Chapter Text
Of course Ariadne brings cheap boxed wine and scarves for everyone. She claims they're home-made party kits in the tradition of the Greeks. Never mind the outrageous bottles Saito had delivered by hand-truck to the presidential suite, which say as much about the Japanese attitude towards alcohol as they do about his sardonic affection for them as a group.
“You need to have something to drink after you get through the good stuff,” she tells Dom with no shame whatsoever.
“Those champagne bottles are bigger than you are. You’ll die if you finish one.”
“Then you can use the boxed wine to pickle me and bury me in an empty. I’ll be a gorgeous corpse.” Ariadne kisses him on the cheek before adorning him with a purple scarf. “Isadora Duncan rides again.”
Dom recalls Mal telling him about Isadora Duncan — namely, about how her scarf got cozy with the rear axle of her car and strangled her to death — but Ariadne’s happy, Yusuf’s grinning, and Eames and Arthur haven’t arrived yet, so he hooks his finger between the silk and his skin and just smiles weakly.
It’s the third one of these get togethers they’ve done, despite Arthur’s hostility to the idea and Eames’s lazy mockery. Mostly it’s Ariadne’s fault. A lot of things are these days. She has the tenacity of a dental drill, without the same precision of damage.
“Because we’re friends,” she says on the phone when she first proposes it, in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary.
“We’re not friends,” Dom says.
“You love me.”
“I like you.” He’s willing to concede that much. “You’re a talented architect. If you stay in dreaming, you’ll have a great career.”
“See?”
“That’s not the same thing as friendship, Ariadne.”
There was never any real hope that she'd listen to him. Through no planning whatsoever, he’s conditioned her to ignore his emotional judgment. “Eames is coming. So’s Yusuf. Arthur won’t come unless you come, so I’m saving him for last. Do it for him.”
“What does Arthur get out of this?” Dom asks, puzzled, and Ariadne says, “Friends, obviously,” as though that should have been clear from the get-go, as though the entire idea of an Inception team reunion is simply to make sure Arthur has a support network in his post-Inception, post-Cobb life.
“Arthur doesn’t need friends.”
“Everybody needs friends.”
“Not Arthur.”
“He doesn’t have friends, you mean. Since you’re not in the business anymore, and poor Arthur is all alone now." Her reproach doesn't even pretend at irony.
“There’s nothing ‘poor’ about Arthur.”
“Maybe not in the financial sense.” Ariadne’s grim, like she’s a doctor handing the bad news to the patient’s next-of-kin.
Dom can’t think of any circumstance in which Arthur could be considered poor Arthur, and is about to say so, but she isn’t finished. “Besides. You owe me.”
At heart, Dom has the instincts of a fair man, though he’s made a wildly successful career out of ignoring them. He listens to them now, against his better judgment. Showing Ariadne the spiderweb crack of guilt where Arthur is concerned will only draw a bullseye for her to hammer a crowbar through later. But.
“How did you get Eames and Yusuf to agree?” he asks, already resigned to the inevitable.
She hears his capitulation. There’s triumph in her: “Bribed them.”
“How?”
“I said the entire Inception team. How do you think?” she demands, then hangs up before he can remember the last, honorary member, and change his mind.
All five of them get together for the first one. They spend the first hour circling each other like the planets of a hostile orrery. There are unpleasant reminders of how Dom managed to earn their mistrust, and old corpses dug up from past jobs that would have been better left buried. Barbs fly like bullets until Saito’s alcohol and Ariadne’s ruthless peacemaking transforms the threat of war into something warily cordial.
The experience isn’t pleasant enough to lure Dom to the next one, but he comes anyway when summoned six months later, beaten down by Ariadne’s persistence. Arthur isn’t there, off the grid on some long-running extraction job that's bleeding horrific rumors out of Hong Kong — “I swear he planned it that way. He’s not getting out of it next time,” Ariadne says, a fierce snap to her voice that bodes ill for the absent point man — but the others are there in force. Saito’s doing again, his motives unfathomable behind a cryptic, cynical little smile. Dom surprises himself by enjoying it.
