Inception/Mysterious Skin - Every Me and Every You (29/30)
Title: Every Me and Every You (29/30)
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Inception/Mysterious Skin fusion
Word count: 3,255
Pairing: Neil/Eames
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: language, allusions to rape,child molestation, and prostitution
Summary: Neil McCormick is fraying at the seams. Then he meets Eames, professional dreamer.
The light in the room was bright, and the hand in his was steady. He sat up, scrubbing a hand over his face and turned to his right. There was a boy sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a tape player. He was punkish and lanky with a dozen earrings and looked a bit unsure.
After a moment, the name returned to him. "Eric," he said, removing the headphones from his ears and handing them back to him.
Eric's shoulders slumped a little in relief. "You're… still with us, McCormick? Did everything get sorted out?"
The other man on the bed sat up then, removing the needle from his arm. "Neil," the man on the bed said loudly.
He looked at Eric and then turned to the other man. "Neil?" he questioned. "My name is Arthur."
There was a moment of silence through the room, and Arthur felt like it was oddly uncomfortable. He looked from the man on the bed to Eric. Then, a name came to him.
"Oh, and you're Eames," Arthur said.
"Yes, I am," said Eames. "What else do you remember?"
Arthur sat back. "My head's still a little fuzzy, but… I remember that I'm from Hutchinson, Kansas. We're… at my mom's house right now. I usually live in New York with Wendy, but she passed away unexpectedly. Eames, you and I work together."
"What about Coach?" Eames asked hesitantly. "What about Brian?"
"Coach?" Arthur said slowly, staring off into the distance as though trying to pull the image into his mind. "Brian is Eric's friend, but… what coach are we talking about exactly?"
"Good God," Eric said, looking as though he wasn't sure whether to be horrified or terribly, terribly relieved. "He doesn't remember."
"What don't I remember?" Arthur asked, whirling around on Eric. "What the fuck?"
"It's nothing," Eames interrupted so that Eric didn't have to sit there gaping like a fish. "Just little things. Your subconscious had a problem, so I went down to help you fix it. Do you remember any of that?"
Arthur glanced back at Eames and then looked down at his lap. "I… I know there was a house, and… a little boy. The little boy was dying. There was a man holding him prisoner, and he attacked me, but I shot him in the head. I don't remember what he was doing."
Eames swallowed, pursed his lips. "The name Neil doesn't mean anything to you?"
"It sounds familiar," Arthur admitted. "Like… I knew him once before. Why? Is he important?"
"What the hell is happening right now?" Eric asked, looking ill. "I thought you said you could fix him."
"Fix me?" Arthur was starting to grow frustrated with the conversation happening around him, one that he apparently wasn't supposed to be a part of. "Damn it, stop acting like I'm not here. Is something wrong with me?"
Eames got off of the bed, smoothed out the wrinkles in his pajamas. Arthur realized he was wearing his boxer shorts and nothing else. "Eames," he said, "tell me what's going on."
"You're Neil McCormick, or at least you were when we fell asleep," Eames replied bluntly.
Arthur started to respond to that but quickly realized he didn't exactly have one. "Oh," was all he managed.
"You've wiped clean your persona," Eames continued, looking lost and confused. Apparently this had never happened before. "Tell me about yourself, quickly."
"I'm… I'm Arthur McCormick, I'm eighteen, and I work in mind crime with you, Eames. I grew up here, and I really don't know what else you want me to say."
"You've actually done it," Eames breathed. "You've literally become somebody else. You don't remember any of the bad things-anything that made you Neil McCormick. Oh, God." Eames looked away, scrubbing a hand over his mouth. "The child must have died in my arms, and you… Christ, you woke up differently. Fuck…"
"I'm going to be okay, aren't I?" Arthur asked, suddenly feeling concerned. He had felt fine when he'd woken up, but now he was being told that something wasn't right, that he wasn't Arthur, that a part of him had possibly died down below in his subconscious.
