9. Painted Hand
Fandom: Inception
Length: 4334
Genre: romance/humor
Pairings: Cobb/Saito
Disclaimer: these characters belong to Christopher Nolan
Warnings: contains mentions of PTSD and domestic violence, but focuses mainly on the aftermath of a really bad Monday morning....
Summary: What happens when two loving killah-killahs are trying to be domestic and raise children? Blood on Philippa's homework, and an awkward meeting with her teacher....
Cobb's stomach hurt in the silence. He was alone in the master bedroom, ready for bed but not tired. He heard James laughing down the hall- must have turned his TV back on. The tired man distracted himself with a mission down the hallway to remind his son it was bedtime. Grumbling, James turned off the flat screen and surrendered the remote at his father's behest. One more reminder about the morning being Monday and a long division test, and Cobb said goodnight to his ever-growing-taller son for a second time and returned to the master bedroom.
He was in a big lonely bed feigning sleep when Saito arrived home. More silence, now accented with the scuff of polished shoes on carpet, the hiss of a silk tie pulled off, the rustle of clothes from limbs. The memory foam mattress made no noise and did not disturb Cobb's side of the bed in the slightest when the other man lowered his weight to it. All sound on mute, he might not have been there, but Cobb could already smell him- slightly spicy cologne and California ocean air from riding with his windows down.
Cobb's fists closed tightly to keep from reaching, and he bit his cheek to keep from speaking. He did not manipulate his breath into simulating sleep patterns; he was not trying to hide his state of unrest. His eyes were open, had barely blinked since the door opened. His whole body was tense.
We will continue this later.
That was the last thing Saito had said to him, earlier that day at the offices. Cool, aloof, unperturbed by all of Cobb's yelling, like he just didn't care anymore. We will continue this later. Cobb was waiting for that promise to be filled. He would not start it; he would not give Saito the satisfaction.
Saito reclined on his side of the bed and turned out the lights. He didn't say a word. (We will continue this later.) Not a single word. He did not reach for Cobb. Cobb wasn't surprised. His jaw popped it was clenched so hard. He lay there with his darkened blue eyes staring intensely from under a heavy brow into the shadows of their room. Saito must have fallen asleep to the labored breathing of the silently raging.
….
"Philippa Cobb, may I ask you what this is on the back of your homework?"
"Oh. That would be blood, Mrs. Mourner."
"And where did it come from?"
"Well, it's what happens when you combine two middle-aged men with short-fused, explosive tempers over burnt toast, and sexual frustration on a Monday morning."
"What?"
"My fathers got in a big fight this morning and at one point Otoosan spat blood in Dad's face. He wiped it off and then must have touched this as he overturned the table; that's his hand print there."
…
"When the student was questioned about it, the reply was that it was of course her step father's blood because her fathers were fighting like always. The blood came to be on the paper when one father spat his blood into the other's face."
"Phill!" Cobb hissed as Saito, with a nervously gracious smile, leaned forward to respectfully explain, "My daughter is often dramatic and flowery with her language- she gets it from her grandfather. This morning was bumpy but in no way a disgrace. I assure you that all is well at home."
"Mr. Saito, we will not write a child's rather glib reference to domestic violence off as flowery language."
Cobb spoke up here, eyes settled darkly on the teacher, "Your statement used phrases like, of course and like always. Phill didn't use those words, exactly, now did she." It wasn't a question.
"Well, no," the teacher yielded, "But her tone implied as much. Mr. Cobb, if you and your husband bloody each other's faces over burnt toast-"
"There were deeper conflicts present than blackened bread," Cobb said lowly, pushing air through his nose. "And I assure you that violence is not the regular method of solving any of our family's issues." He frowned, eyes dropping down to the carpet and his ringed hand stretched the corners of his mouth wide. He shrugged, "This morning was a freak occurrence."
"Pardon me," Saito cut in with a stiff frown, "but how did she describe the incident, exactly?"
"No dictation of the conversation was being taken, Mr. Saito, but that does rather bring us to another issue."
"And what would that be?" Cobb asked shooting a sideways look of reprimand at his daughter, because if the teacher was going to say that the girl had used vulgar language, she was getting her allowance revoked. Philippa was sitting in her chair in silence, slouched so that her school uniform jacket was crinkling.
"She blamed the fight not only on burned toast but," the teacher hesitated with an awkward smile plastered on her placid features, eyes darting between them, to Philippa, to her hands and then back to Cobb with her eyelids lowered delicately, "sexual frustration."
"PHILIPPA!" Cobb cried even as Saito snapped at her in Japanese for an explanation of her behavior. Philippa rose to Saito's comment in haughty Japanese, clearly doing an impression of her step-father, I answered a question. It is your behavior this morning, Otoosan, that is what is in question. He responded in rapid undertones that the proper course of action would have been to talk to her fathers about it, not parade the problem in front of her teachers and get authorities involved!
