fic - Late to Settle [2/5]
Title: Late to Settle
Author: yjudaes
Team: angst.
Prompt: defeat.
Word Count: 1443.
Rating: PG-13, this part.
Warnings: Eames likes to play games; Arthur has a secret. Fulfilling my desire to write a self-indulgent His Dark Materials crossover, though it is otherwise canon-compliant. Nimue is an amber-morph red fox and Mekhmet is a melanistic leopard. Beta duties once again by the fantastic silvrey; donde la fuck, Eli.
Part One
They go under; Eames is forging the mark's mistress, a rote sort of role he has plenty of practice with. She is about forty, with a sleek little Italian Greyhound for a daemon. Well-kept; everything about her is tasteful, from her short red nails to her sleek, honey-blonde ponytail. It’s disconcerting to see Mekhmet abruptly shrink to a quarter of her normal size, somehow weirder than watching Eames change.
“Something about this doesn’t feel right,” Eames says, looking at the forge in the mirrored doors of the hotel elevator. He smooths back a strand of her hair, delicately adjusts the thin strap of the navy blue dress she’s wearing.
Nimue watches the little dog prance with what Arthur can only assume to be half-amusement. The other half is a feeling he knows too well, one that he gets whenever Mekhmet forges something small and precious in front of Nimue. It’s a perverse feeling of role reversal - Arthur doesn’t know what Nimue is thinking, precisely, but he suspects she is thinking about clamping her jaws down around the greyhound’s throat and holding him there, shaking him to let him know - she could hurt him, if she wanted to.
He doesn’t want to think about what that implies regarding his working relationship with Eames.
“The forge is good,” Arthur says noncommittally. He looks at his own reflection, next to Eames’s. He’s fully aware that wasn’t what Eames meant.
Eames is aware of that, too. “No,” he says, frowning at the woman in the mirror for a moment and changing back into himself, though Mekhmet as the dog lingers a few seconds longer before the leopard reappears. His frown is more severe in his own body than it had been on the forge’s face. “I don’t think this plan is going to work,” he clarifies.
Arthur could have predicted he’d say that. And he’s probably right; forging the mistress had been Tollefsrud’s idea, and it had never sat quite correctly with Arthur. The mark was the kind of man who went through women like they were bottles of wine, and not even the sort of wine you’d want to savor. He liked to sample them, test their flavor, and then be done with them. “So what are you thinking?” he asks Eames, his eyes tracking Mekhmet pacing in a small circle, her claws clicking on the tile floor.
“As if you’d trust my judgement?” Eames asks, eyebrows raised.
Arthur raises his eyebrows right back. “Come on,” he says, folding his arms. “All your questionable traits aside, I’ll be the first to admit that your instincts are generally good.” Nimue glances up at him as he says this, flicks her tail disdainfully, and then pretends to ignore him.
Eames looks almost -- flattered, ridiculously enough. “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he declares, his voice echoing in the big, empty space. Arthur rolls his eyes. Not hardly, he thinks, but instead he says,
“So tell me your idea.”
+
The idea is this: instead of forging one of the sea of women the mark has known in his adult life, dig a bit deeper. Back in this man’s university days, there is evidence of a more tangible connection. A girl -- a woman now, certainly -- who he had known since childhood. She’s dropped out of his life, since, but Eames thinks that bringing her back now may be more compelling than offering the mark a mystery whose depths he’s already plumbed, in more ways than one.
"The problem," Arthur says, spreading out the information he's gathered over the wood laminate surface of a cheap conference table, "is that she seems to have dropped off the face of the earth after she turned twenty-five."
Her name is Camille Adedayo. She's half-Nigerian, she's gorgeous (coffee-colored skin and enormous hazel eyes), and Arthur has no idea how she could have managed to disappear this thoroughly. It's as if she's been wiped clean from every record, ever. The only other person he knows who has this few identifying traits, this few fingerprints left in the world, is himself. And even Arthur has little tells, caches of information for the taking, if you know how to get to them. Camille has nothing. "At least not anything that I can find," Arthur says. Nimue pushes a piece of paper toward Mekhmet with one paw.
"I won't insult your intelligence or your skill level by asking you if you checked the Social Security death index," Tollefsrud says, her chin in her hand. You just did, thinks Arthur, but he just shakes his head.
"Nothing," he says. "I checked newspapers, coroner's offices, public records, adjacent to anyplace she had previously lived, and there was nothing. I even checked around the areas where her close friends moved, after graduation. She's still alive, and she didn't get married, I just have no idea where she went."
"I can work with what we have here," Eames muses, running his fingers over a photograph of a smiling Camille at her graduation ceremony. "The mark hasn't seen her in fifteen years, after all, and I'm confident I can do a convincing age-up to real time. But what I can't work with..." he's spreading the photos out, smudging his fingerprints all over their glossy surfaces. Arthur watches the movements of his hands; he himself always touches the photos near their edges, careful not to mark them up, and so does Nimue.
"Arthur?" says Eames. Arthur looks up and meets his eyes. "Her daemon isn't in any of these photos."
"I know," Arthur replies. Tollefsrud shifts irritably in her chair, and her raccoon daemon plucks up one of the papers covered with Camille's information.
