You've Seen How I Live - 2/2
Part II of You've Seen How I Live, an Inception fanfic. This post has been backdated to avoid flist-spamming. For rating, warnings, and other useful information, not to mention the ability to make any sense out of this at all, please see Part I, posted on April 18, 2011.
General aimlessness and a few minor coincidences with trains land her in Baltimore a few days later; she spends a while sightseeing and then calls Abby up.
“I don’t like leaving debts lying around,” she explains, tapping a pen against her cheek. “Or at least, not ones I intend to pay.”
The sound on the other end of the line sounds suspiciously like a chuckle. “I see. What do you have in mind?”
“You have anything formal available?” Eames asks. “There’s a place on the waterfront that sounds pretty good.”
“I don’t have anything right at hand, but if you give me a couple of days I can find something. Next Tuesday?”
“Sounds good.”
Next Tuesday arrives miserably rainy and grey, which is absolutely hideous for most things but does look rather nice on a glass curtain wall after dark, so the window table isn’t a total waste. Eames is settled at the table well before Abby arrives, a feat which requires some fairly flagrant lying about timing, but it deprives the point woman of the opportunity to start anything unexpected.
It doesn’t, however, mean she can’t do something unexpected: in this case, evidently, show up looking like sex itself in shining scarlet stilettos and a sharply plunging black neckline. Luckily, Eames sees her before being noticed herself, so she has a chance to swallow a couple of times before she waves.
“I feel like I’m having dinner with one of your classier forgeries,” Abby comments as she approaches. Eames snorts.
“If I were a forgery, my shoes would match my dress,” she points out. She crosses her ankles and the straps gleam, a navy that distinctly clashes with the peacock silk of her dress.
“What, I’m not worth matching shoes?” Abby asks, failing to hide a smile as she sits.
“I thought they did match until I actually tried them on at the same time,” Eames grumbles. “The shoes come from the most oddly-lit store I’ve ever seen.”
“I see. Any particular reason you decided to point this out?”
“You’re telling me you didn’t already notice?” Eames asks, raising an eyebrow, and Abby laughs a little wistfully.
“I don’t categorize everything, you know, particularly not when I’m off the clock.”
“Well, yes,” Eames says, shrugging, “but don’t tell me you weren’t looking at my legs.”
That laugh is more startled than anything else. Her earrings flash in the light, and Eames leans forward to look.
“Nice jewelry,” she says, tapping her own earlobe for emphasis. “Not what I thought you’d pick, though.”
“I didn’t, actually,” Abby says, running a finger along the curved edge. “They used to be Mal’s.”
“Aaah.” That makes more sense. Across the table, Abby fiddles with her napkin.
“Speaking of the Cobbs, how’s the spawn?” Eames asks, leaning back.
“The spawn?”
“You know, the Cobblets.”
“The - James and Phillipa? Doing well, as far as I know. Slaying dragons in the yard at all hours of the day, I think Cobb said.”
“Dragons? Why dragons?”
She shrugs, which is a bit distracting really, all shadows and sharp collarbones silhouetted under the silk. “Not my area of expertise. Maybe they saw a movie or something.”
They’re interrupted by the server at that point, and Eames’s odd craving for obscenely spiced chicken sparks off a conversation that starts with the difference between global cuisine and global food before wandering through an in-depth discussion about favorite cities, whether Dan Brown novels ought to be burned for the good of humanity (Abby’s perspective) or treasured as unintentional comedy (Eames’s), and the importance of accuracy in details versus accuracy in overall impression while in the dreamscape, depending on purpose.
All of the food is really delicious, which is satisfying on a number of levels, but the desserts are the real highlight. Abby pops one forkful of chocolate cake into her mouth and her eyes slide closed. “Mmm.” Eames almost accuses her of looking orgasmic, which isn’t in fact particularly accurate, but then she takes a bite of her pie and loses her train of thought.
They’re both scraping up the last few bites in surprisingly companionable silence when Abby chuckles quietly at her plate. Eames frowns at her.
“What?”
“Ah - nothing. I was just remembering the first time we ate together, that’s all.”
“What, in Manchester?”
“No, no, New York, back when we were starting out, remember? You had a habit of dragging me to every seedy pizza place you could find.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “And then conning me into paying, as I recall.”
“Funny,” Eames drawls, “I don’t remember that bit.”
“Conning me? Are you actually going to try to deny that one?”
She considers. “No, probably not.” That scores her a brief grin. “What was amusing you about it?”
“Oh, just how much things have changed.” She gestures vaguely around her. “Not exactly where you’d have predicted we’d end up.”
“Very true,” Eames says, although truth be told she doesn’t remember ever feeling surprised at Abby’s maddening competence. “Whatever happened to that helpful little lady from Vermont that I used to know? So sweet and demure, it’s a pity she vanished.”
“From what I hear, she ran into some punk with fluorescent fishnets and a face full of metal,” Abby says with that look she gets, the one that’s a peculiar mixture of irritation and the victorious little smile that means she just dispatched the last projection. Eames runs her fingers along the stem of her empty wine glass.
“Did she really? Impressionable little waif, it sounds like.”
“Hmm,” Abby murmurs, and takes a sip of water, the ice clinking. “And yet there’s a distinct shortage of either facial piercings or brightly colored stockings around here.”
“And plenty of criminal tendencies,” Eames says, keeping her voice low. She runs a finger along the side of her nose, catching the tiny pockmark where the stud used to be, closed over now.
“You don’t get any credit for those,” Abby points out.
“Well, at least I stopped you from acting like you were turning in job applications,” Eames snorts.
Abby starts to say something and then stops, sighs, shakes her head, fiddling with her fork. “We’ve changed quite a bit,” she says. “Ourselves, specifically.”
“I’m not quite sure what you’re driving at here,” Eames admits after a moment.
“Nothing, really. Just a mood.”
“Fair enough,” Eames grants, fidgeting a bit. Her shoe bumps Abby’s ankle; she decides to ignore it.
Abby scrapes up the last chunk of frosting and pops it into her mouth. Eames watches, the mixture of chocolate and tines and tongue.
“I don’t suppose I could tempt you back to my hotel for a few hours,” she says, shifting slightly, just a little more seductive. Abby’s head snaps up.
“Eames, I know this is - that isn’t necessary. Debt paid in full, all obligations cleared. It’s fine.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, of course, because the only possible reason I could want to sleep with a beautiful woman is a misplaced sense of obligation. Clearly.”
Abby’s answering smile hovers somewhere between flattered and amused as she folds her hands primly behind her plate. “Well, in that case.”
“In that case?”
“Let’s get the check.”
Abby doesn’t stay the night, of course, although the two of them do doze for a bit, somewhat by accident. (It’s really rather pleasant; they ended up on the floor of the suite living room again, all the lights off and the stars just visible through the slats of the blinds, Abby smiling in the dimness as Eames leans against her shoulder, and the post-coital haze spreading over them both.)
It’s around one in the morning that Abby stirs, muttering about having her own hotel and not wanting to head home in this state, gesturing apologetically. Eames nods and pries herself off the floor, loans Abby a hairbrush and helps her wipe away the lipstick smudges. She misses one along the jaw, doesn’t notice until Abby’s actually walking out the door, and doesn’t bother mentioning it.
Abby has to leave the city a couple of days later - business in Buenos Aires, she says - and shortly after that, Eames joins up with some old associates working on surface-world theft. It’s a nice change of pace, up until she finds herself in a department story flicking through a stack of the exact kind of disgustingly boring shirts that she never, ever wears, simply because she would look so different wearing them. Time to get back in the dreamscape.
“Marianne Morganstern was looking for a forger,” her best contact says when she calls him up. “I heard you two knew each other?”
Marianne Morganstern is one of Abby’s lesser-used pseudonames. For fuck’s sake.
“Yeah, we’ve met,” she says. “Where’s she based?”
“Vienna, just now.”
Vienna is, oddly enough, a new city for Eames, and rather a nice one. Their current job is basically to enable some rather incompetent art forgers, but they’re going to pay well, and in the meantime Eames gets to forge half a dozen people within the course of one dream, which is enough to keep her interested. Also, they’re working out of an apartment above a vacant storefront, which means that there is rather a lot of sunlight and they leave the windows half-open, and God but Eames had forgotten what a proper spring feels like. The whole thing is really rather lovely.
Three weeks in, they’re all settled and busy; their architect fine-tuning a design, Abby settled at a cheap desk and neck-deep in research, and Eames tailoring a specific (original) forge while she waits for their extractor to finish running a test. The light beep of a ringing cell phone only half-registers as she fiddles with the length of her character’s hair, but then she notices Abby’s noncommittal yeses and nos getting progressively more grim. She glances sideways, noting Abby’s hand clenched around the phone, her half-hidden scowl.
“I remember,” Abby says; there’s a pause, and then the muscles in her arm practically spasm. “I miss her too,” she says, and Eames winces, wondering what’s going on. Abby reaches sideways, tapping against a couple of things on the desk before brushing a pile of books; she shoves once, hard, and they crash onto the floor, making everyone jump.
“Watch out!” Abby calls, staring at the wall. “Sorry, I have to go, I’ll call you back -” and she slams the phone shut. Both Eames and the architect are staring at her.
“Sorry about that, everyone,” she says tightly, standing. “I’ll be back in just a moment.” She heads for the hall; Eames hears the light clang of heels on a fire escape.
She picks up the books, leaving them deliberately haphazard, returns to her seat and taps her pencils against the legal pad. Huh.
“I’m stepping out for a minute,” she lies, and heads for the roof herself.
Abby is perched right on the edge, legs crossed over a three-story drop, a light swirl of smoke rising from the cigarette in her hand. Eames drops to a seat beside her, knocking her feet childishly against the brick.
“Care to explain what all that was about?” she asks after a moment, when Abby stays predictably silent.
“Cobb calling. He wanted to talk.”
“What about?”
Abby flicks ash off her cigarette; the sparks flicker as they tumble to the sidewalk. “It’s Mal’s birthday.”
Oh. “I see,” Eames says, very slowly. It’s a lie.
