fic: no discipline of forgetting (2)
<< part one
[5]
A week passes. Maybe more. Eames loses track -- he and Arthur have been busy undressing each other in every single room of the house. Arthur's even fucked him on the Penrose staircase, right at the edge of the paradox.
Fortunately, Ariadne has an uncanny sense of when to go down to the beach for a couple of hours.
When they're not fucking, they're talking -- the only things two people want to do when they discover each other, really. For once it doesn't matter that there are no people here, no places. There's Arthur, and there's Eames, and that's more than enough.
There's an area stripped of natural vegetation, about twenty minutes inland. It's full of things that shouldn't be allowed to exist. Blivets and Penrose triangles. A statue in motion that seems to spin clockwise at times, and counterclockwise at other, even though the actual direction doesn't change. Arthur's spent hours re-creating optical illusions in three-dimensional space.
Eames sees it for the first time in spring.
"Arthur, you never told me you were a genius."
Arthur shrugs. "They're just logic exercises. Need to keep myself sharp."
Whereas Ariadne builds with natural detail, as if reality springs fully-formed and perfect from her skull, Arthur builds like he lives. He zeroes in on the things that interest him, and ignores everything else with a sort of arrogance. It makes him a shitty architect, but it's perfect for this kind of precise, conceptual work.
"My god -- is that Escher?"
"It is," Arthur says, pleased. "I wouldn't try to walk around in House of Stairs, though. You'll throw up. I did."
Eames spends a while examining Waterfall and Belvedere. Finally Arthur comes up behind him, tucking an arm around his waist and whispering into his ear: "I thought maybe we could work on something together." There's something a little shy in his voice.
"Arthur, yes," Eames says immediately, "I'd love to. How about the Difference Engine?" -- and turns around to catch Arthur's face lighting up with a smile.
God, he'll do anything for that smile.
"I built a treehouse," Arthur says. "Wanna see?"
Apparently, they have a backyard now. Arthur's treehouse takes up most of it. It looks like it's come straight out of a fantasy book. At the base is a door, knob protruding from the bark. Behind the door, a staircase leads up through the hollowed-out trunk, up to an architecturally impossible platform underneath a canopy of leaves.
"I wanted a treehouse the summer of third grade," Arthur says, "and fourth grade, and fifth grade. But my family lived in an apartment."
Eames sprawls out in a beanbag chair. "The little boy in me is enthralled, and he desperately wants to make love to you -- come here."
"You are appalling sometimes."
He takes Arthur's hand, tugging him down into his lap. Arthur comes, a bit reluctant, but then Eames catches his mouth in a lazy kiss and Arthur turns into it, shifting, making a little sigh.
Arthur wraps his arms around Eames' shoulders, pulling him close. His hip presses into Eames' cock through layers of fabric. Eames thinks he would probably content to do this forever, making out like teenagers until they're breathless.
Finally Eames laughs into Arthur's mouth and pulls away. "I haven't made out for this long since high school."
"Really?" Arthur arches an eyebrow. "Maybe you need to work on your foreplay."
"Arthur, merely being in the same room with you is foreplay. You have the tenacity and the sex drive of a seventeen-year-old."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"Please do," Eames says. He cards his fingers through Arthur's hair.
They lie like that for a while.
Finally Arthur says, "I get why Dom thinks it's addictive. It's so easy to create things here. You could build an entire life --" He stops, and hesitates like he's going to continue.
Together, is what Eames thinks he's trying to say. But he doesn't ask; he'd rather linger in the space of maybe.
Eames has convinced Arthur to start sleeping in. They stumble down to the kitchen at noon. Arthur's laughing; Eames keeps trying to snake an arm around his waist, and nearly gets a broken wrist for his troubles.
"Hey," Ariadne says, taking a sip of coffee. "Arthur. I went into your room today to borrow a tie. It's getting kind of dusty in there."
"Shut up," Arthur says, grinning.
"What did you need a tie for?" Eames asks. "Being kinky on your own, are we?"
"No, it's so that she can dress like a baby hipster," Arthur says. He sits down at the table and stretches, yawning. "Eames! Make me breakfast. Coffee. Waffles."
"Say please," Eames says, pouring coffee.
"No."
Eames is tempted to drop a kiss on Arthur's forehead when he hands him the mug. He doesn't want to push his luck, but Arthur glances up at him through his eyelashes, his smile making him look about twelve years old, and Eames realises that yeah, he could probably get away with it.
