Disclaimer: I own neither Inception nor Highlander, I'm just making use of the fair use exemption.

A/N: This was written in response to the prompt:
Highlander/Inception, Arthur/Eames, one of them is a thousand years old; the other just died


Better to burn out than fade away


Arthur has seen Eames die hundreds of times, if not thousands. He's been shot in the head, shot in the gut, stabbed in the gut, garroted, torn limb from limb by a mob, blown up by grenades, crushed by falling buildings, and, on one notable occasion, eaten by dinosaurs. There have been slow painful deaths and sudden unexpected ones. Some of those deaths Arthur caused, and he didn't regret it once. There have been so many, many deaths and really this is just one more.

He checks his totem again. It still tells him that he's in reality.

He doesn't really need a totem. If he truly begins to wonder if this is reality he can just shoot himself and see if the world he wakes up in is the same one that he's walked for the last thousand years.

When Eames first got diagnosed, Arthur did all the research he could on the current state of the art in medicine.

Then he shot himself in the head. When he woke up he called the hospital again to confirm that the diagnosis was still the same, and he did the research again.

He repeated the experiment five days running before he got sick of it and finally admitted to himself that he wasn't going to wake up from this, no matter how many times he died.

Instead, he emptied out his bank accounts into medical research labs to make the state of the art better. It might help someone some day, but it wouldn't be helping Eames this day.

Eames is dead and he's not coming back and Arthur hates him with just as much passion as he's ever loved him, because Eames left. He had a choice and he still left. Arthur had given him a choice, even if it wasn't the choice Arthur wished he could have given. Eames had known his mother, looked like grandfather, and would never have woken up as an Immortal. But there was the PASIV device. Arthur told Eames, had told him that they could dream share, go in layers deep and have a thousand years together, build a world together, all in a few weeks.

Eames had listened to the offer, had heard all of Arthur's arguments, and had still said "no."

"No, sweetheart. Even you can't bounce back from a thousand years in your own head."

"Not in my head, Eames. In yours! With you! And you know better than to underestimate me."

"Not even you, love. The next time you faced a challenge you'd be dead, and you know it. I don't want to meet up with you in the afterlife because some punk got the jump on my point man."

Arther had growled.

"Come love, my death was always in the cards. Better to burn out, than to fade away."

Arthur had stayed by his bedside for the two weeks it took Eames to die. It didn't look like burning out to him, just fading away. It felt like another thousand years, anyway.