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"Five, four, three, two," Eames mouths, as the music fills the dream like smoke in a greenhouse, "ah, Edith Piaf."
He wakes hot-cold, clammy and uncomfortable, stretched out like ... like a patient etherised on a table (smiles at his own joke) on a chair designed for cradling the soon-to-die in comfort. He's still managed to put a crick in his own neck.
"No luck?" Arthur asks immediately, as he sits up. Eames removes the headphones slowly, and folds them between his hands (Arthur won't use the in-ear one with him and Eames won't ask why that is).
"I resent that assumption," he says coolly, "for all you know I have his PIN and his passwords." There are easier ways of getting those, although Eames will concede that regular extraction work rather leads one to choose the shared dream as first option, rather than the last resort it was originally intended to be in the world of corporate espionage.
"You're not smirking," Arthur observes, baldly, taking the headphones off him and putting them away before Eames can snap them, "If you'd succeeded you would be radiating the usual smugness."
"As it happens," Eames says in a loud voice, "I'm not sure the information I did get is exactly worthless."
"But it's not what we went in for."
"We? I. And have a little imagination," Eames bares his teeth in an overenthusiastic smile, and lets his lips fall slowly back to meet in the middle once more. "If you are capable."
From across the unduly dingy white office Yusuf lifts his head from a pile of winter coats, where he has been sleeping, really sleeping, his hair even more unruly than usual. "Are you going to fight again? I have sedatives." He makes it sound like a threat as much as an offer.
"They're not going to," Ariadne slips the cannula awkwardly from her narrow wrist. Eames can see in her warning look the undercurrent of the words unspoken - not while they're around the rest of us - because she is socially smart, too. There can be no assurance that Arthur and Eames, left to their own devices, won't just return to snide remarks, bitching and backbiting with the poisoned ferocity of two men who can hardly 'scape a blowdart shot to the elephant in the room.
"Then what do you have?" Arthur's question is perfectly polite, but however much it may please him to play civil the inflection cannot be lost on anyone in earshot. Eames fancies for a minute that there are pigeons in the skies above who have had sudden attacks of guilt and plummeted to the ground.
"The name and address of his silent partner, darling," Eames says with a cheerful smile that dwells completely on the surface of his face without a single twitch reaching his chest. "Which might turn out to be useful in tracking d- oh, he's awake."
Arthur very calmly punches their borrowed banker on the point of the chin, snapping his head back and knocking him very firmly out again; even though he holds Arthur's gaze, Eames can see Yusuf and Ariadne recoil in the corners of his vision.
"You know we have a perfectly adequate sedative," Yusuf says rather pissily. "It works just fine. I have three hypodermics in the desk. There was no need for that."
"Clearly Arthur's anger management classes aren't having quite the desired effect," Eames says, dragging the corners of his mouth up into the inbred country cousin of a smirk. No real intensity of psychological training is necessary to identify displacement and channelling of rage into innocent targets, and Eames is more knowledgeable than most in that are.
"In the vein of your money management course," Arthur says, his face a genteel mask. "What's the address?"
"For Saito's use, not yours," Eames says, clicking his tongue. "I understand he wants to go and have a civilised conversation with the man before you unleash your particular brand of persuasion on him."
"As opposed to your wholly effective brand of bullshit?" Arthur asks mildly. He would be a little more convincing if he did not have a tiny, tiny muscle twitching at the place where his jaw joined his ear; Eames finds that he is quite capable of looking at that spot without wishing to touch it, these days.
"I'm hungry," Yusuf says loudly into the hot silence which follows. "Ariadne, I think it is lunchtime. I think we have leftover mukimo in the main fridge unless someone has helped themselves to it –" He opens the door to the little room pointedly, as much punctuation as gentlemanly gesture.
Ariadne stops on the threshold, her hips tilted no doubt unconsciously toward Yusuf as he leans on the door, propping it open with concern badly-hidden in his round, expressive face. She says, "I'm going to call Saito, then. He'll want answers."
A nice, neutral sentiment to vanish on. Eames would applaud, if she wasn't effectively shutting him in the office with Arthur and a "do not disturb" sign hanging over the reinforced glass.
"If you want any mukimo –" Yusuf addresses his question to Eames, and Eames finds himself startled by how touched he is. Sure, he had been lying when he said that was his favourite, but the point was he'd lied about it a good three years ago back in Mombasa and from the way Yusuf says it it's clear he thinks he is making an irresistible offer.
He considers joining them. It will be an awkward lunch, peppered with a foodstuff he has mixed feelings about and the earnestness of Ariadne and Yusuf's ill-concealed affection for each other which he can't hold a mirror to. It's not that they're simple, at all; it's just that Ariadne wears her war paint on her face, and the things Yusuf is hiding aren't the kind of things that grow claws and teeth.
It will be an awkward lunch and a welcome respite from the alternative – he moves his head in the affirmative, but Arthur steps in front of him and puts his hand on the outside of the door. "Save us some," he says, and closes the door after them.
"I was going to join them," Eames says brightly, "this office is stuffy." And I don't want to be alone with you any more.
