fic: nobody knew me back home anymore [3/3]
(PART I)
(PART II)
Part III
Arthur loves college. It’s probably the hardest he’s ever worked in his life, and he’s totally exhausted all the time, but he feels a part of something, and the sense of usefulness and belonging sinks down into his bones and makes him proud of himself like he’s never been in his entire life.
It would be better if he didn’t sometimes wake up in the night in a deep, black depression. He doesn’t remember the dreams that cause it, just the hollowness they leave behind. It’s dark in his room and only the pillows are visible, catching moonlight on white cotton, making it burn bright like a candle.
Arthur’s never been homesick, and he doesn’t think he is now. The emptiness, he’s sure, is a kind of Eamesickness. He’s afraid, so afraid, and so sure that he and Eames are finished in all the ways that matter, and it’s only stubbornness that keeps them calling each other once a week and making plans for summer. He’s afraid he’ll fall apart if he loses Eames. He’s afraid he won’t fall apart at all.
He finishes college a different person than when he’s started, but the parts of him that exist for Eames are not gone, only changed. Eames flies in from London for his graduation. He’s been working some kind of boring office job that he never talks about. Arthur suspects he’s doing criminal work on the side; Arthur’s moral code has become stricter in college, and they both choose not to talk about it. There are a lot of things they don’t talk about anymore, either because they forget to mention them or for some other reason Arthur doesn’t want to examine too closely.
Arthur’s father doesn’t show up at his graduation. They haven’t spoken except since Arthur first left for college. Arthur goes to London for Christmas and Easter to visit Eames. He tries not to let it affect him, but Eames can clearly tell he’s sad about it. Eames’ parents have come as well, and they hug him and tell him they’re proud and that he’s brilliant, which only mostly makes up for his father’s absence. He wishes he didn’t care at all, but can’t quite convince himself to forget about his dad.
“I want to kiss you,” Eames says. They’re standing in a sea of young people in pristine uniforms and proud parents taking photos.
“Not really the place for it,” Arthur replies, smiling. “I think you can get away with a manly shoulder hug if you’d like. I told some people earlier that you’re my cousin.”
Eames leans into him, enfolding Arthur in a hug that’s a little too close for cousins. Arthur doesn’t mind much - no one is paying attention.
“My parents want to take you out to dinner.”
“They’re being too nice to me,” Arthur says. They’d given him an absolutely gorgeous watch as a gift earlier, and Arthur’s almost afraid to wear it because it’s too beautiful for him to own. People will probably think he’s stolen it.
“They think they can get away with it today. You must know that they really, really love you as a second son.”
“I hope you don’t think of me as a brother,” Arthur says dryly.
“That’s my line.” Eames grins. “If you don’t need me to lower the tone of the conversation, what good am I?”
“You do me all sorts of good, Mr Eames,” Arthur says, voice sounding even more fond and affectionate than he’d intended. Eames reaches out and adjusts the precise lines of Arthur’s uniform, fingers resting on the brass buttons.
“You look sharp,” Eames murmurs. “This uniform business is giving me all sorts of terrible ideas. You really wouldn’t approve of them.”
“Live in hope,” Arthur suggests.
He forgets, when they’ve been away from each other for a long time, how much better everything is when he’s around Eames. He forgets that he needs Eames - that he is actually a better person in his presence. At this moment, he feels like he and Eames could make it forever, and he doesn’t care that they fell in love too young, or that they live in different worlds, because those things don’t matter. But Eames will leave, and Arthur will forget. He always forgets.
He breathes slowly, so he won’t panic. “Eames, tell me that someday we’re going to live in a house with a fence and a cat and flowerbeds, and you’ll do the crossword while I make coffee every Sunday.”
“No.” Eames says. He smells like wood smoke.
“Why not?”
“I don’t like lying to you.”
Arthur stiffens.
“But, darling, I will tell you this: the two of us are always running towards the same beautiful, dangerous thing. Maybe we aren’t always going there together, at least we’ll both be in the same place at the end.”
---
When Arthur is twenty-two, he is recruited into the dream-share programme. The same year, Eames goes missing for six months and when he finally gets in touch again, the e-mail only says: “Things are a bit hectic at the moment. My phone has been disconnected so I’ll call you when I’m in easy reach again.”
Arthur, who hasn’t had more than three hours of sleep uninterrupted by painfully gruesome, somnacin-induced nightmares in longer than he can remember, writes multiple lengthy replies about how worried he’s been. Arthur is bone-deep angry and achingly lonely and terrified for whatever disaster Eames must have gotten himself into. They haven’t seen each other in over a year.
Arthur has an internalised mental breakdown that lasts three days. Sits blankly staring at walls unless he’s been directly told to do something and all his thoughts feel like separate islands in his head, like he cannot connect anymore.
When he scrapes himself back together he picks up some idiot cadet in a bar that looks like Eames and has sex with him in the back of a car. He feels sick with guilt until he realises that this is the end. He’s reached the end of the road with Eames.
If joining the military represented entering another world from the one Eames occupied, the dream-share programme and the espionage he’s being trained to use lucid-dreaming for represent a whole different universe.
Eames replies to Arthur’s long e-mails a month and three weeks after he’d sent them with a single word: “Sorry.”
Arthur deletes the e-mail after one perfunctory glance.
That night he sleeps a solid six-hours for the first time in what seems like forever, dreaming about Eames instead of re-running training drills of endless, innocent deaths at his own hands. In the dream, he and Eames are lying in the grass behind Elise’s house with the noise from the cast party rippling softly over them and Eames is whispering against Arthur’s neck. Arthur is crying in the dream, saying: “I can’t hear you” again and again.
He wakes dry-eyed.
---
When Arthur is twenty-four, he finishes his fifth military mission with the dream-share programme and decides that if he is going to use cutting edge technology invented to revolutionise education and training for unjustified personal gain, he’d rather the personal gain be his own and not the military’s.
He steals three PASIV devices and goes home to Illinois where he tells his father about the time he and Eames had sex on the kitchen table and not to expect anymore Christmas cards. He tells him father a lot of things he’d always wanted to say, but had never been able to before.
Arthur’s father finally throws a dish that actually manages to hit Arthur. The scar stays for the rest of Arthur’s life - a thin line at the edge of his hairline only visible to someone paying close attention.
That night, bandage taped to his head, Arthur sneaks through the window into what used to be Eames’ bedroom. The Eameses don’t live here anymore. The room is an office now, beige paint covering up the fantastical pencil sketches Eames used to draw on the walls when he was bored. The carpet is still the same and Arthur crouches in corner of the room and peels it back a bit to see the careful heart carved into the floor with E+A inscribed in the middle.
Arthur swallows hard and misses Eames so much it hurts his bones.
---
“I’m not telling you we can’t pull the job without a forger,” Arthur says, breathless. He’s running, but he’s only a block from home, so he hadn’t bothered to tell Farley to call him back later. “I’m just saying. We can do the job, or we can do the job well. And I’m a perfectionist.”
Farley’s voice comes crackling down the line. He sounds resigned, so Arthur knows he’s already won. “Who are we going to bring in this late? I don’t know anyone good enough to pick up a whole new character with only a week and a half to go; do you?”
“It’s not my fault you’ve been procrastinating. Have you tried Torvald?” Arthur slows as he nears his flat, digging in his pocket for keys.
“He can’t do women for shit,” Farley vetoes. Arthur sets his gun on the table next to the door and drops his keys next to it, flicking the lights on as his breathing evens out again. He’s going to have to start running farther. Five miles and the sad, caged-in feeling has barely abated, still pressed tight against the sides of his ribs and the tips of his fingers.
“What about the guy Caroline was raving about the last job we pulled together?”
“The English one, you mean?”
“Yeah. I think he goes by James. I know Dom Cobb knows someone with his contact details, but you’ll have to call; I’m not about to interrupt his honeymoon. Mal would kill me. You have the excuse of not knowing them well.”
“Fine, whatever. This guy better be pretty fucking amazing. Forgers are always high maintenance.”
---
Arthur hears his voice first. It’s unmistakable. That easy, gravelly, almost implacable English drawl. It makes Arthur shiver sweetly. Then he freaks the fuck out.
Arthur lunges over his desk, drawing his gun before Eames has even turned around from talking to Farley.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Arthur asks, not breathing. There is a roaring sound in his ears that makes it difficult to think and Arthur is scared like he hasn’t been in a long time. Eames is in his past and these days, Arthur’s past and present don’t mix.
To his credit, Eames draws his own gun with same easy, practiced speed. “I could say the same to you,” he says, softly. It’s the tone of voice he used to use whispering into Arthur’s neck.
“I’m the fucking point man,” Arthur grits out.
Eames shoves his gun back in to his holster, grinning broadly. “Well, I’m the fucking forger,” Eames replies grandly. Then he turns on his heel, nodding to Farley as if to say, catch you later.
“What the hell?” Farley yells. “Arthur, what the hell?”
Arthur manages to start breathing again and collapses down in his desk chair. His collar is too tight. “I can’t fucking believe…” he whispers to himself.
He doesn’t finish the sentence because there are too many things he can’t believe about this situation. Eames is a forger. Eames works in underground dream-share. Eames has been so close to Arthur for so long without him ever realising. Eames has never been farther away. Arthur could never have guessed he’d find Eames here. And if he can’t second-guess Eames, if he can’t even imagine Eames in this place, how can he still know him? Arthur can’t bring this world and the Eames of his memory together, so that Eames must not really exist.
