fic - Late to Settle [5/5]
Title: Late to Settle
Author: yjudaes
Team: angst.
Prompt: overwhelmed.
Word Count: 1645.
Rating: R, this part, for language.
Summary: Eames likes to play games; Arthur has a secret. Fulfilling my desire to write a self-indulgent His Dark Materials crossover, though it is otherwise canon-compliant. Nimue is an amber-morph red fox and Mekhmet is a melanistic leopard. An endless and overwhelming stream of thank-yous to silvrey, without whom this probably wouldn't exist and certainly wouldn't be finished. ♥
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
He comes awake in the recovery room at the dentist’s office, the hygienist they’d paid off staring at them, her eyes darting nervously between him and Eames. Tollefsrud is sitting stiffly, drinking a glass of water. The mark is still under, the additional sedative working on him.
Nimue climbs into Arthur’s lap and tucks her chin under his head, as he disconnects himself from the PASIV and sits up, wincing at the remnants of pain in his leg. Tollefsrud startles a little, looking over them both. Eames seems unhurt.
Mekhmet yawns, her eyes darting to Arthur. “Did you get it?” Tollefsrud asks, her daemon climbing her shoulder to stare at Eames.
Eames doesn’t say a word, just reaches for a piece of paper, and, eyes closed, starts scribbling. He hands it to Tollefsrud silently and stands up, coming to offer Arthur a hand. “That was a cock-up,” he murmurs quietly, when Arthur takes it.
His gaze holds a keen, familiar curiosity; sometimes he and Mekhmet are intensely alike. “Not here,” Arthur snaps irritably. “We need to go. Come on, come on.” He holds Nimue cradled against him for a moment - she’s surprisingly light, as if, like a bird, she is hollow-boned - and then settles her back down, where she leans against his leg while he sterilizes the PASIV and packs it back into its case.
Eames and Tollefsrud are wiping down every surface they’ve touched, eradicating the traces of their presence, all except for one - the pinprick in the mark’s arm. He might know what it is, when he wakes, but by then it’ll be too late.
+
Arthur lets Eames get into the same cab as him, though it’s unwise; he did promise Eames an explanation, and he doesn’t like shirking his commitments. It feels uncomfortable, forcedly intimate, letting Eames follow him up to his hotel room. “I thought you had a flat in this city,” Eames murmurs, watching Mekhmet move restlessly around the room, sniffing every piece of furniture Arthur has touched, slept in, sat on.
If I did, what makes you think I would take you there, Arthur thinks bitterly. “I don’t know what you’re expecting me to tell you,” he says.
“The truth,” Eames replies. “Come on, Arthur, you -- I thought I was doing well when I could let Mekhmet get thirty yards from me, and you’ve -- you sent Nimue four stories down and across the entire hotel complex to find me. That’s impossible.”
Nimue is still huddled against Arthur’s leg, a sad ball of soft, champagne-colored fur. He wants to be alone; he wants to take her in his arms and croon softly into her ear, tell her he won’t leave her, tell her he won’t make her do it again. He wants to bury his face against her ruff and breathe her in, because she’s his, and he can’t do any of that with Eames here. “What the fuck do you think gives you the right?” he shouts at Eames, the pitch of his voice surprising even him. “Where do you get off, asking me to tell you all my secrets? You think you know me, because we’ve worked together for a few years?”
“I--” says Eames. “No, you’re right, Arthur, I don’t know you at all. I’ve known you for ten years and I don’t really know you, do I? You’re entirely a mystery to me.”
“I’m not your mystery,” Arthur counters. “I’m not some puzzle to be solved, to be broken apart so you can get your satisfaction. God, what is it about me that makes you want to -- torment me endlessly?”
"I suppose I always felt a certain -- kinship," says Eames, almost ashamed, and Arthur looks at him in surprise.
"Kinship?" he asks.
"Yes," says Eames. "She settled when I was very young, you see. I was eleven." Arthur looks between the two of them and tries to imagine a young, coltish, uncertain version of Eames, barely out of childhood, with this harbinger of silent death treading next to him. "I had no idea who I was supposed to be, I was barely learning to navigate the world of adults, and then suddenly -- she stopped. It was as if something had been taken from me, as if she knew something about me I hadn't yet learned, and it made me -- very uncertain, very unhappy, for a while. When I discovered she could still change in dreams, I was almost overjoyed."
"And you felt some kind of kinship to me, because Nimue still hadn't settled when you met me," Arthur says slowly. "So you decided to show that by teasing me, mercilessly?"
