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PRELUDE
The night before the storms, everything is quiet.
The edges of windows jut like broken teeth from the jaws of abandoned buildings; for once, the putrid smoke from the city's block of CCCs isn't crawling thick across the sky. There are so few electric lights left that the sky is deep purple, an ocean of stars.
Arthur tucks himself further into Eames's side, eyes open in the dark. Somewhere, a child is crying.
CITY OF REFUGE
It starts quietly, a soft rain that fits the gray pearly evening, the easy roll of summer thunder in the background. Arthur feels a reflexive surge of hope under his breastbone and tries to quash it. This is just the beginning.
"You think it'll work?" Eames asks him, folding his arms into his chest. He's thin, now, thinner than he's probably ever been since Arthur met him almost a decade ago, but he doesn't look weak. He looks like a razor blade.
Arthur shrugs as noncommittally as he can. Eames already knows the answer––it has to work or they're all dead. Maybe worse. "I don't know. I don't want to jinx it."
They both wince at his word choice; the Jinx is what got Mal in the end, raving in some dirty pit of a government facility until she finally suffocated on her own vomit. Arthur still isn't sure she didn't do it on purpose.
"Come here," Eames says, pulling Arthur to him by the wrists. "I haven't seen you in days."
"You see me all the time," Arthur protests.
"No," Eames disagrees, kissing his eyelids, his nose, "no, I see Arthur, mastermind of the greatest domestic threat the United States has seen since the fucking Civil War––"
"Mr. Eames," Arthur says archly, "I didn't know you could be so romantic."
"But I don't see you," he persists. "I don't––when was the last time––"
"All right, all right," Arthur says, more gently than he means to. "I'm here. We're safe."
Eames snorts. "We're not safe."
"Safe enough," Arthur presses. He brushes Eames's hair out of his face, tucking it awkwardly behind one ear. "You should get this cut. It suits you shorter."
"With what time?" Eames asks, turning into Arthur's palm.
Arthur nods ruefully, but doesn't stop stroking his cheek. The moment sits soft and lovely between them, unusual even when they have the rare luxury of privacy. Arthur draws Eames in closer, resting their foreheads together in unforgivable sentiment.
The rain outside is starting to get harder, now. Soon the winds will pick up and the clouds will reach a boiling fury, and the wrath of God––well, the wrath of Arthur, aided and abetted by Yusuf's vastly creative geometeorengineering, but God's got a better PR team––will have begun.
Arthur shivers, Eames's thumbs still tucked into his belt loops, a little frightened, more than a little turned on.
"You like that?" Eames asks, low, dirty, carefree, like it's eight years ago after all and they're resolving their sexual tension for the first time. Arthur nods, even though they really shouldn't be doing this, it's about as far from the time and the place as possible, not to mention the door's unlocked––
"Arthur?" Ariadne calls as she opens the door. "I need your signat––oh!" Her mouth is a red O as she takes them in, and Arthur realizes that knowing your literal terrorist of a boss is in some kind of tawdry relationship with an undercover government agent (one who's actually working for the side of freedom, justice, and large guns when necessary) is different than catching them practically in flagrante delicto. "Sorry!"
"No, it's fine," Arthur says, stepping back. "Mr. Eames was just leaving."
Eames throws him a look that's halfway between tender and exasperated. "I'll see you later, Arthur."
Arthur smiles at him with as much sincerity as he can manage in front of Ariadne."See you."
Eames nods to Ariadne and edges out around her.
"Here," Ariadne says, then. Arthur hasn't known her for nearly as long as he's known anyone else involved in the war effort––and it is a war, no matter how hard the higher ups are trying to ignore it––but she's quick and competent and, in another world, might have been a friend.
"Thanks," he says, taking the file from her. "You'd think running a covert freedom fighting operation would free us up from something so banal as paperwork and signatures."
"Alas," Ariadne says, smiling mildly.
"Which alias is it this time?" Arthur asks, pen poised.
