Archive of Our Own ^beta

3

There is the tink, whir, thud, tink, whir, thud of Cobb turning his totem obsessively. Arthur’s eyebrow twitches, Cobb should be at home with Phillipa and James, instead he is here. On a job Cobb found. In a warehouse half a country away from his family, with Arthur, Ariadne, Eames

Tink, whir, thud.

Every morning Arthur is the first to the warehouse, he sets his folders in his desk and goes for coffee, black like tar. Cobb comes in next, then Ariadne, then Eames.

Tink, whir, thud.

What there is not, anywhere in this warehouse is the quiet, thrum, thrum, thrum of good people. He realizes he has never heard it, with Cobb, or with Mal, when she was alive. Not once.

Arthur stands up, and walks slowly over to Cobb’s desk. Cobb looks up at him, eyebrows down, his mouth pinched.  Arthur takes a deep breath and straightens his waistcoat and then he slams his palms down on Cobb’s desk. Papers fly, the coffee jumps and spills all down Cobb’s front and the totem falls from the desk. Ariadne and Eames have jumped to their feet, Cobb glances at him as he tries frantically to dry his shirt.

“Either go home, Cobb, or do your job.”

Arthur kicks Mal’s totem away viciously and hopes Cobb never finds it. He walks out of the warehouse. He knows his limits. He can’t work when he is this angry.

Arthur checks over his shoulder, no one is following him. He dips his head down, rolls his shoulders forward, and moves quickly through back alleys and side streets until he is to the little apartment he currently calls home. By the time he has reached the door he has stopped being Arthur and is only Wilee.

His apartment is mostly empty. He doesn’t need much. He tears his suit off, leaves it lying on the floor. A t-shirt, bike shorts, a helmet and he pulls his bike away from the wall. He carries it down the stairs, looks over his shoulder, and rides. The pavement rushes under him, and the wind screams in his ears. He rides for the rest of the day. Wilee rides, wherever he is, even in cities that don’t know how to deal with a rider like him, even when it is dangerous, especially when it is dangerous.

Arthur isn’t his real name. Wilee isn’t either, but it’s a realer thing. He is Wilee, but he isn’t Arthur.

2

The Inception job is a bad idea, the worst idea, but it comes like a breath of fresh air. Keeping Fischer-Morrow from making an energy monopoly is an excellent reason to do something wrong. Excellent.

Wilee likes having good reasons. Arthur likes that he’s not the only one watching Cobb’s back anymore.

Wilee doesn’t like Saito particularly, but Arthur does, and if nothing else it’s nice to have his money smoothing the way.

It’s nice to have a clear goal and to have someone else who is clearly sane and in charge. It makes life simpler. It makes life better.

Wilee sleeps in random parks less, and Arthur doesn’t have to have his suits dry cleaned so often. It’s better.

It’s a terrible idea, but it makes things better. That’s a good reason to do a wrong thing.

1

Wilee got into dreamshare because of Mal.

He meets her because she has a package. He never does learn what’s in it and he doesn’t care.

The thing about Mal is that she grabs your attention and keeps it. Mal stood outside to wait for him, her hands on an ornate black metal fence that Wilee could jump with his bike if he had to. Mal walks straight up to him wide smile and huge brown eyes and asks “are you Wilee?”

Wilee nods, his lips pressed together, staring. He stares because he can’t look away. Mal is lovely.

“Good,” Mal says, and she held out a thick brown envelope to him.

The whole thing is surreal. He takes her envelope, “sign here,” and he can’t get the smell of freshly mown grass or flowers out of his nose. The air is heavy with it. It fits, with Mal. All over done, exceptional, gorgeous.

Mal stands in the shade under a willow tree with her arms crossed and her eyes heavy on his back as he rides away. Wilee doesn’t expect to ever see her again.

The next time he does see her, his hand is on the window of a cab, riding it. He glances in and sees Mal in the backseat and she looks at him thoughtfully and Wilee pushes off the cab right then. He has had enough scheming.

Turns out he didn’t leave quite fast enough. He never learns what she saw in him, that made her think he would be good at dreamshare, he doesn’t ask and she doesn’t tell. Wilee honestly doesn’t want to know.

3

Arthur walks into the warehouse the next morning, he sets his folders on his desk and he goes for coffee. He is well into his work before anyone else gets there. The papers that had flown all over are stacked carefully on Cobb’s desk, and someone has found a nice looking bit of rock for him to use as a paperweight, as if Arthur will attack Cobb’s desk again.

Arthur doesn’t like repeating things that didn’t work the first time.

Cobb spends the day very carefully not looking at him. Eames, on the other hand, stares openly. Eames runs his totem between his fingers and examines Arthur from across the room, like he’s trying to claw his way into Arthur’s head. He hasn’t yet. He only ever sees Arthur, and never Wilee. Eames doesn’t see as much as he thinks he does. Wilee wonders what Eames is seeing now.

It’s Ariadne that comes up to him, late in the afternoon, looking at him like he’s a wild animal and he might attack her, “Is everything alright Arthur?”

Her voice is soft, but it still echoes around the empty warehouse.

She thinks she can protect him from himself. She’s getting her bleeding heart all over his nice suit.

“No.” Arthur says. That is all Arthur says.

2

When Arthur sees Ariadne storm out of the warehouse he knows she’ll be back, even without Cobb’s assurance. He knows, because he did.

Ariadne’s reasons will be different. She’s a different creature all together than Wilee is, than Arthur is. Creation. He can see it in her eyes even as she shouts at him. She loves this. She loves it, it’s hooked into her bones and won’t let her go. Wilee doesn’t love dreamsharing that way, but he’s got other addictions and he knows the feel of it.

In some ways he’s glad for Ariadne, that she found this. That she can get lost in this, and love every second of it. He thinks it might make her life better. In some ways he hates himself for bringing her into this. There is so much horror here, but it’s her choice.

1

Mal takes him under for the first time on a sunny Tuesday, late in the afternoon. Wilee is dubious about letting strange women stick him with things, but it’s been a long time since anyone said he made good decisions.

It’s nighttime in the city that Wilee builds and the lights shine so bright he can hardly look at them. They flicker on and off, to a beat Wilee can’t quite hear. The dream is full of streets and cars and bikes. It’s full of shouting and the quick rush of wind. There’s a deep bass thrum that beats along with Wilee’s heart. That’s the sound of a trusted thing, Wilee thinks. Wilee built a city that ran fast, and so loud he could barely hear Mal when she spoke to him. He loves it, every terrifying, dangerous inch of it.

Wilee doesn’t know it, because he was a law student, not an architect, but most of what he has built is structurally unsound.

He loves it. Wants to take his bike and ride every inch of it. He wants to press his hands against brick walls and scrape his knees on asphalt and play chicken with the cars. He thinks I would love to break bones here.

He does indeed break bones there, but not on a bike. Wilee doesn’t actually mean to, but one moment he is in jeans and a t-shirt and the next he’s there in biking gear. The projections go wild. He is beaten to death with chain bike locks.

Wilee storms away, his shoulders hunched and his head down, habit for wind resistance. He’s shaking all over, his knees are wobbly. Wilee storms away for the same reason he took Nima’s envelope back. He likes a rush, but he won’t put his own life in danger without a damn good reason.

The bad thing about Wilee, one of the many bad things about Wilee, is that he’s a junkie. Adrenaline. He’s broken ribs and been hit by cars. Most people don’t think biking is worth that. Wilee does.

He goes back to Mal in three days’ time. Adrenaline; bad judgment.

Mal takes him to the military, because Mal works for the military. Wilee may not have gone back if he’d known that.

