Disclaimer: I don't own anything!
Author's Note: Despicable Me 2 was absolutely fantastic. I can't choose which one is better, the original or the sequel. Still haven't seen Monsters University.
I'm trying out a new game. Enchanted Arms. Five bucks at Gamestop, I couldn't help myself. Not bad, really. Not a great game, but it's fun to play and I love the battle system.
I'm waiting-impatiently-for the PS4 to come out. I plan to buy a PS3 then. Cheaper prices, my friends. And in October, Assassin's Creed IV. I'm so excited.
I went to see the new Transformers over at Universal Studios. The look and design of the ride far surpasses Spiderman, which is to be expected, but it's kind of a strange feeling because Spiderman is kind of a staple. There is a new Harry Potter section coming-not sure if anyone heard about it. It's going to be Diagon Alley and it'll be in Universal Studios, not Islands of Adventure and there is a confirmed ride in Gringotts. Not sure what the ride's going to be, but likely a simulator/rollercoaster.
There's a Final Fantasy orchestra-Distant Worlds, I think it's called-coming to Miami. I'm headed there with a friend. Road trip!
I am planning on buying On the Road
"It is not the fearless one should admire. It is the one who knows fear, stands with knees that wobble, grasps a sword that shakes in their hands and still fights that deserves my admiration."
-Anonymous
Arthur flinches at fireworks.
He's fine the whole day. He plays with Phillipa and James, kicks the soccer ball around and scoops them up onto his shoulders. He gets in a water gun fight with them and laughs when he skid-slips and he smothers a hot dog in ketchup and mustard. (This is the man Eames loves. This warm, loving man that can go cold, that can be so mercurial)
Even when the kids ask him to light their sparklers—it's not favoritism. Eames is helping in the kitchen and watches on and off—he's fine. Eames sees the slight tension as the end flares, but he doesn't move, smiles with the kids as they race through the grass.
It's when the neighbors start their fireworks that Eames sees it. A flinch backwards, a curling of the fist and back, like a half-feral fetal position.
(The pop and explosions, the bursts of color and sound, they make Arthur's instincts react. He wants to get away, wants to sleep it off. It's why, on most 4th of Julys, Arthur borrows a few sleeping pills of Yusuf's and would lie to the kids, say he was tired and knock out on the guest bed until morning. But he hadn't this time and Eames sees him fighting every urge to run)
So he calls Arthur over and Dom goes to lift James onto his shoulders so he can see better.
He tugs Arthur closer by the hand when he comes into the kitchen. Arthur doesn't fight it—he doesn't do that much anymore. "Darling?"
"I'm fine, Eames."
"Liar. Want me to run out and get some pills at the drugstore?" He knows Arthur is capable of going himself, but Eames has this small fear that with all the fireworks going on today, Arthur will flinch while driving and the car will swerve and (Charles Anderson was in a car accident…)
"…Please? They'll be going off all night."
Eames kissed him lightly. "Sure. I'll be back in five minutes. Ten with traffic."
Arthur loves to learn, no matter the subject.
It's two and a half years that they'd been doing this. Dreamwork, even if the farthest they'd gone was Canada and Mexico. (It's been two months since Arthur had drunkenly kissed him. Eames pretends that, like Arthur, he doesn't remember a thing)
"You're going to what?" Eames asked, setting down his beer before he spit it out over the table in shock.
"I'm taking some time off."
"Why? The both of us finally have some momentum."
"Yes, we do," Arthur agreed, his hands absentmindedly folding and unfolding the bar napkin. Eames wondered if he was trying to make a paper airplane. "People are going to start coming after us now."
"We can handle it."
"We can't know that," Arthur looked up, eyes serious. "Unless you can make me a guarantee that we could handle it, I'm still taking the time off."
"What for then, since you already told me why."
"I'm a good shooter," Eames thought that that was rather an understatement. Arthur shot with a certain precision and coldness that most people could never get away with. "But up close, I'm nothing more than a street brawler."
"Worked out fine for us before."
"In a dream? Where anything can happen? Physics are defied every day in dreams. I can't take the chance that it'll leave me incapable of fighting."
"So what's your plan?"
"I found a place in Chicago that teaches judo and kenpo. I want to learn to fight properly."
