In certain light (1/2)
Title: In certain light
Pairing: Eames/Arthur
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.
Notes: Originally posted here on the kink meme; reposted by request in easier-to-read format.
Summary: This is the secret, he thinks. This is what Arthur keeps hidden.
Eames brings Arthur in during the Copenhagen job as a test run. His field being what it is, when the job goes down, Arthur doesn’t actually know it’s a test.
Any attempt at luring him in by subterfuge will keep Arthur from coming within a thousand miles of the place, so Eames goes the direct route. He invites Arthur for a holiday in Denmark.
Arthur doesn’t buy it in the least, but he does come, and Eames keeps him distracted running intel for another job he’s got going at the same time. Multitasking is a wonderful thing.
He and Arthur spend time together planning the job, doing background checks, casing the mark. The mark, as it so happens, works in the Statens Museum for Kunst. Three days in they’re taking a stroll through the permanent exhibitions, Arthur’s hands in his trouser pockets and Eames lingering over the modern and contemporary wing.
A week later, their extractor deviates from the plan - as Arthur knows it - and surprises the mark at her place of employment.
Arthur is hacked off, the way he always is when his careful planning goes out the window and he has to adapt, but he’s inside the museum within half an hour, keeping them on schedule and making sure everything goes smoothly.
Eames has never said anything about it, but Arthur is at his best in a crisis. He’s well-respected for being organized, competent, and ruthlessly prepared, but what makes the best in the business want to work with him is how he shines when his fourth and fifth back-up plans have gone out the window and all he has left are his wits. That’s the real reason Eames takes jobs with him, and why he secretly hopes something will go wrong every time they work together. Because he gets to see this, Arthur at his most innovative, creating dreamscapes out of smoke and mirrors and building skyscrapers from ink and paper between one breath and the next.
While Arthur is on the second level watching their extractor’s back, Eames drops himself off the side of a building and wakes up to finish his other job.
He has a forgery already hidden inside the museum, dropped off inside the ventilation on a previous visit. Arthur has done his ground work for him on the location, so Eames barely has to lift a finger in order to avoid the cameras and security alarms.
He has the painting out of its frame and rolled into a parcel tube within ten minutes. He’s cutting it close, but there should be just enough time for him to hook himself up again and drop into the first level.
When he does, Arthur is waiting for him. “What happened to you?” he asks, when Eames finds him out on the balcony in their dream-apartment on the first level, gun in hand covering someone on the roof.
“Projections,” he says, as apologetic as he ever can be, because he can tell by how focused Arthur is that at least some of them have turned violent. It’s a plausible enough excuse. “I had to reset.”
Arthur doesn’t call his bluff, but he doesn’t look at him, either. “Cover Ross,” he orders, and ducks inside to check on the mark.
When they wake, mission accomplished, Arthur clears everything out and wipes the security tapes with quick efficiency, once again doing Eames’ work for him. They’re out the door in less than an hour, and no one is ever the wiser.
* * *
Two days after the team has left the country, Eames opens the door to find Arthur outside his hotel room.
“I’d say it was a pleasant surprise, but I’m afraid I can’t be certain,” Eames greets him, put off-balance by both Arthur’s unexpected appearance and the way his tie has been loosened, the top button open on his dress shirt. “Is this business or pleasure?”
Arthur walks past him, forcing Eames to either step aside or end up standing far closer than he would consider acceptable, when he knows for a fact that Arthur is carrying at least three weapons. “Let’s see it,” he says, turning once he’s in the room to face Eames.
Eames doesn’t have to pretend not to know what he’s talking about, which is all the better. He never lies when the truth will serve the same purpose. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me. See what?”
“The Champaigne,” Arthur clarifies.
Eames has an excellent poker face, but he’s been caught a bit flat-footed this time. He’d thought after the first day that he was in the clear. It had been a disappointment more than a relief.
He doesn’t bother lying about it. There are more interesting things to pursue. “How did you know?” he asks, already considering the possibilities. Arthur could have woken during the time he was pulling the actual heist, but it’s unlikely. No one else on the team had been a party to Eames’ plans besides the extractor, who would have at least warned Eames if he’d let anything slip. The painting’s absence hadn’t even been discovered yet, so there was no cause for suspicion.
“After you disappeared from the first level when you were supposed to be standing guard, I got suspicious,” Arthur says. “There’s only one thing that would have pulled you away for how long you were gone, and you’d cased the place already. There’s a private collector in Hamburg who’s stopped relentlessly pressuring the auction houses for French school Baroque-era paintings, and there’s a chip on the inside left corner of the frame still hanging in Copenhagen.”
“No, there isn’t,” Eames objects. He’ll let Arthur accuse him of a great many things, but incompetency at his chosen profession isn’t one of them.
“There is,” Arthur says, smiling slightly. “But it looks more than a few days old. You should probably authenticate before you sell.” He pauses before adding, “You also forgot about the camera in the east stairwell.”
Eames goes still. “You wiped the surveillance tapes,” he says cautiously.
“I also copy them to my laptop so I can review them after a job,” Arthur tells him, which is information Eames could have used a little earlier. He gives Eames a moment to come up with further arguments or excuses, and then prompts, “The painting, Eames.”
He supposes he might as well show it off, so long as Arthur already knows about it. Opening the tube hidden in the back of the room’s small closet, he clears the table and carefully unrolls the canvas.
Arthur stands by his side, studying it in silence. Finally he says, “If I ever find out you’ve left in the middle of a job again, I’ll make sure no one worth working with will ever touch you.”
“Fair enough,” Eames agrees. “Would it soothe your outraged sensibilities if I offered you twenty percent for doing most of the grunt work?”
Arthur’s eyes cut sideways. “As long as you don’t fence it through Duprees,” he says eventually. “He’s how I tracked you here in the first place, and if I can, so can someone else.”
Eames hadn’t been prepared for that. He’d known the man was a braggart, to be sure, but he’d thought Duprees would have the intelligence to keep his mouth shut at least until the deal had been sealed.
“Arthur,” he says speculatively, because he can’t possibly argue that Arthur hasn’t passed his test with flying colours, “How would you like to spend a bit more time working in reality?”
“Thirty percent,” Arthur answers without hesitation. “And I screen all clients.”
“Done,” Eames agrees. He’d expected Arthur to drive a harder bargain, perhaps one that would require extensive coaxing and sweeter offers. He’s almost disappointed.
They fall back into easy silence for a time, studying the canvas. Finally Eames says, “I do hate cherubs.”
Arthur snorts. “So do I.”
* * *
Arthur keeps one foot planted firmly in the dream-extraction world, as Eames had been certain he would. Within six months, however, he’s gone from laying the groundwork on Eames’ procurement jobs to working cons alongside him. Arthur is too expressive to ever make it far on his own, but he’s a superb wingman, drawing enough attention with his youthful looks and tailored suits that hardly anyone ever notices Eames, or at least not when it counts.
Bit by bit, he trains Arthur to be a chameleon, to fade quietly into the background the way Eames has been doing for more than a decade. He introduces Arthur to hooded sweatshirts and sweater vests, reacquaints him with distressed denim and talks him into newsboy caps, and with each disguise he sees another possibility, another tool for them to use. Every time the mark’s eyes drift to Arthur and stick there, Eames finds himself considering Arthur anew.
Gradually, he grows accustomed to seeing Arthur outside of abandoned warehouses and rented lofts. It’s almost a shock when Arthur strolls into a work space in Marseille after doing some covert surveillance and the rest of the team stares openly for a handful of seconds, leaving Eames befuddled until he realizes he’s probably one of only a handful of people who’ve ever witnessed Arthur wearing a graphic print tee.
He sees what’s under the clothes as well, glimpses of muscle beneath skin and sharply-defined bone structure when they’re switching disguises or sharing a room. He doesn’t ever ogle, although he does appreciate, in the same way he would appraise a finely-wrought poison ring. Aesthetically pleasing, and quite probably too dangerous for casual handling.
Arthur prefers to stay fully dressed at all times, so it’s a rare morning for Eames to find him by the window, shirt tossed over the back of the couch and a towel slung over one shoulder while he squeezes the water out of his hair.
“It’s pouring outside,” he says, gesturing to the rain-streaked glass pane with a grimace. “I went to see if I could catch Kennerty making an office coffee run, but he’ll never go out in this weather unless he has to.”
“There’s always tomorrow,” Eames says optimistically. The rain puts rather a damper on his plans as well, since he’d intended to loiter in the park for most of the day and perhaps acquire a small dog. Having one would make certain aspects of their current job a great deal easier.
Arthur hasn’t attempted to move past him into the bedroom to find dry clothing, so Eames stays where he is, leaning against the doorframe. Arthur’s hair is just starting to turn damp, curling up at the ends in a clear warning that it plans to prove unmanageable for the rest of the day without a thorough application of product.
“I don’t suppose you made that coffee run for yourself,” Eames says hopefully at last, pulling himself out of the half-trance he’s been lulled into by the rain. On a dreary day like this, he suspects it will take significant consumption of caffeine for him to get any work done at all.
“On the counter,” Arthur says, smiling slightly. Eames locates the cardboard cup and inhales hazelnut and dark roast, still warm enough for him to feel the steam curling against his face.
“This is usually a sign I’ve been working with someone for too long,” Eames admits, before turning his attention to properly savoring the first sip.
“I knew how you took your coffee within three days of meeting you,” Arthur replies, letting the towel drape over his shoulders now that he’s no longer in danger of dripping on the carpet.
“Mutual,” Eames returns, then pauses. “Although you probably had it written in a notebook somewhere, on a neatly-bullet pointed list.”
He’s pleased to startle a laugh out of Arthur, even a short one. “I use Excel spreadsheets,” Arthur says, turning to pick up his wet shirt from where it’s leaving a damp spot on the upholstery.
As he does, the sunlight makes a valiant, watery attempt to break through the rain, puncturing the clouds with a few weak pinpoint shafts of light. There’s something about the way the light falls, for just a moment, a trick of the glass refracting shades of gray. For a moment, Eames could swear he sees...
The towel has slipped from Arthur’s shoulders to his neck as he bends over. In its absence, Eames can see lean muscle, the jut of shoulder blades pushing against the skin. And something else.
