❝ turning point ❞
UGH AWAKE. 6:30AM......and I deviated from my homework for the kink meme again. What is life...sigh. Now I should IDK go to school and stuff 8/ lmffldkjfdsf.....
→rating: PG/G/?!?!?! / ALL I should think...someone let me know if I'm wrong please....derp
→word count: ~3,000 ish
→warnings: I was sleeping when I wrote this... no seriously.
→notes: original prompt......which as as ever deviated from not only with a pairing but uh yeah it's just....orz I'M SORRY IT'S KIND OF LIKE I didn't sleep and did this on a whim and oh god /_( BUT if I can blame anyone for being inspired while ASLEEP it's definitely thieve and ............. 8| YEAH. lmflsjds /points the finger... with love......
❝ There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. ❞
Below the city threads its lights and sounds together like so many kinds of metal. There's gold and silver for all that fluorescence, and there's iron and steel for the men in suits and women in stilettos sharp as knives, and there's something else hard and unknown yet certifiable; that's for everything else, the rough of the pavement and the rubber burn of tires screeching to a stop over and over. The pads of his fingertips coast along the concrete abrasions and it's so dark up here, far away from the light-sound synesthesia that moves, beacon-like between the overhanging gap of the toes of his shoes. Behind him he hears something, a little like his name but not his name because there's no one else up here.
Arthur knows how dreams work, knows how to suppress the projections when it's just him, more or less. The civilians on the avenue thirty stories down are allowed consciously, and if he coughed, if he only turned the wrong way, he would head down to meet them at a speeding dive. Not that it would matter.
Something about this feels familiar though.
Like an itch under his blood, like a file dragging along the interior of his skin, like a word just out of his breath - out of his capacity, there's something.
If only he could figure out what.
But a voice is calling him, now he's sure of it even as he's sure that's impossible. He's so sure that he tries once more to blot it out, to concentrate on the multifaceted thrum of automobiles interrupted by the tinny distance of cellular phone rings and so many footsteps. The voice isn't saying much. It sounds short, sounds simple, sounds like the voice knows Arthur.
Which he must, considering it's Arthur's own name being called.
That gets him to blink, gets three, four, five sharp shutters of his eyes against the dark and the bright and the muting roar of every little thing. So that's it. Someone is calling him. That someone, that voice. Calling. Well what for?
The wind this high up is bitterly cold, reminds Arthur of a winter on Lake Michigan when the waves froze in place and he and Dom and Mal skated out on tennis shoes, just to run their hands along the diamond white arcs. Things were so good back then. They aren't bad now, he supposes, because Dom is home and Arthur, Arthur for the first time in a humble forever is on his own. Nothing bad about that.
...and yet--
"Arthur!"
When he snaps his vision back into focus, everything goes counterclockwise and it takes Arthur a little too long to understand the reason for this: he's falling, and for a nanosecond he sighs into the gravity, lets the perception of a free-fall dig into the spaces between his ribs and the reflexive curve of his spine. Then there are arms around him, a chin pressed so hard into his shoulder he concludes the voice he recognizes but can't seem to remember means him harm. He does what is only natural and makes to throw the opposition off, but said opposition is having none of it.
"What the fuck Arthur?"
Something happens. Arthur isn't sure what, exactly. But something happens and it happens like thunder without the warning flare of its lightning counterpart, a gripping sensation that hits him with the gracelessness of shock and fear and the understanding that creeps in afterward, the shape of guilt.
"What the fuck Arthur, what--" Arms loosen, understanding the shift in Arthur's posture for precisely what it is: waking up. Around him, Arthur still smells every inch of the city, and under the leaden anchor of his heels he can still feel the fractional unevenness in the concrete of the roof, and at his back he notes warmth so at odds with the whipping cold of January that now he has to turn, so he does.
"I thought..." he trails off, his voice a haggard thing that doesn't seem to belong to him right now as he swallows away those extra pieces, broken bottle shards that glint the whole way down.
