Skybird: For Good 1/2 (Inception/White Collar)
Title: Skybird - For Good
Fandoms: Inception, White Collar
Characters: Neal, Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG-13
For the prompt: Arthur and Eames adopt a kid and raise that kid into Neal Caffrey.
It had been over a year since the last major crisis in their lives, so Neal couldn’t really be surprised when things went to hell again.
He was, however, surprised about the fighting.
Sixteen was a good age. It afforded Neal a non-forged drivers license, greater access to New York venues, and it was one step closer to eighteen-which was a step closer to twenty-one. He had a credit card and he lived in a city with endless opportunities for entertainment. He was dating Danielle Fehn, who was the daughter of an NYPD officer and loved Rococo architecture and iced cappuccinos, and he only had two more years of wretched school before he was free.
Yet none of that had any meaning when Neal walked into the apartment to the sound of shouting, and instantly felt like he was thirteen and lost again.
Eames and Arthur never yelled. They bickered and they bantered and sometimes they would go days without speaking to each other, but they never raised their voices. Neal dropped his backpack on the floor in the sitting room, creeping toward the master bedroom with his stomach tying itself into knots.
Both men were in their room. Eames was standing with his back to the door, his shoulders tense and his hands clenched into fists at his sides. Arthur’s emergency travel bag was already on the bed, an additional suitcase open as he shoved clothes and files into it.
“-clean up his mess!” Eames was snapping, his voice tight and angry. Neal stayed just out of sight, back pressed against the wall as he listened in, gnawing on his bottom lip.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Arthur insisted. “They’re letting him take the fall for this, Eames. They’re abandoning him just because they don’t want the PASIV to become common knowledge.”
“And it isn’t your problem.”
“It is my problem! I won’t let them do this.”
Eames scoffed.
“And what do you think you’re going to do?” he sneered. There was mockery there, and no small amount of ire, but Neal recognized the worried and panicked undertone that lay beneath. “Take down the CIA? Expose their deceits and lies?”
“I need to make sure he’s okay. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s-” Arthur looked away, pausing with a suit jacket half-folded in his hands. “With Mal gone, he’s pretty badly off. I just want to make sure he’s alright.”
“No,” Eames said sharply. “No, that’s not how you work, Arthur. You’re going to try to fix him, and that’s not something you can do in a month.”
“I’m not,” Arthur insisted. “I won’t. I promise, I’ll be back soon. Just-give me some time to get his head back in order. To find out what went wrong.”
“He’s not your responsibility, Arthur.”
Arthur spun around angrily, dropping the jacket into his suitcase. His body was tense, taut.
“I won’t leave him!”
Eames looked at him.
“So you’ll leave your family instead?”
Arthur flinched as if burned. He bowed his head.
“Don’t,” he whispered, voice raw. “Please, don’t. Dom and Mal were like a family to me, too. I owe it to him, Eames. I owe it to her.”
That was what finally broke through the tension crackling between them. Eames’ shoulders sagged. He crossed the room, cupping Arthur’s cheek in his hand, tilting his head up.
“The next time we talk, it will be in person,” he said.
“One month,” Arthur replied softly. “I promise.”
They exchanged a long, lingering kiss that made something twist in Neal’s stomach, because it looked far too much like a goodbye. Arthur shut the suitcase, grabbing it and his duffel as he strode out of the bedroom. Neal didn’t even bother to hide the fact he’d been eavesdropping, staring at Arthur and feeling as thought he was about to lose something precious.
Arthur dropped the suitcase, reaching out to pull Neal into a hug.
“There are some things I need to take care of. A friend I need to take care of. I won’t be gone long, I swear.”
Neal nodded, hugging him back tightly. He stood by Eames as they watched Arthur head to the door, pausing to look back at them with a longing expression before slipping away.
“I’ll be back soon.”
He wasn’t.
A month passed, and Neal was unable to feel surprise when Arthur didn’t return.
“Cobb still won’t tell me what happened,” Arthur said, his voice tired. He called every week like clockwork, checking in on Neal and through him, on Eames. The forger still stubbornly refused to speak to him on the phone, holding fast to their promise. “He wants to take a job in Gdansk. I’m hoping that getting back into the business, working again, doing something familiar-maybe it’ll help. Maybe he’ll finally talk to me.”
“The investigation has concluded he killed her,” Neal said, mixing together a bit of paint on his palette. He was working on a replica of Seurat’s depiction of the Eiffel Tower, phone on speaker beside him. Their calls were almost always conducted via speakerphone, now, for a threefold purpose. Neal liked to keep busy while they talked, he missed the sound of Arthur’s voice filling up a room-and he was fairly certain Eames listened in sometimes for that same reason. So he left it on as he worked, paint smeared across the back of his hands.
“He didn’t,” Arthur replied tiredly. “Even with the stonewalling he’s trying to do now, I know Cobb. I knew Mal. He would never have hurt her.”
Neal had been following the Cobb investigation, keeping files on his computer and newspaper clippings in a folder on his desk. The evidence was damning-but it almost seemed too damning; too methodical. He agreed that there was something odd about the whole thing.
“So the job in Poland-is it dangerous?”
“Not terribly. We’re just building up the mental defenses for some CEO. His company is worried about dreamshare espionage.”
Neal nodded absently, tilting his head to the side with a frown as he surveyed his work. The colors were off, near the bottom. He would have to start over.
“I miss you.”
Neal paused with his brush extended toward the painting. He slowly lowered his hand.
“I miss you, too,” he said softly.
“How is-he?”
There was only one ‘he’ in their vocabulary. Neal cleaned off his paintbrush, wiping the flecks of color from his hands with a rag. If Eames was listening in to them talking about him, it was his own fault. Neal sighed.
“He’s bored. Antsy. He started a copy of the Garden of Earthly Delights last week, and he’s already done with the middle panel. I think I might suggest a weekend trip up to Montreal, just to keep him from crawling out of his own skin. He misses you,” he quietly, after a pause. “He won’t say it, but he hasn’t been talking as much.”
“He always did withdraw when he was upset,” Arthur said, softly. The weariness in his voice was agonizingly palpable, and Neal wondered what the time difference was between Poland and New York. But it didn’t seem to matter to Arthur: wherever he was in the world, he always called Neal at the same time every Saturday evening. Their calls had a comfortable routine: Arthur would ask how Neal was, tell him what he was currently working on, and then ask after Eames.
“Give him my love?” Arthur requested, as usual. Neal smiled.
“Of course. Bonne nuit, mon père.”
“Bonne nuit, mon fils.”
Neal reached for his phone, tucking it back into his pocket. He began putting away the paints and brushes, not bothering to look over at the open doorway.
“You can come in.”
Eames didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed at getting caught, walking into the room with his hands shoved in his pockets and the ghost of a smile on his lips. He glanced at the painting.
“You’re getting better.”
“Why won’t you talk to him?” Neal asked plainly. He slid the drawer of paints shut, frowning as Eames’ face closed off.
“The next time we talk, it will be in person.”
“Even though you don’t know when that will be?”
“That’s his fault, not mine,” Eames said sharply. “The promise is his to break.”
Neal just stared at him, helplessly. Calling his parents children never got him anywhere before, but he’d also never had such a strong desire to do so before. He scrubbed a hand over his face.
“Alright, fine. Whatever. I’m going to go to sleep.”
He went to leave, moving toward the doorway. Eames caught him gently as he passed, holding onto his arm. A flicker of pain cut through the bitterness on the forger’s face.
“I still love him,” he said softly, reassuringly. A parent telling his child that everything was going to be okay, even as the two sides spiraled away from each other.
Neal managed a sad, tired smile.
“I know.”
A truly awful year went by.
Neal learned a lot during that year. He learned Morse code and Caesar cipher, how to plant prints, the proper temperature to age a painting in the oven and that if you smile convincingly enough, people will believe you when you say ‘I’m fine.’ He learned that school records were ridiculously easy to fake and that girls didn’t really like it when you broke up with them.
Danielle took it fairly well, once Neal convinced her that the problem lay with him, not with her. It was close enough to the truth: he just didn’t care about her enough to go out on dates when he knew that Eames would be brooding back at the apartment. The longer Arthur was gone, the further Eames withdrew into himself. It was like watching a plant wilt from lack of sunlight, dying a slow demise of starvation.
“Cobb’s starting to push me away,” Arthur had said in their most recent conversation, his frustration evident. “He’s shut me out more and more, and it’s getting harder for me to trust him.”
And Neal wanted to shout, ‘Then come back home! We care about you more than he ever could!’
But he didn’t; he just said that he missed Arthur, which was true, and that things were okay-which wasn’t.
Eames refused to take any real jobs. He was called upon occasionally to teach subconscious defense to rich Wall Street brokers who thought they had secrets worth stealing, and once in a while he would be gone for a day, but never more than that. He stuck to the unspoken writ that someone would always be there for Neal-even as he slowly went stir-crazy, tension carved into the taut line of his shoulders.
Two weeks after his seventeenth birthday and one week before he was supposed to begin his senior year of high school, Neal slapped a pair of plane tickets on the table in front of Eames. The forger looked at them, blinked, and looked back up at him. Before he could say anything, Neal set a perfectly-replicated diploma down as well. Understanding dawned in Eames’ eyes.
“We’re leaving,” Neal said, very clearly.