But the teacher raised her hands. "English, please!" her nostrils flared and the woman eyed Philippa intently as if trying to determine whether or not the girl had been threatened in the exchange of foreign syllables or at all coached on what to say. Or maybe the teacher was just impressed that the new girl had spoken the difficult language so fluently in the first place. Cobb eyed his daughter as well, worried about her sudden and barely repressed animosity toward her stepfather.
"Sexual frustration," the teacher said, moving forward, "was the exact phrase she used, so there are no grounds to punish her for inappropriate language. In fact, I commend her use of intelligent words in lieu of her more vulgar choices. The content of her speech, however, may be a little advanced for a sixth grader. We are curious as to how your daughter links such aggression to sex, or even the lack thereof, and in such a flippant, every-day way."
"Mrs. Mourner," Cobb tried a laugh, nervously scratching the back of his skull with one finger, "I'm not sure what you're implying here."
"Do you casually chat with your daughter about the details of your sex life?"
"Of course not!" Saito replied in a dark tone. Cobb dropped fingers on Saito's wrist to rein him in. He held up a hand to the teacher and the mean-faced child protective services agent behind her. He was a thin man who hadn't spoken a word all meeting, and who was studying them with intense silence.
"Our daughter is in no way privy to indecency in our home." Philippa wouldn't meet Cobb's eye when he looked at her and his stomach dropped with a bad feeling. He ignored it for now, continuing to sell his point so that they could get out of this mess, "She does have a natural understanding of sex as an act of closeness in a loving relationship, and as an intelligent young woman she might have deduced that a lack of said closeness can lead to bad feelings."
"And has there been a lack?" Philippa piped up suddenly, voice small and tentative, eyes on the carpet and cheeks going red.
"Oh, sweetheart," Cobb breathed, ignoring the teacher completely now and leaning toward his daughter to take her hand. The worried look on Philippa's face was Mal all over again and it broke Cobb's heart. "Everything is good between Aang and me, I promise."
"Otoosan?" she asked of Saito with a glance up at him, who smiled and nodded, taking one of her hands and one of Cobb's as well. He spoke to her kindly (and in English for the teacher's sake), "We have resolved everything, Pippa-chan."
"Philippa," the child protective services agent said kindly, "Could you wait outside? We'd like a word with your parents."
She went obediently, fingers dragging out of the hands of both her fathers. Cobb loosed a breath, jumping his eyebrows at his husband who gave him a reserved look of panic before they turned back to face their accusers.
"Mr. Saito," the man said, "We were told that in the fight you spat a mouthful of blood into Mr. Cobb's face." Saito colored in the cheeks and looked down and the man continued with momentum, "Your children were witness to this rather horrific behavior and yet were packed off to school by the family driver with no explanation."
Cobb cleared his throat to interject before Saito's slipping grip on his temper failed him. "Explanations were given to the kids. We told them things had gotten out of hand, that we were ashamed and sorry they had to see it."
"But it seems now that Philippa hadn't been reassured."
"She's complicated like her mother," Cobb snapped. "I admit that I failed to read her. She said she was okay and I believed her."
The agent looked uninterested in this little fact and looked over at the rigid shape of Saito in his chair. "How often do your disagreements reach such a physical level, Mr. Saito?"
Cobb saw it on his partner's face that he would love to say a few choice words here but instead he echoed from Cobb's assurances from earlier, "This morning was a freak occurrence." God bless him, he managed a breezy apologetic smile and a self-depreciating laugh, all of which made Cobb want to put his arms around him. "I am afraid I was seeing red this morning when I spat in Dom's face. I childishly allowed my manners to fail me for the purposes of dramatic effect."
"Why did you hit him, Dom?" the man asked. Cobb's cheeks filled with heat and his first instinct was to be outraged and refuse to answer the question. Instead, Saito caught his hand and gave it a squeeze and he answered truthfully, "We'd been arguing since yesterday. When the toast went wrong this morning, I shoved him out of the way and he shoved back, and when I blocked the toaster from him, he attempted to reach around me for the plate of bread. It startled me. I- misread --his position as an attack and slammed my skull back into his nose."
"It was an accident," Saito laughed, lightly touching his tender nose where the inside corners of his eyes were darkened. "I often forget his hand-to-hand combat skills are on a hair trigger."
"Combat skills?" the teacher asked.
"Dream-sharing," Cobb supplied readily. "I did some combat simulation work for army recruit training." In the fashion of a master con, it was not a complete lie. Though he was omitting the part where all he'd ever done in that chapter of his life was build the dreams; the fighting and killing came way later and had not been paid for by any government. But they didn't need to know that.
"An accident," the agent repeated dubiously.
Cobb was ready with defense, "He let pain fuel anger and anger fuel spitting in the face of my apology. I let that fuel more anger. It escalated from there into a wrestling match. The kitchen got wrecked but there were no more serious injuries beyond his nose."
