The French Drop 2/5 (An Inception Fanfiction)
Title: The French Drop 2/5
Author: Mel Wong, @chn_breathmint on Livejournal and AO3.
Characters/Pairings: Eames, Arthur, Ariadne, OCs. Eames/Arthur flirting, Arthur/Eames attraction, Arthur/Ariadne attraction (and vice versa), some Ariadne/Eames attraction.
Status: WIP
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Inception or its characters.
Word Count: 5580
Summary: The Eames And Arthur Executive Protection Hour. Gen with mild slash and het overtones.
Warnings: Genderfuck in this chapter, implications about Arthur’s personal life (and by extension, Eames’ personal life.) Personal versions of Eames’ and Arthur’s backgrounds and names, Ariadne’s own background and full name, a little lighter than Parlor Tricks, thank $DEITY for that.
Notes: This is a sequel to Parlor Tricks (1, 2, 3) and may not make a whole lot of sense plotwise if you haven’t read that one. Major spoilers for the movie and, naturally, for Parlor Tricks. I think this damn installment has pretty much confirmed my downward slide into Eames/Arthur/Ariadne poly triad shipping. Thanks to heronymus_waat for the beta. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Eames showed up early the next morning, his arrival preceded by a text message that told her she was on his way. Her cellphone pinged its notification just as she stepped out of the shower while Arthur lay half-asleep, huddled in his sleeping bag.
“Was that Eames?” he had asked, propping himself up on an elbow as she checked the text message, his voice slightly hoarse from what she presumed was residual sleep. His hair had dried in the night and now stuck out in the most ridiculous swoops and curls. A cowlick poked extravagantly from the back of his head, and she realized now why he put all that pomade in his hair.
“Oh my God, Arthur. You look like Robert Smith,” she said, her left hand over her mouth as she fought a ridiculous fit of giggling.
“Robert Smith,” he gasped, his voice between a cough and a sneeze.
“The Cure, Arthur,” she said.
“I know who he is. I just think you’re mistaken about the resemblance,” he said, just before he sneezed again, twice more.
“Are you okay?” she asked, studying his reflection in the mirror of her dresser table as she ran a brush through her damp hair and then pulled it back in a silver barette.
“Did you know your landlady’s cat came in through the window last night?” he asked her as he grabbed another change of clothing from his overnight bag.
“He does that,” she said as she packed her backpack for school.
“Well, he decided to sleep on my face, and he came back after I shooed him away,”
“That just means he likes you.”
“He can go like someone who isn’t allergic to him,” Arthur grumbled as he staggered to the bathroom.
Eames showed up at her door while Arthur was still in the shower, and she checked the peephole, moved the Snapple bottle and disabled the alarm before she let him in. He was dressed more formally today in a striped shirt with an open collar and a faded corduroy jacket. He held a tray with four cups of coffee in one hand, and a brown paper bag in the other.
“Good morning,” he said, grinning brightly as she shut the door behind him.
“Four cups of coffee?” she asked as he handed her the tray.
“Arthur needs at least two cups before he’s actually awake,” he explained as he put the paper bag down on the countertop in her galley kitchen. “Where is your frying pan, love?” he asked, as she watched him pull out a half dozen eggs in a carton and two soggy parcels wrapped in butcher paper.
“Bottom right hand cabinet. Eames, what are you doing?” She put the cups of coffee down on the dinette table and appropriated one for herself.
“Making breakfast,” he said cheerfully. A carton of mushrooms and a can of baked beans came out of the paper bag next. “How do you like your eggs?”
“Over easy,” she said on reflex as she stared at the growing pile of groceries on her kitchen counter. A brace of tomatoes and what looked like a large blood sausage joined the bacon, eggs, baked beans and mushrooms on the counter.
“Unfertilized, please,” she heard Arthur say as he stepped out of the bathroom, his hair tamed by a fresh application of pomade. He had started to look more like himself now that he had showered and shaved and changed into dressier clothing.
“You don’t ovulate, Arthur,” Ariadne said, confused. Eames’ only reply was a dry chuckle as he dropped a few rashers of bacon into the melted butter in her frying pan.
“No, I’m referring to the stunt he pulled back in Manila with the hard-boiled duck embryos.” Arthur picked up his Glock 17 and tucked it away in the holster behind his right hip. The two smaller pistols went into an ankle holster and a pocket holster, respectively.
“Aren’t SERE graduates supposed to eat everything?” She still wasn’t entirely sure on what exactly Arthur had done in his time with the Air Force, but Eames had once told her about Arthur’s survival and evasion qualifications.
“Only if we don’t have a choice. I don’t get off on eating rotting zebra carcass like Bear Grylls does.”
“Don’t be such a big girl’s blouse, Arthur,” Eames said, the tone of his voice slightly peevish. He dished out the rashers of bacon and then cracked three eggs into the pan, where they sizzled in the mixture of butter and bacon fat.
The full English breakfast was, apparently, a meal based mostly on sodium and grease. Some fried mushrooms and blackened slices of tomato sat in the middle of each plate, in a half-hearted nod towards the food pyramid. Ariadne only managed to finish the egg, half her sausage, a single rasher of bacon and the baked beans on toast before she called it quits.
“I can’t do this any more,” she told Eames. A slight queasy feeling was building up in the pit of her stomach and she eyed the remaining food on her plate with a vague sense of apprehension.
“Not a fan of fry-ups, are we?” he asked as he snagged a slice of black pudding off her plate.
“Not in this quantity,” she protested, weakly. She had the unpleasant suspicion that if someone actually shot her now she would probably ooze slowly instead of bleeding.
“I can help you finish it,” Arthur said. He had let Eames have the other chair and had eaten his breakfast standing up at her kitchen counter instead.
“You’re already done?” She couldn’t see Arthur’s plate from where she was sitting, but he had finished one cup of coffee and was working on a second.
“Bloody skinny bastard,” Eames muttered as he cut one of the slices of black pudding in half, “eats more than me and it never shows.”
They split the contents of her plate between them. Eames took the rest of the black pudding and the sad-looking tomato slices, Arthur the bacon, sausage and the fried mushrooms.
“I’ll be walking you to school today,” Eames said after he had finished eating. He wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief and stood up from his seat to collect the submachine gun in its briefcase while Arthur did the dishes.
“You’d let Eames touch your girlfriend?” she asked him as he rinsed the plates off in the sink. He snorted, once, at her question and turned the water off.
“We have an open relationship, and I trust her to practice safer shooting,” he said with a wry smile and the faintest hint of a blush.
“Do you hear that, Eames?” Ariadne asked as she collected her backpack, “Behave yourself around Arthur’s gun.”
His only response was a deep laugh as he led the way out of her door, and they left Arthur behind in her apartment, drying the dishes. They were halfway down the stairs when she froze and realized that Arthur didn’t have a key to her apartment.
