This Ain't A Song For The Broken Hearted (It's Just My Life) (3/4)
Title: This Ain't A Song For The Broken Hearted (It's Just My Life)
Author: paracaerouvoar
Artist: milenaa
Type: Slash
Word Count: 15, 208
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Arthur/Eames, Arthur/OMC (brief)
Warnings Violence, sexual content, strong language, angst, minor OC character death, spoilers for the movie (although, if you’re reading this before you see the movie, then you’re silly. Go see the movie.)
Summary:: It’s been five years since Dublin. Enough time to begin and end a relationship, snapshot moments stretching out into half a decade, and Arthur sits in a bar and thinks of Eames. Eames and everything that could have been and that was, and Arthur wants to regret, wants to remember how not to love, but there’s a pub in Ireland that just won’t let him. It’s been five years since Dublin, and Arthur can’t seem to let go...
Masterpost
Chapter Two
Arthur turns and stands, hopping off the barstool with every intention of leaving, but Eames’ hand grips his wrist lightly, and Eames looks so open, so vulnerable, that Arthur just can’t find it in himself to leave. Not right now. So he sits back down and orders another drink, something stronger than scotch, because something tells him he’s going to need it. They drink in silence, before Eames, staring at the fingerprint smudges in front of him, speaks. ‘Where are you going now? After that job, I’d think somewhere quiet.’ He sounds calm, matter-of-fact, almost like talking to a stranger. Maybe that’s what Arthur is to him now.
‘Where are you going?’ returns Arthur evenly.
‘I was thinking Athens,’ muses Eames, tilting his now empty glass to one side, balancing it on the bar. ‘Your turn.’
‘Dublin.’ Arthur says it quietly, turning to look Eames in the face, the first eye-contact he’s made all evening. He watches expressions flickering across Eames’ face. Shock, covered up by betrayal, a flash or anger, and something strange clinging to the tail end of the Englishman’s thought-process. Something almost wistful, like he was remembering Dublin.
Thought how could he forget? Arthur knows that Dublin is burnt into his memory. Dublin and everything it meant to Arthur and Eames’ fucked-up, dysfunctional relationship. It was a beginning of sorts, and almost certainly an ending. No matter what happens to Arthur, what happens to Eames, they’ll always have had Dublin.
Guilt. For the first time in a long time, Arthur looks at Eames and feels guilt, and understands how it made Cobb into a ghost, a shade. Guilt is slow burning, carnivorous. Guilt is not picky, isn’t bothered by who it sinks it’s all too human claws into.
Arthur feels guilt and wonders whether it was worth bringing Dublin up at all.
Eames waves the bartender over and orders a new drink. Arthur doesn’t listen to the words, what he orders, just the tone of voice, but he can’t hear anything different. Just the same old Eames, right down to his feet. But the eyes. That emotion is still clinging to the edge of the easy smile he gives the bartender in return for his drink.
Arthur looks at the glass and sees Dublin. ‘Vodka and coke?’ he manages to get out, but all he can hear in his head are jovial Irish accents plying them with more drinks, always more drinks. Hot lips on fevered skin, and hands touching everywhere, constantly touching.
Eames takes a drink. ‘Your move,’ he says simply, without tone or inflection, yet Arthur never heard anything sound as much like ‘checkmate’ before.
He sits in silence, watching Eames drink slowly, calmly, until the glass is empty and he orders another. More silence as he watches the drink being mixed and brought over, until Eames takes a sip of this one, Arthur watching the line of his throat as he swallows.
‘I do miss you, you know,’ Eames says suddenly, voice barely perceptible over the noise of the rapidly filling bar. So quiet, so un-Eames-like that Arthur looks at him, really, really looks at him, wondering, just wondering if this is the real Eames [if all this is really just a dream?]. He can feel the weight of his totem in his pocket, but he doesn’t roll it. Not yet. Not until he’s sure he wants to know [if he ever does].
Eames is looking at him, and Arthur knows he has to say something, anything, so he says ‘You miss me? Let’s not forget who walked away from this, from us. Because it sure as hell wasn’t me.’
--
It’s three years after Dublin, and somewhere along the way Arthur forgot how to love. How to not hate Eames to the point of feeling like he’s burning up inside, like he’ll explode if he doesn’t do something, anything.
