Art&Fic: No Wall Too High
Title: No Wall Too High
Author & Artist: janonny & keelain
Team: Romance
Prompts: Overwhelmed, smile
Word count: ~1400 words
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Non-descriptive violence and lots of dead projections
Summary: Just another day on the job.
Note: First story I wrote for the match, and I think I just missed writing BAMFs on the job back then. I'm so sorry to Shu, because this random piece is what I offered to her as a collab, whuuuuut. But thanks for collaborating anyway, bb! Thanks also go to distracterisey for beta-ing this fic, but I've changed it again since so mistakes are all mine.
The job had been going so well. Eames had been pulling off a master class performance, if he said so himself, before it all went to Hell.
They had been asked to join the extraction on very short notice, with one of Arthur’s old military mates calling in a favor. Normally, Eames wouldn’t take a job with that little prep time, but Arthur had asked very nonchalantly while cleaning his gun so Eames knew this Caleb fellow must have done something big for Arthur in the past. In any case, Eames finds it hard to resist Arthur with a gun in hand. (Most people do, but for very different reasons.)
Wearing his favorite female forgery, Eames had just figured out the location of the secret when Joshua, their mark, had gone mental and started screaming his lungs out about pictures of his mother that shouldn’t exist.
Eames had dropped his forgery, assuming his own bulkier form so that he could wrestle the shocked Joshua into a chair, and handcuff him to the arms. Joshua had started raining down verbal abuse and promises of vengeance, a grating addition to the chorus of projections breaking down the front door of the house.
So here Eames is, stuck in a study, trying to win a stand-off against rampaging projections just so he can have two minutes to pick a locked drawer and read Joshua’s dirty secrets.
The entire house is trembling continuously, the world breaking apart with Joshua’s subconscious rebelling against the obvious disparity between reality and dream.
Eames has already decimated a crowd of projections from his position at the top of the stairs, firing down at them continuously with the Uzi he had shaped out of his first gun. He wants to use some heavier artillery, but he can’t resort to those without threatening the structural integrity of the house.
He’s starting to feel a little frazzled, hurrying to the desk to pick at the drawer while Joshua is screaming blue murder at him, and he can hear more projections stampeding into the house. Fighting off a mob of projections has always reminded Eames of zombie movies. There never seems to be an end to them.
As if to confirm his hypothesis, he hears more projections swarm up the stairs. Eames swears and picks up his gun again, rounding the desk and heading for the door to shoot at the projections once more. He feels his nerves stretch thin over the little time they have left on the PASIV and the never-ending waves of projections shoving each other to get up the stairs.
There’s a crash of glass shattering behind him. “Don’t shoot!”
Eames whips around, finger away from the trigger, because he recognizes that voice like it’s his own.
“About time, Arthur,” says Eames, not allowing the spark of relief come through.
Arthur rolls to his feet beside the now broken window and runs to Eames’ side. He shoots a few projections with his Beretta as they climb the stairs.
“Sorry, I was on the grounds and couldn’t get back in through the front door. I had to scale the drain pipe on the other side of the house and come over by the roof,” explains Arthur, sounding a little peeved.
Eames imagines that Arthur must have killed quite a few projections on the grounds to get a chance to scale the drain pipe.
“Caleb fucked up,” says Eames. “I thought the house looked a little different from the photos we got.”
“I was hoping that was just my imagination,” mutters Arthur.
“That’s not possible, seeing as you’ve no imagination,” points out Eames helpfully.
“Are you going to stand here all day babbling? Did you find out the location or not?” asks Arthur, with his usual brand of abrasiveness when he’s impatient.
Eames smiles. “Of course. Here, take my Uzi. I’ll pick the drawer, you handle the projections.”
“My pleasure,” says Arthur, taking the bigger gun from him, while holstering his own Beretta.
Joshua is still screaming in the background. “I’LL KILL ALL OF YOU BASTARDS!! MOTHERFUCKING HELL, DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
Eames pauses on his way to the desk, and deftly stuffs his handkerchief into Joshua’s mouth, muffling his screams.
