I'll know it when I see you - Inception - PG-13
Title: I'll know it when I see you
Author: anamuan
Fandom, Pairing: Inception, Arthur/Eames
Word Count: 4,975
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ten ways Arthur and Eames could have met, and one way they actually do.
Notes: Self-beta. Let me know if you find problems, please.
1. Klaxons start shrilling throughout the base, and shit shit shit. Arthur is sure he didn't trip anything, because he's got the layout memorized and the only way they could have had anything in that last corridor is if they wanted it to go off any time anyone needed to take a piss.
Sure enough, two minutes later, after Arthur ducks down what according to the blue prints in his head is not a dead end, he comes face to face with someone else who is definitely not supposed to be there either. He's bigger, broader than Arthur is, but he moves with an easy grace that tells Arthur that whatever else, he's dangerous. He's wearing gloves and he's got something covering his face, but underneath it he grins, easy and false and devil-may-care, when he sees the pretty silver case that Arthur's carrying in one hand.
"Right then, love. It seems you have something I want," the man says with the broad, oral vowels of a London accent.
Arthur's mouth turns down. "I don't think so," he says, but the argument gets cut short when bullets start ricocheting off the concrete above their heads. Arthur sighs mentally because, seriously? Top secret military base, and they have rookies who don't even know how to take a shot chasing them. Arthur snap kicks the stranger in the gut without warning, while he's still distracted trying to keep his head down. "You'll have to excuse me," Arthur says, and runs.
2. Arthur picks him up at the bar because he can see the top edge of a UK passport in his breast pocket. Just visiting significantly lowers the odds of awkward runnings-into later or of a one night stand that turns into a crazy entitled prick standing on the sidewalk outside his apartment screaming about thinking they had something special two months later. This, for the record, has happened to Arthur twice, both back in college, one even before Arthur discovered that he didn't feel particularly bad about breaking a person's nose.
Of course, there's a fifty-fifty chance that Arthur won't be in town two months later to witness the, frankly, embarrassing scene. This does not, in point of fact, endear Arthur to his landlords any more than if he is. Arthur's taste in men has not improved considerably since graduation, so he's trained himself to be better at picking guys who won't be in town two months later to complicate Arthur's life instead.
Jack, aside from not living nearby, falls right into Arthur's type. He's broad and sloppy, with a fast mouth, a quick laugh, and gorgeous, gorgeous lips. He's dressed like the airline lost his suitcase and he'd been forced to beg clothes off a bum stuck perpetually in the uglier parts of the past century, but the jeans, despite that, hug his ass and thighs in all the right ways. They go back to Jack's hotel room and fuck twice and Arthur doesn't ask to stay the night. As far as Arthur is concerned, this absolutely perfect.
Except, despite all of Arthur's precautions, he runs into Jack two months later (though, granted, not in town), ruining his current streak of not having awkward runnings-into with people he's slept with. He'd been on his all-time longest run, and was, on top of being appalled and, obviously, awkward, quite disappointed about that. Jack's real name turns out to be Eames, and he also turns out to be the best forger Arthur's ever worked with. At least there are no shoutings outside of windows.
It's not until years later that Arthur finds out that the passport he'd seen in Eames's pocket hadn't even been his, but one he’d stolen from an idiot in the airport. They didn't really look alike, but Eames did think he could have managed to pull a convincing grimace and chalk the rest up to 'passport photos, always shite, you know', at least long enough to get a plane ticket.
3. "This is my colleague, Mr. Eames," says the point man on the tenth job Arthur’s worked (2nd job without the Cobbs to keep an eye on him). Arthur's a new architect, and looks way too young to be taken seriously, but he's good. He tried a stint as a chemist, and he's fine at that as long as they go by the book; he'll never be brilliant because he doesn't like messing around with brain chemistry, but could fill in in a pinch. "He'll be joining us on our little endeavour," Martins continues and it should, by all rights, come out smooth, but instead it just sounds like he's quoting lines from a badly-written script.
Eames turns out to be a forger, and stunningly good at it even though it's early days yet and there aren't many forgers running around the industry. Forging's still kind of a dangerous art more than a neat science. Other forgeries Arthur's seen, the industry standard, so to speak, are stiff, stilted somehow, and a dream has to be going perfectly for the projections not to notice. They rely on the inherent strangeness of dreams to work at all, the fact that dreamers are usually willing to accept just about anything while they're unconscious, but once they start looking for the dreamer, it's usually better that the forger take a quick shot to the head than anything else.
When Eames forges, it's nothing like that. It's smooth and brilliant and believable, and the first time Arthur takes Eames down to teach him the maze, he nearly collapses the dream on Eames because he'd forged himself into someone else so seamlessly that Arthur thought he'd left him in the waking world.
Conscious, Eames is brilliant and insufferable and Arthur likes him instantly, in a barbed kind of way. Their point man, though, is absolutely useless and Arthur privately considers strangling him every single day because he keeps coming up with contradictory information and demanding changes to the dream architecture to fit. In lieu of murdering team members (outside of dreams), Arthur ends up redoing most of Martins's research himself because he doesn't feel like he can trust him to have done it right. Through the annoyance, Arthur finds he likes the work. He gets a sense of accomplishment from it that he'd never gotten from the crisp lines of his mazes; he'd never felt the soaring joy the Cobbs seem to take from fulfilling their endless curiosity. This is the job that gives Arthur his start, not in the business, but as point; the job that reshapes the rest of his life.
But Arthur doesn't know any of that yet, so for now he says, "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Eames," and shakes the forger's hand.
4. Arthur doesn't realize his pocket's been picked until he goes to slip the stolen wallet in next to his own slim one. He frowns, thinking back along his walk, any of the places someone could have done it and is forced to come to a single conclusion. The stumble and bump he'd so carefully engineered seems to have backfired on him rather disastrously. He ducks into a shop and pulls out the wallet. Arthur checks the ID first and can't help but wonder if, somewhere else in the city, a Mr. Eames isn't feeling the same way.