He doesn’t argue with her the third time.
“Arthur’s going to be there. He promised,” Ariadne says, even though Dom didn’t ask.
“I thought he was in Luanda.”
“He’s in Jo’burg on a job. The extractor brought Eames in to forge, apparently. He spent fifteen minutes bitching about him— he really likes him, doesn’t he? I told you this would work.”
Ariadne hangs up before Dom can complain about her reckless abuse of pronouns, leaving him confused about who likes whom and finding either scenario equally improbable.
It’s impossible not to grow close to people you’ve been through the fire with, even if they’re completely unbalanced like Dom; even if they look like they should be nice but are really not, like Ariadne. Yusuf likes everybody and has the moral center of a doughnut. It’s impossible not to grow fond him, even if you can’t trust him; and Eames? He’s a complete tosser, but he has a way of getting under your skin.
As for Arthur, well. Nobody gets close to Arthur but Dom, though it isn’t for lack of trying. Shared knowledge of secrets aside, Dom’s not convinced Arthur really likes him all that much, if he ever did. It’s hard not to take it personally when someone’s subconscious kept targeting you for torture. Dom’s honest enough with himself to know exactly why his projection of Mal hated Arthur so much.
Unfortunately, Arthur has had more experience than most with unhappy truths.
Arthur is the last to arrive at the suite, unusually late. His punctuality is not usually reserved for professional occasions, but here it is, 8:15, and the door opens to—
“Eames?” Dom says, surprised, before peering past him for the point man.
“I was invited,” Eames reminds, his grin benevolent.
“I was expecting Arthur,” Dom explains, adding unnecessarily, “He’s late.”
“If it’s late, then you should be expecting me, shouldn’t you?” Eames says, and saunters past him to accept Ariadne’s rapturous hug and Yusuf’s friendly greeting with equanimity. “Nice scarf.”
Dom doesn’t blush, but he does take the scarf off, reminded.
“I got one for you, too,” Ariadne promises Eames, then snatches a laugh out of the air when he spins her in approved ballroom fashion to send her crashing into one of the suite’s couches.
“Saito coming?”
“God,” says Yusuf with a wince, under Ariadne’s regretful, “He wanted to come, but he had a thing.”
“Thing?”
“You know—” One close-bitten hand waves airily, conjuring fantastical menageries from empty space. “A billionaire thing. Saving the manatees or buying up a third world country or something. No, wait. It was some event with ... minshuto? Does that sound right?”
Dom and Yusuf stare at her. Eames is too busy fondling bottles and decanters in an obscene way to notice.
“What?” Ariadne demands. “We’re friends. We talk all the time.”
“About what?”
“I have opinions on things. He finds me refreshing.”
Yusuf mumbles something that gets him pinched by vengeful fingers, while Dom looks at his watch and then at the door, dissatisfied. A tardy Arthur oversets his understanding of basic physical law.
He’s the one who finally says, “I should look for Arthur,” with his totem twitching between his fingers.
“No need to get antsy. He’s coming,” Eames says.
Yusuf waggles his eyebrows at Eames and gets a shard of ice flicked at him. “Not like Arthur to be late.”
“I saw him on the way,” Eames says into his bottle. He grins again, easily, loosely. “He’ll be here.”
Arthur arrives like a ghost, absent one second, here the next. Dom’s face, increasingly squashy in a way more reminiscent of pugs than worry, immediately relaxes. Ariadne is the only one who makes a fuss, but she refuses to be intimidated by Arthur’s level glare, so he’s forced to accept a hug, a scarf, and a kiss on both cheeks in that order.
Not that they’d be stupid enough to admit it, but everyone’s a bit disappointed that the addition of jaunty floral chiffon to his ensemble makes Arthur look stylishly dangerous rather than ridiculous.
“You lost the hat,” Eames says, his face falling ludicrously when he emerges from the bedroom.
Ariadne’s eyebrows rise, insinuating volumes. “Is that a euphemism?”
“An actual hat,” Arthur says.
“He was wearing one,” Eames explains.
“I didn’t lose it.”
