Sing the Doldrums, Sharp and Bright (2/2)

[dipenates]

Title: Sing the Doldrums, Sharp and Bright
Fandom: Inception
Rating: R
Word Count: ~6,100
Characters: Eames/Arthur, Cobb, Ariadne, Yusuf
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Spoilers: For Inception
Summary: Sometimes the hardest part was finding a way inside. A story about an arms dealer, a media magnate, and love.
Warning: Talks, in a non-explicit way about child abuse, which is perpetrated by the bad guys, and not by our heroes.
Note: Written for i_reversebang , with huge thanks to heavenly_rain, who made beautiful art and was lovely while doing it. With thanks to PK, the real-life beta. Any deficiencies in this fic are my own. Follows on from You Let Your Ladder Down For Those Who Really Shine, but it can stand completely alone.

[Part one]

London, June

The sat around the long table in the centre of the workspace. Arthur had transferred the contents of the Wall to a whiteboard on wheels, and it was sitting behind Cobb.

Ariadne and Arthur both had their laptops open and a stack of documents next to them, even if Ariadne's looked as if something had literally been nibbling at it. Eames had a blank sheet of paper in front of him, and a ballpoint pen that Arthur had pressed into his hand five minutes before. Yusuf had a whiteboard behind him, covered in the long strings of letters and numbers that described the compounds he was planning to use on Marley. It wasn't like anybody else in the room could have understood what they meant, but then Eames knew a security blanket when he saw one.

"Where are we?" asked Cobb.

"I've incorporated the detail from the Australian photos into the island scenario," said Ariadne. "I've got a generic bank, and a faithful copy of three floors of the Gherkin, with enough twists to make sure it's a closed system. I've also got a London-ish cityscape, and a Sydney-ish cityscape. They're all stable."

Cobb nodded. "Good."

"I can do you a lovely banker," said Eames. "Archetype, man or woman, or Marley's own money-man, Andrew Davidson"

"What's his relationship like with Marley?"

"Rock solid," said Arthur. "They were at Geelong together. Davidson went to Oxford, Marley to Yale, but they both did MBAs at INSEAD. Davidson's been to the island more than any other friend or associate, and has spent as much time there as some of Marley's children. Apart from Marley's then wife, Davidson was the only person invited to visit Marley when he was hospitalized after having a heart attack four years ago."

Cobb tapped his fingers together. "And you can definitely be convincing, Eames?"

Eames nodded. "I couldn't make it through a four hour conversation about their student days, but I could pass if the set-up was convincing. We know that marks fill in the blanks themselves, as long as you don't do anything stupid."

Cobb nodded. "Do we have the set-up?"

Arthur tilted his head. "I don't know."

Cobb raised his eyebrows. "What are the x factors?"

"Marley doesn't meet with Davidson to discuss business-as-usual issues." Arthur stood up. Put his hands in his pockets. "They either meet socially, or to talk about bigger projects. It looks from what we've been able to get from insiders, and from some restructuring that has been going on in MediaCorp that they're deleveraging so they can reprofile for a big acquisition. There has been some speculation in the business media that Marley has something new media in his sights, but it's not much more than blind items and gossip in business diary columns."

"Something like what?"

Arthur quirked his mouth. "That's the billion dollar question. MySpace is too small to be ruffling this many feathers. Facebook is too big, and Marley and Zuckerberg hate each other like fury. There's a lot of buzz about Twitter, but it seems unlikely that Marley could see a way to monetize that in the short run."

"Something smaller?" Cobb leaned back in his chair.

Arthur shrugged. "Something smaller wouldn't require this much deleveraging. Of course, all the new media speculation could be wrong. He could be planning something much more traditional, maybe even quietly consolidating in a couple of markets."

"So we're not sure why he would need to speak to Davidson?"

"We're in the position of being able to write a script with a lot of detail in it, but we're lacking the big picture of why all of this is happening. So we would have one shot in the dark, and Eames' ability to tapdance."

Eames made a face. He could do it, he knew he could, but it was hard to hold the shape of someone when you were still feeling out who they were. They needed his Andrew Davidson to be shaky round the edges like they needed a hole in the head.

"Personal life?" Cobb asked.

"Even less information," Arthur said. "He's on wife number five. Divorce settlements are all sealed, and the two I managed to get the details of had nothing we could use."

"No spousal abuse? Unusual kinks? Hints at where he spends his money."

"Nothing." Arthur pointed to a sheet of paper that looked like an organogram. "He has twelve children from those five marriages. All the next generation who've graduated college are working for MediaCorp."

