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[metisket]

Inception fic! Because I've lost all control of my life.

When I first watched Inception, I decided it was very disappointing that Jorge Luis Borges was already dead and would not be able to dissect it for our entertainment. That would have been amazing. It is also the reason this fic is so heavily Borges influenced as to almost be a crossover. I had big ideas for this fic. And then they didn’t work, so I had to rearrange the entire thing and chop out 3000+ words…

Anyway, sometimes you mess with a fic for ten years and are finally forced to accept that it’s as good as it’s going to get. Ngl I may have screwed up the formula for transfinite numbers. I tried.

Thank you so much to Zephy for the beta. Both times.

No Spinozists were harmed in the making of this fic. All italicized quotes are from various Borges essays and short stories.

Summary: The two most important people in Arthur’s life are Mal and Eames. In their own, different ways, they’ve understood him, supported him, even defined him for most of his adult life.

Which is why it’s completely ridiculous that he’s ended up wandering the world alone with Dominic Cobb.

(Also on AO3)


Mirror Image


“We…have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.” —Avatars of the Tortoise

* * *

The first time Mal and Arthur meet, Arthur is army enlisted, five years and two tours in. He’s been busted back to private three times and is one smart remark away from a dishonorable discharge. The job is shitty, but that’s okay, because the pay is, too. Arthur’s commanding officer has enthusiastically assigned him to the new Somnacin project, doubtless hoping Arthur will end up brain damaged and no longer his problem.

Mal, meanwhile, is an internationally recognized dream researcher. She’s a rising star in academia, balancing generous offers of grant money on all sides, newly married and blindingly happy about it.

They have, at first glance, nothing in common.

* * *

Arthur reports to the labs—which seems ominous, given his total lack of science background—and he’s left in a hallway for half an hour to kick his heels and reflect on the sins against high command that led him to this pass. He should’ve known better than to hustle a major at poker. Sure, the major can’t prove anything, but he can do plenty to Arthur that Arthur can’t prove came from him either, so, yeah. Way to backfire a con. His mother would be embarrassed.

He’s still brooding over his various failures and how best to keep his mother from finding out about them when Dr. Mallorie Cobb (he presumes) finally appears in the doorway. He doesn’t bother coming to attention because she’s not looking at him—too busy flipping through his file and smiling slyly. This is not a good sign.

Arthur’s file says things like, “Shows initiative,” “Full of ideas for improved efficiency,” and “Independent thinker.” To the trained eye, those statements are code for, “Insubordinate,” “Too smart by half,” and “Backtalking anarchist,” which is why he’s been tossed between less astute COs like a hot rock. He has some qualities that might be useful in an officer, but none that anybody likes to see in an enlisted guy.

Dr. Cobb’s eye shows every sign of being trained, and she closes the file with a warm laugh, shaking her head and murmuring, “And for some reason you joined the army.”

Arthur’s recruiting officer hadn’t mentioned that ‘silent contempt’ was a thing you could be punished for. If he had, Arthur wouldn’t have signed up. He shrugs and waits Dr. Cobb out, idly wondering where her accent is from.

She unlocks her lab and escorts him in, then sets aside his file, the better to study him. Arthur doesn’t know what he expected when he met her eye, but whatever it was, it isn’t what he gets—which is an unsettling sense of instant recognition. Going by the mildly disturbed look on Dr. Cobb’s face, she feels the same way.

They both ignore it, because it’s creepy.

“Well, you should be perfect for my purposes, even if you are a ridiculous mismatch for the army,” Dr. Cobb announces.

“Happy to be your lab rat, doc,” Arthur tells her, flawlessly polite. In tone, anyway.

His CO would’ve had no patience for that response, but Dr. Cobb is of a different school (Arthur knew she would be). She smirks. “Good. What are your feelings on cheese as a reward?”

“I prefer beer,” Arthur admits, reluctantly charmed.

Dr. Cobb laughs at him, and Arthur can’t help but smile back. It’s the first time he’s smiled out of happiness since…fuck, he can’t remember.

“You should call me Mal,” says Dr. Cobb. “And I’ll call you Arthur; your first name is ridiculous.”

His first name is Winston, thanks to his mother’s awful sense of humor and his father’s lack of one. Most people call him by his last name, but he’ll settle for the middle. Not that he’s being consulted.

“We’re going to dream amazing dreams together,” Mal informs him.

And she’s right.

* * *

In defiance of all expectation, though, Arthur’s assignment to Mal starts out surprisingly boring.

It takes a week of mind-numbing trials (a hundred one-minute dreams, followed by tiny drug variations, followed by endless checklists evaluating the stability and clarity of the dreams—and also Arthur’s continued health and sanity, as a side note) before Mal feels confident expanding the project and requisitioning less disposable soldiers than Arthur. That’s when things finally get fun.

Meanwhile, Arthur and Mal understand each other better every day and continue not to talk about it. Each of them, for their own, different reasons, is suspicious of anything easy. They both have a creeping certainty that nothing comes without a price, and if you don’t pay up front, you can’t know when your debt will come due. It’s impossible to trust in something you haven’t earned.

What they have with each other is as effortless as breathing, and neither of them trusts it at all. That doesn’t mean they’re not willing to use it, however.

Arthur gets a promotion of sorts (not accompanied by a higher pay grade—shocker) because Mal has made him her effective second in command. Usually this would wreak havoc with the command structure, and PFC Arthur could kiss his ass goodbye the first time he tried to tell a sergeant what to do—but everyone treats Arthur like an extension of Mal, and everyone’s in love with Mal. Which she knows, and takes utterly shameless advantage of. She sorely tests Arthur’s ability to keep a straight face.

The higher-ups are so relieved to see Arthur obeying someone’s orders that they’ve managed to overlook the fact that the person he’s obeying is a random contractor. They’re missing the point, anyway. Arthur is a terrible soldier, uncontrollably insubordinate, but he’s very good at promises. He doesn’t believe in loyalty to abstract concepts: the army, the military, America. Why should he? What are they, when you come right down to it, and what have they done for him lately? But Mal. Mal he understands, Mal he loves even if he can’t quite bring himself to trust her, or trust in her. She takes him into a hundred dreams of places he’s never been, and every one feels like home. He keeps his promises to Mal and doesn’t care that it looks like obedience.

“Your military,” Mal says two months into the project, voice dripping with scorn. They’re in one of her dreams (a near-replica of a Gaudi-designed house which looks like it belongs underwater and which Arthur loves beyond reason), and she’s always most honest in dreams, out of the range of eavesdroppers. “I cannot believe they’re funding this project for nothing more than imitation battlefields to desensitize soldiers. It’s a painfully stupid waste of time, but I’ll have to deliver results if I want to continue using their money, and Arthur, I do want their money. Also their test subjects.”

Arthur actually finds it hilariously typical of the military that they’ve developed technology with infinite possibility and plan to use it to make killing machines. Task-oriented bastards, you had to give them that. “So you’re desensitizing me first?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Really, Arthur.” Mal throws him an exasperated look. “If you were any more desensitized, you’d be dead. No, I want you to help me design the dreams. You’re familiar with battlefields, and you have the most stable layouts I’ve seen. You’re a natural lucid dreamer.”

She looks incredibly happy about this, which means that it is in some way going to make Arthur’s life a living hell. “And that means…?”

“You’ll have to do a lot of reading,” Mal murmurs, mock solicitous. “Catch up on geometry and architecture and art history, psychology, a little chemistry—”

“You know I never went to college.”

“You would have specialized in the wrong thing if you had. You’re a mathematician in your heart, and pure mathematics wouldn’t have been the right focus. This is much better! Now I have you all to myself, and you’ll study precisely what I need. You’re a blank book, just waiting for me to start writing. It’s wonderful.”

He doesn’t consider himself a blank book, not even academically, and Mal knows it. But she’s right that he’s always been interested in the far edges of math, where it starts to blend into philosophy—he just doesn’t talk about it, because it’s a sideline thing for him, and anyway, he’s never been around anyone who gave a shit. And now Mal is going to scribble all over on top of that. He’s not sure how he feels about it.

“It will be like having a personal tutor,” Mal tells him brightly. “And I won’t even charge you!”

Mal is also a task-oriented bastard. Arthur salutes her.

* * *

“My husband wants to meet you,” Mal announces the day before Arthur takes a week of leave, or, less euphemistically, a week of uninterrupted studying on pain of death by Mal. “He thinks I’m going to run away with you.”

Arthur smiles. “Because you talk about me all the time. Stop talking about me.”

Mal waves this away. “You’re relevant to our research.”

“And he’s funny when he’s jealous.”

“He is hilarious when he’s jealous.” And she’s so earnest about it. She’s the worst, and, terrifyingly, Arthur loves her more every day—but not like that, difficult though the husband may find it to believe.

By all accounts, Mal’s husband is a genius architect—not as good at creating as Mal is at analyzing, but still brilliant. It would be fun to meet an architect who could keep up with Mal…but Arthur’s not sure how he feels about meeting someone so important to her. They’re worryingly close already. “I don’t think bringing me home with you is going to make him less jealous.”

“Hm.” Mal gives him a considering once-over. “You do look twelve. That might help.”

“Thanks, Mal.”

“You’ll enjoy it when you’re fifty.”

“Assuming I live that long.”

“Come to dinner.”

Arthur sighs. He has yet to refuse Mal anything; it’s a problem. “Fine.”

Arthur spends most of his first meeting with Dominic Cobb avoiding suspicious glares and watching Mal stomp gleefully into conversational minefields.

Cobb is obviously Mal’s one true love, and they’re beautiful and a little painful to watch. She keeps reaching out to him, brief touches, just making sure he’s really there. She smiles absently at him when she isn’t otherwise occupied. They unconsciously anticipate each other, making cooking look like a dance, even while they bicker about small, painless things. They fit.

Arthur would envy them if it weren’t so frightening. They’re perfect together, which he’s pretty sure means they’ll be fucked if either of them loses the other—and they’re not exactly leading safe lives, given all this army-funded playing around with brains they do. Arthur’s never depended on anyone, and even he’s miserable when he loses someone. Mal and Cobb are setting themselves up for catastrophe.

That’s why Arthur’s not letting himself depend on Mal, incredibly easy though it would be. He would never have imagined effortless empathy with a middle-class French lady, but there it is. Not that their childhoods were as different as they should have been. Where Arthur was thrown into danger head first, Mal hunted it down. She grew up in a reasonably safe part of the 18th arrondissement in Paris, but you’d never know it by her life experience. She somehow managed to involve herself in every robbery, drug deal, or violent crime within a mile of her home, and she’s lucky to be alive. Arthur, on the other hand, managed to avoid ninety percent of the crap going on in his neighborhood, and he barely survived, even so.

But the thing about the two of them is that if Arthur had grown up in Paris, he would’ve found all the same trouble Mal did. They both require a certain amount of danger to live on; they’re one as bad as the other. The similarity shows, and it’s making Cobb unhappy.

“I hear your dream building is going well,” Cobb says after dessert, one part curiosity to three parts wild suspicion. “I’m surprised, considering—well, you haven’t had much formal training, have you, Arthur?”

Arthur abruptly loses patience. He behaved himself all dinner, it obviously didn’t accomplish anything, so fuck it. He’s never been especially well-behaved, anyway.

“I hear you’re an architect,” he counters, casually hooking an arm over the low back of his chair, posture loose and relaxed in the manner of a man who considers the house and everything in it to be his property. (Arthur’s mother tried to teach him not to be a passive-aggressive asshole in company, but it never stuck.) “Thinking about joining us? Rumor has it you’re not bad.”

Mal is standing with her back to the room holding a bottle of wine in a death grip, one hand clapped over her mouth, shoulders shaking with silent laughter. Game’s up if Cobb notices that. Come on, Mal; work with me, here.

“I’ve gotten some recognition,” Cobb says, his bad opinion of Arthur gaining momentum by the second. “I can pull my weight.”

“I’m sure you could,” Arthur soothes. “Civilians can be surprisingly useful.”

“Okay, kid.” Arthur loves it when they call him ‘kid;’ it’s usually the last stop before demotion. “I know that, unlike you, I haven’t been trained to kill, but there’s a lot more to dreamshare than that! The possibilities are endless, and this narrow-minded, violent approach the military is taking is just—it’s embarrassing and it’s depressing, if you want my honest opinion.”

Arthur happens to agree, but Cobb doesn’t need to know that. “Yes. Defending the nation is embarrassing. You’re right.”

Cobb slams his hands down on the table and jumps to his feet. Ooh, the civilian has a temper. “Look, you little—”

And that’s when Mal loses it, laughing so hard her knees give out and she sinks to the floor. Cobb stares at her, then turns back to Arthur, who’s grinning, and the light dawns.

“Oh, you’re hilarious,” he grumbles, sinking back into his seat, embarrassed. “You realize I don’t know you. For all I knew you could’ve been a mindless grunt. You could!”

“Prejudice is very wrong,” Arthur solemnly informs him.

“It wasn’t prejudice,” Cobb insists. “It was lack of unbiased evidence. So…can you really keep a dream stable for twenty minutes?”

Mal laughs harder.

It’s possible, Arthur thinks, that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

* * *

Arthur looks around and tries to remember how he got here. He can’t.

He must be dreaming, which is interesting, because he has no memory of choosing to dream, and he’s gotten good at remembering things like that. All he knows is that he’s currently standing in a field beside a farmhouse with red siding and a white frame, nothing on the horizon but wheat fields, fences, a few cows. The wind is blowing, there are occasional cow noises, but otherwise it is eerily fucking silent.

This is definitely no dream of Arthur’s. In fact, it’s freaking him out.

“Your Colonel Green,” Mal says, appearing behind him in the manner of dreams, wherein it seems both that she just arrived and that she’s been there all along. “This is his family’s farm.”

For the first time, Arthur thinks he understands why Green is such a prick. It must’ve been horribly disorienting, growing up in this quiet, empty landscape and then moving to the loud chaos of cities and wars and—to a lesser extent—military bases. Arthur sure as shit couldn’t handle the reverse.

Then again, nobody made Green do it. He could’ve been a farmer; he didn’t have to choose the military and, by extension, the opportunity to make Arthur’s life that little bit more unpleasant.

“What are we looking for?” Arthur asks, clear now on why they’re here. “Will we even recognize it?”

“I’ll recognize it when I see it,” Mal says confidently, strolling toward the house. “You’ll kill any projections that try to stop me from taking it, yes?”

Arthur agrees, but Green’s projections turn out to be distressingly passive, and Green himself nowhere in sight. Apparently he trusts the contents of his own mind without examination or question. That may be the most unsettlingly foreign thing about this experience so far, and proof of something Arthur’s long suspected—that Green is about as suited to commanding a psych-based operation as Arthur is to farming.

Arthur and Mal earn a few curious looks in the house, but they’re not challenged, not even when Mal starts ransacking the kitchen. Arthur is beginning to suspect that Green is severely damaged in some subtle way.

“Ah!” Mal cries, holding up a cookie jar in triumph.

A cookie jar. Green hides his deepest, darkest secrets in the cookie jar. That is just…hilarious? Sad? Disturbing? Though not as disturbing as the fact that Mal knew that’s where he would keep them.

The secrets are tucked into a file stamped CLASSIFIED. Arthur will never be able even to pretend to respect Green after this.

“Hm.” Mal pages through the file. “This man is the product of a very strange childhood. But we don’t care, we don’t care…he considers consensual sex with his college girlfriend a terrible secret because they weren’t married? Well, we don’t care—no, we do care a little, but we shouldn’t—ooh, unprovable fraud in a real estate deal with a friend, that’s interesting. Ah, here! Secret military business has its own sub-folder, how precious.” She tilts the paperwork toward Arthur, and they read it together. Unsurprisingly, it is not good news.

The U.S. Army, in its wisdom, has finally worked out what Mal and Arthur knew all along and are currently taking advantage of: you can uncover secrets through dreamshare. They’re calling it extraction, they mean to use it as an interrogation technique, and they’re drastically upping the security clearance for everyone working on Project Somnacin. That’s worrying, but not the real problem.

Green, against the firm recommendation of the rest of the program directors, has decided it’s too risky to allow a contractor, however well-vetted, to know about extraction. He proposes that when they upgrade the program to top secret, they find a way to wipe memories. And then wipe Mal’s.

Wiping memories is almost certainly impossible, and even if it could be done, saner minds will likely succeed in talking Green down from what is, after all, a hysterical overreaction. Then again, they might not. Either way, Arthur and Mal won’t be sticking around to find out.

* * *

“What do you want to do?” Mal asks as soon as they’re back in her office and in one of her dreams. She’s looking to Arthur for reassurance he can’t imagine she really needs. Mal is very practical when her back is against a wall. Then again, she’s dreamt them standing beside St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, and Arthur knows her well enough to know that if she’s dreaming up giant, limestone structures (given to dissolving in rain), it means she’s feeling insecure. Surprising.

“Anything they can do, we can do better,” Arthur suggests casually, as if betraying his employer and arguably his country isn’t a problem for him.

It is a problem. It’s a huge problem. He may not love the army, but he doesn’t betray trusts—he’d never have rated even his current low security clearance if he did. But they haven’t given him a lot of choice. Colonel Green, failure of a human being that he is, has already betrayed Mal, and betraying Mal means betraying Arthur. It’s also very unlikely that they’ll stop with Mal. The way Arthur sees it, this is self-defense.