“She was one of my best friends. My first real friend besides Cobb. And -” Eames doesn’t fill the pause. “I keep forgetting that she’s been gone for so long.” She takes a brief drag on her cigarette and then holds it out to glare at it. “Fuck, this is the worst brand of cigarettes I’ve ever bought.”
“Here.” Eames fishes a replacement out of her jacket pocket and hands it over. “These aren’t bad.”
“Thanks.” She lights it off the old and drops the latter over the edge. “I’m sorry, I’m being ridiculous, it’s just -”
“Don’t,” Eames interrupts sharply, jabbing her in the arm. “Don’t.”
Abby shrugs. “All right, sorry.” She tries out the new cigarette and sighs in smoky relief. “I just - she could recite half a fucking library worth of sketches from all these stand-up comedians I’d never heard of. And do it well, too. I mean, not that I’m any judge of what makes a good stand-up comedian, but everyone I’ve ever seen listen to her thought she was funny.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, I mean, why would you? And it’s just - when Cobb wants to talk about her, it’s never that. Or about the way that she was about people, or -”
“Not quite what you think about when you think about her,” Eames says before she can stop herself, because dammit, she’s made a life out of reading people and how they feel about each other. Abby stares at her for a moment, and then stares out over the street and takes one long, slow, shuddering gasp of smoke, the cigarette trembling in her hands.
After a minute, Eames lights up one of her own.
They don’t say another word until Eames’s cigarette is most of the way gone and Abby’s already stubbed hers out on the roof and kept staring at the sky. Eames reaches over and squeezes her knee, soft and gentle.
“I’ll buy you dinner later,” she offers. Abby looks up and smiles wanly.
“Thank you,” she says, standing, and they head back down together. Luckily, the others on the team are smart enough to stay quiet.
Six hours and a change of plans later, Abby is pressed up against the wall of Eames’s tiny temporary apartment, blouse hanging unbuttoned and untucked over the too-tight waistband of her skirt, smiling for the first time all day.
“This is turning suspiciously habitual,” Eames whispers into her lips, and Abby shifts focus from her battle of wits with Eames’s overcomplicated belt buckle to raise an eyebrow at her.
“This is the third time we’ve done this in eighteen months.”
“Well, you can’t expect any decent math from me at this point,” she lies. Abby actually laughs, halfhearted but real, and Eames kisses her until neither of them can think anymore.
They don’t really mean anything by it, ever, but after that things do start turning into a habit - twice more on the Vienna job, more often on the next, almost regularly after that. Sometimes they get dinner first, sometimes they don’t bother; a few times, dead on their aching feet and almost too crabby to fuck, they order pizza and wolf it shamelessly, Eames’s legs stretched obnoxiously across Abby’s lap. The cities blur together into a string of hotels, sometimes Abby’s and sometimes Eames’s (never overnight, though - just easier that way). They don’t talk between jobs, of course, no reason to, but sooner or later collapsing on the couch and talking as her fingers inch up Abby’s thigh starts to be as much of a routine as anything else in Eames’s life.
It’s still a surprise when a contact reaches her with a message addressed to her and Abby both; more so when she counts up and realizes that they’re finishing up their fifth consecutive job together. Particularly given Abby’s Cobb-related history, that would look like Eames is the new partner. Fair enough.
She doesn’t mention it to Abby, and she doesn’t take the job. When the current one finishes up and Abby buggers off to do whatever it is she does (exactly what Eames does between jobs, i.e. watch movies and sleep too much, except that whenever she starts to think about the Cobbs she visits the odd art museum and bores herself to death), Eames has a few days of kicking herself for turning down any kind of work at all. Luckily, Ariadne gets in contact after a week, looking for a last-minute replacement on a heist.
“Depends on what you did to the last fellow,” Eames lies, adjusting the phone as she picks her shirts off the floor.
“I got sick of his excuses for not doing his job. You’ll be fine.”
“Hold on a second, are you spearheading this?”
“Yeah,” Ariadne says, deadpan.
“God, that makes me feel old.”
“Huh?”
“Last time we worked together you were the baby of the team, pet,” Eames says, voicing her best stereotypical-maiden-aunt. “Has it really been long enough for that sweet little girl to be running her own show?”
“It’s been three years, and I wasn’t even sweet. Listen, are you taking the job?”
“I think your tolerance for bullshit has actually decreased with age, which is rather impressive. Yes, of course, when do you want me in Melbourne?”
“Soon. Also, can you fly here via Paris? I need a file collected from Miles, and I don’t want to fly out there myself.”
“Can do.”
Collecting files from Miles, she can do. The problem is, that requires notifying him several days in advance so as to ensure that he won’t have her arrested, and this apparently sets off the strange and selective guilt-ridden spy network that is family, because she’s loitering impatiently about in an empty classroom when the door swings open and it isn’t Miles.
“Dom Cobb.”
“Hello, Eames. How’ve you been?”
“Busy,” she says, resisting the urge to shove past him and out.
“Yeah, I heard. Picking something up for Ariadne, right?”
“Yes.” She chomps at the metaphorical bullet. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk to you, actually.” He grabs for the nearest chair and drops into it; Eames raises her eyebrows.
“Really.”
“Yeah. Look, ah - about you and Abby.”
Her fingers twitch towards clenched; she resists. “What about?”
“Are you together?”
“Well, seeing as neither of us is her and nobody else is in the room right now, I’d say no, we’re not together at the moment.”
He sighs. “Goddammit, Eames, don’t do this. Are you dating?”
There’s a coin on the heater beside her; she picks it up and flips it idly across the backs of her fingers. “Depends on the definition. We certainly haven’t formalized anything.”
“Then what is going on there?”
She flips the coin and catches it. “A lot of rather enjoyable sex and a great deal of mutual bitching, at least when we’re working the same jobs.”
Cobb visibly struggles not to pass judgment. “How long has this been happening?”
“Depends on what you’re referring to. The bitching has been going on since we met, so, Jesus Christ, around a decade now.” She digs out a cigarette in defiance of their location, but she isn’t quite pissed off enough to light it. “The sex has been going on for -” It occurs to her that she isn’t sure whether to count from Berlin or Vienna, so she settles on, “A while.”
“I didn’t think you liked each other much,” Cobb probes, folding his hands in and out.
Eames shrugs. “Eh, I don’t know. She’s almost entertaining, once you get her to forget about the poker up her ass. And she’s reliable.” She frowns, glancing around the room again in futile hope of some distraction. “Why are you bothering me about it?”
Cobb sighs, shoving himself to his feet. “I don’t - God, I wish Mal was here.” Eames blinks as he paces back and forth. “She’d be better at this, probably. She and Abby always seemed to be on the same page about everything, you know. Birthdays, Christmas, Mal would insist on a present that I didn’t think Abby would ever use, and I don’t know if she did, but she was always so happy to get it -”
“That’s very nice,” Eames interrupts, tossing her coin again. “Back to the question of what the hell you’re on about.”
“Sorry.” He shakes his head, sighs, fidgets for a moment, inspecting the windowpanes. “I… owe Abby a lot. I want her to be happy.” He shifts, bracing his hands against the nearest desk to eye Eames dead-on and close. “I don’t want anyone to compromise that happiness. Or to make her believe that she has something that she doesn’t.”
Eames stares at him for a moment, cigarette and coin forgotten, and then it hits her. “Oh, God, is this your idea of the pissed-off big brother speech? Break her heart and you’ll make sure I never walk again?”
Cobb reddens, but he stares her down, which is actually a remarkably unfamiliar experience at this point. “There are very few people who think of Abby as anyone other than an excellent point man. She stands by the ones who do. I don’t want to see anyone use that to hurt her, and I don’t want to see anyone betray that trust.”
It takes Eames several gaping moments to wind up her astonished rage; then she advances on him, slamming her palms to the scratched-up tabletop. “The sheer nerve of this is fucking ridiculous. Are you actually listening to yourself at this moment? First of all, she is a grown woman and she can take care of herself - she took care of the both of you for four fucking years, that ought to have been a goddamned hint. Second, even if she weren’t, where the hell do you get off sneaking around to manage her life for her? And third, you of all people have absolutely no right to talk to anyone about abusing a trust, and especially not about abusing Abby’s, you miserable fucking cunt.” She stops, breathing hard and half-surprised, but really, the woman nearly kills herself babysitting him around the world and now he gets concerned?
“Do you even know her actual name?” Cobb demands, tense and wincing but not backing off.
“Her projections call her Abby Whittemore, and that’s all the information I need. Get the fuck out before I throw you out.”
“I’m the one with a relative on faculty.”
“I’m the one carrying. Out, and mind your own fucking business.”
Cobb shrugs, standing, and waves his hands. “Looks like I don’t have much to worry about in any case. I’m sorry for bothering you.”
Eames doesn’t move until the door has been closed for a careful count of eighty; then she kicks the nearest desk with such vicious precision that it crashes onto its side and skids into another. She storms out by way of the first-floor window just to make sure that she avoids Cobb completely, stalks straight to Miles’s office to wait for him there, and collects the file in enough of an obvious temper that she can hear frightened grad students chittering as she stalks out.
That night she gets as far as the penultimate digit of Abby’s number half a dozen times, slamming the hotel phone down with a clatter that shakes the desk or snapping the cell shut hard enough that it almost breaks every single time. She doesn’t have the slightest clue what to say - it’s over or this isn’t even anything or do something about that asshole you call a friend or possibly just fuck off, you icy bitch, which doesn’t even make sense but is ridiculously tempting. The only thing that stops her is that they never call each other between jobs, and she isn’t going to be the one to start, even just for that.
She ends up with the hotel phone hanging off the hook, her cell phone on the floor by the wall, and her shortest skirt baring goosebump-coated thighs as she hunts down the seediest bar in the city. She doesn’t know if she’s looking for a fight or sex or what, but she ends up extraordinarily drunk on something that tastes like piss, and shortly after that it’s her fist in someone else’s eye. Things turn a little blurry after that, muscle-mass people and plenty of target, fingernails and mercilessness and the full awareness that this is the stupidest thing she’s ever done, and by some miracle all that happens is that she ends up puking on the sidewalk with a clump of hair ripped out, scratches down her arm, and a bruise turning purple on her jaw. None of them hurt as much as the hangover she develops the next morning, and that - plus a halfhearted shower - is the state in which she arrives in Melbourne.
