Red Oni, Blue Oni 4
Dec. 21st, 2010 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabi_essentiallyWarning for this chapter: Mentions of underage sex.
Arthur ran. He didn't know if he was running to something or away from it, only that he was running. Head down, shoulders pulled forward, legs sprinting as fast as he could. His surroundings blurred by and he thought he was missing something. Some element that he always had with him, some constant reminder, that was now gone. He felt insane, afraid, and strangely exultant.
He slowed down to round a corner and saw the outside of a building made of dark wood. A sign hung above the door. He couldn't read the words on it, at first. He could see the letters, and they filled him with dread, even though at first they didn't make sense. He took a second to search for the meaning in them, to make them fit.
Let Me Go, the sign read. And beneath it, in neon: Funeral Parlor.
Arthur tucked his hands into the pockets of the torn jacket he was now wearing. Scuffed his shoes on the concrete walkway, self-conscious about wearing plain clothes, just old jeans and a plain shirt under a ragged jacket. But he had to go in. He had to be there.
The voice singing from inside was drawing him in. A lone female voice, young, shaky, off-key. Amazing Grace.
Arthur ducked his head, hands still jammed into his pockets, and went up the stairs. It was necessary to see this. Unavoidable.
It played out just as he remembered, with everyone turning to look at him. The young girl ("Sister Of The Deceased" declared a neon sign above her head,) fumbled on the second verse of Amazing Grace before finding the words again. She looked at him as she sang, her eyes accusing.
"I rot as crows peck out my eyes
in waters still and grey
I once was was dead, but now I rise
and on your dreams I prey...
"No," Arthur said, annoyed at this intrusion into reality. "Those are the wrong words."
The little girl stopped singing. The congregation kept staring at him - family and friends in mourning. He didn't belong here.
"You don't get to tell me how to sing," the girl said, pointing her finger. "You didn't even try to save my sister."
"I did try."
"You didn't," she said. "You're Arthur now. Arthur wasn't even here for this. Just some stupid kid, that's all she got."
"Yet, unfortunately," said another voice, this one from behind him, "even Arthur doesn't save everyone." Her accent was unmistakable.
Arthur turned and saw Mal sitting in one of the pews, a dark veil obscuring her features. He couldn't see her face, which was just as well, because he knew what it would look like. Dom sat beside her, his face blank, his eyes refusing to meet Arthur's.
"Dom, tell her that's not true," Arthur said. "Tell her I would have done anything."
Dom stood up and walked over to him. Arthur wanted to turn away from his empty eyes, such a dull blue in the low parlor light. But he wasn't any good at turning away. Someone had told him that once.
Dom cupped the back of his neck and kissed him on the mouth, cold and listless. "Would I do that to my own brother?" he asked.
It didn't occur to Arthur to pull away. Dom was making a point. It was one that Arthur didn't agree with, though. "You're not my brother," he said. "You're more like my father."
"You don't even know who your father was," Dom said. "You just chose me to fill in the place he left. Maybe he was nothing like me."
"Why did you kiss me?" Arthur asked.
"Because you made me think of Mal before she jumped."
"Oh," Arthur said.
"But you're not," Dom said, and then pushed him, hard enough to send him reeling backwards.
Arthur fell in slow motion. Behind him, the coffin lid opened; he heard it creak. On his way down, he turned to face it and saw that it was empty. Thankfully, blissfully empty. Falling would end this. Would end everything. And it was so easy.
A hand grabbed the back of his coat at the collar. Arthur stopped falling, suspended with his arms out to his sides. He hovered over the coffin. It was now filled with dirty water. The joy he felt at hovering over it, just on the edge, filled him with an alien shame. Why would he want to hover in safety like this, here? At a funeral? So close to the coffin himself? Why did it feel so good? And why did it feel so good to be stopped, and held back like this? He questioned himself as he stared into the water and satin.
"Be careful, lambie-lamb," Eames said behind him. "If you go in there, it'll take me forever to get you out."
** ** ** **
Eames followed the trail of blood, which soon ran dry. He was never close enough to catch Arthur. Just close enough to miss him turning corners, disappearing behind walls, and behind shifting scenes. A football field (the American kind, he noted,) a school, a street, a pub, a carnival, a movie theater, a prison.
