the_ragnarok

Title: Can't Catch My Memory
Fandom: Inception, Arthur/Eames, R
Warnings: Violence, mentions of suicide.
Summay: Arthur dies for the first time when he's twenty-two. He never seems to really walk away from that.
Notes: So many thanks to sirona_gs for beta duty. Title and cut-text are from Gwen Knighton's "Last Run", the poem Eames quotes is "Against Entropy" by John M. Ford.

After he sees Cobb off at the airport, Arthur flies to Toronto and rents a hotel room. He spends the rest of the week staring at the ceiling, thinking.

Every now and then the light changes abruptly; he must fall asleep, because he's not tired. He doesn't understand why he's not hungry or thirsty. Maybe he's just blacking out, ordering room service and forgetting about it. Or sleepwalking, that could be it.

It doesn't really bother him.

These are the things that do bother him: whether Cobb is actually, truly safe now. Whether Arthur is; Fisher is a proud and powerful man, not to be angered lightly. Arthur doesn't think they left a trail, but nothing is ever perfect. Even Arthur makes mistakes. Especially Arthur.

He doesn't know what to do with himself, now. That bothers him most of all.

On a whim, he picks up his gun from the night stand, feels the heft of it in his hand. He thinks about shooting through the wall, or maybe aiming it back and pulling the trigger. Maybe Mal was right, after all.

It's stupid. Arthur puts the weapon down. He knows he won't do it.

Living sometimes has its disadvantages, but death is worse. Arthur knows this from experience.

~~

The first time it happens, he's twenty-two.

This is Arthur at twenty-two: shorter than he’ll be at thirty but in the best shape he'll ever be, fatigues gone gray with the powdery dust, sunglasses practically glued to his face. His nose is peeling from sunburn.

At this particular moment, though, the sunglasses have fallen off. The gray dust is turning into thick reddish brown mud.

Arthur's mouth is open, but no sound comes out. His mouth is thick with blood and dust. He can't cough, but he does anyway, and it makes everything worse.

Arthur is dying. He saw the shooter, heard the shot, felt himself fall down. He can't quite tell where he's been hit. A stomach wound, maybe, or the lungs. Somewhere nasty.

He closes his eyes, and wakes up in hell.

~~

Arthur opens his eyes again, and he is... fine.

He's in his own bed on base, in the room he shares with three other men. He's the only one there. He gets up, wavering on his feet. Goes to find something to drink, because his mouth feels like something died in it.

For some reason, that thought makes him cringe.

Doc intercepts him in the mess, looking scandalized. "Who allowed you out of bed, Corporal?"

"Uh," Arthur says. In his defense, the walls are turning funny colors around him.

"You, young man," Doc says, although he suddenly develops an uncanny resemblance to Arthur's aunt Janet, "have a bad fever. You are under strict bed rest."

"Yessir," Arthur mumbles, and falls down.

~~

Recovery is strange. Fever makes Arthur hallucinate. The world shifts around him, pulsing menacingly like it did the one time Arthur did drugs (never, ever again). He has the most awful dreams.

Before, Arthur could never remember his dreams. But now he dreams every night, and it's horrible.

He wakes and stares at the ceiling for long hours. He never seems to get tired or hungry, he never needs to get up and piss. The nights last about a hundred years, every single one of them.

Dawn, when it comes, feels like the sun is punching Arthur in the brain. All at once he gets slammed with tired and thirsty and fuck, headache. He gets out of bed when he's allowed, staggers around like a drunken zombie, but within an hour or two he's back on his side, trying to find a cool spot on his pillow to press his face into. Everything hurts all the time, but Arthur doesn't complain.

The dreams hurt worse.

~~

Eventually, he's better; the world stops spinning every time he moves his head. Doc shakes his head sadly at Arthur when he hands him his transfer papers. "Off to the paper-pushing with you, young man."

"Yessir," Arthur says. There's something odd, something Arthur can't quite put his finger on, but whenever he tries his head starts hurting. He's not all the way better yet.

From the outside, the compound looks huge. It's just as big on the inside, but it doesn't feel like it; all the concrete corridors look exactly the same. Arthur would have worried about getting lost, except for the fact that he needs to know how to get to exactly three places: the mess hall, his room, and the office he works in.

The office, for all intents and purposes, is all Arthur's, except for the drop guy.

