song lyrics.
if a body catch a body
Eames/Mal, PG-13, prompt: " Mal was the one that found Eames, not Cobb. Maybe she knew him before she met Cobb, and they had an affair, or not, so they still have UST. Maybe they're fucking while Cobb is pursuing her or before they get married."
3117 words
--
He sees her first when she is eighteen, in an old college town, back when he used to call out to girls leaning out of their dorm windows, and smoke joints behind the philosophy building made entirely out of red bricks and 18th century doors, St. Patrick's Cross raised like a monument of moss-covered rock.
She's lying on the grass with her eyes closed, the white of her arms stark against the soft, dewy ground - her hair deeply brown, almost black, the best kind of veil, spread open like a fisherman's net.
He doesn't walk up to her. He stubs his cigarette against the wall, watching as she leans up on her elbows and calls out to a friend riding by on a bicycle.
The sun shines high in the sky. It's a beautiful day.
+
He sees her again.
At the convenience store where he buys his cigarettes, he bumps into her carrying armfuls of junk food and supplies. He holds the door open for her on her way out and she smiles at him from under her eyelashes, red scarf around her shoulders, standing out against the deep blue of the October evening.
The next time he sees her, he's late for an exam and she barely even glances at him in the hall because some guy is chatting her up. A few days later, he sees the same guy at a keg party, making out with a different girl. For a second, he feels morally outraged, barely resisting to beat the shit out of the guy, but then remembers he doesn't even know her name and he isn't exactly the epitome of monogamy, either.
Sometimes he even sees her in other people. He once followed a girl to the library because he thought it was her. He'd wanted to say hello but then the girl turned around and he realized he had the wrong person.
+
It's right before Christmas break when he finally talks to her. The ground is covered with soft, downy snow and so is her hair as he marches up the courtyard to her dormitory. He's waiting for a friend to drive him to the airport, chainsmoking behind the statue of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle when he sees her walk past in a red knit cap.
He runs up to her, stopping abruptly when she turns and cocks her head to the side. She's even beautiful up close, with her dark eyes and her heartshaped face, and for a moment he feels like a boy again, tongue thick inside his mouth, words reduced to simple basics.
"Hello," he says to her in a rush, "I've seen you around often and I was wondering if you would be interested in grabbing coffee with me. Or hot chocolate. I'm not very choosy."
When she laughs at him, throwing a hand over her chest, he thinks he's made a mistake - but then she smirks and offers her arm for him to take and relief settles in the pit of his stomach like a surge of warmth.
+
Her name is Mallorie. He talks to her for hours, forgetting the time, in the only coffee shop in town that plays reggae music and also serves alcoholic beverages. He's flying back to London for the holidays but can't be arsed to leave when their shoes are touching under the table and she's doing wildly animated impressions of her professors. She doesn't laugh at his jokes but he laughs at hers. He feels this history, this sense of belongingness and togetherness tugging at his shoulders, even though they've only started talking.
The sentiment is further reinforced when their knees bump under the table and she invites him up to her room.
+
She dresses down to an old football t-shirt and a pair of old drawstring pants. She puts on some music - French pop - and pours wine in mismatched mugs for the both of them.
For a moment, he contemplates kissing her neck as she stands motionless by the window, looking out at the snow covered courtyard below, mug of wine held between her lips. But then the moment passes and she turns, asking him whether he likes the song that played just now.
They spend the evening on separate bends, whispering to each in the dark until it is morning again and light peeks over the edges of the window.
He wants to fuck her very badly, but he also can't get enough of just listening to her speak. At six in the morning, he stumbles out of her room, pulling his jacket round his shoulders. He hears a rustle behind him when he's halfway across the school and turns to see her plodding through the snow in a bathrobe and her red knit hat, waving at him from across the courtyard.
"You forgot your scarf!" she says, and, laughing, wraps it around his neck securely. When they stand close enough, she flicks him on the nose before kissing him lightly on the cheek.
Then she smiles and steps back and says, "Off you go now," like his mother or his sisters but with the condescension replaced with a gentleness in her smile. He pulls her back from the curb of the street for one last kiss goodbye. She stands on her toes and wraps her arms around his neck, soft, like when wives bid their husbands goodbye before they left for war.
+
They have sex after Christmas break. She invites him up again on the same weekend her roommate leaves to visit her boyfriend and they watch black and white movies in the tiny TV set propped up in the middle of the room. She curls up against him on the bed, in a pink jumper and wool socks. When she sits up with her knees pressed to her chest, he sees the pink outline of her panties cupping the round firmness of her bottom.
He watches her for awhile, her arms thrown around her knees and her head ducked down, the blue light of the television cascading on her face.
