Work Text:
Oh, hells. Eames groaned. He'd have known that slim, dark-haired form anywhere. He also knew it was scheduled to be in Antwerp just then, and not decorating the drab conference room in what was supposed to be Eames' headquarters for the next several weeks.
The extractor, Thanh Hoang, glanced up from his screen, catching sight of Eames where he'd paused just inside the door. "Good, you made it. Eames, this is Arthur, our point man. I believe you've worked together before?"
"Indeed," said Eames. "Arthur. The little black cloud in a suit."
Arthur's narrow, handsome face, which had been carefully schooled into a neutral expression, went rigid with fury. His mouth thinned, the proffered hand fell limply to his side, and he turned on his heel and stalked away without a word.
Thanh was livid. "If I'd known there was bad blood between the two of you, I'd have called someone else, Eames. What in God's name --"
Eames' response was succinct. "Exes."
That job went tits up in a hurry, as Eames could have predicted. Arthur refused to speak to or look at him, instead producing copious written memoranda whenever he needed to communicate with Eames. On his part, Eames found it nearly impossible to refrain from sardonic asides, expertly needling Arthur in all the ways he knew, from long experience, would best get under Arthur's skin.
Thanh shouted, scolded, pleaded, threatened, and finally simply threw both of them out. Arthur broke his self-imposed silence to hiss "this is your fault," but otherwise continued to ignore Eames as he swept his laptop and research into a messenger bag and stalked out.
***************************
The second time they tried to work the same job after Mal's death was with Cobb extracting and Eames forging. They only got paid for that one because Cobb was actually every bit as good as everyone said he was; he'd managed to memorize the mark's formulae while running flat-out from a mob.
Arthur, who was supposed to be guarding Cobb's back, had hit his limit and turned his considerable ferocity on Eames instead of the projections, after one particularly well-timed insult. Breaking Arthur's nose had been incredibly cathartic. Eames only regretted that it had happened in the dream instead of real life.
***************************
The grapevine informed Eames, later, that Arthur was working exclusively with Cobb, and that they were taking on true bottom-of-the-barrel, unnecessarily dangerous jobs. Word was that Cobb was looking for any money he could find to pay for his legal defense. Word also was that there was something dangerous on the prowl in Cobb's subconscious. As a result, most competent dreamworkers, Eames included, refused to take jobs with Cobb and, consequently, with Arthur.
Eames told himself he didn't care what Arthur did anymore, or who he worked with, or how many chances he took by associating himself with Cobb's rapid downward spiral.
****************************
By the time Cobb approached him and began blethering about inception, the intervening time and Eames' own considerable curiosity had got the better of his anger. The thought that this mad endeavor might finally be what sent Cobb home and freed Arthur to be his own man again tipped the scale, and he found himself agreeing to forge for the job. He put in the two weeks in Sydney to study Browning, and then, not without trepidation, greeted Arthur in the Paris warehouse.
He was relieved to find that Arthur was civil, if not exactly friendly. Eames could work with civil.
He still had a hard time restraining himself from poking Arthur, but Arthur seemed to have developed either better self-control or a sense of humor over the intervening years, and they were both aware that the difficulty of the job required both of their formidable skills and a complete mutual awareness of all necessary information. An unspoken truce formed, at least for the duration of the job.
When they learned that not only was Fischer militarized, but that the Somnacin blend would cause them to fall into Limbo if they died in the dream, Eames finally allowed himself to drop the pretense that he didn't care what happened to Arthur. He startled himself by manifesting a grenade launcher to dispatch snipers that were trading fire with Arthur in the first level, and was more startled to hear an errant "darling" slip out. He didn't miss Arthur's dumbfounded reaction to the endearment, but it was neither the time nor the place to get into that.
On the second level, Arthur almost automatically knelt to assist him with the cannula, and Eames let his candid concern show in his face and voice as he reminded Arthur that security was going to run him down hard. He was surprised and delighted by Arthur's cheeky response, and was still smiling as he dropped under to the third level.
He pressed the detonator in the hospital, and his eyes opened briefly on the second level in -- was it an elevator? and why, Arthur, was he tied up? - before he came fully awake in his Browning skin on the first level, surrounded by icy water and struggling to escape the van, pulling Fischer's tall, flailing body through the broken window and then up to the surface.