They sit him down in a tiny grey room and they tell him that the point is to teach a civilian how to be a soldier in the dream. If it will carry over into real life, and if it does, can they implement it on a large scale for new recruits. Wilee honestly doesn’t give a shit, but damn he wants to dream.

This is the start of Arthur. The beginning sketches of him. Wilee feels it, deep in his head when they hand him a gun. That disconnect in his brain where he stops being and something else starts. He worries about it, a little. It’s a coping mechanism, he tells himself. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.

That feeling, the feeling of not being quite there, not quite in control, it reminds him of college. It reminds him of the way he used to shake, and the way the world tilted. It reminds him of how no one ever noticed. It reminds him of how he was never quite there. This time the feeling is more solid, but it’s not new.

The military teaches Wilee to shoot and how to get shot. He learns to stand like a soldier and walk like one. He practically is one, some days. Supposedly he learns to withstand torture too, but Wilee’s done that before. Not quite the way the military runs it, but close enough. He thinks of ambulances and dirty cops.

Wilee starts running then. The military have him run often enough, have him go through the same training regimen that new recruits go through, but Wilee runs on his own too. Wakes up early, or goes to bed late and just runs. For the sake of it. To make him feel real, the way dreaming can’t.

Mal works with him most often, with a smile on her lips and a gleam in her eye. Wilee dies and dies and dies and Mal keeps fucking smiling at him.

“It will get better,” Mal says.

Fuck Mal.

Sometimes Wilee works with Miles, who is apparently Mal’s father. Wilee doesn’t love him, doesn’t hate him. At least he doesn’t lie with a smile on his face. Wilee learns that Mal’s husband works there too, but he doesn’t meet Dom then.

Wilee learns to build there, he learns straight lines and actual architecture there. Miles teaches him. Miles who is an architect. Miles comes into dreams with him, and he brings a heaviness to them. A realness, and when Miles is there anything structurally unsound simply falls.

“Physics,” Miles says once, his lips upturned.

The military considers the whole endeavor a failure. What Wilee learns does carry over, but he hasn’t got the muscle memory to go with it. He learns faster than the control subject, but not by enough that it justifies the expense.

Wilee thinks, thank god.

3

When Wilee cannot ride, he runs. It’s a sad substitute, but he likes the feel of the concrete under his shoes, the impact running up his legs. It makes him feel real.

Arthur doesn’t do either. Arthur shoots at the range, or he goes to a dojo. The only time Arthur ever does anything is if someone is following him. Wilee is real, but he’s a secret. Not even Cobb knows about him.

Mal did. Mal is dead. Mal, Mal, Mal, who he never should have trusted. Mal, who got him into this mess.

Arthur goes into the workshop, he sets his folders on his desk, and he gets his coffee.

Arthur works in the dark, lit only by his laptop screen, and he drinks the whole pot of coffee. He can tell the way the sun rises by the shade of blue coming in the window. It’s peaceful. Arthur likes it, Wilee wishes he were asleep. He makes more coffee.

Wilee wonders why he still does this.

The only thing he has ever been reliable at is his job. That’s the only answer he can find.

2

Arthur just works, does his job diligently. Wilee works his way through the people in the warehouse. He finds that it’s Saito and Yusuf, that he finds beauty in the most. It’s a strange thing to find.

It’s in the way Saito holds himself, in the curve of his back, in the way that he recognized the fucking carpet. It’s in the way he practically kidnapped Arthur and Cobb. Fight, tooth and nail for what you want. Saito doesn’t have the charm to talk people into giving him what he wants, not like Eames, not like Mal.

Ariadne, he thinks might grow into something beautiful one day. She’s naïve. She pushes her nose into Cobb’s business, like she can protect him from himself. Like she can protect them from Cobb. She stands with her back straight and her shoulders rolled forward. She wears scarfs and overlarge coats like they’re armor and she can fight for them all.

Ariadne doesn’t get it, the feeling of someone else in your bones. Like you’re one person. Ariadne thinks that everyone in the warehouse is hers. Ariadne doesn’t know shit about shit. She might one day though.

Yusuf, he feels in the back of his head thrum, thrum, thrum. Yusuf, who had wanted to be a proper chemist and found dreamshare instead. Yusuf, who calls back to his dream den every day. Yusuf who takes care of his people.

Yusuf tests his mixtures on Arthur and Arthur hates it, but Wilee sees the way that Yusuf helps him to his feet, grips his elbows, watches with careful eyes to make sure that Arthur is fine. Wilee feels warm hand prints left behind on his arms for the rest of the day.

1

It’s the middle of the night and Wilee and Mal are standing in the parking lot when Mal says, “I’m going to steal it, the PASIV.”

Wilee raises his hands to his shoulders, “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

“Please, Wilee,” she says, “You know that this is over, you know that they will never let you dream again.” It’s not the kick in the gut she means it to be. Wilee loves dreaming, but he hates this. He hates the military, and the way they dream, and he’s starting to think that maybe this is all dreaming is. Maybe he had it wrong from the start. He looked into those big brown eyes and trusted when he shouldn’t of.

Run, Wilee, run, you’re in over your head.

Wilee shakes his head, his chin down, “No, Mal,” he says and he turns away, he looks over his shoulder and says, “don’t take the back stair, there are cameras all over that place,” Wilee leaves. He wraps his arms around himself and breathes freezing air that smells like cold and he ignores Mal shouting after him.

Wilee knows that stealing the PASIV is wrong. Wilee can’t claim not to have done wrong things, but he likes to think he did them for the right reason, and stealing the PASIV? He can’t think of a good reason for that. All he can think of is Mal and her addiction. Him and his. He’s got an old standby to fall back on though.

The military pay him well for his time and it all goes into a bank account and Wilee doesn’t touch it. Wilee doesn’t care about it. He goes back to Raj, and Raj, bless him, takes him back.

It’s hard to let dreaming go, but he rides through traffic, annoying drivers and pedestrians alike, feels the asphalt under his wheels and the wind in his face and he doesn’t mind so much. It’s easier when Wilee reminds himself of all the times he died, of every agonizing second. When he reminds himself of the way he got lost in his own head. Of how his hands stopped shaking when he was holding a gun to a projections head. Of how he didn’t even blink when he turned it on himself.

Wilee thinks it’s over. He thinks it’s done. He doesn’t expect to hear from Mal ever again. She calls him though, and she says “I have a good reason.”

The first job, the first jobs, all of them, are smash and grabs. Mal and Dom aren’t criminals and neither is he. The first job is taking down a child prostitution ring and Wilee, Wilee doesn’t mind doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Mal is the extractor, Cobb is the architect, and Wilee is there to make sure they don’t get hit by cars, or run into pedestrians.

He’s there to troubleshoot, basically.

The jobs keep going like that, for the greater good.

3

It’s hours later before anyone comes in.

“How are Phillipa and James?” Arthur asks Cobb.

Cobb stares at him, “They were good last time I talked to them.”

“When was that?” Arthur is still sitting at his desk, and Cobb is standing in the middle of the room, casting a long shadow towards the front door, a coffee cup in hand.

“Arthur,” Cobb sighs and runs his hand through his hair, “we don’t need to talk about this.”

Arthur stares at Cobb and Cobb ducks his head and looks away.

“Fine for you, what about your kids.”

“Arthur-“

"After all you put us through to get them back,” Arthur says, “after all of that and you’re running away again?”

“I’m not running!” Cobb’s voice echoes loudly and the door squeaks open, Cobb glances at Ariadne, but Arthur just stares at Cobb.

Ariadne watches, eyes wide, and mouth pinched together. She closes the door behind her, and stands stiffly in front of it.

“I’m working,” Cobb says quietly.

“You’re retired,” Arthur says. Wilee wants to fucking hit him.

