Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s not like Arthur to run out of ideas.

It’s what he’s known for, at least in certain circles. Arthur has a plan, and a backup plan, and a secondary backup plan, and an emergency last-ditch effort plan, and if all of those fail, his improvisational skills are second to none. He likes to keep all of his bases covered.

He wasn’t prepared for this, though, and everything he attempts runs up against the same brick wall, dumping him back out where he began to start all over again. Eventually he has to admit defeat, and he does the only remaining thing he can think of to do. He calls Eames.

Mal watches from the shadows while Arthur pulls up the encrypted file on his laptop, scrolling through pages of contacts all labeled by code name and scrambled using a cipher that only he knows. It only takes a moment to decrypt the relevant entry and extract the necessary information.

Cobb has been sleeping for the better part of two days.

It isn’t as hard to reach Eames as Arthur had feared. The last time they’d worked together, Eames had given Arthur a telephone number for somewhere in Britain. That leads him to a neutrally polite receptionist named Patricia who accepts the extension number Eames had provided – Arthur has his doubts now that it’s anything of the kind – and connects him to a computer-generated voicemail box. The message contains another number, ‘for emergencies,’ which in turn leads to another voicemail message, recorded in a Spanish-accented female voice.

Arthur leaves his name and a request for Eames to return his call as soon as possible. Eames will try his office first, undoubtedly, but Arthur has already set his calls to be forwarded to his work cell. The CIA has granted him personal leave for a week, and Arthur hadn’t pushed for more. If they can’t fix this in a week, he doesn’t know that they will.

Eames calls him back barely fifteen minutes later.

“Arthur,” he says pleasantly. “What a wholly unexpected surprise to hear from you. If you think I’m freelancing for your government again after the fiasco in Hong Kong, you must have either selective memory or a hidden masochistic streak.”

“Cobb’s in a coma,” Arthur says. It’s the first time he’s said it out loud; the words feel strange in his mouth. “He’s fallen into limbo. Mal and I can’t wake him up.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line. It drags on for long enough that Arthur grits his teeth. He’d prefer not to beg, but he will if he has to.

He’s just steeling himself for it when Eames’ voice returns. “Half-eleven in the evening your time, that’s the best I can do. I’m in Beirut, it’s a full day’s flight. I assume you’re in Los Angeles?”

“Yes,” Arthur confirms. He’s so relieved it makes his legs weak, and he sits down on the sofa that’s been doubling as his bed for the past few days. He hadn’t realized how desperate he was for someone else to help shoulder the burden until Eames had agreed to come. “I can pick you up at the airport.”

“No bother, I know the way. I’ll be there around midnight.”

“I’ll see you then,” Arthur agrees, and ends the call.

Mal is still watching him from the hallway, leaning against the wall. “He will come?” she asks, voice low. Arthur doesn’t know if it’s the falling darkness or the fact that both of them still act sometimes as if a carelessly raised voice will wake Cobb from sleeping. If only it would.

“Yes,” Arthur says. Mal nods her head, satisfied. She turns and slips back down the hall, toward the master bedroom where Cobb lies sleeping.

Arthur flips open his notebook and gets back to work.

When Eames arrives at the house, they don’t bother with pleasantries. James and Phillipa are with Miles, hastily sent abroad for a holiday, so the house is dark and empty except for the three of them.

Mal makes strong black coffee and explains, only slightly halting as she recalls it, the story of how they’d ended up here. How she and Cobb had gone too far, too fast, too deep. How Cobb had found a way out, with a riddle and a train, and she had followed, only to find that their minds had tricked them and they were still in limbo, dreaming they were awake. How she’d come up with a plan to bring them both out into reality, on the ledge of a hotel suite, only it hadn’t worked. Cobb hadn’t jumped.

“And you’ve gone back in since then,” Eames says when she’s finished. It’s not a question. “You haven’t been able to reach him.”

Mal shakes her head. Her hair is hanging loose, stringy and greasy. Arthur runs a hand through his own and grimaces. He needs a shower, badly, but they haven’t had the time. Every minute they spend out here could be an eternity for Cobb.

“He doesn’t recognize me,” Mal says. “He has built delusions around himself, he thinks I am a ghost. A phantom. He thinks I haunt his dreams.”

“And Arthur?” Eames asks, eyes flicking to him. Arthur shakes his head as well, hating the heavy weight of admitting defeat.

“I can’t even get close. He’s had time down there to build a bigger maze than anything I’ve ever seen before. A whole world, and he’s hidden in the center of it. His projections always turn on me before I can track him down.”

Eames purses his lips for a moment, before setting his coffee cup down onto the saucer with a clink and sitting back. “And what, precisely, do you want me to do?”

“He thinks he’s in reality,” Arthur answers. “You could blend in, be a part of that. You’re used to conning people into revealing things, getting people to trust you so you can take advantage of them. You might be able to get through to him.”

Eames’ lips and eyebrows both twitch upward. “A charming description of my skills, thank you, Arthur.” He steeples his fingers and looks hard first at Arthur, then at Mal. “So what you are in fact asking me to do is to voluntarily drop into limbo, into unconstructed dream space, in the hopes that I’ll be able to return, preferably with Cobb in tow. Without knowing for a fact if it’s even possible.”

Arthur holds his gaze steadily. “I can offer you twice your standard fee,” he says. “With a few thousand extra for hazard pay if that’s not enough.” He can’t go much higher, not without stretching his resources, but he’ll be able to come up with something. He can find a way.

“Please,” Eames replies, shaking his head. “Try not to be quite so insulting. I did get on a plane, didn’t I? I just want to be sure we are all on the same page about what it is you’re requesting.”

“I’ll go in with you,” Arthur tells him. “I know what to expect. I’m willing to run the same risks.”

“No,” Mal says, causing both of them to turn and look at her. “You have never been able to find him, in his maze,” she says to Arthur. Not unkindly, merely stating a fact. “I will go.”

“That would be preferable,” Eames says lightly, picking up his coffee cup again as if the tension from a moment ago had never been. “If anything goes wrong, I trust Arthur will be able to handle any necessary kick.”

Arthur doesn’t think Mal understands the message beneath Eames’ words, but Arthur hears it loud and clear. Eames doesn’t want to descend into limbo without a guarantee that someone will remain behind to watch over and pull him out however necessary, even if it means leaving Cobb behind and sacrificing their chance at saving him. Eames doesn’t know if he can be sure that Mal will be able to make that choice.

Truth be told, Arthur doesn’t know either.

“I’ll get you out,” he promises. “Do you need to do anything first?”

The coffee cup lands again with a decisive click. “No,” Eames says, standing and rolling out his shoulders. “Let’s not keep the poor man waiting any longer, shall we?”

Mal goes to the bedroom to prep the IVs that will connect them to Cobb’s subconscious. Eames hangs behind, waiting until they’re alone before he speaks.

“Of the many things I’ve accused you of in the past,” he says, “losing your focus has never been on the list.”

Arthur holds his gaze steadily. “I know what I’m doing,” he says.

Eames smiles faintly. “I never had a moment of doubt,” he replies, and if he’s lying, Arthur doesn’t call him on it.

He wonders if Eames is doing the same thing.

Eames wakes up too soon.

It’s not by much; even having calculated the time difference, they’re still skittish about falling in too deep, losing themselves in too much time, and Eames is not one to gamble when it concerns himself. So there are only – Arthur checks to confirm – seventeen seconds left on his clock, but even so. Eames is early.

Eames takes a deep, steadying breath. Arthur recognizes that reaction. He’s experienced it more than a few times himself.

He crouches down by Eames’ side where he sits in the armchair next to the bed and speaks quietly. “Everything all right?”

“Perfectly,” Eames says. He pushes himself upright, runs a hand through his slightly-mussed hair, and looks down at Arthur. “You said Cobb believes he’s awake. What happens if you make it obvious that his reality is not real?”

“Mal’s tried,” Arthur answers. “He either doesn’t see it or the dream changes to keep her away from him. His subconscious is protecting the fantasy.”

“Ah, well that explains why you haven’t been able to get near him,” Eames replies. Mal stirs on the bed; they both glance at her, and Arthur checks his watch. Seventeen seconds are up.

Mal sits up slowly, gaze falling to her husband’s face. Arthur doesn’t know how to read her expression, but it hurts him to see just the same. Her face changes, just a little, every time they wake up and Cobb doesn’t.

“The reason you can’t get close to him,” Eames continues, reclaiming Arthur’s attention, “is because he has his own little carbon copy version of you trotting around the globe at his side. I’ve never seen you look better in a suit, for the record.”

Arthur shakes his head. “I wear suits all the time.”

“In the office, I’m sure. When I see you, it tends to be in less than ideal circumstances, and you’re often considerably less pristine. Less tailored waistcoats, more bloodstains.” Eames pulls the tape from his wrist, sliding the needle out of his arm. “Your doppelganger is an equally good shot, however.”

Mal frowns. “He killed you, in the dream?”

Eames smiles faintly. “I admit I can’t be certain. He aimed a gun at my head at the same time your lovely counterpart came at me with a knife. All I can say is that one of you succeeded.”

“What does that mean for Dom’s reality?” Mal asks, her hand dropping to her side, automatically finding Cobb’s hand. Arthur doesn’t even know if she’s aware that she’s done it. “Are you locked out now, as Arthur is?”

“Doubtful.” Eames considers that for another moment before saying, “I doubt he has any idea his subconscious took me out of play. There’s no reason for him to know anything that might force him to accept that his reality is false.” He glances sidelong at Arthur, amused. “Arthur and I may not get along all that well at times, but even Cobb might be suspicious of him putting a bullet in my brain.”

“He shouldn’t be,” Arthur says, deadpan. Eames smiles wider.

“So how do we reach him?” Mal says, and the momentary respite is over, the weight of their difficulty crashing back in. Arthur can almost feel the knots in his shoulders gaining a tighter grip.

Eames goes still, his expression thoughtful. Mal’s fingers thread through Cobb’s, holding on tighter. Arthur just waits. This is why he’d called Eames in the first place, after all. They need someone with fresh ideas.

“What keeps us convinced that this is reality?” Eames asks finally, which is not the response Arthur had been expecting.

He answers anyway. “Memories, logic. The part of our brain that recognizes when something is not as it should be in the real world.”

“Ah, but it’s a close thing sometimes, isn’t it?” Eames replies, and his expression twitches in something that’s almost a wink. “You have to be perfectly sure it’s a dream before you put that gun to your head, and even then there’s always the chance you could be wrong.”

Arthur knows. He’s experienced the shiver of adrenaline when he realizes that he’s about to die, the fear that it’s real and uncertainty that he’ll wake up even when he knows that he’s dreaming.

“He has something, in there,” Mal says. “His totem, he calls it. It is what convinces him that his world is real.”

“Which is bollocks, isn’t it?” Eames says bluntly. “We can prove to ourselves that we’re in a dream, change the laws of physics and the world around us, but the trouble with reality is that everything behaves exactly as it should. Just because your mind refuses to change something doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.”

