I was going to write a sex scene but I want to post this NOW and I'm scared of it.
Title: Nails and Rope
Fandom: Inception
Word Count: 5,096
Rating: PG
Pairing: Arthur/Eames, Eames/Ariadne
Warnings: Boring. Really boring.
Disclaimer: Characters and world set-up belong to Chris Nolan and his hard work. Boringness belongs to me.
Eames stopped being fond of England not long after the first time he left it for another land; a school trip to Hardanger, geography, the examination of fjords which bored him as close to tears as it did the rest of his class. But the air was less oppressive than Hounslow, and the faces were different, and when MI5 picked him up at Oxford the first thing he asked was how far they could post him away from the UK without shooting him into space.
"That's not true," Ariadne says, reaching for a protractor. She has all the requisite software, but Ariadne is a hands-on architect and all her first drafts are drawn by painstaking hand; Eames lounges over a three hundred year old sofa in her rooms with a hole in his socks, mustard on his tie, and sweat on his brow. At least she no longer says 'the truth' as if it is some immutable substance or force, not since the exhaustive lecture on neurology that he treated her to.
"Which part?"
The rain intrudes through a half-open window, saving anyone the bother of watering the cactus Eames insisted on bringing with him. It is another eccentricity he is cultivating with a good deal more care than he is the plant.
"Oxford. Norway. Hating England." Ariadne scowls at her draft and reaches slowly for something else - the rubber, perhaps.
"All of it?" Eames scratches his neck. The collars of his shirt are all too effectively starched by the Parisian laundrette, but this is the price of playing the aristo. One must do things properly.
"MI5."
"Oh no," Eames sighs, "that part is true."
"You worked in intelligence?" Ariadne gives him a fragment of her attention before she returns it to her work - the atrium level of some purely physical hotel, if he remembers correctly, all glass and angles, geometric patterns for hypothetical clients in Dubai.
"I worked in admin," he corrects, wriggling his toes. The sofa is too valuable to be in a students' accommodation, but then Ariadne can afford flourishes like this now. He would not have pegged it for her type at all, and it sits out of kilter with the rest of the minimalist furnishings.
"Doing what?"
"Mostly," says Eames, "I made coffee."
"Is that true?"
"I made coffee in the Saudi Arabian embassy," Eames says, "which entailed a certain degree of Not Making Coffee, too."
"So you were a spy," Ariadne says, reaching for her own coffee. It must be cold by now, but she drinks it without concern; Eames grimaces up at the high moulded ceilings in sympathy with her taste-buds at the thought of their terrible abuse. "That suits you."
"It suits eccentric, aristocratic Eames, doesn't it?" he agrees, "It's precisely the sort of thing you expect a slightly dodgy ex-public schoolboy with a modicum of intelligence to immerse himself in."
"So it's not true."
"It's currently true." He rolls over onto his side, reaching for the newspaper which is two feet too far away for his fingers to touch it. "Tell me about your family," he says, the idle interest passing over like an aeroplane.
"Only if you tell me about yours." She has stuck a mechanical pencil in her hair for safe-keeping and as she reaches for it again he wants to kiss the ends of her fingers, take the rubber-shavings from them with the tip of his tongue.
"Which one?"
"Eames." She calls him this in the certainty that, however much he switches forenames like hats and socks, it will remain a constant identifier. He hasn't the heart to tell her it's as fake as the passport it's printed on.
"I mean that without the tiniest smidgen of facetiousness," he says, resting his too-hot face on his upper arm, sweating into cream wool as he has oft-times before. "I've had several."
She is annoyed enough to swivel on her chair. "I don't mean your collection of false histories, Matthew - Robin - Kim - whichever you are today - I mean the ones you grew up with."
"Neither do I, and so do I," he says evenly, flushing warm all over as he peers up at her, his hand clenched under his head as a species of secondary pillow; the sofa arm is wooden and no more comfortable than the floor. "I've had several."
Ariadne stops with her cold coffee poised at her mouth, and watches him with the kind of discomfiting intensity that he is slowly becoming addicted to; it may be easy to hide from her, but he finds more and more that he'd prefer not to perform so many veils-dances with whatever 'the truth' is. If only it were as simple as merely telling a truth with facts to support it.
"Explain."
"I presume you're familiar with the concept of children's homes," Eames says, as she touches the rim of the cup to her bottom lip but does not drink.
"You -?" She doesn't finish her question, her face constricted with concentration, processing new information - trying to determine if he is playing her for pity. "What happened to your parents? Your birth parents, I mean. How old -?"
"I don't know." Holding her gaze is impossible. He shuffles onto his back again, folds his hands over his belly where his pink paisley shirt strains against a gut that was not this size when he bought it.
"What do you mean, you don't know? How old were you? Didn't anyone tell you?"
"Oh, probably." Eames feels his jaw twitch and wills it to loosen before he can crack a tooth in unasked-for clenching, keeps his voice light and sardonic. "I forgot."
She stares all the harder. "You can't just forget -"
"Oh goodness no, I didn't just," Eames tells the light fitting above him, choking the sharp edges back from his voice with difficulty. "I put a lot of effort into that."
It strikes him abruptly that he is lying on a couch and blurting possible-truths to the attentive ear of a coffee-sipping woman in mildly conservative dress who gives no indication whether or not she believes him; he starts to laugh, and the rain increases until it spatters the rug beneath the windowsill.
"That's all for today, Doctor," he says, rubbing the humidity-sweat from his forehead again with the side of his fingers, spread in a fat fan. Paris is a swamp.
"You had better not be lying about this," Ariadne sets her coffee on the floor, where it can't ruin her draft, and returns to taking measurements. Eames pretends he didn't hear the wobble at the very edge of her voice.
"I might be," Eames mutters, tucking his chin into his chest, hunching his shoulders. The open window blasts him with unexpectedly cold air, "but I wouldn't know."
Either she doesn't hear, or she chooses to ignore it, and when he twists uncomfortably to see what she's doing, her shoulders too are hunched, bending her face-first into something intricate and detailed on the sloping surface in front of her.