Arthur looks over his shoulder with a quick smile. “Thanks!”
For that dimpled smile, I would gag a million vengeful marks, Eames thinks.
Bending over to fiddle with the locked drawer, Eames calls back, “Not a problem, darling. I know how you dislike extraneous noise when you’re trying to concentrate.”
“You really know me well,” shouts Arthur over the loud, rapid-fire of his gun.
They have half a minute to spare by the time Eames memorizes all the secrets they were hired to extract. He looks up to see the perfect line of Arthur’s back, arms steady as he shoots continuously at the projections piling up on the stairs.
“Time to go,” Eames announces.
The music is playing, and Arthur continues shooting at the projections until the house crumbles under their feet, the walls crumpling in.
# # # # # # # # # #
Caleb leaves while Arthur cleans up all evidence of their presence in Joshua’s house. Joshua remains sleeping peacefully on his bed. Usually, Eames would take the opportunity to go as well. It’s the pointman’s role to ensure there’s no trace of evidence that could lead back to the team. But Eames sticks around, because Arthur is his pointman now, and they’re going to be flying out together in any case.
“I think Caleb should have stuck with the military,” muses Eames.
Arthur rolls up the delicate wirings of the PASIV device with his gloved hands, snapping the briefcase shut once he’s done. He gets up in a fluid motion, ready to leave.
“Caleb just needs more experience,” says Arthur with a shrug, leading the way out of the room by habit.
Arthur is used to taking point, while Eames is always there to watch his back. It’s no hardship, what with it being such a nice back attached to a lovely arse.
“He can gain experience on someone else’s time,” says Eames, mildly disgruntled.
Eames is surprised when Arthur leads them to the garage through the kitchen, instead of heading straight outside.
Hitting the button to turn on the lights in the garage, Arthur gestures expansively. “Our car’s ready for us.”
Eames stares. Calling this a car is an understatement. What Joshua has hidden in this unremarkable garage is a work of art.
“Arthur, how did you-”
He sees Arthur’s shrug from the corner of his eye, unable to tear his gaze away from the beautiful, sleek masterpiece in front of him. “I knew Joshua had an Aston Martin Vanquish. And you’ve always wanted one, except you travel so much. We can’t keep it of course, but it’ll make a good enough escape ride to the airport.”
“Arthur, I love you,” breathes out Eames, finally turning around to look at him.
Arthur dimples at him shamelessly. “Without a doubt. And I expect you to show me your full appreciation on the flight.”
“You and your mile high club proclivities,” murmurs Eames.
Leaning forward, he kisses Arthur in a sudden burst of uncontrollable affection. It starts as an enthusiastic, closed-mouth kiss, but Arthur is having none of that, and he deepens the kiss with an aggressive nibble. After a minute where they both escalate this into heated tongue-fucking, Eames rubs his thumb against the sweet curve of that arched neck, and he slides his tongue free of Arthur’s demanding mouth. The thin, parted lips before him are delectably reddened, and Eames wants to suck and nip on them until they’re swollen and sensitive.
But they’ve no time for that. Eames’ urges will have to wait until the flight. After the sweet drive in the Vanquish, Eames is sure that he’ll be more than inclined to indulge Arthur in his fondness for frottage in airplane bathrooms.
Still smiling, Arthur hands Eames a pair of leather driving gloves that he pulls out from his coat pocket. “We don’t want to be leaving fingerprints.”
Eames is grinning as he takes the gloves from him. “Not on the car, we don’t.”
# # # # # # # # # #
THE END
A/N: This is romantic right? SO VERY ROMANTIC! /o\
I originally wanted Arthur to give Eames the chance to drive a Bugatti Veyron, but I couldn’t justify the Mark having a ~2million dollar car in his garage without some hefty security, which they really didn’t have the time to circumvent. A Bugatti Veyron would have been so much more romantic, I’m sure.
Originally intended to be part of the Break Up verse, but it reads fine on its own.
