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alchemyaliceTitle: The Outrage of the Years
Author: Alchemy Alice
Artist: Ellegen
Pairing/Genre: mostly gen, eventually Arthur/Cobb, drama
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Cobb is dreaming. But he is also writing. This is a story about waking up.
Prologue: Words
Part One: Inception
Part Two: Mr. Charles
Arthur sips at a martini, though whether he is actually drinking it is anyone’s guess. The sky outside is steel gray and getting grayer. He has no desire to move from his spot at the bar.
That works out well, seeing as his client is late.
The hotel is all slick mahogany and frosted glass panels, clean to a fault so that even the bartender looks too polished to ever be expected to work hard. He wipes down glasses like he’s caressing them, and doles out soft-spoken, neutral advice to the heavyset executive with a drinker’s nose down at the far end of the bar. In the lobby, stilettos and polished Italian leather dress shoes click staccato punctuation on marble tile.
Arthur checks his watch in the murmuring silence. Twenty minutes past. More than his time is worth, particularly now. And he supposes that it isn’t raining yet, and if he wants to avoid the inevitable downpour it might be prudent to leave sooner rather than later.
He leaves his martini half full, the cocktail sword stripped of its olive.
The revolving doors give way to him and the doorman nods in recognition as he leaves. His hand strays to his phone, but he catches himself halfway there. He’s grown accustomed to working alone, mostly.
Mostly.
He becomes aware that he is being tailed three blocks down.
A narrow side street allows him an avenue by which to test the theory.
Definitely followed. By the doorman, no less. Arthur doesn’t recognize him, but didn’t expect to. Cobol, among others, has many such faceless men.
The back streets of the city are labyrinthine, and he uses them to his advantage. When an alley with a little-known exit route presents itself, he turns into it and whirls.
The doorman is burly and quick.
It only takes Arthur a few seconds to drop him.
A few seconds, in which he is unable to see the second man with a burlap bag and a gun.
***
The phone rings jarringly in the afternoon, while the kids are still at school. It’s cool even for the season in Los Angeles, dipping into jacket weather. Dom picks up the phone without looking, now accustomed to taking calls mid-stride, his gaze still locked on blueprints laid out on the drafting board beneath his hands. “Hello?”
“Hi, Cobb.”
Dom blinks, and has the strange warring desire to both tense up and ease. “Ariadne. How are you, how’s school?”
“I graduated last year, Cobb.” He can hear her eye-roll over the line.
“Yes, of course,” Dom says, blinking. He hadn’t been to her graduation, which seems oddly wrong; he has no immediate memories or explanations for his absence. “What have you been up to, then?”
“Traveling a bit. Saito’s money helped. I’m looking at offers from several firms at the moment, but I’m not sure which one I’m going to go for yet. That’s not why I’m calling, though.”
Tensing wins out. Dom feels his shoulders lock. “Oh? What then?”
“Just…” Ariadne drifts off, and he can hear her pacing. Old wooden floors, probably her Paris apartment. “Have you heard from Arthur lately?”
“Sure. About six months ago, when he was in Malaysia.”
“Sooner than that, Cobb,” Ariadne says, impatience seeping through. “Have you heard from him more recently?”
“No. But we don’t keep in touch that often.” Dom shakes his head. “Why are you asking?”
She pauses. “Because we’ve kept in touch. Arthur and I.”
Dom raises his eyebrows, looks blankly at the studio wall. “Oh?”
“And,” she presses on, “He hasn’t called in almost three weeks. He’s never not called for this long, not without sending a card or something in his stead.”
Dom processes this apparent - what, friendship? - that had sprung up in his absence, before setting it aside and shrugging. “Look, Ariadne, he doesn’t do that with me. I haven’t seen or heard from him. I’m sorry.”
“But he’s your point man,” she insists. “Do you have any idea where he could be?”
“I’m not his keeper,” he replies blankly. “I’m sorry, Ariadne, I really am. But I wouldn’t worry. Arthur’s more than capable of taking care of himself, and three weeks isn’t all that long.”
“If you say so.” She still sounds doubtful, but Dom figures it’s the best he can do.
“If I hear from him, I’ll be sure to let you know,” he says, and hangs up.
He turns back to the blueprint, but where before it had leaped from the page, it now lays flat, long exacting lines rendered lifeless.
Arthur is a man of habit and consistency. It’s unlike him not to keep in touch, if keeping in touch was what he was wont, in the past, to do.
***
Eames doesn’t like mirrors.
He uses them constantly for his profession, but that’s part of the reason why he doesn’t like them. He suspects (when he has occasion to, and he tries very hard to make that as seldom as possible) that he has a subconscious fear that one day, in reality, he will look in a mirror and find someone he doesn’t recognize looking back at him.
He does not, by contrast, have any sort of planned or predicted reaction to seeing more than one of himself at a turn into the looking glass.
The double in the reflection smiles just as easily as he does.
“A most delightful facsimile,” his double says. “Ta.”
Silenced guns are never truly silent, but Eames doesn’t hear this shot at all, because his head has already hit the floor.
***
Dom starts to jump at phone calls. Dread has been a familiar feeling to him since Mal, but it had faded over the past few months and he doesn’t welcome it back. After several neutral calls from the architectural firm courting him and one from Phillipa’s schoolteacher, he begins to write the anxiety off. He hadn’t lied when he said that Arthur could take care of himself.
But then it’s four o’clock in the morning and his cell phone, not the house phone, is vibrating on the bedside table.
He startles in bed and gropes for it without turning on the light. “‘Lo?” he says, his voice sleep-scratched.
“Cobb.”
Adrenaline shoots to his throat, enough to feel like he’s being throttled. “Jesus Christ, Eames, how did you get this number?”
“You’re back on the grid, mate. Don’t be surprised if I know your social security number.”
“What do you want?” Dom demands.
“I’m not calling for me, Cobb. I’m calling about Arthur.”
Dom swings his legs over the side of the bed. “You’ve spoken to him?”
“No, and that’s part of the problem. I was expecting to hear from him about a job, and the call never came through.”
“Maybe he chose not to use you?” Dom suggests.
“You and I both know he would have sent word of that, probably with a terribly smug comment about finding someone more tolerable,” Eames counters dryly. Beneath the drawl, however, his throat sounds carefully tight, which is cause to worry in itself.
“Do you know where he is?” Dom says.
“No. I can tell you where he was last, though.”
Cobb exhales loudly through his nose. It shouldn’t be like this, this is all wrong. Arthur is well built for criminal activity, even more than Cobb is in some ways, but Cobb was the one to drag his stellar military record down into the mud, it was his doing and now Arthur knows nothing else, now he’s missing.
“Okay. Text me the coordinates, I’ll make arrangements.”
“What about your kids?” Eames asks, though his tone suggests it’s only a perfunctory inquiry.
“I’ll take care of them. Text me the coordinates.” Dom hangs up, hand shaking enough for it to take a few tries before the phone fits right in its cradle, the plastic rattle-clack of it too loud in the dark.
He looks around at the shadow outlines of his bedroom, listening to the silence of his children sleeping next door. It is already morning in Paris. Miles will most certainly be awake.
Cobb doesn’t think twice.
***
Ariadne looks as well as can be expected, considering; a little older and wiser, perhaps, but still fiery and without pretense. “I told you something was wrong,” she accuses, in lieu of a greeting, though she still unexpectedly hugs him tightly at the same time. Cobb pauses, and then returns the gesture. She’s tiny in his arms, but solid.
“I know. I’m sorry,” he says. “How was your flight?”
“I used to fly economy to get to school,” she replies. “And first class hasn’t lost its novelty.”
“Good, then?”
“Complimentary champagne is going a long way towards not yelling at you right now.”
Cobb snorts, his smile barely adequate. He feels like he’s been thrumming with worry and something harder, darker, ever since he dropped off his children with Maria.
“Come on, then,” he says. “Eames is waiting.”
Chicago is rainy and not particularly friendly, and Cobb remembers Arthur’s distinct dislike for it. Nevertheless, he ushers Ariadne into the car and drives towards the warehouse he’d arranged.
It isn’t nearly as spacious as the one he’d had in Paris, but it‘s ample enough for their plans. The cement is old and rust-stained, the roof dark and low with piping--a basement facility at best, but discreet.
Ariadne, without instruction, heads for the southeast corner where several dividers are stacked off to the side. Eames rises from one rickety chair at their arrival. Nothing has been set up yet.
