Disclaimer: Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros.

AN: Much love to LauRa-ReaDing-XoX, silver-nightstorm and Ninavs2 for reviewing! And thanks for the new faves and followers o3o

The Absolute Basic

Chapter Four

The bed was unrealistically soft. Eames groaned a little as he turned onto his side. He breathed out hoarsely, keeping his eyes shut, relaxing against the smooth sheets. His cheek was pressed tightly against the pillow. He could feel small, dented lines on his skin where he had been lying on the creases and folds of the covers.

Painfully, Eames pushed himself into a sitting position and shivered as the covers fell around his hips. He was wearing a vest and a pair of striped boxers, and he felt chilled. Isn't the heating on? he thought, forcing himself to get out of the cosy bed and toward the heater, turning the dial up and rubbing his arms uselessly.

"Shower," he muttered to himself. He walked across the furnished bedroom of his London flat with its velvet curtains and wide screen television set in front of the king-sized bed. His job certainly paid well, as long as he managed to get out of his enemies' reach. The bathroom door was open invitingly for him. He stripped quickly, feeling goosebumps rise over his rough, tattooed skin. He stepped into the glass shower cubicle and turned on the steaming water, sighing contently and tipping his head back as he felt the heat seep into his core.

Eames had never expected that meeting Clara Etheridge all those years ago would have led to something like this. And as the water rushed over his head, matting his dark hair against his forehead, Eames closed his eyes briefly and pictured her face. It had once been so difficult to bring that image to mind, mostly because he didn't want to remember her again. Time had erased the layers of her skin, her hair, her eyes...and, incredibly, she was back again. She had jumped right back into his life, doing what she had originally left behind.

How was she feeling right now? Scared? Insecure? He needed to dissect those thoughts, the ones that had led to his silly frame of mind. Yes, he was a fool, believing that seeing her again was going to make everything better. People changed. Eames of all people should have known.

The phrase sounded familiar. Had she once accused him of this? Of changing too much?

The hot water rolled down his limbs, soothing him back into alluring memories.

"So you can change? In the dream?" Clara asked him.

"Hm? Oh, oh yeah." Eames grinned.

Eames was lounging on one of Dom's dining chairs. He had found himself spending more and more time with the insistent man, who was sure of the potential of Dream-sharing and was running experiments with the few he saw fit. Eames supposed he should have counted himself lucky for being found and chosen. He had learned a lot through Cobb and Miles, more so than in the years he had spent Extracting alone. They had taught him things that would have taken months to pick up. And, as a result, he had been able to earn more cash.

"And what did you say you called it?" Clara pressed, shadowed honey eyes kept on him.

Eames took in the girl across the table from him. She was young, barely out of university. Arthur had brought her to them after she graduated without a shadow of a doubt that she could contribute. Cobb and Mal had welcomed her over the course of the last week with open arms, but Eames still had some reservations. There was a freshness about her that seemed to dissipate in all directions, like a pleasant fragrance. Yet, there was something about her appearance that just screamed innocence. Naivety. He glanced up at her. Her hair was draped in front of one shoulder in a loose side braid. She was leaning toward him with her arms on the table, hands held in front neatly, like a student at an interview. Although she was technically an adult, Eames was already approaching thirty, and right now they seemed leagues apart.

"Well, Dom's father-in-law calls it Forging," Eames explained.

"Forging," Clara tried it on her tongue. "That sounds..." She let out a little chuckle.

"What?"

Clara shrugged, her eyes beaming at him. "That sounds sneaky."

Eames smirked and pretended to study another page of notes. "Why d'you say that?"

Clara shifted in her chair and sighed, obviously pondering, "I dunno. It just sounds sneaky. Dodgy, sorta. I mean, you're changing your appearance in a dream to get information you want to make money."

"Well, when you put it like that," Eames laughed. "You make me sound like an asshole."

Clara opened her mouth to reply, then stopped and smiled.

Eames rolled his eyes. "I'm not an asshole, darling."

She ignored him. "Tell me more about the dreams."

"I thought Arthur told you all about it."

"But Arthur hasn't done anything like becoming someone else in a dream," she said eagerly. "How do you do it?"