Author & Artist: janonny & keelain
Team: Romance
Prompts: Overwhelmed, smile
Word count: ~1400 words
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Non-descriptive violence and lots of dead projections
Summary: Just another day on the job.
Note: First story I wrote for the match, and I think I just missed writing BAMFs on the job back then. I'm so sorry to Shu, because this random piece is what I offered to her as a collab, whuuuuut. But thanks for collaborating anyway, bb! Thanks also go to distracterisey for beta-ing this fic, but I've changed it again since so mistakes are all mine.
The job had been going so well. Eames had been pulling off a master class performance, if he said so himself, before it all went to Hell.
They had been asked to join the extraction on very short notice, with one of Arthur’s old military mates calling in a favor. Normally, Eames wouldn’t take a job with that little prep time, but Arthur had asked very nonchalantly while cleaning his gun so Eames knew this Caleb fellow must have done something big for Arthur in the past. In any case, Eames finds it hard to resist Arthur with a gun in hand. (Most people do, but for very different reasons.)
Wearing his favorite female forgery, Eames had just figured out the location of the secret when Joshua, their mark, had gone mental and started screaming his lungs out about pictures of his mother that shouldn’t exist.
Eames had dropped his forgery, assuming his own bulkier form so that he could wrestle the shocked Joshua into a chair, and handcuff him to the arms. Joshua had started raining down verbal abuse and promises of vengeance, a grating addition to the chorus of projections breaking down the front door of the house.
So here Eames is, stuck in a study, trying to win a stand-off against rampaging projections just so he can have two minutes to pick a locked drawer and read Joshua’s dirty secrets.
The entire house is trembling continuously, the world breaking apart with Joshua’s subconscious rebelling against the obvious disparity between reality and dream.
Eames has already decimated a crowd of projections from his position at the top of the stairs, firing down at them continuously with the Uzi he had shaped out of his first gun. He wants to use some heavier artillery, but he can’t resort to those without threatening the structural integrity of the house.
He’s starting to feel a little frazzled, hurrying to the desk to pick at the drawer while Joshua is screaming blue murder at him, and he can hear more projections stampeding into the house. Fighting off a mob of projections has always reminded Eames of zombie movies. There never seems to be an end to them.
As if to confirm his hypothesis, he hears more projections swarm up the stairs. Eames swears and picks up his gun again, rounding the desk and heading for the door to shoot at the projections once more. He feels his nerves stretch thin over the little time they have left on the PASIV and the never-ending waves of projections shoving each other to get up the stairs.
There’s a crash of glass shattering behind him. “Don’t shoot!”
Eames whips around, finger away from the trigger, because he recognizes that voice like it’s his own.
“About time, Arthur,” says Eames, not allowing the spark of relief come through.
Arthur rolls to his feet beside the now broken window and runs to Eames’ side. He shoots a few projections with his Beretta as they climb the stairs.
“Sorry, I was on the grounds and couldn’t get back in through the front door. I had to scale the drain pipe on the other side of the house and come over by the roof,” explains Arthur, sounding a little peeved.
Eames imagines that Arthur must have killed quite a few projections on the grounds to get a chance to scale the drain pipe.
“Caleb fucked up,” says Eames. “I thought the house looked a little different from the photos we got.”
“I was hoping that was just my imagination,” mutters Arthur.
“That’s not possible, seeing as you’ve no imagination,” points out Eames helpfully.
“Are you going to stand here all day babbling? Did you find out the location or not?” asks Arthur, with his usual brand of abrasiveness when he’s impatient.
Eames smiles. “Of course. Here, take my Uzi. I’ll pick the drawer, you handle the projections.”
“My pleasure,” says Arthur, taking the bigger gun from him, while holstering his own Beretta.
Joshua is still screaming in the background. “I’LL KILL ALL OF YOU BASTARDS!! MOTHERFUCKING HELL, DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
Eames pauses on his way to the desk, and deftly stuffs his handkerchief into Joshua’s mouth, muffling his screams.
