[INCEPTION] Fic: Small Little Melody (Arthur/Eames, past Arthur/Ariadne)
Small Little Melody
Arthur/Eames
For the inception_kink prompt: Arthur and Eames have an on/off relationship but actually really love each other. During one of their off phases, Arthur has sex with Ariadne, who gets pregnant. - WHO WILL HE CHOOOOSE And I'm not sure if this is what the prompt wanted, specifically, but I just went with it. :( Sorry, OP. Also, ilu forever fermine, thank you for the beta. Mistakes that can still be found are miiiine.
Eames and Arthur fought a lot, perhaps even several times in one day, and almost always because Eames didn’t do something, or did something too much, or Arthur did nothing at all. Because Eames was frustrated and Arthur was frustrated and in the end, the both of them stewing in their respective black moods amounted to anger.
Lots of it.
Eames thundered out of the apartment, suit jacket in one hand and carry-on luggage in the other. He left without saying goodbye and Arthur, who hated being left behind, left the following day after the briefest phone call from Cobb.
***
It took a while for their tempers to simmer, and altogether cool.
Sometimes, it took months.
In those months, Eames had gone from Johannesburg to the Honduras to Spain to Portugal, all reaping the benefits of jobs well done and minds dismantled.
Arthur stayed in Paris the whole time, long after Cobb had left with his children, and long after Ariadne had asked him to sleep in her apartment during his stay.
It took one phone call from Arthur, and several stumbling words from Eames, to get them both back to New York.
***
They didn’t apologize because they both thought that they were right.
Their arguments boiled over, until nothing else was left of them, and all of the words, and the hasty decisions, and the stupid, stupid things they’ve said and not said were left up in the air where none of them could catch touch them again.
***
“I slept with Ariadne,” Arthur confessed around the hands pressed to his face. He was almost embarrassed to admit it but the guilt had been tearing up at him for months now.
He blamed it on Eames flipping the pork chops on the stove. He also blamed it on the coffee brewing on the counter. He also blamed it on the fact that his skin still tingled where Eames had swept over his fingers and kissed with his lips.
The kitchen smelled heavily of something delicious but Arthur was too distracted to feel hungry.
“Once?” Eames asked.
Arthur shook his head.
“Twice?” Eames tried again, and the sizzle on the pan softened as Arthur heard the slight clang of metal against metal.
“A few times.”
“While we were together?”
Arthur opened his mouth, his lips ghosting over his own palms.
“Well you wouldn’t have had the time to fly to Paris in the past few weeks.” Eames smirked; Arthur could almost hear it above the sound of slowly cooking meat. “I should know.”
Arthur didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. That was Eames’ way of forgiveness and the relief that eased Arthur’s nerves shouldn’t quite feel like a leaden ball at the pit of his stomach.
***
The phone call came a few days later.
Eames sat on the couch, legs crossed at the ankles. He wasn’t looking at Arthur, but Arthur knew that he was all that Eames saw in his head. Like a painfully repetitive creed recited over and over. Some measure of faith.
Arthur broke the silence first. “I need to go to Paris.”
Eames nodded. “Of course you do.”
Arthur packed up his bags later that evening.
He was gone for five months.
***
He returned to Eames sometime in January, with a slight ruddiness to his cheeks and a hesitant smile on his face.
Eames expected luggage and jetlag and probably even a weekend away, just for the both of them.
Arthur arrived with a small bundle in his arms, and the two plane tickets to nowhere sat forgotten in the glove compartment for months afterwards.
***
The radio was turned low, and the thick glass of Eames’ car made the usually noisy streets of New York even lower until the silence thickened.
“Her name’s Margaret.”
Eames nodded, but didn’t look at him or the baby-Margaret-even as he pulled to a full stop at a red light.
“Eames.”
“Hmm?” was all that Eames allowed, stuck between not looking and wanting to.
From the corner of his eye, Eames saw Arthur’s mouth open and close several times. The beginning of each word gulped down, awkwardly, by shallow bobs of his throat.
“She’s going to stay with us for a while,” Arthur finally managed.
Eames sighed through his nose, a heavy rush of air that sounded too loud in the pocket of air and too much quiet in his ears.
“Look,” Arthur said again, beginning to sound as frustrated as Eames was sure he felt.
Eames wasn’t vindictive by nature. He’d slept around in the few months that he and Arthur had put everything on hold and tried (tried) to go back to their own separate lives. But he didn’t get anyone pregnant, did he?
“Look,” Arthur’s voice lowered once Eames finally turned his head to look at him. He looked defeated, Eames thought, resigned to something that he didn’t want but had to and Eames knew he was making it difficult for him. Eames never did anything unplanned, after all, but Arthur had always been some anomaly in an otherwise tightly spun armor.
And Arthur knew it.
“She’s my daughter, Eames.”
“At least tell me you weren’t the one who named her Margaret,” Eames said at length. An unbearable length, by the grimace that twisted Arthur’s lips, and the slight nervous jitter of his fingers cupping the baby’s head.
Then Arthur let out a breath that sounded very much like relief and even though Eames had yet to ease his tight hold on the wheel, the softness to his eyes as he looked at the baby--Margaret--in Arthur’s arms must have been reassuring enough.
***
Eames woke up to the sound of crying, and not the kind of crying Eames was wont to walk away from. It was the kind of crying that no one could ever walk away from, not when it was pure need and no awareness.
He wandered into the living room, after hastily putting on his shirt from last night, and found Arthur in a blind panic.
There was something cooking in the kitchen; it smelled burnt.
The television was on-cartoons, Eames noted idly-but no one was watching.
The baby was crying, on the couch, and Arthur was there by her feet looking very much close to crying himself.
Eames grimaced, pinching the bridge of his nose to bat down a blossoming headache.
