This is a boring story.

This was the response to the prompt "Arthur accidentally-on-purpose kills someone because he gets confused and thinks he's in a dream and they're a projection, when in actuality it's real life. He has to call someone to help him hide the body, and then deal with the consequences. Preferably he calls Dom or Ariadne, but anyone's fine." at the inception kink meme. It got a bit out of hand, 6000 words, and still there's no porn. The T rating's for the corpse.

It can be interpreted as Cobb/Arthur preslash, but there's really nothing here.

It was most frustrating, this clash of schedules. Dom ran a hand through his hair, as he'd been doing for the last half hour or so, as he tried to juggle his new job, Phillipa's recital, and James' PTA meeting.

Sometimes the profound mundanity of it hit him like a freight train, and he lost himself in the awe of it, the fact that these days the things he worried about was that the next-door neighbor's crabgrass was getting into his yard, and it was a losing battle trying to convince her to take care of it, the fact that James was outgrowing his clothes faster than he could buy them (he felt pride about this) and he took him shopping at least once a month, it seemed, or that the house needed cleaning and he was the one who had to do it (something he'd forgotten, he vaguely remembered organizing cleaning schedules with Mal, and dashing out of hotels, leaving his messes to the staff). That he was sitting in his own house, the cushion he and Mal had picked out bending under his weight, his children's voices filling the house.

His job, he thought, was a problem. He'd forgotten how to maneuver office politics, and was thinking of quitting. It wasn't even as if he really needed the money. He'd hoarded during his exile, and Yusuf had given him half of his share back, not meeting his eyes the whole while (he'd been impressed). It wasn't a massive fortune, but extraction usually paid well, and it had added up to something mildly impressive. Enough for a good education for his children and a decent lifestyle, if he didn't get too extravagant.

All in all, he decided, his life was good.

The phone rang, a pleasant mild trill.

Probably his idiot boss again, he thought dryly, getting up to get the call. The last time, he'd contacted him at 1:20 in the morning to yell about a misplaced document, until Cobb had regained his senses enough to remember what document exactly it had been and inform him that it wasn't his mistake, his boss had gotten the dates wrong. There had been an extremely awkward silence from that end and he'd hung up.

Instead, he heard something that made his blood run cold.

Arthur was crying.

Not desperate sobs, or he wouldn't have recognized the voice at all. The voice was still clear, but it shook more than he'd ever heard it, and there was a hollow, nasal quality to it that told him there was a lump in his throat. He sounded like a desperately upset man trying, and failing absurdly, to get himself back in control. "Cobb... Cobb, I'm so sorry..."

It was a moderately warm summer day, but it felt like he'd been plunged into ice. "Arthur," he said, enunciating as clearly as he could, trying to bring some measure of clarity and sanity back to the situation. He squashed down the ridiculous urge to ask, 'you are Arthur, right?' because there was no way, no way in hell that Arthur was calling him, crying, to say sorry, of all things... if someone had torched his wardrobe, maybe, but there was no way he'd call Cobb about that- maybe his weapons dealer, but not Cobb. "What's going on, Arthur?"

Arthur's breath hitched. His voice was strained on the line. "It's good to... talk to you.. it's been some time."

Still Arthur, feeling the need to voice the perfunctory greetings even though something had rattled him badly enough to make him cry, which probably meant that- well, Dom couldn't imagine what. Arthur would be composed on Judgment Day. "Eight months. Arthur. What's going on?"

"I screwed up... screwed up real bad..."

Dom drew breath. "Screwed up how?" (Please, please let it be something mild, please let it be something that can be fixed-)

The words spilled from his friend, like they were being ripped from him, there was agony in his voice, scratchy and raw. " I didn't know, I don't know what I was thinking, I th-thought it was a dream, but he was real, there wuh-wasn't a kick, and he's back here with me, Dom, he's still b-bleeding, I thought it was a dream..."

Dom stiffened, the sweat on his palm slicking up the receiver. He was clutching enough to crush it, he dimly felt. "Arthur, did you hurt- someone? That you thought was a projection?" It could be fixed, his mind babbled at him, they could work something out, even do inception again to shut him up, surely it wouldn't be hard, this was Arthur, they had to do something.

