This job was hard enough as it was. An extraction team had to be a little bit of everything: smooth-talking con artist, beloved confidant, safe-cracker, pick-pocket, hard-line terrorist, world-class sprinter, and martial-arts expert. You had to be willing to share pieces of your head with everyone around you, to let people crawl around inside your mind, picking over your life to use bits of it to create the dream.
You had to bare your relationships in your projections, open up your emotions to find out the danger, and then try to keep everything under wraps to keep the rest of your team safe. A failed extraction usually didn't cause physical harm (unless you had to run from your employer); no, it could cause madness. A dream injury could linger in the mind for weeks, causing a kind of mental post-traumatic stress disorder. Having to kill someone in a dream was really no better, if the consequences were lighter. It disturbed Arthur sometimes how easy it had been for Cobb to just raise the gun and shoot him between the eyes the last time they had been in Saito's mind. He'd felt phantom pain in his leg for days afterward, and a tingle between his eyes every time he'd looked at Cobb.
And now this. The Inception had succeeded, no thanks to him. It was as complicated a job as they had ever done, and he'd gone and added a whole new and different level of clusterfuck by somehow not noticing that Robert Fisher was defended. Oh no Arthur, he told himself sarcastically, that's completely normal that Fisher would have no training. Normal that the heir to a multi-billion dollar company poised to become a new world superpower wouldn't have covered that front on his personal security. Idiot.
Eames had been rushed, forced to compress weeks of his careful observations into a mere hour's work of forgery, and then spend the rest of his time running around like a commando, courting limbo to keep the job afloat. Yusef should have just been a lookout, and had been forced to become an action hero. Cobb had nearly lost control of his own projections, forced to a painful confrontation at the worst possible time. Ariadne had been dragged down deeper than anyone should have had to go, and had to throw herself off a tower just to keep the dreams intact. And Saito... they'd been lucky Saito was strong, because he died for Arthur's mistake. Died after far too long in agony, and spent decades in limbo for Arthur's carelessness.
Arthur blinked against the light as he came back to consciousness, and absently reached into his pocket for his totem. He didn't roll it, didn't check to see whether he was awake or asleep. It didn't matter. The guilt stayed with him, waking or sleeping. A roll of the die couldn't change that.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Roll of the Die - Inception, Arthur, PG-13
Date: 2011-01-14 01:49 pm (UTC)You had to bare your relationships in your projections, open up your emotions to find out the danger, and then try to keep everything under wraps to keep the rest of your team safe. A failed extraction usually didn't cause physical harm (unless you had to run from your employer); no, it could cause madness. A dream injury could linger in the mind for weeks, causing a kind of mental post-traumatic stress disorder. Having to kill someone in a dream was really no better, if the consequences were lighter. It disturbed Arthur sometimes how easy it had been for Cobb to just raise the gun and shoot him between the eyes the last time they had been in Saito's mind. He'd felt phantom pain in his leg for days afterward, and a tingle between his eyes every time he'd looked at Cobb.
And now this. The Inception had succeeded, no thanks to him. It was as complicated a job as they had ever done, and he'd gone and added a whole new and different level of clusterfuck by somehow not noticing that Robert Fisher was defended. Oh no Arthur, he told himself sarcastically, that's completely normal that Fisher would have no training. Normal that the heir to a multi-billion dollar company poised to become a new world superpower wouldn't have covered that front on his personal security. Idiot.
Eames had been rushed, forced to compress weeks of his careful observations into a mere hour's work of forgery, and then spend the rest of his time running around like a commando, courting limbo to keep the job afloat. Yusef should have just been a lookout, and had been forced to become an action hero. Cobb had nearly lost control of his own projections, forced to a painful confrontation at the worst possible time. Ariadne had been dragged down deeper than anyone should have had to go, and had to throw herself off a tower just to keep the dreams intact. And Saito... they'd been lucky Saito was strong, because he died for Arthur's mistake. Died after far too long in agony, and spent decades in limbo for Arthur's carelessness.
Arthur blinked against the light as he came back to consciousness, and absently reached into his pocket for his totem. He didn't roll it, didn't check to see whether he was awake or asleep. It didn't matter. The guilt stayed with him, waking or sleeping. A roll of the die couldn't change that.