Commentary, hooray! Part I.
Does just about exactly what it says on the tin! Because yeah, the fic combined with my (scintillating, of course) comments was TOO LONG FOR ONE POST. Anyhow! This is fic commentary for The Wrath of The Whatever From High Atop The Thing, as requested by jibrailis. ♥
For the record, commentary will be in blue! I used to do it in bold, but then I realized reading that much bold text drives me insane, and I decided to spare everyone. And by everyone, I mean the two or so people who will potentially read this. I love you, two or so people! Here, have a blue heart: ♥
Also, I want everyone to know that I went out into the wide world of the internet and hunted down this icon specifically for posting this fic. And, I guess potentially others like it? I clearly now need to write more political AUs, and will probably spend the rest of this weekend figuring out which fandoms I'm actually qualified to write them in. What an excellent use of my time!
Title: The Wrath of The Whatever From High Atop The Thing
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Arthur/Eames
Spoilers/Warnings: Mentions of character death consistent with the plot of the film. Other than that, no!
Summary: “Pictures of Dom tonight, Eames,” Yusuf replies from the doorway, “or I swear to you, I will point out to Arthur that he has a stalker with no shame and a thousand dollar camera.” From celebutaunt's prompt at the kink meme, "Cobb is the presidential candidate, Ariadne is his running mate, Yusuf is campaign manager, Saito is the sponsor, and Eames is the campaign photographer who spends way too much time taking picture of Cobb's speechwriter, Arthur."
Disclaimer: Inception is absolutely not mine, nor is anything you recognize from it. Nor, obviously, is the title to this story.
Notes: The title is a quote from The West Wing and is, as mentioned, not mine.
Now seems like a good time to point out once again how amazing and wonderful and generally great celebutaunt's prompt was. I loved it so much, you guys. SO, SO MUCH. Now! The actual fic!
“You are completely hopeless,” Yusuf declares, throwing his hands into the air. “I hope you know that there’s only one reason you still have a job, and it is that we are old, old friends.”
“No,” Eames says, “the reason I still have a job is that I am completely brilliant at what I do and we both know it. What’s the problem?”
Because I am a terrible photographer, and can only admire the excellent photographers who fill my personal life in an amateurish and glossy-eyed way, I am worried that this fic does not get across that Eames was actually supposed to be a good photographer. I have written QUITE A FEW AUs now in this fandom, and Eames is really good at his job in all of them because, well, Eames is really good at his job. Also, ahahaha, I remember when I wrote this opening scene and posted it to the kink meme thinking this fic would go on for a few more parts. AH, THE INNOCENCE OF MY YOUTH.
Yusuf gets up from the couch and drops a stack of photographs onto the bed where Eames is sprawled on his stomach, chin propped on his hands, reading the New York Times.
“The problem,” he says, “is that your job is to take photographs of the candidate.”
Eames glances down his nose at the pile of glossy four-by-sixes and then back at the Paul Krugman column he’s reading.
“Et voila. Photographs. I think you may have to explain the problem again, Yusuf, I’m not quite following you.”
“The candidate, Eames. The candidate, whose name is Dominic Cobb. He’s the junior senator from California. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He’s been making some news lately, earned himself a few headlines--”
“You’re hilarious,” Eames says without glancing up from his newspaper.
“This,” Yusuf says, slapping a photograph right down into the middle of a lethally boring paragraph about derivatives, “is not Dominic Cobb.”
I try to read Paul Krugman columns because I feel it is important to be informed about a) the world, b) the economy, and c) people's opinions about both A and B. However, I tend to get stumped by lethally boring paragraphs about, say, derivatives. And, because I am a terrible citizen, etc., etc., I tend to stop reading. Not even because someone has thrown a photograph of a stunningly handsome human being in my face. JUST BECAUSE.
“No,” Eames agrees, “it is not. I’m glad we’ve got this established.”
“Have we got it established? Because to be honest, I’ve always found your infatuation with Arthur adorable, in an emotionally stunted sort of way, but I do need one or two pictures of the Democratic nominee for president in the middle of all of this.”
I love Yusuf in this fic, I am just going to say it. It probably makes me sound overly fond of my own writing, but there it is. Oh Yusuf!
“Even if I were infatuated with Arthur-- a point which I am in no way conceding-- it can’t be all that bad, can it?”
The one eyebrow Yusuf raises is more than enough to convey, you are genuinely more hopeless than I’d thought, you poor bastard, and so Eames scrambles into a sitting position and scoops up the photographs.
“Hmm,” he says. Here’s Arthur scribbling last-minute notes into the margin of Cobb’s speech on the environment from last Tuesday, ink staining his fingers. Here’s Arthur with one hand on his hip, talking to Ariadne about her convention appearance. Here’s Arthur at three o’clock in the morning, his hair falling into his eyes as he tries to stay awake long enough to prep for his CNN interview at ten. Here’s Arthur laughing into his carton of takeout Chinese (Eames remembers that; he’d just made a dirty joke about chopsticks).
This was the point at which I realized I'd gotten myself in for describing a lot of photographs, something I am not generally very good at which is sad, since I have a weird love of, well. Writing about photographs.
“People adore behind the scenes stuff,” he offers.
And by "people," he means me. I LOVE behind-the-scenes pictures from political campaigns. Also behind-the-scenes interviews, behind-the-scenes articles, and behind-the-scenes exposes. LOVE 'EM.
“One or two pictures of the actual scenes would be very much appreciated,” Yusuf replies. “Also, perhaps if you stopped undressing Arthur through a viewfinder and got around to doing it with your hands you could do your job properly.”
“No thank you,” Eames says. “Too many buttons.”
Hee! Proud of this line which, again, I probably seem full of myself BUT I JUST LIKE THAT LINE.
Yusuf snorts. “I somehow doubt you would let them stop you.”
“You are disgusting and I am offended by your insinuations,” Eames declares in his best affronted tone. “Now get out of my hotel room before I have you thrown out.”
“I am going because I have to change for dinner, not because you told me to,” Yusuf says.
“Are you five?” Eames says.
I work in classrooms on a semi-regular basis. That experience is finding its way into my writing, clearly.
“Pictures of Dom tonight, Eames,” Yusuf replies from the doorway. “Pictures of the man who is actually running for president or I swear to you, I will point out to Arthur that he has a stalker with no shame and a thousand dollar camera.”
------
“This may not be the best way to convince everyone that Dom’s a man of the people,” Eames says an hour and a half later.
“Dom’s not a man of the people,” Arthur replies, shrugging. “And anyway, it’s only dinner.”
Eames sighs and glances around the Samuel Halpert Room of the Ritz-Carlton.
That is an actual room at the Ritz-Carlton! I spent more time than I'd really like to admit researching various swanky hotels and the conference rooms thereof. Here, behold: The Samuel Halpert Room!
Also, I won't lie, I did take a moment or two to wonder if Samuel Halpert was in any way related to Jim Halpert. I haven't watched The Office in ages, but I just had to consider it.
“It’s not that I’m complaining about eating with what may be actual gold silverware,” well that's what it looked like to me in the picture! so he says, “it’s just that this isn’t going to convince anyone that the Democratic presidential nominee cares about their taxes.”
Arthur rolls his eyes.
“Dominic Cobb was born in Costa Mesa, California, to parents who wished Nixon wasn’t so damn liberal and who never forgave Reagan for comparing unfavorably to Margaret Thatcher,” Arthur says. “All of this, combined with the fact that he is terrible at beach volleyball, made him determined to get away from home as soon as he could, which he did by becoming a Columbia University freshman at the age of seventeen. He double majored in Political Science and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and then, because he has never in his life been tired of going to school, he went on to Harvard and got his Ph.D. in Economics. Having spent an impressively high percentage of his life in Ivy League lecture halls, he has never held a gun, nor does he understand which end is up on a fishing pole. If you sat him down to watch Monday Night Football, he would try to use it as a metaphor for the world market in silver alloy. He enjoys going to the theater, and last year he made a donation in Mal’s name to the New York Metropolitan Opera. It’s true that he loves baseball, but he’s also determined to create a statistical model which will predict the winner of the World Series, and honest-to-god, Eames, that is what he does with his spare time, which is essentially none existent. And, to top it all off, he had never been to Iowa until last year’s primaries. All of which does not change the fact that not only does he care about people’s taxes, he actually knows how to lower the damn things without bankrupting the entire country.”