Eames shakes his head. “It didn’t -- I didn’t intend for it to be that way, originally, but -- every time I pushed you, you pushed back, and I suppose I settled into a rhythm. We settled into a rhythm. It just got easier to keep it that way.”
Arthur sighs, deflating, and looks to the side. Mekhmet and Nimue have been eerily quiet, this whole time, and still. Mekhmet is standing behind Eames, slightly, and it’s uncharacteristic, for her; normally she moves in front of him, like the predator she is. “You remember the experiments the Magisterium was doing, a while ago,” he says finally. “Trying to separate children from their daemons, before Dust could settle on them.”
“Of course,” Eames answers. “Those experiments were outlawed, Arthur, because they were barbaric. They were torture.”
Arthur shrugs, noncommittal. “The Defense Department was doing something similar, around the same time. Not trying to separate the daemons, necessarily, just to -- test their limits, to see how far they could go. They knew that it was possible, after all. The witches should be enough proof of that.”
“The witches aren’t real,” Eames says almost automatically, and Arthur levels a stare at him so flat that it shuts him up, just like that.
“When I was fifteen and Nimue still hadn’t settled, Defense Department representatives approached my family with interest. They had reached a point where they realized that maybe, in order for this to work, the children had to be old enough that they could understand the purpose of the sacrifice they were making. It required a certain level of abstract logic that most twelve-year olds aren’t entirely capable of grasping.” He runs a hand over his jaw, bends down and strokes Nimue’s cheek. “It was always my decision, Eames. You need to understand that. Nobody did this to me, to us. We did it to ourselves. It wouldn’t have worked, if she didn’t want it to.”
“Doesn’t it--” says Eames, hushed, slightly horrified. “Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Lots of things hurt,” Arthur answers. “And yeah, it hurt at first, and it was terrifying. But I’ve always been...able to push past the pain, for the promise of doing something that nobody else can do.”
Nimue murmurs against his hand, pushing her wet nose against his skin. “Nobody else can do it?” Eames asks, and Arthur shrugs.
“There were a few,” he replies. “I’d hardly claim to be so rare as to be unique. No, there were a few others. I don’t know where they are now, though.”
“Arthur,” Eames says. Arthur looks at him, and he’s staring right at Nimue. “She’s gorgeous, you know? She’s absolutely lovely.”
Nimue stiffens slightly; Arthur feels it in his leg, which is still a little sore, sympathetic pain. “When she settled, I almost couldn’t believe her, you know,” Eames continues. “I had to struggle, not to let you catch me staring at her. The lines of her, the way she moves. I would imagine how soft she must be, I’d imagine running my hands over her fur. I thought she had to feel like a cloud, because she’s so -- ethereal.”
Arthur isn’t sure what to make of it. He can feel himself flushing, barely, even though the compliment isn’t meant for him. Abruptly, Eames stands, and comes over to Arthur. His hands, palms soft and fingers rough with calluses, bracket Arthur’s face. “I thought she was absolutely perfect, because she was just as lovely as you,” he says, very quiet.
He kisses Arthur, and it is almost immediately overwhelming, what Arthur feels - some kind of dizzying mixture of surprise and inevitability. So this is what this was all leading up to, he thinks, and grips Eames’s forearms, holding him close. It feels something like finally having an answer to a question he wasn’t even sure how to phrase correctly.
+
They’re in Istanbul when Arthur gets the e-mail, lying in a nest of crisp white sheets while Nimue and Mekhmet groom each other enthusiastically. Mekhmet is purring riotously, curled in a patch of sunlight that comes in through the big bay windows at the back of the house. Where her fur catches the light, it is dappled chocolate-brown.
His laptop is resting on his chest; he hadn’t bothered to sit up much. Nowhere to go, really. No pressing demands on his time. He doesn’t recognize the name attached to the e-mail, can’t make heads or tails of the IP address.
I heard you were looking for me, it says, simply, with a mobile phone number underneath.
Eames calls it, and despite the unwanted and insistent intrusion of Arthur’s common sense, he sets up a meeting. “An architect,” he says, raising an eyebrow at Arthur.
Arthur shakes his head, thinking that he knows all the architects he could possibly want or need to meet, but two days later he’s dressed in a suit and tie, walking into a seaside café with Eames. Mekhmet curls between their feet, under the table. She’s close enough to touch, if Arthur wanted to, and he thinks to himself that maybe, one of these days, he will.
“Ah,” says Eames, and Arthur looks up, squinting against the late afternoon light as a figure ducks in and walks toward them, her hips swaying in a steady rhythm.
It is Camille Adedayo. Beside her, her daemon is a lion, his mane a magnificent sunburst. How wrong we were, Arthur thinks, and he can’t help but laugh.