"Yes, I," a pause, "I'm well aware of what you thought." For someone who just saved Arthur, Eames manages to look insurmountably put out about it, like he was put up to the job and had it been an ounce more distasteful he would have ignored it altogether. He runs a deft hand down his face, and Arthur notices the clench in the forger's jaw, the one whose tension seems to run down the left of his neck and pool into his shoulders - broad though the rest of him is slimmer from a job he worked a month ago. Still, his perturbed disposition seems out of place and Arthur does not entirely comprehend that what he feels about it happens to be personal offense at first.
"Look, I didn't ask you to," and he can't say it after all, has this sick and abhorrent knot twisting itself in him as he remembers Mal, as he remembers how ill she became and everything they couldn't do to help her. Arthur does not scare easily. He has had guns held to his head plenty of times in the waking world, though to contrast with dreams is unfair. Arthur has run higher stakes gambits than that which had cost one, single, life. But Mal was always different, even when she was dying - even now, when she's dead. Throat dry like it's been scratched that way with sandpaper, he tries again, "..I didn't ask you t---" and stops before charging on, heedless because it is honest to god fifteen degrees out and maybe a little, a little because he knows he owes it. "I didn't ask you to." It's not as simple as that alone but it's the only place to start.
Bleary eyed, he slides the back of his hand across his eyes, welling from having only just woken and the wind in combination, but none of that is the point so much as this: Arthur, through brown eyes now black-blue in the dark, looks right at the other man, unwavering. It is, he expects, as straightforward as they come to be with each other, awake or asleep. But Eames just stares back at him. Arthur thinks he can spot exasperation, and something uncannily like fear.
"Say something!" Arthur should not be snapping at his rescuer but Arthur hates being rescued only second to having needed rescuing in the first place; some things will never change, and he cannot suss out between the nerve-wracking twitch of Eames' mouth and the impossibly bulleted candor of his gaze what he himself is supposed to be deciphering in the conversational gap. For a long, long while, Eames true to form does not comply, but what he does is somehow much more distressing to Arthur, to the Arthur that thinks he knows Eames from all his tells - because everyone has these even if Eames hides his better than most - everything from his preferred firearm to his favorite poet to how many shades of hideous his surprisingly expensive clothes come in. Because Eames, rather than saying anything, reaches out a hand that grips Arthur's chin none too lightly, a lock of a hold with fingers curled and the thumb threatening to bruise across where a dimple shows when Arthur smiles, supposing he does. Then he tilts and pulls, jerks Arthur forward and this is so unexpected that Arthur's body complies with the motion, still perhaps riding the descent from the freedom of the dream to the constraint of waking mortality. Between Eames' fingers, Arthur knows he could wrest himself away but a feeling equal parts perplexity and morbid curiosity keeps him motionless, the threat of his pulse a hammering notion in his throat and his wrist and the formative cage of his chest. He lets it go on far longer than he ever would normally and as if on some invisible wavelength, just as Arthur begins to speak, Eames' hand looses itself, drops away like a dead weight.
"Sorry," Eames says and doesn't sound sorry at all.
"You..." Arthur stops when Eames' non-apology beats him to the punch, but the same man sends him such a look that Arthur continues, as if there wasn't ever another option, as if stopping isn't something Arthur knows how to do any longer, and maybe that constitutes some of the most real and troublesome parts of this situation. "Thanks. I mean...I don't remember getting up here. That's why I was sure it was, you know, a dream. I mean," he breathes a little too narrowly, coughs, clears his voice and it still comes out gravelly and secret, "I was so sure."
And that's it, in a nutshell.
Arthur was sure.
Arthur was sure the way Mal was sure.
Arthur doesn't think he can get his head around this in any way that would be considered right.
What will he tell Dom?
The answer is to him faster than anything else this evening: he won't.
Some of this must show in Arthur's face or his posture or Eames has learned to read minds - a true trespass, to add onto the dozens of others though if that's how he found Arthur tonight, then, the point guesses he's in no place to make snide remarks about it. Fumbling a play in a job is one thing, covering for someone in a hail of gunfire down a brick alley or across a flatland. Pulling someone back from a skyscraper's cliff, that's something else.
Anyway, Eames says, "Arthur." Just a name, just everything.
And yeah, Arthur really, really hates it.
