Eames/Holly: dreaming
Eames had been thinking about this rather a lot lately. This facility he had for entering dreams without much effort at all. It was a failing and of benefit and it was a secret he planned to keep exceptionally close. There had to be something that could be done to suppress it. He'd evaded serious tests in the little way-station of a clinic where their predominant concern had been cracking his head open like an egg. But if he were on the payroll, the odds of discovering a knack for dreaming without the chemistry would exponentially rise. The problem was, without getting himself on payroll he was in a position of weakness with no real levers to wriggle out of it.
Thus when Eames emerged from the turgid dark of dreamlessness onto a boat that rolled under his feet he half-expected it. He was in uniform, because the dream supplied a sense of order even in the pitching darkness of a ship on its way down albeit slowly and by increments. The uniform was a muddled implication of white and gilt braid and military, down to the pips on his shoulders. You could see either or both if you tilted your head. And he was stood in shadow, in the corner of a room more darkness than shape or shadow.
Eames groped for a wall. He could tell the walls from the floor, because of the molding. Somewhere underneath the heavy blanket of nothing, it had once had features. Gilding. As the boat groaned, Eames reached and his fingers glanced worn, warm cotton. Eames's hand was large but his body was less so. Lanky, somewhere in the region of fourteen or fifteen years old. Height, but without the packed muscle of the early twenties when the metabolism worked itself out.
"I'm lost," he said now. It was one of the few useful things someone could say that made them unthreatening. Someone lost had no control. It also happened to be true, and his voice was lighter than it would be as an adult, less formed. It was still husky. The height of the shoulder he'd brushed was short. Child, not man.