The second day, they don’t speak. Not a single word to each other, even when it’s inconvenient.
“Look,” Farley says, clearly exasperated. His hand is gripping Arthur’s elbow a little too tightly, creating visible wrinkles in the fabric of his suit. “I don’t know what the hell is going on between you and James, and, frankly, I don’t care, but if you can’t even summon enough civility to speak to each other, one of you will have to go.”
“Our behaviour is exemplary. We’re being very professional.”
“You really aren’t. You haven’t been to look at the diagrams yet because they’re all on his desk. That is fucking cowardly.”
Arthur scowls.
“One of you will have to go, and it’ll be him, because he hasn’t earned my loyalty like you have. But I’ve heard that he is a fucking genius, and I will not be happy if you lose me a forger who might as well be an artist, yeah? You’re the one who wanted him brought in to start with.”
“Not him,” Arthur growls.
“Whatever, man,” Farley says, throwing his hands up with exasperation. “Get your shit together.”
“Yeah, fine,” Arthur sighs. He doesn’t know how to fix any of this without talking to Eames, but he doesn’t know how to talk to Eames anymore.
They do a dry run in the dream on the fourth day. Eames has only had a week to practise, but his forgery is perfect. He’s breathtakingly good at the work, and Arthur remembers that it used to be like that with Eames. He would pick things up so easily; it was a gift to watch him be good at something because it was like an act of love more than perfection.
Arthur feels Eames’ eyes on him sometimes, too, and he doesn’t mean to show off but he thinks he might be anyway. Farley pauses next to him as they’re putting away the PASIV later that afternoon. “That went smooth, today, Arthur. I didn’t know you could do that thing with the knives. I mean, shit - it was something. If it goes like that on the day, we’ll be aces.”
Arthur shrugs. If Arthur could only get over the dark, empty drop of his stomach every time he saw Eames out of the corner of his eye, all his mannerisms and the way he holds himself just slightly different than Arthur remembered, maybe they would make a perfect team.
It’s a nerve-wracking thought in some ways. With Eames being as excellent at forgery as he is, and Arthur having worked his way to being possibly the most-sought Point Man in the business, it’s likely they’ll end up working together again. He’s not sure if he can handle it, having to form a relationship of estranged business partners with the first (and if he’s honest with himself, only) person he’s ever fallen in love with.
A few hours later, Arthur is going through the plans for an apartment building maze with the architect when Farley comes storming across the room, a sheaf of papers bundled up in his arms, looking red with rage.
“Arthur,” he shouts. He’s breathing in angry, shallow intakes. “What the fuck is this? Did you see these reports? Have you given these a fucking thought! These completely undermine-”
“They’re fine,” Arthur starts to explain, glancing at the papers Farley is clutching. “The new psych evals rule out an unstable dream surface. Those are old news.”
Farley spits at the floor near Arthur’s feet, voice rising even louder. “And you didn’t think I need to know about this? I don’t give a fuck if it’s old news, this intel could jeopardise the whole job!”
He’s screaming by the end, and Arthur can feel himself wincing a little bit. “Farley, calm down, it’s just-”
“I don’t want to hear your bullshit! You were going to let me go in there unprepared! I can’t…” Farley raises his arm and Arthur knows he’s about to throw the coffee cup clenched in his hand when Eames appears out of nowhere, grabbing Farley’s arm to twist him off balance, swinging his other arm around to punch Farley in the jaw. Farley’s head snaps back with an awful, sickening noise. Arthur’s never even heard anything like it in a dream.
The papers drop from Farley’s arm as he crumples to his knees, fluttering around Eames and Farley like a flock of white, settling birds. For a moment all Arthur can think is those are going to take so long to file again; then Eames, who still hasn’t let go of Farley’s arm, pulls him violently close and says in a low, dangerous voice, “Do not yell at Arthur, and do not throw things at him.” He drops Farley’s arm and steps away, allowing Farley to slump forward, gasping.
Eames ambles out the front door, Arthur still frozen, the architect with her mouth hanging open, and the chemist in to doorway to the other room with her jaw dropped as well.
“What the fuck?” Farley wheezes.
Arthur fists his hands in his sleeves and follows Eames out the front door without saying a word.
It’s late afternoon. The streetlights are already on, but there is enough sunlight left to see well. The shade of the hour is blue, hazing the edges of every building into neo-impressionism.
He finds Eames smoking, body a long, curved line against the aluminium wall of the warehouse. He’d been easy in his violence towards Farley, but Arthur can see now that his fingers are shaking as they cup around the Clementine-coloured ash dropping off the end of the cigarette.
“I’m not the same kid you knew,” Arthur says, quietly, folding his arms as he leans against the wall. “You must understand that, at least. The two of us are different people, and we don’t know each other anymore.”
“You don’t like it when people yell.”
Eames doesn’t look at him. His jaw-line is sharp and lean, and Arthur wonders if his stubble would feel the same as Arthur remembers under his fingertips.
“I didn’t like it. Past tense. It don’t care about it anymore.”
“He was going to throw a cup of coffee at your head. There was no fucking way-”
“There are things that have happened to me since I last saw you that are much worse than that. I don’t know where you get off appearing here and trying to fucking protect me.”
“That’s what I’ve always done for you.”
“Not for me. For some other Arthur. You don’t know me.” Arthur feels like he’s lying to Eames, but he doesn’t understand why.
“You keep saying that, but-”
“No, Eames - we’re different now. You don’t know me.”
“If I don’t know you, than who does?” Eames says, sounding raw. “Because I taught you how to ride a bicycle and I read you sonnets so you could study for your English finals and I knew the feel of your skin before anyone else ever did. So who knows you now, Arthur?”
“No one,” Arthur replies, voice perfectly flat. “And I worked for that.”
For a moment, Eames looks devastatingly heartbroken, and then his face twists and his expression is blank. “Fine,” Eames says. “Just remember that you don’t know me either.”
He turns away and the cadence of his walk is one that Arthur has never seen before. Arthur wants to tell Eames that not knowing him is the only thing Arthur thinks about anymore - that it would be impossible for him to forget it.
---
They do the job for real a few days later. It is an unmitigated disaster.
It turns out to be the Chemist’s fault in the end. They go under and half-way through the extraction, the mark slips away from them during the time he’s supposed
to spend with Eames and Farley. They run themselves ragged for three hours of dream-time frantically looking for him. The problem, as they discover, is not that the mark has given them slip - it’s that he’s woken up.
They come around to a room full of well-armed law enforcement. It’s a narrow escape. They loose the architect down a corridor and the rest of them only just make it out. Arthur has three bullet grazes along his arms and he’s losing enough blood that it’s starting to make him light-headed, but it’s nothing that won’t fix easily. Farley’s left wrist is broken. Eames is the least injured, but he’ll still be well-bruised in the morning.
When they’ve run a few blocks from the hotel, Farley pulls them down an alley and passes over a bag.
“I sorted out two safe-houses, so we can split into pairs. I’ll take one, you two take the other. I put the keys and the map in here, so you guys should have everything you need.”
“Farley, I’m not going with-” Arthur begins to say.
Farley cuts him off. “Oh, no,” he says. “Maybe we aren’t the best of friends, the three of us, but I can still do you a favour. You two need to work your shit out because right now you’re a danger to the fucking business. This is a perfect opportunity. Get to the safe-house, and don’t move for at least two weeks, preferably more. Nice knowing you.”
Farley disappears into the beat-up pickup truck he’d parked down the street for the getaway, leaving Arthur and Eames staring at each other in the dark. Arthur’s blood smells like wet metal. He passes out in a rush of coloured black spots and the pavement rears up to meet him.
---
Arthur wakes to fingers brushing with gentle familiarity through his hair. His eyes blink open slowly. It takes a few minutes to adjust to the lack of light.
Eames is sitting propped-up against the headboard next to Arthur. The room they are in is tiny, big enough only to fit the cramped double bed they are both occupying, a folding card table with a camp stove, and two ratty suitcases stacked one on top of the other.
Eames is watching Arthur with an expression that he has seen so often. It feels more like home to him than anything he’s felt in a long time, and Arthur coughs against the rising breathlessness in his throat, which is about as close to tears as Arthur’s been since college.
It’s the hour of the night when being awake feels most lonely and most beautiful to Arthur, as though he’s the only one in the whole world, and everything is there just for him. Here, Eames is home, and looking down at him, and they’re cocooned together in the moment like they used to be, when they were both teenagers and they’d talk until there weren’t any words left to make into new sentences. He suddenly can’t remember the sickening feelings of the days before, when there were so many things completely changed in Eames that he was hard to recognise.
“Eliot Eames,” he says aloud, voice scratchy with sleep. He says it just to prove he knows.
“I’m sorry for waking you,” Eames says. “I was just…”
Arthur wants to shift around but he’s afraid that Eames will stop touching him if he moves even a little. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t fucking know, because Eames is something foreign to him, and yet he still wants to feel Eames’ hands pressed against his skin, still wants to feel Eames’ fingers in his hair with the same want he held at fifteen. When Arthur doesn’t know he panics, and he gets that old track-team feeling, like he just needs to get out and run and run until he can’t breath, and he’s soothed by absolute exhaustion.
He waits for that same feeling to creep up over him and pull him away, but it doesn’t come.
He remembers that there used to be two things that could calm him down. One of them was running, and one of them was Eames.