He pins Eames to the wall, snarling as he claws at his clothes, a truly hideous sunflower yellow shirt that deserves to be ripped to shreds. He claims the older man’s mouth with hot lips, thrusting his tongue inside and licking up the roof of his mouth with a fierce intensity that used to scare him. Untucking the shirt from where it had been escaping from Eames’ pants, he rakes nails down his chest, making him moan and writhe under Arthur’s hands, the noises swallowed by his roaming mouth or the noise from the club next door, the thick drum and bass beat vibrating through the ground to jump in Arthur’s belly next to the lust that’s pooling there as Eames attempts to wrest some control back by tearing his mouth from the younger mans and scraping his teeth along Arthur’s jaw and nibbling savagely at his collarbone.
Arthur’s knees sag momentarily and he braces himself against the wall, Eames trapped between two unyielding, immovable objects. He tries to remedy this, gripping Arthur tighter in an attempt to rebalance things, in turn pinning the other man against the wall, but Arthur merely wraps a hand around the nape of his neck, growling no into Eames’ neck as he presses open mouthed kisses there, his free hand fumbling at his belt buckle.
They fuck right there, against the alley wall covered in blood and graffiti, and it fails to make Arthur feel dirty like it used to. They don’t speak as they clean up, tucking back in and zipping up, and when they’re done they leave, walking out of the alley and heading in different directions silently, and Arthur can’t help but feel they left their relationship, broken and battered as it was, lying in the alley next to the smudges of come decorating the brickwork. Arthur goes home to his apartment, rented and empty apart from the bed and an open suitcase, the contents folded meticulously, just downstairs from Eames’ real apartment. They’re in London for a job, Arthur and Eames and Cobb and Kyle, the team well on their way to extraction notoriety, and with their newfound success comes all the flaws and annoying idiosyncrasies that four starving artists [as Kyle calls them, a smirk dancing on his lips every time] could once ignore and no longer can.
They all act exactly the same of course, because they haven’t changed in any way that seems important right now, but suddenly the first thing that springs to mind for Arthur right now is Kyle’s mindless optimism, unfailing in anything that anyone should [and does] hold dear, and the fact that Cobb’s wife is following them into their dreams, sabotaging anything she can get her hands on, and all Dom can do is draw away from the others, refusing to learn about the dreams Kyle builds in the hope that one day Mal will be gone, forced out of the dream with simple boredom on her part.
And what annoys him more than anything else is Eames. Arthur can’t [doesn’t want to] explain it exactly, but all the little things about Eames [he smokes too much, and plays piano at three in the morning, when his insomnia wears lines in his face and holes in the carpet from pacing, and Arthur can’t find it in himself to feel any more sympathy for the man so intent on destroying whatever they both built up together] are pushing them apart faster than anything they could do deliberately.
Arthur knows it’s not solely Eames’ fault though. He knows that he has things about him that drive Eames to smoking two, three packs in as many days, and he knows that it’s probably his fault that has Eames pacing for hours at a time, picking out tunes on the piano that he used to listen to and smile, and now he can’t listen to them, because they remind him of when everything wasn’t falling apart. He knows that Eames won’t be back until dawn, because that’s what happens when one of them walks out. They leave, because they’re scared of what’ll happen if they stay.
He also knows that he’ll come back though. Arthur doesn’t even want to think about what’ll happen, what he’ll do if Eames doesn’t come back. Because this relationship is frayed and torn, but at the end of the day, it’s Them, and it’s been Them for so long Arthur honestly doesn’t know how to be just Him. It’s been eighteen months of loving Eames and hating Eames and doing both at the same time so much that it’s all Arthur is, at the end of the day. He is Eames, and Eames is him, and he knows it’s not healthy being so wrapped up in one person, one thing, but right now, he doesn’t care.
Right now, he’s just waiting for the sun to come up, and Eames to walk through the front door smelling of smoke and alcohol, and he’ll fall into bed before deciding he can’t sleep and he’ll play the piano for hours until Arthur wants to break every single one of its keys. And if that’s how things are from now on, Arthur’ll take it for what it is.
Just don’t ask him what it is.
--
Eames has been gone for three weeks, and this time, Arthur doesn’t think he’s coming back. The job in London is long since finished, clumsily because of their absentee forger, and the team decided to split and lay low for a while. Cobb to Kenya, Kyle to New York, and Arthur…
Arthur went to Dublin.
The little pub he stayed at before was gone, replaced by a neon monstrosity full of teenagers, barely legal and high on whatever they can get their fifteen year old hands on. He moves on, through the bustling city, and it’s only been three years, but it looks like an alien world to him. Quieter than New York, but crazy compared to serene Paris, Dublin is in between worlds. He finds an inn, Tudor design out of place beside the Holiday Inn and Pizza Hut, but for Arthur it’s perfect.