5. The man smiles, a little crooked, a little bit of trouble, at Arthur as he gets off the elevator. Arthur smiles back, tiny and smug, and hits the number for his floor. They've done this four times before they both get in the elevator at the same time, both going up.
"New to the building?" the man asks with that crooked smile, and what the hell, thinks Arthur; he's cute. He probably thinks he's smooth and dangerous. He probably thinks he's a bad boy, the kind proper Arthur's proper mother had warned him about.
"Yeah, I guess," Arthur says. "You been here long?"
"An American," he says, eyebrows rising just a fraction. "Well, I won't hold it against you. I'm Eames." Eames holds out a hand, which Arthur shakes.
"Arthur," Arthur tells him, and then suddenly, all the lights go out and the elevator lurches to a stop. A moment later, the little red emergency light comes on, throwing weird shadows on everything.
The elevator lurches once, but the lights don't come back on, and then it starts to shake, just a little, rhythmically.
"Shit, fuck, cunt," Eames swears like there's a checklist he has to get through, rattles them off like they're part of an annoyed recitation lesson. Then he grabs Arthur by the shoulders and moves him two steps to the left. "Arthur, I suggest you stand just...here," and lets Arthur's shoulders go.
"Eames," Arthur asks, "What are you doing?"
But Eames doesn't answer as he hits the emergency exit at the top of the car, and then ducks back quickly as what is definitely a bullet ricochets through the gap before gravity pulls the hatch down again.
"Shit," Arthur ducks and swears. "What the fuck?" he demands of Eames, yanking a gun out of its hiding place under his jacket.
Eames regards Arthur warily for a moment, but seems to shrug it off mentally when Arthur keeps the gun firmly pointed above them, at the emergency hatch and, beyond it, unknown but definitely armed forces.
"Very sorry about this, Arthur. It seems some rather unsavoury company has followed me home."
6. They drop them all in in the dark. Arthur doesn't know anyone he's working with, a guy from England who looks a few years older than Arthur is, and a tiny Korean woman who's going by Lee. Her English is good, for which Arthur is grateful, because his Korean is non-existent. Arthur can't speak for Eames, of course, but if he has secret Korean skills, he's not letting on.
Arthur doesn't like it; he doesn't like feeling blind because he hasn't had the time to get any of their intel verified himself. Arthur doesn't even pretend--he just doesn't trust people to do the job as well as he can himself, and he doesn't trust people, so he spends the entire time waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
They're calling it a training mission. Training for what, Arthur doesn't ask, because you don't, but the rounds they let him take in are all live. That means something.
Arthur runs point, because that's what he does. Lee has demolitions expertise, and Eames, well; Eames says he has a "certain set of valuable skills," which turns out to be a polite way to say "can break in to just about anything you can imagine."
They're running twenty-five minutes in before things start to go wrong. One of Lee's charges detonates early.
Lee swears in what Arthur can only presume is colourful Korean, and then says, "There goes our element of surprise." She sounds so matter of fact about it that Arthur decides he kind of likes her, assuming they live and she doesn't sell him out at some point. She stays focused at the business on hand.
"New plan," Arthur says. "Eames, do you think you can handle things inside alone?" Arthur waits for Eames's confirmation, then continues. "Lee, you and I are going to play diversion. We buy Eames as much time as we can. Eames, you get in, get the stuff, and get out as fast as you can. Do what you have to, and don't let anyone put your face on the news."
Eames grins, sharp and dangerous and little condescending. "I have, you know, done this sort of thing before."
"So you keep saying," Arthur says, because he's an ass and he's never seen Eames work. "We'll each send up a flare when we're pulling out. Watch for them. Eames, when you're clear, use the coms. Hopefully they'll think we're the front line and won't even know you've been there. Questions?"
"Rendezvous point?" Lee asks.
"Staying the same. If you get there, don't stay for more than a day and half before moving on. If we miss each other or you get made, lie low; we'll meet up at the back-up a week from tomorrow."
Lee nods, then heads off to the left. Arthur makes a note of that. He doesn't want to wander into anything she leaves in the woods. He helps Eames check his rappelling equipment, makes sure everything's secure.
"Don't fuck up," Arthur says. Eames smiles at Arthur, a flash of white teeth against the dark sky, and then he's gone over the ledge.
7. The first time Arthur meets Eames, Eames shoots him in the head.
Arthur comes up with a gasp, the shock he hadn't had time to express while under. Eames is awake a few moments later, because dreams collapse when the dreamer dies.
"Mr. Eames," Arthur says.
"Cobb said I could find you here," Eames says by way of response. "I thought I would come pay my respects."
"Most people just say 'hello'."
8. It's Arthur's first vacation in what must be at least a year. There are perks to being a semi-legitimate, very talented mind-thief, but there are drawbacks too. The health insurance is crap, for instance, and considering the general level of risk in the business, securing decent health care can be a very expensive endeavour. Another is that, like any freelancer, you have to spend a lot of time lining up the next job and the job after that just to make sure there is a next job; and then you spend a lot of time actually working those jobs, and before you know it, you haven't had an actual day off for eight months.
The perks of being a very talented mind-thief include the fact that Arthur makes enough money that he doesn't have to worry about buying last minute plane tickets or the cost of booking a room in a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. He may ski a little, and he may snowboard a little, to keep in practice, but mostly Arthur will just enjoy being out of the oppressively humid Thai heat.
It's a nice hotel, large enough that Arthur can get lost in the anonymity, but high scale enough that it feels like a proper vacation. Arthur roughs it enough professionally to want to do it for fun.
He scans the lobby automatically as he checks in, mentally blocking out escape routes and running threat assessments on all the other people he can see. Noting places there might be people lurking he can't see. One couple pings on his internal radar, something just a little too sharp-edged about them, but when Arthur looks back, there's nothing suspicious there. They're all smooth edges, and comfortable interactions when the man takes both their suitcases and hands the larger one off to a bell hop. The smaller handles himself, while the woman checks them both in with a different clerk than the one handling Arthur’s reservation.