Eames’ fingers slip down to brush against the corners of Arthur’s eyes. His calluses are in all different places; right for guns instead of pencils. “You’re looking panicked, darling.”
“What are you…?” Arthur tries to swallow the words down, so they can just lie here like this forever, and everything that changed what they are can stay just out of the frame, permanently suspended. He doesn’t want Eames. He doesn’t want Eames to leave. The words stick in his mouth and he has to say them: “What are you doing?”
“I woke up,” Eames murmurs. “And you were just…. Jesus Christ.” Eames laughs a little, and finally he says, “You sleep exactly the same way you always have.”
“What?” Arthur asks.
“I don’t know why, but I thought you’d sleep different now… but you don’t. You sleep just them same. You’ve always slept the same. Your limbs sprawl out in all the directions they possibly can and you go pliant, yet you cling to the bed like a child. It makes me…it makes me….”
“What?” Arthur whispers again, just to say something. Eames’ fingers are in his hair and his gaze is soft and direct. Arthur feels innocent, the way he hasn’t for such a very long time.
“It makes me want you. Maybe…I forgot how to want people.”
Arthur’s back in time; he’s sixteen and Eames shaking with anger over Arthur’s awful father because all Eames really wants is for Arthur to be happy, and just that, just the fact that someone wants him to be happy makes him so.
The trouble is, he isn’t sixteen, and they aren’t the same people anymore. Arthur still believes what he’d said to Eames before, outside the warehouse. Only, now, he’s beginning to see that there is more than one way of dealing with the distance between them.
Everything isn’t slow and young like it was between them the first time around. He’d thought, back then, that he knew what hurt was, but he’d only just tasted its edges.
Arthur rolls away from Eames, and Eames’ hand disappears like he’s been burnt, which wasn’t Arthur’s intention at all. Arthur sits up and turns towards Eames, cross-legged and leaning on his elbows with slight exhaustion curving his frame. His bullet grazes have all been carefully bandaged, but they ache with a certain bracing steadiness.
“Apologies, Arthur,” Eames says, voice ice cold. “I shouldn’t have taken…the liberty.”
Arthur remembers that there was a time when Eames touched him like they were part of each other and slinging an arm around Arthur was the kind of thing that couldn’t be refused.
“No, Eames,” Arthur starts. Eames turns his head away and moves to stand, but Arthur catches his wrist. “Hey….”
“I’m sorry; like I said, I shouldn’t have woken you.”
“I’m not trying to tell you to stop touch-to stop. I don’t want us to think everything will just fall into place, is all. We live in a careful world now.”
“It doesn’t need to be easy. I just…when I saw you in the warehouse I was so angry that I didn’t understand how you’d come to be there. I should have already known you were in the business. What happened to us?”
“You left me.”
“I was on the run from Blackwell Industries.” Eames says, defensively, “Contacting anyone would have ended in their deaths as an example to me. After it was safe, I wrote to you again and again, but you never replied.”
Arthur looks away guiltily, remembering getting blind drunk one night just to have to courage to block Eames’ address. Then he’d dropped into the criminal world and any numbers or addresses connected with his old life had been erased.
“I’m not blaming you, Arthur. I’m just trying to tell you that just because it was over once doesn’t mean it has to be over now.”
Arthur looks up at Eames and thinks he could fall into the kind of comfort Eames always was far too easily. Maybe the real problem is the simplicity of it.
“I’m a Point Man, Eames. I have to be a mystery. You’re a liability to me like nothing else ever could be.”
Eames watches Arthur for a long minute, holding his gaze. Eames brushes one finger up along the thin scar along his hairline from his fight with his father like he’s learning the shape of it. Eames’ is smile is new, one Arthur doesn’t recognise, but he can see that there is something beautiful in newness.
“Arthur, everyone needs a weakness,” Eames says, leaning forward to speak softly into the curve of Arthur’s neck just under his ear. “I promise you’ll never find a better one than me.”
Eames kisses Arthur fiercely, then. If he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine he’s lying in wet grass, the low thrum of too-loud music and jumbled voices forming background noise. They kiss like they know each other (and they do), tilting their lips together in that same, practiced way, Eames’ hands fumbling under Arthur’s t-shirt, working gingerly around the bandages, but pressing bruises everywhere else. They fuck like they love each other, long: gentle movements, harsh only in desperation, Eames’ hands framing Arthur’s hips between his thumbs.
And if they kiss like they know each other and fuck like they love each other, who is to say they don’t?
They lay for a long time after, not sleeping, just breathing together in the cramped double bed, re-learning the rhythm and the sound of two sets of lungs and two heart beats falling into synchronism.
---
The two weeks in the safe-house pass slowly. They tell stories, stare at the ceiling. Eames sketches lazily on the walls in pencil. There is not much to do besides talk and have sex, even if they had wanted to do anything besides that.
Eames drives them to the airport in an awful Citroen hatchback that is at least fifteen years old. Arthur’s blood from the drive to the safe-house has dried into a coffee-and-strawberries coloured crust all over the passenger seat. It makes everything smell like iron. Arthur stretches out in the backseat instead, dozing in and out. The radio station they are listening to seems to be Croatian. Eames laughs occasionally at what’s being said; Arthur realises he must speak the language.
Sometimes it seems like there is too much between them. Sometimes that’s okay.
It’s like when Arthur was making the bed so they could eat breakfast sitting on it without getting crumbs in the sheets, and Eames had been smoking with his head stuck out the window. He’d walked up behind Arthur and put his hands around Arthur waist in that almost silent way of his and purely instinctually, Arthur had flipped around and floored Eames in one smooth, instantaneous motion, knocking all the breath out of Eames’ lungs. There are just some things they have to do differently now.
In the airport, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, staring up at the departures board.
“Where shall we go?” Eames says.
“Let’s play a game,” Arthur replies.
“Yes,” Eames agrees.
“It’s works like this.” Arthur continues. His voice is low and smooth, just for Eames. “I’m going to get on a plane. You have to guess where I’ve gone and follow me. If you guess wrong, you don’t know me anymore. If you guess right…then….” Arthur steps closed to Eames so that his next words are soft against Eames’ neck. “You win,” he whispers.
Eames swallows, and Arthur can feel the shift of his throat underneath his lips, he’s so close to Eames’ skin. “Okay,” Eames says.
Arthur grins at him as he disappears into the crowd. Eames waits for an hour. Then he follows Arthur home.
---
Alice Ford went to Illinois State University to become a teacher and lived in Chicago for two years after she graduated. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like the tall buildings or the fast people and all she wanted to do the whole time was come home - so she did. Her husband (they’d married just out of college) came with her and they bought the Eames’ house when they moved out of town because there was a sense of family worn into all walls and floors.
Alice had been a close friend of Eames’ at school and she remembers sitting in the middle of the floor in the room she knew to be his, staring up at the intricate pencil sketches covering the walls. She’d photographed them all carefully before painting them over. She remembers tracing the faces in the drawings. Arthur’s appeared most frequently.
Alice Ford wasn’t the only person in town who sometimes stumbled across some bit of evidence of the lives of Arthur and Eames and stood for a moment, marvelling, as if they had found a mark of magic. Arthur and Eames had always been like that in school; mysterious, surprising, and beyond the cramped borders of their small town.
It’s that startling quality that makes Alice drop the potted plant she’s carrying onto the front porch in shock, bringing her hands up to cover her mouth in case a shriek slips out. Arthur is sitting on the curb in front of her house.
He’s leaning against the mailbox post and his head is tipped back tiredly. His legs seemed impossibly long, stretched out into the street. He’s wearing a fine pale grey suit with a waistcoat but no tie. A leather briefcase sits next to him and Alice can tell from the way he is resting his fingers on the strap that he’s paying attention to the bag and his surroundings despite looking otherwise like he might be asleep.
Seeing Arthur sitting on the sidewalk in front of her house is about as surprising as finding a parrot in the apple tree in the back garden. Not impossible, but still fundamentally extraordinary.
“Arthur?” she asks. It’s the first she’s seen of him in eight years, but she heard his voice the last night he was ever into town, crushed grey words barely rising above speaking level as he told his father he would never come back and slammed the screen door behind him. She remembers washing dishes and wanting to go out the front door and find him, but she was too afraid.
Arthur sits up with easy grace, twisting around to face her. “Alice,” he says, at ease in that sharp suit and slim smile. “I’m sorry. I hope I’m not disturbing you; I’m only just for someone.”
“Well, uh, hi?” Alice says, still unable to fully make sense of the situation. It’s Arthur standing there. She remembers his photograph in the local newspaper, stiff in his military uniform, a decorated hero. The newspaper didn’t run the story about his temporary disappearance and dishonourable discharge a year later, but Alice had heard about it anyway.
“Eames used to live here, you know.”
“We bought the house from his parents. They’ve moved to-”
“To Brighton. I know.”
“Oh,” Alice looks down at the plant soil and shards of terracotta spread across the steps. “Why are you in town?”
“Sorry, I thought I said. I’m waiting for someone.”
Alice laughs a little. “No, you did say, only I thought…well, never mind. Would you like to come in for some coffee or something while you wait?”
“Sure. Let me just get my bag.” Arthur stands, following her up the steps. He trails his hand along the railing like a little boy and she wonders if he’s remembering coming up these same steps as a child. “I hope I’m not intruding,” Arthur says once they’re inside. He’s taller than she remembers, filling up all the spare space in the dining room with the self-assurance settled just under the surface of his skin, making his motions clean and efficient.