Mal looks down at Cobb’s slack face. “You convince yourself that it is real.”

“So how do we convince him?” Arthur asks. He needs answers, not more questions. He needs to find a way out of this.

“Fantasy or not, Cobb’s world does still obey our rules,” Eames answers. “Theoretically, all we have to do to wake him up is to get him to go to sleep.”

“A job,” Mal says.

It’s not any real surprise that Eames has come to the same conclusion Arthur reached two days ago. There’s a reason they work so well together, professionally speaking.

“We’re going to need a team,” Eames says.

Arthur clears his throat, confesses. “I’ve already picked one.”

Eames’ mouth curls up at the corners. “Somehow, I thought you might’ve.”

“Saito,” Eames repeats, opening the file Arthur hands him to examine the spread of information. “Is he one of yours?”

Arthur shakes his head. “He’s a civilian. Currently the CEO of his own advertising company. He’s done seminars on dream work and the subconscious, the power of suggestion.”

They’re in a storage unit out on the docks, just big enough for a team of five to work in comfortably. Mal had offered the house as their home base, but Eames had declined politely, and privately, Arthur is glad of it. He wants to stay close to Cobb too, but the atmosphere isn’t conducive to clear-headed thinking. Everything, from the pictures on the walls to the brand of beer in the refrigerator, is a constant reminder of what’s at stake, and who it is they’re trying so hard to save.

Arthur can’t function like that. He needs the detachment of four blank walls and a pristine whiteboard where everything has been reduced to numerical values and abbreviations. In a few short hours, they’ll have a full team, and he needs to be thinking about them. Not about Cobb, sleeping his life away alone in his wife’s bed.

“Interesting choice,” Eames allows, setting the glossy surveillance photo of Saito back into the file folder. “You’re thinking of him for the extractor?”

Again, Arthur shakes his head. “Something else. The mark, if we need one, or extra security. A position close to Cobb, where he’ll be in the right place to say all the right things.”

“Pity he has you, or I’d suggest we make him the point man. Cobb won’t believe there’s anyone better out there, unfortunately; I doubt we could convince him to replace you.” Eames glances up at him, looking amused. “We could always shoot you, but he doesn’t need any additional trauma.” He pushes the file away and holds out his hand for the next. “Who do you have in mind for the extractor, then?”

Arthur passes him the file wordlessly. This had been the one difficult decision he’d had to make. Cobb is a CIA extractor at the top of his game; there are very few rivals he doesn’t keep meticulous notes on, which had limited Arthur’s choices to someone Cobb knew, an unknown, or a foreign government agent working for a country with whom they’d never had to be concerned.

He’d selected an up-and-coming CIA agent Cobb wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with or even take note of, as she works in a very different field. Which is to say, not in the field.

“A psychologist,” Eames says thoughtfully. “Specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder. She looks younger than she is, doesn’t she?” He holds up the official ID picture from the CIA file, studying the wide eyes and slight frame. “Cobb’s parenting instincts will have a field day.”

“She’s a doctoral candidate in dream psychology,” Arthur tells him. “If anyone can figure out what’s going on in there, it will be her.”

“Anyone besides you and Mal, you mean,” Eames says, and when Arthur meets his eyes, his gaze is sharp. Too knowing.

Arthur doesn’t say anything.

Eames visibly relents, his tone lightening. “She’s not an extractor,” he points out, shuffling through the contents of the file for the second time. It’s slimmer than the file on Saito: Arthur has access to all of her information, of course, but he won’t risk printing out confidential information on another intelligence agent, even if she isn’t likely to end up in a position where that could be dangerous.

“She’s not,” Arthur agrees. “But what we need is someone who can extract Cobb from his own subconscious. That’s not a typical job for anyone in our line of work.”

Eames ‘hmm’s and spends another moment studying the picture before closing the file and setting it aside on top of the other without further comment. Arthur feels himself relax slightly. It wouldn’t have changed his decision any if Eames had disapproved of his choices, but it’s still reassuring to know that he doesn’t.

“How long before they arrive?” Eames asks, standing up and stretching. Arthur is reminded that he recently got off a twenty-eight hour flight from Lebanon; until now, Eames hasn’t shown any sign of weariness, but the jet lag is clearly setting in. Arthur knows very well how that goes.

“Six hours,” Arthur answers. “They’re both in the country and on their way.”

“Hmm,” Eames says again, looking over at him sidelong. “And how long is that for Cobb?”

“It’s difficult to calculate.” Arthur clears his mind, tallying figures. “The deepest anyone has ever been is two levels down, but that doesn’t mean one day we won’t reach more. Limbo either exists somewhere below that, or it obeys the will of the person trapped there, which could mean that since Cobb thinks he’s in reality, the time difference is closer to what we think of as level one.”

He looks at Eames, who gives him a small, self-deprecating smile and says, “You were always better at the mathematics.”

Arthur favors him with a look which he hopes will convey a reminder that he’s seen Eames clean out high-end casino clientele by counting cards, and he knows better. “The short answer is that I don’t know,” he finishes. “We’re just guessing, based on what Mal has seen when she goes into his dream. It’s only been a few months in there since she first couldn’t wake him, so we ought to have some time.”

“Brilliant,” Eames says, sounding satisfied. “Then, as we’re in a bit of a holding pattern until the rest of the team shows up, I advise we take a few hours and get some rest.”

Arthur starts to protest automatically, but Eames shakes his head.

“If Cobb can spare a few hours,” he says quietly, “so can we.”

Arthur doesn’t have anything to say to that, so he doesn’t. Eames is right, he knows. Arthur hasn’t been at his sharpest, and the more tired he gets, the more mistakes he takes the risk of making. It’s still hard to convince himself that every minute isn’t critical.

Eames doesn’t let him dwell on it for long. “Do you still keep a place around here?” he asks.

Arthur begins to nod; stops and shakes his head. “I’ve been staying with Mal. On the sofa.” It’s been easier for both of them, allowing their discussions to go on late into the night, all of their plans spread across one work space. And neither of them have wanted to be far from Cobb.

“Even better.” Eames holds out a hand. “I’ll stay at your place. Cheaper than a hotel, and with all the comforts of home. If there isn’t a state-of-the-art French press in the kitchen I’ll never mock your predictability again.”

“You don’t like coffee,” Arthur reminds him, because he can’t very well argue about the coffee maker. He digs his keys out of his pocket and tosses them into Eames’ hand before the jingle registers. “Wait…my car key.”

“If you think I’m letting you drive, you’re quite mistaken,” Eames informs him lightly. “When’s the last time you slept?”

Arthur can’t remember. “Mal and I dreamed, yesterday before you arrived,” he says instead. “We tried to reach Cobb again.”

“Not the same thing,” Eames replies. “I’ll drive you back on my way to your place. Need me to pick anything up while I’m there?”

“No,” Arthur says, because he can’t think of anything right now. He can hardly think at all. Now that he’s acknowledged the need to rest, fatigue has hit him like a truck. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Eames says easily, and leads the way to the car.

Arthur sleeps for long enough to complete one REM cycle before he wakes up and returns to the storage unit. He doesn’t have time for two full cycles, and one is enough to keep him going. He’s caught naps here and there; he’s dreamed in limbo. His body has been through worse.

Mal will bring the others when they arrive. Arthur has his own work to do, arranging the empty room into a usable work space. He drags in chairs, tables, power cords with surge protectors. The all-important whiteboard with a full set of dry erase markers. Pencils and sketchpads, modeling materials for whoever ends up acting as architect. A wireless router. A mirror for Eames, if he needs to practice mannerisms for a forgery, and because Arthur’s seen him use it to think, to get lost in his own head outside of dreams. A desk for himself, with the sturdiest chair in the room behind it because he breaks them if he’s not paying enough attention, placed at an angle that lets him see the door and is also completely out of sight of Eames’ mirror.

He catches himself setting up a single reclining lawn chair in the far corner of the room so that Cobb can test their progress, and has to sit down, hard. Just for a second, it feels like he’s too late, like all of this is in vain and reality has already been irrevocably altered.

Then Eames arrives with a familiar stranger in tow, and Arthur pulls himself together.

“I brought coffee,” Eames says, displaying the cardboard tray in his hand. His tone is light enough that Arthur wonders what he saw when he came in.

“You’re a godsend,” Arthur replies, following Eames’ conversational lead as he approaches, meeting Eames and his guest halfway across the room.

“So I’ve been told,” Eames says breezily. “Arthur, this is Saito-san. Saito-san, may I present Arthur.”

Arthur bows just low enough to show proper respect. Saito mirrors him, smiling enough when they straighten to reassure Arthur that he won’t have to be quite so correct in the future. “It is a pleasure,” Saito greets him. “I thank you for the invitation.”

“I thank you for accepting,” Arthur replies. His gaze sweeps the storage unit, finding it not quite so bare as before, before returning to Saito. “May I show you around?”

Saito inclines his head in agreement, so Arthur walks him through the setup, explaining what they do and the traditional way in which they’re accustomed to working. Saito takes it all in with little comment, only interrupting when he has a question or an observation. Eames leaves Arthur’s coffee on his desk with an unerring talent for divining the lay of the land and follows them around, providing his own commentary.

They’ll have to do this all over again once the other new team member arrives, but Arthur finds he doesn’t mind the waste of time. It allows him and Saito to get a sense of each other, to tentatively feel one another out.

Cautiously, he can say that he’s even more confident now in his choice to bring Saito in on this. The man radiates a certain deep calm, one that soothes and sets at ease everyone in his presence without giving the slightest hint of an impression that he can be taken for granted. He’s a force to be reckoned with, even if the demonstrations of that force are far more likely to be quiet and oblique than overt.

If Arthur can’t be in there at Cobb’s side, this is the man he wants in his place.

Mal is the next to show, and with her their psychologist-cum-extractor, Rhiannon Lake. She looks, if possible, even younger in person, with her hair up in a ponytail and glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.

“Miss Lake,” Arthur greets her, holding out his hand. “Thank you for coming.”

Rhiannon gives him a once-over long enough to tell him that she finds him attractive, but she doesn’t follow up on it, for which Arthur is grateful. He doesn’t have the energy to focus on anything besides the job right now.

“I’m glad to help,” she replies, shaking his hand firmly without lingering. “I hope I’ll be able to contribute.”

“You are willing to try,” Mal says, squeezing Rhiannon’s arm gently. “That is enough for our thanks.”

“I have some ideas,” Rhiannon says, “but I’d like to hear what you’ve come up with, first. We didn’t have much time to talk on the phone.”

“Of course,” Arthur answers. He gestures to the half-circle of chairs surrounding the blank whiteboard. “Let me show you around and introduce you to everyone. Then, if everyone is ready, we can get started.”

Eames delivers the first full team briefing, which works for Arthur, as it leaves him free to take notes and organize their ideas as they go. He’s always functioned better as the second-in-command.

Eames appropriates the whiteboard, leaving the first splashes of black across its pristine surface as he begins. “Arthur’s idea, which I think is sound, is to use key words and phrases to get Cobb’s attention, as it were. Approach his subconscious directly, since we’ll all be surrounded by it, and pass along a message. The challenge will be in deciding which message has the best chance of success.”

