The Consequences of Trust (Part 4)
Author's notes: Sorry about the wait between chapters! I work far too much.
Beta(s):
space_raider182
Disclaimer: This story/artwork is based on characters and situations created and owned by the Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. They are not mine, I just like to play with them.
__________
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Arthur is working diligently, populating the profile of their target. The guy is in the lower echelon of a minor cartel so he’s somewhat harder to trace. Arthur is just thankful that Ariadne’s blackmailer is not that well connected, because he really didn’t want to be fucking with the leaders of any Colombian drug running operation right now, or ever, for that matter.
Wild is helping him scour documents but it frustrates the man quickly. He’s stepped out for a long smoke break that Arthur knows will become a typical occurrence. So Arthur continues pouring over phone records, ignoring Wild’s absence, as he searches for anything to aid them with their goal. He’s nearly finished with the first stack when he seizes up at the sound of a familiar voice.
“Ariadne love! Good to see you again. You look like hell!”
“Charming Eames, do you greet everyone with an insult?”
“Only when it’s the truth, my dear. But seriously, you look like you’ve been dragged through the mud. It’s one of those jobs is it?”
“Unfortunately. Arthur is here. He thinks it’s manageable.”
“Well if that unimaginative sod thinks we’re good, then this job will be a piece of cake!”
“I hope so, Eames.” She pauses. “This guy is threatening my family.”
“Hmmm. Can’t have that, can we?” Eames says darkly.
Blood starts pumping so loudly through Arthur’s ears that he can’t register any more of the conversation. His heart races and his palms begin to sweat. He’s panicking. He hadn’t known Eames was going to be on this job.
He should have figured, Ariadne turned to whom she trusted to be the best. He should have known. But he hadn’t, she hadn’t told him, and now Eames is here. Eames is here and Arthur’s heart won’t slow it’s rapid beating.
He hurries to the small restroom of the shop to collect himself before Eames can make it into the back room. It is a strange déjà vu. His head is swimming and his stomach is knotting up uncomfortably. He leans over the sink, clutching the edges of the counter, and looks at himself in the mirror. A grimace etched into his color-drained face.
He thinks about retching into the toilet, but he wouldn’t be able to conceal the sound. Instead he swallows a couple times, forcing the bile down, turns the tap on, and runs the cold water over his hands for a few seconds before scrubbing them over his face. He closes his eyes and concentrates on slowing his breathing.
Finally after a few minutes, he feels like he can leave and unlocks the door, hesitating only for a moment before opening it and stepping out. Eames is sitting at one of the desks, legs spread casually as he slumps into a chair. He’s studying a few photographs that were left out and glances up when Arthur enters.
“Arthur.”
Eames’ greeting is short. There’s no emotion in it, just a quick acknowledgment of his presence in the room. It stabs at Arthur in some small way. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but this, this nothingness, was not it. In the past he’d been greeted with anything from a somewhat too forceful but friendly slap on the back, to flat out flirting, leers, or mockery.
Arthur nods as a reply, sitting at his desk. Returning as little in his acknowledgment of Eames as he received. He tightly clamps down any emotion threatening to creep out. Is this how it really is then? He thinks. I’m nothing to him. Proving it in the dream to stop the need for a facade of friendship, is that all it took?
Anger flares inside of Arthur and his fists curl involuntarily, nails digging into his palms. Little half moons of white appear where the blood is pushed away. He grits his teeth and glares at the papers in front of him, unable to focus on the information but needing something, anything, to look at.
Wild returns from smoking and is introduced to Eames by Ariadne. When they are through exchanging pleasantries, Arthur has calmed. He shouldn’t be letting Eames affect him. He knows where he stands now, and that’s fine. He adjusts his tie, composing himself, and moves to silently slide a folder of profiles onto Eames’ desk. He doesn’t even glance down at Eames when the other man drags the folder across the desk and Arthur sits back down to continue sifting through his papers.
