poly_chromatic | [ VIDEO / ACTION ]

Entry tags:

inception - eames

[ VIDEO / ACTION ]

[ There are plenty of beaches on this fair island - being an island and all that - but only the stretch nearest the City includes the boardwalk, volleyball arenas, shops, vendors, et cetera. A lot of people are attempting to get their last full body tans in before the end of the summer, Eames included, though right now with the video feed going he seems to be sitting on a bench at the edge of the boardwalk. The video pans in a one hundred and eighty degree recording of beach front, the people on the sands like seals or crabs depending on the distance, before finally settling on Ariadne. He may just be trying to keep a recording for himself, or just take a picture - but it's being fed directly to the Network instead.

Ariadne looks quite nice in a two piece bathing suit, by the way. ]

I feel as though beach volleyball was far more popular last summer than this summer. No one's playing much of it anymore.

Who are you talking to?

You. And the network. I think this is as close as anyone can get to a glimpse underneath your neckerchief, apart from that time you posted naked.

[ Ariadne makes a choked off sound, and the video jumbles as she lunges toward him, cutting off soon after. It seems Eames has deemed it better to make a quick escape. ]

[ ooc: Red is Ariadne, normal is Eames! That said, please feel free to treat this like a network post or an open log post! If you want to treat it like a log, feel free to comment and denote in your subject line if it's open to everyone or just Eames and/or Ariadne! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ There are some things you just have to accept with a certain amount of grace. So, Eames gets as far as dropping his device by their things on the beach sands before hooking his arms underneath her toothpick legs, making headway for the waves. It's true that he's scanning them for any signs of sharks, but the ship had been far out to sea; aside from shark attacks being rare in general, it seems even more so for them to come close to the shore. There's no part of him that wants to relive the experience that evening but Eames doesn't believe in changing his lifestyle for fear that something might happen, wading in up to his hips, the cool water making him grimace only just slightly.

Then he finds a wave satisfactorily large enough to dive into and possibly drown Ariadne. Thug life. ]

[ Shark attacks still happen close to shore, but she's hoping the same thing -- that it won't happen. What happened to them was strange, but maybe it was part of the curse. As long as it doesn't happen again, she's content not to dwell on it too much.

Instead she shrieks as she realizes Eames has a hold on her and is diving into a wave, only shutting her mouth and eyes just before the wave hits. ]

[ He swims underneath the wave, letting go of her legs at the last minute before getting his legs back under him and breaking the surface, scrubbing the salt water off his face. Eames might've held her under there if he was feeling particularly cruel today, but as it is he's in a relative good mood, waiting for her to come back up. ]

[ It doesn't take long for Ariadne to pop back up as well, though she has her mane of brown hair to pull out of her face before she can do much else. At least she's laughing. ]

[ Oh, that's good. Eames' mouth quirks up, lowing himself down so the ocean water comes up to his shoulders, toeing at some errant bits of seaweed in the meantime. ]

Do you think about it?

[ The attack, he means - though it's a bit out of the blue. ]

Hmm?

[ She lowers herself down as well, ducking her head back so the water will help with her hair. Once it's all back, she pulls a ponytail off her wrist and pulls it back. ]

You mean that night with the boat?

Yeah.

[ He shuffles further out from shore so that the waves won't bother them too much, though they're not exceptionally large at this time of day. ]

When it went down, and all that.

[ Funny that he's heading further out when they're talking about that time they were attacked by a shark and died, but she follows. ]

Sometimes. I still dream naturally, occasionally -- sometimes I'm bitten again and pulled under. It's not really the attack that bothers me about that night, though.

[ He's banking on the idea that bad life choices will give him some sort of karmic redemption otherwise, okay. Still, her reply is somewhat unexpected, and he looks over at her curiously, wishing he'd brought his sunglasses out with him into the ocean so that he didn't have to squint so much. ]

What is, then?

[ Well, that philosophy would certainly explain some of Ariadne's life choices. ]

Well, the pain wasn't fun. But it was dying slowly. Being helpless, not being able to do anything about it while I bled out. Arthur couldn't wake me up because we weren't asleep, and you... you were just gone, and we could see your blood in the water.

[ She looks down, trails her fingers through the water. No blood, not today. ]

[ Oh. That does make a lot of sense, doesn't it. Eames hadn't gone as quickly as he would have liked, it's the drowning and shock that did him in while the shark took him in deeper and deeper, cold in a way that numbed out everything else. Then there was nothing, then he was waking up sick on the beach, upchunking everything out until he was just dryheaving. ]

That's messed. [ No kidding. ] We didn't have the sort of comfort then like we do in dreams - where even horrific stuff doesn't matter anymore, because we all know how to escape it.

I forget that the City can get more dark than we think, sometimes. It's rather easy to, when even the money looks like it should belong in a bloody pride parade.

[ She isn't sure how long she laid on their makeshift raft with Arthur, with her blood spilling out of her neck despite their best efforts to keep pressure on it, to keep her from dying of blood loss even as the cold clawed at them both. It hadn't worked. Eames had died and so had she, and then they were both awake on the beach, sick while Arthur looked on looking like he'd seen a ghost. ]

I know. [ Her hand moves up to rub at her neck unconsciously. At least there was no scar. ] Every time I've died in a dream so far, it's been fast. It hasn't been nice, but it's been fast. I wasn't helpless for more than a few minutes, if that.

