Infornography - Chibi Lurrel
Title: Infornography
Pairing: Arthur/Eames, Arthur/Robert
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Sometimes these things get away from me.
Notes: For this
prompt (a link the A Softer World). OP, I tried to take that prompt to its most logical conclusion and I couldn't manage it. So this is what happened. Thanks to sorrynotsorry for her services!
Arthur tails Robert Fischer, because it's his job.
This is what he does:
- The paperwork
- The background
- The filing
- The shooting
- The clean up
- The follow-up
He never told Cobb.
Saito insists this part isn’t necessary but Cobb laughs, makes it a joke. “Arthur likes to be thorough.”
And Arthur doesn’t want his last thoughts of Cobb to be hot sparks of anger in his blood but. They are anyway - for leaving, for quitting, for trusting someone who wasn’t him. For letting Mal. For everything. Arthur can feel himself freeze somewhere deep.
Their hug in the airport is forced and Arthur smoothes out his suit right after. Each wrinkle is carefully dispatched, disappeared.
Eames coming up behind him casts a shadow that’s long and heavy.
“Where are you off too, Arthur?” he asks.
“A few nights here, then back to Fischer-Morrow.”
Eames looks dubious. “Oh, really?”
Arthur shrugs. “No rest for the wicked. I’ve got your old job, in fact.”
Eames is still squinting in disbelief, because Arthur is no forger. As far as he knows. “You sure you won’t stand out too much?”
Arthur gives him the expression that passes for a smile, for Eames. “You could find out.”
--
Eames finds out. He sees (and has seen) all the ways Arthur can look in the few days before Arthur’s long ride to Sydney.
Eames makes a list, as he often does:
- Disheveled
- Angry
- Demanding
- Full
- Wanton
- Entirely Undone
Eames, instead, leaves a day early and Arthur never finds the note left carefully pressed in the Gideon Bible on their nightstand. He is sick of looking.
--
Arthur heads to Sydney alone. He decides to limit himself the flight to brood, ten hours of wallowing and regrets and drinking tiny bottles of liquor. Any more than that would be unseemly. Distracting. He’s there to collect, not to spend time on things that he already knows: he’s too cold to let someone else keep him for long.
--
01. Your step-father broke your jaw when you were fifteen, against the wall of the house your mother married him for.
--
Arthur’s new job is horribly pedestrian, something to do with accounting, and it doesn’t occupy much of his time. He takes up drinking at the beach for a while, but he is there to gain information and while drinking himself into a dark sleep each night is enticing, it leaves him wool-headed and dull.
And he is too good at this. Arthur is good at being single-minded. He makes lists. Charts.
How many times a day does Fischer smile?
Does he mention his father?
Do the other employees notice a difference?
Is it permanent?
Is he crazy?
Arthur spends so much time tracking Fischer, making sure that this time he will miss nothing, that he fails to realize that someone is tracking him.
--
It turns out to be a loose end, of course. It always is, in Arthur’s experience.
--
Nash, gun in hand, kicks open the door to his office in the high-rise that houses the bigwigs behind the recently downsized Fischer-Morrow (now just Fischer), and Arthur feels nothing inside. He is not startled or concerned but more troublingly, he is not angry.
Arthur points his gun at Nash’s head anyway, because it’s familiar and Arthur needs a little familiarity now and then.
Fischer glides in behind Nash and he’s smiling, which is a facial expression that has been getting more use at meetings now that he isn’t managing 16 global energy firms.
“I see you’ve been busy,” says Arthur. “Cobol sell you out?”
“Been busy finding you,” Nash spits through a mouthful of grinning teeth.
“Well, you’ve found me.” He nods cordially at Fischer. “It’s been a pleasure.”
Arthur stands up, gun still drawn, expecting to walk out. It’s worked for Eames before, which is something he doesn’t think because that’s still off limits, tucked away, but it’s something he knows.
Fischer smiles a little more broadly. “Nash, go see Ms. Wells in the office two doors down. And put away the gun first.”
Nash drags his eyes from Arthur back to the perfect, smiling face of the 4th richest man on planet earth, holsters his gun, and stalks off.
Fischer closes the door behind him.
“I think I should thank you.” He looks so entirely unafraid that Arthur sits down and lets him talk.
“I have a few questions first, though, Arthur.”
--
02. Your mother died of lung cancer.
--
Arthur would never compromise the mission, of course, so he doesn’t say anything.
Every time Fischer asks if he’s the one who’s been in his head, who did so much damage, and what was he doing there, Arthur moves to leave. So Fischer goes through the rest of what he wants to know.
The first real question is this:
- Arthur, why do you do this?
Then he says the truth: Cobb.
--
Arthur reasons it’s guilt, at first. Guilt is familiar.
Then he thinks, maybe it’s the cut of Fischer’s cheekbones.
The next week, it’s because of his eyes, blue and clear and unsullied by any element.
Fischer doesn’t know him yet.
--
The first time Fischer enters his dreams is their fifth meeting. Each one starts with the same litany of questions that Arthur refuses to answer, though he can feel himself smiling this time. He stays hostile out of habit, anyway.
Fischer has scraped together the basics on his own: he knows Cobb, he knows Eames, he knows Yusuf. He would never guess Saito or Ariadne.
Arthur turns the tables.
- Why me?
--
They are in a field. It’s open, endless, and in bright high contrast colors.
“Where are we right now, Arthur?” Fischer never seems to tire of inserting his name into conversation, clinging to the idea that names are a talisman.
Fischer doesn’t know his name, though.
Arthur shrugs. He’s tired, even though he knows he is asleep. “You’re the one who came to me. I don’t have to tell you shit.”
Fischer just looks at him steadily. “You kissed your mother with that mouth?”