“Oh, you’re up?” Arthur greeted him, but didn’t look up. His hair was mussed, and he hadn’t even changed out of his shirt and pants from yesterday.
“Did you even sleep?” Eames slurred, wandering into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
Arthur glanced at him and over the opened fridge door Eames saw dark circles under his eyes and an even darker shade to his chin.
“She was crying the whole night,” Arthur said, bracing both his hands by the baby’s small body.
Eames knew helplessness when he saw it and Arthur, down to the tired line of his back and the wrinkles on his shirt and the panicked tone to his voice, was not even bothering to hide it.
He could make it easier for him; the stove was right there, with the pancakes slowly burning to an unsavory black; several milk bottles were littered all over the island, all of them empty.
Eames didn’t know if it was guilt that made him close the fridge door with a jerk of his foot, but before he knew it, he was already flipping the stove switch shut with a bottle in one hand, and a packet of powdered milk in the other.
***
Eames came home to a relative quiet in the apartment. Somehow, he managed to lug around a sizable box into the room without breaking his back and making a mess of the bureau in the narrow hallway.
“Arthur?” He called out, nudging the box along with his foot.
“In the bedroom.”
Eames left the box in the living room. Among the tall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf to one side, all dark wood and old books, and the intricate Italian upholstery of the couch, it looked big and bulky and awkward.
“Eames?”
“Yeah, hold on a minute,” he replied, already tearing through the package tape securing the box’s folded flaps with the sharper end of his car keys.
Arthur padded out from the bedroom, bare feet thudding on the wooden floor.
“What’s this?”
Eames shrugged, tearing the tape off and rummaging through bits of Styrofoam and bubble wrap inside. “Well, she can’t sleep on the couch forever.” And neither can you.
Eames hadn’t realized that Arthur hadn’t spoken, already elbow-deep in screws and wooden slats and an instruction manual he didn’t even bother to check, until slender arms wrapped around his chest and Arthur was there, his cheek pressed against Eames’ shoulder blade, and from underneath his suit jacket, Eames' skin tingled where he felt Arthur's lips move air.
“Are you going to help me with this or not?” he said, nudging Arthur with his elbow, but Arthur didn’t move and neither did Eames.
The arms around him tightened even more.
***
Between the two of them, two very smart men with pockets as deep as Cobb’s subconscious could go, they eventually managed to get the crib assembled. It only took three hours, but Eames said that was because they didn’t need instruction manuals and Arthur didn’t bother to look for it.
After it was done, they carried it to the bedroom.
Eames pushed aside the leather arm chairs by the bed until the crib looked just right up against the wall, by the window that faced east.
Arthur picked up Margaret from where she was sleeping, surrounded by their pillows, on the bed. She fussed, but remained quiet as her father put her in her new crib.
She blinked dazedly up at them, her thinly gloved hand hovering by her lips.
“She has my eyes, doesn’t she?” Arthur said, leaning over the crib.
Eames dropped his gaze, but he couldn’t deny the smile on his face, not when Arthur was looking too adoringly at someone that wasn’t him. He should feel jealous, he thought, but found that he wasn’t, not at all.
“Sleep tight, Madge,” Arthur said softly, his fingers ghosting over her the fine thin hair on her head.
Eames looked blandly up at Arthur, where his chin rested on his elbows as he leaned against the crib. “Madge, Arthur, really?”
“What’s wrong with Madge?”
Eames snorted, smiling openly now as he looked down at the sleeping baby with something like pity. “It’s a bloody shit name is what’s wrong with it.”
“Don’t say shit.” Arthur admonished. “Or bloody.”
Eames snorted again, but his playfulness burned low as he said, “Call her Maggie.”
When he looked up, Arthur met his eyes with an expression so different from the three-piece suits that implied a whole other image entirely. There was affection, and there was fondness, and there was no shame at all behind them, no hint of reluctance that Eames had always had to shoulder through with sheer determination. (And gall.)
Eames thought he wanted to kiss Arthur, and Arthur leaned in, looking like he very much wanted to kiss him too.
But then Maggie gave a soft cry and just like that, Arthur shifted and the moment was gone.
For as long as Eames could remember, he had never felt such uncertainty with anything. But Arthur was happy and Maggie was happy and Eames thought maybe he should be happy too.
***
“Support her head, Eames,” Arthur instructed around the diaper wrapper bit between his teeth.
Eames shifted his arms. The baby cooed, and fussed.
“No, not like-" Arthur grunted, exasperated, and pulled at Eames’ arms.
It was awkward, holding something so tiny and so fragile.
Eames scoffed at Arthur, despite the discomfort that tightened underneath his skin. “Darling, I do know how to deal with children, you know.”
Arthur threw him a look as he tore open the wrapper with his teeth.
A pause. “Well, I held the one child.”
Arthur waited.
Eames sighed, but he was smiling, and the baby grinned up at him, toothless and curious and wide-eyed and everything that Eames had never expected. “Yeah, yeah, he was five.” He shrugged. “Same thing.”
Arthur rolled his eyes and held up the diaper.
Eames eyed it, suspiciously, and his smile faltered. “I’m not changing her.”
“I thought you had experience with children?” Arthur pointed out.
***
Eames did not have experience with children.
He changed the baby’s diaper with careful fingers, hesitant around the moist baby wipes and the equally moist baby skin.
He grimaced, he recoiled, and the baby laughed at him, all gums and tongue and bright eyes, both of her feet held loosely in tiny fists.
And Arthur watched it all with his arms crossed smugly on his chest, but his face was warm and soft with something that Eames couldn’t quite place.
***
“Says here,” Eames read off the milk packet’s label. “To shake the bottle.”
Eames shook the bottle. Once. Twice. Three times to be sure.