What now, Mal? He asks no one, silently, the way sane people talk to the dead, he has always felt though he makes no judgments on Dom who has hour long dialogues at Mal's grave every week, like she can actually hear him, like some part of her is still there - not so many feet under but in the air: an immaculate glimmer just out of sight. But Mal was Arthur's friend even if she was not his wife and when she jumped he lost her too. It's not the same but he loved her, knew the fit of her fingers between his and the press of her mouth to his jaw in an amicable and European kiss that made Americans think they were together. She had known, back then of course, the difference between her dream and her reality.
Now that it's happening to him, Arthur feels defeated with an immediacy he doesn't quite grasp and it's like firing one-handed - so much harder than it looks in all the movies he watched as a kid and on top of that, it hurts. No one planted the idea in his head and he has a halfway decent suspicion of what this is - has done some reading since the first symptoms reared themselves in ways that ought to have been as good as warning signs but Arthur couldn't tell anyone, couldn't think of anyone to tell.
Which brings him here.
Which brings him here, with Eames.
That last part, he still fails to understand at all.
"How did you even get here? You were in Russia."
"I was," Eames hums his confirmation in a way so familiar Arthur could almost convince himself they're here after a job and that nothing that happened a minute ago happened at all. Almost. Not quite. "And now, I'm here."
Yeah, so? That's what Arthur thinks. What Arthur says is, "I was so sure."
Eames' look gleans something from that repeated phrase, and later he will explain to Arthur it was half courage and half recklessness intensified by years he considers wasted. At present, all he does is reach out again and this time with both hands, taking the distinct angles of Arthur's face between them and holding them as if to keep him from falling apart right there, right then, and when he seems certain he's assured of this, that's when he crushes their mouths together.
It works surprisingly well.
Arthur has thought about it before, wondered what it would be like, and sometimes when he would go under with the PASIV, there would be a projection of someone so sure of himself that it made Arthur want to wake up on the spot except that that's not what ever happened at all. Instead they would talk, share cigarettes, and walk through locales the other swore he had never seen before. It was, Arthur realizes now with the pang of everything belated and pitiable he never wanted to ante up with, like having an imaginary friend when you're five or six. But Arthur is thirty-two, not five or six, and Eames, Arthur doesn't know how old he really is at all. Eames - chameleon like and so effortlessly articulate that it belies the lazy, nonthreatening posture he so often affects on the face of things - Eames, who is kissing him and Arthur is opening his mouth, learning the hot, too-tight slide of a tongue against and around his own, across his teeth.
He can't breathe.
But it's also good in a way he didn't even know he could feel.
His hands curl and fist in the surprisingly thin cotton of Eames' oxford - something that merits inquiry about, but later - and he leans in the way he did before with Eames' fingers under his chin, but this time Arthur draws back just enough to draw at his lower lip, to suck it in between his own before they both give pause because the instinctual need for air trumps carnal preference, despite their best intentions of otherwise.
Foreheads may or may not bump and Arthur winces out of reflex more than anything, considering he's certainly taken much worse, but Eames brushes a thumb across the smooth expanse of skin like an apology anyway and Arthur's hands do not leave Eames' shirt, no.
There, they simply stay, breathing - expanding and contracting like they're one space instead of two separates in that space.
Minutes pass, maybe longer than minutes, or maybe only one and a swollen mouth brushes along Arthur's jaw, cants up to the corner of it, just below his ear, says, "Do you want to know how I found you?"
"Yes."
"Would you believe I have you under surveillance?"
"No."
"Don't look at me like that. I assure you nothing is beneath me."
"I don't doubt that."
"But you are right. It was just...I was in the area, and you weren't in your hotel room so I--"
"You broke into my hotel room."
"And a good thing that I did, and that I know your penchant for rooftops," Eames follows up, succinct and quick and so profoundly gentle where Arthur so often sees someone dangerous and efficient in his own backhanded way that Arthur finds himself thrown for a loop again, and he senses that it's like getting the kick, or, perhaps, like opening a door.
Or, or, it's like looking at something you've known for years, blinking, and when you open your eyes what you see is exactly what has been there all along but nothing that you ever actually saw.