It’s the best night’s sleep he’s had since Eames left.
The third night he’s there, he’s woken in the morning by a knock on the door, and the stereotypical little old lady [the one that always seems to be the murderer in these sorts of places, but he won’t dwell on that]. She’s holding a postcard, a cheap one from somewhere tacky, and it’s blank, apart from the address. She shrugs, and hands it over, and he spends a few seconds turning it over, and reading the address in the cramped and hard to read handwriting he knows better than his own.
Eames.
That son of a bitch. He just can’t leave Arthur alone. He’s not content with leaving. Arthur just knows that this won’t be the last postcard he gets, somehow.
--
Arthur knows he has to stop getting drunk and being like this with people, but right now he’s very drunk, and he really couldn’t care less how he’s behaving tonight.
Even if said behaviour does consist of backing Kyle up against a wall and kissing him until his mouth doesn’t taste of Eames anymore. He’s nibbling along Kyle’s jaw when he feels the taller man pull away mere millimetres to breathe words into Arthur’s ear.
‘What is this?”
Arthur moves along his jawbone, licking and sucking where it meets his neck. ‘What’s what?’
Kyle’s back arches as Arthur presses a burning kiss to a spot just under his ear, fingers brushing along the sensitive skin just above the waistband of his dress pants. ‘This,’ he hisses, pressing his thumbs into the hollow under Arthur’s hip bones, hands icy cold, like the wind he just came in from. It’s winter in Berlin, and they’ve had almost six inches of snow today. That, coupled with the hurricane like winds and three weeks of previous snow, and all the planes in and out of Berlin Airport have been grounded, or Arthur would have fled to Melbourne. As well as being sunny, it has the added bonus of being one of the places that they’ve never had a job, and therefore Eames has never been inside his apartment there, and it remains untouched by the suffocating fog of Eames that permeates his Paris apartment, and his New York apartment, and countless other buildings.
He doesn’t answer Kyle, bracing himself against the bathroom wall with one hand at the side of Kyle’s head, and moves his head to bite at his collarbone, free hand unbuttoning the younger man’s shirt to give him better access, and Kyle breathes his name, Arthur hitching in the middle of his whisper that reminds him uncomfortably of how he sounded when Eames made him scream.
He dips his thumb under the waistband, nipping at his shoulder with his teeth before reminding him that ‘It’s Daniel right now, not Arthur. You can’t afford to break cover now.’
‘Answer me,’ Kyle whispers fiercely.
Arthur pulls back completely to regard him, before leaning back in, millimetres separating their lips. He can feel Kyle’s breath hot on his skin. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks, voice low but not whispering, rough with lust.
‘You’ve been wandering around since Eames left like you’ve had your dick chopped off, and you have no fucking clue what you’re gonna do now, until about half an hour ago, where you attached yourself to my face like you’ve been doing it for years. I gotta tell you, Daniel,’ [Arthur ignores the tone in which the word curls over him, ignores the burning anger sizzling into lust beaming out of the azure eyes] Kyle leans forward and bites Arthur’s lip, savagely, curling it under with his teeth, almost drawing blood, Arthur thinks. ‘It feels a little like I’m the rebound guy. So forgive me for asking what the fuck you’re doing.’ He presses his lips to Arthur’s quick, chaste. ‘Not complaining you understand. Just curious.’
Arthur presses closer to Kyle, the cold bathroom tiles on the other man’s back, bare from where his shirt’s ridden up, and mashes his lips to him for just a second, before backing away enough to look him in the eye. ‘You’re honestly gonna tell me you care either way?’ He asks, watching as Kyle pants for breath, chest heaving, pupils blown, lips swollen and scarlet.
He answers by wrapping the hand that’s not entwined with Arthur’s belt around the nape of his neck, pulling him in for another kiss and licking his way into Arthur’s mouth, drawing the very tip across the roof of his mouth and making him shudder.
Arthur grins, feral, and swallows the kiss deeper.
--
Arthur’s stomach twists with guilt and pain as he watches Kyle sag between two men bigger than he thought men could be. One of Arthur’s eyes is crusted shut with dried blood that still trickles from a cut on his forehead, but the other can’t look away. Can’t stop looking into Kyle’s eyes, too blue surrounded by all the red. It streams from his eyes, like tears of blood, and Arthur’s vision blurs with nausea as he realises they chopped his tear ducts out. Blood leaks like spilled wine, streaking down his face every time he closes his eyes, opening the wound that has no time to close.