So he does.
He glances over; Ariadne's watching them, looking a little incredulous and a little fond. Eames winks.
"What?" Arthur says, sounding offended.
The next day, Arthur's entire bedroom just ceases to exist. All of his clothes end up in Eames' closet.
It's been almost a year.
Time isn't really the issue in Limbo: theoretically, they can safely spend years here, as long as they don't forget what it is.
There's something enticing in being suspended, free from the consequences of reality. Like the peace of a long train ride. It's enjoyable. Pure creation is enjoyable. But it has a psychological toll -- living here isn't living, just postponement.
Arthur still hasn't found the thing he's looking for. More and more often, there are arguments. They've been here too long, and Arthur wants Eames and Ariadne to go.
But Eames outright refuses to leave without him, and a part of him doesn't want to leave at all.
[6]
Arthur is happy, except for when he isn't.
Eames knows that Arthur's always loved thinking with his gun, giving himself up to chaos and muscle memory. To instinct. A calm comes over him, when he's running or fighting or fucking. When his body's doing the work for him and he doesn't have to think at all -- a flawless machine.
Limbo is slow torture for him. It's the ultimate turning-inwards, away from the stimulus of the outside world. There's no risk, no danger. Eames can see that the fixity of the place is wearing him down.
Going out to search makes Arthur obviously miserable now, even though he has to do it. Every time he returns he drags Eames to bed, hungry, and keeps him there for hours.
But when he's not searching he's restless. He can't put any of what he knows to use; his edges get sharper because there's nothing to blunt them against. Sometimes he's angry over nothing, and won't speak to Eames or Ariadne for days.
He never apologises. Eames just wakes up and Arthur's in his arms again, like he expects to be forgiven.
Arthur's been gone for three weeks.
Eames is in the library, reading a Raymond Chandler novel. It's one of Arthur's, and Arthur's re-read it at least five times topside, judging from the amount of marginalia.
Ariadne's sitting cross-legged on the rug by the fireplace, flipping through books and quoting at random, like it's some sort of quiz.
"The dream is a fulfillment of a wish."
"Freud."
"The fulfillment of a wish results in unpleasure."
"Freud again," Eames says, flipping a page. "You into psychoanalysis? I wouldn't have expected that from you."
"There's a lot you don't know about me. You've been too busy pining after Arthur to figure it out."
Eames looks up in dismay. "Ariadne, I --"
"Hey, no, that's not what I meant." Ariadne laughs. "Don't apologise. It's sweet." She pulls another book off the top of the stack and lets it fall open at random.
"God, you remind me of Mal right now," Eames says. "We used to do this. During postgrad. Mal would lie on the carpet and quiz me and make lewd comments about the Oedipal complex. She's the reason I got into dreamsharing, you know -- it was impossible to say no her."
"When I asked Arthur about her, all he would tell me was that she was lovely."
"She really was."
"Her projection wasn't."
"That's because Dom can't get his shit together," Eames says. "Projections ... get twisted by the dreamwork, by desires and guilt and things that you know aren't even true. In the nineties, Mal and I tried to study them, but we found that you can't interpret them in any scientific way, really. The dream-distortion is too great." Eames laughs. "Ironic now, isn't it?"
Ariadne glances down at the book open in front of her. She reads from it to break the silence: "I think of what I am where I do not think to think."
Arthur's been gone for four weeks.
Lately, he's unhappy more often than not. Failure and restlessness keep him on edge. Whenever Eames brings it up, Arthur tells him to leave, if he's so sick of waiting -- that Eames doesn't owe him anything, that he doesn't owe Eames anything, that he'd rather be here by himself.
"I know what you're thinking about," says Ariadne. "Stop it."
Eames doesn't stop. He says, "He can't keep doing this. I can't keep doing this."
"He's always said you have no obligation to stay."
"As if I'd leave him," Eames snaps.
"I know."
The next morning, Eames wakes up to find Arthur wrapped around him in bed, reclaiming his space like he'd never left.
It's Ariadne who's gone.
Eames doesn't realise what's happened until breakfast, when he's halfway through the crossword. "Arthur," he says calmly, putting his pen down on top of the newspaper. "Where's your totem?"
Arthur looks up from the paper, coffee cup halfway to his mouth. "My what?"
It's like a kick to the chest.
"Nothing, love. I'll be right back," Eames says, and goes to their bedroom.
