Arthur worked. He was fastidious and careful and meticulous and he hated everyone. He hated Dom, for getting into this mess and dragging him along with him. He hated Saito for tagging along when he wasn't wanted or needed and getting fucking shot. He hated fucking Fischer for escaping unscathed and unaware when Arthur's world was splintering around him. He hated Ari too, for refusing to leave him and instead allowing him to wake up to this. And he hated Eames. He hated the arrogant asshole for insisting on coming with him, and following him blindly, and kissing him an insufficient number of times, and for being so fucking irritating, and for not waking up. How was he supposed to just sit here, typing on a laptop, like that would fix it? How could he do anything normal after this? Was he really going to be able to go about his day and not think about Eames lying here? How could he go to the grocery store, sweep the floor, take a fucking job?! Arthur forced back the bile rising in his throat and slammed the laptop shut.

He was alone in the room unless you counted the still forms in the beds beside him. He couldn't remember where Dom and Ari had gone, and he didn't remember how long ago they'd left, and he didn't give a shit. He stood, creakily, and checked the PASIV, for the thousandth time. He brushed unnecessarily over plastic, metal, cloth, skin, hair. He twined his fingers with Eames's thick, unresponsive ones and drew a shuddering breath. He remembered these fingers stitching him up after he got knifed during a job gone bad in Cairo. He remembered them flipping his poker chip back and forth over his knuckles when he wanted to distract people from what he was saying (or wasn't saying). He remembered them running lovingly over his body, remembered them sliding the wedding band on his finger...fucking fuck, stop it. He squelched the (fake) memories, focusing on what he knew was true and real and still worth holding on to. Eames whispering "specificity" against his mouth during the final, frantic kiss they exchanged minutes before walking into the hospital, PASIVs in hand. Of the wink Eames had given him, right as he'd pressed the button and left Arthur alone in a hospital room. He knew these memories, leaned into them for strength. He envisioned a lifetime of trying to sort out fake memories of Eames that Eames would never remember and suppressed a small shudder. He looked at his husband, his lover, his friend. "Eames..." he started, his voice breaking. He blew out a breath. "Eames." Arthur gripped his hand tighter. "I know you can't hear me, but I need to say this. In case..." he paused and squeezed his eyes shut. "I mean, I'm going to say it again when you wake up. I just need you to know that you are so important to me and I can't-"

A small gasp of air made Arthur's eyes fly open. "Eames?" Arthur whispered, searching his face desperately, but he looked the same: unconscious, unmoving, a shadow of the hurricane that was Eames. Arthur's heart was pounding so hard he almost missed the sound of the slide of fabric from the next bed. He whipped his head toward it to see Saito looking around frantically and trying to sit up. "Hey, hey, hey. Saito. Saito, it's ok."

Saito croaked something that sounded like, "It's Lord Saito," then his eyes focused on Arthur. "Arthur? Where...where am I?"

Arthur carefully explained, but all the while he couldn't tear his eyes away from Eames, waiting, hoping. "You're in the hospital, in Los Angeles. You didn't make it out of limbo right away, but the Fischer inception is complete." Eames didn't move. "Cobb woke up a little while ago." Eames still didn't move. Arthur realized he had Eames's fingers tangled in a vice grip and forced himself to relax them slightly. He glanced at Saito. "What happened? Where's Eames?"

Saito was blinking at the ceiling. "I was dreaming," he said softly. "I was dreaming." He unconsciously reached for his chest. "I was shot. And then I was in the hotel, and then I was...Am I still dreaming?" He looked at Arthur, glaring slightly.

Arthur fought the urge to scream, throw things, shoot people. He gritted his teeth instead. "There is literally nothing I can say that would convince you that you're not."

Saito opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment, Dom and Ari walked back in the room. "Cobb," Saito said, even though it sounded like more of a question than a greeting.

