Re: Eames/Holly: dreaming
Neither watch nor bracelet were real. Nor, point of fact, was the signet ring jammed over the knuckle on his index finger. Real was not the point of them. Real took money Eames didn't have and they got the point across which was looking flash. Flash was important. Perhaps above all else. He had the vague sense this could be discarded like a pair of old shoes eventually, but flash was presently a preoccupation.
"What did he go away to do?" Eames noticed the voice that wanted to waver and didn't, and his approval was warm down the line of his questioning. "He might have got stuck." In the portal in the belly of the ship, or somewhere else. Separation came at a cost in a dream. You could lose someone out there and find them again deep within.
He let the boy bob ahead. The boy wanted to and Eames emerged into a hallway that owed more to clinical horror-films than romantic epics where everyone died. He didn't know what form this took in the real world but he understood the menace that plunged along the lengths of the hall. Eames's legs were long, skinny but long. He picked them up swiftly, running like a kid caught knocking the wrong doors and he gripped the boy's wrist to tug him along at Eames's pace. They flinched off course, down another hallway and Eames pointed rather than spoke, at a doorway in the wall.