It calls for more than a little fast talking when she arrives. She’s worked, and worked well, in far worse condition than this, but Ariadne wants to chuck her straight back to Europe. (Ariadne has, since the Fischer job, discovered pixie cuts, fedoras, and the joys of a good gun; she has also run into a few vivid lessons about the price of incompetence, judging by the clear pink scar on her cheek and the steely meticulousness of her methods.)
The architect runs her team hard, once she’s convinced that they belong there; in the fragile half-hours when Eames is awake enough to think and not frantically studying the case, she finds it vaguely reminiscent of Abby at her most tight-wound and withdrawn, and the sensation is bizarrely unfamiliar. Luckily, Eames is too busy cramming her mind with methods and approaches, air ducts and hand gestures, to really think about it.
“There’s a reason we didn’t all become grad students,” she grumbles late one night, gulping bitter coffee as if it’s the elixir of life as she goes through security tapes.
“You could have been,” Ariadne says, shifting a detail of her model millimeters to the left.
It’s blatantly untrue, but she doesn’t feel like sharing that, so she drops the subject in favor of the exact tilt of her target’s head as he talks.
That detail isn’t too hard to commit to memory, but some of them are harder, particularly since the ideal timeframe turns out to be two weeks; Eames barely sleeps outside of dreamspace by the end, but she’s ready in time.
It isn’t an overly complicated con - the core principle is that they fabricate standard business meetings - but it calls for solid, detail-by-detail replication of reality. Razor-sharp work from start to finish, and it lasts nearly twelve hours in dream-time without a rest. Eames’s headache starts to build around hour six and clings to her from forge to forge; she pulls off the job, but by the time they wake she’s headed for a full-on migraine.
“Good work, everyone,” Ariadne tells them, hands flickering over the PASIV without her evident supervision as she packs up. Eames grimaces cheerfully about and flees back to her hotel room, which is thankfully equipped with obscenely thick blinds and the blessed glory of her bed.
Naturally, she’s only barely settled in when the phone rings. Normally she’d throw something at it, but nobody should be able to reach that number besides the hotel management, which shouldn’t be calling her.
“What?” she snaps, tugging the pillow halfway over her head in a pointless attempt to block out everything.
“Check your damn email, Eames.” Abby. Of course.
“What the hell?”
“Look, I don’t want to go through the whole explanation right now -”
“I feel like a herd of lions went on a drunken rampage through my head, I’ve been forging for twelve hours solid, and I’ve been running on three hours’ uninterrupted sleep for the past week. I am fucked if I’m going to get my computer out and sort through whatever you put on the email. Either explain or go away.”
“Your manners are impeccable.”
“Don’t even. They would be if I wanted them that way.”
Abby tsks, somewhere between sympathetic and scolding. “Anyway. Condensed version, Saito is running a complicated setup, three interconnected marks, none straightforward. It looks like a challenge, but doable, and we’ll be working to our own schedule and with pretty much whatever we need for resources. That’s in addition to pay - we don’t have exact figures for that yet, but we’re talking a fortune at his base offer.”
“Sounds wonderful. There a reason it was so goddamn urgent?”
“Well, for one thing, I’d already waited two weeks. For another, you’re my cheapest contact to Ariadne at the moment, and I wanted you to send word on to her before you lost contact. Rumor set your job together at ending fairly soon.”
“Forty-five minutes ago, actually.”
“Ahh. In that case, sorry about this.”
“Yeah, I’m in a mood for a reason. Anyway, Ariadne has business in the city for a week or two still, so I’ll get it all to her tomorrow. How long before you need us in Tokyo?”
“He’s running this out of New York, actually. Think you’ll take it?”
“Probably,” Eames grumbles, burying her pounding head in another pillow. “Given our mutual taste in jobs and the kind of money he pays. I’ll let you know in the morning.”
“Great. Let me know when you’re flying in and I’ll save you the trial by taxi stand.”
“I can catch a goddamn taxi.” Suffocating herself in the pillow isn’t working; she rolls sideways and drags the comforter almost to her ears. Abby huffs with quiet laughter on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. They’ve gotten rarer. Anyway, I’ll see you. Sleep well.” She disconnects, and Eames flops backwards into the pillows.
Four days later she weaves, ducks, and occasionally shoves her way through the crowds at JFK to find the point woman leaning against the wall, compact umbrella swinging from her hand.
“The one time in your life you have an excuse to be late, you’re willing to hurt people to be on time,” Abby drawls as Eames shoves past a particularly obnoxious bearded fellow shouting into a cell phone.
“First of all, I’m not hurting anyone by sane standards, and second, this is hardly the only time I have a reason to be late. Pleasure to see you too.”
“As always. That all your luggage?”
Eames eyes the wheeled suitcase, the duffel currently dragging her shoulders lopsided, and the carryon thumping against her leg. “No, I’ve got an infinite carpetbag lying around here somewhere.”
“No harm in checking, Ms. Eames. Come on, then.” She shoves off the wall and towards the exit, slow enough for Eames to fall into step beside her.
“As a matter of interest, darling, how many times do you have to sleep with someone before you stop calling them Miss?”
“I’ll drop it when you stop with the pet names. All of them, not just one.”
“Damn. What if I stop it around teammates?”
“Then I’ll only call you Ms. Eames when we’re in private. Here, give me that.” She snags the duffel one-handed, slinging it over her own shoulder before the forger has time to do anything but blink.
“Er, thank you.”
“No problem. At least this way you won’t hit anyone with it.”
“Your faith in my coordination is astounding,” Eames drawls as they reach the exit.
“My faith in your coordination is based off of careful observation. You don’t care enough about irritating anyone here to bother paying attention.”
“Well, I wasn’t hitting you, so why do you care?”
Abby shrugs, shoulder rolling under the strap. “Basic moral principles?” she deadpans. Eames muffles a laugh - somewhat - against the back of her hand.
“Stick close to me,” Abby instructs, undoing the ties on the umbrella and shifting Eames’s duffle to her other shoulder. “This thing isn’t quite big enough for two people and this many bags.”
“Does it really matter? It’s only a little water.”
“No, it isn’t.” They’re almost out the doors by this point. Eames, confronted with the sheets of water pounding out of the sky and sliding sideways in rippled miniature waves across the pavement, blinks twice.
“Dammit, I hate it when you’re right.”
“Funny, since usually when I’m right it means that you don’t get soaked, sick, or shot.” She manages to maneuver the two of them out and pop the umbrella up in one motion, and Eames sidles a bit closer, wishing she’d brought a coat. By the time they make it to Abby’s car - a small silver rental, same basic kind she always gets - both of them are soaked to the knees, and Eames is glaring at the atmosphere as if she can intimidate it into being warm enough that she won’t shiver. Abby cranks up the heat the instant she has the keys in the ignition.
“Don’t take it out now,” she says, sliding the car into gear, “but there’s a spare gun in the glove compartment, if you’re missing one. And no, it isn’t a Glock.”
“Why, Abby,” Eames murmurs, pressing a hand to her chest with all the melodrama she can muster, “I’m touched.” The thing is, though, she’s been tapping her hand vaguely against her jacket pockets and the side of her leg all through the plane ride, missing the familiar pressure of a weapon. It’s as much a part of flying as the uncomfortable seats and the soporific safety speeches; probably happens to Abby too.
Still nice not to have to deal with the discomfort longer than need be, even if it doesn’t bother her nearly as much now as it did when she was on her own.
“Anyway,” Abby says, completely ignoring a driver whom Eames feels ought to flipped off immediately, “what the hell did you say to Cobb?”
That takes a little mental backtracking. “What, you mean in Paris? How did you know about that one?”
“He told me about it. Fairly simple methods.”
“Ah.” Eames sighs. “What was it he said?”
“Frankly, I’m not entirely sure what he was driving at. He seemed to be operating under the idea that we were in some sort of love, or something like that.”
Eames snorts. “Oh, there’s a good one. I can just see us settling in some tiny house with a cat and lilacs. We’d burn it down in a week.” Abby doesn’t respond for a moment, squinting out the window at the pounding water, and Eames half-chokes, trying to figure out if she could possibly have misinterpreted things that badly. “Er, that is - I mean to say, you’re not -”
“What? Oh, oh God no, I should damn well hope not.” The rushed flood of the assurance and the astonishment on her face as she glances away from the steering wheel long enough to goggle reassure Eames’s faith in her own abilities. “I’d really prefer that neither of us got killed anytime soon, for one thing.”
“You’re right, that’s a far more probable outcome.” They’re out of the airport now, and Eames tugs her borrowed weapon out of the gun compartment: a Heckler & Koch USP Compact, one of her favorites but common enough to be entirely familiar against the heel of her hand. It’s a pleasant reassurance, particularly coupled with the knowledge that if Abby is handing her this, than the point woman is armed as well. Realistically speaking, being killed is the only likely outcome regardless of whether they lose their heads over each other, but it’s unlikely to happen just now.
“Anyway,” Abby says briskly, pulling past a particularly slow-moving businessman headbanging away to God-knows-what, “are you tired?”
“Tired? Not particularly, no. I slept a bit on the plane.” She glances from the quiet tap-tap of Abby’s fingers against the wheel to the slight smile as she maneuvers the roads. “Your place, I take it?”
“If you’ve no objections.” The wind picks up, and she curses as gallons of water smash horizontally against the windshield. “Sorry, I need to focus on the driving just now.”
The threat of watery death on ostensibly dry land is enough to make Eames shut up, at least until she realizes that they’re headed an odd direction. “Which hotel are you staying at?” she asks, frowning at the sodden city. Abby clears her throat.
“Actually, I’m in an apartment at the moment.”
“Wait, do you know how long we’re going to be here already?” (Abby is, by and large, less likely to get an apartment than even Eames.)
“No, I don’t. I bought the place years ago and never got around to putting on the market.” The careful neutrality in her voice is one she uses when she’s dodging an issue, and Eames doesn’t generally hear it directed at her these days. She turns the issue over.