The drop guy comes once a week, so regular you could set your clock by him. Arthur names him 'drop guy' because the first time he came by, after completely ignoring Arthur's attempt to introduce himself, he dropped a fuckton of documents on the table and vanished.

The files are fairly self explanatory, and all look basically the same. The first things in them are maps, followed by transcripts of interviews and debriefings. Last are pages with empty tables: fill in the locations, the distances, the names.

Arthur's pretty sure he's doing someone's pointless busywork for them. This impression is strengthened by the fact that no one ever takes the documents he fills away; at most, drop guy scans them over after he brings the new batch.

Arthur doesn't particularly mind. He enjoys the quiet.

~~

"Dreary, isn't it?"

Arthur jumps and ends up getting coffee all over the files. He glares murder at the stranger sitting beside his desk.

I've only been gone for a minute, Arthur thinks numbly. When did that get in here?

That is the guy smirking at Arthur, tipping back in his chair until Arthur itches to kick it down. His dress uniform is smartly pressed and his hair is cropped, but there's something about him that looks positively disheveled. Arthur thinks it's the smile.

"I've come to bring you some reading materials." The man gestures lazily at the new pile on Arthur's desk. "I'm sure you're desperately grateful, as it seems you have fuck-all else to do."

Belatedly, Arthur realizes who this is, and blurts, "You're the drop guy now?"

The man arches an eyebrow. "Is that the official rank? I wasn't told."

Arthur is very, very happy he does not flush easily. "No."

The man waits for Arthur to elaborate, shrugs and gets up when Arthur stays silent. "I suppose drop man I am, then. I generally go by the name of Eames, though." He puts out his hand, which Arthur shakes dumbly.

"And you are?" Eames prompts after a moment.

This is the first conversation Arthur has had in, he thinks, months. Perhaps that explains why he rattles off his name, rank and serial number.

Eames' eyebrows fly up and he raises his hands. "You do realize you're not in enemy hands, yes?"

Arthur has a distinct urge to tell Eames (no rank given, he notices) to fuck off. As a more polite alternative he says, "I have work to do."

"I can see." Eames looks at the pile, and for a moment there's something strange about his expression. He almost, Arthur thinks later, when Eames has finally left him alone, looked sad.

~~

Arthur's twenty-five, and the ground opens up beneath him and swallows him whole.

He comes out of the dream pale, silent and furious. Cobb's expression is solicitous, and he says, "Arthur," almost worried, as Arthur leaves the room.

He knows he's being ungrateful. Cobb took him on after the army, gave him a profession and a place to stay. But Arthur, strangely enough, doesn't enjoy dying in cruel and unusual ways.

Although if he's completely honest, that's not what has him so riled up. There's a bigger problem. He's dreaming again.

It doesn't make any sense. Cobb had said (looking at Arthur with a strange grave expression, like he always does when he talks about dreams) that dream-sharing often lead to the loss of natural dreams. Arthur had jumped at the chance.

He's dreamed less often since his discharge, and the dreams themselves were slightly less agonizing. The pain was the same, but the horror was... less. Arthur had thought that dream-sharing could be the next step to getting rid of them altogether.

Instead, as soon as Arthur met Cobb, the dreams returned in full strength. They come every night, now, and Arthur wakes up terrified, clutching the sheets and making sounds that hurt his own ears. He keeps meaning to tell Cobb to fuck off, to stop it, leave.

He never does, because who knows – maybe dream-sharing is actually helping. Maybe without it, things will be worse.

~~

The first time he meets Eames as a civilian, Arthur is almost startled into spilling his coffee again.

Eames grins at him, cheeky, as if no time has passed at all. He flutters his eyelashes at Arthur. "Miss me, darling?"

"Hardly," Arthur says, automatically. He puts his coffee down and looks at Eames. "So you're our third for this run?"

"Indeed I am." Eames gets up and circles around Arthur, looking at him critically. "I don't think civilian life is agreeing with you, Arthur."

"With you, either." Arthur makes a point to smirk. "In uniform you actually looked like a sane human being." Eames is wearing something that makes Arthur wish he could go back in time and strangle whoever invented polyester.

It's not that he cares what Eames wears, per se; but Arthur cares about aesthetics, and it's a shame to hide a body like Eames' under something so ugly.