"Hey," Eric offered suddenly, "he didn't really remember us right away. Maybe it'll just take a little while for his brain to kick back on, you know? Maybe the best thing to do right now is wait it out." Arthur was sure that Eames would have dismissed the ideas of someone who had never used a PASIV before as ludicrous, but at this point no one really knew what was going on.
"Maybe," Eames sighed. "Let's wait a couple of days and see what turns up. I suppose there's nothing else we can do right now."
"So, I'm going to be okay, right?" Arthur asked more sternly, but all he got for answers were subdued looks of uncertainty.
Well, fuck, Arthur thought.
Eames left Arthur in the bedroom to explain the situation to those waiting around outside of it, so Arthur started looking through Neil's old things. There was something about the baseball trophies and old photographs that made him uncomfortable, but he didn't know why. The porno magazines were just as bad but for more obvious reasons. He knew that depravity in such anthologies was to be expected, but some of the boys in the pages of the ones close to the bottom looked way, way too young. The sight of these teen boys tied up and being manhandled by much older men made Arthur feel sick.
Neil's clothes were extremely casual to the point of almost laziness, which was weird for Arthur since he'd always considered himself a rather snappy dresser (though apparently that was only for the last hour or so since he didn't exist until then). He put on the nicest of the clothes that he could find-a pair of jeans without holes in them and a pale blue t-shirt, and then he padded down the hall into the bathroom where he trimmed his hair up the best he could with a pair of scissors he'd found. He combed it so it wasn't hanging so heavily onto his face, but he didn't have any pomade to keep it there. He dug a razor out from behind the mirror and shaved with it, nicking himself on the hinge of his jaw. He pressed his thumb to it to stop the bleeding.
Something about blood.
He couldn't pinpoint it, but there was definitely something familiar in that particular color of red, drawing to mind fuzzy pictures of a nosebleed, of blood caked to his own face and staining his shirt. He wondered where the images had originated from, but they had faded away before he could even attempt to find out. He realized they must have been Neil's memories, maybe even some of the bad things that had happened to mess up his subconscious.
After he was dressed and moderately cleaned up, he grew a bit bored of waiting for Eames to come back, so he walked into the living room on his own. He was immediately met with the gazes of Eames, Eric, his mother, and…
Brian.
Arthur had known Brian was Eric's friend, but looking at him in the flesh brought a welling up of a whole different slew of emotions. They were connected somehow, were close in some way. He wasn't entirely sure it was a happy association, but Arthur had a strong attachment to Brian somehow.
Ellen stood and cautiously walked over to him, touching the side of his face. "So… you're not Neil anymore?" she asked, sounding on the edge of devastation.
"I don't know," Arthur admitted. "Would you still love me if I wasn't?"
"Oh, baby…" she said, eyes welling with tears as she put her arms around him, "Of course I would. You're still my son, no matter what."
Arthur looked at the others in the room: Eames awkwardly shifting foot to foot, Eric avoiding eye contact, and Brian who was looking at Arthur as though he'd never seen him before except in vivid dreams. The expression made him think of a night, Christmastime…
"How long has it been since you two last saw each other?"
"Ten years… Five months… and seven days."
"Something happened to us," he said to Brian. "To you and to Neil. Ten years ago."
Brian paled a little, but he nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Do you remember that then?"
"I remember you came here for Christmas to meet me. You wanted something from me," Arthur said, releasing his mother and taking a step towards the couch where Brian was sitting. "What was it?"
"Answers," Brian replied. "I'd remembered most of it by then, but… I wanted to hear it from you."
"Hear what?" Arthur asked softly, and he felt Eames and Eric both tense as if preparing to leap on Brian to stop him from spilling the beans.
Brian must have sensed their discomfort too because he turned and looked at them and said, "He should know the truth about what happened. I know better than anyone what it's like to be tortured by something you don't remember. Maybe now he's prepared to face it, don't you think?"