"Not going to ask what brings me to Paris?" he asks when the syncopated rhythms of the rain on the upper windowpane have taken over the main noise duties in the room sufficiently; he is sure she won't without prompting. He's been on her sofa all fucking day and she hasn't asked yet.
"How much do you want to borrow?" Her voice is muffled, the cap of a pen waggling like a cigar between her teeth.
"I don't want money," he says, trying not to sound smug, only hurt and scandalised that she'd suggest such a thing. The sofa is starting to hurt his back.
"Uh-huh." The pen lid wags again. "How much?"
"I'm fine," Eames repeats, levering himself into a sitting position with all the grace of a sow in a wallow heaving herself to the trough. "Financially."
"So Arthur leant it to you." And she says 'leant', which means Miles is still teaching her, and oftener than the mere weekly classes with the rest of the students at the Sorbonne.
"He gave me thirty grand of fuck-off money," he corrects, "in the hopes of surgically separating me from Washington until his client stops being his client any more, and pays him." He wipes more sweat from the back of his neck, rests his elbows on his knees. "Apparently my presence was jeopardising his business somewhat."
"Do you have more than two left?" Ariadne mutters, still impeded by plastic pen lid.
"No. Did you know he's teaching politicians to guard their dreams now?" He gets half-way through fiddling in his breast pocket before he remembers he's supposedly given up. Outside an angry car toots someone who bellows back a shower of French invective in an accent evidently torn from Tangiers. "The Republican presidential candidate's running mate. Cupboard ninety-eight percent pure creaking, rotten skeleton."
"He told you that?" She seems briefly impressed, although it's hard to tell with the pen cap and her back to him. Perhaps it's more incredulity than admiration.
"Don't be silly." Eames rubs his face. "He's a martyr to client confidentiality. It's just very obvious."
"Alright." She spins on her chair again, tapping her lip with an uncapped pen; the depth of her thought is, he can see, not projected at this conversation, at him, at the matter under discussion. She's still nine-tenths building. "I give up. Why are you in Paris?"
"To ensure your genius does not go unfed," he says, trying to sound avuncular and grand at once. He succeeds in patronising, at least. "Come, Ms Architect, you work too diligently to remember to stock your cupboards and are in the midst of a situation that can only be described as Old Mother Hubbard-esque."
"The point?"
She's back at the drawing board, drawing a canvas-trainered foot still damp with a coffee-run's rain under her as an afterthought.
"Let me take you to dinner." The words flutter away like frightened pigeons from his mouth, but they do fly out rather than caving back in.
That at least stops her in her tracks, if only to snort at him again in eloquent and concise disbelief. "Can you afford that?"
"With enough over for a taxi, a plane ticket, and whatever else your heart desires, including my immediate absence," he assures her, searching under the sofa for his shoes. "Just let me feed you first and I'll leave quietly."
Ariadne leans back on her chair until she can eyeball him upside-down. "Will you stop being a drama queen and let me finish this floor?"
The rain continues as if it's on a pay-per-drops agreement with the French government and saving up to buy a small country; by the time they reach the restaurant he has in mind, he is soaked and the newspaper he has been using as a makeshift umbrella is a papier-mâché sculpture of nothing in particular which is slowly oozing over his watch. Ariadne's umbrella, tiny and bright blue, has left her with a damp streak up the front and back, and her jeans have tide-marks at the knees.
He still asks for an outdoor table, to the amusement of the maître d', who tries to correct his French under the assumption that Eames has simply misspoken.
"It's raining," Ariadne points out, as if Eames is an idiot as well as insane.
"I know," he says, as they're ushered to a wrought-iron table under a green and white parasol by the giggling, bemused maître d'. "You like being able to smell the streets in the rain while you're eating. It's why you keep the windows open even when it's cold enough to make your fingers blue."
She squints up at him and folds her arms. "I told you I don't like it when you do that."
"Even when it means I get you the table you want?" Eames leans back on his chair, spreading out like an oil slick under her gaze. It's a pose; his internal equilibrium would rather he leaned forward, crushed his gut, laid his head on his arms and stared up at her, but right now she would only walk away in disgust.
The wine is ordered with an abruptness and unmemorability which sparks a now-instinctive worry in his mind, sends him scurrying for his pocket to check the rim of his much-worn poker chip and the scratches, scrapes, and scars that mar the already imperfect circle.
This is as real as any reality ever is; when he focuses on Aridane's face again she looks a little sympathetic, and he wonders how often she finds herself groping for her chess piece like a madwoman in the middle of a market.
"Should I ask how things are with Arthur?" Whatever's on her lips, it's not a smile.
He answers it with a grimace of his own, and a gaggle of tourists run the length of the bridge, skidding toward the Metro station entrance. "Only if you want to."
She has her back to the little drama, her face to the happy diners inside, the closed windows and the tendrils of cigarette smoke shrugging their way through the kitchen door to the adjacent restaurant. "Will you give me an honest answer if I do?"
"Darling, I don't think you need me to answer." He wants so badly to put his head on the table that it feels almost like a hunger pang, which is funny, in its way; Eames very carefully cannot remember the last time he was really hungry.
A police car passes; the Doppler effect, the rain, the dampening of bells across the city - the whole soundtrack to this suddenly excruciating conversation - is muffled and muted by the arrival of the wine, which is either very good or very bad or just wine, he doesn't notice and doesn't care.
Ariadne clears her throat as the waiter retreats and says pointedly, "How are things with Arthur?"
Eames would swear he can see a horse walking sedately out of the Quarter, but it is apparently not a dream; there is a policeman on it. He looks at his wine for guidance, and receives the impression that he should drink as much of it as he can, as quickly as possible.
He downs the glass and ignores her raised eyebrows, the way she's playing with the stem of her glass and not drinking. "Splendid, magnificent, and stultifying."
"Are you still with him?"
"In what sense with, my dear?" He attempts a weak smile as he pours another glass, indicates her with his crooked, unfixable pinky. "I'm sitting here with you."