Arthur has occasionally been described as vengeful.

Mal studies his face, realizes he’s made up his mind, and nods agreement. Vengeance it is. “I’ll explain to Dom,” she says. “You take the equipment. We’ll meet you in Barcelona in two months. The 16th, noon, La Barceloneta, la Plaça de la Font.”

Arthur agrees. If nothing else, there’s a bakery in that plaza that he’s theoretically very fond of. (Thanks to Mal’s dreams, he’s familiar with the layouts of any number of cities he’s never technically seen.) Mal and Arthur both have a gift for not getting caught. Hopefully they’ll be able to keep that going.

When the dream ends, they discuss results the same way they always do. They debate improvements. Arthur tucks a tiny, intricate piece of the PASIV into his boot while Mal twists a longer, thinner piece into her hair, but their conversation never pauses. It’ll take almost a month to smuggle out and replicate the necessary parts, but there’s no doubt they can do it. Arthur has an uncanny memory for design and Mal is the first-named inventor. Besides, security isn’t what it should be—which is hilarious, given what they now know about Green’s feelings. The dreamshare project is still being treated as a low-security, low-priority training program, and a few temporarily misplaced elements won’t raise the screaming red flags they presumably would a month or two from now.

Arthur blesses government inefficiency and closes the slightly cannibalized PASIV, locking it in its safe. He and Mal walk out through the checkpoints together, brazen as hell, silent until they hit the tarmac outside.

“Dom is packing,” Mal murmurs, clearly amused.

“Already? We didn’t know anything until today.”

“He’s packing canned goods, as if he thinks we’ll be stranded in a barren, desolate place.”

Arthur sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “He does understand there’s no reason for anyone to think he—I mean, it’s obvious it has nothing to do with him. He gets that, right?”

Mal squints at the horizon.

“Mal.”

Mal idly studies the nearest Jeep, pretending she’s not avoiding his eyes.

“Mal! I get that fucking with him is your favorite hobby, but you need to tell him he’s in the clear before he freaks and gets us all killed. I’m not kidding, it’s reckless.”

“And we both know you’re never reckless.”

“Exactly. I have never done a single reckless thing,” Arthur lies earnestly.

Mal laughs, and Arthur smiles back at her even though he knows who he’s dealing with and how unwise it is to encourage her.

They reach their cars and go their separate ways, not bothering with goodbyes. Their relationship confuses the other people on the project, who see how well they get along and how seamlessly they work together and fail to understand why they usually avoid each other. The general consensus is that they’re having an affair, but the truth is more simple.

No monster feels at home with a mirror.

* * *

Arthur’s first international crime is a stunning success. Once he and Mal finish stealing and then recreating the PASIV, Arthur takes the replica and goes AWOL. Mal quits the program because her assistant “stole” her work and now she can’t trust anyone, she’ll never be the same, she’s retreating to academia but will of course honor her nondisclosure agreements and not share her results for a period of x years, etc. etc. Since there’s no evidence yet that Arthur stole anything, Mal’s reaction is met with eyerolls and murmurings of hysteria, but not too much resistance. She’s considered a tapped-out resource anyway, and Colonel Green, nominally the man in charge, seems happy in his belief that she’ll never independently figure out extraction and therefore won’t need a mind-wipe after all. Interesting that it doesn’t occur to him that she, a primary inventor of the technology, might grasp the true potential of it.

Happily, Mal enjoys watching people be wrong about her.

By the time it becomes obvious that the technology’s leaked, Arthur is already quietly infamous in Europe. As for Mal, she’s been hired by MIT, and it’s not unusual for an academic to travel as much as she does. She has conferences to attend, fellow scientists to meet, archives to delve into. While the DOD is reflexively suspicious of her, she’s giving them nothing to work with—she’s veered into dream therapy research, at least publicly.

When the army informs her of the probable theft of her work, she uncharitably reminds them that she told them so.

Still, no one can prove that Arthur is guilty of anything beyond being AWOL, and he’s in the wind in any case—Mal is still in touch with some friends of pragmatic morality in the suburbs of Paris, and they accepted Arthur as both an excellent joke and an interesting challenge. By the time they were done with him, his French had improved to near-fluency, he had a decent start on Spanish and Catalan, and he had two new identities.

Barcelona is amazing, if more batshit insane than Mal’s dreams had led Arthur to believe. It’s a fun insanity, though. Arthur’s apartment building in La Barceloneta is comfortably worn in, his neighbors are intriguingly strange, and he does love Mal’s favorite bakery. Best of all, he gets to work with Mal without anyone else slowing them down.

Well, no one but Cobb, anyway, who minimizes his impact by always doing whatever Mal tells him to do. The problem with Cobb is that he spends his free time coming up with fun theories to test, and he never likes a theory unless it could potentially drive all of them insane.

Cobb highlights one of the few differences between Mal and Arthur: they both think he’s adorable, but Mal loves to dream with him while Arthur thinks they should only theorize with him—and then drug him and leave him in a corner while the adults work. Today’s squabble over lunch is a classic example.

“I am not going three levels down,” Arthur explains carefully. “Let someone else do it, and if they don’t go crazy and die, we can try it then. We don’t have to be the fucking canaries, here.”

Arthur’s not allergic to risk, but he does value his sanity more than his life.

“Arthur, this is a chance to experience something no one’s ever experienced before.” Cobb is deep in his earnest/obsessed mode. Arthur idly wonders if causing him a mild physical injury would make him a saner person. “It should be perfectly safe as long as we take basic precautions. Don’t dream memories, don’t lose track of our totems, the usual.”

“You dreamed a memory last week.”

“That was an experiment, and it was only first level, so it was safe. Come on, don’t you have any spirit of adventure?”

“No.”

“Arthur,” Mal murmurs soothingly, reaching over to take both of his hands and trap him. She knows he hates that. “You don’t have to work the theoretical side, but we will because we love the theory. It’s how we got into the business. So let’s do it this way: you keep to the practical side, because that’s where you’re best, and we’ll test out theory. How does that sound?”

Like a terrible idea, but mostly not Arthur’s problem. “It works.”

Cobb stands abruptly, trying to hide a smile and babbling something about having forgotten his keys, which is bullshit. He’s probably off to do a victory dance in private. He makes Arthur tired sometimes.

As soon as Cobb’s back is turned, Mal releases Arthur’s hands and rearranges the silverware in them—switching the fork from his right hand to his left and turning it upside down, putting a knife in his right hand.

Arthur observes this with a sinking feeling, going from aggravation to shame in record time. He’d thought he was at least holding his fork right, for Christ’s sake.

Mal frowns sympathetically at his expression. “You weren’t wrong before. It’s just that this is more European, and most of our work will be in Europe. This way people won’t mark you as American from across the street. So practice. You should know how to switch back and forth.”

Arthur calms, considering that. He studies the way the silverware looks in his hands, deciding he will have to practice if he wants this to seem natural. “Cobb holds his fork like an American.”

“Dom doesn’t care if everyone knows who he is and where he was born,” Mal says, smiling a private smile. “But you like to be overlooked as much as possible.”

She’s right. It’s a game he plays, and local culture is the set of rules he plays by. He wins if people mistake him for native, but the jig isn’t really up unless they work out where he’s from.

Now if only Mal could be this consistently right about things other than Arthur.

“Going three levels down is stupid,” Arthur tells her because he can’t help himself, because he can’t stand knowing he didn’t at least try. “The risk isn’t worth the gain. You know that.”

“And you don’t need to cheat at poker to win,” Mal counters quietly, “but you always do. Why?”

The rush. The fun of beating the game itself. The near-hope that he’ll get caught.

“Fine,” Arthur sighs, giving up on the hopeless and probably hypocritical task of talking Mal into being careful, focusing on trying to eat like a European. Mal’s always been a poor emotional investment anyway; it’s good to be reminded. Not so that he can detach himself—it’s too late for that, he’s already let himself love her. No. Just so that he’s ready.

Brace yourself: you’re going to lose her.

* * *

Once upon a time, when Arthur was in high school, his mother smiled at his father and asked Arthur, Do you think we’ll worry him to death? She was joking, at the time.

Now they’re at his father’s funeral. It’s been six months since Arthur went AWOL with the PASIV, and two months since his mother finally got caught doing something illegal—pickpocketing, of all things.

Arthur doesn’t know the answer to the question.

They’ve always been more sure of each other than they ever were of his father. Arthur is his mother’s creation, but his father was a different kind. Beloved but foreign. Never really owned or understood.

It’s unwise to attend his father’s funeral—to be in the country at all—but Arthur was sneaky about it, and his mother helped—between them, they manage to avoid getting him caught.

And after the funeral, his mother changes her name and moves to a different state, which makes it safe enough to visit her whenever he cheats his way into the country.

He notes with amusement that, like any proud parent, his mother keeps newspaper clippings about his accomplishments on the refrigerator. Articles about shootouts in Colombia, robberies in Morocco, corporate bankruptcies in Sweden. Sometimes she makes mistakes, but not often; she’s clearly attuned to Arthur’s style. He pretends not to notice the articles. Plausible deniability. For the same reason, she never asks whether she’s guessed right.

His father would’ve asked a thousand questions and been horrified by all of the answers.

They miss him.
* * *

Arthur was resigned to Mal’s interrogations even when they worked for the military, because apparently she sees invading his privacy as a kind of extreme sport. Now that they’re officially criminals, she sees no need to put a check on herself at all.

Somehow she’s actually bullied and manipulated him into showing her a dream of his childhood home, even though that is absolutely a dream of a memory and not good practice. (She claimed she wanted to make sure his mind was less banal than Colonel Green’s, and Arthur fell for that despite knowing perfectly well what she was doing. He has a real problem turning down challenges, no matter how stupid they are.)

Arthur shows her the house on Beacon Hill. (No one’s ever been allowed into Dorchester, not even Mal.)

The Beacon Hill apartment was on the top floor of a narrow, tall building with uneven stairs, creaking floors, and a few stolen paintings (his father believed his mother had gotten them at garage sales in Natick; Arthur never asked how that delusion came to be).

It takes Mal two hours of dreamtime to find anything, and she knows him better than anyone.

“Really, Arthur,” she says, staring at the cipher scratched into the underside of the floorboard she’s just pried up. “You are the most functional insane person I’ve ever met, but there’s no doubt at all that you’re insane. How could you possibly force your subconscious to do this?”

“You should talk,” Arthur murmurs. Mal’s secrets are all hidden away in metaphor, in stray scents, in architectural eras and art movements and the clothing styles of her projections. Arthur might not be in a strong position to judge, but based on their experiences of other minds, Mal isn’t exactly mainstream, either.

And as a child, Arthur actually had pried up the floorboards in this apartment (they were loose) to write encoded secrets on them, so matching that in dreams is effortless, almost accidental. The flint shingles on the roof, though—the ones with writing on the inside leaves if you crack them open, idea courtesy Iain Banks—are harder to justify, so it’s lucky Mal doesn’t find them. Or the annotated leaves in the trees Arthur used to climb in front of the apartment building, or the subtle graphs worked into the paintings in the hallway, or the pinholes punched into the rolls of toilet paper such that the message is only visible when the paper is unrolled and held up to light.

“Your mirrors are broken,” she remarks, amused, because she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing (not seeing). They don’t show her reflection or Arthur’s, which is a secret in itself. Still, it’s not her fault that she doesn’t understand; she has no context.

“They’re selective,” Arthur tells her. “How does Cobb hide things?”

“Oh, Dom,” Mal sighs. “He has cookie jar subtlety. Maybe less.”

Arthur presses his lips together and carefully doesn’t laugh about the love of Mal’s life and his boring, boring brain, because that would not end well for him.

* * *

The first time Arthur and Eames meet, Arthur is Mal’s point man. He’s part of a team with an unmatched success rate, he has a place and a purpose, and he’s successfully made a career of his favorite game.

Eames, meanwhile, is one of a handful of people known to be capable of forging, and he’s widely recognized as the best. He’s embittered, abrupt, and dismissive; he’s professional to a fault, but doesn’t seem to be having fun at all. He sees through everyone and is never impressed.

They have, at first glance, nothing in common. Stopping after a first glance is not in Arthur’s job description, though, so he takes his time researching Eames. His mother would be proud—she’s the only person who’s ever accused him of rushing.

Everyone in dreamshare has heard of Eames, of course. Best forger in the world—only forger in the world for a long time—he inevitably has a reputation. A good reputation. The only questionable thing he’s done was nearly beating the architect to death on a job in New Delhi. Still, the architect was Gunter, who Arthur’s been tempted to beat to death, himself. He’s willing to overlook it.

A reputation is only a starting point, though, because dreamshare, for all that it deals in information, is still a small, widely-scattered industry, and they’re not generally paid to steal each other’s secrets. Which means secrets are easy to keep, if you try. And Eames is certainly trying.

One of the keys to good information is knowing the right people. Not the most highly placed—common misconception. No, the ones a little below them, doing eighty percent of the work for ten percent of the pay. Those people often have a very practical attitude toward the sanctity of information, and Arthur loves them all, individually and collectively.

And that is how he manages to get his hands on every file the military has on Eames. And from there, it’s delightfully easy to work backwards.

For a start, Eames’s name is not, in fact, Eames (no surprise there). His rap sheet is a predictable litany of juvenile theft and art forgeries. Nothing recent, despite how hard various authority figures have been looking for him since he went AWOL—he’s learned to cover his tracks, which is a good sign. He appears to come from money, so he’s probably an arrogant, entitled dick. That’s less good. Come to think of it, Thabo, one of Arthur’s favorite extractors, refuses to call Eames anything but Rich Boy—but he says it fondly, and that counts for a lot. Thabo doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Or at all.

Of course, the most worrying thing about a money background is that rich people don’t just dive into a life of crime for kicks—not hands-on and with this level of success, anyway. They usually hire people to do their dirty work for them. This means something must’ve gone very wrong in Eames’s childhood, and since any lingering psychological scars might become a work-related problem, Arthur shamelessly investigates that part of the man’s life, too. He expects some brand of rich boy trauma—distant father, drunk mother, high expectations, not much love. Et cetera.

Eames surprises him (this becomes an annoying trend.) It turns out that, when Eames was fifteen, his father beat his mother to death because she bought a painting he didn’t like. It made all the papers, and even Arthur has to admit that that is legitimate trauma, right there. The father never showed any remorse, either—he actually looks confused in the pictures from his arrest. Because buying bad art is obviously a killing offense, right? (And this man’s son became a forger in every sense of the word. Arthur is reluctantly charmed.)

After that emotional high point, Eames split his time between a cousin’s house, petty crime, and boarding school until he went into the military. Most of his military service is classified; redacted even from the files Arthur could get hold of, but it doesn’t really matter—it has to be dreamshare. That’s why Arthur’s later service is classified, and he was just a lowly career E-3, while Eames was SAS (motto: Who Dares Wins, though Arthur feels The Few, the Proud, the Batshit would be an equally good fit).

In summary: Eames had a horrific childhood, ran away to the army, and after a decade of classified, special forces shenanigans, dropped off the map and started living in the world of mind crime, where his reputation is good. He probably has ridiculous trust issues and no real loyalty to anyone but himself, but he is at least highly professional. It’s a comfortingly familiar pattern. And seeing as Eames is his mother’s maiden name, Arthur might even manage to like him.

“Call me Eames,” the man himself says, shaking Arthur’s hand. Direct gaze, but wary. Defensive rather than offensive. He seems to be exactly what Arthur wanted for this job, and it shouldn’t (doesn’t) matter that there’s something unsettlingly alien about him. Forgers are always a little alien.

“Arthur.” He returns the handshake firmly. “I’m your point man.”

“Ah, the infamous Arthur. So what has the best point man in the business learned about his forger?”

Arthur smiles. It’s not a friendly smile; Eames’s smug drawl is starting to piss him off despite all that he knows. “Not enough.”

One of Eames’s eyebrows goes up in curiosity or alarm, but he doesn’t comment. Mal would’ve commented.

Arthur decides that he and Eames will dream together well enough, but he doubts they’ll ever be friends.

(And relationship analysis skills like that are the reason he studies paper trails instead of people.)

* * *

Eames may be annoying as hell, but Arthur has to hand it to him—he is never boring. For one thing, it only takes him half an hour to see through Arthur. Half an hour to start finishing his sentences and doing viciously accurate impersonations. Half an hour.

It’s not that Arthur doesn’t want anyone to know him (haha, that’s a lie), but he does like to believe, for the sake of his continued survival, that he’s not completely transparent. He’d prefer it to be impossible for some snide rich kid to meet him one day and be capable of forging him well enough to fool his own father the next. Unfortunately, making Arthur’s life difficult seems to be something between a game and a spiritual calling for Eames.

Still, over the course of their first job, Arthur watches Eames effortlessly see to the heart of everyone they meet, watches him metaphorically eat one man alive and steal his skin, and he shelves his dislike. Hiding is a sideline for Arthur, but discovering is Eames’s entire career. It’s only fair that he’s better at it. Besides, most forgers can’t get a handle on Arthur at all. Good to know it takes the best.