Dom said nothing, but walked over to Saito's bedside table and withdrew the top from his pocket. He spun it once, and no one moved until it toppled, then lay there, still and unassuming. They had all seen Cobb complete this move countless times in the warehouse, watching it settle on its side before spinning it again, and maybe again. Now, though, he pocketed it and faced Saito. "Welcome back," he said calmly, eyes never leaving his face.

Saito nodded, then asked, "Does anyone have my phone?" Arthur fished it out of the drawer in the bedside table and handed it to him, and he accepted it with another nod. He dialed, then had a short conversation in Japanese before hanging up and looking pointedly at Dom. "It is done."

Dom nodded his thanks and Arthur realized they were all an awful lot richer, Dom was free to go home to his kids, Ari was free to go back to her shit boyfriend, and Saito had a global monopoly to run. And he had never felt more suffocated in his life. Eames lay there, still attached to the quietly wheezing PASIV, still breathing slowly, heavily, in his not-quite-a-snore way and Arthur thought he might legitimately be losing his mind. He felt himself spinning out of control and backed slowly to the door before clenching his jaw so hard his teeth hurt. He stalked out of the room, the ward, the hospital and found himself sitting in a small garden, staring blankly at the row of bricks with their engraved sponsor names and trying to remember the last things Eames had said to him. He felt someone come up behind him and he turned, bracing himself to explain to Dom that he was fine, really, that he had it together, and to go ahead and call Miles, get back to his kids, he'd take care of everything else. But instead of Dom, it was Ari, and at her quiet pity Arthur felt the ridiculous urge to ask what she was doing out there. Instead, he heard himself blurt out, "I can't remember the last thing he said to me." Ari said nothing, just took another step closer to him. "In real life, I mean. I remember everything from limbo and I can't..." he felt himself start to slip. Either a laugh or a scream was building up in his throat and he knew that he needed to stop talking or it was going to spill out.

Ari looked like she didn't know what to do with her hands. Had Arthur been less tense or perhaps just less Arthur, she would have hugged him, or held his hand. As it was, she ended up sitting on the low wall and clasping them between her knees. "Arthur," she started softly, "Saito said Eames was the one who shot him, but neither of them remembered they were dreaming."

Arthur's eyebrows drew together. "So, he didn't know he was dreaming, but he shot Saito anyway? Why?"

Ari fidgeted. "That's what I asked, and Saito said he...wasn't himself."

Arthur waited. Ariadne lifted one shoulder and gave him a look that said, 'I don't know, that's all the information I have.' Arthur tried to curb his irritation, his fist tight around the die in his pocket, the corners digging into his palm.

"What was it?" Ari asked suddenly.

"What was what?"

"What was the last thing he said to you in limbo?"

Arthur huffed out a non-laugh and just when it seemed he wasn't going to answer at all, he said, "It was about Dom."

"About getting him out of limbo?"

"No," he said woodenly. "It was about asking him to a barbecue and having a beer so things would go back to normal. Jesus, my head is a fucking mess. I can't keep things in limbo straight from things that happened here. I have all of these memories, and none of them happened. What if I slip up and start talking about something that he wasn't actually there for? What am I going to say to him about that? What is he going to remember about me when he wakes up?" Arthur paced as he talked, sitting, standing, hands gesturing, a constant blur of movement like he couldn't handle being still.

"I don't know Arthur, but I do know that hiding down here isn't helping, and I've work to do and so do you. So let's focus on what we can do in the next 10 minutes and after that, we'll focus on the next 10. Ok?"

Arthur's jaw worked, words unable to escape between clenched teeth. He stood with his back to her, seeming preternaturally still compared to his previous momentum.

"Here, I brought you this," Ari said firmly. She held out his broken-in Moleskin, well used and road-weary, but with plenty of room left to write. "You have work to do," she repeated. "And he needs you. And when he wakes up, which he will, he's going to need you then, too. No matter where he is right now, he's going to need you when he comes back."