“Wait,” she told Eames. “I don’t know if Arthur can lock up after he leaves.”
“Of course he can,” Eames said. “What do you take us for?”
“But I have both copies of the -“ Her protest was cut short when Eames plucked a shiny new copy of her apartment key from a trouser pocket and held it before her.
“Never mind.” She had things figured out by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs. Eames had, most probably, taken an impression of her apartment key while she had been dreaming her firearms training, and had used the mold to make duplicates after he had left for the day. She knew that she should have been disturbed by the ease with which he had pulled it off, but now she was just glad to have him and Arthur on her side.
Her day at school was oddly ordinary, considering the rather unusual circumstances. She had wanted to let herself forget and to just go through this day like any other, but Eames’ constant quiet presence was at once reassuring and a reminder that the course of her life was currently slightly askew.
“How do you cope with this?” she asked him, as they stood on the rooftop where she had drawn a maze for Cobb, nearly a year ago. “This paranoia, always having to watch your back.”
“Some of us are naturally nasty, paranoid people, Ariadne,” Eames had said while he squinted into the distance, his gaze casting over the rooftops of Paris. “Extraction work draws all kinds of interesting personalities to it. That and I probably would have had the sense not to take the Cobol job.” He held one of his cigarettes in his hand but had not lighted it yet.
“Probably?” she asked, before she took a bite out of her sandwich.
“I like to think I’m a reasonably careful man,” Eames said, his face thoughtful and saturnine, “but I remember what someone once told me years ago. ‘Fifteen million dollars is not money. It’s a motive with a universal adapter on it.’ Pile the lucre high enough and any number of fools will think it a decent gamble, myself included.”
“Cobb didn’t do it for money, though,” Ariadne said after she had spent a moment thinking of what Eames had said. “He did it because he was trying to get back to his children.”
“The money was just a means to an end, and the end was his motive. Stupid decision, though, which leads us to this.” He pulled his lighter from a pocket and flicked it experimentally. The stiff breeze blowing over the parapet overwhelmed the tiny flame almost immediately.
“How about you? Isn’t there anyone you care enough about that you’d do something like that for them?” she asked. She sometimes thought of Arthur as not having been born as much as assembled in the manner of a forged ID, but Eames, with his easy, insouciant manner, had felt more authentic, as though he had come from somewhere.
“I do not generally involve myself in the business of giving a shite, Ariadne,” The hint of iron in his voice reminded her that the charm was, at times as much a front as the forgeries he put on in dreams. “Caring about someone means they can be used against you.”
“What about this? Coming to Paris to make sure I’m okay?” she asked.
“This is business. Anyone who’s willing to kill me in an attempt to get Arthur is a bloody fool who deserves what’s coming to them,” Eames said around his cigarette as he turned half away from her, cupping his lighter flame in his hands.
“Which is?”
Eames only smiled, his expression oddly and uncharacteristically icy as he brought his index finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said. The ember on the end of the cigarette winked as he took a deep drag on it, wisps of smoke curling out his nostrils and about his face before the wind snatched them away.
She came home from school to find Arthur waiting in her apartment. The intense aroma of garlic, anchovies and tomatoes wafted out about him as he opened the door for her, holding a red-stained wooden spoon in his left hand.
“How was your day?” he had asked her when she came into the room with Eames bringing up the rear. She could only stand and stare at the sight of Arthur wearing her blue gingham apron over his shirt, tie, and dress pants.
“Long,” she said after a moment of exhausted bafflement, before she decided that she was too tired to even care. “You know how it is. You spend weeks working on something, you bring it in for a review session, and your professor rips it apart and then tells you how you can spend the next few days putting it back together.”
“This is constructive criticism, one would assume,” Eames said as he shut the door behind him and sat down in one of the chairs at her dinette table while she dropped her backpack by her bed. He left the briefcase by his seat, which was where Arthur had left it the evening before.
“Well, this is fine art. If they weren’t trying to be constructive I doubt they’d have given me instructions on how to put it back together.” She noticed, then, that Arthur had, rather thoughtfully, brought a folding chair upstairs so someone wouldn’t have to sit on the floor this time. The dinette table was still too small for three diners, though, which meant that someone would probably have to eat at the kitchen counter again.
“I hope you don’t mind pasta for dinner,” Arthur said after the both of them had settled down on opposite sides of her dinette table. He had left his jacket hanging off the back of one of her chairs, and she watched mutely as he drained the spaghetti noodles and tasted the sauce he had left simmering in a saucepan. The knotted apron strings were an incongruous contrast to his polished dress and the matte black pistol grip rising from his waistband.
“That depends on what it’s going to be,” she said.
“Spaghetti alla puttanesca,” Arthur said, “anchovies, garlic, capers, olives, crushed tomatoes, peppers. I like to throw some cooked or canned fish in for protein.” His Italian accent was excellent, and she wondered where he had learned to speak it.
“I didn’t think you could cook,” she said after he had handed a glass of water from the jug she kept in the refrigerator, and then turned his attention back to the draining pasta.
“I know just enough to get by,” he said as he dished out platefuls of spaghetti and then dropped chunks of canned salmon onto the plates. “Boil noodles, make sauce. Beats frying everything because I don’t know what else to do with it.”
Eames shot Arthur an offended look but chose not to protest; something that Ariadne thought wise, since Arthur was the one who had prepared and was serving dinner.
They ate in silence for the most part. Arthur chose to eat standing at the kitchen counter again, and he kept the apron on as he ate. The noodles were al dente; the sauce was intense with the fishy tang of anchovies, the pungency of garlic and the sweetness of slow-cooked tomatoes, laced with a subtle bite of spiciness.
“You were lying, weren’t you, Arthur?” Eames had asked after his first bite.
Arthur glanced up at him from beneath his eyelashes, as though alarmed, before he chewed and swallowed. “What about?”
“About not knowing how to cook more than this. You’re showing off.”
“It’s not like I can make proper hollandaise sauce from scratch,” Arthur said, a little embarrassed. “Every time I try the emulsion breaks.”
“You’re working off a different definition of ‘cooking’, Arthur,” Ariadne said. “Most of us think putting a Pop-Tart in the toaster is cooking.”
“That’s not cooking. That’s not even assembly,” Arthur protested, a hint of disgust apparent in the tone of his voice.
“And you say you can’t cook,” Eames said after he had eaten another forkful of spaghetti.
Eames brought out the PASIV after they had eaten, and he started to set it up for another training session while Arthur cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the sink. He wiped his wet hands on the apron and then took it off, hanging it on a hook on the kitchen wall.
“Three IV lines,” Ariadne said as she watched Eames work. “The both of you today?”
“I’m going to need Arthur’s assistance for this one,” Eames had said with a faint, knowing smirk. “You’ll see why later.”
