like our youth, my darling
i was reading baudelaire for class and then this happened. (it wasn't supposed to happen, really, i was supposed to be asleep by now.)
like our youth, my darling
arthur/eames, pg. 1,732 words.
The first time Eames kills him, they're in Barcelona working a job with Cobb and Mal.
Arthur's never met Eames before; Cobb just shows up at the studio with the Brit in tow and they go under not five minutes later. It's Mal's dreamscape, and Arthur is comfortable enough walking over cobblestones and weaving his way through a series of alleyways. Things go wrong, of course, but Arthur's never found out exactly what; the target's mind isn't militarized, and he's only run into two or three projections, so he concludes that it must be the forger.
There isn't much time to ponder, though, because he can see Cobb and Mal ahead of him but there are ten or so figures in his way. Arthur turns to look behind him and sees Eames.
It happens quickly after that; Eames pulls a gun out of the waistband of his pants and flicks the safety off. Arthur shakes his head frantically and turns around, looking for Cobb, but before he can do much more than wave his hands, Eames has fired. The bullet rips through his flesh and Arthur cries out as he drops to the ground like a puppet with cut strings. "Fuck," he hears Eames mutter.
Then Eames fires again. The bullet enters his skull this time and Arthur wakes up.
The second time Eames kills him, Arthur is completely unprepared.
They're in New York and it's also the second time Arthur's met Eames.
"Hello," Arthur greets. He's already set up the PASIV device and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. His jacket hangs off of the back of his chair and he's been ready to go on this job for a half an hour, but they (just he and Cobb this time, as it has been since Mal got pregnant) have been waiting on the forger. "You're late."
"No point in getting up early if all we're doing is going back to sleep," Eames says smoothly.
The dreamscape is Cobb's. It's much more Eastern than what Arthur has grown used to with Mal and her old-world sensibilities; this place is crowded and ornate and dense. Arthur feels a little trapped, despite the height of the buildings around him and the ocean that he can see if he looks hard enough.
They go their separate ways; Eames is disguised as a woman, and it's the first time Arthur's seen him shift. It's uncanny how easily a man with such a firmly established personality (Arthur knows this despite having only met him twice, and it unnerves him) can just abandon it. At first, around Arthur and Cobb, the petite, busty brunette speaks with Eames's word patterns (Arthur is equally irked by this version of Eames) but when Arthur looks over his shoulder to watch Eames saunter away, the forger's persona slips away so completely that if Arthur didn't know better-
But he does, so he turns around and goes to work.
He should have twenty minutes left, according to his wristwatch, but Eames shows up, panting and annoyed.
"Now you're early," Arthur says, arching an eyebrow. Eames shakes his head.
"Game's up," he says. "He knows."
"What, you got caught?"
Eames snorts. "No, don't be stupid."
Arthur doesn't get a chance to respond, because Eames pulls a gun out (Arthur can't figure out where he was hiding it; the girl's cleavage isn't that generous) and shoots Arthur.
The bullet goes in between his eyes on the first try, and Arthur wakes up with a start.
"Does he just not realize that I can kill myself?" Arthur asks Cobb when they're leaving their airport, in a cab on the way back to see Mal. Cobb frowns. "Eames. He keeps killing me."
Cobb shrugs. "Maybe he likes it." There's a glint of something that Arthur doesn't really care to unravel in his eyes. It's almost teasing, but not quite.
Arthur crosses his arms and looks out the window for the rest of the trip; the cabbie just looks confused.
The next time they work together, they're in Paris.
It's just Arthur and Eames, for the first time; Cobb had set up the job months in advance but Philippa was born two weeks early. Arthur had waved off Cobb's not-entirely-convincing attempt to keep the appointment and had gone to Paris himself, with nothing but the keys to the apartment he'd bought and Eames's phone number, which had been hastily scrawled on a napkin after the New York job.
They play rock paper scissors to see whose dream they go into, because Eames, it turns out, is immune to logic. Arthur wins anyway.
The city is bits and pieces of what he thinks Bruges might be like, but some of the architecture feels more like Toledo. Eames glances around and nods approvingly at Arthur, and they get to work. Eames doesn't shift; he's acting as the extractor in Cobb's absence because Arthur had refused to let him be the point man ("I'm not suicidal, Eames").