"Gregory MacDuff," Ariadne answers.
"Lay on," Arthur muses, and signs the dotted line.
BRING ME MY QUEEN
For seven days and seven nights, the land is scourged clean.
Arthur spends most of it in a semi-meditative state, trying to be a one-man bureaucracy and drinking oceans of instant coffee that's more lukewarm water than anything else. He calls Eames eleven times from three different phones and almost says I love you twice, covers it up awkwardly. He hopes the lines aren't tapped.
To be in love, Arthur has realized, is to be frustrated: by Eames when they're together, by everything else when they're not.
On the fifth day, the city declares a state of emergency via Screening Station––took them long enough, Arthur thinks; the basement of his safe house has been flooded beyond saving for nearly as long as the storm's been raging, and he's got an illegal generator still routing power to the sump pump. (The benefit of being on America's Most Wanted lists, Arthur's found, is that illegal possession no longer seems as serious as it once did. He'd nearly had a heart attack the first time he and Eames rigged up a heater in the middle of the second round of winter blackouts, before anyone knew they were scheduled with purpose.) The radio cautions him not to go outside.
"Helpful as always," Eames says when he hears, his voice distressingly tinny over their poor connection. "I can see your government really believes in the intelligence of its citizens."
"Spare me," Arthur groans, rubbing his forehead. "It's your government, too, by now."
"I never," Eames says in falsetto. "Arthur, how could you say such things?"
Arthur can imagine him fluttering his eyelashes to complete the picture and irrationally is overcome by the desire to kiss him. He huffs out a laugh and apologizes, asks for updates in the field, avoids saying anything he wouldn't in front of Ariadne.
"Have you heard from Cobb?" Eames asks, then, totally serious for once.
Arthur goes cold all over. "No," he says. "Should I have? What's going on?"
Eames doesn't answer for a long moment; Arthur strains and hears a curious shuffling noise in the background. "I'm not sure," he says, American now. "I'll try to get home soon, hon, you know how busy it is here."
Deep laughter, then, and Eames's voice, muffled: "My wife––yeah, I know, I know, I'll see you in a couple minutes. All right. Don't forget you owe me a beer, McKay." Footsteps, a door clicking closed.
Arthur sighs, tracing the grain of the table in front of him. "I should have known you only wanted me for my tendency to vacuum in heels."
Eames chokes alarmingly. "Darling," he says, British again, voice unbearably fond. Arthur's throat hurts. "I'll talk to you later. I need to go pal around, make them remember why they like me."
"Bye," Arthur says. "Keep an eye out for Cobb for me."
"As if I'd do that for anyone else," Eames says, long-suffering, and hangs up.
Arthur listens to the silence echo in the space of his absence for––too long. Then he microwaves his coffee and gets back to work.
CHAINS
The first time they had sex in a bed, Eames nuzzled Arthur's neck in something approaching a caress and said, "The things I want to do to you are illegal in at least thirty states."
Arthur froze under him and grabbed his arms, forced his face away. "Eames," he said, unable to stop himself. "Eames, the things you want to do to me are illegal in every state."
Eames blinked. "Well, a detailed and accurate discussion of public policy isn't not what I expected as pillow talk from you," he said. "I must say I would have expected it after the orgasms, though."
Arthur struggled to sit up. "Sorry, but I mean––you've been treating it like a joke this whole time, but Eames, you're not in France anymore. You're not even in the UK. They're serious about the Jinx, here. They hear you say something they don't like, they fucking––they fucking arrest you. My apartment doesn't have the cooties, last I checked, but––"
"It seriously fucking disturbs me that your country uses children's games as code for illegal domestic espionage. And I can escape an arrest," Eames reminded him, tracing his chin speculatively.
Arthur shrugged him off, irritable. "They're not games. Not anymore. And yeah, you can escape an arrest, but you can't escape one of the Cremation Centers."
Eames abruptly looked horrified. "You're not serious."
