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alchemyaliceTitle: A symbol of all the days
Author: Alchemy Alice
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Arthur/Cobb
Word Count: ~3,000
Rating: PG
Warnings/Disclaimers: I own nothing, this is not my sandbox; also this is a sequel, and won't make any sense without reading what preceded it.
Summary: Follow-up to The Outrage of the Years, written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sin_delight for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
helpbrazil2011. Thank you for donating, and I hope you like this!
It’s difficult, letting go.
Arthur hadn’t really thought it would be. He’s been living in the moment; as he remembers it, the loop only happened once, rewriting all the others in black, insistent ink, and no matter how hard he tries he can’t recall those seven trials, or the pure looping memories in between. They all look like one single set of Penrose stairs to him--singular, paradoxical, and absolute.
So it should be easy to let that one narrative go, put it on a shelf and leave it in favor of newer, better volumes.
It isn’t.
It takes twelve weeks of physiotherapy, and endless hours of exercises, slow and stuttering walks around the apartment and then later, Central Park. It takes relearning how to use utensils deftly, and with precision. He pushes himself too hard, sometimes, and he knows it, though never soon enough. When he realizes his legs have given up the ghost for the day he’s always in some place inconvenient, and Cobb has to carry him to the bathroom or the bedroom.
The newlywed jokes get old, but they say them anyway. And eventually Arthur doesn’t need them as much, because his legs stop giving up, so that even when he’s shaky and exhausted he can make his way up the stairs.
Cobb backs away from his bloody-minded determination, hands held up in surrender, the quirk of a smile at his lips that doesn’t look altogether genuine, but Arthur can walk by himself, dammit, and that’s what matters.
Still, it takes a long time. And he isn’t entirely sure how Cobb manages to stand it, this intrusion into his home and his life. How Dom manages to seem amazed and encouraged by every step in the right direction, every inch of improvement in Arthur’s muscle control. Arthur hardly has the patience for it. He can’t imagine being the one waiting, waiting for things to get better. But he doesn’t have many options, and only this one feels even slightly appealing. So he stays.But he doesn’t remember.
(This is what he had rewritten. This is what lay beneath the scouring ink of his dreams—)
Cobb makes room for Arthur in his life and home like it’s the most natural thing in the world. James and Phillipa patter around him like he’s a given, recounting their after school programs and elementary school gossip, and Cobb himself comes in and out of the house at the strange irregular hours dictated by writing seminars, office hours, and faculty meetings.
It takes Arthur nearly a week to realize that it’s all so smooth because Cobb has already been doing this, making room for him, for seven fucking months. He can’t even imagine what it must have been like, Arthur’s prone form locked away in a bedroom with IV drips and a catheter, one more phantom taking up space.
He sometimes wonders if, when Cobb looks at him, he still only sees a projection, a memory, like he had begun to with Mal.
It doesn’t seem that way, but Arthur’s misjudged before.
He cooks dinner on alternate nights when his arms finally can handle lifting pots of water and roasts in pans. When he does and Cobb comes home to it, Arthur sees a strange, dazed expression on his face in the reflection of the window above the counter. Like Cobb keeps forgetting that he’s awake.
The irony doesn’t escape him.
Ariadne comes by for dinner occasionally, her old life resumed. Arthur notices that she looks at Cobb sometimes with an odd sort of caution, like there is uncomfortable knowledge between them. Cobb notices it, Arthur is sure he does because Cobb is an extractor (now in all senses of the word) and noticing is part of his job.
He doesn’t seem bothered by it though; he meets it instead with steadiness and warmth, things Arthur thought had died with Mal. Cobb is a novelist and a dreamsmith by trade, but he’s also a teacher by nature. He talks her through character sketches and nitpicks her drafts, smiling when she reads out dialogue that shimmers off the page.
Two months after Arthur wakes up, she stops by and hands Cobb a sheaf of papers. He invites her in, but she shakes her head and leaves quickly, her steps light on the sidewalk.
Arthur watches from the living room as Cobb shuts the door absently, head already bent over the top sheet of paper, furrows forming in his brow. He flips the page back, leaving it to dangle from its staple, and then looks up suddenly, quick enough to take Arthur off guard.
Arthur raises his eyebrows neutrally. “What is it?”
Cobb blinks, looks down at the page again and then back up. “She—” he stops. Shakes his head. “She’s doing good work,” he amends. “She’s getting at some truth.”