“Guv’ner,” he drawls.
“Eames,” Cobb acknowledges.
“We waiting on anyone else?”
He shakes his head. “It’s a small team on this one, people who know him, who want him back.”
“Good.”
He glances back at Eames to read him, but Eames is already turning to set up his own equipment, his expression hidden. Cobb had almost forgotten how this game was played, and he doesn’t like it at all; he feels it in a low twist of unease in his stomach. He’d been a good con man, when it had been called for, but back then, his goal had been singular, absolute—take him home, bring him back to his family—not so tied up with a loyalty he hadn’t even given real thought to.
This is so many kinds of different, so many different kinds of dangerous. Eames is representative enough of that—a con man through and through, one made by choice rather than circumstance.
Dom knows he can be dangerous, when pushed. Eames is dangerous just by existing.
“What are our leads?” he asks the room, all too aware that this would be when Arthur would usually answer.
Eames steps up, though. “His last client. A Matthew Oberon. Hired Arthur and I some months back. We did the job for him, no problems, and I’m fairly certain Arthur did a solo for him some time after.”
“Visibly, or is this just hearsay?”
“Visibly. As evidenced here,” Eames pulls up some images on the main projector, and there are clips of Arthur in Mumbai, in Boston and Chicago. Cobb feels his muscles tighten into a hard, skull-like formation that he hadn’t known they could make until Mal killed herself.
“Okay. We need to find him, first of all.”
“Working on it,” Eames says.
Cobb nods, and pulls out his phone.
“Who are you calling?” Ariadne asks.
“Saito. He has resources at his disposal that we don’t.”
Eames looks over at Ariadne, but she just nods as Cobb dials.
The phone rings twice, before it picks up. “Mr. Cobb.”
“Saito. I’m afraid I must ask a favor of you.”
As Cobb talks, he turns away from Eames and Ariadne, wandering slightly, though not entirely out of earshot.
Ariadne stands very still, her own work forgotten, her breathing shallow. The traffic on the street dims slightly, the sounds blurring.
Cobb hangs up.
She resumes her movements. Cars zoom above their heads.
“What did he say?” Eames asks, while looking sidelong at her.
“He’ll call if he finds anything,” Cobb says briefly. He opens a file Eames has left on the table and scans it. “What was the job you did for him?”
“Run of the mill extraction.”
“He was a software developer,” Cobb reads. “Retired at thirty-five?”
“Mm. Not your average programmer. He did contract work for the CIA, NSA. A lot of virtual reality training programs.”
Cobb looks up and narrows his eyes. “Why don’t I know him?”
“He privatized before we got there,” Eames replies. “He made his money and got out before dream-sharing technology made software-based training look like child’s play.”
“And what, he’s working with dreams, now?”
“Word on the street is that he’s trying to break into the market, but as stealthily as possible. Scoping out the competition and leveling them before he even comes onto the scene. The extraction we did was from a chemist. Not Yusuf,” he adds, when Cobb frowns. “Someone not as innovative, but still useful. Working for the government, still, which was why Oberon couldn’t just buy the information off of him.”
“Militarized?”
“No,” Eames snorts. “You’d think the Company would know better by now, but I guess they thought he was too minor to be worth the effort of training him. It was an in and out operation, no snags.”
“That sounds way too simple,” Ariadne says, looking up.
“Yes, it does,” Cobb agrees. He looks at Eames. “Audition?”
Eames considers it. “That does seem likely, in retrospect. But what was he auditioning us for?”
“He wasn’t auditioning you,” Ariadne says. “He was auditioning Arthur. Otherwise you’d have been taken, too.”
“Maybe I’m just cleverer than Arthur.”
Ariadne snorts.
Cobb says, “If it was an audition, then Arthur is either kidnapped and confined, or he’s on a job. Either way, he’ll be in good enough condition to have sent us clues. Ariadne, you’ve been in contact with him the most—does anything from your correspondence come to mind?”
She pulls her luggage up onto the table and unzips it. “Here are the postcards he’s sent to me over the past six months,” she says. “But it was when he stopped that I got worried.”
“Look anyway. How long ago was the Oberon job?”
“Four months ago, give or take,” says Eames.
“And you lost contact when?” Cobb asks Ariadne.
“Almost a month now,” she grimaces.
“That’s a three month window in which Arthur may have had suspicions.” He gestures to Eames, who passes him the security photos. “The tailing started about a month before he went silent.”
“I’ll start there then,” Ariadne says.
They spend most of the rest of the afternoon in silence. Ariadne is tired from the flight, but forces her eyes to focus. There is something there in the postcards—she’s certain now that she sees them all lined up. They’re all conspicuously generic—not at all the ones Arthur would have chosen himself, but carefully impersonal, and occasionally verging on cheesy. She should have known something was wrong just from that, but she’d simply assumed he was trying to be discrete.
She copies down his brief, impersonal missives. They are terse and undeniably Arthur.
A—
Decided on an employer yet? I’m sure the offers are streaming in, perhaps some from old friends. Budapest has been profitable. Good luck with your decisions.
--A
A—
Greece is lovely. The weather is fine and I’m spending my days amid architecture I’m certain you have memorized every brick of. Hope you’re well.
--A
A—
In Canada to visit family. Completely awkward and full of lies. Had to watch hockey with them. Must admit to E that I still can’t keep track of it; sheer Luck is all I’ve got to go on, betting-wise. I’ve had some lately. The Key is confidence of delivery.
--A
“‘E’,” Ariadne mutters. “Eames?”
“What’s that, love?” he looks up from his computer.
“I think Arthur left you a message.” She holds up the postcard.
Eames plucks it from her fingers and scans it.
Cobb looks up from his work as well, and saunters over.
Eames snorts as Cobb approaches. “Not very subtle, is our Arthur,” he says after a second.
“What does it mean, Eames?” Cobb asks intently.
“Quite simple. He’s almost told us—the key to whatever code he was going to send, or has already sent, is on this card.”
“What, ‘Luck’?” Ariadne frowns, remembering the odd capitalization.
“Most would think so, but the postcard was meant for me. I once told him that the key to a con was confidence in delivery.” Eames quirks a smile. “We’d been holed up undercover for a month, and were just about ready to kill each other. He told me confidence was worthless unless you knew the in-codes of the culture.
“And then, my dear Ariadne, he proceeded to recite to me nearly forty examples of Cockney rhyming slang, in the most atrocious accent I have ever heard in my life.”
She giggles, unable to imagine Arthur holding forth in the manner of Dick Van Dyke. Cobb just raises an eyebrow.
Eames smiles, and taps the postcard. “Luck. Reverse-engineered Cockney rhyming, so atrocious that he couldn’t have meant anything else. Luck. Puck. Puck and Oberon.”
“Oberon is the key?”
“A warning and a key all in one,” Eames nods. “One that I could get only because of that conversation, and because of our history with Mr. Matthew Oberon. Reread the postcard without the rhyme: ‘Oberon is all I’ve got to go on, betting-wise. I’ve had some lately.’”
“He knew he was being tailed, as far back as six weeks, then.” Ariadne splays her hands over the postcards.
Cobb looks over her shoulder and then his eyes narrow. “Where did he send the next postcard from?” he asks.
Ariadne picks up the next one in line and flips it over. It features a museum photograph of a marble bust. “Rome,” she says.
“Caesar cipher,” Eames says immediately.
“Vigenére,” Cobb corrects. “A series of Caesar ciphers. It’s what Arthur always used to use when we first started training him in the dream world.”
“Simple,” Eames notes. “Possibly too simple.”
“Yeah, if the decoded message is transparent,” Cobb replies. “Which, knowing Arthur, it won’t be.”
“And it’s crafted so only all three of us could crack every part of it,” Ariadne says. She smiles slightly, and then starts flipping the postcards over, some of them text side up, others picture side up, and then shifting them around on the drafting table.
Cobb watches her for several seconds and then chuckles. “Theseus’s labyrinth?” he says in amusement. “I think he’s reading a little too much into your namesake.”
“What are you talking about?” Eames inquires.
“Marker points,” Ariadne says, pointing to what seem to be ink smudges on the edges of the postcards, but when lined up with other postcards, formed the split halves of. “The easiest way to construct a Cretan labyrinth, or at least what we think is one, is to create a cross and some key points.”
She shifts some of the postcards over, and then stands back. “You see?”