“Bought it around six years ago, I take it?”
Abby looks away from the road long enough for Eames to pick up on gratitude-tinged relief soaking through the warning: enough. “Yes.”
Eames leaves it at a noncommittal hum.
The rain only gets worse, until it’s bad enough to pull over and buy dinner (oversized sizzling mozzarella sticks and taco salad sprawling across the plate, messy undignified food covered in strings of molten cheese and sauce that sticks and smudges on their cheeks.) By the time they make it to Abby’s apartment - all cool shine and crisp corners, probably purchased with the full take from one of her first big jobs - it’s past nine.
“The bedroom’s through that door,” Abby says, toeing off her shoes. Eames does the same, somewhat begrudgingly, and runs the pad of her thumb very lightly along the side of Abby’s throat, base of her jaw down to the collarbone. When she rests her fingers against the edge of her shoulder, just underneath the cotton blouse, Abby arches catlike into the touch and gestures towards the bedroom.
“I have to clean this house, Eames,” she says. “Bed, this time.”
“So dull,” Eames mutters, but she complies, stripping as she goes, fingers teasing and restrained against Abby’s throat until she can push the bedspread back and sink into the crisp cotton. Abby’s buttons are easy work, even one-handed.
The sex ends up slow, almost languid, less about hunger or teasing and more about the familiar shape and sense of muscle and breasts and fingers and lips. By the time it’s over they’re deeply tangled into each other, sticky and satisfied, and it takes a long and dozy while before Eames forces herself to open her eyes properly.
“Damn it, I never did book a hotel.”
“You didn’t book in advance?” Abby scolds sleepily, forehead still resting against Eames’s shoulder. “Oh, right, too lazy to cover your tracks.”
“Not too lazy, considered it more effort than getting a room when I got here.” She tries to persuade herself that she needs to get out of the bed, and can’t quite do it. “What’s the nearest place?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Abby grumbles, pulling the blankets closer around them. “Stay. I can grab your clothes out of the car in the morning.”
“That would work too,” Eames agrees, the ruefulness muffled by weariness and warmth. “Rather well, actually.” She closes her eyes again.
When she wakes, it’s surprisingly easy to orient herself: first Abby, easy to recognize, and the rest of the setting - first bed, then flat - is fairly easy to deduce. By some miracle, they still possess about equal shares in the blankets.
Slipping out of the bed without waking Abby is easier than she might have expected; the point woman mumbles something that sounds like a mixture of obscenities and buries her face in the pillow. Eames might take a moment to chuckle at her attempts to meld with the bed, but she’s entirely naked except for one forgotten sock and shivering slightly in the cool apartment air. Her clothes - the ones not strewn across the apartment - are still down in the car.
Taking quick stock of the room reveals a terry-cloth bathrobe hung over a plain desk chair; Eames shrugs into it, enjoying the softness against her bare skin, and discovers a hotel logo emblazoned on the pocket. A little petty theft, apparently, to go along with all these felonies. The matchbook in the pocket is labeled in Mandarin, faded with age, and mostly empty. Oh well; Eames won’t need a cigarette for another half-hour or so anyway.
Abby’s kitchen is, on first glance, a case of pristinely gleaming tile raised to an art form. It proves, on further inspection, to be almost completely empty. Eames is elbow-deep in the fridge for the third time, hoping that something edible will appear to assure her that this is in fact Abby’s house, when she hears footsteps behind her.
“Oh, go-oo-ahd,” Abby yawns. “I thought you’d left.”
“If I had, I would’ve woken you up to let you know,” Eames says without extracting her head from the fridge. “Your coffeemaker is doing something esoteric that I’m fairly sure is generating coffee, but you might want to check in case I accidentally programmed it to explode on us. Are you aware that you have no food in the house besides a box of crackers and one slice of pizza?”
“I think there’s the remains of a box of cereal in one of the cupboards, but yes, I know. If you know what’s in the fridge, stop wasting power, I’m going to have to actually pay the bill.”
“It’s not like you have to worry about that,” Eames snorts, obeying. “And that cereal isn’t going to taste very good when you don’t have any milk.”
“Damn, I knew there was something I forgot to do on the way back from the airport. I’m blaming you for that one.” Abby, wrapped up in a bathrobe that looks to be unaffiliated with anything and a little bit too small, is bent over her coffeemaker, eyeing it as if it has some stranger’s business secrets hidden in it somehow. “I think you managed to get this to work right, but I’m not sure.”
“You can’t operate your own coffeemaker?” Eames asks, folding her arms as she leans against the counter. It’s more than a little out of character for Abby, who shrugs, looking slightly defensive.
“I’ve only been here for three days, and this is the first time I’ve been back here since Mal died.” She coughs and turns away to rummage through her shelves. “Besides, I’ve been mostly eating out.”
“Somehow I noticed,” Eames says somewhat less dryly than she could, mostly to watch the tips of Abby’s ears turn pink. “By the way, your coffeemaker might be done. Or about to kill us, I’m not sure.”
“Have you actually encountered an exploding coffeemaker at some point and that’s contributing to the paranoia?” Abby asks, wrestling with the handle on the pot. “Jesus Christ, I think they actually managed to make this thing harder to operate than a PASIV.”
“That takes so much incompetence it’s almost a talent,” Eames agrees as Abby finally persuades the thing to pop free. “Your mugs are in the cabinet over the stove.”
“I knew that much, but thank you.” She digs out a plain piece of pale-blue china, sloshes it full of coffee, and hands it off to Eames, who takes it with some surprise.
“My thanks.” The effect is thoroughly ruined when she takes a sip and immediately sprays it into the sink, gagging. “Fuck, this tastes disgusting.”
“Wait, why - did you find this in the cupboard?”
“Where else would I have found it?”
Abby sighs, rubbing her eyes. “Sorry, wasn’t thinking. Yeah, that stuff was some of what I left here when I moved out the last time. I must have forgotten to throw it out.”
“So this coffee is old enough to send to kindergarten, is that what you’re saying here?”
“Essentially, yes.”
The two of them glance from the coffeepot to Eames’s mug to the sink, then back to each other in almost perfect synchronization.
“There’s a café down the street,” Abby says. “Go hit the shower, I’ll throw on something temporary and go get your bags.”
“That sounds like a much better plan,” Eames says, dumping her mug in the sink. “Somehow I don’t think either of us is cut out for domesticity.”
Abby snorts. “Don’t use up all the hot water, I’m going to shower after you.”
Forty-five minutes later, they’re settled in the rather cutesy blue-washed café, Eames watching with amusement as Abby pours spoonful after spoonful of sugar into her tea cup.
“You and your sweet tooth,” she says, shaking her head. She can generally take or leave tea, with or without enhancements, but what she’s currently drinking - something with a name that she didn’t quite process, flavored with nothing but lemon mostly to emphasize her point - is pretty good.
“Thank you for your input, Ms. Eames. How many cigarettes are you going to smoke today?” Abby asks, stirring her tea properly. Eames rolls her eyes.
“Fewer than you are, I suspect.”
“Well, now you’re going to deliberately skew the numbers, so yes.” She lifts the tea to her lips and hums softly, eyes sliding closed. Eames sips her own, smiling.
“I have to say, this is rather more enjoyable than our usual system,” she says, settling her teacup back into its saucer. Abby nods.
“Definitely. I think we’re both getting a bit old for the walk of shame.”
“Does it count as a walk of shame when it’s still in the middle of the night?” Eames asks idly, stirring her tea for no particular purpose.
“It does when you have to get past two doormen and a taxi driver who wants to chat.”
“This is true,” Eames says, grimacing with the memories of one particular taxi driver who’d mistaken her for a prostitute. (She’d told him she was and then spun an elaborate tale about obscenely high rates and dressing down somewhat for the exotic tastes of a famous regular client, but that was entirely beside the point.) “A pity you don’t have handy apartments tucked away in every city.”
“We can share a hotel room next time,” Abby says, leaning back in her chair. They’re at forty-five degrees to each other at the round table, backs to the window, and the sunlight is picking out a few flyaway strands that look a little pale. Eames thinks it’s about time, all things considered, although it may be a trick of the light. “At least that way you’ll be sure to have one.”
“How much will you mock me if I argue that I’m perfectly capable of booking my own hotel room?”
Abby eyes her over the rim of her teacup, eyebrows eloquently raised.
“Right then.” She is saved from any further losses of dignity by the arrival of the waitress with their food, which is surprisingly hearty considering the affected delicacy of the décor. This could be happening in dozens of cities that Eames could name, she considers, and probably several others not on that list; the basic elements - herself, Abby, breakfast, sunlight - could fit precisely like this into almost anywhere in the world. It’s rather a nice thought.
Eames is mostly done with her food - eggs and bacon - well before Abby is done with her waffles, since the point woman has picked up a newspaper. She swipes a syrup-saturated strawberry with no response, and initially intends to leave it be, but it’s extraordinarily good. She inches her fingers across the tablecloth for another.
Abby, of course, pins her hand to the table without looking up. “Get your own next time, Eames.”
“Have I ever complimented you on your kindly and generous nature?” Eames asks, trying - somewhat - to twist away. Abby’s using more than a tiny bit of her strength, so she gives that up and flips her hand upwards, cupping her fingers around Abby’s cool ones. The point woman’s grip softens slightly, enough that Eames could slip free without a struggle if she were so inclined.
“This is going to make it rather difficult for me to finish my food,” she protests, running her finger along Abby’s. The point woman manages to turn a page in the paper one-handed, flapping it noisily as she does.
“You should have thought of that earlier,” she says, smile lurking in her voice even if she’s managing to keep it from her lips. “Forethought saves lives.”
“So does food, under the right circumstances.”
“Indeed it does, but not these.”
It occurs to Eames that they could be doing this for years to come, dipping in and out of each other’s lives, splitting hotel rooms and buying breakfast after sinking into each other’s shapes. The threat of permanence is entirely absent, but this could happen rather indefinitely, until they get too slow to escape the realities of the life they’ve chosen.