Arthur points at the air conditioning vent, which is patiently chugging frozen air into the little room, and he settles one buttock on the edge of the desk like the trendy teacher getting ready to "discuss" something with one of his students; as if any teacher could afford to dress the way Arthur does, or has the time to press every single shirt cuff and carefully maintain each leather jacket.
"It's not the air-conditioning's fault you're too flabby and out of shape to maintain your own temperature."
Eames doesn't bother to recoil. As verbal slaps go it's fairly light. Or at least, as slaps from Arthur go, it's more of a love-tap. "My strict adherence to your lovingly-planned diet may have been slightly marred by everything you eat tasting of farts and boredom, sweetheart."
"And your inability to get up off your increasingly wide behind and do some exercise is going to be explained by my lack of culinary skill as well, is it?" Arthur asks, lacing his fingers together in front of him. Eames predicts, then, that something will be broken by the end of this conversation; probably a window, maybe the desk, possibly a knuckle. Certainly it is going to get louder. There is a timbre of violence in his voice.
Poor Arthur, Eames thinks, irrational even in his own monologue. No one ever taught him how to programme people how to do exactly what he wants, and going up against an arch-manipulator was not a good plan. Poor Arthur.
"On the contrary, you'll have no doubt noticed my ability to walk out becomes more of a prodigious talent when you take that tone," he says, aloud. "Or it would be if you didn't keep closing doors in my face."
"And if you didn't keep walking out in the middle of conversations, before there's any resolution, I wouldn't have to resort to ugly measures –" Arthur's voice goes up a little.
It would be easy to smooth this over, if he didn't care. He would fire off a brisk volley of affectionate interaction, whore out his words to make everything better, the way Eames has practiced and learnt and perfected, the instinct he has which is as old as the reason he won't be covering the three steps to the desk to kiss away the argument. He'd much rather run.
"They're not conversations, they're megalomaniacal lectures dressed up in advice's ill-fitting lingerie," he says, and opens the door.
Arthur gets between him and the open doorway with the same speed and ease of movement as Eames has seen him shove projections down stairwells, shoot suffering dreamers in the head, and launch himself elegantly into the air to cover gaps between two constructed realities sticking up like broken teeth from the skyline of a city. His efficiency has never been in doubt; his skills have never been in question.
Eames could run down a list – he's never written it down, that way lies madness – of all the qualities that attracted him to Arthur in the first place, and they are all the qualities which are currently pushing him to elbow his way through the office door like a rugby-player on a crowded Tube train.
"What," Arthur says, the not-exactly-sunny aspect of his face clouding over further, "are you doing?"
"Going for lunch."
Arthur shakes his head very slowly, and Eames braces himself against the door. He's not sure what for – it's as much psychological steadying as physical, and it's not as if Arthur's ever hit him without being asked to first (and occasionally begged) – but he closes his fingers around the wooden corner and leans his face against the rough-planed edge.
"I don't think you should be –"
"I don't care what you think," Eames says abruptly, jerking the door away from Arthur; his internal equilibrium, physically at least, is gyroscopically perfect, and Eames succeeds in unbalancing himself more than Arthur.
"That's your problem," Arthur says in a low voice, and Eames makes the mistake of meeting his eyes instead of just barging on through to choke down mukimo with Yusuf and Ariadne and listen to their conversation flying over his head and weaving through the cracked parts of his heart with their reassuring non-histrionic connection to each other.
Arthur's gaze is nothing short of malevolent, and Eames exhales slowly. He wants nothing more than to go for a long, exhausting amble through the rest of the city and let someone else deal with the mess he will almost certainly leave behind. And then possibly hop on a plane, and then another plane, and then maybe a space ship. Anything to get out of this office and the suffocating weight of Arthur's expression.
He steps back from the door.
"What happened to your mouth?" Ariadne asks Arthur, twenty minutes later, her fork hanging in the air between her mouth and the plate of reheated mukimo as if someone has paused it there on the celestial DVD player of their lives.
"Nothing."
Eames doesn't need to look at him to know how ugly the look he is being thrown is. There is a plate laid out for him, between Yusuf and Ariadne, a third spot on the table, but he carries on through the narrow kitchen and the undernourished furniture, heading for the door.
"And where are you going?" Ariadne asks. The frustration in her voice is like ink in water, colouring every syllable; the unvoiced echo from Yusuf would be kinder, less anger and more concern, but it also has the diminishing merit of being, in this instance, silent.
"Errands to run," Eames says, pirouetting clumsily on the spot. His hand hurts. "Errands to saunter, at the very least. Shan't be long."
He almost pats his breast pocket for the passport while he's still within sight, the lie is so weak.
"How long, exactly, do we have?" Yusuf whispers. There is no reason for him to whisper, the house is deserted barring the solitary, sedated man napping peacefully on his own rather plush sofa, but there seems to be an air of the dramatic, always, about breaking into someone's home and knocking them out, however gently it's done.
"Twenty minutes, with ten headroom," Arthur says, checking his watch. It was Arthur, of course, who laid down the times, and Arthur who has watched the comings and goings of this place with an eagle eye. Technically, Eames is the extractor on this run, on every run until Cobb returns, as they all half-assume he will. "We're only going to need five."
