Fic: "Like Breathing", Arthur/Eames, NC-17 for extreme kink
Author: neomeruru
Title: Like Breathing
Rating: NC-17/R
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Warnings: pure kink: breathplay, smoking, choking, snuff, pain, top!Arthur, not for the faint of heart
Spoilers: If you haven't watched the movie, you won't understand the spoilers.
Word Count: 3,332
Summary: "Do you want me to choke you to death, Eames?"
Disclaimer: I'm so, so sorry, Mr. Nolan.
a/n: This is my first explicit story, I haven't written anything non-academic for approximately six years, and my first foray into porn involves sexualized character death. I don't even want to consider what that says about me.
Written for a prompt on inception_kink.
(minor editorquibble, for those more pedantic than I am: YES, there is a tense shift. It is on purpose.)
---
In the realm of sexual requests, "I want you to choke me to death" isn't as well-received as "Pull my hair" or "Call me daddy". It's not the kind of thing you can just bring up in the middle of the act. Eames tried, once, when he was younger and stupid, and he had to say it had been a terrible mood killer.
Which is why, when he brings it up with Arthur, he brings it up sideways, in conversation, as a joke, something he could recover from. They were lounging in patio chairs, Cobb and his pet architect naffed off to go do something or other, the warehouse empty and cavernous around them. Their chairs were side-by-each but facing the opposite directions, the air between them redolent with smoke as they passed a cigarette between them in the thick summer heat. They were back in California, for Cobb.
"...I mean, if you had to pick a way, it's just red-blooded and natural to say it'd have to be during sex," Eames was saying, and he was rewarded by Arthur's half smile. It was a favourite pastime for Arthur, mulling over how things could go wrong in the dream. They'd both been ripped apart and woken up shattered enough times for it to be casual conversation.
"You can't literally die from sex, Eames," Arthur pointed out. "It's like being in an earthquake. Something else actually has to kill you. Heart failure, for example."
Eames waved his hand in the air, the cigarette's burning embers tracing a dismissive line. "Of course, right, but you have to admit, accidentally choked half to hell durin' the act is not a terrible way to go out. It's preferable, really." He smiled in his earnest way and took a drag from the cigarette, counting on Arthur (Arthur, who was as observant as a hawk and the keenest man he'd ever had the pleasure of rutting against) to fill in his blanks.
Eames smoked like a chimney whenever his hands were idle; it came to him like breathing. Arthur claimed he only smoked when the forger was around.
("You're going to be the death of me in this world too," he had said when Eames first offered him a cigarette. Five years ago, maybe. He had protected his neck around Eames then; only minutes earlier, the forger had shot him messily through the throat during a dress rehearsal. Arthur hadn't yet learned how to come out of the dream with his trauma already tucked away and locked down like a bank vault. Eames couldn't do anything about that but shrug, move in closer against the cold, and wonder if Arthur buttoned down those pressed pants for both teams.)
(Incidentally, he did. At least for Eames, and that was the part he cared about.)
Arthur didn't say anything at Eames' statement, only claimed the cigarette and looked up at the ceiling as he took a long drag. Leisurely, professional, clearly running through the conversation. He handed the cigarette back to Eames and exhaled a long plume of smoke into the air above them. His eyes were practically slits when he turned them towards Eames, and if the forger were a lesser man he might have had the decency to squirm.
"Do you want me to choke you to death, Eames?" he asked intently, fingers laced over his stomach.
They couldn't get hooked together in the PASIV fast enough.
***
Eames is the king of unhealthy choices: gambling, cigarettes, thievery, forgery, joining the military, dropping out of the military, the tattooing of women's names. Dream sharing. Absinthe, the actual green fairy kind. Trepanation, once, in a trauma clinic in Mumbai. Long story.
Despite all current appearances, Arthur has never been an unhealthy choice.
No one calls Arthur an architect, but Cobb still needed to get balls-deep in someone's mind before Ariadne came along; and when their other architects were nancying out to rival companies or jumping out of windows, it was Arthur who ended up setting the scene so Cobb could get to the business of extraction.