Arthur's projections are, to his surprise, more curious about Eames than anything else. Privately, he'd been expecting openly hostile, but instead they just stare as they walk past. Eames nods at some of them and ignores others and they get on with the job. While they're waiting for the kick (Eames had found a broken alarm clock lying around Arthur's apartment, and Arthur evidentially was enrolled in a crash course on just how stubborn the forger could be), the projections finally take a turn towards violence.
This time, Arthur gets to his gun first. "My dream," he reminds Eames, taking the safety off.
"Fair enough, darling," Eames says.
Darling is what echoes in Arthur's mind when he pulls the trigger.
They stay at Arthur's flat that night.
It's January, and Arthur hasn't been in Paris since September, he estimates. He doesn't realize that he's forgotten to pay his heating bill for the month until the vents stop working even though the thermostat is turned up to seventy nine Fahrenheit.
Actually, he doesn't realize it until he wakes up from his (dreamless) sleep to watch Eames slip in the door of his bedroom with a blanket held around him and his hair sticking up every which way.
"Mfhg?" Arthur grunts.
"'S cold," Eames replies. "I thought we could share body heat."
Arthur blames it on the fact that it's nearly three in the morning and he's just woken up, and also possibly that Eames looks about ten times better with bedhead than he does normally, but he reaches over and flips the blankets down on the other side of the bed. Eames climbs in and snuggles up to him immediately, draping an arm over Arthur's ribcage and nuzzling the back of his neck. Arthur squirms a little.
"Sharing body heat usually works better sans clothing," Eames says smoothly, working his hand down to tease at the waistband of Arthur's boxer shorts.
Arthur kicks him.
"Just a thought, love!"
Arthur only goes into Eames's dream once.
Sharing dreams is weirdly intimate and Arthur isn't exactly comfortable with the particular way he's gotten to know Cobb and Mal. Well, he is, because they're Cobb and Mal and given time, he'd know them just as well without the dreams. What he isn't comfortable with is sharing a dream with Eames.
He's already done it, of course, the time in Paris, but that was his dream, his perfectly controlled world. And it was for a job; this, dream sharing just because, he's never done.
"You don't trust me, pet," Eames says over breakfast. They're at a coffee shop in LA after a job, some basic corporate espionage, and Arthur hasn't had enough caffeine to be having this conversation.
"I don't see why I should," he mutters. Eames chuckles.
"You have every reason to trust me."
"Eames, you like killing me in other people's dreams."
Eames looks affronted. "Just to get you out of harm's way. I've never killed you without good reason."
Arthur just blinks at him.
"Well, you trust a man by knowing him," Eames pushes.
"I thought it was living with him and playing cards with him," Arthur replies. Eames waves his hand dismissively.
"Really, it's dreaming together," he says, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. Arthur isn't sure he wants to find out exactly what kind of dream Eames is talking about.
Even so, that's how Arthur finds himself hooked up to a PASIV device in the meditation room of LAX later that morning.
In Eames's dreamscape, there's a house. It's a nice house, in the country somewhere, painted white with a blue door. A garage sits to one side but the door is shut, so Arthur can't see what he supposes Eames's dream car is. Not that he's wondering.
Inside the front door, the foyer is cluttered with work boots and sneakers and instead of a coat rack there's just a pile of jackets and coats and hats. Arthur makes his way further inside the house until he gets to the kitchen, which is set up with a nice island and a decent sized refrigerator. Even better is that Eames is standing at the island, cooking something that Arthur can't identify but that smells good, spicy and warm. Middle Eastern, maybe, Arthur thinks. Lebanese.
"This is what you dream about?"
"This is home."
Arthur frowns. "You're never supposed dream something that's real."
"We're not on the clock, love," Eames says conversationally. "You'll probably never actually come home with me, so I had to seize my opportunity to get you in my bed."
"I'm not in your bed," Arthur points out.
"Yet," Eames counters. "You haven't tasted this. Works every time."
"Where are you headed?" Arthur asks as they leave the meditation room.
"Home," Eames says. They approach the ticket counter. "One for London Heathrow," he tells the clerk. They both turn to look expectantly at Arthur.
"London Heathrow," he says looking first at his toes and then at Eames, who is positively beaming.
"I hope you're not expecting I'll cook for you again," he says as they board the plane. "I'm done wooing you."
"That was not wooing," Arthur argues. "Killing me twice and cooking for me once does not constitute wooing in any sense of the word."