"You know what sense." She has one hand tucked into her armpit, her shoulder lifted; the other stretches across the table to touch the base of the wine glass almost possessively, feeling out the shapes of the world and in all probability cataloguing them for future use. Every last blade of grass, every single overly-friendly black cat will be inserted into a dreamscape.
He knows she's looking at him intently, waiting for something that resembles A Truth, if not the mythical The Truth, but he finds it impossible to meet her eyes, hypnotised by her blunt fingernails on the glass. She cuts them, doesn't chew them, and there is a white mark on the middle fingernail from some recent impact.
And so he sighs, "I wasn't with him," with his own wide fingers bent around what is a mostly-empty wineglass. "I was fucking him." He gulps another mouthful. "Which I may or may not continue to do."
"Well, that was illustrative." She makes a face, and he catches the tail-end of an expression which seems to be weighing him up as unfeelingly as if he were a batch of prints, a type of construction card on sale. "Are you suggesting you're bored?"
Eames fills the glass again. The end of the bottle, and Ariadne hasn't so much as smelled the glass in front of her; it is a musty, pungent merlot, sitting on the back of his tongue like a burning tire, but that hardly seems important. And he starts to laugh, a thin and underfed whiny dog of a laugh that is no more happy than a scream.
"Have you met Arthur?" he says, and the giggling despond weaves through the words like veins in cheese. "Arthur has a list of things which are normal stapled to the inside of his skull and if you deviate from them for one second all his fuses blow."
"I beg your pardon," she says flatly, not in the slightest bit amused. He can't work out if it's the phrasing, which he is certain is objectively funny, the situation, or the sound of his own half-miserable compulsive chuckling which has robbed the humour from his words.
"He is either a robot or an alien," Eames persists, flagging the waiter for another bottle of wine with only a lift of the bottle and his eyebrows. "He doesn't like anything."
A bicycle passes, heading into the Quarter, a bell scarcely reaching him through the traffic and rain and the pounding song of high blood pressure in his ears. These are nosebleed conditions, and mustard on his tie or not, Eames is fond of this fucking shirt. He pretends an interest in the dregs of his wine, hoping that if it starts now he'll staunch the flow with a receptacle.
It has the additional advantage of taking his eyes of Ariadne's go on, explain yourself gaze.
Words pour out of him like smoke from a fire, leaking and poisoning the air between them. "He just does things because they make him normal; he listens to the right music and wears his clothes the right way and says the right things which he read out of a fucking book somewhere and he has sex the way it says to in some ridiculous military-issue manual somewhere and -"
Her reply is careful and firm. "I'm not sure I wanted to know that." It is also a huge fucking lie; he doesn't need to know her as well as he does to know that there is interest behind her disapproval.
"He has less of a real human personality than -"
"Than you do."
If he were a little less sober he might have taken this by clutching at his heart, miming a stab wound, hissing, or even raising an imaginary handbag to hide behind, but such campy retaliation is hardly fitting, and besides - the second bottle of wine arrives.
"Being with Arthur is like being buried alive," he concludes, nodding the waiter away.
A pair of menus sit neglected between them, and Eames wrestles with the urge to erect a wall of laminated cardboard to hide behind. No one needs a psychology degree or even a back-of-a-cereal-box pretend therapy qualification to understand that raising such a physical rampart would signify so much, too much.
"What do you want with me, Eames?" Ariadne finally sniffs and sips her wine. It is to her liking, he can see, but she doesn't want him to know she likes it, that he got it right, either. "Why are you … unburdening yourself?"
The fourth wine glass is half-empty. He forces himself to put it down and keep his hands still on the cardboard menus. His index finger underlines the words pour deux unconsciously, but he doesn't snatch his hand away just yet. "I think you know."
"Why."
He takes a deep breath and watches her drink, half-silhouetted against the painfully bright-grey sky, lit from behind the clouds by an aggressive sun. It hurts like a toothache to look at it at all. "Because you can't stand me, and you won't try to fix it."
When the light haloing her rain-frizzed hair allows him to look at her face properly, he is mildly surprised - or thinks he is surprised, because there is no such thing as an accident of delivery, is there? No one who knows what he does about the subconscious would think that - to find her disbelieving, wrong-footed.
"You're wrong." She is half-way through the glass.
"About trying to fix it?" He all but lunges for his own drink. "I'm not an interesting problem, you only like interesting problems -" the sentence vanishes into the wine, words diving for cover under the dark-red waves like soldiers behind walls. It is probably just his imagination running away with him in the way that it has always been wont to do, but there is a distinct air of the battlefield over the half-empty bottle, the untouched bread basket, and the cold metal table.
Ariadne sets her glass back on the table and starts picking at a bread roll. She seems just as desperate to redirect her energies onto something else, just as desperate to continue picking the scab, poking the wound, to see what the outcome could possibly be.
"About not being able to stand you."
"Well that could be a problem," he half-laughs into a mostly-empty glass. "Disinterested, then?"
"No."
He drops the wine glass on the table; doesn't place it, drops it. By some miracle or other of angle it doesn't break. He claps his palms to his face and whispers from between the prison of his own skin and bones, as if he is begging at a letterbox in the middle of the night, "Make me stop liking you. Please."
"You are insane, Eames." She moves his wine glass out of the way, lifts the bottle off the table and places it on the floor carefully, somewhere down beside her soggy feet where the restaurant's cat can knock it over instead. "Are you aware of this?"
He feels around in his teeth for effect more than because he thinks there might be something caught in them without him having eaten a thing yet, studying intently the parasol above their table.
"That," he says after a while, "is a distinct possibility. One which I can hardly deny."
"And selfish," she says with girder-dropping firmness. She might as well have reached across the table and hit him in the face, for a variety of reasons he feels no particular urge to own up to.
"Funnily enough Arthur said the same thing." He swirls what little wine he has left and considers asking her if she plans to eat something before both of them get horribly drunk.
"Did he?" Her eyes are like hot coals, like volcanoes, hot and terrifying and beautiful. He wishes there were some way he could hurl himself into them. It would hurt like hell and lengthy death, and be worth every second of the agony. "Did he also call you a parasite?"
