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Once upon a time, there was a place where the nightmares came to life. As young soldiers were coerced to dream together, they were forced to kill each other; no hesitation or mercy. No consequences. It was all a dream, after all.
Eat, sleep, kill, repeat.
The thing with dreams, though, is that the worst of them tend to linger, to dance at the edge of the subconscious, filling heads and hearts with dread long into the day. It’s destructive to dream about pulling the trigger, to know that you killed on command, looking into pleading eyes, and to later meet the same eyes when skimming the crowd of the mess hall.
It’s impossible to come back from certain things.
“Did you know that in the original Sleeping Beauty, the prince just finds her unconscious in the castle and fucks her?” he heard one day from the upper bunk. It was so absurd that his mind immediately snapped out of the panic attack he’s been gearing himself up for.
“Excuse me?” Arthur said, but what he really meant was: distract me.
Eames understood, though, and for the next several months, he did just that. Every evening Eames was spinning tale after tale of gruesome nature as they lay shoulder to shoulder on a too-small cot, getting too close, getting too hopeful. Because somehow, despite how horrific the story, there always was a happily ever after.
It’s impossible to come back from certain things, but it is possible to pull through.
With time, stories turned into conspiratorial whispers. Those ideas lingered just like nightmares did, but they were daydreams instead, and dread was replaced by desire. And when the time came to retrieve the stolen PASIV from within an air duct and crawl through the sewers to finally run in the dead of night as fast as their legs would carry them, Arthur just knew that this was exactly how happily ever after was supposed to feel like.