It's Arthur's dream they wake up in, and because such is just the way of dreams they arrive in medias res -- "how did you get here?" they learned to question when they were (re)learning how to dream -- they stutter in mid-thrust as their bodies come together before they realize that if either of them cared for foreplay and the messy indignity of lube and stretching, they would have started dreaming there first.
If Eames had been there for the Saito job before it went pear-shaped, he might have recognized the setting: wood and paper walls painted with fish and birds and trees, his back pressed into a futon mattress on the floor, the sliding walls on one side folded open to the dreamscape of grey sky and waves and incoming storm. But he didn't care about that, not just then.
What Eames cared about at that moment was the fact that he was on his back, cigarette still perched precariously between his lips, and Arthur was between his legs, crouched, holding Eames' legs up at the knees; and of course that Arthur was fully sheathed in his arse, looking for a moment a little surprised and a lot dishevelled before his expression smoothed and shuttered up the emotion, sliding back into character.
"This is a good dream," Arthur remarked, as if they were sitting in a park enjoying the sunshine, and Arthur was not fucking him slowly, but with great purpose, on the floor. "We should remember this one."
He fully intended to start a sentence, a damn eloquent one too, but just then Arthur hitched himself up and each time he moved the head of his cock brushed up against that spot in Eames that made it impossible to speak, to think anything other than yes, there, again, please.
He was momentarily brought back to reality when he tried to move his hands, to run them down the smooth expanse of chest beneath Arthur's unbuttoned dress shirt, and found that his hands were above his head not by some dream logic but rather by Arthur's design. He made his hands into fists and pulled, but yes, he was securely fastened to the floor with rope.
"Does your average Japanese mansion have ropes attached to the floor, or is that all you, love?" asked Eames imperiously, even as he felt himself sink into the weightlessness of losing control.
"They do this thing called kinbaku, Eames; do a little cultural appreciation sometime," replied Arthur, taking the cigarette from Eames' full lips and pressing his mouth there, stealing a kiss before straightening up. He put the cig between his lips and curled his fingers around it as he inhaled, tapping his mouth with a grin. He sat back and smoked and surveyed his dream handiwork, drawing in and out of the restrained Eames at a leisurely pace.
"Just so you know, here's how it's going to work," Arthur said, smoothly, and Eames was struck with two incredible and competing urges: one, to roll his eyes at the point man's diligent attention to structure, and the other, much more strongly, to use the limited mobility he had to rut against Arthur's cock, close his eyes, and let it play out in a way it only could in his dreams.
Eames closed his eyes and silently chose option two, letting his head fall back against the futon and arching himself against Arthur.
"I'm going to wrap my hands around your neck, and I'm not going to let go until you're dead," Arthur continued, languidly punctuating his words with his hips. Eames couldn't even work up the energy to mock him for enjoying himself in Eames' most fucked-up fantasy. The forger was beyond lies at that point, couldn't lie to himself about the way Arthur's plain sternness and matter-of-fact promises of death made him harder than a rock.
Arthur inhaled and blew the smoke in Eames' face. "You can tell me to stop now, but only now. I'm not going to believe you after this."
Still with eyes closed, Eames buried his face in his bicep and nodded.
He heard Arthur laugh, and then his eyes shot open as he felt one of the man's deft hands wrap around his cock and squeeze, and he could have just howled right there, but when he opened his mouth he could only manage a sob, and honestly he was quite surprised with himself, all things considered.
Arthur's hand was merciless, the look on his face as he looked down at Eames something like tenderness, and something like danger. "Say it, Eames; tell me you want it."
Eames could barely form the words, and at first he thought it was because Arthur's undivided attention was as intense as the sun, something he couldn't even look at, nonetheless communicate with. It's obvious, though, why the point man is making him do it: he never even said the words, he's cloaked them in lies and double entendres and jokes, never even admitting it to himself. He was shocked to feel a wave of relief wash over him as he cried out, "D-do it, please, I want you to choke me to death..."