She lay down on her bed and looked up at the ceiling after she had swabbed her wrist and hooked herself up to the PASIV. Arthur was next, and he sat down with his back to the frame of her bed. Eames stretched himself out full-length on the hardwood floor of his apartment, but before he did so he unclipped the holster of his gun from his belt and laid it on the floor beside him so it wouldn’t dig into his back.
“Are you ready?” Arthur asked, quietly.
“Yeah,” Ariadne said. Eames pushed the button and the sleep plucked at her eyelids and pulled her under into a world of gauzy gray, and then blood-lit blackness.
This time Ariadne found herself sitting in a window seat in what looked like the hall of a large manor house. She could not identify the style in which it had been built without a good look at the outside, but the furnishings and interior setting seemed to point at the 1810s, which made Georgian architecture a likely choice. The furniture in the room had been moved to the sides of the room, most of it covered with dusty drapes. In their place was a large padded mat in the middle of the worsted carpet, and a waning fire licked at ash and embers in the fireplace.
Arthur was draped languidly over an overstuffed chaise lounge, and the dim firelight winked off his cufflinks as he stood up and shed his suit jacket.
“Where is Eames?” she asked as she stood up and joined Arthur on the other side of the room.
“He should be here soon enough,” Arthur said as he left his jacket on the armchair and then took his cufflinks off and rolled his sleeves up.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.” A woman’s voice, soft and velvety, came from the hallway outside the room. She came in, and Ariadne saw that she was roughly the same height as herself, and she wore a tank top over a sports bra and a pair of loose drawstring pants.
“Eames?” Ariadne asked after a moment of dumb silence. She noticed that while the woman’s toenails had been painted the color of frost plums, her fingernails were plain and short, and there was a sinewy spareness to her forearms that suggested a violent, wiry strength.
“One and the same,” the woman said. Green eyes gleamed mischievously from a heart-shaped face framed by a mass of soft blond curls. “We thought it’d be easier to teach you how to defend yourself in hand-to-hand if you had someone of your relative build demonstrate the movements.”
Arthur rubbed at his temples as though he had a headache, and then he undid the knot of his necktie and pulled it out from under his shirt collar. “I know this is necessary, Mr. Eames, but I would appreciate it if you kindly avoided forging any of my exes while you did it.”
The blonde laughed, a single pealing note like a bell, and then she wasn’t. The change was instantaneous and seamless, like two reels of film being spliced together. Eames was now a deeply tanned Chinese woman in an oversize t-shirt and a pair of faded jeans, her shiny black hair pulled back in a severe ponytail.
“Is this better?” she asked Arthur, her voice now not so much velvet as much as whisky and smoke.
“I don’t even know how you managed to get close enough to forge Lee,” Arthur said as he undid his shirt collar.
“You know as well as I do that forgery does not require the forger to know the subject in a Biblical manner,” Eames said, her smile now smug, her teeth startlingly white against the brown of her face.
“No,” Arthur said as he walked over to stand in the middle of the practice mat. “You just prefer to when the subject’s pretty enough.”
“True enough, but alas, Ms. Lee is faithful to her wedding vows, and I once watched her kill a man with a knitting needle. I would not presume to persuade her otherwise,” Eames said, beckoning Ariadne to follow as she joined Arthur on the practice mat. “I doubt you have much experience in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Not unless hitting another kid with a metal lunchbox in middle school counts.”
“Well, not really,” Eames said, “but it does mean you have the right mindset for this. In the real world you want to fight fast, fight hard, and fight them with everything you have to hand. Fair play is for dead people.”
Arthur struck then, as though to emphasize what Eames had said. His movements were swift and snakelike as he grabbed Eames’ hair from behind in a vicious hold. Eames reached up with both hands and seized Arthur’s wrist, pivoting towards him on her heel and twisting his arm backwards. She then stepped neatly away from him and dragged his hand out of her hair, and followed up with a vicious stomp to the spine, her foot stopping an inch from the nape of his neck after he had fallen on the mat.
“You don’t have to be enormously strong to pull this off,” Eames said after she had taken her foot off Arthur’s neck and helped him up, “nor will dream training increase your physical strength and dexterity. What we’re going to teach you is something simpler.”
“What Eames is doing,” Arthur said, “is she’s using the geometry of my body against me.”
“Right,” Ariadne said. “The forearm only rotates so much before you start straining the ligaments of the elbow, and when the elbow and shoulder reach the limits of their articulation my opponent has to follow if he doesn’t want his arm dislocated.” Which would screw up his ability to fight anyway, but she didn’t think it needed saying.
“Very good,” Arthur said. “You know your anatomy.”
“Yeah, well, I took a couple life drawing electives and my professor actually had us get a copy of Gray’s Anatomy for reference.”
“And people say fine art is useless,” Eames smirked.
Eames had Arthur take hold of Ariadne’s hair in a firm but gentle hold as she walked her through the movements of the release. She could feel Arthur’s fingers against her scalp and the pulse of his wrist as she took hold of his arm and turned.
“On your left heel and inwards, towards him,” Eames said, and Arthur loosened his grip as she twisted his arm, so he wouldn’t pull her hair out by the roots. He let his knees buckle and fell on the padded mat once Ariadne had completed her turn. “Once you have your opponent in this position you can try to break his neck with your body weight, or kick him in the throat. The human neck is full of things we really shouldn’t break, and you stand a decent enough chance of crushing his trachea and killing him if you do it right.”
Ariadne let go of Arthur’s wrist then, and he stood up, working the tension out of his shoulder and elbow.
Eames had Ariadne practice the hold-release several more times, increasing the speed of the movements each time until she had learned to grab, twist and kick in one smooth jerk of action.
“I’m going to need to take a break,” Arthur said after the seventh takedown. His mouth had compressed itself into a thin line and his brow was furrowed with pain from the abuse his arm had taken.
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne said as he reached up with his left hand and massaged his shoulder through the fabric of his shirt.
“You don’t ever need to apologize for this,” he said as he regained his feet and staggered over to the chaise lounge.
“Well, I wouldn’t if you were actually trying to hurt me, but I guess I feel kinda bad that we’ve turned you into our punching bag.”
“Better your punching bag here than in reality,” Arthur said with a lopsided shrug and a faint smile, and Ariadne had smiled too, relieved.
The rest of the training session had been basic blows and kicks, and Eames taught Ariadne a knife-hand strike that could be applied to weak points on the human body such as the throat and the wrist, and an open-palmed chin-jab that could shift easily into an eye-gouge. She struck again and again at Eames, who deflected the blows with careful hands while Arthur critiqued her technique from the sidelines.
“You really need to stop telegraphing your jabs like that,” he had said, ten subjective minutes before they were scheduled to wake. “Whenever you pull your hand back you advertise your intention to strike.”
