Work Text:
Arthur stops working, after.
Eames calls once a day the first month, then twice a week, then less. There’s no beating around the bush with Eames, who has no problem whatsoever with telling Arthur that he’s gone gun-shy. It’s what they’re all thinking, Arthur knows, even if Eames is the only one brash enough to say it to his face.
They never liked each other, and maybe that’s why Eames does what no one else is brave enough to do even in the real world, where Arthur is toothless and dulled.
“You calling me a coward, Eames?” Arthur asks, and sees Eames’ smirk through the phone lines in a flicker of memory.
“Are you saying you aren’t?”
There doesn’t seem to be a way to respond—not one Arthur will entertain—so he ends the call with a flick of his thumb.
When the phone rings again a moment later, Arthur drops it on the side of the road and walks on alone.
Eames obviously thinks he gets it. He thinks he has Arthur pigeon-holed into some neat box. It would have to be a neat box for Arthur, because only Arthur would be anal retentive enough to need something stricter than a flat surface times six. Something clean and sterile and as crisp as the suits that line the closet of his London flat.
London, so grey this time of year—every time of year. It fits Arthur’s eyes, the way he sees things now. If he could make things flat, flat as that box Eames pictures him in, it would be a perfect match.
Ariadne comes to see him sometimes. Ariadne with her sad, wide eyes and her silences when they meet for coffee. Ariadne speaks most clearly with the words she doesn’t say, she communicates in the negative space around things, and Arthur is always reminded of him. It’s the way that he spoke as well.
Perhaps there’s something about Limbo that does this to a person, that changes them.
Arthur asks Ariadne about work—the people she meets, the mazes she builds. She asks him for advice sometimes, in the same considerate way she does everything else, and he always tells her the same thing.
“You don’t want me on this. Not if you want to come back out.”
She knows he’s right—he can see it in her eyes, reads her knowledge in the way she never pressures for a better response.
But she keeps asking anyway.
“Why London, Arthur?” she asks once—a question long overdue, and he’s surprised she hasn’t asked it sooner.
He’s surprised she had to ask it at all.
Arthur turns his face up to the sky—grey, it’s about to rain again, about to let out a deluge—and squints like he can see through the clouds to sun.
London, where it’s wet and cold and the air sits heavy in his lungs.
London, a place that is full of old buildings that stay where you put them, and people who don’t stare when you think a little too hard.
London, which is the home of the Standish Institute, the only medical facility in the entire world that specializes in dream research.
“Guess I wanted to work on my tan,” Arthur says.
She doesn’t smile.
Once, Arthur runs into Miles on his way out of the hospital room.
London isn’t all that far from Paris as the private jet flies, after all, and money never was an issue where Miles is concerned. That’s why they’re here at Standish instead of some cheaper hospital stateside, or somewhere closer to Miles in France. Why the man in the room behind Arthur can afford the best, cutting edge treatments even with all of his assets frozen by the US authorities.
There’s an awkward shuffle in which Arthur stammers and steps to one side, only to find the old man still in front of him. It’s embarrassing, this meeting. Shouldn’t ever have happened.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Miles says, continuing their dance by stepping back the other way in time with Arthur’s move. Arthur stands still then, waiting for the man to pass by—for time to continue its steady, slow beat—but Miles squints at him instead, adjusting his glasses.
“Do I know you?” he asks in a different tone. “Do you know my son?”
Son-in-law, Arthur corrects in his head. He thinks that they were introduced once, at a barbeque. Back when Mal took up space in the real world the same as any other human being instead of taking up too much space inside people’s heads.
“No, I’m sorry,” he says, brushing past. “I got the wrong room.”
“I could really use your talents, Arthur, and we both know you could use a little action. So what do you say: meet me in Shanghai?”
“I don’t do that anymore.”
“Careful. Keep saying that and I might believe you some day.”
Arthur sighs, rubbing his eyes. “How did you even get this number, Eames?”
“Wasn’t difficult. I know where you sleep.”
“That’s not funny.”
It isn’t true, either. Arthur knows that much.
You can’t steal information if the target never dreams.
One day, it isn’t coffee. It’s a drink that turns into two that turns into three.
