Disclaimer: I don't own inception, so sad!
Chapter 5. Insomnia
The motel room was even more cramped then any of the three had cared to imagine. A tiny double bed with a sagging mattress took up most of the available floor space, a small brown couch and surprisingly swanky television set took up the remaining room. A door lead onto a minuscule and dirty en suit bathroom for which they were expected to pay a premium price. Snow flurried like driving rain against the panes of the single window, outside the orange glow of the highway lights reflected against the fresh snow to revealed the hundreds of trapped cars, exhaust fumes blurring the scene slightly as Gia stared out at it.
"You're glad not to out there aren't you" she said in an undertone, almost to herself, as Arthur joined her at the window. His head whipped around, his eyes sharp. She avoided his gaze, picking at the Band-aid, Arthur reached out to stop her but pulled his hand back before he touched her.
"What… what did you say?" Arthur felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
"Nothing." Gia turned away from the window, swiftly.
She crossed the room, picking up the little toiletries bag Eames had bought her in Boots, and locked her self in the bathroom.
When the two men heard the key turning in the lock, they turned to each other.
"What's wrong with her do you think?" asked Eames, his voice as soft as a moth in the semi-darkness.
Arthur shuddered, "I don't know, she killed a man today, that's got to have something to do with it. She gives me the creeps somehow."
"Not so tough now that you have to share a room with her eh?" Eames smiled with uncharacteristic bitterness, his full lips twisting.
"What do you think's wrong with her?" asked Arthur, shrugging on a jumper over his white wife-beater.
"I dunno, years of mistreatment by the looks of 'er, Ariadnie will have a field day feeding her up."
"Yeah, I hope so, how do you think we're meant to get her out of the country? Its not like she's got a passport."
"Search me," sighed Eames, stretching out on the couch which he'd automatically claimed as his own. Arthur gave him a withering look and started collecting cushions so that he could sleep on the floor. "Some how, Arthur, I get the feeling that its not going to be a problem, she got us out of that building remember?"
"Yeah, that was…" the memory of the gaping abyss stretching up to meet him as he dropped for balcony to balcony tugged at his mind for a moment. "It was like being in the dream, doing all the things we do when we're not afraid of death."
"Well put darling, although terrifying summed it all up for me. Never again."
The bathroom door opened for a moment, spilling light across their two forms. Eames twisted around to look at the girl standing framed in the doorway, for a moment she smiled, her expression almost wistful and to his sleep-veiled eyes she seamed for that moment achingly familiar. She stood there and regarded them for a moment, drinking in the scene in front of her, Arthur already almost asleep, curled up on the floor with his hand-gun just poking out from underneath the pillow; Eames staring straight back at her from the couch his expression inscrutable.
"Night" Gia whispered
"Sleep well" whispered back Eames. Arthur let out a small snore from his prone position on the floor and for a moment the girl smiled again. Eames felt the same inkling of recognition before she turned away into the darkness.
Eames settled back into the sofa, he could hear the bed rustling as Gia settled down and started thinking again about this girl's strange provenance. Where was she from? And what was it about her that made both him and Arthur, full-grown men and trained dream workers, so dreadfully uneasy? Something in her unwavering stare, the stillness with which she sat and her constant deadpan manner made Eames feel as though she knew something they didn't. But, what did she have to hide, they had rescued her after all?
He let his mind wade through the events of the day. Traveling to the estate, him and Arthur getting along better than usual, the point-man returning his banter with enthusiasm, then their arrival at about half past three in the afternoon. The shadows were already lengthening at that point, so short were the winter days. He should have known that something was wrong from the start. The gang of men with their intense-looking leader getting into the lift had raised the hairs on the back of Eames's neck at the time but he'd put it out of his mind, trying to focus on the job in hand. He chastised himself, of course they were the one's who had been chasing them as they'd left the apartment. Drug dealers who had the kind of money they'd found in Weeler's apparent were seldom unprotected. The gang had probably known that they'd been there on business and had been put on a look out.
The sequences of events began scrolling across Eames's field of vision like morbid Kodak Carrousel, the estate, the girl, the shooting, the weight of Wheeler's body in his hands and the red streak across the floor as they'd dragged him, the burning apartment. He gripped the thin coverlet as adrenaline began seeping into his system as he relived the chase out of the building. How had they survived? Eames let out a shaky breath as he thought over how lucky they'd been. From somewhere in the darkness an alarm clock beeped as the hour changed. Twisting around so that he could see the face he read the tiny numbers to be 1:00 AM. He swore under his breath and rolled over to try and get some sleep.
As the number on the clock scrolled ever closer to 3:00 AM, Eames abandoned any attempt at rest for the time being. Everything was quiet; the occasional drip of a tap in the bathroom and snore from Arthur was all that disturbed the peace. He got up, swinging his legs over the edge of the couch and stretching his back. After a few satisfying clicks Eames headed for the bathroom. He groped momentarily for the light switch, stubbing his toe in the dark, finding the light switch at last and flicking it on he almost leapt out of his skin. Gia was lying curled up in the tiny cracked bathtub. Her skinny arms around her knees and her hair all over her face. Eames clapped a hand over his chest, trying to steady his thudding heart for a moment before shaking her awake. As soon as his hand touched her back she jumped and scrambled away from him.