“Show me how you do it, then, because I think I need a break, too.” Ariadne said, breathless and flushed with exertion. Eames glanced at Arthur and nodded, shifting mid-gesture to his own form, dressed in the stonewashed jeans and Smiths t-shirt he had worn yesterday. He stood barefoot in the middle of the practice mat and waited.
“Step aside, Ariadne,” Arthur said, as he stepped onto the mat and stood before Eames. She backed off and sat down on the chaise lounge, and then they started to spar.
Arthur lunged first, swift and slippery, the knuckles of his right hand curled for a strike to the larynx but Eames turned himself slightly to the left and the punch slipped past his head. He reached up to grab hold of Arthur’s wrist but Arthur broke free, twisting against his thumb in a single smooth movement and finishing the turn with a side kick aimed at the inside of Eames’ ankle.
Eames shifted in response to the kick and took the blow on the shin instead. He followed that up with a vicious jab upwards with the heel of his palm, and Ariadne heard Arthur’s teeth clack as the blow landed. He had executed the jab perfectly; there had been no warning of his strike until his palm had thrust upward against Arthur’s jaw.
“You’re pulling your punches, Arthur. Did all that practice tire you out?” Eames asked sweetly as he stepped back outside of Arthur’s striking range.
“If you want a real fight, I’ll give you one, Mr. Eames,” Arthur said, as he wiped at his bloody lip with the back of his hand. Eames smirked and beckoned, and then Arthur darted in beneath his reach and kicked him in his bruised shin, terminating the movement with a vicious heel-first smash on Eames’ instep. He followed the kick with a knee to the groin that Eames deflected with a half-turn, and then turned Eames’ punch aside with the back of his hand.
“This is more like it,” Eames had wheezed, a painful grin on his face as Arthur spoiled his movements constantly, denying him the room he needed to hit hard.
Some people described fights as dances, but what Ariadne was seeing was not a dance. This was fractured and ugly and fluid, the displacement of air around their bodies punctuated with the staccato smack of blows landing on flesh. Eames’ movements were more straightforward, his punches weighted with the heft of his body behind them. Arthur was at a disadvantage where reach and weight were concerned, but he stepped and dodged with a certainty and grace that would have been beautiful save for the utter brutality of his strikes.
Ariadne wasn’t sure how long they would have continued fighting like this if the timer hadn’t run out, and she was vaguely disappointed when she opened her eyes to find herself staring at the ceiling again.
“You bloody show-off,” Eames said with a chuckle as he sat up and pulled the needles from his wrist.
“Speak for yourself, Mr. Eames,” Arthur said as he struggled to hide the smile on his face. He pressed down on the skin of his own wrist with a thumb until the bleeding stopped, and then checked his watch. “I have to go. Yves is expecting me.”
“Send my regards,” Eames said. Arthur stood up and collected his suit jacket, and he nodded politely at Ariadne before he walked out the door.
“How are you feeling now?” Eames asked her. He sat cross-legged beside her as she sat up and disconnected the IV.
“I’m still a little scared, I guess, but I feel better. Like I’m not completely helpless.” The barette in her hair had started to slide loose, and she tugged it loose with an impatient jerk.
“Good, because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here,” he said with a crooked smile. “I don’t want you dependent on either of us. I want you able to fight for yourself.” He shifted and tucked his feet under himself as though he was going to get up, but she took hold of his wrist and stopped him before he could.
“Hm?” His wrist was cool and dry, a contrast to the feverish warmth of Arthur’s skin.
“I don’t know if this is something I shouldn’t ask, but - Eames, what is it like to be a woman?”
“Wouldn’t you already know that?” he asked as he sat back down beside her bed.
“No, I mean,” she said, frowning as she thought, “What is it like, from a man’s point of view? Does how you feel change when you forge someone in a dream, or is it just visual and tactile for us, the viewers?”
“Mmm.” Eames’ eyes were hooded as he tried to formulate an answer. “This is something like trying to describe the colors of the Sistine Chapel to a man who has been blind from birth, but I’ll try. Lie back down and close your eyes.”
She lay down and did so, and she felt him run a careful hand over her brow as he brushed strands of hair out of her face. His voice grew soft, almost somnolent as he started to talk.
“When I’m a man, I’m a tall man, and broad. I’m aware of the space I feel and the air I displace. Imagine what it’s like, having people step out of your way because of the authority they don’t even know they’re granting you. I can feel my heart beating a slow lento in my chest. Beneath my clothes my skin is scarred and tough and marked with ink, and I can feel the stiffness of scar tissue and the ache of old injuries. Think yourself into that space, the power of your muscles pulling beneath your skin, the stubble on your face like sandpaper.”
She frowned in concentration, her eyes still closed, and he rubbed at her temples with gentle fingers.
“Relax. Don’t force yourself into it; just let your thoughts flow and expand into what I’m describing. Can you feel it?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Good,” he said. “When I walk I walk with purpose and with long, easy strides. My hips are narrow and hard, and I never need to sway to keep ahead. I’m so used to my cock and balls, the soft folds of my foreskin and scrotum that I never really have to think; but they are there, present, influencing how I move and how I sit and how I dress, the belt of my trousers low on my hips. Do you have it?”
She nodded wordlessly, and she heard cloth rustle as he shifted closer to her. The next few words came with a faint surprise as his breath tickled her ear.
“When I’m a woman everything is different. My skin is softer and smoother, like the skin of a peach, and I can feel the weight of my breasts pulling at the muscles on my back, a constant weight and tension that informs and influences every one of my movements. I can feel the hair on the nape of my neck, and it brushes against my shoulders and catches the breeze, displacing the air in a different way. My hips are broader, my femurs more widely spaced, and my arse curves, soft and firm away from the folded cleft of my cunt. I feel vulnerable beneath my clothing, my nylon and silk and elastic, and the heels of my shoes force me to walk with a sway, the tops of my thighs brushing together, marking the absence of my cock with each step. I feel more vulnerable, and people sometimes don’t give me the space they would if I were a man, but there is also a kind of potency and power in the strength of my legs and thighs, and the shift in my balance from my broad hips and my lower center of gravity. That’s what it’s like, or a shadow of what it’s like.”
Ariadne opened her eyes and sat up then, keenly aware of the boundaries of her body and the wetness between her thighs, under her jeans, and she could feel her face flushing as her heart beat faster in the cage of her ribs. “Have you - have you ever - “
“Fucked someone as a woman?”
“I don’t want to pry too much,” she said, a little embarrassed, “but - “
“But you want to know,” he said, rocking back on his knees, a wicked smile spreading across his face.
“Pretty much, yeah,” she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.
“Hmm.” He stood up and brushed at the seat of his trousers before he walked away in the direction of her kitchenette, and she wasn’t sure if she had seen the last traces of a hard-on under his clothing. “Let’s save that answer for another lecture, shall we?” he said as he filled her kettle and put it on. “Right now, I want a cup of tea.”