The thing is Wilee knows running. Wilee doesn’t run, doesn’t ride, to get away from anything, he does it for the sake of. There was a time when people asked him if he was running from something. Demon at your heels? Wilee rides because he likes to. The speed the adrenaline. He understands why Cobb is doing this. He also understands why Cobb can’t do this.

People, two tiny, beautiful people, count on Cobb. Love him with all their hearts. It’s his responsibility to be there for them. Wilee thought Cobb understood that. He thinks he was wrong.

Wilee was wrong about a lot of things, Cobb and Mal, most of all.

There is a reason Wilee doesn’t have kids. There is a reason Vanessa broke up with him, again, and again, and again.

2

They plan the inception with Cobb and Eames running lead. Whether or not this is a good plan, Wilee doesn’t know. Cobb is mad with grief and Eames is himself. The combination is bound to be explosive. The question is whether or not they will explode at the right time, at the right place. Wilee doubts it.

Wilee hates this whole idea. He’s hated this whole idea since he learned the way it was going to go down. He doesn’t mind stealing secrets so much. The mind is unaffected once they’re done. This, though. This is on an entirely different level of fucking wrong. His gut churns and his hands shake and he sits, still and silent in his own skull and Arthur thinks, one last time, for Mal.

“My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps,” Eames suggests, turning back and forth in his chair.

"That might work,” Cobb says.

“Might? We’re gonna need a little more than might.” Arthur says, because he knows the last time Cobb said ‘might’, Arthur got shot in the knee and Nash got killed. The last time Cobb said ‘might’ they got hired for this shit.

“Thank you for your contribution, Arthur,” Eames says, turning a poker chips between his fingers. Arthur thinks it is probably his totem, but he doesn’t know for sure.

Wilee gets what Eames and Cobb are saying, emotions are messy things. The bit about specificity is all Arthur, Arthur hates messes. Wilee just hates this.

It’s Eames who takes the lead, once they figure out positive emotions. Which is for the best because Cobb, Cobb is all about negative emotions lately. Guns, and shades, and grief. Bad decisions all over the place. Wilee can’t say he’s making good decisions, following him. He’s trying though, he’s trying.

‘I will not follow in my father’s footsteps.’

'I will create something for myself.’

‘My father doesn’t want me to be him.’

Eames does good work, he knows how to get to the sharp and pointy end of a thing, and he doesn’t actually go around like some sort of puffed up peacock. Arthur and Eames don’t always get on. Wilee and Eames don’t always get on, but he’s good at what he does.

He’s the best at what he does, or he wouldn’t be here at all.

In some part, Wilee is afraid of Eames. One day, one day Eames will see right through Arthur and straight to Wilee, who is just a bike courier. Wilee who is not built for this. Wilee is afraid of what Eames will do with that information.

1

Mal takes him down into a dream one day, on a whim. The dream is a pretty ballet studio. It’s there for the mirrors. Mal stands to one side with her arms crossed and a slight smile on her face. She passes tips and criticism to Wilee. She is trying to teach him to forge. Wilee thinks that’s bullshit because Mal can barely forge at all.

It turns out though that Wilee can manage a slinky little version of himself, with small shoulders, and lanky muscled arms. She’s got small breasts and small hips and a stomach that’s wider than is fashionable, muscle there. Wilee if he had been a woman. It’s a little unsettling. Wilee manages a man too, who’s a bit taller than he is, and a bit broader, but mostly the same. It’s enough that he wouldn’t be recognized straight off, but the fact of it is that he’s not a forger.

“What would you have been?” Mal asks, quietly, standing just behind his left shoulder.

"What?” Wilee asks, meeting her eyes in the mirror.

“If you hadn’t been a courier, what would you have been?”

Wilee looks at the mirror. He thinks of law school, he thinks of suits. He thinks about how long his hair had been then, and how he had slicked it back, because he looked like a child when it curled. He thinks of his time with the military and learning to stand straight with his shoulders back. He thinks of that thing in his head that held a gun under his chin and took the shot, no hesitation.

Looking back at him in the mirror is a man in a slick suit who wears his face wrong. He stands strait, eyes serious and Wilee thinks, thank god I am not this.

This is Arthur, a quick draft. Not a sketch, but not quite the real thing.

“You should use him,” Mal says, brushing her hands over his shoulders.

“Why?”

“You deal with dangerous people every day.” She clasps her hands over his upper arms and sets her chin on his left shoulder and looks him straight in the eye through the mirror.

Wilee picks jobs, because apparently he is the only one with a moral compass that points, mostly, in the right direction. He wears suits that don’t fit him, and keeps his head shaved. He swears and he smirks and he uses a different name every time.

“What,” Wilee shrugs, “be this asshole?”

Mal says, “only sometimes, only when it’s necessary.”

3

Arthur leaves his folders on his desk and goes to get coffee.

Arthur notices the way everyone is staying as far away from possible, circling him. He doesn’t much mind. His hand tenses and he wishes for his chain lock. Wilee wants to bash it against the desk, the wall, anything.

No one talks to him until Eames sidles up to him around noon, “Heard you got in a tiff with Cobb,” Eames says. He leans his hip against Arthur’s desk, eating peanuts from his cupped hand like some sort of bizarre bird.

“Did you?” Arthur says. He keeps his eyes on his work, tapping diligently at his computer. He is not playing a racing game. He is not doing puzzles. Wilee is. This job is shit.

This whole thing is shit. He should never have agreed to this.

Wilee is only reliable at his job. He should get that fucking looked at.

“Hmm,” Eames says, crunching on his peanuts, “Ariadne asked if that was unusual,” Eames raises an eyebrow, “You understand, pet, that I had to tell her that it was.”

Wilee shrugs. He doesn’t give a shit.

“What is the problem if you don’t mind me asking?” He does.

“Was I the only one that heard him say, ‘inception is the only way to get back to my family’?” Wilee asks.

“Ah,” Eames says, and nods sagely, “a man must do what a man must do.” Wilee glares at Eames until he leaves.

Never coast.

Wilee has been coasting.

Never coast.

It’s time to stop.

2

Arthur drives a cab through clogged streets and gunfire and Wilee wishes he was on a fucking bike. Wishes he could ride between the cars. Wants out of this mess. Arthur hates messes. Wilee doesn’t like being shot at, or chased by ill-intentioned people, full stop.

There is crashing glass, and the smash of metal on metal as he runs his hulking fucking taxi into other cars. Arthur is putting his license to good use. Wilee doesn’t drive.

Saito gets shot and Wilee can hear the thrum, thrum in his ears.

Yusuf takes care of his people.

When it all goes to shit, Cobb is screaming in his face and Yusuf is behind him, with Saito dying on the floor. Eames and his gun and fucking limbo, and Ariadne who doesn’t know shit about shit. Wilee thinks, never coast.

Yusuf and Arthur carry Saito into the other room and lay him out on a table under a window in the warehouse. The light of the whole place is grey, and Wilee worries about dirt, about infection; Arthur knows it doesn’t matter. Saito’s blood on Wilee’s hands licks at him like fucking fire and he knows, knows that this is wrong.

When Arthur learns that Yusuf knew about Limbo, he is furious. When Wilee learns, his gut clenches up and his blood rushes in his ears and he thinks, was I wrong?

Arthur is yelling and Wilee isn’t paying attention.

“You trusted him? What. When he promised you half his share?” Wilee hears the thrum, thrum in his ears, one man he has to protect, one to protect him. Yusuf. Did Wilee read him wrong. He feels warmth against his forearms, in the shapes of handprints, and the long looks from deep brown eyes and thinks, did I misjudge.

“No,” Yusuf says, “His whole share, besides, he said he’d done it before,”

Arthur whirls on Cobb, “What with Mal, because that worked so good?”