"Hey hey hey" Eames murmured, trying to calm her. She didn't seem to want to be calmed and cringed away again at the sound of his voice with a whimper of terror. "Its ok Gia, I'm not going to hurt you, you're safe." Having run out of soothing platitudes Eames climbed into the tub next to her and put an arm around her shaking shoulders to stop her running off at the next opportunity.
"What's wrong 'eh?" he asked after a moment after Gia has stopped shivering.
She raised her head, peeking out at him through her bleached fringe. She shook her head mutely, eyes full of tears.
"Come on, something's up." Eames countered.
Gia cleared her throat, breathing deeply, "I had a dream… or something… about the flat and that guy. I feel sick about it."
Taken aback, Eames fell silent for a moment, rubbing her back in what he hoped was a comforting manner. "What you did, it was right, he deserved it for what he did to you… It'll get better, we're going to take you somewhere really nice, back to the States"
She looked up at him, big blue eyes boring into his until he had to look away. "I mean it, its a good place, we'll take care of you, feed you up a bit." He chuckled and squeezed her shoulder, and she smiled a bit.
"I'd like that, never been to the States."
"Where have you been?" asked Eames. She glanced at him, catching on to his digging.
"The Russia mostly, but I was born in Ireland and lived with my mum's family until I was five. She died you see."
"Oh, I'm sorry, when was that?"
"I was about one so I never knew her… I was adopted and then we moved to the Ukraine, the husband was in the army. But when I was ten, I had to go back in an orphanage…" he raised his eyebrows for her to continue.
"That's it." she wiped her runny nose on her sleeve.
"I'm very sorry." said Eames softly. He noticed the girl's eyelids drifting shut between sentences. "Come on. Off to bed, I'll carry you if you want."
"I'm not a baby" she said, smiling slightly "But I do love the Dora t-shirt"
Eames got out of the bath and helped her out, she nearly came up to his chest and again he got the feeling like he knew her face from somewhere, He searched her face and she raised her eyebrows, questioningly.
"What?"
"Nothing, nothing. Come on." he steered her out of the bathroom and took her back to bed. "In you get darling" he said and she clambered in, drawing the covers up to her chin and peeking over owlishly.
"Are you alright?" he asked her, crouching down so he didn't tower over her. She sat up a bit, regarding him again.
"You're very kind… sorry for waking you."
"Its quite alright sweetie, I wasn't asleep." He smiled "Good night."
"Good night Mr. Eames" she replied and snuggled down. She looked very young to him then, curled up under the duet and he felt a surge of protectiveness towards her that took him by surprise. She was certainly very able to take care of her self as she'd already proved to them, but her vulnerability was just as apparent.
As Eames settled back down on the couch to the sound of Arthur's continuing snoring he knew that sleep would never come. For one thing Gia's scared little face was starting to haunt him every time he closed his eyes, something about her was definitely uncanny, he just couldn't place her face even though he was sure he'd seen her somewhere before.
For another thing he had tomorrow to worry about, smuggling the girl out of the country past the boarder police and he was sure that they hadn't seen the last of Wheeler's gang of thugs.
What had he got himself into, no, he corrected himself, what had he let Dom Cobb get him into? Sometimes, rarely, Eames wished he could leave the dream business for a quiet life, somewhere in England or Ireland where he'd spent every summer of his childhood. Yes, he though, a small but nice house, wife, two children, a good job and two holidays a year by the sea. But, he remembered with a sinking heart, it was not to be.
In the aftermath of the inception job, Cobb's team had been traveling madly across the globe to avoid the suspicions of the now defunct Cobal Engineering Company. They'd also been inundated with requests to perform more inceptions, which Arthur had pilled on his desk in their new office in New York. It was a lucrative time for them, as the only team capable of inception they were able to charge whatever they liked for their services but the complexity of each job was really taking it out of each of them. Eames wondered how Cobb, Ariadne and Yusef were getting along back in New York, the three of them must be working flat out to organize their latest job, a very complicated inception that Arthur had been contacted to do months ago but it was only recently that circumstances had been right. Eames mulled the job over in his mind, thinking about the new characters he had to forge for all the different levels, reliving his meetings with them, their speech patterns and mannerisms.
This lead his thoughts back to Gia and her familiar face. He glanced at the clock and was startled to see it read 4:00 AM. Something about her nagged at the back of his mind.
He tried to thing about the problem professionally; often Eames was asked to forge late relatives of clients using only pictures and their descendants as a guide. Over the years he had become good at recognizing the inherited characteristics between people such a facial expressions as well as those passed on through a close family relationship. His brow furrowed in concentration, trying to picture Gia's face clearly, especially the eyes, picking out the relevant information. He decided after a few minutes that it was something about the shape of her mouth and jaw that he recognized as well as her smile. Not so much her smile but the way her whole face changed and lit up when she smiled as though the sun had come out from behind the clouds. He'd known someone like that he was sure, but who? Finally, his eyes drifted shut.
Hey guys sorry for the long wait! I'm still amazed by how many people actually read the story at all by this point but also REVIEWS ARE LOOOOVE! XX