"Chicago?" Eames wrinkled his nose. "Gets cold over there, doesn't it?" He still remembered winters in London, not always cold enough to snow, but cold enough to be freezing.
"All the better." And Eames remembered that Arthur wasn't very fond of the heat. Or, if he had been, after Iraq, he certainly wasn't anymore.
"How long do you plan to stay there? It'll take a while to master those."
"For a few months, at first. I can't stop dream-working. Otherwise, I have no source of income. I can't legally get a real job since I'm wanted and all."
"I think you'd come up with the money somehow."
Arthur rolled his eyes and took a sip of his soda. Sorry, 'pop' as he called it. "Yes, I'll become the greatest drug dealer in Chicago and have the entire city under my thumb within the month."
Eames tilted the beer bottle at him. "That's what I like to hear; big dreams."
Arthur laughed at that. "Aren't you always saying the one I need to think bigger?"
"Clearly, I'm teaching you something if you want to be the greatest drug dealer in Chicago."
"Yes, because doing dreamwork is a much smaller idea than that."
"Perspective, darling."
He didn't protest to the pet name anymore. He mostly ignored it now. Eames figured it was a step in the right direction. "So what're you going to do?"
"Dreamwork, naturally." It felt strange to even think of doing something else anymore.
"Sure you'll be okay?" They'd worked jobs without each other before, of course, but this felt different somehow.
"'Course I will. And if needs be, I can always go back to forging papers. Besides," Eames grinned cheekily across the table. "You're getting rather good at patching me up now."
"I should try for a medical degree at the rate you're going," Arthur muttered into his glass.
"That's just silly. You'd be a terrible doctor, what with your bedside manner."
"Oh, screw you, Eames."
"Get in line."
"Can't be all that long, can it?"
Eames' grin turned wicked. "I could show you just how long it is."
Arthur chuckled as he stood, dropping some bills on the table to cover his half of the bill. "I'm not that desperate. I'll see you back at the room, Eames. Or not, if there really is a line."
"What's got your knickers in a twist?"
"Not you."
"Ooh. Ouch. So hostile."
Eames waited for a response, but Arthur was already out the door.
Arthur hates silence.
It's something strange that Eames hadn't even noticed really, not until Ariadne mentioned it over lunch on that very first Inception.
They were waiting for their food when she said to Arthur, "You get really into your work, don't you?"
"What?" Arthur looked up from taking a sip of his water.
"I tried getting your attention a couple of times today, but you didn't respond. Or was it the headphones?" She'd thought it was strange, really. Arthur seemed the type of person who needed calm and quiet around him to work. And yet, she'd managed to catch occasional strains of whatever music had been playing from the mp3 player tucked into his vest pocket.
"A little bit of both, actually."
"Don't beat yourself up, Ariadne," Eames told her, squeezing a lime into his beer. "It takes a practiced hand to distract him."
"Or an obnoxious shirt," Arthur shot back, looking pointedly at the rusty orange…thing…that Eames tried to pass as a shirt.
Eames laughed. (In truth, he hadn't thought much of it, but for as long as Eames has known him—which is something like eight years now—Arthur has, whenever possible, had sound. In his apartment, it's the little radio that Arthur keeps tuned to classic rock, but whenever Eames is over, he switches it to jazz and blues. He sings or hums when he cleans. He likes the bustle of the city. In Eames' flat, he never mentions the old fan that is constantly creaking)
Arthur looked over at Ariadne. "Honestly, I just like the noise."
Ariadne hummed in thought as she dipped a fry in ketchup. "…You're a surprising man, Arthur."
(She will n ever know that it isn't just a fondness for sound, for music. Eames might guess the truth though. Arthur hates the total complete silence, the kind where white noise buzzes in your ears and the air is thick because it reminds him of after the explosion. Directly after. When he stumbled about, vision fuzzy and spotty and for a good few months afterwards, he was partially deaf. Thankfully, it was only temporary. But the reason he keeps the noise is because it stops him from remembering the silence of his brother, of his constant presence and warmth and restlessness)
Arthur is a strange kind of optimist.
The dream fell apart. At some point. Tommy's death sent a few shockwaves through the earth and Arthur didn't know where Eames was. He knew only that Amara was with him. He eyed the shaking ground.