Arthur brought the newspaper in this morning.
Eames had tried making them, in his first couple of weeks living here with Ariadne, just to have something to read at breakfast. But they'd come up blank, or full of articles he'd read over the years, a weird scrapbook of events that didn't belong together.
On the dresser is a small box; he opens it.
His poker chip is there. Arthur's die isn't.
In its place is a note in Ariadne's spiky, left-leaning handwriting:
I'll take over the searching. Stay with him, I won't lose myself. I don't know how long it'll take, Eames. Let him forget until I come back. Please. Let him be happy.
[7]
Arthur slips into forgetting slowly, but not slowly enough.
Everything makes sense, in media res. Things aren't strange until you stop to think about them, and in Limbo, you never do. As Arthur's mind remembers how things should be, it starts to change the space around them.
He doesn't notice, but Eames does -- when he steps outside one morning to find a street running past their house. When the morning after that, there's a mailbox on the fencepost and another house down the road. When he takes the car that appears in the driveway out for a spin, and discovers that he and Arthur live on an acreage on the outskirts of an oceanside city. People start to populate it: a mailman, neighbours, pedestrians, until Limbo's empty spaces are filled with Arthur's projections.
Arthur won't go to the beach anymore. It's like there's something there he doesn't want to think about.
A calendar appears on the kitchen wall.
His steps are still silent, his balance perfect -- but inside the house Arthur walks around barefoot. He wears t-shirts, and jeans that have been worn into softness.
And he smiles. All the time.
Eames continues to bring Arthur coffee every morning to go with his newspaper, pretending that everything is lovely. That when Arthur looks at him now, like there's no one else in the world, he doesn't feel his chest clench for an entirely different reason.
They're invited to a barbecue.
"I hate barbecues."
"I don't care. You're coming with me. Try not to be an asshole," Arthur says, and kisses him on the cheek.
Eames goes. The experience is vaguely surreal. He makes small talk with the neighbours, feeling the whole time like he's engaging them in some sort of Turing test.
In dreams, projections are never more than two-dimensional. They walk and talk like dreamers; they'll laugh at your jokes, let you buy them a drink and take them home. But it's just surface play, so slick you can mistake it for depth. If you know you're dreaming, it's easy to see the cracks. Projections lack memory, any conception of selfhood. They only respond.
These projections, though -- they could fool even Eames. He puts a couple of slightly-burnt hamburgers on his plate and mingles with the crowd, awed at the way they interact with stubborn human innocence.
"Does John realise that his wife is sleeping with Gareth?" Eames says curiously as they walk home, carrying foil-wrapped leftovers.
"Shit, really?" Arthur shakes his head. "I don't understand why people do that."
And then, like it's the most natural thing in the world, he takes Eames' hand and laces their fingers together.
"What?" Arthur says after a while. "Why are you staring at me like that?"
"Nothing," Eames says, smiling.
Sometimes Eames wants to forget, even though he knows he can't.
A sick, guilty part of him enjoys it when Arthur yells at him to take out the garbage, or do a grocery run, or especially when he comes home after a long job. Arthur's subconscious has decided it's time for him to be working again, and his mind seamlessly creates the places he travels to, the people he's expecting.
Out of curiosity, Eames visits Paris when Arthur's not there. It's silent, emptied of projections. Arthur's apartment is fully realised, as is the route to his favourite bagel shop (complete with the crooked sign on the street-corner). So are his favourite restaurants and museums and parks. But past the limits of where Arthur goes, the places fade out. An aerial view would probably show a patchwork city, riddled with huge gaps and empty spaces. The whole thing has a post-apocalyptic chill, and it makes Eames feel incredibly lonely.
Today, Arthur's just come home from a two-week extraction in Germany. He's exhausted; he's happy. After dinner, they curl up together on the sofa. Eames notices a little spatter of blood on Arthur's collar.
"Difficult job, love?"
"The best kind," Arthur says, half-dozing with his head in Eames' lap.
He's letting his hair get long, long enough that Eames can run his fingers through it, rubbing Arthur's scalp in soothing circles. Here, at home, Arthur relaxes into himself. His trademark intensity is still there, but it's not focused on anything.
"What're you doing," Arthur murmurs.
"Watching you."
"That's nice." Arthur's eyes stay closed, but he demands, "Kiss me."
Eames laughs, and does.