Dammit, Arthur thinks as a trailer appears in the middle of a field. He’s maybe five, running around in shorts, and his mother is hanging out the door, telling him dinner is ready, and she’s smiling.
Somnacin is a light sedative at best. Arthur shoots himself in the head and kicks Fischer over on his way out of the office.
--
03. You killed him in his own bedroom, and then burnt down the house.
--
Fischer enters his office the next week without the preamble of questions, he simply lays the PASIV out on the desk.
“No,” says Arthur simply. He pauses. “Also, I quit.”
Fischer’s entire demeanor changes. He hardens, his eyes turn to ice and Arthur thinks there might be a man worth knowing there after all, outside of the guilt the hangs on his ribs when he thinks of the bombs, the hundreds of men felled in his mind.
“I don’t think that’s quite your decision, Arthur,” Fischer says, with the force of a man who knows he will never hear the word “no.”
Arthur barely raises his eyebrows. “Will you hunt me down like a dog? Better men than you have tried,” he lies.
Fischer spins and then locks the door. “I don’t think so, Arthur. You’re going to be here until I know you. Until I know you inside and out. Until I know what you did.”
His eyes stay clear.
Arthur laughs.
--
“I think this is a better way to get to know me,” Arthur says lightly as he twirls pasta around his fork.
Fischer is scowling. Arthur wonders when he became like this.
He spends the evening looking into Fischer’s eyes anyway, out of spite.
--
He doesn’t really wonder, though. He knows.
--
The tenth meeting, Arthur is caught working late. He doesn’t enjoy his job, but long hours fill the time. He’s due for a raise soon. He is a model fucking employee.
Arthur’s head snaps up out of habit when the door opens. He knows it’ll be Fischer, predictable, brittle, beautiful Fischer. Arthur studies him in the shaky office light.
“What do you need to know this time?” Arthur says, and he puts heat in his voice.
Fischer’s hands are balled into fists. “What did you take?”
Arthur leans back. “What would you like me to take?”
There’s a loud noise as Fischer bangs his fists onto his desk as though he’s dangerous, a threat, and Arthur smiles.
“I’m quite skilled at extraction. Though I think you might have already discovered that.”
Ficsher’s eyes narrow and Arthur thinks that’s a shame.
“I want you to teach me.”
--
04. We could have been in love, once.
--
Fischer lets him into his mind. Arthur thinks this could be a stupid thing, but maybe it’ll be different, this time. Clean slate.
When they wake up, Fischer smiles, and it’s easy - there are no tight lines in his face. “So?”
“You chipped your front tooth in 1st grade after falling from the monkey bars. Your mother took you to the dentist because your father thought your crying was juvenile.
You went to private intermediate school and high school, were fairly popular but never a star. You ran track reasonably well.
You majored in art history because you were going to get a Harvard MBA anyway.”
Fischer blinks.
“You’ve been staring at my ass whenever you can.”
He doesn’t blush, though, just gives Arthur a new smile. “Impressive.”
They kiss, but it doesn’t go much further than that. Arthur’s hands tremble a little when Fischer leaves.
--
Arthur only has two people in the world that knew him before Mal died, who had crawled inside his head and learned him like one memorizes a map.
Cobb needed to know how he worked so he could be put in a box of tools.
Eames liked the challenge.
--
“I’m glad you came here,” Fischer says, nuzzling his neck. Arthur’s back is flush against his chest. “I think I always lived my life with something missing.”
Arthur shrugs, moving his whole body against Fischer’s. “I don’t think you should look for that with me.”
Fischer laughs. It is a nice laugh, and even though Fischer has his ghosts, it sounds like he can be happy, too.
Arthur lets him peel off his suit and sigh into his shoulder.
--
“What do you know about money, Arthur?” Fischer purrs his name, but Arthur can’t say for sure whether he likes it. His hands are tucked under Arthur’s lapels, his thumbs running over the material.
“I’ve got enough of it,” he says but he doesn’t meet Fischer’s eyes.
“The crushing pressure of it, the weight of it, the knowledge that it could all come tumbling down,” Fischer continues.
“It must be difficult,” he says, because that’s what goes here.
Fischer isn’t stupid. “I guess I’m asking too much.” He pulls Arthur forward, bringing their mouths together. He kisses with a tenderness that Arthur files away. “Maybe I don’t need you to understand what my life was like before.”
Nothing about Fischer is familiar. Arthur hopes that’s enough.
--
Pressure he knows. Pressure is running to Cobb’s house, is sweeping the children up, is watching him try to die over and over.
Pressure is Mal whispering “You’re not real, are you?” when she has her hands buried in his hair. Pressure is seeing the body, bones all wrong, and not crying, not saying anything.
Arthur has no use for authority figures these days.
--
“I can’t teach you much else, Fischer.”
“Robert,” he says. “You haven’t taught me anything.”
He is breathing right into Arthur’s ear, and the sound should be exciting in the dark.
“I know,” Arthur says and smiles, full and real. He hasn’t, because what is there to teach to a man like Fischer, a man so knowable Arthur could have written his biography, twice.
Fischer pulls back, and they are naked, tangled, chest to chest. “What do you know?” Their lithe bodies fit together well, thinks Arthur wistfully.
“Your father. You love him, you’ll continue to no matter what he’s done. Your mother is a soft shade in your mind. Your first love’s name was Julia and she had black hair.”
“I know you…you grew up in a trailer park.” As a counter parry, it is a weak one.
He continues, “And you met Cobb after serving overseas.”
“And?”
“And. You’re with me now.” Fischer tries a triumphant smile.
Arthur’s laugh starts from his feet and crashes out of his mouth. Fischer rolls off him, gracelessly, and Arthur still laughs. He can’t stop, he’s buried himself too deep and part of him needs to escape, to fall out of his throat and into the dark.
--
05. It’s “James.”
- E