Yusuf opens the PASIV and measures out phials with deft hands. "You have fifteen. Should give you three hours –"
"Thank you but unlike some of us there is nothing wrong with my math," Arthur says, with a tight thing on his mouth that might almost count as a smile.
There is a frisson in the air before Eames forces a constructed smile onto his face and says, "Shall we get on with this and quibble about the details later, when we're counting the fee?"
"Or having it counted for you," Arthur says under his breath. Eames ignores him; this being ostensibly in charge of the operation – that is, after all, his role here – is difficult and not at all what he wanted. If he were in the position to pick teams, this wouldn't be what he arranged. He doesn't use a point man. He doesn't need a point man. Point men are the work of the cautious and the research-lazy. It's Cobb's thing. It's not his damn thing.
Yusuf looks from one to the other cautiously, and slots phials into the machine with the expression of a man who will be very grateful when they are all asleep and not having their argument in front of him.
The armchairs are indecently comfortable; Eames suspects that when one can toss around that amount of money, one can afford the kind of luxury that he's never organised to have for himself. He spreads himself into the one nearest their slumbering mark, and rolls up his already-unbuttoned sleeve for the infusion. It always makes him feel a little uneasy, as if the past is about to knock abruptly on his mind, one of those irksome little pasts he definitely didn't have.
"Good luck," Yusuf tells them, handing out the needle-tipped cannulas with gloved hands, and a swab each. He lingers longer over Ariadne until she raises her eyebrows at him, and Eames refuses to admit to a pang of envy until he can ascertain just who it is that he's envious of. Maybe both of them.
one, two, three, four, five, and he stands in the middle of a busy street. Ariadne surveys her brainwork with what looks like a critical eye as they slope off the centre of the road, looking for their mark; Arthur's shoulders make Eames uneasy.
The weather is pleasant but between the gaps in the buildings he can see ugly clouds lurking like muggers in a subway, and when Eames looks he can see Ariadne peering at them as if they're not meant to be there. Things leak between dreamers. He hopes she doesn't make the connection, but that would be futile – if there is one other thing Ms Daedalus the designer of labyrinths is magnificent at, it's linking the unlinked and solving whatever puzzle happens to be in front of her.
"He'll be in the hotel bar –" Eames says, slightly too loudly and more defensively than he'd thought he was going to. The hotel is three buildings down and there's a doorman outside with face that looks remarkably like their mark's holidaying housekeeper, an elderly German man who is deaf in one ear. "— Everyone settled?"
Ariadne nods. Arthur says and does nothing, but Eames knows that waiting for a flare in response is foolish; they step into the hotel bar out of formation, Arthur bringing up the rear, Ariadne holding his arm.
For this extraction, Eames is wearing the blonde. She is significantly thinner than he has been since he was about twelve, and has delicately-plucked eyebrows, potentially fake tits, and enough of an overbite for it to be cute rather than weird-looking; her fingers are long and elegant and tipped with dark nail polish, her make-up both shadowy and understated. She is not the kind of woman Eames would sleep with given the choice - probably. Perhaps she is.
Ariadne looks uncomfortable with her delicately-cut red dress. He can see why – she is neither the shape nor the sort to wear something like that, and though her dream-self can walk in heels it's quite obvious that her physical one would not move with this well.
"Walk from the hips," Eames advises, adding a little more roll to his step, until he looks like a cartoon of a woman slinking through the sedate bar in the middle of the afternoon.
"What hips?" Ariadne snorts, but she does her best.
Their mark looks up at their approach. He is the kind of man who orders hookers and does nothing about them – Arthur has been thorough and Eames, avoiding his own thoughts and enquiries as to why, has double-checked on the back of different contacts, contacts Arthur doesn't have. He is, indeed, the kind of man who orders call girls, and sits in his room watching.
"Mr. Stein," Eames says, putting a hand on the small of Ariadne's back, ostensibly to steady her. Memory dictates the feel of her form beneath his palm, and he's struck with a sudden sadness that has no place here. "We're from the agency."
He finishes his drink slowly; it's clear, and it might be vodka or gin or soda or water – there is no smell in dreams for Eames to determine which it is.
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance," says the old man, getting to his feet slowly. He is not using a stick, in his dream – the image of himself as a man who requires physical assistance is not embedded in his subconscious so deeply yet – and his suit is the kind of work that would send Arthur into frothing fits of envy were he not currently covering the back of the bar. Eames wonders if his flinch shows on this face. "Might I ask your names?"
Eames introduces Ariadne as his sister with the kind of smile that says he knows, and Stein knows, that he is lying for the sake of Stein's libido. Stein takes the favour with pleasant grace, and makes a point of kissing "Nina"'s hand with a bow.
Because Eames is if nothing else already mentally charting his escape routes, he informs the old man that his name is Petunia, and the old man smiles the kind of smile that says he knows, and Eames knows that he knows, that this is utter bullshit.
Stein leads them up to a room which has no number; it is on the top floor, but there is a jump-cut somewhere between the elevator doors opening and their entrance to the room. Eames wonders whether Arthur knows where they're going, and if it's good or bad that he doesn't. There is only one room in this hotel, regardless of where the elevator goes. That much he is sure of.