And even Eames…even Eames hasn’t got Arthur totally down, though he comes unnervingly close. His mistake is in thinking that Arthur has no imagination, because while Arthur may not be as spontaneously creative as Eames, he’s never found a game he couldn’t rig. He gambles in Monte Carlo, Macau, Las Vegas, cheating his way to luxury suites. He tricks precious thoughts from the minds of strangers. He talks men who think they’re straight and women who think they aren’t into bed, careful to disappear before the situation slides from hilarious to awkward.

Any game is worth it if he knows he can win.

Arthur likes a challenge, but he likes all the challenge to come before what most people consider the start of the game. He can’t remember the last time he gambled without cheating, if he ever has. He likes to be certain. And if something goes wrong, he very much prefers that it not be his fault. It has nothing to do with lack of imagination.

But where Arthur is very imaginative when it comes to breaking the rules, Eames only occasionally notices that rules exist.

“I can’t believe,” Eames says scornfully, “that you actually think the boss is the way to get through to her.”

“She obsessively hates her boss,” Arthur replies through gritted teeth. “It’s an emotion. It’s an opening.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard you say yet, Arthur,” Eames announces, falsely cheerful. “I know because I’m keeping a list of the standouts. I may compile a book.”

“Okay, so what do you suggest, Eames?” At least one of them has to try to focus on the job, here.

“The son,” Eames says. “Obviously.”

Using the son is…in a way it’s fucking genius. Arthur hadn’t thought of it because the client is being an interfering dick and mandated no family members, but the son is adopted. It’s a loophole—a weak one, God knows, but Arthur’s completely willing to ask forgiveness instead of permission. Because the mark doesn’t give a shit about anyone who isn’t family. Eames is right, the boss was a serious long shot.

On the other hand, they’re doing the extraction tomorrow, so Arthur won’t have time to research the son. “You’re suggesting we push back the job.”

“I’m suggesting I go drinking with the son tonight, and then forge him tomorrow.”

“That is stupidly reckless, Eames.”

“It’s my risk to take.”

“No. It’s our risk, but you’re taking it.”

“Your problem, Arthur,” Eames murmurs, “is that you need to be a little less obsessed with procedure.” He whisks out the door before Arthur can scream at him.

Arthur and Eames are just similar enough that differences really, really grate, and it’s making Arthur’s life a living hell.

* * *

Eames takes his pay at the end of the (very successful) job and saunters off, possibly even more of a mystery than he was when he sauntered in. Arthur doesn’t like it. He needs to be able to predict the behavior of the people he works with, and Eames is…if not entirely unpredictable, at least very difficult to understand.

It was an added stress that Mal skipped the job because no one’s sure of the effect of Somnacin on pregnant women, and she isn’t willing to be a lab rat (for once). They ended up with Cobb as their extractor instead, and yeah, Arthur likes Cobb well enough, but it isn’t the same. Mal does call Arthur a few days afterward, at least—but it’s to tell him she’s hearing good things about the forger. Of course it is.

“He’s very capable,” Arthur allows unhappily. Eames is capable, it’s true. Also smug, impatient, and completely impossible to deal with outside of work.

“Is that all he is, Arthur?” Mal asks, leading, gentle. “Capable?”

“What are you asking?” Their near-telepathy doesn’t work as well over the phone. It should be a relief, but in practice it’s just annoying.

“I was wondering if I need to pay attention to Mr. Eames. If he might be important to you, one day.”

“No!” Arthur yelps, startled into abruptness. “What? No. Why would you—did Cobb say something? What did he say?” Because the thing is, Arthur and Eames work together beautifully, unconsciously anticipating each other, covering each other’s weak points. They fit, if only while they’re working—though God knows that’s terrifying enough. All Cobb said at the time was, That went surprisingly well, but there’s no end to the incriminating things he might’ve told Mal.

“Oh, Dom.” Mal laughs fondly. “Dom says the two of you fought the entire two weeks and he never wants to work with you at the same time ever again even though you are the best.”

“And somehow you got from this to Eames being my one true love, is that it?”

“Arthur,” Mal murmurs. “My Arthur, you never fight with anyone you don’t love.”

That’s…depressing but true. He’s professionally polite to people he loathes, fears, or is indifferent to. He’s only a dick to his loved ones. If he doesn’t care about someone, he doesn’t care; it is actually impossible for most people to make him feel anything above vague curiosity or mild irritation. He hates that Mal is never wrong about him.

“I don’t know what he is,” he says at last, since there’s no point in lying to Mal.

“Mm.” Mal is unconvinced. “Well. Let me know when you know.”

She hangs up before Arthur can argue, before he knows quite what he wants to argue about. But he knows she’s laughing at him. He can’t hear her, but he knows.

* * *

Once upon a time, Arthur’s mother told him, Behave yourself at least ninety-five percent of the time. It’s the best way to avoid getting caught.

Arthur lives by that rule, but he definitely makes the most of his five percent. There’s no point in having a straight-laced reputation if you don’t take advantage of it. He was the kid who blew up toilets in grade school, but he had a sixth sense for the approach of authority figures, and always disappeared seconds before everyone else got busted. The other kids invariably ratted him out. The teachers always looked horrified and scolded them for picking on tiny, sweet Arthur.

This trick has never gotten old.

His father would frown, worried, and say, You can’t get away with this forever. His mother would laugh and hug Arthur and say, People are depressingly slow, aren’t they? Try not to be cruel. I know it’s hard.

Arthur’s father was an honest, blue-collar worker with the world’s worst luck. He never learned a skill but it became obsolete. He was never hired at a factory but it went under. He was never fired, but he was still out of a job as often as not, and kept moving his family to poorer and poorer neighborhoods, ashamed, helpless. He believed in honesty and loyalty and hard work; he was a good person—an old-fashioned, working-class gentleman. He was not, however, a shining endorsement of honest living.

Arthur’s mother, by contrast, has always been one of nature’s cons. She worked a nine to five secretarial job throughout Arthur’s childhood to give the appearance of honesty and to avoid upsetting her husband. (They both tried so hard not to upset him. By age ten, even Arthur was treating his father like the child of the family: delicate and in need of protection.) Still, if Arthur had pocket money, it was because his mother had taken it from someone else’s pocket. If they went to Fenway, it was because his mother had won tickets cheating at poker. If they ate out, it was because his mother was blackmailing the chef. It was never anything extreme, never anything her husband would notice—buying them a condo in Cambridge, for example, would’ve given the game away—but she did a dozen small, illegal things every week. It was all that kept them fed sometimes, so it was lucky Arthur’s dad wasn’t great at budgeting.

Arthur’s mother had willingly followed his father into a cage of hard work and frugality, and she’d locked the door behind her. Then she spent years teaching Arthur to pick locks.

* * *

Arthur looks around, trying to find his team. Eames is the hardest to find, which makes sense, because he looks nothing like himself, down to posture and physical quirks. Whatever else he is or might become, he is stunningly good at what he does.

Eames is the dreamer on this job, and the design is a half-ruined castle in the Scottish Highlands. It’s a bleak, rocky landscape, abandoned but for a few cows and a handful of projections.

They’re playing tourists for this job, which Arthur wasn’t completely sold on—who trusts tourists?—but now, seeing it in action, he has to admit it was a perfect choice. Tourists are non-threatening.

“You made a good call,” he tells Eames.

“Your opinion of course means the world to me, Arthur,” Eames drawls, strolling off toward the mark and the ruins. Arthur resists the urge to shoot him because that would be unprofessional. He follows and covers him instead, as agreed, nodding to Thabo as they pass each other. Francesca takes a picture of them and grins. Francesca is usually Thabo’s point man—woman—but she’s willing to play architect when they work with Arthur.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Arthur murmurs to Eames.

“We’re looking for you to do your job while letting me do my job, hm?”

Arthur swallows down any and all enraged noises and splits away, heading to his previously-scouted tower with good line of sight to the killing ground, which is where Eames will be talking to the mark. Arthur loves the killing ground. He’s also a fan of the way the tower has honest-to-God arrow slits. There’s a moat. Arthur would like more of his jobs to involve castles in the future.

He gets into position and watches Eames forge a man the mark once met in the British Museum. They’re about to discover their shared interest in black market antiquities.

The team was hired to find out where the mark has been storing said antiquities. The client, a museum curator, is sure they’re still in the UK. They’re not stealing the antiquities back, though, because the client wants to do that herself. Curators can be surprisingly maniacal about their collections.

Eames chats with the mark for a long time. It earns them a few curious looks from the projections, but nothing beyond that. Eames waves for Thabo, who joins them briefly, then heads for the castle with Francesca trailing them. Projections still calm, mark still babbling to Eames. Smooth, smooth, smooth.

The projections start looking uneasy five minutes later, and they really fly off the handle about a minute after that, converging on Eames from all directions. The mark flees the scene, but Eames just keeps an eye on Thabo and Francesca, absently shooting projections that get too close to him or to them. Arthur helps take out as many as he can, but there are too many for that to work long-term.

He’s starting to wonder if they’re ever planning on finishing the fucking extraction when Eames finally drops the forge and turns Arthur’s way, making a little beckoning gesture with two fingers. It’s one of the most irritating things Arthur has seen in his life, and he finds it amazingly easy to shoot Eames in the head.

In the end, the extraction was a dazzling success, which should be a good thing. It is a good thing—it’s just that the seamless teamwork with Eames is freaking Arthur out, not least because he can’t tell whether or not it’s freaking Eames out. Eames is very hard to read, in dreams or out of them. And yes, a lot of people are unreadable while awake—Arthur himself is not the most expressive guy in the world—but it’s incredibly annoying to deal with someone who’s unreadable even when you’re standing inside his mind.

This is what Arthur hates about forgers: it’s impossible to come to any conclusions about them based on the way they present themselves in dreams. All forgers present the same way, which is to say, any way they consciously choose. That’s telling, sure, but only in the way clothing choices are telling.

In dreams, most people look like what they expect to see in the mirror, which means, among other things, that they’re almost always reversed—mirror images of themselves. They may also appear younger or older than they are in the real world, thinner or heavier, more or less attractive, or even, in the case of one extractor Arthur knows, a different gender. The same person may vary in dream appearance from day to day, depending on mood. Complete accuracy is rare and strange and possibly indicative of subtle damage, of a worrying degree of detachment.

Point men are most likely to be accurate, followed by architects, followed by chemists. Extractors are rarely accurate.

And forgers look just as they choose.

Arthur looks exactly like himself in dreams, precise down to the newest line across his forehead. Mal is the same way (strange for an extractor). Cobb is mirror-reversed and a few years younger, a few pounds lighter. Vanilla inaccuracies. (Oh, Cobb.)

Eames deliberately forges himself in his own mirror image, the better to blend in. It’s the creepiest possible option. Eames has a gift that way.

“That was the easiest job I’ve pulled in years,” Thabo tells Arthur. “You and Rich Boy make a good team. I’d work with you again.”

This is incredibly high praise from Thabo, a man not easy with praise. Arthur appreciates it, or at least, he tries to. It’s true, Arthur and Eames do make a good team.

It’s not Thabo’s fault that Arthur finds that annoying.

* * *

“What are you doing here?” Arthur demands.

“Would you believe I came to visit a friend?” Eames asks with a blameless smile.

“No.”

“Hurtful of you.”

It’s midsummer, and Eames has appeared without warning at the door of Arthur’s apartment in Vienna, which is strange, because the last Arthur knew, Eames was in Beirut aggressively courting death, and also didn’t know that Arthur had an apartment in Vienna. Arthur’s trying not to panic over the fact that Eames clearly knows both about the apartment and also where it is. It’s not working.

He immediately hustles Eames all the way from his apartment in Rudolfsheim to his sometime-office in the Millennium Tower. If he’d been feeling friendly, they might’ve gone to a café on Mariahilferstrasse to people-watch. Eames would’ve loved that.

Arthur is not feeling remotely friendly. In fact, he’s trying to talk himself down from homicide over the fact that he’ll have to abandon this entire city. He’s fond of this apartment, despite all the tiny, soccer-playing menaces around the place. It’s his place, and Eames has ruined it.

“I have a job you might enjoy,” Eames says, acting oblivious, like he hasn’t already identified and analyzed Arthur’s every emotion. Asshole. He’s also prowling around the office looking fascinated, which is a trick. Arthur shares this office with two architects and an extractor, all paranoid as hell, so the place is stripped almost bare. The only remotely interesting thing in it is a bowl of walnuts that Arthur blames on Ellie, the extractor, who squirrels food away like she’s expecting a famine. There’s also an amazing view of the Danube, but Eames is ignoring that.

“Telephones, Eames,” Arthur suggests, while reminding himself that killing a famous name in dreamshare would be a bad idea. It’s the sort of thing that makes everyone else nervous, which cuts down on employment opportunities. Also, he would probably miss Eames if he were dead, which is infuriating. “Use them.”

“This is more fun.”

Arthur reminds himself again why he shouldn’t kill the best forger in the business. He also wistfully reflects on the days, not so long ago, when he was under the impression that Eames had no sense of fun. “What’s the job?”

“Breakthrough mathematical something,” Eames murmurs vaguely. “I wrote down the details for you; it was all a mystery to me.”

He knows perfectly well that Arthur would extract from mathematicians for free. There’s no way he can turn this job down. Among other irritating quirks, forgers are very good at manipulation.

Life would be much less complicated if Arthur could decide once and for all to just hate Eames.

“Mark?” Arthur sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose and trying to push back the impending headache.

Eames grins, settling into a sprawl in the desk chair, and gives the details. The mark is a professor at UC Berkeley. Her academic rivals would like to publish before she does and are willing to offer a ridiculous sum of money for the privilege. The mark spent much of her youth philosophizing about math with her brother, who was a devout gardener. He’s been dead for a decade, but Eames is confident he can forge the man anyway.

“You build the garden—the Cobbs tell me you have an uncanny memory for design—I’ll forge the brother, and we shouldn’t even need an extractor,” Eames concludes, idly cracking Ellie’s walnuts. Eames hates walnuts, so this is either a nervous tic or a deliberate attempt to annoy Arthur. Smart money is on option two.

“It’s reckless to work without an extractor,” Arthur points out as calmly as he can. It feels like he has some variation on this conversation every time he works with Eames. “And stop doing that, it’s making me fantasize about killing you.”

Eames pauses, eyebrows raised. “Method?”

“You’re in a rolling chair, there’s a floor-to-ceiling glass window behind you, and we’re on the fifteenth floor.”

“Ah.” Eames spins to peer out the window for the first time. “Thick glass.”

“But not bulletproof.” It goes without saying that Arthur has at least one gun.

“Of course.” Eames carefully sets down the nutcracker and scoots his way around the desk so that it’s between him and the window. “Which extractor did you have in mind, then?” he asks, smiling up at Arthur.

Arthur almost smiles back before he remembers who he’s dealing with and why it’s unwise to encourage him.

Arthur bullies Thabo into being the extractor, complaining bitterly about Eames the entire time. Their relationship delights Thabo, and Arthur is trying not to wonder why. He’s definitely never going to ask.

The professor’s mind is amazing.

* * *

Like Mal, Arthur derives great satisfaction from watching people be wrong about him. At first, they think he’s every bit as buttoned up as he seems. Once they get to know him, they decide it’s all an act, and that he cultivates the uptight look to make his job easier. Neither interpretation is exactly right, and Arthur’s careful to steer people away from the truth.

Step one of the disinformation process is to bury his childhood as deeply as possible. He’s spent years working on it, years studying and imitating and changing habits. It’s not just word choice and manners; it’s body language, attitude, the thousand assumptions inherent in the way people interact. A baby con from the rough part of town just doesn’t walk into a room the way the firstborn son of an old money family does.

Military training covers a multitude of sins, thankfully, and as for the rest, Arthur tries. God, he tries. In fact, he tries too hard—that’s his tell, and he doesn’t know how to fix it. With his neurotically perfect clothes and posture and speech, he comes off as Type A and old-fashioned; he’s lucky most people put it down to a point man quirk.

Most people, but not Eames. Of course not Eames. Eames with his chaotic clothes and bad posture and perfect table manners, Eames who so obviously comes from money that he might as well be wearing diamond-soled shoes. He was apparently born knowing which social rules are important and which can be safely ignored. Regardless of his persona of the moment, he’s always taken seriously when he wants to be. It’s absolutely the thing Arthur hates most about him.

Arthur actually tried imitating Eames for a while—not the whole package, of course. Just a few, discrete mannerisms Arthur liked. He’s done this all his life with many different people, and it had never been a problem before.

With Eames, it was a disaster. Eames always noticed, and once he’d noticed, he’d start imitating Arthur’s imitation, and it quickly devolved into farce (which Arthur found funny, not that he’ll ever admit it). Eames notices every slip. If Arthur’s silverware isn’t perfectly arranged on his plate, Eames fixes it for him. If Arthur’s shirt comes untucked, Eames tugs on it. If Arthur tilts his chair back, Eames threatens to tip it over.

It’s impossible to tell if he does all this because he’s a dick or out of some bizarre, Eamesish attempt at helpfulness, but when Arthur’s feeling uncharitable or especially insecure, he doesn’t care.

