Lay Them Down, by Dybji, PG

[bookshop.livejournal.com]

Fandom: INCEPTION
Title: Lay Them Down; Take Them Up
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Length: 10,000
Author on LJ: dybji
Author Website: author's AO3 profile
Why this must be read: I love this fic because it's so surprising, sharp, and atypical. It's so common to write Arthur and Eames as having some sort of fluid and symbiotic mutual understanding, but this fantastic fic series shows you a totally different version of them--one in which they're still drawn to each other, but constantly clashing on each other's edges, and around their complete lack of mutual understanding--or, rather, their total inability to communicate how they understand each other. The first story of the two was written for the prompt, "Five times Eames saw through Arthur, and one time Arthur let him look," but instead of unrelated shippy vignettes, dybji gives us a story that plays out through glances into team dynamics (Nash is the best), and Arthur's relationship with himself. Every time I re-read, I fill in more of its various layers, and I fall in love with them a little more. I love how totally believable it is that Arthur's abrasiveness to Eames happens because of Eames' unwitting ability to see through him so clearly, and how that, in turn, feeds Eames' own insecurity and self-consciousness. It's just all 100% so believable to me, and it works so well because through it all, they still can't stop liking each other, wanting to be around and protect one another. Ship of my heart, oh my god.

Eames, apparently, didn't do well with being beaten.

"And what if our beloved subject here throws a curveball and doesn't fall for such a cookie-cutter extraction?"

"He hasn't been trained against extraction. There's no reason to try a riskier approach," said Arthur.

"What if he's ever even once heard of extraction, hm," said Eames. "I don't suppose you've ever been up against a subconscious that suspects something it can't quite put its finger on, but —"

"A militarized subconscious attacks extractors as if with bug spray," Arthur said. "An unmilitarized subconscious occasionally might feel as if we're an itch it ought to scratch. I trust you can handle the latter."

"And a subconscious that suspects something but is untrained," said Eames, "has a nasty tendency to instinctively slap at itself, like an arm that somehow knows this itch on its arm is a spider or an ant. It's an awfully nasty curveball to hope you'll miss."

"We'll use the mazes," Cobb said.

"Mazes."

"Arthur's been working on developing a system of delaying subconscious response by designing dreams to work as labyrinths," Cobb said, turning to the paperboard. "It delays any subconscious assaults while allowing us to take direct paths to our destinations. Well. 'Direct.'"

"Refute that plan, Mr. Eames," suggested Arthur, leaning back and smiling.

He got to feel that arch once more before that mission closed – when Eames lost control of his hang glider and would have tumbled had Arthur not tipped him back up with his glider's wing.

"A few more hours' practice wouldn't have hurt after all, then, Mr. Eames, I suppose," he said, feeling like a child at Christmas.

"You have a bit of a competence complex, don't you, dear," said Eames. "Careful with that."

And then he improvised a slipstream air current, an unecessarily elegent virtuoso forgery, and before Arthur could try to fight back against it and regain control of his glider, Eames reached out and arm and steadied it for him. And didn't move it, preventing Arthur from coasting out of it and back onto the track.

"Don't fight it, it's a shortcut," he said. "Those are my specialty."

It was this, this would-be mysterious stranger business, the misfiring charm. He was too fundamentally charismatic to be contemptible; he was too uncomfortably familiar, too awkwardly intimate, to be agreeable. What Arthur was left with was someone he basically liked well enough, and whose company he never enjoyed.

"So you have an allergy to perspicacity?" suggested Nash.

"I work in dreamshare. The last thing I have is an allergy to perspicacity."

"Look, he does it with everyone. What, you're too damn special for anyone to read you? Seriously, Arthur. Here, it's not rocket science. Your favorite subject in school was probably – "

Arthur stood up, the front legs of his chair hitting the warehouse floor with a sharp, resonant crack. "Don't you start with that, too," he said, and left.

Lay Them Down; Take Them Up