The teacher and the agent looked at one another and the agent shrugged, turned back to them with a dramatic draw of breath, "Well, Mr. Cobb, Mr. Saito, we are sorry, but as it is unfortunately suspicious circumstances, this will go on your record."
"What?"
"I am going to believe you that it was an accident," the man cut in. "Because of that little circle of smiles thing I saw just a minute ago." He made a circular motion around the room, encompassing Cobb and Saito and Philippa's empty chair like their joined hands had done. "Don't push me out of my decision that your violence this morning over toast was a freak occurrence that warrants no further investigation into your parenting techniques."
Cobb and Saito clamped their jaws shut and nodded. Standing, they made their final apologies and goodbyes and left the office.
….
"Pip, you should have known goddamn better than to turn in the bloodied homework!" Cobb cried loudly once the family was enclosed in the back of the limo. "You should have recopied it on the way! What were you thinking turning that in, huh? Why would you do that?"
"Did you want them to know that we had been fighting?" Saito asked, looking across at the girl with sad eyes. "Did we frighten you?"
"No!" she snapped, giving away the opposite. She sighed, dramatically rolling her eyes. "I don't see why everyone's making such a big deal out of this!"
"You don't see?" Cobb cried, blue eyes glaring wildly and hairline flattened under his palm, "That was child protective services, Pippa. Don't you understand what that means? We were almost deemed unfit to keep you! They were breathing down our necks about your safety!" And they were looking at my forged past records.
He didn't add that last part, but it made him shift uncomfortably in his seat and glance at Saito, who's stoic expression said he knew this danger all too well himself. He dropped a hand on Dom's thigh, a warm, reassuring, loving touch, but it didn't linger.
Cobb's nostrils flared as he watched the hand pull away. No. Not allowed to cling to propriety right now. He chased the hand, caught it, and pushed his fingers through Saito's, dragging him back over and dropping their joined hands on his thigh, Saito's hand down. He liked the comfort of it. His heart rate was returning to normal the further from the private school the limo took them.
He'd been panicked since being shown his own handprint, painted in his lover's blood, on his daughter's homework while under the judgmental gaze of someone with the authority to take his children from him (again, God, he wouldn't survive it) but now with Saito's hand in his and the threat of losing his babies gone, he was calming down.
"Are you angry with us for the move?" Saito asked. "Do you wish to return to Tokyo?"
She nodded her head even as James shrugged in an I-wouldn't-mind-going-home-now-if-we-can way. Cobb squeezed Saito's hand, infinitely grateful that he'd found a partner who knew to ask these questions. Sometimes Cobb felt he was so old he'd completely forgotten what it was like to be an innocent child. He had to stop expecting them to behave like adults about everything. No one had said the move back to L.A. would be easy, but it was necessary.
Cobb smiled weakly at his son, who smiled back in a reassuring way. "I like it here."
"You do?" Cobb asked.
"Yeah! All the kids think it's awesome that I lived in Japan and can speak Japanese. It's like I'm Superman away from home."
Saito chuckled warmly. Cobb laughed himself and ruffled the kid's hair. "You'll get all the girls, Jamie."
The boy nodded like he was fly, and Philippa snorted. Cobb's eyes snapped to her. She wasn't out of the fire yet, and Cobb wasn't ready to forgive her betrayal.
"At the very least, Pip, you could have answered differently when they asked you what is was," he continued the lecture in a calmer voice that became less calm when he looked up from the way his and Saito's wedding rings were touching and saw Philippa's stubbornly-set chin. "Preserved our privacy, huh? What were you thinking?" He fanned the incrementing paper in his other hand angrily. "This could've been explained in four concise words!" He waved the bloody hand for each word, "This Was. An. Accident."
James piped up then from his seat beside his sister, "I. Consider. This. Art."
Saito smiled at the eight year old boy who so resembled his handsome father. "Or four syllables," he said, mouth scrunching to the side as he put dramatic thought to his answer, then a short phrase in Japanese that made James snicker. Cobb felt his anger dissipate rapidly at the sight of James and Saito smiling together. With a minute of thought, he added a French phrase, four words four syllables.
Reluctantly, Philippa smiled, rolled her eyes, beaten. Like Cobb, she couldn't stay mad when her family was happy, not when her anger stemmed from self-consciousness in the first place. Her embarrassment at having so poorly failed to use common sense was quickly erased with the light hearted word game. But her eyes darkened soon afterwards; she most likely couldn't shake the last tendrils of worry as she remembered her father breaking Saito's nose, apologizing, but then, blood-spattered and pissed, turning over the kitchen table with a curse and rugby tackling Saito into the dishwasher.
"What were you guys fighting about?" James asked catching onto his sister's worry like it was contagious.
