inception drabbling - Inception - G~PG
Author: anamuan
Arthur plays duck-duck-goose | Friday nights are real dinner nights | Arthur finds out that Eames is spectacularly good at domestic things
Summary: Arthur plays duck-duck-goose
Pairing: Gen. Kidfic.
Word-count & Rating: 652 words; totally G.
for coffeeandice
forever,' Phillipa accuses him.'>
"Uncle Arthur, Uncle Arthur!" two tiny voices yell, and then stop suddenly as two tiny bodies collide full force with the back of Arthur's legs. It's fortunate for Arthur that Phillipa and James come with built-in early warning systems, because otherwise he might not have been ready. They don't weigh much yet, not even collectively, but their arms snap around in death-grip bear hugs upon impact, and suddenly having something close around your knees is a good way to end up falling over and taking everything nearby out with you.
Arthur reaches behind himself to pet at their heads. Eventually they stop trying to clutch him to death long enough for him to turn around and say hi.
"Uncle Arthur, we haven't seen you in forever," Phillipa accuses him.
'Feh-ver," James echoes. He's still getting his r's down. Technically all of his 'Uncle Arthur's come out 'Uckle Aah-fer,' but Arthur's not going to hold it against him.
"Sorry Skittles," says Arthur, crouching down so he's closer to eye level with them. "I had to go work. I missed you, though!" he promises gravely.
Phillipa breaks into gales of laughter, whole body shaking as she clutches at her stomach. James laughs too, laughs so hard he falls onto his wee little bum. "We're not skittles, Uncle Arthur!" Phillipa declares. James shakes his head in emphatic, childlike agreement.
"Oh, you're right," Arthur says seriously, then both hands dart out and tickle them mercilessly. They shriek with laughter, and Phillipa falls down too. Her legs thrash, and James wriggles his whole body helplessly on the grass. "You're Reese's Cups!"
"No, no, no," Phillipa shrieks, but Arthur keeps tickling until both children are completely out of breath. He stops, and lets them get their breath back, and then hauls them both back up to their feet.
"Play," says James, sucking on a finger. His hair is everywhere, even worse than Phillipa's for all that it's shorter.
"Yeah, Uncle Arthur, let's go play!" Phillipa agrees. She grabs one of Arthur's hands and starts dragging him further into the back yard. Arthur catches up one of James's pudgy hands and lets himself be pulled.
"What do you want to play?" he asks them.
"Du-goose!" James declares.
"Yeah! Duck duck goose!" Phillipa echoes, yanking on Arthur's arm like she could actually pull him all over the city if she wanted to, and not like she weighs 35 pounds soaking wet and Arthur occasionally kills people barehanded professionally.
"You're the goose!" she tells him, when she decides they're sufficiently far into the back yard. Phillipa plops down onto the grass, but James gets a little confused now that they're there, and Arthur helps him pick his place to sit. Then he goes to stand in between them for a moment before leaving the 'circle' and beginning a slow, ominous pace around them.
"Duck...duck...duck...," Arthur says, tapping each child on the head in turn. "Duck...goo-duck," he intones, pausing ominously by Phillipa's head, and when he settles on 'duck' and moves on, Phillipa relaxes, visibly torn between relief and excitement. "Duck...duck...duck...goose!"
Arthur lets James catch him just before he gets back to James's old spot in the circle, and James gets to be duck. James picks Phillipa as the goose, and she catches him only a few paces later (halfway around their tiny, 3-person game), and the game continues, the children shrieking with fright and laughter.
"Yusuf," Ariadne says, half turning her head, but keeping her eyes forward, like she's unable to look away. "Yusuf, where is our Arthur, and how did that man take over his body?"
Yusuf, for his part, doesn't answer. He just keeps laughing, and snaps another picture with his phone. He is going to have blackmail. He doesn't want it for anything in particular. It's just nice to have it, in case. Maybe he'll threaten to send them to Eames, just to see what Arthur would do.
Summary: Friday nights are real dinner nights.
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Word-count & Rating: 544 words; PG
For K.