He felt Arthur's sharp laugh at the same time as he heard it, not the ha-ha-funny laugh but the I'm-going-to-fuck-you-until-you-die-from-it laugh, and Eames has approximately one heartbeat to consider the dirtiest truth he knows before Arthur is done with their shared cigarette, and he puts it in Eames' mouth and commands, "Breathe."
So Eames does, because he knows even the matter of his breath is completely out of his hands now, sucking at the cigarette, filling his lungs with smoke and burning oxygen. When Arthur takes the cigarette away he is so wound up he forgets to exhale, until Arthur flips the burning ember around and jams it into the forger's skin square in the middle of his chest.
He screams, partly in surprise and mostly in pain, and his body reacts in kind, but Arthur is stubbing out the butt and wiping it across his chest with one hand and the other is still wrapped around his cock, pumping it earnestly now, and his own hands are still over his head, and Arthur's cock is still grounding him at their hips, and there's not exactly a lot of ways to move in that situation. His breath explodes out of him, carrying smoke and expletives.
He is even more surprised when he world explodes into a blinding flash of white light and that terrible sound like church bells inside his skull that tells him hey, pet, you've just been hit in the face, right. The pain that follows on its heels is as fast as a prairie fire, and Eames howls as he feels his nose shattered open and filling with fluid immediately, swelling with broken cartilage and bone and blood matrix.
He cannot see through the pain or speak through the blood starting to pour down his throat, but he feels Arthur's hands on his face and the way the man's pace quickens, driving their bodies together with dire purpose now. He'd never again taunt the man for not having an imagination -- Eames was still harder than a double major with honours, even through the pain.
Arthur's hands slide from his face down to his throat, thumbs brushing against Eames' windpipe and sliding to the side where his pulse rushes just beneath the skin. Like sampling from a buffet, but Arthur is meticulous and a perfectionist and Eames knows for a fact he's choked a man to death before, ten different kinds of badass, and the memory and anticipation make him moan, gurgling up past the blood pooling at the back of his mouth. His last breaths suck both air and blood into his lungs.
"Go to sleep, Mr. Eames," says Arthur, and Eames feels those strong thumbs cross over his trachea -- and then Arthur is moving in him, fucking him with intention, the weight of his whole body resting solely on his throat, and his breath has never felt so strong and so fragile at the same time as Arthur's hands snuff it out. And just like that, Eames is suspended in a world no longer measured by breathing but gaping openness, time stretching out in fear and surrender.
His body doesn't realize it at first, a dim mammalian machine registering only the pain in his face and the feeling of Arthur's cock sliding in and out of him, and his own cock jutting out hungrily in the air between them, growing electric when it rubs against Arthur's tight stomach.
It isn't for at least twenty seconds before his lower brain remembers he needs oxygen, and Eames' mouth works dumbly for a few moments, chest heaving and working but the breath is gone, trapped by the circle of Arthur's hands. His pulse quickens and he can feel it caged underneath those strong hands.
He feels water start to hit his face, and as he starts to struggle he notices distantly that it has started to rain -- Arthur has made it start to rain -- it's coming through the open sliding walls and drenching them, and the ocean wind is coming it with it. He imagines the smell of it, the salt of the ocean, but with no air there is no smell, only fat droplets of rain. He feels panic race through him, igniting him, and the adrenaline that courses through his system is making his heart beat faster and greedily waste the little air he has in his lungs.
He isn't even conscious of the instinct, but his lips are mouthing the words "no, stop," and of course nothing is coming out. Speech is the secondary function of the lungs, he thinks, and he doesn't want Arthur to stop, but every bell in his head is going off now, forty seconds in.
Tears are welling in his eyes now, mingling with the rain that pours in from the window and drips off of Arthur's hair come undone by the water, his nose, his lips, where Arthur's breath is coming ragged and moaning, the same sounds that are aborted in Eames.