Together, the letters on the postcards fit together in lines, and in points.
“Normally, you’d draw out the actual walls from there,” Cobb says, filling them in lightly in pencil.
“But we don’t need to, because Arthur put the important part of the code where all important things in a labyrinth are kept,” Ariadne taps the central cross, where the letters seem darker, marginally clearer. “Right in the center.”
“I’ll be damned,” Eames breathes.
It’s faint, and at points only visible by the gleam of Sharpie over already dark glossy paper, but it’s there.
Ariadne lays scrap paper over it and copies off the letters more clearly.
Eames draws out a Vigenére square while Cobb starts decoding. His frown deepens as he lines up the message with the key. “Shit,” he says fiercely.
“What does it say?” Ariadne says.
Cobb shoves his sheet of paper away from him and strides away from the table. Ariadne pulls it towards her.
BBVTWFGVWRDCZFXISR
NARCISSUS|APPLE|TREE
“Narcissus Apple Tree?” she echoes. “What does that even mean?”
“No idea about the Narcissus part,” Eames says, but even he looks truly worried now. “But Apple Tree…that’s nothing good. Especially if it’s actually possible.”
“It’s possible,” Cobb says.
“You’ve done it before?” Eames asks.
“No, not this one.” His smile is bitter. “But I’ve seen it done. It’s not pretty.”
Ariadne often forgets that Cobb was in the military, like Arthur and Eames. Maybe not in any soldierly capacity, but he’d seen dream technology grow from the ground up, in bunkers and unmarked office buildings. He doesn’t look like it, hunched over slightly like he still isn’t quite convinced of his own youth, hair falling in his eyes, but Ariadne has a feeling that the far sight of a dreamer isn’t so different than that of shell shock.
Eames’ expression closes up. “Someone I knew?” he inquires, carefully blank.
Cobb shakes his head, though slowly. “Different division.”
“Will someone please explain what Apple Tree actually is?”
Cobb turns, and the traffic outside goes silent. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Say that your mind is an apple tree, and the apples are ideas, memories, information. Normally in extraction, you con the mark into pointing out where the one apple you want is, and you go and pick it.
“But say don’t know what information is important, and the mark doesn’t know either. So you want every idea. Every piece of information. And in addition, the branches are all guarded. What do you do?”
Ariadne pales slightly. “Shake the apples loose. Let them come to you.”
“Arthur has a lifetime of secrets from extractions in his head,” Eames says. “And Oberon wants all of them.” He watches Cobb. “Do you know what he means by Narcissus?”
Cobb nods. “It was the only safe house between us we both knew the location of,” he says, and grabs his jacket. “And it’s here in Chicago.”
***
“I take it he didn’t actually talk to Saito?” Eames said dryly, when Cobb had left the building.
Ariadne exhaled. “No. But that gives us a good plot device--Saito can lead us to Arthur much more quickly than having to solve all of the puzzles.”
Eames nodded, his lips pursed. After a second, he said, “Why does Cobb know about the apple tree?”
Ariadne looked both irritated and guilty. “I don’t know. I let Arthur choose the threat.”
Eames blinked. And then he said, “What the bloody hell did you do that for?”
“I didn’t think he’d pick something real! I thought it would make him more comfortable with the plot if he--”
“He doesn’t have that kind of imagination,” Eames interrupted. “He must have chosen it out of...” He stopped, blinked, and then restarted. “It must have been a wish for accuracy and thinking that Cobb hadn’t heard of it. But of course Cobb’s heard of it, Cobb lives and breathes dreaming, quite fucking literally, and he should have known that.” He huffed. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means Cobb is going to have to help write the dream.”
“Yeah,” Ariadne sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
***
It’s little more than a bolthole, and Cobb is reminded of Sherlock Holmes and his collection of closets and hideaways scattered over London. It’s windowless, barely larger than a closet with an attached bathroom, but it looks eerily large, because there had been a reason that he and Arthur had given it the moniker, ‘Narcissus’.
Walls to ceiling, it is plastered with panelled mirrors.
Cobb casts his eye over his infinite shattered reflections, and remembers the first time Arthur had taken him here.
“They weren’t my idea,” Arthur said defensively. “Some crazy actress used to use it to rehearse or something. But she died a while back, and it was cheap, so I thought, why not?”
“Yeah, whatever. You just want to be able to see that your tailor pinned the back vent of your Dior right,” Cobb teased, and Arthur punched him in the arm.
The mirrors are tarnished now, some cracked around the edges. There is canned food and a hotpot on top of a filing cabinet, and a Murphy bed closed up on the wall.
The bed hasn’t been used as a bed for some time, it’s clear. Arthur has made it into a work board.
Pages from classified files, security photos, and records lifted from Oberon’s company are pinned up neatly across the underside of the bed, complete with connections denoted with precise bits of twine. Cobb walks up to it, his footfalls silent.
He reads everything meticulously, committing it to memory. Arthur has always been thorough about his documentation, and Cobb has never been happier about it than he is now, as he stores away the stream of data, the post-it notes written in Arthur’s tight script.
“Why didn’t you call me, goddamnit?” he murmurs at the wall.
He knows exactly why, and he doesn’t like it.
When he leaves, his briefcase is full, and the bolthole looks like no one has been there for months.
***
He gets the call when he’s halfway to the warehouse.
“Hello?”
“I believe I have a lead on your Arthur,” Saito says down the line. He sounds distant and scratchy.
“Tell me,” Cobb says.
***
He reenters the building with a long and impatient stride. “We have a location,” he announces. “Get your things.”
“We don’t have a game plan,” Eames protests.
“We have a location,” Cobb repeats. He shoots Ariadne a look. “Come on. You can look at what I found at the safe house on the way.”
Ariadne looks at Eames, and nods. He follows in her stead. Cobb isn’t sure why or when they became close enough to need to check in with each other, but if it makes them move faster, he doesn’t care.
The flight out of Chicago is delayed by heavy rain, and Cobb paces in the terminal. Ariadne watches him. “Did Saito say what we can expect to find when we get there?” she says eventually.
“No, but it’s easy enough to guess. Top-of-the-line PASIV technology, probably stored in a basement facility that Oberon trusts more than anywhere else, so security is going to be next to impossible. Probably attached to a laboratory with the full range of Somnacin variants necessary for the apple tree procedure.”
“And what precisely constitutes the procedure?” Eames asks. “Since you know so much about it.”
“Two layers of dream space, at least,” Cobb says distantly, unaware of the various crowds milling around him. “And a drug cocktail that includes various truth serums and sedatives to slow brain activity.”
“That has to cause a huge amount of instability,” Ariadne comments.
He glances at her, and after a hesitation, nods. “It’s likely. I’ve never seen what actually went on inside the procedure, just the results. It’s not...even someone as prepared and controlled as Arthur is going to have a hard time with it.”
“Am I going to be able to control the dreamscape at all?”
“Maybe. Hopefully. But we’ll also just have to rely on whatever Arthur’s got up his sleeves in response to what he saw coming. It may not be much, but we have to hope.”
“I find none of this comforting,” Eames murmurs.
Cobb exhales. “You get us into the facility, and you don’t have to come with us if you don’t want to,” he says finally.
Eames narrows his eyes at him. “You wouldn’t last two seconds.”
Cobb raises a brow. “Are you coming then?”
“...Of course.”
***
Three hours later than hoped, they arrive in JFK and Cobb rents a nondescript car to get them to within two blocks of the location Saito had given. There he books them all into a hotel--hardly ideal for clandestine work, since they haven’t even finished reconnaissance, but it’s the best they can manage in the city. Cobb has used this particular establishment before, and knows the staff is capable of discretion. Ariadne nods at the clean Parisian exterior in approval as they enter, and the various attendants and guests pay them no mind.
They take the penthouse suite, which they fill with blueprints and Arthur’s notes. Eames leaves soon after to scope out Oberon’s complex.
When he returns, he goes straight to Ariadne’s workspace, from which he nicks a large sheet of draft paper that he pins to the wall and sketches on from memory. Ariadne looks over his shoulder as he works.
“How far in were you able to get?” she says quietly. “I tried to make some distractions.”
“You were more than helpful, darling,” he says, just as low. “And I’m sure you can fill in the blanks.”
“So long as letting Cobb in didn’t change the floor plan too much,” she replies.
Cobb approaches them. “Do we have an entry point?” he asks.
