(no subject)
Victory Hold Still
2250 words
5 times Eames shows up at Arthur's place. AKA, Eames gets into a lot of bar fights. Arthur takes care of him. YES, THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN REDUCED TO.
1.
One night, Arthur comes home and blinks at how strongly the place smells of motor oil and gas fumes. Also, the living room lights are on, there’s a hole cut through the window screen, and Eames is sitting on the radiator with his shirt hanging open.
“Ah,” says Eames, as if he’s surprised, as if he hadn’t known this was Arthur’s apartment.
Arthur silently hangs his coat up in the shoebox-sized closet. The apartment is actually a studio, meaning that whichever way he moves, he’ll end up closer to Eames. He extracts a pack of cigarettes from the left pocket and lights one up right there by the front door, blowing the smoke up toward the ceiling light.
“Ran into a spot of trouble,” Eames says, as vague as possible.
“While doing what, boosting cars?” Arthur asks.
The only answer is a resounding rip of Velcro coming apart. Inexplicably, Eames is wearing leather fingerless gloves -- which, if Arthur thinks about it, vacillates between being off-the-charts ridiculous and making complete sense.
Eames bites at the fingertip of his glove and pulls it off with his teeth. Arthur taps ash into the empty beer bottle on the counter. “You look like a lifelong insomniac,” he points out. “Have you been sleeping at all?”
Eames still has his chin tilted down, but he flicks his gaze up to meet Arthur’s, eyes crinkling a bit. The skin around them is rubbed a tired pink, and his chin is angular in a way that’s familiar enough not to be off-putting but only just so. The lighting in the studio is pretty shitty, but Arthur can still differentiate between shadows and bruises; that patchy silhouette peeking past Eames’s open shirt is definitely the latter. His head also looks the slightest bit uneven, which means there’s swelling somewhere on his scalp.
Arthur remains silent and just continues smoking.
“I’ll be out by tomorrow,” Eames promises.
“By all means,” Arthur says with faint sarcasm, spreading his arms wide. It’s more practical to act like he’d actually been considering kicking Eames out.
Eames smiles. Without another word, he drops the gloves and heads into the bathroom, where the water starts up almost immediately.
There’s only one towel in there. Arthur finishes his cigarette while resolutely not thinking about how Eames will probably handle that situation.
*
2.
When Arthur picks up the phone, he’s expecting a reserved greeting and maybe some news of a job, but what he gets is blasting guitars and a rough, unfamiliar voice demanding, “Is this Arthur?”
“Who’s calling?” Arthur frowns. He has three phones on him at any given time: one for ‘business’, one for ‘personal’, and one for ‘hardworking normal citizen who gets soliciting calls like any other normal citizen’. This call is coming through on the first one, when it should be on the third.
“The Viper Lounge,” the guy says, which is when Arthur recognizes the music as a White Snake song. “Listen, there’s some crazy guy here who says he knows you. Name’s Eaves or Jeeves or something, but he gave me this number. You gotta come get him out of here, man, he’s fucking nuts.”
Arthur stares at his computer screen, where his e-mail window is still maximized: eames going to the states. short notice -- will probably be there by tonight.
Sometimes Arthur worries that wiring Yusuf ridiculous amounts of money every month in return for information on Eames’s whereabouts is overkill, but phone calls like this reassure him that it’s the right thing to do.
Arthur suddenly feels empathy for all the parents in the world. He snaps back into motion and exits out of the computer browser. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t think that’s my responsibility.”
“Well, your friend just went outside and is probably going to get his ass beat. Is that your responsibility?”
“He can hold his own, I’m sure,” Arthur dismisses. “Thank you, good night.”
He’s as sure about this statement as he ever can be about anything -- the nature of his job has made him wary of absolutes a long time ago, but the thought of Eames losing a bar fight is almost laughable.