The next week felt like the longest of his life. He had to wear Browning any time Fischer was near, and Fischer clung to him as the only familiar landmark in the continually rainy (blasted Yusuf) dreamscape. Fischer wanted to talk about his experience, and his epiphany. Eames knew that it was his job as much to reinforce the idea they'd planted in his head as it had been to plant it in the first place, but it got to be fucking tedious. He took to locking himself in Browning's office for hours at a time just so he could drop the forge and be himself, staring into his own unblinking grey eyes and unlined skin in the mirror. Trying not to think about Arthur.
After they woke up, he had to learn from Ariadne about Arthur's improvised zero-gravity kick. He silently apologized to Arthur for the "no imagination" jab.
********************************
Following Inception, they were able to work together on occasion without degenerating into brawls, verbal or otherwise. Arthur worked frequently with Ariadne now that Cobb was out of the dream business, and Ariadne wanted to work with Eames. She seemed oblivious to the careful distance Eames and Arthur held between them. Eames could see that she and Arthur were fond of each other, but he had seen the kiss on the second level of Inception, and that told him plainer than day that there was no sexual chemistry between them. At Ariadne's urging, then, he periodically took jobs with the two of them, serving as extractor or forge, whatever was required.
He never heard about Arthur becoming romantically involved with anyone else in the business, and he didn't ask. He exercised tact about his own escapades and kept his habitual flirting to a minimum when he worked jobs with Arthur. Although this careful détente wasn't ever what he had wanted from Arthur, it was better than outright hostility, and it meant they were still in one another's life in a minimal way. He preferred that to never seeing Arthur again.
*********************************
2:36 a.m.
Eames woke in pitch blackness to the incessant blare of his cell phone. He fumbled on the bedstand for it, cursing as he knocked off a half-full glass of melted ice that still smelt strongly of bourbon. When he found the phone and picked it up, he cursed again at the timestamp. The caller ID said Ari.
He rubbed his eyes. "If you are drunk dialing me again, Ariadne, I am going to turn you over my knee and--"
"Eames!" Her voice was high and panicky. "Eames, it's Arthur, I don't know what to do. Please... He won't wake up, and he's shaking, and his pulse is crazy fast. Cobb made me promise never to go under into someone's dream again, but he looks bad, Eames, and he has four hours left on the timer. Tell me what to do! Please!"
"Arthur knows how to get himself out of a bad dream." But he had already turned on the bedside light and was struggling into a pair of trousers and shoving his feet into brogues as he spoke. "Tell me where you are."
"The warehouse. I went out after work with some friends, and we were out really late and I didn't realize what time it was. I stopped back here to pick up my notebook, and he was under by himself, alone here, and he was twitching and kind of... vocalizing, but it's not making any sense. He keeps squeezing his eyes closed, like someone's hurting him, but there's nobody else here. It's really scary."
He grabbed his room key and a pullover and was out the door and running down the stairs. "Sweetheart, I'm on my way. You did right to call me. Now, listen to me. Can you try something for me? Yeah?"
Ariadne sniffled and took a few deep breaths, but sounded slightly calmer when she replied. "Yeah.... Ok. Tell me."
"I want you to try to comfort him as best you can. Stroke his hair, hold his hand. If you can fit without it tumbling over, get onto the lounge with him and hold him, and breathe deeply and slowly. Your scent will be familiar to him and the body contact may reassure him. If you can soothe him up here, it may translate into the dream and help him, ok?" He covered the phone, and snapped at the concierge: "Taxi. NOW."
He was in luck, and a cab pulled up in less than a minute. He slid into the backseat the moment it stopped, and barked out an intersection two blocks from the warehouse. When he put the phone to his ear again, Ariadne was humming something Eames didn't recognize. It sounded like a children's lullaby. He listened silently until she spoke again. Her voice trembled, but the edge of hysteria had left it.
"It's a little better. He's stopped shaking and mumbling, but he's still so pale and his pulse is racing. I'm lying on the lounge with him."
"Good girl. Don't try to talk to me, keep doing what you're doing. I'm in a cab about five minutes away. I'll stay on the phone. You just do what you can to calm him."
It was agony waiting for the cab to drive away before he took off running at full speed for the warehouse, arriving out of breath, his blood afire with adrenaline. He unlocked the door with shaking hands and jogged straight back to the area they'd designated for dreaming.