Leaning back in the sunlight and lightly squeezing Abby’s hand, she thinks that there are worse things to do in the meantime. In fact, she rather likes the idea.
General aimlessness and a few minor coincidences with trains land her in Baltimore a few days later; she spends a while sightseeing and then calls Abby up.
“I don’t like leaving debts lying around,” she explains, tapping a pen against her cheek. “Or at least, not ones I intend to pay.”
The sound on the other end of the line sounds suspiciously like a chuckle. “I see. What do you have in mind?”
“You have anything formal available?” Eames asks. “There’s a place on the waterfront that sounds pretty good.”
“I don’t have anything right at hand, but if you give me a couple of days I can find something. Next Tuesday?”
“Sounds good.”
Next Tuesday arrives miserably rainy and grey, which is absolutely hideous for most things but does look rather nice on a glass curtain wall after dark, so the window table isn’t a total waste. Eames is settled at the table well before Abby arrives, a feat which requires some fairly flagrant lying about timing, but it deprives the point woman of the opportunity to start anything unexpected.
It doesn’t, however, mean she can’t do something unexpected: in this case, evidently, show up looking like sex itself in shining scarlet stilettos and a sharply plunging black neckline. Luckily, Eames sees her before being noticed herself, so she has a chance to swallow a couple of times before she waves.
“I feel like I’m having dinner with one of your classier forgeries,” Abby comments as she approaches. Eames snorts.
“If I were a forgery, my shoes would match my dress,” she points out. She crosses her ankles and the straps gleam, a navy that distinctly clashes with the peacock silk of her dress.
“What, I’m not worth matching shoes?” Abby asks, failing to hide a smile as she sits.
“I thought they did match until I actually tried them on at the same time,” Eames grumbles. “The shoes come from the most oddly-lit store I’ve ever seen.”
“I see. Any particular reason you decided to point this out?”
“You’re telling me you didn’t already notice?” Eames asks, raising an eyebrow, and Abby laughs a little wistfully.
“I don’t categorize everything, you know, particularly not when I’m off the clock.”
“Well, yes,” Eames says, shrugging, “but don’t tell me you weren’t looking at my legs.”
That laugh is more startled than anything else. Her earrings flash in the light, and Eames leans forward to look.
“Nice jewelry,” she says, tapping her own earlobe for emphasis. “Not what I thought you’d pick, though.”
“I didn’t, actually,” Abby says, running a finger along the curved edge. “They used to be Mal’s.”
“Aaah.” That makes more sense. Across the table, Abby fiddles with her napkin.
“Speaking of the Cobbs, how’s the spawn?” Eames asks, leaning back.
“The spawn?”
“You know, the Cobblets.”
“The - James and Phillipa? Doing well, as far as I know. Slaying dragons in the yard at all hours of the day, I think Cobb said.”
“Dragons? Why dragons?”
She shrugs, which is a bit distracting really, all shadows and sharp collarbones silhouetted under the silk. “Not my area of expertise. Maybe they saw a movie or something.”
They’re interrupted by the server at that point, and Eames’s odd craving for obscenely spiced chicken sparks off a conversation that starts with the difference between global cuisine and global food before wandering through an in-depth discussion about favorite cities, whether Dan Brown novels ought to be burned for the good of humanity (Abby’s perspective) or treasured as unintentional comedy (Eames’s), and the importance of accuracy in details versus accuracy in overall impression while in the dreamscape, depending on purpose.
All of the food is really delicious, which is satisfying on a number of levels, but the desserts are the real highlight. Abby pops one forkful of chocolate cake into her mouth and her eyes slide closed. “Mmm.” Eames almost accuses her of looking orgasmic, which isn’t in fact particularly accurate, but then she takes a bite of her pie and loses her train of thought.
They’re both scraping up the last few bites in surprisingly companionable silence when Abby chuckles quietly at her plate. Eames frowns at her.
“What?”
“Ah - nothing. I was just remembering the first time we ate together, that’s all.”
“What, in Manchester?”
“No, no, New York, back when we were starting out, remember? You had a habit of dragging me to every seedy pizza place you could find.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “And then conning me into paying, as I recall.”
“Funny,” Eames drawls, “I don’t remember that bit.”
“Conning me? Are you actually going to try to deny that one?”
She considers. “No, probably not.” That scores her a brief grin. “What was amusing you about it?”
“Oh, just how much things have changed.” She gestures vaguely around her. “Not exactly where you’d have predicted we’d end up.”
“Very true,” Eames says, although truth be told she doesn’t remember ever feeling surprised at Abby’s maddening competence. “Whatever happened to that helpful little lady from Vermont that I used to know? So sweet and demure, it’s a pity she vanished.”
“From what I hear, she ran into some punk with fluorescent fishnets and a face full of metal,” Abby says with that look she gets, the one that’s a peculiar mixture of irritation and the victorious little smile that means she just dispatched the last projection. Eames runs her fingers along the stem of her empty wine glass.
“Did she really? Impressionable little waif, it sounds like.”
“Hmm,” Abby murmurs, and takes a sip of water, the ice clinking. “And yet there’s a distinct shortage of either facial piercings or brightly colored stockings around here.”
“And plenty of criminal tendencies,” Eames says, keeping her voice low. She runs a finger along the side of her nose, catching the tiny pockmark where the stud used to be, closed over now.
“You don’t get any credit for those,” Abby points out.
“Well, at least I stopped you from acting like you were turning in job applications,” Eames snorts.
Abby starts to say something and then stops, sighs, shakes her head, fiddling with her fork. “We’ve changed quite a bit,” she says. “Ourselves, specifically.”
“I’m not quite sure what you’re driving at here,” Eames admits after a moment.
“Nothing, really. Just a mood.”
“Fair enough,” Eames grants, fidgeting a bit. Her shoe bumps Abby’s ankle; she decides to ignore it.
Abby scrapes up the last chunk of frosting and pops it into her mouth. Eames watches, the mixture of chocolate and tines and tongue.
“I don’t suppose I could tempt you back to my hotel for a few hours,” she says, shifting slightly, just a little more seductive. Abby’s head snaps up.
“Eames, I know this is - that isn’t necessary. Debt paid in full, all obligations cleared. It’s fine.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, of course, because the only possible reason I could want to sleep with a beautiful woman is a misplaced sense of obligation. Clearly.”
Abby’s answering smile hovers somewhere between flattered and amused as she folds her hands primly behind her plate. “Well, in that case.”
“In that case?”
“Let’s get the check.”
Abby doesn’t stay the night, of course, although the two of them do doze for a bit, somewhat by accident. (It’s really rather pleasant; they ended up on the floor of the suite living room again, all the lights off and the stars just visible through the slats of the blinds, Abby smiling in the dimness as Eames leans against her shoulder, and the post-coital haze spreading over them both.)
It’s around one in the morning that Abby stirs, muttering about having her own hotel and not wanting to head home in this state, gesturing apologetically. Eames nods and pries herself off the floor, loans Abby a hairbrush and helps her wipe away the lipstick smudges. She misses one along the jaw, doesn’t notice until Abby’s actually walking out the door, and doesn’t bother mentioning it.
Abby has to leave the city a couple of days later - business in Buenos Aires, she says - and shortly after that, Eames joins up with some old associates working on surface-world theft. It’s a nice change of pace, up until she finds herself in a department story flicking through a stack of the exact kind of disgustingly boring shirts that she never, ever wears, simply because she would look so different wearing them. Time to get back in the dreamscape.
“Marianne Morganstern was looking for a forger,” her best contact says when she calls him up. “I heard you two knew each other?”
Marianne Morganstern is one of Abby’s lesser-used pseudonames. For fuck’s sake.
“Yeah, we’ve met,” she says. “Where’s she based?”
“Vienna, just now.”
Vienna is, oddly enough, a new city for Eames, and rather a nice one. Their current job is basically to enable some rather incompetent art forgers, but they’re going to pay well, and in the meantime Eames gets to forge half a dozen people within the course of one dream, which is enough to keep her interested. Also, they’re working out of an apartment above a vacant storefront, which means that there is rather a lot of sunlight and they leave the windows half-open, and God but Eames had forgotten what a proper spring feels like. The whole thing is really rather lovely.
Three weeks in, they’re all settled and busy; their architect fine-tuning a design, Abby settled at a cheap desk and neck-deep in research, and Eames tailoring a specific (original) forge while she waits for their extractor to finish running a test. The light beep of a ringing cell phone only half-registers as she fiddles with the length of her character’s hair, but then she notices Abby’s noncommittal yeses and nos getting progressively more grim. She glances sideways, noting Abby’s hand clenched around the phone, her half-hidden scowl.
“I remember,” Abby says; there’s a pause, and then the muscles in her arm practically spasm. “I miss her too,” she says, and Eames winces, wondering what’s going on. Abby reaches sideways, tapping against a couple of things on the desk before brushing a pile of books; she shoves once, hard, and they crash onto the floor, making everyone jump.
“Watch out!” Abby calls, staring at the wall. “Sorry, I have to go, I’ll call you back -” and she slams the phone shut. Both Eames and the architect are staring at her.
“Sorry about that, everyone,” she says tightly, standing. “I’ll be back in just a moment.” She heads for the hall; Eames hears the light clang of heels on a fire escape.
She picks up the books, leaving them deliberately haphazard, returns to her seat and taps her pencils against the legal pad. Huh.
“I’m stepping out for a minute,” she lies, and heads for the roof herself.
Abby is perched right on the edge, legs crossed over a three-story drop, a light swirl of smoke rising from the cigarette in her hand. Eames drops to a seat beside her, knocking her feet childishly against the brick.
“Care to explain what all that was about?” she asks after a moment, when Abby stays predictably silent.
“Cobb calling. He wanted to talk.”
“What about?”
Abby flicks ash off her cigarette; the sparks flicker as they tumble to the sidewalk. “It’s Mal’s birthday.”
Oh. “I see,” Eames says, very slowly. It’s a lie.
“She was one of my best friends. My first real friend besides Cobb. And -” Eames doesn’t fill the pause. “I keep forgetting that she’s been gone for so long.” She takes a brief drag on her cigarette and then holds it out to glare at it. “Fuck, this is the worst brand of cigarettes I’ve ever bought.”