Things about this paragraph which make me gleeful: (1) imaging Dom discovering he wasn't any good at beach volleyball; (1a) imagining Dom playing beach volleyball at all; (2) both Political Science and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures are possible majors at Columbia, and I would study either of them there in a heartbeat-- I would basically like to quadruple major, you guys, I see a LOT of school in my future; (3) you could not pay me to get a Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard, but let me tell you right now: Dom loved it so much he wouldn't mind doing it all again; (4) any time Dom's geekiness is mentioned in this fic, you have to understand that while I was writing it I was bouncing around in my chair with joy because I adore any and all incarnations of Geek!Dom; (5) people who love baseball statistics are the only math people I can hold intelligent conversations with (the rest of them leave me in the dust); (6) this is clearly a paragraph that Arthur has recited so, so very many times. He's got it down cold, people.
So basically I spent a lot of time figuring out all the ways in which Dom could be described as a liberal elite by his opponents, the media, and anyone who happened to wander through his life at any point ever. And there they are!
“I think I’m in love with you,” Eames says. “Also, this steak is amazing.”
“It is very good steak,” Arthur says.
“What, no sweeping declarations, no pledges to cherish me for all eternity?” Eames demands.
“I’m afraid not,” Arthur says. “But come on, you got one out of two. I admitted you were right about the steak.”
“You win some, you lose some,” Eames agrees cheerfully, and slides his camera out of its bag to snap a picture of Dom making a point, his fork coming down on the table emphatically. Saito is listening, his face a portrait of intense concentration which also seems to somehow telegraph, “I’m so rich that were I to dive into my money, Scrooge McDuck style, I’d end up doing laps in an Olympic sized swimming pool.” Eames isn’t sure how Saito does this, but it’s a genuinely impressive skill. Perhaps once you reached a certain tax bracket you were given classes.
I really wish I'd managed to work Saito into this fic more than I did-- I try to write ensemble stuff when I can, especially for AUs because I have so much fun figuring out where everyone belongs, but Saito intimidates me. He is just TOO COOL for me to write, obviously. ;]
“It’s going well, don’t you think?” Ariadne murmurs into Eames’ ear.
She’s seated on his right, her hair swept up into an elegant bun, probably in a ploy to make herself look older than her thirty-five years. I always used to think I’d be ancient when I turned thirty, she’d confided to Eames once as they watched Cobb shaking hands in a Des Moines diner, and now everyone’s desperate to make me look at least forty-five. I fucking hate politics.
“Swimmingly,” Eames replies.
“I swear, I’m going to make a list of words you can only get away with using if you’ve got a British accent,” Ariadne says. “And ‘swimmingly’ is going to be the first thing on it.”
My deepest inner-desires coming through in my writing: God, I wish I could credibly say "swimmingly."
“Promise you’ll put ‘posh’ on it, too. I can’t stand it when Americans say ‘posh,’ you haven’t got the history for it,” Eames says. “You know I adore you, and your country, but really. Keep your flat vowels away from the Queen’s English.”
Ariadne grins and spends the rest of dinner muttering ‘queue’ and ‘flat’ and ‘lift’ at him with what he thinks is supposed to be a Southern twang. As a result, he gets quite a few pictures of the vice-presidential candidate making distinctly undignified faces, and only one or two of Dom.
Yusuf’s probably going to turn a few interesting colors when he sees the film, but it’s worth it when Eames thinks about plastering the one where Ariadne has her nose scrunched up and her eyes bugged out all over the walls of campaign headquarters. Very, very worth it.
“If it weren’t for Arthur, would I be your favorite?” Ariadne asks as they make their way toward the elevator. She’s a bit tipsy, Eames can tell, and he considers ignoring the question in hopes that it will wander off. No such luck.
I have a sneaking suspicion I had been reading Douglas Adams right before I wrote "ignoring the question in hopes that it will wander off." Enjoy my pale imitation!
“I mean, I realize he is. Your favorite, that is. It’s really no contest. But come on, I take second, right?”
“Who says Arthur’s my favorite?” He tries, but his heart’s not really in it. Or too much of his heart is in it. Anyway, something’s wrong with his heart, he’s pretty sure.
I'm oddly fond of this line! SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH HIS HEART. I think later on in this I describe being in love as like having a flu of some variety. I do not actually think love is a heart defect and/or stomach virus, I swear.
“Eames,” Ariadne says, pausing just outside her door to look him in the eye, “the entire fucking universe is aware that you want to be sleeping with Arthur. Okay? You have the hots for the hottest speechwriter in the world of politics. The discussion of split infinitives probably turns you on now. It’s okay. People understand. Did you know the campaign gets anywhere from fifty to one hundred letters a week drooling about how Arthur looks in his suits?”
Let's just take (another) moment to admire writes who are far, far better than I and recall the immortal, Sorkin-penned line, "Josh Lyman, you have the cutest little butt in professional politics."
Eames has a sudden urge to start a bonfire. Perhaps there are some fan letters lying about that would make good kindling.
“Of course there are letters,” Eames says resignedly. “He looks damn good in the suits.”
“Yes,” Ariadne agrees solemnly, “he really, really does.”
------
“Does everybody like him better than me?” Dom demands the next day as he shrugs into his suit jacket, shuffling through his notes one last time.
“Yes,” Yusuf says simply, and then, “Arthur, you cannot be better dressed than the candidate. We’ve talked about this.”
Eames glances up to note Arthur’s slicked back hair, his sharply creased trousers, his perfectly crisp, gray tie. He looks atrociously lovely. Eames, after a moment’s unabashed staring, goes back to fiddling with his camera lens.
I think I have a habit of writing both Arthur and Eames (though especially Arthur) as people who are incredibly inconvenienced by being in love.
“Why?” Dom asks, sounding more genuinely curious than anything else. Eames snaps a photograph of him squinting at himself in the mirror, tugging at the sleeves of his jacket. Dom can never seem to look quite presidential; actually, he tends to look like he’s aimed for professorial and fallen short. Yusuf calls it a liability. Ariadne calls it endearing.
(I also call it endearing. Just for the record. I tend to love Dom more in his AU incarnations, mine and other peoples', than I do in canon.)
“Because,” Yusuf says, “no one has to decide whether or not they want to vote for Arthur. You’re a politician. Everyone is required to hate you. I believe it's in the Constitution.”
“Everyone can’t hate me,” Cobb says, bemused. “Some of them have to vote for me.”
“They can vote for you and still hate you,” Eames points out cheerfully. “Why it happens all the time! Doesn’t it Arthur dearest?”
Ah, my witty observations on America's political system. /sarcasm
/...but not really. I will never /sarcasm.
/aside
“I’m not paying attention to any of you,” Arthur says, “because none of you-- not a single one of you-- is as interesting as this semi-colon.”
A lot of people seemed to like this line! Ahahaha. Did it speak to you, writers of fandom? ;]
“Aw. You like us, you really like us,” Ariadne says, and grins, and sweeps fluidly out of the room in a way Eames has helped her practice so many times he’s lost count. He hears her voice rise over the thundering crowd, hears her tell Northern Virginia that they had better be ready to hear a speech that is going to change their lives. Judging by the noise the make, they are more than ready.
Eames helping Ariadne practice her exit is one of the ways I tried to indicate that he's really helped her settle into this VP role. Also to indicate that they love to hang out and goof around, haha.
“Arthur,” Dom says. It’s not a warning, exactly, nor is it a question. It’s really just Arthur’s name. But Eames glances up again anyway.
“Here,” Arthur says, shoving the speech into Dom’s hands. “It’s done, okay? It’s done. Pay attention to that fucking semi-colon, it is exactly where it needs to be.”
“Some day you won’t finish in time,” Eames says quietly as he captures Dom silhouetted in the doorway, stepping into everything Northern Virginia expects of him.
“Such sacrilege," Arthur says dryly. "I’ll always finish in time."
HE WILL. ALWAYS.
Which is probably true, Eames thinks, quite annoyed. Arthur will probably never make a mistake in his entire life. He will probably never retire, either, and he is certainly too stubborn to die. He will probably have android body parts implanted to replace his own so that he can go on living, go on writing, his metallic fingers clacking away at increasingly advanced keyboards, fussing about misplaced commas and passive tense and the misuse of repetition as a rhetorical device.
I'm terrible about passive tense. :/
“When you are a robot,” Eames says, “and are approached by-- oh, I don’t know, let’s say a really evil microwave-- with a rudimentary outline of the machines’ plans to take over the world, promise that after you have risen up to become their great and terrible and incredibly efficient leader, that you’ll tell them not to kill me.”
Arthur leading robotic uprisings has appeared in two of my Inception fics now. Is this worrying, do we think?
“Is it possible that you’re just drunk all the time?” Arthur asks.
“It’s certainly possible,” Eames says, “but it isn’t actually true.”