"Appearances are deceiving." Eames sits on the edge of the desk and raffles through Arthur's files.

~~

The job goes horribly, horribly wrong. Arthur wishes he could blame anyone but himself. He wishes, even, that he could say he was distracted by Eames and the tantalizing fact that Don't Ask, Don't Tell no longer applied to either of them. But the truth is much worse.

The dreams have escalated into daydreams.

Arthur thinks about PTSD. He thinks about therapy, and dismisses it. Psychological treatment is, to someone in his line of work, a weakness he can't afford.

Cobb yells at Arthur for not keeping his shit together. Arthur takes it, because Cobb's right and Arthur knows it. He also knows that Cobb has enough crap to deal with; his wife is in dream-sharing, too, and there's something going on with her. Arthur shouldn't know this, but Cobb talks too much when he's drunk. This happens far too often, these days.

"She says it's not real," Cobb says, slurring. "I tell her, of course it is. Think of how you got here, think about your life."

Arthur, who lately spends too much time trying to untangle nightmares from reality, remains silent.

Eames just looks at Arthur like he's waiting for something.

~~

The dreams are always the same.

He can't see anything but red, a light nearly-orange shade of blankness. It's too light to be the color of blood, but it makes Arthur thinks of that, anyway.

Everything hurts, worse than it did with the fever, worse than anything Arthur has felt in any waking dream. He tries to talk, but no sound comes out. He's not sure what he'd say, anyway. He hurts so bad he can't think.

It's scorching hot, and Arthur knows he's dead, he's in hell.

Sometimes there's a brief reprieve. Something cool on his forehead, a brush of something soft at his wrist. A soft human voice cutting through the rush of blood in Arthur's ears.

He wishes he didn't realize where all these comforting touches come from, but when he's awake he obsessively sorts through experiences, trying to remind himself what's real. Arthur can't help but recognize Eames' hand from when he pretended to take Arthur's temperature, the touch of his fingers as he puts the IV in Arthur's arm, the sound of his voice quoting random passages at Arthur.

Eames always has books on him, and often they're poetry. He reads them while Arthur works, presumably to drive in the point that Arthur is the last person in the world who still has a fucking sense of work etiquette.

"Electrons find their paths in subtle ways," he reads, "A massless eddy in a trail of smoke; The names of lovers, light of other days –" And at this he raises his eyes to look at Arthur, and smiles at him, an expression Arthur can't quite make sense of.

"Perhaps you will not miss them," Eames says. "That's the joke."

~~

Arthur wakes up, and there's a strange woman in his hotel room.

"Wake up," she tells him.

He sits up to look at her. There's something frightening in her eyes. "What do you want?"

Her mouth curves into a smile. She's beautiful, he realizes. She says, "Do try to follow simple instructions, mon cher."

"But you didn't tell me what to do." He tries to blink sleep from his eyes, tries to think. Everything seems awfully muddled.

The door slams open. It's Cobb, standing in boxers, staring at her. "Mal," he breathes like it's a curse, a prayer. "What are you doing here?"

"What you couldn't." Her teeth flash briefly, bright in the moonlight, as she drives a knife into Arthur's chest.

~~

The dream doesn't end.

It always seems to last forever, but Arthur knows time actually passes because he manages to cobble thoughts together, one at a time.

He thinks, This will never end.

After a while, it occurs to him to think, Won't it?

For a single, clear moment, Arthur can think a complete sentence. He thinks, Maybe if I died again.

He can't speak and he's paralyzed, or so he thinks; his arms and legs will not obey him. For long, terrifying periods, he's not even sure they exist.

But eventually he thinks, Leverage. He's not sure how he does it, but he moves and then everything falls apart.

Arthur's almost satisfied that he manages to scream when the world cracks into pieces.

~~

When he wakes up, it's broad daylight in his hotel room and Eames is sitting on the edge of his bed.

"What," Arthur croaks. Eames smiles at him, reaches a hand to tuck a bit of Arthur's hair behind his ear. His hand is shaking, Arthur realizes.

"You gave me quite a fright," Eames says. His hand trails down, moving Arthur's opened shirt aside, until it reaches a row of sutures on Arthur's chest. "Lucky the knife glanced off the bone, eh?"

Arthur's suddenly sick. "That was Cobb's wife."