He grabbed Amara's arm. "This is our way out." Arthur tried to project his voice, to make it echo across the dreamscape so that Eames could get the message, but he had no idea if it worked. He'd never tried it before, but there was a small window of time that this could be done in. (He doesn't want to be stuck in limbo, not for eighty years. And he won't allow Amara to be down here either.)
He felt her arm jerk against his hand, an instinctive, panicky movement. "What is?"
"Earthquake opens up the earth and we fall."
"What? No way in hell—"
Arthur interrupted her. "It's the only way we're getting out of here before we're eighty. Do you trust me?"
And Amara stared at him and he saw the moment she made her decision (He's saved her life, he's trying to save her sanity and he's trying to protect everyone, but he can't and he's making a choice here, her over her father, the sure save over the possible one) "…Yeah." And even if she didn't, did she have much of a choice?
"You have to go with the fall, understand? Don't fight it. You're going to want to—it's instinct. Don't."
It was the first thing that dreamworkers had to learn; overriding the survivalist instinct and letting oneself die. It was something that a lot of people never learned properly and it was the reason that a lot of dreamworkers—having never learned to do it—went insane after a while. The mind warred with itself.
And from the looks of it, the government wasn't teaching that to their Interpol agents. That was comforting.
But Amara nodded, mouth tight. "Okay."
And the earth shattered beneath them, plummeting them into darkness.
(The last thing Arthur remembers seeing is his brother's eyes peering down from the edge of the hole…)
-/-/
He woke to gasping and coughing. His mind wasn't on right, he knew that. It was still recovering, but he forced himself up and found the room spinning. Closing his eyes tightly before opening them again helped a little and he managed to get himself to Amara's chair.
"Hey, hey, calm down," Arthur grabbed her shoulders. "You're hyperventilating, calm down. Look at me—there you go. Slow down—deep breaths. In….out. In…and out."
(He's had too much practice with this, with panic. His body responds to it still, but his mind stopped. As if everything slows down. It makes him good at his job though.)
Amara shoved him away with more strength than he would have thought she had, wobbling to her feet and slipping something from her pocket. He couldn't guess what her totem was, but he felt his dog tags, their engravings and nicks familiar to his hand. He felt the weight of his die, even rolled it twice, just in case.
She hadn't turned around yet. "We're out?"
"Yeah."
He watched her pull herself together, watched the things that would haunt her nightmares for years be shoved into the back of her mind to be dealt with later. "What about dad?"
Arthur looked back at Eames. He was breathing still, the barely-there breaths of the dreaming, but he crossed the room and checked his pulse anyway. "He's alive."
"But he's not out. We can't just leave him there."
"Of course not." Arthur rolled out a line from the PASIV, checked the chemicals inside. He didn't trust whatever drug was in there, if there were any remnants left of it—his stomach was a little queasy and he had a fierce migraine—likely the side effects. Weighing the possible effects of going back down with traces of the drug still mixed in or refilling it with a clean batch of somancin—and therefore changing what was being fed into Eames' tube. But the effects on Eames' consciousness were unpredictable because of that.
"What if you get stuck down there?"
"I won't." (It's half a lie. He has no idea what's going to happen down there. He doesn't even know if Eames is going to be able to come up, out of limbo. But he isn't about to tell his only daughter that)
Amara crossed her arms over her stomach. It made her look smaller and a little fragile. (Arthur knows that look. He's seen it on Mal. On Mina and his own mother. He hates that look) "You can't promise that."
"No," he agreed. "But it still won't happen." Mind over matter and maybe it has some weight in their line of work. It's strange. He and Amara were on opposite sides of this, but they were still in the same line of work. "You're on guard duty."
She shifted her weight like she wanted to move, to do something. Arthur couldn't guess what it could be. But she didn't move. She just set her jaw and said, "Okay."
Arthur slipped the needle in his skin (In another life, perhaps, he's a druggie. This movement is so easy, so smooth. He already has the scars lining his arms. Perhaps in another life, his brother still died. His brother died and no one ever thought to look for the other twin. Perhaps Cameron Reynolds, never going back to Vermont, faded into obscurity out on the lonely roads of the Midwest. And that life flashes before his eyes as he lays back and he sees Amara activate the PASIV…)