“Mm,” Eames says neutrally. “Of a sort. I’m fairly certain I can acquire some low-grade clearance that will at least allow me to stay past normal business hours and give you both access. I’ve applied for it and should be hearing from them in the next few days.”
“Architecturally, the weakness is here,” Ariadne adds, pencilling in a path, “And it’s likely we can use that to get to where we need to, once we’re sure of Arthur’s location.”
“Okay. I’m going to see if I can get into their mainframe and find that out,” Cobb says.
“You know how to do that?” Eames says in mild surprise.
Cobb smiles thinly. “No. Arthur’s computer does, though. And he always keeps a spare.”
***
It takes them four days. By then Eames has his security clearance, and Ariadne has an entrance and an exit that lends suitable time in between them to find Arthur and...do whatever needs to be done to get him out.
Cobb is the one who finds him, in the worst way he could have envisioned.
Security cameras are sparse and difficult to hack in Oberon’s facility, but between Arthur’s equipment and Cobb’s perseverance, they get through.
They’re all working quietly in the suite as the evening settles, when Cobb shifts suddenly before rising from his seat in front of the laptop. Wordlessly, he goes over to the draft of the building’s layout (now practically a blueprint through Eames’ further exploration and Ariadne’s conjectures) and with sharp movements, deftly draws in a separate chamber and laboratory, two basement levels beneath the lobby. “There,” he says, quietly. “That’s where he is.”
Ariadne startles, and then glances at the computer screen, where the grainy feed from a security camera looks down on a windowless cell. Inside stands Arthur, slim and rumpled and looking not himself at all (hospital scrubs instead of clean oxford and khakis, barely recognizable). His expression is difficult to read through the pixelation, but his stiff carriage speaks well enough of injuries, old and new.
Also, rage.
Cobb, staring at the blueprint on the wall, looks rather the same. His jaw is one tight line of outrage and distress, and his hands are shoved in his pockets like he craves to be loading a gun instead. After a long pause, in which Ariadne and Eames are both uncomfortably silent, he says, “It’ll take us an additional five minutes to get to that level, another ten if the elevator has extra security, which it likely will.”
“I’ll get us access,” Eames says.
“Our entrance and exit will hold,” Ariadne assures.
“We have no idea when they’ll start the process,” Cobb says. “So as of now, we have twenty four hours, and then we’re moving. And let’s pray we get lucky and Arthur’s awake when we get there.”
***
Arthur was waiting in the lobby, sitting blithely in a squared off leather chair that was positioned perfectly in the blind spot of all of the various cameras. He smiled slightly at Ariadne’s approach. Ariadne didn’t smile back.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, standing.
“We can talk about it when we get downstairs,” she said, already turning towards the elevators, security ignoring them both as they passed through.
Oberon’s office building was a glass monolith, in which the weft and warp of silk fell from high and opulent ceilings to define the flow of traffic and imbue a sense of fantasy and creativity, all in the highly controlled fashion of corporate power. Ariadne was dressed for the occasion in gunmetal twill suiting and Louboutins; Arthur was in dark tan and pinstripes.
The elevator rang, and they stepped inside. Ariadne produced a card, which she swiped before inserting a key into the control panel, and then pressing B2.
“So what is it?” Arthur asked, as they began to descend.
“We may have a problem,” was all Ariadne said.
The doors slid open, and they walked the path that Ariadne would be taking with Cobb a few hours hence. She let them into a clean room, followed by an empty laboratory and then down a narrow hallway with flickering halogen lights, all of which ended in a door that was bolted several times over, and was unmarked except by an observation window and a small door with a sliding latch.
Arthur peered clinically through the window.
“Aren’t you uncomfortable with holding yourself hostage?” Ariadne said, after a second.
“No more so than I feel about killing him,” Arthur replied.
Ariadne winced, but then said, “...And?”
He glanced back at her. “It’s kind of disturbing,” he admitted, after a second.
Ariadne’s cell phone rang into the silence, a hollow, echoing sound that resonated in the sterile hallway. She shivered and answered. “Yes, Eames?”
“Cobb is wondering where you are. Finish setting Arthur up and get back here.”
“Right.” She hung up and looked at Arthur. “You’re sure you can do this?”
He shrugged. “I’ve done stranger things, I think.”
Her eyebrow twitched, but she typed the code into the keypad, and stepped back for Arthur to pull open the bolts and then slip inside the room. With a soft click, he shut it behind him.
Ariadne slid the outer bolts back into place. And then she waited.
The silence was cold and interminable. She shifted on her feet, ankles rolling on the unfamiliar stilettos. Then there was a heavy thud, and a harsh curse.
A knock sounded from inside the cell door. Ariadne drew her gun.
“Password,” she said, voice wavering slightly.
“Columbia.” Arthur sounded out of breath.
She unlocked the door.
Arthur stood just inside, expressly looking away from the crumpled figure on the floor. He had already switched clothing with the projection, making the corpse all the more uncanny, its suit crookedly buttoned and creased in the wrong places, the collar pulled up to cover the dark bruising around the neck, but unable to hide the unnatural angle at which the head now lay. Ariadne felt faintly sick.
“We’ll have to move him,” Arthur said. There was a cut across his nose where not-Arthur must have gotten a hit in, but he seemed to be ignoring it. It oozed a thin line of blood that dried up halfway down his cheek.
Ariadne stepped into the cell and raised one hand to the wall, brow furrowing in concentration. When she slid her hand down, it caught on a sturdy metal pull-handle. She gripped it and drew it back.
“Morgue drawer? An elegant solution,” Arthur commented. “Get his feet, will you?”
They hefted the well-tailored body onto the slab, and Ariadne pushed it shut. When she turned away, the drawer was gone.
And next to the cot was a PASIV case.
“What were you going to tell me?” Arthur asked, sitting down on the cot and rolling up the sleeve of his newly-acquired hospital smock.
Ariadne took a breath. “The apple tree,” she said at last.
Arthur looked unfazed. “What about it?”
“Why did you choose it? It’s real. You should have at least warned me that that was what it was going to be.”
“You wanted it to be authentic,” Arthur shrugged. “And anyway, it’s not really real—the dream instability is only there because of the lack of proper drug cocktail keeping us under.”
Ariadne shook her head slowly. “Arthur.”
“You’re telling the story,” he said, looking up at her. “Right?”
“Cobb knows about apple tree targeting. He’s bringing that into the narrative and I can’t stop that.”
Arthur drew taut like a bowstring, unyielding even as Ariadne moved the PASIV into place and heart monitors leap into being around them, ready to monitor Arthur’s every mental tic.
“He’s done it before?” he asked her carefully.
“No. He’s seen it done, though.”
He paled, though he remained modulated and still. “Shit,” he said fervently.
“Why did you pick it?” Ariadne asked again, pressing adhesive patches onto his skin.
Arthur blinked rapidly and shook his head. “I don’t know. It was something we talked about, but as a joke, we didn’t think it was possible...why would Cobb joke about it if it was real?”
Ariadne looked at him, at the flicker of doubt in his face that was there for only a moment and then quickly suppressed. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Shit,” he repeated.
“This is going to be real,” she continued, though her hands were shaking, “As real as it can get down here.”
Arthur looked at her for a long moment, and then he lay back on the cot.
“Fine,” he said, and didn’t stop her when she depressed the button on the PASIV.
***
Cobb looks grim and distressed as they stand in the cell, looking down at Arthur laid out amid the thrum and beeping of medical and dreamsharing equipment. He holds himself differently than how Ariadne remembers him being in Chicago--instead of the tightness of new worry pulling his shoulders taut, this dread looks heavy and old on him, like it’s the inception again, and he’s been running for years. She hadn’t realized what a difference coming home had been for him, and almost regrets pulling him back into the game.
“You’re sure we can’t just wake him up?” she says, hushed.
“No.” He’s already rolling up his sleeves. “We wake him now without fixing anything internally, and it would be just as bad as leaving him overnight, which is what Oberon had planned. We’re going to have to follow him down, put everything straight, and then kick out.”
Ariadne hitches the extra IV lines to the PASIV case and doles them out.
“We have about two hours until the guards change and we’re blown. Forty hours in-dream, starting now.” Cobb seems to hesitate for a moment, his hand hovering over Arthur’s form like it’s made of glass, but then the moment ends and he’s settling on the floor, IV securely in his wrist.
Eames exhales, and shoots a look at Ariadne. “Here we go,” he mutters.
