[ k n o w
→rating: PG/PG-13? Tell me if it ought to be higher.
→word count: ~3,500 ish
→warnings: I was sleeping when I wrote this... no seriously.
→notes: for the sake of familiarity, eames' given name - Henry - is what he's referred to mostly. written for thieve.
Know
They are about to go under when Mal's hand wraps around his wrist, staying his motion. Some people would ask what but Arthur only looks at her, eyes doing all of the inquiring. She is not looking at him, instead watching the even rise and fall of Dominick's chest as she rubs her thumb across the instep of Arthur's wrist. Beside her husband there rests another man, a man who most everyone calls Eames but whose first name has always been Henry.
"He's a thief you know," she says and no, Arthur did not know, yet when he opens his mouth to say as much, he finds that he feels as though he had an idea, a nebulous hunch.
"Yeah?"
"A very good thief," Mal smiles but the smile does not reach her eyes. Arthur can tell even at this quarter of an angle. It is a look Arthur sees when she and Dom have disagreements, which happens far more often than most people understand.
"That doesn't sound like a compliment," Arthur lets his gaze drop to Mal's hand and his wrist. It seems to him that even the specific bend of her fingers has an elegance to it. Mal has a way of infusing her motions, her words, her looks, all of it with an unmistakable sense of self. Most people do not do this; most people do what other people do and it looks the way it does when other people do it, the same as if it was someone else. Nothing Mal does or says could be misconstrued as the intent or reach of another person. Arthur has a hard time looking away from where they are connected, thinks to himself that the sun spends generosity in the taper of Mal's fingers as much as it vests and soundlessly supernovas in her irises. He might be a little in love but he knows it is not the kind of love Mal feels for Dom or Dom for Mal. The way Arthur feels about Mal is the same level of commitment as how he feels for Dom, and he still wakes up recognizing how new it is. He never felt like this toward his own parents and he still does not know why. It would be a lie to say it keeps him awake at night, but as a child it might have. He finds it difficult to remember, but children often have the intuitive accuracy that tells them they are different from others, whereas growing up, people tend to lose that honesty. It gets lost or warped, changes until it is unrecognizable and this is the lie it becomes: that they are not different, that everything is fine, that they do not lack for anything.
Recently Arthur has gotten it into his head that although he could not miss what he never had, it is still nice to have this. He likes that he has the third key to this house tucked away from the rest of the world and he likes that Philippa has known him all her life, calls him family without hesitation. The many ways Dom will still trick him into staying for dinner by cooking too much, Mal's tendency to gift him with things when it is not his birthday - all this, he likes, has grown fond of. He holds the entirety of these things close in some tiny space, the breathing room inside of a fist, and it feels a little the way he supposes home must be.
"What kind of thief - I mean, what does he steal?" he asks when Mal draws her hand away to brush a loose curl out from the glimmer of her eyes.
"What does anyone steal?" Mal purses her lips and it is the same as if she had said you know the answer to that.
"Okay, so, money."
"So money." She does not quite taunt.
"Why're you telling me this?" he half sighs but cannot even find it in himself to frown. Henry being a thief holds less ground than the vagueness of Mal's purpose here. He watches her for some additional tell but reading people has never been Arthur's strong suit, save for in a fight where something more primal takes over and he does not think so much as act, a rush in his blood that rules out losing. A few feet away, Arthur notes the way Henry's shirt - a horrible salmon no less - manages to somehow not clash with his skin. He also notes the way it clings to the breadth of his shoulders and expanse of torso that days ago crushed him down in the backseat of a too-small car, Arthur's hands scrabbling across his skin and the breath punched out of him repeatedly while Henry made a map of his throat.
Fingertips press to Arthur's jaw and he allows himself to be turned toward Mal again. She looks at him as though she can see behind his eyes; he half believes that she can.
"I think you have a right to know who you open your heart to."
Mal has a way of saying things that coming from anyone else would be cinema cliche and making them sound earnest. Arthur thinks that this is because she believes those cliches come from truths and once when he asked, Mal laughed and told him he was probably right. Probably. As though she could not be pinned down long enough to give him something more definitive than that. Thinking of it now, he tries to laugh but the laughter does not come, instead superseded by a knot in his chest where his heart ought to be. If he could take it out, if he could represent the shape and nature of it in paint or charcoal, it would be of Gordian origin. He does not want to let these thoughts in too close, has no idea as to how it should be done; no one is taught that one kind of love looks like this and another kind looks rather different, but he sometimes feels he missed the hardwired primer that most people come presupposed with.