"...he's dead."

Arthur sounded like he was being strangled.

Dom heard himself speak, his mouth move on autopilot while his mind still struggled with the implications. No, no, it can't happen to him, this is Arthur, the best of us, his grasp on reality and illusion was sharp enough to slice stone, "Tell me where you are."

::::::;

The plane ride cost a bloody fortune, but he signed it away with little hesitation. Within two hours the metal giant lifted off into the air, and Dom Cobb pressed the glass of ice water to his forehead and tried to think.

The most important thing was convincing Arthur not to turn himself in. It had sounded like there was a danger of that, but Dom had very firmly told him not to do anything until he got there. It wasn't that Arthur was incompetent, he was the farthest thing from incompetent that Dom could dream of, even in lucid dreams. But he was upset, prone to make mistakes, and he was not considering that if he-

Dom tried to think of reasons Arthur must not give himself up that he would actually listen to. He was certain that 'I don't want you to' wasn't good enough.

The answer came instantly. Arthur's confession would incriminate not only himself but would light the trail to people he had worked with- Dom himself, Yusuf, Eames, and Ariadne, who certainly did not deserve to be locked up for being fascinated by a world no one really quite understood. And Saito would- well, best not think about that. Arthur was a good man, and a rational one, Dom could talk him out of it. As for the- what came after-

They'd find a way, he thought. They always did. What would happen if they did not did not bear thinking about.

He fell asleep, falling in and out of restless sleep that left him with pounding headaches when he awoke, and did not dream.

:::::::

Arthur was slumped in his chair when Dom entered. The door was unlocked, which worried him deeply. He wasn't being careful.

He did not voice the thought, hoping it was mere foresight and not carelessness on Arthur's part.

There was no smell of death. Instead, the apartment gave off a strong stench of bleach, burnt hair and incense. But Dom could see the corpse, splayed out on newspapers on the carpet. He'd never seen a real corpse up close. He hadn't been able to bring himself to look at Mal, and he recalled a few people he'd shot in the knee or arm, somewhere like that. He was pretty certain none of them had died.

He was aware of going pale, and Arthur not meeting his eyes. The man was not tall (good, some cold part of his brain told him, easier to dispose of the body) and had been divested of his trousers. He wore white briefs and a dark shirt. A slight paunch curved out of it. He was blond, his face unremarkable.

He was entirely very pale. Looking at his thighs, Dom saw the reason. There were neat, long, deep diagonal incisions on his thighs, forming a sort of V. Arthur had drained it of blood. Dom tried not to think of a weeping Arthur dragging the corpse to the tub and cutting into its flesh to drain its blood.

At least he'd made a good start, draining the blood and cleansing the odor.

"I couldn't do it." Arthur said, his voice so weak and choked up. He looked dreadful, like he'd collapsed inside and there was only a shell of flesh struggling to hold itself up. His eyes were pits. "Bury him. I can't... touch him again."

Dom had to cross the living room the long way to reach Arthur. He hadn't hugged the man much before- he had, but not really that much- neither of them were the hugging type. But he didn't think twice before wrapping his arms around him, feeling Arthur's skinny chest heave with dry sobs, and Arthur clutched him like a lifeline, shaking so bad that Dom thought he might fall apart. His fingers might leave bruises on his back, but Dom didn't care.

"How long has it been?" he asked.

"Eight hours and forty one minutes."

Dom did not ask if he had eaten. He obviously hadn't. It was clear to him that it was driving Arthur mad (Arthur, who kept his life recorded down in white squares in a scheduler, could not deal well with a corpse in his living room throwing this out of the wonk. He was one of the most resilient men Dom had ever met, but that resilience was built on layers and layers, miles and miles of control and calculation and clear-headedness, everything Arthur had apparently let go of.) to stay here in this house, but also seemed to be risky to lead him out of the house in this state. He might be distraught enough to babble, and he couldn't draw attention like that. Not now.

Ah, hell.

"Come out." he said. "Come on. Let's get out. This can wait for an hour."

Arthur's hands tightened on his shoulders.