“I won’t let the microwaves get you,” Arthur promises. “I’ll probably want to kill you myself, anyway.”
Arthur would never delegate Eames!Assassination to a robot minion! Heaven forbid.
“Good point,” Eames says, and slips out onto the stage to take a few shots of Dom’s hands gripping the podium.
------
They’d met when Yusuf had said, “Ah, Arthur. This is Eames. He’s going to be our campaign photographer.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Arthur had said distractedly, his nose so close to the paper he was scribbling away at that it was probably absorbing ink.
“Likewise,” Eames had said, amused.
That had been it.
Eames feels a sort of amicable apathy toward Arthur after that, has filed him away neatly in his head (hard worker, clearly in love with his job; dresses well; does not give a shit who I am). Then, a week later, Dom buries his head in his hands five minutes before a New Hampshire town hall meeting and says, “Fuck, I can’t say this. Why can’t I say this?” Arthur gently slides the speech out from under Dom’s despairing elbows and goes to work.
Four and a half minutes later Arthur is sliding the speech back to Dom.
“It was the part about jobs. I changed the order of ‘farmers’ and ‘teachers.’ You’ll be fine,” he says.
I really enjoyed writing this section, but I don't have much to say about it evidently. I will say that I meant for Arthur making this change to Dom's speech to indicate not only that Arthur is a really good writer, but also that he knows Dom really, really well. I don't know how they met or how long they've known each other in this fic, but they get each other pretty well.
The next day, NBC plays footage from the speech every two seconds, as does CNN. Everywhere Eames goes, he is faced with Dom slamming his hand onto the podium, his eyes narrowed, as he shouts about the importance of farmers and teachers, about the work in this country which is overlooked or undervalued or simply ignored. It sounds right in Dom’s voice, and Eames feels a rush at the knowledge that only a few people in the world know how close it was to sounding wrong, and that he is one of them.
“You swapped the order of ‘farmers’ and ‘teachers,’” Eames says the next morning, ambushing Arthur in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. “It was supposed to be ‘teachers and farmers,’ and you made it ‘farmers and teachers.’”
“Yes,” Arthur says, his fingers desperately curled around a styrofoam cup full of coffee. Eames finds his eyes darting to them as if they hold the answers.
In my head canon for this story Eames has a thing for Arthur's hands, I think mostly because he's a writer. And even though I hardly (if ever) mention it again, THIS IS WHEN IT BEGINS.
“He would have sounded terrible saying ‘teachers and farmers,’” Eames says.
“I know,” Arthur says. “That’s why I changed it.”
“I have a theory,” Eames says.
“Mm?” Arthur says, taking a quick gulp of coffee.
“You’ve sold your soul to the devil,” Eames says.
“Ah, so you’ve heard about my skills with a fiddle,” Arthur says. Eames snaps a picture of him, bleary-eyed and so damn talented, standing in a middle-of-nowhere parking lot at four in the morning, drinking disgusting, day-old instant coffee and from then on, he can’t seem to stop.
It's love, it's love, it's LOOOOOVE! Etc., etc.
------
Arthur is an alumnus of the University of Connecticut, with a B.A. in Journalism and a minor in Cultural and Historical Anthropology. He saw school as a means to an end, more than anything else, and the only real problem was that once he graduated he realized he had no idea what the end ought to be. Annoyed with himself for being so poorly planned, he moved to New York. He spent somewhere between three weeks and six months working at a Starbucks and being bored out of his mind as a hobby, and then met Mal.
Most of this, Eames decided based on the one quote Arthur had (grudgingly) given to The Los Angeles Times when they wanted to write a feature about him: “I got my degree at the University of Connecticut and then moved to New York. That’s where I met Dom.”
Eames has an excellent imagination, a level of devotion to Arthur which is unparalleled, and way too much free time on his hands. Or, alternatively, just loves creating back story. If so, that's something he and I have in common.
Eames spends endless plane flights early on in the primary campaign, trying to gather up bits and pieces. He watches the way Arthur turns the pages of whatever shitty airport novel he’d bought before takeoff as if that will somehow make everything clear.
Not-at-all-fun fact I deleted a comma from the first sentence of the above paragraph just now because it was bothering me. Oooh! Ahhh! Behind-the-scenes magic!
(It doesn’t work. Arthur just spends a lot of time glaring at him. On one particularly memorable occasion, he is so distracted by the need to stare murderously at Eames that he ends up with a paper cut and bleeds all over page 74 of a sordid Wild West love story of some variety. Eames fights not to laugh, cannot manage it, and sprays Diet Coke out of his nose. Then, in a conciliatory gesture, he snatches the book from Arthur and reads bits of it aloud. No one seems to appreciate it, except that Arthur, perhaps light-headed from the blood loss, tips him a sly smile just as Eames is declaiming about the way Jackson moves like an untamed stallion through the wilds of the high desert. So maybe it all does work, actually.)
------
“Alright,” Yusuf had said once as they wound their way through the Appalachian Mountains, “which do you want to do: pretend to hate ballet, or pretend to love coal mining?”
Cobb laughed, and Yusuf said with a sigh, “I am glad you still think that is a joke. It means the campaign has not yet consumed your soul.”
“Mm, soul,” Ariadne said. “I like it for breakfast, close to burnt-- you know, so it gets really crispy?”
“Absolutely. There’s no other way to eat it,” Eames said, and then, to Yusuf, “Didn’t your mother ever tell you your face would stick that way?”
“No,” Yusuf said, his frown relentless, “because my mother was not a manipulative buffoon.”
“What are you implying about my mother?” Eames asked almost lazily, digging through his camera bag for a better lens.
Eames is not up-in-arms about this because he knows his mom is awesome, and he knows Yusuf knows it. There's no need to leap to the woman's defense: she is, quite simply, a badass.
“Nothing,” Yusuf said, deflating. “Your mother is a lovely woman.”
“Yes she is,” Eames said.
“You’ve met his mother?” Arthur asked, sounding amused. Yusuf nodded distractedly, back to pouring over polling numbers from Lord-knows-where-- at that point, no one in the car would have been surprised if Pluto was the next battleground state.
“He has indeed,” Eames said. When he glanced over Arthur was actually looking up from his notebook, and Eames felt suddenly honor bound to make the momentary lapse in work ethic worth the time.
More random stuff that I doubt really came through in the fic: Arthur helped convince Dom that running for president would not make him a last-place laughingstock, and is thus bound and determined to make it so. He pretty much works every minute of every day.
“My mother is on a mission, Arthur: feed the world,” Eames said. “She is doing this one person at a time, of course, because otherwise it would be quite overwhelming. Anyone I mention to her, even in passing, has to come home for dinner. She is a woman of singular purpose, and that purpose is to ensure that every human being on this planet compliments her Duck a l’Orange.”
Useless fact: I now wish the "overwhelming" in the above paragraph was "impractical" instead. Useless fact redux: Duck a l'Orange was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of fancy but relatively well-known food, which is weird since I've never prepared it, eaten it, or even seen it.
Arthur laughed, and Eames had his camera up before he could even think about it. It’s the laugh lines more than anything else, he thought dazedly as he heard the shutter click.
Laugh lines are my greatest weakness. GREATEST. WEAKNESS. Show me a man with laugh lines and I'll show you me, swooning onto the nearest bit of furniture. Blue eyes preferred, but not necessary. For all the elaboration I will ever need, see: Seth Meyers.
When he lowered the camera again Arthur was still looking at him, a funny little smile on his face, questioning.
“To be fair,” Eames had said, feeling entirely too caught out, “the compliments are always deserved.”
Is it weird that I find that little scene, with Eames taking the picture and Arthur smiling at him (in a way which I now realize I should have described as "quizzical") one of the most romantic parts of this whole thing? Because I do.
So that was late July, a month before the convention. And that, of course, was when Eames realized he was in love. It felt oddly like having the flu.
The last few weeks of July were awful, was the thing. Everyone knew they were going to get the nomination, but everyone was also certain, deep down in their bones, that they were going to lose; every two seconds they seemed to come up against another hurdle they absolutely could not afford to fuck up.
As a Democrat since the womb, the bone-deep certainty re: losing is something I am horribly familiar with.
They hadn’t announced Ariadne yet, but Dom had insisted she travel with them so that they could get to know each other, which was an excruciatingly Dom-like thing to do in that it showed next to no political savvy and great deal too much personal sense. Generally speaking, Dom is far too sensible to be a good politician. Yusuf spent his days and nights trying to keep speculation rife, and coming up with increasingly elaborate plans to rush Ariadne past the press at each and every event. Ariadne spent her days alternatively sulking and offering up fresh and thrilling ideas regarding the future of the country, which meant that no one could decide whether or not they liked her (except for Yusuf who, in between shoving her behind coat racks and reminding her to smile just a bit less, appeared to have taken to her spectacularly well).