He ducks his head and she traces his jaw like a lover or a friend, a friend who loves him.
"Well," he thins his lips, pressing them together as he looks over at Henry again, Eames who he met in the military's dreamshare enrollment, Eames who had the wherewithal to not send him to a psychiatric ward after Arthur shot a man who woke up not knowing who his enemies were, Eames who Arthur patched up on multiple occasions, kneeling in front of him with his arms circling his torso to get the medical tape to band full-circle. Henry who built a desert and a garden that fused with a grassland that bled into the beach Arthur made, and said I think it's beautiful; Arthur remembers the way his eyes looked green against the hard blue of the sky, remembers waking up and looking at them, finding anchor in the solid grayness.
"He specializes in forgery," Mal moves her hand to Arthur's shoulder and the weight is comfortable.
"Bonds?"
"Bonds, paintings, plates." Arthur can see her smile again, still not rising into her eyes. He knew that Henry painted but he never knew what of or why. It takes him a minute to catch up with Mal's inflection, and when it hits him it is a quiet sense of oh.
"You think I'm making a mistake."
"He's not good enough for you."
"And?"
Seated on the floor as they are, four walls made with skin and bones and blood and heartbeats, Arthur feels a smallness in their collective. Mal has a delicate quality to her with the late afternoon sun bending from white-gold to a burnished peach. Dom looks like a man who has beautiful dreams and Arthur knows that this is no embellishment; there are some ways in which no one will ever compare with the science of Dominick Cobb's dreams and his fervor, not for Arthur. With Henry in arm's reach, Arthur cannot tell how he himself fits into this picture, whether something in him has become refined by the space and the moment.
Mal could tell him that he carries his youth like a mask and that she wishes he would just let himself be young, that she wonders if he ever has. She could tell him that for all his kindness and his ability to joke, to be casual, to play tag with Philippa and laugh until the red is in his cheeks, for all of that he still seems like his footing is unsure. All this, Mal notices but telling someone these things and letting them figure it out on their own is a fine line to walk. When Mal first met Arthur, she would not have hesitated, but having Philippa has changed Mal in a way she did not know she could change. She has no illusions about herself, knows her own brand of selfishness wielded often like the shining silver sword of the hero in a storybook - unrepentant and grand, perhaps a little dangerous. The sword is still there, but lately Mal opts for the composure that motherhood is affording her. She feels that Arthur is her friend but some friends she wants to protect more than others.
Arthur can decide for himself, but he should not decide based on a half-truth.
"Then again, when I met Dom, everyone told me this was a mistake." Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur watches her twist her wedding ring in the quiet way of someone who knows exactly what they have. "I told them that I loved him, not the adolescent kind but the sort where he wound up in my dreams and I knew I wanted him outside of them too." She gives him a shrewd look. “Some of them even believed me.”
"This isn't that serious," he insists after a minute and rubs the back of his neck, uncertain of how true that is.
"Perhaps not looking from the inside-out."
"But I should know."
"I don't think that's entirely accurate."
"You knew."
"I did, but yours is another kind of knowing."
They sit like that in silence again, aware that there remain twenty minutes on the clock. About halfway through, Mal pulls him into the office cum study that occupies one of the corners of the house, glass windows running the height of the walls on the two outer edges. He slides onto the ebony bench and Mal follows until her elbows brush his, her hands resting on her lap as his rest atop ivory slats, the fingers splaying before pressing down to form the keys of Edith Piaf. Sometimes Mal sings and sometimes she stays silent; today she does a bit of both and the room is warm and easier for Arthur to connect with than most other things in his life. Compositions lead them through scenes that play across the mind's eye and when there are only a few minutes left, Mal drags him away mid-song to dance - setting the record needle down onto something wistful.