Everyone stepped back except for Arthur's mother who had taken his hand and was now squeezing it so tightly that it hurt a little. Arthur thought that perhaps she was hearing it for the first time too, hearing something no one had ever said but had had suspicions about for a long time.
"Do you remember Coach Heider? The Panthers?" Brian asked.
Arthur blinked and suddenly, yes, he did remember. He recalled the picture from the drawer in his bedroom, the trophies, the face of the little boy from his dream next to the man Arthur had been too uncomfortable to look directly at.
"He did something bad to us, didn't he," Arthur breathed, gaze distant. His mother squeezed his hand even tighter, and now he could feel her hand shaking.
Brian nodded, squirming a little in his seat, sniffing as if to make sure there was no blood slipping out of his nose.
Brian had been the one with the nosebleed. It had happened when he fell over and hit the floor after they put his clothes back on.
"Oh," Arthur said, almost robotically. "Oh."
Brian looked down at his lap.
No one had to say anything. All of the pieces of the puzzle were there.
Arthur ran a hand through his hair, exhaling a little shakily. "Oh. Well. Yeah. Okay. I mean… it's… it's okay. Well, no, it isn't, but… it's over now."
Ellen started to cry, and all Arthur could do was put an arm around her and rock her gently. "Hey," he whispered to her, "don't. Don't do that. It's not your fault. It just happened, okay? It's all right."
Brian looked at Eames who was standing there looking brokenhearted over the scene before him. "It's better this way," Brian told him. "He's facing it… which I guess isn't something that he did before. He didn't want to admit that it hurt him."
"I know…" Eames said, sinking down onto the couch next to him. "I guess I was sort of expecting him to turn back into Neil though."
"He's still Neil," Brian assured him lightly. "He's just Neil without all the baggage. That scared little boy that died in your arms… he's at peace now. No one can hurt him anymore. Neil is still in there, but this Arthur he's become protects him. He doesn't have the walls. He has a soldier. I guarantee if you went down into his subconscious again, Neil would be waiting there… and when he's comfortable enough to come back completely, he will. He'll show himself in small doses."
"You really believe that?" Eames asked.
Brian blushed, smiling awkwardly. "I don't know," he said. "It sounds nice though… and it's what I'd do if I were him, I think."
Eames paused, thinking it over, and he nodded. "Well, I hope you're right."
The next couple of days were a bit weird and awkward. Arthur's mother seemed to burst into tears and apologies whenever she'd see him, and Eric and Brian came by every afternoon to see how he was holding up. Arthur would get snippets and pieces of Neil's memory over time, but he really had nothing more to offer them but that.
Eames was bizarrely distant, wandering through the house and smoking cigarettes, only addressing Arthur when he needed to find something. He was cordial and polite, but Arthur wasn't fooled. He knew that Eames was depressed, that Eames was beginning to think that he'd failed, that Eames had lost something very precious to him in Neil.
On the evening of the third day, Arthur leaned in the doorway of the living room and asked if Eames would come back to his room for a minute. Eames, who had been watching Wheel of Fortune with Ellen, looked at his now-asleep couch mate, nodded, and followed him back.
Arthur shut the door, momentarily getting a feeling of déjà vu, and then he turned around. "Eames, were you and I lovers?" he asked.
Eames actually blushed, probably because he hadn't expected the question at all. "I'm not going to mince words with you. Yes, we were. Neil and I."
"That's what I thought," Arthur said softly, looking Eames up and down. He found that he was able to picture him naked, to pinpoint the location and detail of every tattoo, every mole, every freckle. Eames had meant a lot to Neil, more than Neil probably would even admit. No one memorized those kinds of details without caring about the person. "You think what Brian said is true, don't you? That Neil is staying in his subconscious?"
"I don't know," Eames said in a way that most surely meant yes. His poker face just wasn't selling on this night.
"So… are you… angry at him? Do you feel like he's abandoned you?"
"You're quite to the point, Arthur."
"I am a pointman, Eames," Arthur teased, but it fell a little flat. "Answer the question."
