to where a big man stood, back to them, facing the still-distant trees. "Eames, pet, look who I've found?"
The man turned around and Arthur felt his gut drop. "Ah, lovely. Hello, then. I'm Eames." The man was a Brit, and he held out his hand and Arthur's head was suddenly full of visions involving lots of skin and a dark room and teeth.
But the Army had trained him well, and so Arthur put out a hand and shook, cool and calm. "Arthur. Is Eames your last name?"
The man laughed, crooked teeth shining and beautiful in the sun. "My only name, innit? For all intents and purposes, anyway." He kissed Mal on the cheek, soft and chaste, and leaned as if to kiss Arthur's cheek as well.
Arthur bit back every impulse he had — to step toward Eames, to kiss him, to punch him, to kiss Mal, to pull out the gun in his jacket and end the dream early. "Shall we get on with the exercise, Mal?"
He was imagining things, of course, but she looked almost a little crestfallen. "Arthur's quite right, we must be going." She led them toward the trees again, and Eames's cheery smile, unaffected by Arthur's coolness, followed.
—-
They walked for a long time, long enough to fall into an easy rhythm. Mal led, and the two men walked side-by-side behind her. They didn't speak, not at first, until after a long time Eames cleared his throat.
"The trees never get any closer," Eames observed.
"I'm not an architect, pet, just someone who knows things." She was smiling over her shoulder as they topped a small, rolling hill. "Ah, here we are, lovely."
Arthur looked around. It looked exactly the same as all the rest of Mal's dreamscape: mostly flat, short soft grass, a line of pines in the distance. But below them, at the base of the small hill, lay two dark rectangles of overturned earth. "A garden?"
"Yes, darling, a garden. It's a useful metaphor, no?" She smiled up at them from the two identical plots of earth. "The ground is ready, and you've every seed in the world at your disposal. Water is over there, and I believe you'll find the makings of a compost pile just past that patch of daisies."
Eames chuckled. "It's a pat cliche is what it is, Mal. We tend the garden and you figure us out, is that it, from what we grow?"
She smiled. "More or less, but you're also learning things about yourself and dreamshare. You'll need to manage the flow of time, for one, because you two are in this dream until the first frost."
Arthur opened his mouth to ask how long they had, but Mal had already walked toward the still-distant pines. The two men stood, watching her leave, and if they brushed arms in their stillness it certainly wasn't intentional.
—-
Eames, it turned out, was just as handsome sweating as he was smiling. "Arthur, darling, hand me a little shovel, will you?" Eames held one hand out blindly, seeming to just trust that Arthur would do as he asked. For half a moment, Arthur considered swinging a rake against the other man's arm, beating the smile off his face. Or kicking him over and down, holding him there, making him forget his name with kisses and bites.
Instead, Arthur sighed, "It's a trowel," and handed one over. Their fingers touched ever so briefly, and Arthur felt disgusted and ashamed at the way his heart sped up, the way he flushed, the way he seemed to have suddenly metamorphosed into the heroine of a nineteenth-century romance novel.
"Thank you," and Eames was smiling at him, and Arthur was convinced, again, that Eames was a psychic.
Arthur was weeding, and bored, and hot. He had been a gardener before, sort of, as a child: his mother's herb and vegetable garden had been partially his, too, and he'd always loved helping. But apparently he'd forgotten about weeding, which was swiftly becoming his absolute least favorite thing about this exercise. "Are you SAS?" The question popped out before he could stop it.
They hadn't really talked much since Mal left, aside from deciding who got which plot. Eames had rolled up his shirtsleeves and started in, a smile on his face, while Arthur had spent a while deciding exactly what and where to plant. The obviousness of the metaphor rankled him, but he'd soon gotten distracted by the smell of the earth, and by Eames.
"Yep. Mountains, you know." Eames stopped for a bit, sat back on his haunches, wiped his brow and left a streak of dirt to match the ruined knees of his trousers. "You're, what, Marines? Not a SEAL, you're too small—" he grinned, "No offense, darling, but I've fucked SEALs twice your size and they were the runts."
There are so many things Arthur wants to know more about in those short phrases, but he settles on the one least likely to turn into a fistfight or a proposition. "No, I'm not a SEAL. How'd you know I was a Marine?"
"How'd you know I was SAS?"
"You're British, and military, and you want me." Arthur held his face carefully, banking on that odd gift (the blank look he had mastered at age three, which had kept him out of ninety percent of the trouble he'd earned) of his to keep Eames's near-psychic ability away.