"Oh yes." He finishes the dregs, and eyeballs her glass pleadingly; she tucks it behind her elbow and leans forward to meet his gaze. "Sometime shortly before he gave me the money and told me to sling my hook."
The rain is easing up, and he wants to perform some sort of mad rain dance, start seeding the clouds, anything he can possibly do to bring it back and give the hateful, horrible conversation the proper ambience. If the sun comes out it'll drag hope kicking and screaming behind it, and whatever else he has, he cannot afford hope.
"How much of that do you have left?"
"The money?" For a queasy moment he had assumed she could read his thoughts; he grasps the needling at his money-management skills, at his self-exaggerated gambling habit, at the constructed persona of the profligate playboy posh beast with the poor fashion sense, as tightly as a life-line. "Enough, I told you." He smiles a hollow smile, and the sun betrays him, ambling out from behind a cloud like the bastard it is. "I can do anything you want with it, except build you a house."
She sighs long and loud, and another bicycle splashes through a nearby puddle, sending up a dirty rainbow of fallen rain in a brief re-enactment of the past storm. "What do you think I want?"
"I wouldn't presume to second-guess you, Ariadne."
"Yes you would." She tears a piece of bread in half, squashes a section between her fingers convulsively, unseeingly. "It's what you do."
"Make me stop liking you," he says, conscious that he's whining but uninterested in modulating his voice beyond the rejection of a tipsy slur which would not lend the necessary gravitas to his complaint. He reaches for a piece of bread to mutilate and releases too late that he has copied her movements exactly. "Otherwise I will be anything you want." It may not be the best threat, but it's honest. Oh god, it is honest. "I'm very good at that."
"Are you?" Her laugh has as much humour in it as his did, and he recognises some of the same cadences, but it's impossible to tell if she's unconsciously mirroring him, or if he was stealing from her in the first place. "What if I want you to be you?"
"That could be tricky," he admits, and spreads his hands as if he's offering her cards. It's unnecessarily theatrical, but that's the Eames she's used to. "Pick a me, I'll be that for you."
And there it is, the straw that crushes the poor camel's proverbial vertebrae and smashes very literally the wine glass in front of her as Ariadne throws it off to one side of him; Eames might some other time have offered a silent prayer to a God he's never believed in that the waiter, that the staff do not spot this act of wanton vandalism, but there's no room in his mind for such niceties now.
"I don't want one of your fucking pre-primed profiles, Eames."
He stretches himself across the table and rests his chin on his folded arms, puts himself within reach of her balled fists, his chest protesting that he can no longer breathe, and his face already the red of alcohol-infused Englishman. But he says nothing.
"I want to know who the hell you are, I want to know why you think you can just show up out of nowhere and not-tell me things and make me like you."
She throws the bread off the table and stares down at him as if she might at any moment split his skull open.
"I want a name. A background. Something to go with your face and your avalanche of lies."
There is a ringing silence, but no one from the restaurant's staff is foolhardy enough to step into what looks like, even if it is not, a lover's tiff. They'll wait until one or the other storms off, and bill the loser, like sensible Parisians.
He lifts his chin off his sore arms, and the nape of his neck protests. "I don't have anything."
She says nothing.
"I have five hundred Euros, a bad back, a bad heart, a stomach full of wine and a horrible suspicion that I'm in love with you. And I'm sorry for all of it."
The meal is so silent and conducted with such scaldingly bad atmosphere on every front, what with the pointed did you drop this? remarks from the waiter and the opprobrium pouring through the window from every other remaining diner, that Eames is almost relieved when Ariadne reaches across the table and squeezes his wrist painfully hard.
He's less happy that it's because she won't let him pay for it.
"You can't afford it," she says, throwing in another forty Euros for the wine glass, even though there is no earthly way the poxy thing cost that much. "You need that money to live on, I can't let you."
"I don't need it," he protests, trying to go for his wallet with his left hand. "And I said I would -"
"As if I ever believed your word."
"- I'm trying."
"I don't want you to try." She pulls more notes out of her own wallet awkwardly, her left hand, her dominant hand still nailing him to the table like a manacle. " Ne pas prendre son argent, monsieur, il a très peu. Je paie pour cela."
"No you're not -"
With an exasperated sigh, as if he has just said something so appallingly stupid that she is disgusted with his ignorance and can no longer stand to talk to him, Ariadne releases his hand, a flourish brushing him away. A second later the back of her small, ringless and bony hand connects with his cheek hard enough to make his ears ring and his face turn scarlet.
The waiter backs away with a quick, I'll just be going somewhere else while you two have your domestic gesture that is surprisingly eloquent for a pair of raised eyebrows and widened eyes.
"You want this?" she hisses, leaning over the table to give him a tigerish look that is in danger of burning the flesh from his bones, "You want me? Then you do what I say. You are not paying for this."
"Yes," he says, half-breathless, slumped in his seat with a stinging face and his breath coming in short, hard gasps, as light-headed as if he'd drunk forty bottles of wine instead of the better part of two.
"Yes what?"
"Yes, I want this. You. That." He marvels at his sudden tongue-tiedness, the way words - usually his co-conspirators in every deception - betray him in his moment of need, stab him with short, monosyllabic swords and leave him gasping and floundering, stretching for meaning. "Anything you want. Anything you say."
"Who the fuck are you?" she says, examining him from an inch away as if he's a specimen under a microscope.
Eames nearly chokes on his tongue. "Yours."
She sits back in her seat with a wince-inducing thud and buries her head in her hands.
"I'm so-" he begins, although he finds he's not at all.
"Shut up," she says, holding up a finger, her other hand still clutching at her face. "I'm thinking."
Eames touches the red patch on his face gingerly. It is tender and hot and amazing and perfect and right. He almost wishes she'd hit him harder, punched him, split his lip. Some sort of trophy he could take away with him, Ariadne was here.
"We're going home now," she says, rising from her chair in a clumsy, sharp movement. She sticks out her hand as if he's a small child, misbehaving. "I'll work out what the hell that means on the way. And you -" she smiles, a private joke between herself and her, something he'll never be privy to, "- don't say a thing."