“Where do you live now?” Alice says from the kitchen, kicking a few lego buildings out of her way.
“Paris, sometimes. I travel a lot for work.”
“Oh, France. I love trying to cook French food. I’m sure I’m not very good but…I do my best. What do you do?”
“Don’t be modest, Alice. Didn’t they say you were the best in home ec? And, I’m in espionage.”
Alice only just manages to swallow the mouthful of coffee she’d just taken. “I’m sorry,” she manages. “Did you say espionage? Aren’t you supposed to lie about that sort of thing? Shouldn’t you be telling me you’re an insurance salesman or something?”
Arthur takes his cup of coffee gently, setting it on the table in front of him after taking a sip and making an appreciative noise. He looks up at her from under his dark eyebrows and his grin is an almost invisible twist of his mouth. “That is the lie.”
“Right,” Alice says, falteringly.
“My father still lives next door…do you see him very often?” Arthur asks after a moment of silence. His voice is carefully blank.
“Well, he doesn’t get out much. Just to the grocery store.”
“Is he well?”
“Lonely.”
His mouth twists sourly. “It’s good he got what he worked so hard for.”
She pauses, looking down uncomfortably. She hates awkward silences but mentioning the weather seems like it would only do more harm. Instead, she says: “Whom are you…umm…waiting for?”
“Eames,” Arthur says, simply. The expression on his face is now unfathomable, caught in between worry and longing and something like annoyance.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you’re still friends.” Alice says, almost absently, remembering how jealous she was at the way they were with each other, that easiness that made her feel lonely and wanting. Anyone was a little jealous and lonely watching them. It was a feeling that no one would ever connect with her so well as they connected with each.
“Yes, well, we’ve only recently been back in touch.”
“Are you two-?” She only realises the inappropriateness of her question when she’s already two words in. She wants to ask him if they’re back together. But, of course, it had only even been her own speculation back when she knew them in high school, and she barely knows either of them well enough to ask a personal question like that now.
“Are we…?” Arthur prompts.
“Are you both going to be staying in town long?”
“Only a day or so, probably. It’s a sort of nostalgia trip. If Eames ever finds his way here, anyway.”
“Where is he coming in from?”
Arthur takes another sip of coffee and then spills a little out of the side of the cup. The way it exactly misses spilling on his suit at all makes Alice think perhaps he planned it, but then they’re both busy cleaning up the mess and Arthur never answers due to the distraction.
They speak for another hour, mostly Alice talking about her kids and her job at the elementary school. At four-thirty someone knocks on the front door.
“It’s a little early for Elise to be dropping the kids off from their play-date,” Alice says, worried.
“It’s Eames,” Arthur says, like it’s not a guess, like he knows. “That’s the way he knocks,” Arthur explains when she looks at him quizzically. “I’ve trespassed on your company long enough, Alice. Thanks for the coffee.”
“Eames is welcome to come in, as well,” Alice says genuinely. Arthur gets to his feet anyway. Anyone else would seem indecisive, but Arthur’s deliberation seems purposeful.
She goes to answer the door when the knock sounds a second time; Arthur’s right. It’s Eames.
“Alice!” he says, sweeping her into a one-armed hug. “It’s brilliant to see you.”
He looks tired and a little distracted, as if he is trying to peer around her into the house. He smells like airplanes, re-circulated air and peanuts. Everything else about him is expansive and bright; his suit is well-worn, but there is a lazy, expensive angle to the cut. He grins crooked-white. His accent is more English than she remembers from school.
“Is Arthur in, perhaps?” he asks, before she can answer his first question.
“Umm…Eames!” she stutters out, surprised, for some reason, that he is actually here. “It’s nice to see you, too. Arthur is…in the living room.”
“Thanks,” he says. He glides past her easily and thrusts a bouquet of flowers into her arms as though he’d been expecting to call on her all along. She sets them on the kitchen table before following Eames back into the living room.
“They’re beautiful, Eames,” she says. Arthur is perched on the arm on the sofa. His eyes go soft as Eames enters the room.
“You’re late,” he says, deadpan.
“I had a layover in O’Hare.”
“You should have flown to St Louis International. My flight was direct.”
“There wasn’t another until tomorrow.” Eames is smiling sheepishly, like flight scheduling errors are his fault.
“Did you drive all the way down from Springfield, then?”
“Arthur…” Eames’ voice dies in his throat. The deliberately wry quality of their back-and-quips is absent in the hesitancy with which Eames says Arthur’s name. He says Arthur’s name like he’s been dreaming of saying it, like the word tastes beautiful in his mouth. “I win, don’t I?”
“I suppose,” Arthur concedes.
Eames crosses the distance between them in three strides, and he pulls Arthur to his feet in a swift motion. Then he is tipping Arthur backwards and kissing him, dipping him back like they’re in an old film, black and white and clouded with steam in a train station, written in scripts for each other and no one else.
“I missed you,” Arthur murmurs when they part. Alice stands at the door, feeling like an intruder and yet unable to wrench herself away.
“It’s not that long a flight,” Eames says, wryly.
“Not the flight, you idiot. I’m trying to say something nice. I missed you.”
“I missed you, too.”
Arthur leans his forehead into Eames’ collarbone, letting Eames’ arms come up around him, and Alice can see Eames fingers sliding and settling along the line of Arthur’s spine like he’s forgotten the feel of it and is desperate to re-learn. “I know,” Arthur says softly. Eames pulls Arthur against him tightly, saying with the curve of his wrists and the familiar way his chin settles against Arthur’s temple that knowing is only a piece of what they offer each other.
---
EPILOGUE
It’s late afternoon and the light is making the dust motes in the warehouse glow where it falls through the dirty windows.
Eames is half-asleep over his desk, very purposefully ignoring a stack of reports Arthur insisted he read when Ariadne comes up to him and perches on top of a pile of architecture textbooks she’s taken to leaving in the warehouse to study for finals when she has a free moment.
This is the third job they’ve pulled since Inception; Cobb’s second, since he’d taken the one after Fischer off to be with his kids. They’re still based out of Paris, and the bill Cobb must be running up for airfare in and out of LA is probably extensive. Luckily, Saito’s been footing it without comment. As soon as Ariadne has graduated they’ll probably go back to the states as a team. Eames is trying to convince Yusuf to come along as well, but he’s still undecided about the idea of the permanent group that they’re setting up.
“I think Cobb is jealous of you and Arthur,” she says, firmly, like she’s expecting him to deny it.
Eames cracks a sly grin. “He always has been. Has anyone ever told you that you’re very direct? You could maybe benefit from a little more conversational sprinkles and frosting.”
“Sprinkles and frosting are your job, Eames,” she says grinning. “I’m curious by nature.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I thought you were just obnoxious.” Eames laughs. Ariadne swats his arm and Eames groans and winces as if she’s really hurt him.
“Will the two of you shut up? Some people are actually working around here,” Arthur calls from across the room, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose as he does whenever he’s got a low-grade headache.
“I just noticed that Cobb always looks a bit annoyed when you mention jobs you’ve pulled together without him.”
“Well, Cobb put a lot of his faith in Arthur after Mal; he had to. I suppose it’s difficult when you put all your trust in one person and they’ve already got someone else they trust that much.”
“What are you saying?” Ariadne asks quizzically. She tips her head to the side like a bird.
Eames holds up a finger as if to say watch this. He calls across the room, “Arthur, love, do you remember what flavour my fourteenth birthday cake was?”
“White chocolate and macadamia nut,” Arthur replies, without looking up. “I can’t believe you forgot that cake, Eames.” He sets his pen down and kicks back in his chair, humming at the memory. “Your mother bribed me to spend a week watching everything you ate to figure out what you’d like best and she had it shipped in overnight from the bakery in Harrods. That cake was so fucking delicious I nearly had a crisis of faith.”
Eames laughs. “Do you remember the name of my first and only pet?”
Arthur makes a face, “Tybalt the cat. You gave him to the mechanic in exchange for a new transmission after you drag-raced Toby Pierce across town with me screaming in the backseat. My first ever near-death experience.”
“What was my first tattoo, Arthur?” Eames doesn’t try to stop his voice from softening. Ariadne is looking between the two of them like her world-view has shifted a hundred and eighty degrees. She’s dangerously close to dropping her jaw.
“Eames…” Arthur says, finally staring over at them. “You shouldn’t show off. It’s unbecoming of you.”
Eames shakes his head, tilting his head back as if to say please, just this once. Arthur closes his eyes and Eames thinks, he’s remembering what it looks like; dark against my skin, what it feels like under his fingertips. “A.” Arthur says, quietly. “A for Arthur. A for first kisses. Why are you asking, Eames?”
Eames splays his fingers on the desk. He wishes they were on Arthur’s skin. “Ariadne wanted to know if you trust me, Arthur. But that’s not the right way to think about the question, is it? We both know the real answer is that that we taught each other what trust means.”
fin
more notes (in case you wanted some):
1. Apologies to anyone from southern Illinois who I may have offended in some way. I tried to keep it all pretty general, but I’m sure you can still tell I’ve never even been to southern Illinois let alone lived in a small town there.
2. WHAT WAS THAT EVEN, I DON’T KNOW. I actually wrote a plan for this at the beginning. The end result was not closely related. So…yeah. I realize that there is not a shortage of A+E being young together, but I hope this seemed different in some way, because I did try for that.