"Honestly?" Eames sighed. "I don't know how I feel about the whole thing. I look at you and I see him, but when you move or when you speak it's someone else. I'm a forger, so I'm used to faking it, but-you're not a forgery at all. There's not an ounce of Neil in you, and yet there's so much… I don't know how to explain it. He created you, but he didn't forge you, and if I could just talk to him…" Eames trailed off, visibly drooping before he finished, "I just really want to talk to him. I miss him. I know he's a twat sometimes, but I love him."
There was a beat where no one said anything.
Then, "I love you too, Eames."
Eames looked up, eyes wide. "Neil?" he queried, hesitant.
Neil nodded, arms folding around himself insecurely. "I'm sorry, Eames," he said quietly. "I don't like being me too much these days. You told me that I could be Arthur if I wanted to be, and I think one day I could be… but my body needs to be trained for it, and I know I'd fall back on self-destructive old habits. Even now I want to pretend nothing ever went wrong… but I trust you because you saw what I saw."
"That man who attacked you," Eames said, approaching him slowly. "He's the thing Wendy didn't know about."
"No one knows about it except for you and me. Not even Arthur knows… though he'll probably know when this is over with."
Eames cupped Neil's jaw in his hand and softly asked, "What did he do to you?"
Neil's lips momentarily thinned, and he let his gaze drift off somewhere else before he glanced back at Eames. "He raped me," he said, voice clogged. "In his bathtub. I hit my head, so I passed out after it was over, and he left me on the street."
Eames didn't patronize him by telling him it would be all right or apologize for something he couldn't have stopped even if he wanted to. He just held him, swaying just a little bit in the dim light of the room.
"I can't believe you've actually developed a second personality," Eames said after a while. "That seems like it should be a problem rather than a solution, right? Aren't multiple personalities a bad thing?"
"So I'm a little crazy," Neil replied. "So what? At least I'm aware of it. Besides, Arthur keeps my subconscious fucking clean and organized. I don't think we'll have any problems with it anymore."
"So, you're just going to be Arthur from now on except for moments like this?" Eames asked, pressing a kiss to Neil's cheek.
"I don't really know what I'm doing right now," Neil said, tilting his head back to offer Eames his neck. "I'm hoping someday that me and Arthur will merge together. I think that's possible. I haven't really worked it out yet… but someday I think I'll be one person again. Arthur's still me, or at least a part of me. He holds all the order and keeps me stable because he protects me inside. On the outside, I have you to protect me. I understand if you don't want to stick around though."
"Of course I want to stick around," Eames said, letting his lips linger momentarily over the pulse point in Neil's neck. "Don't be stupid. As long as you're still here, I'll want to stay. I've been so caught up in thinking I'd lost you forever, that I'd destroyed you somehow, but Arthur isn't a replacement or a forgery. He's still you… It's just like Brian said. He's a soldier. He's you without the baggage and baggage or not, I still love you… and even if I never got to speak to you again, if you decided to just let Arthur take over… that would be okay with me. All I want is for you to feel safe and to feel happy and to be at peace. I don't want you to hurt anymore. I want you to be able to sleep at night and to be able to get up in the morning and to do the work that you love and that makes you feel worthwhile."
"I'll get there," Neil said, dropping his forehead to Eames's shoulder. "Someday, I'll get there… but for now I just need some help. I want to have all the good parts of me and the good parts of Arthur. I want his skills and his toughness and all of the cool stuff Wendy and I made up about him… and on my end, I just want… you. Let's face it; you're the best part about me."
"Neil," Eames said, voice shaking a little.
"Just tell Arthur the things he needs to know when you can. He's kind of a stick in the mud, but I'm pretty sure he likes you as much as I do."
Eames squeezed Neil just a little tighter, kissing the top of his head. "I'll take good care of you. Always."
"It's just you and me against the world, Eames. Just you and me… and I trust you with every version of me that exists."
They fell asleep that night, wrapped up in each other's arms, and Neil had the best sleep of his life.