Part Three: Extraction
Author: Alchemy Alice
Artist: Ellegen
Pairing/Genre: mostly gen, eventually Arthur/Cobb, drama
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Cobb is dreaming. But he is also writing. This is a story about waking up.
Prologue: Words
Part One: Inception
Part Two: Mr. Charles
Arthur sips at a martini, though whether he is actually drinking it is anyone’s guess. The sky outside is steel gray and getting grayer. He has no desire to move from his spot at the bar.
That works out well, seeing as his client is late.
The hotel is all slick mahogany and frosted glass panels, clean to a fault so that even the bartender looks too polished to ever be expected to work hard. He wipes down glasses like he’s caressing them, and doles out soft-spoken, neutral advice to the heavyset executive with a drinker’s nose down at the far end of the bar. In the lobby, stilettos and polished Italian leather dress shoes click staccato punctuation on marble tile.
Arthur checks his watch in the murmuring silence. Twenty minutes past. More than his time is worth, particularly now. And he supposes that it isn’t raining yet, and if he wants to avoid the inevitable downpour it might be prudent to leave sooner rather than later.
He leaves his martini half full, the cocktail sword stripped of its olive.
The revolving doors give way to him and the doorman nods in recognition as he leaves. His hand strays to his phone, but he catches himself halfway there. He’s grown accustomed to working alone, mostly.
Mostly.
He becomes aware that he is being tailed three blocks down.
A narrow side street allows him an avenue by which to test the theory.
Definitely followed. By the doorman, no less. Arthur doesn’t recognize him, but didn’t expect to. Cobol, among others, has many such faceless men.
The back streets of the city are labyrinthine, and he uses them to his advantage. When an alley with a little-known exit route presents itself, he turns into it and whirls.
The doorman is burly and quick.
It only takes Arthur a few seconds to drop him.
A few seconds, in which he is unable to see the second man with a burlap bag and a gun.
***
The phone rings jarringly in the afternoon, while the kids are still at school. It’s cool even for the season in Los Angeles, dipping into jacket weather. Dom picks up the phone without looking, now accustomed to taking calls mid-stride, his gaze still locked on blueprints laid out on the drafting board beneath his hands. “Hello?”
“Hi, Cobb.”
Dom blinks, and has the strange warring desire to both tense up and ease. “Ariadne. How are you, how’s school?”
“I graduated last year, Cobb.” He can hear her eye-roll over the line.
“Yes, of course,” Dom says, blinking. He hadn’t been to her graduation, which seems oddly wrong; he has no immediate memories or explanations for his absence. “What have you been up to, then?”
“Traveling a bit. Saito’s money helped. I’m looking at offers from several firms at the moment, but I’m not sure which one I’m going to go for yet. That’s not why I’m calling, though.”
Tensing wins out. Dom feels his shoulders lock. “Oh? What then?”
“Just…” Ariadne drifts off, and he can hear her pacing. Old wooden floors, probably her Paris apartment. “Have you heard from Arthur lately?”
“Sure. About six months ago, when he was in Malaysia.”
“Sooner than that, Cobb,” Ariadne says, impatience seeping through. “Have you heard from him more recently?”
“No. But we don’t keep in touch that often.” Dom shakes his head. “Why are you asking?”
She pauses. “Because we’ve kept in touch. Arthur and I.”
Dom raises his eyebrows, looks blankly at the studio wall. “Oh?”
“And,” she presses on, “He hasn’t called in almost three weeks. He’s never not called for this long, not without sending a card or something in his stead.”
Dom processes this apparent - what, friendship? - that had sprung up in his absence, before setting it aside and shrugging. “Look, Ariadne, he doesn’t do that with me. I haven’t seen or heard from him. I’m sorry.”
“But he’s your point man,” she insists. “Do you have any idea where he could be?”
“I’m not his keeper,” he replies blankly. “I’m sorry, Ariadne, I really am. But I wouldn’t worry. Arthur’s more than capable of taking care of himself, and three weeks isn’t all that long.”
“If you say so.” She still sounds doubtful, but Dom figures it’s the best he can do.
“If I hear from him, I’ll be sure to let you know,” he says, and hangs up.
He turns back to the blueprint, but where before it had leaped from the page, it now lays flat, long exacting lines rendered lifeless.
Arthur is a man of habit and consistency. It’s unlike him not to keep in touch, if keeping in touch was what he was wont, in the past, to do.
***
Eames doesn’t like mirrors.
He uses them constantly for his profession, but that’s part of the reason why he doesn’t like them. He suspects (when he has occasion to, and he tries very hard to make that as seldom as possible) that he has a subconscious fear that one day, in reality, he will look in a mirror and find someone he doesn’t recognize looking back at him.
He does not, by contrast, have any sort of planned or predicted reaction to seeing more than one of himself at a turn into the looking glass.
The double in the reflection smiles just as easily as he does.
“A most delightful facsimile,” his double says. “Ta.”
Silenced guns are never truly silent, but Eames doesn’t hear this shot at all, because his head has already hit the floor.
***
Dom starts to jump at phone calls. Dread has been a familiar feeling to him since Mal, but it had faded over the past few months and he doesn’t welcome it back. After several neutral calls from the architectural firm courting him and one from Phillipa’s schoolteacher, he begins to write the anxiety off. He hadn’t lied when he said that Arthur could take care of himself.
But then it’s four o’clock in the morning and his cell phone, not the house phone, is vibrating on the bedside table.
He startles in bed and gropes for it without turning on the light. “‘Lo?” he says, his voice sleep-scratched.
“Cobb.”
Adrenaline shoots to his throat, enough to feel like he’s being throttled. “Jesus Christ, Eames, how did you get this number?”
“You’re back on the grid, mate. Don’t be surprised if I know your social security number.”
“What do you want?” Dom demands.
“I’m not calling for me, Cobb. I’m calling about Arthur.”
Dom swings his legs over the side of the bed. “You’ve spoken to him?”
“No, and that’s part of the problem. I was expecting to hear from him about a job, and the call never came through.”
“Maybe he chose not to use you?” Dom suggests.
“You and I both know he would have sent word of that, probably with a terribly smug comment about finding someone more tolerable,” Eames counters dryly. Beneath the drawl, however, his throat sounds carefully tight, which is cause to worry in itself.
“Do you know where he is?” Dom says.
“No. I can tell you where he was last, though.”
Cobb exhales loudly through his nose. It shouldn’t be like this, this is all wrong. Arthur is well built for criminal activity, even more than Cobb is in some ways, but Cobb was the one to drag his stellar military record down into the mud, it was his doing and now Arthur knows nothing else, now he’s missing.
“Okay. Text me the coordinates, I’ll make arrangements.”
“What about your kids?” Eames asks, though his tone suggests it’s only a perfunctory inquiry.
“I’ll take care of them. Text me the coordinates.” Dom hangs up, hand shaking enough for it to take a few tries before the phone fits right in its cradle, the plastic rattle-clack of it too loud in the dark.
He looks around at the shadow outlines of his bedroom, listening to the silence of his children sleeping next door. It is already morning in Paris. Miles will most certainly be awake.
Cobb doesn’t think twice.
***
Ariadne looks as well as can be expected, considering; a little older and wiser, perhaps, but still fiery and without pretense. “I told you something was wrong,” she accuses, in lieu of a greeting, though she still unexpectedly hugs him tightly at the same time. Cobb pauses, and then returns the gesture. She’s tiny in his arms, but solid.
“I know. I’m sorry,” he says. “How was your flight?”
“I used to fly economy to get to school,” she replies. “And first class hasn’t lost its novelty.”
“Good, then?”
“Complimentary champagne is going a long way towards not yelling at you right now.”
Cobb snorts, his smile barely adequate. He feels like he’s been thrumming with worry and something harder, darker, ever since he dropped off his children with Maria.
“Come on, then,” he says. “Eames is waiting.”
Chicago is rainy and not particularly friendly, and Cobb remembers Arthur’s distinct dislike for it. Nevertheless, he ushers Ariadne into the car and drives towards the warehouse he’d arranged.
It isn’t nearly as spacious as the one he’d had in Paris, but it‘s ample enough for their plans. The cement is old and rust-stained, the roof dark and low with piping--a basement facility at best, but discreet.
Ariadne, without instruction, heads for the southeast corner where several dividers are stacked off to the side. Eames rises from one rickety chair at their arrival. Nothing has been set up yet.