A minute in now and every muscle has drawn itself tight, every one of his base instincts crying out: move, fight, do anything. His body flails independent of his mind, legs kicking, arms straining to break the ropes that bind him down, his whole body thrashing under Arthur's weight keeping him down, weighing him down like sinking into the ocean, and Arthur's hands, his grip like death around his throat, and Arthur's cock, pounding him mercilessly now, and Arthur's breath in his face, mocking him.
His lungs burn from the inside and the gravity felt like it was sucking his ribcage in with it, like he was a star imploding in the deep and vast silence of space. The silence rushes in on him, collapsing in around his head, utter silence except for the frantic panic of his blood singing in his ears. It sounds like nothing Eames had heard, except perhaps a helicopter, or the end of the world, and reality starts to slip away from him like REM sleep.
His vision is going dim around the edges, the last thing he sees his Arthur's mouth descend upon his, catching his numb lips in his teeth, kissing him hungrily, and then the full deep blackness rushes in. It is punctuated by stars, neurons firing in his head and darkening forever. The French call orgasms la petit mort, and each little death is like coming, it is wet between their bodies, and he thinks that at that point he doesn't even care if he cascades down into Limbo.
It is nothing like any sort of dying Eames has ever experienced before, and he's died more times than any mortal man should be allowed.
Finally, completely surrendered in Arthur's arms, his body gives up fighting and slips silently into the night.
He is gone.
Arthur feels the pulse slow and then stop, and he holds on for longer just to be sure. His hands have left red welts on that strong neck, bruises already blossoming where his thumbs dug in. He pulls out, trailing warm come down Eames' thigh. No, he corrects himself; it's not even a body, it's a husk now without the forger's mind inhabiting it, no more sentient or alive than a projection. Not even alive, not even dead, and wearing the face of Eames.
Even knowing this he is surprised to break character, feeling a little awkward as he leans forward and runs his thumb over those blue lips. The heavy head lolls in his hands; he strokes the cheek with tenderness and whispers an apology only the rain hears.
---
Eames is already awake when Arthur stirs from his sleep, but he finds himself incapable of doing anything other simply staring at Arthur, his breathing heavy and measured like he's not entirely sure he's capable of it. Each breath burns on the way down but it tastes so good, it's like a miracle, he just wants to sit there and breathe. He already has his totem in his hand, running the pad of his thumb over the ridges of the chip and anchoring himself to its deceptively heavy weight.
Arthur opens his eyes and looks over at Eames, his face calm like the surface of a lake. There is a crinkle under Arthur's eyes that Eames translates as mirth, before the point man's gaze goes elsewhere and he smiles, "Dom, Ariadne, welcome back."
The forger follows Arthur's gaze and, yes, Cobb and the architect are back from lunch and they are standing there, watching them. Ariadne is holding a take-out box from the Greek restaurant down the block; they are both flushed from the California heat. Cobb's face is blank concern for a few minutes before he pieces the tension together -- like he'd never fucked around in the dream, he was married to an architect for Christ's sake.
Ariadne, ever willing to believe the best, only smiles her effervescent smile at the pair, "Oh, were you two getting some sleep? It must be so much nicer in the dream."
Arthur shoots Eames a look that almost instantly makes him hard, and then he's conversing with Ariadne about the weather and the merits of falafel like he didn't just enjoy choking the life out of Eames.
Eames gets up and walks away before he can disgrace himself in front of the architect -- despite appearances there are just some things he just doesn't do around a lady, and stroking himself to resolution is one of them. His body feels heavy and languid, swimming in the heat.
The water from the faucet doesn't feel like rain at all as he erases the feeling of death from his skin. Then, Arthur is there and Arthur is unbuckling his pants, Arthur is stroking his cock with one hand and his hair with the other. He tucks his face in the planes of the man's neck and shudders, it doesn't take long for him to come like this.
When he feels grounded again and the world snaps back into focus, he reaches down to return the favour but Arthur's hand is there too, guiding his fumbling grasp away, and he whispers "no, it's all right," while he kisses Eames, hand stroking his face, solid and present and alive.
(It's not long afterwards, perhaps a few days later, they are in bed, when Eames tells him he loves him for the first time. Arthur only laughs and says, "I can't believe you still consider death a life-changing experience.")