Eames laughed, throwing his head back. "I do want you, in every possible way, which is…well. I want most people, really, but you are rather a special case, aren't you? Midwestern American, Jewish, poor. Probably a single mum, or at least a father not in the picture. At least one sister, more likely two, but you only keep in contact with one. You're brilliant but a little dull and you do dreamwork because you're precise, but you've not a lick of imagination or spark."
"Harsh, Mr. Eames," but Arthur smiled because he's mostly right. "How'd you reach your conclusions?"
"The accent is a dead giveaway."
Arthur felt the smile drop off his face and half-expected the world to start tilting. "What accent?"
"You've no accent at all, whatsit, a newscaster accent. The only people who have those are people who've rid themselves of their native one. You're not from the South, that much is clear, and no one on either coast would shed theirs, they love it too much. So that leaves the Midwest." Eames looked concerned for half a heartbeat, peering at Arthur, but the next second he was grinning and fiddling with a tendril of green reaching up from the dirt. "Jewish, well, you know that."
Arthur did know that. The Star of David around his neck, glinting gold in the sun — he'd taken off his jacket to keep it clean, and completely forgotten about it. Half-consciously, he rubbed the chain along the back of his neck.
"But it's a bit dull, so you're not devout, otherwise you'd shine it up like new. You keep it, though, which means someone gave it to you, someone you love. That could be a partner, but the way you keep ogling me makes me think you're unattached, or at least you're not in love with someone." Eames winked, and Arthur couldn't stop the flush that rises up his cheeks.
"The next option is a parent. Jewish heritage is matriarchal, so probably your mum, plus the delicacy of the chain isn't something you'd pick, it's an older woman's taste. Your mum, though, she's not got a lot of money: that chain's shoddy work, but kept up well. The Star's a bit dented, but it's been taken care of. That, and the attention to your clothes, you don't want them ruined. You take care of your things — that's something you do when you're born poor. You keep up shoddy necklaces and are careful with jackets you hate, because you haven't another." Eames looked careful again, probing, as if to make sure Arthur's feelings aren't hurt.
"And from that, you got that we didn't have a dad around to help make money, right? The sisters was probably, what, a guess based on…Honestly I don't even know how you got the sisters." Arthur was weeding again, working on a stubborn taproot of something.
"Lucky guess," he heard Eames say behind him. "You liked Mal immediately, as did I, and I've four sisters myself, so it was a guess. A good one though, right?" Arthur nodded, and Eames continued. "Everyone is brilliant in dreamwork, and you come off as dull and unimaginative right off, that strict adherence to military dress and all. You've no imagination, because you're weeding."
"What?"
"You're weeding, Arthur, in a garden that doesn't exist. You can't bend rules, you can't change it. D'you see any weeds in my garden?"
Arthur turned, and no, there weren't any weeds in Eames's garden. There were buds, though, of flowers that Arthur only half-recognized. There were thorny vines twining up six feet in the air, holding on to nothing, bobbing heads of roses climbing up them. There were sunflowers opening before his eyes, nodding happily at each other. There were what he thought might have been daffodils seeming almost to chime in the wind. "How did you do that?"
"I'm a forger, Arthur. I change things, I suppose is the word. You spent all that time working and I spent all that time pretending to work, and look at our results."
Arthur looked back over his shoulder. There were weeds and stones, yes, and small careful rows and a trampled plant here or there. But there were green shoots, too, and leaves crowning, and a small brown knot that he watched turn red and fat and gorgeous. "I don't have an imagination, but I have a garden." He turned to Eames. "You have roses, and magic, and it's all fake, but mine is real." A pause. "Well, for certain values of real."
"Ah." Eames frowned at Arthur like a puzzle refusing to come together. "You're very American, aren't you? Virtue and anger and fear all wrapped up in a button-down shirt and a cranky expression. No interest in the aesthetic at all."
"I care about the aesthetic, Eames, but not at the expense of the truth." And suddenly they were not talking about gardens, because really they hadn't been talking about gardens at all, the whole time, and Arthur hated the easiness of the metaphor but metaphors are used for a reason.
They do not yell, but the steel and ice in their voices translate well enough.
"You keep everything neat and careful and boringly real, Arthur, that's no more truth than keeping things beautiful and good."
"Good and beautiful are relative, Eames, and you don't get to fake everything. Some things have to be real."
"This is a dream, darling, nothing here is real."
"Nothing?"