"It worked though, didn't it?"
Arthur sighs. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess it did."
like our youth, my darling
arthur/eames, pg. 1,732 words.
The first time Eames kills him, they're in Barcelona working a job with Cobb and Mal.
Arthur's never met Eames before; Cobb just shows up at the studio with the Brit in tow and they go under not five minutes later. It's Mal's dreamscape, and Arthur is comfortable enough walking over cobblestones and weaving his way through a series of alleyways. Things go wrong, of course, but Arthur's never found out exactly what; the target's mind isn't militarized, and he's only run into two or three projections, so he concludes that it must be the forger.
There isn't much time to ponder, though, because he can see Cobb and Mal ahead of him but there are ten or so figures in his way. Arthur turns to look behind him and sees Eames.
It happens quickly after that; Eames pulls a gun out of the waistband of his pants and flicks the safety off. Arthur shakes his head frantically and turns around, looking for Cobb, but before he can do much more than wave his hands, Eames has fired. The bullet rips through his flesh and Arthur cries out as he drops to the ground like a puppet with cut strings. "Fuck," he hears Eames mutter.
Then Eames fires again. The bullet enters his skull this time and Arthur wakes up.
The second time Eames kills him, Arthur is completely unprepared.
They're in New York and it's also the second time Arthur's met Eames.
"Hello," Arthur greets. He's already set up the PASIV device and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. His jacket hangs off of the back of his chair and he's been ready to go on this job for a half an hour, but they (just he and Cobb this time, as it has been since Mal got pregnant) have been waiting on the forger. "You're late."
"No point in getting up early if all we're doing is going back to sleep," Eames says smoothly.
The dreamscape is Cobb's. It's much more Eastern than what Arthur has grown used to with Mal and her old-world sensibilities; this place is crowded and ornate and dense. Arthur feels a little trapped, despite the height of the buildings around him and the ocean that he can see if he looks hard enough.
They go their separate ways; Eames is disguised as a woman, and it's the first time Arthur's seen him shift. It's uncanny how easily a man with such a firmly established personality (Arthur knows this despite having only met him twice, and it unnerves him) can just abandon it. At first, around Arthur and Cobb, the petite, busty brunette speaks with Eames's word patterns (Arthur is equally irked by this version of Eames) but when Arthur looks over his shoulder to watch Eames saunter away, the forger's persona slips away so completely that if Arthur didn't know better-
But he does, so he turns around and goes to work.
He should have twenty minutes left, according to his wristwatch, but Eames shows up, panting and annoyed.
"Now you're early," Arthur says, arching an eyebrow. Eames shakes his head.
"Game's up," he says. "He knows."
"What, you got caught?"
Eames snorts. "No, don't be stupid."
Arthur doesn't get a chance to respond, because Eames pulls a gun out (Arthur can't figure out where he was hiding it; the girl's cleavage isn't that generous) and shoots Arthur.
The bullet goes in between his eyes on the first try, and Arthur wakes up with a start.
"Does he just not realize that I can kill myself?" Arthur asks Cobb when they're leaving their airport, in a cab on the way back to see Mal. Cobb frowns. "Eames. He keeps killing me."
Cobb shrugs. "Maybe he likes it." There's a glint of something that Arthur doesn't really care to unravel in his eyes. It's almost teasing, but not quite.
Arthur crosses his arms and looks out the window for the rest of the trip; the cabbie just looks confused.
The next time they work together, they're in Paris.
It's just Arthur and Eames, for the first time; Cobb had set up the job months in advance but Philippa was born two weeks early. Arthur had waved off Cobb's not-entirely-convincing attempt to keep the appointment and had gone to Paris himself, with nothing but the keys to the apartment he'd bought and Eames's phone number, which had been hastily scrawled on a napkin after the New York job.
They play rock paper scissors to see whose dream they go into, because Eames, it turns out, is immune to logic. Arthur wins anyway.
The city is bits and pieces of what he thinks Bruges might be like, but some of the architecture feels more like Toledo. Eames glances around and nods approvingly at Arthur, and they get to work. Eames doesn't shift; he's acting as the extractor in Cobb's absence because Arthur had refused to let him be the point man ("I'm not suicidal, Eames").