It could be like all of these.
Arthur is staring, he supposes, because Eames waves a hand, sitcom style in front of his face. In response, it's Arthur who reaches out this time, closes his own hand around Eames' wrist, staying it. The soft look from before goes shrewd in a moment so brief Arthur would miss it if he wasn't watching so closely, close enough that it's borderline embarrassing except he finds with that same abrupt quality he's being revisited by tonight that they might be past that, had somehow snuck past those remnant defenses, left the gate closed and infiltrated each other some time ago, when he wasn't looking.
There is a second where he looks back though, his head turning and his gaze canting out across the dead air off the edge of the roof, his hand around Eames' wrist a surefire brand of anchor or paper weight keeping him in place and Arthur too. And Eames, because he knows people and wants with a quiet terribleness to know Arthur more than anyone else, lets Arthur look at what-if for as long as he needs. There's no use in blinding it off, in turning his face back to him if the rooftop will still be there, if a thousand thirty-story buildings will always be there, a moment's lapse of truth versus lies the only thing dividing him from the cut.
Eventually Arthur lets Eames go, a relief to both of their arms bent as they were, but he also looks at him again, peers and even squints a little as though trying to figure another thing out.
"What is it?" Eames stuffs his hands in his pockets, where they won't grab for Arthur's shoulders, won't push him up against the wall of the rooftop entry because that isn't much better than burying the problem with a blindfold. Oh, he wants to do it, but under other circumstances, ones where they don't get followed by their own personal monsters and carved out in all the unforgiving ways monsters know best.
Somewhere not here, I'd like to see you, Eames thinks - not knowing how closely their thoughts draw themselves now - somewhere we have neither of us ever been before, new and irreversibly ours, if that's even possible anymore.
He's about to suggest Arthur go back inside when the hand previously around his wrist touches to the bend of his elbow and Eames quirks a brow at that, then at Arthur himself who gives him a look not shy of well?
"Not that you can't get in on your own, obviously," Arthur says dryly, and maybe Eames is imagining it but there might be a spark in the dark thought of Arthur's eyes, "But I have a key." Then he nods once in the direction of the door, like it's the most natural thing, like he might have wanted something like Eames wanted long ago but never knew how to name it or treat it or keep it as his own.
And, Eames muses in a way he hasn't dared to let himself muse before: maybe he didn't imagine it after all.
...
Arthur wakes to an arm strewn heavily across his abdomen, and a familiar stubble and mouth vested in the juncture of his neck and shoulder.
"Sleep well?" Eames' voice is something he feels more than hears, straight down the full length of his spine, deep into the soles of his feet, and it's so mystifyingly nice that Arthur answers without thinking.
"Better than I can remember."
Part of him, an old, practiced part of him wants to take it back, but Eames slides and curves his hold on Arthur enough to pull him into the full frame of both arms, hands settling at the accent of hipbones and fingers splayed at the front, possessive and not letting him go for old habits, so Arthur does what he can to go with the other part of him - the part that just wants to leave well enough alone.
And okay, in fact, this is better than well enough.
It's so good Arthur coasts the influx of panic as he reaches for the loaded die.
But it's real and it's ironic, he knows, that what he was so sure of being a dream the other night wasn't one, and that this, which he's not sure of at all, is also real. He'll need a new way to tell the difference, he gathers and Eames has, as it happens, not made the jump into telepathy just yet but he could fool Arthur right now as he says, "We'll figure it out."
Inside the too tight curl of his fist, Arthur concentrates on the die a little longer and when he can, he reaches out, places it back on the nightstand and leans back into the warmth framing him, the liquid gold feeling of coming home when he didn't know he wanted a home anymore and, when, upon receiving it, he is made cleanly aware of one other thing: he can return it, can mean it like he doesn't mean anything else. He wonders, idle with the foreignness of this ease, if it's pathetic that he hasn't come to something like this before, that he never went searching the way people so often grow up being shown is normal and right. The hand that held the die covers a broader one at his hip, and Arthur feels the crescent shape of a promise against his right shoulder blade, the intonation of his name breathed across his skin, a kindness in the early morning light; and it tells him something secret, something simple.
