arctic dreams

[wldnst]

.arctic dreams
arthur is a marine biologist. eames is his rival, but eames doesn't know that. written for this prompt.
pg13 . 4727
notes: title shamelessly lifted from barry lopez's wonderful 'arctic dreams', which has much more literary and scientific merit than this.


Arthur had to stop watching the Discovery Channel because of Dr. Howard “call me Eames” Eames. Also, Animal Planet, and certain late night talk shows. It was a shame, really, because Arthur actually enjoyed the Discovery Channel. He hadn’t even minded when they booked Eames for a special every other month, until they started airing ads with Eames fat face in them every single day.

Not that Eames’ face was fat. But, you know, figure of speech. And the camera adds ten pounds. It looked fat, was the point, when slapped up on screen during the Deadliest Catch commercial breaks, or when Eames walked across the bottom of the screen during the actual Deadliest Catch itself, which was the fucking worst. So maybe Eames did look fat, like his cheeks were full of NSF grant money that Arthur fully deserved. But that train of thought brought only danger, and late nights making endless bowls of popcorn drizzled with honey and watching the BBC Oceans series, or listening to the dulcet tones of David Attenborough as he narrated any Planet Earth episode that took place underwater (there were three).

That made it sound like Arthur watched far more television than he actually did. It was just that, when you’d been stuck in the lab and behind desks since finishing your post-doc, you got a little antsy. And while Arthur could acknowledge that Cordylophora penrose was tiny, that didn’t mean he could just make do with the samples his colleagues collected on their research trips and brought back on the plane.

For one, half the specimens were dead when they got back. For two, Arthur’s training was in fucking marine ecology, and he didn’t want to read other people’s shitty field notes and extrapolate the ecology from there. It was unscientific.

So Arthur’s life had transformed into a catch-22: he was stuck taking crap assistant professor jobs and failed to get funding, because he couldn’t get legit research published, because he couldn’t get funding, because he couldn’t get legit research published, because he didn’t have enough funding to actually do the research. He had a tiny lab with no windows on the cold side of the building, and one undergraduate research assistant who was paid with credit hours instead of actual money. And she was actually paying for those credit hours, and that money was siphoned off to something other than Arthur’s fucking lab, which was bullshit, too. He had to culture the Artemia to feed the hydroids himself, for one, and the crap pet store tanks they had to use were constantly getting contaminated and killing off Cordy in droves.

So he watched the Discovery Channel in his apartment after work, to relive his glory days, paying his way through college with a summer job fishing salmon in Alaska, doing his PhD research on Cordylophora in Turkey. And now that a new species of Cordylophora had been identified with anti-freeze proteins and huge invasive potential, what could Arthur do about it? Run experiments in the fucking lab and beg samples off his colleagues.

Then Eames had to come along and ruin Arthur’s one escape, after already stealing Arthur’s career. Eames and Arthur had both done their degrees at Duke, and back then Eames was just an annoying punk who only cared about charismatic megafauna (and Arthur knew it was the ocean, and the last great frontier and shit, but shouldn’t everyone have figured out everything about the big stuff already?) and Arthur was the star. Then Eames had to go and study whale sharks, Rhincodon typus, for his post-doc, the biggest fucking fish in the world, and suddenly he starts gobbling up grants. Like a whale shark gobbling up plankton.

Then, and if this doesn’t add insult to injury Arthur doesn’t know what does, Eames, because he’s a fickle bastard, makes a couple breakthroughs on whale sharks and switches to Monodon monoceros. So now he’s going to the Arctic. Where Arthur should be tracking the northernmost extent Cordylophora inceptus. But no, because Arthur has no funding and needs to teach undergraduates the difference between plankton and nekton until May.

Arthur’s one consolation is that someone who studies the biggest fish in the world and then switches to whales with giant tusks growing out their jaws has got to be compensating for something.

So that’s why Arthur turns off the TV. What happens next, he doesn’t entirely expect.

His phone rings.