Eames stared at the tickets, and something flickered behind the frighteningly empty mask that had settled over his gaze of late.
“Arthur wants you to finish school.”
“Arthur isn’t here.”
Neal said the words matter-of-factly, without any accusation or bitterness in his voice. He still loved his parents unconditionally, despite the messes they made of things, and he couldn’t resent Arthur for running blindly after Cobb any more than he could feel anger at Eames for becoming a husk of his former self. But Neal’s contact with Arthur was already limited to phone calls and text messages and emails, and he wasn’t about to lose his other father as well.
Eames squinted at the tickets. There was a glass of scotch by his hand and Neal was profoundly grateful it seemed to have been forgotten.
“England, huh?”
Neal grinned.
“Yeah. England.”
They went to England.
“You are not allowed to nick the Triregnum.”
Neal pouted. Eames rolled his eyes.
“You would never be able to fence it.”
“I wouldn’t sell it,” Neal replied, though he did agree that religious pieces were oddly difficult to get rid of. “I would wear it around the house. On Sundays.”
Eames cast him an amused look.
“We’d have to find you some robes.”
Neal beamed. He didn’t bother explaining that his grin wasn’t just because of Eames’ indulgence, but because it seemed his father had finally started to be himself again.
They were at the British Museum in London, browsing through a recent exhibition of assorted religious artifacts. Neal supposed he ought to feel ashamed for wanting to steal holy relics, but it wasn’t his fault they were so damn shiny. Especially the Catholic pieces from Rome. There had been a gold chalice studded with jewels that Neal spent a good ten minutes ogling before Eames came to drag him off.
Five months of proper English meals and a life of relative quiet in a cottage just outside of London, and Eames almost seemed back to his old self. He and Neal tossed snark back and forth like most fathers and sons threw baseballs, and the dull look in his eyes had mostly faded. There was still anger there, and bitterness, but it was tempered by the smiles he would get whenever Neal did something new and particularly extravagant. Stealing the Nocturne from the Tate had been one of those things-Neal had spent a full month casing the museum-but that was more self-serving than anything else. He’d really wanted that Whistler.
There were still lapses, of course. Still moments when he would catch Eames looking out the window as if waiting for Arthur to appear at any moment. There’d been one particular instance when they’d been heading toward Piccadilly Circus, passing by Savile Row. Eames had stopped dead in his tracks, staring down the bustling street of fine tailors, and Neal had barely been able to pull him away with some rambling about Apple Corps and the Beatles’ last show.
They’d eventually ended up at Sotheby’s, where Neal may or may not have filched a first-edition Hemingway that was supposed to be up for auction.
Some of Eames’ old SAS contacts had gotten him back into the dreamsharing circuit, and the bored stagnancy appeared to be lifting. He still turned down the more dangerous jobs, but he seemed to feel better about leaving Neal for a day or two while he went off on a jaunt to Scotland or Wales. Eames had grown up in London-he trusted Neal to its myriad streets. Occasionally Neal accompanied him on jobs, but he never met the team Eames worked with and the trips were usually guided by self-interest. He now had two blank college diplomas tucked away in the cottage’s climate-controlled cellar, one from St. Andrews and one from Oxford, and all he needed to do was wait a few years before penning his own degrees.
Neal stopped suddenly as they passed through the Roman section of the museum, staring at a beautiful violet vase.
“That is sitting on the coffee table in our apartment in Queens,” he said, matter-of-factly.
Eames cleared his throat.
“It’s lovely piece, and I wanted it.” He lowered his voice to a mutter, “And it took me four years to create a forgery that would fool the curators, so let’s move it along, shall we?”
Neal smirked, but he allowed himself to be steered away.
They caught a showing of ‘The Far Pavilions’ at the Shaftesbury before heading home, with Eames informing Neal yet again that he was never allowed to drive in England. Or Australia. Or India. Or really anywhere, but the man seemed to be preoccupied with Neal possibly getting himself into a car accident because of left-side versus right-side driving mentality. Neal planned to ignore his fussing at the next available opportunity.
They were at the cottage, Neal having just sent off a text message to Arthur--‘The BM had a showing of Auerbach, you would have loved it’--when Eames turned to him with a thoughtful expression. The forger was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of chile con carne as Neal sat at the kitchen table.
“I’ve never thanked you.”
Neal blinked.
“For what?”
A wistful smile played around Eames’ mouth.
“For taking care of me. I haven’t been a terribly responsible parent, have I?”
Neal just blinked at him again, unable to come up with anything to say. He’d never wanted thanks-he’d just wanted Eames to get better. He understood the reason for Eames’ slow decline, just like he understood the little twist in his stomach every time he sent off an email or text to Arthur, knowing that the long-distance communication would never replace seeing the man himself. Neal stared down at his phone, tracing the groove in the side with his fingernail. It wasn’t often he was at a loss for words.
Eames left the kitchen briefly, and returned with a small mounted globe. He crouched by the table, setting it in front of Neal as he reached out to touch his cheek with a soft smile.
“Anywhere you want to go, Neal.”
Neal looked up, searching his father’s face. When he’d first bought the plane tickets to England, all he’d ever thought about was trying to erase the forlorn lines around Eames’ mouth. The globe-the offer of leaving again-was Eames’ sign that he was ready; that Neal had accomplished his task. There were still remnants of a mask of hurt lingering in Eames’ gaze, but the wry smiles and laughing eyes had finally returned.
Neal smiled, and spun the globe.
The day Neal and Eames started travelling was the day Arthur stopped telling him where he was.
“I know you, Neal,” he’d said. “You can’t come looking for me. Don’t come looking for me. The jobs Cobb has been taking are getting more dangerous, and I don’t want you involved. Either of you.”
Neal replied with a suitably scathing rejoinder, which marked one of the few times he and Arthur had ever fought. It didn’t help that Arthur was ridiculously good at hiding his tracks, and Neal traced seven red herrings before finally giving up. He suspected Eames would be able to locate the elusive point man, but Eames was still irritatingly stubborn when it came to all things Arthur, and refused to give Neal any information he might have had.
Neal sort of wanted to smack them both. Instead he channeled his ire into better outlets, like stealing a Tamayo painting from the Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Spain had been their first stop after England. They rented out a little villa in Toledo and spent two months mapping out the city’s myriad of twisting streets, taking the occasional trip out to Madrid or Pamplona or Barcelona. Neal studied the work of El Greco, tried to revive his memory of Spanish, and fell in love with tapas. He purchased a beautiful cup-hilt rapier that he shipped straight back to London-because any artisan who could make a replica that good deserved payment for their work.
Eames got word of a job in Venice, which suited Neal fine as he had quickly tired of pork in all its many myriad forms. They took up residence in a flat overlooking one of the canals, and while Eames delved into some art curator’s mind, Neal dove into the art and culture of Italy. He took the train to Rome and went straight to Vatican City, gaping at the Sistine Chapel, wandering through the museums and seriously pondering the merits of stealing the Papal staff. He took so many pictures of Caravaggio’s ‘Entombment of Christ’ that he was certain the security guards knew he was planning on forging it.
Venice became Bucharest, and on the plane to Romania Neal read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in order to get into the mood. Unfortunately, he got a little too into it: when they visited the castle, on Neal’s insistence, he spent the entire tour clutching to Eames’ arm and very fiercely saying he was Not Scared.
Bucharest became Cairo became Oslo became Prague, and the more they travelled the more alive Neal felt. Sometimes they went because of a dreamsharing job Eames had been asked onto; sometimes they went because Neal spun the little globe and stopped his finger on a random spot. Sometimes they both agreed there was an art piece that deserved stealing, and plotted accordingly.
The longest they stayed in one place after Spain was a month and a half sojourn on Easter Island. They argued about the best way to steal one of the giant Moai-Eames preferred a heavy-duty excavator while Neal argued for softening the soil with water for easy natural removal-but eventually they agreed that shipping would be too much of a hassle to ever bother with. Neal did, however, insist on making a lovely papier-mâché replica and sitting it down on a random hill.
The reports in the papers the following day had Eames laughing for twenty minutes straight.
Their shortest stay was in Saint Petersburg. Neal adored the architecture and wanted to steal everything inside the Hermitage, but it was the display of Fabergé eggs that did him in. Neal wanted one. He had to have one. So on only their fourth night in Russia they were already fleeing the country, emergency duffels in hand and the lovely Rosebud egg tucked into Neal’s side bag.
He might have taken Eames’ scolding a little better if the forger hadn’t been chuckling around his reprimands.
After what they later deemed The Russia Incident, Eames insisted that they lie low for a while. He had also been hearing whispers in the dreamsharing circles of a brilliant chemist working out of Kenya, so they headed there in order to ferret the man out. They lurked in Nairobi for a few weeks before being redirected to Mombasa, and it was there that they met Yusuf.
Neal liked Yusuf. The man was scarily intelligent, with an offbeat sense of humor and an easygoing outlook on life. He had a cat who immediately took a liking to Neal, curling up in his lap and purring loudly while Yusuf and Eames talked about compounds. The cat’s name was George Charles de Hevesy, after the famous chemist, and no few of Neal’s later aliases would pay homage to the friendly feline. He sent Arthur a picture of the cat’s face, happily mashed against his stomach, but received no immediate reply.
Neal didn’t know the time difference between Mombasa and wherever it was that Arthur was. He only knew that he was sleeping when he received the voicemail he had been waiting almost a year and a half to hear.