Cobb speaks, low and passionate and Wilee does not give a flying fuck what he is saying, what he hears is ‘go, go, go, all the way through.’

Eames says “I am sitting this one out on this level.” Wilee hears ‘coast’.

He hates Cobb in that moment, but he agrees with him.

1

Wilee does find some sense in safety, in secrecy. He gets it. He doesn’t like it but he gets it.

It’s Mal who names this demon that lives in Wilee’s head. She names him Arthur, “Like the king,” she says, “You are our good King Arthur.”

Dom, who doesn’t know him anywhere near as well as Mal, thinks Arthur is his real name. Somehow, Mal conjures up fake documents just for Arthur. Wilee doesn’t like to think about it, so he doesn’t. He uses the ID’s because they’re there and why waste them? It makes his gut turn uneasily. It makes him think of Detective Monday, he’s not sure why.

Mal takes him by the arm one day and pulls him out of work and into a store full of suits. Wilee is less than impressed. He is all function over fashion and everything he sees here is the sort of hindering shit he ran the hell away from.

Can you imagine me in a suit?

He can, because he’s worn them and he hates them. There is a reason he buys them one size to big. Run, run as fast as you can, and breathe before they steal your fucking breath. He’s not built for this shit.

Wilee is especially not built for this particular brand of shit. It is well over his pay grade and bespoke too. Not something he’s ever done before, not something he wants to.

Mal smiles at him indulgently, pushes suits and ties into his hand. Pushes him into dressing rooms, and pushes him over to the tailor so that he can get his measurements taken.

Push, push, push.

“It’ll be alright, Arthur,” Mal says, and it is the first time she’s called him that. He stares at her. He takes a long breath, closes his eyes, and straightens his back. Arthur, Arthur, who wore a bespoke suit in his dream. Who Wilee made, on purpose and not. Arthur. King Arthur, there to protect them, but Wilee most of all.

Arthur who’s colors are starting to fill in.

Mal buys suits for Arthur, and that is the day he starts being Arthur more often than he is Wilee. Mal never calls him Wilee again, and Dom doesn’t either.

Wilee isn’t dead though, he’s kicking and screaming inside his own mind and it doesn’t matter because all they want is Arthur. With his straight shoulders and his straight lines and his perfection.

3

Wilee makes a decision. Whether or not it’s a good decision he doesn’t know. He knows it’s the right one.

Arthur is late to the warehouse; he’s the last one there. Ariadne, Eames, and Cobb are huddled around Cobb’s desk talking. Arthur doesn’t care about what.

“Ah,” Eames says, staring at Arthur, “and here I’d thought you’d just decided on a lie in.” Arthur is carrying a stack of folders that reaches from his hip to his chin, “I can see now though, that you were rather busy.” Arthur doesn’t look at him.

“Do you need help?” Ariadne asks. Arthur shakes his head, moves forward slowly, carefully.

Arthur lifts the stack of folders and sets it heavily on Cobb’s desk.

"What is this?” Cobb asks.

“This,” Arthur says, “Is all the information I have for this job.”

“I think that might be a bit much, love,” Eames says.

“Why do you have a giant stack of information on the job?” Ariadne asks.

Arthur looks Cobb straight in the eye, “I quit,” he says, “don’t get killed.”

Cobb tilts his head and squints, Eames gapes, and Ariadne stammers after him as he leaves.

Arthur looks over his shoulder, no one is following him. He didn’t expect them to.

2

With Fischer and Eames left alone in the room Wilee stands next to Yusuf, shoulder to shoulder. They’re in a dark corner, away from Dom and Ariadne. There’s a still, stiff, silence between them.

“I’m sorry,” Yusuf says. It’s a long time before Wilee says anything.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Wilee hurt Nima once. Almost lost her, her son. He didn’t know, she hadn’t told him. He fixed it. Nima trusts him, still. Trusts him in her house, trusts him with her son.

People make mistakes.

“I didn’t catch that Fischer was militarized,” Wilee looks over at Yusuf through Arthur’s eyes. Yusuf holds his gaze and thrum, thrum, thrum like Yusuf and he are connected by their veins and only have one heart between them. Yusuf knows what it’s like, to have another person in his bones.

Yusuf takes a deep quick breath, nods quickly and goes to help Saito. His shoulder brushes across Wilee’s.

They are connected by their veins, with one heart between them, and one of them is bleeding out.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

1

The clothes are Mal, but the change of his dreamscape, his projections, that is all him.

It is just one more thing he learns from Mal. Like she forced her top to spin without ever stopping in dreams, Wilee teaches his subconscious to be quiet. He goes under time and again, and slowly, slowly he goes from wild racing bikers and screaming drivers and honking horns and crash, crash, crash to something quiet, calm, sedate. Wilee spends most of his time under as Arthur. In suits that he knows Mal would like, thinking about old jobs. Thinking about a life that could have been. He makes up a story for Arthur. He makes up a few stories for Arthur.

Wilee breathes himself out and he breathes Arthur in.

With time, and effort, and somehow almost entirely on accident Wilee makes Arthur real. Finishes him and paints him into the corners of his own mind.

It hurts sometimes. It feels like he’s breaking himself and when he wakes up he runs. He walks slow and calm out of the warehouse, or Mal and Dom’s house, or wherever they are, and he will look over his shoulder to make sure he is not being watched and then he will break into a run. He will run until he finds a bike. Then he will ride as far as he can. He spends a lot of nights sleeping on benches in suits too nice for it.

Wilee hates suits.

Half the time Wilee hates himself.

A lot of his dreamscape is based on pictures. Escher specifically, and Wilee realizes the stair paradox by accident, when he drops himself off a flight of stairs. He waits at the bottom broken ribs and punctured lungs, his own blood pooling around him. He didn’t fall quite far enough to kill him on impact.

3

Wilee shaves his head, and goes back to Manhattan.

Tito is sitting in the office, talking to Raj, when Wilee walks in. His bike is on the rack outside, there’s a helmet under his arm, and he can feel the thrum, thrum, thrum of a good place.

The place smells like paper and sweat and bad office coffee. It’s wonderful.

“Wilee,” Raj says, eyebrows, way, way up, “I didn’t expect to see you here again.”

“Why is that?” Wilee asks.

“Heard you moved on to bigger and better things,” Raj says.

“There is nothing better than this,” and it’s true.

He sits, for a while, and just chats, with Tito, and Raj, and the new receptionist.

Raj, Raj still takes him back. As if Wilee hasn’t quit twice, with no good reason. As if Wilee is worth the trouble. Maybe to Raj, he is.

“I could kiss you,” Wilee says.

Raj holds his hands out in front of him, “Please, don’t,” he says, but the corners of his mouth are tipped up.

2

Picking off projections one by one, and Eames sidles up beside him and pulls a grenade launcher from thin air. Arthur is impressed.

Eames says, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, Darling,” and Wilee wants to scream. Wilee’s idea of a weapon is a goddamn chain lock. He is dreaming fucking bigger. He is a bike courier and that is all he ever wanted to be and he is being shot at.

Arthur barely blinks, he follows Eames, back into the warehouse, into the van. Arthur is all soldier, all military and straight lines, he thought of the gun. Wilee thinks in puzzles, he thinks cause and effect, he thinks cars and pedestrians. How do I ride, how do I run?

How do I not get fucking shot at?

There is a reason that Wilee trusts Yusuf with the car on the first level, even though he hardly ever goes into dreams, even though he is a scientist not a driver. It is the way he talks to his customers, like they’re friends when they’re awake. It’s in the way he talks about his fucking cat.

Wilee is one of Yusuf’s people now.