"I don't suppose there's any chance that she settled late," says Eames with a hint of a laugh in his voice, and Arthur looks at him sharply, feeling Nimue shift against his leg. Her ears have gone back slightly, when he looks at her.
"Not that late," he answers, Tollefsrud echoing, "Don't be stupid," immediately after he says it. Mekhmet's tail thumps against the ground with annoyance. "So what do we do?" Arthur asks Eames.
"I suppose we'll have to wing it." Eames frowns, tapping his fingers against the photos in the same rhythm as Mekhmet's tail thumping against the floor. "I've got enough information here that, with a few practice runs, I should be able to come up with something suitable."
"Come on," Arthur challenges. "That's not going to be good enough. You're excellent at reading people, I'll give you that, but even with these details, there's no way you can know her well enough to know what her daemon would be."
Beside Eames, Mekhmet shows a hint of fang, her claws flexing against the floor. "Well, Arthur," Eames counters, his voice pleasant, airy even. "Unless you're able to improve upon what you've brought us, here, I simply don't see an alternative. We've already covered that none of the mistresses are going to work, as they haven't got a deep enough connection to the mark to coerce him into spontaneously revealing his secrets. They're expected. And we need to
do something unexpected. So what, exactly, do you suggest?"
"I don't know," Arthur says, his eyes dropping down to watch Nimue as she gets to her feet and paces, under the table, caged in by its legs.
"We'll go under tomorrow." Eames shuffles the photos together into a neat pile, hands them to Arthur as if it's all decided. "I'll give it a go, and if you're still not satisfied --"
"We don't have time to scrap the plan again," Tollefsrud says sharply, her daemon stacking papers one by one and slipping them back into their respective folders. "If it doesn't work, you'll just have to go back to the mistress and find a way to make her unexpected."
Arthur has a familiar sense of irritation, embarrassment, pooling in his stomach. It seems to happen with alarming frequency when Eames is around. As she walks past him, Mekhmet glances up at him and says, "Don't want this to be like the Fischer job, do we, darling?" and though Eames is already four feet down the hall and not looking back, Arthur knows the twist of the knife in his gut comes from him. Irrationally, he wants to throw a punch. Nimue's ears are pinned back, her eyes slitted.
He used to wonder if this would all be solved by letting them fight it out. He wondered if he'd get satisfaction from driving his fist into the soft flesh of Eames's mouth, feeling it rip against his sharp teeth. If he'd enjoy watching Nimue tear that glossy black fur out of Mekhmet's hide. He's older, now, though, and he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it wouldn’t solve anything.
Author: yjudaes
Team: angst.
Prompt: defeat.
Word Count: 1443.
Rating: PG-13, this part.
Warnings: Eames likes to play games; Arthur has a secret. Fulfilling my desire to write a self-indulgent His Dark Materials crossover, though it is otherwise canon-compliant. Nimue is an amber-morph red fox and Mekhmet is a melanistic leopard. Beta duties once again by the fantastic silvrey; donde la fuck, Eli.
Part One
They go under; Eames is forging the mark's mistress, a rote sort of role he has plenty of practice with. She is about forty, with a sleek little Italian Greyhound for a daemon. Well-kept; everything about her is tasteful, from her short red nails to her sleek, honey-blonde ponytail. It’s disconcerting to see Mekhmet abruptly shrink to a quarter of her normal size, somehow weirder than watching Eames change.
“Something about this doesn’t feel right,” Eames says, looking at the forge in the mirrored doors of the hotel elevator. He smooths back a strand of her hair, delicately adjusts the thin strap of the navy blue dress she’s wearing.
Nimue watches the little dog prance with what Arthur can only assume to be half-amusement. The other half is a feeling he knows too well, one that he gets whenever Mekhmet forges something small and precious in front of Nimue. It’s a perverse feeling of role reversal - Arthur doesn’t know what Nimue is thinking, precisely, but he suspects she is thinking about clamping her jaws down around the greyhound’s throat and holding him there, shaking him to let him know - she could hurt him, if she wanted to.
He doesn’t want to think about what that implies regarding his working relationship with Eames.
“The forge is good,” Arthur says noncommittally. He looks at his own reflection, next to Eames’s. He’s fully aware that wasn’t what Eames meant.
Eames is aware of that, too. “No,” he says, frowning at the woman in the mirror for a moment and changing back into himself, though Mekhmet as the dog lingers a few seconds longer before the leopard reappears. His frown is more severe in his own body than it had been on the forge’s face. “I don’t think this plan is going to work,” he clarifies.
Arthur could have predicted he’d say that. And he’s probably right; forging the mistress had been Tollefsrud’s idea, and it had never sat quite correctly with Arthur. The mark was the kind of man who went through women like they were bottles of wine, and not even the sort of wine you’d want to savor. He liked to sample them, test their flavor, and then be done with them. “So what are you thinking?” he asks Eames, his eyes tracking Mekhmet pacing in a small circle, her claws clicking on the tile floor.
“As if you’d trust my judgement?” Eames asks, eyebrows raised.