Quietly, Eames says, "Mal's dead."

Arthur nods numbly, not sure what to do about that.

"Jumped off a building." Eames smiles at Arthur, sharp, with none of the kindness Arthur is used to seeing there.

Arthur blinks. "Shit. How long was I out?"

Eames gives him a long look, and laughs without humor. "Now there's a question I'd rather not answer." He gets up, abruptly. "Cobb needs you. You're all right now, yeah?"

Arthur nods, slowly. He feels like his head is about to come off, but otherwise he's fine.

Eames hums to himself. "All right. Go to him." He turns to leave, and in the last moment, pokes his head back in the room. "You know where to find me if you need me."

"Mombasa," Arthur says. He can't remember when Eames told him, but he must have because he nods at Arthur before he shuts the door behind him.

~~

The dreams stop after that.

Arthur's intensely grateful for that. The kind of jobs they're running now have no room for error. Cobb is tense and quiet – dealing with his grief a lot better than Arthur would have thought, all told, but still in need of Arthur's careful attention.

He doesn't hear from Eames. Arthur isn't sure how he feels about that.

~~

And then life finds Arthur in a hotel room, staring at the ceiling and having an existential crisis.

Moreover, Eames finds him.

He must have blacked out again, because he sees Eames sitting on the edge of his bed like he'd been there for hours. Maybe he has.

"You look like someone in need of a job," Eames says, almost a little too casually.

"I might be," Arthur says, like his mouth doesn't taste of dehydration and his eyes aren't dust-dry.

Out of nowhere, Eames produces a file. Arthur is struck by nostalgia. He reaches for it. Eames pulls it back at the last moment, and hands Arthur a glass of water instead.

Arthur gulps it down greedily, ignoring the nausea. He sits up, shakes his head to clear the spots from behind his eyes and reaches out for the file. Eames ignores Arthur's hand and plunks the file directly in his lap.

"A bit of a consulting job," Eames says, offhand. "Get a look at it, I'd like your input."

Arthur expects him leave, and he does. But he returns an hour later with a bag full of sandwiches. It feels like Arthur hasn't eaten in so long that he forgot what hunger even meant, exactly. He tears into his sandwich, getting crumbs all over the bed, not caring in the least.

All the while Eames is sitting in the corner, pretending not to watch Arthur. Arthur doesn't say anything. He's pretty sure he lost his right to an opinion about the subject when he lay down and forgot about getting up.

By the time Eames budges, it's evening. Arthur has lost track of time again, but this time it's fine. He just got caught up in the work. He gazes up sharply when Eames gets up and stretches with a groan.

"Well, it's been lovely," Eames mumbles.

"Stay," Arthur says sharply. Eames looks surprised, although not half as surprised as Arthur is. He's not sure what he wants, but he knows for a fact he doesn't want Eames to leave.

After a moment's pause, Eames lies on the bed beside him. Arthur takes a deep breath. He looks Eames in the eyes and waits.

He's been wanting Eames for what feels like forever, but there's something about the man. For all his casual flirting, Eames has a wall around himself a mile high, and Arthur doesn't know the way in.

Arthur thinks he's waiting for Eames to invite him in. He crawls closer to Eames, so they're nearly touching, and stays still. Arthur's a patient man.

The question Eames asks him isn't the one he expects. "When did your nightmares stop?"

It's only barely more a question than a statement. Arthur should probably be surprised Eames knows about the nightmares in the first place. Or perhaps not; information is Arthur's game, but people are Eames'.

Arthur closes his eyes. It's easier like this. "A while ago."

Eames hums something, a tuneless snatch of memory. Something they've used for a kick ages ago. There's too much meaningful music in Arthur's mind. Sometimes he thinks he lives in in three-quarter time.

Arthur reaches for the comfort of his die, the familiar heavy weight. He won't throw it now. "Are you real?" he asks Eames, voice distant to his own ears.

Eames' arms wrap around him then, and Arthur can't bring himself to tell Eames that they don't do this. For one thing, it might make Eames stop. "Real enough," Eames whispers in his ear. "I think, therefore I am, and all that."

Arthur takes a risk. "What do you think about?"

Eames' arms tighten around him, briefly, and then he gets up. "Things best left alone." He turns his back to Arthur. "For the time being, at least." His voice is soft, and he shuts the door carefully behind himself.