Title: Like Breathing
Rating: NC-17/R
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Warnings: pure kink: breathplay, smoking, choking, snuff, pain, top!Arthur, not for the faint of heart
Spoilers: If you haven't watched the movie, you won't understand the spoilers.
Word Count: 3,332
Summary: "Do you want me to choke you to death, Eames?"
Disclaimer: I'm so, so sorry, Mr. Nolan.
a/n: This is my first explicit story, I haven't written anything non-academic for approximately six years, and my first foray into porn involves sexualized character death. I don't even want to consider what that says about me.
Written for a prompt on inception_kink.
(minor editorquibble, for those more pedantic than I am: YES, there is a tense shift. It is on purpose.)
---
In the realm of sexual requests, "I want you to choke me to death" isn't as well-received as "Pull my hair" or "Call me daddy". It's not the kind of thing you can just bring up in the middle of the act. Eames tried, once, when he was younger and stupid, and he had to say it had been a terrible mood killer.
Which is why, when he brings it up with Arthur, he brings it up sideways, in conversation, as a joke, something he could recover from. They were lounging in patio chairs, Cobb and his pet architect naffed off to go do something or other, the warehouse empty and cavernous around them. Their chairs were side-by-each but facing the opposite directions, the air between them redolent with smoke as they passed a cigarette between them in the thick summer heat. They were back in California, for Cobb.
"...I mean, if you had to pick a way, it's just red-blooded and natural to say it'd have to be during sex," Eames was saying, and he was rewarded by Arthur's half smile. It was a favourite pastime for Arthur, mulling over how things could go wrong in the dream. They'd both been ripped apart and woken up shattered enough times for it to be casual conversation.
"You can't literally die from sex, Eames," Arthur pointed out. "It's like being in an earthquake. Something else actually has to kill you. Heart failure, for example."
Eames waved his hand in the air, the cigarette's burning embers tracing a dismissive line. "Of course, right, but you have to admit, accidentally choked half to hell durin' the act is not a terrible way to go out. It's preferable, really." He smiled in his earnest way and took a drag from the cigarette, counting on Arthur (Arthur, who was as observant as a hawk and the keenest man he'd ever had the pleasure of rutting against) to fill in his blanks.
Eames smoked like a chimney whenever his hands were idle; it came to him like breathing. Arthur claimed he only smoked when the forger was around.
("You're going to be the death of me in this world too," he had said when Eames first offered him a cigarette. Five years ago, maybe. He had protected his neck around Eames then; only minutes earlier, the forger had shot him messily through the throat during a dress rehearsal. Arthur hadn't yet learned how to come out of the dream with his trauma already tucked away and locked down like a bank vault. Eames couldn't do anything about that but shrug, move in closer against the cold, and wonder if Arthur buttoned down those pressed pants for both teams.)
(Incidentally, he did. At least for Eames, and that was the part he cared about.)
Arthur didn't say anything at Eames' statement, only claimed the cigarette and looked up at the ceiling as he took a long drag. Leisurely, professional, clearly running through the conversation. He handed the cigarette back to Eames and exhaled a long plume of smoke into the air above them. His eyes were practically slits when he turned them towards Eames, and if the forger were a lesser man he might have had the decency to squirm.
"Do you want me to choke you to death, Eames?" he asked intently, fingers laced over his stomach.
They couldn't get hooked together in the PASIV fast enough.
***
Eames is the king of unhealthy choices: gambling, cigarettes, thievery, forgery, joining the military, dropping out of the military, the tattooing of women's names. Dream sharing. Absinthe, the actual green fairy kind. Trepanation, once, in a trauma clinic in Mumbai. Long story.
Despite all current appearances, Arthur has never been an unhealthy choice.
No one calls Arthur an architect, but Cobb still needed to get balls-deep in someone's mind before Ariadne came along; and when their other architects were nancying out to rival companies or jumping out of windows, it was Arthur who ended up setting the scene so Cobb could get to the business of extraction.