Tonight Arthur will fall asleep on the couch, and Eames will have to carry him to the bedroom. He'll stir, of course, when Eames starts undressing him; his mouth and hands will fumble with sleepy want. And Eames will give in, like he always does. He'll turn him over and fuck him until Arthur comes apart. Afterwards, Arthur will fall asleep with a smile on his lips, and if he wakes in the night he'll reach for Eames without hesitation.
It isn't right.
He's wanted Arthur for years, but not like this -- domesticated, amnesic, his sharp edges eroded by Limbo, like a smooth stone on a beach.
Arthur's projection of Dom invites them over for dinner on a Saturday.
Arthur drives along the road, signals left, and turns. They park in front of Dom's apartment, the one he'd been renting when he met Eames (and through Eames, Mal). Arthur had lived there with Dom, until the engagement.
He takes a key from his pocket and lets them in.
"My right-hand man!" Dom calls from somewhere in the house. "Come here, I need you -- I think I burnt the sauce but I can't tell --"
Eames follows Arthur into the kitchen. Sketches are spread out over the tile floor; Eames steps on a pencil and hears it snap. Dom never did how to clean up after himself. Arthur picks his way through the mess easily, throwing his jacket on a chair. He rolls up his sleeves, manhandles Dom out of the way, and peers into the pan.
"Too bad neither of us know how to cook."
Arthur and Dom start arguing over what kind of take out to get. It's an old, familiar argument, judging from their laughter -- not really an argument at all. They're easy with each other, relaxed, sometimes not bothering to complete their thoughts out loud. Eames leans against the counter, watching.
Dom's looking at Arthur like he's the brightest thing in the room.
Maybe Dom used to look at him like that all the time, before he met Mal. Maybe even after. Maybe he was the very first person to do it, and Arthur never forgot.
But Arthur's projection is out of date. Eames hasn't seen that expression on Dom's face for years.
[8]
Ariadne's gone for five weeks. At the end of the fifth week, Eames remembers that there's something he once chose to forget.
And suddenly, he needs to remember.
In the living room, he lifts the Escher print from the wall. The safe is still there, right behind it. Eames has no idea what the code might be, but he's spent years performing extraction, and he breaks it in under ten minutes.
There's a single object inside the safe.
A tiny metal spinning-top.
Dom's totem.
Of course.
It's Dom they've been searching for. Dom's the thing keeping Arthur here, the thing he won't let go of. He always is.
The memory, locked away, comes back to him: the Fischer job, the dangers of sedation. On the first level, Dom had been taken out by a stray bullet, as they dragged Fischer into the warehouse. Arthur had materialised a gun, going down into Limbo after him, without even thinking about it, and Eames had done the same.
"I am where I do not think to think," says a voice behind him.
Eames turns to find Ariadne reaching over his shoulder, into the safe. She steps back and holds up the totem, examining it.
"Please tell me what the fuck is going on," says Eames. "I didn't put it here, but Arthur told me neither of you did."
"I lied to him," says Ariadne.
Eames pauses, then says: "That day on the beach. When you found something in the sand, and wouldn't show it to me. It was this."
"Yeah. He threw it away -- he's forgotten on purpose. I found him, you know. He's living on an island off the coast, a little to the north. With Mal. Well, with a projection of Mal. They're happy."
"Ariadne," Eames says flatly, "we've been here for over a year, and now you're telling me you hid the thing that could have led us to Dom?"
"Remember what Freud said? The dream is the fulfillment of a wish?" Ariadne slips the totems into her pocket and crosses her arms. "He also said, the fulfillment of a wish results in unpleasure. People don't let themselves get what they want, Eames. Even if it's right there for them to take. They're cowards, they find ways to defer it."
"You're not explaining yourself very well."
"You wanted Arthur," Ariadne continues. "But you've never let yourself claim him. You just keep letting him walk away, out of some misguided sense of honour. And he wouldn't let himself have you, because -- well, we both know why. Dom." Ariadne smiles, a half-smile that Eames doesn't exactly like. "So I had to make things easy for you two. Keep you here together, give Arthur some time to let go."
There's a silence, after which she says dryly: "There's this emptiness I feel when you're not around, Eames. It's like I'm not here at all."
She'd said she couldn't remember how she'd died, up in the first level.
Because she hadn't.
Ariadne smiles at him, and even now, there's nothing pernicious about her, nothing seductive, not like Dom's projection of Mal. This Ariadne has the same cheerful curiosity as the real one, the expression that's wide-eyed and ironic at the same time. It makes sense. Her purpose wasn't to guilt or to torment: it was to disarm.