The sight of Ariadne's petite body snuggled so closely against Arthur's long, slender one, her hand over his heart and her glossy dark hair streaming over his shoulder, sent an irrational wave of jealousy over him, but Eames reminded himself that he no longer had any right to feel jealousy where Arthur was concerned.
He knelt down next to the two of them.
He'd nursed Arthur through a memorable bout of the flu once, and seen him shot and injured in the dreamscape many times, but he had never seen a healthy Arthur look this bad before. His skin was pale and cool -- dehydration? -- and his breathing was rapid and shallow. His body tremored at Eames' approach, but his eyes, which were scrunched tightly closed, didn't open. Eames wondered if he was having an allergic reaction to the Somnacin, but when he checked the bottle in the PASIV, it was the same formulation they had used the previous afternoon for a practice run.
Ariadne's round brown eyes were huge and scared, but her voice was even. "It comes and goes. His pulse has slowed a little, but his face -- he's so miserable, Eames. Please help him."
"You remember how to give a kick, yeah?"
She nodded.
"All right, I'm not going to change the time he has left until I know what he's doing down there, but I want you to set a timer for five minutes and give me a kick. Drop the headrest of the lounge, that should wake me. A music cue would be nice but isn't necessary. That will give me an hour down there, hopefully enough time to find him and figure out what the problem is. If you can stay on the lounge with him and it seems to be helping him, do that."
He was unspooling a PASIV line and swabbing his arm with alcohol as he spoke. He arranged himself on the lounge next to Arthur's with the PASIV next to him, inserted the needle, and pushed the button.
2:51 a.m.
Eames opened his eyes again in a monotone cityscape, tall grey buildings and concrete pavement as far as he could see. An icy wind whistled through empty streets. The sky was a sullen, sooty red, with inky clouds boiling across its surface. The air was charged and stank of ozone, but the only lightning he could see flickered in the far distance. The security measures on the buildings were excessive, the windows covered with iron bars, the doors heavy slabs of steel. Multiple security personnel guarded the entrance of each building, and they watched him with flat, unfriendly faces.
He belatedly recalled Arthur's disturbingly effective militarization -- but he also recalled that, once upon a time, Arthur had left a loophole in his mental security for Eames (nothing put a damper on dream trysts like a SWAT team bursting into the room, as they'd learned to mutual chagrin). Apparently the loophole still held true, since the heavily armed guards did nothing but stare as he made his way down what looked like the main thoroughfare.
He methodically peered into the windows of each building and looked down the side streets, but could see no sign that Arthur was here anywhere. He knew Arthur was alone, so he was unconcerned that Arthur was being held and harmed in one of the locked-up-tight buildings. And he wasn't concerned about a trap, because Arthur had clearly planned this little jaunt for a time he believed nobody would be near the warehouse. Whatever was happening here was presumably something Arthur wanted to have happen, or he'd have given himself the kick by now.
But he also knew Arthur, and Arthur's orderly, exquisite, oddly beautiful dreamscapes. The ugly, boxy monotony of the scene surrounding him, not to mention whatever the fuck was going on with the weather, was so out of character for Arthur that Eames knew something was deeply wrong.
Half of his allotted hour had run, and he had thoroughly covered several blocks of city streets without picking up any hint of Arthur's presence. The air remained charged and almost pressurized. Twice, the entire dreamscape had quaked, buildings swaying, the black clouds racing across the sky, and thunder booming in the distance as if the dreamer was undergoing some massive trauma, but of the dreamer himself there was no sign.
Eames stopped, covered his eyes with his hand, and focused. When he opened them, a shiny black and chrome Triumph Speed Triple R was parked just behind him, keys in the ignition. He slung a leg over the seat, turned the keys, and used it to more efficiently cover the grid of the city, opening his senses to search for any trace of Arthur.
Years ago, when Eames and Arthur had worked together exclusively and built themselves a refuge from the world, they'd dreamed together in "training exercises" that were half practice, half play. Arthur built diabolical, fantastical labyrinths for Eames to find him in, while Eames forged multitudes to distract and disarm Arthur. Eames called on those memories now, hunting for the tiniest sign of where Arthur was concealing himself. It was different this time, of course, because Arthur hadn't built this city with the intention of having Eames seek him out. As far as Eames could tell, there were no sly hints scattered about, no street signs with clever puns, no 'lost dog' notices with Arthur's dream-phone-number on them.