Arthur observes them a beat longer, just in case. Nothing there, Arthur decides at last, neither of them displaying a hint of whatever it was that Arthur had thought he'd seen. The woman clicks ahead on her modest heels, and the man handles the rolling suitcase efficiently, but nothing about them speaks of anything dangerous. She's clearly happier to be there than he is--must be him footing the bill--but other than that, they're just another upper-middle class couple on holiday.
The next day has perfect skiing weather, but Arthur decides that he is on vacation and he doesn't feel like skiing today, so he doesn't. Instead he sleeps in, gets up late, and heads down to the hotel restaurant for an exorbitantly expensive breakfast. It's pretty much deserted, most guests on the slopes and well after the breakfast rush, so they put him at what is technically the bar while they get ready to serve lunch.
Sometime between ordering and actually getting waffles, the man from the lobby wanders into the restaurant and sits far closer to Arthur than is necessary in a nearly-empty hotel restaurant. He just orders a hot tea, though, and stares morosely at it while he drinks. Arthur keeps half an eye on him through breakfast, but nothing happens and Arthur decides he's being paranoid (which is another drawback in his profession--so very often unjustified paranoia is, in fact, entirely justified. Eventually, it makes you crazy).
"Your check, Mr. Eames," a solicitous waiter says at one point, and the hotel-lobby man pays in cash before leaving Arthur alone to his late breakfast. Arthur doesn't even really register making a mental note of the man's name, because that's just something he does (SEE: paranoia). If he'd paid with credit, Arthur would have been halfway to memorizing his signature.
Arthur doesn't see Eames again until the day before he's decided to leave. It's evening, and the hotel's bar is crowded now. There's a semi-raucous party in one corner, a bunch of college students with rich parents and no discipline burning their parents' money on a weekend trip. The hum from the rest of the bar is nice, almost soothing, and Arthur relaxes a little in the namelessness of it. Arthur sees Eames and wife come in, watches them settle into a table, and then he lets that bit if information go because it's not important.
Eames comes to the bar to order their drinks. He's sliding in between Arthur's place at the bar, and the handsy couple next to him, or Arthur wouldn't have been able to hear him ask for a neat Scotch and a Jack on the rocks. It's not an order Arthur would have expected, so it catches his attention. The bartender makes both and slides them toward Eames, who reaches to take them, but then, suddenly, Eames drops his hand on Arthur's shoulder instead.
Arthur turns, ready to ask just what he thinks he's doing, when the man leans forward. "Just hold still for a moment," he murmurs and kisses him full on the mouth. It's hardly a kiss at all, almost clinical, and after a moment Eames pulls back and says, 'Thanks for that," and picks up his drinks.
"Won't your wife mind that you're kissing strange men in the hotel's bar?" Arthur asks blandly when the man pulls back.
"She's not my wife," Eames says bitterly. "She's an awful person who has dragged me to this bloody awful cold place and won't let me leave when I thought she was a friend and a decent human being." Arthur snorts a laugh at that, surprising them both, because the man just sounds so pathetic about it. Eames crooks a smile at him, and then disappears back to his table with his drinks.
9. Arthur may be cheating at cards, but he thinks it's only fair because the dealer, some scruffy, disreputable-looking Englishman, is fixing the deck. None of the other schmucks at their table seem to have noticed, but Arthur's not really surprised by that. Their primary trait seems to be having too much money to burn, not brains or observation skills. So far they've been proving very adept at burning through money.
Arthur catches him at it on the second hand, sees that tiny flicker that means he's dealing from the middle instead of the top of the deck. That's when Arthur starts counting cards.
It's a lot harder to fix a hand when you're only playing, and Arthur is forced to resort to lifting a spare deck from another of the establishment's tables and switch cards out from the hand he's dealt. It's risky, and if the dealer's main target weren't the obnoxious American trying to pass himself off as an oil tycoon, it probably wouldn't have worked at all. As it is, Arthur's very careful, and doesn't try it too often, just does enough to keep him from ever losing big. He can afford to waste a couple hundred dollars.
Every so often, the dealer throws Arthur a win. Everyone gets them except Oil Tycoon, who only ever gets cards to put him a few points below whoever takes the hand. Arthur's last hand--he can see Mal, silhouetted in the establishment's entrance: time to go--he waits till the next time the dealer tosses him one. He lays down the Ace of Hearts, and asks for two cards. Once the dealer's turned his attention to his mark, Arthur carefully switches out the remaining four cards in his hand.
The dealer had given Arthur two pair: jacks and kings. Based on what everyone else has showing, it should be enough to win this hand. Arthur waits until the dealer looks at him for his call; he smirks and folds, a bit more of a flourish in it than he'd normally put. The dealer nearly boggles for a moment, controls it carefully. Arthur's smirk grows a little at that; he can't help it.
Oil Tycoon wins big, and Arthur sneaks away from the table while he celebrates. He doesn't know it was enough, but he thinks it is, so he hovers a moment by the door to watch the dealer check Arthur's last hand. Arthur knows he has when he whips around, trying to find Arthur in the crowded game room.
Arthur always did like a challenge. He lets himself savour the victory as he follows Mal out onto the street. Arthur's folded hand is five aces. Cheaters seldom prosper is written neatly along one side of the second Ace of Hearts, a present for the dealer.
10. Arthur notices Eames because he's the only other foreigner in their car, and because he doesn't have one of the two standard reactions white people outside major metro areas in China have. Eames just glances at him when he comes in and then goes back to his two-day-old English-language paper. No pleased surprise at finally finding another Westerner. No disdain or hostility, like this is his China because he's a special snowflake and the other white people aren't allowed to be there.