They work in a quiet, professional, manner. There is no banter like there used to be. Eames attempts once to playfully joke with Arthur, but Arthur shuts him down. It’s the first time Eames has attempted anything other than indifference and it immediately enrages Arthur again. Maybe he’s a little too brusque about his refusal to play their game because Eames gives up far more easily than he should, while Ariadne shoots them both a confused look.
***
The days go by slowly. The air always thick with tension and it’s excruciatingly difficult for Arthur to concentrate. Sure, he could be ok working with Eames, having no relationship, no friendship with this man. He’s worked with plenty of people he actively disliked even.
But every time Eames moves, Arthur’s body tenses involuntarily and he has to will himself to stay calm. He keeps flicking glances over to the forger just to keep track of his location. Eames has to notice of this, but he doesn’t say anything about it. Arthur thinks he’s grateful for that small allowance. He doesn’t have a satisfactory explanation if Eames were to call him on it.
Arthur has never been this distrustful before. Sure, he’s a criminal and had to work with other criminals, ones who would sell him out for very little reason at all. He’d worked with people who would lie and steal from anyone. But he would always protect his team, no matter if they would not return the favor, because as point it’s simply what he did.
Maybe he’s just feeling the loss. Being the best in the field he’d been able to maintain a fairly reliable team these last few years. At least he thought he had until the Weiss job.
His thoughts loop back to that day. To Eames, as Kohler, but still Eames, slamming the brick down on his face, and his goddamn eyes flashing grey as he tortured Arthur to an agonizing death. Each blow like a knife stabbed into his heart.
The phantom pain that ghosts across his skin at the memory is a new and frightening development. Arthur startles, standing abruptly, tipping over his chair when he remembers the shift of shattered bones under his skin. Ariadne jumps at the sound of wood hitting wood, her head snapping up from working on her model.
He doesn’t even grab his jacket before dashing out of the shop to scramble to the relative safety of his apartment. He thinks his hands wouldn’t be able to keep hold of it anyway with the way they’re shaking.
He needs to be alone now, to reorient himself, to shut his mind off. He sees Ariadne try to stop him from leaving, but he ignores her. Eames just watches him exit. Arthur misses the down turned corners of the Forger’s mouth as he toys nervously with a toothpick.
***
Arthur arrives at his small apartment flushed and jittery. To calm himself he takes a long, warm shower. He looks at himself in the mirror after he delicately prods the line of his eye socket with the tips of his fingers. Reassuring himself that the structure is still whole.
Afterward he crawls into bed, bundled underneath the sheets despite the heat. It feels safer, which is stupid, acting like he is a frightened child, but it comforts him nonetheless. Arthur’s nightmares return.
Unlike before, he remembers the dreams very clearly. They’re worse. He’s trapped, strapped to a chair, and a man he thought he trusted is looming above him. Then Eames is mutilating his face, killing him over and over.
Eames no longer appears as Kohler but instead shifts from different versions of himself from Arthur’s memories. Eames is in his Royal Air force uniform, splattering blood across the front. Ruining his yellow paisley button down that Arthur hates. In his tuxedo bringing agony and death with nothingness behind his gray eyes. And Arthur is always trapped, unable to look away, unable to die. Forced to relive it on repeat every night.
***
Arthur tries to rush the timeline for the job because he can no longer sleep on his own and sleeping with the PASIV is not the same. The quicker this all is finished, the faster he can get as far away as possible.
He needs the nightmares to end. He needs sleep. He needs to not be responsible for anyone’s life right now. He needs to run.
Instead he throws himself farther into his research like before, pouring over every necessary and unnecessary line of information. He rechecks everything three times. Then he checks again, just to be sure, just to have something that he knows for certain to be the truth. Just to have control over something because right now he can’t really control himself.
He spends as much time away from the shop on surveillance as he safely can without being noticed by the mark. When he is in the shop he avoids Ariadne just as much as Eames because she’s worried and he doesn’t want to deal with it.