It tells him better late than never.
→rating: PG/G/?!?!?! / ALL I should think...someone let me know if I'm wrong please....derp
→word count: ~3,000 ish
→warnings: I was sleeping when I wrote this... no seriously.
→notes: original prompt......which as as ever deviated from not only with a pairing but uh yeah it's just....orz I'M SORRY IT'S KIND OF LIKE I didn't sleep and did this on a whim and oh god /_( BUT if I can blame anyone for being inspired while ASLEEP it's definitely thieve and ............. 8| YEAH. lmflsjds /points the finger... with love......
❝ There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. ❞
Below the city threads its lights and sounds together like so many kinds of metal. There's gold and silver for all that fluorescence, and there's iron and steel for the men in suits and women in stilettos sharp as knives, and there's something else hard and unknown yet certifiable; that's for everything else, the rough of the pavement and the rubber burn of tires screeching to a stop over and over. The pads of his fingertips coast along the concrete abrasions and it's so dark up here, far away from the light-sound synesthesia that moves, beacon-like between the overhanging gap of the toes of his shoes. Behind him he hears something, a little like his name but not his name because there's no one else up here.
Arthur knows how dreams work, knows how to suppress the projections when it's just him, more or less. The civilians on the avenue thirty stories down are allowed consciously, and if he coughed, if he only turned the wrong way, he would head down to meet them at a speeding dive. Not that it would matter.
Something about this feels familiar though.
Like an itch under his blood, like a file dragging along the interior of his skin, like a word just out of his breath - out of his capacity, there's something.
If only he could figure out what.
But a voice is calling him, now he's sure of it even as he's sure that's impossible. He's so sure that he tries once more to blot it out, to concentrate on the multifaceted thrum of automobiles interrupted by the tinny distance of cellular phone rings and so many footsteps. The voice isn't saying much. It sounds short, sounds simple, sounds like the voice knows Arthur.
Which he must, considering it's Arthur's own name being called.
That gets him to blink, gets three, four, five sharp shutters of his eyes against the dark and the bright and the muting roar of every little thing. So that's it. Someone is calling him. That someone, that voice. Calling. Well what for?
The wind this high up is bitterly cold, reminds Arthur of a winter on Lake Michigan when the waves froze in place and he and Dom and Mal skated out on tennis shoes, just to run their hands along the diamond white arcs. Things were so good back then. They aren't bad now, he supposes, because Dom is home and Arthur, Arthur for the first time in a humble forever is on his own. Nothing bad about that.
...and yet--
"Arthur!"
When he snaps his vision back into focus, everything goes counterclockwise and it takes Arthur a little too long to understand the reason for this: he's falling, and for a nanosecond he sighs into the gravity, lets the perception of a free-fall dig into the spaces between his ribs and the reflexive curve of his spine. Then there are arms around him, a chin pressed so hard into his shoulder he concludes the voice he recognizes but can't seem to remember means him harm. He does what is only natural and makes to throw the opposition off, but said opposition is having none of it.
"What the fuck Arthur?"
Something happens. Arthur isn't sure what, exactly. But something happens and it happens like thunder without the warning flare of its lightning counterpart, a gripping sensation that hits him with the gracelessness of shock and fear and the understanding that creeps in afterward, the shape of guilt.
"What the fuck Arthur, what--" Arms loosen, understanding the shift in Arthur's posture for precisely what it is: waking up. Around him, Arthur still smells every inch of the city, and under the leaden anchor of his heels he can still feel the fractional unevenness in the concrete of the roof, and at his back he notes warmth so at odds with the whipping cold of January that now he has to turn, so he does.
"I thought..." he trails off, his voice a haggard thing that doesn't seem to belong to him right now as he swallows away those extra pieces, broken bottle shards that glint the whole way down.