“Oh,” Arthur says, and doesn’t really know what to make of it. Absently, he squeezes stress balls in his hands, feeling the thin tendons and muscles strengthen. He barely notices the hand Cobb briefly rests on the back of his neck as he goes to his office, because it’s happened so many times before.
He wakes with Cobb close on his heels.
“Fuck!” he manages to exclaim. “You weren’t kidding!”
Cobb rubs his forehead where no doubt a long range rifle had just made a significant hole. “We used to build that type of security,” he said ruefully. “Tactical teams, reflexive accuracy. And Arthur was the best.”
“Well, fuck.”
Ariadne doesn’t come back for a fortnight, in which Cobb works as usual, but with an air of distraction hovering around him. Arthur recognizes the look.
“Got a narrator yet?” he asks over coffee.
Cobb startles over his mug. “For what?”
“Whatever you’re working on. You have a story or something.”
Cobb peers at him. “You’re creepy when you do that.”
“I’m your point man,” he replies automatically, and then flinches.
He’s not in the military anymore. The military left him to rot.
Cobb continues watching him steadily. He takes a sip of his coffee. “You are my point man,” he confirms, after a second. He has a strange look on his face, half-appraising, half-smiling.
Arthur sort of hates the way such a simple assurance could make the knot in his stomach soften and ease. He covers it with a quirk of one eyebrow as coffee scalds his tongue. “My question stands. You got a narrator?”
“Pretty much,” Cobb answers. “But that’s the easy part. The hard part is what he’s going to say.”
“Ain’t that always the way?” Arthur says dryly, and Cobb chuckles.
In the evening, Arthur does his PT, and listens in between reps to the soft tap of laptop keys.
Cobb’s nervous energy gives way slowly to determination, so Arthur knows it’s going well. He notices other things too, like how he can go out and get groceries now, that he’s regained his normal weight and normal muscle, and that somehow, despite that, he hasn’t left yet.
Most of his stuff, what little of it there is, had been retrieved by Cobb not long after he’d taken Arthur himself out of the hospital in the dead of night. It’s in storage, Cobb said, whenever you want to get anything.
Everything Arthur has ever needed fits in one suitcase, which he keeps with him at all times. He eradicated permanence from his life before he even entered dreamsharing, or met Cobb. He had never given it further thought.
Now he realizes that, except to retrieve his clothes and hang them in the guest room closet, he hasn’t gone near the suitcase since he woke up. Very quietly, he panics.
Then Cobb comes home bearing packages of pad thai and the panic in him thaws and slowly dissolves. “I could have cooked,” he says as Cobb dumps the bag in the kitchen.
“You could’ve,” Cobb agrees. “But I didn’t have my phone to call ahead, so this is what we’ve got instead.”
“You’re not letting me earn my keep here,” Arthur complains, not thinking.
“You don’t have to earn anything,” Cobb replies easily.
They both fall silent then, though, and Arthur listens, his breath shortening. He can see Cobb’s jaw tighten and flex, a tight, cautious smile tugging at his lips before fading.
Cobb reaches across to get to a cabinet, suddenly in Arthur’s space, and Arthur can hardly breathe.
“Utensils?” Cobb suggests quietly, almost drowned out by the sound of the plates clacking together in his hand.
“Yeah,” Arthur grunts, and turns in place to pull out the drawer, ever closer to the brush of Cobb’s chest against his shoulders. He thinks that maybe he imagines how Cobb’s breath stutters slightly, puffing against the back of his neck before moving away.
Dinner is quiet, even for the kids, and with a furrowed brow, Cobb scribbles on his napkin.
Five:
Ink.
There is ink everywhere.
It chokes the breath out of his lungs and Cobb can feel himself falling out of his own features, his own skin, his eyes turning as black as smokers’ lungs and then there is nothing. Nothing.
He wakes violently and is caustically sick on the floor, barely avoiding collapsing his vein as he rips the IV out.
Eames wakes up twelve minutes later, demanding, “Where the hell were you?”
“Kicked out,” Cobb says grimly. “We’ve got new problems.”
The next day, Arthur quietly makes contact with Eames while Cobb is at the university.
“Arthur, what an unexpected pleasure,” he drawls over the phone, though his voice is tight.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“How the hell did you get this number?” Eames shot back. There’s a shuffling in the background, and Arthur figures it’s cards. Eames never could get out of that particular habit.