~~

It's like Eames reminds him about... something. Living, maybe, or maybe just that he has a job.

A job Arthur comes to realize he despises.

It wasn't so bad with Cobb. Half-insane, brilliant Cobb, who made what they did for a living look like a cross between art and mad science. Arthur's reminded, uncomfortably, that he's a criminal. That what he's doing is tearing people's minds open and letting the insides leak.

Arthur doesn't want to do that anymore, but he's too scared to stop.

He likes the jobs Eames brings him, because those are at least interesting. Eames pretends not to check on Arthur. It's a polite fiction, but Arthur appreciates it.

~~

Arthur's the best because he's had to be; because once he learned to work on two hours of sleep or less a night, while dodging nightmares and too-vivid day-dreams, he can't help but be excellent when he's not thus distracted.

But he still, eventually, fails.

A job goes wrong, and wrong again. Arthur's impaled on a mast by an angry projection of a sailor, and then shot in the stomach (fuck, not that, he hates that) on the first level. His architect is kind enough to shoot him in the head, and he surfaces.

He wakes to the sounds of an alarm, curses quietly and packs the equipment as best as he can. The extractor and the architect give him quick nods and disappear; he's the point man, clean-up is part of his job.

He's not too worried, though. There's still three minutes before security can get there, and he's done in two. He brushes invisible lint off his clothes, turns smartly and leaves.

The guards are heading at him. Arthur shoots them without blinking.

Then he hears the quiet click of a magazine slipping into its chamber, the click of the safety being removed. Arthur's frozen into himself.

He's fast. He knows this. He could turn around and maybe he'll shoot the mark before he gets shot himself, maybe he could still get out of this alive.

His knees buckle, and he sinks to the floor. His head drops to his chest.

The mark has stepped behind him. Arthur feels cold steel touching the back of his head.

"Make it fast," Arthur says, his voice rough and low.

A loud noise, then silence.

~~

Everything is red. Everything hurts. The heat is unbearable.

For the first time, Arthur can think enough to realize his eyes are closed. He opens them.

The red mist resolves itself into a bedroom. It looks like someone's house. It looks like nowhere Arthur has ever seen before.

He opens his mouth and no sound comes out. His throat hurts enough that the pain registers as a separate sensation for a moment.

"Don't try to talk," he hears someone say. "Here."

There's something burning cold at Arthur's lips. An ice chip. He opens his lips to take it in, nearly groaning at the sensation.

His head is pounding hard enough to warn against any sort of movement. Arthur turns it anyway.

Eames smiles at him, a shaky smile unlike anything he ever directed at Arthur. "Think you'd like to stay awake, for a change?"

The question must have been rhetoric, because Eames almost looks surprised when Arthur nods. He quickly regains his composure. "Good. Do you think you can stay up for a little? Cobb's gone to take a nap, and I'm sure he'll want to talk to you."

Arthur tries to make everything make sense. Cobb, he knows, is in LA with his kids; Eames is in Mombasa, where he always is when he isn't working.

He makes a noise, which Eames interprets correctly as Where am I?

"LA," Eames says. "Which is currently suffering from the worst heat wave in known history. Sorry about that, darling, Cobb apparently thinks air conditioning is the devil's invention."

Arthur wants to shrug, wants to tell him it's okay. Eames smiles at him and scoots to a bedside chair, where he's apparently been reading the newspaper.

There's something odd about that. Arthur makes an inquisitive noise.

Eames looks almost guilty as he shows Arthur the paper. "You might want to look at the date, love."

Arthur blinks. He let his head drop back into the pillow.

Eames, solicitously, feeds him another ice chip.

~~

By the time Cobb gets up, Arthur can talk.

"I've been dreaming," Arthur says. The words feel foreign on his tongue, thick and strange like a mixture of dust and blood. "For – how long?"

"About a month," Cobb says. At the same time Eames says, "Ten years."

Arthur tries to do the math in his head, even though it's still swimming from the drugs. "That doesn't work," he says. He's sure of that.

"Non-linear time," Cobb says. "Can you remember when, exactly, you left the army?"

Arthur shakes his head, mute. He finds himself prodding at his memory like a sore tooth, searching for faces and names. It's already turning fuzzy and unreal, the timeline unraveling as he tries to put it together.

