"Better never to have met you in my dream than to wake and reach for hands that are not there."
Addams Memorial
Eames
I woke with a start, inhaling sharply. I knew I was back because the air wasn't as clean. It was thick and smoggy in my lungs. I could sense the difference, even though it didn't look any thicker. Darcy was leaning on me, her head on my chest. For half a moment, I feared that she hadn't died with me. But then my fears were neutralized she gasped as she was pulled out of her dream as well, jumping slightly. I pulled her into my chest in a tight hug as soon as I realized that she was crying. She was a little girl again, an old soul in a young body.
I looked up and was shocked to find our room occupied. Arthur, Ariadne, Cobb, and two others I didn't know were being held at gunpoint by Raj. They all glanced at us and I looked back at my team as if they had returned from the dead. Their faces were so alien- I hadn't seen them for ten years. And then I realized that it was I who had returned.
"I see that they've woken up," Raj said in a mocking tone. He smiled crookedly. "Aw, is Darcy sad?" He asked in a baby voice. Darcy didn't even look up at his jibe. But Cobb looked absolutely infuriated.
"Don't you talk to her-"
"Oh go shove it up your ass, Cobb." Raj said, suddenly sounding bored. Cobb fumed, but bit his lower lip and said nothing. Raj turned back towards me and Darcy, who had calmed down a bit at my side. I kept holding her anyways.
"You failed, you bastard," I spat at Raj. I pulled the IV leads out of my own arm and then out of Darcy's, taking care not to hurt her in the process. Raj looked at me with his head on a tilt and cocked the gun in his hand.
"Want to bet, you fucking forger?" Raj asked. His pistol had six bullet slots. If he used all those bullets and hit a different target every time, one of us would get out alive, but that wasn't an inspiring probability. I pressed my lips together and said nothing. Darcy had stopped crying when Raj spoke hatefully to me. She looked up at him with wide, angry eyes. Her fear was gone. This was a Darcy I'd only seen a few times before. She was cool, collected, and absolutely irrevocably pissed off at him.
"Don't talk to him like that," she demanded. She got to her feet, a little wobbly from all the sedation. But she still stared down Raj, who looked amused.
"So I see that during your years in Limbo, you two have become a "thing."" Raj said mockingly. I expected Darcy to shy away a little at this, but she instead stood taller than before.
"You thought it would break us." Darcy said proudly. "You thought that we'd hate each other. You've never been so wrong."
"It didn't matter how you felt about each other," Raj said. But he looked slightly flustered. "I'm killing you anyways. You, Cobb, your fucking merry men who follow you around. They're all idiots. And you're an idiot. I'm going to shoot everyone here." He pointed the gun at Ariadne who cowered, a scream ready on her lips. Out of nowhere, one of the guys I didn't know tackled Raj. He just jumped on him, as if there was no gun in Raj's hand. It fired twice into the guy, but he didn't stop fighting.
"Jason!" Ariadne screamed. The rest of the shots went off, and I counted them. Three, four, five, six. Not all of them made contact with the guy named Jason. Some ricocheted off the walls, and I saw Arthur cover Ariadne in the way that I was covering Darcy. I finally knew how he felt about that architect. He couldn't let anything hurt her, or it would hurt him. When the gun was out of bullets, Raj pushed Jason off of his chest and made a break down the hall.
Cobb, Darcy and I immediately made to follow him. Cobb stopped in the doorway and we all looked back at Arthur, Ariadne, Jason, and the other team member of Darcy's. They all waved us on.
"We'll take care of him," Arthur said quietly. We all nodded to acknowledge this and set off at a sprint in pursuit of Raj. We saw him turn a corner up ahead and he ran down the three flights of stairs to the ground floor. When we burst through the door, he was standing in a large open room that had probably once been a cafeteria, looking around for another way out. Cobb and I slowed, but Darcy kept running at him.
"Darcy, come back," I yelled at her. I didn't know if he had another gun, or any other sort of weapon. She couldn't get hurt. Not again.
"Dar!" Cobb yelled at her. She reached Raj and jumped onto his back, attempting to flatten him. Apparently, she had expected him to be weak and fold under her weight, but he instead toppled backwards and slammed to the ground on top of her on the linoleum. Cobb and I reached him only a millisecond later and grabbed him by the arms, allowing Darcy to move out from under him before we knocked him to the floor. I made sure that I swung his head down hard enough, so that if he had inflicted any more pain on my girl, he'd be getting it back tenfold. Darcy was on her feet in an instant, again a little shaky, but she was glaring down at him, looking wholly unharmed.
"Fucker," she spat at him. I couldn't remember hearing Darcy speak so vulgarly before. Raj looked back up at her, a vengeance in his eye.
"I'll still get you someday you whore. Don't doubt it. I'm going to find you and kill you, short and sweet." He said, his voice sickeningly gleeful. She flinched momentarily at this before regaining her composure. But I wasn't going to stand for that. He was threatening her. My Darcy.