Ariadne and Yusuf: this fic's unsung BFFs!
And, of course, there was Robert Fischer.
“The worst part about it is that he’s so nice,” Ariadne said miserably one evening as they all took over Dom’s hotel room, curling into chairs and sprawling across the rug.
Ariadne and Robert: this fic's unsung love story! Well, it's more like Ariadne has a goofy campaign crush on him from afar and Robert thinks she's really nice and has a good handshake the two times they meet, but. Whatever! Unsung love story!
“His campaign bloody well isn’t,” Yusuf said sulkily from his chair, scooting back so that he could rest his feet on the desk.
Everyone made “hmm”-ing sounds of agreement. Someone who sounded suspiciously like Arthur compared Peter Browning unfavorably to the backside of a toad.
Someday in the future of this fic's timeline, Arthur and Eames wile away an afternoon trading Shakespearean insults. It's true love, people.
“It’s a negative ad,” Dom said into the eventual silence. “It isn’t as if he’s committed murder. In fact, he hasn’t even committed a misdemeanor. It’s well within his rights to accuse me of killing my wife.”
“Right,” Arthur said slowly. “What you don’t seem to be grasping, here, is that it’s also despicable, not to mention that it shows all the political flair of pond scum.”
(The ad was the work of pond scum, indisputably. It had everything: the ominous music; the footage of Mal, smiling and laughing on Dom's arm; pictures of the car, one side practically sheared off (Eames had no fucking clue how the Fischer campaign had got hold of it, but it was poisonous); and then headline after headline, most of them from the tabloids, full of the sickly sweet speculation that was so irrationally damning to a political candidacy. It was simultaneously one of the most impressive pieces of strategy Eames had ever seen and a perfectly good reason for moving to the Great White North and never speaking to another living soul again.
When Eames had relayed all of this to Arthur in a half-drunk bit of philosophizing, Arthur had raised an eyebrow, loosened his tie, and said, "It's politics, Mr. Eames."
It was all very depressing.
Neither of them WANT to be impressed by the ad, but they are, and whenever they realize this they spend a while trying to reaffirm that they are possessed of souls.)
“It’s true,” Yusuf said to Cobb, careful. “Accusing you of being responsible for Mal’s death is insensitive, to say the least.”
“I’m not making the speech,” Dom said immediately, and Yusuf backed down without a fight, his palms upturned in surrender.
This is how, in the same month that Eames realizes he is in love with Arthur and almost throws up his campaign dinner of fried chicken and M&Ms, he also learns about the speech.
Mmm, campaign food. In addition, amongst senior campaign staff, Ariadne is the Keeper of The Takeout Menus, and has in her possession lists of good Thai, Chinese, Indian and Italian food from every major city. She rules with an iron fist. Don't mess with Ariadne or she's ordering FOR you, ya hear?
The speech isn’t the speech, really, it’s The Speech. Every time it comes up Cobb’s entire face sort of swallows itself in a way that should be Muppet-lookalike levels of funny but which is painful instead, and Arthur leaves the room. Yusuf just sighs, pushes his glasses up his nose if he’s wearing them, and runs his fingers through his hair if he’s not.
When Eames goes to ask about it he considers opening with a joke (something awful, something along the lines of, is it about his secret love affair with a Teletubby, then?), but decides against it because it turns out he really isn’t that much of an asshole.
“What is it?” He asks instead, after he has wandered into Yusuf’s hotel room unannounced.
“What’s what?” Yusuf says, lowering the volume on NBC’s Charleston affiliate.
“Does this sound like Abbot and Costello to anyone else?” Eames inquires of the empty room.
“Eames,” Yusuf says with an excellent imitation of patience, “are you here to be useful in some way, or should I just scold you out of the room now?”
More Yusuf-Eames interaction! HI YUSUF.
“As equal as I’m sure you would be to that task, please don’t,” Eames says. “The speech. What’s the speech?”
“What speech?” Yusuf says, but he isn’t even trying.
“You aren’t even trying,” Eames says, and Yusuf has the temerity to roll his eyes.
“The speech is about Mal,” he says. “What more do you need to know?”
This is an excellent question, really. Mal is a brick wall, of sorts-- when she is the answer, you stop asking. But Eames has never had a healthy relationship with physics, and brick walls have never deterred him quite the way that they should.
This phrase about a healthy relationship with physics is something I've wanted to work into a fic for something like two years now, but it's never worked. I think it did, this time, but my judgment might be warped by my many months of yearning. Feel free to tell me what a horrible clunker it is, if you so choose.
“What about her?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Yusuf says. “All I know is that when Arthur first told me Dom was going to run, I told him he had to have something prepared about Mal. Everyone knows the entire story, after all. I told him it was fundamental that Dom be prepared to put everything in his own words. So Arthur wrote a speech.”
No, he wrote The Speech, Eames corrects him mentally, and sets off in search of Arthur.
------
“I want to read it,” Eames announces when he finds Arthur sitting on the roof.
“No,” Arthur says.
There is a momentary pause.
“You’re on the roof,” Eames says.
I'M ON A ROOF AND/IT'S GOING FAST AND/I GOT A NAUTICAL THEMED--
Yeah. Anyway.
“Yes,” Arthur agrees, “I am.”
“Alright,” Eames says companionably, and settles down onto the cold concrete beside him. If the sun was setting this would all perfect, in a rather disgusting way, but it’s just twilight instead, gray and chilly.
“It’s cold,” Arthur says.
“It’s chilly,” Eames says.
“Are we going to argue over temperature gradations now?” Arthur inquires, sounding like he wouldn’t particularly mind.
“If you like,” Eames says. He can feel himself smiling.
Instead of saying anything about wind chill, Arthur says, “Dom’s going to get the nomination.”
“Probably,” Eames says, because that would just be a stupid thing to argue about.
“He’s going to have to talk about her eventually,” Arthur says.
Eames makes a sort of hum of agreement. Arthur sighs.
“I’m not even sure if it’s any good,” he says. He means The Speech, of course, and Eames wants to read it so badly he can feel it in his rapidly numbing fingertips.
“Of course it is,” Eames says. “Everything you write is good, everything you write is fucking brilliant.”
“You didn’t know Mal,” Arthur says softly. “You didn’t-- I’m not sure fucking brilliant is really good enough. And the two of them together-- I don’t know what would be good enough.”
I sort of like that Arthur knows he's fucking brilliant. He isn't going to dispute that compliment. It's just the truth!
Eames is surprised, once again. For a man who is so fastidious about grammar, Arthur’s capacity to surprise has always been, well. Surprising.
One of this Eames' favorite things about this Arthur is that this Arthur is unpredictably unpredictable. You think you know a guy--!
“What was she like?” Eames asks.
“She was lovely,” Arthur says.
“I wish I’d met her,” Eames says.
They stay on the roof longer than is reasonable for two expert political operatives, and then when too long shifts into where-in-God’s-name-have-you-been long they get up and go inside. Eames doesn’t hear about The Speech again for a long time.
------
The convention itself goes off without a hitch. For three days, everyone from the campaign walks around a bit dazed, astonished by their own charmed lives. Ariadne’s speech is a rousing success, and every pundit in the country immediately gloms on to the “smart, savvy, independent woman” story line, which is rather patronizing but also an excellent way to earn votes. Cobb manages to leave the tax code alone for an hour and forty-five minutes of the two total hours he spends speaking, which everyone counts as a win. Yusuf drinks a bracingly unhealthy amount of champagne on the first night, proposes toasts to everyone he has ever met, one-by-one, and spends the next two days telling everyone within earshot that he has always known Dom is something special. Even Arthur seems to enjoy himself, and makes one more appearance than is strictly required of him, which is nigh on astounding. Eames relishes every minute of the convention, of course, since the entire event requires Arthur to be in exquisitely tailored suits, and to smile more than twice a day.
It is the eye of the storm, of course, a bizarrely calm oasis in the midst of the riot that is American politics. But everyone honest to God enjoys themselves, which is a good thing, since within a week everything has gone spectacularly and horribly wrong.
And now for a boring, "amazingly_me Wishes She'd Made A Small Conventions Correction" Interlude: should've hyphenated "honest to God." This concludes our interlude. We now return you to our previously scheduled (and potentially more interesting than this) commentary.
------
PART II.