Ariadne is wearing a long, black gown and looks stunning. She looks like another man’s daydream.
“Dance with me, Arthur,” she demands, and he isn’t sober enough to say no. It seems like there’s water in the room, flooding the carpet and turning the dance floor into a marsh.
This is why he never drinks. It confuses things too much.
Ariadne smells sweet, like perfume. Her hair is soft against his lips when he turns his head. She sighs, holding onto him tightly.
“Tell me,” he whispers, and it feels like the sharp inhalation before falling—that moment just before the kick.
She’s been waiting for this. They both have. Waiting for the clock to tick down and the music to start. Deep echo from somewhere else.
There is music—a waltz, Arthur thinks. It’s coming from the band as he turns Ariadne in slow circles. There is a clock, ticking toward midnight.
Ariadne’s lips brush his ear. “Afterwards,” she promises.
There’s the kick.
Arthur sinks into her like she’s made of water. He runs his hands over her skin and makes her arch for him, makes her sob into the air while pleasure strikes her again and again. She sounds like she’s dying, and there are streaks on her cheeks: tears.
“Kiss me,” Ariadne demands. “Arthur, kiss me.”
It’s the price of passage, so he does.
Afterwards.
Afterwards, she leans out of the bed and rummages through her purse for something. Comes back up with an old-fashioned cigarette case and a lighter.
“You smoke?” Arthur says. It’s been a long time since anything surprised him.
“Only here.”
“Here in the bed, or ...”
“Just here,” Ariadne repeats, and they sit silently for a few minutes while she puffs on the cigarette, smoke curling up toward the ceiling.
Arthur glances out the window to make sure the rain isn’t doing the same thing and then returns his eyes to the curve of her throat. The way her hair falls.
She’s nothing like him, really. But she reminds Arthur of him just the same.
Finally, she says, “Ask me again.”
It’s been two years. Arthur doesn’t have to ask. He doesn’t have to know. But after no more than a brief pause, he says, “What happened in there?”
“He stayed to find Saito. You know that. Ask what you really want to know.” And she looks at him then, with those wide, sad eyes. Arthur wonders what she saw, to look with eyes like that.
“Did he say anything?” he asks finally. “About me?”
“Arthur, the world was falling apart around us. Everything was—there wasn’t any time.”
“Did he?” Arthur presses.
She takes another pull on her cigarette and then stubs it out on the nightstand.
“No.”
Because she was honest with him, and because she’s the only other person who ever saw Cobb for who he was, Arthur takes her again.
In the second afterwards, when he’s putting on his tie, she walks up behind him and puts her arms around his stomach. He can feel her breasts against his back, knows she’s naked still.
“Come with me,” she pleads. “Arthur, come with me.”
Arthur shuts his eyes and lets her hold him. When he tilts his head back, he can almost feel the sun on his face. In a whisper, he asks, “Am I dreaming?”
“Don’t you know?” Ariadne replies, running her hands up his chest and rucking up his shirt. Undoing his hard work. Erasing his order.
“I lost my totem.”
It’s a confession Arthur hasn’t been able to make aloud before, but he thinks Ariadne already knew that the die was a worthless fake. It was fake when he made it, years before he even knew she existed.
It’s why Arthur can’t take Eames up on any of his endless offers. Why he can’t go with Ariadne now, no matter how strongly she reminds him of things past.
“He couldn’t let her go, and it destroyed him,” Ariadne points out. “Do you really think he’d want you to do the same?”
It feels like she’s scolding him. Maybe she is.
I loved him, Arthur wants to say in his own defense. When he was here, the world made sense.
But he already said all that, in the simplest way that he could. She heard him. He knows she heard him.
Arthur remains silent, and eventually she leaves.
It’s cold in the room, and Arthur orders some of the heated blankets the nurses always have on hand. He accepts them with a polite smile and sends the girl away, then unfolds them and spreads them out himself before sitting down in his customary chair.
It’s late. They won’t be disturbed.
He puts his hand in his pocket, brings out a familiar weight and sets it on the nightstand.
The hospital breathes around them. He breathes. Arthur breathes.
On the nightstand, the top spins.