Eames must know him far too well or somehow has eyes that can see through phone lines, because into Arthur’s silence he then adds, “You raided Cobb’s office, didn’t you? Getting bored of your convalescence, darling?”
“Maybe,” Arthur mutters. “How are your underground contacts lately?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean, if I get you in contact with one of those people, the first thing they’ll do is find out that the Department of Defense thinks you’re a vegetable, and any sign of that not being the case will bring them down on your head like the hounds of Hell. If they’re stupid enough to get in bed with that sort of risk, they’ll be doing it to blackmail you into doing whatever they want. So…”
He keeps talking, but Arthur’s not listening anymore. Because he’d found Eames’ number in Cobb’s office, and now he’s standing over Cobb’s desk, where there is a thick stack of papers, on top of which is Ariadne’s story. It’s entitled, ‘The Outrage of the Years’, but he’s not looking at that.
What he’s looking at is the scrap of napkin from the previous night, thrown on top of the manuscript. Cobb’s scrawl nearly punctures the fragile paper, hurried lines that always meant inspiration too sudden and jarring to find its own piece of paper.
“Arthur? Arthur, are you even listening to me as I explain your very delicate situation to your dream-addled brain?”
“No,” Arthur says, meaning for it to sound level and dismissive, but it comes out breathy and awed.
“Is it really so awful living with the darling Cobbs, anyway?” Eames asks, and there’s something knowing in his tone that Arthur can’t pinpoint.
“No. No, it’s not,” Arthur says slowly, on auto-pilot. Cobb’s writing is in blue ink, ballpoint and uneven.
“Right then. I see this conversation going nowhere useful, and I have things to get back to. Don’t call me unless you and Cobb both have a job worth doing, and for god’s sake get over yourself.”
Over the dial tone, Arthur reads and reads again the stuttering lines on the napkin in his hand.
Arthur swallows, and his hands shake.
Six:
Cobb finds him in the cathedral, not Cobb-Cobb, but Arthur’s projection, and he is a tight and merciless and monstrous thing in his most severe black suit and assassin’s gloves, and for days afterwards it haunts him, that this is what Arthur imagines, this is the shade that Cobb has in his mind become.
Cobb thinks of Mal, and for a week he doesn’t speak.
Yusuf makes tea in the kitchen and takes it to Eames. Eames looks sidelong at the living room.
“Do you think it’s still worth it?” Yusuf asks. “You’re the one who’s been down there with him.”
“It could be,” Eames said slowly. “But we’re not doing enough. We’re not good enough. We need outside help.”
Yusuf nods.
Cobb comes home looking haggard, and Arthur almost feels bad, but he needs to know, he needs to know now before the suitcase upstairs has to be filled and taken away again. The sensible part of him knows that he should know already, should already be assured, but its equally impossible not to feel doubt.
He has always known too well about his own feelings, about the sheer crippling weight of them. It’s part of the reason he finds it so impossible to imagine them being shared by anyone else.
“Arthur, hey,” Cobb says in distraction, throwing his briefcase on the sideboard in the hall and pushing his hair back from his eyes. “Are the kids home yet?”
“No, we have a few minutes yet,” Arthur replies. The napkin in his hand is a crumpled wad. Cobb spots it anyway. He nods to it.
“What’s that?”
“Something I read,” Arthur says evenly, and offers it, hand unfolding around it.
Cobb shrugs off his coat and plucks the mass from Arthur’s fingers, straightening it meticulously from its edges. He sucks in a breath before it’s fully flattened. “You were in my office?” he says, after a long moment.
Arthur frowns. The office is certainly Cobb’s space, but Cobb has never been particularly private about it. “Yes,” he confirms, though more hesitantly.
Cobb smiles, a quick flash of teeth. “You’re out of practice, then,” he says, “Because you’ve missed the more important bits.”
He takes Arthur’s wrist in his hand, his grip warm and soft. Arthur follows him like he’s exerting magnetic pull. They go down the hall to the office, where Cobb’s papers are in the same disarray both he and Arthur had left them in. Cobb lets go of Arthur though, and opens a drawer in his desk where Arthur catches a glimpse of a stack of papers, disheveled but filled with post-its that probably constitute their organizational structure. He draws out a scant few sheets, placing the napkin over the top of them like they’re a set.