He realizes, then, that Yusuf is also one of his, and Saito, bleeding out in the back of the van. His, his, his, and he can hear it in the beating of his heart. I have to take care of these people, he thinks.

He doesn’t know how.

1

Wilee never really becomes Arthur, and thank God for that. He has to put effort into keeping his dreams calm, and sedate. He has to herd his rowdy projections into suits and ties and fancy dresses. His whole subconscious is a lie and that’s a totem in and of itself. Just how unreal the whole thing is. The way his projections lie to him, and the way the city streets are too clean and the traffic too orderly.

Wilee doesn’t mean to make himself into a walking totem, but he does. Wilee doesn’t gamble and he never did. That’s why he picked the die. If all of it is going to be lies, the suits and the dreams and Arthur, then his totem can be a lie too. His projections tell lies. His projections tell him lies. When asked they’ll make up stories about a life that isn’t his. A life that might have been his once, if he hadn’t made this decision or had made that one. Just how far back their history goes depends on the day. It depends on which Arthur Wilee needs.

No one has ever properly extracted anything from Arthur. It’s because they’re not extracting from the right fucking person.               

Arthur is more real in the dreams. He settles heavier over Wilee’s body. His steps even out, his chin goes up. When they are in dreams Wilee looks through Arthur’s eyes and speaks with Arthur’s mouth and mostly, he doesn’t do anything at all. Arthur is the only real forge Wilee has ever managed.

Wilee is terrified of Arthur.

3

Vanessa did move on to bigger and better things. That was always the kind of woman she was. Big dreams, big life. Wilee’s just a small guy, he thinks small scale.

He stands in front of Vanessa’s door, in a sweatshirt and jeans, same as ever. Bojun, Nima’s son, answers the door. He’s older now, and shot up like a weed, he comes up to the middle of Wilee’s chest.

“Wilee!” Bojun grabs him around the waist, hugs him tight. Wilee laughs, and picks Bojun up, spins him around. Bojun is almost too big.

“Is Vanessa around?” Wilee asks, and Bojun gives him a knowing grin. Vanessa and Wilee tend to fall together and then fall apart. It’s happened enough times that Bojun can see it coming. The twelve year old can see it coming. That’s Wilee’s life.

“I’ll go get her,” Bojun says, and disappears into the apartment. Wilee leans against the wall opposite the door. Vanessa smiles when she sees him, and closes the door behind her.

“How long are you here this time?” She asks.

“I’m here to stay.”

"Oh, really?” She asks arms crossed over her chest one eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, I learned my lesson,” Wilee smiles, “no better place to be.”

Vanessa smiles, “You got an apartment?”            

Wilee laughs, “Should I not have?”

Vanessa leans across the hallway pushes against his chest.

“Here,” Wilee says, “this is my number, call me whenever. If you’re still interested, I’ve grown up a bit since last time you saw me.”

Vanessa takes the slip of paper, “It was your priorities that were the problem Wilee.”

Wilee nods, “yea,” he says, “those have changed to,” he leans forward and kisses her on the cheek, “I am still working for Raj though, fair warning.”

Vanessa smiles at him when he leaves.

2

Ariadne and Arthur sit quietly, in the lobby of a hotel that is Arthur all over, and Wilee nowhere. Arthur explains Mr. Charles. It’s not an idea he likes. Wilee minds it less. Cause, effect, Fischer isn’t stupid, but he’s sheltered. Wilee could see that on the fucking plane. He could see it in the way he played little fish around Eames, polite words and ducked head. He could see it in his politeness to Cobb, the way he’d followed his lead. Water, and a toast to a dead man. Fischer was obviously uncomfortable. He didn’t say a word against it. Polite, and shy; little fish.

Hell, Fischer followed Cobb on the airplane. He’s panicked and stressed now, so long as Cobb comes across as fucking competent, which, dubious, then this should work fine.

Arthur dislikes repeating things that haven’t worked before. Wilee, who has spent years learning bike tricks, knows sometimes you just have to keep doing stupid shit until it works. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is madness.

Wilee’s out of his fucking mind, and he’s only just caught on. Everyone else saw it though. He wants to laugh, hysterical.

Wilee kisses Ariadne, a quick grandma peck, because she is trying. For all of her fumbling she is trying to keep them safe from Cobb. She’s too young, and not his type, but it makes her smile a little. Makes her stop worrying and that’s the best he can do while hiding from Fischer’s projections.

They set the charges.

“Will you use a timer?”

“No, I have to judge it myself.”

He wonders where the hell Ariadne was during his briefings on this shit.

1

Wilee meets Eames through Mal. They needed a forger and none of them are more than passable.

Wilee doesn’t know how exactly Mal found Eames, just that she says, “I’ve found our forger,” and is gone for three days and comes back with a scruffy British man.

Eames greets Dom first, smiles wide and charms Dom right out of his fucking socks. Wilee distrusts him immediately. He tends to go for honest people, as a general rule. It’s one of his favorite bits of hypocrisy.

“You must be the forger,” Arthur says, back straight, shoulders back, hand out.

“And you must be the infamous Arthur,” Eames says, one eyebrow quirked, and smirking. He takes Arthurs hand and gives it a solid shake.

“Indeed,” Mal says, pleased, “This is our Arthur, and this Arthur, is Mr. Eames.”

Arthur nods at Mal, “a pleasure to meet you Mr. Eames,” and then he moves away. Back to his computer, back to his work.

Wilee watches Eames and tries to decide if he is lovely like Mal, or beautiful like Vanessa and Nima. He knows it’s strange to make value judgments based on beauty. The way Wilee means it though isn’t entirely surface.

Vanessa is beautiful to Wilee because she is a fighter. Nima is too, in a different way. They have both fought tooth and nail for what they wanted, what they believed in, what they loved. That is why they are beautiful.

That is why Mal is lovely. Mal gets what she wants, always, but she’s never had to fight for it. It’s like she gets things because she expects them, which fucking baffles Wilee.

Wilee isn’t sure whether or not Eames is beautiful. The downturn at the corners of his mouth when he watches someone says yes, the gambling habit says yes, the ability to talk his way into and out of any situation says no. But maybe.

The gambling habit is also terrifying. Wilee knows all about gambling and how it can lead to high speed bike chases and how the lives of little boys can depend on it. Wilee doesn’t gamble. He’s got a lot of good reasons.

“What are you looking at, love?” Eames asks, and Wilee is looking at him, obviously.

Arthur shrugs, “What are you working on?”

"Oh, nothing, just a little profile of our mark,” Arthur nods. Wilee leans back into his chair and does not do research.

“What are you doing?” Eames asks, “Or not doing, as the case may be.” Eames leans his hip against Arthur’s desk, perfectly ordered, and crosses his arm and looks at him.

“How do you define beauty,” Arthur asks, because Wilee would have said something like, ‘I’m trying to decide if you’re beautiful,’ or more likely nothing at all.

Eames raises an eyebrow, “Well that depends, darling, on whether or not it has anything to do with my arse.”

Wilee sighs and rubs his face.

“It doesn’t.”

“You’re quite sure? You were staring rather hard,” Eames grins.

“Go away, Mr. Eames, I’m working,” and Arthur lets the front to legs of his chair clack onto the concrete floor and clicks open his browser because this conversation needs to be over.

“Of course, love,” Eames says, and if his hips sway more than strictly necessary when he walks away Wilee doesn’t notice.

3

Wilee stops carrying a gun, because he can’t hide it under his biking gear. He keeps a knife with him, in a pocket sown into the strap of his messenger bag. He knows how to use it. Most of the time he wishes he didn’t.

Wilee breaths in New York and he breathes out Arthur. Arthur clings in his head, with sharp fingers. Whenever Wilee is nervous, whenever something hits him just wrong and puts him on edge Arthur comes out to play. Slowly though, slowly though he’s learning how to look out of the corner of his eye and see a thug and think, that’s not my problem. They’re not here for me.