Still, there was something, wasn't there? A very faint pull, like two magnets on opposite ends of a table. Yes. He reoriented himself to the north-west, and opened the throttle up full.
Now that he was attuned to it, the pull became more solid, and he grinned fiercely, sure that he was on to something. It led him out of the cityscape and through equally monotonous suburban streets, and then out into foothills. These, at least, were reminiscent of Arthur's usual taste, being lushly forested and green. The dull red sky didn't change, though, and the sense of tension and oppression grew stronger.
Over the roar of the motorcycle, he heard an intake of breath, and then familiar strains from an electric guitar, and hastily pulled off the road. Re-entering the dreamscape in a moving vehicle was usually the cue for spectacular road-rash, if not outright death and dismemberment. Jeff Buckley's silky, haunted voice had reached the second verse before Eames felt the kick.
2:56 a.m.
"Ari, another five minutes. I'm close, but I need more time."
"He's shaking again, and his pulse is back up, but -- ok, go." She curled back up around Arthur's unconscious form.
Eames pressed the button.
2:57 a.m.
The highway he was on became a single lane, then a dirt road, but Eames was more and more sure he was headed in the right direction. Finally he was forced to leave the motorcycle and jog up a steep, narrow lane through the trees. The air up here was even more oppressive, leaving him gasping and winded by the time he spotted a trace of smoke in the air and followed it to a well-concealed campfire, with a familiar figure sitting motionless on a rock in front of it, staring into the sullen red sky.
At Eames' approach, Arthur turned around, made a shooing gesture, and said dully: "Go away."
Eames intended to do no such thing, but he found he had difficulty moving the closer he got to Arthur. The tension surrounding him was nearly palpable; it was trying to wade through chest-high water. He couldn't help being deeply impressed on a technical level that Arthur was manipulating the atmosphere to that degree, but his concern for what it said about Arthur's state of mind was more pressing.
"Why are you even up here? I thought I got rid of you already." Arthur stood, unsteadily, and one hand reached toward his own lower back.
Eames suddenly realized that Arthur thought he was a projection, and hastened to disabuse him of that notion before Arthur got hold of whatever he was reaching for. "Darling," he began.
"Don't call me that! You have no right. Not anymore."
Thunder rolled ominously, but Arthur hadn't actually attacked him yet. Eames scowled. "Right. I'm here because you scared Ariadne half to death. She found you in the warehouse with four hours left on the PASIV, shaking and muttering and looking on the verge of having a stroke. She called me to come find out what you were doing down here, since Cobb put the fear of God into her about snooping in private dreams. Luckily for you, I've no such compunctions."
Throughout this speech, Arthur's face lost its dull misery and began to tighten in horror as he realized Eames was not, in fact, a projection. His hands dropped to his sides, fists clenched, and he stepped backward several steps toward the edge of the clearing.
Don't do it, Eames thought nonsensically. You'll never fly, Arthur, you'll just die, whatever this is right now can't happen if you fall--
But Arthur didn't. He just stared, miserable and silent, at the black clouds in the distance.
"Nothing you'd like to get off your chest?"
No response.
"Well. Can't say I'm surprised." The words left a bitter taste in Eames' mouth.
Arthur finally shook his head, but it was less a negative answer to the question and more a gesture of surrender. When he spoke, it was in a low, pained voice, his brown eyes fixed on the smoking campfire between them.
"I came down here to get away from you. I thought if maybe... if I had some time away from you. You know we've worked the last three jobs together? It just feels like I can't get away. But even down here, the bells across the river were chiming your name. You kept showing up, and I kept killing you, and had to come further and further out in the mountains to be alone. The sky keeps getting worse and the air is so heavy." He sighed. "I've been trying to make the clouds go away, but it's impossible. They weigh too much." Arthur's face was set, leaden, his eyes screwed shut, and his body was so tense Eames could see his hunched shoulders quivering.
Comprehension, and a vast, aching sense of pity, flooded Eames. "Arthur. If --" he gestured at the clouds roiling above them, "if these are tears, let them fall. You're hurting yourself trying to hold them back. Please, let go, love."