Phew! That's a lot of commentary, people. I'm leaving this post public because it's sort of fic, I guess? And since my fic is usually public, it seemed to make sense for this to be. You can still ask me to do commentary for something, right over here!
For the record, commentary will be in blue! I used to do it in bold, but then I realized reading that much bold text drives me insane, and I decided to spare everyone. And by everyone, I mean the two or so people who will potentially read this. I love you, two or so people! Here, have a blue heart: ♥
Also, I want everyone to know that I went out into the wide world of the internet and hunted down this icon specifically for posting this fic. And, I guess potentially others like it? I clearly now need to write more political AUs, and will probably spend the rest of this weekend figuring out which fandoms I'm actually qualified to write them in. What an excellent use of my time!
Title: The Wrath of The Whatever From High Atop The Thing
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Arthur/Eames
Spoilers/Warnings: Mentions of character death consistent with the plot of the film. Other than that, no!
Summary: “Pictures of Dom tonight, Eames,” Yusuf replies from the doorway, “or I swear to you, I will point out to Arthur that he has a stalker with no shame and a thousand dollar camera.” From celebutaunt's prompt at the kink meme, "Cobb is the presidential candidate, Ariadne is his running mate, Yusuf is campaign manager, Saito is the sponsor, and Eames is the campaign photographer who spends way too much time taking picture of Cobb's speechwriter, Arthur."
Disclaimer: Inception is absolutely not mine, nor is anything you recognize from it. Nor, obviously, is the title to this story.
Notes: The title is a quote from The West Wing and is, as mentioned, not mine.
Now seems like a good time to point out once again how amazing and wonderful and generally great celebutaunt's prompt was. I loved it so much, you guys. SO, SO MUCH. Now! The actual fic!
“You are completely hopeless,” Yusuf declares, throwing his hands into the air. “I hope you know that there’s only one reason you still have a job, and it is that we are old, old friends.”
“No,” Eames says, “the reason I still have a job is that I am completely brilliant at what I do and we both know it. What’s the problem?”
Because I am a terrible photographer, and can only admire the excellent photographers who fill my personal life in an amateurish and glossy-eyed way, I am worried that this fic does not get across that Eames was actually supposed to be a good photographer. I have written QUITE A FEW AUs now in this fandom, and Eames is really good at his job in all of them because, well, Eames is really good at his job. Also, ahahaha, I remember when I wrote this opening scene and posted it to the kink meme thinking this fic would go on for a few more parts. AH, THE INNOCENCE OF MY YOUTH.
Yusuf gets up from the couch and drops a stack of photographs onto the bed where Eames is sprawled on his stomach, chin propped on his hands, reading the New York Times.
“The problem,” he says, “is that your job is to take photographs of the candidate.”
Eames glances down his nose at the pile of glossy four-by-sixes and then back at the Paul Krugman column he’s reading.
“Et voila. Photographs. I think you may have to explain the problem again, Yusuf, I’m not quite following you.”
“The candidate, Eames. The candidate, whose name is Dominic Cobb. He’s the junior senator from California. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He’s been making some news lately, earned himself a few headlines--”
“You’re hilarious,” Eames says without glancing up from his newspaper.
“This,” Yusuf says, slapping a photograph right down into the middle of a lethally boring paragraph about derivatives, “is not Dominic Cobb.”
I try to read Paul Krugman columns because I feel it is important to be informed about a) the world, b) the economy, and c) people's opinions about both A and B. However, I tend to get stumped by lethally boring paragraphs about, say, derivatives. And, because I am a terrible citizen, etc., etc., I tend to stop reading. Not even because someone has thrown a photograph of a stunningly handsome human being in my face. JUST BECAUSE.
“No,” Eames agrees, “it is not. I’m glad we’ve got this established.”
“Have we got it established? Because to be honest, I’ve always found your infatuation with Arthur adorable, in an emotionally stunted sort of way, but I do need one or two pictures of the Democratic nominee for president in the middle of all of this.”
I love Yusuf in this fic, I am just going to say it. It probably makes me sound overly fond of my own writing, but there it is. Oh Yusuf!
“Even if I were infatuated with Arthur-- a point which I am in no way conceding-- it can’t be all that bad, can it?”
The one eyebrow Yusuf raises is more than enough to convey, you are genuinely more hopeless than I’d thought, you poor bastard, and so Eames scrambles into a sitting position and scoops up the photographs.
“Hmm,” he says. Here’s Arthur scribbling last-minute notes into the margin of Cobb’s speech on the environment from last Tuesday, ink staining his fingers. Here’s Arthur with one hand on his hip, talking to Ariadne about her convention appearance. Here’s Arthur at three o’clock in the morning, his hair falling into his eyes as he tries to stay awake long enough to prep for his CNN interview at ten. Here’s Arthur laughing into his carton of takeout Chinese (Eames remembers that; he’d just made a dirty joke about chopsticks).
This was the point at which I realized I'd gotten myself in for describing a lot of photographs, something I am not generally very good at which is sad, since I have a weird love of, well. Writing about photographs.
“People adore behind the scenes stuff,” he offers.
And by "people," he means me. I LOVE behind-the-scenes pictures from political campaigns. Also behind-the-scenes interviews, behind-the-scenes articles, and behind-the-scenes exposes. LOVE 'EM.
“One or two pictures of the actual scenes would be very much appreciated,” Yusuf replies. “Also, perhaps if you stopped undressing Arthur through a viewfinder and got around to doing it with your hands you could do your job properly.”
“No thank you,” Eames says. “Too many buttons.”
Hee! Proud of this line which, again, I probably seem full of myself BUT I JUST LIKE THAT LINE.
Yusuf snorts. “I somehow doubt you would let them stop you.”
“You are disgusting and I am offended by your insinuations,” Eames declares in his best affronted tone. “Now get out of my hotel room before I have you thrown out.”
“I am going because I have to change for dinner, not because you told me to,” Yusuf says.
“Are you five?” Eames says.
I work in classrooms on a semi-regular basis. That experience is finding its way into my writing, clearly.
“Pictures of Dom tonight, Eames,” Yusuf replies from the doorway. “Pictures of the man who is actually running for president or I swear to you, I will point out to Arthur that he has a stalker with no shame and a thousand dollar camera.”
------
“This may not be the best way to convince everyone that Dom’s a man of the people,” Eames says an hour and a half later.
“Dom’s not a man of the people,” Arthur replies, shrugging. “And anyway, it’s only dinner.”
Eames sighs and glances around the Samuel Halpert Room of the Ritz-Carlton.
That is an actual room at the Ritz-Carlton! I spent more time than I'd really like to admit researching various swanky hotels and the conference rooms thereof. Here, behold: The Samuel Halpert Room!
Also, I won't lie, I did take a moment or two to wonder if Samuel Halpert was in any way related to Jim Halpert. I haven't watched The Office in ages, but I just had to consider it.
“It’s not that I’m complaining about eating with what may be actual gold silverware,” well that's what it looked like to me in the picture! so he says, “it’s just that this isn’t going to convince anyone that the Democratic presidential nominee cares about their taxes.”
Arthur rolls his eyes.
“Dominic Cobb was born in Costa Mesa, California, to parents who wished Nixon wasn’t so damn liberal and who never forgave Reagan for comparing unfavorably to Margaret Thatcher,” Arthur says. “All of this, combined with the fact that he is terrible at beach volleyball, made him determined to get away from home as soon as he could, which he did by becoming a Columbia University freshman at the age of seventeen. He double majored in Political Science and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and then, because he has never in his life been tired of going to school, he went on to Harvard and got his Ph.D. in Economics. Having spent an impressively high percentage of his life in Ivy League lecture halls, he has never held a gun, nor does he understand which end is up on a fishing pole. If you sat him down to watch Monday Night Football, he would try to use it as a metaphor for the world market in silver alloy. He enjoys going to the theater, and last year he made a donation in Mal’s name to the New York Metropolitan Opera. It’s true that he loves baseball, but he’s also determined to create a statistical model which will predict the winner of the World Series, and honest-to-god, Eames, that is what he does with his spare time, which is essentially none existent. And, to top it all off, he had never been to Iowa until last year’s primaries. All of which does not change the fact that not only does he care about people’s taxes, he actually knows how to lower the damn things without bankrupting the entire country.”