"I love the smell of nepotism in the morning," said Yusuf, wryly.

"They're all solid performers. Graham, the oldest son, is the President of one of MediaCorp's television holdings, and his daughter Alison is President of one of the movie studios. They've all been shuffled around the various divisions to get enough experience of the different operations."

"Any strained relationships with his children?"

Arthur shook his head. "They're one of the most written-about families in the world. The business media is all over them, but they're also profiled constantly in the Australian gossip columns, and in the international news media. They have family dinners, take family vacations, get together for the holidays. There's nothing negative that shows on paper, or in the phone calls that I've managed to listen in on. He doesn't take big meetings, doesn't have any discussion in front of other people that he can have one-on-one. Doesn't trust any of the people who report to him. I can't find any kind of feud or disagreement that we could exploit to get information. He's paranoid beyond any other mark I've ever seen."

"It's not paranoia if we're out to get you," said Yusuf, picking at the edges of his nails. "It's bloody sensible."

"So we're nowhere?" Cobb's voice vibrated with frustration, and Eames had never had much difficulty separating Arthur the professional, from Arthur who warmed Eames's feet with his own, but he felt a pang of defensiveness. Arthur had clearly rattled every last source, turned over every last rock. It wasn't his fault that Marley was fucking crazy.

"There's one thing," said Arthur, and Eames's spine prickled at his tone, which had obviously been intended to be lighthearted, but missed by a crucial inch. "I found something strange in one of his server logs—" He waved his hands, sliding over the technical details, in a way that he didn't usually.

He paused, bit his lip. Eames felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Arthur cleared his throat. "He, um, likes fucking children."

Eames felt the ripple down the table. Felt Ariadne jerk beside him, and Yusuf's head snap up. Felt the terrible calm settle over him that he'd last experienced when pinned down by enemy fire, while kicking the shit out of an embassy to get to a group of British hostages.

"So," he asked, and his voice sounded like ice in his own ears, "would you like me to play the pimp or the child?"

Cobb's expression was speculative, and Eames fought down the desire to punch him in the face. Bit back the thought of Cobb's nose exploding in a brilliant flash of scarlet, staining his shirt and his teeth.

"We can't," Ariadne said, flatly. "We can't."

Yusuf said nothing, and Eames could almost hear him thinking about manufacturing desire in little test tubes. Tweaking the long skeins of compounds into something with an added aphrodisiac bang.

"Let's talk about this tomorrow," Cobb said, looking at Arthur, and Eames's fingers twitched against his leg.

--

Eames was too hot. The sheet felt wrinkled beneath him, and he couldn't get comfortable. He normally slept with one arm thrown over Arthur, or, during the nights when Arthur didn't want that weight across his stomach, his arm lying straight down Arthur's leg, on top of the duvet.

It felt like the space between them had been disturbed somehow, as though it would be wrong to smooth his hand over Arthur's skin, and Eames tried to find a new position, one that didn't rely on him lying curled round Arthur. He balanced precariously on the edge of the bed.

Arthur rolled over. Folded his hand over Eames's hip.

"If there was another way," he said, as though it were a complete thought. As though he was resuming a conversation that they had broken off for the purposes of cleaning their teeth and washing their faces.

"There is another way," Eames said. "There's me going mano a mano with the banker. Davidson. I can learn any script you give me, Arthur."

"I know," Arthur said, gentling his fingers back and forth. "It's just—"

"Just what?"

"He wants money. Power. Privacy. He's bombastic, and bullying, and determined when he goes after all of that." Arthur's fingers stilled. "He craves this. He feels this like fire scorching his skin. He's on his knees before this." His fingers started up again. "This is his weakness. This is where he's careless."

Eames couldn't read Arthur's tone, didn't want to. The air in their bedroom felt curdled and thick.

--

He woke up alone, the sheets cool under his skin.

Arthur was dressed when he got up, a long-sleeved pale blue shirt on top of a pair of dark jeans. Eames kissed him good morning and his lips were dry and chapped.

They sat, side by side, at the glossy breakfast bar, and picked at the coffee and bagels that Arthur had made. Eames longed, for a moment, for New York.

"I can't," Eames started, because it was the cleanest truth that he had. "I can't forge a child like that. I won't."

Arthur looked at him. "I can help."

Eames physically recoiled, felt the bile flash hot and thick in his throat. "Are you fucking insane?"

"I want—"

"What?" Eames said, fury ebbing so quickly it tugged somewhere in his chest. "What do you want, Arthur?"