Author: Mel Wong, @chn_breathmint on Livejournal and AO3.
Characters/Pairings: Eames, Arthur, Ariadne, OCs. Eames/Arthur flirting, Arthur/Eames attraction, Arthur/Ariadne attraction (and vice versa), some Ariadne/Eames attraction.
Status: WIP
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Inception or its characters.
Word Count: 5580
Summary: The Eames And Arthur Executive Protection Hour. Gen with mild slash and het overtones.
Warnings: Genderfuck in this chapter, implications about Arthur’s personal life (and by extension, Eames’ personal life.) Personal versions of Eames’ and Arthur’s backgrounds and names, Ariadne’s own background and full name, a little lighter than Parlor Tricks, thank $DEITY for that.
Notes: This is a sequel to Parlor Tricks (1, 2, 3) and may not make a whole lot of sense plotwise if you haven’t read that one. Major spoilers for the movie and, naturally, for Parlor Tricks. I think this damn installment has pretty much confirmed my downward slide into Eames/Arthur/Ariadne poly triad shipping. Thanks to heronymus_waat for the beta. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Eames showed up early the next morning, his arrival preceded by a text message that told her she was on his way. Her cellphone pinged its notification just as she stepped out of the shower while Arthur lay half-asleep, huddled in his sleeping bag.
“Was that Eames?” he had asked, propping himself up on an elbow as she checked the text message, his voice slightly hoarse from what she presumed was residual sleep. His hair had dried in the night and now stuck out in the most ridiculous swoops and curls. A cowlick poked extravagantly from the back of his head, and she realized now why he put all that pomade in his hair.
“Oh my God, Arthur. You look like Robert Smith,” she said, her left hand over her mouth as she fought a ridiculous fit of giggling.
“Robert Smith,” he gasped, his voice between a cough and a sneeze.
“The Cure, Arthur,” she said.
“I know who he is. I just think you’re mistaken about the resemblance,” he said, just before he sneezed again, twice more.
“Are you okay?” she asked, studying his reflection in the mirror of her dresser table as she ran a brush through her damp hair and then pulled it back in a silver barette.
“Did you know your landlady’s cat came in through the window last night?” he asked her as he grabbed another change of clothing from his overnight bag.
“He does that,” she said as she packed her backpack for school.
“Well, he decided to sleep on my face, and he came back after I shooed him away,”
“That just means he likes you.”
“He can go like someone who isn’t allergic to him,” Arthur grumbled as he staggered to the bathroom.
Eames showed up at her door while Arthur was still in the shower, and she checked the peephole, moved the Snapple bottle and disabled the alarm before she let him in. He was dressed more formally today in a striped shirt with an open collar and a faded corduroy jacket. He held a tray with four cups of coffee in one hand, and a brown paper bag in the other.
“Good morning,” he said, grinning brightly as she shut the door behind him.
“Four cups of coffee?” she asked as he handed her the tray.
“Arthur needs at least two cups before he’s actually awake,” he explained as he put the paper bag down on the countertop in her galley kitchen. “Where is your frying pan, love?” he asked, as she watched him pull out a half dozen eggs in a carton and two soggy parcels wrapped in butcher paper.
“Bottom right hand cabinet. Eames, what are you doing?” She put the cups of coffee down on the dinette table and appropriated one for herself.
“Making breakfast,” he said cheerfully. A carton of mushrooms and a can of baked beans came out of the paper bag next. “How do you like your eggs?”
“Over easy,” she said on reflex as she stared at the growing pile of groceries on her kitchen counter. A brace of tomatoes and what looked like a large blood sausage joined the bacon, eggs, baked beans and mushrooms on the counter.
“Unfertilized, please,” she heard Arthur say as he stepped out of the bathroom, his hair tamed by a fresh application of pomade. He had started to look more like himself now that he had showered and shaved and changed into dressier clothing.
“You don’t ovulate, Arthur,” Ariadne said, confused. Eames’ only reply was a dry chuckle as he dropped a few rashers of bacon into the melted butter in her frying pan.
“No, I’m referring to the stunt he pulled back in Manila with the hard-boiled duck embryos.” Arthur picked up his Glock 17 and tucked it away in the holster behind his right hip. The two smaller pistols went into an ankle holster and a pocket holster, respectively.
“Aren’t SERE graduates supposed to eat everything?” She still wasn’t entirely sure on what exactly Arthur had done in his time with the Air Force, but Eames had once told her about Arthur’s survival and evasion qualifications.
“Only if we don’t have a choice. I don’t get off on eating rotting zebra carcass like Bear Grylls does.”
“Don’t be such a big girl’s blouse, Arthur,” Eames said, the tone of his voice slightly peevish. He dished out the rashers of bacon and then cracked three eggs into the pan, where they sizzled in the mixture of butter and bacon fat.
The full English breakfast was, apparently, a meal based mostly on sodium and grease. Some fried mushrooms and blackened slices of tomato sat in the middle of each plate, in a half-hearted nod towards the food pyramid. Ariadne only managed to finish the egg, half her sausage, a single rasher of bacon and the baked beans on toast before she called it quits.
“I can’t do this any more,” she told Eames. A slight queasy feeling was building up in the pit of her stomach and she eyed the remaining food on her plate with a vague sense of apprehension.
“Not a fan of fry-ups, are we?” he asked as he snagged a slice of black pudding off her plate.
“Not in this quantity,” she protested, weakly. She had the unpleasant suspicion that if someone actually shot her now she would probably ooze slowly instead of bleeding.
“I can help you finish it,” Arthur said. He had let Eames have the other chair and had eaten his breakfast standing up at her kitchen counter instead.
“You’re already done?” She couldn’t see Arthur’s plate from where she was sitting, but he had finished one cup of coffee and was working on a second.
“Bloody skinny bastard,” Eames muttered as he cut one of the slices of black pudding in half, “eats more than me and it never shows.”
They split the contents of her plate between them. Eames took the rest of the black pudding and the sad-looking tomato slices, Arthur the bacon, sausage and the fried mushrooms.
“I’ll be walking you to school today,” Eames said after he had finished eating. He wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief and stood up from his seat to collect the submachine gun in its briefcase while Arthur did the dishes.
“You’d let Eames touch your girlfriend?” she asked him as he rinsed the plates off in the sink. He snorted, once, at her question and turned the water off.
“We have an open relationship, and I trust her to practice safer shooting,” he said with a wry smile and the faintest hint of a blush.
“Do you hear that, Eames?” Ariadne asked as she collected her backpack, “Behave yourself around Arthur’s gun.”
His only response was a deep laugh as he led the way out of her door, and they left Arthur behind in her apartment, drying the dishes. They were halfway down the stairs when she froze and realized that Arthur didn’t have a key to her apartment.
