Prompt Post No. 6

[inception_anon]

* * * Round 6 is now closed to new prompts. * * *

Welcome to Round 6 of the Inception Kink Meme. This post will be closed to new prompts once it reaches three thousand comments. Also, please check our updated rules.

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Arthur/Eames

[anonymous]

"I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her"

... YEAH, IT'S A RAINY DAY SO I STAYED IN AND WATCHED NOTTING HILL
don't judge me ;___;

Re: Arthur/Eames

[anonymous]

Someone's already doing this for Big Bang! \o/
http://community.livejournal.com/inception_bang/892.html?thread=124028#t124028

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 1/?

[anonymous]

Yeah, um. So this is enormous and you may not even be here any more, Nonny, but here is a Notting Hill fic for you!

Also I should really warn for astronomical levels of sap, fluff, total implausibility, and gratuitous movie star cameos.

___________________________

I Seem to Be a Verb.The thing about London that Arthur liked most was that if you wanted to disappear everyone would let you, without a lot of fuss. And if you wanted to open a bookshop that only sold books on applied sciences, people might call you a lousy businessman, but mostly they'd leave you alone. Basically, no one in London gave two shillings for what Arthur did, which was why Arthur liked London enough to sell books on architecture, design, and engineering at a bookshop called The Robie House, a name he'd chosen on a whim when he was signing the papers and regretted ever since

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 2/?

[anonymous]

When she came alone, Mal liked to sit in the back and thumb through the art and architecture books, of the giant coffee table variety that hugged the lower shelves on the back wall because they were too big to fit anywhere else. Arthur would never call his cataloguing system perfect, but it would do until he bothered to get one of those bar-code scanner things for his iphone. Or an iphone, for that matter. Or assistants to help with the scanning. His Monday/Wednesday afternooner didn’t count because she mostly came to sit cross-legged in the aisles, read books, and scold him for not getting cats

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 3/?

[anonymous]

He was wearing a rough-hewn hoodie from some American university, sweatpants, and a giant pair of sunglasses, and his face was hidden. But Arthur would have known Eames at any distance by the crowded hunch of his shoulders when he moved. It was definitely, definitively Eames. The Eames. In his specialty bookstore that only sold books on applied sciences, except for the touristy bookshelf that only had books with three-word titles (Gödel, Escher, Bach, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Poetry, Language, Thought, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs).

And now Eames was standing in front of the touristy shelf and looking at the titles as if he had meant to wander in off the street and start book-buying at Arthur’s shop. The Eames, the same Eames who had come out just after his first major film break, when Arthur was 17 and just getting used to the feeling of not wanting to die of shame every time another boy crept into his wank fantasies. The same Eames that Arthur had emulated, forcing himself to act as if being gay was no big deal-until finally, one

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 4/?

[anonymous]

Someone coughed pointedly, and Arthur jolted back to reality to find one of the bodyguards eying him from beside the cash register. He had built the counter in the back of the store so that people would at least have to wander through it before they demanded to know why he didn’t sell Dan Brown or Joanna Lindsay. He’d always considered this one of his better decisions until now: the bodyguard had a long body and a long face, and didn’t look as though he liked his time being wasted.

“Are you done?” said the bodyguard, giving him the fisheye.

“I don’t know,” Arthur snapped. “Is he done

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 5/?

[anonymous]

It was another immediately recognizable look, the ‘Let’s-bond-over-how-smart-we-both-are-for-liking-this-book’ look that readers gave booksellers when they secretly wanted to be congratulated on their reading taste. Ordinarily Arthur responded to this look with as much dry scorn as possible, but just at that moment he was so busy looking back at Eames that he forgot what he was supposed to do.

Eames blinked at him, and Arthur remembered. He looked down at the book. “Oh,” he said when he did. “Wow.”

Eames beamed at him. “I can’t believe there’s even a bookstore in London with a copy of this.”

“Wow,” said Arthur again. “Yeah, you-you found my only copy.” Which wasn’t what he meant. What he meant was, You’re the first person who’s ever picked up my forty-year-old copy of Switch On the Night, which isn’t even for sale, which never mattered before because no one ever touched it, but you did, and you’re in my store, and you’re Eames

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 7/?

[anonymous]

Eames blinked at him again, and for a moment Arthur imagined he looked intrigued. “Well, that’s very kind of you,” he said. “Thank you, er-?”

He held out his hand.

“Arthur,” Arthur said, taking it. “I’m Arthur.”

“Thank you, Arthur,” said Eames.

His handshake was firm and utterly peremptory, and Arthur did his best not to notice.

Eames looked delighted. “You hear that?” he said to Martin. “It loves me!”

“You think everyone loves you,” said Prianka. Even from the back of the shop Arthur could see her eyes roll.

“No, they’re just intimidated by the size of my BAFTA,” said Eames. Then he winced. “Oh, god, that sounded egotistical.” He threw a half-glance at Arthur. “But, seriously, have you ever seen one up close?” Eames asked him. “They’re huge. You could take out half a city block with one. I told my mum the one they gave me was bigger than any actual role I’ve ever had.”