“Hey, Neal. It’s me. I’m sorry I couldn’t catch you earlier-the job went a little south, we found out we had the wrong mark… I’m just-I’m tired of this. I’m tired of Cobb. I’m tired of the lies and the secrets and all the dangerous stunts he keeps pulling. After we finish up this job-after we finish this job, I’m going to go to New York to finish clearing up some things. And then I’m going to come to you.”
Neal had just two days of elated cheer before reality came crashing down again.
’Job went bad,’ said Arthur’s brief text message. ‘New situation. Call when I can. I’m so sorry.’
Neal barely had time to be devastated before he found out the reason for Arthur’s delay. Eames stormed into their rather stuffy Mombasa apartment, slamming the door shut behind him and cursing beneath his breath. Neal caught ‘git’ and ‘bloody moron’ as Eames paced the room like a caged tiger, yanking off the jacket of one of the linen suits he’d been favoring in the stifling Kenyan heat.
“Going to share with the class?” Neal asked, bemused. Eames stopped in his tracks, only then seeming to notice the teen sitting there. He scowled.
“Your idiot father-” and Neal had to bite down on his lip to keep from asking ‘which one?’- “Had a price put on his head by Cobol Engineering. Cobb as well, and some architect named Nash, though apparently he’s already been caught. Damn it, I told him never to work with Cobol, what in hell was he thinking? What was Cobb thinking?”
Neal tightened his grip on his phone, just barely resisting the urge to call Arthur right then to make sure he was really okay.
“Will he be alright?”
Eames ran his fingers through his hair distractedly, shaking his head.
“I don’t know. He should be. Word is that Cobol is desperate to get them, which means they don’t know where they are, either. If he lays low for a while…”
Eames sat down abruptly on the sofa, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes. He looked tired, and worried, and all kinds of afraid. But then the mask of indifference dropped back again, as he seemed to recall that he was still angry with Arthur for leaving them.
Neal sighed, and went to make some tea.
They spent the next few days hanging around various casinos in some of the shabbier parts of Mombasa. Eames brought back a few chips for Neal to forge-admittedly, third-world casinos were much less careful about the chips they cashed-and he seemed to rediscover scotch again. It was an undesirable habit that Neal noticed cropped up whenever the forger was trying to ignore something. While Eames played poker or blackjack or whatever other gambling outlet was the flavor of the day, Neal took the opportunity to watch the people around them. It was almost ridiculously easy to figure out the tells of the supposed experts. He kept a lookout in case someone accused Eames of cheating-which, at card games, he usually did-but he never played accomplice to look at other players’ hands.
They were at a shady casino near the harbor when Neal received a cryptic text from Arthur-‘Tell him to not take the job’-which he dutifully passed along to a perplexed Eames. It wasn’t until later in the day, when Neal was absently watching the people around him, that he understood what the message might mean.
When Dominic Cobb came walking through the front doors, it took all of Neal’s willpower not to spit his soda back into its glass.
He caught Eames’ gaze and tapped the back of his left ring finger, glancing over the forger’s right shoulder pointedly.
Company.
Neal was too far away and the casino too loud to hear the words exchanged between the two men, but something blank and cool settled over Eames’ face when he caught sight of the extractor.
Cobb was not what Neal had expected. He knew his face from the papers, but those images had been taken years ago. Any anger Neal might have felt towards Cobb dissipated as he studied the man’s hunched shoulders; as he took in the lines around his mouth and the deadened look in his eyes. There was something empty and broken about the extractor, and all Neal could feel towards him was pity.
When they got up to leave, headed toward the upstairs bar, Eames made no motion to indicate that Neal should stay. So, of course, he followed.
He tucked himself into a corner, within listening range and in full view of their table.
“Inception,” Cobb began, and Neal felt his stomach drop to his shoes.
He knew the concept, of course, and he knew Eames’s team had tried it when he worked with the SAS. He knew that the job had been an absolute disaster, and he knew that inception was pretty much an impossible feat.
He also knew that his father was terribly bored of the usual corporate dreamshare espionage, and dying for a job that would challenge him.
It was not a recipe for anything good.
Sure enough, Eames’ eyes lit up instantly. Whatever resentment lingered from Cobb stealing away Arthur’s loyalty was put on a backburner in the face of professional intrigue; the interest of someone far too skilled to stay content with the norm.
“Interested?” Cobb was saying. “Because Arthur keeps telling me it can’t be done.”
Neal’s heart leapt to his throat. He’d already known Arthur was with Cobb, of course. He’d spent the majority of the past two years agonizing over that fact. But hearing Cobb talk about his absent father so casually-so obviously unaware of the fact Arthur’d had a family and a life before-drove home just how long it had been since Neal had seen him. Cobb spoke of Arthur like a casual acquaintance, a business partner, when he was everything to Neal.
Eames froze with a pistachio halfway to his mouth. The flash of hurt and longing in his eyes was almost painful for Neal to witness, it was so raw and unguarded. The expression was quickly masked, however: replaced with a quirk of his lips that ran just this side of bitter.
“Arthur,” he repeated, as if tasting the name on his tongue. “Are you still working with that stick in the mud?”
“He’s good at what he does, right?”
A sad smile played around Eames’ mouth.
“Oh, he’s the best. But he has no imagination.”
“Not like you.”
A man appeared at the bar, too well-dressed and too wary-looking to be anything but a tail. For a moment Neal felt a spike of fear, worried that the Spaniards or the Czechs-or even worse, the Russians-had found them, but the man was looking at Cobb, not at Eames. He glanced over, saw the recognition in his father’s eyes, and relaxed a little. They were talking about the job, about finding a chemist and using Yusuf, when Eames finally brought Cobb’s attention to his tail.
“That price on my head-was that dead or alive?”
A smirk curled Eames’ lips.
“Don’t remember. See if he starts shooting.”
Neal waited until both Cobb and his tail had gone-jumping out a window? Really?-before he got up from his spot near the back of the room, wandering over to his father. Eames settled himself at the bar, finishing off his beer as Neal sat next to him.
“You’re going to take the job.”
It wasn’t a question. Eames smiled.
“Yes.”
“You are not going to Paris.”
“Like hell.”
The conversation had gone downhill from there.
“No,” Eames had replied sharply, cutting off Neal’s arguments. “You listen to me. The people involved in this are powerful, and they are dangerous, and I am not letting you anywhere near it. I am going to Australia, and then I am going to Paris. You are going back to London. End of story.”
“But Arthur-”
“Arthur would say the same thing, and you know it. We would never put you in danger. I understand you want to see him again, but this job is not the time. Now come on, we both need to catch our flights.”
Neal peered up at the dark sky from beneath the protection of the tin-roof awning, listening to the rain patter down. Through the automatic doors behind him, instructions and advisements were being given in both English and French, a tinny female voice calling out over the loudspeakers. He shifted the duffel on his shoulder as he watched cars drive by, absently palming the phone in his jacket pocket.
He’d waited long enough for Eames’ plane to get airborne. Then he had turned around, marched to customer service and changed his ticket destination from London to Paris.
Paris had the Louvre. Paris had the Musée d’Orsay and the Rodin and was just a short distance from Versailles. Paris was the fashion and cultural center of the world and above all else Paris had Arthur, and there was no force on the planet that was going to keep Neal away.
“Neal!”
Neal froze in place, his heart hammering against his ribcage.
Slowly, he turned around.
Arthur looked tired. Granted, Neal calling him from de Gaulle airport at three in the morning probably didn’t help-but the weariness seemed even deeper than that. It was present in the tightness in his eyes, in the stiffness of his gait. He was wearing slacks and a t-shirt, trenchcoat thrown over his shoulders like an aside, and he didn’t have an umbrella. He’d answered his phone, sounding sleepy and alarmed that Neal would be calling him in the middle of the night, and it appeared he had just dashed straight to his car afterward.
In Arthur’s eyes was a disbelieving kind of wonder, and Neal felt something crack inside of him.
“Père-”
He dropped his duffel to the sidewalk, leaving it lying forgotten on the concrete as he took the few steps to meet Arthur halfway. The shoulder beneath his cheek was damp with rain, but Neal couldn’t care less as strong arms enfolded him in a tight embrace.
“What are you doing here?” Arthur said breathlessly. “I know Eames took the job, but he would never risk-”
“I came on my own,” Neal said. He didn’t need any more tension between those two. “He tried to send me back to London. It didn’t work.”
Arthur chuckled. He pulled away, cupping Neal’s jaw in his hand. He tilted his head up with a fond expression, studying Neal’s face with a minute attention to detail. A wistful look crossed his features.
“You’ve gotten older.”
“By nearly two years,” Neal replied. Arthur swallowed hard, an agonized flicker of emotion flashing across his face.
“Neal, I’m sorry-”
“Don’t,” Neal interrupted, his voice hoarse. “Don’t. I understand. I always have. I just-I want you back. I just want my family back.”
“You know I would do anything for you,” Arthur said softly, brushing a stray lock of Neal’s tousled hair away from his face. “But I’m afraid it won’t be that easy.”
Neal sighed, leaning his forehead against Arthur’s shoulder. The chasm between his parents would take time to fill, he knew that. Arthur had left them with barely a word and Eames had responded by cutting him off completely. Neither one was faultless. And Eames-well, Neal had seen first-hand what happened to Eames. It wouldn’t be easy to mend something like that.