Arthur knew she was right, but he still hesitated with his hand on the Moleskin. "Ari...if he doesn't wake up-"

"He WILL, Arthur," she gripped the book tighter, pulling it back to her and forcing him to look her in the eye.

Arthur looked back, his eyes hard. "If he doesn't, Ari, I'm going in and you can't stop me."

Ari's lips thinned, but she eventually nodded and released the notebook. And when they were walking back to the room and she slipped her small hand in Arthur's, he didn't let go.


The business was going well. He'd gotten the reports to prove it. Eames sat in the board room anyway, at the end of the obscenely large conference table, stroking his beard and glaring at the man in front of him. He was young, wearing a cheap suit and stuttering through the conversation in frankly painful Japanese, but Eames felt no inclination to switch to English to accommodate him. He was eager, capable, intelligent, and not bad looking either. But Eames didn't feel anything when he looked at him except tired. He let him wear himself out before letting the silence drag on and giving him time to stew. Then Eames made a few vague threats, granted his benevolent permission, and watched him scurry away. Was this how Saito had lived? He had thought that once he was on top, the relentless feeling of not-living-up-to-his-potential, and not-doing-what-he's-supposed-to-be-doing, would dissipate. But when it didn't, he had kept trying, kept climbing, and now, even though Saito is gone, he still doesn't feel like he's fulfilled what he's supposed to become.

Eames sighed. He looked at the heavy bag he'd had hung in the corner, the gloves hanging from a nearby hook. Not long ago, when he started to feel like this, he'd grab the gloves and pound out some of his frustrations. Now, though, he just wanted to go back to bed. Last week he'd notified Donna at the front desk that he was going home with a migraine, then he'd slept for 17 hours. Then he'd stayed awake for 24. Souji had long since stopped expecting him to keep anything that resembled a normal schedule and had taken to adding notes to the ones Eames kept in the Moleskin on his desk as a way to communicate with him.

He headed back to the penthouse now, his bodyguard following him silently and posting himself unobtrusively outside the door. Eames jotted two sentences in the Moleskin regarding the meeting, then sat at the desk and allowed himself to become comfortably numb. He fluctuated between bouts of frantic productivity and almost catatonic lethargy. He could feel the lethargy seeping in, darkening his vision around the edges, settling over him like a lead vest. It would pass, though. It always did.

In the chair by the bed, the room quiet and dim, machines beeping, the PASIV whirring, Arthur sat rolling his Moleskin in his hands. The pages had long since been filled with equations, tasks, contingency plans, and a list of the reasons it was a terrible idea to hook himself up to Eames to pursue him relentlessly through unconstructed dream space and rip him out of it by sheer force of will. The leading reason being that Ari had dumped a huge dose of Somnacin in his bloodstream when the dose he'd administered to last until the end of visiting hours ran out, and his first equation had been to calculate how long it would take his body to burn it off. He checked Eames's watch, which he'd wound around his own wrist. He needed at least two more hours before even he would risk it. He twisted the notebook again.

"Well, Eames, if you were awake and I told you we had two hours to kill, I know exactly what you'd say," Arthur said, his voice loud in the empty room. He felt silly talking to Eames because he's been in dreams enough times to know that Eames wouldn't be able to hear him. Still, his voice skittered out of him nervously, and he just kept talking and twisting. "Do you remember that time we were in Minsk and you were trying to quit smoking? God, you were being such a dick and driving everyone crazy. I brought in a box of donuts and a box of nicotine gum and you were so pissed. You kept getting in my face and I finally yelled at you that you should fight someone or fuck someone but leave the rest of us out of it. Remember? I thought you were going to deck me." Arthur smiled ruefully. "You always did seem more inclined to go with the former rather than the latter when it came to me. And I always seemed to keep falling for you at the most inconvenient times."

