Work Text:
Eames isn't expecting a queue for the PASIV at half three. He expects someone to be in the warehouse, isn't entirely sure that Yusuf ever leaves, but is dismayed to find half the team under in the middle of the fucking night. He closes the heavy door behind him and sags against it, feeling his last chance for actual sleep slip away as the PASIV whirs and wheezes for Arthur and Ariadne and Saito.
Thirty feet beyond them a lab space is delineated by the glow of a half dozen swing lamps. Eames watches Yusuf swirl a few centimeters of milky fluid in an Erlenmeyer flask, counting in tune to a Kiswahili pop song currently saturating Mombasa's airwaves. Yusuf reaches thelathini on a sustained trill and raises the flask to eye level to peer at the contents. Eames hasn't a clue whether it's a newly-tweaked formula or just cream for Yusuf's potent coffee.
“If you've come to watch me tip Arthur over you’ll have to wait,” Yusuf pushes the sleeve of his kurta away from his watch and glances up at Eames, “seventeen minutes.”
"Came to sleep," says Eames. "But watching you slap our teammates about is always entertaining.” He reaches for the back of the closest stool, swivels it a little. It's a posh ergonomic number sporting adjustable dials and levers at every joint.
"Why do you have three of these things when we're going under on those garden loungers?"
"I ask for equipment and it appears. I ask for a stool and three appear." Yusuf cocks his head. "Perhaps Saito is secretly a Djinn?"
It's as plausible as half of Eames' theories.
"I'd be careful with your next request then," he says.
"Ah, but I grant wishes too." Yusuf gestures to his apparatus, his beakers, his abundant seating. “You wish for sleep? I shall provide it.”
“It’s just jet-lag. Sydney to Paris is bollocks.”
It isn't just jet-lag.
It's jet-lag coupled with the vexatious certainty that he is overlooking something.
He spent a couple of days this afternoon crafting his forgery of Browning. Christ, what a manipulative shit. Eames isn't sure if it is truly more difficult to forge someone for whom he has little empathy or if his mind simply builds barriers from his own distaste. Beyond pride in his art there is no pleasure to be found in being that officious prick.
Back in his own skin Eames is chafed by a metaphorical pea under his mattress. It happens sometimes — dreaming jostles a thought loose or a memory rises like so much flotsam. He knows a few minutes alone in dream-space would likely sort it out; soothe his mind at least. But with that plan scuppered his stamina flags. Trying to kip here seems so much simpler than heaving himself back to his bed. He hefts one end of a recliner and drags it toward the lab. The screech of metal on concrete echoes off the high ceilings.
“What’s up with that?” He nods to the cluster of sleepers.
“Issues with a bridge on the first level and looped corridors on the second," says Yusuf.
“That explains Ariadne and Arthur but why is Saito down there with them?” he asks. There is, in fact, coffee perking away in a glass contraption half a meter from a jar with a bright green poison warning. Eames resolves to avoid ingesting anything Yusuf brews, even if he does regularly inject Yusuf's compounds into his veins.
“He likes going under," Yusuf shrugs. "Ariadne thinks he’s honing his business strategies. Arthur is worried that he’s addicted to dreaming."
“And what do you think? Is he devising a hostile takeover of dream-share?” Eames asks.
Yusuf squints at the sleeping trio, “I think billionaires are outside my field of study.” He decants the solution into a series of vials and the fruit-grass tang of esters temporarily displaces the lingering ink and machine oil scent of the old press shop.
Not cream, then, Eames hopes as he more or less falls onto the lounger. Christ. He isn't moving for a month.
Everything about this job is exhausting. And ridiculous.
Cobb and Arthur, while not without their charms and challenges, are reliable, predictable. But Saito is all surface, a highly-polished cypher. Is Saito’s interest in dreaming, however avid, enough to explain all this mucking about in the trenches? Eames needs to see what Arthur has unearthed on their most hands-on of clients. Arthur will have a file. Arthur always has a file.
Arthur loses years when he dreams; scrunches his brow in a childlike show of concentration that Eames finds more endearing than is reasonable. His right shoulder cants away from Saito, shifting his torso toward Ariadne. However slight and unconscious the posture it telegraphs some level of trust: whatever Arthur's learned about Saito it hasn't alarmed him.
Ariadne is less of an enigma. Architects all piss their pants when they get a chance to cheat physics and gravity. She's catching on quickly, thank fuck, her designs complex without being unnecessarily complicated. And she is asking the right questions. Eames likes working with people who ask good questions. They tend to root out sloppy assumptions and faulty logic.
The clink of a glassware draws his attention back to the lab.
Yusuf.
Eames has sourced compounds from Yusuf a half-dozen times but that dream den was a surprise. One that doesn't add up. He tracks activity in his adopted city, of course. Such a potentially lucrative operation should have come to his attention, even without his connection to shared dreaming.
He gazes past Yusuf and recalls a dozen still figures tethered to a refurbished PASIV; the dim coolness of a Mombasa cellar. That room is a riddle — despite Yusuf’s offer of a soporific it doesn't fit. Neither do the men, anonymous and without any displays of wealth. They can't be customers. And a dozen doses of Somnacin each day is more than even a chemist can offer without the expectation of a return.
“Is it research, then? Clinical trials of some sort, your lotus-eaters?” he asks.
Yusuf’s pause is his only outward reaction to the abruptness of the question. “Indirectly, yes. But it’s a secondary outcome.”
Eames waits. Let a silence stretch long enough and most people will rush to fill it.
Yusuf, however, doesn't seem bothered.
“They’re not customers," Eames says when Yusuf fails to continue.
“They are patients.”
While he chews on that Eames watches Yusuf move to the PASIV, bend to check a reading. Closing his eyes, Eames lets the rhythm of the device here carry him back. He had been distracted: focused on Cobb and Cobol and a Japanese businessman asking for inception. What had been said? What did he miss?
“‘They come," Eames recites along with a voice from that memory. "To be woken up.’”
“Yes," says Yusuf without looking up.
“You’re not treating an illness,” he says, following the string. “You're treating their symptoms.”
"I'm granting them control," Yusuf stands. "Relief from pain without losing lucidity. Time to prepare for death."
Terminal patients, pain management — It's a dream hospice. Simple, but staggering in it's implications.
"Palliative care," Eames muses as the puzzle piece slots into place, the itch recedes."A completely new use for the compounds.”
Yusuf nods, “Speaking of which, care to knock Arthur on his arse, for science?"
Eames does, yes. And he means to say so.
But knot unravelled, he slides into sleep.