"...This wouldn't be quite the brightest idea we've had..."
Eames comment fell flat in the still, lifeless air of Saito's subconscious. They were standing on a hard, flat surface, that looked to be made of red marble; the air was filled with clouds of smoke that hung, unmoving, in the gathered dark. Everything around them was perfumed, drenched in the strong, rotting stench of death. From somewhere, thousands of feet above, tiny lights glittered like distant eyes, like things forgotten. There were no projections.
Cobb had designed a dream for Saito's mind, thinking it would make the transaction easier. His layout had been a parlor in one of Saito's old estate homes, where he used to hold private business meetings and personal conferences. There was meant to be a full room situated in the Japanese man's head, now - a warm, crimson-and-chocolate colored room, dappled with leather furniture, a strong oak desk, a flashy, grated fireplace in the far wall. The room was supposed to be dotted with bookshelves containing business manuals, classic novels, magazine clippings and the like; a few sweeping, graceful calligraphy paintings should have hung from the dark red walls. A real, Arabian carpet, bought by Saito at a high-end auction, was supposed to cover the floor. There was supposed to be a box of cigars tucked away in a glossy, gold-lined desk, beside two heavy obsidian pens and a bottle of tasteful scotch.
But none of it held in Saito's subconscious. As soon as they were aware of the dream, they realized that the entire level had dissolved. Eames, the dreamer, could do nothing to remedy this, though Cobb has instructed him in the design - because nothing stuck in Saito's mind. Anything they attempted to conjure - a set of stairs, a doorway, a platform - seemed to crack, twist, fade, or dissolve before their eyes. It was a miracle they were standing on anything as solid as that red marble.
Beneath them, however, was darkness. It looked stretched and infinite. Cobb could feel the tense, rhythmic beating of his heart as he peered down into it.
"So how do we press on?" Eames asked, when Cobb remained silent. "Shall I jump first, or you?"
"...Just, give me a minute..." Cobb was studying the sky above them. There was something particularly odd about it; there were too many stars, thousands and thousands of stars, bustling and overlapping and bumping into one another. They cast down rays of cold blue light on the dream-agents and the red marble, giving the area a ghostly, pale glow. From somewhere far away, was the high, screeching sound of metal rubbing against itself, so distant Cobb could hardly hear it. Eames glanced upwards and squinted unsurely.
"...Cobb," said the Brit hesitantly, his hands fidgeting in his pockets. "...Are they getting closer?"
Cobb found he'd been wondering the same thing. The lights seemed to be glowing, gently, brighter, larger. The screeching began to grow gradually louder - and then the color was washed out of Eames face.
"...Goddammit, Cobb, build something - !"
They were not small, distant lights held up in a midnight sky; they were rows upon rows of violently blue, glaring searchlights, hung from a series of jagged metal rafters suspended in midair. The gradual, soft glowing had been their distant descent, seemingly slow - but now they screamed, rushed ferociously through the air, fell like lightning towards the red marble.
Cobb had half a second to react. He found himself trying to think like Ariadne.
There was a long, groaning noise, like a steamship being overturned in the sea. Eames felt his body swing and fall flat against the red marble, as Cobb swung the entire platform a hundred and eighty degrees.
There was a horrible crushing, crashing noise; shards of glass and marble flew around the two men, slammed flat, upside-down, on the underside of the marble. For a second, they seemed safe.
Then there was another sound, like someone trying to cut cement with a chainsaw; the middle of the marble snapped, broke, and began to fold inwards on the two men. Eames grabbed Cobb by his jacket-collar and they half-dragged each other to one side of the inward-folding marble; Cobb managed todrag Eames, in the last second, out of the swiftly closing gap and onto the small shred left of the platform.
"Well," Eames breathed, the two of them clumped together on the marble. "Well and good, isn't it? Trapped on a floating piece of brick, with choice between being smashed to bits and taking the big swan dive. And we aren't getting paid. Lovely."
"You sure look on the bright side, don't you Eames?" Cobb stated blandly, glancing down below them - now above them, he couldn't quite be sure - to some new phenomena forming in Saito's unstable mind.
It was a boat - at least, he thought it was a boat. There was something disjointed and wrong about it, like it had been made from pieces of other things. He distinctly saw the side of a taxi cab jutting from one end of it, and what could have been part of a construction crane - and at the helm (he tried not to say it, even to himself) looked like half a dead body.
Then he realized, with sickening clarity, that it was half a body - but not a dead one.
It was Saito. He looked older than Cobb remembered - but not nearly as old as he'd been in limbo. Still tall, still fairly unwrinkled, his hair had greyed considerably, and his eyes sagged in a creeping, inhumane way. His naked, upper torso was jutting from the side of ship's mast.
"Is that - " Eames looked uncertainly at the pale form on the ship, and seemed to shudder.
"...Come on," Cobb said, with more confidence than he felt. Bracing himself against the slowly dissolving red marble, he jumped down - up - made what was understandably a suicidal leap towards the ship.