Still, after he hangs up, he tosses his phone from one hand to the other, then decides to head down there anyway. Google tells him that The Viper Lounge is only three blocks away, so Arthur shrugs on a jacket and starts the walk.
When Eames has a purpose or goal, he’s the guy sitting on three-day stakeouts, forgoing all kinds of hygiene and eating only dry oatmeal for sustenance. During jobs, he’s a veritable waterfall of ideas, and even though well more than half of them have to be thrown out because lack of experience by the rest of the team or just because the idea is absolutely insane, Arthur’s secure in the knowledge that Eames is pretty brilliant when it comes down to it.
The downside of this is, if Eames doesn’t have anything to do, he gets bored. Very, very bored.
By the time Arthur gets to The Viper Lounge, the crowd is in full swing, judging by what he can see through the windows. The glass is all fogged up, but Arthur can still pick out a man at the bar who’s holding an icepack to his head. He’s standing on his own and laughing with people. Going by that fact, Eames must be in good enough shape for a decathlon.
Instead, Arthur’s foot nudges something soft when he shuffles closer to the window. That something grunts, “Arthur.”
Arthur blinks down at the prone body on the sidewalk. “What the hell. Eames?” he finally says, and his voice comes out flat when he’s actually pretty blown away.
“I recognized your shoes,” Eames coughs. Then he rolls over, effectively using Arthur’s foot as a pillow. He grins up at Arthur and the streetlights glint off his teeth, which are stained with a transparent sheen of red.
“It’s way too late for me to pretend I didn’t see you, isn’t it?” Arthur asks after another pause.
“We both know you’re too much of a Good Samaritan to even entertain that option,” Eames points out.
With his lungs practically bursting from things unsaid and sighs not exhaled, Arthur eases his foot out from underneath Eames’s head. Eames turns and spits onto the asphalt. In the shadows, it looks like a dark inkblot.
*
3.
Arthur cleans the blood off, then pokes at the wound and says, “For ex-special forces, you sure as hell can’t throw a punch.”
“But I can take one,” Eames breathes out, mouth spreading into a grin. “Isn’t that what matters, in the end?”
Arthur considers this. “Still much less efficient than being able to throw a punch.”
“Your perspicacity is astounding,” Eames states, and his voice is akin to a cat’s purr, with an undercurrent of something raspier that scrapes its way out of his throat.
Arthur stares at him dead in the eye, ignoring the urge to swallow. After a few seconds, he shifts his focus and concentrates on slowly applying the butterfly tape. Eames looks away as he does so, and it’s easy for Arthur to steal quick glances at Eames’s lashes, the freckles that echo over his cheeks before fading away. His skin is warm under Arthur’s hands.
“So, what is it, a testosterone dump?” Arthur asks in a low voice, mostly because close proximity seems to call for it. “Are you some kind of masochist who likes getting the shit kicked out of them? Or maybe you're just a horrible fighter outside of dreams.”
Eames simply says, “Just keeping sharp.”
In reality, it’s probably a predictable combination of Eames’s tendency to experiment with people’s boundaries and his exponentially declining hand-to-hand skills when too much alcohol gets involved. Eames is rarely the type to yell and actively provoke someone. He much prefers to do it slyly, digging his nails in and pulling at whatever weakness he can grab a hold of. Then people feel like they’ve been played, in addition to insulted, and Eames is usually too drunk to even try to block the incoming hits.
Fittingly, he’s also the type to pick at scabs before they’re ready to come off.
“That’s going to scar,” Arthur says as Eames worries at a weeks-old wound on his cheek.
“It’s not going to be anywhere near as bad as the one on your elbow,” Eames says, “so take comfort in that.”
All things considered, Arthur is relatively scar-free. The only exception to that is the thin, raised line about four inches long that bisects the inner crease of his elbow. He’d cut it open on some barbed wire and an ER doctor had stitched it up, but the wound had reopened a few days later when he’d gotten into some deep shit in rural China. By the time he’d gotten back to Guangzhou, the infection had been giving off a noticeable scent.