For a moment, he’s almost certain there’s light rising from Arthur’s back, fragmenting and splitting as it travels, spreading in a wide arc over his torso. There’s the faintest hint of colour, faded violet and summer-sky blue, a shimmer of pale green blurring into yellow. Lines of light stretching up, out, fracturing into dozens upon dozens before they disappear.
Then the clouds gain their strength again, Arthur straightens, and all Eames had seen had been a trick of the light, nothing more.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Arthur says, brushing by him on his way into the bedroom.
Eames stays where he is, staring through the window into the dull, gray-washed daylight, and watches the rain.
* * *
One of the first things to change, once they’ve established themselves as partners, is how much Arthur lets him see. Eames had long suspected that Arthur’s defenses had evolved through necessity rather than nature; that the aloof distance he keeps between himself and the other members of his extraction teams is there because he’s aware of how vulnerable he is when others are inside his mind, and is on guard at all times to keep from giving anything else away.
Eames himself was a confidence man long before dream-extraction came along, so he doesn’t make any such distinction. When he considers himself safe in reality, however, Arthur not only drops his defenses, he doesn’t even appear to notice their absence.
As frustrating as it occasionally is, there’s something refreshing about Arthur’s forthrightness. When he’s not on guard, he’s appallingly easy to read, to the point that Eames actually has to force himself to stop making note of weaknesses and measuring how best to take advantage of them, tallying up pressure points and considering ways to make them crack. Arthur opens up to him with the force of an avalanche, and Eames is simply overwhelmed.
He knows about Arthur’s fear of drowning, his intense dislike for wilderness survival experts, his dietary habits and food allergies, his preferred concealed weapons and where he carries them, his weakness for small baby animals and newborns, his aversion to extreme sports, his love for caramels, and the five aliases he uses on a regular basis. All things Eames could use to hurt him, in a dream - with the possible exception of the caramels - and all things Arthur doesn’t seem to mind him knowing because they’re not in a dream.
Arthur’s glance lingers on a blonde with a keyhole neckline decorating her simple black dress, and then he smiles at the woman behind her pushing a pram, and Eames almost tells him to stop, for God’s sake, because Eames can’t stop cataloguing every little thing he gives away and the list is far too long for men in their profession.
Instead he says, “You could have asked for her number.”
Arthur doesn’t even bother to act surprised that he noticed. “She wouldn’t have given it,” he says. “The little girl was hers.”
Eames had known that already, had spotted the way the woman had glanced behind her at the pram when they paused at the street corner, but he is impressed that Arthur picked up on it. “You should consider trying your hand at forgery,” he suggests. He doesn’t know whether Arthur has ever tried it or not - it seems likely - but observation goes a long way when it comes to shifting skins.
Arthur shakes his head. “I’m not good with people the way you are.”
Eames snorts. “If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have brought you on,” he replies, and pulls out a cigarette as he turns the corner, spotting their mark on the sidewalk ahead.
“My sister says I let my impressions of people cloud my objectivity,” Arthur says, falling just slightly out of step as they approach the street corner and prepare to split up. “I think she’s probably right.”
And that, right there, is simply too much. “Try not to make it quite so easy for me, would you?” he says, turning to face Arthur as they wait for the signal to change. “You should have some secrets, in the event of our partnership unhappily dissolving. I’d hate to have to use personal information against you, but you do keep putting the bullets in my hand.”
Arthur smiles, but it’s a strange smile, Eames thinks, twisting and distant. “I’m sure I can manage to keep something back,” he says, and at that moment, Eames believes it. Arthur has a secret Eames doesn’t know, and in the face of all of Arthur’s aggravatingly expressive honesty, that’s a lure almost too strong for Eames to resist.
Arthur has a secret, and Eames now wants nothing more than to know what it is.
* * *
“I want my point man back.”
“Cobb,” Eames says cheerfully. “What a pleasure to hear from you. Afraid I haven’t seen him recently, but I’ll be sure to pass along the message if I do.”
That last part is a bald-faced lie, depending on how one defines ‘recent’. Arthur had left forty-five minutes ago to meet with a possible fence following their latest heist. They’re hoping to get rid of the raw jewels and antiques before they catch a flight to Antigua next week.
Cobb makes a noise not unlike a train engine venting steam. “Look, I know you’re in touch with him. The two of you haven’t been especially discreet when it comes to working together.”
“Like I said, I’ll be happy to relay your request,” Eames soothes. “If I happen to hear from him…”
Cobb cuts him off. “I’m telling you this because I need him on a job in three weeks and I can’t work with him if he’s dead. Interpol knows about the antiques. The extraction team you two conned in South Africa set you up. You’re walking into a trap.”
Eames goes very still. “How do you know this?”
Cobb’s answering tone is mirthless. “I told you. You two haven’t been all that discreet.”
Eames doesn’t waste any more time. He dismantles and disposes of the phone, shattering the electronics with several well-placed blows from the nearest lamp, and tucks his gun into his waistband. The meet was scheduled for fifteen minutes ago. If Arthur had been on time…
He yanks the door open and comes face to face with Arthur, both of them startled and on edge enough to draw their firearms before recognizing each other. Eames drops his gun to his side with an almost sick feeling of relief, stepping aside as Arthur pushes past him into the room.
“We’ve been made. The meet was either a set-up or our fence has friends in high places.”
“The former,” Eames answers. “I just got a phone call from an old friend of yours.”
Arthur glances at him, curious, but he doesn’t spare any more of his attention than that, already doing his own version of Eames’ quick and dirty clean-up and disposal. “How much cash do we have?”
“Enough,” Eames answers. “Leave everything; we can pick up new clothes once we’re over the border. Change first,” he adds, as Arthur picks up the carrying case they’ve been using to house the antiques. “You’re striking enough already as it is.”
Arthur gives him another look, but doesn’t protest. He strips off his suit jacket and tie with familiar efficiency, neatly unbuttoning his dress shirt just in time to catch the t-shirt Eames tosses at his head. In another thirty seconds he’ll be just another backpacker catching the evening train.
Eames pulls open the curtain, checking for any sign of activity on the street below. Arthur isn’t careless enough to miss picking up a tail, but that doesn’t mean the authorities haven’t been busy making inquiries of their own.
When he turns back, the orange glow of sunset hits Arthur squarely across the shoulders, painting his skin dark and vibrant. Streaks of tangerine and purple stretch from his shoulder blades, disappearing into shadow as they reach out toward the corners of the room. It doesn’t look anything like a rainbow, like a trick of the light. It doesn’t look like anything Eames has ever seen.
Arthur pulls the t-shirt over his head and runs his hands through his hair enough times to destroy the fragile construct of styling gel. When he turns around and sees Eames staring, something changes in his face, a veil dropping over his expression.
He knows Eames has seen something. Eames wonders whether Arthur can possibly imagine what he thinks he just saw, or whether Arthur suspects Eames of looking at him for a different reason altogether. On any other day, Eames thinks, he wouldn’t be far wrong.
They don’t have the time to dwell on it now. Arthur picks his gun up from the bed, tucking it into the waistband of his trousers, and slings the strap of the carrying case over his shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
They work Cobb’s extraction job, because Eames doesn’t like to owe anyone a debt if he can help it, and then they end up working a few more. Cobb and his wife Mal are rising stars in the extraction world, and they’re taking Arthur along with them. Eames has been at the top of this game since it first became a whisper on the black market, but he can’t deny that the combination of all four of them together gives him even more of an edge.
They work five high-risk and spectacularly successful jobs before someone’s past catches up with them and it all goes to shit.
Eames is in the middle of charming the mark with an impeccable forgery of her secretary when sudden, white-hot agony explodes in his chest and his entire world goes red.
Arthur is at his side in less time than Eames can account for, considering where he was supposed to be, which means that either Arthur had been closer than he’d thought or Eames has lost time. He looks up at Arthur’s face, haloed by the harsh fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling, and sees naked fear and tightly-leashed panic on Arthur’s face.
“Eames? Eames. Stay with me,” Arthur orders. One of his hands is supporting Eames’ head, which is pillowed on Arthur’s knees; the other is pressing down hard on a wound already on fire with pain.
Eames is about to tell him to just kill him and and finish the job without him, because he can’t play out the rest of his role at this point, when the look on Arthur’s face finally registers and he realizes. Arthur has been out of dream-sharing for so long that he’s lost track of reality. He’s forgotten this isn’t real, that if Eames dies he’ll only wake up. He thinks Eames is actually bleeding out right now on this ballroom floor.
He manages to say as much, garbled though it may be, and sees Arthur’s lips compress into a thin line.
“This is reality,” Arthur tells him. “You’re awake. You were shot out of the dream and woke up. Eames, do not... Stay with me. Don’t give up.”
Eames starts to laugh, but it hurts so much that he stops almost at once, choking on air and gasping through the mangled agony in his chest. He’s about to respond when he sees the light again. The naked bulb, hanging from a wire. The half-finished ceiling of the attic they’ve been using as a base, where they’d brought the mark once she’d passed out from the drugs.
He looks down and sees a shirt covering the wound that must be Arthur’s, because Arthur’s arms are bare from his shoulders down to his hands on Eames’ chest where he’s applying pressure. Eames sees his own hand, trapped beneath Arthur’s on top of the bloodstained shirt. His own fingernails, cut too short, with the stain from a black permanent marker still clear on the side of his thumb, beside a smear of blood. His blood.
“Christ,” he says, or tries to say, but everything hurts and it’s been a long bloody time since he’s been shot.
“Eames,” Arthur says again, his voice sharp. “Come on. Stay with me.”
There are spangled colours framing Arthur’s head and shoulders, soaking up the light from overhead and the bright daylight seeping in through the white gauze curtains. Rainbow colours breaking like a prism and slicing through the air, arcing in two strong lines and curved protectively over Eames as if to shelter him from the dark spots dancing across his vision.
Wings.
He tries to speak and chokes again, wracked by spasms of coughing that amplify the pain he feels now all the way to his toes. He can hear Mal in the background, her voice frantic as she speaks to someone on the end of a telephone line about an ambulance. He hears Cobb say, “We have to move him,” and Arthur snap, “We can’t move him like this. I’ll handle it.”
He’s dimly aware of another argument, of Mal’s heels clicking rapidly away from them, and then the stutter of a car engine coming to life outside. He thinks Christ, this was not in the plan at all, and wonders if Arthur’s taken the time yet to plan out all of the ways he’d prefer not to die in this business.