“Guv’ner,” he drawls.
“Eames,” Cobb acknowledges.
“We waiting on anyone else?”
He shakes his head. “It’s a small team on this one, people who know him, who want him back.”
“Good.”
He glances back at Eames to read him, but Eames is already turning to set up his own equipment, his expression hidden. Cobb had almost forgotten how this game was played, and he doesn’t like it at all; he feels it in a low twist of unease in his stomach. He’d been a good con man, when it had been called for, but back then, his goal had been singular, absolute—take him home, bring him back to his family—not so tied up with a loyalty he hadn’t even given real thought to.
This is so many kinds of different, so many different kinds of dangerous. Eames is representative enough of that—a con man through and through, one made by choice rather than circumstance.
Dom knows he can be dangerous, when pushed. Eames is dangerous just by existing.
“What are our leads?” he asks the room, all too aware that this would be when Arthur would usually answer.
Eames steps up, though. “His last client. A Matthew Oberon. Hired Arthur and I some months back. We did the job for him, no problems, and I’m fairly certain Arthur did a solo for him some time after.”
“Visibly, or is this just hearsay?”
“Visibly. As evidenced here,” Eames pulls up some images on the main projector, and there are clips of Arthur in Mumbai, in Boston and Chicago. Cobb feels his muscles tighten into a hard, skull-like formation that he hadn’t known they could make until Mal killed herself.
“Okay. We need to find him, first of all.”
“Working on it,” Eames says.
Cobb nods, and pulls out his phone.
“Who are you calling?” Ariadne asks.
“Saito. He has resources at his disposal that we don’t.”
Eames looks over at Ariadne, but she just nods as Cobb dials.
The phone rings twice, before it picks up. “Mr. Cobb.”
“Saito. I’m afraid I must ask a favor of you.”
As Cobb talks, he turns away from Eames and Ariadne, wandering slightly, though not entirely out of earshot.
Ariadne stands very still, her own work forgotten, her breathing shallow. The traffic on the street dims slightly, the sounds blurring.
Cobb hangs up.
She resumes her movements. Cars zoom above their heads.
“What did he say?” Eames asks, while looking sidelong at her.
“He’ll call if he finds anything,” Cobb says briefly. He opens a file Eames has left on the table and scans it. “What was the job you did for him?”
“Run of the mill extraction.”
“He was a software developer,” Cobb reads. “Retired at thirty-five?”
“Mm. Not your average programmer. He did contract work for the CIA, NSA. A lot of virtual reality training programs.”
Cobb looks up and narrows his eyes. “Why don’t I know him?”
“He privatized before we got there,” Eames replies. “He made his money and got out before dream-sharing technology made software-based training look like child’s play.”
“And what, he’s working with dreams, now?”
“Word on the street is that he’s trying to break into the market, but as stealthily as possible. Scoping out the competition and leveling them before he even comes onto the scene. The extraction we did was from a chemist. Not Yusuf,” he adds, when Cobb frowns. “Someone not as innovative, but still useful. Working for the government, still, which was why Oberon couldn’t just buy the information off of him.”
“Militarized?”
“No,” Eames snorts. “You’d think the Company would know better by now, but I guess they thought he was too minor to be worth the effort of training him. It was an in and out operation, no snags.”
“That sounds way too simple,” Ariadne says, looking up.
“Yes, it does,” Cobb agrees. He looks at Eames. “Audition?”
Eames considers it. “That does seem likely, in retrospect. But what was he auditioning us for?”
“He wasn’t auditioning you,” Ariadne says. “He was auditioning Arthur. Otherwise you’d have been taken, too.”
“Maybe I’m just cleverer than Arthur.”
Ariadne snorts.
Cobb says, “If it was an audition, then Arthur is either kidnapped and confined, or he’s on a job. Either way, he’ll be in good enough condition to have sent us clues. Ariadne, you’ve been in contact with him the most—does anything from your correspondence come to mind?”
She pulls her luggage up onto the table and unzips it. “Here are the postcards he’s sent to me over the past six months,” she says. “But it was when he stopped that I got worried.”
“Look anyway. How long ago was the Oberon job?”
“Four months ago, give or take,” says Eames.
“And you lost contact when?” Cobb asks Ariadne.
“Almost a month now,” she grimaces.
“That’s a three month window in which Arthur may have had suspicions.” He gestures to Eames, who passes him the security photos. “The tailing started about a month before he went silent.”
“I’ll start there then,” Ariadne says.
They spend most of the rest of the afternoon in silence. Ariadne is tired from the flight, but forces her eyes to focus. There is something there in the postcards—she’s certain now that she sees them all lined up. They’re all conspicuously generic—not at all the ones Arthur would have chosen himself, but carefully impersonal, and occasionally verging on cheesy. She should have known something was wrong just from that, but she’d simply assumed he was trying to be discrete.
She copies down his brief, impersonal missives. They are terse and undeniably Arthur.
A—
Decided on an employer yet? I’m sure the offers are streaming in, perhaps some from old friends. Budapest has been profitable. Good luck with your decisions.
--A
A—
Greece is lovely. The weather is fine and I’m spending my days amid architecture I’m certain you have memorized every brick of. Hope you’re well.
--A
A—
In Canada to visit family. Completely awkward and full of lies. Had to watch hockey with them. Must admit to E that I still can’t keep track of it; sheer Luck is all I’ve got to go on, betting-wise. I’ve had some lately. The Key is confidence of delivery.
--A
“What’s that, love?” he looks up from his computer.
“I think Arthur left you a message.” She holds up the postcard.
Eames plucks it from her fingers and scans it.
Cobb looks up from his work as well, and saunters over.
Eames snorts as Cobb approaches. “Not very subtle, is our Arthur,” he says after a second.
“What does it mean, Eames?” Cobb asks intently.
“Quite simple. He’s almost told us—the key to whatever code he was going to send, or has already sent, is on this card.”
“What, ‘Luck’?” Ariadne frowns, remembering the odd capitalization.
“Most would think so, but the postcard was meant for me. I once told him that the key to a con was confidence in delivery.” Eames quirks a smile. “We’d been holed up undercover for a month, and were just about ready to kill each other. He told me confidence was worthless unless you knew the in-codes of the culture.
“And then, my dear Ariadne, he proceeded to recite to me nearly forty examples of Cockney rhyming slang, in the most atrocious accent I have ever heard in my life.”
She giggles, unable to imagine Arthur holding forth in the manner of Dick Van Dyke. Cobb just raises an eyebrow.
Eames smiles, and taps the postcard. “Luck. Reverse-engineered Cockney rhyming, so atrocious that he couldn’t have meant anything else. Luck. Puck. Puck and Oberon.”
“Oberon is the key?”
“A warning and a key all in one,” Eames nods. “One that I could get only because of that conversation, and because of our history with Mr. Matthew Oberon. Reread the postcard without the rhyme: ‘Oberon is all I’ve got to go on, betting-wise. I’ve had some lately.’”
“He knew he was being tailed, as far back as six weeks, then.” Ariadne splays her hands over the postcards.
Cobb looks over her shoulder and then his eyes narrow. “Where did he send the next postcard from?” he asks.
Ariadne picks up the next one in line and flips it over. It features a museum photograph of a marble bust. “Rome,” she says.
“Caesar cipher,” Eames says immediately.
“Vigenére,” Cobb corrects. “A series of Caesar ciphers. It’s what Arthur always used to use when we first started training him in the dream world.”
“Simple,” Eames notes. “Possibly too simple.”
“Yeah, if the decoded message is transparent,” Cobb replies. “Which, knowing Arthur, it won’t be.”
“And it’s crafted so only all three of us could crack every part of it,” Ariadne says. She smiles slightly, and then starts flipping the postcards over, some of them text side up, others picture side up, and then shifting them around on the drafting table.
Cobb watches her for several seconds and then chuckles. “Theseus’s labyrinth?” he says in amusement. “I think he’s reading a little too much into your namesake.”
“What are you talking about?” Eames inquires.
“Marker points,” Ariadne says, pointing to what seem to be ink smudges on the edges of the postcards, but when lined up with other postcards, formed the split halves of. “The easiest way to construct a Cretan labyrinth, or at least what we think is one, is to create a cross and some key points.”
She shifts some of the postcards over, and then stands back. “You see?”
Together, the letters on the postcards fit together in lines, and in points.