Eames wasn't there, which means he’s either heard the story or catalogued the scar's existence to memory.
When Arthur looks at the clock, its digits swim in his vision for a bit. 3:23 a.m. He gets up from the couch, tosses away all the garbage, and then heads to the kitchen. “Here,” he calls, opening the freezer and tossing Eames a bag of peas.
“Good to know you’ve fully grown in to Cobb’s mothering tendencies,” says Eames.
“I'm not the one needing to be cleaned up like an infant,” Arthur replies.
He turns out the light without bothering to warn Eames. It stays off through the night; Arthur knows his apartment well enough to walk through it in the dark, and he has no problems when switching out the bag of peas for a fresh one a few hours later.
*
4.
“Hey,” Eames says. His eyes are bright and watery, even in the low light. There’s a thick river of red running out of both nostrils and his left eye is already swelling. “Hello. We should leave now.”
“Should we,” Arthur repeats.
“Yes. I got us kicked out.”
After only a brief pause, Arthur drains the rest of his drink and slides out of the booth with no complaints. For some reason, Eames grins wide at him, then trails behind as they push their way through to the doors.
Of course there are people waiting for them outside, and of course Arthur practically walks right into someone’s fist with his face. In the end, he gets blood all over his new tie and bits of gravel have pressed permanent grooves into his shirt. He doles out several broken noses, though, and manages to fend off three people without too much effort.
Everyone scatters when a car rolls by while honking incessantly. Arthur’s staring up at the sky when Eames’s face comes into view. He looks -- troubled, which is something Arthur isn’t used to seeing so candidly.
“Sorry,” Eames says too loudly, probably still drunk. “Sorry, I’m sorry -- ”
“What?” Arthur croaks. “You’ve almost gotten me killed tons of times, you asshole. There was that one time, with the scythe, and -- seriously, you’re apologizing for a bar fight?”
Eames just touches Arthur’s lip, which feels freshly bruised. “Besides,” Arthur adds, “those were the guys I was talking shit to while you were in the bathroom, so.”
The punch to his shoulder hurts more than anything else so far. They lean on each other all the way home.
*
5.
“Certain circumstances have come to a head,” Eames is saying. The volume keeps cutting in and out. “I shouldn’t risk heading back to Britain, or several other locations...in the eastern hemisphere...for that matter,” he adds, sounding more and more distracted by the end.
It’s almost four in the morning. There are iridescent slivers lying all over the floor by Arthur’s bed, the remnants of some nature sounds CD that had been stuffed into his mailbox when he’d checked it for the first time in months. He’d tried it as a last resort, after melatonin and other OTC drugs. Chancing it with prescriptions was too risky, seeing as how the last time he took Ambien, one of the lasting effects was that his subconscious was plagued by mythical creatures with a propensity for tearing the heads off any intruders.
After Cobb and Saito had woken up and Arthur had gotten home from the most quietly fucked up flight in the history of aviation, three years worth of jetlag had seemed to hit all at once, forming some kind of black hole of sleep where the exhaustion collapsed in on itself and warped inside-out. The result has been Arthur not being able to sleep for more than a couple hours at a time, and it’s been going on for weeks.
“Eames,” Arthur nearly barks.
“Yes?” Eames replies, more alert, the word coming through loudly in the earpiece.
Arthur pauses, then says, “You’re picking at the wrong lock. And it’s already open anyway.”
The third floor window is pretty high up from the sidewalk, but it’s still easy to see the exact moment that Eames looks up and meets Arthur’s eyes without any hesitation. Even from this distance, and despite the wide smile, Arthur can recognize the tired slump of his shoulders, the way his hair is shorn close to his scalp around the sides like it always is in times of stress.
Light from the hallway spills over Eames’s feet as he opens the building door and disappears from view. Arthur turns and sits on the windowsill, waiting for Eames to come through his front door.