On the other hand, he’s aware that Eames can dissect people at a glance and destroy them with a word. If he wanted to take Arthur apart, Arthur would be in pieces all over the floor—but Eames has always restricted himself to mild pranks. That leaves Arthur with an awful combined sense of irritation and indebtedness, and no easy way to repay either.

Well, almost no way. Eames is a little dyslexic, and while he understands logically that that has no relationship to his intelligence, he doesn’t really believe it. He’s under the unshakeable (though hideously inaccurate) impression that he’s stupid, courtesy some jackass teacher or relative who got to him when he was young and defenseless. It’s a weakness, and weaknesses were made to be exploited.

If Arthur compliments Eames’s intelligence in an amazed tone at every opportunity, he and Eames are the only ones who know why, just as he and Eames are the only ones who know why Eames keeps rearranging Arthur’s silverware. Then, too, Eames always fixes Arthur’s mistakes in presentation before anyone else notices, just as Arthur always chooses Eames for jobs that require the most brilliant of forgers. They’re even.

It’s lucky they’ve hammered out this arrangement, because Arthur’s somehow ended up working with Eames almost as often as he works with Mal and Cobb. He’s not sure why. He is sure that he doesn’t want to examine the reasons.

At the moment, he’s working yet another job with Eames and Cobb, which is a special hell. Arthur can work reasonably well with either one, but something about working with the two of them together is exhausting. It would be livable—even fun—if Mal were there with them, but she’s skipping. She claims it’s because she’s pregnant again, but Arthur knows it’s really because she’s on the brink of some huge theoretical breakthrough and can’t be pried from her books. That, and she loves throwing Arthur into awkward social situations and then laughing at his pain from afar.

On the plus side, Cobb has grown up a lot in the last few years. He used to pitch prima donna tantrums with any extractor but Mal, but so far he’s behaving himself with Ellie. Arthur almost has faith that everything won’t go to shit.

And against all experience, the job is indeed smooth and beautiful. Even so, Arthur ends it physically and emotionally exhausted, and informs Mal that he flatly refuses to work with her husband again unless she is around to make him behave.

This is clearly the most hilarious thing Mal’s heard all day. Arthur gets no sympathy from anyone.

* * *

Two years later, Mal and Arthur dream of Paris. It turns out to be their last dream together. Appropriate, really.

“Your husband claims it’s dangerous to dream memories. He gives lectures on this topic on a daily basis,” Arthur mentions, peering into the window of Mal’s favorite patisserie. They’re acting like locals and disturbing nothing; Arthur’s projections are ignoring them.

“He certainly does,” Mal agrees, sad but smiling. “And then he does it himself.”

Arthur sighs. “I’ve noticed.”

“He is hopeless, isn’t he?” Mal murmurs, the question addressed more to herself than to Arthur. How can you find each flaw more endearing than last? But they have two kids by now, so it’s too late for her to be asking herself that.

“Hopeless,” Arthur agrees. He’s not just talking about Cobb and Mal knows it, which is why she’s laughing. At Arthur, at herself. “I know you love him more than life and all, but you have to admit, Mal, he’s so predictable it hurts.”

“He’s straightforward most of the time,” she allows, “but he’s a brilliant architect and a good extractor. Don’t act superior, Arthur. All of us are straightforward at the deepest levels, it’s…humbling. We think we’re so complex, but we’re simple at the core. Dom just doesn’t bother to pretend.”

He doesn’t know how to pretend, Arthur thinks uncharitably. He still can’t decide if it’s cute or annoying. “Deepest levels? You’ve gone further than three?”

“Yes, and we were fine. I’ll talk you into going with us someday.”

“You won’t.”

“You’re so cautious about this one thing, it’s strange.” She gives Arthur a weighing look. She’s great at those; she used to make drill sergeants squirm. “But it doesn’t mean you’re wrong,” she allows, abrupt and alarming. “So if I’m gone—if I ever leave Dom behind, I want you to look after him for me. Not forever, I don’t ask forever. Just until you know he’ll survive.”

“Mal, what—?”

“If you find your someone, tell me, and I promise I’ll do the same for you. So promise me you’ll take care of Dom. If I lose myself.”

He promises out of confusion, he promises because this is a dream of a memory and nothing seems as real as it should. He promises for the sake of a purely theoretical return promise.

But he does promise, and promises are important to both of them.

* * *

Arthur’s next job with Eames and Cobb turns out to be their last job before Mal’s death. He’d sworn never to work with them both on the same job again without Mal present, and he hasn’t, not until now. But Mal asked it of him, and at this point, he can’t deny her anything.

Worse yet, Cobb is playing at being an extractor, which would be worrying at the best of times and is downright terrifying now—Cobb isn’t dealing well with Mal’s…illness, insanity, whatever. Usually, his greatest gift as an extractor is his ability to hire brilliant people and then get the hell out of their way, but this time, he’s micromanaging. It’s a warning sign, and Arthur should be trying to help, but he isn’t dealing especially well with Mal’s illness, either. He’s having trouble so much as looking at Cobb—he’s too much a mirror of Arthur’s own pain.

For his part, Cobb also seems obligingly eager to avoid Arthur. He keeps sending Arthur off on pointless field trips with Eames while he sits alone in the warehouse and broods over The Plan. Today, for instance, he’s sent them to a public pool to reconfirm for the third time that the mark is incapable of sitting in sunlight for more than five minutes without falling asleep.

They reconfirm. And indeed. The mark’s passed out flat on his back with his arms straight down by his sides, just like every other time they checked. Useless information acquired, they wander back to the warehouse, Arthur resolving to memorize every mind-numbing detail of the mark’s life so he’ll look constantly busy and Cobb will leave him be.

“Did you know,” Eames murmurs, peering into the window of a random pawn shop with inexplicable interest, “there’s an argument that the position you sleep in—when you’re sleeping naturally—says a fair bit about you? If there’s anything in it, our mark must be a very rigid personality.”

Arthur sleeps curled into fetal position on his side, one hand under his pillow, fingertips brushing the handle of the sheathed knife he keeps there. He happens to know that Eames sleeps sprawled carelessly on his back, arms spread out, taking up more than his share of space. No matter how Arthur analyzes that, it’s depressing. “Fascinating, Eames.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Eames asks abruptly.

“What?”

“And not just you, Cobb. I do prefer to be forewarned if I’m dreaming with people on the brink of losing their minds.”

He makes a valid point there, unfortunately. “Mal.”

“Excellent! Mal.” Eames grins, abrupt and alarming. And so very fake. “So Mal is…sick? Angry? Leaving Cobb for a cabana boy in Tahiti?”

If only it were just a cabana boy. “You could say she’s sick. She’s…” She’s walking dead, she’s given up, we’ll be lucky if she’s still alive by the time we get back. “Too many experiments in dreaming.”

Arthur braces himself for the third degree, but Eames just nods, all expression draining from his face, eyes dropping to the sidewalk. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

Of course. Information is important to both of them. Eames wouldn’t treat it lightly, or ask for more than he needs.

Arthur has a sudden, irrational moment of panic that he’ll end up losing Eames, too.

* * *

Promises are dangerous. They come back to haunt you whether you keep them or not; they’re the seeds of nightmare.

But then, there’s plenty of nightmare fuel to go around. Mal watching her reflection in the blade of a knife with calculating interest. Cobb’s voice cracking every time he says her name. Mal gripping Arthur’s wrist so tightly she leaves red stripes that turn dark and end as bruises, both of them knowing it won’t be enough to hold her. Mal is present only in the most literal sense of the term. In every way that counts, she’s already gone.

She and Arthur have dinner together the week before the Cobbs’ anniversary. Cobb’s been in a good mood because Mal’s been making the effort to hide her mental state from him. He thinks she’s getting better, but all she’s done is make up her mind.

She hasn’t been hiding anything from Arthur; he’s touched that she trusts him even when she thinks he’s a projection. As they eat, Arthur watches her tense expression and dead eyes, and he knows, not suspects, but knows that he’ll never see her again. Not alive. He doesn’t try to talk her out of it because there’s no point. She thinks he’s a projection, which automatically invalidates any argument he might make, and it will only end with both of them miserable.

He doesn’t want to ruin their farewell dinner.

“If Dom doesn’t, if he won’t…if he stays…you remember, Arthur,” she says as she leaves, desperate, wild, beautiful even broken. “Remember what you promised me.”

He wonders what Mal thinks she’s doing, calling in favors from a projection. But still, he remembers.

* * *

Mal’s funeral is just as terrible as Arthur knew it would be. What he couldn’t have predicted, if he’d thought about it at all, was that Eames would be there. Eames generally prefers the path of least resistance, and Mal’s funeral is anything but. But Arthur didn’t think about it. Thus far, in fact, he’s managed not to think about anything beyond logistics.

To be fair, the logistics are complicated. Most critically, there’s the task of preventing anyone from accosting Cobb and accusing him of murder—the police haven’t formally charged him yet, but he has been told not to leave town, and the ambiguity is causing a certain amount of friction among the mourners. Arthur keeps having to run interference.

Apart from the social logistics, there are, of course, the physical logistics. First there’s the service at the church (interesting choice—when did Cobb get religion?). Next, the burial, an inconvenient thirty miles away. Finally, the post-funeral dinner, twenty miles in a different direction, at someone’s cousin’s house. It makes for a lot of transportation. It’s also a smoggy 100 degrees in the LA basin, and Arthur has to make sure no one faints and pitches into the grave after Mal. That would do nothing for the already frayed nerves of her parents. God, her parents.

Mal’s dad is currently too much of a mess to have opinions; he’s clearly still hoping he’ll wake up from this nightmare. Her mom, though, has a tense expression and dead eyes; she knows reality when she sees it, and she’s decided to blame Cobb for what she sees. Arthur understands her feelings, but Mal wouldn’t approve, and Arthur promised. So on top of organizing the funeral, he manages Cobb in particular: he bullies him into getting dressed in the morning, keeps an eye on him throughout the service, shields him from various ill-wishers, drives him and the kids to the church and the burial and the dinner and finally back home.

And somewhere along the way Arthur discovers that he’s acquired Eames. He doesn’t know what to do about that—it’s not in the script. Maybe he doesn’t need to do anything. He’s under no obligation to Eames, no obligation to be pleasant or supportive or even sane. He’s never promised Eames a thing. He’s never allowed himself to.

So he ignores the persistent presence of Eames, and when the day is finally over, he drives to the nearest bar and proceeds to drink himself into a bitter, sullen stupor, trying to erase Mal and the funeral and his own likely future from his mind. This takes all of his energy, which leaves none for speaking to anyone, not even Eames. For whatever reason, and very unusually, Eames respects the silence. He just sits beside Arthur, drinking water and being. Well. Persistently present. Also stealing Arthur’s keys when Arthur orders his fourth drink. It’s…not unpleasant to have him there.

For a little while, Arthur manages to forget.

It doesn’t last.

* * *

Two months after Mal dies, Cobb says, “I miss her,” as if Arthur doesn’t know that, as if Arthur doesn’t miss her just as much, even if he needs her less.

That doesn’t matter. What matters is that Cobb on his own would self-destruct, and Arthur promised Mal he wouldn’t let that happen. He can’t fix Cobb’s ruined family, but he can hold him still until he stops flailing around trying to hurt himself. It’s thankless, but duty often is.

For the first three months after Cobb’s accused of murder, it’s just the two of them, alone together, changing locations every week. Arthur calls in favors, has friends and acquaintances and even respected enemies throw off the scent, lay false trails. He builds up three strong identities for Cobb, who will need them once he’s eased off the deranged grieving enough to work, and forces him to keep a low profile in the meantime.

If the military knew about Cobb’s connection to the theft of the PASIV, the lowest profile in the world couldn’t save him, but no one knows. Mal was good about that, even at the end. Possibly due to distraction, she left all the blame at Arthur’s door. (With his permission. He’d had no intention of doing anything under his birth name again, and he has even less intention of it now.)

“I can work,” Cobb announces around month four. “I have to get back to my kids; I need money. I need to work.”

“You’re not working,” Arthur says dismissively, refusing to look away from his computer. He’s already caught three grammatical errors in the Daily Mail and he’s only read one article; he’s not in a forgiving mood. “You’d get us both killed.”

In retrospect, he should have found a more diplomatic way to put that—Cobb is contrary at the best of times. Arthur may be an excellent planner and organizer, but he’s never been great at people. That was Mal’s job.

“I know you loved Mal,” Cobb says, halfway between a shared secret and an accusation.

“Yeah,” Arthur agrees mildly. “I did.”

“Mal would’ve wanted me to be with the kids.”

“Actually, Mal wanted you dead. Remember?” Not technically true. Mal wanted him alive and awake, and thought death was the only way to get there. And can they confidently say she was wrong? Cobb’s not up to philosophy at the moment, though, so Arthur doesn’t bother delving into the true nature of reality.

“Mal in her right mind would’ve wanted me to be with the kids,” Cobb insists tightly.

“I know exactly what Mal wanted,” Arthur informs him, finally looking up from the train wreck in print. “And that’s why you’re not working right now.” Because Arthur promised. She made him promise.

Cobb chokes on enraged frustration and storms out of the room. But not out of the building. He’s not quite stupid enough to ditch Arthur—he knows how dependent he is. They’re like conjoined twins who can’t stand each other. It’s amazing.

Arthur doesn’t laugh, but only because he’s not sure he could stop if he started.

* * *

Five months after Mal’s death, Eames chases Arthur and Cobb down. He’s looking for a crew, but Arthur still won’t let Cobb work (he’d get everyone killed), and can’t leave him alone (he’d get himself killed). It’ll be a few months yet before Arthur’s accounts are all tapped out, and he plans to make the most of them. He turns Eames down. He tells himself he’s not disappointed to have to do it.

Eames takes the rejection with amused resignation, but Cobb throws a fit. He goes through his well-trodden litany—needing to work, the kids, what Mal would have wanted—but throws in a new twist—that Arthur’s never trusted him and is therefore biased. At this point he’s almost yelling, bellowing that if Mal were here, she would—

And that is where Arthur leaves the room. Yeah, he promised, and yeah, he understands why Cobb’s on the ragged edge, but even so, there are limits to the amount of crap Arthur can take before he kills Cobb himself. If Cobb would remember, ever, at any time, that Arthur is also grieving, that would make life so much less unbearable.

He climbs up to the roof of the hotel that’s hosting the latest Cobb-related drama, leans on the concrete parapet, and buries his face in his hands. He spends the next five minutes trying really hard not to think.

“I know you were fond of the late Mrs. Cobb,” Eames drawls, elbows appearing on the parapet beside Arthur, “but there’s no need to follow her example.”

He sounds bored, which means nothing. Forgers always pretend, even when there’s no reason to, even when it actively undermines them. Because if Eames is here at all, it means he’s very, very worried. “I’m not the jumping kind, Eames,” Arthur says.

“Nor was she, from what I understand,” Eames murmurs.

“Yeah,” Arthur sighs, idly pushing a few chips of concrete off the parapet and vaguely hoping they hit someone unpleasant down below. “She had a kick when she would chain smoke every time we dreamed.”

Eames can run for miles on tiny scraps of information. “Ah. Quit topside, did she?”

“When she was trying to get pregnant, the first time.”

Eames takes that in and comes to all the right conclusions. Mal did things in dreams that she wouldn’t let herself do topside. She lived in dreams and only existed while awake. Dangerous—people like that sometimes choose to forget they’re dreaming. The only strange thing about Mal’s story is that she did the opposite. Overcorrection, maybe.

“Did you warn her to stop smoking in dreams, Arthur?” Eames asks, studying Arthur carefully. Missing nothing.

“Once.” After that, there was no point; she knew what Arthur thought, she didn’t care, and she could be violently stubborn. Mal was very carefree until she wasn’t, just as Arthur is very careful until he isn’t. She made me promise, he thinks, wanting to tell Eames, unable to form the words. I let her go. “But who knows, maybe she’s not dead. Maybe she woke up.”

“Oh,” Eames sighs, sinking slowly down to sprawl on the ledge. “Philosophy.”

Arthur smiles, faint and shaky, but there. Eames is a relief. Arthur wishes he could run away with him.

He can’t let himself, of course. He’s not even sure Eames would want him to. Instead, he sighs and collapses across the ledge beside Eames, letting their elbows touch. Letting himself have this, just for a while.

* * *

“Zahir in Arabic means ‘notorious,’ ‘visible’; in this sense it is one of the ninety-nine names of God, and the people (in Muslim territories) use it to signify ‘beings or things which possess the terrible property of being unforgettable, and whose image finally drives one mad.’” —The Zahir

* * *

Death was far from new to Arthur by the time Mal died. In fact, death wasn’t new to Arthur by the time he was old enough to legally drink, and by then he’d long adopted the neighborhood custom of going to the graves of loved ones on the anniversaries of their deaths and getting trashed. It seemed a noble thing to ditch school for when he was sixteen.

It’s definitely not noble to ditch Cobb for it, but tradition is tradition, and this is the first anniversary, so it’s important. He’d drag Cobb along, but something tells him it wouldn’t go over well. Plus Cobb would get arrested. There’s that.

Mal would’ve appreciated this tradition—pity she and Arthur never had any common dead. Well, they had one, but they never did figure out where her body ended up.