Mal turns toward them from where she’s been staring at the far wall. “You don’t think I have tried?” she says. “If I cannot reach my own husband, you think a stranger will succeed?”

“No, I don’t,” Eames agrees. “Which is why we’re bypassing any attempt to convince him he’s in a dream. Instead we drop him into another dream, clearly manufactured, which with any luck will trick his brain into waking itself up.”

“How do we make sure he doesn’t simply return to his current state?” Rhiannon asks, looking up from the file brief Arthur has compiled.

“Well, that’s the tricky bit,” Eames admits. “He’ll be very comfortable there, which will make it difficult for us to convince him he needs to continue on. What we’re hoping is that the verbal and visual cues we plant will serve as something of an anti-reality totem, which will propel him further out of limbo if he loses momentum.”

“Mal will handle the visual cues,” Arthur contributes. “There are bound to be fragments of his memories already in there with him, so we can use those after he thinks he’s woken up, to convince him he’s still dreaming.”

“And Saito, along with Mal, will provide the verbal cues,” Eames finishes.

Saito nods once. “You are familiar,” he says, “with the concept of a mantra.”

“Of course.” Rhiannon is the one to answer, a slight frown marring her youthful features. “The idea of using sounds to focus and purify the mind.”

“In essence, yes,” Saito agrees, inclining his head. “Something which is repeated that has great meaning. The key is in repetition. The more familiar the mind becomes with an idea, the more comfortable it is.”

“Spoken like a man in advertising,” Eames puts in.

Saito acknowledges the jab gracefully. “By extension, we can use the liturgical collect. A ritual response which also takes on great meaning in the correct context.”

“The Lord be with you,” Rhiannon murmurs.

Arthur thinks it, but Eames is the one to echo, “And also with you.”

A slight smile touches Saito’s face. “Even so. It is not the words which have power, but the memories and emotions that come with them.”

“Just like in dreams,” Rhiannon says. “The visual stimuli are always secondary to the emotional response they provoke.”

Saito nods again; a teacher praising a favored student. “With the repetition of the words comes the power. The right phrase can provoke a strong memory and change a decision in a matter of moments. If we reinforce the phrases themselves, Mister Cobb will create the meaning for himself.”

“He’ll still sense that it’s coming from an outside source,” Arthur says, testing the truth of the words. “It’s hard to implant a call and response that strong.”

“Not so hard as you might imagine,” Saito says. He’s smiling again. “For instance, sometimes you feel like a nut…”

“…sometimes you don’t.” Arthur says it with Eames and Rhiannon this time, all of them in the same breath. “Very impressive,” Arthur allows. “And you think this is how we reach Cobb?”

“Not only how we reach him, but more importantly, how we break the illusion that his world is in fact reality,” Eames agrees.

“His totem,” Mal says, and Eames nods.

“The problem with convincing one’s self of a dream state is that if the subconscious believes it to be reality, all of the usual rules will apply. Particularly when the subject is also the dreamer and therefore in full control of the physics.” Eames’ mouth twitches. “Weebles may wobble, but they won’t fall down.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow. “How long have you been planning that one?” he asks. Eames just grins at him.

“So he goes into a dream state, wakes up, we use the verbal cues to signal him and he wakes up again, dropping out of limbo,” Rhiannon concludes.

“It’s not going to be simple as all that, but that’s the gist,” Eames confirms. “For this to work, we’ll need the job he thinks he’s taking on to be exceedingly complex. The more layers there are, the more time Saito and Miss Lake will have to communicate the message.”

“A dream within a dream,” Mal murmurs.

“A dream within a dream inside limbo,” Arthur reminds them. “Is that even going to work?”

“Theoretically,” Eames allows. “In our favor, we’ll have Miss Lake and Saito guiding Cobb exactly where we want him, as well as control of numerous other friends and family members.”

“How?” Rhiannon glances around, frowning. “Are there more team members?”

“Not exactly,” Arthur replies. “Eames has a somewhat…unique skill set.”

“It’s a side effect of altering subconscious perception,” Eames explains. “In essence, I can become anyone in a dream by changing how I perceive myself. The subject accepts what my mind projects visually. It’s relatively simple on a very basic level; changing clothes or accessories is something anyone with training in shared dreaming can learn to do. On the grander scale, of course, it is considerably more challenging.”

This is the watered-down version; Arthur has heard it much more in-depth on several occasions, but the specifics aren’t necessary to this job, only the possibilities that forging creates.

“So you can create people from his past? Memories?” Rhiannon asks.

“To a degree, yes, so long as I am familiar with the targets,” Eames replies, with a hint of cautious reservation.

There are more limits on what he can accomplish, of course, based on emotional stability and individual memory. Eames’ forgeries are near-flawless, but that doesn’t matter if the subject remembers someone differently from their genuine physical appearance, or if they have a strong enough emotional reaction that they go into a panic and toss everyone out of the dream. Arthur doesn’t mention that, just waits to see what Rhiannon comes up with.

“Would the call and response be stronger if we created entire memories?” Rhiannon asks, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “If we can manifest a person from his past, why not an entire conversation? Something that carries emotional weight?”

“It won’t work,” Arthur says bluntly. He shakes his head as he speaks; it’s a good enough idea, but they’ll never be able to carry it off. “Individual memory is highly subjective. If you ask five different people to tell you what they saw and heard at a specific time and place, they’ll give you five different answers. We hold onto pieces of events, and then we fill in the gaps for ourselves. It’s why suspects can be incorrectly identified, and why different retellings of events never match up. There are always discrepancies, and those are created within our minds.”

Rhiannon doesn’t seem put off by his dismissal; instead, she appears more thoughtful. “This is a horrible suggestion,” she says slowly, “but what if we used fragments of memory to slowly drive him towards insanity? If we pushed him over the edge, could we achieve a sort of mental reboot when he wakes up?”

“I’m afraid that’s more in your realm of expertise than mine,” Eames answers, and Arthur doesn’t miss the way his eyes had flicked, the same way Arthur’s had, to Mal before returning to Rhiannon. “But remember that he doesn’t merely have one world to hide in down there. Limbo is a vast, endless space filled with whatever we choose. Normally, dreams collapse when the dreamer becomes intensely emotional. With Cobb, we have no idea what might happen.”

“The important thing is that you and Saito stay with him,” Arthur adds. “Whatever roles you take on, you’ll have to be involved on every level of the dream, all the way to the end. Without you, he can choose not to confront whatever’s in his own subconscious that’s keeping him down there, and without Saito, he might not respond to the kicks.”

“So I’m the extractor for our team, but on Cobb’s team, I’ll be something else,” Rhiannon extrapolates.

Eames nods. “Precisely. For expediency’s sake, I would suggest an architect. The world of dream work is very small; it would be unusual for you to present yourself as an established criminal without trustworthy references. Architects, on the other hand, are drawn from outside, from universities and corporations, so they can be unknowns.”

“She’s spent three years studying dream psychology and working in other people’s dreamscapes,” Arthur points out skeptically. “She’ll be the best damn new architect anyone has ever seen, even if she makes mistakes on purpose to disguise her skill level. The training is instinctive, she won’t be able to help herself.”

“She can pick it up exceptionally fast,” Eames replies, shrugging. “With a glowing recommendation from a well-known source.”

Mal looks at him at the same time Arthur does. “You think he will go to my father,” she says.

Eames shrugs again. “There is a set precedent. And it’s what I would do, if I were him, given enough pressure from outside forces. Which we can provide, once we create the job.”

“And do we know what that will be?” Rhiannon asks. “An illegal extraction, like the kind he’s working in his mind?”

Arthur is about to answer when Mal speaks over him. “No.”

Arthur waits, but no one else asks the question, so he has to. He trusts Mal with his life, but they can’t have any secrets from each other, not now. “What, then?”

Mal turns her head to look at him. Her hair is piled up on her head, messy curls escaping, and she hasn’t bothered with makeup. She may not have showered in days. She’s still beautiful.

“Inception,” she says.

“Why?” Eames asks, but Arthur has a different question.

“It’s never been done successfully,” he says. “What makes you think he’ll take a job that’s doomed to failure?”

“He will find a way to do it,” she says, almost distant, and for a moment the hairs stand up on the back of Arthur’s neck. Then she turns to Eames and says, “It is the one thing he cannot refuse to do.”

Arthur wants to argue, wants to demand to know more, all of the secrets he can see hidden behind her eyes. He wants to ask if she’s known things all along that would help, if they’ve been throwing themselves at a brick wall for days because she’s been holding back.

Mal looks at him, and he stays silent.

“So we put him in need of a new architect,” Eames says carefully, as if picking his way over the conversational broken glass Arthur and Mal have littered between them. “And then Rhiannon…”

“No,” Rhiannon interrupts suddenly, and they all turn to look at her. There’s a half-smile on her face when she elaborates, “It’s all in the power of suggestion, right? I’ll be Ariadne. Leading Theseus from the labyrinth.”

“Ariadne, then,” Eames says after a pause. “Let’s all start getting used to that.”

They break for the night sometime after midnight. Arthur had wanted to push on, but he’d been overwhelmed by Eames and Rhiannon – Ariadne – arguing that they all needed to be fresh and as sharp as possible to do this job, and a sedative wasn’t the same as true sleep. They’d finally won him over with the argument that all of them could, at the very least, do with some time to themselves to think through new ideas.

Mal is on the sofa when he returns to the house, sitting in the dark.

“Mal?” he asks warily, circling the sofa so that he can see her face, pale in the shadows.

She has something in her hand, turning it over in her fingers, but he can’t see what it is. “Do you know why the job had to be inception, Arthur?” she asks, not looking up at him.

“No,” he answers. He sits down carefully on the stuffed armchair cattycorner from the sofa, the one that all of them hate but it was a wedding gift from Miles, so Cobb and Mal won’t get rid of it. Arthur doesn’t know why he’s thinking about that right now. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t think he wants to know whatever it is Mal’s about to tell him.

“Do you know it’s possible to break into your own mind?” she asks him, as if it’s a riddle. “You can open the safe and see what’s inside. What others will see. You can’t steal from yourself, but you can see.”

She looks up at him then, and her eyes are bright but dry, the skin beneath them swollen and thin.

“He put something in my mind,” Mal tells him. “When we were together, in limbo. I didn’t know. I didn’t find it until after, when I woke up alone and he was still asleep. When I went back in and looked for him, and found it there instead.”

Arthur’s lips part, but nothing comes out. He doesn’t know what to say.

“He thinks he killed me,” she says, void of inflection. “He could not trust me, and he couldn’t see that it would be all right.”

Arthur licks his lips. They feel too dry for even one word. “What…?”

“He told me my world wasn’t real,” Mal answers, shaking her head. “And he told himself that it was. But you don’t understand. You don’t know why he had to do it.”

Arthur’s throat is tight. His voice is too loud and too quiet all at once. “Why, Mal?”