Arthur cries his own salty tears because Kyle can’t.
Arthur fights because Kyle can’t. Not with two men twisting his arms until it looks like his elbow joints will pop, blowing through the skin with fragments of used-to-be-bone. Like his knee, now useless dead weight, his right leg dragging behind him, ruined. They have to be dreaming, they can’t be awake. He wrestles free from his own guards, hunting in pockets for his totem, now a dulled red die that shines despite the layer of hard living it gained, not unlike him. It’s in his hand, and he’s rolling it, about to roll when a boot comes down hard on his hand, shattering the fingers, the hand, the wrist. He screams, and his totem is gone, hidden in the mess of bone shards that used to be his hand.
Kyle’s trying to speak past chipped teeth and torn lips, and Arthur’s pretty sure his jaw’s broken [as sure he can be when the pain in his hand is making his vision go white and there are bells ringing in his ears like air raid sirens], but he still tries to speak, spitting out words and molars like he’ll die if he doesn’t. Flecks of blood fly out with the mangled words, and Arthur can’t hear anything over the sound of his own screaming as the boot comes back down, grinding his hand into the concrete floor. He forces his head up, looking at Kyle, fighting past the pain in his hand and the ringing in his head that’s a thousand times worse than the nausea he felt earlier, and his blood runs cold, then hot as he realises what Kyle’s mouthing.
’Dreaming.’
They’re dreaming. He doesn’t know if it’s true, he can’t roll his totem with a broken hand, the other busy curling into ribs he knows are broken, but if all he has to trust is Kyle, then he has to. He unfolds from his foetal position, ignoring the broken glass feeling in his lungs and reaches for a gun he knows they haven’t found and his hand snaps forward, perfect marksmanship hitting first one of the men holding Kyle, then the other, and he winces as the architect hits from the floor and vomits blood, red strings of bile hanging from shredded lips. Arthur’s gasping for breath as he rolls over, flinching when his broken ribs shift, jabbing at his lungs and firing again, and he keeps firing at the man who broke his hand, his ribs, the man who shot Kyle in the stomach and made him watch. He fires until he has two bullets left.
One for Kyle, and one for himself.
--
He wakes up slowly, eyelids heavy as he blinks away the black, and he can’t understand why his limbs aren’t working like they should. His mind is foggy, and so is his vision, and he fights to clear it, struggling to sit up and wincing when he pushes himself up using his right hand, dropping back to hit the pillows behind him and hissing in pain as that jolts ribs that he thinks are broken. He stares blearily at his hand, covered in white plaster from knuckles to elbow, his index and middle fingers taped together and his hand looks blindingly white with it all. His throat is dry, scratchy, like he’s been screaming in his dreams.
And then he remembers what he was dreaming about, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been this scared in his life. Bile rises in his throat, and he rolls to his side, coughing and sputtering as he splatters on the floor, just missing the rug he knows as his own, and he realises he’s in his own apartment.
More pieces slide into place as his ribs [definitely broken, he decides] scream at him for the movement, and the injury is just too close to that which he sustained in the dream world that he decides it’s time to panic. His chest contracts, and there are iron bars on his ribs and he fights to draw breath, voice creaking as he calls out names. Cobb. Kyle. Eam- His breath catches in his throat as he realises that he lost Eames, and he might have lost Kyle, too. And he doesn’t think he can handle that.
He chokes on the next panicked breath, and Cobb is there suddenly, there like he’s always been when Arthur needed him, like Arthur had been for him when he lost Mal, and his hand is on Arthur’s chest, not crushing, just restraining, and he’s shouting at Arthur to calm down and breathe slowly or he’ll shoot him, goddamnit, and Arthur can feel the iron bars loosening as Cobb talks, incessant, unrelenting, until he’s breathing normally, and the black spots vanish from his eyes.
He licks his lips and tastes dry blood, like rust and salt on his tongue. He doesn’t think he can speak yet, his throat torn to pieces by things he was doing while he ‘slept’, but he still coughs out one more word, Kyle, and he watches as Cobb hides a wealth of emotions behind the mask built by the death of his wife, yet his eyes tell Arthur that something’s wrong, seriously wrong, and Arthur’s heart skips a beat all over again. Cobb swallows and looks away, and Arthur knows, just knows that Kyle’s gone, and he’s not coming back. There’s something hollow in his chest, hollow like when Eames left, but his eyes stay dry. He cried all his tears while he was dreaming.