He reaches up to touch the dazzling strands of light above him, now so bright they’re nearly blinding, washing everything else out.
Arthur’s wings are the last thing he sees before everything goes black.
* * *
Someone has, apparently, put out a hit on him.
Their fox-faced chemist had put a bullet through his chest while the rest of them were under and then taken off, out of the neighborhood before Mal had seen Eames on the ballroom floor in the dream and woken everyone up. The bullet had missed his heart and lungs, “and that,” Arthur says, “is why we don’t give guns to chemists.”
Mal is incandescent with rage. She stays with him in the hospital once he’s stabilized and after they’ve broken him out, moved him to a safer facility where no one asks questions about gunshot wounds and kidnappings. Arthur and Cobb disappear for the initial six weeks of his recovery, and when they return Arthur looks older, with that calm look in his eyes that he gets when he’s certain a job is finished and no one’s after them. Eames doesn’t ask any questions.
It takes three months before he’s well enough to consider himself healed, and another two after that before Arthur does. They’ve been working exclusively in dream-sharing, because the physical demands aren’t as great and because together, there is nothing Eames and Mal aren’t able to extract. Mal asks questions and plays tricks of the mind while Eames picks pockets and lockboxes, stealing secrets. Cobb builds cities never dreamt of before, bombed-out ruins and ancient temples and modern metropolitan skylines stretching across the horizon. Arthur keeps them on schedule, on task; on the right plane out of the airport and on speed dial when the next job comes.
It’s a lifestyle that’s easy to get lost in, but every so often Eames gets the itch to do something physical, something tangible, and then he and Arthur will take a few weeks on their own to procure someone’s irreplaceable Piranesi or Rousseau.
And every now and then, Eames will look up and see Arthur standing backlit by a lamp or caught in the last dying rays of the sun, and wonder what exactly it was that he’d seen in that musty attic.
Somewhere along the line, he decides to make it a game. It’s not conscious at first, but he is aware that he watches Arthur closely when they’re together in a hotel suite, whenever there’s a chance Arthur might slip off his shirt and reveal something incredible.
It’s too easy to go from idly watching to taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves: needing something from the bedroom while Arthur is still in a towel, fresh from the shower; insisting that they change disguises at the last possible moment; spilling wine on Arthur’s two-hundred-dollar designer shirt.
He does feel slightly bad about that one. He feels worse when Arthur looks at him like he knows what Eames is after; when he flexes the muscles in his back and turns deliberately as he shrugs the shirt off, as if to say there, are you satisfied now?
Eames isn’t.
He calls Mal. “What would you think about running an extraction on Arthur? For practice, as a challenge. We’ll tell him what we’re doing, of course, and you and I can race to see who gets there first.”
She laughs in his ear, happy the way she always is now, with her belly rounding for the first time and a rosy flush constantly warming her cheeks. “What are you looking for?” she asks him, too clever by half to be fooled by his pretense. “What secrets is Arthur keeping that you want so badly to know?”
He doesn’t tell her, and he doesn’t ask Arthur. He watches Arthur smoking a cigarillo out on a balcony in Naples, in a crisp white shirt so light he can see Arthur’s skin through the fabric. He leans against the wall and imagines he can see lines of colour painting fractals on Arthur’s back, splitting into radiance.
* * *
They spend a few weeks in Hungary conning the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation in between dreaming jobs. It’s after midnight, and Arthur is at the table of their rented apartment eating scrambled eggs, which he won’t consume unless they’re swimming in hot sauce because he hates the taste of eggs, and which he only ever makes during the early hours of the morning.
It’s almost worrisome, how much he knows about Arthur now. Their extraction teams keep making casual comments, misunderstood statements or assumptions about Arthur, and Eames has to bite his tongue not to correct them. It’s uncomfortable, knowing someone so well. It feels almost like they really have become partners, in a domestic sense as well as professional.
Epiphany hits him so suddenly that he almost laughs out loud. He must make some noise, because Arthur looks up at him, inquiring, the last of the eggs gone and his attention back on the files of financial information he’s been studying. Eames shakes his head, but he can’t help the smile. After all, what do you do to get a man out of his clothes?
It’s not so difficult, really.
He steps into Arthur’s personal space, slowly enough to be deliberate, and bends to bring their faces close together. He pretends not to notice the way Arthur’s hand twitches sideways to bring his pinkie finger into contact with the butter knife. If it were Eames, he’d probably be seeking the reassurance of a blunt weapon as well.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, voice low.
“What do you think?” Eames replies. He tilts his head slightly, telegraphing his intent, and pauses when they’re no more than a breath apart.
Arthur still watches him, wary. “Why?”
Eames shrugs. “It could be fun.” He flashes a quick smile and says reassuringly, “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Arthur relaxes slightly. “Everything means something,” he says, and before Eames can respond, Arthur pushes forward and kisses him.
Arthur is, Eames notes, a very skilled kisser. They tease each other for a while like that, no physical contact besides their lips and tongues, until Eames judges them comfortable enough to take this to the next step.
“Bed?” he suggests, and Arthur only studies him for a handful of seconds before he nods.
They go to Eames’ room, which Eames considers only fair, considering. He turns on the light by the bed as they undress. It’s not glaringly bright, but it does enough to illuminate Arthur’s fair skin, banishing shadows to the corners of the room.
Arthur is surprisingly aggressive in bed. If Eames had spent any amount of time thinking about it, he would have pegged Arthur as the romantic type, prone to afternoon bouts of slow lovemaking and exquisitely thorough in giving pleasure. In reality, Arthur bites when Eames gives him the space and the exposed skin, and his fingers dig bruises into the meat of Eames’ back, practically daring him to either object or return in kind.
Eames growls when Arthur reaches between his legs and squeezes just a shade too hard, and then Arthur’s teeth set none-too-gently in Eames’ bicep and he hisses, breaking loose to flip Arthur over onto his stomach and pin him with his full weight on Arthur’s legs and one of Arthur’s arms twisted up behind his back. And this will do nicely, if Eames can keep him here. Arthur is already flexing against him, testing the strength of Eames’ hold.
Eames slots his hips against Arthur’s arse and shifts his weight forward, his cock rubbing back and forth slowly in the groove between Arthur’s cheeks. Arthur groans softly and muffles it in the pillow, relaxing his weight against the mattress as Eames slides further, digging in a little against the soft skin. Eames braces himself and drinks in the narrow expanse of Arthur’s back as he shifts, but there’s nothing but pale, smooth skin on display, no pastel lines or broad curves.
Eames closes his eyes briefly, biting his lip as he moves faster, the underside of his cock rubbing against hot skin. Arthur’s cheeks clench, gripping him tighter, and a second later Arthur squirms around enough to get a hand behind him, helping Eames push his arse cheeks closer together so that there’s more resistance.
“Fucking…Christ,” Eames says, exhaling hard at the added pressure. He speeds up his thrusts, watching the head of his cock slide up and down, smearing a wet spot on the small of Arthur’s back.
“Come on,” Arthur says into the pillow, and Eames does, faster and faster until he finally has to take himself in hand and squeeze just enough, with Arthur’s gorgeous arse milking him as he spurts all over Arthur’s bare back.
Arthur gives him fifteen seconds for afterglow, and then reaches beneath himself to get a hand on his cock. “Wait,” Eames says, recovering his verbal skills. “Here…”
He pulls Arthur’s hips back and Arthur goes easily, braced on his knees and elbow, his other hand jacking himself off quick and desperate. There’s a drop of come high up on his arse. Eames is tempted to lick it.
He swipes a finger through the mess on Arthur’s back and slides down, down where his cock had been rubbing, where the skin is still flushed pink. Arthur groans again when he pushes in, but his body doesn’t protest the intrusion beyond clamping down hotly around Eames’ fingertip. Arthur rocks back and forth slightly, helping Eames work inside him until his finger is in deep. It’s a tight fit, but Eames has plenty of lubrication to work with, and after a few seconds Arthur adjusts enough that Eames can draw his finger out, smear it once again through the spatter of his own come, and push back in.
He’s done this once before, with a woman, and the anatomy isn’t so different. It takes him a few tries, but he’s finally confident enough of his placement to start a steady rhythm, fingering Arthur opening and hopefully hitting the right mark more times than not. Arthur’s hand moves feverishly, the sound of skin on skin slapping loudly in the otherwise quiet room. His entire body begins to tense up, and Eames smiles to himself and pushes two fingers inside just as Arthur starts to come.
They’re going to have a bloody great mess to clean up, he thinks, as Arthur goes lax on the bed, lying next to the wet spot soaking the blanket. Eames withdraws from Arthur’s arse, provoking a quiet moan and an almost certainly unconscious roll of Arthur’s hips.
Eames rests his hand in the shallow dip above the swell of Arthur’s arse, and gazes at his naked back. Nothing. All in his imagination, then? He almost smiles. As if seeing rays of light emerging from someone’s back could be anything else.
Arthur stirs slightly. “We should change the blanket,” he says.
“Or,” Eames suggests, “we can just kick it off tonight and take the one from your room tomorrow.”
Arthur stills, considering. “Or we could do that.”
It doesn’t have to mean anything, Eames thinks, as he does enough basic clean-up that they won’t wake up smeared with dried come. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want another shot in the morning, in daylight.
* * *
Eames wakes up first. The rush of alertness he experiences upon finding someone else in his bed eliminates any possibility of going back to sleep, so after lying still for a few minutes to let his nerves settle, he rolls onto his side to look at Arthur.
Arthur is apparently not a light sleeper, or at least not light enough that Eames’ awakening registers. This could be aided by the fact that he’s buried under the single blanket still left on the bed and has his head burrowed under the pillow, so Eames suspects he can hardly hear a thing through the layers of cotton batting and polyester.
That is, if in fact it’s Arthur in the bed next to him. It could just as easily be a man made of pillows. Eames reaches out - cautiously - to touch the pile of blanket where he approximates Arthur’s shoulder to be, squeezing gently when merely resting a hand on the blanket garners no response.