Leading her in the soft waltz, Arthur considers asking her to elaborate on Henry's background. He has no doubt that she knows everything that can be known. Mal has always been that sort of person, from what he can gather. She prefers to hold all of the cards. Someday this will be a terrifying thing, but for now Arthur only admires it, considers leaning in the doorway of the things she knows just to have an idea. The sun almost complete with its fall below the horizon line, the last reaching lines of it glint off of the ring on Mal's hand; it occurs to Arthur that he never saw his mother wearing a ring at all. The connection makes little sense, as Arthur knows enough to understand he does not love Mal as if she was his mother or even his sister, but the word friend does not quite do it for his side of the sentiment either. It is as if Mal in her singularity defies the framework of a word, and that is very much her, enough so that Arthur rarely pursues this line of thought further. Mal smells like a clean shower and a perfume lathed in something rich made of too many components to pin down. Yet it does not cloy, even as it lingers, seems to remind him she was there hours later. In his own way, Arthur is fond of this trait; he thinks there is something lasting about it that goes beyond a tangible scent, something utterly identifiable as Mal.
It is what he finds himself drawn to in all of the people he gravitates toward and it is only the image of whichever quality that shifts, changes depending on who he is looking at.
"This isn't that serious," he says again as he steps them into a turn, smiling with the slightness of someone who is trying to be convincing.
Mal only peers back at him. "Do you know what it is to be a lover, Arthur?"
He shakes his head once, no hesitation and no self-consciousness. Some things are just true and he thinks that somewhere out there, it is likely that there are people who never learn; it strikes him square and center to acknowledge that he does not want to be one of those who never do. Then he remembers how when Henry left for several months - leaving Arthur, Dom, and Mal to the dream research on their own - he would lie awake at night and mark up sections of books he thought he might like, as some poor simulacrum for the person and conversation that was no longer there.
It might have been loneliness, but it was a new feeling and Arthur had a hard time placing it - still does. If he attempts to trace it back to something else he has felt before, he thinks it might echo a little off of his time in foster families. To Arthur it was not a difficult thing - whether the family had enough room or whether they cared or whether they were cruel; whatever hand was dealt, he managed because from an even younger age he had lived inside of a sense of composure, a reliability on control. There is a scar low on Arthur's back from that time and he remembers feeling worst when he was brought into the kind of family that had no business taking on other kids - the kind where the host family took more children for the payoff. It was useful in its own way, getting to know how many kinds of households there were and how none of them fit him, not even his own. Sometimes the others would ask him about his parents and he would shrug because he did not want to answer them and even if he had, he did not know how to. Mal and Dom have no insight on his past. No one does. Arthur prefers it this way since he himself can barely make heads or tails out of it. He shrinks at the thought of pity when he hardly felt enough to deserve it, and he does not want people imagining abuses where there were none. Just because he likes his privacy does not mean there is something wrong with him, something to fix, but he thinks someone like Mal especially would disagree.
Some days, Arthur knows who he is by the skin of his teeth and nothing else, but he would be afraid most of all to lose that last way of knowing himself. He has lived at great distances from people all his life with the exception of Henry, Dom, and Mal - and now Philippa - and he has no regrets. It is all he knew how to do, but something about staying in this house so often seems to have taken root in him alongside his original childhood, the growing up defined by scrapes and broken bones rather than days on a calendar.
Again he tries to smile at Mal and this time she sends their steps askew by stopping, raising both hands to either side of his face and ghosting her thumbs across the slants of his cheekbones.
"You will tell me when you figure it out?"
"Sure," he says as if it is anything, as if it is nothing; but it is much closer to everything. Then the moment is over and Mal brings him back into the waltz with such strength that he laughs before reclaiming the lead.
"You have dimples, you know," she says when his eyes crinkle.
"Do I?" Arthur asks and it is funny how unimportant that kind of thing is until someone else notices it.
Then they lapse into a conversational silence, the music to keep things animate and their motion to keep it fluid until Mal's humming turns to words. Arthur chases after her voice with his own and it has the feeling of children in summer, running through a golden field with stems as high as their eyes. In this field the girl tells the boy who is her friend things that she never tells the boy that she loves; in this field the boy says not very much at all but gives away a great deal and they both come away richer for it, friends who did not know they needed each other as deeply as they did.
***
Back in the living room, the two men wake up to a song they both know, slightly scratched in the air from the record player. Even from several rooms away they both lift their heads as they notice the other sound - Arthur and Mal singing. It is a private moment and this emanates off of it as distinct as heat from the sun or judgment from a court of law, so Dom offers Eames a drink and they go out back, each wondering what the other two have been talking about and neither of them bringing it up to speak of.
“You know what you're doing?” Dom asks finally, leaning with his arms folded on the wooden railing.
Henry bides his time with another swallow before saying, “Would you step in if I told you no?”