"Yes, I," a pause, "I'm well aware of what you thought." For someone who just saved Arthur, Eames manages to look insurmountably put out about it, like he was put up to the job and had it been an ounce more distasteful he would have ignored it altogether. He runs a deft hand down his face, and Arthur notices the clench in the forger's jaw, the one whose tension seems to run down the left of his neck and pool into his shoulders - broad though the rest of him is slimmer from a job he worked a month ago. Still, his perturbed disposition seems out of place and Arthur does not entirely comprehend that what he feels about it happens to be personal offense at first.
"Look, I didn't ask you to," and he can't say it after all, has this sick and abhorrent knot twisting itself in him as he remembers Mal, as he remembers how ill she became and everything they couldn't do to help her. Arthur does not scare easily. He has had guns held to his head plenty of times in the waking world, though to contrast with dreams is unfair. Arthur has run higher stakes gambits than that which had cost one, single, life. But Mal was always different, even when she was dying - even now, when she's dead. Throat dry like it's been scratched that way with sandpaper, he tries again, "..I didn't ask you t---" and stops before charging on, heedless because it is honest to god fifteen degrees out and maybe a little, a little because he knows he owes it. "I didn't ask you to." It's not as simple as that alone but it's the only place to start.
Bleary eyed, he slides the back of his hand across his eyes, welling from having only just woken and the wind in combination, but none of that is the point so much as this: Arthur, through brown eyes now black-blue in the dark, looks right at the other man, unwavering. It is, he expects, as straightforward as they come to be with each other, awake or asleep. But Eames just stares back at him. Arthur thinks he can spot exasperation, and something uncannily like fear.
"Say something!" Arthur should not be snapping at his rescuer but Arthur hates being rescued only second to having needed rescuing in the first place; some things will never change, and he cannot suss out between the nerve-wracking twitch of Eames' mouth and the impossibly bulleted candor of his gaze what he himself is supposed to be deciphering in the conversational gap. For a long, long while, Eames true to form does not comply, but what he does is somehow much more distressing to Arthur, to the Arthur that thinks he knows Eames from all his tells - because everyone has these even if Eames hides his better than most - everything from his preferred firearm to his favorite poet to how many shades of hideous his surprisingly expensive clothes come in. Because Eames, rather than saying anything, reaches out a hand that grips Arthur's chin none too lightly, a lock of a hold with fingers curled and the thumb threatening to bruise across where a dimple shows when Arthur smiles, supposing he does. Then he tilts and pulls, jerks Arthur forward and this is so unexpected that Arthur's body complies with the motion, still perhaps riding the descent from the freedom of the dream to the constraint of waking mortality. Between Eames' fingers, Arthur knows he could wrest himself away but a feeling equal parts perplexity and morbid curiosity keeps him motionless, the threat of his pulse a hammering notion in his throat and his wrist and the formative cage of his chest. He lets it go on far longer than he ever would normally and as if on some invisible wavelength, just as Arthur begins to speak, Eames' hand looses itself, drops away like a dead weight.
"Sorry," Eames says and doesn't sound sorry at all.
"You..." Arthur stops when Eames' non-apology beats him to the punch, but the same man sends him such a look that Arthur continues, as if there wasn't ever another option, as if stopping isn't something Arthur knows how to do any longer, and maybe that constitutes some of the most real and troublesome parts of this situation. "Thanks. I mean...I don't remember getting up here. That's why I was sure it was, you know, a dream. I mean," he breathes a little too narrowly, coughs, clears his voice and it still comes out gravelly and secret, "I was so sure."
And that's it, in a nutshell.
Arthur was sure.
Arthur was sure the way Mal was sure.
Arthur doesn't think he can get his head around this in any way that would be considered right.
What will he tell Dom?
The answer is to him faster than anything else this evening: he won't.
Some of this must show in Arthur's face or his posture or Eames has learned to read minds - a true trespass, to add onto the dozens of others though if that's how he found Arthur tonight, then, the point guesses he's in no place to make snide remarks about it. Fumbling a play in a job is one thing, covering for someone in a hail of gunfire down a brick alley or across a flatland. Pulling someone back from a skyscraper's cliff, that's something else.
Anyway, Eames says, "Arthur." Just a name, just everything.
And yeah, Arthur really, really hates it.