Arthur didn't seem to notice the inadvertent endearment, as he didn't move a muscle. Around them, the dreamscape quaked again, and then a second time. The ground under Eames' feet heaved, and he staggered, but he didn't take his eyes off of Arthur.
And then the skies opened. One couldn't call it a downpour or even a deluge, Eames marveled. It was more akin to standing under a waterfall. He was drenched instantly, as was Arthur. The campfire vanished in a billow of steam as thunder concussed the air in a series of rapid detonations.
The ground beneath them quickly turned to a thick, sticky mud, and the tent collapsed and tumbled down the hill. Neither of them paid any attention to it. Arthur's face was buried in his hands and his shoulders were shaking, but the oppression in the air began to ease as the water soaked the dreamscape.
Eames squelched through the mud to Arthur's side, put a protective arm around him, and looked around for a more protected area to ride out the storm. He immediately dismissed the idea of trying to get back to the city; the dirt path he'd followed to Arthur's campsite was already a small river, and the flat concrete of the city would be flooding, if it hadn't already.
"Arthur." He heard the unfamiliar note of compassion in his own voice. "Dearest, we need to get out of this rain. Is there a place we can go?" He shook Arthur gently but firmly, trying to rouse him from his internal focus.
Arthur eventually raised his head, fruitlessly attempted to brush the straggles of wet hair out of his face, and looked around, seeming to try to pinpoint something. "A cave," he finally said. "A little further up."
With Arthur leading, Eames helping to hold him up, and both of them slipping and cursing in the mud, they made it to a low overhang with, Eames was relieved to see, a cozy hollow tucked into the hill behind it. It was low and narrow and looked like something a bear might sleep in for the winter, but it had a fire neatly laid out in the entryway, and even a pack of matches ready to light it, because this was Arthur's dream and even in this weird hellscape Arthur simply couldn't help Arthuring.
Eames urged Arthur into the hollow while he fussed with the fire, postponing the inevitable conversation about Arthur's revelations. Arthur didn't show any signs of wanting to leave the dream, and Eames was damned if he was going to leave Arthur down here by himself again, so it looked like they were going to just sit here in this cave for a while and not talk.
That was fine. Contrary to popular opinion, Eames could keep his mouth shut for hours, if necessary. If they weren't talking, at least they weren't actively making the situation worse.
When he couldn't put it off any longer, he stripped off his muddy shoes, crawled into the back of the little cave next to Arthur and sat, not quite touching him, watching the fire.
Arthur's dark eyes, barely visible in the low light, were fixed on the flames, and his long arms wrapped around his knees. Wet hair fell over his face, the ends starting to curl as they dried. He mumbled something, and Eames didn't quite catch it. He tilted his head interrogatively, and Arthur said more clearly: "Thank you."
Eames didn't have a response to that right away. He settled on "You had us well spooked," and waited to see what would happen.
Arthur sighed, and turned his head where it rested on his folded arms so that he was looking at Eames. His eyes were tired and puffy but still beautiful, thought Eames. He'd always thought Arthur was beautiful, top to toe.
"I didn't mean for you to know that. I thought nobody would come, and I could be alone and have some peace, then go up and carry on with the job. And never have to say that to you."
"If my presence is so intolerable--"
Arthur cut him off, shaking his head. "You don't get it. I wanted you here. Wanted you to work with us. I wanted to be - around you. Again. But it isn't the same, and that makes it worse." He paused, then took a deep breath. "You were so angry, Eames. You were awful, just... so hateful. It killed me that you could be like that with me. Like nothing we had before was real."
His words caught Eames utterly flat-footed. "I was awful? You vanished on me. I tried to reach you, but it was like you died, Arthur, when Mal died. I flew home from Shenzhen that night and you were already gone."
Arthur opened his mouth, clearly on the verge of saying something, but Eames wasn't about to let him interrupt. "You disappeared without a word, with Dominic fucking Cobb, and you never came back. I had all of your clothes and your books and your paintings at the flat; I had to box them up and put you out of my life like a dead person had lived there with me, and I didn't know why. The next time I saw you, you turned around and walked away like we'd never met. And I still don't know why. I never wanted you to leave, never."