Arthur appreciates this greatly, because it means he neither has to do with curious small talk nor territorial displays of one-up-manship. Arthur sits down on the barely-padded bench across from him, close to the door rather than by the window. He pulls his book out and settles down to read.
They could probably have passed the entirety of their ride like that, sleeping hard-sleeper at night from Kaifeng to Qingdao, and buying food from vendors through the train window when it stops for fifteen minutes in a station on the way, and never saying a word to each other. But they don't.
Eames talks to Arthur because Arthur's Chinese is atrocious. Arthur likes to think of it as 'passable' but that's a stretch and he knows it. It's the blasted tones. His reading and writing is actually exceptional--but the tones, it's like he can't even hear them, much less remember them, so he just makes them up as he goes. One of the train ladies comes by selling cigarettes, and Arthur hates Chinese cigarettes, but awful, acrid cigarettes are better than no cigarettes at all, so he tries to buy a pack from her.
"She's gouging you," Eames says, in English, with a smile that's directed at the train lady rather than at Arthur. Then, before Arthur can tell him, yes, he knows but he doesn't care right now, Eames turns entirely to the woman and says in some barely comprehensible Western dialect, "I want two packs."
The woman gasps in surprise, and rattles something back in the same dialect, too fast and a little too far away from Mandarin for Arthur to grasp. Eames says something back, and they go back and forth a few more times, and then the train lady is walking away with a smile and Arthur never got his pack of disgusting and very necessary Chinese cigarettes.
"Wait," Arthur calls after the cigarette lady, but she ignores him, or doesn't hear him, or he's gotten the tone completely wrong and she thinks he's just yelled 'blowfish' for no reason.
"Your Putonghua sounds like you'd learned Thai badly once and decided to see where it could get you in life anyway," Eames says, tossing his extra pack to Arthur, who barely catches it in his surprise.
"Fuck you," Arthur says, then: "Thanks for the smokes, though." He lights one and inhales gratefully. "I'd have been willing to pay 3 times what they're worth if it meant I could just get a damn cigarette."
"Eames," Eames introduces himself then.
"Arthur."
11. Arthur's a very good driver. Except in dreams, or LA. There, he's ruthless. Cutthroat. Brutal. It serves him in good stead.
Arthur cuts through the traffic like a madman. His mother would be appalled with him, if she ever saw him driving like this. He's on the highway, and there is definitely not enough space between him and the car ahead of him if it stops suddenly, but there is no way in hell Arthur is letting any jackass on the road cut in front of him. The only way to prevent this is to drive in a state of constant tailgating, but Arthur's not the only one, so it becomes that the only way to get anywhere at all is to drive in a constant state of tailgating. You have to fight for your place in traffic. The only thing worse than driving in this city is trying to find parking. Arthur excels at both because, quite frankly, he drives like he's psychotic and more than willing to take another car down in blazing glory if it comes to it. It's like there's an aura of reckless disregard for human life floating ten feet in any direction around his car the moment he buckles his seat belt.
Consequently, other cars back off, because driving in LA doesn't always mean you've got a death wish--usually it just means you need to get somewhere, and you've learned to live with the constant possibility of hurtling steel and flaming wreckage to do it.
That's why Arthur's surprised to find someone even more reckless than he is on the road. He slams on his breaks, and cuts the wheel to the left, towards the shoulder, but it's not enough and it's not fast enough, and he clips the car that had just darted in front of him from the right lane in the tail light. The other car starts to spin, but the driver pretty miraculously brings it back under control and guides it over to the shoulder to park a few dozen feet ahead of Arthur's own car.
Arthur makes sure he's all the way on the shoulder and throws his car into park. He puts his hazards on, jabbing the little button the dash with what is probably unnecessary force. Two seconds later he's stalking up the noisy edge of the highway to politely ask the other driver what the fuck he or she thinks they're doing, because they're fucking dangerous. The other driver is a man, similar height, broader build. He hasn't shaved, and he looks like he shops at the same places Dom does, only goes for the flashy colors, instead.
"Sorry, mate; didn't see you," he says, when Arthur gets within hearing distance. He fishes into a pocket, and Arthur tenses, inexplicably waiting for a handgun, but he comes out with a wallet instead. Of course. "I've only got five hundred dollars on me right now, but take it for the damage."
Arthur's eyes narrow. "Look, buddy, I don't know how they do insurance in England, but throwing money at me isn't how it works here. You could have killed me. You realize that there are actually other cars on this road," Arthur gestures at the highway where, since both their cars are more or less on the shoulder, the traffic is solid and the cars are barely even slowing down. It's LA. They've got another two hours of rush hour, at least.
The man looks pained for a second, and starts fishing in his pockets again, this time with an unmistakable 'where's my pen?' air. "I haven't got proper insurance on it; it's a rental, he explains, finally finding his pen. He pulls a scrap of paper out of his wallet, and turns around to scrawl something across the back of it on the top of the car.
Done, he holds it out to Arthur. "If the five hundred doesn't cover it, give me a call on this number. I'll take care of the rest. Tell me..." he trails off expectantly.
"Arthur," Arthur supplies. He's taking phone numbers, he might as well give a name.
"Tell me Arthur's calling. I'll make sure to take your call."
Arthur looks down at the number. 916 area code. "What about yours?" he asks, gesturing toward the back of the man's car. The tail-light's out, but otherwise there doesn't look like there's too much damage. It should still drive.
"Well, I think it's pretty clear I've lost my deposit, but my fault, so don't worry about it. I'm actually running quite late. I shouldn't spend any more time here," he says, climbing back into his rental. He somehow manages to navigate himself back out into the stream of relentless traffic without killing anyone. Arthur has to take a moment to admire that--it should, by all rights, be an miraculous act of pure anger to get oneself back onto the road without the help of an emergency vehicle.
It's not until five minutes later, after Arthur's own acts of miraculous road-rage and bulldozer determination, that he realizes how smoothly the man had avoided both giving Arthur his name and involving any authorities. And he'd thought the driving was impressive.