It turns out Arthur’s maternal grandfather has died, and Arthur’s up ten thousand dollars. And he should really, really feel something other than pleasure at this news, because this is his grandfather, but ten thousand dollars is enough to get himself and a research assistant up to the Arctic circle, and if Arthur has to fund his own research, he’ll do it. Also, Arthur’s grandfather was about due to die, and, additionally, kind of an asshole. So if his death is the deus ex machina that gets Arthur’s life back on track, Arthur will take it, no questions asks.

“Ariadne,” Arthur says the next day in lab. “What are you doing this summer?”

“Reading in the hammock,” Ariadne says. “Why?”

“Well, it happens that I’ve come in to a little cash,” Arthur says.

“Arthur,” she says, giving him a withering look. “If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times, I will not be your live-in data entry slave. For no amount of money in the world.”

“You could call me Doctor,” Arthur suggests.

“No.”

“Well, I was going to offer to pay you to come to Svalbard with me, but if you aren’t interested...” Arthur tails off.

“Svalbard?” Ariadne says. “Well, fuck me. Your wish is my command, Dr. Goldin.”

“Ugh, just call me Arthur,” Arthur says. “But you’re doing all the data entry.”

“If you don’t help with data entry, I won’t help you when you get stuck with R.”

“I don’t know why I put up with you,” Arthur says, and Ariadne grins.

“Because you hate training people.”

“Well, there is that.”

“So let’s shake on it, then.”

So they do, and then Arthur sets up a new Artemia culture, and sends e-mails to his contacts in Ny-Ålesund.

One month, two weeks, and three days later, Arthur and Ariadne are on a flight to Amsterdam. From there they have a connection to Oslo, and they’ll stay the night there before flying up to Longyearben and from there, finally, to Ny-Ålesund. Arthur had borrowed equipment from the university and made up a grant named after his grandfather to explain his sudden influx of funding, and all is right with the world.

Until the person in seat 12C boards their flight to Amsterdam. Ariadne is 12A (window) which put Arthur in 12B (middle) because Ariadne had sat in the middle on the flight to New York and a baby had, for all intents and purposes, eaten her sleeve.

Arthur can hear a man with a British accent flirting with the flight attendants, and when a flash of paisley appears in the aisle, it’s apparent that’s the flirt. When he turns and shoves his luggage into the overhead compartment across the aisle, Arthur does not check out his ass, and if his shirt lifts and exposes a strip of skin, Arthur does not notice. Because he’s wearing paisley, and Arthur emphatically refuses to look twice at anyone wearing paisley, even if they do have lovely broad shoulders and might be sitting next to him for the next seven hours.

The man in the paisley shirt, the loud flirty British man in the paisley shirt, sits down next to Arthur. He sticks out a hand.

“Hello, loves,” he says. “I’m Eames.”

Arther manages not to punch him in the face, but just barely.

“Ariadne,” says Ariadne, turning away from the window and looking uncertainly at Arthur. Arthur realizes that maybe bitching about Eames publicly and constantly wasn’t a great way to retain his vestiges of authority and professionalism, but he nods a little at Ariadne, who shakes Eames’ hand.

Arthur is still clutching his right wrist with his left hand, to prevent punching. But his hand is turning white, and Eames is sort of looking at it, so he frees and extends it.

“Arthur,” he says, and Eames looks at him more closely.

“Arthur!” he exclaims. “Arthur Goldin!”

Arthur squints at Eames, who is beaming at him, bizarrely.

“It’s Howard Eames! Remember, from Duke?” Eames continues. “The grand old alma mater.”

“I know who you are, Eames,” Arthur says.

“Well why didn’t you say anything?” Eames asks. “I’d heard you were coming to Ny-Ålesund, didn’t expect to share a flight. It’s been awhile, eh? You haven’t changed a bit!”

Arthur gapes at Eames a little. He really, really, wishes there was a subtle way to ask Ariadne to switch seats.

“Ariadne’s my research assistant,” he says, instead. If the segue in any way confuses Eames, he doesn’t show it.

“That’s great,” Eames says. “I can’t get a research assistant, you know. Can’t find the funding.”

Arthur is pretty sure he’s opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish (Carassius auratus auratus), right now. And then suddenly his hand is holding Eames chin firmly in his grasp, and he is pulling their faces together.