Saito caught Cobb's eye. Neither was sure how to put it into words. Saito dropped a second hand on the one he held and gave the children a gentle, teasing smile, "Love is not strong if it is not tested, like a rough stone polished smooth by the sea."
"But what were you fighting about?" Philippa prodded, challenging the side step answer that'd been heavily disguised as a wise proverb.
Cobb sighed, chuckled, "Both of us were being silly."
Running Proclus Global together was occasionally a competition between them, who could do it better, who could make which head-honcho decisions without consulting the other first. Then there was the never ending work of raising restless adolescents. It was busybusybusy and worryworryworry sprinkled in among a constant stream of feeling like they were doing it all wrong and screwing the kids up.
On top of that, their relationship had compromised a business deal because the client perceived their marriage as indecent, meanwhile they'd not been having enough sex (Philippa had been remarkably perceptive of that and it simultaneously disturbed and impressed Cobb that she could read adults so easily. DID THAT MEAN SHE KNEW WHAT THEY'D DONE THIS MORNING TO MAKE UP AFTER SHE AND JAMES HAD LEFT FOR SCHOOL?) and they'd started fighting because yesterday had been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back when Saito smiled (that little wicked glinting smile, that wanting smile) at a pretty Japanese woman as she left a conference room.
You wanted her.
No, I did not.
Did too, I know you, goddamn it.
Calm down.
Don't talk to me like that. I'd be overreacting if we were just fuckbuddies, but we're not. We're married for Chrissakes! Vows. Fidelity. That is NOT how you look at people who aren't your husband!
Keep your voice down; the whole company will hear you.
Let them hear me! Or, wait, no we can't let the world know we like to touch each other-they don't like it and we'll lose their business. Better to keep that under the table and fuck random women to maintain a more suitable image.
I only looked, Dom. I did nothing else. Were you always this jealous of a husband?
Jealous?
Insecure, even.
Fuck you. You haven't looked at me since the Akimoto deal fell through.
Buzz of intercom. Uh-excuse me… Sir?
Yes, Mitchel?
Meeting's starting, sir.
We will continue this later.
At the beginning of their relationship, the way Saito became so disconnected and ruthless whenever he was offended or scared was cause for a lot of insecurity on Cobb's behalf. It hadn't been easy for Cobb to accept his feelings toward a man in the first place, but he had done, and he'd fallen in love, and sometimes he felt he'd been cruelly tricked by some heartless puppeteer who just liked to watch him squirm. Those insecure feelings had come fewer and farther between the more they fell into one another, and since their fairly recent wedding this was the first resurface of it.
So, yes, Cobb was a jealous husband; it came with having the ghost of one man wrapped around his heart so tightly that the organ wouldn't survive if he was removed. Cobb was no stranger to such gut wrenching pain; he'd felt about Mal the same way. It was the only way Cobb knew how to love.
James and Philippa were soothed by his sincere answer that it was just some silliness, which Saito elaborated on with a softly chuckled, "a senseless squabble fixed with some kindness."
"So you aren't going anywhere, Otoosan?" Philippa asked, tone subtly accusing. Cobb recalled her earlier hostility towards him and Saito did, too, asking,
"Why would I ever leave my family?"
Philippa shrugged, "You might change your mind. Mom did. She changed her mind about wanting to stay here with us. You might, too."
"Never," Saito promised with a wink. Philippa reluctantly returned his grin and then looked at her father, her expression apologetic but relieved and happy. Cobb's heart twisted at the thought of his daughter torturing herself with notions that she would lose a beloved parent again.
The poor child, she had been the perfect age for tramatization when Mal left them and Cobb ran away. He'd regained her trust by returning, had proven he'd never not come back. Saito, however, had no way of proving he would never leave when things got bad. He filled a delicate capacity in her life, one her scars prevented her from trusting too deeply.
The best they could do (short of Inception anyway, which was out of the question) was ask her to take a leap of faith.
As Saito asked after James's math test, Cobb dropped his head back to rest. It'd been quite the last two days and he was ready to go home and relax. Saito slid closer but only close enough that his knee brushed Cobb's leg. Cobb's mouth quirked at the corner from the contact and the blackness behind his eyelids filled with Saito's black/brown eyes glittering at extremely close proximity.
He could still feel the man's thumbs tracing his jaw as the heavily accented breath washed over his mouth, smelling like the mountain dew he'd gulped to get the taste of blood out of his mouth. Saito's little wicked, wanting smile, and his low, breathy voice had doled out the above mentioned kindness in his native tongue, words that Cobb's lower stomach ached to hold onto. No more room for jealousy, anata. I followed you out of Limbo. I will follow you for the rest of my life.
Saito held his hand all the way home.
F I N
a/n: Weirdly, this is a continuation of a much longer Dom/Saito that hasn't even been written yet, but that exists in the strange Limbo place of the cognitive phase. One day it will be written down. And it will be epic.
COMMENT! PRETTY PLEASE WITH A JAPANESE HUSBAND ON TOP?