The curiosity is near-overwhelming, so after a few moments of watching and pondering, he reaches out to lightly tug at the sheet where it’s wrinkled up beneath Arthur’s pillow. Arthur doesn’t resist when Eames pulls the sheet down from the nape of his neck, exposing a few inches of pale skin. Holding his breath, Eames props himself up on one elbow and peels the sheet further down.
Arthur rolls away to one side, stealing the meager amount of covering Eames has been left with, and resettles himself in a veritable cocoon of bedcovering. Eames can’t interpret the irritated mumbling that follows, muffled beneath the pillow and roughened by sleep, but his best guess is something along the lines of ‘fuck off’.
Arthur is apparently not a morning person, either.
Eames has a vague plan to wait him out, to stroke his back through the blankets and coax him into emerging with promises of coffee and blankets, but he has to piss and he’s still unpleasantly fragrant from the night before. Not to mention, Arthur now has sole possession of all of the bedclothes.
After a shower and a shave, he finds Arthur at the table with both hands wrapped around a mug of instant coffee, wearing underwear and a t-shirt so worn it’s coming apart at the seams. And awake, for a certain value of the word.
“Good morning,” Eames greets him, going to the coffee pot to dump out the absolute swill Arthur drinks first thing in the morning so that he can make a pot of proper coffee.
Arthur grunts something at him and drains his mug before shuffling off to the bathroom. Eames hears the shower running a minute later, and after considering whether Arthur would be amenable to company - not likely at the moment - he sets about finding breakfast.
When Arthur reappears, he looks far more human. “To think,” Eames muses. “All this time I thought you started the day wide awake and ready to face the world.”
Arthur’s “Fuck off” this time is perfectly intelligible. He roots through the fridge and settles on a carton of leftover lo mein, which he eats cold while Eames watches in a kind of familiar horror. The things Arthur considers breakfast never cease to amaze.
Eames finishes drinking his second mug of coffee and nudges the pot wordlessly in Arthur’s direction when he reaches for it. The way Arthur looks at him then makes him think that if he’s going to say something about last night, this is the time to do it.
“So,” Eames says, “ready for another delightful day of corporate espionage?”
Arthur lets him off the hook. Eames hadn’t really expected anything less.
* * *
Arthur had been meeting their mark for drinks, so Eames is surprised when he hears a scuffle at the door before the sun has even begun to set, along with the sound of a key scraping in the lock. He slides one hand casually over the holster at his waist, thumbing off the safety. There’s another scuffle, a soft thump, and the door opens.
It is Arthur, but there’s something not quite right about him, something that warns Eames to leave his hand close to his holster for the time being. He sees Arthur’s eyes flick to his hip, taking that in, but Arthur doesn’t make any move for a weapon of his own, just slides sideways and pushes the door shut. His other arm is around his waist. Eames tries not to let it bother him that he doesn’t know what it’s hiding, but he doesn’t entirely succeed.
“You’re back early,” he says evenly.
“I got kicked out of the bar,” Arthur answers.
Eames’ eyebrows go up. Arthur shifts slightly, and his jacket creaks; black leather, with several metal chains hanging from it that jingle when he moves. It’s incongruous against his crisply-pressed wool trousers.
“New jacket?” Eames asks, because that certainly hadn’t been what Arthur had left the apartment in this morning.
Arthur huffs out something like a laugh. “I bought it from a biker,” he says, and now Eames really is determined to ask questions. He’s about to start in on them when Arthur lets the jacket fall open, and Eames sees the bright red stain soaking the front of Arthur’s white dress shirt.
“Christ,” Eames says, on his feet at once. “What happened?”
“There was a fight,” Arthur says. “Some bastard got me with a broken bottle.”
Eames’ lips twitch. Arthur’s gaze sharpens on him immediately.
Eames holds his hands up, surrendering. “You have to admit, it is fairly amusing,” he points out. “I’ve seen you take out entire teams of trained thugs, and you end up felled by some lout with a beer bottle and a temper.”
“Hilarious,” Arthur bites out. “In my defense, the mark was right there watching, and the fuckhead who started it was a drunken sports fan pissed off that Hungary lost a football match. I couldn’t very well pull out a gun and shoot him.”
“I would’ve,” Eames replies, pulling out a chair so that Arthur can sit down and retrieving a towel from the kitchen to hopefully avoid making a mess of the floor. “Hungary is pants at football.”
Arthur makes that huffing sound again, easing the leather jacket off his shoulders as he sits.
“I take it this wasn’t a gift from your new friend with the bottle?” Eames asks, tossing the jacket onto the other chair.
Arthur shakes his head. “I just got it to cover the blood. Mine was - shit - not in great shape. I was trying not to attract attention.”
Eames shakes his head. “I’ll get the med kit,” he says.
“Get mine,” Arthur tells him. “It has more in it.”
When Eames returns from the bathroom with Arthur’s toiletry case, Arthur is picking gingerly at the shirt sticking wetly to his stomach. “Go on, take it off,” Eames says, motioning to Arthur’s shirt. “Let’s see the damage.”
It’s not bad, compared to a lot of things Eames has seen. Certainly they’re in no danger of needing a hospital. It’s still bad enough that Eames will probably have to suture.
“This will hurt a lot less two levels down, if you want me to take care of it,” Eames offers. Getting Arthur halfway plastered is another option, but Eames would prefer not to thin his blood when he’s already lost enough of it.
“I can take it,” Arthur answers, leaning against the chair back. “There’s some anesthetic spray in the kit. Just do it.”
Eames looks up at him, intending to argue, and forgets everything he’d intended to say.
The light coming through the window behind Arthur glances off every ray of colour stretching out around him, spreading wide and shining like Arthur’s own personal aurora borealis. Eames can see the stronger lines shooting out in bright arcs, with thinner, fainter lines branching out in all directions. They layer each other, fragmenting and fading so that Eames can’t seem to take them all in at once, can only gaze, rapt, at such a dazzling display of the fantastic.
Arthur opens his eyes, brow drawn and mouth pursing, probably to ask why Eames is taking so bloody long about it. Then he sees Eames staring and his face clears, going blank so abruptly that Eames knows, he knows Arthur has seen what he’s seeing.
This is the secret, he thinks. This is what Arthur keeps hidden.
Arthur holds his gaze for a long while, and then his eyes slide closed again. “I can do it,” he says quietly, and even then it takes an effort for Eames to tear his eyes away from the vision of dancing lights, to look back at the torn flesh sluggishly bleeding down Arthur’s abdomen and pooling sticky in his navel.
“No,” he says, clearing his throat. “No, I’ve got it. Just hold still.”
Arthur’s body is taut under his hands, probably from the pain. Eames works as quickly and carefully as he’s able, cleaning up the mess and stitching the wound shut in the one place that looks too deep to heal easily on its own. When he’s finished, he says, “There,” quietly, and looks back up.
Arthur’s wings haven’t disappeared. If anything, they’re stronger now, soaking up the colours of the sunset and refracting the light in spectacular fashion. Arthur is watching him this time, watching him look, watching him see, and Eames can’t find any reason to make himself stop.
His hand somehow comes to rest on Arthur’s thigh of its own accord, stroking lightly through the rich fabric. Now that he’s seen, he wants to touch, to experience this vision in every way possible.
He slides his hand higher up on Arthur’s thigh. “Do you…?” he begins, and then stops. Arthur probably shouldn’t engage in any moderately athletic fucking right after being sliced open with a bottle, but Eames thinks they could be careful enough. If Arthur agrees, that’s good enough for him. Eames wants.
Arthur just looks at him. Then he closes his eyes, and nods.
It’s enough. Eames is touching him almost before Arthur finishes, running his hands up Arthur’s bare sides, sliding around to his back. The wings aren’t solid; Eames’ hands find nothing but smooth, unmarred skin, and when he lifts his hand, he can see it pass through the rays of light without interruption.
“Over the couch,” Eames suggests, because at least Arthur will be more comfortable there, able to rest his chest on the arm of the couch if he kneels on the floor.
There are condoms and lube in Arthur’s toiletry bag as well as medical supplies, saving Eames a trip down the hallway. He strips off and kneels between Arthur’s thighs once he’s resettled, nudging them slightly wider apart so that he can fit himself against the cleft of Arthur’s arse, rubbing against warm skin as he hardens.
Eames passes over the lube, and Arthur fingers himself open as Eames runs his hands up Arthur’s spine, gazing his fill at the bright shafts of light emanating from Arthur’s back. They’re just the slightest bit warmer than the air around them. He wants to know if Arthur can feel it when he runs his hand through them, when he strokes the skin where they emerge. The way Arthur shudders beneath him makes Eames think he probably can.
Arthur pulls his fingers out, bumping his knuckles against Eames’ cock, and pushes his hips back. Eames takes the invitation, pushing hard just enough to get in and then sinking forward slowly, until he’s in to the balls and Arthur is panting softly against the upholstery.
He fucks Arthur slowly, drawing it out, wanting it to last while he stares, amazed, at the lights shimmering and dazzling before him. They move when Arthur does, dancing with every arch and flex, every thrust that Arthur pushes back into to meet him.
Eames licks the sweat from Arthur’s back and traces the light between Arthur’s shoulder blades with his tongue, feeling Arthur quiver beneath him and tense up in a way that brings about deliciously good things for Eames. He fucks in harder, pulling Arthur’s hips back so he can go deeper and Arthur can get a hand underneath himself to jack off.
Eames comes and half-collapses on top of Arthur, his thighs shaking too much to hold his weight. Arthur makes a soft noise of pain, bitten off but still audible, which is enough to prompt Eames to pull out and inspect the damage.
None of the stitches have torn out, but the cut is bleeding again, pulled apart by strain or sweat. Eames ties off the condom and pitches it in the bin, washing his hands before he returns with an antiseptic wipe.
Arthur doesn’t protest when Eames cleans him up for a second time; when Eames looks up, his eyes are closed. The pain is probably starting to sink in, now that the adrenaline’s faded.
The sun is nearly gone, more shadows than light in the open room. Arthur’s wings have grown fainter, the colours paling and dissolving as the light retreats. And now Eames has another answer, another secret.
“We can get the blanket from your bed, if you think you’ll be cold,” Eames says, unable to resist reaching out and tracing a line down Arthur’s back as the wings disappear.
Arthur shakes his head. He doesn’t stand when Eames does, but when Eames remains, waiting, he pulls himself up and follows Eames to bed.