Arthur hesitated, and Eames sighed. "We can't go back in there until we've discussed it."

Arthur looked across the room, and out of the window, to the Thames. "I want him to pay," Arthur said. He turned back to Eames and his eyes were full of light, of the river. "I just want him to pay."

Eames swallowed around the lump in his throat. "I want that too."

--

"You have no fucking right," said Eames, and he knew that he was almost hissing at Cobb.

Cobb was reliable, as solid and dependable as granite, except where he wasn't. "I think we need to let him make up his own mind on this."

Eames blew his breath out through his teeth. "So we just let the part of Arthur that's half-dead in gratitude to you and Mal chum up with the part of him that wants some fucking slight measure of justice?"

Cobb narrowed his eyes. "Justice?" He said it like it sat uneasily on his tongue.

Eames knew. Knew that justice was a concept that they'd bent and twisted and traduced so thoroughly that it seemed ridiculous to even invoke it.

He would give it to Arthur if he could.

--

Ariadne took them down into the island dreamscape, and they stood, the three of them, in the echoing palace of Marley's house. Eames breathed in the scent of wealth and privilege, expensive linen and heavy beeswax furniture polish, lush vases of flowers, and smiled at Ariadne, admiration and congratulation and fondness. She didn't smile back.

Arthur's expression was carefully blank, but Eames picked up on the minute flicker in the corner of his mouth that meant that his implacability was laced together with twine and guts.

Eames took a breath, quick and slight, and shifted into character. A kid, six years old. Big eyes. Dark hair. Thin face.

Ariadne flinched.

Arthur looked at him, dragged in a breath that sounded like it scraped his throat raw, and shot him in the face.

"I guess we go with Plan B, then?" Ariadne didn't look at either of them as she disentangled herself from the PASIV, and climbed out of the chair.

Arthur didn't move. Eames pulled out needle connecting him to the PASIV and went to Arthur's side. He wasn't sure whether to touch him, whether Arthur would want Eames's hands on him.

Arthur reached out without opening his eyes, lacing his fingers through Eames's. Arthur shook a little, in the shelter of Eames's hand. "I have no idea what I was thinking."

Eames dropped his mouth to Arthur's fingers.

--

Eames watched as Arthur made his way outside, into the little street. Cobb was talking to Yusuf, as Yusuf lit one cigarette from the butt of another. When Yusuf saw Arthur he flicked his freshly lit cigarette into the neighbour's Audi, ignoring Cobb's frown, and jerked his head in the direction of the deli they bought most of their lunches from.

Arthur jammed his hands in his pockets, and, not looking at Cobb, started to talk. Cobb laid one his hands flat against Arthur's back, and Arthur leaned his head towards Cobb, muscle jumping in his jaw. Cobb slid his hand up to the back of Arthur's neck, and kissed his forehead.

Eames looked back at the papers on his desk, and smiled for the first time in a week.

--

July, Sydney

"Okay?" Eames said, and he was breathing hard enough that it could, by rights, be called panting.

Ariadne looked at the stopwatch around her neck. "Twenty seconds to spare."

"It's not long enough," Arthur said, and Eames took a moment to be deeply resentful that Arthur wasn't even out of breath. That Arthur had just laid waste to a whole battalion's worth of projections and hadn't even broken a sweat.

"I can make you a couple of shortcuts," Ariadne said. "Let you get from the shoreline to the house without having to go through the jungle."

"Won't that make it more unstable?" It was a rhetorical question. Arthur knew the rules as well as Ariadne did.

--

Eames had almost made it back to the table when the sound of their voices stopped him in his tracks, behind an honest-to-goodness palm tree, just out of their eyeline.

"We could still pull it. Go back to the banker."

"You really think that's less risky?" Cobb sounded genuinely interested. "I want to get this done, Arthur. We're the best. The best."

Eames rolled his eyes. Cobb could be a stone-cold motherfucker, but he had the kind of restless desire to win that was definitely going to get them all killed if they didn't rein him in.

"We've run the operation three times in simulation. Even before we get inside Marley's dreamspace, we're cutting it fine for time."

"Mmm," Cobb said.

"Really fine," Arthur said, seriously. "Eames is rock-solid. There's no one better."

Cobb took a noisy sip of his wine. "They train their special forces pretty well."

Eames blushed, hot and hard, back pressed to the wall.

"My point," Arthur said, briskly, "is that we can't take anything else off the time. There's no contingency. We could all end up in Limbo."