3. Title from ‘Lippy Kids’ by Elbow.
(PART I)
(PART II)
(PART II)
Part III
Arthur loves college. It’s probably the hardest he’s ever worked in his life, and he’s totally exhausted all the time, but he feels a part of something, and the sense of usefulness and belonging sinks down into his bones and makes him proud of himself like he’s never been in his entire life.
It would be better if he didn’t sometimes wake up in the night in a deep, black depression. He doesn’t remember the dreams that cause it, just the hollowness they leave behind. It’s dark in his room and only the pillows are visible, catching moonlight on white cotton, making it burn bright like a candle.
Arthur’s never been homesick, and he doesn’t think he is now. The emptiness, he’s sure, is a kind of Eamesickness. He’s afraid, so afraid, and so sure that he and Eames are finished in all the ways that matter, and it’s only stubbornness that keeps them calling each other once a week and making plans for summer. He’s afraid he’ll fall apart if he loses Eames. He’s afraid he won’t fall apart at all.
He finishes college a different person than when he’s started, but the parts of him that exist for Eames are not gone, only changed. Eames flies in from London for his graduation. He’s been working some kind of boring office job that he never talks about. Arthur suspects he’s doing criminal work on the side; Arthur’s moral code has become stricter in college, and they both choose not to talk about it. There are a lot of things they don’t talk about anymore, either because they forget to mention them or for some other reason Arthur doesn’t want to examine too closely.
Arthur’s father doesn’t show up at his graduation. They haven’t spoken except since Arthur first left for college. Arthur goes to London for Christmas and Easter to visit Eames. He tries not to let it affect him, but Eames can clearly tell he’s sad about it. Eames’ parents have come as well, and they hug him and tell him they’re proud and that he’s brilliant, which only mostly makes up for his father’s absence. He wishes he didn’t care at all, but can’t quite convince himself to forget about his dad.
“I want to kiss you,” Eames says. They’re standing in a sea of young people in pristine uniforms and proud parents taking photos.
“Not really the place for it,” Arthur replies, smiling. “I think you can get away with a manly shoulder hug if you’d like. I told some people earlier that you’re my cousin.”
Eames leans into him, enfolding Arthur in a hug that’s a little too close for cousins. Arthur doesn’t mind much - no one is paying attention.
“My parents want to take you out to dinner.”
“They’re being too nice to me,” Arthur says. They’d given him an absolutely gorgeous watch as a gift earlier, and Arthur’s almost afraid to wear it because it’s too beautiful for him to own. People will probably think he’s stolen it.
“They think they can get away with it today. You must know that they really, really love you as a second son.”
“I hope you don’t think of me as a brother,” Arthur says dryly.
“That’s my line.” Eames grins. “If you don’t need me to lower the tone of the conversation, what good am I?”
“You do me all sorts of good, Mr Eames,” Arthur says, voice sounding even more fond and affectionate than he’d intended. Eames reaches out and adjusts the precise lines of Arthur’s uniform, fingers resting on the brass buttons.
“You look sharp,” Eames murmurs. “This uniform business is giving me all sorts of terrible ideas. You really wouldn’t approve of them.”
“Live in hope,” Arthur suggests.
He forgets, when they’ve been away from each other for a long time, how much better everything is when he’s around Eames. He forgets that he needs Eames - that he is actually a better person in his presence. At this moment, he feels like he and Eames could make it forever, and he doesn’t care that they fell in love too young, or that they live in different worlds, because those things don’t matter. But Eames will leave, and Arthur will forget. He always forgets.
He breathes slowly, so he won’t panic. “Eames, tell me that someday we’re going to live in a house with a fence and a cat and flowerbeds, and you’ll do the crossword while I make coffee every Sunday.”
“No.” Eames says. He smells like wood smoke.
“Why not?”
“I don’t like lying to you.”
Arthur stiffens.
“But, darling, I will tell you this: the two of us are always running towards the same beautiful, dangerous thing. Maybe we aren’t always going there together, at least we’ll both be in the same place at the end.”
---
When Arthur is twenty-two, he is recruited into the dream-share programme. The same year, Eames goes missing for six months and when he finally gets in touch again, the e-mail only says: “Things are a bit hectic at the moment. My phone has been disconnected so I’ll call you when I’m in easy reach again.”
Arthur, who hasn’t had more than three hours of sleep uninterrupted by painfully gruesome, somnacin-induced nightmares in longer than he can remember, writes multiple lengthy replies about how worried he’s been. Arthur is bone-deep angry and achingly lonely and terrified for whatever disaster Eames must have gotten himself into. They haven’t seen each other in over a year.
Arthur has an internalised mental breakdown that lasts three days. Sits blankly staring at walls unless he’s been directly told to do something and all his thoughts feel like separate islands in his head, like he cannot connect anymore.
When he scrapes himself back together he picks up some idiot cadet in a bar that looks like Eames and has sex with him in the back of a car. He feels sick with guilt until he realises that this is the end. He’s reached the end of the road with Eames.
If joining the military represented entering another world from the one Eames occupied, the dream-share programme and the espionage he’s being trained to use lucid-dreaming for represent a whole different universe.
Eames replies to Arthur’s long e-mails a month and three weeks after he’d sent them with a single word: “Sorry.”
Arthur deletes the e-mail after one perfunctory glance.
That night he sleeps a solid six-hours for the first time in what seems like forever, dreaming about Eames instead of re-running training drills of endless, innocent deaths at his own hands. In the dream, he and Eames are lying in the grass behind Elise’s house with the noise from the cast party rippling softly over them and Eames is whispering against Arthur’s neck. Arthur is crying in the dream, saying: “I can’t hear you” again and again.
He wakes dry-eyed.
---
When Arthur is twenty-four, he finishes his fifth military mission with the dream-share programme and decides that if he is going to use cutting edge technology invented to revolutionise education and training for unjustified personal gain, he’d rather the personal gain be his own and not the military’s.
He steals three PASIV devices and goes home to Illinois where he tells his father about the time he and Eames had sex on the kitchen table and not to expect anymore Christmas cards. He tells him father a lot of things he’d always wanted to say, but had never been able to before.
Arthur’s father finally throws a dish that actually manages to hit Arthur. The scar stays for the rest of Arthur’s life - a thin line at the edge of his hairline only visible to someone paying close attention.
That night, bandage taped to his head, Arthur sneaks through the window into what used to be Eames’ bedroom. The Eameses don’t live here anymore. The room is an office now, beige paint covering up the fantastical pencil sketches Eames used to draw on the walls when he was bored. The carpet is still the same and Arthur crouches in corner of the room and peels it back a bit to see the careful heart carved into the floor with E+A inscribed in the middle.
Arthur swallows hard and misses Eames so much it hurts his bones.
---
“I’m not telling you we can’t pull the job without a forger,” Arthur says, breathless. He’s running, but he’s only a block from home, so he hadn’t bothered to tell Farley to call him back later. “I’m just saying. We can do the job, or we can do the job well. And I’m a perfectionist.”
Farley’s voice comes crackling down the line. He sounds resigned, so Arthur knows he’s already won. “Who are we going to bring in this late? I don’t know anyone good enough to pick up a whole new character with only a week and a half to go; do you?”
“It’s not my fault you’ve been procrastinating. Have you tried Torvald?” Arthur slows as he nears his flat, digging in his pocket for keys.
“He can’t do women for shit,” Farley vetoes. Arthur sets his gun on the table next to the door and drops his keys next to it, flicking the lights on as his breathing evens out again. He’s going to have to start running farther. Five miles and the sad, caged-in feeling has barely abated, still pressed tight against the sides of his ribs and the tips of his fingers.
“What about the guy Caroline was raving about the last job we pulled together?”
“The English one, you mean?”
“Yeah. I think he goes by James. I know Dom Cobb knows someone with his contact details, but you’ll have to call; I’m not about to interrupt his honeymoon. Mal would kill me. You have the excuse of not knowing them well.”
“Fine, whatever. This guy better be pretty fucking amazing. Forgers are always high maintenance.”
---
Arthur hears his voice first. It’s unmistakable. That easy, gravelly, almost implacable English drawl. It makes Arthur shiver sweetly. Then he freaks the fuck out.
Arthur lunges over his desk, drawing his gun before Eames has even turned around from talking to Farley.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Arthur asks, not breathing. There is a roaring sound in his ears that makes it difficult to think and Arthur is scared like he hasn’t been in a long time. Eames is in his past and these days, Arthur’s past and present don’t mix.
To his credit, Eames draws his own gun with same easy, practiced speed. “I could say the same to you,” he says, softly. It’s the tone of voice he used to use whispering into Arthur’s neck.
“I’m the fucking point man,” Arthur grits out.
Eames shoves his gun back in to his holster, grinning broadly. “Well, I’m the fucking forger,” Eames replies grandly. Then he turns on his heel, nodding to Farley as if to say, catch you later.
“What the hell?” Farley yells. “Arthur, what the hell?”
Arthur manages to start breathing again and collapses down in his desk chair. His collar is too tight. “I can’t fucking believe…” he whispers to himself.
He doesn’t finish the sentence because there are too many things he can’t believe about this situation. Eames is a forger. Eames works in underground dream-share. Eames has been so close to Arthur for so long without him ever realising. Eames has never been farther away. Arthur could never have guessed he’d find Eames here. And if he can’t second-guess Eames, if he can’t even imagine Eames in this place, how can he still know him? Arthur can’t bring this world and the Eames of his memory together, so that Eames must not really exist.