“Not L’Hôpital,” said Arthur, and then immediately regretted it

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 7/?

[anonymous]

He signed as The Robie House and handed it to Eames. Eames read the inscription, then glanced up at Arthur again. “Thank you, Arthur,” he said again, in a different voice

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 8/?

[anonymous]

Four months later, Arthur was actually outside for once, taking a stroll along the Long Water, when his phone rang. It was Ariadne, calling from the store, and Arthur ignored it because usually when Ariadne phoned it was because someone desperately needed a book on applied nuclear physics that had gone out of print in 1933, and Arthur had inventoried it and then lost it, which meant it was probably shelved under Aquatic Forensics, or one of the other categories they had just made up for lack of better descriptors; and since Arthur never had any idea where anything was, he never answered the phone

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 9/?

[anonymous]

“Arthur? Arthur, are you there?” Arthur skimmed past the other actors and found Eames, in the right hand column. The photo was a stock image from that collab he’d done with Herzog last year, which meant it was probably a phone interview.
“Arthur?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m here. Hang on a sec, I found it.”

OK! caught up with everyone’s favorite enigma, Eames, currently on break between filming the second and third films in the mega-blockbuster fantasy trilogy Mayhem. The modest workaholic was only too happy to tell us where he likes to go to relax when he’s not hauling himself up the ladder to superstardom.

Arthur took a deep breath.

EAMES’ Top 5 Everyday Sanctuaries1. The Italian fountain at Kensington Gardens. My brother pushed me in it once when I was a kid. Some things stay with you

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 10/?

[anonymous]

Arthur swallowed and began attempting to explain to anyone who would listen that this was a science bookstore.

“What’s that mean?” someone said.

“It means we only sell books on science,” said Arthur.

“Was this place designed by Frank Lloyd Wright?” said someone else.

“I’ll get you an aspirin,” said Mal.

And so it went. The first day six different journalists called him to ask him if it was true that he was having an affair with Eames. “Come on,” said one. “Just one little sex tape?” At least eight people came in specifically to check out Arthur and inform him they’d be more than happy to plunder his treasure, and an inspector from Scotland Yard came by to ask him if he knew anything about a missing Fragonard. Forty people came in to buy commercial fiction, and between the two of them, Ariadne and Arthur managed to sell about half of them books. “I sold a woman looking for Twilight a copy of Gorillas in the Mist,” said Ariadne at the end of the day. “I win

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 11/?

[anonymous]

“I can’t believe you,” said Dom-that was the name of Mal’s dour husband-two nights later. “I don’t know if I want you hanging around our kids anymore.”

“What?” said Arthur. “Why? Because I’m gay? You already knew that!”

“Because you slept with Eames,” said Dom, “and didn’t even get me an autograph!”

“I didn’t sleep with Eames,” said Arthur wearily.

“You didn’t tell anyone he came to the shop,” said Mal. “That looks suspicious.”

“See? That looks suspicious,” said Dom.

“There was nothing to tell,” said Arthur. “He came in, he bought a book, he left, it happened months ago.”

“He remembered your name,” said Dom accusingly.

“Because he’s not a heel,” said Arthur.

“You know what I think?” said Mal. “I think you like him, Arthur.”

“Who does Arthur like?” said Phillipa from Arthur’s elbow, where she was drawing a racecar on Arthur’s arm in red sharpie. “Can he come over?”

“I don’t think Arthur wants his friend Eames to come over, honey,” said Dom with a glare.

What Arthur wanted was currently off the table, because what he

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 12/?

[anonymous]

“It’s seriously like you don’t actually want to run a successful business,” said Ariadne when he came back to the register. “Do you actually want a successful business?”

“Go take a lunch break,” Arthur said.

“I only have a four-hour shift.”

“Then take an extended coffee break,” said Arthur.

“You don’t!” said Ariadne. “You don’t want a successful business! I knew it! You’re independently wealthy and you don’t actually care whether you sell books or not!”

“Bring me back a soy macchiato,” said Arthur, pushing her out the door.

“Hipster,” said Ariadne.

Even if Ariadne was technically right, it wasn’t like Arthur resented his bookshop suddenly being trendy, even if it meant he had to work harder to keep up with requests, and spend more hours cleaning up and reshelving, and hire a boutique to make brochures so he could hand them to people out instead of answering the same questions eighty times a day, even if the marketing firm had drawn the line at bulleting, “No, I did not have sex with Eames,” at the top

FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 13/?

[anonymous]

“Sorry, I’m still not getting what’s bad about this,” said Yusuf, after Arthur had re-explained. “You could get sex every night for the next five years just off the idea that you might have done it with Eames.” He barked out a laugh. “Oh, my god, you’re on the E-list

Re: FILL: I Seem to Be a Verb (Notting Hill AU) 13/?

[cobweb_diamond]

I ONLY SLEPT WITH YOU FOR TWO YEARS THAT ONE TIME AS AN IRONIC JOKE

i keep making high-pitched noises in my mind