“Normally, you’d draw out the actual walls from there,” Cobb says, filling them in lightly in pencil.
“But we don’t need to, because Arthur put the important part of the code where all important things in a labyrinth are kept,” Ariadne taps the central cross, where the letters seem darker, marginally clearer. “Right in the center.”
“I’ll be damned,” Eames breathes.
It’s faint, and at points only visible by the gleam of Sharpie over already dark glossy paper, but it’s there.
Ariadne lays scrap paper over it and copies off the letters more clearly.
Eames draws out a Vigenére square while Cobb starts decoding. His frown deepens as he lines up the message with the key. “Shit,” he says fiercely.
“What does it say?” Ariadne says.
Cobb shoves his sheet of paper away from him and strides away from the table. Ariadne pulls it towards her.
BBVTWFGVWRDCZFXISR
NARCISSUS|APPLE|TREE
“Narcissus Apple Tree?” she echoes. “What does that even mean?”
“No idea about the Narcissus part,” Eames says, but even he looks truly worried now. “But Apple Tree…that’s nothing good. Especially if it’s actually possible.”
“It’s possible,” Cobb says.
“You’ve done it before?” Eames asks.
“No, not this one.” His smile is bitter. “But I’ve seen it done. It’s not pretty.”
Ariadne often forgets that Cobb was in the military, like Arthur and Eames. Maybe not in any soldierly capacity, but he’d seen dream technology grow from the ground up, in bunkers and unmarked office buildings. He doesn’t look like it, hunched over slightly like he still isn’t quite convinced of his own youth, hair falling in his eyes, but Ariadne has a feeling that the far sight of a dreamer isn’t so different than that of shell shock.
Eames’ expression closes up. “Someone I knew?” he inquires, carefully blank.
Cobb shakes his head, though slowly. “Different division.”
“Will someone please explain what Apple Tree actually is?”
Cobb turns, and the traffic outside goes silent. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Say that your mind is an apple tree, and the apples are ideas, memories, information. Normally in extraction, you con the mark into pointing out where the one apple you want is, and you go and pick it.
“But say don’t know what information is important, and the mark doesn’t know either. So you want every idea. Every piece of information. And in addition, the branches are all guarded. What do you do?”
Ariadne pales slightly. “Shake the apples loose. Let them come to you.”
“Arthur has a lifetime of secrets from extractions in his head,” Eames says. “And Oberon wants all of them.” He watches Cobb. “Do you know what he means by Narcissus?”
Cobb nods. “It was the only safe house between us we both knew the location of,” he says, and grabs his jacket. “And it’s here in Chicago.”
***
“I take it he didn’t actually talk to Saito?” Eames said dryly, when Cobb had left the building.
Ariadne exhaled. “No. But that gives us a good plot device--Saito can lead us to Arthur much more quickly than having to solve all of the puzzles.”
Eames nodded, his lips pursed. After a second, he said, “Why does Cobb know about the apple tree?”
Ariadne looked both irritated and guilty. “I don’t know. I let Arthur choose the threat.”
Eames blinked. And then he said, “What the bloody hell did you do that for?”
“I didn’t think he’d pick something real! I thought it would make him more comfortable with the plot if he--”
“He doesn’t have that kind of imagination,” Eames interrupted. “He must have chosen it out of...” He stopped, blinked, and then restarted. “It must have been a wish for accuracy and thinking that Cobb hadn’t heard of it. But of course Cobb’s heard of it, Cobb lives and breathes dreaming, quite fucking literally, and he should have known that.” He huffed. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means Cobb is going to have to help write the dream.”
“Yeah,” Ariadne sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
***
It’s little more than a bolthole, and Cobb is reminded of Sherlock Holmes and his collection of closets and hideaways scattered over London. It’s windowless, barely larger than a closet with an attached bathroom, but it looks eerily large, because there had been a reason that he and Arthur had given it the moniker, ‘Narcissus’.
Walls to ceiling, it is plastered with panelled mirrors.
Cobb casts his eye over his infinite shattered reflections, and remembers the first time Arthur had taken him here.
“They weren’t my idea,” Arthur said defensively. “Some crazy actress used to use it to rehearse or something. But she died a while back, and it was cheap, so I thought, why not?”
“Yeah, whatever. You just want to be able to see that your tailor pinned the back vent of your Dior right,” Cobb teased, and Arthur punched him in the arm.
The mirrors are tarnished now, some cracked around the edges. There is canned food and a hotpot on top of a filing cabinet, and a Murphy bed closed up on the wall.
The bed hasn’t been used as a bed for some time, it’s clear. Arthur has made it into a work board.
Pages from classified files, security photos, and records lifted from Oberon’s company are pinned up neatly across the underside of the bed, complete with connections denoted with precise bits of twine. Cobb walks up to it, his footfalls silent.
He reads everything meticulously, committing it to memory. Arthur has always been thorough about his documentation, and Cobb has never been happier about it than he is now, as he stores away the stream of data, the post-it notes written in Arthur’s tight script.
“Why didn’t you call me, goddamnit?” he murmurs at the wall.
He knows exactly why, and he doesn’t like it.
When he leaves, his briefcase is full, and the bolthole looks like no one has been there for months.
***
He gets the call when he’s halfway to the warehouse.
“Hello?”
“I believe I have a lead on your Arthur,” Saito says down the line. He sounds distant and scratchy.
“Tell me,” Cobb says.
***
He reenters the building with a long and impatient stride. “We have a location,” he announces. “Get your things.”
“We don’t have a game plan,” Eames protests.
“We have a location,” Cobb repeats. He shoots Ariadne a look. “Come on. You can look at what I found at the safe house on the way.”
Ariadne looks at Eames, and nods. He follows in her stead. Cobb isn’t sure why or when they became close enough to need to check in with each other, but if it makes them move faster, he doesn’t care.
The flight out of Chicago is delayed by heavy rain, and Cobb paces in the terminal. Ariadne watches him. “Did Saito say what we can expect to find when we get there?” she says eventually.
“No, but it’s easy enough to guess. Top-of-the-line PASIV technology, probably stored in a basement facility that Oberon trusts more than anywhere else, so security is going to be next to impossible. Probably attached to a laboratory with the full range of Somnacin variants necessary for the apple tree procedure.”
“And what precisely constitutes the procedure?” Eames asks. “Since you know so much about it.”
“Two layers of dream space, at least,” Cobb says distantly, unaware of the various crowds milling around him. “And a drug cocktail that includes various truth serums and sedatives to slow brain activity.”
“That has to cause a huge amount of instability,” Ariadne comments.
He glances at her, and after a hesitation, nods. “It’s likely. I’ve never seen what actually went on inside the procedure, just the results. It’s not...even someone as prepared and controlled as Arthur is going to have a hard time with it.”
“Am I going to be able to control the dreamscape at all?”
“Maybe. Hopefully. But we’ll also just have to rely on whatever Arthur’s got up his sleeves in response to what he saw coming. It may not be much, but we have to hope.”
“I find none of this comforting,” Eames murmurs.
Cobb exhales. “You get us into the facility, and you don’t have to come with us if you don’t want to,” he says finally.
Eames narrows his eyes at him. “You wouldn’t last two seconds.”
Cobb raises a brow. “Are you coming then?”
“...Of course.”
***
Three hours later than hoped, they arrive in JFK and Cobb rents a nondescript car to get them to within two blocks of the location Saito had given. There he books them all into a hotel--hardly ideal for clandestine work, since they haven’t even finished reconnaissance, but it’s the best they can manage in the city. Cobb has used this particular establishment before, and knows the staff is capable of discretion. Ariadne nods at the clean Parisian exterior in approval as they enter, and the various attendants and guests pay them no mind.
They take the penthouse suite, which they fill with blueprints and Arthur’s notes. Eames leaves soon after to scope out Oberon’s complex.
When he returns, he goes straight to Ariadne’s workspace, from which he nicks a large sheet of draft paper that he pins to the wall and sketches on from memory. Ariadne looks over his shoulder as he works.
“How far in were you able to get?” she says quietly. “I tried to make some distractions.”
“You were more than helpful, darling,” he says, just as low. “And I’m sure you can fill in the blanks.”
“So long as letting Cobb in didn’t change the floor plan too much,” she replies.
Cobb approaches them. “Do we have an entry point?” he asks.