He makes sure that he and Eames are never in at the same time when building the dreamscape with Ariadne. Eames hasn’t attempted to follow them under during their planning but Arthur can’t be sure he won’t. He’s still unsure if he’ll be able to handle going in with Eames during the actual job. But he’ll have to, somehow. Ariadne needs him.
It’s bad enough that she has to be worried about her brother, and her client, and this mark. She really shouldn’t have to be worried over a teammate’s mental health yet again. He’s not Cobb. His wife didn’t commit suicide in front of him and there is no reason he should be behaving this way.
That knowledge changes nothing.
On the days when it’s impossible to avoid the group, Arthur keeps to himself. Wild ignores him, practicing the maze over and over for the extraction. Ariadne frowns at him but concentrates on her models.
Eames hovers, without speaking a word to him. He stares at Arthur, his eyes unreadable. Arthur hates how the man can hide everything he’s thinking when he wants to. But maybe Arthur doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking after all.
He’s only sleeping a few fitful hours a night. As the deadline approaches Arthur gets worse. He’s noticeably frayed at his edges, his features drawn tight and his skin paler. His lack of sleep stretching him thin. Ariadne becomes more nervous but she’s stopped asking Arthur what is wrong. He hasn’t given her an answer and he won’t.
He’d snapped at her, telling her to pay attention to the level because if she wanted her brother to remain alive she just needed to get her shit done. He’d earned a glare from Wild for that comment. He hadn’t meant it like that. It should have been directed towards himself. And bringing up the situation with her sibling was just cruel. But he can’t take it back because it’s partly true. But more importantly it has effectively shut her up so he can focus on getting this over with. Eames, thankfully, wasn’t there for that incident. He’d been out tailing the mark’s wife for reference.
***
The day before the extraction Arthur enters the shop just after sunrise. He hears the murmurs of voices beyond the entry room walls. Ariadne and Eames are discussing something, oblivious to his arrival. It’s odd because Arthur is always the first one in. They must have stayed overnight.
Arthur finds it unsettling and that thing in the pit of his stomach hardens. As quietly as possible he continues through the entry room, approaching the archway to the main room where his two partners are talking.
“What happened down there, Eames? He hasn’t been the same since the Weiss job.”
“I didn’t think it would affect him like this. Arthur is always the fucking strong one, holding the pieces together with Cobb for so long and all.”
“You didn’t think what would affect him, Eames? I saw him wake up; he was a mess. Did you know he passed out for an hour after vomiting on the floor? I thought he was having a heart attack, Eames. It scared the shit out of me until I checked his pulse and he was still alive.”
“Fuck.”
“What happened? Jackson didn’t know anything. I asked. Why won’t you tell me?”
Arthur’s blood turns to ice and he decides to make his presence known before this goes farther. He really doesn’t need Ariadne’s pity, or her therapy, or her help. He didn’t want her to know. He didn’t need his teammates talking about him while he was out. He quietly slinks back to the door, opening and shutting it loudly as if he was coming in for the first time. The conversation cuts off immediately.
Arthur walks in like he hasn’t heard anything. He pretends it’s just another day despite the fact that he would rather bolt out the door than be here. He stalks past where the two are seated to set up his laptop at his desk.
Ariadne looks caught, an embarrassed pink rosing her cheeks as she fiddles with her summer scarf. Eames looks as expressionless as he has been since after the Weiss job. Arthur ignores them both. It’s just one more day until this is over. When Wild arrives he repeats that to himself, as a mantra, while they all go over the final details.
***
For this job, Arthur finds that he has to get creative when the projections start becoming hostile much too quickly. Ariadne is smart and her design is a perfect mess of mazes within mazes. He’s usually more able to distract projections, to remain calm in the dream. But he’s agitated at being put under with Eames for the first time since the incident, from walking in on the chat from this morning, and so he's been distracted, slipping, allowing the projections too much time to become restless.
No playful kiss is going to distract his them now that they're already violent.
Wild and Eames are perfectly capable of extracting without Arthur at their sides. If he can distance himself, run himself in circles and change the dream, he may be able to distract the projections. He leaves his team to wander Ariadne’s maze in his mind.
