✘ fic。
Title: To the Best of his Knowledge
Author: climb
Team: angst
Prompt: the attempt was to work in silence, fear, smile, and fall
Word count: ~1, 800
Rating: all [ inform me if you think it ought not to be though, please ]
Warnings: none.
When Arthur is eight he breaks his arm falling from a tree and he doesn't think anything of it until it's months later and he's getting his cast removed and he's being asked:
Your mom didn't want anyone to sign it, huh? They say it like they've seen this before and they tsk and give a shake of the head and bestow a kind, understanding smile that Arthur receives because he's young enough not to reject well-meaning pity just yet.
He's thinking that his mom doesn't really care either way but no one offered and when he tries to scrounge up a name that might look natural on the plastered bandaging, he comes up blank.
+
When Arthur is fourteen he can speak fluent French and conjugates Latin verbs for fun, studies sign language and ancient hieroglyphs because communication fascinates him. One wouldn't know this by his silence in the halls and his diligent replica of it in the classroom where his paperwork is superlative and his participation is so-so, where his peers regard him with the cool indifference of children that could be mean - dreadful mean, terrible mean, hard and sharp and scarring mean the way only kids can be - but Arthur confuses them enough that they opt for ignoring him instead.
It's fine. Arthur likes the quiet and the quiet seems to like him.
He's not lonely and for now he doesn't mind being alone.
Adolescence isn't the total dive culture makes it out to be, he thinks, changing the lens on his camera, fingertips gentle on the rim as they turn it tight into place.
Alone isn't bad. Nothing wrong with it.
Once he asks his father if he thinks it's weird and his father says yes but he's not going to force Arthur to make friends, to join sports teams, to do any of the things he did.
Make your own choices, his father says and what Arthur hears is you're on your own.
And it's fine.
It's all fine.
+
When Arthur is fifteen and one month, he speaks at a funeral because it turns out his parents didn't have that many friends either so it falls to him. It's a sparse affair with the appropriate somberness and even some rain on the fringe but Arthur doesn't feel any of it. He should be crying. Other people are crying. He should be crying. His whole world should be turned inside-out and he shouldn't be able to breathe; but he can, he can breathe and he can speak in even tones and he can hold his own against a meager pond of adults whose names and relations don't mean anything to him.
He can and he does.
But it makes him feel like a terrible person, and he wonders for the first time in his life what's wrong with him.
+
When Arthur is nineteen he's on scholarship in a general studies program because he couldn't make up his mind and his professors are all telling him he's spreading himself too thin. It's the first form of concern to date Arthur can put a clean and clear identifier on and even doing so lends its own confusion - as though he's saying he hasn't had it before. And that's not quite right. His parents cared for him but this feels more like investment and maybe he likes that better.
Again he thinks something must be wrong with him but the validation of a future is hard to turn away from.
He makes it through another year before the pool funding his scholarship gets cut, and he bows out with a grace that is natural and predates anything he'll learn from an older, richer source of elegance. It's a little rough around the edges, a boy in a tree reaching for the wrong branch - rotted wood and nothing to support the weight he's about to thrust onto it.
+
When Arthur is twenty-three the military has done him some favors and taken a few of its own and none of it really shows on the surface because Arthur went in a blank slate and has thus far remained very close to that - tabula rasa, a quiet, self-contained efficiency. His capacity to be ignored by his peers is a plus here, and when he rises through the ranks it has a sense of inevitability to it - not as though he was ever meant to do this (Arthur learns quickly that he believes, down in the marrow of his bones, that he doesn't think anyone is meant to do this) but as though he can't help but excel at functioning on the level of use. So when Arthur says Yes sir what he's really saying is thanks.
It really can't be exaggerated, the relief of having a direct kind of purpose, terrible though it might be.
+
When Arthur is twenty-four he meets Henry Eames and instead of getting shipped off to fight a war on someone else's territory, he gets signed on to fight a war in someone else's mind.
The first time he wakes up he tastes blood and he chokes on it until he realizes it's not actually there.
A hand on his back is heavy and warm and there's a voice saying, how old are you anyway?
+
It's a month later when Eames first goes under with Arthur. The former gets kicked right out and when Arthur wakes up he looks over and says, twenty-four.