Things about this paragraph which make me gleeful: (1) imaging Dom discovering he wasn't any good at beach volleyball; (1a) imagining Dom playing beach volleyball at all; (2) both Political Science and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures are possible majors at Columbia, and I would study either of them there in a heartbeat-- I would basically like to quadruple major, you guys, I see a LOT of school in my future; (3) you could not pay me to get a Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard, but let me tell you right now: Dom loved it so much he wouldn't mind doing it all again; (4) any time Dom's geekiness is mentioned in this fic, you have to understand that while I was writing it I was bouncing around in my chair with joy because I adore any and all incarnations of Geek!Dom; (5) people who love baseball statistics are the only math people I can hold intelligent conversations with (the rest of them leave me in the dust); (6) this is clearly a paragraph that Arthur has recited so, so very many times. He's got it down cold, people.
So basically I spent a lot of time figuring out all the ways in which Dom could be described as a liberal elite by his opponents, the media, and anyone who happened to wander through his life at any point ever. And there they are!
“I think I’m in love with you,” Eames says. “Also, this steak is amazing.”
“It is very good steak,” Arthur says.
“What, no sweeping declarations, no pledges to cherish me for all eternity?” Eames demands.
“I’m afraid not,” Arthur says. “But come on, you got one out of two. I admitted you were right about the steak.”
“You win some, you lose some,” Eames agrees cheerfully, and slides his camera out of its bag to snap a picture of Dom making a point, his fork coming down on the table emphatically. Saito is listening, his face a portrait of intense concentration which also seems to somehow telegraph, “I’m so rich that were I to dive into my money, Scrooge McDuck style, I’d end up doing laps in an Olympic sized swimming pool.” Eames isn’t sure how Saito does this, but it’s a genuinely impressive skill. Perhaps once you reached a certain tax bracket you were given classes.
I really wish I'd managed to work Saito into this fic more than I did-- I try to write ensemble stuff when I can, especially for AUs because I have so much fun figuring out where everyone belongs, but Saito intimidates me. He is just TOO COOL for me to write, obviously. ;]
“It’s going well, don’t you think?” Ariadne murmurs into Eames’ ear.
She’s seated on his right, her hair swept up into an elegant bun, probably in a ploy to make herself look older than her thirty-five years. I always used to think I’d be ancient when I turned thirty, she’d confided to Eames once as they watched Cobb shaking hands in a Des Moines diner, and now everyone’s desperate to make me look at least forty-five. I fucking hate politics.
“Swimmingly,” Eames replies.
“I swear, I’m going to make a list of words you can only get away with using if you’ve got a British accent,” Ariadne says. “And ‘swimmingly’ is going to be the first thing on it.”
My deepest inner-desires coming through in my writing: God, I wish I could credibly say "swimmingly."
“Promise you’ll put ‘posh’ on it, too. I can’t stand it when Americans say ‘posh,’ you haven’t got the history for it,” Eames says. “You know I adore you, and your country, but really. Keep your flat vowels away from the Queen’s English.”
Ariadne grins and spends the rest of dinner muttering ‘queue’ and ‘flat’ and ‘lift’ at him with what he thinks is supposed to be a Southern twang. As a result, he gets quite a few pictures of the vice-presidential candidate making distinctly undignified faces, and only one or two of Dom.
Yusuf’s probably going to turn a few interesting colors when he sees the film, but it’s worth it when Eames thinks about plastering the one where Ariadne has her nose scrunched up and her eyes bugged out all over the walls of campaign headquarters. Very, very worth it.
“If it weren’t for Arthur, would I be your favorite?” Ariadne asks as they make their way toward the elevator. She’s a bit tipsy, Eames can tell, and he considers ignoring the question in hopes that it will wander off. No such luck.
I have a sneaking suspicion I had been reading Douglas Adams right before I wrote "ignoring the question in hopes that it will wander off." Enjoy my pale imitation!
“I mean, I realize he is. Your favorite, that is. It’s really no contest. But come on, I take second, right?”
“Who says Arthur’s my favorite?” He tries, but his heart’s not really in it. Or too much of his heart is in it. Anyway, something’s wrong with his heart, he’s pretty sure.
I'm oddly fond of this line! SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH HIS HEART. I think later on in this I describe being in love as like having a flu of some variety. I do not actually think love is a heart defect and/or stomach virus, I swear.
“Eames,” Ariadne says, pausing just outside her door to look him in the eye, “the entire fucking universe is aware that you want to be sleeping with Arthur. Okay? You have the hots for the hottest speechwriter in the world of politics. The discussion of split infinitives probably turns you on now. It’s okay. People understand. Did you know the campaign gets anywhere from fifty to one hundred letters a week drooling about how Arthur looks in his suits?”
Let's just take (another) moment to admire writes who are far, far better than I and recall the immortal, Sorkin-penned line, "Josh Lyman, you have the cutest little butt in professional politics."
Eames has a sudden urge to start a bonfire. Perhaps there are some fan letters lying about that would make good kindling.
“Of course there are letters,” Eames says resignedly. “He looks damn good in the suits.”
“Yes,” Ariadne agrees solemnly, “he really, really does.”
------
“Does everybody like him better than me?” Dom demands the next day as he shrugs into his suit jacket, shuffling through his notes one last time.
“Yes,” Yusuf says simply, and then, “Arthur, you cannot be better dressed than the candidate. We’ve talked about this.”
Eames glances up to note Arthur’s slicked back hair, his sharply creased trousers, his perfectly crisp, gray tie. He looks atrociously lovely. Eames, after a moment’s unabashed staring, goes back to fiddling with his camera lens.
I think I have a habit of writing both Arthur and Eames (though especially Arthur) as people who are incredibly inconvenienced by being in love.
“Why?” Dom asks, sounding more genuinely curious than anything else. Eames snaps a photograph of him squinting at himself in the mirror, tugging at the sleeves of his jacket. Dom can never seem to look quite presidential; actually, he tends to look like he’s aimed for professorial and fallen short. Yusuf calls it a liability. Ariadne calls it endearing.
(I also call it endearing. Just for the record. I tend to love Dom more in his AU incarnations, mine and other peoples', than I do in canon.)
“Because,” Yusuf says, “no one has to decide whether or not they want to vote for Arthur. You’re a politician. Everyone is required to hate you. I believe it's in the Constitution.”
“Everyone can’t hate me,” Cobb says, bemused. “Some of them have to vote for me.”
“They can vote for you and still hate you,” Eames points out cheerfully. “Why it happens all the time! Doesn’t it Arthur dearest?”
Ah, my witty observations on America's political system. /sarcasm
/...but not really. I will never /sarcasm.
/aside
“I’m not paying attention to any of you,” Arthur says, “because none of you-- not a single one of you-- is as interesting as this semi-colon.”
A lot of people seemed to like this line! Ahahaha. Did it speak to you, writers of fandom? ;]
“Aw. You like us, you really like us,” Ariadne says, and grins, and sweeps fluidly out of the room in a way Eames has helped her practice so many times he’s lost count. He hears her voice rise over the thundering crowd, hears her tell Northern Virginia that they had better be ready to hear a speech that is going to change their lives. Judging by the noise the make, they are more than ready.
Eames helping Ariadne practice her exit is one of the ways I tried to indicate that he's really helped her settle into this VP role. Also to indicate that they love to hang out and goof around, haha.
“Arthur,” Dom says. It’s not a warning, exactly, nor is it a question. It’s really just Arthur’s name. But Eames glances up again anyway.
“Here,” Arthur says, shoving the speech into Dom’s hands. “It’s done, okay? It’s done. Pay attention to that fucking semi-colon, it is exactly where it needs to be.”
“Some day you won’t finish in time,” Eames says quietly as he captures Dom silhouetted in the doorway, stepping into everything Northern Virginia expects of him.
“Such sacrilege," Arthur says dryly. "I’ll always finish in time."
HE WILL. ALWAYS.
Which is probably true, Eames thinks, quite annoyed. Arthur will probably never make a mistake in his entire life. He will probably never retire, either, and he is certainly too stubborn to die. He will probably have android body parts implanted to replace his own so that he can go on living, go on writing, his metallic fingers clacking away at increasingly advanced keyboards, fussing about misplaced commas and passive tense and the misuse of repetition as a rhetorical device.
I'm terrible about passive tense. :/
“When you are a robot,” Eames says, “and are approached by-- oh, I don’t know, let’s say a really evil microwave-- with a rudimentary outline of the machines’ plans to take over the world, promise that after you have risen up to become their great and terrible and incredibly efficient leader, that you’ll tell them not to kill me.”
Arthur leading robotic uprisings has appeared in two of my Inception fics now. Is this worrying, do we think?
“Is it possible that you’re just drunk all the time?” Arthur asks.
“It’s certainly possible,” Eames says, “but it isn’t actually true.”
“I won’t let the microwaves get you,” Arthur promises. “I’ll probably want to kill you myself, anyway.”