Friday nights are real dinner nights, whenever they're anywhere that can be considered 'home'. The rest of the week, they can subsist on take-out and caffeine. If they make something, it'll be heated up in the microwave, or beans on toast, or a half-assed omelet, but Friday is reserved for an actual meal, something you have to go to trouble to make.
They start planning on Wednesday, figuring out what people are in the mood for, and taking stock of what ingredients they have around the apartment already and what they need to get from the store. Sometimes they squabble about it; mostly they don't. They keep their arguments in reserve over who has to do the dishes Friday evening. There's a rotation, but whomever's turn it is always tries to barter, beg or cheat their way out of it. It's embarrassing behavior for grown men, but the alternative is doing the dishes.
Some time on Thursday is dedicated to the grocery run. They've been on a quest to eat the most ridiculously pretentious meals they can think of for the past couple of months, an endeavor that has resulted in a lot of frantic googling of oven temperatures and cooking techniques. Last week, they'd made a Swiss chard and sweet potato gratin, and had spent a fair bit of their Thursday night on prep, washing and cutting and drying out the chard. Dessert had been a delicious, tangy-sweet grapefruit yogurt cake.
This time they're trying for a simpler meal, specifically something that will take significantly less slicing and settle on a bacon, onion Flammkuchen. The energy they save goes straight into dessert, with Arthur making petit pots de creme au chocolat. They can bring the extra over to Cobb's house, or give them to Ariadne and Yusuf because Ariadne eats chocolate like it has magical properties in high enough doses.
On Friday, Arthur takes the kitchen all afternoon--the pots de creme will need to chill for a few hours, and if they're going to be ready in time for dinner, he needs to knock them out early. Eames sits perched in Arthur's counter space, drinking a glass of wine. Arthur claims Eames is in the way, and Eames claims that Arthur is using extra dishes because it's Eames's turn with the dishes, and they both try not to break and grin at the other.
Eames makes the pizza dough from scratch even though Arthur had pulled for just buying a pre-made crust when they went to buy the fromage blanc and a nice white wine to go with it. Arthur finishes the bottle Eames had started earlier, distracting Eames from caramelizing the onions with an argument-discussion on the US health care overhaul.
The Flammkuchen take less than twenty minutes once they've gone in the oven, and then, because they've had enough with propriety, they open up the bottle of white and Eames hops back up on the newly cleared counter next to Arthur and they just eat in the kitchen instead of setting the tiny two-person table in the next room. They eat the petit pots de creme out of teacups, and when Arthur licks a smear of chocolate off Eames's lower lip, he tastes like everything Arthur can ever remember wanting.
Summary: Arthur finds out that Eames is spectacularly good at domestic things
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Word-count & Rating: 706 words; G.
Written for kamikaze_bunny for my not very valentine drabble post.
Arthur is used to being good at things. He doesn't have to be the best at everything, but he does like to be passable at anything that might be valuable later. General life skills fall under that heading. Arthur can sew a button back on just as well as he can stitch a wound--it'll scar, but it should hold until you can get to a professional. He doesn't cook much, but he knows how, and he's got a couple of staple dishes he can pull out to feed himself. Arthur is tidy, and basic cleaning always seemed more like common sense than a particular skill, but that was before he'd moved in with Eames.
The house is just, somehow, neater. It's not something Arthur can explain. There isn't any dust on the window sills. The kitchen counters are always clear. Arthur does the dishes automatically whenever they're in the sink, but there are never weeks' worth of already dry plates still sitting in the drying rack, and the groceries never just get left on the counter until later. Books get cleared up off the end table, and the first thing Eames wants to do when he gets home from a job is vacuum.
Things appear in Arthur's fridge. He doesn't just have ground beef in the freezer and a couple cans of black beans in the pantry. It's not just a bag of oranges or apples in the fridge, because vitamins. It's things like fresh, whole artichokes. It's whole squash. It's half a duck. It's things Arthur doesn't even know how to cook. It's things that end up on Arthur's plate in the evenings and are, invariably, the best thing Arthur's ever eaten in his life.