And Arthur, always a few steps ahead of him, shifting. First naked, then in a suit and jacket, then in jeans and an old coat.
Arthur kept running. Eames walked behind, because Arthur wasn't as fast as he thought. He acted like he was running, but Eames saw clearly that it was as if he were going through water. He struggled for speed, but never gained any.
Eventually he slowed to a stop, and Eames caught up. Arthur went into a place called "Let Me Go Funeral Parlor." Eames watched him push open the double-doors (his posture was terrible, and defensive, so unlike the Arthur that he knew, who stood straight-backed and even-shouldered.) The sound of a young girl singing floated out from the doors. The melody was instantly recognizable, but Eames couldn't make out the words.
He went to the window and looked through the stained glass.
Arthur appeared distorted through the blues and greens of the glass. The people attending the funeral all glared at him. Eames couldn't see their expressions, but he could feel their intent. He felt a terrible, consuming guilt from this place. A burden, like a physical weight.
He saw the girl stop singing and point to Arthur, saw Mal, just a shadow under a veil, and Dom – a shadow without a veil. Dom rose, walked to Arthur, and kissed him. Eames's hand tightened on the sill. He wanted to break the window. Then Dom pushed Arthur backwards, toward the coffin.
Arthur spun, arms out, as if to catch his balance and stop himself from falling in.
He needn't have.
Eames saw himself appear behind Arthur and catch him by the collar.
Is that how Arthur sees me? he wondered. Because the Eames that he was looking at was beautiful and clear, radiant in the candlelight.
He needed a closer look at Arthur's fantasy of him, so he went around the front and unobtrusively pushed the doors open. It was easy to sneak in when Arthur already thought he was here.
"You stopped me from falling," Arthur said to the other Eames, the angelic looking one.
"Yes, of course I did, darling," said this other Eames. His smile was serene, sweet, and full of love. He was clean-shaven, and the real Eames ran his hand over his own face, feeling a day's worth of stubble. Arthur liked him shaven. He would keep that in mind.
"What if I wanted to fall?" Arthur asked.
"I would not let you, duckie. Who else would be my pet? You mustn't go yet, dearest. Our business here is not finished."
Does he think I talk like that? Eames wondered. Maybe I do? Or does he want me to? And then he realized that of course, this was Arthur's subconscious version of him. He was watching an archetype of himself.
Lucidity flooded him. The dream, the experiment, everything they were trying to accomplish came back to him. The funeral parlor warped. Arthur frowned at the slight ripple in the dream, but he was still under. He was still unaware. Eames held his breath and carefully, silently watched Arthur's projection of him.
The Eames projection pulled Arthur away from the coffin, put his arms around him, pet his hair like a dog, kissed his face. Arthur allowed all of this the way he never would in real life. But of course, this was how it went in the deepest dreams. We are who we are not, Eames thought.
Arthur's projection of Dom returned and said, "Eames, you know better than that. Arthur doesn't really have any feelings. He's more or less empty inside, but he is good at doing what he's told. He's adequate, anyway."
"And not always," Mal said from behind her veil.
"And," added the young girl who had been singing at the funeral, "not when it counts. When it matters the most, he falls short. Always has."
Eames felt his gut twist at those words – surely that wasn't how Arthur saw himself, but maybe it was how he thought others saw him.
The projection of Eames suddenly shoved Arthur away, causing him to stumble backwards.
"It's quite true that you fail when the most is at stake, I suppose, my pigeon," the projection said. "You did almost get us killed."
"That wasn't even my fault," Arthur said, his eyes wide, betrayed. At once, he was dressed in a three-piece suit: midnight-black and buttoned to his neck and wrists. "I'm not some kind of ninja, I'm just..."
"Just what, poppet?" the projection Eames asked.
The real Eames felt such horror at this abject treatment of Arthur, he was about to call it quits. He tried to push forward, but Arthur's projections blocked his way.
"Just a man?" the projection said. And then laughed at him. "Or just a boy?"
"Fuck you," Arthur snarled.
And while the real Eames wanted to cheer for him for saying that, the projection of Eames slapped Arthur, open-handed, so hard that it almost knocked him over. The real Eames shoved projections aside, feeling sick.
Arthur straightened up slowly. His eyes looked glazed, empty. "How could you hit me?" he asked. His voice came out low, almost a whisper, his words slow and sluggish. "How could you? How could you?"