Later when she turns to him, pulling him on top of her and between her legs, he says, "I'm not used to girls like you."
She smiles. "That's because I'm one of a kind,"
"You don't have to make a joke," he tells her. "I like you without the jokes."
He fucks her on the bed and she bleeds a little, afterwards. She doesn't cry but breathes in and out in slow and steady inhales and exhales, eyes closed the entire time as if she were doing a breathing exercise.
"Did you come?" he asks her when the two of them are smoking in bed. The windows are open to let the smell out.
She laughs, stubbing her cigarette and rolling on top of him, sitting on his hips. "If it's good for you then it's good for me. Was it good for you?"
"Yes," he says, and it comes out as a breathless honest truth. That's the effect he has on her, his stomach constantly ties itself in knots. She leans down and rests her cheek against his chest. She traces the faint outline of his tattoos with the tip of her finger and a few seconds later, they fall asleep.
+
Nobody is serious when they're eighteen.
They've been together seven months when she invites him to the summerhouse in Marseille where her family spends their summers every year.
He's never done anything like this before, he's never had anything like her in his life, a powerhouse - the kind of girl who wears lipstick everywhere and burns a bra or two as a symbolic act of feminism. But also the kind of girl who cries during sad movies and shows up at his dorm room with hot chocolate during the last leg of finals.
She takes dancing classes at a studio near the Conservatoire de Paris. He's seen her a few times with the bottom half of her shirt missing and her hair pulled back from her face, lost in the rhythm of her bones, gracefully flowing to the beat in her head.
Even now as they lie together on the grass, listening to the chorus of insects, the thick summer air humming around them, she carries with her that same grace - her eyeliner thick, like calligraphy around her eyes, and that tiny dot near her cheek, the smell of her hair.
Drugged by the intermittent breeze of summer, they hold hands and watch as the skies shift overhead. Years later, he'll look back and remember this day in fragments, the summer heat and the dewy grass, the fading smell of flowers, and her hair, her hair, bobbing down her shoulders, blending into the deep black of the night and falling around his face like a curtain as she kisses him, once, before racing him back to the house.
+
Miles doesn't like him. He isn't up front about it like Mal's mother, but Eames isn't daft not to sense the dislike. He's invited to Christmas dinner that year, along with a string of some of Miles' best students. There's Dominic Cobb who, despite being a few years younger than Eames, already has a number of accollades under his belt. He's working on a dissertation about dreamsharing and how it negatively impacts a person's view of reality.
What the dinner really is, is Miles allowing a group of men to chat Mal up. Eames pretends not to care, even as Miles practically shoves Cobb at his daughter. They all head home afterwards but Miles offers Cobb the spare room upstairs because it is late and he is easily Miles' favourite.
Later on, Mal sneaks into the basement where Eames is curled up on a lumpy mattress.
"Are you jealous?" she whispers under the covers, running her toes up his leg. "You're jealous, aren't you?"
Eames can feel her smile in the dark.
"Come here," she says, beckoning him with a finger. "Come here and let me kiss you."
+
A month later, she hauls a large briefcase onto the bed.
"It's called a passive device," she says, hands on her hips.
"A what?"
"A passive device," she repeats. "P-A-S-I-V. A portable automated somnacin intravenous device. I found it in my father's study." She wipes the sweat off her forehead. "What do you think?"
She hands him an instrunction manual.
"I'm not sure what to think," he says honestly, turning the manual over in his hands. "What does it even do?"
She smiles, grabbing him by the wrist.
+
He follows her down there, through endless tunnels and sprawling landscapes of white, through rives and desert tundra. Like junkies they knew better than to keep coming back, but they couldn't stop, not when it felt good, not when it made them feel alive.
They had a life together down there. They lived in buildings made entirely out of glass and walked around vast cities, building monuments for themselves.
And then they wake up and it starts all over again, the monotone of their daily lives.
+
After graduation, they live together in a one-room apartment.
The rent is expensive and the bathroom is tiny. The lack of space makes the two of them irritable, prone to bickering, but in the morning before they leave for work, they reach for each other under the covers, wading through bedclothes like swimmers looking for buried treasure.
Two months in, he finds a pregnancy test sitting on the bathroom sink. It tests positive. They talk in the kitchen, their voices accelerating in pitch as their conversation turns into heated argument. He leaves because that's what he does best. When he comes back three hours later, she's sitting at the table, leaning on her elbows and cradling her face.
"I'm not keeping it," she tells him, "We obviously cannot have a child together when you can't even pay half of the rent."
+
They get better at dreaming. Sometimes he prefers the dreams to their own reality. Down there, she loves him more and he loves her more and it is perfect. They do nothing but sleep like children all day long because, really, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about, that is what love comes to: the desire for shared sleep.