Author: osaki_nana_707
Fandom: Inception/Mysterious Skin fusion
Word count: 3,255
Pairing: Neil/Eames
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: language, allusions to rape,child molestation, and prostitution
Summary: Neil McCormick is fraying at the seams. Then he meets Eames, professional dreamer.
The light in the room was bright, and the hand in his was steady. He sat up, scrubbing a hand over his face and turned to his right. There was a boy sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a tape player. He was punkish and lanky with a dozen earrings and looked a bit unsure.
After a moment, the name returned to him. "Eric," he said, removing the headphones from his ears and handing them back to him.
Eric's shoulders slumped a little in relief. "You're… still with us, McCormick? Did everything get sorted out?"
The other man on the bed sat up then, removing the needle from his arm. "Neil," the man on the bed said loudly.
He looked at Eric and then turned to the other man. "Neil?" he questioned. "My name is Arthur."
There was a moment of silence through the room, and Arthur felt like it was oddly uncomfortable. He looked from the man on the bed to Eric. Then, a name came to him.
"Oh, and you're Eames," Arthur said.
"Yes, I am," said Eames. "What else do you remember?"
Arthur sat back. "My head's still a little fuzzy, but… I remember that I'm from Hutchinson, Kansas. We're… at my mom's house right now. I usually live in New York with Wendy, but she passed away unexpectedly. Eames, you and I work together."
"What about Coach?" Eames asked hesitantly. "What about Brian?"
"Coach?" Arthur said slowly, staring off into the distance as though trying to pull the image into his mind. "Brian is Eric's friend, but… what coach are we talking about exactly?"
"Good God," Eric said, looking as though he wasn't sure whether to be horrified or terribly, terribly relieved. "He doesn't remember."
"What don't I remember?" Arthur asked, whirling around on Eric. "What the fuck?"
"It's nothing," Eames interrupted so that Eric didn't have to sit there gaping like a fish. "Just little things. Your subconscious had a problem, so I went down to help you fix it. Do you remember any of that?"
Arthur glanced back at Eames and then looked down at his lap. "I… I know there was a house, and… a little boy. The little boy was dying. There was a man holding him prisoner, and he attacked me, but I shot him in the head. I don't remember what he was doing."
Eames swallowed, pursed his lips. "The name Neil doesn't mean anything to you?"
"It sounds familiar," Arthur admitted. "Like… I knew him once before. Why? Is he important?"
"What the hell is happening right now?" Eric asked, looking ill. "I thought you said you could fix him."
"Fix me?" Arthur was starting to grow frustrated with the conversation happening around him, one that he apparently wasn't supposed to be a part of. "Damn it, stop acting like I'm not here. Is something wrong with me?"
Eames got off of the bed, smoothed out the wrinkles in his pajamas. Arthur realized he was wearing his boxer shorts and nothing else. "Eames," he said, "tell me what's going on."
"You're Neil McCormick, or at least you were when we fell asleep," Eames replied bluntly.
Arthur started to respond to that but quickly realized he didn't exactly have one. "Oh," was all he managed.
"You've wiped clean your persona," Eames continued, looking lost and confused. Apparently this had never happened before. "Tell me about yourself, quickly."
"I'm… I'm Arthur McCormick, I'm eighteen, and I work in mind crime with you, Eames. I grew up here, and I really don't know what else you want me to say."
"You've actually done it," Eames breathed. "You've literally become somebody else. You don't remember any of the bad things-anything that made you Neil McCormick. Oh, God." Eames looked away, scrubbing a hand over his mouth. "The child must have died in my arms, and you… Christ, you woke up differently. Fuck…"
"I'm going to be okay, aren't I?" Arthur asked, suddenly feeling concerned. He had felt fine when he'd woken up, but now he was being told that something wasn't right, that he wasn't Arthur, that a part of him had possibly died down below in his subconscious.