"...Alright then," was Eames only reaction before he, too, jumped.
Then there was only a distinct, odd feeling, not exactly of falling - more of plunging, like the slow descent that comes after breaking the surface of the water. It was not enough to kick them - but it brought them down towards the ship at a rate they hadn't anticipated. Cobb hit first, his shoulder grinding down the side of the mast as he fell and cracked, hard, against the broken wooden deck. Eames' arm caught on a jutted bar as he came; it tore a swift, red gash through his flesh, and he collapsed on top of Cobb's legs with a halted cry.
"Dammitall, Cobb," Eames hissed, as Cobb pulled himself from underneath the Forger. With a generous effort, Cobb lifted the Brit to his feet, as Eames cradled his bloody arm into his chest.
"Alright?" Cobb asked. Eames, looking a little paler than usual but not much worse for wear, just nodded stiffly.
"Do your part of the job, yeah?" the Forger said, gesturing with head towards the twisted form attached to the mast. Cobb felt a horrible sense of dread at the idea of approaching the man, but did not show it; he nodded to Eames and turned around with a set, searching look.
"...Mr. Saito?" Cobb found addressing the torso as, possibly, one of the strangest things he'd ever done - and the Extractor had done some strange things.
Saito looked like something dragged from a horror film. Not a bloody, gruesome horror film involving wrenches and knives and masticated flesh - but a cold, gut-gripping, twisted horror, a reality that bent and drained things, grew unnatural specimens in dark corners. Saito was one such specimen; his flesh was pale, and his bones looked pressed too close to the surface. He had the aura of an excruciatingly sick man, though there was no blemish on his pale skin.
He did not look at Cobb when his name was spoken. His eyes were turned upwards, into his head, and the filmy whiteness of it mocked the Extractor.
"Mr. Saito. It's Mr. Cobb. You may remember me from a job we did for you," the Extractor pushed on, though there was no visible sign from the previous Tourist. "I need you to try and think, Mr. Saito. I need you to come back again. Come back again. Like last time."
There was a long moment where Eames watched the two men, where Cobb dare not speak again. Saito's eyes began to slowly, painfully move in their sockets. A slow line of red blood dripped from the left one.
"I need you to remember, Mr. Saito. Remember," Cobb pursued, hoping the torso's stirring was a good sign. "You have something to tell me, don't you? Something I didn't know before."
This last statement resonated in Saito's dismembered form.
"...I know you," Saito's voice was nothing more than a rasp; the man had been thoroughly, utterly broken.
"...from a half-remembered dream," Cobb said softly. Saito's filmy, whitened eyes looked at him lazily, and without any real recognition.
"And you remember me, of course, sweetheart," Eames grinned jokingly at Saito's damaged self. The Brit was, apparently, trying to get his mind off the throbbing pain in his arm.
"Eames..." Cobb warned, not wanting to further upset the current imbalance of the dream - but Saito's voice rolled in from behind him.
"Noise coming up. From below."
Then he began to babble, incoherently, in Japanese. Eames and Cobb exchanged looks - a silent recognition to remember anything, everything that Saito was likely to say.
"...I sit inside. Insist on being..."
"...on being what?" Cobb encouraged.
Saito's eyes began to roll forward. More slick red lines, dripping down his cheek from the lolling sockets.
"...emptied out and stared back. Old man. I dropped me... from the bottom, up."
"Cobb, he's not making an ounce of bloody sense," Eames commented, but his tone was low, as though he feared speaking too loud would disrupt Saito's mind further.
"Mr. Saito..." but a sudden apprehension had struck Cobb. He realized, abruptly, as Saito's eyes finally rolled forward and looked at him - he would do anything to never, ever, see the eyes of a man who'd been Eradicated.
"...An idea. Is... resilient," it came out of the Tourist's throat like a horrible whisper.
Saito suddenly would not stop staring, directly, into Cobb's eyes. Cobb could not do the same; there was something deeply and disturbingly wrong about Saito's eyes - they seemed colorless, cold, and hauntingly infinite. Looking into Saito's eyes was like looking into space - but without stars, without darkness, without light. A void of complete and utter nothing.
"...Highly contagious," Cobb seemed to say it without thinking, a guttural reaction to Saito's words. He felt it getting colder, stiller within the dream. A distinct, unnatural feeling of claustrophobia descended on him - but there were no walls, nothing to contain him. Just Saito's eyes, and their infinite, pressing, cage-like nothing.
"Impossible... to... eradicate."
Something in the way Saito pronounced this last word sent a cold, slimy feeling through Cobb. He stepped back suddenly, in horror and disgust, almost tripping into Eames.
"Where the truth is lost, like scattered bits of glass. You can't hold them; they stare back at you. They stare and say: you are not..." Saito didn't finish. His mouth seemed to freeze.
"...You are not what, Saito?" Cobb pressed, almost too distracted by his words to be overly-consumed with his unnatural gaze, with the cruel way his body jutted from the wood.