Eames says sadly, “It was a fedora. He was lovely in it."
“You’d be a great Frank Sinatra impersonator,” Ariadne decides, while Arthur studies Eames, the faintest of frowns on his face. When he finally says, “I gave it away,” Eames mimes theatrical shock, leaving uncertain whether he’s more surprised at the admission of a personal act, or at the concept of Arthur being generous.
“To somebody cute?” Ariadne wants to know. “Or to a homeless person in desperate need of fashion?”
“‘In desperate need of fashion?’” Yusuf echoes.
“It’s a real thing. Look at Eames.”
All eyes turn to Eames, who slouches pointedly at them all, comfortable in his lurid purple paisley, orange Ariadne scarf, and shiny olive slacks.
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Eames challenges.
Arthur’s mouth relaxes.
“Oh my God,” says Ariadne, her face crumpling. She clings to Arthur’s arm. “Help.”
“I don’t do lost causes anymore,” Arthur says, small creases deepening at the corners of his eyes.
It’s lovely, really. When Arthur really smiles, he has dimples.
“You should’ve kept the fedora,” Eames laments, while Ariadne buries her face in Arthur’s shoulder and shakes with giggles. “I was planning to have so many fantasies around that hat, you have no idea. I was going to imagine you in my bathtub, covered in bubbles, wearing nothing but that hat. Or I could have borrowed it. I met a gorgeous little elf boy tonight with blue and silver hair, studs all down his ears—”
He doesn’t finish his thought, because Arthur’s face suddenly loses all expression. It’s his version of a warning rattle (a terrifyingly steep learning curve for neophytes in dreamshare).
Eames might push his luck to the precipice, but there are too many things in the room that could be turned into a weapon, and the distance between that blank-faced warning and bone-splintering violence is the breadth of a whisper.
“Was it something I said?” he wonders, his smile sprawling bright and wild.
“Jesus,” says Ariadne, feeling the sharp crest of tension through the arm she’s embracing. She steps away to peer up at Arthur. “It’s just Eames.”
“Drink?” Dom asks. He pushes a half-filled glass into Arthur’s hand.
Arthur blinks, stony gaze relaxing, and the moment passes.
The stories about Dom and Arthur have more to do with Arthur taking care of Dom rather than the other way around. There’s a flip side to that coin that only a few in dreamshare realize. Eames, because he studies people, learns people, is one of them. From the way Yusuf’s eyes are growing rounder, he’s just become another.
”Phillipa ordered me to show you the video of her ballet recital,” Dom says with absent-minded apology, the parabola of his stroll drawing Arthur away in a conversation that neatly cuts Eames out.
Ariadne wanders over to Eames, claiming his arm in place of Arthur’s. “What the fuck was that about?” she whispers up at him. “He’s touchy tonight.”
Eames, staring after Arthur, lifts his shoulders in a careless shrug. “Haven’t a clue,” he lies. He grins down at her. “Do you really kiss your mother with that mouth?”
Two drinks down, Arthur removes the suit coat. Three drinks down, he rolls up his sleeves.
Sometime between drinks five and six, he’ll loosen his tie. The rest of the gang has learned to gauge the temperature of acceptable social risk by the barometer of Arthur’s deshabille. Until then, they make their best guesses about what will escape Arthur’s wrath, and prepare to dive for cover if they’re proved wrong. It’s a heady game, if more painful than most. If they weren’t a little addicted to adrenaline, they wouldn’t have entered the business to begin with.
“Never Have I Ever?” Eames suggests from his sprawl on the floor, and Dom says, “Fuck, no. I’m not playing that game.”
“Why not?” Yusuf’s contribution, from the sofa where his lap is playing pillow to Ariadne’s feet. “I don’t mind. How do you play it?”
“Someone says something they’ve never done, and everybody who’s done it takes a drink.”
“Sounds easy.”
“Until the alcohol poisoning, which leads to death.” Dom is firm on this subject, even knowing he will be accused of being stuffy. On cue, Eames gives him a pitying look.