2250 words
5 times Eames shows up at Arthur's place. AKA, Eames gets into a lot of bar fights. Arthur takes care of him. YES, THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN REDUCED TO.
1.
One night, Arthur comes home and blinks at how strongly the place smells of motor oil and gas fumes. Also, the living room lights are on, there’s a hole cut through the window screen, and Eames is sitting on the radiator with his shirt hanging open.
“Ah,” says Eames, as if he’s surprised, as if he hadn’t known this was Arthur’s apartment.
Arthur silently hangs his coat up in the shoebox-sized closet. The apartment is actually a studio, meaning that whichever way he moves, he’ll end up closer to Eames. He extracts a pack of cigarettes from the left pocket and lights one up right there by the front door, blowing the smoke up toward the ceiling light.
“Ran into a spot of trouble,” Eames says, as vague as possible.
“While doing what, boosting cars?” Arthur asks.
The only answer is a resounding rip of Velcro coming apart. Inexplicably, Eames is wearing leather fingerless gloves -- which, if Arthur thinks about it, vacillates between being off-the-charts ridiculous and making complete sense.
Eames bites at the fingertip of his glove and pulls it off with his teeth. Arthur taps ash into the empty beer bottle on the counter. “You look like a lifelong insomniac,” he points out. “Have you been sleeping at all?”
Eames still has his chin tilted down, but he flicks his gaze up to meet Arthur’s, eyes crinkling a bit. The skin around them is rubbed a tired pink, and his chin is angular in a way that’s familiar enough not to be off-putting but only just so. The lighting in the studio is pretty shitty, but Arthur can still differentiate between shadows and bruises; that patchy silhouette peeking past Eames’s open shirt is definitely the latter. His head also looks the slightest bit uneven, which means there’s swelling somewhere on his scalp.
Arthur remains silent and just continues smoking.
“I’ll be out by tomorrow,” Eames promises.
“By all means,” Arthur says with faint sarcasm, spreading his arms wide. It’s more practical to act like he’d actually been considering kicking Eames out.
Eames smiles. Without another word, he drops the gloves and heads into the bathroom, where the water starts up almost immediately.
There’s only one towel in there. Arthur finishes his cigarette while resolutely not thinking about how Eames will probably handle that situation.
*
2.
When Arthur picks up the phone, he’s expecting a reserved greeting and maybe some news of a job, but what he gets is blasting guitars and a rough, unfamiliar voice demanding, “Is this Arthur?”
“Who’s calling?” Arthur frowns. He has three phones on him at any given time: one for ‘business’, one for ‘personal’, and one for ‘hardworking normal citizen who gets soliciting calls like any other normal citizen’. This call is coming through on the first one, when it should be on the third.
“The Viper Lounge,” the guy says, which is when Arthur recognizes the music as a White Snake song. “Listen, there’s some crazy guy here who says he knows you. Name’s Eaves or Jeeves or something, but he gave me this number. You gotta come get him out of here, man, he’s fucking nuts.”
Arthur stares at his computer screen, where his e-mail window is still maximized: eames going to the states. short notice -- will probably be there by tonight.
Sometimes Arthur worries that wiring Yusuf ridiculous amounts of money every month in return for information on Eames’s whereabouts is overkill, but phone calls like this reassure him that it’s the right thing to do.
Arthur suddenly feels empathy for all the parents in the world. He snaps back into motion and exits out of the computer browser. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t think that’s my responsibility.”
“Well, your friend just went outside and is probably going to get his ass beat. Is that your responsibility?”
“He can hold his own, I’m sure,” Arthur dismisses. “Thank you, good night.”
He’s as sure about this statement as he ever can be about anything -- the nature of his job has made him wary of absolutes a long time ago, but the thought of Eames losing a bar fight is almost laughable.