The room is plainly of Ariadne's design. This long working together, he has come to appreciate that certain quirks of her taste will end up in everything, no matter how tailored they are to suit the requirements and mind of the subject, no matter who the dreamer is (although it is also possible to tell who is hosting, these days, in many tiny ways, and he has always been able to identify an Arthur-hosted dream by the lacquer and the shadows). Ariadne's designs, more troublingly, make him feel comfortable.
"I'm sure you charming ladies will not begrudge an old man skipping the formalities," says Stein, closing the door behind them. "As I am extremely ancient and might not make it to the end in one piece if we get too bogged down in idle chit-chat."
Eames and Ariadne exchange a quick glance, and Eames-as-blonde smiles his most deceptively flirtatious smile at Stein. "No problem, Mr Stein. Your wish is our command."
The wall safe will be behind the reproduction of Manet's Olympia. Eames can see the painting directly above the headboard of the bed; the combination will be irrelevant at this stage, anything he does to the safe will open it.
There is a click of a lock sliding into place.
Ariadne smiles blankly at Stein, therefore doing – although she probably doesn't know it and Eames will certainly never tell her – a creditable impression of a bored escort girl. Stein makes a motion with his hand which translates in any language into "take it off".
Eames deliberately misinterprets the direction of the gesture, and peels the strap from the blonde body's shoulder with slow seductiveness, overplaying the pout and the smouldering-eyes thing until he feels again like a caricature of sexiness, but it seems to work. Stein clasps his hands together and smiles an unsettlingly pleasant and grandfatherly smile at this display, and Eames can feel Ariadne rolling her eyes even if she thinks she's suppressing it.
He's not sure when the knife appears in Stein's withered hands, but he is sure it's not part of the plan.
"What –"
"Do you think I don't know," says Stein in a low hiss. "Do you think I don't know you're all spying on me?" He looks distressingly like someone's kindly grandfather still, and an unwanted and improperly-suppressed part of Eames points out that no, he just reminds Eames of his grandfather right now.
"Eames," Ariadne says, pulling a gun from her garter with surprising ease. He knows it's not part of the costume he gave her for this, but he also knows that she is distinctly averse to showing up in these things unprepared.
"I didn't know!" he snaps. The blonde is fading from him, unneeded and impermanent in his surprise. "I – spying?"
"All you agencies are the same," Stein grumbles, pointing the tip of the short knife at them in a slow figure-of-eight, "I order women and you send me lies. Fakers. You're not even a real woman –" he glares at Eames, who concedes that at this moment he may not be the most credible woman but he's also sure that five minutes ago he was complete down to the ovaries. "– You're trying to see why I've lived this long, aren't you? AREN'T YOU?"
He's not aware he's dreaming, Eames realises – Ariadne shoots him a significantly weighted look that suggests she's reached the same conclusion, but he can't be sure – he's just impressively paranoid and completely insane. Eames isn't sure he should be quite that relieved about this information, it effectively renders anything they take from this useless, but for a moment he relaxes.
Which is when – without warning, without a single pre-empting muscular flinch – Stein stabs him in the chest.
At first Eames reacts with disbelief. It's far from the first time he's been killed in a dream, and he's had few qualms about shooting himself in the head to get out when he doesn't need to be down any longer (a tactic which he wishes worked as damn well in the waking world, and with so few side-effects), but Ariadne has a gun and this was going well and –
And the knife has hit cartilage, not his lungs, as far as he can tell through the scalding-white pain that hits him like a sonic boom.
Eames goes down like a two-bit hooker and cracks his head on the side-table, his hands curling into terse Cs of pain. His lung may or may not be punctured, but he certainly cannot feel a single shred of air in him, and the room is blurring through the blasted bloody pain-tears. He makes a vague grabbing motion at the knife.
"Eames, no —"
"Shoot me," he mutters, unsure if his mouth is actually working. The agony is so acute that he feels as if he's swimming out of himself. "Quickly."
"I can't, you're hosting, this is the only chance we –"
"Ariadne this kind of fucking hurts," he hisses, making another ineffectual swipe at his chest, "and he is off his nut."
"How many people I have to tell this way," Stein says sadly, hovering with the knife. Another knife, another knife. The first one is still standing out of his chest like an umbrella out of a foofy cocktail, and Eames can't quite close his fingers on it. "How many of you girls. You think you'd learn. I thought they won't send any more spies."
"KNIFE," Eames barks, as Stein makes a feint at Ariadne.
She shoots him in the thigh, and though her arm jerks spasmodically with the recoil her face is perfectly composed. Stein staggers back, but there's a good chance he's not going to feel a sodding thing; Eames never had the chance to study the dreams of the mad (well, beyond being chased around several bloody levels by Cobb's angry projected guilt), and he's not sure what to do with a dreamer this violent.
Also, thinking is not easy with this much pain coursing through him like poison through his mind.
"ME, NOT HIM," he howls, making flapping motions at Ariadne.