"Hey," Eric offered suddenly, "he didn't really remember us right away. Maybe it'll just take a little while for his brain to kick back on, you know? Maybe the best thing to do right now is wait it out." Arthur was sure that Eames would have dismissed the ideas of someone who had never used a PASIV before as ludicrous, but at this point no one really knew what was going on.
"Maybe," Eames sighed. "Let's wait a couple of days and see what turns up. I suppose there's nothing else we can do right now."
"So, I'm going to be okay, right?" Arthur asked more sternly, but all he got for answers were subdued looks of uncertainty.
Well, fuck, Arthur thought.
Eames left Arthur in the bedroom to explain the situation to those waiting around outside of it, so Arthur started looking through Neil's old things. There was something about the baseball trophies and old photographs that made him uncomfortable, but he didn't know why. The porno magazines were just as bad but for more obvious reasons. He knew that depravity in such anthologies was to be expected, but some of the boys in the pages of the ones close to the bottom looked way, way too young. The sight of these teen boys tied up and being manhandled by much older men made Arthur feel sick.
Neil's clothes were extremely casual to the point of almost laziness, which was weird for Arthur since he'd always considered himself a rather snappy dresser (though apparently that was only for the last hour or so since he didn't exist until then). He put on the nicest of the clothes that he could find-a pair of jeans without holes in them and a pale blue t-shirt, and then he padded down the hall into the bathroom where he trimmed his hair up the best he could with a pair of scissors he'd found. He combed it so it wasn't hanging so heavily onto his face, but he didn't have any pomade to keep it there. He dug a razor out from behind the mirror and shaved with it, nicking himself on the hinge of his jaw. He pressed his thumb to it to stop the bleeding.
Something about blood.
He couldn't pinpoint it, but there was definitely something familiar in that particular color of red, drawing to mind fuzzy pictures of a nosebleed, of blood caked to his own face and staining his shirt. He wondered where the images had originated from, but they had faded away before he could even attempt to find out. He realized they must have been Neil's memories, maybe even some of the bad things that had happened to mess up his subconscious.
After he was dressed and moderately cleaned up, he grew a bit bored of waiting for Eames to come back, so he walked into the living room on his own. He was immediately met with the gazes of Eames, Eric, his mother, and…
Brian.
Arthur had known Brian was Eric's friend, but looking at him in the flesh brought a welling up of a whole different slew of emotions. They were connected somehow, were close in some way. He wasn't entirely sure it was a happy association, but Arthur had a strong attachment to Brian somehow.
Ellen stood and cautiously walked over to him, touching the side of his face. "So… you're not Neil anymore?" she asked, sounding on the edge of devastation.
"I don't know," Arthur admitted. "Would you still love me if I wasn't?"
"Oh, baby…" she said, eyes welling with tears as she put her arms around him, "Of course I would. You're still my son, no matter what."
Arthur looked at the others in the room: Eames awkwardly shifting foot to foot, Eric avoiding eye contact, and Brian who was looking at Arthur as though he'd never seen him before except in vivid dreams. The expression made him think of a night, Christmastime…
"How long has it been since you two last saw each other?"
"Ten years… Five months… and seven days."
"Something happened to us," he said to Brian. "To you and to Neil. Ten years ago."
Brian paled a little, but he nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Do you remember that then?"
"I remember you came here for Christmas to meet me. You wanted something from me," Arthur said, releasing his mother and taking a step towards the couch where Brian was sitting. "What was it?"
"Answers," Brian replied. "I'd remembered most of it by then, but… I wanted to hear it from you."
"Hear what?" Arthur asked softly, and he felt Eames and Eric both tense as if preparing to leap on Brian to stop him from spilling the beans.
Brian must have sensed their discomfort too because he turned and looked at them and said, "He should know the truth about what happened. I know better than anyone what it's like to be tortured by something you don't remember. Maybe now he's prepared to face it, don't you think?"