Ariadne, her head propped on the arm of the settee that she has claimed as her throne, lifts her glass into the air to declaim, “Never have I ever had a threesome.”
She watches with interest while Eames and Yusuf gleefully drink; then raises her eyebrows at Dom when he grudgingly takes one, too. Leaned against the wall of the on the far side of the room, behind Ariadne and Yusuf’s sofa, Arthur silently does the same.
“Now I just feel left out,” Ariadne says sadly. “Never have I ever had a foursome.”
Dom announces, “I’m not playing this,” while Yusuf sips, Eames throws back another drink and grins, showing all his teeth. Something in his expression shifts, then; out of the corner of his eye, Dom watches Arthur take another drink.
Yusuf stretches to bump fists with Eames, whose eyes flicker back to Arthur, distracted.
“I like this game,” Yusuf announces.
“I’ve been doing college all wrong,” Ariadne laments.
“We’re not playing this,” Dom says again, pressing the point because alcohol poisoning is bad.
“I can take it!”
“I’m not worried about you.”
Ariadne protests, “I’ve had experiences.”
The other four exchange glances.
Ariadne rolls her eyes. “Oh, please.”
“Believe me,” Dom says, while Yusuf grins, and Eames says brightly, “Never have I ever been in a sexual situation involving a goat.”
Yusuf sputters, “You twat. I knew I shouldn’t have told you—”
“Bottoms up, mate.”
Dom looks pained. “You won’t be able to do much drinking, is all I’m saying, Ariadne.”
It’s an argument that plainly sways her. Her eyes widen indignantly, then narrow. “Just how slutty are you guys?”
“Oh, pet,” Eames says almost fondly, and a few seconds later, Arthur says, “Yeah, let’s not.” So they don’t.
Eames could fill a book with everything he knows about Arthur. It would be a short book, but it would be a beautiful one: the sharp peaks of his collarbones; the graceful curves of his hands; the uncompromising set of his mouth; the shallow sine wave of his spine.
The words would be terse and to the point, because it would be a book about Arthur, rather than a book about Eames. Eames loves words of any language; loves the way they roll across his tongue, making fantasy and shapes and dreams even without the benefit of a PASIV. He paints with words. If it was a book about Eames, it would be rich poetry and lines of prose that wrap around each other, getting increasingly smaller until the naked eye couldn’t read them.
A book about Arthur would be all about the whitespace, the stories between the words. Bulleted lists. Facts.
Fact: Arthur is widely acknowledged as the best point man in the business.
Fact: once you’ve earned his loyalty, there is nothing Arthur will not do for you. There are no limits.
Fact: when he’s on a job, he hides no less than five guns with extra clips, and two knives in various places around the hotel or apartment he’s taken.
Fact: attempting to enter a private bathroom while Arthur is within, even if he’s just brushing his teeth, will result in immediate violence. The kind that leaves scars.
Fact: there are no rumors of Arthur ever having a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone, either inside or outside of dreamshare. By the same token, his sexual preferences are completely unknown.
Fact: Eames occasionally wanks off to fantasies about Arthur: rumpling his suit; baring smooth, pale skin; tasting him, opening him, taking him apart until he’s nothing but shocked sounds, helpless pleas, and desperate, writhing need.
Fact: Eames is fairly sure he doesn’t stand a chance, but he dearly, but dearly loves a challenge.
The alcohol Saito provided them is good. Damn good. His motives may be incomprehensible and, if placed under scrutiny, possibly terrifying, but he deserves all six toasts they give him before Arthur starts forcing Ariadne and Dom to drink bottles of water between glasses of champagne.
Dom, who has been cowed into preemptive submission by a year on the PTA, only puts up token resistance. Ariadne perversely gets drunker on the water than she did on the booze.
“Worst sex experience,” she says without warning, dropping the subject like a rock in the middle of a conversation about who the fuck knows what. Jungian archetypes or something.
Eames asks promptly, “Mouth, hands, or penetration? Giving or receiving?”
“Everything. Anything. Overall. With a human being,” she clarifies.
Yusuf chuckles. “You’re fixated on my goat story.”
“It was a goat.”