What now, Mal? He asks no one, silently, the way sane people talk to the dead, he has always felt though he makes no judgments on Dom who has hour long dialogues at Mal's grave every week, like she can actually hear him, like some part of her is still there - not so many feet under but in the air: an immaculate glimmer just out of sight. But Mal was Arthur's friend even if she was not his wife and when she jumped he lost her too. It's not the same but he loved her, knew the fit of her fingers between his and the press of her mouth to his jaw in an amicable and European kiss that made Americans think they were together. She had known, back then of course, the difference between her dream and her reality.
Now that it's happening to him, Arthur feels defeated with an immediacy he doesn't quite grasp and it's like firing one-handed - so much harder than it looks in all the movies he watched as a kid and on top of that, it hurts. No one planted the idea in his head and he has a halfway decent suspicion of what this is - has done some reading since the first symptoms reared themselves in ways that ought to have been as good as warning signs but Arthur couldn't tell anyone, couldn't think of anyone to tell.
Which brings him here.
Which brings him here, with Eames.
That last part, he still fails to understand at all.
"How did you even get here? You were in Russia."
"I was," Eames hums his confirmation in a way so familiar Arthur could almost convince himself they're here after a job and that nothing that happened a minute ago happened at all. Almost. Not quite. "And now, I'm here."
Yeah, so? That's what Arthur thinks. What Arthur says is, "I was so sure."
Eames' look gleans something from that repeated phrase, and later he will explain to Arthur it was half courage and half recklessness intensified by years he considers wasted. At present, all he does is reach out again and this time with both hands, taking the distinct angles of Arthur's face between them and holding them as if to keep him from falling apart right there, right then, and when he seems certain he's assured of this, that's when he crushes their mouths together.
It works surprisingly well.
Arthur has thought about it before, wondered what it would be like, and sometimes when he would go under with the PASIV, there would be a projection of someone so sure of himself that it made Arthur want to wake up on the spot except that that's not what ever happened at all. Instead they would talk, share cigarettes, and walk through locales the other swore he had never seen before. It was, Arthur realizes now with the pang of everything belated and pitiable he never wanted to ante up with, like having an imaginary friend when you're five or six. But Arthur is thirty-two, not five or six, and Eames, Arthur doesn't know how old he really is at all. Eames - chameleon like and so effortlessly articulate that it belies the lazy, nonthreatening posture he so often affects on the face of things - Eames, who is kissing him and Arthur is opening his mouth, learning the hot, too-tight slide of a tongue against and around his own, across his teeth.
He can't breathe.
But it's also good in a way he didn't even know he could feel.
His hands curl and fist in the surprisingly thin cotton of Eames' oxford - something that merits inquiry about, but later - and he leans in the way he did before with Eames' fingers under his chin, but this time Arthur draws back just enough to draw at his lower lip, to suck it in between his own before they both give pause because the instinctual need for air trumps carnal preference, despite their best intentions of otherwise.
Foreheads may or may not bump and Arthur winces out of reflex more than anything, considering he's certainly taken much worse, but Eames brushes a thumb across the smooth expanse of skin like an apology anyway and Arthur's hands do not leave Eames' shirt, no.
There, they simply stay, breathing - expanding and contracting like they're one space instead of two separates in that space.
Minutes pass, maybe longer than minutes, or maybe only one and a swollen mouth brushes along Arthur's jaw, cants up to the corner of it, just below his ear, says, "Do you want to know how I found you?"
"Yes."
"Would you believe I have you under surveillance?"
"No."
"Don't look at me like that. I assure you nothing is beneath me."
"I don't doubt that."
"But you are right. It was just...I was in the area, and you weren't in your hotel room so I--"
"You broke into my hotel room."
"And a good thing that I did, and that I know your penchant for rooftops," Eames follows up, succinct and quick and so profoundly gentle where Arthur so often sees someone dangerous and efficient in his own backhanded way that Arthur finds himself thrown for a loop again, and he senses that it's like getting the kick, or, perhaps, like opening a door.
Or, or, it's like looking at something you've known for years, blinking, and when you open your eyes what you see is exactly what has been there all along but nothing that you ever actually saw.
It could be like all of these.