Arthur just gaped at him, seemingly struck dumb. Then, without warning, he reached out and shoved hard, slamming Eames into the packed earth wall of the cave. "More lies. You can't even really help it, can you?" His laugh was bitter, sharp and humorless. "I told you exactly how to reach me, and when I could meet you in Toronto, and why I needed to leave. I had to ditch all my devices when we left -- they were looking for us, you knew that. So I put all the details in that letter, in our old code, and I dropped it in the mail on our way to the airport. But you didn't show up in Toronto, and you never even sent a response. A call. Anything. And two weeks later Nash said he'd seen you at a club in New York with your tongue halfway down some woman's throat, and I thought, well, maybe it was never real for you after all."
His voice died out as he saw the look on Eames' face.
"You posted a letter. Arthur, did it even once occur to you that I might never have received it? How dare you think so little of me, that you assume I would just let you go like that?" His voice rose, his accent thickening. "I called everywhere. Everyone I could think of. I tried to reach you through Miles, even, but Cobb was so busy alienating people right and left that no-one would even pass a message for me. I'd no idea what bloody hellhole you'd materialize in next, or who was after you, or if someday I'd just find your corpse in a ditch somewhere. Christ, Arthur! The two of you kept running from crisis after crisis, disasters one after the other, and never a single word of explanation." Eames clenched his jaw, not wanting to reveal the next bit, but he'd gone too far not to, now. "It broke me. And I hated you for it."
"You didn't get it." Arthur had gone a sickly white, delayed guilt at the realization etching lines in his face that didn't exist in the waking world.
Eames looked away, consciously slowing his own breath. The worst of what he'd needed to say was out, and the arrow had struck true. Now that it had been said, the desire to hurt Arthur faded as rapidly as it had arisen. "No. I didn't get it. And I tried to reach you. I tried over and over for so long. That woman in the club was material for a forge, Arthur; that's all. I was faithful to you until you cut me dead in Munich."
Arthur shook his head and closed his eyes tightly, like he was about to trigger another downpour on the dreamscape, and Eames steeled himself for the storm. Then he opened them again, his expression uncharacteristically hesitant. "I … dreamed about you. Impossible dreams. And I woke up alone, every time."
We used to be so brave, Eames thought. Of the two of them, Arthur had always been the more fearless, and here he was, taking the leap again for them both. Which was good, because Eames was having a panicky moment of unreality, unsure whether he was really sitting here with Arthur, patching up the most broken parts of his entire life.
"I dreamt the world stopped turning, when you left," he admitted. Terrible dreams, those had been, running through tunnels, trapped underground, frantic to find the mechanism hidden deep in the subterranean recesses of his own mind that would take the impossible weight of the world and heave it into reverse.
"I dreamed," Arthur said softly, "that we were lovers, still."
Eames had, of course, heard the saying 'one's heart skipped a beat,' but he'd always thought it was rubbish. He'd certainly never experienced it himself. Turned out, it was a fairly accurate description of the sudden leap in his chest at Arthur's admission.
He gripped his totem so hard his fingers hurt. His brain spun crazily, unsure again whether this conversation was actually happening, trying to grapple with the enormity of what he'd just learned, and the depths of the time irretrievably lost between them.
Despite his conscious hesitation, though, his body yearned all at once toward Arthur, wanting nothing more than to touch him and wrap him up and never let go again. Eames held out only a moment before giving in to the urge, pushing Arthur's dark curls away from his face, then circling an arm around Arthur's shoulders.
Arthur leaned gladly into him, turning his head just enough for his mouth to whisper against Eames' cheek. "I'm sorry. More than I can say." It was simple and so heartfelt that Eames bent to return the ghost of a kiss, his lips pausing sweetly, forgivingly, on Arthur's forehead for only a moment.
They huddled there, Arthur's head on Eames' shoulder, hands entwined, simply feeling one another's familiar shapes once more.
It was only when it dawned on Eames that he had Arthur in his arms, true, but it was a cold and sodden and shivering Arthur, and that he was cold and sodden and shivering himself, and that they were, not, in fact, trapped in the dreamscape but had a nice warm hotel room waiting for them, that he realized he'd been far more than an hour in the dreamscape without a kick.
"Darling," he murmured, pressing another kiss to the top of Arthur's head, "can we continue this in my hotel? Ari's been anxious about you, and I'd rather do the kissing and making up bit in a bed than in a cave. Even," he felt obligated to add, "a very nice cave like this."