Still, after he hangs up, he tosses his phone from one hand to the other, then decides to head down there anyway. Google tells him that The Viper Lounge is only three blocks away, so Arthur shrugs on a jacket and starts the walk.
When Eames has a purpose or goal, he’s the guy sitting on three-day stakeouts, forgoing all kinds of hygiene and eating only dry oatmeal for sustenance. During jobs, he’s a veritable waterfall of ideas, and even though well more than half of them have to be thrown out because lack of experience by the rest of the team or just because the idea is absolutely insane, Arthur’s secure in the knowledge that Eames is pretty brilliant when it comes down to it.
The downside of this is, if Eames doesn’t have anything to do, he gets bored. Very, very bored.
By the time Arthur gets to The Viper Lounge, the crowd is in full swing, judging by what he can see through the windows. The glass is all fogged up, but Arthur can still pick out a man at the bar who’s holding an icepack to his head. He’s standing on his own and laughing with people. Going by that fact, Eames must be in good enough shape for a decathlon.
Instead, Arthur’s foot nudges something soft when he shuffles closer to the window. That something grunts, “Arthur.”
Arthur blinks down at the prone body on the sidewalk. “What the hell. Eames?” he finally says, and his voice comes out flat when he’s actually pretty blown away.
“I recognized your shoes,” Eames coughs. Then he rolls over, effectively using Arthur’s foot as a pillow. He grins up at Arthur and the streetlights glint off his teeth, which are stained with a transparent sheen of red.
“It’s way too late for me to pretend I didn’t see you, isn’t it?” Arthur asks after another pause.
“We both know you’re too much of a Good Samaritan to even entertain that option,” Eames points out.
With his lungs practically bursting from things unsaid and sighs not exhaled, Arthur eases his foot out from underneath Eames’s head. Eames turns and spits onto the asphalt. In the shadows, it looks like a dark inkblot.
*
3.
Arthur cleans the blood off, then pokes at the wound and says, “For ex-special forces, you sure as hell can’t throw a punch.”
“But I can take one,” Eames breathes out, mouth spreading into a grin. “Isn’t that what matters, in the end?”
Arthur considers this. “Still much less efficient than being able to throw a punch.”
“Your perspicacity is astounding,” Eames states, and his voice is akin to a cat’s purr, with an undercurrent of something raspier that scrapes its way out of his throat.
Arthur stares at him dead in the eye, ignoring the urge to swallow. After a few seconds, he shifts his focus and concentrates on slowly applying the butterfly tape. Eames looks away as he does so, and it’s easy for Arthur to steal quick glances at Eames’s lashes, the freckles that echo over his cheeks before fading away. His skin is warm under Arthur’s hands.
“So, what is it, a testosterone dump?” Arthur asks in a low voice, mostly because close proximity seems to call for it. “Are you some kind of masochist who likes getting the shit kicked out of them? Or maybe you're just a horrible fighter outside of dreams.”
Eames simply says, “Just keeping sharp.”
In reality, it’s probably a predictable combination of Eames’s tendency to experiment with people’s boundaries and his exponentially declining hand-to-hand skills when too much alcohol gets involved. Eames is rarely the type to yell and actively provoke someone. He much prefers to do it slyly, digging his nails in and pulling at whatever weakness he can grab a hold of. Then people feel like they’ve been played, in addition to insulted, and Eames is usually too drunk to even try to block the incoming hits.
Fittingly, he’s also the type to pick at scabs before they’re ready to come off.
“That’s going to scar,” Arthur says as Eames worries at a weeks-old wound on his cheek.
“It’s not going to be anywhere near as bad as the one on your elbow,” Eames says, “so take comfort in that.”
All things considered, Arthur is relatively scar-free. The only exception to that is the thin, raised line about four inches long that bisects the inner crease of his elbow. He’d cut it open on some barbed wire and an ER doctor had stitched it up, but the wound had reopened a few days later when he’d gotten into some deep shit in rural China. By the time he’d gotten back to Guangzhou, the infection had been giving off a noticeable scent.