If he builds he can calm himself and create distractions. If he’s far enough away, the mark should remain somewhat unaware. He has to take the risk. The mark isn’t militarized but as a criminal many of his projections are armed. If Arthur stays with the team, the projections gun them all down.
He’s in the middle of building an eight-tier Penrose staircase when the first thrums of elongated musical notes flood the dream. Building paradoxical architecture always absorbs his attention.
The concentration needed to hold the stability of the structure while making it a seamless loop creates a tunnel of focus, pushing out all his other thoughts, silencing the turmoil. He's been simultaneously dodging death and building structures in the small section of maze he’s sequestered.
The music pulses in the sky. Arthur knows that if they’ve made it to the timer, then the job must be a success. Nobody wants to shoot themselves out early unless they have to. And nobody has given him a kick signifying failure.
As the music continues it’s slowed cadence, the final few minutes drawing near, Arthur contemplates his next move. The unease he felt earlier returns now that he’s not building, knowing he’ll be back in a room with Eames soon.
The second his eyes open topside, he swiftly removes the needle and begins clearing out. Back at the shop, he burns his files in a bin and heads out to empty his apartment. They’ll have payment in the morning, and Ariadne will no longer owe this asshole client anything.
It’s not his way to leave before everyone else. It goes against every fiber of his being, everything that has been ingrained into him from his training. But they don’t have to worry about retaliation with the job’s success and Arthur can barely contain his need to flee.
He gives a short goodbye, purposefully ignoring the surprised looks. He doesn’t care. He just needs to escape. He can feel the panic building inside, like a volcano waiting to erupt. Like it always does when you are moments away from reaching a goal, or moments away from dying, for that matter.
It takes him all of three hours before he’s on a flight to Spain. He’s been keyed up for days and he knows he’s not going to sleep through the long flight, so he stares out of the window watching the vast ocean pass by below.
He doesn’t last long in Madrid, or Berlin and Florence after. They’re too transitional and he never feels comfortable. He never feels safe. The nightmares continue.
Continue to Part 5
Beta(s):
space_raider182 Disclaimer: This story/artwork is based on characters and situations created and owned by the Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. They are not mine, I just like to play with them.
__________
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Arthur is working diligently, populating the profile of their target. The guy is in the lower echelon of a minor cartel so he’s somewhat harder to trace. Arthur is just thankful that Ariadne’s blackmailer is not that well connected, because he really didn’t want to be fucking with the leaders of any Colombian drug running operation right now, or ever, for that matter.
Wild is helping him scour documents but it frustrates the man quickly. He’s stepped out for a long smoke break that Arthur knows will become a typical occurrence. So Arthur continues pouring over phone records, ignoring Wild’s absence, as he searches for anything to aid them with their goal. He’s nearly finished with the first stack when he seizes up at the sound of a familiar voice.
“Ariadne love! Good to see you again. You look like hell!”
“Charming Eames, do you greet everyone with an insult?”
“Only when it’s the truth, my dear. But seriously, you look like you’ve been dragged through the mud. It’s one of those jobs is it?”
“Unfortunately. Arthur is here. He thinks it’s manageable.”
“Well if that unimaginative sod thinks we’re good, then this job will be a piece of cake!”
“I hope so, Eames.” She pauses. “This guy is threatening my family.”
“Hmmm. Can’t have that, can we?” Eames says darkly.
Blood starts pumping so loudly through Arthur’s ears that he can’t register any more of the conversation. His heart races and his palms begin to sweat. He’s panicking. He hadn’t known Eames was going to be on this job.
He should have figured, Ariadne turned to whom she trusted to be the best. He should have known. But he hadn’t, she hadn’t told him, and now Eames is here. Eames is here and Arthur’s heart won’t slow it’s rapid beating.
He hurries to the small restroom of the shop to collect himself before Eames can make it into the back room. It is a strange déjà vu. His head is swimming and his stomach is knotting up uncomfortably. He leans over the sink, clutching the edges of the counter, and looks at himself in the mirror. A grimace etched into his color-drained face.