How did he do it? How had he learned to put on the world's most convincing disguise? It had simply come to him as easily as changing into a new set of clothes. After having been introduced to the world of dreaming in the army, everything had fallen into place, and Eames had found the one thing he loved doing. Forging. He helped make it what it was, and it was slowly making him into...well, a more complicated person.

"You have to start small. It takes time to work up to the final thing, and it takes a lot of practise," he started, trying unsuccessfully to convey the hours of training and mental preparation he needed to convincingly take on a new role. "I need to know a lot about the person, first of all. You can't be someone if you don't know anything about them."

"And then?"

"And then it's all about tricking the Subject and the Dreamers into thinking I'm someone else," he stated simply.

Clara wedged her elbows on the table and propped her chin on top of her hands. "Don't you ever get confused about who you are?"

He had to laugh at this. "Now don't you pick out the nasty bits quickly," he said, running his fingers over the ridges indented on the table. Swirling patterns led the way. "I've never really gotten confused. I know what I'm doing."

"Do you think you ever will get lost?"

Eames stared at her, then burst out with a toothy grin, "So many questions. You are too nosy for your own good."

"Am I? Speak for yourself. All you're planning to do is snoop around in other people's business."

"Well, so are you. If you wanna earn big bucks, you're gonna have to stick around with the Dream-sharing and learn all about Extraction, love."

The conversation lapsed a little as a different expression crossed Clara's face. She scratched her collarbone, then glanced around them. "Where's Arthur? And everyone else? I want to start already. Lately it's all been talk but no action. I want to dream."

Eames smiled slyly. "Darling, you already are."

The warehouse sat just a few meters from the Thames. It was far removed from central London, however, most likely because Golden Clover Hotels wanted their illegal workers as far as possible from them. They blatantly wanted everything, and that everything had to be perfect: wealth, power, and an untainted reputation. It made Clara's insides squirm just thinking about it, but then again, was this really that different from her old, 'honest' job? It wasn't black and white when it came to the greedy.

Clara arrived with the files outside the drabby warehouse at quarter to ten in the morning, slightly earlier than planned. She was shivering despite wearing the biggest sweater she had packed (which, in all fairness, was rather thin and useless). The wind teased her hair this way and that, and the river churned behind the railings ahead. She stomped her feet about and rested her back against the brick wall, cursing under her breath and ignoring the looks some passerbys were giving her. She must have looked quite odd; a young woman standing huddled against a gloomy, mouldy red warehouse.

Clara had forgotten how cold London could be. Her mother had an apartment near Hyde Park, and she had often visited before the day Clara's father fell into a coma after he was hit by a car. After all the comfort and support Clara had given her mother, somehow, the two women had drifted apart. And neither - seemingly - had bothered to fix their relationship while both husband and father was confined to a lonely care home.

Leave it be, she reminded herself as she hugged herself. Regret doesn't change anything. She had never been close to her mother to begin with. Clara's mother owned a small but prestigious accountancy firm and was obsessed on making it big. It was her father who had really taken care of her. He had been a doctor - a General Practitioner, to be precise - and had been responsible for sparking Clara's interest in molecules and organisms and cells and dreams. Everything had a starting point.

"Your first Inception. Exciting stuff," someone called out, and Clara's head snapped up. Her eyes landed on Eames' figure, strolling casually towards her in a leather jacket and pink shirt. A file was tucked under one arm and he was swirling a keyring around his index finger. He looked too comfortable. Too normal. Why couldn't she be like him? Why couldn't she just erase everything from her face and look as collected and as natural and as removed as he did? It would have saved so much trouble.

Clara bit her lip and tried to smile as he walked up to the large steel doors next to her. She watched him twist the key inside the lock and push the door open for them both. She followed him inside, grateful for the shelter against the wind, but it was still damned cold inside. There were curtained windows on each of the looming walls, painted a slate grey. The warehouse was huge, enough to set a modest swimming pool in the middle with space to spare. Tables and chairs were littered around various dusty equipment and machinery.

"You're cold."

"I - er, yeah, I am." Clara recovered from her daze, instinctively scratching her nails over her collarbone, near her necklace. It was a nervous tick of hers, something her mother had picked out and scolded her for.

"Here, put this on," Eames continued, and, to her horror, he began to shrug off his jacket.