"That's only the start of it," Eames says. He sounds tired, like he has in any of the dozens of jobs they've pulled together.

"So," Arthur says, slow. "Tell me if I got it right. I was shot. A stomach wound."

"Which would have killed you if you weren't unbelievably lucky," Eames interjects.

"And some army bigshot thought putting me under and telling my subconscious I'm healthy will make me heal faster."

"Thus revolutionizing the field of army medicine," Cobb says, grimacing.

Arthur nods, slowly. "I'm guessing that didn't work."

"They kept trying to wake you up." Eames' voice was terse. "Every time they did, your vitals went haywire. If you gained consciousness at all, you were screaming and flailing. You turned your bed over that time the projection of Mal killed you in the first level." Cobb has the decency to look shamefaced at that. "We thought you'd die for sure."

"That was later, though," Cobb added. "They brought Eames in from the British dream-sharing program when they couldn't bring you out, and Eames brought me in after he couldn't, either."

"Forgive me," Eames says, bitingly, "for thinking you could convince someone that they were dreaming, if not the opposite."

Cobb's hands clench into fists. He doesn't answer. Arthur waits for him to storm off in anger, but apparently Cobb doesn't do that in reality.

"As it happens, that failed as well," Eames says, softer. He gives Cobb an apologetic look. Cobb grunts and waves it off. Eames looks back to Arthur. "And then, of course, we had to leave the army."

Arthur stares at Eames. "What?"

"To say you nearly died," Eames says, voice clipped, "would be an understatement ten times over. More than that." He looks Arthur straight in the eye, as though daring him to say something. "They were killing you. I couldn't stand it."

"So what happened?" Arthur asks.

Eames shrugs. "Eventually I got someone to listen."

"Mainly," Cobb added, "by pointing out what a monumental waste of taxpayer money the whole project was."

"Cobb here was – is – a private contractor." Eames bares his teeth at Cobb. "He agreed to put you up while you recovered from your injuries, in the hopes that you'll eventually decide to grace the waking world with your presence again."

"I'm still injured," Arthur says.

"Getting better, though," Cobb says. "And when you're up on your feet, I've got a few job offers for you." He gets up. "Actually, I could give you things to do right now – research like you used to do in the army, stuff like that."

Eames rolls his eyes. "Let the man be, Cobb. He's just woken up to a terrifyingly existential revelation."

"No rest for the wicked," Cobb says easily and leaves the room.

Arthur takes the opportunity to take a good look at Eames. He looks the same age he did in the dream, but then again, Eames always did look mostly the same, never mind how long passed between their meetings.

Eames is looking back at him. Actually, Eames is looking at Arthur like he can't believe his eyes. Arthur thinks he looks grateful enough to burst into tears, but he might just be projecting.

"What shall I do with you, hmm?" There's a lazy curiosity in Eames' voice that barely masks the way it breaks in the middle of a sentence.

That's not a bad question, even if he's not sure that's how Eames means it. Arthur doesn't want the job he's been doing in the long dream, but he's not certain just how much of the dream pertains to reality. Nothing's the same now. Even the colors are subtly different than they were, filtered through the lense of – Arthur guesses – Eames' perception, and then Cobb's. Even Arthur himself is changed.

Eames isn't, though. Eames is just exactly the same as he's always been. He's always pushed Arthur away – gentle and careful, but unrelenting. The desire Arthur has held for him is old and familiar, and he thinks for a change he knows what to do about it.

"Come here," Arthur says eventually, finally. He halfway expects Eames to refuse, to get up with the same regretful expression he's worn for half the dream. Instead, Eames lies down beside him, careful not to disturb the various tubes poked into Arthur. Eames leans up on an elbow and looks down at him. It feels exhilarating. It feels inevitable.

"Kiss me," Arthur tells him.

Eames obliges, slow and thoughtful and so fucking careful. Arthur wishes he could tell Eames to relax, that he won't break him, but Arthur's so broken he barely remembers what wholeness is.

He thinks he finds a taste of it, though, lurking in the corner of Eames' mouth.

"You read me poetry," he murmurs when Eames let him go. "When I was dreaming. I think I felt you hold my hand."

"I did," Eames says. Shameless, but maybe it's because there's nothing to be ashamed of.