I saw a gun that had seemingly slid across the floor, probably knocked away by Darcy when she tackled him. In a moment, I realized how close she had come to being shot again by Raj- this time in real life. The blood was pounding in my ears as I imagined what could have happened. I knew what I had to do. I had to keep Dar safe. That would never happen while this sick fucker was still alive. I took four strides to reach the gun, picked it up, and took two strides back. I held it menacingly above him.
"You going to kill me, Eames?" He smiled, blood covering his teeth from where I had slammed his head into the ground. I cocked the gun and fired once, hitting him in the forehead. His whole head snapped backwards and his eyes rolled back in his head. Cobb and Darcy both looked at me with blank shock. I spat on Raj's corpse.
"Yes I am, darling," I answered him. Darcy looked at me for a moment, freezing. Then she charged me and hugged me around the waist. Her body fit perfectly into mine as we kissed- we'd had years of practice. When we pulled apart, she turned to Cobb who was watching us with a look of blank shock. He regained his composure almost at once.
"Mr. Dom?" She said a little weakly. He smiled, stepping away from the corpse and towards her.
"Hey, Dar," he said. He was using the voice that he reserved for only James and Phillipa. I realized quickly that she had been in his life before either of them. She was like a daughter to him too. When they hugged, it was simply paternal. Their relationship made sense. It seemed completely natural. She looked up at him seriously.
"Dom, you've been doing Inception," she scolded him. I was shocked at how quickly she changed the subject from the dead man on the floor, but understood it. She had to put it out of her mind for a while, until she could compartmentalize. So I watched the proceedings between Dom and Dar. For a moment, it was as if their roles were reversed- she was the parent and he was the reluctant child. He looked guilty and I wondered why this was such a problem.
"I needed to, to get back to the US, to my kids," he explained. Her smile became a little fixed. She hadn't known about his children. It must have been quite a shock to her to see the dear old father figure had moved on. Then, sudden realization seemed to hit her.
"We're going to talk about this later, Mr. Dom Cobb, I can promise you that. But right now- we need to go see Jason."
Arthur
The sound of the shots that had fired into Jason's body reverberated in my skull. I remember the looks of shock on everyone's faces. Ariadne screamed. I was surprised that Darcy didn't. She seemed to be the most volatile. She just watched with wide, distant eyes. When the bullets missed Jason's body, and they were bouncing off the walls, I saw Eames cover Darcy the way that I was covering Ariadne and I couldn't help but be sidetracked- what had happened between them down there?
When Eames and Cobb and Darcy went after Raj, and that left me and Jason, Ariadne and Nathan. Nathan was clearly torn. He had suddenly been reunited with his long lost cousin, who was really so much like his daughter or sister. He was overjoyed. But then again, his friend, his teammate, was down for the count, with three bullet wounds in his shoulder and chest. Nathan couldn't focus, so I found myself at the helm.
"Listen, Jason, Jason, bud, can you hear me? Don't answer that. Just, if you can hear me, then just… you keep it up. You keep breathing, and you stay alive, we're going to get you some help." I said. Jason's eyes were open, but clearly unable to focus on anything. They kept moving around, looking for the source of my voice. He had broken out in a cold sweat and he was already soaked in his own blood, which was pooling on the floor. When he coughed, blood came out.
Gently, I sat him up a little, looking checking out his back.
"There are no exit wounds," I informed Ariadne seriously. She had been sitting there, frozen, ever since the first shot. Her eyes drifted over to mine at a painfully slow rate.
"What… what does that mean for him?" I bit my lower lip and tried hard to think of a delicate way to put this.
"There's no way he'd make it to any hospital in time," Nathan said bluntly, his bright eyes dulling as he looked mournfully at his fallen point man. In a quick, jerky motion, Jason grabbed at Ariadne's arm.
"You're… safe?" He asked. Ariadne, whose eyes were filling with tears, nodded to him. Then the young man turned his gaze on me. His eyes were blank, and I wondered if he could even see me at all.
"You'll keep her safe?" He asked me, his breath coming laboriously.
"I will," I answered him surely. He nodded, then laid his head back.
"And you'll… keep Darcy safe?" Jason asked Nathan.
"Don't you worry about Darcy and Ariadne right now, Jason," Nathan chastised him gently. Jason swallowed hard, and then licked his lips, smearing crimson blood over them.
"Darcy's gotten her ass kicked… for me. And Ariadne's… my friend." Jason said, scowling slightly. "You keep them safe." He commanded.
"We will, Jason, just… try to hold on, okay?" Nathan said. Jason nodded slowly, painfully. But no one made any attempts to move him. We just wanted him to hold on for our sake.
And as Darcy, Cobb, and Eames came skidding around the corner, Jason drew a last shuddering breath, before going still. I wondered how this could have happened- how could I have hated Jason so much only a few hours ago? Because as I watched him die, I felt nothing but remorse for the friend I had lost.
A/N: There's really nothing more to say than I'm sorry and thank you to any readers who have stuck around. The junior year workload has hit hard, so that's my lame excuse for being gone for so long. I hope to finish the story in the next chapter or two to find some closure. Thank you to anyone whose stayed with the story!