(She was a chemist friend of Mal’s, and her name was Anabella. She was gorgeous and wild, and her usual expression suggested she’d recently stuck her finger in a light socket and was thinking about doing it again. Interestingly for the industry, Ana not only failed to see why preferring dreams to reality was a problem, but also why the distinction in any way mattered. It all seemed, she said, real enough to her, and there was no way to prove the existence of a world outside the mind in any case. She found totems hilarious. She slept with Arthur and argued with Mal about the objective existence of reality and failed to take either of them seriously. She took almost nothing seriously; she was always laughing. She’d died laughing, falling off a building while trying to escape an enraged mark—the world’s last, best joke at her expense.

Possibly where Mal had gotten the idea, in retrospect.

Ana must’ve expected to wake up when she hit the ground. And maybe she did; maybe that’s what happens when you die in the real world. Maybe you wake up. Maybe there is no real world.)

Mal is buried in Riverside fucking California in some godforsaken cemetery in the midst of a bleak, brown landscape that Arthur violently disapproves of. Cemeteries should be dark, closed in, and full of trees. What they should not be is barren except for sad, sick grass that’s losing the battle of pretending it belongs in a desert. On top of that, gravestones should stand up. These are doormat gravestones because the people who mow the pitiful excuse for a lawn can’t be bothered to trim around real gravestones. In related news, Arthur has always hated California. The entire state is an expensive but halfhearted imitation of randomly selected originals.

Mallorie Cobb, the doormat gravestone says. Beloved mother and wife.

Here lies Dr. Mallorie Miles Cobb, Arthur thinks. Undoubtedly annoyed that she is not as famous as she should be. What, couldn’t Cobb afford a few more letters?

He’s still brooding over that when Eames appears. Eames, who would show up now, when Arthur is at his worst. But then, if Arthur were going to share his mourning traditions with anyone other than Mal, he would choose Eames.

In fact, the more Arthur thinks about it, the more unlikely Eames’s presence starts to seem. It’s just too perfect that he’s here. The surreal feeling intensifies, partly because Eames shouldn’t have been able to find Arthur here, and partly because Arthur has, by this time, been at the grave for three hours and wiped out one and a half of the three six-packs of Sam Adams (it’s tradition) that he brought with him, and that’s enough to make anything seem surreal. (A drunk is an easy mark, Arthur’s mother always says. Arthur doesn’t like being an easy mark in front of Eames—not that anybody could tell, given how often he sets himself up for it.)

Of course, it’s always a little hard to believe that Eames is real, no matter how you look at him and how sober you are when you do it. It can make things awkward on jobs.

“Not what I would’ve imagined,” Eames says slowly, once he’s given Arthur and surroundings a thorough inspection.

Under normal circumstances, Arthur would ignore that, or maybe say something vaguely snide, but he’s been sitting in direct Southern California sunshine for hours drinking lots of beer and very little water while staring at the grave of his—what, friend? Platonic life partner? His Mal—and it’s too much effort. He goes for something simpler and more to the point. This is clearly his day for reliving high school, anyway. “Yeah, well. The fuck d’you know about me, really?”

Eames’s face does something uninterpretable. Arthur hands him a beer. He needs one; it’s tradition. Eames clearly didn’t see that coming, either.

It’s always satisfying to surprise Eames, seeing as he tends to be such a sanctimonious prick on the subject of his own brilliant imagination and Arthur’s lack thereof. Like imagination is worth the pain it brings you. Arthur has spent actual decades wishing for less imagination than he has. Must be nice, not feeling like your brain is actively trying to ruin you.

Not that Eames’s life has been a cakewalk either, obviously—just a different kind of shitty. Arthur knows this, because of the two of them, he’s always been better about background checks. Eames tends to dive in blind and assume he can make up the difference on observation alone. He’s gonna get his stupid ass killed that way. And then what will Arthur do? Arthur will fucking die, that’s what he’ll do. Observe that, Mr. Eames.

“Arthur…why…? Hm. What possessed you to come here with more beer than is at all reasonable for one person?”

“Tradition,” Arthur explains seriously.

“Tradition,” Eames repeats like he doesn’t think he heard right, even though, obviously, that is what Arthur said. Eames’s reaction vaguely makes Arthur want to shoot him, but he can’t, because they’re not dreaming. He probably should have brought a gun anyway; that’s quasi-traditional, too. Guns and beer and grief, though. Bad combination, Arthur’s always thought. And the cops seemed to agree with him.

“Mal only died last year.” Eames is apparently still talking. He was so good about not talking when they were at Mal’s funeral. Why can’t he do that again? “How can it be tradition?”

“Not just for Mal,” Arthur hisses, exasperated, waving his bottle around and slopping some beer onto the grave. But that’s okay. Mal secretly liked beer. “For people who die.”

Eames is outright staring now. “I knew you were military, so that would explain…but you didn’t learn this from that lot.”

Hell no, he didn’t learn to grieve from the military. Military grief is order and quiet calm, guns fired on cue and only for show, spouses and children crying in formation. It seems like it should be Arthur’s style, but it really, really isn’t. That was so often true with the military. “High school tradition,” he elaborates.

This doesn’t seem to make Eames any happier. Arthur hands him another beer, though he still hasn’t drunk the first one. Ungrateful.

“And what’s the rest of this tradition? If I may ask,” Eames asks. The hell is the point of asking if you can ask a question after you’ve already asked it? “What happens after you’ve sat at the grave and got completely pissed?”

“You wait until dark,” Arthur informs him, “then you drive around and shoot out car windows. In memory of. You drive slow, though, because if you crash, it’s tough to disappear when someone calls the cops about the people shooting out windows. You know?”

“Ah.” Eames looks really dumb when he’s surprised. Arthur fervently hopes his face will stick like that. It would make dealing with him less…whatever. It’d be easier if he could be less hot, is all. “And is that the plan for today? Drive around and shoot out windows?”

“Don’t be stupid. It’s depressing to do that alone.”

“As opposed to drinking alone all afternoon. At a grave.”

“I’m drinking with Mal,” Arthur corrects, and pours the rest of his bottle onto the grave to prove his point. “And you. Mostly Mal. Anyway, drunk and disorderly. Who needs that? I’m too old for that shit.”

Eames sighs and rubs his mouth, wiping away whatever expression his face was trying to make. Fucking forgers and their lying fucking faces.

“Anyway,” and this is when Arthur realizes exactly how drunk and possibly dazed with heat exhaustion he is, because now he’s the one talking without prompting, while Eames watches with hawk’s eyes and a firmly neutral expression. “I’m not usually alone. Traditionally, I mean. There were always a bunch of us.”

“In high school.”

“Right. Drunk, miserable kids with guns. Good times.”

Eames may actually be finding this funny, which is amazing in a really fucked up kind of way. “And did you ever manage to maim anyone at this?”

“Yeah, but just ourselves, that time Sean shot at Fiona’s gravestone and the bullet ricocheted and hit him in the leg and we had to lie to his mom about what happened and his sister threw a shoe at his face.” Arthur snickers. That had been hilarious. “Jackass.”

“He shot at your friend’s grave?”

“My girlfriend’s grave.” It seems important that Eames understand this. “That’s different, I was like. Chief mourner. After her family, I mean.”

Eames takes a minute. “And this person shot at your girlfriend’s grave…why?”

“Because she got shot to death, so he wanted to, you know, make that obvious. Always was a moron.”

“Was?”

“Oh yeah. No way a guy like that survives puberty. He kicked it the next year, nobody was surprised. Sister was wicked pissed, though. He died of an OD, maybe? I can’t even remember, I’d kind of cut him loose already. How fucked is that?”

“Reasonably fucked,” Eames allows. “I believe I’m finally beginning to understand you, though, Arthur.”

Arthur snorts with laughter and drops his latest empty bottle onto the browning, pathetic grass. “Sucks to be you.”

Eames narrows his eyes. “Not at all.”

“I’m neurotic and hostile and I hold grudges like it’s going out of style. You do get that.” Arthur notes with interest that he is baring his underbelly for no apparent reason. He wonders if Eames will stomp on him.

“Arthur, I can honestly say I’ve never been fonder of you.”

“Hah!” Apparently not; Eames is such a freak. Which. Is definitely why Arthur likes him. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t get too attached if I were you. I mean, Mal and I are basically the same person, and Mal’s dead, so…not a great sign.”

“You and Mal weren’t a bit alike.”

“So much for understanding me.”

“I didn’t even think you were especially close.”

“How close are you with yourself, Mr. Eames, forger?”

“Mallorie Cobb was a hedonist,” Eames insists, leaning forward, going all serious. Arthur feels it’s not fair to be serious with him when he’s this drunk. “She was a woman of extremely poor impulse control. She was endlessly curious about everything. You, Arthur, are none of those things.”

Arthur giggles. Kind of embarrassing, especially when it takes him a while to stop, but there it is. Apparently he’s pulled the wool over Eames’s eyes more successfully than he’d thought.

Arthur loves good food and expensive fabrics, fast cars and easy touch, the adrenaline rush of sex and theft and violence. He doesn’t know what else hedonism is. When he’s tempted by something, he generally gives in at the speed of thought, and if he exercises restraint, it’s only so that he can get away with more in the long run. As for curiosity, curiosity. He’s a point man. His actual job is to know everything about everything, and he loves his job. That takes something beyond curiosity, something more like a compulsive need for information.

“I’m all those things,” he says once he’s managed to stop giggling. He’s all those things and worse. Mal’s defining characteristic was her insane, helpless devotion to her loved ones, and a consequent reluctance to love anybody. That’s Arthur’s defining characteristic, too. “And you’re supposed to be good at reading people.”

“Mm.” Eames is eyeing him, way too interested. “I can predict behavior without always knowing the reasons behind it. More difficult that way, of course.”

“Whatever.” Forgers are annoying and they have always been annoying. Even when they’re Eames.

For some reason, being blown off makes Eames laugh. Eames is the best forger there is, so it makes sense that he’s the most annoying forger there is. Arthur smiles at him anyway.

“Right, then,” Eames declares. “If you’re skipping driving around and shooting at things this time, may I suggest an alternative plan?”

“Can’t stop you,” Arthur allows.

“I suggest I drive you back to your hotel, force you to hydrate, and wait to make sure you don’t choke on your own vomit while you sleep this off.”

That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun for Eames. “What’s in it for you?”

“Blackmail,” Eames replies promptly.

“That’s low,” Arthur murmurs, impressed. “I don’t want to ditch my car here.”

“Ah, but it isn’t your car, is it, Arthur? You stole it this morning; you haven’t even had time to grow attached.”

Man has a point. Arthur’d actually planned to ditch the car as soon as he got back from the cemetery. “Yeah, okay.”

“Have you spent enough time here?”

Arthur gazes around vacantly and considers that. They’re really supposed to stay until it’s dark, and it’s only dusk. On the other hand, Mal was always a huge fan of the idea of Arthur and Eames sleeping together, so she definitely wouldn’t mind Arthur letting Eames drag his drunk ass away. She’d hope it would lead to things.

It abruptly occurs to Arthur that he kind of hopes it leads to things himself, so maybe Mal was onto something (she always was, with him). He’ll have to do something about that. Later. When he isn’t sloppy drunk, because that is no state in which to try to seduce someone who’s sober, especially someone like Eames, who would probably laugh himself sick.

But sometime, definitely.

“Okay,” Arthur says, to Mal or Eames or both, he’s not sure. “You’re right. We should go.” And then, as Eames hoists him to his unsteady feet, “I hate that you’re always right.”

Eames laughs. “When you’re sober, I’m going to remind you that you said that.”

“Not you,” Arthur scoffs. “Mal. Mal is always right.”

“Mal is dead, Arthur. She dove out of a window. She must’ve been wrong about something.”

“Well, she was right about me.”

There’s a long pause while Eames debates what to do with that statement. It never ends well when Eames stops to think. This time, for instance, he decides that the smartest thing to say is, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how much you missed her.”

And what the fuck, Eames? This is not a sorry day. The funeral was the sorry day. This is a fuck-the-world-I’m-alive day, and Eames was doing so well up to now. Where did that even come from? Eames is a fake and a thief and a liar and pity looks fucking bizarre on him. Also Arthur hates being pitied, especially by Eames.

Arthur’s not sure how best to express this irritation while staggeringly drunk, so he tries to stomp on Eames’s foot. It doesn’t quite work, but it does knock both of them over, which is at least a distraction.

* * *

“You have not awakened to wakefulness, but to a previous dream. This dream is enclosed within another, and so on to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path you must retrace is interminable and you will die before you ever really awake.” —The God’s Script

* * *

It’s been two years since Mal’s death, and it is officially past time for Cobb to get a fucking grip.

The first year—fine. Fine. Arthur was grieving himself, and there’s nothing you can do about that kind of grief except ride it out. Grit your teeth, try not to do anything incredibly stupid, and wait. It takes for fucking ever, but it does get better. You eventually go numb out of sheer self-preservation.

Arthur pretty much had his shit together by the end of that first year, but he didn’t begrudge Cobb the second. Arthur hasn’t made lists of their respective dead, but he’s pretty sure he’s had more losses than Professor Cobb, and, like anything, grieving improves with practice. Besides, Cobb hadn’t just lost his wife; he’d lost his kids and his whole way of life, too. That earned him a free year.

Now, though? Cobb’s not getting better, he’s getting worse, and it’s infuriating. People die all the time; you can’t fly off the handle over every fucking corpse. And if Cobb really can’t deal, he could at least shut up and keep his misery to himself like everybody else. Even Mal would be kicking his ass by now. Of course, telling him that would just send him into another spiral of angst and self-loathing, and then Arthur might shoot him in the face in real time. And he can’t do that, no matter how desperately he sometimes wants to. Even so, he can’t be around the guy all the time no matter how much protection he needs. Because sometimes he needs protection from Arthur. It’s a problem.

The upshot of all this is that Arthur’s run away to Copenhagen, leaving Cobb to the dubious mercies of Thabo and Francesca. Copenhagen’s the best choice for vacations from Cobb. No one knows he has an apartment here, for starters, and it’s one of his favorite cities—an unpredictable mix of order and chaos, which he finds soothing. Also, the graffiti is hilarious.

(When he’s most disgusted with Cobb, he goes to the States, because Cobb can’t follow him there. He doesn’t do it often, though. It’s both cruel and dangerously close to breaking a promise.)

At the moment, Arthur’s hanging around Nyhavn, drinking aquavit and people watching. Directly across from him are two family restaurants and a strip club, and one of the strippers has wandered out to sit on the stoop and listen, along with the families, to a random guy playing guitar on the sidewalk. It’s really tough to sour a scene like that.

Unfortunately, Cobb has a gift for souring things, and he also has Arthur’s phone number.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Arthur informs the phone, aware of how futile every word is. It’s not enough that Cobb is crazed and borderline suicidal—he’s stubborn as fuck, too. “We made enough on the last job to set us up for months, then you instantly took that job with Thabo, and—are you done with that already? How are you done already? It’s time to take a break, I’m serious. Breathe, Cobb.”

“We don’t have time to sit around breathing,” Cobb hisses, apparently unaware of what a lunatic he sounds like.

“Why not?” Arthur demands.

“Where are you?”

Arthur rolls his eyes and knocks back the last of his aquavit. “What does it matter?”

“You don’t want to tell me where you are?”

“Not really, no. I have horrible visions of you showing up here, frothing at the mouth because there’s no time to waste because we need to be doing…what, exactly?”

Cobb sighs like he’s the put-upon one in this relationship. “A job.”

“You just finished a job.”

“Well, I found another one.”

“How about you let me find the jobs, and you just…calm the fuck down before you get someone killed.” Probably Arthur, given the way the luck tends to run.

“But this is a fun job,” Cobb argues, and Arthur’s breath catches, because there. There he is. That’s Mal’s Cobb. Sometimes Arthur forgets how much he used to like the man, before everything.

That doesn’t mean he’s not suspicious. “Fun?”

“You’ll see,” Cobb says, almost brightly, almost the way he used to be. “I’ll meet you at your place in Montevideo next Wednesday.” He hangs up before Arthur can argue. That’s deliberate.

Arthur glares at the phone, feeling manipulated. He knows it’s irrational to blame the phone for all the trouble in his life, but it’s still a struggle not to pitch the fucking thing into the canal and run away to Harstad where Cobb will never find him. (No one ever suspects Norway.)

The guy to his left wordlessly holds out a beer. Arthur takes it. What the hell. “Skol,” he says.

“Skol,” says the strange Dane who’s been nicer to Arthur today than anyone he actually knows, which is beyond depressing. They drink. “Your boss?” The guy asks in English, gesturing to the phone.

“…Right.” Boss. Jailer. Fellow inmate. Whatever.

The guy nods sympathetically and falls quiet. Arthur wonders what it would take to coax this man into babysitting Cobb in Arthur’s place. Money? Fame? Sexual favors? Or maybe the answer is nothing, because no sane person would ever volunteer to babysit someone like Cobb long-term.

It’s a moot point, anyway. Arthur wouldn’t actually trust anyone else to take care of Cobb long-term. Fuck his life.

He glances across the way in time to see the stripper stand and wander inside, presumably back to work, leaving just the families to listen to the guitar player. Break’s over, back to the shit job. Arthur feels a distressing amount of sympathy.