He still looks over his shoulder every time he leaves his house, every time he leaves any building. He probably won’t ever stop.

Tito and Raj are the same as they ever were, but most of the people he works with now, he doesn’t recognize their faces. He’ll learn them. Some of them know his name. Some of them have heard stories about him.

He hears the thrum, thrum, thrum, of good people.

His legs burn, and he relearns this city. He takes great heaving breaths and it’s the first time he’s felt this free since he met Mal.

2

Arthur ‘finds’ the PASIV, sets it on the bed and lets Cobb work his shtick.

“Shh,” Arthur says, when he hears someone at the door. If all goes well this will be Browning. The door opens and Arthur grabs the man and yanks him to his knees, puts his gun to his head, holds him by his collar. It is Browning.

“Uncle Peter?” Fischer asks, “What’s going on?

Cobb takes the room key from Browning’s hands, “you said you were kidnapped together?”

“Not exactly, they already had him, they’d been torturing him,” Fischer stares at Browning. His eyes are glassy and Arthur wonders if he always looks like he’s on the verge of tears.

“You saw them torture him?” Cobb asks and Fischer shakes his head.

“The kidnappers are working for you.” Fischer takes it from there. Him attacking his subconscious, and it attacking him back. It’s the sort of trouble Wilee worries about getting into with Arthur one day. Please god, don’t ever let Arthur be anything but a forge.

Wilee thinks of the issues Fischer fucking has. It’s his subconscious coming up with this shit, after all. He thinks his father was taunting him on his deathbed. God. Worse still, it’s entirely possible that he was. Wilee doesn’t get on with his father, or any of his family, but never once has he thought they fucking hated him.

Fuck Fischer and his big, googley, sad eyes. Fuck this job. Wilee knows he does bad things, but this is fucking pushing it. It was pushing it the moment he realized they had to screw around with Fischer’s emotions. This is a tad more morally grey than Wilee is comfortable with, and by a tad he means fucking miles.

“Security’s going to run you down hard,” Eames says softly.

“And I will lead them on a merry chase,” Wilee says with Arthur’s mouth, because running, riding, that is something that Wilee is good at. Being chased is something he knows how to do.

Eames smiles at him, his eyes crinkling and all his teeth showing. He trusts Arthur enough to let him put the line in.

“Just be back before the kick.”

“Go to sleep, Mr. Eames.” Wilee will take care of his people. Wilee doesn’t feel the thrum, thrum, thrum with Eames, or Ariadne, or Cobb, and he’s not sure they’re his people, but he has to take care of them, for now.

It’s the right thing to do.

He stands alone in a room full of sleeping people and he thinks, when did this become my life?

Wilee takes off his suit jacket, because no one will see and he fucking hates suits. Besides, there’s no point in ripping out the shoulders.

1

Wilee visits Mal the day before she jumps, the sun shining orange over them in her back yard. It’s beautiful. The children are laughing across the yard and Dom is inside, watching closely through the sliding glass doors.

Mal tells him, about her life and Dom’s. She tells him about the city they made and how in love they were and how, “Dom doesn’t know, Dom doesn’t believe me.” Wilee isn’t stupid, he can make a guess about what happened there.

“Maybe,” Wilee says, “maybe Dom’s right. Maybe this is real.” Mal looks at him with sad eyes. She reaches out to him and cups his face in her hands, runs her thumbs over his cheekbones.

The last words Mal had ever says to him are, “I know you are not real, because you are only Arthur.”

Wilee had closed his eyes and pulled away. Sat back in his chair and watched the sun set and listened to the crickets and felt like he had been stabbed. Because Wilee’s still in there, still kicking around inside this skull and Mal, Mal can’t see it because she doesn’t want to.

Mal will fight for Dom, but Mal won’t fight for him. Mal won’t even fight for her children. Just Dom.

Wilee leaves because he thinks he might be sick if he stays.

3

Wilee stops kidding himself. He gets rid of Arthur’s phone, burns his moleskins. Wilee isn’t going back. He doesn’t need the numbers, he doesn’t need the information. Wilee can’t forget what he’s done, but he can leave it behind.

He keeps one gun, hidden behind the false back of one of the cabinets. The rest he puts in a metal lockbox that he fills with stones. He rents a boat and he drops them into the ocean. May they never wash ashore.

Wilee isn’t an honest man, not entirely, but he tries. If he has to steer the conversation away from the work he’s been doing, or where he’s been, he won’t lie about it. He tries not to. It makes for a few awkward conversations with Vanessa and with Nima and in the end he tells them, “I was trying to protect a friend,” and then he chokes up a bit and shakes his head, “someone I thought was a friend. I was wrong.” Nima takes his hand, and Vanessa makes more coffee.

These are good people. He doesn’t know why he ever left them.

The effects of the Somnacin wear off, after a while, and he starts to dream again. He’s always, always lucid. It’s strange though, being lucid in natural dreams, it’s not as real, or as clear as PASIV dreaming, it’s also much, much stranger. Things are the wrong color, and he tends to dream in stories, he gets caught up in murder schemes and ridiculous romances.

Sometimes Arthur shows up in his dreams, but he’s not like Mal, he’s not a Shade and he doesn’t hurt Wilee. Mostly he just stands around, sometimes he plays detective, in a murder mystery, or once the starring role in a sex dream that Wilee is still confused at.

Lucid dreaming is easier than PASIV dreaming ever was, even before he was using it to hurt people. Cobb wasn’t worth it, Wilee thinks. He wasn’t really one of Wilee’s people. He wasn’t worth doing wrong for. Cobb wasn’t the right reason. Neither was Mal.

2

The gravity shifts come out of nowhere and Arthur is all competence, and Wilee, Wilee thinks, never coast. Arthur runs up and down the walls like a spider, clinging and throwing people about. He wonders what Yusuf did to turn the car over.

Wilee thinks of hiding from police men, he thinks of outrunning Detective Monday. He remembers that this is for his people. This is his job. Wilee is good at his job, Wilee is only ever good at his job.

All he wants to do is ride his bike until he drops and has to sleep on the sidewalk in an overpriced suit.

Not today. Not today. Today he shoots projections and tumbles up and down walls and runs, runs, because he has to protect these people. He has to protect these people even though what they’re doing is wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Wilee’s all tangled up in his own moral codes, but Arthur, ever competent is not.

On the stairway, with one guard behind him, Arthur rushes up the stairs, pushes him from behind, “paradox,” he says, because he is a theatrical piece of shit. Projection or no, Wilee doesn’t envy the man his landing.

He hears the music then. It’s too soon.

Yusuf.

Please be safe.

1

When Mal kills herself Wilee looks over his shoulder, takes out his bike, and he rides until he falls over. He finally crashes in the dead of night in a park he doesn’t recognize, he can’t peddle any more. No coasting, and so the peddles catch on his feet and he goes over. His is chest heaving, legs aching, shoulder bruised by impact with concrete, and a long cut on his shin. Wilee doesn’t give a fuck about any of it.

He sleeps on a bench in that park, and it’s the first time he’s done that since Arthur was finished. Every second of it is Wilee, it’s one of the worst nights of his life.

He doesn’t go to Mal’s funeral. The only time Wilee has ever been reliable is on the job. He wonders if Mal knew that.

What Wilee does instead is visit Vanessa. He takes his bike, and he goes as Wilee. His hair is longer, and he pulls it back in a short ponytail. He stands in a sweatshirt and jeans with his helmet under his arm and he knocks on Nima’s door. They still live together, Vanessa and Nima. They did have to move to a bigger place, with four people in it now, but they live together.