Arthur would never delegate Eames!Assassination to a robot minion! Heaven forbid.
“Good point,” Eames says, and slips out onto the stage to take a few shots of Dom’s hands gripping the podium.
------
They’d met when Yusuf had said, “Ah, Arthur. This is Eames. He’s going to be our campaign photographer.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Arthur had said distractedly, his nose so close to the paper he was scribbling away at that it was probably absorbing ink.
“Likewise,” Eames had said, amused.
That had been it.
Eames feels a sort of amicable apathy toward Arthur after that, has filed him away neatly in his head (hard worker, clearly in love with his job; dresses well; does not give a shit who I am). Then, a week later, Dom buries his head in his hands five minutes before a New Hampshire town hall meeting and says, “Fuck, I can’t say this. Why can’t I say this?” Arthur gently slides the speech out from under Dom’s despairing elbows and goes to work.
Four and a half minutes later Arthur is sliding the speech back to Dom.
“It was the part about jobs. I changed the order of ‘farmers’ and ‘teachers.’ You’ll be fine,” he says.
I really enjoyed writing this section, but I don't have much to say about it evidently. I will say that I meant for Arthur making this change to Dom's speech to indicate not only that Arthur is a really good writer, but also that he knows Dom really, really well. I don't know how they met or how long they've known each other in this fic, but they get each other pretty well.
The next day, NBC plays footage from the speech every two seconds, as does CNN. Everywhere Eames goes, he is faced with Dom slamming his hand onto the podium, his eyes narrowed, as he shouts about the importance of farmers and teachers, about the work in this country which is overlooked or undervalued or simply ignored. It sounds right in Dom’s voice, and Eames feels a rush at the knowledge that only a few people in the world know how close it was to sounding wrong, and that he is one of them.
“You swapped the order of ‘farmers’ and ‘teachers,’” Eames says the next morning, ambushing Arthur in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. “It was supposed to be ‘teachers and farmers,’ and you made it ‘farmers and teachers.’”
“Yes,” Arthur says, his fingers desperately curled around a styrofoam cup full of coffee. Eames finds his eyes darting to them as if they hold the answers.
In my head canon for this story Eames has a thing for Arthur's hands, I think mostly because he's a writer. And even though I hardly (if ever) mention it again, THIS IS WHEN IT BEGINS.
“He would have sounded terrible saying ‘teachers and farmers,’” Eames says.
“I know,” Arthur says. “That’s why I changed it.”
“I have a theory,” Eames says.
“Mm?” Arthur says, taking a quick gulp of coffee.
“You’ve sold your soul to the devil,” Eames says.
“Ah, so you’ve heard about my skills with a fiddle,” Arthur says. Eames snaps a picture of him, bleary-eyed and so damn talented, standing in a middle-of-nowhere parking lot at four in the morning, drinking disgusting, day-old instant coffee and from then on, he can’t seem to stop.
It's love, it's love, it's LOOOOOVE! Etc., etc.
------
Arthur is an alumnus of the University of Connecticut, with a B.A. in Journalism and a minor in Cultural and Historical Anthropology. He saw school as a means to an end, more than anything else, and the only real problem was that once he graduated he realized he had no idea what the end ought to be. Annoyed with himself for being so poorly planned, he moved to New York. He spent somewhere between three weeks and six months working at a Starbucks and being bored out of his mind as a hobby, and then met Mal.
Most of this, Eames decided based on the one quote Arthur had (grudgingly) given to The Los Angeles Times when they wanted to write a feature about him: “I got my degree at the University of Connecticut and then moved to New York. That’s where I met Dom.”
Eames has an excellent imagination, a level of devotion to Arthur which is unparalleled, and way too much free time on his hands. Or, alternatively, just loves creating back story. If so, that's something he and I have in common.
Eames spends endless plane flights early on in the primary campaign, trying to gather up bits and pieces. He watches the way Arthur turns the pages of whatever shitty airport novel he’d bought before takeoff as if that will somehow make everything clear.
Not-at-all-fun fact I deleted a comma from the first sentence of the above paragraph just now because it was bothering me. Oooh! Ahhh! Behind-the-scenes magic!
(It doesn’t work. Arthur just spends a lot of time glaring at him. On one particularly memorable occasion, he is so distracted by the need to stare murderously at Eames that he ends up with a paper cut and bleeds all over page 74 of a sordid Wild West love story of some variety. Eames fights not to laugh, cannot manage it, and sprays Diet Coke out of his nose. Then, in a conciliatory gesture, he snatches the book from Arthur and reads bits of it aloud. No one seems to appreciate it, except that Arthur, perhaps light-headed from the blood loss, tips him a sly smile just as Eames is declaiming about the way Jackson moves like an untamed stallion through the wilds of the high desert. So maybe it all does work, actually.)
------
“Alright,” Yusuf had said once as they wound their way through the Appalachian Mountains, “which do you want to do: pretend to hate ballet, or pretend to love coal mining?”
Cobb laughed, and Yusuf said with a sigh, “I am glad you still think that is a joke. It means the campaign has not yet consumed your soul.”
“Mm, soul,” Ariadne said. “I like it for breakfast, close to burnt-- you know, so it gets really crispy?”
“Absolutely. There’s no other way to eat it,” Eames said, and then, to Yusuf, “Didn’t your mother ever tell you your face would stick that way?”
“No,” Yusuf said, his frown relentless, “because my mother was not a manipulative buffoon.”
“What are you implying about my mother?” Eames asked almost lazily, digging through his camera bag for a better lens.
Eames is not up-in-arms about this because he knows his mom is awesome, and he knows Yusuf knows it. There's no need to leap to the woman's defense: she is, quite simply, a badass.
“Nothing,” Yusuf said, deflating. “Your mother is a lovely woman.”
“Yes she is,” Eames said.
“You’ve met his mother?” Arthur asked, sounding amused. Yusuf nodded distractedly, back to pouring over polling numbers from Lord-knows-where-- at that point, no one in the car would have been surprised if Pluto was the next battleground state.
“He has indeed,” Eames said. When he glanced over Arthur was actually looking up from his notebook, and Eames felt suddenly honor bound to make the momentary lapse in work ethic worth the time.
More random stuff that I doubt really came through in the fic: Arthur helped convince Dom that running for president would not make him a last-place laughingstock, and is thus bound and determined to make it so. He pretty much works every minute of every day.
“My mother is on a mission, Arthur: feed the world,” Eames said. “She is doing this one person at a time, of course, because otherwise it would be quite overwhelming. Anyone I mention to her, even in passing, has to come home for dinner. She is a woman of singular purpose, and that purpose is to ensure that every human being on this planet compliments her Duck a l’Orange.”
Useless fact: I now wish the "overwhelming" in the above paragraph was "impractical" instead. Useless fact redux: Duck a l'Orange was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of fancy but relatively well-known food, which is weird since I've never prepared it, eaten it, or even seen it.
Arthur laughed, and Eames had his camera up before he could even think about it. It’s the laugh lines more than anything else, he thought dazedly as he heard the shutter click.
Laugh lines are my greatest weakness. GREATEST. WEAKNESS. Show me a man with laugh lines and I'll show you me, swooning onto the nearest bit of furniture. Blue eyes preferred, but not necessary. For all the elaboration I will ever need, see: Seth Meyers.
When he lowered the camera again Arthur was still looking at him, a funny little smile on his face, questioning.
“To be fair,” Eames had said, feeling entirely too caught out, “the compliments are always deserved.”
Is it weird that I find that little scene, with Eames taking the picture and Arthur smiling at him (in a way which I now realize I should have described as "quizzical") one of the most romantic parts of this whole thing? Because I do.
So that was late July, a month before the convention. And that, of course, was when Eames realized he was in love. It felt oddly like having the flu.
The last few weeks of July were awful, was the thing. Everyone knew they were going to get the nomination, but everyone was also certain, deep down in their bones, that they were going to lose; every two seconds they seemed to come up against another hurdle they absolutely could not afford to fuck up.
As a Democrat since the womb, the bone-deep certainty re: losing is something I am horribly familiar with.
They hadn’t announced Ariadne yet, but Dom had insisted she travel with them so that they could get to know each other, which was an excruciatingly Dom-like thing to do in that it showed next to no political savvy and great deal too much personal sense. Generally speaking, Dom is far too sensible to be a good politician. Yusuf spent his days and nights trying to keep speculation rife, and coming up with increasingly elaborate plans to rush Ariadne past the press at each and every event. Ariadne spent her days alternatively sulking and offering up fresh and thrilling ideas regarding the future of the country, which meant that no one could decide whether or not they liked her (except for Yusuf who, in between shoving her behind coat racks and reminding her to smile just a bit less, appeared to have taken to her spectacularly well).