[ Ariadne pulls her hand away and looks down, laughing slightly. Her scar from the glass is still there. ] One of my first curses involved reliving someone being tortured with magic and I'm being stalked by a vampire. I'm not sure I'll ever forget, not entirely.

[ Eames nods a bit - or, at least, nods and then immediately lifts himself up to avoid a curling wave to the ear, arms moving in broad circles around him to keep him afloat. He thinks Ariadne got the bad set of cards concerning the curses, and though the ones Eames has endured have been relatively light-hearted it doesn't mean they affect him any less, just in different ways. Like being led to believe he had a family and had adopted Miss Ivy for his own, with Arthur of all people. He's supposed to dislike kids but in that short span of a weekend he was all right with it, all right with what that meant his life had become - domestic, boring, settled.

A long time ago he'd figured the stereotypical way big time criminals end their lives just wasn't for him. He's forty-five in the City, forty-three back in that hotel near LAX, will likely sooner turn up dead at fifty than pissing himself at some retirement home, babbling his happy self all the way down dementia lane. At least, he hopes as much. Eames does memory exercises every day not just because of their nature of work but because early Alzheimer's has an unfortunate habit of cropping up in certain family members.

At least the brain scan with Dr. Wilson didn't turn up with plaques, tell you what. ]

Even when you leave here?

[ It hasn't just been curses for her. They've been a large part of it, sure, but sometimes it's people leaving, dealing with the aftermath. Other times it's just people. All she can do is try and deal with it, to try and make it out of those events and move on to the next one. ]

Well, that'll depend.

[ They've spoken about that before, though. She's said that she doesn't want her memories tampered with and that opinion remains the same. ]

What about you? Do you think about it?

[ Because he had to have asked for a reason, right? ]

No.

[ Pulling his feet up, he floats on his back for a time, squinting at the bright sky. Really should've brought out his sunglasses, but he maneuvers himself closer to Ariadne - moreso drifting by her, and around. ]

I think accepting the most unfortunate option, that we'll not remember two or more years of our experiences here, would make it so neither of us were able to appreciate what happened to us in the here and now. Vampires, darkness, people we find relatively agreeable leaving; all that aside, I mean. Otherwise we'd start to cry about how there wasn't much of a point.

But at the same time, we've come to a point where we don't necessarily have to pretend to be the people we aren't just to avoid consequences we don't actually have, here. Opportunistic in all forms, really.

[ Ariadne left hers behind for the simple reason of not wanting raccoon eyes.

She listens, though it wasn't what she was asking. Ariadne has yet to pretend to be someone else, or at least hasn't had to do it as much as he has. That bit is revealing, and she treads a little closer. ]

So people might get to see the "real" Eames here, then? [ She'd finger waggle to go with that if she weren't swimming. ] Though I meant if you thought about the attack.

[ Oh. Oops. ]

I'm afraid the real Eames is a bad ghost story - see him, you die in seven days, so on and so forth. [ His mouth curls upward in amusement, though, her voice coming in muddled from his ears being in and out of the water depending on the wave. ]

I don't know. A little bit. My memory tells me it was a shark, but sometimes I'm not certain.

The real Eames is that girl from The Ring?

[ Everything makes sense now.

... well, except his next comment. That actually makes her hesitate. ]

What do you mean? [ Because sometimes she isn't certain either. ]

[ Yes. He is actually Samara. He'd be okay with that being an explanation, especially for the adjective Mae and Ariadne have settled with. ]

Well, when it was dragging me down - I saw it up against all the lights at the top, yeah? Moon and the makeshift rafts, so on. And when I was pulling it off of you, it seemed a little thin to be a shark. Not that I can exactly call myself the next Lara Croft and go about punching marine life, but... [ He shrugs, ocean water sloshing around as he rightens himself up again, hand smoothing down the hair at the back of his head, gel loosened up for a day at the beach. ]

[ That's so Eames of him. ]

A little thin? Sharks can be pretty thin -- I mean, they're fish. [ Still, she frowns, trying to think. ] Did it feel kind of... weird, to you? Smooth, kind of?

It felt smooth in some places, yeah. But more like cloth in others - fishing nets wrapped around it, could be. I couldn't tell, it was too dark, but.

[ Just a thought, anyway; it's what he has on his mind whenever he thinks about it, what they should really be on the look out for in the City and during curses that get the better of them. ]

Fishing nets have holes in them, though. I mean... they're nets.

[ She looks sort of nervous now. ]

You know sharks aren't smooth, right? They feel like sandpaper.

I wasn't aware of that, no. [ Not enough watching of shark week, this one... ]

Could have been the ones with the very small holes, to capture fish for research. Or the shrimp. Shrimp nets, yeah. [ UHM. Not that he's seen people fishing off the island, either, which is curious in that itself. ]

Would a shark even have been able to swim if it was wrapped up in fishing nets?

[ And why are they still in the ocean for this conversation? ]

I don't think any teeth came out either, when it bit down. Apparently that's pretty common with sharks.

If it wasn't wrapped around its fins, why not?

[ The ocean is a lot more refreshing to be in than the hot sands, for one. Even if not-sharks are in the water. Besides, they were rather far out, not by the shore. ]

Why do you know so much about sharks?

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