"I didn't!" Eames shouted, fighting his way toward Arthur. The parlor stretched, longer and longer, and the more he ran, shoved, and pushed ahead, the farther away Arthur got. "Arthur, at least hear me! I didn't, I never would, not like that. And you're not my pet or my duckling or my darling or my anything."
"Eames?" Arthur asked, his eyes scanning over the heads of the crowd. "Where are you really?"
"And you're not my sweetheart, or my pigeon, or my lamb or any of that shit!"
The parlor shrank back to its original size. The projection of Eames faded into nothing. The rest of the projections cleared a path for him, finally. He made it to Arthur, gripped him by the wrist. "You're not my anything, Arthur, do you see? I would never think of you as belonging to me. I could never own you. You, the dark god of dreams, whose very shadow is feared in the world of mind-heists. Would you ever stand for me coddling you? Would you ever stand for me striking you? You would shoot me in the face, our history together be damned. That's why, Arthur. It's why I keep returning to your trousers. Sex is our uncomplicated way of saying all of this."
He gripped the back of Arthur's neck and kissed him, hot and charged and hungry. Arthur tasted like incense and candle-smoke.
"I fuck you because I like you," Eames said, all teeth and lips against Arthur's mouth. "I let you fuck me for the same reason."
Arthur seemed to snap out of his confusion then, and he pulled away. The suit was gone, replaced again by the jeans, the plain shirt and torn coat. To Eames's horror, he was a child again, no more than seventeen. Eames took a few hasty steps back, feeling a terrible guilt for having kissed him like this.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know we were going back to this. I didn't mean to... I didn't mean to take that from you."
Arthur's eyes went hooded, defiant under the wire-frame glasses he was suddenly wearing. There was an unpleasant, sneery smirk on his face.
"So what?" he said. "It's not a big deal. I've been fucking since I was fourteen, did you know that? Second week of high school in fact. I let the upper crust girls ride me blind. I let one of them tie me to her fancy bed and bring me gin and tonic until I couldn't think, and I let her fuck me dry every few weeks after school before her parents came home."
A projection of a young girl slid up behind Arthur. She was staggeringly beautiful, under a face-full of makeup. Her eyes were cold and dark as she slid her sharp nails through Arthur's curls. She took his glasses off, threw them to the floor and crushed them under her stiletto heel.
"I let them do it because I liked it. Because it made me hard, on the outside and on the inside."
"Arthur," Eames said, gentle. "You can't intimidate me and you won't drive me away by acting like this. I hustled for years, all right mate, since I was fifteen. I'm the last person who would be ashamed of you. We are who we are."
Arthur stood down, dropping his gaze to his crushed glasses. The girl slunk away.
"What happened after that girl?" Eames asked.
"Nothing," Arthur said.
"You fucking liar," said a voice behind him. It was a girl's voice, shrill and hysterical with tears. "How can you deny me, how dare you fail me and then deny me? You said you would never let me go!"
Arthur turned, his eyes wide, and took a few steps back, almost into Eames.
The coffin made another appearance, only this time it wasn't empty. Wet hands clawed their way out of the coffin, which sloshed water onto the wood floor with every movement. She hiked herself onto her elbows and peered out, a ragged doll of a corpse. Half of her mouth was rotted away, giving her a hideous, grinning look. Filthy blond hair clung to her blue, bloated face.
"Jesus Christ," Eames said, his hands on Arthur's shoulders, "you've got a Mal of your own. You and Cobb and your fucking guilt!"
The corpse of the girl vaulted herself out of the coffin and launched herself at Arthur. She stank of putrid water. Eames grabbed Arthur and pulled him aside.
"She's quick," Arthur said, "run!"
Eames didn't need to be told twice. He ran, Arthur gripping him by the arm and pulling him along beside him, and they crashed through the double-doors, with Arthur's zombie-girl on their heels.
The stairs outside the door no longer went down to the street: now they went up.
"Really, Arthur?" Eames panted.
They charged up the stairs, too slow. The girl snatched at their ankles, snarling. Eames was terrified to turn around and look at how close she was. He felt her breath on the backs of his legs, the skim of her wet fingertips on his calves.
"Fuck, fuck!" Arthur panted, looking over his shoulder.
Eames didn't look back. He just looked up.