“Alright, another one couldn’t hurt.” Shook it again, several times, until bubbles filled up the small gap of air inside the bottle.
The baby looked at him expectantly, as if in challenge.
Eames smirked down at her. “I’m the expert here, alright? Be patient.”
Eames turned back to the packet, reading further. “Warm the bottle.”
Warm. The bottle.
The baby gurgled and started to fuss. It was already a one-fifteen in the afternoon. Eames looked apologetically at her before holding up a finger.
“Be right back.”
Maggie fussed even more, the first notes of a lungful of a good cry erupting from her lips.
Eames didn’t panic; he never panicked.
He pretended that the slight rush to his stride as he walked to the crib was urgency, not panic. He took her in his arms, bounced her slightly.
Bounced her again, just to be sure.
But she was already wailing, and the sound pierced his ears.
“Yeah, alright, next time, I do the groceries, yeah?” Eames chuckled, shaking his head at himself, before going into the kitchen and juggling the baby, the baby’s milk, and a long list of names he planned on calling, immediately, to help look for a trained nanny. The best one. Even if she (or he, Eames later conceded) had to come from the other side of the bloody world.
***
“We’re not getting a nanny,” Arthur said, in a tone that implied, no, emphasized, that they didn’t need to discuss this further.
Eames frowned at him. He reached out and pulled Arthur in by his arms until their bodies were flush against each other.
Arthur’s jaw remained stubbornly set, and Eames kissed his cheek. When Arthur didn’t ease, he kissed him again, and again, and again, until he felt the skin stretch to a reluctant smile.
“Alright,” Eames conceded. “We’re not getting one.”
Arthur nodded, damn right we’re not, and kissed Eames on the lips.
It was sweet and tender and they stood there in each other’s arms for a while but when they lay down the bed a few minutes later, they did nothing else but sleep, exhausted.
***
The phone rang.
Eames was in the kitchen, heating up the bottle on the stove. He held the baby in his arms; she was sucking on his finger, and slobber had already dampened his newly pressed shirt.
The phone rang again.
“Arthur, could you get that?” Eames called out.
Arthur did, and if it hadn’t been for the baby, and the bottle, and the heat of the kitchen at the back of his neck, Eames would have noticed that the silence afterwards couldn’t have been good at all.
***
“Ariadne wants her back,” Arthur said a few minutes later. His shirt was undone, his hair a mess, even though Eames was almost certain that Arthur had already been impeccably dressed earlier.
Eames sobered, and gently pried his finger from the baby’s lips. She fussed, and Arthur took her from his arms.
The expression that twisted Arthur’s face made Eames feel as helpless as Arthur looked. He slumped slightly, his back resting against the counter top. The bottle warmed on the stove, forgotten.
***
“I think six months are a little bit unfair,” Arthur said later that evening.
Eames turned his head on the pillow, careful not to shift too much. They lay on the bed with the baby between them, fast asleep. Arthur’s arm curled protectively around her while Eames’ large hand covered her belly. Her heart was a steady beat against his thumb over her small chest.
“You had her for three weeks, that’s not so bad, eh?” Eames assured him, in a tone that he hoped was at the very least comforting.
But only looked at him with bemusement. He wasn’t finding anything positive about the situation and Eames felt helpless.
He swallowed, worked around his throat, and tried again. “Well what do you want me to say? The mother wants her child, Arthur, you can’t do anything about that.”
They were both getting frustrated, and with the baby in between them, there was no way to deal with it properly.
Arthur was angry, and everything that Eames wanted to say to make it all better weren’t going to help.
“You don’t understand,” Arthur finally said. His voice broke, and Eames heard it, but they both pretended he didn’t.
***
Of course Eames understood.
He’d made a fortune understanding people, left and right, man and woman, anything and everything, you name it. He understood that there were things between fathers and their children, that distance was never a good thing for any relationship, and that when it came down to it, if Arthur needed to, he would have to make a choice.
Eames understood all this, and maybe more, but the baby was crying, short bursts of painfully high notes in Eames’ ear, and Arthur was sleeping, and try as he might, even he couldn’t think through the deep, welling ache in his chest as he held her close.
***
Arthur left, and between then and now sat a haze of several months and several jobs. They ran into each other, shapeless and incoherent, and Eames found it more and more difficult to concentrate on straight-edged forgeries as he drifted from job to job.
Not thinking about Arthur.
But he was, and the fear in his chest grew large as each night passed with neither phone call nor email from Arthur and he wondered if this was it, if Arthur had decided already.
In Beijing, Arthur caught up with him. With a caution to his smile that Eames pretended not to notice, not when his arms were full of him, their bodies touching through their thin clothes. He was warm, and smelled faintly of tiredness and Paris and too many miles between them.
They stumbled into Eames’ hotel room, fingers eager against the waistband of their trousers, belts unbuckled, and even as they went from the door to the couch to the bed, Eames kissed him and Arthur kissed him back and the fear abated, for a little while, until all that was left to feel was the gnawing pit of need and want staggered over too many months spent apart.
“Miss me, did you?” Eames panted into Arthur’s ear as he lay on the bed, Arthur straddling his hips.
Arthur smiled down at him, and he opened his mouth as if to say something. But it clicked closed with a snap and Eames, who had wanted to hear what he wanted to say, to know that Arthur maybe missed him too, didn’t stand a chance against lips, suddenly too passionate and too urgent, clouding all other thoughts from his mind.
***
“Maybe we can move to Paris?” Arthur asked, as Eames stumbled out of the bed, untangling his lags from the bed sheets.
Eames stilled, frowning. They never really did have an apartment. They rented lofts and penthouses all across the world but they never really stayed anywhere. Eames went where his work took him and so did Arthur but they always found each other when they needed to but until now, there was never really a need to settle down. The need to not have to find each other anymore.