Arthur shook his head, hiding his hands in his own armpits. "I don't know," he said. "There are rumors."
Arthur can't remember what Eames said to that, anymore, but it must have been convincing enough get him back in bed, because he remembers that without too much difficulty––how they tangled awkwardly, how they fought. Arthur has a tiny scar on his left shoulder because of it.
He doesn't miss those, days, though. Every encounter was chance, or at least felt like it, and over too quickly in case they got caught; clothes stayed on, words upon words left unsaid. They can take their time now, when Eames gets the opportunity to come home, and it's not like the government has enough control to Jinx anyone as far off the radar as Arthur has made sure he is.
He misses Eames, though, aches with it like he never did in the beginning, even when they spent months apart, Arthur still just a number-crunching data analyst in a dreamlab, Eames the same world-class con man he is now but with more gambling debts. If nothing else, Arthur thinks, at least the end of the world makes cheating people out of their life's savings and then losing it all again a little more difficult.
One of the phones rings again, startling him so that he almost tips backwards off his chair. He looks around, but Ariadne's nowhere in sight. Thank god. Reputation saved.
"Hey," he says. "Hello."
"Arthur," Yusuf greets him, "hi, I'm glad I didn't have to leave a message this time. Have you heard from Cobb?"
Fucking Cobb. Not again. "No. Should I have?"
Yusuf makes a little sound of uncertainty. "I've been hearing things."
Arthur groans. "The last time we heard things about Cobb we had to rescue him from a CCC in some kind of zero gravity nightmare. It was insane. I had ashes in places that ashes should never go."
Yusuf chuckles. Of course. He got to keep watch and drive the getaway car. He thought Arthur coming out covered in the sooty remains of garbage and dear beloved pets was fucking hysterical. The asshole. Arthur doesn't know why he puts up with him. "Well. Whatever Cobb is up to, the storm should be stopping in about thirty-six hours, as long as I've calibrated everything correctly."
Oh right. "Good," says Arthur. "Good. That gives Eames enough time to––"
"Yes, Arthur, I have heard this before, multiple times," Yusuf reminds him. "You might even say I helped come up with it. Perhaps. If you were so inclined."
Arthur coughs and subsides. "Right. Okay. Well––did you call for any particular reason or just to gloat about your engineering brilliance and ask after Cobb?"
"Mostly to gloat," Yusuf says. "I thought about coming up there but your office is so far away from the lab, the telephone seemed easier. Plus also I don't want the pasta to boil over."
Arthur squints at the phone even though Yusuf can't see him and his squints were never as intimidating as Cobb's, anyway. "Are you cooking in the lab? I thought we agreed no food in the lab in case of accidental poisoning or something."
"A man needs to eat," Yusuf says. "Besides, we agreed no underlings could bring food in the Somnacin lab. My scientific underlings are nowhere in sight because I can't pay them in anything but knowledge and glory and democratic principles, which doesn't exactly lead to a willingness to stay overtime, and also this is no longer a Somnacin lab. Ergo, pasta."
"Well, the way you cook pasta, it hardly counts as food," Arthur admits. "Whatever, just don't kill yourself via Bunsen burner or something, I might need you around for future endeavors."
"It's a wonder I don't just steal you and your sweet nothings away from Eames," Yusuf says, and hangs up on him. Asshole.
Arthur wishes Eames were around more to help them; he likes Yusuf and he thinks Yusuf likes him, but they need a third party or substantial amounts of alcohol before they can have a civilized conversation that lasts more than a few minutes, and alcohol that isn't made in Yusuf's bathtub and-or guaranteed to cause blindness in moderate doses is hard to come by.
Fuck that, Arthur wishes Eames were around more, period. He misses him like a limb or a lung. He's thirsty for his hands, his voice––for him. Saving the world's a real bitch sometimes.
The storm thunders on.