He thinks about retching into the toilet, but he wouldn’t be able to conceal the sound. Instead he swallows a couple times, forcing the bile down, turns the tap on, and runs the cold water over his hands for a few seconds before scrubbing them over his face. He closes his eyes and concentrates on slowing his breathing.
Finally after a few minutes, he feels like he can leave and unlocks the door, hesitating only for a moment before opening it and stepping out. Eames is sitting at one of the desks, legs spread casually as he slumps into a chair. He’s studying a few photographs that were left out and glances up when Arthur enters.
“Arthur.”
Eames’ greeting is short. There’s no emotion in it, just a quick acknowledgment of his presence in the room. It stabs at Arthur in some small way. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but this, this nothingness, was not it. In the past he’d been greeted with anything from a somewhat too forceful but friendly slap on the back, to flat out flirting, leers, or mockery.
Arthur nods as a reply, sitting at his desk. Returning as little in his acknowledgment of Eames as he received. He tightly clamps down any emotion threatening to creep out. Is this how it really is then? He thinks. I’m nothing to him. Proving it in the dream to stop the need for a facade of friendship, is that all it took?
Anger flares inside of Arthur and his fists curl involuntarily, nails digging into his palms. Little half moons of white appear where the blood is pushed away. He grits his teeth and glares at the papers in front of him, unable to focus on the information but needing something, anything, to look at.
Wild returns from smoking and is introduced to Eames by Ariadne. When they are through exchanging pleasantries, Arthur has calmed. He shouldn’t be letting Eames affect him. He knows where he stands now, and that’s fine. He adjusts his tie, composing himself, and moves to silently slide a folder of profiles onto Eames’ desk. He doesn’t even glance down at Eames when the other man drags the folder across the desk and Arthur sits back down to continue sifting through his papers.
They work in a quiet, professional, manner. There is no banter like there used to be. Eames attempts once to playfully joke with Arthur, but Arthur shuts him down. It’s the first time Eames has attempted anything other than indifference and it immediately enrages Arthur again. Maybe he’s a little too brusque about his refusal to play their game because Eames gives up far more easily than he should, while Ariadne shoots them both a confused look.
***
The days go by slowly. The air always thick with tension and it’s excruciatingly difficult for Arthur to concentrate. Sure, he could be ok working with Eames, having no relationship, no friendship with this man. He’s worked with plenty of people he actively disliked even.
But every time Eames moves, Arthur’s body tenses involuntarily and he has to will himself to stay calm. He keeps flicking glances over to the forger just to keep track of his location. Eames has to notice of this, but he doesn’t say anything about it. Arthur thinks he’s grateful for that small allowance. He doesn’t have a satisfactory explanation if Eames were to call him on it.
Arthur has never been this distrustful before. Sure, he’s a criminal and had to work with other criminals, ones who would sell him out for very little reason at all. He’d worked with people who would lie and steal from anyone. But he would always protect his team, no matter if they would not return the favor, because as point it’s simply what he did.
Maybe he’s just feeling the loss. Being the best in the field he’d been able to maintain a fairly reliable team these last few years. At least he thought he had until the Weiss job.
His thoughts loop back to that day. To Eames, as Kohler, but still Eames, slamming the brick down on his face, and his goddamn eyes flashing grey as he tortured Arthur to an agonizing death. Each blow like a knife stabbed into his heart.
The phantom pain that ghosts across his skin at the memory is a new and frightening development. Arthur startles, standing abruptly, tipping over his chair when he remembers the shift of shattered bones under his skin. Ariadne jumps at the sound of wood hitting wood, her head snapping up from working on her model.
He doesn’t even grab his jacket before dashing out of the shop to scramble to the relative safety of his apartment. He thinks his hands wouldn’t be able to keep hold of it anyway with the way they’re shaking.
He needs to be alone now, to reorient himself, to shut his mind off. He sees Ariadne try to stop him from leaving, but he ignores her. Eames just watches him exit. Arthur misses the down turned corners of the Forger’s mouth as he toys nervously with a toothpick.