He chats with the stranger about soccer teams for a while in a possibly sad attempt to prove to himself that Cobb doesn’t own him, then he downs the rest of the stranger’s beer, thanks him, and walks back home, preemptively starting up his Mal mantra.

You can’t kill Cobb: you promised Mal.

You can’t ditch Cobb: you promised Mal.

You can’t assist Cobb in his suicide: you promised Mal.

You promised, you promised, you promised.

He’s really coming to hate promises.

* * *

The trouble with promises to the dead is that they’re not open for renegotiation. Not that Mal was a fan of renegotiation at the best of times, but if nothing else, Arthur would like to be able to complain to someone. Someone alive and paying attention.

Cobb-with-Mal was an appealing guy. Arthur wouldn’t have married the man himself, but he never questioned what Mal saw in him, never found her devotion confusing. Cobb-without-Mal is something else again, pathetic and broken and an oddly boring flavor of crazy. He’s been wearing Arthur down for months with his lies and his recklessness and even his brilliance, with his Uncanny Valley projection of Mal. Arthur hates knowing that that’s all Mal was to Cobb, hates the thought that she loved a man who knew her so little.

But he told Mal he would take care of Cobb, and he will.

And that’s why he’s flying in a private jet to Paris, proposing to go through with this inception fool’s errand. By now, Arthur’s almost as invested in getting Cobb back to his kids as Cobb is himself, but, unlike Cobb, he’s still on speaking terms with reality. He can weigh up the likelihood of success vs. death in this case, and it looks really fucking bad. The odds say Arthur is going to die of Dominic Cobb. And he’s going to die annoyed.

It comes to Arthur’s attention that he’s holding his fork like an American, eating with his elbows on the table, and talking with his mouth full—this is a cry for help. Mal would have given him a hug and laughed at him. Eames would steal his fork and chuck it in the toilet. Cobb, unsurprisingly, doesn’t notice.

Spitefully, Arthur asks who the victim of Cobb’s previous inception was, but he doesn’t really need to. If the symptoms of inception are a sudden, overwhelming idea that comes seemingly from nowhere and refuses to let go—well, they both know who fits that bill.

In all these years, Arthur never once suspected that Cobb actually did murder Mal. But of course he did. Of course he did, and of course he did it out of curiosity and arrogance. Cobb always has suffered from being invariably right.

Arthur would like to renegotiate the terms of his promise, but even if that were possible, he knows Mal. He knows what she would say, despite everything.

You promised.

He did promise. It’s too late to have a tantrum about it.

* * *

It falls to Arthur to train the baby architect. He resents that. He needs to be doing a ridiculous amount of research on dementedly secretive people, and doesn’t have energy to waste on training the amateur.

He goes along with it anyway because the idea of Cobb training anyone is horrifying beyond Arthur’s ability to cope with it. He doesn’t want Ariadne ruined before she starts, not when she’s so full of potential.

And she really is. If he has to train anyone, at least it’s Ariadne. It’s fun to watch her learn, even if he doesn’t have time for it.

Ariadne in dreams looks older and thinner than she is in reality, which is an interesting change because it isn’t a flattering one. She dreams herself tired and haggard and worn. Arthur probably shouldn’t be surprised—it’s not every young grad student who eagerly signs up to commit crimes for the sake of creation. Mal did, of course, but Ariadne doesn’t give the same impression of demented devil-may-care as Mal. She’s more purely obsessed. Like Cobb.

Arthur dreams them an office building, something the Cobbs might have designed, all clean lines and sharp edges and far too much glass. The important point here, though, are the Penrose steps, which is why he explains them as carefully as he does. If he was hoping for a work-appropriate response, though, he’s doomed to disappointment.

“What was she like in real life?” Ariadne asks, because she thinks it’s okay to ask Arthur about Mal. She would never ask Cobb because it would be insensitive to interrogate a man about his dead wife. But Arthur. Arthur’s safe.

Sometimes you have to laugh.

“She was lovely,” Arthur says, proud that he managed to say anything, proud that he managed to stop afterward.

She asks if Eames knew Mal. Arthur admits that he did. She asks if Arthur worked with Mal often. He admits that he did. She asks what Mal and Eames thought of each other. He claims he doesn’t know, which is only dubiously true.

At this point, Ariadne finally detects that Arthur doesn’t want to talk about this, and falls quiet, embarrassed, when the damage is already done. Even so, she has a better learning curve than Cobb.

Christ. Arthur already had one babysitting project, he really didn’t need another. But here she is. Mind like a razor, common sense of a lemming. And she watches Cobb, worries about Cobb, tries to talk sense to Cobb—so involved so quickly.

I don’t know if you can’t see what’s going on, she says, or if you just don’t want to.

Hilarious. This from someone who’s still trying to lead Cobb out of the labyrinth, who refuses to see how hopeless that is. Arthur wishes her better luck than her namesake, anyway (Theseus was an ungrateful bastard).

Ariadne does too much, and it baffles Arthur. Ariadne, in general, baffles Arthur. She doesn’t owe any of them anything, so why this almost suicidal desire to help? The only thing they’ve ever done for her was introduce her to dreamshare, which is not unlike introducing someone to heroin, and yet she has a bizarre loyalty to all of them and particularly to Cobb. Arthur’s not about to talk her down, of course—she’s a genius architect, they need her, and Arthur is a mercenary bastard at heart. Besides, he’s not even sure he could talk her down; he’d have to understand her first.

She fascinates him, though. He’s never met anyone but Cobb with such an unlikely combination of dizzying intelligence and stunning lack of common sense, and Arthur’s always loved a paradox.

Cobb fascinated him too, once upon a time. He remembers.

When Arthur’s in need of distraction, he kills time wondering who their Minotaur is. Which of them is Asterion, trapped in his labyrinth until someone comes to kill him for being the monster they made of him? Could be any of them. They all lure their prey into the same mazes they’re lost in themselves.

Or maybe this is all about Cobb. Maybe Cobb is man, maze, and monster, all rolled into one, and the rest of them are nonessential props. In which case, Arthur’s happy to leave him to it.

If he could leave. Which he can’t.

* * *

Just to compound the number of bad ideas being perpetrated on this job, Cobb asks Arthur where Eames is, and Arthur has to admit that Eames is in Mombasa. Right in the middle of Cobol territory, and that’s not the worst of it.

Cobb wants Eames on this job. This job. Eames, with his metric ton of daddy issues, working a job about daddy issues. What could possibly go wrong? Saito really managed whip Cobb into a frenzy with all that ‘going home’ crap, and now Cobb is thinking things through even less than usual.

Arthur doesn’t much care for Saito. He hasn’t since he first unearthed the mistress, and the fact that Saito’s the calculating bastard who talked them into this inception disaster isn’t helping. Arthur’s been refusing to pronounce his name correctly in a bid to make himself feel better, but Saito doesn’t seem to care. It’s hard to enjoy your pettiness when the object of it refuses to sink to your level. (This dislike doesn’t prevent Arthur from calling Saito and alerting him to Cobb’s trip to Mombasa. He may not trust Saito with much, but he does trust him to protect his investment.)

Obviously, Arthur would love to see Cobb go home (or just away, generally) more than anyone. The problem with that dream, however beautiful, is that it’s all but impossible to realize, and Arthur seriously doubts that goading Cobb to full-throttle madness is a step in the right direction. Worst case scenario, this will all end with Arthur and Cobb trapped together forever in Limbo. Because that is exactly the kind of shit that happens to Arthur.

The situation does improve a little once Arthur finishes training Ariadne, and it improves further when Eames joins them in Paris. Arthur’s never liked teaching, not even the most brilliant students, so it’s a relief to have that over with. It’s also good to have Eames around, daddy issues, ill-advised lust, and all. For one thing, it means that there’s at least one person here who Arthur feels perfectly comfortable complaining to about anything and everything, and that’s a huge relief.

It means that when Cobb next has a fit and storms off, Ariadne scurrying after him to try to calm him down, Arthur doesn’t have to sit around and stew alone in the aftermath. Instead, he can turn to Eames and say, “I don’t understand him.”

Eames considers. “Do you want to?”

“No.”

“Then I won’t explain.”

“He’s a driven man,” Yusuf says quietly, pausing in his analysis of the mass spec of something. “Not troubled by too much sanity.”

As is the case with many of Eames’s friends, Arthur likes and respects Yusuf. And he doesn’t trust him at all. “You have a point, but that doesn’t excuse him.”

“What wouldn’t we do for our families?” Yusuf waves a dismissive hand.

“All you have for family is a cat,” Eames points out.

“I would gladly perform inception for Makeda,” Yusuf declares. Arthur’s not convinced he’s joking. Seriously, all of Eames’s friends are like this.

Not that anyone in this line of work is exactly normal. The trouble with dreamshare is that no one who’s happy with reality bothers to go into it. Every dreamer Arthur’s worked with lies and hides as a compulsion and a hobby.

This job is no exception. Saito pretends to know what he’s asking for. Cobb pretends to be sane. Ariadne pretends to be innocent. Yusuf pretends to be nice. Eames pretends to be different people entirely, which is overkill of the first order and probably cheating besides, so it’s very Eames in that way.

Arthur pretends to have everything under control, and that’s the biggest lie of all.

Even so, now that they’re all together, the team is working out better than Arthur could’ve dreamt in his wildest fits of optimism. The boss is a liar, the extractor is insane, the architect is an infant, and the chemist is more loyal to his cat than to any of his coworkers—to say nothing of Arthur and Eames, who are so fucked up that Arthur struggles even to define what’s wrong with them. It should’ve ended in tears and death within a week.

But they are, all of them, brilliant. It’s always fun to work with geniuses, even deranged geniuses (or maybe geniuses are, by definition, deranged).

Arthur would almost be enjoying himself if he weren’t so absolutely sure they were all going to die. Or worse.

* * *

Cobb’s latest inspired notion is that Ariadne should be more familiar with the challenges and limits of extraction, and the team as a whole should have some experience working together. His solution to this problem is a trip into one of Arthur’s dreams. He doesn’t bother to ask what Arthur thinks of this idea. But then he wouldn’t, would he?

Arthur appreciates but does not acknowledge Eames’s troubled stare. He obediently goes under instead, and dreams them a library, as close to infinite in size as his mind can manage (not close at all, but close enough to horrify normal people). Each gallery is hexagonal, lit by two spherical lamps and surrounded by a low railing. There’s nothing but air between the galleries, an endless fall. Four sides of each gallery hold five bookshelves each; twenty shelves per gallery. Each shelf contains thirty-five books. Each book is four hundred and ten pages long.

The remaining two sides of each gallery are taken up with walkways leading to the adjoining galleries. Each walkway is connected to those above and below by a spiral staircase shaped like the inside of a seashell. Each walkway holds a mirror, and every mirror lies.

Reflections of inanimate objects are accurate enough, but reflections of people and projections are, at the very least, a few seconds out of step with the originals, and often they behave completely independently, or refuse to appear at all. Arthur casts no reflection here, and neither did Mal, so it’s not surprising to find Eames staring into a mirror that reflects everything but him.

“Your brain worries me, Arthur,” he says. “Were you raised in a cult of some kind?”

“I’m going to tell my mother you said that,” Arthur informs him.

Eames looks gleeful, like he’s gotten away with something. Apparently he didn’t know Arthur’s mother was alive until just now. He really doesn’t do his research. “I think you were born in a test tube and raised as a lab rat, and you think the lead scientist is your mother,” Eames declares, and Arthur can’t help but smile, remembering Mal.

“You’ve found me out, Mr. Eames,” he says with bland provocation. “You must know all of my secrets.”

Eames clearly takes that for the challenge it is.

“This is amazing,” Ariadne breathes, passing by and distracting them from…whatever they were doing, Cobb close behind her.

Cobb, of course, has been here before. He smiles wistfully, opening the nearest book to find it full of nonsense—or apparent nonsense. If you read every single book in the library in the correct order and with the correct cipher, you would know everything Arthur has ever hidden. But that would take a lifetime.

This is Arthur’s version of subconscious security. Regardless of the structure he’s given to work with, nothing can change his tendency to remember everything in code, to create informational mazes, paradoxes, infinite loops, to hopelessly tangle everything important. He hides things even (especially) from himself. His subconscious is more person than place—a vicious, suspicious, secretive person.

When he first showed Mal the library, she explored for hours, laughing at him and saying, No more Borges for you.

“It’s the Library of Babel,” Arthur explains now. Everyone thinks he means something biblical, and he doesn’t bother to clarify. Mal would explain if she were here, but she isn’t, not even Cobb’s projection of her. (No one but Arthur ever sees Arthur’s projection of Mal. He’s spent a stupid amount of time trying to convince himself that that isn’t creepy.)

He walks over to stand beside Eames, and they both study a mirror that reflects neither of them. When Cobb passes behind them on his way to the next gallery, he’s reflected as if there’s nothing between him and the mirror—but where Cobb keeps walking, his reflection stops and stares at Arthur, menacing in a way the real Cobb never is.

Eames frowns and cycles through half a dozen forged faces, but the mirror stays stubbornly empty of anyone but Cobb; it isn’t fooled. Eames keeps at it anyway, until Cobb’s reflection gets bored and wanders off.

“If Mrs. Cobb were here,” Eames says thoughtfully, “would she have a reflection?”

Arthur smiles at him. “No.”

The mirrors are the real secret.

* * *

“Arthur, come be Yusuf’s guinea pig. He needs someone to test out the inner ear thing,” Cobb says, and the best part is, he’s not joking. He’s all but living on a Somnacin IV these days; can’t Yusuf just knock him over a few times while he’s out?

Three levels. This is how you killed Mal, you worthless dick, Arthur thinks, but it’s an old complaint, worn thin from repetition. “No problem,” he says.

No problem. Three levels down, untested compound, inception. Sure, whatever.

There was a time, Arthur remembers, when insanity was his greatest fear. Now it seems like a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Eames, amusingly, tags along on every single test. Ariadne keeps shooting him disapproving looks because he’s laughing at Arthur when he’s down and generally acting like even more of an ass than usual, but Arthur understands what he’s doing. Yusuf is here on Eames’s recommendation, which means that Eames will hold himself responsible for anything that goes wrong with the compound. So he’s watching. Standing watch. That he’s enjoying himself while doing it is a detail.

It’s not that Eames doesn’t trust Yusuf. Not at all; he trusts Yusuf as much as he’s capable of trusting anyone. He’s proud of Yusuf, even. It’s just that he knows what his responsibilities are, and he takes them very seriously. Much as he loves to pretend otherwise.

Cobb takes himself very seriously, but doesn’t seem to feel he has responsibilities to anyone but his kids. The differences between the ways he and Eames deal with pressure are psychologically fascinating.

“How’s the compound?” Cobb asks with alarming uncertainty. “Stable, right?”

“…Right,” Arthur agrees, wishing he had the authority to assign Cobb busywork. “Aren’t you supposed to be entertaining Saito?”

Cobb scowls. “I don’t have time for that.”

But he does have time to nag the shit out of Arthur and Yusuf.

Eames turns to give Arthur a look. It’s a look Arthur’s been fielding from Eames increasingly frequently over the years—it says, I’m not sure why you haven’t killed him yet, but I’m amazed by your bullheadedness on the topic.

Arthur scowls at them both.

* * *

It’s the day before they fly to Sydney, and everyone but Cobb is helping clear out the warehouse. It’s something approaching domestic work, and maybe that’s what gets to Ariadne, who abruptly declares, “I know you guys so well, I feel like I should be bringing you home for Christmas.” She doesn’t seem to be joking.

You’re an insane person, Arthur silently informs her.

The impulse to drag people home is one Arthur does not and has never understood. Not even in theory. It seems to tie in with that bizarre, lingering attachment so many people have to the place they happened to be born, which is another thing Arthur doesn’t understand. Because it’s irrational. Arthur’s been all over the world, and as far as he can tell, every place has advantages and disadvantages, but they’re all full of people, so they all find a way to be a pain in the ass.

Arthur would, in theory, like to introduce people to his mother. He’s proud of his mother; he’d enjoy showing her off. Theoretically, he’d like all of his favorite people to know each other, even if it’s too dangerous in practice. (His mother would adore Eames, which is the most terrifying thought Arthur’s had in a while.) So that impulse, he understands. But places? It’ll be a cold day in hell before he takes anyone to Dorchester, or even admits to having lived there.

“Ariadne,” Eames says, fond but dismissive, “you don’t know us well. You don’t know anything whatsoever about Arthur, for example. Not his real name or his hometown or his first love.”

Arthur could point out that she doesn’t know any of those things about Eames, either, but before he gets the chance, Ariadne is already asking where he’s from. Because of course she is. Because for some reason, Eames wanted her to.

“I can’t answer that question honestly,” Arthur informs her, trying to make himself focus on shredding incriminating documents rather than whatever it is Eames is up to.

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure.” He really isn’t. He’s tried to tell people where he’s from before, and it never works. He can sometimes come as near as Boston, but he can’t force himself to be more specific than that. It’s weird, but not his most pressing psychological concern.

Ariadne is now staring at him. Eames, meanwhile, is sniggering unhelpfully, and if he thinks Arthur is too good a person to turn this back on him, he’s going to find out that he’s wrong.