"You fucking manipulative shit," Eames says finally.
"Hey, be nice. Projections only exist as an extension of the dreamer."
"Right, so what does that make you? Repression with a vendetta? My fucking id?"
Ariadne raises her eyebrows. She sounds almost like she's chastising Eames when she says, "You know it's not that simple."
Ariadne lets Eames think in silence. It doesn't take him very long to shuffle the pieces into order.
Eames remembers the day he first found her, on the clifftop. How lonely he'd been. How much he'd wanted Arthur. Ariadne had kept him company while he's waited, said things to Arthur that he hadn't had the courage to, made choices he hadn't wanted to touch.
"Why would I project you?"
"Why not?" Ariadne replies. "Arthur likes me, trusts me. So do you. You both seem to think I'm naive. I'm not a threat. I'm not a rival."
Not like Dom, she doesn't say.
He and Dom have known each other for years. For some of those, they were friends. But in the past decade, Dom's gotten Eames arrested six times, hospitalised twice, and tortured once. (On rainy days, Eames' left shoulder still aches.) He's also taken two of the things that Eames actually bothered to care about, and now one of them is gone.
Dom loved Mal with a frightening intensity; he still does.
And Arthur, he never loved at all. Eames can't forgive him for that.
"If you lost consciousness right now," Ariadne says, "you'd just accept what was around you when you woke up." It's not threatening, just contemplative -- the way she sounds when she's piecing together a building floorplan. "So if I wasn't there, you'd forget all about me. And if none of the totems were here, you wouldn't have to worry about reality, either."
"Stop it."
With a gesture, Ariadne makes the wall-safe disappear. "I could go give the kick to Dom, and then it would just be you and Arthur here. Doesn't a part of you want that?" She smiles brightly. "I'm a part of you. I want that."
"I don't. So shut the fuck up, please."
Ariadne ignores him. "I'd come back, of course. How much time would you want with him? A year? Two? Hey, goddamn it -- don't be like that -- Eames -- put the gun down, Eames."
She sounds surprised, though not very, as Eames flicks the safety off.
Eames says calmly, "I don't want to do this."
"Are you sure?" Ariadne says. She laughs, and it's more resigned than anything else. "Humans are just this mess of conflicting drives and instincts. You know that. It's why you love them. You are what you do, Eames. So who's going to win out? The ego or the id?"
"You know it's not that simple," Eames says, parroting her own words back to her. To himself, in a way. Jesus.
Ariadne closes her eyes.
"Look," she says finally, "whatever. I'm not going to sit here and debate personhood with myself. If that's what you want, do it. Just fucking do it. It'll make your superego feel better."
There's a long pause.
"Eames --"
He does it.
Afterwards, he swallows. Closes his eyes and just stands there for a while. He takes the totem from her pocket, then he picks the body up gently, carries it down to the beach, and lays it on the shore of his unconscious.
The tide will take it away.
Arthur is in the living room when Eames returns. He's sitting on the sofa, head in his hands. He glances up, eyes wide, as Eames kneels in front of him and says, "I need to tell you something."
And he does. He tells him every single fucking thing, in a voice so quiet it sometimes drops into a whisper. He looks straight into Arthur's eyes. He doesn't ask for forgiveness, because he's not sure if he deserves it.
Arthur's silent the whole time -- but it's strange; as Eames speaks the tension drains out of his body, not the other way around.
"Thank god," Arthur says when Eames is done, and kisses him. There's no hunger in it, just a sweet breath of relief.
"Arthur?" he asks, tentative.
Arthur leans back, pulling into himself until they're not touching anymore. Eames lets him do it, even though his body screams no.
"You knew," Eames realises.
"Only since this afternoon. I came home from Dom's place early" -- Arthur's mouth twists, as he considers what his Dom is, and isn't -- "and I heard you and ... her, talking. I stopped on the stairs. I listened."
"You didn't say anything."
Arthur looks away. His voice goes hard when he says, "I had to know whether you would tell me the truth. If you hadn't --"
He stops, and then adds, softer: "But you did."
As if he's going to touch Eames, he shifts forward. But he stops halfway, saying, "Give me some time."
Eames wants to reach for him, to cup his jaw and kiss him, gentle and deep. But something about Arthur is still hesitant. It wouldn't be right, if he did it now, and Arthur confirms that thought by getting up. Eames steps back to let him have space. "Wait," Eames says. He holds out Dom's totem for Arthur to take.