Arthur looks over his shoulder with a quick smile. “Thanks!”
For that dimpled smile, I would gag a million vengeful marks, Eames thinks.
Bending over to fiddle with the locked drawer, Eames calls back, “Not a problem, darling. I know how you dislike extraneous noise when you’re trying to concentrate.”
“You really know me well,” shouts Arthur over the loud, rapid-fire of his gun.
They have half a minute to spare by the time Eames memorizes all the secrets they were hired to extract. He looks up to see the perfect line of Arthur’s back, arms steady as he shoots continuously at the projections piling up on the stairs.
“Time to go,” Eames announces.
The music is playing, and Arthur continues shooting at the projections until the house crumbles under their feet, the walls crumpling in.
# # # # # # # # # #
Caleb leaves while Arthur cleans up all evidence of their presence in Joshua’s house. Joshua remains sleeping peacefully on his bed. Usually, Eames would take the opportunity to go as well. It’s the pointman’s role to ensure there’s no trace of evidence that could lead back to the team. But Eames sticks around, because Arthur is his pointman now, and they’re going to be flying out together in any case.
“I think Caleb should have stuck with the military,” muses Eames.
Arthur rolls up the delicate wirings of the PASIV device with his gloved hands, snapping the briefcase shut once he’s done. He gets up in a fluid motion, ready to leave.
“Caleb just needs more experience,” says Arthur with a shrug, leading the way out of the room by habit.
Arthur is used to taking point, while Eames is always there to watch his back. It’s no hardship, what with it being such a nice back attached to a lovely arse.
“He can gain experience on someone else’s time,” says Eames, mildly disgruntled.
Eames is surprised when Arthur leads them to the garage through the kitchen, instead of heading straight outside.
Hitting the button to turn on the lights in the garage, Arthur gestures expansively. “Our car’s ready for us.”
Eames stares. Calling this a car is an understatement. What Joshua has hidden in this unremarkable garage is a work of art.
“Arthur, how did you-”
He sees Arthur’s shrug from the corner of his eye, unable to tear his gaze away from the beautiful, sleek masterpiece in front of him. “I knew Joshua had an Aston Martin Vanquish. And you’ve always wanted one, except you travel so much. We can’t keep it of course, but it’ll make a good enough escape ride to the airport.”
“Arthur, I love you,” breathes out Eames, finally turning around to look at him.
Arthur dimples at him shamelessly. “Without a doubt. And I expect you to show me your full appreciation on the flight.”
“You and your mile high club proclivities,” murmurs Eames.
Leaning forward, he kisses Arthur in a sudden burst of uncontrollable affection. It starts as an enthusiastic, closed-mouth kiss, but Arthur is having none of that, and he deepens the kiss with an aggressive nibble. After a minute where they both escalate this into heated tongue-fucking, Eames rubs his thumb against the sweet curve of that arched neck, and he slides his tongue free of Arthur’s demanding mouth. The thin, parted lips before him are delectably reddened, and Eames wants to suck and nip on them until they’re swollen and sensitive.
But they’ve no time for that. Eames’ urges will have to wait until the flight. After the sweet drive in the Vanquish, Eames is sure that he’ll be more than inclined to indulge Arthur in his fondness for frottage in airplane bathrooms.
Still smiling, Arthur hands Eames a pair of leather driving gloves that he pulls out from his coat pocket. “We don’t want to be leaving fingerprints.”
Eames is grinning as he takes the gloves from him. “Not on the car, we don’t.”
# # # # # # # # # #
THE END
A/N: This is romantic right? SO VERY ROMANTIC! /o\
I originally wanted Arthur to give Eames the chance to drive a Bugatti Veyron, but I couldn’t justify the Mark having a ~2million dollar car in his garage without some hefty security, which they really didn’t have the time to circumvent. A Bugatti Veyron would have been so much more romantic, I’m sure.
Originally intended to be part of the Break Up verse, but it reads fine on its own.