Eames wasn't there, which means he’s either heard the story or catalogued the scar's existence to memory.
When Arthur looks at the clock, its digits swim in his vision for a bit. 3:23 a.m. He gets up from the couch, tosses away all the garbage, and then heads to the kitchen. “Here,” he calls, opening the freezer and tossing Eames a bag of peas.
“Good to know you’ve fully grown in to Cobb’s mothering tendencies,” says Eames.
“I'm not the one needing to be cleaned up like an infant,” Arthur replies.
He turns out the light without bothering to warn Eames. It stays off through the night; Arthur knows his apartment well enough to walk through it in the dark, and he has no problems when switching out the bag of peas for a fresh one a few hours later.
*
4.
“Hey,” Eames says. His eyes are bright and watery, even in the low light. There’s a thick river of red running out of both nostrils and his left eye is already swelling. “Hello. We should leave now.”
“Should we,” Arthur repeats.
“Yes. I got us kicked out.”
After only a brief pause, Arthur drains the rest of his drink and slides out of the booth with no complaints. For some reason, Eames grins wide at him, then trails behind as they push their way through to the doors.
Of course there are people waiting for them outside, and of course Arthur practically walks right into someone’s fist with his face. In the end, he gets blood all over his new tie and bits of gravel have pressed permanent grooves into his shirt. He doles out several broken noses, though, and manages to fend off three people without too much effort.
Everyone scatters when a car rolls by while honking incessantly. Arthur’s staring up at the sky when Eames’s face comes into view. He looks -- troubled, which is something Arthur isn’t used to seeing so candidly.
“Sorry,” Eames says too loudly, probably still drunk. “Sorry, I’m sorry -- ”
“What?” Arthur croaks. “You’ve almost gotten me killed tons of times, you asshole. There was that one time, with the scythe, and -- seriously, you’re apologizing for a bar fight?”
Eames just touches Arthur’s lip, which feels freshly bruised. “Besides,” Arthur adds, “those were the guys I was talking shit to while you were in the bathroom, so.”
The punch to his shoulder hurts more than anything else so far. They lean on each other all the way home.
*
5.
“Certain circumstances have come to a head,” Eames is saying. The volume keeps cutting in and out. “I shouldn’t risk heading back to Britain, or several other locations...in the eastern hemisphere...for that matter,” he adds, sounding more and more distracted by the end.
It’s almost four in the morning. There are iridescent slivers lying all over the floor by Arthur’s bed, the remnants of some nature sounds CD that had been stuffed into his mailbox when he’d checked it for the first time in months. He’d tried it as a last resort, after melatonin and other OTC drugs. Chancing it with prescriptions was too risky, seeing as how the last time he took Ambien, one of the lasting effects was that his subconscious was plagued by mythical creatures with a propensity for tearing the heads off any intruders.
After Cobb and Saito had woken up and Arthur had gotten home from the most quietly fucked up flight in the history of aviation, three years worth of jetlag had seemed to hit all at once, forming some kind of black hole of sleep where the exhaustion collapsed in on itself and warped inside-out. The result has been Arthur not being able to sleep for more than a couple hours at a time, and it’s been going on for weeks.
“Eames,” Arthur nearly barks.
“Yes?” Eames replies, more alert, the word coming through loudly in the earpiece.
Arthur pauses, then says, “You’re picking at the wrong lock. And it’s already open anyway.”
The third floor window is pretty high up from the sidewalk, but it’s still easy to see the exact moment that Eames looks up and meets Arthur’s eyes without any hesitation. Even from this distance, and despite the wide smile, Arthur can recognize the tired slump of his shoulders, the way his hair is shorn close to his scalp around the sides like it always is in times of stress.
Light from the hallway spills over Eames’s feet as he opens the building door and disappears from view. Arthur turns and sits on the windowsill, waiting for Eames to come through his front door.