ETA:
Art by crotalus_atrox
Also, sequel: "Oxygen" (contains sexing)
Fandom: Inception
Word Count: 5,096
Rating: PG
Pairing: Arthur/Eames, Eames/Ariadne
Warnings: Boring. Really boring.
Disclaimer: Characters and world set-up belong to Chris Nolan and his hard work. Boringness belongs to me.
Eames stopped being fond of England not long after the first time he left it for another land; a school trip to Hardanger, geography, the examination of fjords which bored him as close to tears as it did the rest of his class. But the air was less oppressive than Hounslow, and the faces were different, and when MI5 picked him up at Oxford the first thing he asked was how far they could post him away from the UK without shooting him into space.
"That's not true," Ariadne says, reaching for a protractor. She has all the requisite software, but Ariadne is a hands-on architect and all her first drafts are drawn by painstaking hand; Eames lounges over a three hundred year old sofa in her rooms with a hole in his socks, mustard on his tie, and sweat on his brow. At least she no longer says 'the truth' as if it is some immutable substance or force, not since the exhaustive lecture on neurology that he treated her to.
"Which part?"
The rain intrudes through a half-open window, saving anyone the bother of watering the cactus Eames insisted on bringing with him. It is another eccentricity he is cultivating with a good deal more care than he is the plant.
"Oxford. Norway. Hating England." Ariadne scowls at her draft and reaches slowly for something else - the rubber, perhaps.
"All of it?" Eames scratches his neck. The collars of his shirt are all too effectively starched by the Parisian laundrette, but this is the price of playing the aristo. One must do things properly.
"MI5."
"Oh no," Eames sighs, "that part is true."
"You worked in intelligence?" Ariadne gives him a fragment of her attention before she returns it to her work - the atrium level of some purely physical hotel, if he remembers correctly, all glass and angles, geometric patterns for hypothetical clients in Dubai.
"I worked in admin," he corrects, wriggling his toes. The sofa is too valuable to be in a students' accommodation, but then Ariadne can afford flourishes like this now. He would not have pegged it for her type at all, and it sits out of kilter with the rest of the minimalist furnishings.
"Doing what?"
"Mostly," says Eames, "I made coffee."
"Is that true?"
"I made coffee in the Saudi Arabian embassy," Eames says, "which entailed a certain degree of Not Making Coffee, too."
"So you were a spy," Ariadne says, reaching for her own coffee. It must be cold by now, but she drinks it without concern; Eames grimaces up at the high moulded ceilings in sympathy with her taste-buds at the thought of their terrible abuse. "That suits you."
"It suits eccentric, aristocratic Eames, doesn't it?" he agrees, "It's precisely the sort of thing you expect a slightly dodgy ex-public schoolboy with a modicum of intelligence to immerse himself in."
"So it's not true."
"It's currently true." He rolls over onto his side, reaching for the newspaper which is two feet too far away for his fingers to touch it. "Tell me about your family," he says, the idle interest passing over like an aeroplane.
"Only if you tell me about yours." She has stuck a mechanical pencil in her hair for safe-keeping and as she reaches for it again he wants to kiss the ends of her fingers, take the rubber-shavings from them with the tip of his tongue.
"Which one?"
"Eames." She calls him this in the certainty that, however much he switches forenames like hats and socks, it will remain a constant identifier. He hasn't the heart to tell her it's as fake as the passport it's printed on.
"I mean that without the tiniest smidgen of facetiousness," he says, resting his too-hot face on his upper arm, sweating into cream wool as he has oft-times before. "I've had several."
She is annoyed enough to swivel on her chair. "I don't mean your collection of false histories, Matthew - Robin - Kim - whichever you are today - I mean the ones you grew up with."
"Neither do I, and so do I," he says evenly, flushing warm all over as he peers up at her, his hand clenched under his head as a species of secondary pillow; the sofa arm is wooden and no more comfortable than the floor. "I've had several."
Ariadne stops with her cold coffee poised at her mouth, and watches him with the kind of discomfiting intensity that he is slowly becoming addicted to; it may be easy to hide from her, but he finds more and more that he'd prefer not to perform so many veils-dances with whatever 'the truth' is. If only it were as simple as merely telling a truth with facts to support it.
"Explain."
"I presume you're familiar with the concept of children's homes," Eames says, as she touches the rim of the cup to her bottom lip but does not drink.
"You -?" She doesn't finish her question, her face constricted with concentration, processing new information - trying to determine if he is playing her for pity. "What happened to your parents? Your birth parents, I mean. How old -?"
"I don't know." Holding her gaze is impossible. He shuffles onto his back again, folds his hands over his belly where his pink paisley shirt strains against a gut that was not this size when he bought it.
"What do you mean, you don't know? How old were you? Didn't anyone tell you?"
"Oh, probably." Eames feels his jaw twitch and wills it to loosen before he can crack a tooth in unasked-for clenching, keeps his voice light and sardonic. "I forgot."
She stares all the harder. "You can't just forget -"
"Oh goodness no, I didn't just," Eames tells the light fitting above him, choking the sharp edges back from his voice with difficulty. "I put a lot of effort into that."
It strikes him abruptly that he is lying on a couch and blurting possible-truths to the attentive ear of a coffee-sipping woman in mildly conservative dress who gives no indication whether or not she believes him; he starts to laugh, and the rain increases until it spatters the rug beneath the windowsill.
"That's all for today, Doctor," he says, rubbing the humidity-sweat from his forehead again with the side of his fingers, spread in a fat fan. Paris is a swamp.
"You had better not be lying about this," Ariadne sets her coffee on the floor, where it can't ruin her draft, and returns to taking measurements. Eames pretends he didn't hear the wobble at the very edge of her voice.
"I might be," Eames mutters, tucking his chin into his chest, hunching his shoulders. The open window blasts him with unexpectedly cold air, "but I wouldn't know."
Either she doesn't hear, or she chooses to ignore it, and when he twists uncomfortably to see what she's doing, her shoulders too are hunched, bending her face-first into something intricate and detailed on the sloping surface in front of her.