Chapter Four
Author: paracaerouvoar
Artist: milenaa
Type: Slash
Word Count: 15, 208
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Arthur/Eames, Arthur/OMC (brief)
Warnings Violence, sexual content, strong language, angst, minor OC character death, spoilers for the movie (although, if you’re reading this before you see the movie, then you’re silly. Go see the movie.)
Summary:: It’s been five years since Dublin. Enough time to begin and end a relationship, snapshot moments stretching out into half a decade, and Arthur sits in a bar and thinks of Eames. Eames and everything that could have been and that was, and Arthur wants to regret, wants to remember how not to love, but there’s a pub in Ireland that just won’t let him. It’s been five years since Dublin, and Arthur can’t seem to let go...
Masterpost
Chapter Two
Arthur turns and stands, hopping off the barstool with every intention of leaving, but Eames’ hand grips his wrist lightly, and Eames looks so open, so vulnerable, that Arthur just can’t find it in himself to leave. Not right now. So he sits back down and orders another drink, something stronger than scotch, because something tells him he’s going to need it. They drink in silence, before Eames, staring at the fingerprint smudges in front of him, speaks. ‘Where are you going now? After that job, I’d think somewhere quiet.’ He sounds calm, matter-of-fact, almost like talking to a stranger. Maybe that’s what Arthur is to him now.
‘Where are you going?’ returns Arthur evenly.
‘I was thinking Athens,’ muses Eames, tilting his now empty glass to one side, balancing it on the bar. ‘Your turn.’
‘Dublin.’ Arthur says it quietly, turning to look Eames in the face, the first eye-contact he’s made all evening. He watches expressions flickering across Eames’ face. Shock, covered up by betrayal, a flash or anger, and something strange clinging to the tail end of the Englishman’s thought-process. Something almost wistful, like he was remembering Dublin.
Thought how could he forget? Arthur knows that Dublin is burnt into his memory. Dublin and everything it meant to Arthur and Eames’ fucked-up, dysfunctional relationship. It was a beginning of sorts, and almost certainly an ending. No matter what happens to Arthur, what happens to Eames, they’ll always have had Dublin.
Guilt. For the first time in a long time, Arthur looks at Eames and feels guilt, and understands how it made Cobb into a ghost, a shade. Guilt is slow burning, carnivorous. Guilt is not picky, isn’t bothered by who it sinks it’s all too human claws into.
Arthur feels guilt and wonders whether it was worth bringing Dublin up at all.
Eames waves the bartender over and orders a new drink. Arthur doesn’t listen to the words, what he orders, just the tone of voice, but he can’t hear anything different. Just the same old Eames, right down to his feet. But the eyes. That emotion is still clinging to the edge of the easy smile he gives the bartender in return for his drink.
Arthur looks at the glass and sees Dublin. ‘Vodka and coke?’ he manages to get out, but all he can hear in his head are jovial Irish accents plying them with more drinks, always more drinks. Hot lips on fevered skin, and hands touching everywhere, constantly touching.
Eames takes a drink. ‘Your move,’ he says simply, without tone or inflection, yet Arthur never heard anything sound as much like ‘checkmate’ before.
He sits in silence, watching Eames drink slowly, calmly, until the glass is empty and he orders another. More silence as he watches the drink being mixed and brought over, until Eames takes a sip of this one, Arthur watching the line of his throat as he swallows.
‘I do miss you, you know,’ Eames says suddenly, voice barely perceptible over the noise of the rapidly filling bar. So quiet, so un-Eames-like that Arthur looks at him, really, really looks at him, wondering, just wondering if this is the real Eames [if all this is really just a dream?]. He can feel the weight of his totem in his pocket, but he doesn’t roll it. Not yet. Not until he’s sure he wants to know [if he ever does].
Eames is looking at him, and Arthur knows he has to say something, anything, so he says ‘You miss me? Let’s not forget who walked away from this, from us. Because it sure as hell wasn’t me.’
--
It’s three years after Dublin, and somewhere along the way Arthur forgot how to love. How to not hate Eames to the point of feeling like he’s burning up inside, like he’ll explode if he doesn’t do something, anything.