The door cracks, splinters, and falls into the room like so much painted tissue-paper. Eames closes one eye and tries to convince his body that it needs to breathe, that there isn't really a four-inch blade sticking out of his sternum, and that he is not in miserable agony at all.
Surely Yusuf must be able to see that something is drastically wrong, here. Surely his body is struggling for breath and freaking poor Yusuf out?
There is a loud sigh from the doorway, and Eames mirrors it without thinking. The source is familiar.
"Can't you get anything right?" Arthur asks. There is a loud, final-flat bang, and Eames opens his eyes in Stein's living room.
"What's happening?" Yusuf asks as Eames rips the cannula out of his arm and bleeds briefly onto the armchair. "You looked like you were having a fit, I was considering aborting the infusion if it continued, you –"
Eames waves a hand at Stein's stupefied form. "This one," he says curtly, "is off his rocker. Proper mental. We're not going to get anything from him we can actually use, so we've just lost our bloody fee." He rubs his hands on each other, smoothes back already-flat hair, and taps his foot on the floor – Ariadne and Arthur are still out, but with the host gone the dream will not remain stable for long.
Yusuf looks crestfallen. "That is really very shitty news," he says philosophically, "I had been intending to buy a new television. And possibly a house, to put it in."
"Sorry," Eames mutters, watching the slack faces of the three sleepers, "I didn't know this was a dead end."
"Ah, well," Yusuf pats him companionably on the back, "One has to examine many dead ends in order to solve an unknown maze. Or so Ariadne tells me."
Eames says nothing. There is a palpable warmth in Yusuf's voice when he quotes Ariadne, and there is something like a ray of sunshine pouring out of him toward her sleeping body; he tries to examine the distance between himself and Arthur and all he can find is a cold, limping gratitude that Arthur showed up and shot him when Ariadne would not.
Yusuf eyes him oddly. "Are you sure you're all right, my friend? You look quite ghostly."
The van takes a corner slowly, calmly, as if it's transporting a fragile cargo. Eames leans back against the wall and resist the urge to bump the back of his head off the "wood" panels. They're such cheap chipboard, if he puts any force behind it he'll go right through and smack his skull on the metal, and he's not that annoyed with himself.
Across from him, Arthur puts his hands in his pockets – an awkward gesture at this angle – and says under his breath, "This never happens when Cobb is in charge."
In the front, Ariadne fiddles with the sat-nav. He can hear the instructions cutting off mid-sentence, the clipped Radio 4 woman's voice switching between ideas with every press of the little rubber buttons.
"Shut up," Eames says quietly, taking his hands out of his pockets consciously, so that he's not mirroring Arthur any more.
"Cobb," Arthur says firmly, "runs a competent extraction under any kind of pressure."
Eames makes a point of examining his nail beds with the kind of scrutiny he normally only gives people he's intending to forge, and people he's intending to fuck. "Cobb isn't in the business any more, Arthur."
The van takes a corner in the opposite direction a little harder, and Eames has to grab the wheel-arch to prevent himself from sliding off it. Arthur peers back at him serenely, judgement etched in the small groves around his mouth, and Eames glances at the road ahead, instead. It's just beginning to rain.
"You were never any good at running a team," Arthur adds, quietly. He is probably trying to hold Eames's gaze, but Eames stares along the incoming traffic and waits for the signs leading to the bridge.
There is a quick burst of radio static, and Eames sees Yusuf move to turn the van's stereo off again. The dial or the preset must be completely out, for there's not even the faint undercurrent of distorted voices swimming between the assigned bandwidths.
"No," he says, clutching the wheel-arch in preparation as Yusuf comes to another abrupt turning, and a motorbike whizzes past them, "I was just never any good at running with a point man who doesn't do his job properly."
Arthur says nothing. Eames clenches his fingers on the wheel-arch, but Yusuf takes the corner smoothly and no one honks at them this time.
"Frankly I don't even want to work with a point man," Eames says, still watching the road rather than Arthur. "I'm capable of checking things for myself a good deal more thoroughly than you apparently are. Maybe Cobb needed someone to take care of all that stuff for him, or maybe he just felt sorry for you, but I'm not him and if I don't have the false assurance of you getting the information I need and allegedly covering my back when you're doing no such thing –"
"Perhaps you should let someone else lead this team," Arthur says without any indication that he's heard Eames at all. "You don't have the necessary skills. There are other thieves, and better ones. As I've said before."
"Yusuf," Eames says, raising his voice from the poisonous whisper it's sunken into over their conversation, "can you stop, please."
"We're in the middle of a road," Yusuf says, over his shoulder. "I'll stop as soon as we can."
"Stop the van, Yusuf," Eames repeats, bracing himself against the wall. "I'm getting out now."
"We're in the middle of a road, I would really rather you didn't –" Yusuf says anxiously.
He can see Arthur move toward the door before he's left his gently vibrating perch at the opposite side of the van, and Eames clutches at the ceiling, bent at the neck as the vehicle sways. They can't be going all that fast.
"If you stop me leaving this time I'm going to break your fucking fingers," Eames says quietly.
"And I'll shoot you," Arthur says with the calm certainty of a man who has a Sig in his shoulder holster even when he's just going for a cup of coffee.