He felt Arthur grin into his shoulder. "You go on up. I'll follow in a minute or two. I'd just like another moment here."
"Are you sure?" Eames looked into Arthur's eyes, trying to suss out any lingering self-destructive impulses there. He only saw peace, though.
To be considerate, he stepped outside the cave again before pulling the gun from its holster and pressing it against his temple.
4:29 a.m.
Eames woke to the sound of Arthur's familiar, even breathing, as well as light, feminine snores. Ariadne's face was relaxed in sleep, her head pillowed on Arthur's chest, gently drooling on Arthur's shirt. He couldn't help a chuckle as he disconnected the PASIV, and she stirred and opened her tired eyes.
"He stopped shaking and scrunching his eyes up, and his pulse and breathing went back to normal, so I figured you'd found him, and I decided not to wake you," she explained.
Eames reached over and fondly rumpled her hair. "That was exactly right. He just wanted another moment down there. Can you call a cab to the hotel? Pickup in ten minutes at the usual spot."
She yawned and nodded, carefully untangling herself from Arthur. "Is he... is it ok?"
"He will be. I'll stay with him, watch over him tonight to make sure."
She smiled, and caught him in a surprise hug. "I knew you'd take care of it. I'm so glad you came."
Arthur's breathing had changed when Ariadne stood up; Eames knew from long experience that he was awake now and merely feigning sleep.
When Ariadne stepped outside with her phone, he looked at Arthur's face, and those lovely dark eyes, now scratchy and reddened, were watching him. He knelt to remove the cannula from Arthur's wrist, and Arthur caught his hand and raised it to his lips instead.
5:41 a.m.
"Eames?"
"Mmm?"
"Thank you," Arthur said. "For coming for me."
"Well, I haven't really. Not yet." Not that he hadn't given it the old college try for about thirty seconds, but they were both old enough, and knew each other well enough, to admit to being just a little too worn for the hot reunion shag Eames had never allowed himself to envision. (Actually, that was a lie. He'd envisioned it in painstaking pornographic detail on many an occasion, immediately regretting it each time. But he wasn't going to tell Arthur that.)
Arthur punched his arm, his aim painfully accurate despite the pitch-blackness of the hotel room. "You're never going to change, are you?" It didn't sound angry or bitter, though. It did sound tired, but it was an utterly godforsaken hour of the morning, so that might be excused.
"No, probably not."
The response was a soft, lengthy sigh, and then Arthur was quiet long enough for Eames to start to get worried again. "I missed it," Arthur finally admitted. "I missed everything about you. Especially the irritating parts."
It was such an Arthur thing to say, and such an Eames thing to be delighted by the mock-hostility embedded in the affection, that it scared him a little: was the world turning in reverse, after all? "I aim to please."
"You always have."
Eames rolled onto his side, tugging Arthur into the little spoon position. Arthur wasn't quite shaped the same as Eames remembered -- this Arthur was thicker in the neck and shoulder, softer around the middle, had a surgical scar bisecting one thigh -- but he was Arthur, and he was there, and Arthur could be ninety and bald and incontinent and Eames would still want to hold him.
He kissed Arthur's neck, oddly comforted by the fact that Arthur's scent hadn't changed in the intervening years. "I feel obligated to point out this is going to be a disaster and will probably end in blood and tears."
Arthur laughed softly. "Yeah. Well, we got the tears part out of the way already, because I'm an idiot."
"You're a stubborn, self-deprecating, passive-aggressive twat with astonishing atmospheric control in the dreamscape, yes."
"Guess that means you'll be the one doing the bleeding."
It hadn't been meant cruelly; Eames knew that. When Arthur wanted to hurt someone, he didn't do it in that fond, drowsy, half-teasing tone. All the same, it bit deep. "I've been the one doing the bleeding. For six years, Arthur."
They lay silently in the dark, just breathing.
"I'd give you the time back in years off my life," Arthur said eventually. "If I could."
"I know you would." Eames was suddenly weary beyond belief. It had been, as they say, A Day. "Waste of years you could spend making it up to me in future, though."
"That's true."
Arthur did not say, Every year of my life henceforth is thine, my love, or They're all yours, or even Are you sure that's what you want?, but those weren't very Arthurish things to say, and Eames didn't expect them. Instead, Arthur only fumbled for Eames' hand, and kissed it again.
It was enough.