He pins Eames to the wall, snarling as he claws at his clothes, a truly hideous sunflower yellow shirt that deserves to be ripped to shreds. He claims the older man’s mouth with hot lips, thrusting his tongue inside and licking up the roof of his mouth with a fierce intensity that used to scare him. Untucking the shirt from where it had been escaping from Eames’ pants, he rakes nails down his chest, making him moan and writhe under Arthur’s hands, the noises swallowed by his roaming mouth or the noise from the club next door, the thick drum and bass beat vibrating through the ground to jump in Arthur’s belly next to the lust that’s pooling there as Eames attempts to wrest some control back by tearing his mouth from the younger mans and scraping his teeth along Arthur’s jaw and nibbling savagely at his collarbone.
Arthur’s knees sag momentarily and he braces himself against the wall, Eames trapped between two unyielding, immovable objects. He tries to remedy this, gripping Arthur tighter in an attempt to rebalance things, in turn pinning the other man against the wall, but Arthur merely wraps a hand around the nape of his neck, growling no into Eames’ neck as he presses open mouthed kisses there, his free hand fumbling at his belt buckle.
They fuck right there, against the alley wall covered in blood and graffiti, and it fails to make Arthur feel dirty like it used to. They don’t speak as they clean up, tucking back in and zipping up, and when they’re done they leave, walking out of the alley and heading in different directions silently, and Arthur can’t help but feel they left their relationship, broken and battered as it was, lying in the alley next to the smudges of come decorating the brickwork. Arthur goes home to his apartment, rented and empty apart from the bed and an open suitcase, the contents folded meticulously, just downstairs from Eames’ real apartment. They’re in London for a job, Arthur and Eames and Cobb and Kyle, the team well on their way to extraction notoriety, and with their newfound success comes all the flaws and annoying idiosyncrasies that four starving artists [as Kyle calls them, a smirk dancing on his lips every time] could once ignore and no longer can.
They all act exactly the same of course, because they haven’t changed in any way that seems important right now, but suddenly the first thing that springs to mind for Arthur right now is Kyle’s mindless optimism, unfailing in anything that anyone should [and does] hold dear, and the fact that Cobb’s wife is following them into their dreams, sabotaging anything she can get her hands on, and all Dom can do is draw away from the others, refusing to learn about the dreams Kyle builds in the hope that one day Mal will be gone, forced out of the dream with simple boredom on her part.
And what annoys him more than anything else is Eames. Arthur can’t [doesn’t want to] explain it exactly, but all the little things about Eames [he smokes too much, and plays piano at three in the morning, when his insomnia wears lines in his face and holes in the carpet from pacing, and Arthur can’t find it in himself to feel any more sympathy for the man so intent on destroying whatever they both built up together] are pushing them apart faster than anything they could do deliberately.
Arthur knows it’s not solely Eames’ fault though. He knows that he has things about him that drive Eames to smoking two, three packs in as many days, and he knows that it’s probably his fault that has Eames pacing for hours at a time, picking out tunes on the piano that he used to listen to and smile, and now he can’t listen to them, because they remind him of when everything wasn’t falling apart. He knows that Eames won’t be back until dawn, because that’s what happens when one of them walks out. They leave, because they’re scared of what’ll happen if they stay.
He also knows that he’ll come back though. Arthur doesn’t even want to think about what’ll happen, what he’ll do if Eames doesn’t come back. Because this relationship is frayed and torn, but at the end of the day, it’s Them, and it’s been Them for so long Arthur honestly doesn’t know how to be just Him. It’s been eighteen months of loving Eames and hating Eames and doing both at the same time so much that it’s all Arthur is, at the end of the day. He is Eames, and Eames is him, and he knows it’s not healthy being so wrapped up in one person, one thing, but right now, he doesn’t care.
Right now, he’s just waiting for the sun to come up, and Eames to walk through the front door smelling of smoke and alcohol, and he’ll fall into bed before deciding he can’t sleep and he’ll play the piano for hours until Arthur wants to break every single one of its keys. And if that’s how things are from now on, Arthur’ll take it for what it is.
Just don’t ask him what it is.
--
Eames has been gone for three weeks, and this time, Arthur doesn’t think he’s coming back. The job in London is long since finished, clumsily because of their absentee forger, and the team decided to split and lay low for a while. Cobb to Kenya, Kyle to New York, and Arthur…
Arthur went to Dublin.
The little pub he stayed at before was gone, replaced by a neon monstrosity full of teenagers, barely legal and high on whatever they can get their fifteen year old hands on. He moves on, through the bustling city, and it’s only been three years, but it looks like an alien world to him. Quieter than New York, but crazy compared to serene Paris, Dublin is in between worlds. He finds an inn, Tudor design out of place beside the Holiday Inn and Pizza Hut, but for Arthur it’s perfect.