“Can’t find the funding?” Arthur hisses. “Can’t find the fucking funding? When I swear you’ve gotten every single grant I’ve applied for with your fucking useless narwhal shit, charismatic megafauna what the fuck.”

Arthur pushes Eames away from him and turns to Ariadne.

“I think,” he says. “We should switch seats.”

Arthur thinks he handled that well. And if Eames keeps staring him, and if Arthur reads the same article about Atlanta in the in-flight magazine twenty-three times without ever managing to finish it or fall asleep, no one has to know.

Except Eames, who doesn’t seem to be sleeping, either, and is half the reason Arthur can’t.

Eames is everywhere after that: on their flight to Oslo, in their hotel, eating open-faced egg sandwiches at the free breakfast, and then he joins them on the increasingly small planes that bring them to Svalbard, and then, finally, to Ny-Ålesund.

The night they got to Oslo, Ariadne talked to Arthur like he might break, and after they turned off the lights in their tiny hotel room, Arthur on the bottom bunk and Ariadne on the top, she whispered down to him, “Arthur, Eames isn’t as bad as you think,” and Arthur pretended to be asleep.

So Arthur doesn’t know if it’s jet lag, or Eames, or Ariadne treating him like he is a child and she is the kindest mother, but when they land in Ny-Ålesund he wants to cry. He thinks maybe it’s Ny-Ålesund itself, which looks like everything he ever imagined, cold and sparse and so, so bright, with lovely little buildings painted every which color, as if to remind themselves that colors exist in this spartan landscape.

When they get off the plane Arthur breathes in the cold air, hefts his bag, and manages not to cry. Instead he waves, because he sees Yusuf standing by the airstrip.

“I’ve got a truck ready to move your stuff over to the AML and the bunkhouse,” Yusuf says, referring to the lab where Arthur’s renting space, and he and Ariadne begin to load everything up into the truck’s bed, while Yusuf goes over to greet Eames, thumping him on the back and exclaiming loudly. Of course Yusuf and Eames are friends. Arthur wishes the scientific community wasn’t so ridiculously inbred, but it’s like wishing for all the snow on Svalbard to melt and hell to freeze over and a million impossible things.

Eames comes over, hefting one of Arthur’s bags.

“Careful with that,” Arthur says sharply, and Eames tosses it in the truck.

“No worries, mate,” he says easily. “Just trying to help.”

All that means is that now Arthur has to go carry one of Eames’ bags. He picks one of the bigger ones, just to show he can, only it’s full of clothes or something, and not particularly heavy. Which is typical, really.

They all squeeze into the front bench of the truck, and Yusuf drives them over to the bunkhouse. Eames’ thigh is warm against his, but Arthur tries not to notice.

Eames is in the same bunkhouse. And there’s a mens’ wing and a womens’, so Arthur is stuck sleeping with him, or near him. Eames calls top bunk, of course. Not that Arthur wanted it, but he doesn’t want to sleep under Eames all summer, either.

That night in the bathroom Eames and Arthur stand at sinks side by side and brush their teeth in silence, and Arthur thinks to himself that Svalbard was supposed to be a solution to seeing Eames every night on the television, and now Arthur has to see him every night in the bathroom. Which is exponentially worse, especially given the fact that Eames sleeps shirtless despite being at 78 degrees north.

“Hypothesis,” Ariadne says the next day, when they’re preparing to take a boat Arthur has rented out for samples and Arthur is complaining about Eames inexplicable inability to clothe himself. “Eames slept with you in grad school, and then tragically jilted you, and that’s why you’re so unreasonable about him.”

“What?” Arthur looks up from fiddling with his life jacket, startled. “No. And no experiment you could do could prove that, so.”

“I could ask Eames,” Ariadne suggests.

“Eames is a liar,” Arthur says.

“No experiment you could do could prove that,” Ariadne says, raising her voice several octaves and sticking a finger up her nose.

“I could ask Eames a series of randomly generated questions to which I know the answers, and if he lies a statistically significant amount of the time, then he’s a scientifically proven liar.”