“I want to raise her, Eames,” Arthur said, when the quiet wore on. He sounded nervous, his eyes averted to his lap. “And I can’t do it if I’m away all the time.”
Eames loved Arthur, and before that Eames loved his job, and even before that he loved himself, selfishly and unabashedly, and that worked for the both of them for a while, but Eames wasn’t the only one who needed Arthur now and that made all the difference.
But he wasn’t anything if not resourceful; there was no one solution to a problem, there will always be other ways to solve anything and Eames was determined to make Arthur see that.
“We can always visit,” then after a moment, Eames amended, “You can always see her whenever you want to.”
Arthur shook his head, and when he looked up at Eames, he wasn’t indecisive, Eames thought, he wasn’t uncertain either. He’d made a choice long before he’d come to Beijing, Eames realized, and Arthur was nothing if not stubborn.
***
They spent two days in the city, and those two days were filled with nothing else but each other, and room service lunches, and nothing of the city at all.
As Arthur slept, Eames slipped into his clothes, took his bag, and closed the door behind him.
Arthur never said anything, in between gasps of breath and sated smiles and lingering touches on his skin, and Eames didn’t have to say it for him.
He left, and helped Arthur choose what he needed to.
***
Arthur called him, but Eames didn’t answer, and Arthur called again.
Sixty-four times, in almost seven hours.
Eames threw out his mobile, changed his number, and took on jobs that kept him far away from France.
***
They heard about each other through the years that followed.
Eames through his shady contacts in the military. News about a mole in the system that bypassed high-security websites and pilfered blueprints and dossiers and God knew what else.
Arthur through Saito, whose friends in low places burrowed even lower in the grid, much lower than Eames did, and trailed after the ghosts of Eames’ footsteps with half-confirmed hearsays and the unreliable grapevine.
In their heads, they painted vivid images of high-profile jobs and pitch perfect forgeries and other people, faceless and nameless and foreign, but Arthur was always slick and well-dressed in Eames’ mind and Eames remained casual and cocksure in Arthur’s.
***
After a job in Mombasa, Eames had worn out Cobol’s welcome with a bullet to his thigh and three clean breaks on his jaw.
On the same year, Ariadne’s designs for renovations of some museum or other won out against the competition and Eames heard about it, not through his contacts or his underground scheming, but on the front page of a three-month old French newspaper he’d found in his hospital room.
Arthur was in Paris, as he said he would be, and Eames found out because he was there, in grainy black and white, smiling, with a toddler on his hip, and Ariadne by his side.
***
“Maggie!”
The child, gangly and lively, and grinning madly at something she chased down the cobblestone sidewalk, ran past strangers on the sidewalk, evading Arthur’s outstretched arms.
“Maggie!” Arthur tried again, sighing in frustration. “Come on, your mother wants us back before dinner time.”
“Non, papa!” She replied with a squeal, sticking her tongue out at him over her shoulder.
“Reviens ici!1,” Arthur tried a third time. This was how Maggie knew her father was serious, when he spoke in French, his tongue stumbling over the soft syllables.
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
Arthur looked at her, sternly, hands at his hips and his face a measure of his previously warm mood beginning to darken. Impatience stood out in lines around his mouth, frowning.
“Non,” she said again, forcefully, stomping her foot to the ground.
Arthur’s face darkened even more and so did hers and father and daughter were locked at a standstill in the middle of a crowded sidewalk.
“She has your stubborn streak, I see.”
Arthur whirled around, surprised, as a familiar voice and a familiar cocksure lilt of a British accent said from behind him.
Eames stood, in tweed and scruff, and shoulders bent more heavily than Arthur remembered, with a slight smile that was even more familiar than the rest of him. His eyes were still bright, but dulled slightly by the tired lines around the corners.
His breath caught in his throat, like a punch to the gut worth six years and dead ends and nothing, absolutely nothing from Eames who had left him in Beijing and tried his damn best to torch down the paper trail he left behind.
Eames neared him, with a stride that was off, somehow. Pained, Arthur later realized, and as soon as he was near enough, Arthur punched him in the face. Crisp.
Eames’ head snapped back, but he was laughing. Arthur was not; his knuckles were sore, his heart even more so, but when Eames rubbed his cheek and looked up at him with a warmth that Arthur had missed all these years, he couldn’t turn away.
A tugging pulled at his arm from his side, and suddenly Maggie was there, looking up at both of them with widened eyes. “Qui est-il2, papa?”
Arthur picked her up. “This is-"
Eames looked at Maggie with the smile he had worn when he fed her, and rocked her to sleep, and watched her being carried away by her father through the gate back to Paris and to her normal, happy life.
“I’m Eames, sweetheart,” Eames said. He looked at Arthur, with something like hope veiled by six years too many. “An old friend of your father’s.”
“Friend,” Arthur scoffed around a bulk of air and many, many words, and many, many things he’d wanted to say, tightly gripping his throat. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“Comme l'oncle Dom?3” Maggie asked her father. Eames smirked at that.
But Arthur shook his head. “No, he was a different kind of friend.”
“Very different,” Eames agreed, and over Maggie’s head they smiled at each other and there many many things, still, to not be said and to not be forgiven, but Eames found himself walking down a street in Paris with Arthur by his side and his daughter between them and all was not going to be well for a while but this was where they had left off.
This was where they were going to start again.
***
END
Yeah, uh, Babelfish helped me with the French so if I got any of that wrong, my bad. Also, thanks to post_script3 for correcting some of these!
1 - Reviens ici! - Please come back (although Babelfish translated it as "Please return") so idk how that is.
2 - Qui est-il? - Who is he?