"Not going to ask what brings me to Paris?" he asks when the syncopated rhythms of the rain on the upper windowpane have taken over the main noise duties in the room sufficiently; he is sure she won't without prompting. He's been on her sofa all fucking day and she hasn't asked yet.
"How much do you want to borrow?" Her voice is muffled, the cap of a pen waggling like a cigar between her teeth.
"I don't want money," he says, trying not to sound smug, only hurt and scandalised that she'd suggest such a thing. The sofa is starting to hurt his back.
"Uh-huh." The pen lid wags again. "How much?"
"I'm fine," Eames repeats, levering himself into a sitting position with all the grace of a sow in a wallow heaving herself to the trough. "Financially."
"So Arthur leant it to you." And she says 'leant', which means Miles is still teaching her, and oftener than the mere weekly classes with the rest of the students at the Sorbonne.
"He gave me thirty grand of fuck-off money," he corrects, "in the hopes of surgically separating me from Washington until his client stops being his client any more, and pays him." He wipes more sweat from the back of his neck, rests his elbows on his knees. "Apparently my presence was jeopardising his business somewhat."
"Do you have more than two left?" Ariadne mutters, still impeded by plastic pen lid.
"No. Did you know he's teaching politicians to guard their dreams now?" He gets half-way through fiddling in his breast pocket before he remembers he's supposedly given up. Outside an angry car toots someone who bellows back a shower of French invective in an accent evidently torn from Tangiers. "The Republican presidential candidate's running mate. Cupboard ninety-eight percent pure creaking, rotten skeleton."
"He told you that?" She seems briefly impressed, although it's hard to tell with the pen cap and her back to him. Perhaps it's more incredulity than admiration.
"Don't be silly." Eames rubs his face. "He's a martyr to client confidentiality. It's just very obvious."
"Alright." She spins on her chair again, tapping her lip with an uncapped pen; the depth of her thought is, he can see, not projected at this conversation, at him, at the matter under discussion. She's still nine-tenths building. "I give up. Why are you in Paris?"
"To ensure your genius does not go unfed," he says, trying to sound avuncular and grand at once. He succeeds in patronising, at least. "Come, Ms Architect, you work too diligently to remember to stock your cupboards and are in the midst of a situation that can only be described as Old Mother Hubbard-esque."
"The point?"
She's back at the drawing board, drawing a canvas-trainered foot still damp with a coffee-run's rain under her as an afterthought.
"Let me take you to dinner." The words flutter away like frightened pigeons from his mouth, but they do fly out rather than caving back in.
That at least stops her in her tracks, if only to snort at him again in eloquent and concise disbelief. "Can you afford that?"
"With enough over for a taxi, a plane ticket, and whatever else your heart desires, including my immediate absence," he assures her, searching under the sofa for his shoes. "Just let me feed you first and I'll leave quietly."
Ariadne leans back on her chair until she can eyeball him upside-down. "Will you stop being a drama queen and let me finish this floor?"
The rain continues as if it's on a pay-per-drops agreement with the French government and saving up to buy a small country; by the time they reach the restaurant he has in mind, he is soaked and the newspaper he has been using as a makeshift umbrella is a papier-mâché sculpture of nothing in particular which is slowly oozing over his watch. Ariadne's umbrella, tiny and bright blue, has left her with a damp streak up the front and back, and her jeans have tide-marks at the knees.
He still asks for an outdoor table, to the amusement of the maître d', who tries to correct his French under the assumption that Eames has simply misspoken.
"It's raining," Ariadne points out, as if Eames is an idiot as well as insane.
"I know," he says, as they're ushered to a wrought-iron table under a green and white parasol by the giggling, bemused maître d'. "You like being able to smell the streets in the rain while you're eating. It's why you keep the windows open even when it's cold enough to make your fingers blue."
She squints up at him and folds her arms. "I told you I don't like it when you do that."
"Even when it means I get you the table you want?" Eames leans back on his chair, spreading out like an oil slick under her gaze. It's a pose; his internal equilibrium would rather he leaned forward, crushed his gut, laid his head on his arms and stared up at her, but right now she would only walk away in disgust.
The wine is ordered with an abruptness and unmemorability which sparks a now-instinctive worry in his mind, sends him scurrying for his pocket to check the rim of his much-worn poker chip and the scratches, scrapes, and scars that mar the already imperfect circle.
This is as real as any reality ever is; when he focuses on Aridane's face again she looks a little sympathetic, and he wonders how often she finds herself groping for her chess piece like a madwoman in the middle of a market.
"Should I ask how things are with Arthur?" Whatever's on her lips, it's not a smile.
He answers it with a grimace of his own, and a gaggle of tourists run the length of the bridge, skidding toward the Metro station entrance. "Only if you want to."
She has her back to the little drama, her face to the happy diners inside, the closed windows and the tendrils of cigarette smoke shrugging their way through the kitchen door to the adjacent restaurant. "Will you give me an honest answer if I do?"
"Darling, I don't think you need me to answer." He wants so badly to put his head on the table that it feels almost like a hunger pang, which is funny, in its way; Eames very carefully cannot remember the last time he was really hungry.
A police car passes; the Doppler effect, the rain, the dampening of bells across the city - the whole soundtrack to this suddenly excruciating conversation - is muffled and muted by the arrival of the wine, which is either very good or very bad or just wine, he doesn't notice and doesn't care.
Ariadne clears her throat as the waiter retreats and says pointedly, "How are things with Arthur?"
Eames would swear he can see a horse walking sedately out of the Quarter, but it is apparently not a dream; there is a policeman on it. He looks at his wine for guidance, and receives the impression that he should drink as much of it as he can, as quickly as possible.
He downs the glass and ignores her raised eyebrows, the way she's playing with the stem of her glass and not drinking. "Splendid, magnificent, and stultifying."
"Are you still with him?"
"In what sense with, my dear?" He attempts a weak smile as he pours another glass, indicates her with his crooked, unfixable pinky. "I'm sitting here with you."
"You know what sense." She has one hand tucked into her armpit, her shoulder lifted; the other stretches across the table to touch the base of the wine glass almost possessively, feeling out the shapes of the world and in all probability cataloguing them for future use. Every last blade of grass, every single overly-friendly black cat will be inserted into a dreamscape.