Ariadne and Yusuf: this fic's unsung BFFs!
And, of course, there was Robert Fischer.
“The worst part about it is that he’s so nice,” Ariadne said miserably one evening as they all took over Dom’s hotel room, curling into chairs and sprawling across the rug.
Ariadne and Robert: this fic's unsung love story! Well, it's more like Ariadne has a goofy campaign crush on him from afar and Robert thinks she's really nice and has a good handshake the two times they meet, but. Whatever! Unsung love story!
“His campaign bloody well isn’t,” Yusuf said sulkily from his chair, scooting back so that he could rest his feet on the desk.
Everyone made “hmm”-ing sounds of agreement. Someone who sounded suspiciously like Arthur compared Peter Browning unfavorably to the backside of a toad.
Someday in the future of this fic's timeline, Arthur and Eames wile away an afternoon trading Shakespearean insults. It's true love, people.
“It’s a negative ad,” Dom said into the eventual silence. “It isn’t as if he’s committed murder. In fact, he hasn’t even committed a misdemeanor. It’s well within his rights to accuse me of killing my wife.”
“Right,” Arthur said slowly. “What you don’t seem to be grasping, here, is that it’s also despicable, not to mention that it shows all the political flair of pond scum.”
(The ad was the work of pond scum, indisputably. It had everything: the ominous music; the footage of Mal, smiling and laughing on Dom's arm; pictures of the car, one side practically sheared off (Eames had no fucking clue how the Fischer campaign had got hold of it, but it was poisonous); and then headline after headline, most of them from the tabloids, full of the sickly sweet speculation that was so irrationally damning to a political candidacy. It was simultaneously one of the most impressive pieces of strategy Eames had ever seen and a perfectly good reason for moving to the Great White North and never speaking to another living soul again.
When Eames had relayed all of this to Arthur in a half-drunk bit of philosophizing, Arthur had raised an eyebrow, loosened his tie, and said, "It's politics, Mr. Eames."
It was all very depressing.
Neither of them WANT to be impressed by the ad, but they are, and whenever they realize this they spend a while trying to reaffirm that they are possessed of souls.)
“It’s true,” Yusuf said to Cobb, careful. “Accusing you of being responsible for Mal’s death is insensitive, to say the least.”
“I’m not making the speech,” Dom said immediately, and Yusuf backed down without a fight, his palms upturned in surrender.
This is how, in the same month that Eames realizes he is in love with Arthur and almost throws up his campaign dinner of fried chicken and M&Ms, he also learns about the speech.
Mmm, campaign food. In addition, amongst senior campaign staff, Ariadne is the Keeper of The Takeout Menus, and has in her possession lists of good Thai, Chinese, Indian and Italian food from every major city. She rules with an iron fist. Don't mess with Ariadne or she's ordering FOR you, ya hear?
The speech isn’t the speech, really, it’s The Speech. Every time it comes up Cobb’s entire face sort of swallows itself in a way that should be Muppet-lookalike levels of funny but which is painful instead, and Arthur leaves the room. Yusuf just sighs, pushes his glasses up his nose if he’s wearing them, and runs his fingers through his hair if he’s not.
When Eames goes to ask about it he considers opening with a joke (something awful, something along the lines of, is it about his secret love affair with a Teletubby, then?), but decides against it because it turns out he really isn’t that much of an asshole.
“What is it?” He asks instead, after he has wandered into Yusuf’s hotel room unannounced.
“What’s what?” Yusuf says, lowering the volume on NBC’s Charleston affiliate.
“Does this sound like Abbot and Costello to anyone else?” Eames inquires of the empty room.
“Eames,” Yusuf says with an excellent imitation of patience, “are you here to be useful in some way, or should I just scold you out of the room now?”
More Yusuf-Eames interaction! HI YUSUF.
“As equal as I’m sure you would be to that task, please don’t,” Eames says. “The speech. What’s the speech?”
“What speech?” Yusuf says, but he isn’t even trying.
“You aren’t even trying,” Eames says, and Yusuf has the temerity to roll his eyes.
“The speech is about Mal,” he says. “What more do you need to know?”
This is an excellent question, really. Mal is a brick wall, of sorts-- when she is the answer, you stop asking. But Eames has never had a healthy relationship with physics, and brick walls have never deterred him quite the way that they should.
This phrase about a healthy relationship with physics is something I've wanted to work into a fic for something like two years now, but it's never worked. I think it did, this time, but my judgment might be warped by my many months of yearning. Feel free to tell me what a horrible clunker it is, if you so choose.
“What about her?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Yusuf says. “All I know is that when Arthur first told me Dom was going to run, I told him he had to have something prepared about Mal. Everyone knows the entire story, after all. I told him it was fundamental that Dom be prepared to put everything in his own words. So Arthur wrote a speech.”
No, he wrote The Speech, Eames corrects him mentally, and sets off in search of Arthur.
------
“I want to read it,” Eames announces when he finds Arthur sitting on the roof.
“No,” Arthur says.
There is a momentary pause.
“You’re on the roof,” Eames says.
I'M ON A ROOF AND/IT'S GOING FAST AND/I GOT A NAUTICAL THEMED--
Yeah. Anyway.
“Yes,” Arthur agrees, “I am.”
“Alright,” Eames says companionably, and settles down onto the cold concrete beside him. If the sun was setting this would all perfect, in a rather disgusting way, but it’s just twilight instead, gray and chilly.
“It’s cold,” Arthur says.
“It’s chilly,” Eames says.
“Are we going to argue over temperature gradations now?” Arthur inquires, sounding like he wouldn’t particularly mind.
“If you like,” Eames says. He can feel himself smiling.
Instead of saying anything about wind chill, Arthur says, “Dom’s going to get the nomination.”
“Probably,” Eames says, because that would just be a stupid thing to argue about.
“He’s going to have to talk about her eventually,” Arthur says.
Eames makes a sort of hum of agreement. Arthur sighs.
“I’m not even sure if it’s any good,” he says. He means The Speech, of course, and Eames wants to read it so badly he can feel it in his rapidly numbing fingertips.
“Of course it is,” Eames says. “Everything you write is good, everything you write is fucking brilliant.”
“You didn’t know Mal,” Arthur says softly. “You didn’t-- I’m not sure fucking brilliant is really good enough. And the two of them together-- I don’t know what would be good enough.”
I sort of like that Arthur knows he's fucking brilliant. He isn't going to dispute that compliment. It's just the truth!
Eames is surprised, once again. For a man who is so fastidious about grammar, Arthur’s capacity to surprise has always been, well. Surprising.
One of this Eames' favorite things about this Arthur is that this Arthur is unpredictably unpredictable. You think you know a guy--!
“What was she like?” Eames asks.
“She was lovely,” Arthur says.
“I wish I’d met her,” Eames says.
They stay on the roof longer than is reasonable for two expert political operatives, and then when too long shifts into where-in-God’s-name-have-you-been long they get up and go inside. Eames doesn’t hear about The Speech again for a long time.
------
The convention itself goes off without a hitch. For three days, everyone from the campaign walks around a bit dazed, astonished by their own charmed lives. Ariadne’s speech is a rousing success, and every pundit in the country immediately gloms on to the “smart, savvy, independent woman” story line, which is rather patronizing but also an excellent way to earn votes. Cobb manages to leave the tax code alone for an hour and forty-five minutes of the two total hours he spends speaking, which everyone counts as a win. Yusuf drinks a bracingly unhealthy amount of champagne on the first night, proposes toasts to everyone he has ever met, one-by-one, and spends the next two days telling everyone within earshot that he has always known Dom is something special. Even Arthur seems to enjoy himself, and makes one more appearance than is strictly required of him, which is nigh on astounding. Eames relishes every minute of the convention, of course, since the entire event requires Arthur to be in exquisitely tailored suits, and to smile more than twice a day.
It is the eye of the storm, of course, a bizarrely calm oasis in the midst of the riot that is American politics. But everyone honest to God enjoys themselves, which is a good thing, since within a week everything has gone spectacularly and horribly wrong.
And now for a boring, "amazingly_me Wishes She'd Made A Small Conventions Correction" Interlude: should've hyphenated "honest to God." This concludes our interlude. We now return you to our previously scheduled (and potentially more interesting than this) commentary.
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PART II.
Phew! That's a lot of commentary, people. I'm leaving this post public because it's sort of fic, I guess? And since my fic is usually public, it seemed to make sense for this to be. You can still ask me to do commentary for something, right over here!