Her gaze has wandered; she brings it back to him, and Arthur almost wishes she hadn’t. The look in her eyes is so bleak that she doesn’t look like the woman he knows at all.

“He asked me to marry him,” she says, “but I asked him first. I put a picture in his mind, a picture of the two of us, grown old together. I thought it would be romantic. That he would understand, that we would marry and have children and live out that dream.”

“Mal,” Arthur says.

She continues on without acknowledging him. “But it didn’t work. No one knows you better than a lover. I hid it so well that he never realized it wasn’t his idea; that it had come from me. I thought he knew. But he didn’t understand. And he found a way for us to grow old together. A place no one else could reach or tear us apart.”

Limbo. Arthur doesn’t know whether he breathes the word or just thinks it, but neither of them needs to say it out loud.

“Do you understand?” Mal says. “He planted his thought in my mind. But I did it to him first.”

Arthur sits, stone still, for a long time. Then he moves over to the sofa, and Mal folds against him when he touches her, rests against his chest without saying a word.

He holds her for the rest of the night. She doesn’t cry.

“With Cobb as the extractor,” Eames says, writing out their team members on the whiteboard, “we now have a point man, a forger, and an architect.”

“Wait, who’s the point man?” Ariadne asks, glancing around.

“Arthur,” Eames answers. “Or rather, Cobb’s projection of Arthur, which we can’t displace without upsetting his dream world. Don’t make the mistake of treating him the same way as the real Arthur,” he warns her, tapping the dry erase marker against the board. “He’s a part of Cobb’s subconscious, nothing more.”

“And where will Saito be?” Ariadne asks.

“That’s the question,” Arthur agrees. “Our best idea so far has been putting him in as the mark. He’ll have less freedom, but almost constant contact with Cobb once the job starts.”

“That will be too late,” Saito replies, apologetic but firm. “For the verbal cues to take hold, they will need to start on the first level. In his reality.”

“Who else would be on a criminal extraction team?” Ariadne inquires, leaning forward to run down the list on the board. Arthur blinks. It’s not that he ever forgets, precisely, that Cobb thinks he’s living as an exile pulling illegal jobs. It’s just not often at the forefront of his mind. He needs to be more careful and stay on target.

“I was thinking,” Saito says, in that particular tone of his which is both humble and resolved, “of being his employer.”

“It’s unnecessary,” Eames points out. “It’s a role Arthur or I can play from safe anonymity, through phone calls or correspondence. And there would be no way to get you from there into the dreams.”

“I would come with the rest of the team,” Saito says.

“Not possible,” Eames says, shaking his head, making it in a second before Arthur’s own objection. “There are a handful of people in the world who do this work, as you well know, and Cobb would never take an untrained dreamer along on a job. No one would. It’s absolutely unheard of, and bloody dangerous besides.”

“There could be special circumstances,” Saito demurs. “I would have plenty of time to learn while the others prepare for the job. And,” he adds, with a thin little smile, “it would not be a question.”

The way he says it, Arthur can believe it. If they put Saito in a position to make demands, and make the stakes high enough, Cobb might go for it. “We could do it,” he says slowly. “You know Cobb loves bending the rules.”

“He always has,” Mal says, with a sad smile on her face. Seeing that, Arthur wonders how long it will be before they both start using the past tense, talking about Cobb as if he doesn’t exist anymore.

Eames expels a breath loud enough for Arthur to hear the frustration in it, but he just shakes his head. “We’ll have to give him some bloody good bait,” he says instead of objecting further. “If we can’t hook the fish, there’s no point to any of this.”

“He will not walk away from this,” Mal says, and her voice is clear, louder than Arthur has heard her speak since before Cobb fell asleep that last time. “I know how to convince him.”

“How?” Ariadne asks. Arthur stays silent. He can feel Eames watching him, but doesn’t make eye contact.

“Because the reward will be our children,” Mal answers. Her voice is strained on the last word, and Arthur doesn’t know how he couldn’t have thought that she would be missing them, alone in that bedroom with her husband who can do nothing but sleep.

Eames wisely doesn’t say anything, just lightens his tone and moves on. “That makes a full team, then,” he says. “We can rely on the mark to be a product of Cobb’s imagination, since his role is a passive one. After the first level, Cobb’s projection of me ought to take over, which will leave me free to be wherever and whomever I need to be.”

“Who’s really designing the dreams?” Ariadne asks. “Is that part of my job?”

Eames shakes his head. “Arthur would be the wisest choice. He’s the only one who’s worked with both Cobb and I extensively enough to be able to design dreams that look as though they’ve been created from our subconscious minds as well as his own. And he’s been trained for it, which means there won’t be quite as much of a time crunch when it gets down to it.”

Arthur writes a note to himself to that effect. Designing three different dream levels will be a challenge, but Eames is right in that Arthur knows Cobb’s designs almost as well as his own, and he can make a passable imitation of Eames’. Mal could probably do it as well, but her skills have never been based in architecture, and she’ll be busy enough working with Saito and Ariadne on how to breach Cobb’s defenses and bring him back to them.

“Will Arthur and I go into the dream with you?” Mal asks. Arthur’s head snaps up from his Moleskine. He can’t believe Mal, or Eames, or anyone, would consider it a possibility for him to remain uninvolved.

Eames very obviously doesn’t look at him, in spite of Arthur’s eyes boring into the side of his head. “Inadvisable,” he answers Mal. “The two of you are already present as projections, and you in particular would pose a danger if discovered.” He smiles at her, somehow managing to make the declination charming. “I’ve seen you and Cobb work together. We could put you on the other side of a plaza full of people and he’d still go straight to you.”

Arthur still hasn’t recovered enough to make an argument, but Ariadne is ahead of him. “Is it wise to go in without Arthur? You just said he’ll be the architect, and therefore the one with the most intimate knowledge of the layouts.”

“It will be ten times more difficult for a number of reasons, yes, but not impossible,” Eames replies. “We can make do. You’ll need to know the dream layouts as well as he does, to re-create them for Cobb.”

“I’m going in,” Arthur says, cutting off any further discussion. “If anything goes wrong or needs to change, I’m the best bet for getting you out safely. And I can draw fire to buy you time.”

“Both good points,” Eames says, but Arthur knows him well enough by now to know that that wasn’t agreement or surrender. Eames in turn seems to know that Arthur recognizes what he’s up to, because he says, “Let’s take a break for dinner and clear our heads, shall we?” before Arthur can push any farther.

Eames moves slightly away from the rest of the group to put on his coat, and he takes his time about it, so he must already know Arthur isn’t going to let this go. “Eames,” he says, and when Eames turns around, he doesn’t even bother with a pretense that he thinks Arthur is cornering him for anything else.

“There’s no way to get you close enough to Cobb to do any good,” Eames tells him flat-out. “You’ve tried before and you haven’t been able to. There’s no reason to think it will be any different this time. You would be more of a risk than an asset, and if it were anyone else on any other job, you would be saying the exact same thing.”

But it isn’t anyone else, Arthur thinks, and even knowing it’s a losing argument he can’t help trying. “I could go in as another member of the team. Forge a disguise.”

“You’re abysmal at forgery,” Eames tells him, not unkindly. “You couldn’t even hold a mustache when we worked the Kaufmann job.”

“I’m not used to having one,” Arthur defends.

“You’re not used to wearing someone else’s face and body, either, and it’s not as easy as you might imagine.” Eames shifts his weight against the doorframe, crosses his arms. “It takes sixty percent of my concentration on the best of days, which is to say when I’m not attempting to fool a trained extractor who also knows me rather well, and for you it would be more like ninety-five. You don’t have that to spare.”

“I could practice,” Arthur tries, but he’s already given up. Eames is right and they both know it.

“No,” Eames says, calmly enough but without room for argument. “You stay out of sight.”

Arthur’s shoulders draw tight. “I’m not going to spend the entire mission hiding while you take all the risks,” he says, teeth clenched. He’s almost surprised the words have room to escape.

“What’s the definition of a point man, Arthur?” Eames asks.

To assume the first and most exposed position in a combat military formation, Arthur’s brain supplies, instantly and without mercy. The lead soldier advancing through hostile or unsecured territory.

He doesn’t need to say it out loud. Eames claps him on the shoulder as he moves past. “You’re already doing enough,” he says, low-voiced. “Save some work for the rest of us.”

Arthur turns away and crosses to his desk, sitting down and pushing papers around without seeing any of them. He knows Eames is right. It doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

Ariadne approaches him after the others have gone out. He thinks at first she’s inviting him out to dinner, and then possibly that she’s come to give him a hard time for clearly having no intention of leaving the storage unit yet with the rest of them.

He’s wrong on both guesses.

“I’m trying to decide whether or not to fight for you on this,” Ariadne says without preamble. “Are you going to be all right in there, if you go in with us?” There’s nothing coloring her tone that he can tell, only honest inquiry.

“I’m the one you’re worried about?” he asks in turn, instead of answering. He tries to make it a joke, a deflection to put her off of this line of questioning, but Ariadne doesn’t smile.

“Mal’s not going into the dream. You might be. We’re going to be heading straight into limbo, where subconscious manifestations are the worst.” Ariadne leans forward slightly with one hand propped up on his desk, not giving him an out. “So are you going to be all right in there?”

Arthur twists the cap onto his ballpoint pen with a click and gives Ariadne his full and serious attention. “I have my subconscious on a very tight rein,” he assures her.

She does smile at that, a wry twist of her lips. “I’m sure you think you do,” she says neutrally.

“Please don’t analyze me,” Arthur requests.

Ariadne grins. “Can’t help it,” she says. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll pretend I didn’t.”

“I would appreciate that.” He looks down at his desk and the research they still have to do, the details to iron out, and then looks back up at her. He can’t remember lunch now, but he assumes it was a long while ago. “Would you care for some dinner?”

Her smile grows into something real. “I would be charmed,” she replies.

He stands up and leaves the file folders on his desk, taking only his Moleskine. All of the important points are in there, and he doubts they’ll discuss anything in detail that he won’t be able to remember. “In that case,” he says, gesturing for her to go ahead, “let me show you L.A.”

Eames returns to the storage unit at some point after everyone else but Arthur has gone home, dull with exhaustion. Arthur has been drawing mazes, level after level using every trick he knows and hopefully a few that Cobb doesn’t, but it’s not what’s holding his attention. He can’t stop going through the plan, flagging the problems and assigning risk values to everything that has a chance of going wrong.

There are a lot of things that could go wrong.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Eames says, coming over to look at Arthur’s latest design for the third level. It’s meant to be his own dream, which ought to make it easier than the others, but instead he’s drawing dead end after dead end. He’s getting nowhere and he knows it, but he can’t make himself stop.

“Because I have an enormous amount of work to do?” Arthur replies, dry. He ignores Eames’ fingers on his sketchbook, flipping back through endless pages of previous failures.

“Well, that,” Eames agrees. “And I still have your car keys.”

“Oh. Right.” Arthur blinks a few times, feeling as if he’s underwater when he looks up from his work. There are black and white lines scrolling out behind his eyelids. “I’ll just stay here tonight.”