It's Arthur's dream they wake up in, and because such is just the way of dreams they arrive in medias res -- "how did you get here?" they learned to question when they were (re)learning how to dream -- they stutter in mid-thrust as their bodies come together before they realize that if either of them cared for foreplay and the messy indignity of lube and stretching, they would have started dreaming there first.
If Eames had been there for the Saito job before it went pear-shaped, he might have recognized the setting: wood and paper walls painted with fish and birds and trees, his back pressed into a futon mattress on the floor, the sliding walls on one side folded open to the dreamscape of grey sky and waves and incoming storm. But he didn't care about that, not just then.
What Eames cared about at that moment was the fact that he was on his back, cigarette still perched precariously between his lips, and Arthur was between his legs, crouched, holding Eames' legs up at the knees; and of course that Arthur was fully sheathed in his arse, looking for a moment a little surprised and a lot dishevelled before his expression smoothed and shuttered up the emotion, sliding back into character.
"This is a good dream," Arthur remarked, as if they were sitting in a park enjoying the sunshine, and Arthur was not fucking him slowly, but with great purpose, on the floor. "We should remember this one."
He fully intended to start a sentence, a damn eloquent one too, but just then Arthur hitched himself up and each time he moved the head of his cock brushed up against that spot in Eames that made it impossible to speak, to think anything other than yes, there, again, please.
He was momentarily brought back to reality when he tried to move his hands, to run them down the smooth expanse of chest beneath Arthur's unbuttoned dress shirt, and found that his hands were above his head not by some dream logic but rather by Arthur's design. He made his hands into fists and pulled, but yes, he was securely fastened to the floor with rope.
"Does your average Japanese mansion have ropes attached to the floor, or is that all you, love?" asked Eames imperiously, even as he felt himself sink into the weightlessness of losing control.
"They do this thing called kinbaku, Eames; do a little cultural appreciation sometime," replied Arthur, taking the cigarette from Eames' full lips and pressing his mouth there, stealing a kiss before straightening up. He put the cig between his lips and curled his fingers around it as he inhaled, tapping his mouth with a grin. He sat back and smoked and surveyed his dream handiwork, drawing in and out of the restrained Eames at a leisurely pace.
"Just so you know, here's how it's going to work," Arthur said, smoothly, and Eames was struck with two incredible and competing urges: one, to roll his eyes at the point man's diligent attention to structure, and the other, much more strongly, to use the limited mobility he had to rut against Arthur's cock, close his eyes, and let it play out in a way it only could in his dreams.
Eames closed his eyes and silently chose option two, letting his head fall back against the futon and arching himself against Arthur.
"I'm going to wrap my hands around your neck, and I'm not going to let go until you're dead," Arthur continued, languidly punctuating his words with his hips. Eames couldn't even work up the energy to mock him for enjoying himself in Eames' most fucked-up fantasy. The forger was beyond lies at that point, couldn't lie to himself about the way Arthur's plain sternness and matter-of-fact promises of death made him harder than a rock.
Arthur inhaled and blew the smoke in Eames' face. "You can tell me to stop now, but only now. I'm not going to believe you after this."
Still with eyes closed, Eames buried his face in his bicep and nodded.
He heard Arthur laugh, and then his eyes shot open as he felt one of the man's deft hands wrap around his cock and squeeze, and he could have just howled right there, but when he opened his mouth he could only manage a sob, and honestly he was quite surprised with himself, all things considered.
Arthur's hand was merciless, the look on his face as he looked down at Eames something like tenderness, and something like danger. "Say it, Eames; tell me you want it."
Eames could barely form the words, and at first he thought it was because Arthur's undivided attention was as intense as the sun, something he couldn't even look at, nonetheless communicate with. It's obvious, though, why the point man is making him do it: he never even said the words, he's cloaked them in lies and double entendres and jokes, never even admitting it to himself. He was shocked to feel a wave of relief wash over him as he cried out, "D-do it, please, I want you to choke me to death..."