Author: anamuan
Fandom, Pairing: Inception, Arthur/Eames
Word Count: 4,975
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ten ways Arthur and Eames could have met, and one way they actually do.
Notes: Self-beta. Let me know if you find problems, please.
1. Klaxons start shrilling throughout the base, and shit shit shit. Arthur is sure he didn't trip anything, because he's got the layout memorized and the only way they could have had anything in that last corridor is if they wanted it to go off any time anyone needed to take a piss.
Sure enough, two minutes later, after Arthur ducks down what according to the blue prints in his head is not a dead end, he comes face to face with someone else who is definitely not supposed to be there either. He's bigger, broader than Arthur is, but he moves with an easy grace that tells Arthur that whatever else, he's dangerous. He's wearing gloves and he's got something covering his face, but underneath it he grins, easy and false and devil-may-care, when he sees the pretty silver case that Arthur's carrying in one hand.
"Right then, love. It seems you have something I want," the man says with the broad, oral vowels of a London accent.
Arthur's mouth turns down. "I don't think so," he says, but the argument gets cut short when bullets start ricocheting off the concrete above their heads. Arthur sighs mentally because, seriously? Top secret military base, and they have rookies who don't even know how to take a shot chasing them. Arthur snap kicks the stranger in the gut without warning, while he's still distracted trying to keep his head down. "You'll have to excuse me," Arthur says, and runs.
2. Arthur picks him up at the bar because he can see the top edge of a UK passport in his breast pocket. Just visiting significantly lowers the odds of awkward runnings-into later or of a one night stand that turns into a crazy entitled prick standing on the sidewalk outside his apartment screaming about thinking they had something special two months later. This, for the record, has happened to Arthur twice, both back in college, one even before Arthur discovered that he didn't feel particularly bad about breaking a person's nose.
Of course, there's a fifty-fifty chance that Arthur won't be in town two months later to witness the, frankly, embarrassing scene. This does not, in point of fact, endear Arthur to his landlords any more than if he is. Arthur's taste in men has not improved considerably since graduation, so he's trained himself to be better at picking guys who won't be in town two months later to complicate Arthur's life instead.
Jack, aside from not living nearby, falls right into Arthur's type. He's broad and sloppy, with a fast mouth, a quick laugh, and gorgeous, gorgeous lips. He's dressed like the airline lost his suitcase and he'd been forced to beg clothes off a bum stuck perpetually in the uglier parts of the past century, but the jeans, despite that, hug his ass and thighs in all the right ways. They go back to Jack's hotel room and fuck twice and Arthur doesn't ask to stay the night. As far as Arthur is concerned, this absolutely perfect.
Except, despite all of Arthur's precautions, he runs into Jack two months later (though, granted, not in town), ruining his current streak of not having awkward runnings-into with people he's slept with. He'd been on his all-time longest run, and was, on top of being appalled and, obviously, awkward, quite disappointed about that. Jack's real name turns out to be Eames, and he also turns out to be the best forger Arthur's ever worked with. At least there are no shoutings outside of windows.
It's not until years later that Arthur finds out that the passport he'd seen in Eames's pocket hadn't even been his, but one he’d stolen from an idiot in the airport. They didn't really look alike, but Eames did think he could have managed to pull a convincing grimace and chalk the rest up to 'passport photos, always shite, you know', at least long enough to get a plane ticket.
3. "This is my colleague, Mr. Eames," says the point man on the tenth job Arthur’s worked (2nd job without the Cobbs to keep an eye on him). Arthur's a new architect, and looks way too young to be taken seriously, but he's good. He tried a stint as a chemist, and he's fine at that as long as they go by the book; he'll never be brilliant because he doesn't like messing around with brain chemistry, but could fill in in a pinch. "He'll be joining us on our little endeavour," Martins continues and it should, by all rights, come out smooth, but instead it just sounds like he's quoting lines from a badly-written script.
Eames turns out to be a forger, and stunningly good at it even though it's early days yet and there aren't many forgers running around the industry. Forging's still kind of a dangerous art more than a neat science. Other forgeries Arthur's seen, the industry standard, so to speak, are stiff, stilted somehow, and a dream has to be going perfectly for the projections not to notice. They rely on the inherent strangeness of dreams to work at all, the fact that dreamers are usually willing to accept just about anything while they're unconscious, but once they start looking for the dreamer, it's usually better that the forger take a quick shot to the head than anything else.
When Eames forges, it's nothing like that. It's smooth and brilliant and believable, and the first time Arthur takes Eames down to teach him the maze, he nearly collapses the dream on Eames because he'd forged himself into someone else so seamlessly that Arthur thought he'd left him in the waking world.
Conscious, Eames is brilliant and insufferable and Arthur likes him instantly, in a barbed kind of way. Their point man, though, is absolutely useless and Arthur privately considers strangling him every single day because he keeps coming up with contradictory information and demanding changes to the dream architecture to fit. In lieu of murdering team members (outside of dreams), Arthur ends up redoing most of Martins's research himself because he doesn't feel like he can trust him to have done it right. Through the annoyance, Arthur finds he likes the work. He gets a sense of accomplishment from it that he'd never gotten from the crisp lines of his mazes; he'd never felt the soaring joy the Cobbs seem to take from fulfilling their endless curiosity. This is the job that gives Arthur his start, not in the business, but as point; the job that reshapes the rest of his life.
But Arthur doesn't know any of that yet, so for now he says, "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Eames," and shakes the forger's hand.
4. Arthur doesn't realize his pocket's been picked until he goes to slip the stolen wallet in next to his own slim one. He frowns, thinking back along his walk, any of the places someone could have done it and is forced to come to a single conclusion. The stumble and bump he'd so carefully engineered seems to have backfired on him rather disastrously. He ducks into a shop and pulls out the wallet. Arthur checks the ID first and can't help but wonder if, somewhere else in the city, a Mr. Eames isn't feeling the same way.