"STOP THE VAN," Eames barks.
"WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A NO-STOPPING ZONE," Yusuf shouts back, frustrated but apparently not angry. "If you will please just wait I will stop this van as soon as I can stop it without being arrested or causing a crash, Eames. Have patience."
"Eames," Ariadne says, turning in her seat – he can just see her concerned face through the gap in the headrest, "please calm down."
No, Eames thinks, but he doesn't say it; as the van sways and another motorbike passes, he shoulders past Arthur and puts his hand on the back door's handle.
Arthur grabs his wrist, pulls it backward, but Eames has his fingers locked around the black plastic handle now, and all it will take is a downward jerk to open the door, and then if this thing is going less than thirty he'll be able to at least roll and hope the car behind them stops, and whatever else, he's not staying here with Arthur any more.
"Don't be an idiot," Arthur advises, which is probably sensible – but Eames is sick of listening to him.
He yanks his arm so hard that Arthur is forced to either let go or overbalance, and Arthur chooses to fall. Eames releases the roof as the van begins to slow, grabs the handle with his other arm, and throws his weight at the door just as he pulls the handle down.
The door pops open, and as Eames suspected it would, Arthur's self-preservation instinct gets the better of him; as he rolls along the road at a sedate pace, and cars honk and drivers swear, he can see Arthur gripping the lip of the van's doorway to hold himself in place.
If he weren't currently being smashed against the tarmac, he'd wave goodbye.
Eames bounces off the front of a red car in a peaceful daze, rolls over the bonnet, and lands – awkwardly – on his feet. The entire process seems to take place a thousand miles away from him, and he's only dimly aware of brushing off his suit and waving sarcastically at the furious man whose car he has just badly dented as he limps away. His body must be screaming at him, but he's not feeling a thing of it.
He walks down the pavement, away from the van, with a tinny singing noise in his ear, and blood running down his face from somewhere between his eyebrows.
The hotel room is not the greatest nor grandest he's been in, and that's in part because he's paying for it with his own money and in part because there are a limited number of hotels within walking distance of the main road which will accept instant booking from a man who has blood all over his face and looks like he has been run over repeatedly.
Eames lies on his face until his throat and shoulders start to hurt, and then he lies on his back.
After a while he wonders if he should have had a shower, or at the very least a scrub, before he plunged head-first into the nice clean…ish covers, but it's too late now, and there's blood drying in his eyebrows and around the corners of his nostrils. He smells of petrol and pain, and his chest hurts.
When his phone rings he takes it out of his pocket and throws it the length of the room.
This proves to be a mistake, as it makes his shoulder hurt again.
When it starts ringing again, he slides off the bed and fishes for it under the wardrobe, all of his body complaining that it would far rather lie still and work out just what the fuck he's been doing to it these last few hours. It's Ariadne's number, and he presses the button to answer, holds it against his ear without saying a thing until she gives in first and lets him know Arthur hasn't just stolen her phone.
She doesn't say what the fuck have you been doing, because Ariadne is a smart woman and knows he won't give her a straight answer. She asks instead, "Are you going to come back?"
"Circumstance-dependent."
"You mean you're not coming back if Arthur stays here," Ariadne interprets, possibly for the benefit of someone else listening in on the call. Eames hopes it's Yusuf.
"Those are some of the circumstances," Eames agrees. "We should go to lunch somewhere nice. I know a restaurant. They have an open-door policy."
"It's dinnertime."
"Well then, we should go to dinner somewhere that takes late reservations. I promise not to bleed too effusively in your starter." He rubs his face, and flakes of dried blood detach themselves from his skin and patter onto the carpet. "Although I'd ask for a limited attendance."
Ariadne coughs pointedly. "You can't just run away and hide from us all."
He can't stop himself from laughing at that, although it makes everything below his neck hurt like mad. "I can't? My dear Daedalian maid, I've made a lifetime of it. I can and I am."
Even her breathing sounds angry as he wanders around the room, trying to stretch the pain out of his legs and convince his body that he wasn't hit by a car. It works even less well in reality than in dreams, this lying to his muscles and bones. "I thought better of you than this, Eames."
"Then you're an idiot," he says gently, "as Arthur will no doubt tell you, thinking well of me never gets anyone anywhere."
She sighs at him so hard that it sounds like they're talking through a gale. "Look, just because you're desperate for people to underestimate you doesn't mean you succeed in making them. I know you're not stupid, and you're not the bastard you're trying to pass yourself off as, either. Come back. Or come and meet me and Yusuf somewhere."
"Somewhere Arthur cannot shoot my knees off, maybe."
"Listen," Ariadne says in a low voice, "if push comes to shove – and I would rather it didn't – we can cope without a point man. But there is no point in my making levels and Yusuf refining a somnacin infusion if we have no one capable of performing extractions."
Eames smiles a slightly surprised, slightly impressed smile to the empty room and opens the door with a sharp twist that makes his wrist click. "I'm sorry, you're dumping Arthur?"