“But your question base might be skewed towards things people lie about, like their weight and whether they slept with their colleagues,” Ariadne suggests, somehow making colleague sound like a dirty word.

“I don’t sleep with my colleagues,” Arthur frowns.

“You don’t sleep with anyone,” Ariadne says, which is, okay, touche. The truth is that it’s just been awhile, but Arthur knows if he tells Ariadne how long she’ll just mock him some more.

Arthur puts his binoculars and compass around his neck and clambers into the skiff while Ariadne hands over dry sacks containing their equipment. She climbs in the boat then, too, and Arthur yanks the pull cord with his whole body. It takes six tries before the engine putters to life, and when Arthur looks up Eames is applauding from the shore. Arthur undoes the cleat hitches that hold the boat to the dock, gives Eames the finger (and, just to be safe, a two-fingered salute), and steers out to sea.

Well, not precisely out to sea; their boat is too small for it, so they putter along the shore, going into inlets at regular intervals to collect samples. There’s a method, of course: today they’re sampling inlets, and later they’ll sample the inland glacial streams, and later still the open ocean.

Mostly Arthur is just happy to be outside and taking detailed notes in his Rite-in-the-Rain notebook. When they stop to eat lunch Ariadne looks at him, squints a little, and says, “Are you actually smiling?”

Arthur tries to frown, but it hurts his face a little. “Yes,” he says, finally.

Ariadne grins.

“I like it here,” she says.

They do inland surveys the next day, and then run some lab tests on the Cordylophora they find to test for anti-freeze proteins the the day after that. That pattern seems to work, so that’s what they settle on: two days in the field, one day in the lab. The thing about Svalbard in the summer is that it never gets dark, which should be obvious but there’s something about the reality of it that surpasses Arthur’s expectations. They work until ten at night daily, and he doesn’t even notice.

Arthur and Ariadne (and Eames) have been on Svalbard for a week when Dominic and Mal Cobb get in. Yusuf insists that they all need to eat together, by which he means himself and Cobb and Mal and Eames and Arthur, because they all went to school together, even though it’s not like they were friends.

Correction: Eames and Arthur weren’t friends. But Arthur was friends with Cobb and Mal and Yusuf, and Eames was friends with Cobb and Mal and Yusuf, and Cobb and Mal and Yusuf were friends with each other, so.

They actually had a few of dinners like this when they were in graduate school, but Arthur always sat at the opposite end of the table from Eames, and whenever he reminisced about those meals he’d just pretend Eames hadn’t been there.

Ariadne comes, too, because she’s Arthur’s research assistant. And it’s not like you can not invite someone to the mess hall.

They talk about their research, mostly; Yusuf is a geochemist studying the glaciers, and Cobb and Mal are climatologists, and Eames is studying fucking narwhals. Arthur, of course, is studying the population spread and adaptations of the invasive hydroid Cordylophora inceptus, which is very important if not as easy to market as the rest. When he comments on this Eames, who is sitting next to Arthur despite what happened the last time he sat next to Arthur, pats him on the back.

“Don’t worry, darling, if you keep putting together stuff like that last paper you did in Biological Invasions I’m sure you’ll make the cover of Nature any day now.”

Arthur is not sure if Eames is being sarcastic or not, but glares at him just to be on the safe side.

Ariadne changes the subject, and soon they’re trading stories about their graduate years.

“I ate ramen noodles my entire first year,” Eames says. “I swear. Arthur, on the other hand, had a sugar daddy.”

“I did not,” Arthur says, frowning. “Just because my stipend was bigger than yours.”

“No advisor needs to meet with his advisee every other day,” Eames says, and Arthur glares at him again. Everyone else at the table looks like they’re beginning to develop headaches. “And you went around in all those sweater vests.”

“Sweater vests,” Arthur says. “Aren’t sexy. They’re comfortable. I lose body heat from my torso very easily.”

Eames stares at him.

“Arthur,” Mal says. “Sweater vests are sexy if you have a kink for underage schoolboys.”

Arthur turns bright red, he can feel it, and everyone at the table is sort of nodding, except Ariadne, who is biting her hand to keep from laughing.