Arthur is staring, he supposes, because Eames waves a hand, sitcom style in front of his face. In response, it's Arthur who reaches out this time, closes his own hand around Eames' wrist, staying it. The soft look from before goes shrewd in a moment so brief Arthur would miss it if he wasn't watching so closely, close enough that it's borderline embarrassing except he finds with that same abrupt quality he's being revisited by tonight that they might be past that, had somehow snuck past those remnant defenses, left the gate closed and infiltrated each other some time ago, when he wasn't looking.
There is a second where he looks back though, his head turning and his gaze canting out across the dead air off the edge of the roof, his hand around Eames' wrist a surefire brand of anchor or paper weight keeping him in place and Arthur too. And Eames, because he knows people and wants with a quiet terribleness to know Arthur more than anyone else, lets Arthur look at what-if for as long as he needs. There's no use in blinding it off, in turning his face back to him if the rooftop will still be there, if a thousand thirty-story buildings will always be there, a moment's lapse of truth versus lies the only thing dividing him from the cut.
Eventually Arthur lets Eames go, a relief to both of their arms bent as they were, but he also looks at him again, peers and even squints a little as though trying to figure another thing out.
"What is it?" Eames stuffs his hands in his pockets, where they won't grab for Arthur's shoulders, won't push him up against the wall of the rooftop entry because that isn't much better than burying the problem with a blindfold. Oh, he wants to do it, but under other circumstances, ones where they don't get followed by their own personal monsters and carved out in all the unforgiving ways monsters know best.
Somewhere not here, I'd like to see you, Eames thinks - not knowing how closely their thoughts draw themselves now - somewhere we have neither of us ever been before, new and irreversibly ours, if that's even possible anymore.
He's about to suggest Arthur go back inside when the hand previously around his wrist touches to the bend of his elbow and Eames quirks a brow at that, then at Arthur himself who gives him a look not shy of well?
"Not that you can't get in on your own, obviously," Arthur says dryly, and maybe Eames is imagining it but there might be a spark in the dark thought of Arthur's eyes, "But I have a key." Then he nods once in the direction of the door, like it's the most natural thing, like he might have wanted something like Eames wanted long ago but never knew how to name it or treat it or keep it as his own.
And, Eames muses in a way he hasn't dared to let himself muse before: maybe he didn't imagine it after all.
...
Arthur wakes to an arm strewn heavily across his abdomen, and a familiar stubble and mouth vested in the juncture of his neck and shoulder.
"Sleep well?" Eames' voice is something he feels more than hears, straight down the full length of his spine, deep into the soles of his feet, and it's so mystifyingly nice that Arthur answers without thinking.
"Better than I can remember."
Part of him, an old, practiced part of him wants to take it back, but Eames slides and curves his hold on Arthur enough to pull him into the full frame of both arms, hands settling at the accent of hipbones and fingers splayed at the front, possessive and not letting him go for old habits, so Arthur does what he can to go with the other part of him - the part that just wants to leave well enough alone.
And okay, in fact, this is better than well enough.
It's so good Arthur coasts the influx of panic as he reaches for the loaded die.
But it's real and it's ironic, he knows, that what he was so sure of being a dream the other night wasn't one, and that this, which he's not sure of at all, is also real. He'll need a new way to tell the difference, he gathers and Eames has, as it happens, not made the jump into telepathy just yet but he could fool Arthur right now as he says, "We'll figure it out."
Inside the too tight curl of his fist, Arthur concentrates on the die a little longer and when he can, he reaches out, places it back on the nightstand and leans back into the warmth framing him, the liquid gold feeling of coming home when he didn't know he wanted a home anymore and, when, upon receiving it, he is made cleanly aware of one other thing: he can return it, can mean it like he doesn't mean anything else. He wonders, idle with the foreignness of this ease, if it's pathetic that he hasn't come to something like this before, that he never went searching the way people so often grow up being shown is normal and right. The hand that held the die covers a broader one at his hip, and Arthur feels the crescent shape of a promise against his right shoulder blade, the intonation of his name breathed across his skin, a kindness in the early morning light; and it tells him something secret, something simple.
It tells him better late than never.