And at the top of the stairs, crashing down with the force of an avalanche, was a wave of water so tremendous it made a tsunami look insignificant.
"Oh, fucking no," Eames said. Dismay and panic swept him faster than water could.
It hit, tumbling him over, until he didn't know what was up or down. He lost Arthur in the rushing wave as it swept him away. And he couldn't breathe, couldn't get his bearings and couldn't get any fucking oxygen. This was too much, he couldn't do this anymore.
And that was it, right there: his fear, not Arthur's. Being washed away, consumed to death, swept out never to return, and smothered under the weight. A lonely, alien death.
It was time to end this dream, for he now knew what it was. He remembered it all. He recalled their experiment, and that he had come up with this idea to help Arthur.
With relief, he called all of this lucidity back to his mind. Under the waves, struggling to breathe, Eames tried to wake up.
And then he remembered that he was under sedation.
** ** ** **
NEXT PART
So, the next part will fill the blood-play prompt, but is coming across a lot darker than I thought it would. Possible squick-warning for the next part.
Yeah, happy holidays, hehe. ;D
Arthur ran. He didn't know if he was running to something or away from it, only that he was running. Head down, shoulders pulled forward, legs sprinting as fast as he could. His surroundings blurred by and he thought he was missing something. Some element that he always had with him, some constant reminder, that was now gone. He felt insane, afraid, and strangely exultant.
He slowed down to round a corner and saw the outside of a building made of dark wood. A sign hung above the door. He couldn't read the words on it, at first. He could see the letters, and they filled him with dread, even though at first they didn't make sense. He took a second to search for the meaning in them, to make them fit.
Let Me Go, the sign read. And beneath it, in neon: Funeral Parlor.
Arthur tucked his hands into the pockets of the torn jacket he was now wearing. Scuffed his shoes on the concrete walkway, self-conscious about wearing plain clothes, just old jeans and a plain shirt under a ragged jacket. But he had to go in. He had to be there.
The voice singing from inside was drawing him in. A lone female voice, young, shaky, off-key. Amazing Grace.
Arthur ducked his head, hands still jammed into his pockets, and went up the stairs. It was necessary to see this. Unavoidable.
It played out just as he remembered, with everyone turning to look at him. The young girl ("Sister Of The Deceased" declared a neon sign above her head,) fumbled on the second verse of Amazing Grace before finding the words again. She looked at him as she sang, her eyes accusing.
"I rot as crows peck out my eyes
in waters still and grey
I once was was dead, but now I rise
and on your dreams I prey...
"No," Arthur said, annoyed at this intrusion into reality. "Those are the wrong words."
The little girl stopped singing. The congregation kept staring at him - family and friends in mourning. He didn't belong here.
"You don't get to tell me how to sing," the girl said, pointing her finger. "You didn't even try to save my sister."
"I did try."
"You didn't," she said. "You're Arthur now. Arthur wasn't even here for this. Just some stupid kid, that's all she got."
"Yet, unfortunately," said another voice, this one from behind him, "even Arthur doesn't save everyone." Her accent was unmistakable.
Arthur turned and saw Mal sitting in one of the pews, a dark veil obscuring her features. He couldn't see her face, which was just as well, because he knew what it would look like. Dom sat beside her, his face blank, his eyes refusing to meet Arthur's.
"Dom, tell her that's not true," Arthur said. "Tell her I would have done anything."
Dom stood up and walked over to him. Arthur wanted to turn away from his empty eyes, such a dull blue in the low parlor light. But he wasn't any good at turning away. Someone had told him that once.
Dom cupped the back of his neck and kissed him on the mouth, cold and listless. "Would I do that to my own brother?" he asked.
It didn't occur to Arthur to pull away. Dom was making a point. It was one that Arthur didn't agree with, though. "You're not my brother," he said. "You're more like my father."
"You don't even know who your father was," Dom said. "You just chose me to fill in the place he left. Maybe he was nothing like me."
"Why did you kiss me?" Arthur asked.
"Because you made me think of Mal before she jumped."
"Oh," Arthur said.
"But you're not," Dom said, and then pushed him, hard enough to send him reeling backwards.
Arthur fell in slow motion. Behind him, the coffin lid opened; he heard it creak. On his way down, he turned to face it and saw that it was empty. Thankfully, blissfully empty. Falling would end this. Would end everything. And it was so easy.