Length: 4334
Genre: romance/humor
Pairings: Cobb/Saito
Disclaimer: these characters belong to Christopher Nolan
Warnings: contains mentions of PTSD and domestic violence, but focuses mainly on the aftermath of a really bad Monday morning....
Summary: What happens when two loving killah-killahs are trying to be domestic and raise children? Blood on Philippa's homework, and an awkward meeting with her teacher....
Cobb's stomach hurt in the silence. He was alone in the master bedroom, ready for bed but not tired. He heard James laughing down the hall- must have turned his TV back on. The tired man distracted himself with a mission down the hallway to remind his son it was bedtime. Grumbling, James turned off the flat screen and surrendered the remote at his father's behest. One more reminder about the morning being Monday and a long division test, and Cobb said goodnight to his ever-growing-taller son for a second time and returned to the master bedroom.
He was in a big lonely bed feigning sleep when Saito arrived home. More silence, now accented with the scuff of polished shoes on carpet, the hiss of a silk tie pulled off, the rustle of clothes from limbs. The memory foam mattress made no noise and did not disturb Cobb's side of the bed in the slightest when the other man lowered his weight to it. All sound on mute, he might not have been there, but Cobb could already smell him- slightly spicy cologne and California ocean air from riding with his windows down.
Cobb's fists closed tightly to keep from reaching, and he bit his cheek to keep from speaking. He did not manipulate his breath into simulating sleep patterns; he was not trying to hide his state of unrest. His eyes were open, had barely blinked since the door opened. His whole body was tense.
We will continue this later.
That was the last thing Saito had said to him, earlier that day at the offices. Cool, aloof, unperturbed by all of Cobb's yelling, like he just didn't care anymore. We will continue this later. Cobb was waiting for that promise to be filled. He would not start it; he would not give Saito the satisfaction.
Saito reclined on his side of the bed and turned out the lights. He didn't say a word. (We will continue this later.) Not a single word. He did not reach for Cobb. Cobb wasn't surprised. His jaw popped it was clenched so hard. He lay there with his darkened blue eyes staring intensely from under a heavy brow into the shadows of their room. Saito must have fallen asleep to the labored breathing of the silently raging.
….
"Philippa Cobb, may I ask you what this is on the back of your homework?"
"Oh. That would be blood, Mrs. Mourner."
"And where did it come from?"
"Well, it's what happens when you combine two middle-aged men with short-fused, explosive tempers over burnt toast, and sexual frustration on a Monday morning."
"What?"
"My fathers got in a big fight this morning and at one point Otoosan spat blood in Dad's face. He wiped it off and then must have touched this as he overturned the table; that's his hand print there."
…
"When the student was questioned about it, the reply was that it was of course her step father's blood because her fathers were fighting like always. The blood came to be on the paper when one father spat his blood into the other's face."
"Phill!" Cobb hissed as Saito, with a nervously gracious smile, leaned forward to respectfully explain, "My daughter is often dramatic and flowery with her language- she gets it from her grandfather. This morning was bumpy but in no way a disgrace. I assure you that all is well at home."
"Mr. Saito, we will not write a child's rather glib reference to domestic violence off as flowery language."
Cobb spoke up here, eyes settled darkly on the teacher, "Your statement used phrases like, of course and like always. Phill didn't use those words, exactly, now did she." It wasn't a question.
"Well, no," the teacher yielded, "But her tone implied as much. Mr. Cobb, if you and your husband bloody each other's faces over burnt toast-"
"There were deeper conflicts present than blackened bread," Cobb said lowly, pushing air through his nose. "And I assure you that violence is not the regular method of solving any of our family's issues." He frowned, eyes dropping down to the carpet and his ringed hand stretched the corners of his mouth wide. He shrugged, "This morning was a freak occurrence."
"Pardon me," Saito cut in with a stiff frown, "but how did she describe the incident, exactly?"
"No dictation of the conversation was being taken, Mr. Saito, but that does rather bring us to another issue."
"And what would that be?" Cobb asked shooting a sideways look of reprimand at his daughter, because if the teacher was going to say that the girl had used vulgar language, she was getting her allowance revoked. Philippa was sitting in her chair in silence, slouched so that her school uniform jacket was crinkling.
"She blamed the fight not only on burned toast but," the teacher hesitated with an awkward smile plastered on her placid features, eyes darting between them, to Philippa, to her hands and then back to Cobb with her eyelids lowered delicately, "sexual frustration."
"PHILIPPA!" Cobb cried even as Saito snapped at her in Japanese for an explanation of her behavior. Philippa rose to Saito's comment in haughty Japanese, clearly doing an impression of her step-father, I answered a question. It is your behavior this morning, Otoosan, that is what is in question. He responded in rapid undertones that the proper course of action would have been to talk to her fathers about it, not parade the problem in front of her teachers and get authorities involved!