3 - Comme l'oncle Dom? - Like Uncle Dom?
Arthur/Eames
For the inception_kink prompt: Arthur and Eames have an on/off relationship but actually really love each other. During one of their off phases, Arthur has sex with Ariadne, who gets pregnant. - WHO WILL HE CHOOOOSE And I'm not sure if this is what the prompt wanted, specifically, but I just went with it. :( Sorry, OP. Also, ilu forever fermine, thank you for the beta. Mistakes that can still be found are miiiine.
Eames and Arthur fought a lot, perhaps even several times in one day, and almost always because Eames didn’t do something, or did something too much, or Arthur did nothing at all. Because Eames was frustrated and Arthur was frustrated and in the end, the both of them stewing in their respective black moods amounted to anger.
Lots of it.
Eames thundered out of the apartment, suit jacket in one hand and carry-on luggage in the other. He left without saying goodbye and Arthur, who hated being left behind, left the following day after the briefest phone call from Cobb.
***
It took a while for their tempers to simmer, and altogether cool.
Sometimes, it took months.
In those months, Eames had gone from Johannesburg to the Honduras to Spain to Portugal, all reaping the benefits of jobs well done and minds dismantled.
Arthur stayed in Paris the whole time, long after Cobb had left with his children, and long after Ariadne had asked him to sleep in her apartment during his stay.
It took one phone call from Arthur, and several stumbling words from Eames, to get them both back to New York.
***
They didn’t apologize because they both thought that they were right.
Their arguments boiled over, until nothing else was left of them, and all of the words, and the hasty decisions, and the stupid, stupid things they’ve said and not said were left up in the air where none of them could catch touch them again.
***
“I slept with Ariadne,” Arthur confessed around the hands pressed to his face. He was almost embarrassed to admit it but the guilt had been tearing up at him for months now.
He blamed it on Eames flipping the pork chops on the stove. He also blamed it on the coffee brewing on the counter. He also blamed it on the fact that his skin still tingled where Eames had swept over his fingers and kissed with his lips.
The kitchen smelled heavily of something delicious but Arthur was too distracted to feel hungry.
“Once?” Eames asked.
Arthur shook his head.
“Twice?” Eames tried again, and the sizzle on the pan softened as Arthur heard the slight clang of metal against metal.
“A few times.”
“While we were together?”
Arthur opened his mouth, his lips ghosting over his own palms.
“Well you wouldn’t have had the time to fly to Paris in the past few weeks.” Eames smirked; Arthur could almost hear it above the sound of slowly cooking meat. “I should know.”
Arthur didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. That was Eames’ way of forgiveness and the relief that eased Arthur’s nerves shouldn’t quite feel like a leaden ball at the pit of his stomach.
***
The phone call came a few days later.
Eames sat on the couch, legs crossed at the ankles. He wasn’t looking at Arthur, but Arthur knew that he was all that Eames saw in his head. Like a painfully repetitive creed recited over and over. Some measure of faith.
Arthur broke the silence first. “I need to go to Paris.”
Eames nodded. “Of course you do.”
Arthur packed up his bags later that evening.
He was gone for five months.
***
He returned to Eames sometime in January, with a slight ruddiness to his cheeks and a hesitant smile on his face.
Eames expected luggage and jetlag and probably even a weekend away, just for the both of them.
Arthur arrived with a small bundle in his arms, and the two plane tickets to nowhere sat forgotten in the glove compartment for months afterwards.
***
The radio was turned low, and the thick glass of Eames’ car made the usually noisy streets of New York even lower until the silence thickened.
“Her name’s Margaret.”
Eames nodded, but didn’t look at him or the baby-Margaret-even as he pulled to a full stop at a red light.
“Eames.”
“Hmm?” was all that Eames allowed, stuck between not looking and wanting to.
From the corner of his eye, Eames saw Arthur’s mouth open and close several times. The beginning of each word gulped down, awkwardly, by shallow bobs of his throat.
“She’s going to stay with us for a while,” Arthur finally managed.
Eames sighed through his nose, a heavy rush of air that sounded too loud in the pocket of air and too much quiet in his ears.
“Look,” Arthur said again, beginning to sound as frustrated as Eames was sure he felt.
Eames wasn’t vindictive by nature. He’d slept around in the few months that he and Arthur had put everything on hold and tried (tried) to go back to their own separate lives. But he didn’t get anyone pregnant, did he?
“Look,” Arthur’s voice lowered once Eames finally turned his head to look at him. He looked defeated, Eames thought, resigned to something that he didn’t want but had to and Eames knew he was making it difficult for him. Eames never did anything unplanned, after all, but Arthur had always been some anomaly in an otherwise tightly spun armor.
And Arthur knew it.
“She’s my daughter, Eames.”
“At least tell me you weren’t the one who named her Margaret,” Eames said at length. An unbearable length, by the grimace that twisted Arthur’s lips, and the slight nervous jitter of his fingers cupping the baby’s head.
Then Arthur let out a breath that sounded very much like relief and even though Eames had yet to ease his tight hold on the wheel, the softness to his eyes as he looked at the baby--Margaret--in Arthur’s arms must have been reassuring enough.
***
Eames woke up to the sound of crying, and not the kind of crying Eames was wont to walk away from. It was the kind of crying that no one could ever walk away from, not when it was pure need and no awareness.
He wandered into the living room, after hastily putting on his shirt from last night, and found Arthur in a blind panic.
There was something cooking in the kitchen; it smelled burnt.
The television was on-cartoons, Eames noted idly-but no one was watching.
The baby was crying, on the couch, and Arthur was there by her feet looking very much close to crying himself.
Eames grimaced, pinching the bridge of his nose to bat down a blossoming headache.