The second day, they don’t speak. Not a single word to each other, even when it’s inconvenient.
“Look,” Farley says, clearly exasperated. His hand is gripping Arthur’s elbow a little too tightly, creating visible wrinkles in the fabric of his suit. “I don’t know what the hell is going on between you and James, and, frankly, I don’t care, but if you can’t even summon enough civility to speak to each other, one of you will have to go.”
“Our behaviour is exemplary. We’re being very professional.”
“You really aren’t. You haven’t been to look at the diagrams yet because they’re all on his desk. That is fucking cowardly.”
Arthur scowls.
“One of you will have to go, and it’ll be him, because he hasn’t earned my loyalty like you have. But I’ve heard that he is a fucking genius, and I will not be happy if you lose me a forger who might as well be an artist, yeah? You’re the one who wanted him brought in to start with.”
“Not him,” Arthur growls.
“Whatever, man,” Farley says, throwing his hands up with exasperation. “Get your shit together.”
“Yeah, fine,” Arthur sighs. He doesn’t know how to fix any of this without talking to Eames, but he doesn’t know how to talk to Eames anymore.
They do a dry run in the dream on the fourth day. Eames has only had a week to practise, but his forgery is perfect. He’s breathtakingly good at the work, and Arthur remembers that it used to be like that with Eames. He would pick things up so easily; it was a gift to watch him be good at something because it was like an act of love more than perfection.
Arthur feels Eames’ eyes on him sometimes, too, and he doesn’t mean to show off but he thinks he might be anyway. Farley pauses next to him as they’re putting away the PASIV later that afternoon. “That went smooth, today, Arthur. I didn’t know you could do that thing with the knives. I mean, shit - it was something. If it goes like that on the day, we’ll be aces.”
Arthur shrugs. If Arthur could only get over the dark, empty drop of his stomach every time he saw Eames out of the corner of his eye, all his mannerisms and the way he holds himself just slightly different than Arthur remembered, maybe they would make a perfect team.
It’s a nerve-wracking thought in some ways. With Eames being as excellent at forgery as he is, and Arthur having worked his way to being possibly the most-sought Point Man in the business, it’s likely they’ll end up working together again. He’s not sure if he can handle it, having to form a relationship of estranged business partners with the first (and if he’s honest with himself, only) person he’s ever fallen in love with.
A few hours later, Arthur is going through the plans for an apartment building maze with the architect when Farley comes storming across the room, a sheaf of papers bundled up in his arms, looking red with rage.
“Arthur,” he shouts. He’s breathing in angry, shallow intakes. “What the fuck is this? Did you see these reports? Have you given these a fucking thought! These completely undermine-”
“They’re fine,” Arthur starts to explain, glancing at the papers Farley is clutching. “The new psych evals rule out an unstable dream surface. Those are old news.”
Farley spits at the floor near Arthur’s feet, voice rising even louder. “And you didn’t think I need to know about this? I don’t give a fuck if it’s old news, this intel could jeopardise the whole job!”
He’s screaming by the end, and Arthur can feel himself wincing a little bit. “Farley, calm down, it’s just-”
“I don’t want to hear your bullshit! You were going to let me go in there unprepared! I can’t…” Farley raises his arm and Arthur knows he’s about to throw the coffee cup clenched in his hand when Eames appears out of nowhere, grabbing Farley’s arm to twist him off balance, swinging his other arm around to punch Farley in the jaw. Farley’s head snaps back with an awful, sickening noise. Arthur’s never even heard anything like it in a dream.
The papers drop from Farley’s arm as he crumples to his knees, fluttering around Eames and Farley like a flock of white, settling birds. For a moment all Arthur can think is those are going to take so long to file again; then Eames, who still hasn’t let go of Farley’s arm, pulls him violently close and says in a low, dangerous voice, “Do not yell at Arthur, and do not throw things at him.” He drops Farley’s arm and steps away, allowing Farley to slump forward, gasping.
Eames ambles out the front door, Arthur still frozen, the architect with her mouth hanging open, and the chemist in to doorway to the other room with her jaw dropped as well.
“What the fuck?” Farley wheezes.
Arthur fists his hands in his sleeves and follows Eames out the front door without saying a word.
It’s late afternoon. The streetlights are already on, but there is enough sunlight left to see well. The shade of the hour is blue, hazing the edges of every building into neo-impressionism.
He finds Eames smoking, body a long, curved line against the aluminium wall of the warehouse. He’d been easy in his violence towards Farley, but Arthur can see now that his fingers are shaking as they cup around the Clementine-coloured ash dropping off the end of the cigarette.
“I’m not the same kid you knew,” Arthur says, quietly, folding his arms as he leans against the wall. “You must understand that, at least. The two of us are different people, and we don’t know each other anymore.”
“You don’t like it when people yell.”
Eames doesn’t look at him. His jaw-line is sharp and lean, and Arthur wonders if his stubble would feel the same as Arthur remembers under his fingertips.
“I didn’t like it. Past tense. It don’t care about it anymore.”
“He was going to throw a cup of coffee at your head. There was no fucking way-”
“There are things that have happened to me since I last saw you that are much worse than that. I don’t know where you get off appearing here and trying to fucking protect me.”
“That’s what I’ve always done for you.”
“Not for me. For some other Arthur. You don’t know me.” Arthur feels like he’s lying to Eames, but he doesn’t understand why.
“You keep saying that, but-”
“No, Eames - we’re different now. You don’t know me.”
“If I don’t know you, than who does?” Eames says, sounding raw. “Because I taught you how to ride a bicycle and I read you sonnets so you could study for your English finals and I knew the feel of your skin before anyone else ever did. So who knows you now, Arthur?”
“No one,” Arthur replies, voice perfectly flat. “And I worked for that.”
For a moment, Eames looks devastatingly heartbroken, and then his face twists and his expression is blank. “Fine,” Eames says. “Just remember that you don’t know me either.”
He turns away and the cadence of his walk is one that Arthur has never seen before. Arthur wants to tell Eames that not knowing him is the only thing Arthur thinks about anymore - that it would be impossible for him to forget it.
---
They do the job for real a few days later. It is an unmitigated disaster.
It turns out to be the Chemist’s fault in the end. They go under and half-way through the extraction, the mark slips away from them during the time he’s supposed
to spend with Eames and Farley. They run themselves ragged for three hours of dream-time frantically looking for him. The problem, as they discover, is not that the mark has given them slip - it’s that he’s woken up.
They come around to a room full of well-armed law enforcement. It’s a narrow escape. They loose the architect down a corridor and the rest of them only just make it out. Arthur has three bullet grazes along his arms and he’s losing enough blood that it’s starting to make him light-headed, but it’s nothing that won’t fix easily. Farley’s left wrist is broken. Eames is the least injured, but he’ll still be well-bruised in the morning.
When they’ve run a few blocks from the hotel, Farley pulls them down an alley and passes over a bag.
“I sorted out two safe-houses, so we can split into pairs. I’ll take one, you two take the other. I put the keys and the map in here, so you guys should have everything you need.”
“Farley, I’m not going with-” Arthur begins to say.
Farley cuts him off. “Oh, no,” he says. “Maybe we aren’t the best of friends, the three of us, but I can still do you a favour. You two need to work your shit out because right now you’re a danger to the fucking business. This is a perfect opportunity. Get to the safe-house, and don’t move for at least two weeks, preferably more. Nice knowing you.”
Farley disappears into the beat-up pickup truck he’d parked down the street for the getaway, leaving Arthur and Eames staring at each other in the dark. Arthur’s blood smells like wet metal. He passes out in a rush of coloured black spots and the pavement rears up to meet him.
---
Arthur wakes to fingers brushing with gentle familiarity through his hair. His eyes blink open slowly. It takes a few minutes to adjust to the lack of light.
Eames is sitting propped-up against the headboard next to Arthur. The room they are in is tiny, big enough only to fit the cramped double bed they are both occupying, a folding card table with a camp stove, and two ratty suitcases stacked one on top of the other.
Eames is watching Arthur with an expression that he has seen so often. It feels more like home to him than anything he’s felt in a long time, and Arthur coughs against the rising breathlessness in his throat, which is about as close to tears as Arthur’s been since college.
It’s the hour of the night when being awake feels most lonely and most beautiful to Arthur, as though he’s the only one in the whole world, and everything is there just for him. Here, Eames is home, and looking down at him, and they’re cocooned together in the moment like they used to be, when they were both teenagers and they’d talk until there weren’t any words left to make into new sentences. He suddenly can’t remember the sickening feelings of the days before, when there were so many things completely changed in Eames that he was hard to recognise.
“Eliot Eames,” he says aloud, voice scratchy with sleep. He says it just to prove he knows.
“I’m sorry for waking you,” Eames says. “I was just…”
Arthur wants to shift around but he’s afraid that Eames will stop touching him if he moves even a little. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t fucking know, because Eames is something foreign to him, and yet he still wants to feel Eames’ hands pressed against his skin, still wants to feel Eames’ fingers in his hair with the same want he held at fifteen. When Arthur doesn’t know he panics, and he gets that old track-team feeling, like he just needs to get out and run and run until he can’t breath, and he’s soothed by absolute exhaustion.
He waits for that same feeling to creep up over him and pull him away, but it doesn’t come.
He remembers that there used to be two things that could calm him down. One of them was running, and one of them was Eames.