“Mm,” Eames says neutrally. “Of a sort. I’m fairly certain I can acquire some low-grade clearance that will at least allow me to stay past normal business hours and give you both access. I’ve applied for it and should be hearing from them in the next few days.”
“Architecturally, the weakness is here,” Ariadne adds, pencilling in a path, “And it’s likely we can use that to get to where we need to, once we’re sure of Arthur’s location.”
“Okay. I’m going to see if I can get into their mainframe and find that out,” Cobb says.
“You know how to do that?” Eames says in mild surprise.
Cobb smiles thinly. “No. Arthur’s computer does, though. And he always keeps a spare.”
***
It takes them four days. By then Eames has his security clearance, and Ariadne has an entrance and an exit that lends suitable time in between them to find Arthur and...do whatever needs to be done to get him out.
Cobb is the one who finds him, in the worst way he could have envisioned.
Security cameras are sparse and difficult to hack in Oberon’s facility, but between Arthur’s equipment and Cobb’s perseverance, they get through.
They’re all working quietly in the suite as the evening settles, when Cobb shifts suddenly before rising from his seat in front of the laptop. Wordlessly, he goes over to the draft of the building’s layout (now practically a blueprint through Eames’ further exploration and Ariadne’s conjectures) and with sharp movements, deftly draws in a separate chamber and laboratory, two basement levels beneath the lobby. “There,” he says, quietly. “That’s where he is.”
Ariadne startles, and then glances at the computer screen, where the grainy feed from a security camera looks down on a windowless cell. Inside stands Arthur, slim and rumpled and looking not himself at all (hospital scrubs instead of clean oxford and khakis, barely recognizable). His expression is difficult to read through the pixelation, but his stiff carriage speaks well enough of injuries, old and new.
Also, rage.
Cobb, staring at the blueprint on the wall, looks rather the same. His jaw is one tight line of outrage and distress, and his hands are shoved in his pockets like he craves to be loading a gun instead. After a long pause, in which Ariadne and Eames are both uncomfortably silent, he says, “It’ll take us an additional five minutes to get to that level, another ten if the elevator has extra security, which it likely will.”
“I’ll get us access,” Eames says.
“Our entrance and exit will hold,” Ariadne assures.
“We have no idea when they’ll start the process,” Cobb says. “So as of now, we have twenty four hours, and then we’re moving. And let’s pray we get lucky and Arthur’s awake when we get there.”
***
Arthur was waiting in the lobby, sitting blithely in a squared off leather chair that was positioned perfectly in the blind spot of all of the various cameras. He smiled slightly at Ariadne’s approach. Ariadne didn’t smile back.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, standing.
“We can talk about it when we get downstairs,” she said, already turning towards the elevators, security ignoring them both as they passed through.
Oberon’s office building was a glass monolith, in which the weft and warp of silk fell from high and opulent ceilings to define the flow of traffic and imbue a sense of fantasy and creativity, all in the highly controlled fashion of corporate power. Ariadne was dressed for the occasion in gunmetal twill suiting and Louboutins; Arthur was in dark tan and pinstripes.
The elevator rang, and they stepped inside. Ariadne produced a card, which she swiped before inserting a key into the control panel, and then pressing B2.
“So what is it?” Arthur asked, as they began to descend.
“We may have a problem,” was all Ariadne said.
The doors slid open, and they walked the path that Ariadne would be taking with Cobb a few hours hence. She let them into a clean room, followed by an empty laboratory and then down a narrow hallway with flickering halogen lights, all of which ended in a door that was bolted several times over, and was unmarked except by an observation window and a small door with a sliding latch.
Arthur peered clinically through the window.
“Aren’t you uncomfortable with holding yourself hostage?” Ariadne said, after a second.
“No more so than I feel about killing him,” Arthur replied.
Ariadne winced, but then said, “...And?”
He glanced back at her. “It’s kind of disturbing,” he admitted, after a second.
Ariadne’s cell phone rang into the silence, a hollow, echoing sound that resonated in the sterile hallway. She shivered and answered. “Yes, Eames?”
“Cobb is wondering where you are. Finish setting Arthur up and get back here.”
“Right.” She hung up and looked at Arthur. “You’re sure you can do this?”
He shrugged. “I’ve done stranger things, I think.”
Her eyebrow twitched, but she typed the code into the keypad, and stepped back for Arthur to pull open the bolts and then slip inside the room. With a soft click, he shut it behind him.
Ariadne slid the outer bolts back into place. And then she waited.
The silence was cold and interminable. She shifted on her feet, ankles rolling on the unfamiliar stilettos. Then there was a heavy thud, and a harsh curse.
A knock sounded from inside the cell door. Ariadne drew her gun.
“Password,” she said, voice wavering slightly.
“Columbia.” Arthur sounded out of breath.
She unlocked the door.
Arthur stood just inside, expressly looking away from the crumpled figure on the floor. He had already switched clothing with the projection, making the corpse all the more uncanny, its suit crookedly buttoned and creased in the wrong places, the collar pulled up to cover the dark bruising around the neck, but unable to hide the unnatural angle at which the head now lay. Ariadne felt faintly sick.
“We’ll have to move him,” Arthur said. There was a cut across his nose where not-Arthur must have gotten a hit in, but he seemed to be ignoring it. It oozed a thin line of blood that dried up halfway down his cheek.
Ariadne stepped into the cell and raised one hand to the wall, brow furrowing in concentration. When she slid her hand down, it caught on a sturdy metal pull-handle. She gripped it and drew it back.
“Morgue drawer? An elegant solution,” Arthur commented. “Get his feet, will you?”
They hefted the well-tailored body onto the slab, and Ariadne pushed it shut. When she turned away, the drawer was gone.
And next to the cot was a PASIV case.
“What were you going to tell me?” Arthur asked, sitting down on the cot and rolling up the sleeve of his newly-acquired hospital smock.
Ariadne took a breath. “The apple tree,” she said at last.
Arthur looked unfazed. “What about it?”
“Why did you choose it? It’s real. You should have at least warned me that that was what it was going to be.”
“You wanted it to be authentic,” Arthur shrugged. “And anyway, it’s not really real—the dream instability is only there because of the lack of proper drug cocktail keeping us under.”
Ariadne shook her head slowly. “Arthur.”
“You’re telling the story,” he said, looking up at her. “Right?”
“Cobb knows about apple tree targeting. He’s bringing that into the narrative and I can’t stop that.”
Arthur drew taut like a bowstring, unyielding even as Ariadne moved the PASIV into place and heart monitors leap into being around them, ready to monitor Arthur’s every mental tic.
“He’s done it before?” he asked her carefully.
“No. He’s seen it done, though.”
He paled, though he remained modulated and still. “Shit,” he said fervently.
“Why did you pick it?” Ariadne asked again, pressing adhesive patches onto his skin.
Arthur blinked rapidly and shook his head. “I don’t know. It was something we talked about, but as a joke, we didn’t think it was possible...why would Cobb joke about it if it was real?”
Ariadne looked at him, at the flicker of doubt in his face that was there for only a moment and then quickly suppressed. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Shit,” he repeated.
“This is going to be real,” she continued, though her hands were shaking, “As real as it can get down here.”
Arthur looked at her for a long moment, and then he lay back on the cot.
“Fine,” he said, and didn’t stop her when she depressed the button on the PASIV.
***
Cobb looks grim and distressed as they stand in the cell, looking down at Arthur laid out amid the thrum and beeping of medical and dreamsharing equipment. He holds himself differently than how Ariadne remembers him being in Chicago--instead of the tightness of new worry pulling his shoulders taut, this dread looks heavy and old on him, like it’s the inception again, and he’s been running for years. She hadn’t realized what a difference coming home had been for him, and almost regrets pulling him back into the game.
“You’re sure we can’t just wake him up?” she says, hushed.
“No.” He’s already rolling up his sleeves. “We wake him now without fixing anything internally, and it would be just as bad as leaving him overnight, which is what Oberon had planned. We’re going to have to follow him down, put everything straight, and then kick out.”
Ariadne hitches the extra IV lines to the PASIV case and doles them out.
“We have about two hours until the guards change and we’re blown. Forty hours in-dream, starting now.” Cobb seems to hesitate for a moment, his hand hovering over Arthur’s form like it’s made of glass, but then the moment ends and he’s settling on the floor, IV securely in his wrist.
Eames exhales, and shoots a look at Ariadne. “Here we go,” he mutters.
Part Three: Extraction