Arthur raises his eyebrows right back. “Come on,” he says, folding his arms. “All your questionable traits aside, I’ll be the first to admit that your instincts are generally good.” Nimue glances up at him as he says this, flicks her tail disdainfully, and then pretends to ignore him.
Eames looks almost -- flattered, ridiculously enough. “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he declares, his voice echoing in the big, empty space. Arthur rolls his eyes. Not hardly, he thinks, but instead he says,
“So tell me your idea.”
+
The idea is this: instead of forging one of the sea of women the mark has known in his adult life, dig a bit deeper. Back in this man’s university days, there is evidence of a more tangible connection. A girl -- a woman now, certainly -- who he had known since childhood. She’s dropped out of his life, since, but Eames thinks that bringing her back now may be more compelling than offering the mark a mystery whose depths he’s already plumbed, in more ways than one.
"The problem," Arthur says, spreading out the information he's gathered over the wood laminate surface of a cheap conference table, "is that she seems to have dropped off the face of the earth after she turned twenty-five."
Her name is Camille Adedayo. She's half-Nigerian, she's gorgeous (coffee-colored skin and enormous hazel eyes), and Arthur has no idea how she could have managed to disappear this thoroughly. It's as if she's been wiped clean from every record, ever. The only other person he knows who has this few identifying traits, this few fingerprints left in the world, is himself. And even Arthur has little tells, caches of information for the taking, if you know how to get to them. Camille has nothing. "At least not anything that I can find," Arthur says. Nimue pushes a piece of paper toward Mekhmet with one paw.
"I won't insult your intelligence or your skill level by asking you if you checked the Social Security death index," Tollefsrud says, her chin in her hand. You just did, thinks Arthur, but he just shakes his head.
"Nothing," he says. "I checked newspapers, coroner's offices, public records, adjacent to anyplace she had previously lived, and there was nothing. I even checked around the areas where her close friends moved, after graduation. She's still alive, and she didn't get married, I just have no idea where she went."
"I can work with what we have here," Eames muses, running his fingers over a photograph of a smiling Camille at her graduation ceremony. "The mark hasn't seen her in fifteen years, after all, and I'm confident I can do a convincing age-up to real time. But what I can't work with..." he's spreading the photos out, smudging his fingerprints all over their glossy surfaces. Arthur watches the movements of his hands; he himself always touches the photos near their edges, careful not to mark them up, and so does Nimue.
"Arthur?" says Eames. Arthur looks up and meets his eyes. "Her daemon isn't in any of these photos."
"I know," Arthur replies. Tollefsrud shifts irritably in her chair, and her raccoon daemon plucks up one of the papers covered with Camille's information.
"I don't suppose there's any chance that she settled late," says Eames with a hint of a laugh in his voice, and Arthur looks at him sharply, feeling Nimue shift against his leg. Her ears have gone back slightly, when he looks at her.
"Not that late," he answers, Tollefsrud echoing, "Don't be stupid," immediately after he says it. Mekhmet's tail thumps against the ground with annoyance. "So what do we do?" Arthur asks Eames.
"I suppose we'll have to wing it." Eames frowns, tapping his fingers against the photos in the same rhythm as Mekhmet's tail thumping against the floor. "I've got enough information here that, with a few practice runs, I should be able to come up with something suitable."
"Come on," Arthur challenges. "That's not going to be good enough. You're excellent at reading people, I'll give you that, but even with these details, there's no way you can know her well enough to know what her daemon would be."
Beside Eames, Mekhmet shows a hint of fang, her claws flexing against the floor. "Well, Arthur," Eames counters, his voice pleasant, airy even. "Unless you're able to improve upon what you've brought us, here, I simply don't see an alternative. We've already covered that none of the mistresses are going to work, as they haven't got a deep enough connection to the mark to coerce him into spontaneously revealing his secrets. They're expected. And we need to
do something unexpected. So what, exactly, do you suggest?"
"I don't know," Arthur says, his eyes dropping down to watch Nimue as she gets to her feet and paces, under the table, caged in by its legs.
"We'll go under tomorrow." Eames shuffles the photos together into a neat pile, hands them to Arthur as if it's all decided. "I'll give it a go, and if you're still not satisfied --"
"We don't have time to scrap the plan again," Tollefsrud says sharply, her daemon stacking papers one by one and slipping them back into their respective folders. "If it doesn't work, you'll just have to go back to the mistress and find a way to make her unexpected."
Arthur has a familiar sense of irritation, embarrassment, pooling in his stomach. It seems to happen with alarming frequency when Eames is around. As she walks past him, Mekhmet glances up at him and says, "Don't want this to be like the Fischer job, do we, darling?" and though Eames is already four feet down the hall and not looking back, Arthur knows the twist of the knife in his gut comes from him. Irrationally, he wants to throw a punch. Nimue's ears are pinned back, her eyes slitted.
He used to wonder if this would all be solved by letting them fight it out. He wondered if he'd get satisfaction from driving his fist into the soft flesh of Eames's mouth, feeling it rip against his sharp teeth. If he'd enjoy watching Nimue tear that glossy black fur out of Mekhmet's hide. He's older, now, though, and he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it wouldn’t solve anything.