It’s Nima’s son that answers the door and Wilee smiles at him, slow and fake, he sniffs and asks, “Is Vanessa home.” The little boy nods and closes the door on Wilee. Vanessa comes out a few minutes later. She is all beautiful, same as she ever was. In a camisole and sweats, but it’s not that that gets him, it’s the curve of her shoulders, the muscles in her arms, her fucking frown of all things.

“Wilee,” she says, slow and low. They are still friends, they talk over the phone sometimes, but it’s been a while since they’ve seen each other and now he’s just shown up, red eyed and stupid at her front door. A warm welcome is asking a bit much.

Wilee gives her a watery smile and he says, “a friend of mine killed herself,” he laughs, “I should be at her funeral right now, but I’m bad at shit like that.” Wilee shrugs and stares down and away at the shoe stains low on the wall, where someone has kicked it.

“Oh,” Vanessa says, “Oh,” and she pulls him into a tight hug. She crushes him against her chest and he falls apart on her shoulder, just outside her door in an apartment building full of people he doesn’t know. Never let it be said that Wilee doesn’t know how to make a scene.

Wilee wraps his arms around Vanessa’s shoulders and he sobs huge, gasping sobs into her neck, sobs that shake them both. Vanessa rocks him back and forth, and presses her cheek against his hair and croons something without tune. Lines of songs she can remember, that change into something else once she can’t.

When Wilee is done, when he steps back Vanessa grips him by the shoulders like she’s holding him up. Maybe she is. He rubs his eyes with his wrists and tries to smile at her, “I’m sorry,” he says. Vanessa shakes her head and frowns and pulls him inside her apartment.

The front room has a few toys strewn about the carpet, a comfortable looking couch, a bookshelf on the far wall, a wide window. What Wilee notices, even though he’s never been here before, is the thrum, thrum, thrum he hears. It’s a sound that lives in the back of his head. It is the sound of a trusted place. Of trusted people

Vanessa keeps one hand on his shoulder and she sets him down at the kitchen table, gets him water. She sits across from him and holds his hand in hers.

Wilee still loves her.

3

His legs burn and the city screams around him, cars honk, and pedestrians yell. Wilee has a chain lock around his waist and a package in his bag. He hears the thrum, thrum, thrum of a good place in his ears. Good place, good people.

He and Vanessa don’t fall back together this time, not in the same way. It’s a question, what will happen with them, and neither of them is in much of a hurry to answer it. Bojun makes a face like he’s dying every time he sees them together.            

Wilee goes over to Vanessa’s and Nima’s every Sunday for dinner. He never misses.

One day, in the middle of a delivery he gets a call. Nima’s mother has died. He thinks of Yusuf, Yusuf who takes care of his people, who still calls Wilee.

Wilee calls Raj, “It’s an emergency, Raj,” he says.

“Fine, fine, but you’re not getting your cut,” and Wilee thinks that’s fine. He’s got more than enough money stowed away.

Wilee rides as fast as he can to Nima’s house and if Vanessa is surprised to see him at the door, Wilee isn’t bothered by it. She’s got good reason.

The four of them, Vanessa, Bojun, Nima, and Wilee sit on the couch together, bundled up in one big blanket. They drink tea and coffee and watch shit movies all night. All four of them cry. In shifts practically. The next day is hard, they are all stiff, from sleeping on the couch, and dried out and drained from crying. Nima and Bojun go out in the middle of the day and Vanessa and Wilee start funeral plans.

It’s a small funeral and quiet. Wilee stands at Nima’s shoulder and she leans on him like he’s actually dependable. These are my people he thinks. I have to take care of them. Wilee holds Nima while she cries, and wraps his arm around Bojun’s shoulders. Vanessa holds his hand very tightly, when she’s not with Nima or Bojun. The two of them have taken shifts, to look after Nima and Bojun. It’s hard on all of them, but it’s worse on them.

Yusuf calls Wilee sometimes, on his new number. They talk about nothing and everything. Yusuf is far away, but he’s still one of his people. Saito sends him long handwritten letters and Wilee responds by email because he’s a douchebag.

Life is good enough.

2

When they are in free fall, Arthur thinks of the plan, he thinks of explosives and how they won’t work. When they are in free fall Wilee thinks, cause and effect. Explosions cause things to move, quickly, and with great force. What can I move? Together they make the elevator drop.

Wilee worries sometimes if he is actually making his own second personality. Wilee worries sometimes that he already has.

Wilee tucks himself into a corner of the elevator, gripping the handrail as hard as he can. It won’t really kill me, he thinks. This is worse than gunshots to the head, it’s worse than falling. It’s because of the waiting, he hates waiting.

Never coast.

After the explosion, there is a moment where he wants to breathe in. Water stings his eyes, and he helps Ariadne, gives her the oxygen mask, pushes her out the door. Swims up, up, up. He flops onto the shore, and Arthur sits them up, all professional, all over. Drowning, not a problem. 

When Ariadne tells him Cobb went for Saito, Arthur is worried, Wilee thinks, thank fucking god. Thank fucking God. Because Wilee can’t help Saito now, but Cobb, Cobb might be able too.

Wilee finds Yusuf next. Runs across the beach until he comes upon him a mile or so from where he and Ariadne came up. Yusuf is bent over, his elbows on his knees and he looks up at Arthur.

“Are you alright?” Wilee asks.

Yusuf flaps his hand. His eyes are wide and he’s taking huge gulping breaths, but he’s smiling. Wilee sits down next to him, and puts a hand on his back, grips his shoulder.

“Cobb is going after Saito,” Wilee says, and looks out over the ocean.

“Good,” Yusuf says, he pauses for a moment, “do you think he will get him back?”

Wilee closes his eyes and ducks his head, “I don’t know.” Yusuf nods, and leans into Wilee, presses their shoulders together. They sit there for a long time.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

1

At the insistence of Nima and Vanessa both, he stays for dinner. Bojun, Nima’s son, takes the seat to his right, even as the women in the room work to give him space. Wilee doesn’t know exactly what Vanessa told Nima and her mother but they’ve both been giving him worried looks since they got home.

The food is good; Wilee doesn’t cook, but he helped Nima’s mother a little. She’d pulled him up and shoved a knife in his hand and set him to chopping things. It’s surprisingly good to be useful.

Wilee is quiet, just listening and no one tries to pull him into the conversation. He can only half understand it. Nima’s mother speaks some English, but not a lot, and he gets lost in the rhythm of it. It makes a good counterpoint to the thrumming in his head.

This, he thinks, is a good place.

Wilee thinks he’s fine, and it’s actually Bojun that sets him off. Bojun who sets his hands on the table and leans across to kiss Nima’s cheek and Wilee thinks of Phillipa and James. He sucks in a deep ragged breath, trying to be as quiet as he can, he closes his eyes tight and tries, tries not to cry. The back of his throat is tight and he can’t breathe. He’s had enough. He wants this to be over.

There are two tiny hands wrapped around his. He opens his eyes and looks over at Bojun, who is looking up at him with wide eyes. Wilee doesn’t know Bojun well, and he doesn’t know exactly what Bojun knows about him, but Bojun looks at him and he says, “it will be okay.”

Wilee croaks out a laugh and curls in on himself and Bojun keeps one hand pressed against Wilee’s knuckles and runs the other up and down his forearm until Wilee pulls himself back together. He sniffs and wipes his eyes, and pats Bojuns hand, sandwiching it between the palm of one hand and the back of the other.

“Thank you,” he says and Bojun smiles at him, nods and goes back to his dinner. Vanessa, Nima, and her mother are still talking, like nothing happened. They all glance at him from time to time, but they don’t bring any attention to him.