BALLAD OF TREASON
When the rain finally slows, Arthur is awake. He usually is, these days; sleep is regretfully hard to come by in a world born anew. Eames is wrapped around him like a snake, which isn't helping.
"Darling," Eames whispers, "I realize that you are, of course, a brave little toaster, but you won't be of any use to anyone if you don't try to get some sleep."
"I know that," Arthur hisses. "I'm not awake on purpose."
Eames groans and lets go of him, sitting up in the process. "You're thinking, you know. I can feel it. It's very disruptive."
Arthur crosses his arms over his chest and glares at the ceiling. "Oh, I do apologize," he says, trying for Eames on his poshest day and missing just enough to be utterly obnoxious. "I'll try to lower the volume, shall I?"
"You used to be better at that," Eames admonishes, grinning at him, stroking his hair out of his face.
Arthur scowls and bats at his hand ineffectually. "If you were around more, maybe I'd get in more practice," he says, dropping the accent.
"Oh, Arthur," Eames says. His name sounds lonely, all by itself like that, while Eames traces patterns on his chin. Arthur's heart clenches. "I wish I could be."
Arthur nods and blinks hard. "I know," he says. "None of us chose this."
Eames shakes his head. "No," he says, "none of us did." He kisses the side of Arthur's neck, but there isn't any passion in it, which is just as well. Arthur's not the in the mood, anyway.
Three hours later, the sun is struggling free from its heavy cloud cover.
"Judgment Day," says Eames into Arthur's shoulder.
LAST TRAIN
For Mal, Arthur and Eames had been a foregone conclusion.
"But of course you will fuck him," she would say delicately, pouring Arthur coffee.
"I don't think that's how this works," he'd reply, blowing on his cup.
"You don't know how this works," Mal would remind him, sipping from her own steaming mug without concern.
The conversation repeated itself whenever Eames came to town.
"But he's a crook," Arthur would protest. "I can't sleep with a crook."
"No, non," Mal would cry, shaking an adamant finger, "he is a confidence man and sometimes very rich. Entirely different."
"A crook," Arthur would insist.
"Handsome and rich!" Mal would rebut.
When it finally happened, a mostly clothed, mostly accidental fumble in Mal and Cobb's guest half-bath, Mal left him a Post-It on the door that said only I told you so, in her loopy, perfect handwriting; tacked on was a P.S. in Cobb's decidedly bolder hand: Never again in our bathroom, for God's sake.
Arthur had crumpled it up and stuffed it in a pocket, determined never to see any living person ever again but particularly not anyone professionally or personally associated with Dom Cobb. The moratorium, of course, didn't last long––Mal, her timing ever excellent, phoned him the next morning tell him she was pregnant with Phillipa, still yet codenamed The Thing––but it had been months before he saw Eames again.
"Of course you will fuck him again," Mal would say, pressing her hands to her belly as though covering The Thing's tiny ears.
"Didn't we already talk about this?" Arthur'd reply. "Déjà-goddamn-vu."
The day Eames tells him he has to go fully under, that the safe house isn't safe until he's shed his government persona for the last time, Arthur spends entire hours replaying that conversation. Again and again, theme and variation.
BURN THRU
After Eames disappears, Cobb shows up on Arthur's information network as he so often does, a blip in the system, easily overlooked unless you know what kind of blip you're looking for. Luckily, Arthur, who's known Cobb longer than anyone else alive, knows exactly what kind of blip he's looking for, and when he finds it––a flash of the silver briefcase Cobb could never leave behind, spotted behind several others in a supposedly abandoned train compartment––he sends out an invitation in response.
Cobb RSVPs by knocking at Arthur's front door.
"Miss me?" he asks.
"Uh," says Ariadne. "Wh––"
"Wrong person," he says, and pushes past her using the sheer strength of his charisma, shit-eating grin wide on his face. "Miss me?" he asks Arthur, who's standing a few feet behind and slightly to the left of her.