“Okay,” Yusuf says, clapping his hands together. “What are everyone’s plans for tomorrow?”

“I’ve got a satellite tracker on a nar that’s real close to the shore up north, so I’m heading up to check it out,” Eames says.

“Inlet surveys,” Ariadne and Arthur say, almost simultaneously.

“Jinx,” Ariadne says. “You do data entry.”

Arthur punches her, but lightly, because you shouldn’t abuse undergraduates or research assistants.

“Actually,” Eames says. “Where are you surveying?”

“Up in Widgefjorden,” Ariadne volunteers.

“Can I hitch a ride up there? The boat I work with doesn’t usually go so close to the coast, it’ll save me some cash.”

Ariadne looks at Arthur.

“Fine,” he sighs. Not being a complete asshole sucks.

“I can help with your surveys, too,” Eames offers. “It’ll be great.”

Arthur corners Cobb alone after dinner, when they’re walking from the mess hall to the bunkhouse.

“Why didn’t you tell me Eames would be here?” he asks.

“Seriously?” Cobb says. “I do you a favor, get you lab space, and you just want to know why I didn’t protect you from Howard Eames?”

When Cobb puts it like that it sounds unreasonable.

“Yes,” says Arthur.

“Arthur, Eames isn’t as bad as you think,” Cobb says, and he sounds exactly like Ariadne, which makes Arthur scowl. Cobb is not his research assistant, and they are not in a hotel room with the shades down, so Arthur can’t pretend to be asleep.

It’s times like these that Arthur wishes he was a narcoleptic, although he realizes narcolepsy probably doesn’t work the same way it does in movies.

“He took the bunk on top of mine,” Arthur says, and Cobb squints his eyes, against the sun or in annoyance Arthur’s not sure, and looks at him like he’s stupid.

“Arthur,” Cobb says, still squinting. “If I didn’t know you were such a good researcher, your distinct lack of observational skills would be disturbing.”

Arthur decides to hold on to the good researcher bit and ignore the rest.

The next morning Eames talks to Arthur incessantly while they’re getting dressed, even though Arthur refuses to respond until he’s had his coffee. The narwhal they’re looking for is a male, it turns out, and Eames really appreciates this, and his supplies shouldn’t take up too much extra space in the skiff. It goes on like this all through breakfast, until they’re finally on the dock. Arthur manages to start the boat on the first try, which is a relief, because if Eames offered to do it for him Arthur thinks he’d kill himself.

“PFD, on,” Arthur says, pointing to the life jacket on the floor when Ariadne goes to untie them from the dock.

“I can swim,” Eames says, and Arthur shrugs.

“It’s your life.”

“Hey,” Eames says as they head out of Kongsfjorden. “Some Discovery Channel folks are coming up next week to film me, you should talk to them.”

Arthur is glad he needs to hold the motor steady to keep them on course, because it’s times like these that he really wants to punch Eames in his preternaturally large mouth.

“I saw you on David Letterman once,” Ariadne says, and so then Eames starts talking about that while Arthur sulks in the aft of the boat.

When they get to Widgefjorden Eames takes out his tracking equipment and fiddles with that while Ariadne and Arthur begin their sampling. It’s a nice day out, and the sky is completely clear and the light is astonishingly bright, reflecting off the snow and occasionally fragmenting into rainbows. Arthur tries to think about these things and not the fact that Eames is in the boat with them, and so never more than sixteen feet away.

He’s taking notes in his Rite-in-the-Rain notebook when Eames interrupts him.

“You’re smiling,” he says, sounding strangely awed.

Arthur schools his face into a frown, but it’s uncomfortable.

“Arthur likes it out here,” Ariadne says, speaking for him.

“You have dimples,” Eames says, and goes back to what he’s doing. Now Arthur is staring at him.

Eames needs to get a triangulation on his narwhal, so they move around to the other side of the fjord and Ariadne and Arthur continue to take samples. They stop for lunch and Ariadne explains their methodology to Eames, who catches on pretty quick, Arthur has to admit, and then suddenly it’s getting late and they need to head back.