"I have a rented car." Dom wheedled.

::::::

He remembered how Arthur took his coffee, pure black, untainted in any way by the slightest lick of cream or a single speck of sugar. He bought him an extravagant caramel frappuccino instead, not even looking at the price, but just handing over a wad of cash and waiting for the change, which he did not count. It was enormous.

He avoided meat, and brought back along with the frap a packet of fries, blueberry yogurt, a sweet yam 'n cheese pizza, a packaged salad, and a vegetarian's sub. He felt a little foolish as he climbed back into his car. Arthur was limp on the passenger seat, his face devoid of any expression. The sunlight exposed how pale and tired he really looked. Dark circles like bruises lined his eyes.

"Your choice." Dom said.

Arthur looked at him, and his lips twitched- a little. Dom was aware of how ridiculous he must look. Arthur unloaded the food, fitting the enormous frappuccino into the drink slot, the fries and yogurt on the dashboard, the salad, sub, and pizza on the backseat. Freed of his burden, Dom reached for the pizza, and offered Arthur a slice.

Arthur took it, but did not eat. Instead, he studied it, in all its vegetarian glory, and looked vaguely mystified by it. Dom thought a few things he could say to break the tension, but in the end stayed silent.

"I'm sorry. I'm not hungry." Arthur said, at last.

"Doesn't matter, you're going to eat." Dom said, worry gnawing at his stomach. "At least drink the coffee."

"Yes, I really- want to be awake right now." Arthur said wearily.

"You need sleep, too." Dom said. (What went unvoiced, by both of them: Arthur, of course, could not possibly sleep in his house.) "You don't have to drink the coffee. Just eat something, and if you want, sleep here. At least a few hours."

A fierce surge of something in his chest that made him feel like he was back at home, watching his children play in the yard, made him add, "I'll take care of it. Everything will be okay."

He was staring at Arthur intensely, but Arthur did not meet his eyes. "Okay," he only said, a little brokenly. Dom took the cold pizza from his fingers (Arthur's hand seemed icy) and put it down, handing him the fries instead. No one hated fries.

Dom stayed with him while he was eating, and went out briefly to get a drink for him. He clinked the ice in it around a bit to dissolve the sedative as he returned.

He didn't think Arthur was, at a certain level, unaware of what Dom was doing, and there was a blind, clutching gratefulness in his movements as he gulped down the beverage.

Dom adjusted the seat for him, so that it reclined almost completely. He arranged his arms around for him, trying not to worry about how icy his hands seemed. He drove the car back to Arthur's aparment, parking it at the lowest level. It seemed wrong to leave Arthur there, but it had taken root in his mind that he must not let Arthur see the corpse again, that it would mess everything up.

He took a deep breath, and took the elevator back upstairs to do what had to be done.

It was unpleasant business. He'd done plenty of horrible things in dreams, for various reasons- to distract, to attract, to horrify, to convince, to harden himself. He'd been in nightmares before, he'd orchestrated several of them, he'd been terribly good at them before Mal had died and it became too difficult to be an architect at all.

It seemed to be a completely different matter, however, to actually crouch over that bloodless carcass and hold the blowtorch to his face. He looked away as he burned the face clean away, obscuring the features. He did the same with the hands to destroy the fingerprints.

He knew a bit about getting rid of corpses, but stuff that had seemed pretty simple in theory made him freeze up. He gained a horrible, shallow understanding of how Arthur must have felt, staring down at what he'd done and wondering what the hell to do about it.

Dom knew that neither of them had the nerve to cut up the body, which made it the easiest to get rid of. Arthur had apparently started the process by draining it a blood- a good move, for several reasons, but not the one that related to actual disposal.

The way he saw it, there were several things they could do with it, but the easiest and simplest and swiftest was burial. If he did that, he was determined to do it on his own. He had not actually killed the man, and he was fairly certain he could achieve an emotional distance from what he was doing, something that Arthur could not do. They were in a fairly urban area, so Dom would drive out for several hours into the country, and...