Wilee sleeps on the couch that night and wakes up to Vanessa, and coffee.

“You’re up early,” he says.

She nods, “I figured you’d leave without saying goodbye.”

Wilee nods and looks out the window, “I’m sorry,” he says, “I shouldn’t have put all this on you.”

Vanessa punches him in the shoulder and pulls him into a half hug, “That’s what friends are for, asshole.”

He smiles at her and takes the coffee she gives him. They drink it in silent company, sitting in the sun that comes through the window and Vanessa is reading through a battered paperback and it’s peaceful. For the first time in a long time it’s peaceful.

Wilee sighs, when he’s finished his coffee and Vanessa walks him to the door. They hug, tight and fierce and Wilee can almost feel their hearts beating in time.

“Thank you,” he says one last time, and then he leaves.

3

Wilee still keeps his totem. He actually has two. The die and a backup, it’s a bit of ribbon he keeps tied around his waist. At first it was because he missed the feel of his chain lock. Now it’s just habit. Besides, it’s always good to have a backup.

Wilee doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to give up his totems. He wishes he could, but he performed inception. He knows a bit too well what might happen to him without one.

Vanessa thinks it’s strange that he keeps a die with him, that he won’t let her touch it.

“It’s a reminder,” he says.

“You want to tell me what it reminds you of?”

“Life,” he says, because he’s realized now that dreaming was never life. It took him too long to realize that.

2

There is a week in the first level left. Wilee rides. As often as possible.

Yusuf, Ariadne, and Eames sit in a hotel room and drink copiously and worry about Cobb and Saito and Wilee can’t deal with sitting still when one of his people might be dead. So he walks out of the hotel he looks over his shoulder, no one is following him, and suddenly he is Wilee again. There is friction under his wheels and rain on his shoulders and it is fucking beautiful. When he comes back at night sometimes Eames looks at Arthur like he is a puzzle to be solved.

One day, Yusuf comes down to the lobby with him, “what do you do when you leave?” he asks.

Wilee smiles at him, “I ride,” and he hefts a bike into his arms from thin air.

“I wouldn’t have thought you were a rider, Arthur.”

Wilee grins, wide and open in a way Arthur can’t, “You can call me Wilee,” he says.

Yusuf looks at him, long and slow, taking him in, he nods, “Wilee,” he says, “it suits you.”

Yusuf doesn’t follow him after that, but he smiles after Wilee when he leaves, and puts a hand on his shoulder when he comes back, if he’s still awake.

One night when Wilee gets back, Eames is the only one still awake and he’s half-drunk, he asks, “What do you do all day, pet?”

“I ride my bike,” Wilee says, and Eames snorts.

“Don’t tell me then, I’ll figure it out myself.”

1

Before Mal died Wilee picked jobs, but she was the one with the contacts. When she died he took her phone, and her notebooks and he found every name that he could. He didn’t recognize all of them, had to do more research than he liked to find out who owed Mal what and who did what and who was best at what.

Wilee doesn’t do this for the money, he did this for the rush, and now he does this for Dom. Dom lives out of hotels, and sometimes Wilee does too, mostly he gets a hotel room and rents an apartment under a different name. He discards fake ID’s like they’re old receipts. A different name every few months, always with backup, just in case.

Most of his money he gives to Vanessa or Nima, sometimes to Miles for Phillipa and James, or just charity when none of them will take it. He could give it to Dom, to help him buy his way back home. He won’t though, because Arthur, straight backed and military loyal likes Dom, but Wilee knows too much about what happened to Mal.

Wilee has no particular love of Dom, but he was never the person you could rely on unless it was for work. Wilee couldn’t go to Mal’s funeral, couldn’t make himself, but he can make sure her husband doesn’t kill himself. He can do that for her. That’s his job, after all.

For as long as he can he keeps them on the sort of good Samaritan jobs that they’d been doing up to that point, but Dom is wild and self-destructive and eventually he starts taking jobs without Arthur’s input.

This is around the time that Mal’s shade starts shooting him. This is also when Dom becomes Cobb.

Wilee knows that what he’s doing is wrong, but Wilee is small. Wilee sees the people in his life, and the things that happen to them, and nothing else exists. Taking care of Cobb for Mal is right. What they’re doing is wrong.

He isn’t sure if he’s doing the wrong thing for the right reason, or if he’s just wrong.

3

Wilee knows there is someone in his apartment as soon as he reaches the front door. There’s a slip of paper on the landing. He got that trick from The Sting. He wonders if he should run. He can’t think of anyone he’s pissed off lately, and Nima and Vanessa both have a key.

Wilee sets his bike against the wall and pulls the knife from the pouch he sowed into the strap of his bag, it’s warm from being pressed into his chest all day. He keeps his arm down, with the tip of the knife pointed up his arm, hiding it from view.

He opens the door and knows immediately that it is not Vanessa or Nima, there is the smell of cologne that he doesn’t recognize and some of his things have been moved. Nothing valuable has been touched. Someone has gone through the stack of raggedy old books he keeps. One corner of the rug is turned up. There’s a creaking from the kitchen floorboards. Wilee stays where he is in the doorway, ready to run if he has to.

Eames walks into his front room, eating off a plate he took from Wilee’s cupboards. Eames cooked. He had to have, because Wilee doesn’t have anything in his kitchen, he eats while he’s working, or at Nima’s.

Wilee sighs, and lets his grip on the knife go slack. Eames has killed in self-defense, but he’s not a murderer, he likes people to much to kill them without good reason. Money is not a good enough reason.

“So,” Wilee says, “Are you here to warn me about a hit, or just to annoy me?”

Eames doesn’t look up from his food, just leans against the frame or the kitchen entryway, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to track you down, love?” Eames asks, “Even Yusuf wouldn’t tell me where you’ve been, no matter how much money I offered him.”

“Yusuf’s a friend,” Wilee says, and he hefts his bike, he maneuvers it into the apartment and sets it against the wall. Eames is staring at him.

“So you really weren’t kidding about the biking, then?” Eames asks, slowly, eyebrows up.

“No.” Wilee walks past Eames into the kitchen and sees that Eames has in fact seen fit to stock it. There are grocery bags everywhere. Wilee stops and stares at them.

“I would have put things away, but I’ve no idea how you keep your kitchen.”

“I don’t,” Wilee says.

“You don’t?” Eames asks with a raised eyebrow.

“I don’t cook.” Wilee shakes his head and pulls water from the fridge, it’s the only thing in there. Wilee leans against the kitchen counter, stares at Eames and waits.

“You don’t cook,” Eames says, “I’d imagined you wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t prepared by your obsessive hands.”

Wilee raises an eyebrow, “You also think that the only thing I wear is suits, you’re wrong.”

“Yes I rather was, I don’t suppose you’d mind me getting to know the new and improved Arthur?”

Wilee is trying to be an honest man, so he says, “Blow me, douchebag,” and Eames gapes at him. “This is who I’ve always been, asshole, Arthur was a forge,” Wilee waves his hand around the kitchen, “I don’t care where you put shit, so long as it doesn’t rot on my kitchen counter.

Wilee walks out of the kitchen, and takes a shower. It’s not a short shower, but it’s not long. Fifteen minutes, long enough to get clean, and to let the hot water ease his muscles. Who knew how tense break-ins could make a person.

Eames is sitting on his couch when Wilee comes back out in a clean t-shirt and jeans.

“You are not gone,” he says.

“I had hoped to get to know you J-“

“It’s Wilee.”

“Like the coyote?”

Wilee nods. Eames purses his lips.

“You can stay until the fridge is empty, but you’re sleeping on the couch,” Wilee says. Eames grins.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Eames found him, fought to find him. Wilee has time to find out if he is one of Wilee’s people after all.