Everyone stepped back except for Arthur's mother who had taken his hand and was now squeezing it so tightly that it hurt a little. Arthur thought that perhaps she was hearing it for the first time too, hearing something no one had ever said but had had suspicions about for a long time.
"Do you remember Coach Heider? The Panthers?" Brian asked.
Arthur blinked and suddenly, yes, he did remember. He recalled the picture from the drawer in his bedroom, the trophies, the face of the little boy from his dream next to the man Arthur had been too uncomfortable to look directly at.
"He did something bad to us, didn't he," Arthur breathed, gaze distant. His mother squeezed his hand even tighter, and now he could feel her hand shaking.
Brian nodded, squirming a little in his seat, sniffing as if to make sure there was no blood slipping out of his nose.
Brian had been the one with the nosebleed. It had happened when he fell over and hit the floor after they put his clothes back on.
"Oh," Arthur said, almost robotically. "Oh."
Brian looked down at his lap.
No one had to say anything. All of the pieces of the puzzle were there.
Arthur ran a hand through his hair, exhaling a little shakily. "Oh. Well. Yeah. Okay. I mean… it's… it's okay. Well, no, it isn't, but… it's over now."
Ellen started to cry, and all Arthur could do was put an arm around her and rock her gently. "Hey," he whispered to her, "don't. Don't do that. It's not your fault. It just happened, okay? It's all right."
Brian looked at Eames who was standing there looking brokenhearted over the scene before him. "It's better this way," Brian told him. "He's facing it… which I guess isn't something that he did before. He didn't want to admit that it hurt him."
"I know…" Eames said, sinking down onto the couch next to him. "I guess I was sort of expecting him to turn back into Neil though."
"He's still Neil," Brian assured him lightly. "He's just Neil without all the baggage. That scared little boy that died in your arms… he's at peace now. No one can hurt him anymore. Neil is still in there, but this Arthur he's become protects him. He doesn't have the walls. He has a soldier. I guarantee if you went down into his subconscious again, Neil would be waiting there… and when he's comfortable enough to come back completely, he will. He'll show himself in small doses."
"You really believe that?" Eames asked.
Brian blushed, smiling awkwardly. "I don't know," he said. "It sounds nice though… and it's what I'd do if I were him, I think."
Eames paused, thinking it over, and he nodded. "Well, I hope you're right."
The next couple of days were a bit weird and awkward. Arthur's mother seemed to burst into tears and apologies whenever she'd see him, and Eric and Brian came by every afternoon to see how he was holding up. Arthur would get snippets and pieces of Neil's memory over time, but he really had nothing more to offer them but that.
Eames was bizarrely distant, wandering through the house and smoking cigarettes, only addressing Arthur when he needed to find something. He was cordial and polite, but Arthur wasn't fooled. He knew that Eames was depressed, that Eames was beginning to think that he'd failed, that Eames had lost something very precious to him in Neil.
On the evening of the third day, Arthur leaned in the doorway of the living room and asked if Eames would come back to his room for a minute. Eames, who had been watching Wheel of Fortune with Ellen, looked at his now-asleep couch mate, nodded, and followed him back.
Arthur shut the door, momentarily getting a feeling of déjà vu, and then he turned around. "Eames, were you and I lovers?" he asked.
Eames actually blushed, probably because he hadn't expected the question at all. "I'm not going to mince words with you. Yes, we were. Neil and I."
"That's what I thought," Arthur said softly, looking Eames up and down. He found that he was able to picture him naked, to pinpoint the location and detail of every tattoo, every mole, every freckle. Eames had meant a lot to Neil, more than Neil probably would even admit. No one memorized those kinds of details without caring about the person. "You think what Brian said is true, don't you? That Neil is staying in his subconscious?"
"I don't know," Eames said in a way that most surely meant yes. His poker face just wasn't selling on this night.
"So… are you… angry at him? Do you feel like he's abandoned you?"
"You're quite to the point, Arthur."
"I am a pointman, Eames," Arthur teased, but it fell a little flat. "Answer the question."