Part two
Pairing: Eames/Arthur
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.
Notes: Originally posted here on the kink meme; reposted by request in easier-to-read format.
Summary: This is the secret, he thinks. This is what Arthur keeps hidden.
Eames brings Arthur in during the Copenhagen job as a test run. His field being what it is, when the job goes down, Arthur doesn’t actually know it’s a test.
Any attempt at luring him in by subterfuge will keep Arthur from coming within a thousand miles of the place, so Eames goes the direct route. He invites Arthur for a holiday in Denmark.
Arthur doesn’t buy it in the least, but he does come, and Eames keeps him distracted running intel for another job he’s got going at the same time. Multitasking is a wonderful thing.
He and Arthur spend time together planning the job, doing background checks, casing the mark. The mark, as it so happens, works in the Statens Museum for Kunst. Three days in they’re taking a stroll through the permanent exhibitions, Arthur’s hands in his trouser pockets and Eames lingering over the modern and contemporary wing.
A week later, their extractor deviates from the plan - as Arthur knows it - and surprises the mark at her place of employment.
Arthur is hacked off, the way he always is when his careful planning goes out the window and he has to adapt, but he’s inside the museum within half an hour, keeping them on schedule and making sure everything goes smoothly.
Eames has never said anything about it, but Arthur is at his best in a crisis. He’s well-respected for being organized, competent, and ruthlessly prepared, but what makes the best in the business want to work with him is how he shines when his fourth and fifth back-up plans have gone out the window and all he has left are his wits. That’s the real reason Eames takes jobs with him, and why he secretly hopes something will go wrong every time they work together. Because he gets to see this, Arthur at his most innovative, creating dreamscapes out of smoke and mirrors and building skyscrapers from ink and paper between one breath and the next.
While Arthur is on the second level watching their extractor’s back, Eames drops himself off the side of a building and wakes up to finish his other job.
He has a forgery already hidden inside the museum, dropped off inside the ventilation on a previous visit. Arthur has done his ground work for him on the location, so Eames barely has to lift a finger in order to avoid the cameras and security alarms.
He has the painting out of its frame and rolled into a parcel tube within ten minutes. He’s cutting it close, but there should be just enough time for him to hook himself up again and drop into the first level.
When he does, Arthur is waiting for him. “What happened to you?” he asks, when Eames finds him out on the balcony in their dream-apartment on the first level, gun in hand covering someone on the roof.
“Projections,” he says, as apologetic as he ever can be, because he can tell by how focused Arthur is that at least some of them have turned violent. It’s a plausible enough excuse. “I had to reset.”
Arthur doesn’t call his bluff, but he doesn’t look at him, either. “Cover Ross,” he orders, and ducks inside to check on the mark.
When they wake, mission accomplished, Arthur clears everything out and wipes the security tapes with quick efficiency, once again doing Eames’ work for him. They’re out the door in less than an hour, and no one is ever the wiser.
* * *
Two days after the team has left the country, Eames opens the door to find Arthur outside his hotel room.
“I’d say it was a pleasant surprise, but I’m afraid I can’t be certain,” Eames greets him, put off-balance by both Arthur’s unexpected appearance and the way his tie has been loosened, the top button open on his dress shirt. “Is this business or pleasure?”
Arthur walks past him, forcing Eames to either step aside or end up standing far closer than he would consider acceptable, when he knows for a fact that Arthur is carrying at least three weapons. “Let’s see it,” he says, turning once he’s in the room to face Eames.
Eames doesn’t have to pretend not to know what he’s talking about, which is all the better. He never lies when the truth will serve the same purpose. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me. See what?”
“The Champaigne,” Arthur clarifies.
Eames has an excellent poker face, but he’s been caught a bit flat-footed this time. He’d thought after the first day that he was in the clear. It had been a disappointment more than a relief.
He doesn’t bother lying about it. There are more interesting things to pursue. “How did you know?” he asks, already considering the possibilities. Arthur could have woken during the time he was pulling the actual heist, but it’s unlikely. No one else on the team had been a party to Eames’ plans besides the extractor, who would have at least warned Eames if he’d let anything slip. The painting’s absence hadn’t even been discovered yet, so there was no cause for suspicion.
“After you disappeared from the first level when you were supposed to be standing guard, I got suspicious,” Arthur says. “There’s only one thing that would have pulled you away for how long you were gone, and you’d cased the place already. There’s a private collector in Hamburg who’s stopped relentlessly pressuring the auction houses for French school Baroque-era paintings, and there’s a chip on the inside left corner of the frame still hanging in Copenhagen.”
“No, there isn’t,” Eames objects. He’ll let Arthur accuse him of a great many things, but incompetency at his chosen profession isn’t one of them.
“There is,” Arthur says, smiling slightly. “But it looks more than a few days old. You should probably authenticate before you sell.” He pauses before adding, “You also forgot about the camera in the east stairwell.”
Eames goes still. “You wiped the surveillance tapes,” he says cautiously.
“I also copy them to my laptop so I can review them after a job,” Arthur tells him, which is information Eames could have used a little earlier. He gives Eames a moment to come up with further arguments or excuses, and then prompts, “The painting, Eames.”
He supposes he might as well show it off, so long as Arthur already knows about it. Opening the tube hidden in the back of the room’s small closet, he clears the table and carefully unrolls the canvas.
Arthur stands by his side, studying it in silence. Finally he says, “If I ever find out you’ve left in the middle of a job again, I’ll make sure no one worth working with will ever touch you.”
“Fair enough,” Eames agrees. “Would it soothe your outraged sensibilities if I offered you twenty percent for doing most of the grunt work?”
Arthur’s eyes cut sideways. “As long as you don’t fence it through Duprees,” he says eventually. “He’s how I tracked you here in the first place, and if I can, so can someone else.”
Eames hadn’t been prepared for that. He’d known the man was a braggart, to be sure, but he’d thought Duprees would have the intelligence to keep his mouth shut at least until the deal had been sealed.
“Arthur,” he says speculatively, because he can’t possibly argue that Arthur hasn’t passed his test with flying colours, “How would you like to spend a bit more time working in reality?”
“Thirty percent,” Arthur answers without hesitation. “And I screen all clients.”
“Done,” Eames agrees. He’d expected Arthur to drive a harder bargain, perhaps one that would require extensive coaxing and sweeter offers. He’s almost disappointed.
They fall back into easy silence for a time, studying the canvas. Finally Eames says, “I do hate cherubs.”
Arthur snorts. “So do I.”
* * *
Arthur keeps one foot planted firmly in the dream-extraction world, as Eames had been certain he would. Within six months, however, he’s gone from laying the groundwork on Eames’ procurement jobs to working cons alongside him. Arthur is too expressive to ever make it far on his own, but he’s a superb wingman, drawing enough attention with his youthful looks and tailored suits that hardly anyone ever notices Eames, or at least not when it counts.
Bit by bit, he trains Arthur to be a chameleon, to fade quietly into the background the way Eames has been doing for more than a decade. He introduces Arthur to hooded sweatshirts and sweater vests, reacquaints him with distressed denim and talks him into newsboy caps, and with each disguise he sees another possibility, another tool for them to use. Every time the mark’s eyes drift to Arthur and stick there, Eames finds himself considering Arthur anew.
Gradually, he grows accustomed to seeing Arthur outside of abandoned warehouses and rented lofts. It’s almost a shock when Arthur strolls into a work space in Marseille after doing some covert surveillance and the rest of the team stares openly for a handful of seconds, leaving Eames befuddled until he realizes he’s probably one of only a handful of people who’ve ever witnessed Arthur wearing a graphic print tee.
He sees what’s under the clothes as well, glimpses of muscle beneath skin and sharply-defined bone structure when they’re switching disguises or sharing a room. He doesn’t ever ogle, although he does appreciate, in the same way he would appraise a finely-wrought poison ring. Aesthetically pleasing, and quite probably too dangerous for casual handling.
Arthur prefers to stay fully dressed at all times, so it’s a rare morning for Eames to find him by the window, shirt tossed over the back of the couch and a towel slung over one shoulder while he squeezes the water out of his hair.
“It’s pouring outside,” he says, gesturing to the rain-streaked glass pane with a grimace. “I went to see if I could catch Kennerty making an office coffee run, but he’ll never go out in this weather unless he has to.”
“There’s always tomorrow,” Eames says optimistically. The rain puts rather a damper on his plans as well, since he’d intended to loiter in the park for most of the day and perhaps acquire a small dog. Having one would make certain aspects of their current job a great deal easier.
Arthur hasn’t attempted to move past him into the bedroom to find dry clothing, so Eames stays where he is, leaning against the doorframe. Arthur’s hair is just starting to turn damp, curling up at the ends in a clear warning that it plans to prove unmanageable for the rest of the day without a thorough application of product.
“I don’t suppose you made that coffee run for yourself,” Eames says hopefully at last, pulling himself out of the half-trance he’s been lulled into by the rain. On a dreary day like this, he suspects it will take significant consumption of caffeine for him to get any work done at all.
“On the counter,” Arthur says, smiling slightly. Eames locates the cardboard cup and inhales hazelnut and dark roast, still warm enough for him to feel the steam curling against his face.
“This is usually a sign I’ve been working with someone for too long,” Eames admits, before turning his attention to properly savoring the first sip.
“I knew how you took your coffee within three days of meeting you,” Arthur replies, letting the towel drape over his shoulders now that he’s no longer in danger of dripping on the carpet.
“Mutual,” Eames returns, then pauses. “Although you probably had it written in a notebook somewhere, on a neatly-bullet pointed list.”
He’s pleased to startle a laugh out of Arthur, even a short one. “I use Excel spreadsheets,” Arthur says, turning to pick up his wet shirt from where it’s leaving a damp spot on the upholstery.
As he does, the sunlight makes a valiant, watery attempt to break through the rain, puncturing the clouds with a few weak pinpoint shafts of light. There’s something about the way the light falls, for just a moment, a trick of the glass refracting shades of gray. For a moment, Eames could swear he sees...
The towel has slipped from Arthur’s shoulders to his neck as he bends over. In its absence, Eames can see lean muscle, the jut of shoulder blades pushing against the skin. And something else.