"No, you're dumping Arthur," she makes an annoyed noise, and he can hear someone else moving near the phone. Hopefully, hopefully, it is Yusuf. He wants no misguided attempts to bring Arthur to confront him and 'get things out in the open', not again. "I'm just pointing out that – look, Saito says you are less disposable than him. I am provisionally taking your side, because although you are clearly insane, you are a very good extractor."
He acknowledges this with a nod she can't see, pulls himself together, and says, "Thank you," so quietly he's not sure she'll even hear it. The hotel corridor is empty and the prints on the wall are as cheap and ugly as his clothes.
"Eames," Ariadne says, with a tone of certain finality, "let us know where you want to meet." And just as he is about to hang up and send her the map reference, she adds in an exasperated voice, "And don't jump out of any more moving vehicles, please. Not when Yusuf's driving. You nearly gave him a heartattack."
He can't help laughing to himself as he sends her the map reference; it's not until he's half-way down the corridor that he realises he still hasn't washed, is still liberally speckled with blood and road dirty. Eames swears at the ceiling, turns on his heel, and heads back to his room.
The first thing he says to Yusuf, when he runs into him outside the poky restaurant with the ugly pink plastic flamingos gaffer-taped to the paving slabs at the front, is, "Sorry about that." He means it, at least as much as the timing and Yusuf's potential coronary incident are concerned.
Yusuf shrugs. He is wearing a lavender shirt which clashes magnificently with Eames's road-scraped bright pink one with blue stripes, and Eames almost wants to hug him for the ungodly spectacle they must present to the casual passer-by. "Now I am better-prepared," he says philosophically. "I know that when you start shouting for me to stop the van, you are about to do something extremely stupid, and I should stab you with a hypodermic."
"Yusuf my friend, if you stab me every time I do something stupid I'm going to end up looking like a tea-strainer." Eames pats him on the upper arm in lieu of the hug which is still brewing in his sore muscles.
"Hrm." Yusuf puts his hand over Eames's for a moment longer than Eames was expecting him to; it's warmer than his hand, which is unusual, and drier, which isn't. "Please try not to jeopardise your own life in future. I would rather you did not die."
Eames clears his throat in search of a glib remark, and is absurdly grateful for Ariadne's appearance when it transpires that there are none at his disposal. She is wearing a beanie hat to go with her scarf, which might cause problems with another restaurant but at this one will scarcely be out of place.
"I think I should apologise," he begins, holding out both his hands to greet her, but she simply slaps at his palms until he puts them down again.
"I think you should shut up," Ariadne counters, "and find our table. Don't laugh at my hat. I got paint in my hair and it won't come out."
In direct contravention of her instructions, he starts smiling. "I wouldn't dream of it."
"Very funny," Yusuf observes, as if he's remarking on the weather.
The restaurant is as he remembers it and this is precisely why he comes here; it looks like a six-year-old was left in charge of the décor after downing a bucket of brightly-coloured fizzy drinks and luminous sweeties. The flamingos continue inside, without the mollifying presence of the weather fading them back from garish; they lurk in the corners, and one or two carry plastic bowls of popcorn upon their backs, strapped into place with yet more gaffer tape.
Fake ivy plummets from the low ceiling in the company of fairy lights in the shape of small frogs. The bar is light by a nauseating cacophony of coloured light tubes, and most of the seating appears to have been salvaged from churches; beneath their feet are squares of fake turf, and the odd badly-constructed plastic mushroom. The table numbers are marked on small garden gnomes.
"I see," Yusuf says, turning to him with a very serious expression. "You apologise to us for behaving like a lunatic by … assaulting our retinas."
"It's a safety measure," Eames assures him, trying to remove his jacket and only succeeding in making himself grimace in pain as his shoulder and chest refuse to cooperate.
"In what way is this a safety measure, please?" Yusuf grabs the collar of Eames's jacket and when Eames winces again, Ariadne tugs his sleeves down in synchrony until he can wriggle it off without setting off a fresh round of white-hot aches.
"Well," Eames says, taking in the chaotic mess in one slow gesture, "there isn't an architect in business who'd design a dream to look like this, is there?"
"None that aren't in need of severe medication," Ariadne agrees, as he points out the table furthest from the door. "Is that your point?"
"No need to keep fumbling for your totem every two seconds," Eames murmurs.
"Please tell me I will be able to eat here without hallucinating," Yusuf says in mock-anguish, as they feel their way between the half-full tables without acquiring a second glance from any of the diners. There is a man eating by himself in a unicorn costume, and another who has placed on his table, beside the number-gnome, a small army of balloon animals to whose number his partner is constantly adding between mouthfuls. They are not even in the top 50% of weirdness in the room, and are certainly not noticeable.
"It's got all the relevant food hygiene certificates," Eames says, distractedly. The table has a vast array of names scratched into the varnish, which may be in some way related to it being a flower-shaped array of old schooldesk lids with a central column. "Honestly, I come here because I don't bang my knees on the table leg and no one is rude about my shirts."
"Honestly?" Ariadne raises her eyebrows – they disappear under the edge of her beanie hat, making her look for a moment like an incredulous egg under a cosy.
"Service included, drinks cheap and highly alcoholic, food does not cause internal haemorrhaging," Eames says, ticking the points off on his fingers, "and no one has ever looked for me here."
