It has been a long goddamn job, and everyone is exhausted. They should go home, really, but the Somnacin and adrenaline are making sleep seem like a whole other country right now. So instead, Arthur takes them all to a quiet bar, out of the way, where no one will bother then and no one will see them and they can drink until the adrenaline leaves them crashing and dozing off. They sit at the bar and no one orders, because Arthur does his job, and the bartender already knows what they want and how.

The night goes on and transitions into that strange time when the casual drinkers are gone and the alcoholics haven't yet arrived. The team is alone in the bar. They drink and drink, beer after beer, except for Eames, who is drinking something tall and neon blue and impossibly sweet, as usual. He's happy to drink beer at work or at home, he explains, but at a bar? Where he's paying someone? "They damn well better earn the tip, no offense intended, pet," with a wink at the bartender.

"I should never have left home," Ari groans, looking at her watch. "It's…fucking six in the morning in Paris. I'd be waking up now, to get a shower in and go to class."

"Why in the name of all that is holy would you schedule class that early?" Dom looks horrified. "You are strange, I swear. Strange little architect."

"I don't know," Arthur said, the light slur on the "n" the only sign of his drunkenness. "I always liked early classes, getting done and going home and crashing for a while to go out that night."

"Yes, but we weren't all brilliant with hangovers like you were," Yusuf grumbles, his head sinking lower and lower. "And I would have killed someone to go to college, you know?"

"Sorry, Yusuf," and Ari looks genuinely abashed. "I didn't even think—"

"I didn't go to university, either," Eames says. "Never needed it, really, nor did Yusuf. He's smart enough to make the compounds without it, and no one needed to teach me to lie." The shark grin on Eames's face should be disturbing, really, but no one seems to notice.

"How did everyone get into this business, anyway?" Ari tips back her beer, long white neck and dark hair glowing in the neon lights.

Yusuf, his head finally resting on the bar, sighs and fiddles with his half-empty glass. "I needed the money."

Dom fidgets, rubbing his fingers together, missing the cigarette that should really be there. "Miles, and then Mal."

"Military, for me," Eames says with a wide smile, just as Arthur mutters, "School, then the Army."

—-

Yusuf was sixteen and brilliant, reading chemistry textbooks and sleeping in the streets. He was also, unfortunately, using heroin on a regular basis. Heroin is expensive, and Yusuf did anything necessary to scrape together enough cash to keep himself well-supplied.

He doesn't go into detail about any of the jobs he did before stumbling into a dreamwork lab, but they were many and varied and often illegal. When he came into the Den of Dreams looking for work, he thought it was a sex parlor, or perhaps what Ari would call a "head shop." One look at the clientele, however, and he understood: a place to dream, as much as you wanted, and a place to make money from those dreams.

The owner, a stooped old man named Asher, hired Yusuf first as a sweeper, then as breath-checker, to make sure the customers haven't died, to keep an eye on their vital signs. Yusuf read every dreamtech book in the office, of which there weren't many, and used some of his earnings to buy more. Over time, Asher offered him a deal: if Yusuf got clean, he could help with the actual dreamwork: injections, dosage, the chemistry of the compounds. Something crystallized for Yusuf in that moment, and by his eighteenth birthday he was free of his heroin addiction and hooked on dreamwork.

Yusuf has good veins, still, luckily, but he's never quite gotten over the feeling of a needle in his arm. His relocation from Kenya to Los Angeles has helped curb the everpresent itch of the addict, and the work keeps him steady enough; the work, the cats, and the team.

—-

Miles was (still is) the creator of dreamwork. People think it's Dom, that he and Mal pioneered it all, but they were just the faces, the liaisons, the publicity people. Miles did the work. Miles, with three doctorates (clinical psychology, biochemistry, art history), with eight published books (including Manipulating Subconscious Structures and Perceptions, which every dreamworker worth his or her salt has partially memorized), with a beautiful, brilliant daughter.

When Dom took his class — paradoxical architecture as metaphor, exciting stuff — Miles recognized something there: raw talent, drive, loneliness. Something. Whatever it was, Miles brought Dom home for dinner, and Mal was there, and that was the end of it. Dom worked for Miles, TA'd his classes, read every word the man wrote. When Miles spoke at a conference on combat training techniques, floating dreamshare as a perfect training tool for the military, Dom was there. When Miles took a three-star general under to show him the possibilities, Dom built the world for them. When Mal displayed a previously unknown genius for figuring out mazes and finding anything hidden anywhere, Dom started thinking about the future.

And then it all ended. First the military gave up on dreamshare, saying it was too expensive and time-consuming. Then Miles finally earned tenure and decided to recede from the private eye. Mal and Dom kept playing with dreamshare, investigating and learning and publishing articles no one believed. Then Mal died, and Dom fled, and the only way to make a living with his particular set of skills was to become, basically, a thief.

He's working hard, now, trying to prove that there are legal uses for dreamshare beyond the obvious. Sinking money into lunch-break dream vacations and coma therapies and anything that looks like it might make his work worth something at last.

—-

Arthur and Eames tell their stories together, because they're really the same story.

Arthur was brilliant with numbers, recruited into a computer science program with the military (programming bombers, designing software for navy vessels, etc.), getting paid to sit through classes taught by people with a third of his intuitive comfort with the subject. Eames was a forger in the more traditional sense, picked up for faking a bill that hadn't been manufactured yet — he'd miscalculated the number of days in February, forgotten about Leap Year, and Arthur never let him live it down — and offered the chance to redeem himself in Her Majesty's service.

When they both showed promise in various aspects (puzzle-solving, flexibility of mind, favorable brainwave activity), they were plucked for an international team. Three years later, after joining the ranks of those with what the military called (in a fit of uncharacteristic pop culture knowledge) the Dreamer's Disease (loss of ability to dream naturally, night terrors, occasional delusions, lowered immune systems, fatigue, migraines, general decline in mental health), the team was disbanded, and Arthur and Eames were honorably discharged.

The need for Somnacin as the only way to dream meant that, for all intents and purposes, they were addicts, and as addicts do, they gravitated toward careers in which their addiction was sated as part of the job. That they'd known each other in the past, that they'd worked together: that was a bonus, unexpected and gratifying.

They worked even better as criminals than they had as teammates, and even though most jobs didn't need a forger, Eames took pains to cultivate a passable talent for dream architecture, too, enough that they worked almost exclusively as a pair for a couple of years.

Then Arthur met Dom Cobb and Mal, and everything coalesced, and the four of them could do anything. They spent one perfect, glorious year making so much money and having a wonderful time doing it, and then Mal jumped and Eames fled, because it was all suddenly so real, and Arthur stayed because he had an utter inability to leave someone alone when they couldn't handle it. And that was that, another year passed, and then the Fischer job.

And the fact that they'd always shared a bed, in addition to origin stories and quiet jokes and coffees, was just another part of them. They were, in most ways, the same, and the ways that they were different were almost uniformly the result of the year they'd spent apart more than the years they'd spent together.

—-

The sun is just peeking over the horizon, and the bartender makes apologetic noises as he kicks them out. By now their payment has cleared, and the team is much richer than they were twelve hours ago. Now, at last, the adrenaline is wearing off. Everyone is finally drunk enough to stagger home, or at least to the hotel, and if Arthur and Eames clutch each other, stay together, enter the same room, it's not only no one's business, but it's hardly surprising, is it?