Eames's face hardened, and for the first time Arthur remembered just how big the man was. "Nothing."
With that, frost came, hurried and crazed as if it had to run to be there.
—-
Arthur woke up blinking, the Somnacin taste sour in his mouth.
"You did well, Corporal," the sergeant smiled, and Arthur nodded and signed forms and sat for a psych eval and, one year later, took his honorable discharge and disappeared.
When he next woke up with a Somnacin aftertaste, he'd just helped a man named Cobb test a dream design for loss of logic. Arthur was making a bit of a name for himself that way, as a stage tester and a researcher. Cobb had contacted him through a friend of a friend of a vague acquaintance, which was just the way Arthur liked it.
They'd hit it off well enough — Cobb was clever and visionary and strange, and Arthur was a little hard to work with, and it was good. So when Cobb asked if Arthur'd like to come over for dinner, meet the wife, Arthur didn't hesitate to say sure, and to offer to bring wine.
"Yeah, that'd be great. My wife's French, so she's a big wine fan. Around seven, okay?"
At exactly seven o'clock, Arthur showed up, cradling a bottle in each arm, Cobb immediately pulled him inside, made him sit at the beautiful round table, and shouted, "Honey, Arthur's here!"
When she came down the stairs, Arthur took a moment to be grateful he'd set down the wine already. She lit up and cooed at him, "Arthur, darling, it's you!"
The smile broke over his face before he could think. "Mal?"
"And you brought dimples with your wine, perfect, hello, hello." She kissed him on both cheeks and laughed through their explanation to Dom.
After that, it all fell into place. Arthur worked with Dom and Mal, doing marginally legal dreamwork and the occasional completely illegal job. They made money, so much money, and Mal had the kids, and Arthur was happy. Mal never really brought up the garden, and Arthur never seemed to be needed on jobs training military dreamers, and all was well.
Then Mal jumped, and everything changed.
—-
Eames had made a name for himself, too, leaving the SAS and sinking a chunk of his inheritance on updating and improving the mechanical aspects of dreamwork tech. He'd coined the name "forger" for people with the ability to alter their appearance in dreams, and he was the best there was.
Arthur kept up with Eames the way he kept up with everyone he'd ever worked with: passively, never interfering. But then Eames got himself nicked in Agra and Arthur could so easily fix it (a wrong choice in airline, nothing Eames could have prevented) and so he did. That changed things, and suddenly Eames crowded in on the edges of his life, Eames's patterns and welfare and moves.
And when Arthur found his way mysteriously cleared, every once in a while, he knew who to blame. Eames was brilliant, too, after all: everyone in dreamwork was brilliant. Everyone in dreamwork was also, suddenly, a criminal after Bechdel vs. Mahim, and Arthur lost track of Eames in the shuffle of every one of the thousands of dreamworkers changing names and locations and everything about themselves.
That Eames sent him an easily-trace email, putting him in Mombassa, and that Arthur responded with a less-easily-traced postcard placing him in Paris…well, that was professional courtesy, really, or a sort of friendship. It certainly wasn't anything else.
When they started emailing regularly, the same old song about beauty and truth, that was more because dreamwork is oddly lonely than because they actually wanted to talk. They were both older, and the conversation was fundamentally different than it had been eight years before in the sun in a dream. Beauty and truth, they spent years arguing over, and then the Fischer job solved the problem.
—-
"Well done, Arthur," Eames grinned, showing crow's feet around his eyes that hadn't been there before.
"And you, Mr. Eames." Arthur smiled back, feeling his dimples and wrinkles and suddenly he realized something. "You know that's the first time we've met?"
Eames looked puzzled. "We met in the…" He trailed off. "You know, you're right, Arthur. How about that."
They stared at each other, and Arthur felt the words rising in his throat, but Eames beat him to it.
"Beauty and truth are the same, really, aren't they?"
"No." Arthur watched Eames, watched him wait for Arthur to finish his sentence. Eight years of talking and a few months together, they knew each other better than that. "They're two sides of the same coin, maybe, but they're not the same."
"Potato, potato, Arthur."
"Tomato, you mean."
As they walked together, still not touching, their argument drifted back over the corridor.
"It's the next line in the song, it's not—"
"I know that, but when you say it just as a phrase—"
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, darling."
"Eames, do not quote Emerson at me, I swear to god I will shoot you."
"Can't shoot me, we're in real life now, I'd die."
"I'd rather you not die."
"Glad we're on the same page, then, Arthur."