But Saito's eyes had rolled back into his had again, and his body had become still. And then, abruptly, there was Eames - yelling -
"Bloody hell, Cobb -"
The floating slab of red marble fell on the ship; Cobb had half a second of semi-conscious thought before the weight hit him, a flash of crushing, crushing pain -
- and he awoke in the hospital in Tokyo.
Eames was rolling his left arm, obviously adjusting to the sudden lack of pain. Yusuf was already putting the wires back into the silver case. Saito lay on the starched white bedsheets, looking exactly the same as he had in the photograph.
"How'd it go?" the Chemist asked, with honest intrigue. Cobb found himself unable to speak, trying to make sense of what he'd just experienced in Saito's mind. Eames, however, still had his voice.
"Mr. Saito is a most cracked parrot."
l-l
Ariadne had been working on mazes for the past few hours. Without knowing her subject, or the fundamentals on how the levels were to be designed, she was forced to stick to basic architectural shapes. It bothered her not to have a focus or intent on her work; she was used to building around the general idea that would encompass the maze as opposed to its physical attributes. Without a subject, the maze seemed useless and incompetent.
She gave up soon into her fifth design. Unable to sit, draw, or sculpt any longer, she wandered into the office-quarter of the warehouse, where Arthur was working.
She had to resist the urge to laugh upon entering. Arthur had been doing research; in her mind, the idea of thorough, elaborate research involved messy room, papers flung everywhere, books lying on chairs, things posted half-hazardly on the wall - the general chaos of an architectural student's workspace a day before exams.
But Arthur was immaculate. Books were assembled in standing rows on a low shelf to his right - books like The Interpretation of Dreams, Abnormal States of Brain and Mind, and Psychology of the Unconscious. He had great stacks of research papers and notes, of course; but they were neatly stacked and standing at the desk, filed in manila folders or bound in notebooks. There were highlighters and pens assembled in a collected row on the desk-top, beside a half-used stack of sticky notes and a box of thumbtacks. He'd used the tacks to post newspaper and magazine articles along the walls, symmetrically aligned between photographs of Fischer, Browning, and Saito - along with about twenty mugshots of various people Ariadne had never seen before. Colored pieces of string had been tacked to the wall, creating connections between various pictures and article posted to the cement wall, so it resembled a strange, colorful web.
She was also struck by one, singular contradiction in the room, which made the laugh die in her throat. Against the far wall, on a low table, lay three or four handguns. Six loaded magazines were assembled in a row beside them, along with a holster and a cleaning kit.
"How're the designs coming?" Arthur's question snapped her back to reality. To reality. He had placed a laptop down in front of him, and he was looking at her. She was dimly aware of the slight hint of red from somewhere in the deep brown of his eyes.
"I... I can't really work on the models without a basis - or a subject," Ariadne admitted. "I feel like I'm just creating nonsense."
"The sketches you had in Paris were good," Arthur said honestly. "You've been able to create some complicated layouts without subjects."
"There's more to dreaming than that, though," Ariadne mused. Arthur paused in his reading and regarded her, intently, and she felt it almost as deeply as within a dream. "I'm still new at this. I don't want to screw it up."
"You made Inception a success. Which makes you the best Architect I've ever known," Arthur gave her that sly, slight smile. Ariadne smiled back, and felt a heat in her cheeks.
"Thanks..." the Architect found she didn't know quite what else to say. It was late, and the London sky was dark and dotted with stars. The hum of airplanes could still be heard from high above the warehouse building, like the great, constant beat of metal wings.
As she stood there, she became more and more aware of the fact that Arthur was not moving. He had not returned to his research; had not opened a book or regarded any of his notes. He was looking at her, with that barely perceptible smile still hanging in the corner of his mouth. He seemed content, just looking at her.
"...Well, I'm pretty tired," Ariadne found herself saying, although she really wasn't. "I... I'm going to head back to the hotel. Let you get back to work."
"Yeah, we should probably get out of here. I just have a few things to finish up."
Ariadne made a move towards the door, but something about what he'd said - We should probably get out of here. It ignited a significant feeling in her chest, drew up some pleasant feeling. She was aware that he had said it before.
"...Arthur?"
Arthur's eyes were still on her, and she remembered quietly where he'd said it before. On a couch. In a hotel. In a dream. After...
"In... Inception. When we were at the hotel..."
She trailed off. She felt a deep, soaring feeling inside her that made her wonder if she was dreaming. But it felt too real - and she was too acutely aware of Arthur, sitting composed on the folding chair before his wall of research. He was leaning on his knees, his pressed, dark blue shirt rolled up above his elbows, looking at her with those penetrating, red-brown eyes. The situation was breathtakingly real. And the feeling in the room, after she had spoken - the feeling of Arthur contemplating her meaning, remembering the same moment she was remembering... the moment that she hadn't mentioned, but seemed to be immediately there, in front of them...
"...Goodnight, Ariadne," he said gently.
He was still smiling, more in his eyes than in his mouth.