“I won’t ask for your real name, but…can you talk about your first love?” Ariadne asks hesitantly.

Arthur’s first love was Fiona Kelile. He lost his virginity to her when they were fourteen. He’d nearly died that day in a random drive-by shooting, after which there didn’t seem to be any reason not to have as much sex as he wanted. Life was short. Life could conceivably be measured in minutes, in fact. Fiona had felt the same way, and she’d been right, because she’d died a year later when someone broke into her family’s apartment to steal their TV and ended up panicking and shooting everyone. Unlike other people Arthur’s loved, Fiona did not die laughing.

She’d been something else, Fiona, fierce and strange and wild. She had high cheekbones and dark eyes and an intermittently shaved head. She swore at administrators and kicked over desks and (in a surprising show of academic investment) keyed teachers’ cars when she failed a test. On the other hand, there was nothing you could throw at her that she couldn’t handle, right up to the end.

Fiona horrified Arthur’s father down to his Puritan bones, but his mother found her charming, and Arthur adored her to the point of idiocy. Maybe some of that was hormones, the intensity of first times, the insanity of their lives in general—but more of it was real.

He glances at Eames and finds himself thinking, You’re the quietest person I’ve ever loved. A strange thought on so many levels.

“Not a happy story, Ariadne,” he says repressively.

Ariadne seems horrified to have asked, but Eames is studying Arthur intently, devoid of shame. “Is this the shooting at the gravestone girlfriend?”

Arthur stares at Eames. Then he looks at Yusuf (who is watching with detached interest) and Ariadne (who looks like she’s trying to sink into the floor), and says, “It might be. But enough about me. Let’s talk about your love life, Eames.”

“Dull compared to yours, I’m sure!”

It irritates Arthur that he doesn’t actually know whether it is or isn’t. Eames’s childhood is easy to track, but once he joined the military, he vanished like smoke. Other than one surprisingly normal boyfriend in high school, Arthur doesn’t know anything about anyone Eames has dated.

“There was a rumor,” Yusuf says, “that you and Mrs. Cobb were lovers, Arthur.”

It makes sense that Yusuf would instantly take Eames’s side in this. It makes sense, but Arthur doesn’t have to like it. He can’t leave it unaddressed, either, because if he did, Ariadne might say something to Cobb, and that would be a crashing disaster.

“Yeah,” Arthur sighs, annoyed. “I think Mal started that rumor.”

Yusuf and Ariadne blink and Eames grins insanely. Arthur tells himself he isn’t starting to enjoy this.

“Um,” Ariadne says eventually, “why?”

“Because ‘Dom is hilarious when he’s jealous.’” He’s pretty sure he even got the inflection right, there. He’s proud of himself. “Apparently.” Though that still pisses him off, especially at the moment, when everything about Cobb is pissing him off. That Cobb could believe that of Mal—Mal who rarely made promises but never broke them. It was impossible to suspect Mal of infidelity if you understood her at all.

“How did you meet Mrs. Cobb?” asks Ariadne, who is apparently never going to learn when to stop asking questions.

“We met on the job.” Arthur says. He tells a different lie every time someone asks this question (a habit that seems to charm Eames—he’s keeping a list). In this case, the job was real enough. It’s just not how they met. “Mal was the extractor, Dom was the architect, I was point.”

“Did you know her well?” Ariadne presses.

And Arthur has talked about himself enough today. “Have you and Eames finished packing the compound for transport?”

“Not yet, but—”

“You should.”

“We should!” Eames agrees, putting a hand on Ariadne’s shoulder and steering her firmly out of the room, because he has a clearer understanding than Ariadne of when he’s in danger of being murdered. “Let us pack some chemicals! Only packing, no personal conversations. Let’s not inspire Arthur to try to become imaginative, he might strain himself…”

And then they’re gone, and at last there’s peace.

Well. Some degree of peace. Yusuf persists in watching Arthur work for a long time afterward, which is not especially peaceful.

Arthur ignores him with studious dedication.

* * *

They’re flying from Paris to Sydney, and everyone is asleep except for Arthur and Cobb. It makes sense that they’re the most keyed up; they both know this is their last chance.

“Do you still miss her?” Cobb asks, staring out the window at the black nothing of a nighttime ocean or desert.

“Of course,” Arthur says in a voice carefully drained of expression, and thinks, If I didn’t, you’d be long dead. Pushed off a building, choked with a tie, shot in the face. Arthur spends a lot of time daydreaming about the possibilities. It’s like meditation.

Cobb nods wisely, and Arthur turns back to his Robert Fischer file and tries to control his face. It’s breathtaking how little Cobb understands.

Before they took off, Ariadne asked if it was true that Cobb was the best extractor in the business. Arthur smiled the way he always does when she says things like ‘in the business.’ It’s adorable, like a grade schooler discussing stock options. He agreed that Cobb has a reputation, and left it at that. It’s a reputation for being erratic as hell and a lying, overbearing jerk besides, but Saito’s not wrong—he is the best extractor in the business. On his good days, it’s a pleasure to watch him work.

He’s still more a freakishly talented but broken architect than an extractor, and Arthur would have to be an idiot to trust him. Thanks to Cobb, Arthur’s been shot, stabbed, thrown off buildings, driven into walls at high speeds, drowned…the list goes on. His least favorite death was being burned at the stake, not so much because of the death itself as the circumstances. Cobb’s projection of Mal was the one that lit the fire. Arthur could smell his own meat cooking whenever he drew breath to scream, and Mal laughed.

Arthur’s heard all about guilt and transference, mostly from Francesca, and he understands that that’s what’s going on here. He just doesn’t see why he should care. Cobb may have reasons for being the way he is, but that’s no excuse.

Arthur dreamed that human flesh smells great when cooked, which is just fucked up enough to be funny.

“I know you’re angry,” Cobb says.

There is no good response to that.

“I need to get back to my kids, Arthur. I have to. What did you expect me to do?”

“Actually, this is pretty much exactly what I expected you to do. The details are a little surprising, but the general idea isn’t.” I knew you’d get me killed one day.

“Then why are you angry?” Cobb asks, honestly confused. And if there’s a more pointless exercise than trying to explain himself to Dominic Cobb, Arthur can’t think what it might be.

“Spite,” he says.

“Spite? Are you—Arthur, I’m being serious.”

“I know you are. Look—I need to go through this file a couple more times to be safe, and we should both try to sleep. Can we talk about this after the job’s done?” Because in all probability, they’ll both die, and that’ll put paid to that conversation.

“Six more hours?” Cobb asks with a sigh, leaning back and giving up on Arthur.

“Six and half,” Arthur tells him. Then he starts sorting the Fischer file alphabetically by crime, both to make his excuse look legit and to distract himself from violence.

* * *

This is not Arthur’s finest moment.

Sub-security is a huge fucking thing to miss, and he knows it better than anyone. Cobb may not have made it clear how important the research was this time, but he shouldn’t have had to. Arthur should have done his goddamn job.

And he would have, if this had been any other job, if he weren’t strung out on rage and exhaustion and bitterness, a danger to everyone, a liability.

For reasons unclear to him, he feels very betrayed by Yusuf. Maybe it’s just because no one should ever, ever side with Cobb. Or maybe it’s because Yusuf is supposed to belong to Eames and therefore to Arthur…and there’s a train of thought he’s not planning to pursue.

He does appreciate the way Eames managed to turn this around and mystically make it all Cobb’s fault, but not Arthur’s or Yusuf’s. Eames defending Yusuf makes sense; Eames defending Arthur is…more than Arthur hoped for. But there’s no way around the truth—Arthur fucked up.

He’s been trying to stay calm on this job. He’s been trying to take out his aggression on Eames, in fact, as the lesser evil, and he’s sworn off drinking for the duration because his already shaky impulse control takes a dive when he drinks. But despite his best efforts, it looks like he’s finally lost the ability to handle Cobb being, just. Himself. Neurotic and brittle and in Arthur’s face all the fucking time.

Funny how often you don’t notice your advantages until they’re gone. In this case, Arthur hadn’t noticed his lingering, habitual affection for Cobb until it disappeared, the first crack appearing with the confirmation that Cobb really did kill Mal, and the last of it dissolving into bitterness as Cobb screamed at him for putting the team at risk. (Something had to be the last straw; it’s not a huge surprise that it turned out to be hypocrisy.)

This means it is past time for Cobb’s stupid legal impasse to resolve itself, because now that Arthur doesn’t care about Cobb at all, keeping his promise to Mal will be almost impossible. Keeping it in the spirit in which it was intended, anyway. Arthur’s great at talking himself around the letter of the law. It’s what makes him a successful dreamer; it’s what made him so unpopular with the army.

Because what exactly did Mal mean when she asked him to protect Cobb? At that point, she thought the world wasn’t real, so wouldn’t she agree that killing Cobb would be a good thing? Arthur would be reuniting them, after all. One way or another.

And there’s a second argument that goes: if Cobb really loses his shit, he might be a danger to Mal’s children. She may have delegated kid duty to her parents, but she would absolutely want Arthur to protect them, too, if he could. If the kids could be saved but Cobb couldn’t, wouldn’t the logical solution be…?

Arthur tries to detach himself from his fondness for this line of thinking. He knows what Mal would really have had to say about it, and he’s very loyal, almost pathologically so.

That doesn’t quite mean that Cobb has nothing to worry about.

* * *

After the inception job, Arthur visits Cobb and his kids exactly once.

“Thank you for all you did, Arthur,” Cobb says, sitting on his porch swing in his backyard in honest-to-God suburbia, drinking a beer, unapologetically checked out on everything interesting in life. “I know I was—I know I didn’t make it easy for you. I don’t understand why you stuck with me, but…I’m grateful, you know? You didn’t have to do all that for me.”

“I didn’t,” Arthur points out—mildly enough, he thinks, considering the months (years?) of stifled black rage it covers.

“You didn’t what? Have to? I know, that’s what I’m saying.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

Cobb goes silent, thinking that over. “Mal,” he decides eventually, resigned.

Arthur doesn’t bother responding because yes, obviously, Mal. He takes a tentative sip of the beer. It’s the kind of cheap, crappy American beer that only broke people and assholes drink by choice. He puts it aside, wishing he were surprised.

“I never did understand what you were to each other,” Cobb says eventually. Still being petty about it, after all these years—years after Mal’s literal death. Arthur is so tired of him, it’s a near-physical weight.

“We didn’t really understand, either.” Friend, partner, soul-twin—Mal was a lot of things to Arthur. She’d had the potential to be everything, and it had terrified them both. A relationship too effortless, too painless to be trusted.

“I was jealous,” Cobb admits.

“I know,” Arthur says, because he does. Mal knew too, and thought it was funny. He doesn’t mention that.

“You know.” Cobb barks a brief, bitter laugh and downs the rest of his nasty beer, tension tightening his shoulders for the first time since they touched down in LA. “Did that bother you at all?”

“Should it have?”

“Yes, Arthur. Yes, you should probably worry about making your friend’s husband insanely jealous.”

“Why?”

“What if I’d lost it and killed you?”

Arthur laughs. He laughs harder than he has in years, harder than he has since Mal. Death by Dominic Cobb. God. He spent a long time convinced that would be how it ended, but always by misadventure, never murder. Murder by Cobb might qualify as the world’s most embarrassing epitaph.

“God, Cobb,” Arthur breathes, leaning back in his deck chair, boneless with warmth and burdens lifted. “I wish you’d tried.” He forces himself to fight inertia, to stand and brush the wrinkles from his suit while Cobb flails for a response.

Cobb is home safe, as balanced as he’s likely to get, and the kids, who Arthur isn’t even technically responsible for, are also safe with their father and grandparents. Everything is settled. Arthur has officially kept his promise. “I’m glad you made it home,” he tells Cobb with perfect sincerity. “I’m happy for you, and more importantly, Mal would be happy with me. And it’s a relief that your kids have their dad back. It’s not fun growing up without parents.”

“Wait. Did you—”

“But I’m done, okay? You burned right through me. So have a nice life, I mean that. But don’t call.”

He leaves Cobb staring incredulously, mouth open—a nice parting image. He walks out the front door into harsh, California sunshine, Cobb behind him, now and forever, and the world in front of him. It feels like a prison break.
* * *

“We accept reality easily, perhaps because we intuit that nothing is real.” —The Immortal

* * *

As soon as Arthur’s abandoned Cobb to the loving arms of his family, he flies from LA straight back to Australia—Adelaide, this time. It still makes him embarrassingly easy to track; it only takes Eames a week to catch up.

It seemed more important to get back to Australia than to disappear, though, because Arthur’s found the man who militarized Fischer, and he may be holing up in Adelaide at the moment, but he’s a wanderer by nature—Arthur wouldn’t want to miss him. Not least because he’s really not worth the effort of chasing.

His name is Jon-Jon, and Arthur’s always hated him. First of all, there’s the irrational dislike for any grown man who calls himself Jon-Jon. Then there were the awful stories from the one time Francesca worked with him. Fischer is just the final nail in the coffin. Maybe Jon-Jon didn’t do anything for Fischer that any other extractor wouldn’t have done, but Arthur doesn’t see why he should care. With Jon-Jon, he wasn’t looking for a reason so much as an excuse.

Bottom line: Arthur was in enough of a hurry to be sloppy, and of course he can’t be sloppy without Eames taking advantage of it. There’s a certain inevitability to the situation. It wouldn’t be a problem, either, except that now Eames is…hovering. Meaning that Arthur, who had been planning to do this job on his own, is now going to need to incorporate Eames into it.

Oh well.

“It troubles me,” Eames drawls, “to think that you don’t believe I know exactly what you’re up to.”

“I know you know what I’m up to,” Arthur answers absently, studying the equipment he has spread out across the table in the hotel room before grudgingly setting aside the C4. This is a minor heist; if he’s so out of real-world practice that he can’t manage a poorly secured private residence in freaking Adelaide without explosives, he should just stay home. “But you won’t tell anyone, so it doesn’t matter what you know.”

“You trust me not to tell anyone.”

“I know you won’t tell anyone.” Arthur pauses for his usual ten seconds between having a bad idea and acting on it, then acts on it. “Of course I trust you, Eames. That’s why I keep working with you. I trust you with my life and my team and my mind.”

Judging from Eames’s face, this is the worst thing Arthur’s ever said to him. It probably is the worst thing Arthur’s ever said to him; nothing horrifies Eames like being trusted. It’s too close to being known. But he pulls himself together fast, going from devastation to faked indifference in a heartbeat.

“I see. You expect me not to tell.” Eames sidles over to crowd up behind Arthur, close enough to prevent escape (as if Arthur would bother), but not close enough to prevent him from working (which would end in violence). “What do you expect me to do, then?”

“I didn’t expect you to show up.”

“But you haven’t kicked me out. You must expect something, Arthur.”

“You could help. I know the concept may be strange to you.” Arthur’s surprised to find he’d actually like the help, if only because it’s a pleasure to watch Eames work.

“Payout?”

“Not the point.” He’s not even sure what to steal, yet. Whatever seems most irreplaceable.

“So spite is the point.”

“It keeps me warm at night.”

“Of course. It is good practice, I suppose—committing crimes while awake. Staying in touch with reality, they tell me that’s important.”

Yes, Arthur thinks but does not say, unsure of the soundness of his logic. Because we went too deep, because Mal is dead, because she and I are the same. He vaguely remembers having a similar conversation with Eames before. Although he was pretty hammered at the time, so it’s possible he wasn’t making sense.

“Ah,” says Eames, voice soft and a little sad. Eames almost always understands Arthur these days; it’s the one similarity between him and Mal. Dangerous. It makes Arthur lazy about explaining himself to people who aren’t borderline psychic.

“Are you coming with me, Mr. Eames?” Arthur asks, cool and disinterested.

“Far be it from me to miss out on a good, old-fashioned burglary, darling,” Eames drawls, moving back to a socially acceptable distance because that’s what Arthur needs from him. A good forger may know the location of every button, but he also knows when not to push them.

Arthur smiles at the idea of Eames employing tact, and starts preparing a second set of gear.

* * *

Eames stays with Arthur once the Adelaide job is over, trailing after him like it’s his only plan for the future. Arthur is not going to question it. If he’s shaken off Cobb only to acquire Eames, that’s the best exchange he’s ever made in his life.

“I’ve never tried to extract from a forger,” he says idly one day, because if he’s got Eames, he’s going to take ruthless advantage of him.

Eames shrugs like he doesn’t care one way or the other; sometimes he is deliberately, gleefully annoying. It’s a sign of Arthur’s own perversion that he’s charmed by it. “First level?”

“Good enough. You build it.”

“Hm, a challenge. Design?”

“Something personal,” Arthur says, like he doesn’t know exactly what he wants to see. “Hometown, house you grew up in, something like that.”

“Memories, Arthur? Bad practice.”

“I’ll be there, so it’ll be a flawed memory. And you can tweak it—not exactly the place you know, but something with the same feel.”

It’s a weak argument. Eames’s eyes narrow in suspicion, but, oddly, he goes for it anyway.