He knows she's looking at him intently, waiting for something that resembles A Truth, if not the mythical The Truth, but he finds it impossible to meet her eyes, hypnotised by her blunt fingernails on the glass. She cuts them, doesn't chew them, and there is a white mark on the middle fingernail from some recent impact.
And so he sighs, "I wasn't with him," with his own wide fingers bent around what is a mostly-empty wineglass. "I was fucking him." He gulps another mouthful. "Which I may or may not continue to do."
"Well, that was illustrative." She makes a face, and he catches the tail-end of an expression which seems to be weighing him up as unfeelingly as if he were a batch of prints, a type of construction card on sale. "Are you suggesting you're bored?"
Eames fills the glass again. The end of the bottle, and Ariadne hasn't so much as smelled the glass in front of her; it is a musty, pungent merlot, sitting on the back of his tongue like a burning tire, but that hardly seems important. And he starts to laugh, a thin and underfed whiny dog of a laugh that is no more happy than a scream.
"Have you met Arthur?" he says, and the giggling despond weaves through the words like veins in cheese. "Arthur has a list of things which are normal stapled to the inside of his skull and if you deviate from them for one second all his fuses blow."
"I beg your pardon," she says flatly, not in the slightest bit amused. He can't work out if it's the phrasing, which he is certain is objectively funny, the situation, or the sound of his own half-miserable compulsive chuckling which has robbed the humour from his words.
"He is either a robot or an alien," Eames persists, flagging the waiter for another bottle of wine with only a lift of the bottle and his eyebrows. "He doesn't like anything."
A bicycle passes, heading into the Quarter, a bell scarcely reaching him through the traffic and rain and the pounding song of high blood pressure in his ears. These are nosebleed conditions, and mustard on his tie or not, Eames is fond of this fucking shirt. He pretends an interest in the dregs of his wine, hoping that if it starts now he'll staunch the flow with a receptacle.
It has the additional advantage of taking his eyes of Ariadne's go on, explain yourself gaze.
Words pour out of him like smoke from a fire, leaking and poisoning the air between them. "He just does things because they make him normal; he listens to the right music and wears his clothes the right way and says the right things which he read out of a fucking book somewhere and he has sex the way it says to in some ridiculous military-issue manual somewhere and -"
Her reply is careful and firm. "I'm not sure I wanted to know that." It is also a huge fucking lie; he doesn't need to know her as well as he does to know that there is interest behind her disapproval.
"He has less of a real human personality than -"
"Than you do."
If he were a little less sober he might have taken this by clutching at his heart, miming a stab wound, hissing, or even raising an imaginary handbag to hide behind, but such campy retaliation is hardly fitting, and besides - the second bottle of wine arrives.
"Being with Arthur is like being buried alive," he concludes, nodding the waiter away.
A pair of menus sit neglected between them, and Eames wrestles with the urge to erect a wall of laminated cardboard to hide behind. No one needs a psychology degree or even a back-of-a-cereal-box pretend therapy qualification to understand that raising such a physical rampart would signify so much, too much.
"What do you want with me, Eames?" Ariadne finally sniffs and sips her wine. It is to her liking, he can see, but she doesn't want him to know she likes it, that he got it right, either. "Why are you … unburdening yourself?"
The fourth wine glass is half-empty. He forces himself to put it down and keep his hands still on the cardboard menus. His index finger underlines the words pour deux unconsciously, but he doesn't snatch his hand away just yet. "I think you know."
"Why."
He takes a deep breath and watches her drink, half-silhouetted against the painfully bright-grey sky, lit from behind the clouds by an aggressive sun. It hurts like a toothache to look at it at all. "Because you can't stand me, and you won't try to fix it."
When the light haloing her rain-frizzed hair allows him to look at her face properly, he is mildly surprised - or thinks he is surprised, because there is no such thing as an accident of delivery, is there? No one who knows what he does about the subconscious would think that - to find her disbelieving, wrong-footed.
"You're wrong." She is half-way through the glass.
"About trying to fix it?" He all but lunges for his own drink. "I'm not an interesting problem, you only like interesting problems -" the sentence vanishes into the wine, words diving for cover under the dark-red waves like soldiers behind walls. It is probably just his imagination running away with him in the way that it has always been wont to do, but there is a distinct air of the battlefield over the half-empty bottle, the untouched bread basket, and the cold metal table.
Ariadne sets her glass back on the table and starts picking at a bread roll. She seems just as desperate to redirect her energies onto something else, just as desperate to continue picking the scab, poking the wound, to see what the outcome could possibly be.
"About not being able to stand you."
"Well that could be a problem," he half-laughs into a mostly-empty glass. "Disinterested, then?"
"No."
He drops the wine glass on the table; doesn't place it, drops it. By some miracle or other of angle it doesn't break. He claps his palms to his face and whispers from between the prison of his own skin and bones, as if he is begging at a letterbox in the middle of the night, "Make me stop liking you. Please."
"You are insane, Eames." She moves his wine glass out of the way, lifts the bottle off the table and places it on the floor carefully, somewhere down beside her soggy feet where the restaurant's cat can knock it over instead. "Are you aware of this?"
He feels around in his teeth for effect more than because he thinks there might be something caught in them without him having eaten a thing yet, studying intently the parasol above their table.
"That," he says after a while, "is a distinct possibility. One which I can hardly deny."
"And selfish," she says with girder-dropping firmness. She might as well have reached across the table and hit him in the face, for a variety of reasons he feels no particular urge to own up to.
"Funnily enough Arthur said the same thing." He swirls what little wine he has left and considers asking her if she plans to eat something before both of them get horribly drunk.
"Did he?" Her eyes are like hot coals, like volcanoes, hot and terrifying and beautiful. He wishes there were some way he could hurl himself into them. It would hurt like hell and lengthy death, and be worth every second of the agony. "Did he also call you a parasite?"
"Oh yes." He finishes the dregs, and eyeballs her glass pleadingly; she tucks it behind her elbow and leans forward to meet his gaze. "Sometime shortly before he gave me the money and told me to sling my hook."