Then he holds them out to Arthur. The gesture is steady, assured. Arthur takes them.
“You know, they say actions speak more than words,” Cobb says slowly, shoving his hands in his pockets. “But if that’s the case, then I’ve been shouting from the rooftops and you haven’t heard a word.”
Arthur swallows. “Maybe I know that words are more important to you,” he replies, and even to his own ears his voice sounds low and unsteady.
“Then read the goddamn story, Arthur,” Cobb says.
Arthur looks between the sheets of paper and the napkin. He has the scribbled lines memorized by now.
I once knew a man who stopped time.
I knew him and he knew me.
He gave me words when I had none,
and I will chase him 'cross the horizon like the setting sun.
“I think I’ve read the important part already,” he murmurs.
Cobb exhales. “Arthur—”
“I’d like to put my suitcase in storage, if that’s all right,” Arthur interrupts. He tosses the story onto the desk, the napkin fluttering to the floor, and flattens his hands over Cobb’s lapels just as Cobb grips his waist to pull him in.
“That’s fine with me,” Cobb breathes, and the last word is caught and sealed beneath Arthur’s lips.
Seven:
Ariadne writes,
This is a story about loss, and a story about love.
-
Edit: Now with beautiful accompanying art byellegen! Go see it and leave her praise here.
Author: Alchemy Alice
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Arthur/Cobb
Word Count: ~3,000
Rating: PG
Warnings/Disclaimers: I own nothing, this is not my sandbox; also this is a sequel, and won't make any sense without reading what preceded it.
Summary: Follow-up to The Outrage of the Years, written for
sin_delight for helpbrazil2011. Thank you for donating, and I hope you like this! It’s difficult, letting go.
Arthur hadn’t really thought it would be. He’s been living in the moment; as he remembers it, the loop only happened once, rewriting all the others in black, insistent ink, and no matter how hard he tries he can’t recall those seven trials, or the pure looping memories in between. They all look like one single set of Penrose stairs to him--singular, paradoxical, and absolute.
So it should be easy to let that one narrative go, put it on a shelf and leave it in favor of newer, better volumes.
It isn’t.
It takes twelve weeks of physiotherapy, and endless hours of exercises, slow and stuttering walks around the apartment and then later, Central Park. It takes relearning how to use utensils deftly, and with precision. He pushes himself too hard, sometimes, and he knows it, though never soon enough. When he realizes his legs have given up the ghost for the day he’s always in some place inconvenient, and Cobb has to carry him to the bathroom or the bedroom.
The newlywed jokes get old, but they say them anyway. And eventually Arthur doesn’t need them as much, because his legs stop giving up, so that even when he’s shaky and exhausted he can make his way up the stairs.
Cobb backs away from his bloody-minded determination, hands held up in surrender, the quirk of a smile at his lips that doesn’t look altogether genuine, but Arthur can walk by himself, dammit, and that’s what matters.
Still, it takes a long time. And he isn’t entirely sure how Cobb manages to stand it, this intrusion into his home and his life. How Dom manages to seem amazed and encouraged by every step in the right direction, every inch of improvement in Arthur’s muscle control. Arthur hardly has the patience for it. He can’t imagine being the one waiting, waiting for things to get better. But he doesn’t have many options, and only this one feels even slightly appealing. So he stays.But he doesn’t remember.
(This is what he had rewritten. This is what lay beneath the scouring ink of his dreams—)
One:
Cobb steps into the dream, and he barely has a chance to get a word out before his doppelganger steps out of the crowd, his posture and clothes just right, but the tilt of his head all wrong, all Arthur.
“You’re not real,” not-Cobb says, and draws a Beretta from his jacket.
Cobb wishes in a brief and painful moment that Arthur didn’t remember just how sharp his firing reflexes are.
Cobb steps into the dream, and he barely has a chance to get a word out before his doppelganger steps out of the crowd, his posture and clothes just right, but the tilt of his head all wrong, all Arthur.
“You’re not real,” not-Cobb says, and draws a Beretta from his jacket.
Cobb wishes in a brief and painful moment that Arthur didn’t remember just how sharp his firing reflexes are.
Cobb makes room for Arthur in his life and home like it’s the most natural thing in the world. James and Phillipa patter around him like he’s a given, recounting their after school programs and elementary school gossip, and Cobb himself comes in and out of the house at the strange irregular hours dictated by writing seminars, office hours, and faculty meetings.