"You son of a bitch," Arthur says. "Ariadne, if you ever let anyone else through that door without vetting them I'll kill you both myself." He hoists his gun to prove that he's not actually kidding.
"Okay," says Ariadne faintly, beating a hasty retreat as she does.
"Hey," Arthur says.
"Hi," Cobb answers. "It looks like you've been busy."
"You could say that," Arthur allows. "How about you?"
Cobb shrugs. His hair is dyed blackish and his face looks ill, sallow. "Not much room for fugitives in the dream world at the moment," he says. "Not that there's much of a dream world anymore, of course. Not that you'd know anything about that, of course."
Arthur ignores the jab and nods. The last dream he'd gone into was almost two years ago now, the government-sanctioned prison experiment that starred Cobb as the central dreamer in a permanent nightmare. "I've gotten out of that line of business," he says.
"And into revolution?" Cobb asks.
"Something like that," Arthur agrees. "Eames likes to call it large-scale creative consulting."
Cobb snorts. "He would." He hefts his bags––the PASIV he's never without, now, and a black bag that's unremarkably scuffed––and says, "Do you mind if I put these somewhere?"
Arthur sighs and waves him onward. "How long are you staying?"
"How long will you let me?" Cobb asks.
"Long enough to get myself killed," Arthur grumbles, climbing the stairs.
He leaves Cobb up there in the safe house's makeshift guest room, arranging his suitcase under the futon and fiddling with the divine machinery that makes up the PASIV's guts. He checks up with Ariadne, too, on his way back, who, by virtue of circumstance, has just received an update from Yusuf, who confirms that his little rain trick has seriously fucked up the continental United States's weather patterns for the conceivable future, and also that he's taking a nap until the next stage is ready to be implemented, so anyone who bothers him better have the best reason of all time and/or be ready to deal with another apocalypse.
"There's riots all over," Ariadne sighs, eyes shining with something approaching idealism. "People are sick of it, all of it. No one's heard anything from the capitol, but it's not looking good."
"We still have to see it through," Arthur reminds her.
"But at least the hardest part's over," Ariadne says. "People are fighting back, now."
For once, Arthur just doesn't have the heart to crush her youthful vim and vigor. "Uh-huh," he says.
CORNER GIRL
It's not like Arthur wants to be a king or anything, although for a brief and regrettable period in his later adolescence he did vehemently argue for the benefits of benevolent tyranny whenever anyone asked about his political leanings, which didn't do much but assure that no one asked about his political leanings more than once.
And it's not like he's got a vision for a better world, either; he doesn't. He has a list of things he wants (his best friend not to be dead; his best friend's husband not to be crazy; their children not to be spirited away, whereabouts unknown; to hold Eames's hand in public; a government who wants the best for its people more often than it doesn't) and a list of things he can have (very little, at the moment, which is sort of the problem). He's just trying to make the lists overlap.
He's trying to make everyone's lists overlap a little more easily. That's all.
DREAMS OF NECTAR
"A while ago, and you wouldn't have had anything to do with this," Cobb muses, munching on black olives out of a can. Arthur has no idea where he found it––probably hidden in the futon cushion or something. "You would just have jumped ship. Gone to Europe or something, gotten out of this Godforsaken place."
Arthur says, "It's been a long time since then." The smell of the olives is slightly too sweet, approaching rancid; the pit of his stomach roils. "I grew up a little, maybe."
"No, I don't think so," Cobb says, pinching his lips to one side. "Eames finally got to you."
"Your armchair psychology is no more charming than it ever was," Arthur says, because Cobb is right, of course he is––the United States-that-was is Eames's by adoption rather than birth, but he's the only person Arthur knows who really still believes in the American dream in spite of everything, an all-encompassing hope he can't quite give up. It's an enthusiasm that's catching.
Cobb laughs at him, smug and comfortable in his insanity. It's odd to see him so stably unstable––without Mal or Phillipa or James, without anything or anyone to live for, he's evened out some; his desperation is gone, Arthur thinks, but he came up on the wrong side.