Eames’ fingers slip down to brush against the corners of Arthur’s eyes. His calluses are in all different places; right for guns instead of pencils. “You’re looking panicked, darling.”
“What are you…?” Arthur tries to swallow the words down, so they can just lie here like this forever, and everything that changed what they are can stay just out of the frame, permanently suspended. He doesn’t want Eames. He doesn’t want Eames to leave. The words stick in his mouth and he has to say them: “What are you doing?”
“I woke up,” Eames murmurs. “And you were just…. Jesus Christ.” Eames laughs a little, and finally he says, “You sleep exactly the same way you always have.”
“What?” Arthur asks.
“I don’t know why, but I thought you’d sleep different now… but you don’t. You sleep just them same. You’ve always slept the same. Your limbs sprawl out in all the directions they possibly can and you go pliant, yet you cling to the bed like a child. It makes me…it makes me….”
“What?” Arthur whispers again, just to say something. Eames’ fingers are in his hair and his gaze is soft and direct. Arthur feels innocent, the way he hasn’t for such a very long time.
“It makes me want you. Maybe…I forgot how to want people.”
Arthur’s back in time; he’s sixteen and Eames shaking with anger over Arthur’s awful father because all Eames really wants is for Arthur to be happy, and just that, just the fact that someone wants him to be happy makes him so.
The trouble is, he isn’t sixteen, and they aren’t the same people anymore. Arthur still believes what he’d said to Eames before, outside the warehouse. Only, now, he’s beginning to see that there is more than one way of dealing with the distance between them.
Everything isn’t slow and young like it was between them the first time around. He’d thought, back then, that he knew what hurt was, but he’d only just tasted its edges.
Arthur rolls away from Eames, and Eames’ hand disappears like he’s been burnt, which wasn’t Arthur’s intention at all. Arthur sits up and turns towards Eames, cross-legged and leaning on his elbows with slight exhaustion curving his frame. His bullet grazes have all been carefully bandaged, but they ache with a certain bracing steadiness.
“Apologies, Arthur,” Eames says, voice ice cold. “I shouldn’t have taken…the liberty.”
Arthur remembers that there was a time when Eames touched him like they were part of each other and slinging an arm around Arthur was the kind of thing that couldn’t be refused.
“No, Eames,” Arthur starts. Eames turns his head away and moves to stand, but Arthur catches his wrist. “Hey….”
“I’m sorry; like I said, I shouldn’t have woken you.”
“I’m not trying to tell you to stop touch-to stop. I don’t want us to think everything will just fall into place, is all. We live in a careful world now.”
“It doesn’t need to be easy. I just…when I saw you in the warehouse I was so angry that I didn’t understand how you’d come to be there. I should have already known you were in the business. What happened to us?”
“You left me.”
“I was on the run from Blackwell Industries.” Eames says, defensively, “Contacting anyone would have ended in their deaths as an example to me. After it was safe, I wrote to you again and again, but you never replied.”
Arthur looks away guiltily, remembering getting blind drunk one night just to have to courage to block Eames’ address. Then he’d dropped into the criminal world and any numbers or addresses connected with his old life had been erased.
“I’m not blaming you, Arthur. I’m just trying to tell you that just because it was over once doesn’t mean it has to be over now.”
Arthur looks up at Eames and thinks he could fall into the kind of comfort Eames always was far too easily. Maybe the real problem is the simplicity of it.
“I’m a Point Man, Eames. I have to be a mystery. You’re a liability to me like nothing else ever could be.”
Eames watches Arthur for a long minute, holding his gaze. Eames brushes one finger up along the thin scar along his hairline from his fight with his father like he’s learning the shape of it. Eames’ is smile is new, one Arthur doesn’t recognise, but he can see that there is something beautiful in newness.
“Arthur, everyone needs a weakness,” Eames says, leaning forward to speak softly into the curve of Arthur’s neck just under his ear. “I promise you’ll never find a better one than me.”
Eames kisses Arthur fiercely, then. If he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine he’s lying in wet grass, the low thrum of too-loud music and jumbled voices forming background noise. They kiss like they know each other (and they do), tilting their lips together in that same, practiced way, Eames’ hands fumbling under Arthur’s t-shirt, working gingerly around the bandages, but pressing bruises everywhere else. They fuck like they love each other, long: gentle movements, harsh only in desperation, Eames’ hands framing Arthur’s hips between his thumbs.
And if they kiss like they know each other and fuck like they love each other, who is to say they don’t?
They lay for a long time after, not sleeping, just breathing together in the cramped double bed, re-learning the rhythm and the sound of two sets of lungs and two heart beats falling into synchronism.
---
The two weeks in the safe-house pass slowly. They tell stories, stare at the ceiling. Eames sketches lazily on the walls in pencil. There is not much to do besides talk and have sex, even if they had wanted to do anything besides that.
Eames drives them to the airport in an awful Citroen hatchback that is at least fifteen years old. Arthur’s blood from the drive to the safe-house has dried into a coffee-and-strawberries coloured crust all over the passenger seat. It makes everything smell like iron. Arthur stretches out in the backseat instead, dozing in and out. The radio station they are listening to seems to be Croatian. Eames laughs occasionally at what’s being said; Arthur realises he must speak the language.
Sometimes it seems like there is too much between them. Sometimes that’s okay.
It’s like when Arthur was making the bed so they could eat breakfast sitting on it without getting crumbs in the sheets, and Eames had been smoking with his head stuck out the window. He’d walked up behind Arthur and put his hands around Arthur waist in that almost silent way of his and purely instinctually, Arthur had flipped around and floored Eames in one smooth, instantaneous motion, knocking all the breath out of Eames’ lungs. There are just some things they have to do differently now.
In the airport, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, staring up at the departures board.
“Where shall we go?” Eames says.
“Let’s play a game,” Arthur replies.
“Yes,” Eames agrees.
“It’s works like this.” Arthur continues. His voice is low and smooth, just for Eames. “I’m going to get on a plane. You have to guess where I’ve gone and follow me. If you guess wrong, you don’t know me anymore. If you guess right…then….” Arthur steps closed to Eames so that his next words are soft against Eames’ neck. “You win,” he whispers.
Eames swallows, and Arthur can feel the shift of his throat underneath his lips, he’s so close to Eames’ skin. “Okay,” Eames says.
Arthur grins at him as he disappears into the crowd. Eames waits for an hour. Then he follows Arthur home.
---
Alice Ford went to Illinois State University to become a teacher and lived in Chicago for two years after she graduated. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like the tall buildings or the fast people and all she wanted to do the whole time was come home - so she did. Her husband (they’d married just out of college) came with her and they bought the Eames’ house when they moved out of town because there was a sense of family worn into all walls and floors.
Alice had been a close friend of Eames’ at school and she remembers sitting in the middle of the floor in the room she knew to be his, staring up at the intricate pencil sketches covering the walls. She’d photographed them all carefully before painting them over. She remembers tracing the faces in the drawings. Arthur’s appeared most frequently.
Alice Ford wasn’t the only person in town who sometimes stumbled across some bit of evidence of the lives of Arthur and Eames and stood for a moment, marvelling, as if they had found a mark of magic. Arthur and Eames had always been like that in school; mysterious, surprising, and beyond the cramped borders of their small town.
It’s that startling quality that makes Alice drop the potted plant she’s carrying onto the front porch in shock, bringing her hands up to cover her mouth in case a shriek slips out. Arthur is sitting on the curb in front of her house.
He’s leaning against the mailbox post and his head is tipped back tiredly. His legs seemed impossibly long, stretched out into the street. He’s wearing a fine pale grey suit with a waistcoat but no tie. A leather briefcase sits next to him and Alice can tell from the way he is resting his fingers on the strap that he’s paying attention to the bag and his surroundings despite looking otherwise like he might be asleep.
Seeing Arthur sitting on the sidewalk in front of her house is about as surprising as finding a parrot in the apple tree in the back garden. Not impossible, but still fundamentally extraordinary.
“Arthur?” she asks. It’s the first she’s seen of him in eight years, but she heard his voice the last night he was ever into town, crushed grey words barely rising above speaking level as he told his father he would never come back and slammed the screen door behind him. She remembers washing dishes and wanting to go out the front door and find him, but she was too afraid.
Arthur sits up with easy grace, twisting around to face her. “Alice,” he says, at ease in that sharp suit and slim smile. “I’m sorry. I hope I’m not disturbing you; I’m only just for someone.”
“Well, uh, hi?” Alice says, still unable to fully make sense of the situation. It’s Arthur standing there. She remembers his photograph in the local newspaper, stiff in his military uniform, a decorated hero. The newspaper didn’t run the story about his temporary disappearance and dishonourable discharge a year later, but Alice had heard about it anyway.
“Eames used to live here, you know.”
“We bought the house from his parents. They’ve moved to-”
“To Brighton. I know.”
“Oh,” Alice looks down at the plant soil and shards of terracotta spread across the steps. “Why are you in town?”
“Sorry, I thought I said. I’m waiting for someone.”
Alice laughs a little. “No, you did say, only I thought…well, never mind. Would you like to come in for some coffee or something while you wait?”
“Sure. Let me just get my bag.” Arthur stands, following her up the steps. He trails his hand along the railing like a little boy and she wonders if he’s remembering coming up these same steps as a child. “I hope I’m not intruding,” Arthur says once they’re inside. He’s taller than she remembers, filling up all the spare space in the dining room with the self-assurance settled just under the surface of his skin, making his motions clean and efficient.