***
Arthur arrives at his small apartment flushed and jittery. To calm himself he takes a long, warm shower. He looks at himself in the mirror after he delicately prods the line of his eye socket with the tips of his fingers. Reassuring himself that the structure is still whole.
Afterward he crawls into bed, bundled underneath the sheets despite the heat. It feels safer, which is stupid, acting like he is a frightened child, but it comforts him nonetheless. Arthur’s nightmares return.
Unlike before, he remembers the dreams very clearly. They’re worse. He’s trapped, strapped to a chair, and a man he thought he trusted is looming above him. Then Eames is mutilating his face, killing him over and over.
Eames no longer appears as Kohler but instead shifts from different versions of himself from Arthur’s memories. Eames is in his Royal Air force uniform, splattering blood across the front. Ruining his yellow paisley button down that Arthur hates. In his tuxedo bringing agony and death with nothingness behind his gray eyes. And Arthur is always trapped, unable to look away, unable to die. Forced to relive it on repeat every night.
***
Arthur tries to rush the timeline for the job because he can no longer sleep on his own and sleeping with the PASIV is not the same. The quicker this all is finished, the faster he can get as far away as possible.
He needs the nightmares to end. He needs sleep. He needs to not be responsible for anyone’s life right now. He needs to run.
Instead he throws himself farther into his research like before, pouring over every necessary and unnecessary line of information. He rechecks everything three times. Then he checks again, just to be sure, just to have something that he knows for certain to be the truth. Just to have control over something because right now he can’t really control himself.
He spends as much time away from the shop on surveillance as he safely can without being noticed by the mark. When he is in the shop he avoids Ariadne just as much as Eames because she’s worried and he doesn’t want to deal with it.
He makes sure that he and Eames are never in at the same time when building the dreamscape with Ariadne. Eames hasn’t attempted to follow them under during their planning but Arthur can’t be sure he won’t. He’s still unsure if he’ll be able to handle going in with Eames during the actual job. But he’ll have to, somehow. Ariadne needs him.
It’s bad enough that she has to be worried about her brother, and her client, and this mark. She really shouldn’t have to be worried over a teammate’s mental health yet again. He’s not Cobb. His wife didn’t commit suicide in front of him and there is no reason he should be behaving this way.
That knowledge changes nothing.
On the days when it’s impossible to avoid the group, Arthur keeps to himself. Wild ignores him, practicing the maze over and over for the extraction. Ariadne frowns at him but concentrates on her models.
Eames hovers, without speaking a word to him. He stares at Arthur, his eyes unreadable. Arthur hates how the man can hide everything he’s thinking when he wants to. But maybe Arthur doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking after all.
He’s only sleeping a few fitful hours a night. As the deadline approaches Arthur gets worse. He’s noticeably frayed at his edges, his features drawn tight and his skin paler. His lack of sleep stretching him thin. Ariadne becomes more nervous but she’s stopped asking Arthur what is wrong. He hasn’t given her an answer and he won’t.
He’d snapped at her, telling her to pay attention to the level because if she wanted her brother to remain alive she just needed to get her shit done. He’d earned a glare from Wild for that comment. He hadn’t meant it like that. It should have been directed towards himself. And bringing up the situation with her sibling was just cruel. But he can’t take it back because it’s partly true. But more importantly it has effectively shut her up so he can focus on getting this over with. Eames, thankfully, wasn’t there for that incident. He’d been out tailing the mark’s wife for reference.
***
The day before the extraction Arthur enters the shop just after sunrise. He hears the murmurs of voices beyond the entry room walls. Ariadne and Eames are discussing something, oblivious to his arrival. It’s odd because Arthur is always the first one in. They must have stayed overnight.
Arthur finds it unsettling and that thing in the pit of his stomach hardens. As quietly as possible he continues through the entry room, approaching the archway to the main room where his two partners are talking.