“Oh, you’re up?” Arthur greeted him, but didn’t look up. His hair was mussed, and he hadn’t even changed out of his shirt and pants from yesterday.
“Did you even sleep?” Eames slurred, wandering into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
Arthur glanced at him and over the opened fridge door Eames saw dark circles under his eyes and an even darker shade to his chin.
“She was crying the whole night,” Arthur said, bracing both his hands by the baby’s small body.
Eames knew helplessness when he saw it and Arthur, down to the tired line of his back and the wrinkles on his shirt and the panicked tone to his voice, was not even bothering to hide it.
He could make it easier for him; the stove was right there, with the pancakes slowly burning to an unsavory black; several milk bottles were littered all over the island, all of them empty.
Eames didn’t know if it was guilt that made him close the fridge door with a jerk of his foot, but before he knew it, he was already flipping the stove switch shut with a bottle in one hand, and a packet of powdered milk in the other.
***
Eames came home to a relative quiet in the apartment. Somehow, he managed to lug around a sizable box into the room without breaking his back and making a mess of the bureau in the narrow hallway.
“Arthur?” He called out, nudging the box along with his foot.
“In the bedroom.”
Eames left the box in the living room. Among the tall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf to one side, all dark wood and old books, and the intricate Italian upholstery of the couch, it looked big and bulky and awkward.
“Eames?”
“Yeah, hold on a minute,” he replied, already tearing through the package tape securing the box’s folded flaps with the sharper end of his car keys.
Arthur padded out from the bedroom, bare feet thudding on the wooden floor.
“What’s this?”
Eames shrugged, tearing the tape off and rummaging through bits of Styrofoam and bubble wrap inside. “Well, she can’t sleep on the couch forever.” And neither can you.
Eames hadn’t realized that Arthur hadn’t spoken, already elbow-deep in screws and wooden slats and an instruction manual he didn’t even bother to check, until slender arms wrapped around his chest and Arthur was there, his cheek pressed against Eames’ shoulder blade, and from underneath his suit jacket, Eames' skin tingled where he felt Arthur's lips move air.
“Are you going to help me with this or not?” he said, nudging Arthur with his elbow, but Arthur didn’t move and neither did Eames.
The arms around him tightened even more.
***
Between the two of them, two very smart men with pockets as deep as Cobb’s subconscious could go, they eventually managed to get the crib assembled. It only took three hours, but Eames said that was because they didn’t need instruction manuals and Arthur didn’t bother to look for it.
After it was done, they carried it to the bedroom.
Eames pushed aside the leather arm chairs by the bed until the crib looked just right up against the wall, by the window that faced east.
Arthur picked up Margaret from where she was sleeping, surrounded by their pillows, on the bed. She fussed, but remained quiet as her father put her in her new crib.
She blinked dazedly up at them, her thinly gloved hand hovering by her lips.
“She has my eyes, doesn’t she?” Arthur said, leaning over the crib.
Eames dropped his gaze, but he couldn’t deny the smile on his face, not when Arthur was looking too adoringly at someone that wasn’t him. He should feel jealous, he thought, but found that he wasn’t, not at all.
“Sleep tight, Madge,” Arthur said softly, his fingers ghosting over her the fine thin hair on her head.
Eames looked blandly up at Arthur, where his chin rested on his elbows as he leaned against the crib. “Madge, Arthur, really?”
“What’s wrong with Madge?”
Eames snorted, smiling openly now as he looked down at the sleeping baby with something like pity. “It’s a bloody shit name is what’s wrong with it.”
“Don’t say shit.” Arthur admonished. “Or bloody.”
Eames snorted again, but his playfulness burned low as he said, “Call her Maggie.”
When he looked up, Arthur met his eyes with an expression so different from the three-piece suits that implied a whole other image entirely. There was affection, and there was fondness, and there was no shame at all behind them, no hint of reluctance that Eames had always had to shoulder through with sheer determination. (And gall.)
Eames thought he wanted to kiss Arthur, and Arthur leaned in, looking like he very much wanted to kiss him too.
But then Maggie gave a soft cry and just like that, Arthur shifted and the moment was gone.
For as long as Eames could remember, he had never felt such uncertainty with anything. But Arthur was happy and Maggie was happy and Eames thought maybe he should be happy too.
***
“Support her head, Eames,” Arthur instructed around the diaper wrapper bit between his teeth.
Eames shifted his arms. The baby cooed, and fussed.
“No, not like-" Arthur grunted, exasperated, and pulled at Eames’ arms.
It was awkward, holding something so tiny and so fragile.
Eames scoffed at Arthur, despite the discomfort that tightened underneath his skin. “Darling, I do know how to deal with children, you know.”
Arthur threw him a look as he tore open the wrapper with his teeth.
A pause. “Well, I held the one child.”
Arthur waited.
Eames sighed, but he was smiling, and the baby grinned up at him, toothless and curious and wide-eyed and everything that Eames had never expected. “Yeah, yeah, he was five.” He shrugged. “Same thing.”
Arthur rolled his eyes and held up the diaper.
Eames eyed it, suspiciously, and his smile faltered. “I’m not changing her.”
“I thought you had experience with children?” Arthur pointed out.
***
Eames did not have experience with children.
He changed the baby’s diaper with careful fingers, hesitant around the moist baby wipes and the equally moist baby skin.
He grimaced, he recoiled, and the baby laughed at him, all gums and tongue and bright eyes, both of her feet held loosely in tiny fists.
And Arthur watched it all with his arms crossed smugly on his chest, but his face was warm and soft with something that Eames couldn’t quite place.
***
“Says here,” Eames read off the milk packet’s label. “To shake the bottle.”
Eames shook the bottle. Once. Twice. Three times to be sure.