He shuddered. So much for emotional distance; he was beginning to feel his skin crawl on every inch of his body. He had been wrong about the smell. When he'd entered the house, all he'd been able to sense was the bleach and incense that Arthur had put all over the place to hide the stench. But the longer he stayed here, the more he became aware of the subtle odor of- it was indescribable. Rotten meat and bleach mingled in the air, and the pizza he'd eaten seemed to lie stale in his stomach. He tried not to breath. The flesh he'd burnt off lingered, too, but it was actually better than the corpse smell- he tried not to think of chicken.

He briefly went out to buy a large box, and more incense, some strong spicy thing. He took a taxi instead of the car, not wanting to disturb Arthur- or rather, he much felt that he did not want Arthur to smell what Dom had just been near, although the idea was of course ludicrous. Arthur had been near the body eight times longer than Dom had, but- still.

The cab driver gave him a queer look as he came back. "What's that smell?" he said, and Dom tensed, before remembering it was just the incense he was asking about, not the persistent odor of death he could still smell even out here, in the world of the living, the sunlight, and civilized sanity. "Mother in law's funeral." he said, the lie slipping out easily, as well as a false Texan drawl. "Oriental gel."

The driver nodded, and Dom gave him a few extra bucks in apology for the lingering smell.

He nearly had a heart attack when he came back inside to see Arthur surveying his work. "You were asleep!" he accused, his heartbeat stuttering in his ribcage. He set down the box and incense and tried to sort out the things going through his head. Terror: for a moment, he'd thought that Arthur was a stranger who had found out what they'd done. Horror: Arthur was seeing this again, and Dom had not wanted him to see this again, especially after he'd mutilated the face and fingers to obscure his identity. Grief: Arthur's face, as he turned to face Dom, was gray. He looked like he was going out of his mind.

"It smells like chicken in here," he said, and started to laugh brokenly, tears running down his face, his mouth pursed in an odd way, a bit like dark humor, a bit like madness. Dom crossed the room and palmed his face, turning it away from the corpse. "Go out," he pleaded, aware that he was upset too, not as much as Arthur but enough to say, "Don't, don't-"

"His name was D-Damian Quinn, he was twenty-seven, his birthday's March 5th, he has a sister and two brothers, but one of them's dead, he died of overdose, his mom's alive, he lives with her, he's lost contact with the sister, her name's Elisa, but she's a prostitute in Masachusetts now, I checked-" his point man babbled against his shoulder. Dom did not make him stop talking but just wrapped his arms around him, giving a solid point of reference in a universe that was rapidly spinning out of control.

"-He had one girlfriend, just one, when he was nineteen, they dated for fourteen months, she had an abortion once, I think- he hits the bars sometimes, sometimes he hires some call girls-"

Dom did not like to point out that Arthur had slipped into the present tense, but he knew that he had to stop thinking about it. With his arms still around him, he guided him gently into the kitchen. Arthur was shivering badly again, whey-faced.

"You didn't sleep long."

"I had nightmares." Arthur admitted, pulling back slowly. Dom could not quite make out the expression on his face, but the realization chilled him. Nightmares. Dreams. Extractors- didn't really have them. Arthur had been in the business for quite a while. Natural dreams- after all this time- had to have shaken him. He sat down next to him. "I dreamt it was all a dream, that I checked my totem and shot myself and woke up and never called you- and then I woke up again."

"Arthur." he said, going for composed but only achieving wavering. "Arthur, please. Get out."

His point man did not look at him, but he could see his hand fumbling in his pocket. "I keep hoping." he murmured, turning the red dice over and over in his hands, looking at like blankly, like he'd never seen it before. "Dom," (not Cobb, he noted, not Cobb, but Dom) "I keep doubting what number it's supposed to land on... I can't remember if it was loaded in dreams or in reality..."

Dom wasn't supposed to know this- every man's totem his own, right?- but hell, they'd been working so long together it was impossible not to, and as the die dropped from those slender fingers and clattered to a stop on the floor...

It turned a 3. He let out a heavy sigh, unable to deny that he, too, had been hoping- just a little, just a little, it was difficult to keep this kind of hope at bay when he was often astonished by the line between reality and dream- that this wasn't... this wasn't.