“I know.”
Arthur’s fingers curled around the nape of Neal’s neck, pulling him closer, arms wrapping tightly around him as if he expected him to disappear at any second.
“God, I’ve missed you,” Arthur rasped, his voice muffled in Neal’s hair. “So much.”
Neal pressed his face into Arthur’s neck, hands clutching at the damp material of his father’s jacket. The tremor in Arthur’s words was so bizarre, so raw and unguarded-a display of emotions only ever shown to those closest to him. To his family; to the people he loved. Neal squeezed his eyes shut, tightening his grip.
“Don’t send me away. I know I shouldn’t have come, but I couldn’t-”
“It’s okay, Neal,” Arthur murmured. “It’s okay. I won’t, I promise.”
Neal pulled back, studying his face intently. There was a fierceness to Arthur’s voice; a glint in his eyes that said this was a promise he wouldn’t be breaking. A slow smile curled Neal’s lips, mirrored on his father’s.
“Come on,” Arthur said. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”
Neal picked up his phone, tired and bleary, to a scathing string of half-coherent British in his ear.
“You little prat! I told you to go back to London-I told you to go home. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice you switching tickets? You’re a bloody pain in my arse and when I get to Paris-”
Neal dropped his head back onto the pillow with a groan. Eames always did have the tendency toward slang when he was particularly displeased, and Neal was not nearly awake enough to translate.
It was close to noon, bright light filtering through the curtains. Arthur was staying at Regyn’s, a wonderfully sumptuous hotel in the heart of Montmartre. He’d booked a double, out of habit or otherwise, and had been using the extra room as a study until Neal dropped in. Papers were shoved off the bed and photos filed away in order to make room for Neal to wedge himself back into Arthur’s life.
Not that either of them had gone to sleep right away. There were two empty wine glasses still sitting on the lounge table, remnants of their hours-long conversation that had lasted until nearly dawn. They’d turned it in just as the sun was rising, and Neal had hoped to get in a solid eight hours of sleep to make up for his awful jet lag.
He really ought to have known better.
“-put your arse right back on a plane as soon as I land-”
“No,” Neal said firmly, suddenly wide awake. There was a short, startled silence.
“Beg pardon?”
“No,” he repeated. “I’m not leaving. You can try to make me, but it won’t work. I’m staying here.”
“Neal-”
“No. It has been nearly two years since I’ve seen Arthur-since I have had my family in one place. You can pretend to hate each other as much as you want, but I am not giving up that easily.”
Eames was quiet for a few moments. Neal’s heart thumped in his chest, adrenalin kicking around in his system from the outburst.
”Where are you staying?” Eames asked at last. Neal blinked.
“Hôtel Regyn’s. Why?”
Eames sighed, and Neal could almost see him running his fingers through his hair.
“Book me a room. I should be done here by the end of the week; my flight is scheduled for Friday.”
A wide, silly grin broke out across Neal’s face.
“And you’re going to get a rock from Uluru for me, right?”
Eames snorted. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Neal smiled, some of the tension in him easing. It wouldn’t be an easy task to repair what was broken between his parents, but at least he was going to be in a position to help try.
“Thank you,” he said, soft and sincere. He sensed Eames’ quiet smile.
“I’ll see you soon.”
Neal lay in bed for a little while longer, soaking up the sunlight and the warmth of the sheets. He was in Paris, wonderful lovely Paris, with the world as his oyster and the art scene laid out at his feet. He was pondering the merits of stealing something from the Catacombs-and weighing the ‘unique’ versus the ‘creepy’ factor-when a soft knock on the door roused him.
“C’me in,” he mumbled.
Arthur was wearing a sharp suit of pearl-grey wool, though the jacket had been left off in favor of just slacks and waistcoat. It was a Zegna, and not an outfit Neal recognized, so he guessed it had been made after Arthur left. He rolled sleepily onto his back, cracking a yawn and rubbing at his eyes as Arthur sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You left your favorite Kilgour in New York,” he said helpfully, reaching out to tug on the French-cuff sleeve of Arthur’s muted lavender shirt.
Arthur smiled, his expression fond.
“I left all of my favorite things in New York.”
Neal ducked his head, grinning back. He climbed out of bed, scrubbing at the mess of his hair as he padded to the bathroom, fishing out a toothbrush from his bag. He still felt disgusting from travelling, but that wouldn’t wear off for a few days at least.
“Do you think you’re up for some sightseeing today?” Arthur asked. “The Louvre has some wonderful showings on exhibit that I thought you might enjoy.”
Neal snorted, spitting out toothpaste into the sink.
“I will never be so tired that I would say no to the Louvre.”
The Louvre had Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. The Louvre had the Venus de Milo and The Coronation of Napoleon and it had the freaking Mona Lisa. A trip to Paris was not complete without stopping by to say hello to the Lisa.
Of course, to Neal, ‘hello’ was rather akin to ‘someday, you will be mine.’
He turned back to Arthur with a brilliant smile, unable to douse the feeling of lightness in his chest, which had been absent for far too long.
“Allons-y, mon père.”
They went to the Louvre.
They went to the Louvre and the Musée Picasso and the Grévin; they went to the Arc de Triomphe and Sacré Coeur and the Champs-Élysées. They skipped the Eiffel Tower because the lines were too damn long to bother with, and because there was nothing truly worth stealing up there. They took a half-day trip out to Chartrés where Neal ate the best marzipan on the planet, and they went on full-day trips to both Marseille and Bordeaux.
They also went to Versailles, where Arthur ended up having to almost physically drag Neal away.
They drank smoky French roast and dined on foie gras and escargot and earthy black truffles smothered in butter. There were fresh baguettes and cheese and salami and croissants for breakfast every morning, and by the time the week was over Neal was fairly certain he’d gained pounds just from looking at all the food. It was like one of their old overseas trips, back when he was still in school and they would catch a week or two during breaks to show him the world. It was an intense, exhilarating period of time, stuffed to bursting with all the things to see and do.
There was only one thing-one person-missing, but both Neal and Arthur tried to avoid the subject as much as possible, even up to the moment he arrived.
“The Tamayo in Madrid,” Arthur said as they stood near the baggage claim at Charles de Gaulle airport, watching the arrivals and departures screen.
“That was me,” Neal confessed, a little sheepishly. Arthur’s lips twitched.
“The Topkapi dagger?”
“Eames.”
“Blackie?”
“Neither of us, actually,” he admitted. “Though, that was a lovely piece of work. We’re still not sure how the thief managed that one.”
“The Hollander chess set.”
Neal winced. That had not been a pretty heist. Too much melodramatic roof-scaling and window-picking, and he’d had splinters in his palms for weeks afterward.
“Ah…that was me. In my defense,” he added quickly, “It was supposed to be your birthday present.”
Arthur blinked, just a twitch of surprise, before his eyes softened. He cast Neal a fond glance that seemed to forgive all of his thieving transgressions.
“How did you know about the Topkapi, anyway?” Neal asked, scanning the arrivals. ‘SYD 10:45 ON TIME’ caught his attention. “We were positive that had been a clean job.”
Arthur raised his eyebrows.
“You forget what I do for a living.”
Neal chuckled. “Right.”
“I have a file,” Arthur admitted. Neal wasn’t even surprised. “All of the heists and forgeries in the past year that looked like they could be either of you.”
He paused, then added, “The Fabergé threw me. That one was messy.”
Neal made a face. The Rosebud was in his possession; that was all that mattered, for now. He was still working on adding bonus points for flair.
“The Hermitage is a very secure museum,” he said loftily. “With very good night guards.”
“Ex-military?” Arthur asked, voice dry. Neal grimaced.
“Attached to Yarygins and AK-47s,” he agreed mournfully. Arthur shook his head.
“I wish I could yell at you for putting yourself into that kind of danger,” he said, bemused, “But it wouldn’t make any difference, would it?”
“Probably not,” Neal admitted. He grinned unrepentantly. “It was a Fabergé.”
“And it cost me my favorite pair of oxfords.”
Neal nearly jumped out of his skin at the familiar voice behind him. He did an abrupt about-face, turning on heel to scowl at his irritatingly sneaky father.
“Don’t do that.”
Eames wore a smirk and a white pinstriped dress shirt, button undone at the throat. There was a duffel slung over his shoulder and Neal knew there would be no other luggage: they always travelled light. There were dark circles beneath Eames’ eyes, courtesy of thirty hours spent on planes and in airports, and the curve of his lips was decidedly fixed.
Neal held his breath as Eames’ gaze shifted from him to Arthur. But the expression on Eames’ face was so completely closed off, so vacant of emotion, that he couldn’t get any kind of reading-which, in and of itself, was a bad sign.
“Arthur.”
“Eames,” Arthur replied quietly. “It’s been a while.”
Neal cast him a helpless look, hearing the forced neutrality in his voice. Eames was keeping himself distant and Arthur’s automatic reaction was to clamp down on his own emotions, and both of them were damn idiots.
“Longer than a month,” Eames noted. Arthur’s face smoothed into a carefully blank mask.
“So it has.”
Neal kind of wanted to stab them both.
Arthur turned, tilting his head toward the airport exit.
“I have a car. Shall we go?”
Eames nodded briefly, hitching his bag up and moving to follow.
Neal trailed after them and wondered if patricide was still considered illegal in France.