“Here.” Eames fishes a replacement out of her jacket pocket and hands it over. “These aren’t bad.”
“Thanks.” She lights it off the old and drops the latter over the edge. “I’m sorry, I’m being ridiculous, it’s just -”
“Don’t,” Eames interrupts sharply, jabbing her in the arm. “Don’t.”
Abby shrugs. “All right, sorry.” She tries out the new cigarette and sighs in smoky relief. “I just - she could recite half a fucking library worth of sketches from all these stand-up comedians I’d never heard of. And do it well, too. I mean, not that I’m any judge of what makes a good stand-up comedian, but everyone I’ve ever seen listen to her thought she was funny.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, I mean, why would you? And it’s just - when Cobb wants to talk about her, it’s never that. Or about the way that she was about people, or -”
“Not quite what you think about when you think about her,” Eames says before she can stop herself, because dammit, she’s made a life out of reading people and how they feel about each other. Abby stares at her for a moment, and then stares out over the street and takes one long, slow, shuddering gasp of smoke, the cigarette trembling in her hands.
After a minute, Eames lights up one of her own.
They don’t say another word until Eames’s cigarette is most of the way gone and Abby’s already stubbed hers out on the roof and kept staring at the sky. Eames reaches over and squeezes her knee, soft and gentle.
“I’ll buy you dinner later,” she offers. Abby looks up and smiles wanly.
“Thank you,” she says, standing, and they head back down together. Luckily, the others on the team are smart enough to stay quiet.
Six hours and a change of plans later, Abby is pressed up against the wall of Eames’s tiny temporary apartment, blouse hanging unbuttoned and untucked over the too-tight waistband of her skirt, smiling for the first time all day.
“This is turning suspiciously habitual,” Eames whispers into her lips, and Abby shifts focus from her battle of wits with Eames’s overcomplicated belt buckle to raise an eyebrow at her.
“This is the third time we’ve done this in eighteen months.”
“Well, you can’t expect any decent math from me at this point,” she lies. Abby actually laughs, halfhearted but real, and Eames kisses her until neither of them can think anymore.
They don’t really mean anything by it, ever, but after that things do start turning into a habit - twice more on the Vienna job, more often on the next, almost regularly after that. Sometimes they get dinner first, sometimes they don’t bother; a few times, dead on their aching feet and almost too crabby to fuck, they order pizza and wolf it shamelessly, Eames’s legs stretched obnoxiously across Abby’s lap. The cities blur together into a string of hotels, sometimes Abby’s and sometimes Eames’s (never overnight, though - just easier that way). They don’t talk between jobs, of course, no reason to, but sooner or later collapsing on the couch and talking as her fingers inch up Abby’s thigh starts to be as much of a routine as anything else in Eames’s life.
It’s still a surprise when a contact reaches her with a message addressed to her and Abby both; more so when she counts up and realizes that they’re finishing up their fifth consecutive job together. Particularly given Abby’s Cobb-related history, that would look like Eames is the new partner. Fair enough.
She doesn’t mention it to Abby, and she doesn’t take the job. When the current one finishes up and Abby buggers off to do whatever it is she does (exactly what Eames does between jobs, i.e. watch movies and sleep too much, except that whenever she starts to think about the Cobbs she visits the odd art museum and bores herself to death), Eames has a few days of kicking herself for turning down any kind of work at all. Luckily, Ariadne gets in contact after a week, looking for a last-minute replacement on a heist.
“Depends on what you did to the last fellow,” Eames lies, adjusting the phone as she picks her shirts off the floor.
“I got sick of his excuses for not doing his job. You’ll be fine.”
“Hold on a second, are you spearheading this?”
“Yeah,” Ariadne says, deadpan.
“God, that makes me feel old.”
“Huh?”
“Last time we worked together you were the baby of the team, pet,” Eames says, voicing her best stereotypical-maiden-aunt. “Has it really been long enough for that sweet little girl to be running her own show?”
“It’s been three years, and I wasn’t even sweet. Listen, are you taking the job?”
“I think your tolerance for bullshit has actually decreased with age, which is rather impressive. Yes, of course, when do you want me in Melbourne?”
“Soon. Also, can you fly here via Paris? I need a file collected from Miles, and I don’t want to fly out there myself.”
“Can do.”
Collecting files from Miles, she can do. The problem is, that requires notifying him several days in advance so as to ensure that he won’t have her arrested, and this apparently sets off the strange and selective guilt-ridden spy network that is family, because she’s loitering impatiently about in an empty classroom when the door swings open and it isn’t Miles.
“Dom Cobb.”
“Hello, Eames. How’ve you been?”
“Busy,” she says, resisting the urge to shove past him and out.
“Yeah, I heard. Picking something up for Ariadne, right?”
“Yes.” She chomps at the metaphorical bullet. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk to you, actually.” He grabs for the nearest chair and drops into it; Eames raises her eyebrows.
“Really.”
“Yeah. Look, ah - about you and Abby.”
Her fingers twitch towards clenched; she resists. “What about?”
“Are you together?”
“Well, seeing as neither of us is her and nobody else is in the room right now, I’d say no, we’re not together at the moment.”
He sighs. “Goddammit, Eames, don’t do this. Are you dating?”
There’s a coin on the heater beside her; she picks it up and flips it idly across the backs of her fingers. “Depends on the definition. We certainly haven’t formalized anything.”
“Then what is going on there?”
She flips the coin and catches it. “A lot of rather enjoyable sex and a great deal of mutual bitching, at least when we’re working the same jobs.”
Cobb visibly struggles not to pass judgment. “How long has this been happening?”
“Depends on what you’re referring to. The bitching has been going on since we met, so, Jesus Christ, around a decade now.” She digs out a cigarette in defiance of their location, but she isn’t quite pissed off enough to light it. “The sex has been going on for -” It occurs to her that she isn’t sure whether to count from Berlin or Vienna, so she settles on, “A while.”
“I didn’t think you liked each other much,” Cobb probes, folding his hands in and out.
Eames shrugs. “Eh, I don’t know. She’s almost entertaining, once you get her to forget about the poker up her ass. And she’s reliable.” She frowns, glancing around the room again in futile hope of some distraction. “Why are you bothering me about it?”
Cobb sighs, shoving himself to his feet. “I don’t - God, I wish Mal was here.” Eames blinks as he paces back and forth. “She’d be better at this, probably. She and Abby always seemed to be on the same page about everything, you know. Birthdays, Christmas, Mal would insist on a present that I didn’t think Abby would ever use, and I don’t know if she did, but she was always so happy to get it -”
“That’s very nice,” Eames interrupts, tossing her coin again. “Back to the question of what the hell you’re on about.”
“Sorry.” He shakes his head, sighs, fidgets for a moment, inspecting the windowpanes. “I… owe Abby a lot. I want her to be happy.” He shifts, bracing his hands against the nearest desk to eye Eames dead-on and close. “I don’t want anyone to compromise that happiness. Or to make her believe that she has something that she doesn’t.”
Eames stares at him for a moment, cigarette and coin forgotten, and then it hits her. “Oh, God, is this your idea of the pissed-off big brother speech? Break her heart and you’ll make sure I never walk again?”
Cobb reddens, but he stares her down, which is actually a remarkably unfamiliar experience at this point. “There are very few people who think of Abby as anyone other than an excellent point man. She stands by the ones who do. I don’t want to see anyone use that to hurt her, and I don’t want to see anyone betray that trust.”
It takes Eames several gaping moments to wind up her astonished rage; then she advances on him, slamming her palms to the scratched-up tabletop. “The sheer nerve of this is fucking ridiculous. Are you actually listening to yourself at this moment? First of all, she is a grown woman and she can take care of herself - she took care of the both of you for four fucking years, that ought to have been a goddamned hint. Second, even if she weren’t, where the hell do you get off sneaking around to manage her life for her? And third, you of all people have absolutely no right to talk to anyone about abusing a trust, and especially not about abusing Abby’s, you miserable fucking cunt.” She stops, breathing hard and half-surprised, but really, the woman nearly kills herself babysitting him around the world and now he gets concerned?
“Do you even know her actual name?” Cobb demands, tense and wincing but not backing off.
“Her projections call her Abby Whittemore, and that’s all the information I need. Get the fuck out before I throw you out.”
“I’m the one with a relative on faculty.”
“I’m the one carrying. Out, and mind your own fucking business.”
Cobb shrugs, standing, and waves his hands. “Looks like I don’t have much to worry about in any case. I’m sorry for bothering you.”
Eames doesn’t move until the door has been closed for a careful count of eighty; then she kicks the nearest desk with such vicious precision that it crashes onto its side and skids into another. She storms out by way of the first-floor window just to make sure that she avoids Cobb completely, stalks straight to Miles’s office to wait for him there, and collects the file in enough of an obvious temper that she can hear frightened grad students chittering as she stalks out.
That night she gets as far as the penultimate digit of Abby’s number half a dozen times, slamming the hotel phone down with a clatter that shakes the desk or snapping the cell shut hard enough that it almost breaks every single time. She doesn’t have the slightest clue what to say - it’s over or this isn’t even anything or do something about that asshole you call a friend or possibly just fuck off, you icy bitch, which doesn’t even make sense but is ridiculously tempting. The only thing that stops her is that they never call each other between jobs, and she isn’t going to be the one to start, even just for that.
She ends up with the hotel phone hanging off the hook, her cell phone on the floor by the wall, and her shortest skirt baring goosebump-coated thighs as she hunts down the seediest bar in the city. She doesn’t know if she’s looking for a fight or sex or what, but she ends up extraordinarily drunk on something that tastes like piss, and shortly after that it’s her fist in someone else’s eye. Things turn a little blurry after that, muscle-mass people and plenty of target, fingernails and mercilessness and the full awareness that this is the stupidest thing she’s ever done, and by some miracle all that happens is that she ends up puking on the sidewalk with a clump of hair ripped out, scratches down her arm, and a bruise turning purple on her jaw. None of them hurt as much as the hangover she develops the next morning, and that - plus a halfhearted shower - is the state in which she arrives in Melbourne.