This just should be a 'wasn't'.

"It's still an is." he said. The smell was getting to him. "Get back to the car, Arthur."

"My mess." Arthur said. His voice was quiet, almost a mutter, but his face was hard and his eyes were- frightening. "I shouldn't leave you to-"

"It's not healthy for-" Dom started, and realized the tactic wouldn't work. "Arthur, what I'm going to do it pretty simple. I'll just need you to carry the box down with me. If anyone meets us, the story is that we got the wrong address for a delivery, it went to your house, the box is full of incense-"

"We'll have to take my car." Arthur said, operating on auto. "Yours is rented, they might ask questions, about the smell-"

"Good, good." Dom said, relieved to see he wasn't all gone. "And that's it, simple story."

He hesitated, wondering if it would be too patronizing to ask this, "Arthur, if you aren't- up to... What I mean is, if you don't want to talk-"

"I'll leave the talking up to you." Arthur murmured, a little humorless grin on his face that frightened him worse than the blank look had. "I know I'm not in any state to-"

Arthur stopped talking. There was a look on his face that told Dom that he was gathering courage or strength to say something that he wasn't confident enough to say. "Dom, I shouldn't have called you- you have kids-"

What he was trying to say was, Dom thought, you have a new life now, this is my fuck-up, and it's a fuck-up related to the job you left behind, and it was none of your business, and I should never have pulled you back in. Not a strong seed of guilt, compared to the other thing, but he thought it was his responsibility to put at least one of the demons at bay. "I'm glad you called me." he said, a smidgen more passionately than he had intended, maybe. "Arthur-" he wondered how to follow up with this without sounding like, well, a girl- "I'm glad- you trust me enough as a friend to have done that."

Arthur blinked a little, and it was hard to tell what he was thinking. But he was obedient as Dom led him out of the kitchen and into his own bedroom, where it smelled much less- less like chicken and incense and deteriorating human, more like expensive cologne and potpourri and mandarin. Dom breathed gratefully, but shut the door behind him swiftly.

He finished the job quickly, and despite never having done it before, Dom was pretty certain he'd masked all the tracks. Arthur had done a good job, and Dom hoped he'd remembered to mingle the blood with water and bleach before sending it down, because just draining it would stink up the sewers and maybe even alert someone to- this. He probably had, from the five empty containers he found littered around the tub. There was a little smear of red on the water, just one smear, and he winced before wiping it away.

He shaved the corpse, and decided not to undress him before putting him in the box. It was probably a little riskier to leave it the way it was, but not much- and besides, Arthur would be coming along, whether he liked it or not, and Dom didn't want to expose him to more yuck than possible. Ridiculous notion, of course, but still, he felt that- well.

He covered the face with some foil before folding the body in, because it was getting too close to a bad horror movie.

Arthur was out again by then. He was wearing new clothes- not a suit, but jeans, honest-to-god jeans (Cobb wondered where in hell he'd gotten them), a dark brown shirt, and an unreadable look on his face. His hair was rumpled, the front combed over to give the illusion of a fringe. He was wearing a Yankees cap.

Nothing except his clothes and stance had changed, but he looked like a completely different person.

About ten years older, for a start.

"You should- do it, too." he said neutrally.

"They don't know me here." Dom said, and a thought came to him, so sudden and powerful that he forgot to speak with it for a moment. The thought was: It's not going to be an issue for you, either, people recognizing you here, because I'm not going to let you stay here, I cannot. "It's fine. We're both disappearing after this."

"Risky." Arthur-the-point-man said instantly. "You can be just a visitor, but I've been living here for several months, if I leave suddenly, after Damian goes missing-"

"He's not Damian." Dom growled. "He's just some mugger, okay? And for god's sake, you should have known better than to look all that up about him-" With Arthur in those clothes, it was so easy to see him again as the kid he'd found, too smart, too skinny, with a look like a machine's light in his eyes, one still making mistakes.

"I couldn't not." Arthur said urgently. "Cobb, I couldn't- I couldn't- not!"

They looked bleakly at each other for a few seconds.

"Fine." Cobb grudgingly conceded. "But- you know you should try to forget about it."

