A Flagship Named Desire

So here is something weird. I have had this piece of art on my wall in my office space in every place I've lived for like, fifteen+ years? I got it from someone doing a give away of the prints on tumblr all those years ago but sadly I no longer have the envelope that it was sent in or any of the messages around getting it. They were super nice and sent it to me for free because I asked how much it would be to get one I think, still one of the nicest things someone has just randomly done for me, but I don't know who it was anymore.

@motetus

inception // arthur x eames

the rituals are intricate

We need a forger.

Inception  •  Arthur/Eames  •  Project Somnacin

Dream sharing was first utilized by the military to provide a realistic training method for soldiers, in Project Somnacin.

The army had changed Arthur, as it changed most young men. Eames can still remember Arthur’s boyish smile, how beautifully it lit up his face. The way it always reached his eyes, and how easily his dimples appeared. If Eames was to tell stories of that time, none of their colleagues would believe him. Most people in the industry didn’t meet Arthur until after, when that permanent frown had already materialized. Few had known him before.

They were the guinea pigs. The lab rats. They were exposed to new drugs and trauma barely tested before. There were deaths. Accidents. Suicides.

There’s only so many times you can kill someone, getting blood all over your hands, or watch your comrades die right before your eyes. There’s only so many times you can be tortured, having every bone in your body break, just to wake up, throat still raw from your screaming, and finding your body still intact. There’s only so many times you can hold the barrel of a gun to your temple and pull the trigger, before it starts fucking with your head.

inception // arthur x eames

The Bucharest Job  |  23.04.2005

The attraction didn’t start in Bucharest. No, the attraction began in Warsaw on the Klein job some one and a half years prior, back when Arthur had still been green. But the fucking, that started in the middle of Bucharest.

Arthur blamed Cobb. Mal was out on another job–a favor for a friend; something she couldn’t say no to–and Dom was pissier and lonelier than usual. That, and a longterm bromance with their extractor (steeped in some toxic masculinity, naturally), made it difficult for Arthur to get a word in without being undermined and belittled. He tired of that quickly and took up with the rest of the team. 

Somehow that turned into taking up with Eames specifically. Arthur, feeling angry and undervalued (and maybe a little horny), decided to throw caution to the wind for the first time in awhile. (The difference between his recklessness and, say, fucking Cobb’s, which would come later, was that Arthur at least knew it was a misstep). 

So he fucked Eames, got fucked by Eames. And it was good. Or as good as it could be between two young-twenty-something men who were maybe more invested in getting the most out of the experience for themselves and less so for their partner. The point being: it worked for Arthur. Three blissful weeks on the job when he remembered what it was to see someone, which turned into years of frequent-enough indiscretions in hotel rooms (and, memorably, once at an aquarium). 

During Bucharest, Arthur learned that Eames would wake up at the ass-crack of dawn if it meant that he could enjoy a lazy, full breakfast. (Never in bed, of course, so Arthur spent his fair share of mornings swaddled up in the hotel comforter at the small breakfast table in the room, grunting and staring at his coffee as if the caffeine might visually enter his bloodstream). He learned the story behind each of Eames’ awful (and fucking hot, he shamefully had to admit) tattoos, nearly all fake except for the few stories that were too strange to be fiction. And there were other things too, of course: Eames mumbled incoherently in his sleep; he read before bed every night (unless it’s Arthur who topped, in which case he seemed to pass out straight away without so much as a perfunctory clean-up); he had a habit of leaving Arthur little notes or sketches (the former poorly spelled, the latter small masterpieces in Arthur’s novice eyes), a few of which Arthur tucked away for safekeeping.