Arthur's almost out the door when he turns around. The words come out rough, like he doesn't want to say them out loud: "I think I'm in love with you." And then he goes.
In Limbo, it's easy to create.
It's easy to be -- the self you've always wanted, without the weight of reality.
It's easy to forget.
In the shadow of every thing lurks its opposite, outside of dreams. Desire and fear, happiness and sadness, virtue and vice. People exist as as wholes, contradictions hanging in balance. Here, though, you can suspend gravity. You can tilt the scales, creating perfection. A rebirth into an endless death.
If asked, Eames would have said no. No, don't try to shove the parts of me I don't want under the rug -- keep the resentment and the guile where I can see them, where they can't do any harm. He's not even sure if they're his sins, but he can't live with the weight of them.
He wants to atone for what he's done. If he can. If it's him who did it, in the end.
Eames waits.
[9]
For once, he doesn't have to wait long.
Arthur comes back to him the next day. He presses himself into Eames' arms the moment the door opens, kissing him with hunger. It takes him a while to notice that Eames is passive, not kissing back. "What's wrong?" he asks, bewildered.
Eames pulls away, going to close the door. "Where's Dom?"
"Gone," Arthur says. "I found him. Gave him the kick, told him we'd follow. I wanted us to have another day together." When Eames stays silent, he adds, "I'm not angry, Eames."
"What I did --" He manipulates people for a living; he does it almost without thinking. But it's something he's never wanted to do to Arthur.
"But you didn't," Arthur says. He frowns. "Dom and I talked about this. His projection of Mal got me alone, once. She tied me to a chair. She -- burned me, and electrocuted me. She cut my skin off, in chunks. I kept passing out."
"Jesus."
"Yeah." Arthur laughs, hollow. "He almost wouldn't work with me again, after that one. My point is -- Dom's never going to forgive himself for those things. But he didn't do them. It's not like he wanted them to happen."
"A part of me might have," Eames says.
There's something honest in Arthur's voice when he says, "It doesn't matter, though. You made your choices. You waited, you told me the truth. Even back when Dom and I were on the run -- god, I owe you so many fucking favours that if you sold my soul the Supreme Court wouldn't complain. And you never called them in, you never made me do anything."
Eames lets Arthur kiss him.
Arthur runs his tongue along the seam of Eames' lips, and when they part, the kiss turns into something gentle, breathless. It feels like absolution.
"I want to show you something," Arthur says, leading Eames upstairs.
On the floor of the bedroom closet is a chest. Inside of it are maps of Limbo, detailed and methodical, labelled in Arthur's neat writing. He must have drawn them as he searched.
The northern coastline, where Dom had been living all along, is terra incognita. Blank on the map. Unexplored.
"I never went there," Arthur says. "It was like my mind didn't want to. When I told myself I had to go north, it would get too cold, or I'd be too tired. Or something. And I'd find a reason to come back. Every time."
They spend their last day quietly, taking comfort in routines: making dinner together, washing the dishes. Arthur looks for excuses to touch him, and Eames pretends not to notice. Every touch has an urgency to it, a feeling of finality.
At night, they undress each other slowly, like they're trying to map, to memorise.
Arthur press him into the bed and explores every inch of his skin. He kisses Eames for ages, precise and devastating, their skin touching everywhere, their cocks nudging together slowly.
The slow burn builds inside them both, and it's unbearable.
He could turn it desperate, he knows -- get Arthur on his back, pin his wrists, kiss him slick and deep until he's begging for a cock in his mouth, in his ass, anything. Instead, Eames puts a hand in the small of Arthur's back and lets Arthur direct him.
Eames can feel his skin heating up until he's flushed and trembling, writhing in the sheets as Arthur sucks bruises into his neck, bites down on his collarbone. Arthur doesn't let up, his hips keeping Eames pinned, and it's so good. Eames can't get enough of Arthur's mouth, of his skin; he wants so badly to be fucked, to have Arthur inside of him.
"Arthur, please." His voice comes out hoarse, wrecked. "I want --"
But it's not about what he wants, tonight. It's about what Arthur wants, so Eames stays pliant and obedient and lets Arthur make demands of his body.
He works his way down Eames' chest, a slow drag of tongue and teeth across his tattoos, and lower. He takes Eames' cock into the wet heat of his mouth, his tongue licking up and down the underside; he lets Eames fuck into him like that, as the minutes stretch out and time loses meaning.