Author: yjudaes
Team: angst.
Prompt: overwhelmed.
Word Count: 1645.
Rating: R, this part, for language.
Summary: Eames likes to play games; Arthur has a secret. Fulfilling my desire to write a self-indulgent His Dark Materials crossover, though it is otherwise canon-compliant. Nimue is an amber-morph red fox and Mekhmet is a melanistic leopard. An endless and overwhelming stream of thank-yous to silvrey, without whom this probably wouldn't exist and certainly wouldn't be finished. ♥
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
He comes awake in the recovery room at the dentist’s office, the hygienist they’d paid off staring at them, her eyes darting nervously between him and Eames. Tollefsrud is sitting stiffly, drinking a glass of water. The mark is still under, the additional sedative working on him.
Nimue climbs into Arthur’s lap and tucks her chin under his head, as he disconnects himself from the PASIV and sits up, wincing at the remnants of pain in his leg. Tollefsrud startles a little, looking over them both. Eames seems unhurt.
Mekhmet yawns, her eyes darting to Arthur. “Did you get it?” Tollefsrud asks, her daemon climbing her shoulder to stare at Eames.
Eames doesn’t say a word, just reaches for a piece of paper, and, eyes closed, starts scribbling. He hands it to Tollefsrud silently and stands up, coming to offer Arthur a hand. “That was a cock-up,” he murmurs quietly, when Arthur takes it.
His gaze holds a keen, familiar curiosity; sometimes he and Mekhmet are intensely alike. “Not here,” Arthur snaps irritably. “We need to go. Come on, come on.” He holds Nimue cradled against him for a moment - she’s surprisingly light, as if, like a bird, she is hollow-boned - and then settles her back down, where she leans against his leg while he sterilizes the PASIV and packs it back into its case.
Eames and Tollefsrud are wiping down every surface they’ve touched, eradicating the traces of their presence, all except for one - the pinprick in the mark’s arm. He might know what it is, when he wakes, but by then it’ll be too late.
+
Arthur lets Eames get into the same cab as him, though it’s unwise; he did promise Eames an explanation, and he doesn’t like shirking his commitments. It feels uncomfortable, forcedly intimate, letting Eames follow him up to his hotel room. “I thought you had a flat in this city,” Eames murmurs, watching Mekhmet move restlessly around the room, sniffing every piece of furniture Arthur has touched, slept in, sat on.
If I did, what makes you think I would take you there, Arthur thinks bitterly. “I don’t know what you’re expecting me to tell you,” he says.
“The truth,” Eames replies. “Come on, Arthur, you -- I thought I was doing well when I could let Mekhmet get thirty yards from me, and you’ve -- you sent Nimue four stories down and across the entire hotel complex to find me. That’s impossible.”
Nimue is still huddled against Arthur’s leg, a sad ball of soft, champagne-colored fur. He wants to be alone; he wants to take her in his arms and croon softly into her ear, tell her he won’t leave her, tell her he won’t make her do it again. He wants to bury his face against her ruff and breathe her in, because she’s his, and he can’t do any of that with Eames here. “What the fuck do you think gives you the right?” he shouts at Eames, the pitch of his voice surprising even him. “Where do you get off, asking me to tell you all my secrets? You think you know me, because we’ve worked together for a few years?”
“I--” says Eames. “No, you’re right, Arthur, I don’t know you at all. I’ve known you for ten years and I don’t really know you, do I? You’re entirely a mystery to me.”
“I’m not your mystery,” Arthur counters. “I’m not some puzzle to be solved, to be broken apart so you can get your satisfaction. God, what is it about me that makes you want to -- torment me endlessly?”
"I suppose I always felt a certain -- kinship," says Eames, almost ashamed, and Arthur looks at him in surprise.
"Kinship?" he asks.
"Yes," says Eames. "She settled when I was very young, you see. I was eleven." Arthur looks between the two of them and tries to imagine a young, coltish, uncertain version of Eames, barely out of childhood, with this harbinger of silent death treading next to him. "I had no idea who I was supposed to be, I was barely learning to navigate the world of adults, and then suddenly -- she stopped. It was as if something had been taken from me, as if she knew something about me I hadn't yet learned, and it made me -- very uncertain, very unhappy, for a while. When I discovered she could still change in dreams, I was almost overjoyed."
"And you felt some kind of kinship to me, because Nimue still hadn't settled when you met me," Arthur says slowly. "So you decided to show that by teasing me, mercilessly?"
Eames shakes his head. “It didn’t -- I didn’t intend for it to be that way, originally, but -- every time I pushed you, you pushed back, and I suppose I settled into a rhythm. We settled into a rhythm. It just got easier to keep it that way.”