It calls for more than a little fast talking when she arrives. She’s worked, and worked well, in far worse condition than this, but Ariadne wants to chuck her straight back to Europe. (Ariadne has, since the Fischer job, discovered pixie cuts, fedoras, and the joys of a good gun; she has also run into a few vivid lessons about the price of incompetence, judging by the clear pink scar on her cheek and the steely meticulousness of her methods.)
The architect runs her team hard, once she’s convinced that they belong there; in the fragile half-hours when Eames is awake enough to think and not frantically studying the case, she finds it vaguely reminiscent of Abby at her most tight-wound and withdrawn, and the sensation is bizarrely unfamiliar. Luckily, Eames is too busy cramming her mind with methods and approaches, air ducts and hand gestures, to really think about it.
“There’s a reason we didn’t all become grad students,” she grumbles late one night, gulping bitter coffee as if it’s the elixir of life as she goes through security tapes.
“You could have been,” Ariadne says, shifting a detail of her model millimeters to the left.
It’s blatantly untrue, but she doesn’t feel like sharing that, so she drops the subject in favor of the exact tilt of her target’s head as he talks.
That detail isn’t too hard to commit to memory, but some of them are harder, particularly since the ideal timeframe turns out to be two weeks; Eames barely sleeps outside of dreamspace by the end, but she’s ready in time.
It isn’t an overly complicated con - the core principle is that they fabricate standard business meetings - but it calls for solid, detail-by-detail replication of reality. Razor-sharp work from start to finish, and it lasts nearly twelve hours in dream-time without a rest. Eames’s headache starts to build around hour six and clings to her from forge to forge; she pulls off the job, but by the time they wake she’s headed for a full-on migraine.
“Good work, everyone,” Ariadne tells them, hands flickering over the PASIV without her evident supervision as she packs up. Eames grimaces cheerfully about and flees back to her hotel room, which is thankfully equipped with obscenely thick blinds and the blessed glory of her bed.
Naturally, she’s only barely settled in when the phone rings. Normally she’d throw something at it, but nobody should be able to reach that number besides the hotel management, which shouldn’t be calling her.
“What?” she snaps, tugging the pillow halfway over her head in a pointless attempt to block out everything.
“Check your damn email, Eames.” Abby. Of course.
“What the hell?”
“Look, I don’t want to go through the whole explanation right now -”
“I feel like a herd of lions went on a drunken rampage through my head, I’ve been forging for twelve hours solid, and I’ve been running on three hours’ uninterrupted sleep for the past week. I am fucked if I’m going to get my computer out and sort through whatever you put on the email. Either explain or go away.”
“Your manners are impeccable.”
“Don’t even. They would be if I wanted them that way.”
Abby tsks, somewhere between sympathetic and scolding. “Anyway. Condensed version, Saito is running a complicated setup, three interconnected marks, none straightforward. It looks like a challenge, but doable, and we’ll be working to our own schedule and with pretty much whatever we need for resources. That’s in addition to pay - we don’t have exact figures for that yet, but we’re talking a fortune at his base offer.”
“Sounds wonderful. There a reason it was so goddamn urgent?”
“Well, for one thing, I’d already waited two weeks. For another, you’re my cheapest contact to Ariadne at the moment, and I wanted you to send word on to her before you lost contact. Rumor set your job together at ending fairly soon.”
“Forty-five minutes ago, actually.”
“Ahh. In that case, sorry about this.”
“Yeah, I’m in a mood for a reason. Anyway, Ariadne has business in the city for a week or two still, so I’ll get it all to her tomorrow. How long before you need us in Tokyo?”
“He’s running this out of New York, actually. Think you’ll take it?”
“Probably,” Eames grumbles, burying her pounding head in another pillow. “Given our mutual taste in jobs and the kind of money he pays. I’ll let you know in the morning.”
“Great. Let me know when you’re flying in and I’ll save you the trial by taxi stand.”
“I can catch a goddamn taxi.” Suffocating herself in the pillow isn’t working; she rolls sideways and drags the comforter almost to her ears. Abby huffs with quiet laughter on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. They’ve gotten rarer. Anyway, I’ll see you. Sleep well.” She disconnects, and Eames flops backwards into the pillows.
Four days later she weaves, ducks, and occasionally shoves her way through the crowds at JFK to find the point woman leaning against the wall, compact umbrella swinging from her hand.
“The one time in your life you have an excuse to be late, you’re willing to hurt people to be on time,” Abby drawls as Eames shoves past a particularly obnoxious bearded fellow shouting into a cell phone.
“First of all, I’m not hurting anyone by sane standards, and second, this is hardly the only time I have a reason to be late. Pleasure to see you too.”
“As always. That all your luggage?”
Eames eyes the wheeled suitcase, the duffel currently dragging her shoulders lopsided, and the carryon thumping against her leg. “No, I’ve got an infinite carpetbag lying around here somewhere.”
“No harm in checking, Ms. Eames. Come on, then.” She shoves off the wall and towards the exit, slow enough for Eames to fall into step beside her.
“As a matter of interest, darling, how many times do you have to sleep with someone before you stop calling them Miss?”
“I’ll drop it when you stop with the pet names. All of them, not just one.”
“Damn. What if I stop it around teammates?”
“Then I’ll only call you Ms. Eames when we’re in private. Here, give me that.” She snags the duffel one-handed, slinging it over her own shoulder before the forger has time to do anything but blink.
“Er, thank you.”
“No problem. At least this way you won’t hit anyone with it.”
“Your faith in my coordination is astounding,” Eames drawls as they reach the exit.
“My faith in your coordination is based off of careful observation. You don’t care enough about irritating anyone here to bother paying attention.”
“Well, I wasn’t hitting you, so why do you care?”
Abby shrugs, shoulder rolling under the strap. “Basic moral principles?” she deadpans. Eames muffles a laugh - somewhat - against the back of her hand.
“Stick close to me,” Abby instructs, undoing the ties on the umbrella and shifting Eames’s duffle to her other shoulder. “This thing isn’t quite big enough for two people and this many bags.”
“Does it really matter? It’s only a little water.”
“No, it isn’t.” They’re almost out the doors by this point. Eames, confronted with the sheets of water pounding out of the sky and sliding sideways in rippled miniature waves across the pavement, blinks twice.
“Dammit, I hate it when you’re right.”
“Funny, since usually when I’m right it means that you don’t get soaked, sick, or shot.” She manages to maneuver the two of them out and pop the umbrella up in one motion, and Eames sidles a bit closer, wishing she’d brought a coat. By the time they make it to Abby’s car - a small silver rental, same basic kind she always gets - both of them are soaked to the knees, and Eames is glaring at the atmosphere as if she can intimidate it into being warm enough that she won’t shiver. Abby cranks up the heat the instant she has the keys in the ignition.
“Don’t take it out now,” she says, sliding the car into gear, “but there’s a spare gun in the glove compartment, if you’re missing one. And no, it isn’t a Glock.”
“Why, Abby,” Eames murmurs, pressing a hand to her chest with all the melodrama she can muster, “I’m touched.” The thing is, though, she’s been tapping her hand vaguely against her jacket pockets and the side of her leg all through the plane ride, missing the familiar pressure of a weapon. It’s as much a part of flying as the uncomfortable seats and the soporific safety speeches; probably happens to Abby too.
Still nice not to have to deal with the discomfort longer than need be, even if it doesn’t bother her nearly as much now as it did when she was on her own.
“Anyway,” Abby says, completely ignoring a driver whom Eames feels ought to flipped off immediately, “what the hell did you say to Cobb?”
That takes a little mental backtracking. “What, you mean in Paris? How did you know about that one?”
“He told me about it. Fairly simple methods.”
“Ah.” Eames sighs. “What was it he said?”
“Frankly, I’m not entirely sure what he was driving at. He seemed to be operating under the idea that we were in some sort of love, or something like that.”
Eames snorts. “Oh, there’s a good one. I can just see us settling in some tiny house with a cat and lilacs. We’d burn it down in a week.” Abby doesn’t respond for a moment, squinting out the window at the pounding water, and Eames half-chokes, trying to figure out if she could possibly have misinterpreted things that badly. “Er, that is - I mean to say, you’re not -”
“What? Oh, oh God no, I should damn well hope not.” The rushed flood of the assurance and the astonishment on her face as she glances away from the steering wheel long enough to goggle reassure Eames’s faith in her own abilities. “I’d really prefer that neither of us got killed anytime soon, for one thing.”
“You’re right, that’s a far more probable outcome.” They’re out of the airport now, and Eames tugs her borrowed weapon out of the gun compartment: a Heckler & Koch USP Compact, one of her favorites but common enough to be entirely familiar against the heel of her hand. It’s a pleasant reassurance, particularly coupled with the knowledge that if Abby is handing her this, than the point woman is armed as well. Realistically speaking, being killed is the only likely outcome regardless of whether they lose their heads over each other, but it’s unlikely to happen just now.
“Anyway,” Abby says briskly, pulling past a particularly slow-moving businessman headbanging away to God-knows-what, “are you tired?”
“Tired? Not particularly, no. I slept a bit on the plane.” She glances from the quiet tap-tap of Abby’s fingers against the wheel to the slight smile as she maneuvers the roads. “Your place, I take it?”
“If you’ve no objections.” The wind picks up, and she curses as gallons of water smash horizontally against the windshield. “Sorry, I need to focus on the driving just now.”
The threat of watery death on ostensibly dry land is enough to make Eames shut up, at least until she realizes that they’re headed an odd direction. “Which hotel are you staying at?” she asks, frowning at the sodden city. Abby clears her throat.
“Actually, I’m in an apartment at the moment.”
“Wait, do you know how long we’re going to be here already?” (Abby is, by and large, less likely to get an apartment than even Eames.)
“No, I don’t. I bought the place years ago and never got around to putting on the market.” The careful neutrality in her voice is one she uses when she’s dodging an issue, and Eames doesn’t generally hear it directed at her these days. She turns the issue over.
“Bought it around six years ago, I take it?”