Ariadne picks up one of the menus and toys with it for a moment, picking at the stuck-on ransom-note letters the way so many of the clientele before her have no doubt done; Eames knows he's destroyed at least two menus that way, but apparently someone on the staff quite enjoys cutting up old magazines.
"And now you've brought us here?" she says after a while.
"Well, if I'm wrong and you stab me in the back I have other restaurants in other cities," he says, and his shoulder twinges violently, as if calling him on the partial lie. "Although admittedly without quite such a lenient tab or charming policy toward spirit measures."
"What exactly is going on with you and Arthur?" Ariadne asks abruptly, laying the menu down again and catching his gaze as efficiently as fishhooks in his eyes.
"You know, I thought you'd at least order a drink before the third degree started."
"Did you really?" Yusuf asks, peering at the menu under Ariadne's hands with apparent interest. "That was very silly of you."
"No," Eames concedes. "Nothing is happening."
He is almost bowled over by the force of their joint incredulity.
"Right," Ariadne says with a great deal of sarcasm. "Your little James Bond impression this afternoon was because you'd left something behind and suddenly remembered it."
"I'm sure James Bond doesn't ache this badly afterward," Eames says ruefully. He catches the eye of a passing waiter and shakes his head minutely. It won't work, they recognise him and sooner or later a drink will show up in front of him under the presumptive belief that he wants it and will eventually pay for it, and they are usually right about it. "Also I heard James Bond had plenty of money and an endless string of sexual conquests."
"Eames," Ariadne sighs. "There's no need to be nervous."
"I'm not nervous," Eames scoffs, doing what he feels is a brilliant impression of affront. "What do I have to be nervous about?"
"We'd like to keep you," Yusuf says, still examining the menu. "What on earth is a Flexible Flamingo?"
"It makes you puke pink, I think it has cranberry juice in it, and other than that I don't know." Eames stares at him for a moment, and adds, "What do you mean, 'keep'? I thought we already covered my unerring devotion to my work and how it is erring vigorously in the face of having to see Arthur ever again."
"This is less of a professional arrangement," Yusuf says absently, and, "Fascinating, look, there's one called a Muppet's Revenge. I am having horrible premonitions of blue fur and hands in orifices already."
"Yusuf," Ariadne says quietly. It's both wonderful and unpleasant how she manages to retain such authority when she is wearing a child's beanie hat and haloed by the light of a small army of blue-and-green plastic frog lights. "Let me."
"As long as you promise not to scare the shit out of him," Yusuf says placidly, turning the cocktail menu over and raising his eyebrows at the inverse. "Just because he seems bent on causing me cardiac problems and takes us to horrible insane-person restaurants that serve things called a Whoopie Moopie, which I am not sure are real English words – this does not mean you can revenge yourself upon him by making him squirm."
"What exactly is going on," Eames says, fighting the urge to find out if he can squeeze through the back window like a cat and run far, far away from this conversation. The window is maybe a foot across, and if there's one thing he's sure of it's that he is a lot more than a foot across.
"Since you've made it very clearly you're not … involved with Arthur any more," Ariadne says, and Eames can see the words drama queen written on her eyes when he looks at her.
"… I am trying very hard not to be involved with Arthur any more," he corrects. Going back there had been a mistake, and it seems to be a mistake he has no hope of extricating himself from without firepower or a lot of fake passports.
"Then we –" Ariadne glances sideways at Yusuf, and pats him on the back of the hand in one of those established-couple gestures that he has never been able to get the hang of, "– were wondering if you'd prefer perhaps … being involved … with us. Instead."
"Oh," Eames says.
A threateningly green concoction in a print glass with a flamingo painted on it is slid onto the table in front of him. He tries to make the waiter take it away again, but the man has the face of someone Eames has slept with at some point, and there will be no shoving away gratis drinks in this place without offending someone.
"What is that?" Yusuf asks, apparently equal parts revolted and intrigued.
"It's an Aldous Huxley," says the waiter, and, "do you want to order one?"
"I am going to be extremely sick," Eames mutters, looking at it. He's had an evening or two rendered unmemorable by these vicious cocktails, and there's more than one shirt he's had to give up on after redecorating it with regurgitated Huxleys. "I don't think they want to order one, Ross."
"Well order something soon or I'm going to get in trouble." The waiter dips an exaggerated curtsey to Ariadne. "Nice hat." He leaves with his empty tray balanced on his head for no reason Eames can adequately explain.
"Are you going to answer?" Ariadne asks uneasily, when Ross is out of earshot.
"Huh?" Eames pushes the Huxley into the middle of the table and squints around it at them. Ariadne's hat is on skewed, covering one eyebrow and not the other, and she has a tissue in her sleeve. She looks intensely serious and determined; Yusuf has two or three curls tucked behind an ear and it has deformed the entire lie of his hair into something deranged. There is something caught in his eyelashes.
"Answer," Ariadne repeats. "Please. I would like to know whether we're colleagues or … otherwise."
"Oh, that," Eames says as nonchalantly as he can. "I'd love to." He pushes the Huxley toward her with a grimace. "Only get rid of this because no one is going to benefit from drinking it."