Arthur sighs, deflating, and looks to the side. Mekhmet and Nimue have been eerily quiet, this whole time, and still. Mekhmet is standing behind Eames, slightly, and it’s uncharacteristic, for her; normally she moves in front of him, like the predator she is. “You remember the experiments the Magisterium was doing, a while ago,” he says finally. “Trying to separate children from their daemons, before Dust could settle on them.”
“Of course,” Eames answers. “Those experiments were outlawed, Arthur, because they were barbaric. They were torture.”
Arthur shrugs, noncommittal. “The Defense Department was doing something similar, around the same time. Not trying to separate the daemons, necessarily, just to -- test their limits, to see how far they could go. They knew that it was possible, after all. The witches should be enough proof of that.”
“The witches aren’t real,” Eames says almost automatically, and Arthur levels a stare at him so flat that it shuts him up, just like that.
“When I was fifteen and Nimue still hadn’t settled, Defense Department representatives approached my family with interest. They had reached a point where they realized that maybe, in order for this to work, the children had to be old enough that they could understand the purpose of the sacrifice they were making. It required a certain level of abstract logic that most twelve-year olds aren’t entirely capable of grasping.” He runs a hand over his jaw, bends down and strokes Nimue’s cheek. “It was always my decision, Eames. You need to understand that. Nobody did this to me, to us. We did it to ourselves. It wouldn’t have worked, if she didn’t want it to.”
“Doesn’t it--” says Eames, hushed, slightly horrified. “Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Lots of things hurt,” Arthur answers. “And yeah, it hurt at first, and it was terrifying. But I’ve always been...able to push past the pain, for the promise of doing something that nobody else can do.”
Nimue murmurs against his hand, pushing her wet nose against his skin. “Nobody else can do it?” Eames asks, and Arthur shrugs.
“There were a few,” he replies. “I’d hardly claim to be so rare as to be unique. No, there were a few others. I don’t know where they are now, though.”
“Arthur,” Eames says. Arthur looks at him, and he’s staring right at Nimue. “She’s gorgeous, you know? She’s absolutely lovely.”
Nimue stiffens slightly; Arthur feels it in his leg, which is still a little sore, sympathetic pain. “When she settled, I almost couldn’t believe her, you know,” Eames continues. “I had to struggle, not to let you catch me staring at her. The lines of her, the way she moves. I would imagine how soft she must be, I’d imagine running my hands over her fur. I thought she had to feel like a cloud, because she’s so -- ethereal.”
Arthur isn’t sure what to make of it. He can feel himself flushing, barely, even though the compliment isn’t meant for him. Abruptly, Eames stands, and comes over to Arthur. His hands, palms soft and fingers rough with calluses, bracket Arthur’s face. “I thought she was absolutely perfect, because she was just as lovely as you,” he says, very quiet.
He kisses Arthur, and it is almost immediately overwhelming, what Arthur feels - some kind of dizzying mixture of surprise and inevitability. So this is what this was all leading up to, he thinks, and grips Eames’s forearms, holding him close. It feels something like finally having an answer to a question he wasn’t even sure how to phrase correctly.
+
They’re in Istanbul when Arthur gets the e-mail, lying in a nest of crisp white sheets while Nimue and Mekhmet groom each other enthusiastically. Mekhmet is purring riotously, curled in a patch of sunlight that comes in through the big bay windows at the back of the house. Where her fur catches the light, it is dappled chocolate-brown.
His laptop is resting on his chest; he hadn’t bothered to sit up much. Nowhere to go, really. No pressing demands on his time. He doesn’t recognize the name attached to the e-mail, can’t make heads or tails of the IP address.
I heard you were looking for me, it says, simply, with a mobile phone number underneath.
Eames calls it, and despite the unwanted and insistent intrusion of Arthur’s common sense, he sets up a meeting. “An architect,” he says, raising an eyebrow at Arthur.
Arthur shakes his head, thinking that he knows all the architects he could possibly want or need to meet, but two days later he’s dressed in a suit and tie, walking into a seaside café with Eames. Mekhmet curls between their feet, under the table. She’s close enough to touch, if Arthur wanted to, and he thinks to himself that maybe, one of these days, he will.
“Ah,” says Eames, and Arthur looks up, squinting against the late afternoon light as a figure ducks in and walks toward them, her hips swaying in a steady rhythm.
It is Camille Adedayo. Beside her, her daemon is a lion, his mane a magnificent sunburst. How wrong we were, Arthur thinks, and he can’t help but laugh.