It takes Arthur nearly a week to realize that it’s all so smooth because Cobb has already been doing this, making room for him, for seven fucking months. He can’t even imagine what it must have been like, Arthur’s prone form locked away in a bedroom with IV drips and a catheter, one more phantom taking up space.
He sometimes wonders if, when Cobb looks at him, he still only sees a projection, a memory, like he had begun to with Mal.
It doesn’t seem that way, but Arthur’s misjudged before.
He cooks dinner on alternate nights when his arms finally can handle lifting pots of water and roasts in pans. When he does and Cobb comes home to it, Arthur sees a strange, dazed expression on his face in the reflection of the window above the counter. Like Cobb keeps forgetting that he’s awake.
The irony doesn’t escape him.
Two:
Ariadne is perfect--inquisitive, brilliant and creative, with a grasp of dreaming and storytelling that leaves Cobb breathless, even when he knows she’s only a figment here. But he thinks he’s gotten the particular taste of her inspiration right, he can set her in motion and trust her to do well.
He forgets, and Eames forgets too, unfortunately, that Arthur has met Ariadne, and while the likeness is good, his perception of her is colored differently than Cobb’s.
He shoots her out of existence, and Eames and Cobb follow swiftly after in a hail of silent gunfire.
Ariadne is perfect--inquisitive, brilliant and creative, with a grasp of dreaming and storytelling that leaves Cobb breathless, even when he knows she’s only a figment here. But he thinks he’s gotten the particular taste of her inspiration right, he can set her in motion and trust her to do well.
He forgets, and Eames forgets too, unfortunately, that Arthur has met Ariadne, and while the likeness is good, his perception of her is colored differently than Cobb’s.
He shoots her out of existence, and Eames and Cobb follow swiftly after in a hail of silent gunfire.
Ariadne comes by for dinner occasionally, her old life resumed. Arthur notices that she looks at Cobb sometimes with an odd sort of caution, like there is uncomfortable knowledge between them. Cobb notices it, Arthur is sure he does because Cobb is an extractor (now in all senses of the word) and noticing is part of his job.
He doesn’t seem bothered by it though; he meets it instead with steadiness and warmth, things Arthur thought had died with Mal. Cobb is a novelist and a dreamsmith by trade, but he’s also a teacher by nature. He talks her through character sketches and nitpicks her drafts, smiling when she reads out dialogue that shimmers off the page.
Two months after Arthur wakes up, she stops by and hands Cobb a sheaf of papers. He invites her in, but she shakes her head and leaves quickly, her steps light on the sidewalk.
Arthur watches from the living room as Cobb shuts the door absently, head already bent over the top sheet of paper, furrows forming in his brow. He flips the page back, leaving it to dangle from its staple, and then looks up suddenly, quick enough to take Arthur off guard.
Arthur raises his eyebrows neutrally. “What is it?”
Cobb blinks, looks down at the page again and then back up. “She—” he stops. Shakes his head. “She’s doing good work,” he amends. “She’s getting at some truth.”
“Oh,” Arthur says, and doesn’t really know what to make of it. Absently, he squeezes stress balls in his hands, feeling the thin tendons and muscles strengthen. He barely notices the hand Cobb briefly rests on the back of his neck as he goes to his office, because it’s happened so many times before.
Three:
Cobb squints up at the cathedral, and props a hand over his brow.
Two seconds later he curses violently.
Eames has gone down in a hail of bullets a couple times before, but never have said bullet manage to hit him dead on in the chest and head so efficiently.
Cobb squints up at the cathedral, and props a hand over his brow.
Two seconds later he curses violently.
Eames has gone down in a hail of bullets a couple times before, but never have said bullet manage to hit him dead on in the chest and head so efficiently.
He wakes with Cobb close on his heels.
“Fuck!” he manages to exclaim. “You weren’t kidding!”
Cobb rubs his forehead where no doubt a long range rifle had just made a significant hole. “We used to build that type of security,” he said ruefully. “Tactical teams, reflexive accuracy. And Arthur was the best.”
“Well, fuck.”
Ariadne doesn’t come back for a fortnight, in which Cobb works as usual, but with an air of distraction hovering around him. Arthur recognizes the look.
“Got a narrator yet?” he asks over coffee.
Cobb startles over his mug. “For what?”