Arthur put the notebook down and crossed the floor to stand by him. He reached out a finger to stroke the place where Eames's wedding ring had been, angry at himself for wanting this so badly. "I have all these stories that you would love, but I keep telling myself that they're not real. So I'm going to forget about them and tell you stories that you'll remember." His voice got quieter and quieter as he spoke until he was barely above a whisper. "Except...except for this one. Because, well, because it always made you laugh. And I just...So, we took the kids ice skating one Christmas. They were so excited to go, they were talking about it non-stop for a week and Dom kept texting me death threats because we'd told them "too soon". He was so sick of hearing about it, I thought he wouldn't even go, just drop them off and run. But he did, laced up a pair of skates and went out there with James on one hand and Phillipa on the other. And he was fucking awful at it. It became pretty obvious that he was holding their hands to keep himself up and you were giving him a bunch of shit about it. The world's greatest extractor, wobbling around on ice skates, dependent on his kids to keep him from falling on his ass." Arthur shook his head, a smile playing around the corners of his mouth at the memory. "Anyway, pretty soon he falls down like we all knew he was going to, and you start laughing, but Phillipa...she was about 7 or 8 at the time...Phillipa gets mad. She starts yelling, "Stop laughing, Uncle Eames, you big bully! It's not his fault, it's just lubricated friction! It's a force of nature!" Oh, god, I thought you were going to fall over you were laughing so hard. Apparently they were learning about kinetic energy in science class. She was even madder because we were all laughing, but you finally calmed down enough to tell her that lubricated friction was probably the most powerful force in nature and you yourself were a big fan of it, and then she finally forgave you." Arthur smiled for real now, his fingers mapping Eames's palm. "If I had a nickel for every time you said the words "lubricated friction" after that...and I kept telling you that as far as euphemisms go, that was wasn't very subtle, but it didn't stop you." Arthur finally dropped his hand and shoved them into his pockets. "Anyway. I just wanted to share that one with you." He checked Eames's watch again. "So, now back to your regularly scheduled program."

He sank back into his chair and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, the hot tears that he finally stopped holding back leaking around them.


Eames sat in the penthouse, his lips wrapped around a cigar and a haze of blue smoke over him. He felt a little lightheaded, probably because he hadn't eaten anything, but he finished the list he'd been writing up in a Moleskin, his neat handwriting covering the pages. It was instructions to Souji, so he left it on the desk where he knew he'd find it in the morning. Souji was a good man, a good father too. And he'd told him last week that Yumiko was expecting again, so he was going to be a busy man too. A man like that should have a legacy, something to pass on to his children, a name to leave the world with. He deserved it.

Eames took his cigar and a tumbler with him out onto the balcony and looked out over the night skyline. It was beautiful out here at night. The city stretched out before him, the lights twinkling, the traffic too far away to hear. It was a lot of work to get to where he was. It was blood, and sweat, and he felt like he'd laid every brick. He could go out right now and say, or get , or do anything he wanted. How many people in the world got to say that? There was absolutely nothing above him.

He leaned out over the rail and played a game with himself, seeing how far he could relax his hand before the glass tumbler slipped from his grasp and shattered on the cement far below. It turned out, not very far. From this high up it looked like a flower, or maybe a snowball that had landed, spreading glittering tendrils out in a perfect circle. The cigar was next, but far less satisfying when it landed and bounced a short distance away. Eames frowned. He leaned out a little farther, trying to see if he could spot the cigar where it had rolled.

"I hate you," he said aloud, firmly and calmly. He had no idea who he was talking to, if it were himself or someone else. "I hate you for not being here. I hate you for not saving me."

Then he played a game with himself, seeing how far he could lean before he tipped over the railing and shattered on the cement far below. It turned out, not very far.


Arthur watched the second hand tick toward the two-hour mark. He had the PASIV line in one hand, his shirt sleeve already rolled, a rubber tube already wrapped around his bicep. Ten seconds...he licked his lips and readjusted his grip on the needle. 5 seconds...he swallowed and glanced toward Eames's face one last time...and dropped the fucking needle. Two ice-blue eyes stared directly back at him.