“Not an option,” Eames says apologetically. “I need you functional tomorrow, I’m afraid. Besides, I want you to take a trip with me.”

Arthur looks briefly at the fruitless pencil drawings, the notes that have ceased making sense. “All right,” he says, almost surprised with himself for not putting up more of a fuss. Eames just claps him on the back with an approving noise and heads for the door.

It’s not that Arthur isn’t paying attention to where they’re going, precisely, but he doesn’t recognize the part of town they’re in, and his concentration is focused elsewhere, still sorting through loops and cul-de-sacs. When they pull into a parking lot, he looks up and reads the faded sign announcing their destination as a martial arts studio. Then he raises an eyebrow at Eames.

“I need a sparring partner,” Eames says blandly, getting out of the car. “And Mal is far too vicious for me.”

Arthur snorts. “I don’t have anything to wear,” he points out, reluctantly following Eames and climbing out only because Eames is ignoring him and has just shut the other car door.

Eames shuts the trunk and tosses a duffel bag in his direction. It smacks into his chest and Arthur catches it automatically, unzipping the main pouch to find a bundle of workout clothing, with a pair of his own track pants on the top.

“There are advantages to living in your apartment,” Eames tells him cheerfully. “Although you shouldn’t keep your spare firearm in your underwear drawer; it might cause people to have all sorts of inappropriate thoughts.”

Arthur rifles through the bag. The track pants are his; the pale pink Hello Kitty t-shirt most definitely is not. “I take it you couldn’t find the shirt drawer?” he drawls, holding up the garment in question.

“Your clothing storage system could use some refining,” Eames replies easily. “Come on. You could use a little loosening up.”

Arthur stills. “I’m not using you as a punching bag, Eames,” he says seriously.

Eames raises an eyebrow. “Who said I would let you?” he counters, and heads through the gravel lot to the studio door.

Arthur drags his heels, stalling, but Eames is still at the door when he arrives. When Arthur sees why, he groans. “Please don’t tell me we’re breaking in.”

“It’s not as if we’re stealing anything,” Eames reasons. “Ah.” The lockpicks are withdrawn and secreted neatly away, and Eames pushes the door open to usher Arthur inside.

Arthur finds the lights, then thinks better of that and leaves the lobby area dark, closing the door to the studio itself before he flips the switch. “I try to avoid members of my teams going to jail for stupid reasons,” he says, dropping the duffel bag in the corner.

He strips down and changes into the workout clothes, pulling on the ghastly t-shirt because it’s the only suitable thing in the bag – of course it is – and Arthur hadn’t been dressed for this when he’d left the Cobbs’ house this morning.

When he turns around, Eames is stretching and smirking at him. “It looks good on you,” he says.

“You’re going to feel so stupid when I put you on your ass while wearing this,” Arthur informs him, raising his arms over his head and sinking into his own series of stretches.

He thinks about dragging it out, but Eames is far too clever to let him get away with that, and now that they’re here, walking through a few simple katas doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Arthur hasn’t sparred in weeks, and his muscles are knotted up from the tension of the past few days. It can’t hurt to let himself work out a little of his frustration, as long as he makes sure he doesn’t direct it at Eames.

“Come on then,” Eames says finally, walking to the center of the mats. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Arthur takes a deep breath, centers himself, and steps into a standard combative drill, the movements flowing with the ease of muscle memory even though it’s been years since he was in basic training. Eames blocks him effortlessly, also using standard countermoves, until at the very end he twists instead of retreating and Arthur finds himself being flipped onto the mat.

“Oh come now,” Eames challenges. “Use a little imagination.”

Arthur rolls back and flips up onto his feet, studying Eames’ balance and center of gravity. Then he starts another standard combative, and halfway through he takes advantage of the opening provided by Eames’ arm raised to block his punch, and lands a solid kick in the center of Eames’ stomach.

It’s not nearly enough to take Eames down or even do more than set him back a step, but Eames grins at him. “Better,” he says, and this time he comes at Arthur first.

They’re well-matched, enough that it takes all of Arthur’s concentration to stay on his feet. Eames has a weight and mass advantage, but Arthur relies more heavily on the martial arts that utilize speed and flexibility over solid muscle, so once he stops trying to stick to drills, they’re on even footing.

He’d forgotten the sense of absolute calm that comes with sparring like this, the way his mind quiets until nothing exists beyond the two of them and the mats. The last few times he’d fought, it had been in the agency gym with one of the trainers, and this isn’t nearly the same thing. Eames isn’t merely allowing Arthur to run through his practice moves and giving him a good workout. He’s fighting back.

After the first ten minutes or so they stop being careful with each other. Eames comes on aggressively enough that Arthur has to put his full weight into everything he does, and before long neither of them are pulling any punches. They’re not fighting full out as if this were a combat situation, but they are hitting with enough force to put each other down hard when they connect.

Arthur’s lost track of time when a beep from the corner signals Eames’ alarm going off, alerting him to the fact that it’s been an hour and a half since they started. Eames takes three steps back, out of Arthur’s immediate striking range, and holds up his hands. “Enough,” he says, and Arthur nods, letting his body relax and uncoil. His muscles have the kind of well-used feeling that means he’s going to be sore in a good way tomorrow.

“Thank you,” he says as they slip out the door into the night, and Eames stops, looking surprised and amused.

“You’re welcome,” he answers. And then, magnanimously, “You can keep the shirt.”

Arthur punches him one more time for that, but gently, because his hand hurts and he’s quite certain he’s put bruises on every part of Eames there is to bruise. He knows because he feels the same way.

Eames drops him off at the Cobbs’ house before driving back to Arthur’s apartment alone, and Arthur lets himself in through the front door into still silence. The door to the master bedroom is closed; Arthur thinks Mal is probably still awake, but he won’t disturb her.

Mal’s eyes are constantly rimmed with red now, but Arthur hasn’t seen her cry. Not since that first day.

He turns the shower on hot and leaves his sweaty clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor. The adrenaline from the fight still has him wound up, so he jerks off under the spray while the shower beats a tattoo on the back of his neck and the tiles like the precision firing of a machine gun. He’s perfectly silent so that he won’t risk Mal hearing him, save for the sound of his hand slapping over wet skin, and a grunt and gasp at the end when he comes.

He has every intention of going back to work as soon as he dries off, but he sits down on the sofa and closes his eyes for just a second, and before he knows it he’s fast asleep.

They have a dream run-through scheduled for the morning, which leaves Arthur refreshed, relaxed, and with absolutely nothing useful to do besides draw more labyrinths. He paces for a bit, tidies up the room, fusses with the chairs, and finally returns to the whiteboard.

They’ve made a mess of it, notations scribbled across multiple events and times, chaos in creativity. The other side of it is even worse. Ariadne’s taken to flipping it at the hinges when she needs more room to write something out, but Saito walks around the far side and just invites anyone else in the discussion along with him, so there is text going in both directions. Eames, upon running out of space in the margins, has employed arrows leading around to the other side, where whatever he’s been working on continues in a similarly haphazard fashion. There’s a line of looping cursive up one side that must be Mal’s, but Arthur can’t figure out what it says.

Arthur stands for a moment, hands on his hips, studying the entire picture, and then shakes his head.

Grabbing the eraser, he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.

The plan solidifies in his head as he re-writes it, painstakingly re-creating every single note on the board, regardless of whether he personally understands or considers it relevant. Luckily the most difficult parts to decipher are Saito’s, as he uses his own shorthand, and his handwriting is as neat and clear as Arthur’s own. Eames and Mal both scrawl their observations with the careless ease of people not used to having others read them, but thankfully Arthur knows both of them well enough to interpret once he gets a general idea of what it is they’re saying.

He supposes he should be grateful that even though they have eight or nine languages between them (possibly more; he suspects Eames may be holding out on him), everything on the board is written in English.

Red for level one: Cobb’s reality. Saito creating the idea, offering the job. Miles, or Eames-as-Miles, introducing Ariadne. Eames being called in, because there’s no one else Cobb would call for something that important. All related notes in black bullet points beneath each relevant point. Green for level two: The first dream.

He loses track of time while he’s working, putting all other thoughts out of his head as he transfers and organizes information. His visualization becomes clearer with every stroke of color, and he ends up adding nearly as many new detail notes as he copies over. The beep of his watch pulls him out of it, just as he’s capping the blue marker on the limbo level. He glances over to see the dreamers stirring, slowly rising back to consciousness.

He has the last few bullet points still to write out, so he returns to working and tunes out the murmur of conversation from the others once he’s sure they’re all awake and untroubled. He senses Eames’ approach when they’re still ten feet apart, but then Eames knows better than to sneak up in Arthur’s blind spot even when he’s not carrying a gun.

Eames stands silently while Arthur finishes adding his own notes to the list, looking over his work. When Arthur straightens up and glances over at him, there’s a funny half-smile playing at the corners of Eames’ mouth.

“You’ve color-coded them?” he says.

Arthur doesn’t have time to reply before Ariadne appears to hover at his side, studying the layout. “The times don’t match up,” she points out, a fact Arthur had already taken note of but hadn’t yet remedied. He starts doing the math as she speaks, factoring in a time-release compound instead of a normal sedative. “We’d need a compound that would accelerate higher brain function to a very specific degree, and even then, level two would end up closer to…”

“Don’t touch that,” Arthur says without breaking away from his timetables, as Ariadne’s fingers creep steadily toward smudging his notes.

She hesitates, and then starts to reach again. “But if we multiply consistently by a factor of ten…”

Her hand strays far too close to his calculations, a marker – blue, not black – uncapped and poised above the board.

Arthur pulls the penknife from his inner jacket pocket, flips it open and holds it in reverse grip above the back of Ariadne’s hand, a silent warning. She freezes at once, and slowly retreats.

He’s only half-paying attention, lost to the factors of minutes and seconds, but he still hears Eames laugh. “Ariadne,” he says in an exaggerated tone of polite introduction, “may I present Arthur. I don’t believe you two have met properly.”

Arthur tosses the penknife, catches it in forward saber grip and flips it around to Filipino just to show off. Left-handed. Eames is harder to warn off than Ariadne.

Ariadne takes another slow step back. Arthur finishes his second column of sums and moves on to the third. “Is he always like this?” she whispers, far too loudly for any expectation that he’d actually fail to overhear her.

Eames chuckles. “Hardly,” he says, then continues, “Most of the time he’s much worse.”

Arthur doesn’t lower the penknife even a fraction of an inch, but he does smile, fairly certain they can’t catch him doing it.

Ariadne wisely leaves him to his work, but Eames hangs around for a few minutes more. Arthur is barely aware of him until Eames claps him on the shoulder and says, “It’s good to have you back.”

Arthur eats half of his lunch, as usual, without removing his eyes, writing hand, or attention from his work. Ariadne has treated them all to sushi, but he doesn’t think she’s the reason everyone else has a selection of various rolls while Arthur has a tidy plate of sashimi. There are only two people here who would have reason to know how much Arthur loathes cold seaweed and rice.