It’s the best night’s sleep he’s had since Eames left.
The third night he’s there, he’s woken in the morning by a knock on the door, and the stereotypical little old lady [the one that always seems to be the murderer in these sorts of places, but he won’t dwell on that]. She’s holding a postcard, a cheap one from somewhere tacky, and it’s blank, apart from the address. She shrugs, and hands it over, and he spends a few seconds turning it over, and reading the address in the cramped and hard to read handwriting he knows better than his own.
Eames.
That son of a bitch. He just can’t leave Arthur alone. He’s not content with leaving. Arthur just knows that this won’t be the last postcard he gets, somehow.
--
Arthur knows he has to stop getting drunk and being like this with people, but right now he’s very drunk, and he really couldn’t care less how he’s behaving tonight.
Even if said behaviour does consist of backing Kyle up against a wall and kissing him until his mouth doesn’t taste of Eames anymore. He’s nibbling along Kyle’s jaw when he feels the taller man pull away mere millimetres to breathe words into Arthur’s ear.
‘What is this?”
Arthur moves along his jawbone, licking and sucking where it meets his neck. ‘What’s what?’
Kyle’s back arches as Arthur presses a burning kiss to a spot just under his ear, fingers brushing along the sensitive skin just above the waistband of his dress pants. ‘This,’ he hisses, pressing his thumbs into the hollow under Arthur’s hip bones, hands icy cold, like the wind he just came in from. It’s winter in Berlin, and they’ve had almost six inches of snow today. That, coupled with the hurricane like winds and three weeks of previous snow, and all the planes in and out of Berlin Airport have been grounded, or Arthur would have fled to Melbourne. As well as being sunny, it has the added bonus of being one of the places that they’ve never had a job, and therefore Eames has never been inside his apartment there, and it remains untouched by the suffocating fog of Eames that permeates his Paris apartment, and his New York apartment, and countless other buildings.
He doesn’t answer Kyle, bracing himself against the bathroom wall with one hand at the side of Kyle’s head, and moves his head to bite at his collarbone, free hand unbuttoning the younger man’s shirt to give him better access, and Kyle breathes his name, Arthur hitching in the middle of his whisper that reminds him uncomfortably of how he sounded when Eames made him scream.
He dips his thumb under the waistband, nipping at his shoulder with his teeth before reminding him that ‘It’s Daniel right now, not Arthur. You can’t afford to break cover now.’
‘Answer me,’ Kyle whispers fiercely.
Arthur pulls back completely to regard him, before leaning back in, millimetres separating their lips. He can feel Kyle’s breath hot on his skin. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks, voice low but not whispering, rough with lust.
‘You’ve been wandering around since Eames left like you’ve had your dick chopped off, and you have no fucking clue what you’re gonna do now, until about half an hour ago, where you attached yourself to my face like you’ve been doing it for years. I gotta tell you, Daniel,’ [Arthur ignores the tone in which the word curls over him, ignores the burning anger sizzling into lust beaming out of the azure eyes] Kyle leans forward and bites Arthur’s lip, savagely, curling it under with his teeth, almost drawing blood, Arthur thinks. ‘It feels a little like I’m the rebound guy. So forgive me for asking what the fuck you’re doing.’ He presses his lips to Arthur’s quick, chaste. ‘Not complaining you understand. Just curious.’
Arthur presses closer to Kyle, the cold bathroom tiles on the other man’s back, bare from where his shirt’s ridden up, and mashes his lips to him for just a second, before backing away enough to look him in the eye. ‘You’re honestly gonna tell me you care either way?’ He asks, watching as Kyle pants for breath, chest heaving, pupils blown, lips swollen and scarlet.
He answers by wrapping the hand that’s not entwined with Arthur’s belt around the nape of his neck, pulling him in for another kiss and licking his way into Arthur’s mouth, drawing the very tip across the roof of his mouth and making him shudder.
Arthur grins, feral, and swallows the kiss deeper.
--
Arthur’s stomach twists with guilt and pain as he watches Kyle sag between two men bigger than he thought men could be. One of Arthur’s eyes is crusted shut with dried blood that still trickles from a cut on his forehead, but the other can’t look away. Can’t stop looking into Kyle’s eyes, too blue surrounded by all the red. It streams from his eyes, like tears of blood, and Arthur’s vision blurs with nausea as he realises they chopped his tear ducts out. Blood leaks like spilled wine, streaking down his face every time he closes his eyes, opening the wound that has no time to close.