“Alright, another one couldn’t hurt.” Shook it again, several times, until bubbles filled up the small gap of air inside the bottle.
The baby looked at him expectantly, as if in challenge.
Eames smirked down at her. “I’m the expert here, alright? Be patient.”
Eames turned back to the packet, reading further. “Warm the bottle.”
Warm. The bottle.
The baby gurgled and started to fuss. It was already a one-fifteen in the afternoon. Eames looked apologetically at her before holding up a finger.
“Be right back.”
Maggie fussed even more, the first notes of a lungful of a good cry erupting from her lips.
Eames didn’t panic; he never panicked.
He pretended that the slight rush to his stride as he walked to the crib was urgency, not panic. He took her in his arms, bounced her slightly.
Bounced her again, just to be sure.
But she was already wailing, and the sound pierced his ears.
“Yeah, alright, next time, I do the groceries, yeah?” Eames chuckled, shaking his head at himself, before going into the kitchen and juggling the baby, the baby’s milk, and a long list of names he planned on calling, immediately, to help look for a trained nanny. The best one. Even if she (or he, Eames later conceded) had to come from the other side of the bloody world.
***
“We’re not getting a nanny,” Arthur said, in a tone that implied, no, emphasized, that they didn’t need to discuss this further.
Eames frowned at him. He reached out and pulled Arthur in by his arms until their bodies were flush against each other.
Arthur’s jaw remained stubbornly set, and Eames kissed his cheek. When Arthur didn’t ease, he kissed him again, and again, and again, until he felt the skin stretch to a reluctant smile.
“Alright,” Eames conceded. “We’re not getting one.”
Arthur nodded, damn right we’re not, and kissed Eames on the lips.
It was sweet and tender and they stood there in each other’s arms for a while but when they lay down the bed a few minutes later, they did nothing else but sleep, exhausted.
***
The phone rang.
Eames was in the kitchen, heating up the bottle on the stove. He held the baby in his arms; she was sucking on his finger, and slobber had already dampened his newly pressed shirt.
The phone rang again.
“Arthur, could you get that?” Eames called out.
Arthur did, and if it hadn’t been for the baby, and the bottle, and the heat of the kitchen at the back of his neck, Eames would have noticed that the silence afterwards couldn’t have been good at all.
***
“Ariadne wants her back,” Arthur said a few minutes later. His shirt was undone, his hair a mess, even though Eames was almost certain that Arthur had already been impeccably dressed earlier.
Eames sobered, and gently pried his finger from the baby’s lips. She fussed, and Arthur took her from his arms.
The expression that twisted Arthur’s face made Eames feel as helpless as Arthur looked. He slumped slightly, his back resting against the counter top. The bottle warmed on the stove, forgotten.
***
“I think six months are a little bit unfair,” Arthur said later that evening.
Eames turned his head on the pillow, careful not to shift too much. They lay on the bed with the baby between them, fast asleep. Arthur’s arm curled protectively around her while Eames’ large hand covered her belly. Her heart was a steady beat against his thumb over her small chest.
“You had her for three weeks, that’s not so bad, eh?” Eames assured him, in a tone that he hoped was at the very least comforting.
But only looked at him with bemusement. He wasn’t finding anything positive about the situation and Eames felt helpless.
He swallowed, worked around his throat, and tried again. “Well what do you want me to say? The mother wants her child, Arthur, you can’t do anything about that.”
They were both getting frustrated, and with the baby in between them, there was no way to deal with it properly.
Arthur was angry, and everything that Eames wanted to say to make it all better weren’t going to help.
“You don’t understand,” Arthur finally said. His voice broke, and Eames heard it, but they both pretended he didn’t.
***
Of course Eames understood.
He’d made a fortune understanding people, left and right, man and woman, anything and everything, you name it. He understood that there were things between fathers and their children, that distance was never a good thing for any relationship, and that when it came down to it, if Arthur needed to, he would have to make a choice.
Eames understood all this, and maybe more, but the baby was crying, short bursts of painfully high notes in Eames’ ear, and Arthur was sleeping, and try as he might, even he couldn’t think through the deep, welling ache in his chest as he held her close.
***
Arthur left, and between then and now sat a haze of several months and several jobs. They ran into each other, shapeless and incoherent, and Eames found it more and more difficult to concentrate on straight-edged forgeries as he drifted from job to job.
Not thinking about Arthur.
But he was, and the fear in his chest grew large as each night passed with neither phone call nor email from Arthur and he wondered if this was it, if Arthur had decided already.
In Beijing, Arthur caught up with him. With a caution to his smile that Eames pretended not to notice, not when his arms were full of him, their bodies touching through their thin clothes. He was warm, and smelled faintly of tiredness and Paris and too many miles between them.
They stumbled into Eames’ hotel room, fingers eager against the waistband of their trousers, belts unbuckled, and even as they went from the door to the couch to the bed, Eames kissed him and Arthur kissed him back and the fear abated, for a little while, until all that was left to feel was the gnawing pit of need and want staggered over too many months spent apart.
“Miss me, did you?” Eames panted into Arthur’s ear as he lay on the bed, Arthur straddling his hips.
Arthur smiled down at him, and he opened his mouth as if to say something. But it clicked closed with a snap and Eames, who had wanted to hear what he wanted to say, to know that Arthur maybe missed him too, didn’t stand a chance against lips, suddenly too passionate and too urgent, clouding all other thoughts from his mind.
***
“Maybe we can move to Paris?” Arthur asked, as Eames stumbled out of the bed, untangling his lags from the bed sheets.
Eames stilled, frowning. They never really did have an apartment. They rented lofts and penthouses all across the world but they never really stayed anywhere. Eames went where his work took him and so did Arthur but they always found each other when they needed to but until now, there was never really a need to settle down. The need to not have to find each other anymore.