He felt Arthur's sharp laugh at the same time as he heard it, not the ha-ha-funny laugh but the I'm-going-to-fuck-you-until-you-die-from-it laugh, and Eames has approximately one heartbeat to consider the dirtiest truth he knows before Arthur is done with their shared cigarette, and he puts it in Eames' mouth and commands, "Breathe."
So Eames does, because he knows even the matter of his breath is completely out of his hands now, sucking at the cigarette, filling his lungs with smoke and burning oxygen. When Arthur takes the cigarette away he is so wound up he forgets to exhale, until Arthur flips the burning ember around and jams it into the forger's skin square in the middle of his chest.
He screams, partly in surprise and mostly in pain, and his body reacts in kind, but Arthur is stubbing out the butt and wiping it across his chest with one hand and the other is still wrapped around his cock, pumping it earnestly now, and his own hands are still over his head, and Arthur's cock is still grounding him at their hips, and there's not exactly a lot of ways to move in that situation. His breath explodes out of him, carrying smoke and expletives.
He is even more surprised when he world explodes into a blinding flash of white light and that terrible sound like church bells inside his skull that tells him hey, pet, you've just been hit in the face, right. The pain that follows on its heels is as fast as a prairie fire, and Eames howls as he feels his nose shattered open and filling with fluid immediately, swelling with broken cartilage and bone and blood matrix.
He cannot see through the pain or speak through the blood starting to pour down his throat, but he feels Arthur's hands on his face and the way the man's pace quickens, driving their bodies together with dire purpose now. He'd never again taunt the man for not having an imagination -- Eames was still harder than a double major with honours, even through the pain.
Arthur's hands slide from his face down to his throat, thumbs brushing against Eames' windpipe and sliding to the side where his pulse rushes just beneath the skin. Like sampling from a buffet, but Arthur is meticulous and a perfectionist and Eames knows for a fact he's choked a man to death before, ten different kinds of badass, and the memory and anticipation make him moan, gurgling up past the blood pooling at the back of his mouth. His last breaths suck both air and blood into his lungs.
"Go to sleep, Mr. Eames," says Arthur, and Eames feels those strong thumbs cross over his trachea -- and then Arthur is moving in him, fucking him with intention, the weight of his whole body resting solely on his throat, and his breath has never felt so strong and so fragile at the same time as Arthur's hands snuff it out. And just like that, Eames is suspended in a world no longer measured by breathing but gaping openness, time stretching out in fear and surrender.
His body doesn't realize it at first, a dim mammalian machine registering only the pain in his face and the feeling of Arthur's cock sliding in and out of him, and his own cock jutting out hungrily in the air between them, growing electric when it rubs against Arthur's tight stomach.
It isn't for at least twenty seconds before his lower brain remembers he needs oxygen, and Eames' mouth works dumbly for a few moments, chest heaving and working but the breath is gone, trapped by the circle of Arthur's hands. His pulse quickens and he can feel it caged underneath those strong hands.
He feels water start to hit his face, and as he starts to struggle he notices distantly that it has started to rain -- Arthur has made it start to rain -- it's coming through the open sliding walls and drenching them, and the ocean wind is coming it with it. He imagines the smell of it, the salt of the ocean, but with no air there is no smell, only fat droplets of rain. He feels panic race through him, igniting him, and the adrenaline that courses through his system is making his heart beat faster and greedily waste the little air he has in his lungs.
He isn't even conscious of the instinct, but his lips are mouthing the words "no, stop," and of course nothing is coming out. Speech is the secondary function of the lungs, he thinks, and he doesn't want Arthur to stop, but every bell in his head is going off now, forty seconds in.
Tears are welling in his eyes now, mingling with the rain that pours in from the window and drips off of Arthur's hair come undone by the water, his nose, his lips, where Arthur's breath is coming ragged and moaning, the same sounds that are aborted in Eames.
A minute in now and every muscle has drawn itself tight, every one of his base instincts crying out: move, fight, do anything. His body flails independent of his mind, legs kicking, arms straining to break the ropes that bind him down, his whole body thrashing under Arthur's weight keeping him down, weighing him down like sinking into the ocean, and Arthur's hands, his grip like death around his throat, and Arthur's cock, pounding him mercilessly now, and Arthur's breath in his face, mocking him.