"Honestly?" Eames sighed. "I don't know how I feel about the whole thing. I look at you and I see him, but when you move or when you speak it's someone else. I'm a forger, so I'm used to faking it, but-you're not a forgery at all. There's not an ounce of Neil in you, and yet there's so much… I don't know how to explain it. He created you, but he didn't forge you, and if I could just talk to him…" Eames trailed off, visibly drooping before he finished, "I just really want to talk to him. I miss him. I know he's a twat sometimes, but I love him."
There was a beat where no one said anything.
Then, "I love you too, Eames."
Eames looked up, eyes wide. "Neil?" he queried, hesitant.
Neil nodded, arms folding around himself insecurely. "I'm sorry, Eames," he said quietly. "I don't like being me too much these days. You told me that I could be Arthur if I wanted to be, and I think one day I could be… but my body needs to be trained for it, and I know I'd fall back on self-destructive old habits. Even now I want to pretend nothing ever went wrong… but I trust you because you saw what I saw."
"That man who attacked you," Eames said, approaching him slowly. "He's the thing Wendy didn't know about."
"No one knows about it except for you and me. Not even Arthur knows… though he'll probably know when this is over with."
Eames cupped Neil's jaw in his hand and softly asked, "What did he do to you?"
Neil's lips momentarily thinned, and he let his gaze drift off somewhere else before he glanced back at Eames. "He raped me," he said, voice clogged. "In his bathtub. I hit my head, so I passed out after it was over, and he left me on the street."
Eames didn't patronize him by telling him it would be all right or apologize for something he couldn't have stopped even if he wanted to. He just held him, swaying just a little bit in the dim light of the room.
"I can't believe you've actually developed a second personality," Eames said after a while. "That seems like it should be a problem rather than a solution, right? Aren't multiple personalities a bad thing?"
"So I'm a little crazy," Neil replied. "So what? At least I'm aware of it. Besides, Arthur keeps my subconscious fucking clean and organized. I don't think we'll have any problems with it anymore."
"So, you're just going to be Arthur from now on except for moments like this?" Eames asked, pressing a kiss to Neil's cheek.
"I don't really know what I'm doing right now," Neil said, tilting his head back to offer Eames his neck. "I'm hoping someday that me and Arthur will merge together. I think that's possible. I haven't really worked it out yet… but someday I think I'll be one person again. Arthur's still me, or at least a part of me. He holds all the order and keeps me stable because he protects me inside. On the outside, I have you to protect me. I understand if you don't want to stick around though."
"Of course I want to stick around," Eames said, letting his lips linger momentarily over the pulse point in Neil's neck. "Don't be stupid. As long as you're still here, I'll want to stay. I've been so caught up in thinking I'd lost you forever, that I'd destroyed you somehow, but Arthur isn't a replacement or a forgery. He's still you… It's just like Brian said. He's a soldier. He's you without the baggage and baggage or not, I still love you… and even if I never got to speak to you again, if you decided to just let Arthur take over… that would be okay with me. All I want is for you to feel safe and to feel happy and to be at peace. I don't want you to hurt anymore. I want you to be able to sleep at night and to be able to get up in the morning and to do the work that you love and that makes you feel worthwhile."
"I'll get there," Neil said, dropping his forehead to Eames's shoulder. "Someday, I'll get there… but for now I just need some help. I want to have all the good parts of me and the good parts of Arthur. I want his skills and his toughness and all of the cool stuff Wendy and I made up about him… and on my end, I just want… you. Let's face it; you're the best part about me."
"Neil," Eames said, voice shaking a little.
"Just tell Arthur the things he needs to know when you can. He's kind of a stick in the mud, but I'm pretty sure he likes you as much as I do."
Eames squeezed Neil just a little tighter, kissing the top of his head. "I'll take good care of you. Always."
"It's just you and me against the world, Eames. Just you and me… and I trust you with every version of me that exists."
They fell asleep that night, wrapped up in each other's arms, and Neil had the best sleep of his life.