But the teacher raised her hands. "English, please!" her nostrils flared and the woman eyed Philippa intently as if trying to determine whether or not the girl had been threatened in the exchange of foreign syllables or at all coached on what to say. Or maybe the teacher was just impressed that the new girl had spoken the difficult language so fluently in the first place. Cobb eyed his daughter as well, worried about her sudden and barely repressed animosity toward her stepfather.
"Sexual frustration," the teacher said, moving forward, "was the exact phrase she used, so there are no grounds to punish her for inappropriate language. In fact, I commend her use of intelligent words in lieu of her more vulgar choices. The content of her speech, however, may be a little advanced for a sixth grader. We are curious as to how your daughter links such aggression to sex, or even the lack thereof, and in such a flippant, every-day way."
"Mrs. Mourner," Cobb tried a laugh, nervously scratching the back of his skull with one finger, "I'm not sure what you're implying here."
"Do you casually chat with your daughter about the details of your sex life?"
"Of course not!" Saito replied in a dark tone. Cobb dropped fingers on Saito's wrist to rein him in. He held up a hand to the teacher and the mean-faced child protective services agent behind her. He was a thin man who hadn't spoken a word all meeting, and who was studying them with intense silence.
"Our daughter is in no way privy to indecency in our home." Philippa wouldn't meet Cobb's eye when he looked at her and his stomach dropped with a bad feeling. He ignored it for now, continuing to sell his point so that they could get out of this mess, "She does have a natural understanding of sex as an act of closeness in a loving relationship, and as an intelligent young woman she might have deduced that a lack of said closeness can lead to bad feelings."
"And has there been a lack?" Philippa piped up suddenly, voice small and tentative, eyes on the carpet and cheeks going red.
"Oh, sweetheart," Cobb breathed, ignoring the teacher completely now and leaning toward his daughter to take her hand. The worried look on Philippa's face was Mal all over again and it broke Cobb's heart. "Everything is good between Aang and me, I promise."
"Otoosan?" she asked of Saito with a glance up at him, who smiled and nodded, taking one of her hands and one of Cobb's as well. He spoke to her kindly (and in English for the teacher's sake), "We have resolved everything, Pippa-chan."
"Philippa," the child protective services agent said kindly, "Could you wait outside? We'd like a word with your parents."
She went obediently, fingers dragging out of the hands of both her fathers. Cobb loosed a breath, jumping his eyebrows at his husband who gave him a reserved look of panic before they turned back to face their accusers.
"Mr. Saito," the man said, "We were told that in the fight you spat a mouthful of blood into Mr. Cobb's face." Saito colored in the cheeks and looked down and the man continued with momentum, "Your children were witness to this rather horrific behavior and yet were packed off to school by the family driver with no explanation."
Cobb cleared his throat to interject before Saito's slipping grip on his temper failed him. "Explanations were given to the kids. We told them things had gotten out of hand, that we were ashamed and sorry they had to see it."
"But it seems now that Philippa hadn't been reassured."
"She's complicated like her mother," Cobb snapped. "I admit that I failed to read her. She said she was okay and I believed her."
The agent looked uninterested in this little fact and looked over at the rigid shape of Saito in his chair. "How often do your disagreements reach such a physical level, Mr. Saito?"
Cobb saw it on his partner's face that he would love to say a few choice words here but instead he echoed from Cobb's assurances from earlier, "This morning was a freak occurrence." God bless him, he managed a breezy apologetic smile and a self-depreciating laugh, all of which made Cobb want to put his arms around him. "I am afraid I was seeing red this morning when I spat in Dom's face. I childishly allowed my manners to fail me for the purposes of dramatic effect."
"Why did you hit him, Dom?" the man asked. Cobb's cheeks filled with heat and his first instinct was to be outraged and refuse to answer the question. Instead, Saito caught his hand and gave it a squeeze and he answered truthfully, "We'd been arguing since yesterday. When the toast went wrong this morning, I shoved him out of the way and he shoved back, and when I blocked the toaster from him, he attempted to reach around me for the plate of bread. It startled me. I- misread --his position as an attack and slammed my skull back into his nose."
"It was an accident," Saito laughed, lightly touching his tender nose where the inside corners of his eyes were darkened. "I often forget his hand-to-hand combat skills are on a hair trigger."
"Combat skills?" the teacher asked.
"Dream-sharing," Cobb supplied readily. "I did some combat simulation work for army recruit training." In the fashion of a master con, it was not a complete lie. Though he was omitting the part where all he'd ever done in that chapter of his life was build the dreams; the fighting and killing came way later and had not been paid for by any government. But they didn't need to know that.
"An accident," the agent repeated dubiously.
Cobb was ready with defense, "He let pain fuel anger and anger fuel spitting in the face of my apology. I let that fuel more anger. It escalated from there into a wrestling match. The kitchen got wrecked but there were no more serious injuries beyond his nose."