“Whatever you’re working on. You have a story or something.”
Cobb peers at him. “You’re creepy when you do that.”
“I’m your point man,” he replies automatically, and then flinches.
He’s not in the military anymore. The military left him to rot.
Cobb continues watching him steadily. He takes a sip of his coffee. “You are my point man,” he confirms, after a second. He has a strange look on his face, half-appraising, half-smiling.
Arthur sort of hates the way such a simple assurance could make the knot in his stomach soften and ease. He covers it with a quirk of one eyebrow as coffee scalds his tongue. “My question stands. You got a narrator?”
“Pretty much,” Cobb answers. “But that’s the easy part. The hard part is what he’s going to say.”
“Ain’t that always the way?” Arthur says dryly, and Cobb chuckles.
In the evening, Arthur does his PT, and listens in between reps to the soft tap of laptop keys.
Four:
The library is winding and infinite, but hasn’t yet begun to pull itself into knots and defy gravity. Eames decides to take the classics to heart, and unwinds a length of cable, which he affixes to the librarian’s desk. She glares at him.
“Are you trying to create a tripping hazard, Mr. Eames?” she inquires.
“Am I?” he grins.
She recrosses her legs behind the desk. “Try not to be disruptive.”
The problem with leaving a trail behind is that you leave a trail behind. In what should have been an empty library full of Arthur’s memories, knowledge and speculations, Eames gets tracked and taken down by a SWAT unit of projections.
The library is winding and infinite, but hasn’t yet begun to pull itself into knots and defy gravity. Eames decides to take the classics to heart, and unwinds a length of cable, which he affixes to the librarian’s desk. She glares at him.
“Are you trying to create a tripping hazard, Mr. Eames?” she inquires.
“Am I?” he grins.
She recrosses her legs behind the desk. “Try not to be disruptive.”
The problem with leaving a trail behind is that you leave a trail behind. In what should have been an empty library full of Arthur’s memories, knowledge and speculations, Eames gets tracked and taken down by a SWAT unit of projections.
Locked in the cathedral, Cobb paces, hands clutching at his hair, shoes kicking up soot but never disturbing it enough to clear it away.
Arthur watches him walk and walk, and says nothing. He won't remember any of it in a few hours anyway.
Arthur watches him walk and walk, and says nothing. He won't remember any of it in a few hours anyway.
Cobb’s nervous energy gives way slowly to determination, so Arthur knows it’s going well. He notices other things too, like how he can go out and get groceries now, that he’s regained his normal weight and normal muscle, and that somehow, despite that, he hasn’t left yet.
Most of his stuff, what little of it there is, had been retrieved by Cobb not long after he’d taken Arthur himself out of the hospital in the dead of night. It’s in storage, Cobb said, whenever you want to get anything.
Everything Arthur has ever needed fits in one suitcase, which he keeps with him at all times. He eradicated permanence from his life before he even entered dreamsharing, or met Cobb. He had never given it further thought.
Now he realizes that, except to retrieve his clothes and hang them in the guest room closet, he hasn’t gone near the suitcase since he woke up. Very quietly, he panics.
Then Cobb comes home bearing packages of pad thai and the panic in him thaws and slowly dissolves. “I could have cooked,” he says as Cobb dumps the bag in the kitchen.
“You could’ve,” Cobb agrees. “But I didn’t have my phone to call ahead, so this is what we’ve got instead.”
“You’re not letting me earn my keep here,” Arthur complains, not thinking.
“You don’t have to earn anything,” Cobb replies easily.
They both fall silent then, though, and Arthur listens, his breath shortening. He can see Cobb’s jaw tighten and flex, a tight, cautious smile tugging at his lips before fading.
Cobb reaches across to get to a cabinet, suddenly in Arthur’s space, and Arthur can hardly breathe.
“Utensils?” Cobb suggests quietly, almost drowned out by the sound of the plates clacking together in his hand.
“Yeah,” Arthur grunts, and turns in place to pull out the drawer, ever closer to the brush of Cobb’s chest against his shoulders. He thinks that maybe he imagines how Cobb’s breath stutters slightly, puffing against the back of his neck before moving away.
Dinner is quiet, even for the kids, and with a furrowed brow, Cobb scribbles on his napkin.
Five:
Ink.
There is ink everywhere.