“Wait,” she told Eames. “I don’t know if Arthur can lock up after he leaves.”
“Of course he can,” Eames said. “What do you take us for?”
“But I have both copies of the -“ Her protest was cut short when Eames plucked a shiny new copy of her apartment key from a trouser pocket and held it before her.
“Never mind.” She had things figured out by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs. Eames had, most probably, taken an impression of her apartment key while she had been dreaming her firearms training, and had used the mold to make duplicates after he had left for the day. She knew that she should have been disturbed by the ease with which he had pulled it off, but now she was just glad to have him and Arthur on her side.
Her day at school was oddly ordinary, considering the rather unusual circumstances. She had wanted to let herself forget and to just go through this day like any other, but Eames’ constant quiet presence was at once reassuring and a reminder that the course of her life was currently slightly askew.
“How do you cope with this?” she asked him, as they stood on the rooftop where she had drawn a maze for Cobb, nearly a year ago. “This paranoia, always having to watch your back.”
“Some of us are naturally nasty, paranoid people, Ariadne,” Eames had said while he squinted into the distance, his gaze casting over the rooftops of Paris. “Extraction work draws all kinds of interesting personalities to it. That and I probably would have had the sense not to take the Cobol job.” He held one of his cigarettes in his hand but had not lighted it yet.
“Probably?” she asked, before she took a bite out of her sandwich.
“I like to think I’m a reasonably careful man,” Eames said, his face thoughtful and saturnine, “but I remember what someone once told me years ago. ‘Fifteen million dollars is not money. It’s a motive with a universal adapter on it.’ Pile the lucre high enough and any number of fools will think it a decent gamble, myself included.”
“Cobb didn’t do it for money, though,” Ariadne said after she had spent a moment thinking of what Eames had said. “He did it because he was trying to get back to his children.”
“The money was just a means to an end, and the end was his motive. Stupid decision, though, which leads us to this.” He pulled his lighter from a pocket and flicked it experimentally. The stiff breeze blowing over the parapet overwhelmed the tiny flame almost immediately.
“How about you? Isn’t there anyone you care enough about that you’d do something like that for them?” she asked. She sometimes thought of Arthur as not having been born as much as assembled in the manner of a forged ID, but Eames, with his easy, insouciant manner, had felt more authentic, as though he had come from somewhere.
“I do not generally involve myself in the business of giving a shite, Ariadne,” The hint of iron in his voice reminded her that the charm was, at times as much a front as the forgeries he put on in dreams. “Caring about someone means they can be used against you.”
“What about this? Coming to Paris to make sure I’m okay?” she asked.
“This is business. Anyone who’s willing to kill me in an attempt to get Arthur is a bloody fool who deserves what’s coming to them,” Eames said around his cigarette as he turned half away from her, cupping his lighter flame in his hands.
“Which is?”
Eames only smiled, his expression oddly and uncharacteristically icy as he brought his index finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said. The ember on the end of the cigarette winked as he took a deep drag on it, wisps of smoke curling out his nostrils and about his face before the wind snatched them away.
She came home from school to find Arthur waiting in her apartment. The intense aroma of garlic, anchovies and tomatoes wafted out about him as he opened the door for her, holding a red-stained wooden spoon in his left hand.
“How was your day?” he had asked her when she came into the room with Eames bringing up the rear. She could only stand and stare at the sight of Arthur wearing her blue gingham apron over his shirt, tie, and dress pants.
“Long,” she said after a moment of exhausted bafflement, before she decided that she was too tired to even care. “You know how it is. You spend weeks working on something, you bring it in for a review session, and your professor rips it apart and then tells you how you can spend the next few days putting it back together.”
“This is constructive criticism, one would assume,” Eames said as he shut the door behind him and sat down in one of the chairs at her dinette table while she dropped her backpack by her bed. He left the briefcase by his seat, which was where Arthur had left it the evening before.
“Well, this is fine art. If they weren’t trying to be constructive I doubt they’d have given me instructions on how to put it back together.” She noticed, then, that Arthur had, rather thoughtfully, brought a folding chair upstairs so someone wouldn’t have to sit on the floor this time. The dinette table was still too small for three diners, though, which meant that someone would probably have to eat at the kitchen counter again.
“I hope you don’t mind pasta for dinner,” Arthur said after the both of them had settled down on opposite sides of her dinette table. He had left his jacket hanging off the back of one of her chairs, and she watched mutely as he drained the spaghetti noodles and tasted the sauce he had left simmering in a saucepan. The knotted apron strings were an incongruous contrast to his polished dress and the matte black pistol grip rising from his waistband.
“That depends on what it’s going to be,” she said.
“Spaghetti alla puttanesca,” Arthur said, “anchovies, garlic, capers, olives, crushed tomatoes, peppers. I like to throw some cooked or canned fish in for protein.” His Italian accent was excellent, and she wondered where he had learned to speak it.
“I didn’t think you could cook,” she said after he had handed a glass of water from the jug she kept in the refrigerator, and then turned his attention back to the draining pasta.
“I know just enough to get by,” he said as he dished out platefuls of spaghetti and then dropped chunks of canned salmon onto the plates. “Boil noodles, make sauce. Beats frying everything because I don’t know what else to do with it.”
Eames shot Arthur an offended look but chose not to protest; something that Ariadne thought wise, since Arthur was the one who had prepared and was serving dinner.
They ate in silence for the most part. Arthur chose to eat standing at the kitchen counter again, and he kept the apron on as he ate. The noodles were al dente; the sauce was intense with the fishy tang of anchovies, the pungency of garlic and the sweetness of slow-cooked tomatoes, laced with a subtle bite of spiciness.
“You were lying, weren’t you, Arthur?” Eames had asked after his first bite.
Arthur glanced up at him from beneath his eyelashes, as though alarmed, before he chewed and swallowed. “What about?”
“About not knowing how to cook more than this. You’re showing off.”
“It’s not like I can make proper hollandaise sauce from scratch,” Arthur said, a little embarrassed. “Every time I try the emulsion breaks.”
“You’re working off a different definition of ‘cooking’, Arthur,” Ariadne said. “Most of us think putting a Pop-Tart in the toaster is cooking.”
“That’s not cooking. That’s not even assembly,” Arthur protested, a hint of disgust apparent in the tone of his voice.
“And you say you can’t cook,” Eames said after he had eaten another forkful of spaghetti.
Eames brought out the PASIV after they had eaten, and he started to set it up for another training session while Arthur cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the sink. He wiped his wet hands on the apron and then took it off, hanging it on a hook on the kitchen wall.
“Three IV lines,” Ariadne said as she watched Eames work. “The both of you today?”
“I’m going to need Arthur’s assistance for this one,” Eames had said with a faint, knowing smirk. “You’ll see why later.”