The teacher and the agent looked at one another and the agent shrugged, turned back to them with a dramatic draw of breath, "Well, Mr. Cobb, Mr. Saito, we are sorry, but as it is unfortunately suspicious circumstances, this will go on your record."
"What?"
"I am going to believe you that it was an accident," the man cut in. "Because of that little circle of smiles thing I saw just a minute ago." He made a circular motion around the room, encompassing Cobb and Saito and Philippa's empty chair like their joined hands had done. "Don't push me out of my decision that your violence this morning over toast was a freak occurrence that warrants no further investigation into your parenting techniques."
Cobb and Saito clamped their jaws shut and nodded. Standing, they made their final apologies and goodbyes and left the office.
….
"Pip, you should have known goddamn better than to turn in the bloodied homework!" Cobb cried loudly once the family was enclosed in the back of the limo. "You should have recopied it on the way! What were you thinking turning that in, huh? Why would you do that?"
"Did you want them to know that we had been fighting?" Saito asked, looking across at the girl with sad eyes. "Did we frighten you?"
"No!" she snapped, giving away the opposite. She sighed, dramatically rolling her eyes. "I don't see why everyone's making such a big deal out of this!"
"You don't see?" Cobb cried, blue eyes glaring wildly and hairline flattened under his palm, "That was child protective services, Pippa. Don't you understand what that means? We were almost deemed unfit to keep you! They were breathing down our necks about your safety!" And they were looking at my forged past records.
He didn't add that last part, but it made him shift uncomfortably in his seat and glance at Saito, who's stoic expression said he knew this danger all too well himself. He dropped a hand on Dom's thigh, a warm, reassuring, loving touch, but it didn't linger.
Cobb's nostrils flared as he watched the hand pull away. No. Not allowed to cling to propriety right now. He chased the hand, caught it, and pushed his fingers through Saito's, dragging him back over and dropping their joined hands on his thigh, Saito's hand down. He liked the comfort of it. His heart rate was returning to normal the further from the private school the limo took them.
He'd been panicked since being shown his own handprint, painted in his lover's blood, on his daughter's homework while under the judgmental gaze of someone with the authority to take his children from him (again, God, he wouldn't survive it) but now with Saito's hand in his and the threat of losing his babies gone, he was calming down.
"Are you angry with us for the move?" Saito asked. "Do you wish to return to Tokyo?"
She nodded her head even as James shrugged in an I-wouldn't-mind-going-home-now-if-we-can way. Cobb squeezed Saito's hand, infinitely grateful that he'd found a partner who knew to ask these questions. Sometimes Cobb felt he was so old he'd completely forgotten what it was like to be an innocent child. He had to stop expecting them to behave like adults about everything. No one had said the move back to L.A. would be easy, but it was necessary.
Cobb smiled weakly at his son, who smiled back in a reassuring way. "I like it here."
"You do?" Cobb asked.
"Yeah! All the kids think it's awesome that I lived in Japan and can speak Japanese. It's like I'm Superman away from home."
Saito chuckled warmly. Cobb laughed himself and ruffled the kid's hair. "You'll get all the girls, Jamie."
The boy nodded like he was fly, and Philippa snorted. Cobb's eyes snapped to her. She wasn't out of the fire yet, and Cobb wasn't ready to forgive her betrayal.
"At the very least, Pip, you could have answered differently when they asked you what is was," he continued the lecture in a calmer voice that became less calm when he looked up from the way his and Saito's wedding rings were touching and saw Philippa's stubbornly-set chin. "Preserved our privacy, huh? What were you thinking?" He fanned the incrementing paper in his other hand angrily. "This could've been explained in four concise words!" He waved the bloody hand for each word, "This Was. An. Accident."
James piped up then from his seat beside his sister, "I. Consider. This. Art."
Saito smiled at the eight year old boy who so resembled his handsome father. "Or four syllables," he said, mouth scrunching to the side as he put dramatic thought to his answer, then a short phrase in Japanese that made James snicker. Cobb felt his anger dissipate rapidly at the sight of James and Saito smiling together. With a minute of thought, he added a French phrase, four words four syllables.
Reluctantly, Philippa smiled, rolled her eyes, beaten. Like Cobb, she couldn't stay mad when her family was happy, not when her anger stemmed from self-consciousness in the first place. Her embarrassment at having so poorly failed to use common sense was quickly erased with the light hearted word game. But her eyes darkened soon afterwards; she most likely couldn't shake the last tendrils of worry as she remembered her father breaking Saito's nose, apologizing, but then, blood-spattered and pissed, turning over the kitchen table with a curse and rugby tackling Saito into the dishwasher.
"What were you guys fighting about?" James asked catching onto his sister's worry like it was contagious.
Saito caught Cobb's eye. Neither was sure how to put it into words. Saito dropped a second hand on the one he held and gave the children a gentle, teasing smile, "Love is not strong if it is not tested, like a rough stone polished smooth by the sea."