( Part 2 )
Fandoms: Inception, White Collar
Characters: Neal, Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG-13
For the prompt: Arthur and Eames adopt a kid and raise that kid into Neal Caffrey.
It had been over a year since the last major crisis in their lives, so Neal couldn’t really be surprised when things went to hell again.
He was, however, surprised about the fighting.
Sixteen was a good age. It afforded Neal a non-forged drivers license, greater access to New York venues, and it was one step closer to eighteen-which was a step closer to twenty-one. He had a credit card and he lived in a city with endless opportunities for entertainment. He was dating Danielle Fehn, who was the daughter of an NYPD officer and loved Rococo architecture and iced cappuccinos, and he only had two more years of wretched school before he was free.
Yet none of that had any meaning when Neal walked into the apartment to the sound of shouting, and instantly felt like he was thirteen and lost again.
Eames and Arthur never yelled. They bickered and they bantered and sometimes they would go days without speaking to each other, but they never raised their voices. Neal dropped his backpack on the floor in the sitting room, creeping toward the master bedroom with his stomach tying itself into knots.
Both men were in their room. Eames was standing with his back to the door, his shoulders tense and his hands clenched into fists at his sides. Arthur’s emergency travel bag was already on the bed, an additional suitcase open as he shoved clothes and files into it.
“-clean up his mess!” Eames was snapping, his voice tight and angry. Neal stayed just out of sight, back pressed against the wall as he listened in, gnawing on his bottom lip.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Arthur insisted. “They’re letting him take the fall for this, Eames. They’re abandoning him just because they don’t want the PASIV to become common knowledge.”
“And it isn’t your problem.”
“It is my problem! I won’t let them do this.”
Eames scoffed.
“And what do you think you’re going to do?” he sneered. There was mockery there, and no small amount of ire, but Neal recognized the worried and panicked undertone that lay beneath. “Take down the CIA? Expose their deceits and lies?”
“I need to make sure he’s okay. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s-” Arthur looked away, pausing with a suit jacket half-folded in his hands. “With Mal gone, he’s pretty badly off. I just want to make sure he’s alright.”
“No,” Eames said sharply. “No, that’s not how you work, Arthur. You’re going to try to fix him, and that’s not something you can do in a month.”
“I’m not,” Arthur insisted. “I won’t. I promise, I’ll be back soon. Just-give me some time to get his head back in order. To find out what went wrong.”
“He’s not your responsibility, Arthur.”
Arthur spun around angrily, dropping the jacket into his suitcase. His body was tense, taut.
“I won’t leave him!”
Eames looked at him.
“So you’ll leave your family instead?”
Arthur flinched as if burned. He bowed his head.
“Don’t,” he whispered, voice raw. “Please, don’t. Dom and Mal were like a family to me, too. I owe it to him, Eames. I owe it to her.”
That was what finally broke through the tension crackling between them. Eames’ shoulders sagged. He crossed the room, cupping Arthur’s cheek in his hand, tilting his head up.
“The next time we talk, it will be in person,” he said.
“One month,” Arthur replied softly. “I promise.”
They exchanged a long, lingering kiss that made something twist in Neal’s stomach, because it looked far too much like a goodbye. Arthur shut the suitcase, grabbing it and his duffel as he strode out of the bedroom. Neal didn’t even bother to hide the fact he’d been eavesdropping, staring at Arthur and feeling as thought he was about to lose something precious.
Arthur dropped the suitcase, reaching out to pull Neal into a hug.
“There are some things I need to take care of. A friend I need to take care of. I won’t be gone long, I swear.”
Neal nodded, hugging him back tightly. He stood by Eames as they watched Arthur head to the door, pausing to look back at them with a longing expression before slipping away.
“I’ll be back soon.”
He wasn’t.
A month passed, and Neal was unable to feel surprise when Arthur didn’t return.
“Cobb still won’t tell me what happened,” Arthur said, his voice tired. He called every week like clockwork, checking in on Neal and through him, on Eames. The forger still stubbornly refused to speak to him on the phone, holding fast to their promise. “He wants to take a job in Gdansk. I’m hoping that getting back into the business, working again, doing something familiar-maybe it’ll help. Maybe he’ll finally talk to me.”
“The investigation has concluded he killed her,” Neal said, mixing together a bit of paint on his palette. He was working on a replica of Seurat’s depiction of the Eiffel Tower, phone on speaker beside him. Their calls were almost always conducted via speakerphone, now, for a threefold purpose. Neal liked to keep busy while they talked, he missed the sound of Arthur’s voice filling up a room-and he was fairly certain Eames listened in sometimes for that same reason. So he left it on as he worked, paint smeared across the back of his hands.
“He didn’t,” Arthur replied tiredly. “Even with the stonewalling he’s trying to do now, I know Cobb. I knew Mal. He would never have hurt her.”
Neal had been following the Cobb investigation, keeping files on his computer and newspaper clippings in a folder on his desk. The evidence was damning-but it almost seemed too damning; too methodical. He agreed that there was something odd about the whole thing.
“So the job in Poland-is it dangerous?”
“Not terribly. We’re just building up the mental defenses for some CEO. His company is worried about dreamshare espionage.”
Neal nodded absently, tilting his head to the side with a frown as he surveyed his work. The colors were off, near the bottom. He would have to start over.
“I miss you.”
Neal paused with his brush extended toward the painting. He slowly lowered his hand.
“I miss you, too,” he said softly.
“How is-he?”
There was only one ‘he’ in their vocabulary. Neal cleaned off his paintbrush, wiping the flecks of color from his hands with a rag. If Eames was listening in to them talking about him, it was his own fault. Neal sighed.
“He’s bored. Antsy. He started a copy of the Garden of Earthly Delights last week, and he’s already done with the middle panel. I think I might suggest a weekend trip up to Montreal, just to keep him from crawling out of his own skin. He misses you,” he quietly, after a pause. “He won’t say it, but he hasn’t been talking as much.”
“He always did withdraw when he was upset,” Arthur said, softly. The weariness in his voice was agonizingly palpable, and Neal wondered what the time difference was between Poland and New York. But it didn’t seem to matter to Arthur: wherever he was in the world, he always called Neal at the same time every Saturday evening. Their calls had a comfortable routine: Arthur would ask how Neal was, tell him what he was currently working on, and then ask after Eames.
“Give him my love?” Arthur requested, as usual. Neal smiled.
“Of course. Bonne nuit, mon père.”
“Bonne nuit, mon fils.”
Neal reached for his phone, tucking it back into his pocket. He began putting away the paints and brushes, not bothering to look over at the open doorway.
“You can come in.”
Eames didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed at getting caught, walking into the room with his hands shoved in his pockets and the ghost of a smile on his lips. He glanced at the painting.
“You’re getting better.”
“Why won’t you talk to him?” Neal asked plainly. He slid the drawer of paints shut, frowning as Eames’ face closed off.
“The next time we talk, it will be in person.”
“Even though you don’t know when that will be?”
“That’s his fault, not mine,” Eames said sharply. “The promise is his to break.”
Neal just stared at him, helplessly. Calling his parents children never got him anywhere before, but he’d also never had such a strong desire to do so before. He scrubbed a hand over his face.
“Alright, fine. Whatever. I’m going to go to sleep.”
He went to leave, moving toward the doorway. Eames caught him gently as he passed, holding onto his arm. A flicker of pain cut through the bitterness on the forger’s face.
“I still love him,” he said softly, reassuringly. A parent telling his child that everything was going to be okay, even as the two sides spiraled away from each other.
Neal managed a sad, tired smile.
“I know.”
A truly awful year went by.
Neal learned a lot during that year. He learned Morse code and Caesar cipher, how to plant prints, the proper temperature to age a painting in the oven and that if you smile convincingly enough, people will believe you when you say ‘I’m fine.’ He learned that school records were ridiculously easy to fake and that girls didn’t really like it when you broke up with them.
Danielle took it fairly well, once Neal convinced her that the problem lay with him, not with her. It was close enough to the truth: he just didn’t care about her enough to go out on dates when he knew that Eames would be brooding back at the apartment. The longer Arthur was gone, the further Eames withdrew into himself. It was like watching a plant wilt from lack of sunlight, dying a slow demise of starvation.
“Cobb’s starting to push me away,” Arthur had said in their most recent conversation, his frustration evident. “He’s shut me out more and more, and it’s getting harder for me to trust him.”
And Neal wanted to shout, ‘Then come back home! We care about you more than he ever could!’
But he didn’t; he just said that he missed Arthur, which was true, and that things were okay-which wasn’t.
Eames refused to take any real jobs. He was called upon occasionally to teach subconscious defense to rich Wall Street brokers who thought they had secrets worth stealing, and once in a while he would be gone for a day, but never more than that. He stuck to the unspoken writ that someone would always be there for Neal-even as he slowly went stir-crazy, tension carved into the taut line of his shoulders.
Two weeks after his seventeenth birthday and one week before he was supposed to begin his senior year of high school, Neal slapped a pair of plane tickets on the table in front of Eames. The forger looked at them, blinked, and looked back up at him. Before he could say anything, Neal set a perfectly-replicated diploma down as well. Understanding dawned in Eames’ eyes.
“We’re leaving,” Neal said, very clearly.
Eames stared at the tickets, and something flickered behind the frighteningly empty mask that had settled over his gaze of late.