“It was ornamental. It wasn’t mine, anyway.”
“Why do we have to talk about sex anyway?” Dom asks, and is completely ignored by everyone except for Ariadne, who decrees vindictively, “You first. That’s what you get for criticizing my great ideas.”
Dom brightens. Sadly, the alcohol he’s been guzzling has had the worst possible effect on his judgment. Once upon a time, he was a badass legend in criminal circles, but now he organizes bake sales in between extractions; what’s left of his dignity wears a pretty floral bonnet and cries into its Chardonnay during late night reruns of Desperate Housewives.
Halfway through his story, he visibly realizes that it was a really bad idea to share this one, because it isn’t just the worst sex experience the rest of them have ever heard; it’s also the most embarrassing.
“Aw. That was so sweet,” Ariadne says when he’s done, her eyes warm and damp.
Arthur and Eames eye her, while Yusuf demands, “Why the hell would you tell us that story? My balls have crawled back up into my body.”
“You asked,” Dom says lamely.
“Mal tied you up, wrapped your meat and two veg in saran wrap, dropped you off naked in front of a biker bar— and she thought that was funny?”
Arthur says with nostalgia, “I miss Mal.”
In a rare moment of harmony, Eames says wistfully, “God, so do I.”
Yusuf’s worst sex story is mercifully free of farm animals, though there’s a malicious parrot with an eidetic memory that makes an appearance. Eames’s story is in the plural form — stories — which, a la Sheherezade, chain one into the other until his audience is left wondering why he doesn’t just give up and take a vow of chastity. Ariadne’s story rouses Yusuf’s haphazard fraternal instincts; he enthusiastically volunteers Eames and his old uni mate, apparently named Spider, to break the culprit’s legs.
“Or I can just hire Arthur,” Yusuf suggests.
“I don’t do intimidation,” Arthur says.
“Yes you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re doing it right now. See? There you go. You just did it again.” Arthur frowns at Yusuf, who lifts a defensive arm. “And again.”
Eames grins into his glass. “Leg-breaking isn’t intimidation, Arthur. That’s the step before you get physical. Once you get to broken bones, you’ve gone straight to punishment.”
“I do punishment,” Arthur decides, as though there were any doubt.
“Darling. Say that again. It made me shiver all over in the best possible way.”
Arthur rolls his eyes. Ariadne, tipsy enough to be single-minded, is busy furrowing her brows over the earlier conversation. “If the step before is— and the one after, you know, punishment. Then. Wait, what step is when you just shoot someone in the head?”
“Absolution,” Arthur says.
“You’re a sick fuck,” Yusuf says, face warming with appreciation. They drink a toast to Arthur.
From worst sex experience they hop to funniest, which in Yusuf’s case involves yet another accidental animal — “I’m detecting a theme here,” Ariadne says when she’s able to breathe again, her face blotchy with oxygen deprivation — and in Dom’s case is decreed nowhere near as satisfying as the gift-wrapped dick tale.
Ariadne threatens to throw up from laughing halfway through Eames’s story, which wins a quiet chuckle from even Arthur. Ariadne’s story, by comparison, is more sweet than hilarious, involving her first time. It’s her wry commentary on the event that makes them laugh.
It takes no prompting from that point to go around the room again on stories about first times.
“Well, Mal—” Dom begins, winning eyerolls from half the room and smirks from the other half.
“Really? You saved yourself for marriage?” Ariadne flails on the sofa, trying to sit up to stare at Dom. “Oh my God. Arthur. Arthur. You were totally right. He really is a unicorn.”
Dom glares. Arthur shrugs, not even bothering to look apologetic.
“No, really. Really.” Yusuf yelps as Ariadne crawls across him, planting her hands wherever is most convenient for her progress. Mostly, this seems to require his face. “That’s precious. How old were you? Twenty? Twenty-five? Thirty?”
“Mal wasn’t my first,” Dom protests, harassed.
“Liar!”
“She wasn’t!”
“You manwhore!”
“Seventeen,” Dom says, subsiding under Ariadne’s disappointed glare, and Eames’s subsequent laugh. “I didn’t meet Mal until I was twenty-four.”