Dom considers this and finally says, “No, I don't think I would. Mal might.” The last bit he laughs because Mal would. “But I'd still like to know which it is.” And it sounds like he's my friend too. In the not too distant future, Dominick Cobb will lose the world he knows and Arthur will be collateral damage. They will both be to blame because they will both let it happen and Henry will be kept out of it entirely, the door shut closed on the things that once were. They will never be strangers because people who once knew each other can never be real strangers; anyone who says differently is lying. It will be the darkest kind of pretend - a denial that roots through the spine and makes camp in the mouth where it twists words the wrong way and lets none of the right ones out.
“I can honestly,” Henry pauses as if he knows exactly how ridiculous that preamble is, coming from him; he does. “--say that I have no idea. We'll see, I suppose.”
“Mal would say that isn't good enough.”
“What would you say?”
The pause between them thickens as the last violets of dusk settle into a blue distance, and Dom heaves a sigh that belongs to an old friend before letting it settle back into the familiarity of his shoulders. Dom has known Arthur almost as long as Henry Eames, thinks that Arthur has always shown a lot of potential - not perhaps as an architect, his repertoire of what is convincing being limited, but Arthur once told him he was an early lucid dreamer and it shows in his navigation of the dreamscape, no matter what it is. He guesses it has half to do with Arthur's technical approach to things, his tendency to build maps behind his eyes where others just follow what is in front of them, but Arthur also loves books the way Dom loves books, and Arthur yearns to travel but never lets himself go. These things are truths that the older man harbors like a guardsman, they not being secrets but still ringing of confidence. He wonders how much of this Henry knew already, or knows, or worse, does not know.
“It's up to Arthur, isn't it?” he says at last and the upward curve of his mouth bespeaks a fondness, something protective.
Henry needles a cigarette between his lips and lights it before the hum of a reply, saying, “That, it is.”
Evening silhouettes them like inked shapes with the fused glow a pinprick of light farther to the left. Henry knows that Arthur will make up his own mind and later when he asks him to go to Belize with him and he says no, he will wonder if it has been made up the other way after all. Then Arthur will lean in for a taste of him - saying yes and no at the same time, saying there is something anchoring me down here, saying maybe this is good enough. He will invite Arthur to a multitude of other countries, will find himself frustrated beyond antidote with the refusal to be had anywhere but in this particular shoreline coasting against the Pacific. Until one day, Arthur will say yes.
Mal will remind him that he is a thief, but this time the smile will reach her eyes and Arthur will say that he knows. Dom will say nothing and hope for the best with the rapt attentiveness of someone who appreciates the silence. Philippa will cling to Arthur with the brevity of a child and then, thinking herself too grown up for that, will kiss him demurely on the cheek and say see you soon. Before he leaves, Arthur will ask Dom and Mal not to dig too much deeper into the dream until they know more about it from the outside - until they have more of the facts and Dom will tell him not to worry while Mal whispers something to Henry that Arthur does not have to hear to recognize it as a warning.
Then Arthur will go, following Henry to an insignificant flat steeped in the history of Paris.
That will be the beginning of the end, but it will be a good beginning - the type that builds a man from the ground up, opens him and makes him vulnerable the way all the best things do. Henry will fall in love in the tiny rental where he and Arthur have to vie for space in the hall or the bath - elbows jostling and sides brushing more often than they mean to. They will get on each other's nerves (as they did on the military base) and they will yell for no good reason only to come back laughing in the rain, no one else around to hear. There Arthur will ask Henry to paint, so Henry will paint Arthur and Arthur will read to him in perfect French (a language her pronounces - everyone points out - criminally better than his native English) or Latin. Some days Henry will be working a job and Arthur will be transfixed by the clench of his jaw or the tension in his arms, and other days Arthur will dally in the museums with a mutual acquaintance while Henry looks forward to said acquaintance leaving.
He will want Arthur to himself.
They will remember the things they learned first in the military and then they will learn new things about each other - Arthur's favorite book, Henry's favorite artist, Arthur's first dream, Henry's first fight. Their bodies will find all of the ways to collide, only to do them all over again - Arthur pinned to a thin wall or Henry slipping into the shower behind him while still clothed, Arthur 's legs a vice grip around Henry's waist and Henry's hands spanning the small of Arthur's back in the same way a person says mine, Arthur with his eyes blown dark and wide and honest beneath him as Henry tells him all the different ways he plans to keep him.
And Arthur will write a letter to Mal that he never sends. It will say one thing: I think I know.
I think I know.