Arthur's projections are, to his surprise, more curious about Eames than anything else. Privately, he'd been expecting openly hostile, but instead they just stare as they walk past. Eames nods at some of them and ignores others and they get on with the job. While they're waiting for the kick (Eames had found a broken alarm clock lying around Arthur's apartment, and Arthur evidentially was enrolled in a crash course on just how stubborn the forger could be), the projections finally take a turn towards violence.
This time, Arthur gets to his gun first. "My dream," he reminds Eames, taking the safety off.
"Fair enough, darling," Eames says.
Darling is what echoes in Arthur's mind when he pulls the trigger.
They stay at Arthur's flat that night.
It's January, and Arthur hasn't been in Paris since September, he estimates. He doesn't realize that he's forgotten to pay his heating bill for the month until the vents stop working even though the thermostat is turned up to seventy nine Fahrenheit.
Actually, he doesn't realize it until he wakes up from his (dreamless) sleep to watch Eames slip in the door of his bedroom with a blanket held around him and his hair sticking up every which way.
"Mfhg?" Arthur grunts.
"'S cold," Eames replies. "I thought we could share body heat."
Arthur blames it on the fact that it's nearly three in the morning and he's just woken up, and also possibly that Eames looks about ten times better with bedhead than he does normally, but he reaches over and flips the blankets down on the other side of the bed. Eames climbs in and snuggles up to him immediately, draping an arm over Arthur's ribcage and nuzzling the back of his neck. Arthur squirms a little.
"Sharing body heat usually works better sans clothing," Eames says smoothly, working his hand down to tease at the waistband of Arthur's boxer shorts.
Arthur kicks him.
"Just a thought, love!"
Arthur only goes into Eames's dream once.
Sharing dreams is weirdly intimate and Arthur isn't exactly comfortable with the particular way he's gotten to know Cobb and Mal. Well, he is, because they're Cobb and Mal and given time, he'd know them just as well without the dreams. What he isn't comfortable with is sharing a dream with Eames.
He's already done it, of course, the time in Paris, but that was his dream, his perfectly controlled world. And it was for a job; this, dream sharing just because, he's never done.
"You don't trust me, pet," Eames says over breakfast. They're at a coffee shop in LA after a job, some basic corporate espionage, and Arthur hasn't had enough caffeine to be having this conversation.
"I don't see why I should," he mutters. Eames chuckles.
"You have every reason to trust me."
"Eames, you like killing me in other people's dreams."
Eames looks affronted. "Just to get you out of harm's way. I've never killed you without good reason."
Arthur just blinks at him.
"Well, you trust a man by knowing him," Eames pushes.
"I thought it was living with him and playing cards with him," Arthur replies. Eames waves his hand dismissively.
"Really, it's dreaming together," he says, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. Arthur isn't sure he wants to find out exactly what kind of dream Eames is talking about.
Even so, that's how Arthur finds himself hooked up to a PASIV device in the meditation room of LAX later that morning.
In Eames's dreamscape, there's a house. It's a nice house, in the country somewhere, painted white with a blue door. A garage sits to one side but the door is shut, so Arthur can't see what he supposes Eames's dream car is. Not that he's wondering.
Inside the front door, the foyer is cluttered with work boots and sneakers and instead of a coat rack there's just a pile of jackets and coats and hats. Arthur makes his way further inside the house until he gets to the kitchen, which is set up with a nice island and a decent sized refrigerator. Even better is that Eames is standing at the island, cooking something that Arthur can't identify but that smells good, spicy and warm. Middle Eastern, maybe, Arthur thinks. Lebanese.
"This is what you dream about?"
"This is home."
Arthur frowns. "You're never supposed dream something that's real."
"We're not on the clock, love," Eames says conversationally. "You'll probably never actually come home with me, so I had to seize my opportunity to get you in my bed."
"I'm not in your bed," Arthur points out.
"Yet," Eames counters. "You haven't tasted this. Works every time."
"Where are you headed?" Arthur asks as they leave the meditation room.
"Home," Eames says. They approach the ticket counter. "One for London Heathrow," he tells the clerk. They both turn to look expectantly at Arthur.
"London Heathrow," he says looking first at his toes and then at Eames, who is positively beaming.
"I hope you're not expecting I'll cook for you again," he says as they board the plane. "I'm done wooing you."
"That was not wooing," Arthur argues. "Killing me twice and cooking for me once does not constitute wooing in any sense of the word."
"It worked though, didn't it?"
Arthur sighs. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess it did."