He looks for Mal first when that occurs to him, because she’s the most obvious choice, and because he hasn’t checked in on her in a while. The last he’d seen, she had been writing out key phrases with Saito, the two of them murmuring back and forth in low, solemn voices. Arthur had seen her face when Mal had said, “Tell him to take a leap of faith,” and he’d moved further away to give them their privacy.

Arthur trusts Mal to take care of herself, and even Cobb at his most doting has always known better than to act as though Mal needs looking after, but this, right now, is different. Arthur has seen the pieces of memory Mal has added into his designs: curtains blowing, Phillipa and James crouched down with their heads together, shards of broken glass. It’s the feeling that accompanies them, more than the images, which leaves him feeling sick and unsettled whenever he sees them turn up in the dreams.

Mal is the strongest person he knows, but she’s barely holding herself together right now, and Arthur has never felt so impotent in his life.

The storage unit isn’t particularly large, so when he doesn’t see Mal after an initial sweep of the room, Arthur frowns. Now that he thinks about it, he can’t remember seeing her since before Ariadne left to pick up take-out. Saito catches his eye the next time Arthur looks his way, and nods gravely at the door.

Arthur picks up his plate and goes outside.

He finds Mal down on the docks, her legs dangling off the edge of one of the smaller piers. She doesn’t look up when he sits beside her, just keeps staring out over the horizon. “He has always loved the ocean,” she tells him, and Arthur doesn’t ask who she means. “It was why we moved here, when we decided to have children.”

Arthur doesn’t ask why she’s telling him this, or say that he already knows, that he remembers walking along the beach with Cobb back when Mal was pregnant with James, Cobb carrying Phillipa while they discussed agency jobs and dream theory over the sound of the waves crashing against the sand.

“You can’t understand what it is like until you have lost yourself down there,” Mal says without looking at him. Arthur holds himself in check and looks out at the water, waiting for her to say what she needs to say. After a beat, she continues, “Sometimes I wonder if I had to be lost in order for him to find me. If the reason he didn’t wake up is because he was never lost, himself.”

“You both knew you were in limbo,” Arthur says slowly, thoughts turning in his head.

“Yes,” Mal answers simply. “But I didn’t wake up until I had forgotten. Until I remembered what I had lost.”

“He needs to lose himself in order to find himself,” Arthur echoes, and Mal finally looks over at him, holds his eyes.

The first thing Arthur does upon returning to the storage unit is spin the whiteboard around to the opposite side and start writing. There’s not much space, next to the newest set of timetables. He really needs to pick up a second whiteboard.

Saito is the first one to join him, drawn either by his focus or the words Arthur is writing down. He has Eames’ attention not long after that, and the ever-curious Ariadne, drawn out from her psychological profiling by the promise of something of interest.

Arthur finishes writing and steps away to let the others see. “We need to drop Cobb into limbo,” he says.

“Forgive me for stating the obvious,” Eames replies, “but I thought the point of this venture was that he was already there.”

“We need him to recognize it,” Arthur explains. “It doesn’t matter how many dreams we drop him into; if he maintains enough control to keep track of where he believes he is, then we won’t succeed. He’ll just keep returning to the first level.”

“But if his mind acknowledges the fact that he’s in limbo, it could be enough to convince him to leave the dream,” Ariadne says slowly.

“Ariadne said that in order for him to leave, he needs to confront whatever’s holding him down there,” Arthur reminds them. “Whatever that is, chances are it’s going to be in limbo.”

Eames studies him shrewdly. “This was Mal’s idea, wasn’t it?” he asks. Arthur hesitates briefly, then nods.

“The question is,” Saito interjects politely, “how do we convince a man to voluntarily fall into such a place alone?”

“There are two ways to drop into limbo,” Arthur says, underlining words on the whiteboard as he makes each point. “The first is to go in too deep. Inexperienced dreamers don’t know their limits; they push how far they can go. Cobb won’t go for that, he’s been burned once already.”

“And the second?” Ariadne prompts, already looking ahead to the other option.

“The second is to wake the dreamer.” Arthur slashes a line through Eames’ name on the bottom level. “Without a host mind, the dream itself loses stability and falls apart. And without a kick, anyone else inhabiting that dream is trapped, with only their own subconscious to fill in the blanks.”

“Which is bloody dangerous,” Eames points out, but it’s not quite an objection. Arthur thinks Eames has probably taken the same leaps of logic that Arthur has.

“It would be,” he agrees, “except that Saito and Ariadne would already be in limbo. There’s nowhere else for them to go.”

“They could lose each other, though,” Eames points out reasonably. “Or Cobb could find a way to give himself a kick, in which case we’d all be up a bloody creek.”

“Is there another way?” Ariadne asks.

Arthur looks at Eames, who in turn rubs his chin, meditative. “Not easily,” Eames admits. “The only other options would be for either Cobb to go into limbo voluntarily and allow both you and Saito to follow him there, which strains credulity, or for one of you to go and for him to follow you. Which is not only difficult to arrange in theory, but almost impossible to put into practice.”

“So once we’re in the second dream, we would need to give Eames a kick,” Ariadne surmises.

“Which means we need someone to stay on the next level up,” Arthur points out.

“And we need Saito and Ariadne both to stay with Cobb until the end, to ensure that he reaches whatever catharsis he needs to wake up,” Eames finishes. Arthur nods.

“I could take you out of the dream,” Mal’s voice says from behind them, and they all turn in unison to look at her. “It would not be so far that you would lose yourself,” she says, looking at Eames, “if I woke you up from here, into reality.”

Eames considers for a moment, then says, “It’s hardly the most dangerous thing we’re attempting in all of this, I suppose.”

Arthur turns the whiteboard around again, back to the outline of their plan, and writes, LIMBO.

“You’re with me this afternoon,” Eames informs Arthur, leaning over his desk and neatly removing his sketchpad. “If I’m going into Cobb’s head, I need to have some idea of the security I’m up against, and you’re the next best thing.”

“Mal knows Dom’s mind better than anyone,” Arthur tells him.

“Which is why she’s training Ariadne,” Eames replies, “on how to do the extraction. And why you are with me.”

Arthur hesitates. There are more useful things he could be doing, awake, more strategies he can run with Saito. They’re this close, he can feel it.

Eames slaps him on the shoulder. “Come on, then,” he says cheerfully. “I’ve always wanted to know what Central Intelligence Agency sub-security is like.”

They set up chairs in a corner out of the way of the others, and Arthur preps the IVs with the familiarity of long practice. Saito comes over when Arthur nods at him, his hand hovering over the depressor.

“Be careful,” Arthur tells Eames. And then they’re under.

Eames has set up a harmless enough dreamscape. A few buildings, a park, wide streets. There’s little traffic, but Arthur’s mind begins to populate it as soon as he becomes aware, filling in the sidewalks and café tables.

“Not too bad so far,” Eames comments, hands in his pockets. He’s dressed them both appropriately for the weather; khaki pants, light cotton shirts. It’s a mild spring day, with just enough sunshine to counter the light breeze.

They take a stroll through the park, watching a golden retriever leap for a Frisbee, and two children digging in the sand on an empty volleyball court. Arthur’s projections pay Eames absolutely no mind, which doesn’t surprise Arthur at all. Eames’ real talent is in camouflage, blending in and assuming a disguise from his subject’s mind. He wouldn’t be able to do his job if he couldn’t fly under the radar.

The challenge will come once Arthur’s mind recognizes him as an outsider. Eames stops when they reach the opposite side of the park, turns around and looks up at a tall building jutting up toward the sky.

“Now, let’s see what we’re up against, shall we?” he suggests.

The building explodes.

Arthur swears, jerking Eames back with him as he moves for cover, instincts and training both screaming against being caught like this out in the open. The city has taken an abrupt turn toward martial law, with entire units of soldiers moving in to evacuate the civilians – protecting the less-guarded parts of Arthur’s subconscious from interrogation – and secure the area.

Eames picks off four with a handgun before retreating further, falling back into the maze of alleyways he surely installed for this purpose. Arthur takes a second to intercept one of the soldiers before he follows, jabbing an elbow into the man’s windpipe and confiscating his sidearm. He feels better with a gun in his hand.

“Given the right maze, it’s not impossible,” Eames says, panting slightly as they reach the end of the alleyway and turn a corner, ducking behind a dumpster. It’s defensible, at least; Arthur thinks they ought to be able to hold off oncoming projections from here for several hours if they have to, bottlenecked and barricaded.

Eames guides him around the dumpster with a hand warm in the small of his back. Arthur’s entire focus centers on that point of contact for the split-second he has before it disappears again, and when Eames withdraws he feels almost cold.

“Of course, this isn’t what we’re likely to be doing in a dream,” Eames continues, and Arthur looks at him without understanding for a moment before he sees what Eames has in his hand, flipping it open to rifle through the contents.

Arthur’s wallet. Eames picked his pocket.

“Eames, wait,” he begins, but that’s all he has time to do before his projections mobilize against the threat.

Eames takes out the three SWAT troopers at the mouth of the alley before cocking his rifle up and hitting the first sniper taking aim from the roof above them. Arthur appreciates his competence, but Eames hasn’t realized yet that it’s not him they’re gunning for anymore.

Arthur gets the next two foot soldiers, and breaks cover for long enough to kick away the grenade rolling to a stop in front of their dumpster. It blows at the mouth of the alley and takes the next squadron of soldiers with it, showering the two of them with a hail of debris from the brick walls surrounding them on all sides. With the whir of helicopter blades overhead blocking out both sound cues and sunlight, Arthur aims for the second sniper, but Eames is a hair-trigger ahead of him.

The third sniper puts a bullet between Arthur’s eyes.

He wakes completely and all at once, eyes still closed and breathing regular, the training too ingrained for him to give himself away even when it’s not a real hostage situation. Never let them know you’re awake.

He opens his eyes a second later, running through the standard litany of Where am I? How did I get here? to reassure himself of his surroundings.

Eames is still dreaming. It’s his dream; Arthur’s absence won’t cause it to collapse. There’s not much time left on the clock, and the projections should have disappeared when Arthur did, but he doesn’t know if Eames has been wounded in the firefight and he doesn’t want to risk it. If there’s a chance Eames is hurt, Arthur’s waking him up.

He shoves his foot against the chair rung between Eames’ legs and gives them both a kick.

Eames’ hand is moving to his hip before he’s even fully awake, reaching for a gun he doesn’t have as his body hits the floor. He’s been trained the same way Arthur has; his eyes are open and his body is angled toward Arthur and tensed for a fight before another second passes.

Arthur’s smile is small and wry. “Welcome to CIA sub-security,” he says.

Eames catches his breath and his balance before pushing himself smoothly to his feet. “Well, it certainly is effective,” he comments. “You wake up, effectively removing whatever information I’m trying to obtain, while I’m trapped in a stable dream without a kick. I assume, in a field situation, you’d have slit my throat by now.”

“His first,” Arthur corrects, chin jerking forward to indicate Saito, who has remained awake nearby to watch over them. “Then yours.”

“Right,” Eames says, rolling out his shoulders. He settles back into the chair and flashes Arthur a tight, dangerous smile. “Shall we go again?”