It chokes the breath out of his lungs and Cobb can feel himself falling out of his own features, his own skin, his eyes turning as black as smokers’ lungs and then there is nothing. Nothing.
He wakes violently and is caustically sick on the floor, barely avoiding collapsing his vein as he rips the IV out.
Eames wakes up twelve minutes later, demanding, “Where the hell were you?”
“Kicked out,” Cobb says grimly. “We’ve got new problems.”
The next day, Arthur quietly makes contact with Eames while Cobb is at the university.
“Arthur, what an unexpected pleasure,” he drawls over the phone, though his voice is tight.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“How the hell did you get this number?” Eames shot back. There’s a shuffling in the background, and Arthur figures it’s cards. Eames never could get out of that particular habit.
Eames must know him far too well or somehow has eyes that can see through phone lines, because into Arthur’s silence he then adds, “You raided Cobb’s office, didn’t you? Getting bored of your convalescence, darling?”
“Maybe,” Arthur mutters. “How are your underground contacts lately?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean, if I get you in contact with one of those people, the first thing they’ll do is find out that the Department of Defense thinks you’re a vegetable, and any sign of that not being the case will bring them down on your head like the hounds of Hell. If they’re stupid enough to get in bed with that sort of risk, they’ll be doing it to blackmail you into doing whatever they want. So…”
He keeps talking, but Arthur’s not listening anymore. Because he’d found Eames’ number in Cobb’s office, and now he’s standing over Cobb’s desk, where there is a thick stack of papers, on top of which is Ariadne’s story. It’s entitled, ‘The Outrage of the Years’, but he’s not looking at that.
What he’s looking at is the scrap of napkin from the previous night, thrown on top of the manuscript. Cobb’s scrawl nearly punctures the fragile paper, hurried lines that always meant inspiration too sudden and jarring to find its own piece of paper.
“Arthur? Arthur, are you even listening to me as I explain your very delicate situation to your dream-addled brain?”
“No,” Arthur says, meaning for it to sound level and dismissive, but it comes out breathy and awed.
“Is it really so awful living with the darling Cobbs, anyway?” Eames asks, and there’s something knowing in his tone that Arthur can’t pinpoint.
“No. No, it’s not,” Arthur says slowly, on auto-pilot. Cobb’s writing is in blue ink, ballpoint and uneven.
“Right then. I see this conversation going nowhere useful, and I have things to get back to. Don’t call me unless you and Cobb both have a job worth doing, and for god’s sake get over yourself.”
Over the dial tone, Arthur reads and reads again the stuttering lines on the napkin in his hand.
Arthur swallows, and his hands shake.
Six:
Cobb finds him in the cathedral, not Cobb-Cobb, but Arthur’s projection, and he is a tight and merciless and monstrous thing in his most severe black suit and assassin’s gloves, and for days afterwards it haunts him, that this is what Arthur imagines, this is the shade that Cobb has in his mind become.
Cobb thinks of Mal, and for a week he doesn’t speak.
Yusuf makes tea in the kitchen and takes it to Eames. Eames looks sidelong at the living room.
“Do you think it’s still worth it?” Yusuf asks. “You’re the one who’s been down there with him.”
“It could be,” Eames said slowly. “But we’re not doing enough. We’re not good enough. We need outside help.”
Yusuf nods.
Cobb comes home looking haggard, and Arthur almost feels bad, but he needs to know, he needs to know now before the suitcase upstairs has to be filled and taken away again. The sensible part of him knows that he should know already, should already be assured, but its equally impossible not to feel doubt.
He has always known too well about his own feelings, about the sheer crippling weight of them. It’s part of the reason he finds it so impossible to imagine them being shared by anyone else.
“Arthur, hey,” Cobb says in distraction, throwing his briefcase on the sideboard in the hall and pushing his hair back from his eyes. “Are the kids home yet?”
“No, we have a few minutes yet,” Arthur replies. The napkin in his hand is a crumpled wad. Cobb spots it anyway. He nods to it.
“What’s that?”
“Something I read,” Arthur says evenly, and offers it, hand unfolding around it.
Cobb shrugs off his coat and plucks the mass from Arthur’s fingers, straightening it meticulously from its edges. He sucks in a breath before it’s fully flattened. “You were in my office?” he says, after a long moment.
Arthur frowns. The office is certainly Cobb’s space, but Cobb has never been particularly private about it. “Yes,” he confirms, though more hesitantly.