Dom Cobb is a dangerous man.
"Where is he, anyway?" Cobb asks, sucking an olive off his right middle finger.
"Away," Arthur answers shortly.
"On business?" Cobb guesses aloud. "What kind of business does a con man have at the end of the world?"
"You'd be surprised," Arthur says. "He has his uses."
Cobb nods consideringly. "You know if you'd asked me––"
Arthur shakes his head. "You're already too high profile," he explains. "Not that it makes a difference now you're in this house anyway. But at the time it seemed prudent to let you get on with––whatever. Getting better. Starting to. You know."
Cobb sucks up another olive with a pop. "You didn't want me involved."
"Not that," Arthur says. "Well, maybe that, but there wasn't much you could do from the inside, and we had all the outside coverage we could handle. Another pair of eyes wouldn't have done much."
"A pair of untrustworthy eyes?" Cobb asks, looking determinedly at the yellow label of the can.
"I didn't say that," Arthur says.
Cobb says, "You didn't need to." He stretches his neck with another disconcertingly loud pop.
Arthur stands up, not sure what to do with his hands. "I've got to meet with Yusuf and some other people," he says.
"Yusuf?" Cobb asks. "Not Eames's crazy friend who'd never come into the field?"
"He's not crazy, he just thinks too big for his budget," Arthur explains.
"How'd you get him involved?" Cobb asks.
Arthur says, "I gave him an audience."
"Bye," says Cobb, and gulps down some olive juice.
Arthur feels his face contort in disgust of its own free will––one skill Cobb has never lost is his innate ability to completely crash through almost every ounce of self-control Arthur has ever fought for––and leaves him there.
When he gets down to the office, Ariadne and Yusuf are waiting for him, along with two of Yusuf's underlings whose names are either Kay and Mary or May and Cary.
"Okay," says Arthur. "Let's do this."
DEVINE BELL
Most of what they're doing hinges on Eames's ability to start an avalanche––to plant doubts, to coax them to full growth, to watch the devastating consequences without flinching or dropping character. He's done it before on a smaller scale; he excels at it. Arthur trusts him without question to do his job and do it well.
But Arthur has a job to do, too: to disseminate information. In a way, he's been preparing for this his entire life. And when he and Yusuf break into the central information beam that's been stuck on static for days and days, when his face––previously known to the American public only in a blurred profile shot taken days before he found his way to the safe house––is plastered on every public Screening Station that still works, he feels, for the first time, like he's been doing it all for a reason.
He's got twenty minutes of stolen air time and a stack of notes he knows by heart.
"Someone once said, 'The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society,'" he begins. "So I wonder––in what was once the freest and most open of societies––why we rely so heavily upon it."
He casts his eyes down, takes a breath, and then looks the American public straight in the eye. "My name is Arthur," he says. "You might have heard of me."
BRIGHT MORNING STARS
"You were so good," Eames will say two nights later, at arm's length though it's been weeks. "You were so good."
Arthur will cross his arms and shake his head. "You would have been better."
"I don't think so," Eames will disagree, and they'll talk for an hour before––
"Touch me," he'll say, "please, it's been so long, just, I need––" and Eames will.
TAIYANG CHULAI
The newspapers are dead and the internet doesn't work anymore, but they still gather around the Screening Stations early every morning in hope of some kind of news, and this is the flickering image that greets them : a slender, dark haired man, bags under his eyes, obviously uneasy with the scrutiny he knows he's under.
"I can't offer much, but I can offer you this," he says. "A hope. A chance. More than we have now. Someone also once said that 'whenever any form of government becomes destructive to their ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.' And I think they have become destructive, and I think we, the people, need to pursue our collective happiness."
It goes on for a little longer and then the screen goes as dark as the sky above it. Someone whistles, there's an anonymous clap, and then slowly, spreading across the whole of the city, a cheer winds its way up as the sun rises.