“Where do you live now?” Alice says from the kitchen, kicking a few lego buildings out of her way.
“Paris, sometimes. I travel a lot for work.”
“Oh, France. I love trying to cook French food. I’m sure I’m not very good but…I do my best. What do you do?”
“Don’t be modest, Alice. Didn’t they say you were the best in home ec? And, I’m in espionage.”
Alice only just manages to swallow the mouthful of coffee she’d just taken. “I’m sorry,” she manages. “Did you say espionage? Aren’t you supposed to lie about that sort of thing? Shouldn’t you be telling me you’re an insurance salesman or something?”
Arthur takes his cup of coffee gently, setting it on the table in front of him after taking a sip and making an appreciative noise. He looks up at her from under his dark eyebrows and his grin is an almost invisible twist of his mouth. “That is the lie.”
“Right,” Alice says, falteringly.
“My father still lives next door…do you see him very often?” Arthur asks after a moment of silence. His voice is carefully blank.
“Well, he doesn’t get out much. Just to the grocery store.”
“Is he well?”
“Lonely.”
His mouth twists sourly. “It’s good he got what he worked so hard for.”
She pauses, looking down uncomfortably. She hates awkward silences but mentioning the weather seems like it would only do more harm. Instead, she says: “Whom are you…umm…waiting for?”
“Eames,” Arthur says, simply. The expression on his face is now unfathomable, caught in between worry and longing and something like annoyance.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you’re still friends.” Alice says, almost absently, remembering how jealous she was at the way they were with each other, that easiness that made her feel lonely and wanting. Anyone was a little jealous and lonely watching them. It was a feeling that no one would ever connect with her so well as they connected with each.
“Yes, well, we’ve only recently been back in touch.”
“Are you two-?” She only realises the inappropriateness of her question when she’s already two words in. She wants to ask him if they’re back together. But, of course, it had only even been her own speculation back when she knew them in high school, and she barely knows either of them well enough to ask a personal question like that now.
“Are we…?” Arthur prompts.
“Are you both going to be staying in town long?”
“Only a day or so, probably. It’s a sort of nostalgia trip. If Eames ever finds his way here, anyway.”
“Where is he coming in from?”
Arthur takes another sip of coffee and then spills a little out of the side of the cup. The way it exactly misses spilling on his suit at all makes Alice think perhaps he planned it, but then they’re both busy cleaning up the mess and Arthur never answers due to the distraction.
They speak for another hour, mostly Alice talking about her kids and her job at the elementary school. At four-thirty someone knocks on the front door.
“It’s a little early for Elise to be dropping the kids off from their play-date,” Alice says, worried.
“It’s Eames,” Arthur says, like it’s not a guess, like he knows. “That’s the way he knocks,” Arthur explains when she looks at him quizzically. “I’ve trespassed on your company long enough, Alice. Thanks for the coffee.”
“Eames is welcome to come in, as well,” Alice says genuinely. Arthur gets to his feet anyway. Anyone else would seem indecisive, but Arthur’s deliberation seems purposeful.
She goes to answer the door when the knock sounds a second time; Arthur’s right. It’s Eames.
“Alice!” he says, sweeping her into a one-armed hug. “It’s brilliant to see you.”
He looks tired and a little distracted, as if he is trying to peer around her into the house. He smells like airplanes, re-circulated air and peanuts. Everything else about him is expansive and bright; his suit is well-worn, but there is a lazy, expensive angle to the cut. He grins crooked-white. His accent is more English than she remembers from school.
“Is Arthur in, perhaps?” he asks, before she can answer his first question.
“Umm…Eames!” she stutters out, surprised, for some reason, that he is actually here. “It’s nice to see you, too. Arthur is…in the living room.”
“Thanks,” he says. He glides past her easily and thrusts a bouquet of flowers into her arms as though he’d been expecting to call on her all along. She sets them on the kitchen table before following Eames back into the living room.
“They’re beautiful, Eames,” she says. Arthur is perched on the arm on the sofa. His eyes go soft as Eames enters the room.
“You’re late,” he says, deadpan.
“I had a layover in O’Hare.”
“You should have flown to St Louis International. My flight was direct.”
“There wasn’t another until tomorrow.” Eames is smiling sheepishly, like flight scheduling errors are his fault.
“Did you drive all the way down from Springfield, then?”
“Arthur…” Eames’ voice dies in his throat. The deliberately wry quality of their back-and-quips is absent in the hesitancy with which Eames says Arthur’s name. He says Arthur’s name like he’s been dreaming of saying it, like the word tastes beautiful in his mouth. “I win, don’t I?”
“I suppose,” Arthur concedes.
Eames crosses the distance between them in three strides, and he pulls Arthur to his feet in a swift motion. Then he is tipping Arthur backwards and kissing him, dipping him back like they’re in an old film, black and white and clouded with steam in a train station, written in scripts for each other and no one else.
“I missed you,” Arthur murmurs when they part. Alice stands at the door, feeling like an intruder and yet unable to wrench herself away.
“It’s not that long a flight,” Eames says, wryly.
“Not the flight, you idiot. I’m trying to say something nice. I missed you.”
“I missed you, too.”
Arthur leans his forehead into Eames’ collarbone, letting Eames’ arms come up around him, and Alice can see Eames fingers sliding and settling along the line of Arthur’s spine like he’s forgotten the feel of it and is desperate to re-learn. “I know,” Arthur says softly. Eames pulls Arthur against him tightly, saying with the curve of his wrists and the familiar way his chin settles against Arthur’s temple that knowing is only a piece of what they offer each other.
---
EPILOGUE
It’s late afternoon and the light is making the dust motes in the warehouse glow where it falls through the dirty windows.
Eames is half-asleep over his desk, very purposefully ignoring a stack of reports Arthur insisted he read when Ariadne comes up to him and perches on top of a pile of architecture textbooks she’s taken to leaving in the warehouse to study for finals when she has a free moment.
This is the third job they’ve pulled since Inception; Cobb’s second, since he’d taken the one after Fischer off to be with his kids. They’re still based out of Paris, and the bill Cobb must be running up for airfare in and out of LA is probably extensive. Luckily, Saito’s been footing it without comment. As soon as Ariadne has graduated they’ll probably go back to the states as a team. Eames is trying to convince Yusuf to come along as well, but he’s still undecided about the idea of the permanent group that they’re setting up.
“I think Cobb is jealous of you and Arthur,” she says, firmly, like she’s expecting him to deny it.
Eames cracks a sly grin. “He always has been. Has anyone ever told you that you’re very direct? You could maybe benefit from a little more conversational sprinkles and frosting.”
“Sprinkles and frosting are your job, Eames,” she says grinning. “I’m curious by nature.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I thought you were just obnoxious.” Eames laughs. Ariadne swats his arm and Eames groans and winces as if she’s really hurt him.
“Will the two of you shut up? Some people are actually working around here,” Arthur calls from across the room, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose as he does whenever he’s got a low-grade headache.
“I just noticed that Cobb always looks a bit annoyed when you mention jobs you’ve pulled together without him.”
“Well, Cobb put a lot of his faith in Arthur after Mal; he had to. I suppose it’s difficult when you put all your trust in one person and they’ve already got someone else they trust that much.”
“What are you saying?” Ariadne asks quizzically. She tips her head to the side like a bird.
Eames holds up a finger as if to say watch this. He calls across the room, “Arthur, love, do you remember what flavour my fourteenth birthday cake was?”
“White chocolate and macadamia nut,” Arthur replies, without looking up. “I can’t believe you forgot that cake, Eames.” He sets his pen down and kicks back in his chair, humming at the memory. “Your mother bribed me to spend a week watching everything you ate to figure out what you’d like best and she had it shipped in overnight from the bakery in Harrods. That cake was so fucking delicious I nearly had a crisis of faith.”
Eames laughs. “Do you remember the name of my first and only pet?”
Arthur makes a face, “Tybalt the cat. You gave him to the mechanic in exchange for a new transmission after you drag-raced Toby Pierce across town with me screaming in the backseat. My first ever near-death experience.”
“What was my first tattoo, Arthur?” Eames doesn’t try to stop his voice from softening. Ariadne is looking between the two of them like her world-view has shifted a hundred and eighty degrees. She’s dangerously close to dropping her jaw.
“Eames…” Arthur says, finally staring over at them. “You shouldn’t show off. It’s unbecoming of you.”
Eames shakes his head, tilting his head back as if to say please, just this once. Arthur closes his eyes and Eames thinks, he’s remembering what it looks like; dark against my skin, what it feels like under his fingertips. “A.” Arthur says, quietly. “A for Arthur. A for first kisses. Why are you asking, Eames?”
Eames splays his fingers on the desk. He wishes they were on Arthur’s skin. “Ariadne wanted to know if you trust me, Arthur. But that’s not the right way to think about the question, is it? We both know the real answer is that that we taught each other what trust means.”
fin
more notes (in case you wanted some):
1. Apologies to anyone from southern Illinois who I may have offended in some way. I tried to keep it all pretty general, but I’m sure you can still tell I’ve never even been to southern Illinois let alone lived in a small town there.
2. WHAT WAS THAT EVEN, I DON’T KNOW. I actually wrote a plan for this at the beginning. The end result was not closely related. So…yeah. I realize that there is not a shortage of A+E being young together, but I hope this seemed different in some way, because I did try for that.
3. Title from ‘Lippy Kids’ by Elbow.
(PART I)
(PART II)