Arthur cries his own salty tears because Kyle can’t.
Arthur fights because Kyle can’t. Not with two men twisting his arms until it looks like his elbow joints will pop, blowing through the skin with fragments of used-to-be-bone. Like his knee, now useless dead weight, his right leg dragging behind him, ruined. They have to be dreaming, they can’t be awake. He wrestles free from his own guards, hunting in pockets for his totem, now a dulled red die that shines despite the layer of hard living it gained, not unlike him. It’s in his hand, and he’s rolling it, about to roll when a boot comes down hard on his hand, shattering the fingers, the hand, the wrist. He screams, and his totem is gone, hidden in the mess of bone shards that used to be his hand.
Kyle’s trying to speak past chipped teeth and torn lips, and Arthur’s pretty sure his jaw’s broken [as sure he can be when the pain in his hand is making his vision go white and there are bells ringing in his ears like air raid sirens], but he still tries to speak, spitting out words and molars like he’ll die if he doesn’t. Flecks of blood fly out with the mangled words, and Arthur can’t hear anything over the sound of his own screaming as the boot comes back down, grinding his hand into the concrete floor. He forces his head up, looking at Kyle, fighting past the pain in his hand and the ringing in his head that’s a thousand times worse than the nausea he felt earlier, and his blood runs cold, then hot as he realises what Kyle’s mouthing.
’Dreaming.’
They’re dreaming. He doesn’t know if it’s true, he can’t roll his totem with a broken hand, the other busy curling into ribs he knows are broken, but if all he has to trust is Kyle, then he has to. He unfolds from his foetal position, ignoring the broken glass feeling in his lungs and reaches for a gun he knows they haven’t found and his hand snaps forward, perfect marksmanship hitting first one of the men holding Kyle, then the other, and he winces as the architect hits from the floor and vomits blood, red strings of bile hanging from shredded lips. Arthur’s gasping for breath as he rolls over, flinching when his broken ribs shift, jabbing at his lungs and firing again, and he keeps firing at the man who broke his hand, his ribs, the man who shot Kyle in the stomach and made him watch. He fires until he has two bullets left.
One for Kyle, and one for himself.
--
He wakes up slowly, eyelids heavy as he blinks away the black, and he can’t understand why his limbs aren’t working like they should. His mind is foggy, and so is his vision, and he fights to clear it, struggling to sit up and wincing when he pushes himself up using his right hand, dropping back to hit the pillows behind him and hissing in pain as that jolts ribs that he thinks are broken. He stares blearily at his hand, covered in white plaster from knuckles to elbow, his index and middle fingers taped together and his hand looks blindingly white with it all. His throat is dry, scratchy, like he’s been screaming in his dreams.
And then he remembers what he was dreaming about, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been this scared in his life. Bile rises in his throat, and he rolls to his side, coughing and sputtering as he splatters on the floor, just missing the rug he knows as his own, and he realises he’s in his own apartment.
More pieces slide into place as his ribs [definitely broken, he decides] scream at him for the movement, and the injury is just too close to that which he sustained in the dream world that he decides it’s time to panic. His chest contracts, and there are iron bars on his ribs and he fights to draw breath, voice creaking as he calls out names. Cobb. Kyle. Eam- His breath catches in his throat as he realises that he lost Eames, and he might have lost Kyle, too. And he doesn’t think he can handle that.
He chokes on the next panicked breath, and Cobb is there suddenly, there like he’s always been when Arthur needed him, like Arthur had been for him when he lost Mal, and his hand is on Arthur’s chest, not crushing, just restraining, and he’s shouting at Arthur to calm down and breathe slowly or he’ll shoot him, goddamnit, and Arthur can feel the iron bars loosening as Cobb talks, incessant, unrelenting, until he’s breathing normally, and the black spots vanish from his eyes.
He licks his lips and tastes dry blood, like rust and salt on his tongue. He doesn’t think he can speak yet, his throat torn to pieces by things he was doing while he ‘slept’, but he still coughs out one more word, Kyle, and he watches as Cobb hides a wealth of emotions behind the mask built by the death of his wife, yet his eyes tell Arthur that something’s wrong, seriously wrong, and Arthur’s heart skips a beat all over again. Cobb swallows and looks away, and Arthur knows, just knows that Kyle’s gone, and he’s not coming back. There’s something hollow in his chest, hollow like when Eames left, but his eyes stay dry. He cried all his tears while he was dreaming.
Chapter Four