"It's why they pay us the big bucks, Arthur." Cobb sounded uncharacteristically blasé, and Eames wondered just how much of the viognier he'd drunk.

"Dom," Arthur began. "We could—"

"No," Cobb said. "He's right. As much as it causes me an actual physical pain to say so, he's right."

Eames strained to hear, but Arthur said nothing. Eames leaned away from the wall, and schooled his face into detachment.

--

Eames shot two projections. They looked like the security guards at the compound of a James Bond villain, and he would have laughed if he hadn't been dodging and cheating through a shower of gunfire for what felt like half an hour.

Arthur had missed the main rendezvous, and the first backup, and by rights Eames should be rappelling up through the layers of dreamscape to the surface. He wasn't, though. He was crawling through the undergrowth of the strip of jungle that shielded the main buildings of Marley's island hideaway from the sea.

All around him, he could hear shouts, the whip of vegetation against combat trousers and weapons being reloaded, metal sliding against metal.

He commando-rolled across a terrace, dodging behind a substantial sun lounger for cover from the fire from the treeline. The French doors on to the terrace were locked and bolted, so Eames took the butt of his gun and smashed the glass. He brushed enough of the fragments out of the frame to fit through, and cut the throat of the women in the maid's uniform next to the drinks cabinet, who was wielding a bow and arrow, and fuck Marley's subconscious, frankly.

The house was ridiculous, larger than anything anybody really needed, and it took him minutes to hack his way through the reception rooms to the staircase that led to Marley's private study. The marble of the stairs, of the passage that stretched along one wing of the house, was slick with blood, and it filled Eames's nostrils, coppery and rich. The whole house was starting to look like the last ten minutes of Apocalypse Now, but he made his way around the dismembered limbs into the study. It was decorated in dark blues, corporate and curiously blank, and unmistakeably the backdrop to a photo that Arthur had shown him, fingers trembling on the keys to his laptop, head turned away from the screen. It was a photo that he wished he could bleach from his brain.

Arthur was there, of course, and Eames's rush of gratitude quieted the churn in his stomach. He was tucking a folder into his waistband, blandest manila, and buttoning his waistcoat down over it. Eames knew without being told that it had the information the client wanted, the detail of the leverage that Marley had used to get rid of the parade of politicians who stood in his way. Arthur raised his eyebrow at Eames. Looked out of the window that overlooked the rose garden, gun in each hand, and fired a couple of rounds into the projections below. Eames crouched against the wall, weapon cocked, knee grinding against the glass that glittered against the carpet.

Eames was in tactical gear. He'd found through long experience that he thought more like a soldier when he was dressed like one. He looked at Arthur's back, long and slender, at the shirt sleeves rolled up Arthur's arms, at the curve of his ass in his expensive beige trousers, and wondered if it would be an outrageous fucking liberty to take a minute to push Arthur against the wall and lick his tongue into Arthur's mouth.

He glanced at Marley, sitting on the sofa in the corner of the room, arms tied behind his back, mouth taped, and felt a rush of heat that surprised him. He wanted to carve Marley into tiny pieces, wanted him to beg for his life while Eames smashed a rock into his face. Marley looked back, and he looked so ordinary, so plain, that Eames felt suddenly ridiculous.

The music swirled around them, rich as the smell of roses, and Arthur extended an arm, cocked his gun.

"Come on," he said to Eames, voice strong and clear. "Let's go home."

Comments

[laughing-lovers.livejournal.com]

WHAT

You can't just leave it like that! I need to know every detail of everything forever! Man that was good. Tiiiits. I... have no words? I really really liked this. Vivid and fantastic.

[dipenates.livejournal.com]

*Beams* Thank you so much. I'm really glad you liked it.

[lillyg.livejournal.com]

Nice sequel! ^^

[tourdefierce.livejournal.com]

This is lovely. It's soft and subtle, with that sharp edge of blood that really shines through your characterization of Arthur through Eames' eyes. All the characters here really come to life under Eames' observation and I delight in the way you've built Cobb.

This is lovely and painful and a very enjoyable read.

[sanguine-bastet.livejournal.com]

I hadn't even realized that this fic existed until recently, and I can see how that deprived me. It's a lovely fic, especially as a continuation and build up of the previous one. Also, the bit

Eames rolled his eyes. Cobb could be a stone-cold motherfucker, but he had the kind of restless desire to win that was definitely going to get them all killed if they didn't rein him in.

is pretty much Inception in a nutshell, and amused me way too much.