Eames feels the orgasm curling in the base of his spine, and manages, "You need to stop."
When Arthur comes up to kiss him, it's filthy: his mouth is warm, his lips slick and reddened. He gets a hand underneath Eames' hip and flips him over, silent and exact, and Eames lies there obediently, shivering into the sheets and waiting for the press of fingers.
But then Arthur kisses in between his shoulderblades; he trails his tongue down Eames' spine. Eames moans, his cock pressing swollen and heavy against the softness of the blankets as Arthur's tongue reaches the small of his back, slipping lower, licking at his hole until he can't take it anymore.
He gets on his hands and knees, and Arthur puts a hand on his hip to hold him there.
Finally, the blunt tip of his cock nudges up against Eames, into him; one sharp thrust and he's inside, his breath coming fast and shallow.
Arthur fucks him, hard, and Eames can feel Arthur's hands pressing the bruises into his hips like he's taking a punishment out of Eames' skin. He moans softly and lets him, lets Arthur fuck him deep and hard and unforgiving until Eames can't even think anymore, just move, just feel.
It doesn't take long -- he's been on the edge ever since Arthur put his mouth on him. When he comes, Arthur doesn't let up. He fucks Eames through his orgasm, and past it, his lips brushing Eames' shoulder, and Eames can't do anything about it but let Arthur fuck him until he comes.
After, the desperation melts out of them, leaving them tangled and trembling. They sleep, never not touching.
In the morning, when they walk away from the house, they leave it intact.
On the clifftop, Eames makes a picnic basket and opens it up: sandwiches cut into quarters, a bottle of ice wine, and lemon sorbet that won't melt. Then he spends an hour dreaming up cloud-shapes -- ridiculous, exquisite, lewd -- to make Arthur laugh.
Lying side-by-side in the grass, they lapse into silence. The sky goes clear blue again. It's sunny, because they want it to be.
"After the inception takes," Arthur says, "there's a position for Dom at the university. He's going to settle down. No more jobs. He wants me to go with him."
"Will you?"
Arthur tugs Eames closer, pressing his nose into the juncture between Eames' neck and his jaw. It tickles. "I was going to. But now I won't."
Eames breathes.
"What we have here," Arthur says. "I don't know if we can have it, up there. I'm ... happy." He sounds confused about that fact. "But our lives, dreamsharing, there's so much that's missing. I'm not, I can't just -- settle, yet. Maybe ever. I don't know what I want. What you want --"
He stops, making a small, frustrated noise.
"Ssh," Eames says. He puts a hand overtop Arthur's mouth.
"Eames," Arthur protests, muffled.
"I want you, if you'll have me."
Arthur's frown disappears; then it comes back again. "It's not that easy."
"It can be."
At the edge of the cliff, the military precision steals back into Arthur's body like a loose thread pulled tight. He stands calm, looking down at his death with a smile. The waters below are broken up by sharp rocks; a riptide makes sure they'll get there.
Arthur turns his head and takes a moment to look at Eames, wonderingly. "You waited a long time for me," he says. "Longer than I deserved."
"Make it worth my while, darling."
"I will."
He slips their hands together.
They step off the edge.
[10]
Limbo fades upon waking.
You don't remember all of it, just like you don't remember all of a dream. If you close your eyes and try to hold on, sifting through the memories before they fade, more of it stays. But in time, the details blur away. Reality replaces them.
It's the feeling that lasts -- the touch-memories, the emotions.
The plane touches down at LAX. Inside of it are six people who have just done the impossible. At the airport, they try not to smile at each other too much, and they go their separate ways.
In the time it takes Eames to blink, Arthur disappears.
Eames goes to London, and settles into his flat. He has Arthur's number, but he won't call it. There's no more to say. He's done all that he can. He has for years.
Eames waits.
Nineteen days after the Fischer job ends, Arthur knocks on his door.
He's wearing jeans and a t-shirt and a smile. There's more than one suitcase on the ground behind him.
Tentative, Eames puts a hand on Arthur's waist and asks, "Do you remember?"
Arthur steps in so close that Eames can smell a hint of coffee; then he reaches out, ghosting his fingers along Eames' jaw. It's gentle and slow, like he can afford to take his time now.
"Yes."
--
There is no discipline of forgetting.
-- Umberto Eco