His childhood home—or what he’s claiming was his childhood home—is actually a mansion, an estate, beautiful and huge and almost completely sterile. Marble stairways, polished oak tables, floors covered in thick, dark red carpet with obvious, boring patterns. Even the art on the walls is blandly forgettable—nothing that Eames would choose. Landscapes with uninspired color palates, somewhere between impressionistic and just plain bad; busts of, presumably, ancestors, so conventional and posed as to be unidentifiable. The projections are all servants (do people even have servants anymore?) and none of them meet Arthur’s eyes. There are no mirrors at all, which Arthur finds sad for reasons he can’t explain.

Within fifteen minutes, he’s sure there’s nothing of Eames hidden in this place, so he heads outside. Eames strolls after him, hands in pockets, wearing an amused half-smile.

It’s hardly better outside. Arthur never really understood the term manicured lawn until now. The grounds are all trimmed hedges and evenly spaced trees and an army of gardener projections that ignore them. The whole place is some kind of British Stepford nightmare. At least the outside smells of something—a series of somethings, in fact, none of which make sense without context. Honeysuckle, cardamom, sage. Old sweat, rotten meat, burnt plastic. There’s obviously meaning there, but it’s in a shorthand a person could spend a lifetime trying to decipher. Arthur doesn’t try. (Not yet.)

Nothing inside. Nothing useful outside. So where does a forger keep his secrets? And not just any forger, but Eames, who has such trust issues he makes Arthur look gullible.

Oh.

“Take your shirt off,” Arthur orders, spinning to face him.

Eames’s eyebrows climb and he loses his irritating half-smile, which is gratifying. “Darling,” he drawls, “I had no idea.”

“Off,” Arthur demands. “Take it off.”

When Eames hesitates, Arthur knows he was right, but before he has a chance to gloat, Eames actually takes his shirt off. It’s the last thing Arthur expected, especially if he was right.

And he was. Eames is covered in tattoos. All of his tattoos from the waking world are here, which is interesting, but there are dozens—hundreds?—more, everywhere skin is exposed and presumably under the clothes he still has on. Mainly images, but also phrases, symbols, numbers; hieroglyphics from a language only Eames speaks. Arthur doesn’t need the details to get the gist, though—rage, disappointment, bitterness, confusion. And hope. Eames always was kind of a romantic.

Speaking of which, there’s one tattoo, small and almost lost among the others, just below his collarbone on the left side. It’s an infinity symbol, familiar in both location and style, but Eames isn’t the one who has that tattoo in the waking world.

Arthur is. It’s his only tattoo.

He has an abrupt insight into why Eames was willing to take his shirt off, why he didn’t forge himself without the tattoos before he did. In fact, much of Eames’s behavior for the last several years makes sudden, beautiful sense.

“You’re grinning,” Eames says, as close to hesitant as he comes. “You’re grinning like you just stabbed a lifelong enemy to death. That grin is always a bad omen for me, Arthur.”

Arthur reaches out and presses his palm to cover his tattoo on Eames’s body and refuses to explain himself. Eames can just work this out on his own.

He will, Arthur knows. He always sees through Arthur sooner or later. It’s comforting.

* * *

Arthur told himself he would wait to do things at Eames’s pace, but it’s turning into a real test of character, and he’s pretty sure he’s failing. This is not a huge surprise—mind criminals aren’t exactly known for their strong characters, and anyway, the odds are against him. Once you know a man’s branded himself your possession, it’s hard not to treat him accordingly…but that’s unfair to Eames. It’s wrong to take advantage of what someone’s subconscious gives away (unless you’re being paid to, obviously).

On top of that, there’s the basic problem that Eames is Eames, meaning any attempt to treat this like past relationships is futile. It goes against all of Arthur’s instincts not to use his every advantage against Eames with malice or at least mischief aforethought. And Eames isn’t helping—he clearly thinks he’s being messed with whenever Arthur tries to hit on him. That would be the trust issues in action.

Still…Arthur considers the enormously interesting dreams Eames builds, and can’t bring himself to regret a single thing about the person Eames has turned out to be. Even if his issues are cockblocking Arthur at the moment.

The stupid impasse finally resolves itself, thank God, with a near-death experience and subsequent adrenaline high that leads to them falling into bed together. It’s actually Arthur’s most tried-and-true method of starting relationships; his life is a shitshow like that.

Possibly even more of a shitshow than usual at the moment—in the morning, Arthur wakes to the sound of a text from the architect announcing that she quits. He then finds that his entire body aches, thanks to getting hit by a (fortunately slow-moving) car the day before. Quickly thereafter, he discovers that Eames is planning to be weird about everything.

And to think, this isn’t even Arthur’s most awkward morning after. Therein lies the flaw in the thank-god-we’re-alive hook-up.

He still buys Eames coffee en route to the creepy, abandoned morgue they’re working out of, since it’s something he would’ve done for anyone he trusted enough to let sleep in his apartment, sex or no sex. It’s actually something he’s done for Eames before, so it catches him off guard when Eames shakes his head, amused and slightly bitter, and says, “Pretending it didn’t happen, are we?”

“What? No,” Arthur snaps impatiently, because everything hurts and he’s tired and this was supposed to be good and it was good and now Eames is fucking it up because Arthur can’t have nice things.

“No? I was sure the coffee was a metaphor.” Eames stares suspiciously at the cup. “It is, isn’t it? If it’s not a metaphor for forget-this-happened, is it a metaphor for…a relationship? Are you handing me a relationship metaphor, Arthur?”

Arthur’s handing him a cup of coffee, but if he’s determined to make it a metaphor, fine. It can be multi-purpose. “That’s right. It’s relationship coffee, Eames.”

Eames looks confused, which makes no sense. He does finally take the goddamn coffee, though. “It can’t be.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow.

“We’d nearly died,” Eames insists staunchly. “It doesn’t count.”

“Then most of my relationships don’t count. Where the hell is this coming from?”

“You start most relationships after nearly dying?”

“Yes, yes, I do. Oh no, you don’t get to make that face, you five-star hypocrite. You’re just as crazy as I am. Shut up.”

Eames is grinning now. It makes as little sense as the confused look before it, but it’s much more welcome. “So we’re in a relationship, then,” he carols. It’s amazing how quickly he can flip from one method of ruining everything to another. “I never saw you as the relationship kind, Arthur.”

“Really? Then pay more attention, you failure of a forger.” Given the ever-increasing number of people who want Arthur dead, random one night stands have become an unworkable risk, so it’s relationships, however casual, or nothing. He doesn’t bother explaining this to Eames, though, because they’ve made it to the morgue, and Arthur has a ridiculous number of things to do, courtesy the AWOL architect. Eames-induced personal crises will just have to wait.

“Hm. You’ve always been the devoted kind, true. How is Cobb, by the way?” Eames asks lightly, propping his hip against Arthur’s desk, gazing off into the distance. Detaching himself from both the question and the previous conversation. Arthur appreciates that, though not as much as he’d appreciate Eames fucking off and letting him work.

“I wouldn’t know.”

Unfortunately, that makes Eames snap back into focus. “You don’t know?”

“Why should I?”

“You were attached at the hip for years, Arthur. It was legendary. It’s only been six months since the Fischer job, and already you don’t know how he is? When did you last see him?”

“A week after the Fischer job. You know that—I’ve been with you ever since.”

“And you last phoned…?”

“I didn’t.”

Eames fumbles for a response. Eames fumbling for a response is probably a sign of the apocalypse. “Really, Arthur,” he says eventually, trying for snide but arriving at worried. “I had you pegged as more loyal than that.”

“I am loyal.” Arthur finds the file on the cousin they’re going to forge and slaps it against Eames’s chest; he puts a hand up to catch it. “You just have the wrong Cobb.”

“Ah. Should’ve known.” Eames is obviously relieved, the idiot. He never had anything to worry about, and yes, he should have known. World’s best forger, Arthur’s ass.

* * *

It’s been a shitty month full of horrible things happening to people Arthur likes, and because his mind never misses a beat, he’ll be having creatively awful nightmares about it for at least three months to come. In a counterproductive bid to punish his own brain, he’s been trying not to sleep at all. Stupid, of course. Stupid and dangerous, because he’s starting to cross over into that surreal mental borderland where nothing seems real, and that’s potentially fatal in dreamshare. So far, though, spite is still triumphing over common sense, and Arthur is still refusing to sleep unless he’s using Somnacin to do it—and he won’t let himself do that too often, because it’s a waste of resources.

If you use it enough (and Arthur has), Somnacin is supposed to make it impossible to dream without it. That would actually be really nice from where Arthur’s standing—nothing but lucid dreaming, ever. Lovely. But no, not for him. His subconscious refuses to be leashed.

Eames hasn’t commented on any of Arthur’s behavior, but he’s been lurking within touching distance as often as he can get away with. It’s irritating, it’s comforting, it’s very Eames.

End result: it’s 3am (3:11, actually, but who’s counting?) and Arthur is scribbling equations and graphs and scraps of Escher designs across Eames’s back with a blue pen. Infinite series, fractals, paradoxical constructs. He’s trying to tie Eames here, trying to write out enough logic knots that he’ll always have to loop back to this place. No straight line disappearances.

Arthur is writing a scarily possessive love letter into Eames’s skin in the language of math and impossible architecture. (And he would cheerfully cut his own throat before admitting that to anyone under any circumstances.)

It won’t work, anyway. When you get right down to it, you can’t even rely on the infinite. There are more real numbers than there are natural numbers, but both the set of real numbers and the set of natural numbers are infinite. Meaning some infinite sets are more infinite than other infinite sets, so it’s official that nothing in the universe makes any fucking sense. Thanks for nothing, Georg Cantor.

With the brittle, calm illogic of 48 hours of sleeplessness, Arthur decides once and for all that transfinite numbers are ruining his life. ℵℴ < 𝔠 ∴ fml, he writes across Eames’s left shoulder blade, directly opposing the infinity symbol Eames only has in dreams.

“Arthur. What are you doing?” Eames mumbles, half awake.

“Thinking,” Arthur replies. It’s not a lie.

There’s a long pause. Arthur allows himself to hope that Eames has gone back to sleep, but no, of course not. Nothing about Eames is ever easy. (It’s why he’s never boring.) “Are you telling me you’re using my back as scratch paper?”

“Something like that.” x³ + y³ = z³, he writes. Fermat’s Last Theorem. Fermat was a shameless asshole, and Arthur admires that in a person. Plus, the theorem now also reminds him of Lisbeth Salander, with whom he identifies more than he’d like.

“I’ve seen how you treat your scratch paper,” Eames says, more awake and slightly worried.

“Like that, I said,” Arthur snaps, scribbling y = ax² + bx + c down Eames’s spine. It’s the standard form equation for a parabolic graph, because parabolas are like arches and arches are Arthur’s favorite architectural form and fuck, he isn’t even making sense to himself anymore.

Eames waits for the pen to stop moving, then rolls abruptly, pins Arthur to the bed, and takes it away from him. “What are you thinking about, then?”

“Parabolic arches.”

“Right. Lie back and think of England,” Eames instructs, tossing the pen to the floor.

Obligingly, Arthur thinks of England. He thinks of England at gibbering high speeds. He thinks about the Royal Society of London and abandoned Tube stations and Jack the Ripper. He thinks about sewage in the Fleet River and George III peeing blue and Anne Boleyn’s alleged third nipple. He’s just starting to wonder why Oxford and Cambridge both have a Bridge of Sighs when Eames wraps a hand around his dick and he’s blessedly allowed to stop thinking about anything for a while.

By the time Arthur wakes up in the morning, Eames is already gone. Not surprising. He’s starting a new job today; it pays to be timely.

The next time they see each other, one of Arthur’s drawings and half of the equations have been tattooed onto Eames’s back.

Eames is insane and Arthur loves him so much it’s embarrassing.

* * *

“Thabo has a job for us,” Eames says. “He tells me we’re his favorites.”

Eames is sitting next to Arthur on a bench in the botanical gardens in Sydney, gazing across the water at the opera house. This job announcement is completely out of the blue. Arthur smiles despite himself.

“And he asked you to ask me? Great. He’ll be sending us matching sweaters next. Is Francesca the architect?”

“No. Apparently she’s taking a few years to earn a doctorate in geology.” Eames and Arthur exchange baffled looks.

“…Okay. So who else is he getting?”

“I’ll talk Yusuf into it,” Eames decides. “He’s dying of boredom; success disagrees with him. We’ll be doing him a favor. And it would be nice to have Ariadne along; we do need an architect. Though she’s such a name these days, she may not have time for us.”

Arthur smirks. “She’ll have time.”

“She will, won’t she? We know all of her embarrassing baby stories.”

“She really was a baby, God.”

Not anymore, though. These days Ariadne has the calm face and crazy eyes common to most architects, plus the hard-worn body of a not-exactly-white-collar criminal. A knife scar here, a half-healed bullet wound there. She also has a sterling reputation for creativity and reliability, which are two traits not often found in one person. She’s well on her way to being a dreamshare legend. “I feel old just thinking about this,” Arthur reflects.

“We could retire after this job, you know,” Eames says idly, draping his arm across the back of the bench and around Arthur’s shoulder. “We are rolling in money. How do you like Sydney?”

Arthur loves Sydney. He loves Australia in general—in addition to its other charms, it has the double advantage of being the country he associates most strongly with getting rid of Cobb, and also of being really, really far away from Cobb. But it’ll be twenty plus years before he and Eames are actually ready to retire, supposing they survive that long, and by that time, Arthur won’t be up to handling the downsides of Australia. “Sharks,” he says. “Brown snakes. Blue-ringed octopi. Homicidal magpies. Funnel webs—”

“Well, we wouldn’t want to be bored, darling. I could learn to surf. We could live in Dee Why. It’s an excellent plan.”

Eames is amused. Eames is going to be less amused when a shark eats his arm. “Deadly animals are never a plus, Eames.”

“You’re surprisingly timid. What about Japan? Surely you love Japan. All those rules. And the grateful, absurdly wealthy former client in Tokyo. And Kei, of course, who’s still devoted to you.”

Kei was the ludicrously young chemist on the Cobol Engineering job that almost ruined and nearly ended Arthur’s life. He was the only member of the team who didn’t fuck anything up, but the association has still kept Arthur from working with him again. Arthur’s not sure why Eames even knows that Kei exists, but he is sure that he doesn’t want to find out. “Earthquakes,” he says. “Tsunamis. Blue-ringed octopi again, actually. The Japanese Giant Hornet—”

“My God, you are boring.” Eames slumps down and closes his eyes, pained; for that, Arthur will one day write him the world’s most embarrassing obituary. Arthur is not boring. He just likes to know what’s coming, and wild animals and natural disasters are infamously unpredictable. “I’m trying to plan our future, you know,” Eames complains with a sadness he wants Arthur to think is feigned. “You’re breaking my heart at every turn.”

He wouldn’t be making such a joke of it if he weren’t scarily sincere; it’s how he operates. Arthur sighs. “I love Copenhagen.”

“…I never knew you’d spent any time there.”

“No one did until just now, that was the point. I have a nice place there. Hyggelig.”

“You speak Danish?”

“No, but people in Denmark generally speak English better than I do, and I do speak Norwegian. We can stumble along with that. Everyone will hold us in gentle contempt, but it’s always nice to be underestimated.”

“Sounds lovely. Apart from the absolutely savage winters, of course.”

“Yeah, that’s why we’ll keep your place in Mombasa.”

Eames sits up straight. “We will?”

“Obviously. You love it there.”

“Kenya is one of the most politically corrupt countries in the world, Arthur.”

Not the point, Arthur thinks. Where bribery and blackmail are the keys to success, Arthur happily takes advantage of them. They remind him of his childhood, and anyway, he’s always been quick to figure out the rules and how to break them. Humans, he can handle. His problem with Mombasa is more, oh, black mambas, crocodiles, malaria, Dengue fever…but at least it’s not Nairobi. “You love Kenya because it’s one of the most politically corrupt countries in the world.”

“…That doesn’t irritate you? I was fairly sure it would irritate you.”

Arthur does not say, If you didn’t love broken things, you wouldn’t love me. “Everything about you irritates me, Eames. I’m used to it.”

“You think I’m wonderful,” Eames contradicts blithely. It sounds like arrogance, but it isn’t—it’s just that he’s finally worked out what an embarrassingly sure thing Arthur is. “There are snakes in Mombasa,” he admits after a strategic pause.

“Black mambas,” Arthur agrees, knowing instantly that it was a mistake to respond.

“It’s not all bad, being bitten by a black mamba,” Eames lies. “Gives you twenty minutes to call your loved ones and say goodbye.”

“That’s a quote from someone, isn’t it?”

“Classic U.S. Navy hazing, actually. Which isn’t to say that it’s not true. Because it is.”

Arthur doesn’t bother to ask why Eames is familiar with U.S. Navy hazing practices. He just smiles and leans back against the bench, boneless with warmth and contentment, and watches Eames arguing the merits of death by poisonous snake like the dangerously insane person he is.

This is it, Arthur knows. For the first time, he’s looking at someone he has every intention of holding onto until death. Friend, partner, love of his life. It’s…surprisingly freeing. I fought for you and now you’re mine. In the end, it really is that simple.

“—and it frightens me badly when you smile that way,” Eames says, interrupting his own monologue.

Arthur laughs, closing his eyes and turning his face to the harsh, Australian sunshine. He says, “It should.”