For a moment, he’s almost certain there’s light rising from Arthur’s back, fragmenting and splitting as it travels, spreading in a wide arc over his torso. There’s the faintest hint of colour, faded violet and summer-sky blue, a shimmer of pale green blurring into yellow. Lines of light stretching up, out, fracturing into dozens upon dozens before they disappear.
Then the clouds gain their strength again, Arthur straightens, and all Eames had seen had been a trick of the light, nothing more.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Arthur says, brushing by him on his way into the bedroom.
Eames stays where he is, staring through the window into the dull, gray-washed daylight, and watches the rain.
* * *
One of the first things to change, once they’ve established themselves as partners, is how much Arthur lets him see. Eames had long suspected that Arthur’s defenses had evolved through necessity rather than nature; that the aloof distance he keeps between himself and the other members of his extraction teams is there because he’s aware of how vulnerable he is when others are inside his mind, and is on guard at all times to keep from giving anything else away.
Eames himself was a confidence man long before dream-extraction came along, so he doesn’t make any such distinction. When he considers himself safe in reality, however, Arthur not only drops his defenses, he doesn’t even appear to notice their absence.
As frustrating as it occasionally is, there’s something refreshing about Arthur’s forthrightness. When he’s not on guard, he’s appallingly easy to read, to the point that Eames actually has to force himself to stop making note of weaknesses and measuring how best to take advantage of them, tallying up pressure points and considering ways to make them crack. Arthur opens up to him with the force of an avalanche, and Eames is simply overwhelmed.
He knows about Arthur’s fear of drowning, his intense dislike for wilderness survival experts, his dietary habits and food allergies, his preferred concealed weapons and where he carries them, his weakness for small baby animals and newborns, his aversion to extreme sports, his love for caramels, and the five aliases he uses on a regular basis. All things Eames could use to hurt him, in a dream - with the possible exception of the caramels - and all things Arthur doesn’t seem to mind him knowing because they’re not in a dream.
Arthur’s glance lingers on a blonde with a keyhole neckline decorating her simple black dress, and then he smiles at the woman behind her pushing a pram, and Eames almost tells him to stop, for God’s sake, because Eames can’t stop cataloguing every little thing he gives away and the list is far too long for men in their profession.
Instead he says, “You could have asked for her number.”
Arthur doesn’t even bother to act surprised that he noticed. “She wouldn’t have given it,” he says. “The little girl was hers.”
Eames had known that already, had spotted the way the woman had glanced behind her at the pram when they paused at the street corner, but he is impressed that Arthur picked up on it. “You should consider trying your hand at forgery,” he suggests. He doesn’t know whether Arthur has ever tried it or not - it seems likely - but observation goes a long way when it comes to shifting skins.
Arthur shakes his head. “I’m not good with people the way you are.”
Eames snorts. “If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have brought you on,” he replies, and pulls out a cigarette as he turns the corner, spotting their mark on the sidewalk ahead.
“My sister says I let my impressions of people cloud my objectivity,” Arthur says, falling just slightly out of step as they approach the street corner and prepare to split up. “I think she’s probably right.”
And that, right there, is simply too much. “Try not to make it quite so easy for me, would you?” he says, turning to face Arthur as they wait for the signal to change. “You should have some secrets, in the event of our partnership unhappily dissolving. I’d hate to have to use personal information against you, but you do keep putting the bullets in my hand.”
Arthur smiles, but it’s a strange smile, Eames thinks, twisting and distant. “I’m sure I can manage to keep something back,” he says, and at that moment, Eames believes it. Arthur has a secret Eames doesn’t know, and in the face of all of Arthur’s aggravatingly expressive honesty, that’s a lure almost too strong for Eames to resist.
Arthur has a secret, and Eames now wants nothing more than to know what it is.
* * *
“I want my point man back.”
“Cobb,” Eames says cheerfully. “What a pleasure to hear from you. Afraid I haven’t seen him recently, but I’ll be sure to pass along the message if I do.”
That last part is a bald-faced lie, depending on how one defines ‘recent’. Arthur had left forty-five minutes ago to meet with a possible fence following their latest heist. They’re hoping to get rid of the raw jewels and antiques before they catch a flight to Antigua next week.
Cobb makes a noise not unlike a train engine venting steam. “Look, I know you’re in touch with him. The two of you haven’t been especially discreet when it comes to working together.”
“Like I said, I’ll be happy to relay your request,” Eames soothes. “If I happen to hear from him…”
Cobb cuts him off. “I’m telling you this because I need him on a job in three weeks and I can’t work with him if he’s dead. Interpol knows about the antiques. The extraction team you two conned in South Africa set you up. You’re walking into a trap.”
Eames goes very still. “How do you know this?”
Cobb’s answering tone is mirthless. “I told you. You two haven’t been all that discreet.”
Eames doesn’t waste any more time. He dismantles and disposes of the phone, shattering the electronics with several well-placed blows from the nearest lamp, and tucks his gun into his waistband. The meet was scheduled for fifteen minutes ago. If Arthur had been on time…
He yanks the door open and comes face to face with Arthur, both of them startled and on edge enough to draw their firearms before recognizing each other. Eames drops his gun to his side with an almost sick feeling of relief, stepping aside as Arthur pushes past him into the room.
“We’ve been made. The meet was either a set-up or our fence has friends in high places.”
“The former,” Eames answers. “I just got a phone call from an old friend of yours.”
Arthur glances at him, curious, but he doesn’t spare any more of his attention than that, already doing his own version of Eames’ quick and dirty clean-up and disposal. “How much cash do we have?”
“Enough,” Eames answers. “Leave everything; we can pick up new clothes once we’re over the border. Change first,” he adds, as Arthur picks up the carrying case they’ve been using to house the antiques. “You’re striking enough already as it is.”
Arthur gives him another look, but doesn’t protest. He strips off his suit jacket and tie with familiar efficiency, neatly unbuttoning his dress shirt just in time to catch the t-shirt Eames tosses at his head. In another thirty seconds he’ll be just another backpacker catching the evening train.
Eames pulls open the curtain, checking for any sign of activity on the street below. Arthur isn’t careless enough to miss picking up a tail, but that doesn’t mean the authorities haven’t been busy making inquiries of their own.
When he turns back, the orange glow of sunset hits Arthur squarely across the shoulders, painting his skin dark and vibrant. Streaks of tangerine and purple stretch from his shoulder blades, disappearing into shadow as they reach out toward the corners of the room. It doesn’t look anything like a rainbow, like a trick of the light. It doesn’t look like anything Eames has ever seen.
Arthur pulls the t-shirt over his head and runs his hands through his hair enough times to destroy the fragile construct of styling gel. When he turns around and sees Eames staring, something changes in his face, a veil dropping over his expression.
He knows Eames has seen something. Eames wonders whether Arthur can possibly imagine what he thinks he just saw, or whether Arthur suspects Eames of looking at him for a different reason altogether. On any other day, Eames thinks, he wouldn’t be far wrong.
They don’t have the time to dwell on it now. Arthur picks his gun up from the bed, tucking it into the waistband of his trousers, and slings the strap of the carrying case over his shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
They work Cobb’s extraction job, because Eames doesn’t like to owe anyone a debt if he can help it, and then they end up working a few more. Cobb and his wife Mal are rising stars in the extraction world, and they’re taking Arthur along with them. Eames has been at the top of this game since it first became a whisper on the black market, but he can’t deny that the combination of all four of them together gives him even more of an edge.
They work five high-risk and spectacularly successful jobs before someone’s past catches up with them and it all goes to shit.
Eames is in the middle of charming the mark with an impeccable forgery of her secretary when sudden, white-hot agony explodes in his chest and his entire world goes red.
Arthur is at his side in less time than Eames can account for, considering where he was supposed to be, which means that either Arthur had been closer than he’d thought or Eames has lost time. He looks up at Arthur’s face, haloed by the harsh fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling, and sees naked fear and tightly-leashed panic on Arthur’s face.
“Eames? Eames. Stay with me,” Arthur orders. One of his hands is supporting Eames’ head, which is pillowed on Arthur’s knees; the other is pressing down hard on a wound already on fire with pain.
Eames is about to tell him to just kill him and and finish the job without him, because he can’t play out the rest of his role at this point, when the look on Arthur’s face finally registers and he realizes. Arthur has been out of dream-sharing for so long that he’s lost track of reality. He’s forgotten this isn’t real, that if Eames dies he’ll only wake up. He thinks Eames is actually bleeding out right now on this ballroom floor.
He manages to say as much, garbled though it may be, and sees Arthur’s lips compress into a thin line.
“This is reality,” Arthur tells him. “You’re awake. You were shot out of the dream and woke up. Eames, do not... Stay with me. Don’t give up.”
Eames starts to laugh, but it hurts so much that he stops almost at once, choking on air and gasping through the mangled agony in his chest. He’s about to respond when he sees the light again. The naked bulb, hanging from a wire. The half-finished ceiling of the attic they’ve been using as a base, where they’d brought the mark once she’d passed out from the drugs.
He looks down and sees a shirt covering the wound that must be Arthur’s, because Arthur’s arms are bare from his shoulders down to his hands on Eames’ chest where he’s applying pressure. Eames sees his own hand, trapped beneath Arthur’s on top of the bloodstained shirt. His own fingernails, cut too short, with the stain from a black permanent marker still clear on the side of his thumb, beside a smear of blood. His blood.
“Christ,” he says, or tries to say, but everything hurts and it’s been a long bloody time since he’s been shot.
“Eames,” Arthur says again, his voice sharp. “Come on. Stay with me.”
There are spangled colours framing Arthur’s head and shoulders, soaking up the light from overhead and the bright daylight seeping in through the white gauze curtains. Rainbow colours breaking like a prism and slicing through the air, arcing in two strong lines and curved protectively over Eames as if to shelter him from the dark spots dancing across his vision.
Wings.
He tries to speak and chokes again, wracked by spasms of coughing that amplify the pain he feels now all the way to his toes. He can hear Mal in the background, her voice frantic as she speaks to someone on the end of a telephone line about an ambulance. He hears Cobb say, “We have to move him,” and Arthur snap, “We can’t move him like this. I’ll handle it.”
He’s dimly aware of another argument, of Mal’s heels clicking rapidly away from them, and then the stutter of a car engine coming to life outside. He thinks Christ, this was not in the plan at all, and wonders if Arthur’s taken the time yet to plan out all of the ways he’d prefer not to die in this business.