"But what were you fighting about?" Philippa prodded, challenging the side step answer that'd been heavily disguised as a wise proverb.
Cobb sighed, chuckled, "Both of us were being silly."
Running Proclus Global together was occasionally a competition between them, who could do it better, who could make which head-honcho decisions without consulting the other first. Then there was the never ending work of raising restless adolescents. It was busybusybusy and worryworryworry sprinkled in among a constant stream of feeling like they were doing it all wrong and screwing the kids up.
On top of that, their relationship had compromised a business deal because the client perceived their marriage as indecent, meanwhile they'd not been having enough sex (Philippa had been remarkably perceptive of that and it simultaneously disturbed and impressed Cobb that she could read adults so easily. DID THAT MEAN SHE KNEW WHAT THEY'D DONE THIS MORNING TO MAKE UP AFTER SHE AND JAMES HAD LEFT FOR SCHOOL?) and they'd started fighting because yesterday had been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back when Saito smiled (that little wicked glinting smile, that wanting smile) at a pretty Japanese woman as she left a conference room.
You wanted her.
No, I did not.
Did too, I know you, goddamn it.
Calm down.
Don't talk to me like that. I'd be overreacting if we were just fuckbuddies, but we're not. We're married for Chrissakes! Vows. Fidelity. That is NOT how you look at people who aren't your husband!
Keep your voice down; the whole company will hear you.
Let them hear me! Or, wait, no we can't let the world know we like to touch each other-they don't like it and we'll lose their business. Better to keep that under the table and fuck random women to maintain a more suitable image.
I only looked, Dom. I did nothing else. Were you always this jealous of a husband?
Jealous?
Insecure, even.
Fuck you. You haven't looked at me since the Akimoto deal fell through.
Buzz of intercom. Uh-excuse me… Sir?
Yes, Mitchel?
Meeting's starting, sir.
We will continue this later.
At the beginning of their relationship, the way Saito became so disconnected and ruthless whenever he was offended or scared was cause for a lot of insecurity on Cobb's behalf. It hadn't been easy for Cobb to accept his feelings toward a man in the first place, but he had done, and he'd fallen in love, and sometimes he felt he'd been cruelly tricked by some heartless puppeteer who just liked to watch him squirm. Those insecure feelings had come fewer and farther between the more they fell into one another, and since their fairly recent wedding this was the first resurface of it.
So, yes, Cobb was a jealous husband; it came with having the ghost of one man wrapped around his heart so tightly that the organ wouldn't survive if he was removed. Cobb was no stranger to such gut wrenching pain; he'd felt about Mal the same way. It was the only way Cobb knew how to love.
James and Philippa were soothed by his sincere answer that it was just some silliness, which Saito elaborated on with a softly chuckled, "a senseless squabble fixed with some kindness."
"So you aren't going anywhere, Otoosan?" Philippa asked, tone subtly accusing. Cobb recalled her earlier hostility towards him and Saito did, too, asking,
"Why would I ever leave my family?"
Philippa shrugged, "You might change your mind. Mom did. She changed her mind about wanting to stay here with us. You might, too."
"Never," Saito promised with a wink. Philippa reluctantly returned his grin and then looked at her father, her expression apologetic but relieved and happy. Cobb's heart twisted at the thought of his daughter torturing herself with notions that she would lose a beloved parent again.
The poor child, she had been the perfect age for tramatization when Mal left them and Cobb ran away. He'd regained her trust by returning, had proven he'd never not come back. Saito, however, had no way of proving he would never leave when things got bad. He filled a delicate capacity in her life, one her scars prevented her from trusting too deeply.
The best they could do (short of Inception anyway, which was out of the question) was ask her to take a leap of faith.
As Saito asked after James's math test, Cobb dropped his head back to rest. It'd been quite the last two days and he was ready to go home and relax. Saito slid closer but only close enough that his knee brushed Cobb's leg. Cobb's mouth quirked at the corner from the contact and the blackness behind his eyelids filled with Saito's black/brown eyes glittering at extremely close proximity.
He could still feel the man's thumbs tracing his jaw as the heavily accented breath washed over his mouth, smelling like the mountain dew he'd gulped to get the taste of blood out of his mouth. Saito's little wicked, wanting smile, and his low, breathy voice had doled out the above mentioned kindness in his native tongue, words that Cobb's lower stomach ached to hold onto. No more room for jealousy, anata. I followed you out of Limbo. I will follow you for the rest of my life.
Saito held his hand all the way home.
F I N
a/n: Weirdly, this is a continuation of a much longer Dom/Saito that hasn't even been written yet, but that exists in the strange Limbo place of the cognitive phase. One day it will be written down. And it will be epic.
COMMENT! PRETTY PLEASE WITH A JAPANESE HUSBAND ON TOP?