Abby looks away from the road long enough for Eames to pick up on gratitude-tinged relief soaking through the warning: enough. “Yes.”
Eames leaves it at a noncommittal hum.
The rain only gets worse, until it’s bad enough to pull over and buy dinner (oversized sizzling mozzarella sticks and taco salad sprawling across the plate, messy undignified food covered in strings of molten cheese and sauce that sticks and smudges on their cheeks.) By the time they make it to Abby’s apartment - all cool shine and crisp corners, probably purchased with the full take from one of her first big jobs - it’s past nine.
“The bedroom’s through that door,” Abby says, toeing off her shoes. Eames does the same, somewhat begrudgingly, and runs the pad of her thumb very lightly along the side of Abby’s throat, base of her jaw down to the collarbone. When she rests her fingers against the edge of her shoulder, just underneath the cotton blouse, Abby arches catlike into the touch and gestures towards the bedroom.
“I have to clean this house, Eames,” she says. “Bed, this time.”
“So dull,” Eames mutters, but she complies, stripping as she goes, fingers teasing and restrained against Abby’s throat until she can push the bedspread back and sink into the crisp cotton. Abby’s buttons are easy work, even one-handed.
The sex ends up slow, almost languid, less about hunger or teasing and more about the familiar shape and sense of muscle and breasts and fingers and lips. By the time it’s over they’re deeply tangled into each other, sticky and satisfied, and it takes a long and dozy while before Eames forces herself to open her eyes properly.
“Damn it, I never did book a hotel.”
“You didn’t book in advance?” Abby scolds sleepily, forehead still resting against Eames’s shoulder. “Oh, right, too lazy to cover your tracks.”
“Not too lazy, considered it more effort than getting a room when I got here.” She tries to persuade herself that she needs to get out of the bed, and can’t quite do it. “What’s the nearest place?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Abby grumbles, pulling the blankets closer around them. “Stay. I can grab your clothes out of the car in the morning.”
“That would work too,” Eames agrees, the ruefulness muffled by weariness and warmth. “Rather well, actually.” She closes her eyes again.
When she wakes, it’s surprisingly easy to orient herself: first Abby, easy to recognize, and the rest of the setting - first bed, then flat - is fairly easy to deduce. By some miracle, they still possess about equal shares in the blankets.
Slipping out of the bed without waking Abby is easier than she might have expected; the point woman mumbles something that sounds like a mixture of obscenities and buries her face in the pillow. Eames might take a moment to chuckle at her attempts to meld with the bed, but she’s entirely naked except for one forgotten sock and shivering slightly in the cool apartment air. Her clothes - the ones not strewn across the apartment - are still down in the car.
Taking quick stock of the room reveals a terry-cloth bathrobe hung over a plain desk chair; Eames shrugs into it, enjoying the softness against her bare skin, and discovers a hotel logo emblazoned on the pocket. A little petty theft, apparently, to go along with all these felonies. The matchbook in the pocket is labeled in Mandarin, faded with age, and mostly empty. Oh well; Eames won’t need a cigarette for another half-hour or so anyway.
Abby’s kitchen is, on first glance, a case of pristinely gleaming tile raised to an art form. It proves, on further inspection, to be almost completely empty. Eames is elbow-deep in the fridge for the third time, hoping that something edible will appear to assure her that this is in fact Abby’s house, when she hears footsteps behind her.
“Oh, go-oo-ahd,” Abby yawns. “I thought you’d left.”
“If I had, I would’ve woken you up to let you know,” Eames says without extracting her head from the fridge. “Your coffeemaker is doing something esoteric that I’m fairly sure is generating coffee, but you might want to check in case I accidentally programmed it to explode on us. Are you aware that you have no food in the house besides a box of crackers and one slice of pizza?”
“I think there’s the remains of a box of cereal in one of the cupboards, but yes, I know. If you know what’s in the fridge, stop wasting power, I’m going to have to actually pay the bill.”
“It’s not like you have to worry about that,” Eames snorts, obeying. “And that cereal isn’t going to taste very good when you don’t have any milk.”
“Damn, I knew there was something I forgot to do on the way back from the airport. I’m blaming you for that one.” Abby, wrapped up in a bathrobe that looks to be unaffiliated with anything and a little bit too small, is bent over her coffeemaker, eyeing it as if it has some stranger’s business secrets hidden in it somehow. “I think you managed to get this to work right, but I’m not sure.”
“You can’t operate your own coffeemaker?” Eames asks, folding her arms as she leans against the counter. It’s more than a little out of character for Abby, who shrugs, looking slightly defensive.
“I’ve only been here for three days, and this is the first time I’ve been back here since Mal died.” She coughs and turns away to rummage through her shelves. “Besides, I’ve been mostly eating out.”
“Somehow I noticed,” Eames says somewhat less dryly than she could, mostly to watch the tips of Abby’s ears turn pink. “By the way, your coffeemaker might be done. Or about to kill us, I’m not sure.”
“Have you actually encountered an exploding coffeemaker at some point and that’s contributing to the paranoia?” Abby asks, wrestling with the handle on the pot. “Jesus Christ, I think they actually managed to make this thing harder to operate than a PASIV.”
“That takes so much incompetence it’s almost a talent,” Eames agrees as Abby finally persuades the thing to pop free. “Your mugs are in the cabinet over the stove.”
“I knew that much, but thank you.” She digs out a plain piece of pale-blue china, sloshes it full of coffee, and hands it off to Eames, who takes it with some surprise.
“My thanks.” The effect is thoroughly ruined when she takes a sip and immediately sprays it into the sink, gagging. “Fuck, this tastes disgusting.”
“Wait, why - did you find this in the cupboard?”
“Where else would I have found it?”
Abby sighs, rubbing her eyes. “Sorry, wasn’t thinking. Yeah, that stuff was some of what I left here when I moved out the last time. I must have forgotten to throw it out.”
“So this coffee is old enough to send to kindergarten, is that what you’re saying here?”
“Essentially, yes.”
The two of them glance from the coffeepot to Eames’s mug to the sink, then back to each other in almost perfect synchronization.
“There’s a café down the street,” Abby says. “Go hit the shower, I’ll throw on something temporary and go get your bags.”
“That sounds like a much better plan,” Eames says, dumping her mug in the sink. “Somehow I don’t think either of us is cut out for domesticity.”
Abby snorts. “Don’t use up all the hot water, I’m going to shower after you.”
Forty-five minutes later, they’re settled in the rather cutesy blue-washed café, Eames watching with amusement as Abby pours spoonful after spoonful of sugar into her tea cup.
“You and your sweet tooth,” she says, shaking her head. She can generally take or leave tea, with or without enhancements, but what she’s currently drinking - something with a name that she didn’t quite process, flavored with nothing but lemon mostly to emphasize her point - is pretty good.
“Thank you for your input, Ms. Eames. How many cigarettes are you going to smoke today?” Abby asks, stirring her tea properly. Eames rolls her eyes.
“Fewer than you are, I suspect.”
“Well, now you’re going to deliberately skew the numbers, so yes.” She lifts the tea to her lips and hums softly, eyes sliding closed. Eames sips her own, smiling.
“I have to say, this is rather more enjoyable than our usual system,” she says, settling her teacup back into its saucer. Abby nods.
“Definitely. I think we’re both getting a bit old for the walk of shame.”
“Does it count as a walk of shame when it’s still in the middle of the night?” Eames asks idly, stirring her tea for no particular purpose.
“It does when you have to get past two doormen and a taxi driver who wants to chat.”
“This is true,” Eames says, grimacing with the memories of one particular taxi driver who’d mistaken her for a prostitute. (She’d told him she was and then spun an elaborate tale about obscenely high rates and dressing down somewhat for the exotic tastes of a famous regular client, but that was entirely beside the point.) “A pity you don’t have handy apartments tucked away in every city.”
“We can share a hotel room next time,” Abby says, leaning back in her chair. They’re at forty-five degrees to each other at the round table, backs to the window, and the sunlight is picking out a few flyaway strands that look a little pale. Eames thinks it’s about time, all things considered, although it may be a trick of the light. “At least that way you’ll be sure to have one.”
“How much will you mock me if I argue that I’m perfectly capable of booking my own hotel room?”
Abby eyes her over the rim of her teacup, eyebrows eloquently raised.
“Right then.” She is saved from any further losses of dignity by the arrival of the waitress with their food, which is surprisingly hearty considering the affected delicacy of the décor. This could be happening in dozens of cities that Eames could name, she considers, and probably several others not on that list; the basic elements - herself, Abby, breakfast, sunlight - could fit precisely like this into almost anywhere in the world. It’s rather a nice thought.
Eames is mostly done with her food - eggs and bacon - well before Abby is done with her waffles, since the point woman has picked up a newspaper. She swipes a syrup-saturated strawberry with no response, and initially intends to leave it be, but it’s extraordinarily good. She inches her fingers across the tablecloth for another.
Abby, of course, pins her hand to the table without looking up. “Get your own next time, Eames.”
“Have I ever complimented you on your kindly and generous nature?” Eames asks, trying - somewhat - to twist away. Abby’s using more than a tiny bit of her strength, so she gives that up and flips her hand upwards, cupping her fingers around Abby’s cool ones. The point woman’s grip softens slightly, enough that Eames could slip free without a struggle if she were so inclined.
“This is going to make it rather difficult for me to finish my food,” she protests, running her finger along Abby’s. The point woman manages to turn a page in the paper one-handed, flapping it noisily as she does.
“You should have thought of that earlier,” she says, smile lurking in her voice even if she’s managing to keep it from her lips. “Forethought saves lives.”
“So does food, under the right circumstances.”
“Indeed it does, but not these.”
It occurs to Eames that they could be doing this for years to come, dipping in and out of each other’s lives, splitting hotel rooms and buying breakfast after sinking into each other’s shapes. The threat of permanence is entirely absent, but this could happen rather indefinitely, until they get too slow to escape the realities of the life they’ve chosen.
Leaning back in the sunlight and lightly squeezing Abby’s hand, she thinks that there are worse things to do in the meantime. In fact, she rather likes the idea.