He reaches up to touch the dazzling strands of light above him, now so bright they’re nearly blinding, washing everything else out.
Arthur’s wings are the last thing he sees before everything goes black.
* * *
Someone has, apparently, put out a hit on him.
Their fox-faced chemist had put a bullet through his chest while the rest of them were under and then taken off, out of the neighborhood before Mal had seen Eames on the ballroom floor in the dream and woken everyone up. The bullet had missed his heart and lungs, “and that,” Arthur says, “is why we don’t give guns to chemists.”
Mal is incandescent with rage. She stays with him in the hospital once he’s stabilized and after they’ve broken him out, moved him to a safer facility where no one asks questions about gunshot wounds and kidnappings. Arthur and Cobb disappear for the initial six weeks of his recovery, and when they return Arthur looks older, with that calm look in his eyes that he gets when he’s certain a job is finished and no one’s after them. Eames doesn’t ask any questions.
It takes three months before he’s well enough to consider himself healed, and another two after that before Arthur does. They’ve been working exclusively in dream-sharing, because the physical demands aren’t as great and because together, there is nothing Eames and Mal aren’t able to extract. Mal asks questions and plays tricks of the mind while Eames picks pockets and lockboxes, stealing secrets. Cobb builds cities never dreamt of before, bombed-out ruins and ancient temples and modern metropolitan skylines stretching across the horizon. Arthur keeps them on schedule, on task; on the right plane out of the airport and on speed dial when the next job comes.
It’s a lifestyle that’s easy to get lost in, but every so often Eames gets the itch to do something physical, something tangible, and then he and Arthur will take a few weeks on their own to procure someone’s irreplaceable Piranesi or Rousseau.
And every now and then, Eames will look up and see Arthur standing backlit by a lamp or caught in the last dying rays of the sun, and wonder what exactly it was that he’d seen in that musty attic.
Somewhere along the line, he decides to make it a game. It’s not conscious at first, but he is aware that he watches Arthur closely when they’re together in a hotel suite, whenever there’s a chance Arthur might slip off his shirt and reveal something incredible.
It’s too easy to go from idly watching to taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves: needing something from the bedroom while Arthur is still in a towel, fresh from the shower; insisting that they change disguises at the last possible moment; spilling wine on Arthur’s two-hundred-dollar designer shirt.
He does feel slightly bad about that one. He feels worse when Arthur looks at him like he knows what Eames is after; when he flexes the muscles in his back and turns deliberately as he shrugs the shirt off, as if to say there, are you satisfied now?
Eames isn’t.
He calls Mal. “What would you think about running an extraction on Arthur? For practice, as a challenge. We’ll tell him what we’re doing, of course, and you and I can race to see who gets there first.”
She laughs in his ear, happy the way she always is now, with her belly rounding for the first time and a rosy flush constantly warming her cheeks. “What are you looking for?” she asks him, too clever by half to be fooled by his pretense. “What secrets is Arthur keeping that you want so badly to know?”
He doesn’t tell her, and he doesn’t ask Arthur. He watches Arthur smoking a cigarillo out on a balcony in Naples, in a crisp white shirt so light he can see Arthur’s skin through the fabric. He leans against the wall and imagines he can see lines of colour painting fractals on Arthur’s back, splitting into radiance.
* * *
They spend a few weeks in Hungary conning the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation in between dreaming jobs. It’s after midnight, and Arthur is at the table of their rented apartment eating scrambled eggs, which he won’t consume unless they’re swimming in hot sauce because he hates the taste of eggs, and which he only ever makes during the early hours of the morning.
It’s almost worrisome, how much he knows about Arthur now. Their extraction teams keep making casual comments, misunderstood statements or assumptions about Arthur, and Eames has to bite his tongue not to correct them. It’s uncomfortable, knowing someone so well. It feels almost like they really have become partners, in a domestic sense as well as professional.
Epiphany hits him so suddenly that he almost laughs out loud. He must make some noise, because Arthur looks up at him, inquiring, the last of the eggs gone and his attention back on the files of financial information he’s been studying. Eames shakes his head, but he can’t help the smile. After all, what do you do to get a man out of his clothes?
It’s not so difficult, really.
He steps into Arthur’s personal space, slowly enough to be deliberate, and bends to bring their faces close together. He pretends not to notice the way Arthur’s hand twitches sideways to bring his pinkie finger into contact with the butter knife. If it were Eames, he’d probably be seeking the reassurance of a blunt weapon as well.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, voice low.
“What do you think?” Eames replies. He tilts his head slightly, telegraphing his intent, and pauses when they’re no more than a breath apart.
Arthur still watches him, wary. “Why?”
Eames shrugs. “It could be fun.” He flashes a quick smile and says reassuringly, “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Arthur relaxes slightly. “Everything means something,” he says, and before Eames can respond, Arthur pushes forward and kisses him.
Arthur is, Eames notes, a very skilled kisser. They tease each other for a while like that, no physical contact besides their lips and tongues, until Eames judges them comfortable enough to take this to the next step.
“Bed?” he suggests, and Arthur only studies him for a handful of seconds before he nods.
They go to Eames’ room, which Eames considers only fair, considering. He turns on the light by the bed as they undress. It’s not glaringly bright, but it does enough to illuminate Arthur’s fair skin, banishing shadows to the corners of the room.
Arthur is surprisingly aggressive in bed. If Eames had spent any amount of time thinking about it, he would have pegged Arthur as the romantic type, prone to afternoon bouts of slow lovemaking and exquisitely thorough in giving pleasure. In reality, Arthur bites when Eames gives him the space and the exposed skin, and his fingers dig bruises into the meat of Eames’ back, practically daring him to either object or return in kind.
Eames growls when Arthur reaches between his legs and squeezes just a shade too hard, and then Arthur’s teeth set none-too-gently in Eames’ bicep and he hisses, breaking loose to flip Arthur over onto his stomach and pin him with his full weight on Arthur’s legs and one of Arthur’s arms twisted up behind his back. And this will do nicely, if Eames can keep him here. Arthur is already flexing against him, testing the strength of Eames’ hold.
Eames slots his hips against Arthur’s arse and shifts his weight forward, his cock rubbing back and forth slowly in the groove between Arthur’s cheeks. Arthur groans softly and muffles it in the pillow, relaxing his weight against the mattress as Eames slides further, digging in a little against the soft skin. Eames braces himself and drinks in the narrow expanse of Arthur’s back as he shifts, but there’s nothing but pale, smooth skin on display, no pastel lines or broad curves.
Eames closes his eyes briefly, biting his lip as he moves faster, the underside of his cock rubbing against hot skin. Arthur’s cheeks clench, gripping him tighter, and a second later Arthur squirms around enough to get a hand behind him, helping Eames push his arse cheeks closer together so that there’s more resistance.
“Fucking…Christ,” Eames says, exhaling hard at the added pressure. He speeds up his thrusts, watching the head of his cock slide up and down, smearing a wet spot on the small of Arthur’s back.
“Come on,” Arthur says into the pillow, and Eames does, faster and faster until he finally has to take himself in hand and squeeze just enough, with Arthur’s gorgeous arse milking him as he spurts all over Arthur’s bare back.
Arthur gives him fifteen seconds for afterglow, and then reaches beneath himself to get a hand on his cock. “Wait,” Eames says, recovering his verbal skills. “Here…”
He pulls Arthur’s hips back and Arthur goes easily, braced on his knees and elbow, his other hand jacking himself off quick and desperate. There’s a drop of come high up on his arse. Eames is tempted to lick it.
He swipes a finger through the mess on Arthur’s back and slides down, down where his cock had been rubbing, where the skin is still flushed pink. Arthur groans again when he pushes in, but his body doesn’t protest the intrusion beyond clamping down hotly around Eames’ fingertip. Arthur rocks back and forth slightly, helping Eames work inside him until his finger is in deep. It’s a tight fit, but Eames has plenty of lubrication to work with, and after a few seconds Arthur adjusts enough that Eames can draw his finger out, smear it once again through the spatter of his own come, and push back in.
He’s done this once before, with a woman, and the anatomy isn’t so different. It takes him a few tries, but he’s finally confident enough of his placement to start a steady rhythm, fingering Arthur opening and hopefully hitting the right mark more times than not. Arthur’s hand moves feverishly, the sound of skin on skin slapping loudly in the otherwise quiet room. His entire body begins to tense up, and Eames smiles to himself and pushes two fingers inside just as Arthur starts to come.
They’re going to have a bloody great mess to clean up, he thinks, as Arthur goes lax on the bed, lying next to the wet spot soaking the blanket. Eames withdraws from Arthur’s arse, provoking a quiet moan and an almost certainly unconscious roll of Arthur’s hips.
Eames rests his hand in the shallow dip above the swell of Arthur’s arse, and gazes at his naked back. Nothing. All in his imagination, then? He almost smiles. As if seeing rays of light emerging from someone’s back could be anything else.
Arthur stirs slightly. “We should change the blanket,” he says.
“Or,” Eames suggests, “we can just kick it off tonight and take the one from your room tomorrow.”
Arthur stills, considering. “Or we could do that.”
It doesn’t have to mean anything, Eames thinks, as he does enough basic clean-up that they won’t wake up smeared with dried come. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want another shot in the morning, in daylight.
* * *
Eames wakes up first. The rush of alertness he experiences upon finding someone else in his bed eliminates any possibility of going back to sleep, so after lying still for a few minutes to let his nerves settle, he rolls onto his side to look at Arthur.
Arthur is apparently not a light sleeper, or at least not light enough that Eames’ awakening registers. This could be aided by the fact that he’s buried under the single blanket still left on the bed and has his head burrowed under the pillow, so Eames suspects he can hardly hear a thing through the layers of cotton batting and polyester.
That is, if in fact it’s Arthur in the bed next to him. It could just as easily be a man made of pillows. Eames reaches out - cautiously - to touch the pile of blanket where he approximates Arthur’s shoulder to be, squeezing gently when merely resting a hand on the blanket garners no response.