"Eames?" he said, rising jerkily out of the chair. "Eames?"

Eames blinked at him, a small frown between his eyebrows.

"Are you ok? Jesus fucking Christ, Eames, say something."

Eames frowned. "A...Arthur?"

Arthur sagged with relief. "Oh, god," he breathed, reaching for him. He wanted to kiss him, taste him, devour him. He wanted to hug him and breathe him in, and never let go but-but Eames flinched. Just before Arthur touched his face there was the tiniest of movements, Eames recoiled a minuscule amount and there was a flash of confusion in his eyes. Arthur dropped his hands immediately but he felt like he'd been punched in the chest. Calm down, calm down, he told himself. He's just confused, he just needs a second. Do NOT freak out.

"Arthur? Where am I?" Eames was still frowning, his eyes moving slowly around the room.

"You're in the hospital. We came to get Dom and Saito." Arthur held his breath as Eames's eyes came back to rest on his.

"And where were you?" he said slowly.

Arthur blanched. "I...I was here. I was right here." He ached to be able to touch Eames, to assure himself that he was real, and alive, and ok. He gripped his die in his pocket instead.

Eames went back to surveying the room. "I don't remember how I got here."

At his words, Arthur started. He moved to the neatly folded pile of clothes and brought them to Eames. He indicated the pocket and watched as Eames slowly withdrew his poker chip.

"But," he sounded confused as he ran his thumb along the edge, "isn't it supposed to be smooth?"

Arthur tried to look encouraging. "It's smooth in dreams. You were just there a long time."

Eames frowned again but flipped the chip smoothly over his knuckles. "I remember this."

"That's good, Eames. That's good." Arthur dragged the chair closer to Eames and sat down next to him, his eyes on the poker chip. "Tell me something else you remember. Something that you know is real, something you're sure isn't a dream."

Eames was quiet for a long time. The poker chip slipped and rolled along the blanket, but he didn't reach to pick it up. He just stared at it.

"It doesn't matter how old it is, just one that you know isn't a dream."

Eames thought for a bit and Arthur forced himself to stay silent, counting seconds in his head.

"I remember when you got cut."

Arthur blinked. "When I...what?"

Eames looked at him. "In Cairo. The mark's brother went after you with a knife, and got you down the back."

Arthur sat back a little. "Yeah. I remember that. He ruined my suit. That was a new suit, too."

Eames gave him a small smile, but he looked tired as if dredging up the memory had taken a lot of effort. "I thought he ruined your back."

"He tried. And I do have a pretty impressive scar, I'm told. But I had some decent help, though, so he didn't ruin too much of me."

Eames leaned his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, his small smile still in place. "I stitched you up." Arthur could breathe a little easier.

"Ok, so you remember what happened. Do you remember anything else? Do you remember how you felt?"

Eames's eyes stayed closed, but his smile turned into a smirk. "Turned on."

Arthur laughed. Eames started to laugh too, and at the sound, Arthur couldn't stop himself from taking his hand and threading their fingers together. Eames squeezed his hand.

Arthur tried to swallow down the lump tight in his throat. "What, what about inception? Do you remember that?"

Eames opened his eyes. The crease between his eyebrows was back. "Yes? Maybe? I remember...you were being a condescending prick during the planning."

Arthur breathed out a laugh. "Do you remember anything else? How did you feel?"

Eames laughed. "Turned on."

Arthur couldn't help the grin that threatened to split his face in two. "I think you're going to be ok."

Eames turned his head to look at him, suddenly serious. "I don't know, Arthur. I'm don't know if I'm the same person. I was someone else for years, someone no one liked very much, someone I didn't like very much." His voice was low and he looked away. "Someone you wouldn't like very much."

"Well, that's how you know it was a dream."

Eames looked back at him wearily, questioning.

"I will always like you," Arthur said, simply. "Very much."