“What happened down there, Eames? He hasn’t been the same since the Weiss job.”
“I didn’t think it would affect him like this. Arthur is always the fucking strong one, holding the pieces together with Cobb for so long and all.”
“You didn’t think what would affect him, Eames? I saw him wake up; he was a mess. Did you know he passed out for an hour after vomiting on the floor? I thought he was having a heart attack, Eames. It scared the shit out of me until I checked his pulse and he was still alive.”
“Fuck.”
“What happened? Jackson didn’t know anything. I asked. Why won’t you tell me?”
Arthur’s blood turns to ice and he decides to make his presence known before this goes farther. He really doesn’t need Ariadne’s pity, or her therapy, or her help. He didn’t want her to know. He didn’t need his teammates talking about him while he was out. He quietly slinks back to the door, opening and shutting it loudly as if he was coming in for the first time. The conversation cuts off immediately.
Arthur walks in like he hasn’t heard anything. He pretends it’s just another day despite the fact that he would rather bolt out the door than be here. He stalks past where the two are seated to set up his laptop at his desk.
Ariadne looks caught, an embarrassed pink rosing her cheeks as she fiddles with her summer scarf. Eames looks as expressionless as he has been since after the Weiss job. Arthur ignores them both. It’s just one more day until this is over. When Wild arrives he repeats that to himself, as a mantra, while they all go over the final details.
***
For this job, Arthur finds that he has to get creative when the projections start becoming hostile much too quickly. Ariadne is smart and her design is a perfect mess of mazes within mazes. He’s usually more able to distract projections, to remain calm in the dream. But he’s agitated at being put under with Eames for the first time since the incident, from walking in on the chat from this morning, and so he's been distracted, slipping, allowing the projections too much time to become restless.
No playful kiss is going to distract his them now that they're already violent.
Wild and Eames are perfectly capable of extracting without Arthur at their sides. If he can distance himself, run himself in circles and change the dream, he may be able to distract the projections. He leaves his team to wander Ariadne’s maze in his mind.
If he builds he can calm himself and create distractions. If he’s far enough away, the mark should remain somewhat unaware. He has to take the risk. The mark isn’t militarized but as a criminal many of his projections are armed. If Arthur stays with the team, the projections gun them all down.
He’s in the middle of building an eight-tier Penrose staircase when the first thrums of elongated musical notes flood the dream. Building paradoxical architecture always absorbs his attention.
The concentration needed to hold the stability of the structure while making it a seamless loop creates a tunnel of focus, pushing out all his other thoughts, silencing the turmoil. He's been simultaneously dodging death and building structures in the small section of maze he’s sequestered.
The music pulses in the sky. Arthur knows that if they’ve made it to the timer, then the job must be a success. Nobody wants to shoot themselves out early unless they have to. And nobody has given him a kick signifying failure.
As the music continues it’s slowed cadence, the final few minutes drawing near, Arthur contemplates his next move. The unease he felt earlier returns now that he’s not building, knowing he’ll be back in a room with Eames soon.
The second his eyes open topside, he swiftly removes the needle and begins clearing out. Back at the shop, he burns his files in a bin and heads out to empty his apartment. They’ll have payment in the morning, and Ariadne will no longer owe this asshole client anything.
It’s not his way to leave before everyone else. It goes against every fiber of his being, everything that has been ingrained into him from his training. But they don’t have to worry about retaliation with the job’s success and Arthur can barely contain his need to flee.
He gives a short goodbye, purposefully ignoring the surprised looks. He doesn’t care. He just needs to escape. He can feel the panic building inside, like a volcano waiting to erupt. Like it always does when you are moments away from reaching a goal, or moments away from dying, for that matter.
It takes him all of three hours before he’s on a flight to Spain. He’s been keyed up for days and he knows he’s not going to sleep through the long flight, so he stares out of the window watching the vast ocean pass by below.
He doesn’t last long in Madrid, or Berlin and Florence after. They’re too transitional and he never feels comfortable. He never feels safe. The nightmares continue.
Continue to Part 5