Arthur leans back and closes his eyes. “Try not to pick my pocket this time,” he warns.

To his right, he hears Eames chuckle. “Now where would be the fun in that?”

“We have a new set of problems,” Eames tells the group when he finally gives up on dreaming for the afternoon, satisfied with his knowledge of CIA sub-security training.

Their last run had been next to impossible even with Arthur helping; his subconscious had been more wary each time they went under, prepared for the inevitable assault. When Arthur’s secrets had manifested as a convoy of armored vehicles, Eames had finally admitted defeat.

Although not, of course, before giving it his best shot with a grenade launcher and a daredevil motorcycle chase. Arthur had lasted just long enough to be reasonably impressed before being shot through the lung by one of the guards manning the roadblock.

“Pity your projections don’t have your aim,” Eames had said, crouching down beside him, and mercifully finished the job. After that, he’d apparently decided he had enough information to call the team back to the whiteboard.

“If Cobb’s security is anything like Arthur’s, his first line of defense will be to remove himself from the dream if anything goes wrong or suggests the feel of an extraction. And our plan depends on quite a lot going wrong.”

“Can we change the way I question him?” Ariadne asks. “If his subconscious doesn’t recognize us as a threat, it wouldn’t have any reason to turn on him.”

“We’d still need to change things in the dream on the lower levels,” Arthur says. “That’s enough to set off his security. We’ve both been trained to respond to outside manipulation by eliminating the influence.”

“Even if he thinks there’s another architect?” Eames asks him.

Arthur takes a second to think that over. “You could try it,” he hazards. “The problem again is that Cobb is both dreamer and subject. It could go either way.”

“And if he dies in this dream,” Mal says, “he will not wake up.”

“No,” Eames says. “It’s unlikely. Much more possible is that he’d be pulled out of our part of the dream.”

“And we would be lost,” Saito finishes. “Without him as our guide, we would not have an anchor to hold the dream stable.”

“What if we took a different approach?” Eames suggests. “If his subconscious believes he cannot die, would that be enough to disable security?”

Mal’s eyes are dark, and impossible to read when she looks back at Eames. “You mean to make him a god.”

“Not as such, no,” Eames answers thoughtfully. “I was thinking more along the lines of a side effect of the dream or of the sedative compound. Something which would keep him from seeing death as an option.”

“It is certainly possible,” Saito says, “if the story is believable.”

“There’s no known sedative that has that effect,” Arthur points out. “Dying in a dream always means waking up, unless you’re under on multiple levels. It’s the end of the dream. Cobb knows that.”

“Our plan depends on him dropping into limbo,” Ariadne interjects. “Can we do both? If we kill him in the dream and he believes that will take him to limbo, will he acknowledge it?”

“It’s too dangerous,” Arthur answers immediately. “That many levels under, killing someone means we risk losing them to limbo permanently before they can be rescued. The timeline would be too highly accelerated.”

“We wouldn’t need to control the first level,” Eames reminds them. “His own subconscious believes that death there is absolute, and we could protect him there if it turns on him.”

“I could follow him,” Saito says. “One would think I would have the resources.”

“Because he’s not going to be at all suspicious of you turning up to pull him out of a jam somewhere you’re not even supposed to be,” Arthur says, dubious.

Saito smiles, almost. “I can be very convincing.”

Arthur turns it over in his mind, studying the layout of the plan on the whiteboard. “Three levels,” he says finally. “A dream within a dream within a dream.”

Mal cocks her head in his direction, at the exact angle to suggest irony. “Weren’t you the one saying we should not attempt things that have never been done?”

“Why hasn’t it been attempted, though?” Arthur prompts. The sequence of events on the whiteboard rearranges itself in his mind, shifts to allow a third dimension. “Think it through.”

“The dreams would be too unstable,” Mal answers him, and there’s a hint of steel in her voice. He’s been careful not to reference the events that put Cobb in the coma they’re trying to rescue him from, but he knows she hasn’t forgotten or forgiven herself for any of it. “They would fall apart at the slightest disturbance, and you would be trapped.”

“In limbo, where we would already be,” Ariadne adds, clearly trying to understand.

Arthur inclines his head. “Hence the sedative.”

“That’s four…five levels,” Ariadne says. “Is it even possible to go that deep?”

“It doesn’t matter how many levels there are,” Arthur says, before anyone else can answer. “It’s all limbo.”

He doesn’t look at Mal after he says it.

“Right,” Eames says, turning back to examine the whiteboard. “Three levels then. Let’s get to work, shall we?”

They’ve spent five hours hashing out a new plan to account for the extra level when the nagging feeling in the back of Arthur’s mind finally solidifies.

“No,” he says. “It won’t work. The chemist can’t be a projection.”

He stands, taking the dry erase marker from Eames, and makes notes in small, neat print in the open margins.

“The chemist shows Cobb the dreamer’s den, suggesting his own current state. Ideally, he also drops the hint about dreamers wanting and needing to wake up. He creates the compound, which we should control, and tells Cobb about the sedative properties. But the most important thing is that on the second level, the chemist controls the kick.” He underlines the word KICK in the green column and turns to face the group. “If everything doesn’t go according to plan, which it probably won’t, we need the leeway to adjust the timeline. We need the chemist.”

Everyone is silent for a moment, following Arthur’s line of black arrows through levels one and two of the plan.

“He’s right,” Ariadne says.

“So we need a chemist,” Saito says. His fingers are steepled, eyes hooded; a man lost in thought.

Arthur caps the marker, flipping through his own mental rolodex of contacts. “Everyone I know is CIA. They work with us on every assignment, we see them two or three times a week. Cobb will know all of them.”

Mal shakes her head, seemingly having come to the same conclusion herself.

“Black market?” Ariadne suggests.

It’s possible. Arthur hadn’t wanted to cross that line if he could avoid it, but they’re backed into a corner now. If it will save Cobb, Arthur will do it. He knows Mal feels the same way.

As if reading his thoughts, Mal voices hers. “He would only have to descend to the second level,” she says. Arthur follows the line of arrows again, tracing the path.

“You are suggesting that we trust someone unknown and perhaps not trustworthy inside Mr. Cobb’s mind,” Saito points out. He doesn’t sound wholly supportive of the idea. And he’s the one of them who has worked with the broadest range of dream workers; he ought to know.

“If Saito doesn’t think it’s a good idea, then I don’t either,” Arthur says. “But we need a chemist.”

“Not necessarily,” Eames says. He’s taken Arthur’s chair; the two of them seem to be switching off by turns in front of the whiteboard, when they aren’t fighting over the marker. As Arthur turns to look at him, he says, “What we need is someone who can impersonate a chemist.”

“The compound isn’t real,” Mal says, in dawning understanding.

“And let’s face it, how many of us actually know or pay attention to what a chemist is doing when we’re working on a job.” There’s a twinkle in Eames’ eyes now. “They go off and do mysterious things with chemicals in a separate room with beakers and safety glass, give us complicated scientific explanations that make our eyes glaze over, run a few experiments on whatever poor sod volunteers for it, and then they put us under. It’s not even a challenging subterfuge.”

Subterfuge, Arthur thinks, and when he catches Eames’ eyes, they’re twinkling again, like he knows what Arthur’s thinking. Eames, Arthur thinks now, is connected to any number of people who make a living by pretending to be someone or something they’re not.

Mal is apparently thinking along those same lines. “So you could find someone,” Mal presses, sitting forward. “Someone you trust.”

Eames purses his lips and smiles. “I do believe I have just the man.”

Yusuf is a round-faced, cheerful man with a seemingly permanent smile and the thickest Scottish accent Arthur has ever heard.

“Now that will never do,” Eames drawls, after backs have been slapped and introductions made all around. “Can’t you do something a little more Middle Eastern?”

“Would sir prefer a lightly roasted kebab?” Yusuf returns sarcastically, his accent falling halfway between Indian and Disney movie villain. “Made by one of my nine lovely wives? Perhaps I could fix your computer? Hello, this is customer service, Yusuf speaking, how may I help you today?”

Eames laughs out loud, and Arthur throws a sharp look at him. Yusuf just keeps grinning.

“We’ll never get to the actual inception,” Arthur says, crossing his arms uncomfortably. He thinks the caricature is a joke between the two of them, and possibly an old one, but this is serious. They have a job to do. “U.S. customs officials won’t even let him on the plane, sounding like that. We’ll be trapped in airport security for months.”

“I’d almost forgotten how uptight Americans are,” Yusuf comments, eyes bright and intelligent as he looks Arthur over. His accent has smoothed out into something almost imperceptible, a foreign lilt to the consonants that Arthur can’t quite pin down.

“And he’s not even wearing a tie,” Eames agrees. “You should see what he apparently looks like when he’s under the critical eye of his countrymen.”

Arthur starts to bite out a cutting reply, but Yusuf holds up his hands, placating. “I will do my best to stick to the script,” he promises, back to sounding incongruously Scottish for someone ostensibly working out of East Africa. “I assure you, I take this as seriously as you do.”

“There’s not much of a script,” Arthur warns.

Yusuf just winks at him. “Luckily, I’m also exceptional at improvisation.”

They catch Yusuf up on the plan, and between all of them they manage to cobble together a list of the basic essentials any chemist would understand. Ariadne is the most help, having dabbled in her sister-field of psychiatry just enough to have an understanding of pharmaceuticals. Yusuf is a quick study, bright and patient, willing to go along for the ride while the rest of them steer him through crash courses in everything from chemistry to neuroscience to time factoring.

Arthur walks him through the maze that will become his level just once, and is floored when Yusuf recites every detail back to him without a single misstep. When they go in for a practice run, Yusuf takes over walking them through everything, only asking questions a few times about some detail or another, never the layout itself. All of his projections are wearing sunglasses.

“Where did you find him?” Arthur asks Eames later, while Eames gets them set up for their own test run on his level.

“Hmm? Oh, Yusuf?” Eames smiles. “British intelligence.”

Arthur stares. Eames catches his eye and his smile grows. “I thought it was only fair to tell you. He knows who you are, after all.”

Arthur starts swearing. Eames just laughs and drops them in.

Eames has made a habit, every morning, of stopping by Starbucks on their way in to the storage unit. It’s already such an ingrained part of Arthur’s daily routine when he’s working a job that it takes him an almost embarrassingly long time to notice that they keep ending up here, in spite of the fact that Eames has never actually asked Arthur whether or not he’d like to stop.

The revelation comes while they’re waiting for Ariadne’s latte, with Arthur already halfway through the cup of strong, slightly-burnt coffee that Eames somehow knows without asking is essential to starting his morning. Eames hasn’t ordered anything. Eames doesn’t like coffee.

It makes sense, once Arthur thinks about it. He’s been focused on holding Mal together, and he hadn’t been paying attention to what Eames was doing. Or not enough attention, clearly. He knows better than to look away from Eames for too long.