A hand grabbed the back of his coat at the collar. Arthur stopped falling, suspended with his arms out to his sides. He hovered over the coffin. It was now filled with dirty water. The joy he felt at hovering over it, just on the edge, filled him with an alien shame. Why would he want to hover in safety like this, here? At a funeral? So close to the coffin himself? Why did it feel so good? And why did it feel so good to be stopped, and held back like this? He questioned himself as he stared into the water and satin.
"Be careful, lambie-lamb," Eames said behind him. "If you go in there, it'll take me forever to get you out."
** ** ** **
Eames followed the trail of blood, which soon ran dry. He was never close enough to catch Arthur. Just close enough to miss him turning corners, disappearing behind walls, and behind shifting scenes. A football field (the American kind, he noted,) a school, a street, a pub, a carnival, a movie theater, a prison.
And Arthur, always a few steps ahead of him, shifting. First naked, then in a suit and jacket, then in jeans and an old coat.
Arthur kept running. Eames walked behind, because Arthur wasn't as fast as he thought. He acted like he was running, but Eames saw clearly that it was as if he were going through water. He struggled for speed, but never gained any.
Eventually he slowed to a stop, and Eames caught up. Arthur went into a place called "Let Me Go Funeral Parlor." Eames watched him push open the double-doors (his posture was terrible, and defensive, so unlike the Arthur that he knew, who stood straight-backed and even-shouldered.) The sound of a young girl singing floated out from the doors. The melody was instantly recognizable, but Eames couldn't make out the words.
He went to the window and looked through the stained glass.
Arthur appeared distorted through the blues and greens of the glass. The people attending the funeral all glared at him. Eames couldn't see their expressions, but he could feel their intent. He felt a terrible, consuming guilt from this place. A burden, like a physical weight.
He saw the girl stop singing and point to Arthur, saw Mal, just a shadow under a veil, and Dom – a shadow without a veil. Dom rose, walked to Arthur, and kissed him. Eames's hand tightened on the sill. He wanted to break the window. Then Dom pushed Arthur backwards, toward the coffin.
Arthur spun, arms out, as if to catch his balance and stop himself from falling in.
He needn't have.
Eames saw himself appear behind Arthur and catch him by the collar.
Is that how Arthur sees me? he wondered. Because the Eames that he was looking at was beautiful and clear, radiant in the candlelight.
He needed a closer look at Arthur's fantasy of him, so he went around the front and unobtrusively pushed the doors open. It was easy to sneak in when Arthur already thought he was here.
"You stopped me from falling," Arthur said to the other Eames, the angelic looking one.
"Yes, of course I did, darling," said this other Eames. His smile was serene, sweet, and full of love. He was clean-shaven, and the real Eames ran his hand over his own face, feeling a day's worth of stubble. Arthur liked him shaven. He would keep that in mind.
"What if I wanted to fall?" Arthur asked.
"I would not let you, duckie. Who else would be my pet? You mustn't go yet, dearest. Our business here is not finished."
Does he think I talk like that? Eames wondered. Maybe I do? Or does he want me to? And then he realized that of course, this was Arthur's subconscious version of him. He was watching an archetype of himself.
Lucidity flooded him. The dream, the experiment, everything they were trying to accomplish came back to him. The funeral parlor warped. Arthur frowned at the slight ripple in the dream, but he was still under. He was still unaware. Eames held his breath and carefully, silently watched Arthur's projection of him.
The Eames projection pulled Arthur away from the coffin, put his arms around him, pet his hair like a dog, kissed his face. Arthur allowed all of this the way he never would in real life. But of course, this was how it went in the deepest dreams. We are who we are not, Eames thought.
Arthur's projection of Dom returned and said, "Eames, you know better than that. Arthur doesn't really have any feelings. He's more or less empty inside, but he is good at doing what he's told. He's adequate, anyway."
"And not always," Mal said from behind her veil.
"And," added the young girl who had been singing at the funeral, "not when it counts. When it matters the most, he falls short. Always has."
Eames felt his gut twist at those words – surely that wasn't how Arthur saw himself, but maybe it was how he thought others saw him.
The projection of Eames suddenly shoved Arthur away, causing him to stumble backwards.