The curiosity is near-overwhelming, so after a few moments of watching and pondering, he reaches out to lightly tug at the sheet where it’s wrinkled up beneath Arthur’s pillow. Arthur doesn’t resist when Eames pulls the sheet down from the nape of his neck, exposing a few inches of pale skin. Holding his breath, Eames props himself up on one elbow and peels the sheet further down.
Arthur rolls away to one side, stealing the meager amount of covering Eames has been left with, and resettles himself in a veritable cocoon of bedcovering. Eames can’t interpret the irritated mumbling that follows, muffled beneath the pillow and roughened by sleep, but his best guess is something along the lines of ‘fuck off’.
Arthur is apparently not a morning person, either.
Eames has a vague plan to wait him out, to stroke his back through the blankets and coax him into emerging with promises of coffee and blankets, but he has to piss and he’s still unpleasantly fragrant from the night before. Not to mention, Arthur now has sole possession of all of the bedclothes.
After a shower and a shave, he finds Arthur at the table with both hands wrapped around a mug of instant coffee, wearing underwear and a t-shirt so worn it’s coming apart at the seams. And awake, for a certain value of the word.
“Good morning,” Eames greets him, going to the coffee pot to dump out the absolute swill Arthur drinks first thing in the morning so that he can make a pot of proper coffee.
Arthur grunts something at him and drains his mug before shuffling off to the bathroom. Eames hears the shower running a minute later, and after considering whether Arthur would be amenable to company - not likely at the moment - he sets about finding breakfast.
When Arthur reappears, he looks far more human. “To think,” Eames muses. “All this time I thought you started the day wide awake and ready to face the world.”
Arthur’s “Fuck off” this time is perfectly intelligible. He roots through the fridge and settles on a carton of leftover lo mein, which he eats cold while Eames watches in a kind of familiar horror. The things Arthur considers breakfast never cease to amaze.
Eames finishes drinking his second mug of coffee and nudges the pot wordlessly in Arthur’s direction when he reaches for it. The way Arthur looks at him then makes him think that if he’s going to say something about last night, this is the time to do it.
“So,” Eames says, “ready for another delightful day of corporate espionage?”
Arthur lets him off the hook. Eames hadn’t really expected anything less.
* * *
Arthur had been meeting their mark for drinks, so Eames is surprised when he hears a scuffle at the door before the sun has even begun to set, along with the sound of a key scraping in the lock. He slides one hand casually over the holster at his waist, thumbing off the safety. There’s another scuffle, a soft thump, and the door opens.
It is Arthur, but there’s something not quite right about him, something that warns Eames to leave his hand close to his holster for the time being. He sees Arthur’s eyes flick to his hip, taking that in, but Arthur doesn’t make any move for a weapon of his own, just slides sideways and pushes the door shut. His other arm is around his waist. Eames tries not to let it bother him that he doesn’t know what it’s hiding, but he doesn’t entirely succeed.
“You’re back early,” he says evenly.
“I got kicked out of the bar,” Arthur answers.
Eames’ eyebrows go up. Arthur shifts slightly, and his jacket creaks; black leather, with several metal chains hanging from it that jingle when he moves. It’s incongruous against his crisply-pressed wool trousers.
“New jacket?” Eames asks, because that certainly hadn’t been what Arthur had left the apartment in this morning.
Arthur huffs out something like a laugh. “I bought it from a biker,” he says, and now Eames really is determined to ask questions. He’s about to start in on them when Arthur lets the jacket fall open, and Eames sees the bright red stain soaking the front of Arthur’s white dress shirt.
“Christ,” Eames says, on his feet at once. “What happened?”
“There was a fight,” Arthur says. “Some bastard got me with a broken bottle.”
Eames’ lips twitch. Arthur’s gaze sharpens on him immediately.
Eames holds his hands up, surrendering. “You have to admit, it is fairly amusing,” he points out. “I’ve seen you take out entire teams of trained thugs, and you end up felled by some lout with a beer bottle and a temper.”
“Hilarious,” Arthur bites out. “In my defense, the mark was right there watching, and the fuckhead who started it was a drunken sports fan pissed off that Hungary lost a football match. I couldn’t very well pull out a gun and shoot him.”
“I would’ve,” Eames replies, pulling out a chair so that Arthur can sit down and retrieving a towel from the kitchen to hopefully avoid making a mess of the floor. “Hungary is pants at football.”
Arthur makes that huffing sound again, easing the leather jacket off his shoulders as he sits.
“I take it this wasn’t a gift from your new friend with the bottle?” Eames asks, tossing the jacket onto the other chair.
Arthur shakes his head. “I just got it to cover the blood. Mine was - shit - not in great shape. I was trying not to attract attention.”
Eames shakes his head. “I’ll get the med kit,” he says.
“Get mine,” Arthur tells him. “It has more in it.”
When Eames returns from the bathroom with Arthur’s toiletry case, Arthur is picking gingerly at the shirt sticking wetly to his stomach. “Go on, take it off,” Eames says, motioning to Arthur’s shirt. “Let’s see the damage.”
It’s not bad, compared to a lot of things Eames has seen. Certainly they’re in no danger of needing a hospital. It’s still bad enough that Eames will probably have to suture.
“This will hurt a lot less two levels down, if you want me to take care of it,” Eames offers. Getting Arthur halfway plastered is another option, but Eames would prefer not to thin his blood when he’s already lost enough of it.
“I can take it,” Arthur answers, leaning against the chair back. “There’s some anesthetic spray in the kit. Just do it.”
Eames looks up at him, intending to argue, and forgets everything he’d intended to say.
The light coming through the window behind Arthur glances off every ray of colour stretching out around him, spreading wide and shining like Arthur’s own personal aurora borealis. Eames can see the stronger lines shooting out in bright arcs, with thinner, fainter lines branching out in all directions. They layer each other, fragmenting and fading so that Eames can’t seem to take them all in at once, can only gaze, rapt, at such a dazzling display of the fantastic.
Arthur opens his eyes, brow drawn and mouth pursing, probably to ask why Eames is taking so bloody long about it. Then he sees Eames staring and his face clears, going blank so abruptly that Eames knows, he knows Arthur has seen what he’s seeing.
This is the secret, he thinks. This is what Arthur keeps hidden.
Arthur holds his gaze for a long while, and then his eyes slide closed again. “I can do it,” he says quietly, and even then it takes an effort for Eames to tear his eyes away from the vision of dancing lights, to look back at the torn flesh sluggishly bleeding down Arthur’s abdomen and pooling sticky in his navel.
“No,” he says, clearing his throat. “No, I’ve got it. Just hold still.”
Arthur’s body is taut under his hands, probably from the pain. Eames works as quickly and carefully as he’s able, cleaning up the mess and stitching the wound shut in the one place that looks too deep to heal easily on its own. When he’s finished, he says, “There,” quietly, and looks back up.
Arthur’s wings haven’t disappeared. If anything, they’re stronger now, soaking up the colours of the sunset and refracting the light in spectacular fashion. Arthur is watching him this time, watching him look, watching him see, and Eames can’t find any reason to make himself stop.
His hand somehow comes to rest on Arthur’s thigh of its own accord, stroking lightly through the rich fabric. Now that he’s seen, he wants to touch, to experience this vision in every way possible.
He slides his hand higher up on Arthur’s thigh. “Do you…?” he begins, and then stops. Arthur probably shouldn’t engage in any moderately athletic fucking right after being sliced open with a bottle, but Eames thinks they could be careful enough. If Arthur agrees, that’s good enough for him. Eames wants.
Arthur just looks at him. Then he closes his eyes, and nods.
It’s enough. Eames is touching him almost before Arthur finishes, running his hands up Arthur’s bare sides, sliding around to his back. The wings aren’t solid; Eames’ hands find nothing but smooth, unmarred skin, and when he lifts his hand, he can see it pass through the rays of light without interruption.
“Over the couch,” Eames suggests, because at least Arthur will be more comfortable there, able to rest his chest on the arm of the couch if he kneels on the floor.
There are condoms and lube in Arthur’s toiletry bag as well as medical supplies, saving Eames a trip down the hallway. He strips off and kneels between Arthur’s thighs once he’s resettled, nudging them slightly wider apart so that he can fit himself against the cleft of Arthur’s arse, rubbing against warm skin as he hardens.
Eames passes over the lube, and Arthur fingers himself open as Eames runs his hands up Arthur’s spine, gazing his fill at the bright shafts of light emanating from Arthur’s back. They’re just the slightest bit warmer than the air around them. He wants to know if Arthur can feel it when he runs his hand through them, when he strokes the skin where they emerge. The way Arthur shudders beneath him makes Eames think he probably can.
Arthur pulls his fingers out, bumping his knuckles against Eames’ cock, and pushes his hips back. Eames takes the invitation, pushing hard just enough to get in and then sinking forward slowly, until he’s in to the balls and Arthur is panting softly against the upholstery.
He fucks Arthur slowly, drawing it out, wanting it to last while he stares, amazed, at the lights shimmering and dazzling before him. They move when Arthur does, dancing with every arch and flex, every thrust that Arthur pushes back into to meet him.
Eames licks the sweat from Arthur’s back and traces the light between Arthur’s shoulder blades with his tongue, feeling Arthur quiver beneath him and tense up in a way that brings about deliciously good things for Eames. He fucks in harder, pulling Arthur’s hips back so he can go deeper and Arthur can get a hand underneath himself to jack off.
Eames comes and half-collapses on top of Arthur, his thighs shaking too much to hold his weight. Arthur makes a soft noise of pain, bitten off but still audible, which is enough to prompt Eames to pull out and inspect the damage.
None of the stitches have torn out, but the cut is bleeding again, pulled apart by strain or sweat. Eames ties off the condom and pitches it in the bin, washing his hands before he returns with an antiseptic wipe.
Arthur doesn’t protest when Eames cleans him up for a second time; when Eames looks up, his eyes are closed. The pain is probably starting to sink in, now that the adrenaline’s faded.
The sun is nearly gone, more shadows than light in the open room. Arthur’s wings have grown fainter, the colours paling and dissolving as the light retreats. And now Eames has another answer, another secret.
“We can get the blanket from your bed, if you think you’ll be cold,” Eames says, unable to resist reaching out and tracing a line down Arthur’s back as the wings disappear.
Arthur shakes his head. He doesn’t stand when Eames does, but when Eames remains, waiting, he pulls himself up and follows Eames to bed.
Part two