5. The man smiles, a little crooked, a little bit of trouble, at Arthur as he gets off the elevator. Arthur smiles back, tiny and smug, and hits the number for his floor. They've done this four times before they both get in the elevator at the same time, both going up.
"New to the building?" the man asks with that crooked smile, and what the hell, thinks Arthur; he's cute. He probably thinks he's smooth and dangerous. He probably thinks he's a bad boy, the kind proper Arthur's proper mother had warned him about.
"Yeah, I guess," Arthur says. "You been here long?"
"An American," he says, eyebrows rising just a fraction. "Well, I won't hold it against you. I'm Eames." Eames holds out a hand, which Arthur shakes.
"Arthur," Arthur tells him, and then suddenly, all the lights go out and the elevator lurches to a stop. A moment later, the little red emergency light comes on, throwing weird shadows on everything.
The elevator lurches once, but the lights don't come back on, and then it starts to shake, just a little, rhythmically.
"Shit, fuck, cunt," Eames swears like there's a checklist he has to get through, rattles them off like they're part of an annoyed recitation lesson. Then he grabs Arthur by the shoulders and moves him two steps to the left. "Arthur, I suggest you stand just...here," and lets Arthur's shoulders go.
"Eames," Arthur asks, "What are you doing?"
But Eames doesn't answer as he hits the emergency exit at the top of the car, and then ducks back quickly as what is definitely a bullet ricochets through the gap before gravity pulls the hatch down again.
"Shit," Arthur ducks and swears. "What the fuck?" he demands of Eames, yanking a gun out of its hiding place under his jacket.
Eames regards Arthur warily for a moment, but seems to shrug it off mentally when Arthur keeps the gun firmly pointed above them, at the emergency hatch and, beyond it, unknown but definitely armed forces.
"Very sorry about this, Arthur. It seems some rather unsavoury company has followed me home."
6. They drop them all in in the dark. Arthur doesn't know anyone he's working with, a guy from England who looks a few years older than Arthur is, and a tiny Korean woman who's going by Lee. Her English is good, for which Arthur is grateful, because his Korean is non-existent. Arthur can't speak for Eames, of course, but if he has secret Korean skills, he's not letting on.
Arthur doesn't like it; he doesn't like feeling blind because he hasn't had the time to get any of their intel verified himself. Arthur doesn't even pretend--he just doesn't trust people to do the job as well as he can himself, and he doesn't trust people, so he spends the entire time waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
They're calling it a training mission. Training for what, Arthur doesn't ask, because you don't, but the rounds they let him take in are all live. That means something.
Arthur runs point, because that's what he does. Lee has demolitions expertise, and Eames, well; Eames says he has a "certain set of valuable skills," which turns out to be a polite way to say "can break in to just about anything you can imagine."
They're running twenty-five minutes in before things start to go wrong. One of Lee's charges detonates early.
Lee swears in what Arthur can only presume is colourful Korean, and then says, "There goes our element of surprise." She sounds so matter of fact about it that Arthur decides he kind of likes her, assuming they live and she doesn't sell him out at some point. She stays focused at the business on hand.
"New plan," Arthur says. "Eames, do you think you can handle things inside alone?" Arthur waits for Eames's confirmation, then continues. "Lee, you and I are going to play diversion. We buy Eames as much time as we can. Eames, you get in, get the stuff, and get out as fast as you can. Do what you have to, and don't let anyone put your face on the news."
Eames grins, sharp and dangerous and little condescending. "I have, you know, done this sort of thing before."
"So you keep saying," Arthur says, because he's an ass and he's never seen Eames work. "We'll each send up a flare when we're pulling out. Watch for them. Eames, when you're clear, use the coms. Hopefully they'll think we're the front line and won't even know you've been there. Questions?"
"Rendezvous point?" Lee asks.
"Staying the same. If you get there, don't stay for more than a day and half before moving on. If we miss each other or you get made, lie low; we'll meet up at the back-up a week from tomorrow."
Lee nods, then heads off to the left. Arthur makes a note of that. He doesn't want to wander into anything she leaves in the woods. He helps Eames check his rappelling equipment, makes sure everything's secure.
"Don't fuck up," Arthur says. Eames smiles at Arthur, a flash of white teeth against the dark sky, and then he's gone over the ledge.
7. The first time Arthur meets Eames, Eames shoots him in the head.
Arthur comes up with a gasp, the shock he hadn't had time to express while under. Eames is awake a few moments later, because dreams collapse when the dreamer dies.
"Mr. Eames," Arthur says.
"Cobb said I could find you here," Eames says by way of response. "I thought I would come pay my respects."
"Most people just say 'hello'."
8. It's Arthur's first vacation in what must be at least a year. There are perks to being a semi-legitimate, very talented mind-thief, but there are drawbacks too. The health insurance is crap, for instance, and considering the general level of risk in the business, securing decent health care can be a very expensive endeavour. Another is that, like any freelancer, you have to spend a lot of time lining up the next job and the job after that just to make sure there is a next job; and then you spend a lot of time actually working those jobs, and before you know it, you haven't had an actual day off for eight months.
The perks of being a very talented mind-thief include the fact that Arthur makes enough money that he doesn't have to worry about buying last minute plane tickets or the cost of booking a room in a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. He may ski a little, and he may snowboard a little, to keep in practice, but mostly Arthur will just enjoy being out of the oppressively humid Thai heat.
It's a nice hotel, large enough that Arthur can get lost in the anonymity, but high scale enough that it feels like a proper vacation. Arthur roughs it enough professionally to want to do it for fun.
He scans the lobby automatically as he checks in, mentally blocking out escape routes and running threat assessments on all the other people he can see. Noting places there might be people lurking he can't see. One couple pings on his internal radar, something just a little too sharp-edged about them, but when Arthur looks back, there's nothing suspicious there. They're all smooth edges, and comfortable interactions when the man takes both their suitcases and hands the larger one off to a bell hop. The smaller handles himself, while the woman checks them both in with a different clerk than the one handling Arthur’s reservation.