"No!" Clara interrupted, her voice louder than was plainly necessary. "I'm okay, really."

Eames smirked, took the jacket off and threw it at her. Clara caught the jacket and held it in front of her as if it would scald her. "You're not dying of hypothermia on my watch, love."

She attempted to give it back to him, protesting, "Eames, really, it's fine."

"Just shut it and put it on. Heaters'll take forever to warm up the damn place."

Stop it!

She could have taken it a step further, but what would be the point? She couldn't stand up and deny his presence forever. Pretending to hate him would get her nowhere, and it was immature. Pathetic.

Then it struck her, it really did. There was Eames, right across the table, and if she had fancied or dared, she could have walked up to him and slipped her hands beneath his ridiculous shirt and felt his heartbeat, racing against her fingertips, reassuring and methodic and just there.

"Fine," she grumbled, keeping her face averted as she threaded her arms through the larger jacket. It had his heavy smell laced all over the torturous thing. Rusty alleyways, liquor, a cocoon of bed sheets. Enticing and distasteful at the same time.

"Where's Arthur?" Clara muttered automatically, folding her arms tightly across her chest, the jacket bulky over her smaller build.

Eames checked his watch with a grin. "Knowing him, he's probably timed his arrival to the dot. Never early, never late."

Clara stood for a while, then dragged a chair over to the table and sat down. She coughed. "Can you tell me what happened to Dom? And Mal? She...died?"

Eames copied her, pulling another chair to the table and relaxing into it. "Well," he started, "you know how Cobb and Mal loved their experiments. They always wanted to go deeper in the dreams, especially Dom, always pushing the boundaries. One day they ended up in Limbo."

Clara's lips parted in surprise. She had never been to the realm of raw creation and forgetfulness. "Wow. They went down that much?"

"Yeah. Dom said it was amazing, but it was terrifying too. They spent decades down there, just building stuff and believing that they were awake." Eames ran a troubled hand over his slicked hair. "After decades, Dom remembered what was reality, but Mal kept believing that Limbo was real."

"So what happened?"

"Dom had to perform Inception on her."

Clara gave a shallow laugh.

Eames nodded. "It was his first, and it was perfect. Limbo, the deepest level of the dreams. Planting an idea - and such a simple one, too - on that level would mean tremendous results. He made her believe that her world was a dream. So they killed themselves and woke up." He sighed.

Clara contemplated. "They woke up...and she still believed?"

Eames was studying his knuckles. "Mal believed that reality was still, in fact, a dream. So she killed herself to wake herself up." He made a fist with his hand, then unclenched it. "She died about two years after you left."

She had nothing to say, except: "And Cobb?"

"He was blackmailed by Mal. She wanted Cobb to go with her, but he didn't, so she made it seem like he killed her and that tore him away from his kids. He couldn't go back to them, not until the six of us performed Inception on Robert Fischer and a certain powerful man got Cobb back home." Eames scratched his jaw. "Dom never forgave himself for Mal."

The silence that followed was appropriate. Clara thought about Mal, her genuine smile and love for Dom. Clara had not grown particularly close to either of them, but they had left their marks on her. They had embodied - to Clara - the most creative and daring souls in her life.

"I'm not proud of the things I've done either, Clara," Eames murmured abruptly, and before she knew it his warm hand was covering hers.

She yanked her hand away, fire suddenly in her veins. "Stop it."

"This isn't who I-"

"I got it, Eames, thanks." She was standing now, circling away from him unsteadily.

She heard him get to his feet as well. "We need to talk," he insisted.

You have no idea what I'm hiding from you.

"No, we don't." Clara flung her hands up, still facing away. I'm not ready yet. "We really don't need to waste time on this. I left the Extractions for f-family reasons, and many others. Stop concerning yourself with-"

"I don't believe a single bloody word of that." He was taking deliberate steps toward her. "You were always going on and on about-"

The doors heaved open with a loud drawl and Arthur strode in. "Perfect," he said, carrying a briefcase and files. "We're all here. I need to talk to you guys about getting the rest of the team." He walked over to them and set the briefcase on the table. "Shall we bring back Ariadne?"

"Sure thing, darling," Eames chimed, and Clara hated him for his steady, perfect voice.

AN: Awk tension.