"It's quite true that you fail when the most is at stake, I suppose, my pigeon," the projection said. "You did almost get us killed."
"That wasn't even my fault," Arthur said, his eyes wide, betrayed. At once, he was dressed in a three-piece suit: midnight-black and buttoned to his neck and wrists. "I'm not some kind of ninja, I'm just..."
"Just what, poppet?" the projection Eames asked.
The real Eames felt such horror at this abject treatment of Arthur, he was about to call it quits. He tried to push forward, but Arthur's projections blocked his way.
"Just a man?" the projection said. And then laughed at him. "Or just a boy?"
"Fuck you," Arthur snarled.
And while the real Eames wanted to cheer for him for saying that, the projection of Eames slapped Arthur, open-handed, so hard that it almost knocked him over. The real Eames shoved projections aside, feeling sick.
Arthur straightened up slowly. His eyes looked glazed, empty. "How could you hit me?" he asked. His voice came out low, almost a whisper, his words slow and sluggish. "How could you? How could you?"
"I didn't!" Eames shouted, fighting his way toward Arthur. The parlor stretched, longer and longer, and the more he ran, shoved, and pushed ahead, the farther away Arthur got. "Arthur, at least hear me! I didn't, I never would, not like that. And you're not my pet or my duckling or my darling or my anything."
"Eames?" Arthur asked, his eyes scanning over the heads of the crowd. "Where are you really?"
"And you're not my sweetheart, or my pigeon, or my lamb or any of that shit!"
The parlor shrank back to its original size. The projection of Eames faded into nothing. The rest of the projections cleared a path for him, finally. He made it to Arthur, gripped him by the wrist. "You're not my anything, Arthur, do you see? I would never think of you as belonging to me. I could never own you. You, the dark god of dreams, whose very shadow is feared in the world of mind-heists. Would you ever stand for me coddling you? Would you ever stand for me striking you? You would shoot me in the face, our history together be damned. That's why, Arthur. It's why I keep returning to your trousers. Sex is our uncomplicated way of saying all of this."
He gripped the back of Arthur's neck and kissed him, hot and charged and hungry. Arthur tasted like incense and candle-smoke.
"I fuck you because I like you," Eames said, all teeth and lips against Arthur's mouth. "I let you fuck me for the same reason."
Arthur seemed to snap out of his confusion then, and he pulled away. The suit was gone, replaced again by the jeans, the plain shirt and torn coat. To Eames's horror, he was a child again, no more than seventeen. Eames took a few hasty steps back, feeling a terrible guilt for having kissed him like this.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know we were going back to this. I didn't mean to... I didn't mean to take that from you."
Arthur's eyes went hooded, defiant under the wire-frame glasses he was suddenly wearing. There was an unpleasant, sneery smirk on his face.
"So what?" he said. "It's not a big deal. I've been fucking since I was fourteen, did you know that? Second week of high school in fact. I let the upper crust girls ride me blind. I let one of them tie me to her fancy bed and bring me gin and tonic until I couldn't think, and I let her fuck me dry every few weeks after school before her parents came home."
A projection of a young girl slid up behind Arthur. She was staggeringly beautiful, under a face-full of makeup. Her eyes were cold and dark as she slid her sharp nails through Arthur's curls. She took his glasses off, threw them to the floor and crushed them under her stiletto heel.
"I let them do it because I liked it. Because it made me hard, on the outside and on the inside."
"Arthur," Eames said, gentle. "You can't intimidate me and you won't drive me away by acting like this. I hustled for years, all right mate, since I was fifteen. I'm the last person who would be ashamed of you. We are who we are."
Arthur stood down, dropping his gaze to his crushed glasses. The girl slunk away.
"What happened after that girl?" Eames asked.
"Nothing," Arthur said.
"You fucking liar," said a voice behind him. It was a girl's voice, shrill and hysterical with tears. "How can you deny me, how dare you fail me and then deny me? You said you would never let me go!"
Arthur turned, his eyes wide, and took a few steps back, almost into Eames.
The coffin made another appearance, only this time it wasn't empty. Wet hands clawed their way out of the coffin, which sloshed water onto the wood floor with every movement. She hiked herself onto her elbows and peered out, a ragged doll of a corpse. Half of her mouth was rotted away, giving her a hideous, grinning look. Filthy blond hair clung to her blue, bloated face.