“I want to raise her, Eames,” Arthur said, when the quiet wore on. He sounded nervous, his eyes averted to his lap. “And I can’t do it if I’m away all the time.”
Eames loved Arthur, and before that Eames loved his job, and even before that he loved himself, selfishly and unabashedly, and that worked for the both of them for a while, but Eames wasn’t the only one who needed Arthur now and that made all the difference.
But he wasn’t anything if not resourceful; there was no one solution to a problem, there will always be other ways to solve anything and Eames was determined to make Arthur see that.
“We can always visit,” then after a moment, Eames amended, “You can always see her whenever you want to.”
Arthur shook his head, and when he looked up at Eames, he wasn’t indecisive, Eames thought, he wasn’t uncertain either. He’d made a choice long before he’d come to Beijing, Eames realized, and Arthur was nothing if not stubborn.
***
They spent two days in the city, and those two days were filled with nothing else but each other, and room service lunches, and nothing of the city at all.
As Arthur slept, Eames slipped into his clothes, took his bag, and closed the door behind him.
Arthur never said anything, in between gasps of breath and sated smiles and lingering touches on his skin, and Eames didn’t have to say it for him.
He left, and helped Arthur choose what he needed to.
***
Arthur called him, but Eames didn’t answer, and Arthur called again.
Sixty-four times, in almost seven hours.
Eames threw out his mobile, changed his number, and took on jobs that kept him far away from France.
***
They heard about each other through the years that followed.
Eames through his shady contacts in the military. News about a mole in the system that bypassed high-security websites and pilfered blueprints and dossiers and God knew what else.
Arthur through Saito, whose friends in low places burrowed even lower in the grid, much lower than Eames did, and trailed after the ghosts of Eames’ footsteps with half-confirmed hearsays and the unreliable grapevine.
In their heads, they painted vivid images of high-profile jobs and pitch perfect forgeries and other people, faceless and nameless and foreign, but Arthur was always slick and well-dressed in Eames’ mind and Eames remained casual and cocksure in Arthur’s.
***
After a job in Mombasa, Eames had worn out Cobol’s welcome with a bullet to his thigh and three clean breaks on his jaw.
On the same year, Ariadne’s designs for renovations of some museum or other won out against the competition and Eames heard about it, not through his contacts or his underground scheming, but on the front page of a three-month old French newspaper he’d found in his hospital room.
Arthur was in Paris, as he said he would be, and Eames found out because he was there, in grainy black and white, smiling, with a toddler on his hip, and Ariadne by his side.
***
“Maggie!”
The child, gangly and lively, and grinning madly at something she chased down the cobblestone sidewalk, ran past strangers on the sidewalk, evading Arthur’s outstretched arms.
“Maggie!” Arthur tried again, sighing in frustration. “Come on, your mother wants us back before dinner time.”
“Non, papa!” She replied with a squeal, sticking her tongue out at him over her shoulder.
“Reviens ici!1,” Arthur tried a third time. This was how Maggie knew her father was serious, when he spoke in French, his tongue stumbling over the soft syllables.
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
Arthur looked at her, sternly, hands at his hips and his face a measure of his previously warm mood beginning to darken. Impatience stood out in lines around his mouth, frowning.
“Non,” she said again, forcefully, stomping her foot to the ground.
Arthur’s face darkened even more and so did hers and father and daughter were locked at a standstill in the middle of a crowded sidewalk.
“She has your stubborn streak, I see.”
Arthur whirled around, surprised, as a familiar voice and a familiar cocksure lilt of a British accent said from behind him.
Eames stood, in tweed and scruff, and shoulders bent more heavily than Arthur remembered, with a slight smile that was even more familiar than the rest of him. His eyes were still bright, but dulled slightly by the tired lines around the corners.
His breath caught in his throat, like a punch to the gut worth six years and dead ends and nothing, absolutely nothing from Eames who had left him in Beijing and tried his damn best to torch down the paper trail he left behind.
Eames neared him, with a stride that was off, somehow. Pained, Arthur later realized, and as soon as he was near enough, Arthur punched him in the face. Crisp.
Eames’ head snapped back, but he was laughing. Arthur was not; his knuckles were sore, his heart even more so, but when Eames rubbed his cheek and looked up at him with a warmth that Arthur had missed all these years, he couldn’t turn away.
A tugging pulled at his arm from his side, and suddenly Maggie was there, looking up at both of them with widened eyes. “Qui est-il2, papa?”
Arthur picked her up. “This is-"
Eames looked at Maggie with the smile he had worn when he fed her, and rocked her to sleep, and watched her being carried away by her father through the gate back to Paris and to her normal, happy life.
“I’m Eames, sweetheart,” Eames said. He looked at Arthur, with something like hope veiled by six years too many. “An old friend of your father’s.”
“Friend,” Arthur scoffed around a bulk of air and many, many words, and many, many things he’d wanted to say, tightly gripping his throat. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“Comme l'oncle Dom?3” Maggie asked her father. Eames smirked at that.
But Arthur shook his head. “No, he was a different kind of friend.”
“Very different,” Eames agreed, and over Maggie’s head they smiled at each other and there many many things, still, to not be said and to not be forgiven, but Eames found himself walking down a street in Paris with Arthur by his side and his daughter between them and all was not going to be well for a while but this was where they had left off.
This was where they were going to start again.
***
END
Yeah, uh, Babelfish helped me with the French so if I got any of that wrong, my bad. Also, thanks to post_script3 for correcting some of these!
1 - Reviens ici! - Please come back (although Babelfish translated it as "Please return") so idk how that is.
2 - Qui est-il? - Who is he?
3 - Comme l'oncle Dom? - Like Uncle Dom?