The chop is picking up when they leave the fjord, but Arthur’s seen worse before, and he’s always liked the bounce of the skiff when it slams across waves.

“Everything in dry sacks?” he shouts to the other two, and after they nod he brings the boat up on plane, and they start pounding the waves. Ariadne’s hair is moving like it’s alive, becoming a tangled mess, and Arthur can feel his doing the same, and he should really get it cut. Eames is in the bow like a figurehead, and they’re all laughing because they’re fucking alive, they are going fast and they can feel the thuds off every wave with all the bones in their bodies, they are up past the Arctic Circle and they’re on top of the world in every sense.

Then they come down off one wave particularly hard, and there’s water sloshing over the bow, and Eames isn’t sitting there any more.

“FUCK,” Arthur shouts, and he pulls the kill cord and is out of the boat before he can think of anything else, before he can think about the rescue rope somewhere in the bottom of the boat, and everything he knows about rescuing someone who has fallen overboard, and how cold the water is.

What Arthur is thinking about is Eames: Eames when they were in seminar together, as graduate students, Eames with his stupidly large mouth and his lovely, lovely arms. Eames staring at him, with something in his eyes that Arthur can’t quite grasp. Eames saying stupid shit. Eames and his whale sharks, and his narwhals, and Eames walking across the bottom of the screen during Deadliest Catch. Eames on the airplane, when Arthur was holding their faces so close together he could see everything, every pore, the lines in his irises. Eames’ paper on whale sharks in Nature, which was kind of brilliant. Eames brushing his teeth with no shirt on in the bathroom. Eames talking about Arthur’s dimples.

Eames and Eames and Eames and Eames.

The water is cold, and when it hits him, when the frigidity hits him, Arthur knows he only has a few seconds. He can see a shock of light brown hair bobbing over the next wave, and he hears Ariadne saying something but he can’t comprehend what, and then his arm is under Eames’ arms, and he is towing him back to the boat.

For once being a life guard in college is paying off.

Ariadne reaches out her hand over, and Arthur is so, so grateful he taught her how to bring a body back on board, because Eames is practically useless, and it’s a small blessing that he seems to know enough not to thrash about.

Ariadne reaches for Arthur next, and when he’s back in the boat she looks at him.

“You,” she says. “Are such a dumbass.”

And then she fishes around in one of the dry sacks for their emergency thermal blankets, and hands one to Arthur and one to Eames, who is peeling off his wet layers and putting on his life jacket, and in Arthur’s opinion late is not better than never right now.

“I’ll bring us home,” she says, and starts the engine.

Despite peeling off his wet outer layers and wearing the thermal blanket, Arthur is shivering within five minutes. Eames, who has been silent this whole time, looks at him.

“Losing body heat through your torso?” he asks, and Arthur frowns. Eames hesitates, then opens his arms and exposes his bare chest.

“Come here, Arthur. I’ll keep you warm,” he says.

Arthur looks at him, and suddenly his body is wracked with shivers, and he moves towards Eames on the bench, and curls into him, and with both their thermal blankets wrapped around and the warmth that Eames is radiating like a furnace, he begins to feel okay.

Ariadne brings them back as fast as she can without getting properly up on plane, and then she ties the boat to the dock and looks and Eames and Arthur. She sighs.

“You’re both dumbasses,” she says. “I’ll unload the boat. Go back to the bunkhouse.”

So Eames and Arthur walk back to the bunkhouse with their thermal blankets wrapped around them, and when they get there they both strip off the remainder of their wet clothes.

“You can shower first,” Eames says, looking at his feet, and Arthur knows that’s as close as he’s going to get to an apology.

“Eames,” Arthur says, and he desperately hopes this is the right thing. “I was thinking we could shower together.”

The look on Eames’ face says that was the right thing, exactly.

So they do.

And if that night, after dinner, Arthur crawls into Eames’ sleeping bag and Eames whispers, “I’ve been waiting so long” and quietly peels off his infinite layers of clothing, sweaters and baselayers and longjohns and underwear, if that happens, no one has to know.

Except Eames.