It doesn’t surprise him that Eames knows what to do to keep Arthur from coming unraveled, either. Eames’ job is to read people, to take them apart, figure them out, discover all of the little quirks and patterns that make them tick. Arthur had done his own research thoroughly when Eames had joined one of his teams, back in the day. He wouldn’t have expected Eames to do any less.

His only question is why Eames is doing it at all, and the answer to that is both immediate and obvious.

Eames finally seems to notice that he’s staring and lifts an eyebrow. “Problem?” he asks, with the casual calm that promises he’ll be able to take care of it, whether it’s six men with concealed weapons blocking the exit or the fact that Arthur has accidentally added Sweet’N’Low.

Which, for the record, he would never do.

“No,” Arthur says, shaking his head.

Eames’ eyebrow climbs higher. “Solution?”

Arthur’s lips quirk. “Maybe,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate. Eames gives him shit for being mysterious, Arthur collects Ariadne’s latte from the counter, and they go back to work.

Arthur spends the morning trying to figure out the logistics of layering his own labyrinth over Cobb’s dream world in Mombasa so that it leads him only to Eames or to Saito. The difficulty is that once Cobb wakes up from the dream hosted by Eames-as-Nash, Arthur will effectively lose control of the layout.

It’s funny how ‘design three dreams’ has now multiplied into six. Arthur’s already taking shortcuts, but there’s only so much he can get away with. He hopes Cobb doesn’t suspect the fact that Saito’s taste in art directly mirrors Arthur’s own, because he doesn’t have time to come up with anything else. Maybe they can blame it on their fake architect. Eames-as-Nash certainly produces enough other problems.

“What are you going to do about the projections when Saito gives you up on the roof?” he asks Eames, who seems to have taken it upon himself to coach Ariadne in how to catch Cobb’s eye and gain his trust, and is giving her pointers that Arthur has to tune out if he doesn’t want to be distracted interrupting them with disbelieving snorts.

“Shoot them,” Eames replies casually.

“What if you’re swarmed?” Arthur asks, frowning.

“Yusuf will shoot them,” Eames says patiently, before returning his attention to Ariadne. “Play young and innocent,” he advises. “Use the baby deer eyes. Cobb has always been prone to taking in waifish orphans.”

In his peripheral vision, Arthur can see Eames look meaningfully in his direction. Ariadne’s gaze follows, thoughtful, a second later, as if making the connection.

“Wrong,” Arthur says without looking away from his work. “I was Mal’s waifish orphan.” He makes a mental note and moves onto the next issue. “Do we have a backup plan for getting Cobb into limbo, in case the kick doesn’t knock you out of the dream?”

“I may be able to offer a solution,” Saito’s smooth voice replies, and Arthur looks up to see him standing in front of Arthur’s desk, patient and impeccable as always. Saito inclines his head slightly and says, “I wonder if I might have a word.”

“Of course,” Arthur replies, standing up and ignoring the curious gazes following them as he and Saito step outside. They try not to linger too much outdoors, to draw attention to the fact that this particular storage unit is being used less for storage and more as a meeting place, but they haven’t been strict about it. All of them have reached the point, at various times during the week, of needing to get out of the enclosed space and breathe fresh air, or nicotine-laced smoke.

Mal has been out here the most, staring off at the horizon or the water. Arthur hasn’t said a word.

“I would like to propose something to you,” Saito begins once the door is closed behind them. “An alternative plan.”

Arthur wonders if six mazes is about to become seven, and if so, whether Eames will kick up a fuss about him staying overnight to finish it. “An alternative to which part, exactly?”

“Limbo,” Saito says. “Our plan currently depends on Mr. Cobb’s reality dissolving along with his dream, and finding himself lost until we rescue him.”

“Killing him is the only other way to guarantee he makes the drop, and if we do that, we could lose him down there,” Arthur points out. He admits that it’s not the best plan ever, but they aren’t exactly swimming in viable options.

“Let me ask you a question, which I believe only you are qualified to answer,” Saito offers. “If another member of the team were to be lost on a job, is Mr. Cobb the kind of man who would go into limbo to retrieve them?”

Arthur feels cold suddenly. He wants to say yes, but the Cobb he knew worked for the agency, not as an aspiring career criminal who had lost everything and been outcast from his own family. If it were for Mal, Cobb would do it in a heartbeat. For Arthur, possibly. He can’t be sure, though, and that’s what makes him shake his head. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I wish I did.”

Saito doesn’t look particularly bothered by this answer. “If he were given no choice,” Saito suggests. “If he could not complete the job without this person.”

“You mean the mark,” Arthur starts to say, and then his brain catches up with the plan and the reason Saito is the one asking him this question, out here apart from the rest of them. He inhales. “You mean the employer.”

Saito inclines his head again, gracefully. “We have decided that I need to be with him until the end,” he says in reminder. “Perhaps he also needs to become lost in order to be found.”

To become lost, Arthur’s mind repeats. “You would die on the job.”

“We already know he will have security,” Saito points out. “It could seem to be an accident.”

Arthur shakes his head, hating himself that he’s considering it at the same time. “If you die in limbo after that many dream levels, you could be lost. For months, or years, even. Cobb might never find you.”

“But if he did,” Saito replies, “he would have a reason to come back.”

“And if he doesn’t,” Arthur begins, but Saito holds up a hand.

“Then I put myself into your capable hands,” he says.

“I won’t be in the dream,” Arthur tells him, hearing the words as if someone else has spoken them.

Saito smiles. “So Mr. Eames has said.”

Arthur searches Saito’s expression for any hint that this is something other than what it seems. He doesn’t find any. “Why am I the one you’re asking?” he asks bluntly.

“Because you are the leader of this team,” Saito answers. “And because you are the one who refuses to take risks. But you are also the one who will do anything it takes. And that is where I will find my answer.”

Arthur thinks of Cobb, and Mal, and how many times they’ve already risked themselves looking for a way to bring Cobb back. It’s a slippery slope, and he’s right on the edge of the precipice.

“All right,” he says.

They go back inside, and Arthur sits back down at his desk. He needs another anchor, a beacon they can use to locate Saito if Cobb can’t find him. Something that doesn’t belong in Cobb’s limbo. A remnant from one of Arthur’s designs.

He pulls out his sketchpad and starts working.

Eames wanders by some time later with an apple and one of the organic chemistry textbooks Yusuf has been memorizing with frightening speed. “How’s it coming?” he asks.

Arthur runs a charcoal-stained hand through his hair. There’s no way they’ll be ready by tomorrow morning. “We need another month,” he answers honestly.

Eames rubs the apple against his shirt and tosses it to Arthur. “That’s the spirit.”

In the morning, Arthur heads straight for Eames.

“I’m going in with you,” Arthur says.

Eames visibly rolls out his shoulders before turning around. “You know, it’s funny, I thought we’d had this conversation already.”

“You can’t complete the job without me,” Arthur persists.

“We have the entire plan written out from start to finish, in your handwriting, I might add,” Eames returns. “Nowhere does it say ‘oh bugger, we need another team member here.’”

“No,” Arthur says, with more heat than he’s brought to the conversation thus far. “What this means is that on the third level, you’re going to be protected from Cobb’s subconscious projections by one of Cobb’s subconscious projections, and if we know what his projection of Mal is capable of when it comes to turning on him, what the fuck do you think mine could do?”

“We all agreed it was a necessary risk,” Eames says patiently. “Certainly more necessary than you bringing down projections on your head when we already know Cobb is gunning for you.”

“If I wait until you drop to the fourth level, I can eliminate his projection of me and take its place.” Arthur holds Eames’ eyes, trying to communicate the importance of this point. “His security will already be after you by that point, so I won’t even attract unnecessary attention, and Cobb will never be the wiser. If you’re killed by rogue projections before you even make it to limbo, this entire fucking exercise will have been pointless.”

“Putting you at risk in our place,” Eames returns.

“Saito is going to die in limbo,” Arthur says flatly. “Do you want to talk to me about risk?”

“That doesn’t mean you need to take everything else on yourself,” Eames retorts.

“What’s the definition of a point man, Eames?” Arthur asks quietly.

Eames goes very still. “Goddamn you,” he says softly.

Arthur waits him out. It takes long enough that the silence between them is tense and taut, but finally Eames blows out a breath and nods. “Fine. All right.” He pauses, then says, “I don’t like it,” as if he can’t stand not registering his protest one more time.

“I know,” Arthur says. He knows why, too. For once on this venture, Arthur isn’t the one of them whose judgment is being clouded by emotion.

“The timing will be tricky. That’s if you can get near us to begin with, because you’ll have to drop from the first and second levels on your own, unless you find us after the drop and hook yourself in. Which on level two will be next to impossible, once Yusuf…”

“Eames,” Arthur interrupts, and Eames falls silent. “I know.”

Eames moves abruptly into his personal space, and for a moment Arthur thinks Eames is actually going to kiss him, but instead he presses their foreheads together. “Bloody point men,” Eames breathes, his hand warm and strong wrapped around the back of Arthur’s neck.

“I’ll come back,” Arthur tells him. He can’t tell if that’s the real issue here, but it’s the only one he can solve.

Eames laughs, but it doesn’t sound all that amused. “I know you will,” he replies, stepping back out of Arthur’s space and shoving his hands into his pockets. “Try not to get yourself killed down there.”

Arthur waits without knowing what he’s waiting for, until finally he does and it still hasn’t come. “Is that it?” he asks, surprised into honesty.

Eames arches both eyebrows. “I thought we’d just established that I have agreed to let you have your way and plunge into danger unaided.”

Arthur shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean.”

Eames studies him, and finally his lips curl up at the corners, just a bit. “Ah,” he says. His tone is surprisingly gentle when he says, “I hardly thought this was the best time, did you?”

Arthur thinks of Mal, eyes bloodshot and empty, and Cobb, lost in his own dream world of fantasy and pointless grief. Of how the past week has been mostly a blur, and none of them have been able to afford distractions, least of all him.

“No,” he admits. Then, because he never knows when to stop pushing, he asks, “Why didn’t you say something, before?”

Eames smirks. “Well, until now my interactions with you have been considerably more action-based,” he points out, and Arthur gets a flash of the two of them pinned down on a balcony in Muscat, back-to-back with Eames’ reassuring strength pressed warmly against him as they’d fired off round after round. “Before, as you so uniquely put it, it wasn’t worth the potential hassle. I’d no idea there were this many layers underneath the tactical training and knowledge of high-tech weaponry.”

“Stop, I may swoon,” Arthur says dryly.

Eames doesn’t say anything else, just looks at him with that fond little smile on his face, and that more than anything gives Arthur the courage to ask, “After?”

Eames studies him, and Arthur is patient, letting Eames take all the time he needs. Finally there’s the barest of nods, and Eames’ lips twitching again, and Eames agrees: “After.”

Arthur clears his mind and focuses. They’ve removed the extra furniture from the bedroom, so there’s room for him to lie flat on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling. Eames is by his side, close enough that Arthur could reach out and touch if he needed to.

He doesn’t. He can do that when they wake up. All of them.

“Ready?” Mal asks, her hand on the depressor.

Arthur flexes his fingers. He nods.

They drop into limbo.