Arthur discovers an ice cream maker under the sink. Two weeks later, there's fresh, homemade watermelon icecream in tupperware in the freezer. Arthur doesn't know where Eames even gets the time to make shit like that. That night, Eames makes up pancake batter from scratch and serves them both his variation of ice cream crepes after dinner.
Eames won't let Arthur take his clothing out to get repaired; he does it himself. Arthur can sew a button, but he can't rip out a seam or take a pair of trousers in. Arthur can't take a shirt apart completely, and the sew it back together so that it fits in all the right places and still gives him a full range of motion. Eames can.
And he does, sometimes just for fun. Always with Arthur's wardrobe, which means down days end up with Arthur standing on a chair with his clothes stuck full of pins, and then peeling very carefully out of them so Eames can work.
All of these things, Arthur can deal with. He thinks of them as pleasant surprises, or oddly endearing personal quirks. It's just, Eames knits. Which, fine, whatever. A guy's got to relax somehow. Knitting is a pretty transportable hobby, and knitting needles can be transformed into deadly weapons ridiculously easily, so Arthur's not going to begrudge him the skill. It's just that Eames knits him the ugliest sweaters known to man, and pouts if he doesn't wear them.
Eames's pout is a force of nature and wholly irresistible, and Arthur is certain Eames does the whole ugly sweater routine specifically to make Arthur suffer (point in case, Eames knit Ariadne something adorable and chic and exactly her style for her graduation present, which means that he can for Arthur; he just chooses not to).
Eames doesn't dress himself like this; there's no reason for him to dress Arthur like it. The current sweater Arthur's been forced into is red and white, and has a pattern of hearts and ribbons somehow knitted into it. Arthur has absolutely no idea how one would even go about doing something like this--on a technical level, as well as a matter of taste. The only saving grace in the whole matter is that they're also the softest sweaters known to man, and as long as Arthur keeps his eyes closed, they're kind of like heaven to curl up in.
Arthur makes extra sure Eames never catches him nuzzling into the sweater's collar. He'd never live it down.
Arthur plays duck-duck-goose | Friday nights are real dinner nights | Arthur finds out that Eames is spectacularly good at domestic things
Summary: Arthur plays duck-duck-goose
Pairing: Gen. Kidfic.
Word-count & Rating: 652 words; totally G.
for coffeeandice
forever,' Phillipa accuses him.'>
"Uncle Arthur, Uncle Arthur!" two tiny voices yell, and then stop suddenly as two tiny bodies collide full force with the back of Arthur's legs. It's fortunate for Arthur that Phillipa and James come with built-in early warning systems, because otherwise he might not have been ready. They don't weigh much yet, not even collectively, but their arms snap around in death-grip bear hugs upon impact, and suddenly having something close around your knees is a good way to end up falling over and taking everything nearby out with you.
Arthur reaches behind himself to pet at their heads. Eventually they stop trying to clutch him to death long enough for him to turn around and say hi.
"Uncle Arthur, we haven't seen you in forever," Phillipa accuses him.
'Feh-ver," James echoes. He's still getting his r's down. Technically all of his 'Uncle Arthur's come out 'Uckle Aah-fer,' but Arthur's not going to hold it against him.
"Sorry Skittles," says Arthur, crouching down so he's closer to eye level with them. "I had to go work. I missed you, though!" he promises gravely.
Phillipa breaks into gales of laughter, whole body shaking as she clutches at her stomach. James laughs too, laughs so hard he falls onto his wee little bum. "We're not skittles, Uncle Arthur!" Phillipa declares. James shakes his head in emphatic, childlike agreement.
"Oh, you're right," Arthur says seriously, then both hands dart out and tickle them mercilessly. They shriek with laughter, and Phillipa falls down too. Her legs thrash, and James wriggles his whole body helplessly on the grass. "You're Reese's Cups!"
"No, no, no," Phillipa shrieks, but Arthur keeps tickling until both children are completely out of breath. He stops, and lets them get their breath back, and then hauls them both back up to their feet.