Arthur observes them a beat longer, just in case. Nothing there, Arthur decides at last, neither of them displaying a hint of whatever it was that Arthur had thought he'd seen. The woman clicks ahead on her modest heels, and the man handles the rolling suitcase efficiently, but nothing about them speaks of anything dangerous. She's clearly happier to be there than he is--must be him footing the bill--but other than that, they're just another upper-middle class couple on holiday.
The next day has perfect skiing weather, but Arthur decides that he is on vacation and he doesn't feel like skiing today, so he doesn't. Instead he sleeps in, gets up late, and heads down to the hotel restaurant for an exorbitantly expensive breakfast. It's pretty much deserted, most guests on the slopes and well after the breakfast rush, so they put him at what is technically the bar while they get ready to serve lunch.
Sometime between ordering and actually getting waffles, the man from the lobby wanders into the restaurant and sits far closer to Arthur than is necessary in a nearly-empty hotel restaurant. He just orders a hot tea, though, and stares morosely at it while he drinks. Arthur keeps half an eye on him through breakfast, but nothing happens and Arthur decides he's being paranoid (which is another drawback in his profession--so very often unjustified paranoia is, in fact, entirely justified. Eventually, it makes you crazy).
"Your check, Mr. Eames," a solicitous waiter says at one point, and the hotel-lobby man pays in cash before leaving Arthur alone to his late breakfast. Arthur doesn't even really register making a mental note of the man's name, because that's just something he does (SEE: paranoia). If he'd paid with credit, Arthur would have been halfway to memorizing his signature.
Arthur doesn't see Eames again until the day before he's decided to leave. It's evening, and the hotel's bar is crowded now. There's a semi-raucous party in one corner, a bunch of college students with rich parents and no discipline burning their parents' money on a weekend trip. The hum from the rest of the bar is nice, almost soothing, and Arthur relaxes a little in the namelessness of it. Arthur sees Eames and wife come in, watches them settle into a table, and then he lets that bit if information go because it's not important.
Eames comes to the bar to order their drinks. He's sliding in between Arthur's place at the bar, and the handsy couple next to him, or Arthur wouldn't have been able to hear him ask for a neat Scotch and a Jack on the rocks. It's not an order Arthur would have expected, so it catches his attention. The bartender makes both and slides them toward Eames, who reaches to take them, but then, suddenly, Eames drops his hand on Arthur's shoulder instead.
Arthur turns, ready to ask just what he thinks he's doing, when the man leans forward. "Just hold still for a moment," he murmurs and kisses him full on the mouth. It's hardly a kiss at all, almost clinical, and after a moment Eames pulls back and says, 'Thanks for that," and picks up his drinks.
"Won't your wife mind that you're kissing strange men in the hotel's bar?" Arthur asks blandly when the man pulls back.
"She's not my wife," Eames says bitterly. "She's an awful person who has dragged me to this bloody awful cold place and won't let me leave when I thought she was a friend and a decent human being." Arthur snorts a laugh at that, surprising them both, because the man just sounds so pathetic about it. Eames crooks a smile at him, and then disappears back to his table with his drinks.
9. Arthur may be cheating at cards, but he thinks it's only fair because the dealer, some scruffy, disreputable-looking Englishman, is fixing the deck. None of the other schmucks at their table seem to have noticed, but Arthur's not really surprised by that. Their primary trait seems to be having too much money to burn, not brains or observation skills. So far they've been proving very adept at burning through money.
Arthur catches him at it on the second hand, sees that tiny flicker that means he's dealing from the middle instead of the top of the deck. That's when Arthur starts counting cards.
It's a lot harder to fix a hand when you're only playing, and Arthur is forced to resort to lifting a spare deck from another of the establishment's tables and switch cards out from the hand he's dealt. It's risky, and if the dealer's main target weren't the obnoxious American trying to pass himself off as an oil tycoon, it probably wouldn't have worked at all. As it is, Arthur's very careful, and doesn't try it too often, just does enough to keep him from ever losing big. He can afford to waste a couple hundred dollars.
Every so often, the dealer throws Arthur a win. Everyone gets them except Oil Tycoon, who only ever gets cards to put him a few points below whoever takes the hand. Arthur's last hand--he can see Mal, silhouetted in the establishment's entrance: time to go--he waits till the next time the dealer tosses him one. He lays down the Ace of Hearts, and asks for two cards. Once the dealer's turned his attention to his mark, Arthur carefully switches out the remaining four cards in his hand.
The dealer had given Arthur two pair: jacks and kings. Based on what everyone else has showing, it should be enough to win this hand. Arthur waits until the dealer looks at him for his call; he smirks and folds, a bit more of a flourish in it than he'd normally put. The dealer nearly boggles for a moment, controls it carefully. Arthur's smirk grows a little at that; he can't help it.
Oil Tycoon wins big, and Arthur sneaks away from the table while he celebrates. He doesn't know it was enough, but he thinks it is, so he hovers a moment by the door to watch the dealer check Arthur's last hand. Arthur knows he has when he whips around, trying to find Arthur in the crowded game room.
Arthur always did like a challenge. He lets himself savour the victory as he follows Mal out onto the street. Arthur's folded hand is five aces. Cheaters seldom prosper is written neatly along one side of the second Ace of Hearts, a present for the dealer.
10. Arthur notices Eames because he's the only other foreigner in their car, and because he doesn't have one of the two standard reactions white people outside major metro areas in China have. Eames just glances at him when he comes in and then goes back to his two-day-old English-language paper. No pleased surprise at finally finding another Westerner. No disdain or hostility, like this is his China because he's a special snowflake and the other white people aren't allowed to be there.