They carried the body out, stinking of incense. Arthur had a bag with a change of clothes, and a second box, containing a shovel he'd purchased a few hours after the killing. They thankfully met no on on the elevator, and only met one woman in the parking lot, whom Arthur did not recognize.

It was 8pm.

"Do you know any good burial sites nearby?" he said.

"I looked it up." Arthur said, sounding bleary. They'd put the box in the back seat- it wouldn't fit in the trunk, of course- and the human-smell was already creeping into the periphery of their olfactory senses. "There's a... long stretch of road, southwest... about four hours away. Ghost road, middle of the forest, no one goes there. There aren't even any security cameras. Back in the sixties it was the link between two thriving cities, but both of them are just quiet, now, and the traffic gets diverted off to highway 29, so..."

He sighed, relieved. "Good. Good job."

:::::

It went over well.

Once the sun set, time seemed to go much faster, and Dom remembered stretches while they were both digging when he just blanked out and his hand took control while he thought of nothing at all.

They both worked like demons, and when they finished, it was 2:13, and the hole was deep enough that Dom, standing in it, could not see Arthur's shoes. He climbed out, with a little difficulty, thinking vaguely that it was a really good thinking on Arthur's part, bringing along the change of clothes (but then, this was Arthur, what had he expected). They threw the body in, now smelling strong enough that they had to sprinkle more incense before covering it up. Arthur stopped in the middle, looking vaguely ill, but did not throw up. Dom finished, quickly, and scraped some autumn debris over it to hide the fresh bald patch in the soil. He doubted anyone could find it, though, they'd walked at least a mile and half into the forest, counting on a compass to bring them back. (Returning, however, seemed to be a small problem when they slumped against trees, unmindful of bugs, and stared at each other, engraving this secret into their souls.

"He's going to show up in my dreams." Arthur muttered.

Dom didn't tell him that it was manageable. A memory flashed hard in his mind, Mal's eyes on him as she shot Arthur in the knee, that scream ringing out. No, it wasn't the sort of thing that could be managed.

He sighed deeply. "Let's get back."

They did, Arthur tottering a bit. He fell asleep without taking anything.

What Dom wanted to do most of all was to drive all the way back to his home, never mind the fact that it was about nine states away, and introduce Arthur to the life he'd built up before the phonecall. Show him how it was like, that beautiful mundanity of it.

Swallowing, he put some pressure on the brakes and was there by 6:14. They met no one on the way up.

:::::

He didn't have to look long for the machine. It wasn't that Arthur was unsubtle about hiding it. Dom simply knew him too well. He removed the ceiling fixture to find the suitcase, neatly stowed away, and quite a lot of vials, and plenty of IV lines. He hooked himself up.

It never occurred to him to feel any guilt about this at all.

He wound up in front of a supermarket. It was late at night, virtually no one was there. Even with the haze of memory uncurling too slowly for his liking, Dom strode to the side of the store, where no one could see him in the darkness unless they were really looking. Brushing away some grit from the sidewalk with his palm, he fished through his pocket for his totem and spun it.

It was still spinning when Arthur arrived on the scene.

He might have been drunk. It was hard to tell, but there was a kind of entire looseness in his gait, and he walked with his shoulders thrown back, kind of lounging as he walked. He tried not to stare too much.

Dom was vaguely aware that there was something vastly wrong with this scenario, but even after eight months, he still had all his instincts intact, and knew not to concentrate on it too much. It was probably the way the buildings curved, or the way the sky was in pieces, something like that. Normal in dreams, strange in reality, and if he tried to think like he was in the latter everything would come crashing down. He tried to remember this as an eleven-feet tall Arthur pulled out a bazooka out of his canvas bag (which had appeared, sometime) and blew a hole in the mugger creeping behind him (the normal-sized mugger).

It was one of those explicit dreams, and Dom remembered Eames being derogatory about Arthur's imagination and tried not to laugh or be sick at once. The gore settled on Arthur (now normal sized) and he smeared the blood on his face with his left hand, looking dazed. It was all over him.

Dom shot him.

They woke at the same time.