She lay down on her bed and looked up at the ceiling after she had swabbed her wrist and hooked herself up to the PASIV. Arthur was next, and he sat down with his back to the frame of her bed. Eames stretched himself out full-length on the hardwood floor of his apartment, but before he did so he unclipped the holster of his gun from his belt and laid it on the floor beside him so it wouldn’t dig into his back.
“Are you ready?” Arthur asked, quietly.
“Yeah,” Ariadne said. Eames pushed the button and the sleep plucked at her eyelids and pulled her under into a world of gauzy gray, and then blood-lit blackness.
This time Ariadne found herself sitting in a window seat in what looked like the hall of a large manor house. She could not identify the style in which it had been built without a good look at the outside, but the furnishings and interior setting seemed to point at the 1810s, which made Georgian architecture a likely choice. The furniture in the room had been moved to the sides of the room, most of it covered with dusty drapes. In their place was a large padded mat in the middle of the worsted carpet, and a waning fire licked at ash and embers in the fireplace.
Arthur was draped languidly over an overstuffed chaise lounge, and the dim firelight winked off his cufflinks as he stood up and shed his suit jacket.
“Where is Eames?” she asked as she stood up and joined Arthur on the other side of the room.
“He should be here soon enough,” Arthur said as he left his jacket on the armchair and then took his cufflinks off and rolled his sleeves up.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.” A woman’s voice, soft and velvety, came from the hallway outside the room. She came in, and Ariadne saw that she was roughly the same height as herself, and she wore a tank top over a sports bra and a pair of loose drawstring pants.
“Eames?” Ariadne asked after a moment of dumb silence. She noticed that while the woman’s toenails had been painted the color of frost plums, her fingernails were plain and short, and there was a sinewy spareness to her forearms that suggested a violent, wiry strength.
“One and the same,” the woman said. Green eyes gleamed mischievously from a heart-shaped face framed by a mass of soft blond curls. “We thought it’d be easier to teach you how to defend yourself in hand-to-hand if you had someone of your relative build demonstrate the movements.”
Arthur rubbed at his temples as though he had a headache, and then he undid the knot of his necktie and pulled it out from under his shirt collar. “I know this is necessary, Mr. Eames, but I would appreciate it if you kindly avoided forging any of my exes while you did it.”
The blonde laughed, a single pealing note like a bell, and then she wasn’t. The change was instantaneous and seamless, like two reels of film being spliced together. Eames was now a deeply tanned Chinese woman in an oversize t-shirt and a pair of faded jeans, her shiny black hair pulled back in a severe ponytail.
“Is this better?” she asked Arthur, her voice now not so much velvet as much as whisky and smoke.
“I don’t even know how you managed to get close enough to forge Lee,” Arthur said as he undid his shirt collar.
“You know as well as I do that forgery does not require the forger to know the subject in a Biblical manner,” Eames said, her smile now smug, her teeth startlingly white against the brown of her face.
“No,” Arthur said as he walked over to stand in the middle of the practice mat. “You just prefer to when the subject’s pretty enough.”
“True enough, but alas, Ms. Lee is faithful to her wedding vows, and I once watched her kill a man with a knitting needle. I would not presume to persuade her otherwise,” Eames said, beckoning Ariadne to follow as she joined Arthur on the practice mat. “I doubt you have much experience in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Not unless hitting another kid with a metal lunchbox in middle school counts.”
“Well, not really,” Eames said, “but it does mean you have the right mindset for this. In the real world you want to fight fast, fight hard, and fight them with everything you have to hand. Fair play is for dead people.”
Arthur struck then, as though to emphasize what Eames had said. His movements were swift and snakelike as he grabbed Eames’ hair from behind in a vicious hold. Eames reached up with both hands and seized Arthur’s wrist, pivoting towards him on her heel and twisting his arm backwards. She then stepped neatly away from him and dragged his hand out of her hair, and followed up with a vicious stomp to the spine, her foot stopping an inch from the nape of his neck after he had fallen on the mat.
“You don’t have to be enormously strong to pull this off,” Eames said after she had taken her foot off Arthur’s neck and helped him up, “nor will dream training increase your physical strength and dexterity. What we’re going to teach you is something simpler.”
“What Eames is doing,” Arthur said, “is she’s using the geometry of my body against me.”
“Right,” Ariadne said. “The forearm only rotates so much before you start straining the ligaments of the elbow, and when the elbow and shoulder reach the limits of their articulation my opponent has to follow if he doesn’t want his arm dislocated.” Which would screw up his ability to fight anyway, but she didn’t think it needed saying.
“Very good,” Arthur said. “You know your anatomy.”
“Yeah, well, I took a couple life drawing electives and my professor actually had us get a copy of Gray’s Anatomy for reference.”
“And people say fine art is useless,” Eames smirked.
Eames had Arthur take hold of Ariadne’s hair in a firm but gentle hold as she walked her through the movements of the release. She could feel Arthur’s fingers against her scalp and the pulse of his wrist as she took hold of his arm and turned.
“On your left heel and inwards, towards him,” Eames said, and Arthur loosened his grip as she twisted his arm, so he wouldn’t pull her hair out by the roots. He let his knees buckle and fell on the padded mat once Ariadne had completed her turn. “Once you have your opponent in this position you can try to break his neck with your body weight, or kick him in the throat. The human neck is full of things we really shouldn’t break, and you stand a decent enough chance of crushing his trachea and killing him if you do it right.”
Ariadne let go of Arthur’s wrist then, and he stood up, working the tension out of his shoulder and elbow.
Eames had Ariadne practice the hold-release several more times, increasing the speed of the movements each time until she had learned to grab, twist and kick in one smooth jerk of action.
“I’m going to need to take a break,” Arthur said after the seventh takedown. His mouth had compressed itself into a thin line and his brow was furrowed with pain from the abuse his arm had taken.
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne said as he reached up with his left hand and massaged his shoulder through the fabric of his shirt.
“You don’t ever need to apologize for this,” he said as he regained his feet and staggered over to the chaise lounge.
“Well, I wouldn’t if you were actually trying to hurt me, but I guess I feel kinda bad that we’ve turned you into our punching bag.”
“Better your punching bag here than in reality,” Arthur said with a lopsided shrug and a faint smile, and Ariadne had smiled too, relieved.
The rest of the training session had been basic blows and kicks, and Eames taught Ariadne a knife-hand strike that could be applied to weak points on the human body such as the throat and the wrist, and an open-palmed chin-jab that could shift easily into an eye-gouge. She struck again and again at Eames, who deflected the blows with careful hands while Arthur critiqued her technique from the sidelines.
“You really need to stop telegraphing your jabs like that,” he had said, ten subjective minutes before they were scheduled to wake. “Whenever you pull your hand back you advertise your intention to strike.”
