6

The first sensation when Arthur opens his eyes is a dull throbbing in his temple. It doesn't exactly hurt but he must be pretty drugged up because his heart is beating so hard he can feel the palpitations in every vein and artery. The room around him is woozy, slightly blurred and it feels as if he has opened his eyes underwater.

He puts his hand out to touch his bandaged head but someone stops him. A nurse, he thinks. She's smiling. Or grimacing. He can't tell, and it still feels as if he's had too much drink, or sat up too fast.

All the blood rushes to his head. Then darkness. Black.

And as if a guardian angel was watching over him, as soon as Eames set out to find his friend, there was a breakthrough. The Brit had been absent-mindedly flicking through his TV channels when he stopped on a story that caught his eyes. On the ten o'clock news was the scandal of a group of Egyptian merchants offering tourist expeditions like bungee-jumping on the Nile when in fact they were murderers and con-men, robbing the customers and then letting them use faulty equipment which often broke. Three were dead and two seriously injured.

He was still only half-watching (he wasn't really a news at ten man) when he saw a groaning, twitching figure being rushed past on a makeshift strecther. Then he stopped, rewound and rewatched. Ten times. It was him. Eames was 99% sure.

Without even switching the telly off, he grabbed his coat, passport, phone and wallet and left his apartment running, the door slamming shut behind him and the only sound in the late-night air the pounding of his feet and of his heart.

Arthur takes a long time to rehabilitate. The hospital room is dank and grimy and filled with diseased others. He should be at the American Embassy. He should be in a private hospital. He should be back with his friends. But no one knows who he is and he still cannot speak or move properly. He groans a little when the nurse changes the seeping bandages. She is old and rough, clearly wanting to be rid of him. He is just another inconvenience.

His dreams are clustered and insensible. Colours, voices, scents and sounds attack him with vivacity almost amounting to agony. He feels so much while sleeping these days. It's getting to that point – there's more life in his dreams. What if he dreams forever...maybe the pain of the present will leave him.

Then one night, out of the blue, Arthur has a dream even stranger. Almost like a half-memory, a living daydream but more concrete and yet more fantastical. In his dream there's a man talking to his old nurse, he's arguing with her in a language he clearly doesn't speak. He's talking slowly and loudly. It's a voice Arthur has heard and cursed and blessed and cherished a thousand times. But now it sounds like hope. He tries to sit up and reach and speak, beg the voice to come closer, to get him out of this hospital where he cannot move and he knows no one. He's scared. But everything blurs and wobbles and falls and he's alone again.

Eames sits in the chair, rubbing restlessly at his raw eyes. He is so tired that his head nods from time to time, dipping to sit gently on his collarbone. Light filters in from the slightly open curtains and illuminates the floating dust motes. Eames frowns. For the hideously large amount of money he's paying there shouldn't be any dust. Anywhere. Ever. He scribbles this tired thought on a notepad for the cleaning staff to ignore.

The slanted ray throws Arthur's sleeping form into golden light. But in the brightness he looks even more fragile. Vulnerable. Without thinking, Eames puts out a hand and trails it softly down the haggard cheek of the usually so dapper Point Man. When Arthur stirs, Eames startles and runs out of the room for a nurse. He doesn't come back. Not quite yet.

The fact that Arthur is there, less than ten metres away, alive, awake. It's too much to take in. He still needs a little while.