Arthur appreciates this greatly, because it means he neither has to do with curious small talk nor territorial displays of one-up-manship. Arthur sits down on the barely-padded bench across from him, close to the door rather than by the window. He pulls his book out and settles down to read.
They could probably have passed the entirety of their ride like that, sleeping hard-sleeper at night from Kaifeng to Qingdao, and buying food from vendors through the train window when it stops for fifteen minutes in a station on the way, and never saying a word to each other. But they don't.
Eames talks to Arthur because Arthur's Chinese is atrocious. Arthur likes to think of it as 'passable' but that's a stretch and he knows it. It's the blasted tones. His reading and writing is actually exceptional--but the tones, it's like he can't even hear them, much less remember them, so he just makes them up as he goes. One of the train ladies comes by selling cigarettes, and Arthur hates Chinese cigarettes, but awful, acrid cigarettes are better than no cigarettes at all, so he tries to buy a pack from her.
"She's gouging you," Eames says, in English, with a smile that's directed at the train lady rather than at Arthur. Then, before Arthur can tell him, yes, he knows but he doesn't care right now, Eames turns entirely to the woman and says in some barely comprehensible Western dialect, "I want two packs."
The woman gasps in surprise, and rattles something back in the same dialect, too fast and a little too far away from Mandarin for Arthur to grasp. Eames says something back, and they go back and forth a few more times, and then the train lady is walking away with a smile and Arthur never got his pack of disgusting and very necessary Chinese cigarettes.
"Wait," Arthur calls after the cigarette lady, but she ignores him, or doesn't hear him, or he's gotten the tone completely wrong and she thinks he's just yelled 'blowfish' for no reason.
"Your Putonghua sounds like you'd learned Thai badly once and decided to see where it could get you in life anyway," Eames says, tossing his extra pack to Arthur, who barely catches it in his surprise.
"Fuck you," Arthur says, then: "Thanks for the smokes, though." He lights one and inhales gratefully. "I'd have been willing to pay 3 times what they're worth if it meant I could just get a damn cigarette."
"Eames," Eames introduces himself then.
"Arthur."
11. Arthur's a very good driver. Except in dreams, or LA. There, he's ruthless. Cutthroat. Brutal. It serves him in good stead.
Arthur cuts through the traffic like a madman. His mother would be appalled with him, if she ever saw him driving like this. He's on the highway, and there is definitely not enough space between him and the car ahead of him if it stops suddenly, but there is no way in hell Arthur is letting any jackass on the road cut in front of him. The only way to prevent this is to drive in a state of constant tailgating, but Arthur's not the only one, so it becomes that the only way to get anywhere at all is to drive in a constant state of tailgating. You have to fight for your place in traffic. The only thing worse than driving in this city is trying to find parking. Arthur excels at both because, quite frankly, he drives like he's psychotic and more than willing to take another car down in blazing glory if it comes to it. It's like there's an aura of reckless disregard for human life floating ten feet in any direction around his car the moment he buckles his seat belt.
Consequently, other cars back off, because driving in LA doesn't always mean you've got a death wish--usually it just means you need to get somewhere, and you've learned to live with the constant possibility of hurtling steel and flaming wreckage to do it.
That's why Arthur's surprised to find someone even more reckless than he is on the road. He slams on his breaks, and cuts the wheel to the left, towards the shoulder, but it's not enough and it's not fast enough, and he clips the car that had just darted in front of him from the right lane in the tail light. The other car starts to spin, but the driver pretty miraculously brings it back under control and guides it over to the shoulder to park a few dozen feet ahead of Arthur's own car.
Arthur makes sure he's all the way on the shoulder and throws his car into park. He puts his hazards on, jabbing the little button the dash with what is probably unnecessary force. Two seconds later he's stalking up the noisy edge of the highway to politely ask the other driver what the fuck he or she thinks they're doing, because they're fucking dangerous. The other driver is a man, similar height, broader build. He hasn't shaved, and he looks like he shops at the same places Dom does, only goes for the flashy colors, instead.
"Sorry, mate; didn't see you," he says, when Arthur gets within hearing distance. He fishes into a pocket, and Arthur tenses, inexplicably waiting for a handgun, but he comes out with a wallet instead. Of course. "I've only got five hundred dollars on me right now, but take it for the damage."
Arthur's eyes narrow. "Look, buddy, I don't know how they do insurance in England, but throwing money at me isn't how it works here. You could have killed me. You realize that there are actually other cars on this road," Arthur gestures at the highway where, since both their cars are more or less on the shoulder, the traffic is solid and the cars are barely even slowing down. It's LA. They've got another two hours of rush hour, at least.
The man looks pained for a second, and starts fishing in his pockets again, this time with an unmistakable 'where's my pen?' air. "I haven't got proper insurance on it; it's a rental, he explains, finally finding his pen. He pulls a scrap of paper out of his wallet, and turns around to scrawl something across the back of it on the top of the car.
Done, he holds it out to Arthur. "If the five hundred doesn't cover it, give me a call on this number. I'll take care of the rest. Tell me..." he trails off expectantly.
"Arthur," Arthur supplies. He's taking phone numbers, he might as well give a name.
"Tell me Arthur's calling. I'll make sure to take your call."
Arthur looks down at the number. 916 area code. "What about yours?" he asks, gesturing toward the back of the man's car. The tail-light's out, but otherwise there doesn't look like there's too much damage. It should still drive.
"Well, I think it's pretty clear I've lost my deposit, but my fault, so don't worry about it. I'm actually running quite late. I shouldn't spend any more time here," he says, climbing back into his rental. He somehow manages to navigate himself back out into the stream of relentless traffic without killing anyone. Arthur has to take a moment to admire that--it should, by all rights, be an miraculous act of pure anger to get oneself back onto the road without the help of an emergency vehicle.
It's not until five minutes later, after Arthur's own acts of miraculous road-rage and bulldozer determination, that he realizes how smoothly the man had avoided both giving Arthur his name and involving any authorities. And he'd thought the driving was impressive.