“Show me how you do it, then, because I think I need a break, too.” Ariadne said, breathless and flushed with exertion. Eames glanced at Arthur and nodded, shifting mid-gesture to his own form, dressed in the stonewashed jeans and Smiths t-shirt he had worn yesterday. He stood barefoot in the middle of the practice mat and waited.
“Step aside, Ariadne,” Arthur said, as he stepped onto the mat and stood before Eames. She backed off and sat down on the chaise lounge, and then they started to spar.
Arthur lunged first, swift and slippery, the knuckles of his right hand curled for a strike to the larynx but Eames turned himself slightly to the left and the punch slipped past his head. He reached up to grab hold of Arthur’s wrist but Arthur broke free, twisting against his thumb in a single smooth movement and finishing the turn with a side kick aimed at the inside of Eames’ ankle.
Eames shifted in response to the kick and took the blow on the shin instead. He followed that up with a vicious jab upwards with the heel of his palm, and Ariadne heard Arthur’s teeth clack as the blow landed. He had executed the jab perfectly; there had been no warning of his strike until his palm had thrust upward against Arthur’s jaw.
“You’re pulling your punches, Arthur. Did all that practice tire you out?” Eames asked sweetly as he stepped back outside of Arthur’s striking range.
“If you want a real fight, I’ll give you one, Mr. Eames,” Arthur said, as he wiped at his bloody lip with the back of his hand. Eames smirked and beckoned, and then Arthur darted in beneath his reach and kicked him in his bruised shin, terminating the movement with a vicious heel-first smash on Eames’ instep. He followed the kick with a knee to the groin that Eames deflected with a half-turn, and then turned Eames’ punch aside with the back of his hand.
“This is more like it,” Eames had wheezed, a painful grin on his face as Arthur spoiled his movements constantly, denying him the room he needed to hit hard.
Some people described fights as dances, but what Ariadne was seeing was not a dance. This was fractured and ugly and fluid, the displacement of air around their bodies punctuated with the staccato smack of blows landing on flesh. Eames’ movements were more straightforward, his punches weighted with the heft of his body behind them. Arthur was at a disadvantage where reach and weight were concerned, but he stepped and dodged with a certainty and grace that would have been beautiful save for the utter brutality of his strikes.
Ariadne wasn’t sure how long they would have continued fighting like this if the timer hadn’t run out, and she was vaguely disappointed when she opened her eyes to find herself staring at the ceiling again.
“You bloody show-off,” Eames said with a chuckle as he sat up and pulled the needles from his wrist.
“Speak for yourself, Mr. Eames,” Arthur said as he struggled to hide the smile on his face. He pressed down on the skin of his own wrist with a thumb until the bleeding stopped, and then checked his watch. “I have to go. Yves is expecting me.”
“Send my regards,” Eames said. Arthur stood up and collected his suit jacket, and he nodded politely at Ariadne before he walked out the door.
“How are you feeling now?” Eames asked her. He sat cross-legged beside her as she sat up and disconnected the IV.
“I’m still a little scared, I guess, but I feel better. Like I’m not completely helpless.” The barette in her hair had started to slide loose, and she tugged it loose with an impatient jerk.
“Good, because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here,” he said with a crooked smile. “I don’t want you dependent on either of us. I want you able to fight for yourself.” He shifted and tucked his feet under himself as though he was going to get up, but she took hold of his wrist and stopped him before he could.
“Hm?” His wrist was cool and dry, a contrast to the feverish warmth of Arthur’s skin.
“I don’t know if this is something I shouldn’t ask, but - Eames, what is it like to be a woman?”
“Wouldn’t you already know that?” he asked as he sat back down beside her bed.
“No, I mean,” she said, frowning as she thought, “What is it like, from a man’s point of view? Does how you feel change when you forge someone in a dream, or is it just visual and tactile for us, the viewers?”
“Mmm.” Eames’ eyes were hooded as he tried to formulate an answer. “This is something like trying to describe the colors of the Sistine Chapel to a man who has been blind from birth, but I’ll try. Lie back down and close your eyes.”
She lay down and did so, and she felt him run a careful hand over her brow as he brushed strands of hair out of her face. His voice grew soft, almost somnolent as he started to talk.
“When I’m a man, I’m a tall man, and broad. I’m aware of the space I feel and the air I displace. Imagine what it’s like, having people step out of your way because of the authority they don’t even know they’re granting you. I can feel my heart beating a slow lento in my chest. Beneath my clothes my skin is scarred and tough and marked with ink, and I can feel the stiffness of scar tissue and the ache of old injuries. Think yourself into that space, the power of your muscles pulling beneath your skin, the stubble on your face like sandpaper.”
She frowned in concentration, her eyes still closed, and he rubbed at her temples with gentle fingers.
“Relax. Don’t force yourself into it; just let your thoughts flow and expand into what I’m describing. Can you feel it?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Good,” he said. “When I walk I walk with purpose and with long, easy strides. My hips are narrow and hard, and I never need to sway to keep ahead. I’m so used to my cock and balls, the soft folds of my foreskin and scrotum that I never really have to think; but they are there, present, influencing how I move and how I sit and how I dress, the belt of my trousers low on my hips. Do you have it?”
She nodded wordlessly, and she heard cloth rustle as he shifted closer to her. The next few words came with a faint surprise as his breath tickled her ear.
“When I’m a woman everything is different. My skin is softer and smoother, like the skin of a peach, and I can feel the weight of my breasts pulling at the muscles on my back, a constant weight and tension that informs and influences every one of my movements. I can feel the hair on the nape of my neck, and it brushes against my shoulders and catches the breeze, displacing the air in a different way. My hips are broader, my femurs more widely spaced, and my arse curves, soft and firm away from the folded cleft of my cunt. I feel vulnerable beneath my clothing, my nylon and silk and elastic, and the heels of my shoes force me to walk with a sway, the tops of my thighs brushing together, marking the absence of my cock with each step. I feel more vulnerable, and people sometimes don’t give me the space they would if I were a man, but there is also a kind of potency and power in the strength of my legs and thighs, and the shift in my balance from my broad hips and my lower center of gravity. That’s what it’s like, or a shadow of what it’s like.”
Ariadne opened her eyes and sat up then, keenly aware of the boundaries of her body and the wetness between her thighs, under her jeans, and she could feel her face flushing as her heart beat faster in the cage of her ribs. “Have you - have you ever - “
“Fucked someone as a woman?”
“I don’t want to pry too much,” she said, a little embarrassed, “but - “
“But you want to know,” he said, rocking back on his knees, a wicked smile spreading across his face.
“Pretty much, yeah,” she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.
“Hmm.” He stood up and brushed at the seat of his trousers before he walked away in the direction of her kitchenette, and she wasn’t sure if she had seen the last traces of a hard-on under his clothing. “Let’s save that answer for another lecture, shall we?” he said as he filled her kettle and put it on. “Right now, I want a cup of tea.”