Arthur sat up. He hadn't showered, and there was still dirt clinging to his face, except where the tears that smeared it out in long vertical trails. His eyes were wild, his hair disheveled, and he was breathing like he'd run a race. Dom plucked out the needle and looked at Arthur levelly.

"Why don't we try my dream." he said.

:::::

He'd tried only once, after he'd shot Mal. She hadn't been there. It had worked beautiful, spires rising at his command, the sky blurring from rain to sun to snow in a blink of the eye. He'd even imitated Ariadne and curled the world around, except that his was circular, a city inside a sphere. He'd flown again, even, wings shooting out of his back, defying gravity as he imagined foreign muscles shifting, driving him up like a bullet into the sky, where he lingered...

It hadn't been the same at all.

It was just so pale, in comparison to waking up to sunlight and birds in his own damn house, getting up early to make breakfast, shoveling off the best for his children, laughing about the horrible mistakes with them. Dreams were nothing to the stifling heat in the car as they drove to Disneyland with the air conditioner broken, but happy anyway even with the mild dissatisfaction. It was nothing, nothing compared to waking up and spinning his totem, and watch it fall in tandem to his children's laughter.

So that was where they went.

Arthur had been to Dom's house before, of course, while he'd been in exile. He nursed a cup of coffee. Next to him, Dom crossed his legs.

"I don't like coffee anymore." Arthur murmured, and Dom changed it to tea, one of those he'd tasted on his many travels but hadn't remembered the name of. Strong kick, no scent. He thought it appropriate.

James was playing in the backyard, with a neighbor's kid, a year younger. Their voices formed a pleasant backdrop, and obscured the nuances of doom in their silence. Dom absently took Arthur's hand and brushed his thumb over his knuckles. They were very bony. Arthur had very smooth hands.

"You know it wasn't-" he said.

"You don't have to comfort me." Arthur said. "I know it was a mistake. It doesn't change anything. I should have been... I was drunk... I was so stupid."

Dom squeezed his hand.

"Do you know what the stupid thing is?" Arthur burst out, his voice thin and high. "You know why I thought it was a dream? I had a gun. I don't carry them around much in... in reality. I'd gotten sloshed, and I couldn't remember walking out of the bar, I felt like I'd started off in the middle of the road... the road was all I could remember. And I had a gun, and he was staring at me... he stared at me, and then he started to follow me..."

Typical projection behavior. Probably the sodding bastard had thought he'd picked out an easy target: obviously rich, drunk, kind of skinny. Fucking idiot. Arthur had no fault here, Dom thought, a great deep rage opening up inside him that had more to do with the situation than Damian fuck-him-for-having-a-name Quinn. He was the only one at blame here, it wasn't Arthur's fault he was so goddamn good at his job.

"And you know how projections, if you don't shoot them right, they stay around and scream, and I always, used to feel so sorry for them when I was younger- and they got on my nerves... Dom, I shot him because I didn't feel like listening to senseless screaming."

"You know it wasn't-" Dom started, and shut up. This was really one of those things you couldn't- say anything about. He just wanted, a desire so deep he felt like caving in on himself, for Arthur to forget this had ever happened. This event had no point in the grand scheme of things, except to ruin Arthur's life.

"I want you to come here." he said abruptly.

Arthur went very still.

"Just- for a week, or two, I don't know." Dom said. He rarely fumbled with words, not that much, but- well. "Or- longer. There's lots of room here. The kids love you. And you really- do need to get some distance. On this."

Arthur thought too much, even in dreams. He got that expression on his face. (Dom didn't like it very much.)

"Please." he said.

The expression turned into the absurdly pigheaded I-will-be-strong expression that should have their place only on the faces on divorced housewives or pregnant teens. Arthur's mouth wobbled a bit.

His stomach rumbled, and he put an arm around Arthur's shoulder, feeling like they were years in the past, when Arthur had been too young, kind of scruffy, too cute, and Mal had mothered him all throughout her pregnancy, 'getting practice', and they'd been so blissed out, even during the bad times, they'd all...

Arthur whispered something, but he missed it. "What?" he said.

"I said yes."

It was a start.