The rain is easing up, and he wants to perform some sort of mad rain dance, start seeding the clouds, anything he can possibly do to bring it back and give the hateful, horrible conversation the proper ambience. If the sun comes out it'll drag hope kicking and screaming behind it, and whatever else he has, he cannot afford hope.
"How much of that do you have left?"
"The money?" For a queasy moment he had assumed she could read his thoughts; he grasps the needling at his money-management skills, at his self-exaggerated gambling habit, at the constructed persona of the profligate playboy posh beast with the poor fashion sense, as tightly as a life-line. "Enough, I told you." He smiles a hollow smile, and the sun betrays him, ambling out from behind a cloud like the bastard it is. "I can do anything you want with it, except build you a house."
She sighs long and loud, and another bicycle splashes through a nearby puddle, sending up a dirty rainbow of fallen rain in a brief re-enactment of the past storm. "What do you think I want?"
"I wouldn't presume to second-guess you, Ariadne."
"Yes you would." She tears a piece of bread in half, squashes a section between her fingers convulsively, unseeingly. "It's what you do."
"Make me stop liking you," he says, conscious that he's whining but uninterested in modulating his voice beyond the rejection of a tipsy slur which would not lend the necessary gravitas to his complaint. He reaches for a piece of bread to mutilate and releases too late that he has copied her movements exactly. "Otherwise I will be anything you want." It may not be the best threat, but it's honest. Oh god, it is honest. "I'm very good at that."
"Are you?" Her laugh has as much humour in it as his did, and he recognises some of the same cadences, but it's impossible to tell if she's unconsciously mirroring him, or if he was stealing from her in the first place. "What if I want you to be you?"
"That could be tricky," he admits, and spreads his hands as if he's offering her cards. It's unnecessarily theatrical, but that's the Eames she's used to. "Pick a me, I'll be that for you."
And there it is, the straw that crushes the poor camel's proverbial vertebrae and smashes very literally the wine glass in front of her as Ariadne throws it off to one side of him; Eames might some other time have offered a silent prayer to a God he's never believed in that the waiter, that the staff do not spot this act of wanton vandalism, but there's no room in his mind for such niceties now.
"I don't want one of your fucking pre-primed profiles, Eames."
He stretches himself across the table and rests his chin on his folded arms, puts himself within reach of her balled fists, his chest protesting that he can no longer breathe, and his face already the red of alcohol-infused Englishman. But he says nothing.
"I want to know who the hell you are, I want to know why you think you can just show up out of nowhere and not-tell me things and make me like you."
She throws the bread off the table and stares down at him as if she might at any moment split his skull open.
"I want a name. A background. Something to go with your face and your avalanche of lies."
There is a ringing silence, but no one from the restaurant's staff is foolhardy enough to step into what looks like, even if it is not, a lover's tiff. They'll wait until one or the other storms off, and bill the loser, like sensible Parisians.
He lifts his chin off his sore arms, and the nape of his neck protests. "I don't have anything."
She says nothing.
"I have five hundred Euros, a bad back, a bad heart, a stomach full of wine and a horrible suspicion that I'm in love with you. And I'm sorry for all of it."
The meal is so silent and conducted with such scaldingly bad atmosphere on every front, what with the pointed did you drop this? remarks from the waiter and the opprobrium pouring through the window from every other remaining diner, that Eames is almost relieved when Ariadne reaches across the table and squeezes his wrist painfully hard.
He's less happy that it's because she won't let him pay for it.
"You can't afford it," she says, throwing in another forty Euros for the wine glass, even though there is no earthly way the poxy thing cost that much. "You need that money to live on, I can't let you."
"I don't need it," he protests, trying to go for his wallet with his left hand. "And I said I would -"
"As if I ever believed your word."
"- I'm trying."
"I don't want you to try." She pulls more notes out of her own wallet awkwardly, her left hand, her dominant hand still nailing him to the table like a manacle. " Ne pas prendre son argent, monsieur, il a très peu. Je paie pour cela."
"No you're not -"
With an exasperated sigh, as if he has just said something so appallingly stupid that she is disgusted with his ignorance and can no longer stand to talk to him, Ariadne releases his hand, a flourish brushing him away. A second later the back of her small, ringless and bony hand connects with his cheek hard enough to make his ears ring and his face turn scarlet.
The waiter backs away with a quick, I'll just be going somewhere else while you two have your domestic gesture that is surprisingly eloquent for a pair of raised eyebrows and widened eyes.
"You want this?" she hisses, leaning over the table to give him a tigerish look that is in danger of burning the flesh from his bones, "You want me? Then you do what I say. You are not paying for this."
"Yes," he says, half-breathless, slumped in his seat with a stinging face and his breath coming in short, hard gasps, as light-headed as if he'd drunk forty bottles of wine instead of the better part of two.
"Yes what?"
"Yes, I want this. You. That." He marvels at his sudden tongue-tiedness, the way words - usually his co-conspirators in every deception - betray him in his moment of need, stab him with short, monosyllabic swords and leave him gasping and floundering, stretching for meaning. "Anything you want. Anything you say."
"Who the fuck are you?" she says, examining him from an inch away as if he's a specimen under a microscope.
Eames nearly chokes on his tongue. "Yours."
She sits back in her seat with a wince-inducing thud and buries her head in her hands.
"I'm so-" he begins, although he finds he's not at all.
"Shut up," she says, holding up a finger, her other hand still clutching at her face. "I'm thinking."
Eames touches the red patch on his face gingerly. It is tender and hot and amazing and perfect and right. He almost wishes she'd hit him harder, punched him, split his lip. Some sort of trophy he could take away with him, Ariadne was here.
"We're going home now," she says, rising from her chair in a clumsy, sharp movement. She sticks out her hand as if he's a small child, misbehaving. "I'll work out what the hell that means on the way. And you -" she smiles, a private joke between herself and her, something he'll never be privy to, "- don't say a thing."
ETA:
Art by crotalus_atrox
Also, sequel: "Oxygen" (contains sexing)