“Arthur wants you to finish school.”
“Arthur isn’t here.”
Neal said the words matter-of-factly, without any accusation or bitterness in his voice. He still loved his parents unconditionally, despite the messes they made of things, and he couldn’t resent Arthur for running blindly after Cobb any more than he could feel anger at Eames for becoming a husk of his former self. But Neal’s contact with Arthur was already limited to phone calls and text messages and emails, and he wasn’t about to lose his other father as well.
Eames squinted at the tickets. There was a glass of scotch by his hand and Neal was profoundly grateful it seemed to have been forgotten.
“England, huh?”
Neal grinned.
“Yeah. England.”
They went to England.
“You are not allowed to nick the Triregnum.”
Neal pouted. Eames rolled his eyes.
“You would never be able to fence it.”
“I wouldn’t sell it,” Neal replied, though he did agree that religious pieces were oddly difficult to get rid of. “I would wear it around the house. On Sundays.”
Eames cast him an amused look.
“We’d have to find you some robes.”
Neal beamed. He didn’t bother explaining that his grin wasn’t just because of Eames’ indulgence, but because it seemed his father had finally started to be himself again.
They were at the British Museum in London, browsing through a recent exhibition of assorted religious artifacts. Neal supposed he ought to feel ashamed for wanting to steal holy relics, but it wasn’t his fault they were so damn shiny. Especially the Catholic pieces from Rome. There had been a gold chalice studded with jewels that Neal spent a good ten minutes ogling before Eames came to drag him off.
Five months of proper English meals and a life of relative quiet in a cottage just outside of London, and Eames almost seemed back to his old self. He and Neal tossed snark back and forth like most fathers and sons threw baseballs, and the dull look in his eyes had mostly faded. There was still anger there, and bitterness, but it was tempered by the smiles he would get whenever Neal did something new and particularly extravagant. Stealing the Nocturne from the Tate had been one of those things-Neal had spent a full month casing the museum-but that was more self-serving than anything else. He’d really wanted that Whistler.
There were still lapses, of course. Still moments when he would catch Eames looking out the window as if waiting for Arthur to appear at any moment. There’d been one particular instance when they’d been heading toward Piccadilly Circus, passing by Savile Row. Eames had stopped dead in his tracks, staring down the bustling street of fine tailors, and Neal had barely been able to pull him away with some rambling about Apple Corps and the Beatles’ last show.
They’d eventually ended up at Sotheby’s, where Neal may or may not have filched a first-edition Hemingway that was supposed to be up for auction.
Some of Eames’ old SAS contacts had gotten him back into the dreamsharing circuit, and the bored stagnancy appeared to be lifting. He still turned down the more dangerous jobs, but he seemed to feel better about leaving Neal for a day or two while he went off on a jaunt to Scotland or Wales. Eames had grown up in London-he trusted Neal to its myriad streets. Occasionally Neal accompanied him on jobs, but he never met the team Eames worked with and the trips were usually guided by self-interest. He now had two blank college diplomas tucked away in the cottage’s climate-controlled cellar, one from St. Andrews and one from Oxford, and all he needed to do was wait a few years before penning his own degrees.
Neal stopped suddenly as they passed through the Roman section of the museum, staring at a beautiful violet vase.
“That is sitting on the coffee table in our apartment in Queens,” he said, matter-of-factly.
Eames cleared his throat.
“It’s lovely piece, and I wanted it.” He lowered his voice to a mutter, “And it took me four years to create a forgery that would fool the curators, so let’s move it along, shall we?”
Neal smirked, but he allowed himself to be steered away.
They caught a showing of ‘The Far Pavilions’ at the Shaftesbury before heading home, with Eames informing Neal yet again that he was never allowed to drive in England. Or Australia. Or India. Or really anywhere, but the man seemed to be preoccupied with Neal possibly getting himself into a car accident because of left-side versus right-side driving mentality. Neal planned to ignore his fussing at the next available opportunity.
They were at the cottage, Neal having just sent off a text message to Arthur--‘The BM had a showing of Auerbach, you would have loved it’--when Eames turned to him with a thoughtful expression. The forger was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of chile con carne as Neal sat at the kitchen table.
“I’ve never thanked you.”
Neal blinked.
“For what?”
A wistful smile played around Eames’ mouth.
“For taking care of me. I haven’t been a terribly responsible parent, have I?”
Neal just blinked at him again, unable to come up with anything to say. He’d never wanted thanks-he’d just wanted Eames to get better. He understood the reason for Eames’ slow decline, just like he understood the little twist in his stomach every time he sent off an email or text to Arthur, knowing that the long-distance communication would never replace seeing the man himself. Neal stared down at his phone, tracing the groove in the side with his fingernail. It wasn’t often he was at a loss for words.
Eames left the kitchen briefly, and returned with a small mounted globe. He crouched by the table, setting it in front of Neal as he reached out to touch his cheek with a soft smile.
“Anywhere you want to go, Neal.”
Neal looked up, searching his father’s face. When he’d first bought the plane tickets to England, all he’d ever thought about was trying to erase the forlorn lines around Eames’ mouth. The globe-the offer of leaving again-was Eames’ sign that he was ready; that Neal had accomplished his task. There were still remnants of a mask of hurt lingering in Eames’ gaze, but the wry smiles and laughing eyes had finally returned.
Neal smiled, and spun the globe.
The day Neal and Eames started travelling was the day Arthur stopped telling him where he was.
“I know you, Neal,” he’d said. “You can’t come looking for me. Don’t come looking for me. The jobs Cobb has been taking are getting more dangerous, and I don’t want you involved. Either of you.”
Neal replied with a suitably scathing rejoinder, which marked one of the few times he and Arthur had ever fought. It didn’t help that Arthur was ridiculously good at hiding his tracks, and Neal traced seven red herrings before finally giving up. He suspected Eames would be able to locate the elusive point man, but Eames was still irritatingly stubborn when it came to all things Arthur, and refused to give Neal any information he might have had.
Neal sort of wanted to smack them both. Instead he channeled his ire into better outlets, like stealing a Tamayo painting from the Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Spain had been their first stop after England. They rented out a little villa in Toledo and spent two months mapping out the city’s myriad of twisting streets, taking the occasional trip out to Madrid or Pamplona or Barcelona. Neal studied the work of El Greco, tried to revive his memory of Spanish, and fell in love with tapas. He purchased a beautiful cup-hilt rapier that he shipped straight back to London-because any artisan who could make a replica that good deserved payment for their work.
Eames got word of a job in Venice, which suited Neal fine as he had quickly tired of pork in all its many myriad forms. They took up residence in a flat overlooking one of the canals, and while Eames delved into some art curator’s mind, Neal dove into the art and culture of Italy. He took the train to Rome and went straight to Vatican City, gaping at the Sistine Chapel, wandering through the museums and seriously pondering the merits of stealing the Papal staff. He took so many pictures of Caravaggio’s ‘Entombment of Christ’ that he was certain the security guards knew he was planning on forging it.
Venice became Bucharest, and on the plane to Romania Neal read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in order to get into the mood. Unfortunately, he got a little too into it: when they visited the castle, on Neal’s insistence, he spent the entire tour clutching to Eames’ arm and very fiercely saying he was Not Scared.
Bucharest became Cairo became Oslo became Prague, and the more they travelled the more alive Neal felt. Sometimes they went because of a dreamsharing job Eames had been asked onto; sometimes they went because Neal spun the little globe and stopped his finger on a random spot. Sometimes they both agreed there was an art piece that deserved stealing, and plotted accordingly.
The longest they stayed in one place after Spain was a month and a half sojourn on Easter Island. They argued about the best way to steal one of the giant Moai-Eames preferred a heavy-duty excavator while Neal argued for softening the soil with water for easy natural removal-but eventually they agreed that shipping would be too much of a hassle to ever bother with. Neal did, however, insist on making a lovely papier-mâché replica and sitting it down on a random hill.
The reports in the papers the following day had Eames laughing for twenty minutes straight.
Their shortest stay was in Saint Petersburg. Neal adored the architecture and wanted to steal everything inside the Hermitage, but it was the display of Fabergé eggs that did him in. Neal wanted one. He had to have one. So on only their fourth night in Russia they were already fleeing the country, emergency duffels in hand and the lovely Rosebud egg tucked into Neal’s side bag.
He might have taken Eames’ scolding a little better if the forger hadn’t been chuckling around his reprimands.
After what they later deemed The Russia Incident, Eames insisted that they lie low for a while. He had also been hearing whispers in the dreamsharing circles of a brilliant chemist working out of Kenya, so they headed there in order to ferret the man out. They lurked in Nairobi for a few weeks before being redirected to Mombasa, and it was there that they met Yusuf.
Neal liked Yusuf. The man was scarily intelligent, with an offbeat sense of humor and an easygoing outlook on life. He had a cat who immediately took a liking to Neal, curling up in his lap and purring loudly while Yusuf and Eames talked about compounds. The cat’s name was George Charles de Hevesy, after the famous chemist, and no few of Neal’s later aliases would pay homage to the friendly feline. He sent Arthur a picture of the cat’s face, happily mashed against his stomach, but received no immediate reply.
Neal didn’t know the time difference between Mombasa and wherever it was that Arthur was. He only knew that he was sleeping when he received the voicemail he had been waiting almost a year and a half to hear.