"Play," says James, sucking on a finger. His hair is everywhere, even worse than Phillipa's for all that it's shorter.
"Yeah, Uncle Arthur, let's go play!" Phillipa agrees. She grabs one of Arthur's hands and starts dragging him further into the back yard. Arthur catches up one of James's pudgy hands and lets himself be pulled.
"What do you want to play?" he asks them.
"Du-goose!" James declares.
"Yeah! Duck duck goose!" Phillipa echoes, yanking on Arthur's arm like she could actually pull him all over the city if she wanted to, and not like she weighs 35 pounds soaking wet and Arthur occasionally kills people barehanded professionally.
"You're the goose!" she tells him, when she decides they're sufficiently far into the back yard. Phillipa plops down onto the grass, but James gets a little confused now that they're there, and Arthur helps him pick his place to sit. Then he goes to stand in between them for a moment before leaving the 'circle' and beginning a slow, ominous pace around them.
"Duck...duck...duck...," Arthur says, tapping each child on the head in turn. "Duck...goo-duck," he intones, pausing ominously by Phillipa's head, and when he settles on 'duck' and moves on, Phillipa relaxes, visibly torn between relief and excitement. "Duck...duck...duck...goose!"
Arthur lets James catch him just before he gets back to James's old spot in the circle, and James gets to be duck. James picks Phillipa as the goose, and she catches him only a few paces later (halfway around their tiny, 3-person game), and the game continues, the children shrieking with fright and laughter.
"Yusuf," Ariadne says, half turning her head, but keeping her eyes forward, like she's unable to look away. "Yusuf, where is our Arthur, and how did that man take over his body?"
Yusuf, for his part, doesn't answer. He just keeps laughing, and snaps another picture with his phone. He is going to have blackmail. He doesn't want it for anything in particular. It's just nice to have it, in case. Maybe he'll threaten to send them to Eames, just to see what Arthur would do.
Summary: Friday nights are real dinner nights.
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Word-count & Rating: 544 words; PG
For K.
Friday nights are real dinner nights, whenever they're anywhere that can be considered 'home'. The rest of the week, they can subsist on take-out and caffeine. If they make something, it'll be heated up in the microwave, or beans on toast, or a half-assed omelet, but Friday is reserved for an actual meal, something you have to go to trouble to make.
They start planning on Wednesday, figuring out what people are in the mood for, and taking stock of what ingredients they have around the apartment already and what they need to get from the store. Sometimes they squabble about it; mostly they don't. They keep their arguments in reserve over who has to do the dishes Friday evening. There's a rotation, but whomever's turn it is always tries to barter, beg or cheat their way out of it. It's embarrassing behavior for grown men, but the alternative is doing the dishes.
Some time on Thursday is dedicated to the grocery run. They've been on a quest to eat the most ridiculously pretentious meals they can think of for the past couple of months, an endeavor that has resulted in a lot of frantic googling of oven temperatures and cooking techniques. Last week, they'd made a Swiss chard and sweet potato gratin, and had spent a fair bit of their Thursday night on prep, washing and cutting and drying out the chard. Dessert had been a delicious, tangy-sweet grapefruit yogurt cake.
This time they're trying for a simpler meal, specifically something that will take significantly less slicing and settle on a bacon, onion Flammkuchen. The energy they save goes straight into dessert, with Arthur making petit pots de creme au chocolat. They can bring the extra over to Cobb's house, or give them to Ariadne and Yusuf because Ariadne eats chocolate like it has magical properties in high enough doses.
On Friday, Arthur takes the kitchen all afternoon--the pots de creme will need to chill for a few hours, and if they're going to be ready in time for dinner, he needs to knock them out early. Eames sits perched in Arthur's counter space, drinking a glass of wine. Arthur claims Eames is in the way, and Eames claims that Arthur is using extra dishes because it's Eames's turn with the dishes, and they both try not to break and grin at the other.
Eames makes the pizza dough from scratch even though Arthur had pulled for just buying a pre-made crust when they went to buy the fromage blanc and a nice white wine to go with it. Arthur finishes the bottle Eames had started earlier, distracting Eames from caramelizing the onions with an argument-discussion on the US health care overhaul.