"Jesus Christ," Eames said, his hands on Arthur's shoulders, "you've got a Mal of your own. You and Cobb and your fucking guilt!"
The corpse of the girl vaulted herself out of the coffin and launched herself at Arthur. She stank of putrid water. Eames grabbed Arthur and pulled him aside.
"She's quick," Arthur said, "run!"
Eames didn't need to be told twice. He ran, Arthur gripping him by the arm and pulling him along beside him, and they crashed through the double-doors, with Arthur's zombie-girl on their heels.
The stairs outside the door no longer went down to the street: now they went up.
"Really, Arthur?" Eames panted.
They charged up the stairs, too slow. The girl snatched at their ankles, snarling. Eames was terrified to turn around and look at how close she was. He felt her breath on the backs of his legs, the skim of her wet fingertips on his calves.
"Fuck, fuck!" Arthur panted, looking over his shoulder.
Eames didn't look back. He just looked up.
And at the top of the stairs, crashing down with the force of an avalanche, was a wave of water so tremendous it made a tsunami look insignificant.
"Oh, fucking no," Eames said. Dismay and panic swept him faster than water could.
It hit, tumbling him over, until he didn't know what was up or down. He lost Arthur in the rushing wave as it swept him away. And he couldn't breathe, couldn't get his bearings and couldn't get any fucking oxygen. This was too much, he couldn't do this anymore.
And that was it, right there: his fear, not Arthur's. Being washed away, consumed to death, swept out never to return, and smothered under the weight. A lonely, alien death.
It was time to end this dream, for he now knew what it was. He remembered it all. He recalled their experiment, and that he had come up with this idea to help Arthur.
With relief, he called all of this lucidity back to his mind. Under the waves, struggling to breathe, Eames tried to wake up.
And then he remembered that he was under sedation.
** ** ** **
NEXT PART
So, the next part will fill the blood-play prompt, but is coming across a lot darker than I thought it would. Possible squick-warning for the next part.
Yeah, happy holidays, hehe. ;D
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-21 09:27 pm (UTC)but I like :D
and my heart breaks for arthur >-<
and eames
his confession was so beautiful
I mean he used the word fuck but well
men :D
awesome work :3
no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 10:06 pm (UTC)I think I have more heartbreaking!Arthur in store for the next chapter, actually. A little worried about how that will come across. I hope it works!
Thank you! ^_^
no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-21 09:38 pm (UTC)IS THIS KARA?!!
This is why I love you Tabi, you say it without saying it! This is brilliant.
Poor Arthur. So confused.
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Date: 2010-12-22 10:07 pm (UTC)Thanks!
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Date: 2010-12-21 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 10:08 pm (UTC)Brick is amazing, sometimes I can't even help it that it influences these stories. ^_^
Glad you like it. Thank you!
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Date: 2010-12-23 12:02 pm (UTC)This story is intense so far and I'm loving it!
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Date: 2010-12-23 06:05 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you like it! :D
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Date: 2010-12-22 12:00 am (UTC)and then i read the author note and was like *phew* >o< don't scare a girl like that!
hm...bloodplay prompt...*nervous look at arthur's creepy creepy zombie girl*
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Date: 2010-12-22 10:09 pm (UTC)^_^
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Date: 2010-12-22 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 10:12 pm (UTC)I'm glad you liked this, and that it worked for you on this level! Thanks! ^_^
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Date: 2010-12-22 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 06:59 am (UTC)Hee! Neat...and very ELM STREETish!
Love Pseudo Eames and all his increasingly ludicrous endearments :)
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Date: 2010-12-22 10:14 pm (UTC)Anyway, that's what I had in mind.
Glad you like it! ^_^ Thanks, as always!
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Date: 2010-12-22 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-22 11:23 am (UTC)P.S another stunning chapter!
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Date: 2010-12-22 10:17 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you liked this! Thank you very much! ^_^
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Date: 2010-12-23 12:30 pm (UTC)it's just like watching a thriller unfolding in front of my eyes~~ so vivid and intense! what a wonderful way to start my reading time~~~~ will be waiting eagerly for the coming chapter. please bring the darker side~~
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Date: 2010-12-23 06:06 pm (UTC)I'm posting the next part today; it's pretty dark, so I hope you enjoy it! ^_^