“Hey, Neal. It’s me. I’m sorry I couldn’t catch you earlier-the job went a little south, we found out we had the wrong mark… I’m just-I’m tired of this. I’m tired of Cobb. I’m tired of the lies and the secrets and all the dangerous stunts he keeps pulling. After we finish up this job-after we finish this job, I’m going to go to New York to finish clearing up some things. And then I’m going to come to you.”
Neal had just two days of elated cheer before reality came crashing down again.
’Job went bad,’ said Arthur’s brief text message. ‘New situation. Call when I can. I’m so sorry.’
Neal barely had time to be devastated before he found out the reason for Arthur’s delay. Eames stormed into their rather stuffy Mombasa apartment, slamming the door shut behind him and cursing beneath his breath. Neal caught ‘git’ and ‘bloody moron’ as Eames paced the room like a caged tiger, yanking off the jacket of one of the linen suits he’d been favoring in the stifling Kenyan heat.
“Going to share with the class?” Neal asked, bemused. Eames stopped in his tracks, only then seeming to notice the teen sitting there. He scowled.
“Your idiot father-” and Neal had to bite down on his lip to keep from asking ‘which one?’- “Had a price put on his head by Cobol Engineering. Cobb as well, and some architect named Nash, though apparently he’s already been caught. Damn it, I told him never to work with Cobol, what in hell was he thinking? What was Cobb thinking?”
Neal tightened his grip on his phone, just barely resisting the urge to call Arthur right then to make sure he was really okay.
“Will he be alright?”
Eames ran his fingers through his hair distractedly, shaking his head.
“I don’t know. He should be. Word is that Cobol is desperate to get them, which means they don’t know where they are, either. If he lays low for a while…”
Eames sat down abruptly on the sofa, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes. He looked tired, and worried, and all kinds of afraid. But then the mask of indifference dropped back again, as he seemed to recall that he was still angry with Arthur for leaving them.
Neal sighed, and went to make some tea.
They spent the next few days hanging around various casinos in some of the shabbier parts of Mombasa. Eames brought back a few chips for Neal to forge-admittedly, third-world casinos were much less careful about the chips they cashed-and he seemed to rediscover scotch again. It was an undesirable habit that Neal noticed cropped up whenever the forger was trying to ignore something. While Eames played poker or blackjack or whatever other gambling outlet was the flavor of the day, Neal took the opportunity to watch the people around them. It was almost ridiculously easy to figure out the tells of the supposed experts. He kept a lookout in case someone accused Eames of cheating-which, at card games, he usually did-but he never played accomplice to look at other players’ hands.
They were at a shady casino near the harbor when Neal received a cryptic text from Arthur-‘Tell him to not take the job’-which he dutifully passed along to a perplexed Eames. It wasn’t until later in the day, when Neal was absently watching the people around him, that he understood what the message might mean.
When Dominic Cobb came walking through the front doors, it took all of Neal’s willpower not to spit his soda back into its glass.
He caught Eames’ gaze and tapped the back of his left ring finger, glancing over the forger’s right shoulder pointedly.
Company.
Neal was too far away and the casino too loud to hear the words exchanged between the two men, but something blank and cool settled over Eames’ face when he caught sight of the extractor.
Cobb was not what Neal had expected. He knew his face from the papers, but those images had been taken years ago. Any anger Neal might have felt towards Cobb dissipated as he studied the man’s hunched shoulders; as he took in the lines around his mouth and the deadened look in his eyes. There was something empty and broken about the extractor, and all Neal could feel towards him was pity.
When they got up to leave, headed toward the upstairs bar, Eames made no motion to indicate that Neal should stay. So, of course, he followed.
He tucked himself into a corner, within listening range and in full view of their table.
“Inception,” Cobb began, and Neal felt his stomach drop to his shoes.
He knew the concept, of course, and he knew Eames’s team had tried it when he worked with the SAS. He knew that the job had been an absolute disaster, and he knew that inception was pretty much an impossible feat.
He also knew that his father was terribly bored of the usual corporate dreamshare espionage, and dying for a job that would challenge him.
It was not a recipe for anything good.
Sure enough, Eames’ eyes lit up instantly. Whatever resentment lingered from Cobb stealing away Arthur’s loyalty was put on a backburner in the face of professional intrigue; the interest of someone far too skilled to stay content with the norm.
“Interested?” Cobb was saying. “Because Arthur keeps telling me it can’t be done.”
Neal’s heart leapt to his throat. He’d already known Arthur was with Cobb, of course. He’d spent the majority of the past two years agonizing over that fact. But hearing Cobb talk about his absent father so casually-so obviously unaware of the fact Arthur’d had a family and a life before-drove home just how long it had been since Neal had seen him. Cobb spoke of Arthur like a casual acquaintance, a business partner, when he was everything to Neal.
Eames froze with a pistachio halfway to his mouth. The flash of hurt and longing in his eyes was almost painful for Neal to witness, it was so raw and unguarded. The expression was quickly masked, however: replaced with a quirk of his lips that ran just this side of bitter.
“Arthur,” he repeated, as if tasting the name on his tongue. “Are you still working with that stick in the mud?”
“He’s good at what he does, right?”
A sad smile played around Eames’ mouth.
“Oh, he’s the best. But he has no imagination.”
“Not like you.”
A man appeared at the bar, too well-dressed and too wary-looking to be anything but a tail. For a moment Neal felt a spike of fear, worried that the Spaniards or the Czechs-or even worse, the Russians-had found them, but the man was looking at Cobb, not at Eames. He glanced over, saw the recognition in his father’s eyes, and relaxed a little. They were talking about the job, about finding a chemist and using Yusuf, when Eames finally brought Cobb’s attention to his tail.
“That price on my head-was that dead or alive?”
A smirk curled Eames’ lips.
“Don’t remember. See if he starts shooting.”
Neal waited until both Cobb and his tail had gone-jumping out a window? Really?-before he got up from his spot near the back of the room, wandering over to his father. Eames settled himself at the bar, finishing off his beer as Neal sat next to him.
“You’re going to take the job.”
It wasn’t a question. Eames smiled.
“Yes.”
“You are not going to Paris.”
“Like hell.”
The conversation had gone downhill from there.
“No,” Eames had replied sharply, cutting off Neal’s arguments. “You listen to me. The people involved in this are powerful, and they are dangerous, and I am not letting you anywhere near it. I am going to Australia, and then I am going to Paris. You are going back to London. End of story.”
“But Arthur-”
“Arthur would say the same thing, and you know it. We would never put you in danger. I understand you want to see him again, but this job is not the time. Now come on, we both need to catch our flights.”
Neal peered up at the dark sky from beneath the protection of the tin-roof awning, listening to the rain patter down. Through the automatic doors behind him, instructions and advisements were being given in both English and French, a tinny female voice calling out over the loudspeakers. He shifted the duffel on his shoulder as he watched cars drive by, absently palming the phone in his jacket pocket.
He’d waited long enough for Eames’ plane to get airborne. Then he had turned around, marched to customer service and changed his ticket destination from London to Paris.
Paris had the Louvre. Paris had the Musée d’Orsay and the Rodin and was just a short distance from Versailles. Paris was the fashion and cultural center of the world and above all else Paris had Arthur, and there was no force on the planet that was going to keep Neal away.
“Neal!”
Neal froze in place, his heart hammering against his ribcage.
Slowly, he turned around.
Arthur looked tired. Granted, Neal calling him from de Gaulle airport at three in the morning probably didn’t help-but the weariness seemed even deeper than that. It was present in the tightness in his eyes, in the stiffness of his gait. He was wearing slacks and a t-shirt, trenchcoat thrown over his shoulders like an aside, and he didn’t have an umbrella. He’d answered his phone, sounding sleepy and alarmed that Neal would be calling him in the middle of the night, and it appeared he had just dashed straight to his car afterward.
In Arthur’s eyes was a disbelieving kind of wonder, and Neal felt something crack inside of him.
“Père-”
He dropped his duffel to the sidewalk, leaving it lying forgotten on the concrete as he took the few steps to meet Arthur halfway. The shoulder beneath his cheek was damp with rain, but Neal couldn’t care less as strong arms enfolded him in a tight embrace.
“What are you doing here?” Arthur said breathlessly. “I know Eames took the job, but he would never risk-”
“I came on my own,” Neal said. He didn’t need any more tension between those two. “He tried to send me back to London. It didn’t work.”
Arthur chuckled. He pulled away, cupping Neal’s jaw in his hand. He tilted his head up with a fond expression, studying Neal’s face with a minute attention to detail. A wistful look crossed his features.
“You’ve gotten older.”
“By nearly two years,” Neal replied. Arthur swallowed hard, an agonized flicker of emotion flashing across his face.
“Neal, I’m sorry-”
“Don’t,” Neal interrupted, his voice hoarse. “Don’t. I understand. I always have. I just-I want you back. I just want my family back.”
“You know I would do anything for you,” Arthur said softly, brushing a stray lock of Neal’s tousled hair away from his face. “But I’m afraid it won’t be that easy.”
Neal sighed, leaning his forehead against Arthur’s shoulder. The chasm between his parents would take time to fill, he knew that. Arthur had left them with barely a word and Eames had responded by cutting him off completely. Neither one was faultless. And Eames-well, Neal had seen first-hand what happened to Eames. It wouldn’t be easy to mend something like that.