Cobb smiles, a quick flash of teeth. “You’re out of practice, then,” he says, “Because you’ve missed the more important bits.”
He takes Arthur’s wrist in his hand, his grip warm and soft. Arthur follows him like he’s exerting magnetic pull. They go down the hall to the office, where Cobb’s papers are in the same disarray both he and Arthur had left them in. Cobb lets go of Arthur though, and opens a drawer in his desk where Arthur catches a glimpse of a stack of papers, disheveled but filled with post-its that probably constitute their organizational structure. He draws out a scant few sheets, placing the napkin over the top of them like they’re a set.
Then he holds them out to Arthur. The gesture is steady, assured. Arthur takes them.
“You know, they say actions speak more than words,” Cobb says slowly, shoving his hands in his pockets. “But if that’s the case, then I’ve been shouting from the rooftops and you haven’t heard a word.”
Arthur swallows. “Maybe I know that words are more important to you,” he replies, and even to his own ears his voice sounds low and unsteady.
“Then read the goddamn story, Arthur,” Cobb says.
Arthur looks between the sheets of paper and the napkin. He has the scribbled lines memorized by now.
I once knew a man who stopped time.
I knew him and he knew me.
He gave me words when I had none,
and I will chase him 'cross the horizon like the setting sun.
Cobb exhales. “Arthur—”
“I’d like to put my suitcase in storage, if that’s all right,” Arthur interrupts. He tosses the story onto the desk, the napkin fluttering to the floor, and flattens his hands over Cobb’s lapels just as Cobb grips his waist to pull him in.
“That’s fine with me,” Cobb breathes, and the last word is caught and sealed beneath Arthur’s lips.
Seven:
Ariadne writes,
This is a story about loss, and a story about love.
It’s all words on a page from there.
-
Edit: Now with beautiful accompanying art by
ellegen! Go see it and leave her praise here.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2011 03:03 (UTC)i read this last night but i was only half-awake and was worried i'd leave some kind of incoherent babble as feedback (which--um, it's likely i'm going to do that anyway, but yes) because this. this this THIS. i don't even know, it's probably one of my favouritest things to have come out of the fandom ever, i can't even tell you.
the writing was so gorgeous, and on point, and it meshed with your big bang in such a lovely way, without being too confusing or diluted in its own storytelling. i felt like it was restrained and wild all at once, with perfect characterization and fantastic dialogue and - just -- yes. this is everything arthur/cobb should aspire to be, always. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2011 14:57 (UTC)Thank you so much, I am so, so glad you enjoyed this. I'm especially glad that you thought it fit with 'Outrage' while still standing somewhat on its own, given that the scale and focus of it is so different. So thank you for reading, and for leaving such incredibly kind words, I'm so pleased you liked it!
no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2011 01:04 (UTC)The way you wrote their interactions, how they're coping, Arthur slowly incorporating himself into Cobb's life, all of this is just so lovely ♥
And dumb moment here, but Ariadne is writing what happened to them in Arthur's mind for Cobb right? Or are we all going open interpretation? I absolutely adore this, thank you once again for writing this for me :)
no subject
Date: 1 Mar 2011 19:11 (UTC)Thank you so much, I'm so pleased you enjoyed it!
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Date: 1 Mar 2011 19:14 (UTC)I'd be lying if I say I wasn't morbidly wondering what happened to them afterwards. *winks*
Haha, it could have gone badly I suppose. IT WAS ALL EVEN MORE OF A DREAM OH CRAP. But no, I require happy endings for everyone :D
Thank you, I'm so glad you enjoyed this, darling!
no subject
Date: 3 Mar 2011 13:14 (UTC)DUUUDE, I am sorry that I am saying little. I blame it on the work-avalanche but know that I love this. As usual. And I really love the way your h/c is always way more emotional and comforting that pointlessly porny. If that makes sense. Oooh, alliteration! (Unvoiced plosive, if my lessons fail me not.)
no subject
Date: 3 Mar 2011 16:28 (UTC)Pfft, no worries, my friend. We're all ridiculously busy--it was only procrastination from stuff that managed to get this story done. But anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it! It was a fun little wrap-up to do. (Hee alliteration ftw!)
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Date: 7 Mar 2011 05:11 (UTC)no subject
Date: 7 Mar 2011 12:27 (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2011 00:06 (UTC)