+
When Arthur is twenty-five and three months he's a lucid dreaming veteran of the sedative induced kind, which is funny since he was always one without it as a child, but this is different. This is shared lucid dreaming and he'll say this many times in his life as if he can't believe it himself: there's nothing quite like it.
As it happens, Eames' mind is a strange place and Arthur knows this because he's been in it the most. He knows the weight of a thought versus the sharp edge of a question, the subtle grace of a nuance and these particulars seem to wrench at him from his own insides in a way he can't account for in the slightest. This is Eames who shares his on-site dormitory and works out at strange hours which suits Arthur because Arthur drives everyone else crazy by cleaning at similarly odd times of night - two or three A.M. most often. This is Eames who laughs raucously with his S.A.S buddies and invites Arthur along sometimes and the other night, after he got into a fight, let Arthur patch him up, roll his eyes and sigh at him like he was an annoyance.
Thank you, Eames had said and Arthur, feeling a change in the heft of his gaze had muttered something like stop getting into fights and left the room without another word.
And Eames watched him go but Arthur has always had a damnable habit of not looking back.
+
When Arthur is twenty-five plus six months he meets Dominick and Mallorie Cobb and he doesn't mean for it to happen this way but Eames moves into the background of his thoughts. It happens so smoothly that Arthur doesn't have time to notice that, for a while there, Eames had been himself at the forefront of them - a shock of want in the midst of necessity and regiment.
+
Eames notices.
+
When Arthur is twenty-six and a quarter, he feels loved and he knows that that's the feeling that it is, can name it and place it on the tip of his tongue like the one taste in the world he wants the most. Everything is warm here and the dreams are beautiful. He can see them lingering in the particular blue of Dominick Cobb's irises and hear them in the lilt of Mal's voice.
Arthur falls a little bit in love with all of it but it's that part he still doesn't get.
+
When Arthur is almost twenty-seven he meets Eames for the second time and from the way Dom and Mal greet him he supposes everyone knew he was coming but him. Arthur stands a little rigidly and offers a hand that Eames shakes with a look of bemusement that reeks of thought we were past that. He doesn't jostle the specific balance of things as Arthur privately fears, dreads, and over the next few months he gets used to Eames again in a way that is different from how he became accustomed to him on base.
One night Eames finds him reading in the backyard using the scant porch light that drifts far enough over and remarks that Arthur is killing his eyes before their time.
Arthur says they're his eyes.
The next night he finds a miniature reading light clipped to the cover of his book with a nondescript scrawl that says, Alternatively, you could read indoors.
It takes Arthur a minute or so to realize he's smiling.
+
When Arthur is twenty-seven he asks Eames if he stumbled onto forgery because he wanted to be someone else.
Eames tells him no and then, smoke exiting between his lips says, the trick to this kind of deception is that you always prefer your true self, it's the only way it will work - all that changing; you need something to come back to.
Arthur says oh and Eames laughs, rubbing the cigarette out on the pavement before bringing a hand to the side of his face and pulling him in close.
He says well I lied maybe, it doesn't always have to be your 'self' and Arthur hears the subtlety for once, gets it even as much as he doesn't know why.
Oh he says again and thinks that Eames tastes the same as waking up after sinking into a sunset - bronzed and ancient and present.
It doesn't make sense that Eames is kissing him but something else must kick in because Arthur's hands are knotted into his shirt and he's learning the intricate sharps of Eames' teeth and the roof of his mouth. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense at all.
But he lets it happen anyway.
+
When Arthur is twenty-eight, Mal has lost her sense of reality and she looks at him like a ghost, like a traitor. Eames says there's nothing to be done for her and Arthur who can't believe that - who refuses to believe that - never quite forgives him for it.
+
When Arthur is twenty-eight and four months, Mal jumps and Arthur goes so far into himself that he forgets how far out he'd managed to be. Eames comes back but Arthur isn't quite Arthur anymore as much as a function of Arthur, a necessity.
What he wants doesn't matter because right now it just can't.
He looks at Dom and he knows it and he looks at Philippa and James and he knows it.
Eames keeps telling him to stop but Arthur doesn't think he knows how and when Dom runs he decides that either way it's no longer an option.
I'll stop when he does, he says.
Eames says, his fingertips dragging down the notches of his spine, You're going to kill yourself.
And Arthur says, We'll see.