“I know.”
Arthur’s fingers curled around the nape of Neal’s neck, pulling him closer, arms wrapping tightly around him as if he expected him to disappear at any second.
“God, I’ve missed you,” Arthur rasped, his voice muffled in Neal’s hair. “So much.”
Neal pressed his face into Arthur’s neck, hands clutching at the damp material of his father’s jacket. The tremor in Arthur’s words was so bizarre, so raw and unguarded-a display of emotions only ever shown to those closest to him. To his family; to the people he loved. Neal squeezed his eyes shut, tightening his grip.
“Don’t send me away. I know I shouldn’t have come, but I couldn’t-”
“It’s okay, Neal,” Arthur murmured. “It’s okay. I won’t, I promise.”
Neal pulled back, studying his face intently. There was a fierceness to Arthur’s voice; a glint in his eyes that said this was a promise he wouldn’t be breaking. A slow smile curled Neal’s lips, mirrored on his father’s.
“Come on,” Arthur said. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”
Neal picked up his phone, tired and bleary, to a scathing string of half-coherent British in his ear.
“You little prat! I told you to go back to London-I told you to go home. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice you switching tickets? You’re a bloody pain in my arse and when I get to Paris-”
Neal dropped his head back onto the pillow with a groan. Eames always did have the tendency toward slang when he was particularly displeased, and Neal was not nearly awake enough to translate.
It was close to noon, bright light filtering through the curtains. Arthur was staying at Regyn’s, a wonderfully sumptuous hotel in the heart of Montmartre. He’d booked a double, out of habit or otherwise, and had been using the extra room as a study until Neal dropped in. Papers were shoved off the bed and photos filed away in order to make room for Neal to wedge himself back into Arthur’s life.
Not that either of them had gone to sleep right away. There were two empty wine glasses still sitting on the lounge table, remnants of their hours-long conversation that had lasted until nearly dawn. They’d turned it in just as the sun was rising, and Neal had hoped to get in a solid eight hours of sleep to make up for his awful jet lag.
He really ought to have known better.
“-put your arse right back on a plane as soon as I land-”
“No,” Neal said firmly, suddenly wide awake. There was a short, startled silence.
“Beg pardon?”
“No,” he repeated. “I’m not leaving. You can try to make me, but it won’t work. I’m staying here.”
“Neal-”
“No. It has been nearly two years since I’ve seen Arthur-since I have had my family in one place. You can pretend to hate each other as much as you want, but I am not giving up that easily.”
Eames was quiet for a few moments. Neal’s heart thumped in his chest, adrenalin kicking around in his system from the outburst.
”Where are you staying?” Eames asked at last. Neal blinked.
“Hôtel Regyn’s. Why?”
Eames sighed, and Neal could almost see him running his fingers through his hair.
“Book me a room. I should be done here by the end of the week; my flight is scheduled for Friday.”
A wide, silly grin broke out across Neal’s face.
“And you’re going to get a rock from Uluru for me, right?”
Eames snorted. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Neal smiled, some of the tension in him easing. It wouldn’t be an easy task to repair what was broken between his parents, but at least he was going to be in a position to help try.
“Thank you,” he said, soft and sincere. He sensed Eames’ quiet smile.
“I’ll see you soon.”
Neal lay in bed for a little while longer, soaking up the sunlight and the warmth of the sheets. He was in Paris, wonderful lovely Paris, with the world as his oyster and the art scene laid out at his feet. He was pondering the merits of stealing something from the Catacombs-and weighing the ‘unique’ versus the ‘creepy’ factor-when a soft knock on the door roused him.
“C’me in,” he mumbled.
Arthur was wearing a sharp suit of pearl-grey wool, though the jacket had been left off in favor of just slacks and waistcoat. It was a Zegna, and not an outfit Neal recognized, so he guessed it had been made after Arthur left. He rolled sleepily onto his back, cracking a yawn and rubbing at his eyes as Arthur sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You left your favorite Kilgour in New York,” he said helpfully, reaching out to tug on the French-cuff sleeve of Arthur’s muted lavender shirt.
Arthur smiled, his expression fond.
“I left all of my favorite things in New York.”
Neal ducked his head, grinning back. He climbed out of bed, scrubbing at the mess of his hair as he padded to the bathroom, fishing out a toothbrush from his bag. He still felt disgusting from travelling, but that wouldn’t wear off for a few days at least.
“Do you think you’re up for some sightseeing today?” Arthur asked. “The Louvre has some wonderful showings on exhibit that I thought you might enjoy.”
Neal snorted, spitting out toothpaste into the sink.
“I will never be so tired that I would say no to the Louvre.”
The Louvre had Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. The Louvre had the Venus de Milo and The Coronation of Napoleon and it had the freaking Mona Lisa. A trip to Paris was not complete without stopping by to say hello to the Lisa.
Of course, to Neal, ‘hello’ was rather akin to ‘someday, you will be mine.’
He turned back to Arthur with a brilliant smile, unable to douse the feeling of lightness in his chest, which had been absent for far too long.
“Allons-y, mon père.”
They went to the Louvre.
They went to the Louvre and the Musée Picasso and the Grévin; they went to the Arc de Triomphe and Sacré Coeur and the Champs-Élysées. They skipped the Eiffel Tower because the lines were too damn long to bother with, and because there was nothing truly worth stealing up there. They took a half-day trip out to Chartrés where Neal ate the best marzipan on the planet, and they went on full-day trips to both Marseille and Bordeaux.
They also went to Versailles, where Arthur ended up having to almost physically drag Neal away.
They drank smoky French roast and dined on foie gras and escargot and earthy black truffles smothered in butter. There were fresh baguettes and cheese and salami and croissants for breakfast every morning, and by the time the week was over Neal was fairly certain he’d gained pounds just from looking at all the food. It was like one of their old overseas trips, back when he was still in school and they would catch a week or two during breaks to show him the world. It was an intense, exhilarating period of time, stuffed to bursting with all the things to see and do.
There was only one thing-one person-missing, but both Neal and Arthur tried to avoid the subject as much as possible, even up to the moment he arrived.
“The Tamayo in Madrid,” Arthur said as they stood near the baggage claim at Charles de Gaulle airport, watching the arrivals and departures screen.
“That was me,” Neal confessed, a little sheepishly. Arthur’s lips twitched.
“The Topkapi dagger?”
“Eames.”
“Blackie?”
“Neither of us, actually,” he admitted. “Though, that was a lovely piece of work. We’re still not sure how the thief managed that one.”
“The Hollander chess set.”
Neal winced. That had not been a pretty heist. Too much melodramatic roof-scaling and window-picking, and he’d had splinters in his palms for weeks afterward.
“Ah…that was me. In my defense,” he added quickly, “It was supposed to be your birthday present.”
Arthur blinked, just a twitch of surprise, before his eyes softened. He cast Neal a fond glance that seemed to forgive all of his thieving transgressions.
“How did you know about the Topkapi, anyway?” Neal asked, scanning the arrivals. ‘SYD 10:45 ON TIME’ caught his attention. “We were positive that had been a clean job.”
Arthur raised his eyebrows.
“You forget what I do for a living.”
Neal chuckled. “Right.”
“I have a file,” Arthur admitted. Neal wasn’t even surprised. “All of the heists and forgeries in the past year that looked like they could be either of you.”
He paused, then added, “The Fabergé threw me. That one was messy.”
Neal made a face. The Rosebud was in his possession; that was all that mattered, for now. He was still working on adding bonus points for flair.
“The Hermitage is a very secure museum,” he said loftily. “With very good night guards.”
“Ex-military?” Arthur asked, voice dry. Neal grimaced.
“Attached to Yarygins and AK-47s,” he agreed mournfully. Arthur shook his head.
“I wish I could yell at you for putting yourself into that kind of danger,” he said, bemused, “But it wouldn’t make any difference, would it?”
“Probably not,” Neal admitted. He grinned unrepentantly. “It was a Fabergé.”
“And it cost me my favorite pair of oxfords.”
Neal nearly jumped out of his skin at the familiar voice behind him. He did an abrupt about-face, turning on heel to scowl at his irritatingly sneaky father.
“Don’t do that.”
Eames wore a smirk and a white pinstriped dress shirt, button undone at the throat. There was a duffel slung over his shoulder and Neal knew there would be no other luggage: they always travelled light. There were dark circles beneath Eames’ eyes, courtesy of thirty hours spent on planes and in airports, and the curve of his lips was decidedly fixed.
Neal held his breath as Eames’ gaze shifted from him to Arthur. But the expression on Eames’ face was so completely closed off, so vacant of emotion, that he couldn’t get any kind of reading-which, in and of itself, was a bad sign.
“Arthur.”
“Eames,” Arthur replied quietly. “It’s been a while.”
Neal cast him a helpless look, hearing the forced neutrality in his voice. Eames was keeping himself distant and Arthur’s automatic reaction was to clamp down on his own emotions, and both of them were damn idiots.
“Longer than a month,” Eames noted. Arthur’s face smoothed into a carefully blank mask.
“So it has.”
Neal kind of wanted to stab them both.
Arthur turned, tilting his head toward the airport exit.
“I have a car. Shall we go?”
Eames nodded briefly, hitching his bag up and moving to follow.
Neal trailed after them and wondered if patricide was still considered illegal in France.
( Part 2 )