The Flammkuchen take less than twenty minutes once they've gone in the oven, and then, because they've had enough with propriety, they open up the bottle of white and Eames hops back up on the newly cleared counter next to Arthur and they just eat in the kitchen instead of setting the tiny two-person table in the next room. They eat the petit pots de creme out of teacups, and when Arthur licks a smear of chocolate off Eames's lower lip, he tastes like everything Arthur can ever remember wanting.
Summary: Arthur finds out that Eames is spectacularly good at domestic things
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Word-count & Rating: 706 words; G.
Written for kamikaze_bunny for my not very valentine drabble post.
Arthur is used to being good at things. He doesn't have to be the best at everything, but he does like to be passable at anything that might be valuable later. General life skills fall under that heading. Arthur can sew a button back on just as well as he can stitch a wound--it'll scar, but it should hold until you can get to a professional. He doesn't cook much, but he knows how, and he's got a couple of staple dishes he can pull out to feed himself. Arthur is tidy, and basic cleaning always seemed more like common sense than a particular skill, but that was before he'd moved in with Eames.
The house is just, somehow, neater. It's not something Arthur can explain. There isn't any dust on the window sills. The kitchen counters are always clear. Arthur does the dishes automatically whenever they're in the sink, but there are never weeks' worth of already dry plates still sitting in the drying rack, and the groceries never just get left on the counter until later. Books get cleared up off the end table, and the first thing Eames wants to do when he gets home from a job is vacuum.
Things appear in Arthur's fridge. He doesn't just have ground beef in the freezer and a couple cans of black beans in the pantry. It's not just a bag of oranges or apples in the fridge, because vitamins. It's things like fresh, whole artichokes. It's whole squash. It's half a duck. It's things Arthur doesn't even know how to cook. It's things that end up on Arthur's plate in the evenings and are, invariably, the best thing Arthur's ever eaten in his life.
Arthur discovers an ice cream maker under the sink. Two weeks later, there's fresh, homemade watermelon icecream in tupperware in the freezer. Arthur doesn't know where Eames even gets the time to make shit like that. That night, Eames makes up pancake batter from scratch and serves them both his variation of ice cream crepes after dinner.
Eames won't let Arthur take his clothing out to get repaired; he does it himself. Arthur can sew a button, but he can't rip out a seam or take a pair of trousers in. Arthur can't take a shirt apart completely, and the sew it back together so that it fits in all the right places and still gives him a full range of motion. Eames can.
And he does, sometimes just for fun. Always with Arthur's wardrobe, which means down days end up with Arthur standing on a chair with his clothes stuck full of pins, and then peeling very carefully out of them so Eames can work.
All of these things, Arthur can deal with. He thinks of them as pleasant surprises, or oddly endearing personal quirks. It's just, Eames knits. Which, fine, whatever. A guy's got to relax somehow. Knitting is a pretty transportable hobby, and knitting needles can be transformed into deadly weapons ridiculously easily, so Arthur's not going to begrudge him the skill. It's just that Eames knits him the ugliest sweaters known to man, and pouts if he doesn't wear them.
Eames's pout is a force of nature and wholly irresistible, and Arthur is certain Eames does the whole ugly sweater routine specifically to make Arthur suffer (point in case, Eames knit Ariadne something adorable and chic and exactly her style for her graduation present, which means that he can for Arthur; he just chooses not to).
Eames doesn't dress himself like this; there's no reason for him to dress Arthur like it. The current sweater Arthur's been forced into is red and white, and has a pattern of hearts and ribbons somehow knitted into it. Arthur has absolutely no idea how one would even go about doing something like this--on a technical level, as well as a matter of taste. The only saving grace in the whole matter is that they're also the softest sweaters known to man, and as long as Arthur keeps his eyes closed, they're kind of like heaven to curl up in.
Arthur makes extra sure Eames never catches him nuzzling into the sweater's collar. He'd never live it down.