They get married in their dreams. She looks radiant in white with lilies in her hair and a ring shining on her fingers. He kisses her. They wake up.
+
They start sleeping in separate beds.
Miles calls because he wants his daughter back and thinks she's wasting her life being with him. They talk less these days and almost always spend their evenings apart - drinking with friends, working over time.
In February, he joins the army. This has more to do with him wanting to prove something to her than anything else. It leads to another argument and for half a minute he believes that it had all been for nothing, that she's going to leave him, either way, despite this grand gesture he's making for her - they've both packed their suitcases before and driven off into the night, they've both sworn each other off, pushed and pull - but then she looks at him and her eyes are soft and she says the last thing he ever expected to hear.
"Why are you punishing yourself?"
They talk all night at the kitchen table and come to a concensus that this thing - whatever it is - between them is no longer working out. They arrive at that conclusion with such remarkable candor that he stops short and asks her if she's joking. She isn't.
And it's true though, in a way, and it makes sense. He wants her to be happy. She isn't happy anymore, he isn't happy. She used to curl up behind him in the morning and whisper in his ear, slide her hands underneath the hem of his shirt to curve against his stomach. He used to love it when she played her pop songs at night and danced around in her underwear, making toast in the kitchen, or struggled hard to find the right words in English before bursting into frustated noise and throwing her hands in the air. He still loves all of these things. He still loves her.
He collects his things over the weekend and hugs her one final time by the doorway and although he hasn't left yet, he misses her already.
+
He comes back twelve months later, after having learned how to dismantle a rifle and swear in half a dozen different intonations, after chipping a tooth during tactical exercises and getting shot a total of forty six times during dream simulations.
She still lives in the same apartment. He still owns a spare key. Some of the furniture has been moved around. He waits until she gets home.
+
When she sees him later, grinning on the sofa, hands clasped on one knee, she jumps and something in her face changes.
"You're back." she says, blinking. "Why didn't you call to tell me you were coming?"
"I wanted to surprise you." he tells her. "How do I look?"
+
It's amazing how much a person can change within any given amount of time. She wears her hair shorter and stands more with the dignified grace of a lady than a young girl trying to anchor herself to the world.
She looks at him with guarded eyes. He feels septic. They have tea in the kitchen and make small talk while she puts on her make-up and earrings. He tells her about a new tattoo of his and how he once piloted a Dassault Rafale at an air force base in Saint-Dizier. He doesn't tell her how much he has missed her.
He leaves an hour later when she says she's expecting somebody. He is halfway down the hall when she runs after him, out of breath, her lipstick smudged and smeared across her mouth.
"Did I forget anything?" he asks her.
"Yes." she says, and kisses him.
+
He hears her sigh when his hands part the fabric of her clothes. This, he remembers with clarity, the way she comes undone under his touches and cants her hips forward to let him in, in, in. He takes her against the wall, wrapping her legs around his waist, her mouth against his ear, soft, mouthing silent promises.
It doesn't last long. He comes inside her pulsing after a few deliberate thrusts and she flings her arms tight around his shoulders, trembling around him.
When she puts her clothes back on, he watches as she picks up a ring from the coffee table and slips it on. She adjusts her hair, her eyes shining. Not with meanness or gloating but with tears.
+
The wedding is set in June. She calls him just a few days before the ceremony after getting into a huge argument with Cobb. With the two of them, it's always pull and release. Pull and release. I think my father loves him more than I do, sometimes. He should marry him instead. Pull and release. I'm five weeks pregnant. Pull and release.
They meet in his apartment. He's got money now - connections, a side business - they're both different people and this is only half a year later.
But when she lets her hair down, when she steps outside her clothes and unclasps the hook of her bra, he sees traces of the old her in the heat of her cheeks, the slow way she bats her eyelashes and lowers herself to the bed.
He loves her. She's five weeks pregnant and often times he wonders if it's his but it doesn't matter. He loves her.
This will be the last time he'll ever get to touch her like this. He knew this would happen maybe three, four years ago. He knew it the moment she let him into her bed. He knew that she was going to marry someone else, that she was going to wear her hair shorter and quit smoking and move to a bigger apartment. He knew he would still be in love with her even after they stopped seeing each other.
"We are all just stories," she says, as she kicks off her heels. "I will be a footnote in the story of your life. You will sleep fine without me."
And there is no way around it. Life will go on and the pain will recede. There will be new people, time will pass, but the wounds will always be there.
Eames cups her face one last time and he kisses her, soft, slow, farewell, into the night.
--
notes
I had The Shivers - Just Didn't Need To Know on repeat while writing this. Any and all mistakes are mine. I tried my hand at an origin story but it turned out more AU than I would have liked. ):