Yusuf says smugly, “Fifteen.”
“Fourteen,” from Eames, raising his eyebrow at Dom’s snort. “I was mature for my age.”
“What about Arthur?” Ariadne demands, letting her head loll back so she can peer around the settee at the point man.
“What about Arthur?” asks Arthur, leaned lazy and untouchable on the other side of the room, wall to his back, all exits covered. His face is flushed with the alcohol, finally, and he’s down to his waistcoat now, his tie a sleek ribbon around his shoulders. Ariadne’s upside-down face wins a real, unguarded smile; his dimple materializes for a split-second, teasing them, then disappears.
Ariadne squirms, rolling over onto her side to rest her chin on the arm of the settee. “Watch where you’re putting that foot,” Yusuf complains without heat, wincing as it digs into his groin, but she’s already on, “You’re being awfully quiet.”
“Drinking,” Arthur excuses. He lifts his bottle to show them.
“Liquid courage. You haven’t said anything. We’re sitting here, showing all our dirty laundry—”
“Or in Dom’s case, his waterproofed testicles,” Eames interjects.
Arthur’s mouth twists. “Nothing to say.”
“Worst sex experience?” Ariadne prods.
Arthur shrugs.
“Funniest?”
Another shrug. Ariadne’s eyes narrow dangerously. “How old were you?”
“I knew it. He’s still a virgin,” Eames gloats, purely for the principle of the thing. Arthur’s lips thin.
“How do you figure?” Yusuf asks.
“Anybody who dresses in that many layers is hiding something.”
“Weapons?” Yusuf suggests, which Eames isn’t ashamed to admit is a good point. Also, quite a turn-on.
The subject temporarily derails the conversation. There’s nothing overt about it, but by now they’re familiar enough with Arthur to be aware of his faint relief. Eames’s persistent curiosity is equally clear, so no one is surprised when he returns to the topic with unabashed directness when Arthur has displayed to Ariadne’s satisfaction at least two of the knives concealed on his person.
“I just don’t see how it’s any of your business how old I was when I started,” Arthur retorts.
Eames demands, brightly, “But how much sex, really?”
“Again, none of your goddamn business.”
“But we’re sharing, Arthur. This is what friends do. We share.”
“We’re not friends, Eames.”
“Arthur,” Ariadne says reproachfully. “We’re all your friends. Don’t make that face. I saw that face.”
“I’ve had a lot of sex,” Yusuf says, stepping hastily in front of Arthur’s retort, while Ariadne wrinkles up her nose and retrieves her foot from Yusuf’s lap with, “I don’t want to hear about any other animals.”
“I love a nice deflowering,” Eames says as provokingly as he knows how, his eyes half-lidding and the tip of his tongue sliding across his lower lip. He leers at Arthur. “If you ever fancy an experienced lover to pop your cherry—”
There’s an, “Ew,” from Ariadne, while Dom’s smile falters and dies as he meets Arthur’s eyes. There’s a curious tension under the mirth that sputters across the room. Arthur’s shoulders are settling into tight, braced lines.
“I’ll have you know I’m much in demand with virgins,” Eames says with great dignity.
Ariadne lifts her head off the settee in an impatient puff of breath. “Come on, Arthur. It’s just a question, geez.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“I’m just curious—”
Yusuf stirs, his hands curling into uneasy question marks at Arthur’s expression, “Ari.”
“It’s the sounds they make that I like. Everything’s new to them. It’s lovely. And the way they spread their legs and writhe—” Eames says with relish.
Ariadne buries her face in a pillow to wail, “Oh my God. I’m never going to have sex again. Eames!”
“Does anyone want to try this brandy?” Dom asks a little too loudly, a little too pedantically to be convincing. “Saito had it sent over. It’s got to be at least forty years old. Yusuf? Arthur?”
“—and the way they shiver and beg me when I work my way in and coax the little dears into their first—” Eames is saying, when a muscle jumps in Arthur’s jaw and he snaps,
“Fuck you, Eames. Eight, alright? I was eight.”