His lungs burn from the inside and the gravity felt like it was sucking his ribcage in with it, like he was a star imploding in the deep and vast silence of space. The silence rushes in on him, collapsing in around his head, utter silence except for the frantic panic of his blood singing in his ears. It sounds like nothing Eames had heard, except perhaps a helicopter, or the end of the world, and reality starts to slip away from him like REM sleep.
His vision is going dim around the edges, the last thing he sees his Arthur's mouth descend upon his, catching his numb lips in his teeth, kissing him hungrily, and then the full deep blackness rushes in. It is punctuated by stars, neurons firing in his head and darkening forever. The French call orgasms la petit mort, and each little death is like coming, it is wet between their bodies, and he thinks that at that point he doesn't even care if he cascades down into Limbo.
It is nothing like any sort of dying Eames has ever experienced before, and he's died more times than any mortal man should be allowed.
Finally, completely surrendered in Arthur's arms, his body gives up fighting and slips silently into the night.
He is gone.
Arthur feels the pulse slow and then stop, and he holds on for longer just to be sure. His hands have left red welts on that strong neck, bruises already blossoming where his thumbs dug in. He pulls out, trailing warm come down Eames' thigh. No, he corrects himself; it's not even a body, it's a husk now without the forger's mind inhabiting it, no more sentient or alive than a projection. Not even alive, not even dead, and wearing the face of Eames.
Even knowing this he is surprised to break character, feeling a little awkward as he leans forward and runs his thumb over those blue lips. The heavy head lolls in his hands; he strokes the cheek with tenderness and whispers an apology only the rain hears.
---
Eames is already awake when Arthur stirs from his sleep, but he finds himself incapable of doing anything other simply staring at Arthur, his breathing heavy and measured like he's not entirely sure he's capable of it. Each breath burns on the way down but it tastes so good, it's like a miracle, he just wants to sit there and breathe. He already has his totem in his hand, running the pad of his thumb over the ridges of the chip and anchoring himself to its deceptively heavy weight.
Arthur opens his eyes and looks over at Eames, his face calm like the surface of a lake. There is a crinkle under Arthur's eyes that Eames translates as mirth, before the point man's gaze goes elsewhere and he smiles, "Dom, Ariadne, welcome back."
The forger follows Arthur's gaze and, yes, Cobb and the architect are back from lunch and they are standing there, watching them. Ariadne is holding a take-out box from the Greek restaurant down the block; they are both flushed from the California heat. Cobb's face is blank concern for a few minutes before he pieces the tension together -- like he'd never fucked around in the dream, he was married to an architect for Christ's sake.
Ariadne, ever willing to believe the best, only smiles her effervescent smile at the pair, "Oh, were you two getting some sleep? It must be so much nicer in the dream."
Arthur shoots Eames a look that almost instantly makes him hard, and then he's conversing with Ariadne about the weather and the merits of falafel like he didn't just enjoy choking the life out of Eames.
Eames gets up and walks away before he can disgrace himself in front of the architect -- despite appearances there are just some things he just doesn't do around a lady, and stroking himself to resolution is one of them. His body feels heavy and languid, swimming in the heat.
The water from the faucet doesn't feel like rain at all as he erases the feeling of death from his skin. Then, Arthur is there and Arthur is unbuckling his pants, Arthur is stroking his cock with one hand and his hair with the other. He tucks his face in the planes of the man's neck and shudders, it doesn't take long for him to come like this.
When he feels grounded again and the world snaps back into focus, he reaches down to return the favour but Arthur's hand is there too, guiding his fumbling grasp away, and he whispers "no, it's all right," while he kisses Eames, hand stroking his face, solid and present and alive.
(It's not long afterwards, perhaps a few days later, they are in bed, when Eames tells him he loves him for the first time. Arthur only laughs and says, "I can't believe you still consider death a life-changing experience.")