(no subject)
title: all the faces you wear
pairing: arthur/eames, mal/cobb
rating: pg
disclaimer: I don't own them at all.
word count: 2524
summary: Arthur's known Eames for a while now and he's always wearing different faces, hiding the one Arthur prefers to see.
Strange is nothing new to them. Strange just means that they’re at work, doing the job. The first time that Arthur feels something strange that he can’t explain, though, happens when they’re performing an extraction on a local bank manager in Tucson. It doesn’t register as strange until he wakes and sees one additional cord lying bodiless, yet used, like there was something there to begin with. Except that when he awakes, there’s only the mark, Nash, and Cobb in the room, no extra body. Arthur rubs at his eyes and tries to remember what happened, digging out details from a dream he barely recalls.
“Everything okay?” Nash asks as he readies the kick. Arthur’s been forcibly ejected from the job, a knife through the heart by a testy security guard.
Arthur concentrates and thinks of the customer in the bank. He thinks of the way she’d looked at him on the way to the vault, as if she could pick out that he didn’t belong. He must have been adjusting the dreamscape too obviously. He’ll have to pare down his little hints and small adjustments if he doesn’t want the next job to go awry.
He remembers green eyes and dark hair, a wink, and then nothing.
“I think I’m getting obvious,” Arthur says, prying the hook-up from his arm and shifting to gesture to Cobb and the mark. “They’ll be finished soon. The vault was just opening. We’ll be done soon.”
“Good.”
“Yeah,” Arthur agrees uneasily and turns to look at the abandoned cord, not yielding any further answers the more he looks at it.
*
“I never expected to meet a guy like you in a place like this.”
Arthur knows that something here is wrong. He’s distracted from his lookover of the bar to sight Cobb, Nash, Mal, and the mark, and he’s looking for the new guy that Cobb’s brought in, swearing that they could use a thief. According to the law, they’re all upstanding fine citizens and this man, this Eames, he’s apparently something of a dastardly bastard - or that was how Mal put it with a rueful grin.
“Though,” Mal had murmured, sliding her fingers through Cobb’s hair and fixing it lovingly. “He is handsome.”
“I’m going to get jealous.”
“I don’t think I’m his type,” had been her reply, mimicking Cobb’s cadence before stealing a kiss. She glances past Cobb and gives Arthur a knowing grin, though he hasn’t got the first idea what to do with it. He’s jolted from the memory by a soft hand on his chest.
“Am I boring you?” the blonde girl asks with a slightly hurt look on her face, as though somehow he’s committed a criminal offence. The loaded die in his pocket feels the wrong weight and Arthur takes comfort in placing himself in a dream.
Arthur fixes a charming smile on his face. “No, darling,” he promises her. “I was just looking for a friend.”
The wicked grin she gives to him precedes the kiss and Arthur breathes out a contented sigh as he gives in and at least accepts that the work is being done as he keeps an eye out. That’s his job on this particular run and nothing more. He’ll find Eames later, ask him why on earth he hadn’t been where he was expected.
She parts from the kiss and strokes delicate fingers over his face. “Is he nice, your friend?”
“I barely know him. Though, some say he’s handsome.”
“You should always form your own opinions,” is the girl’s thought on the matter. “Even about their looks.”
*
It turns out, annoyingly enough, that Eames is handsome. Of course, he’s also incredible irritating a good portion of the time, which seems to balance out the karmic scales. They’re preparing for a dalliance into the mind of a young actor who knows more than he should about his director. The director is paying them to extract just how much is known.
Cobb warns them not to build from memories.
It turns out their forger isn’t quite so fastidious with the rules. Arthur’s stepped into the dream expecting to see a falsified projection. He’s never seen the transformation before his eyes, but he’s been tasked to get Eames into costume and in place and is impatiently pacing with the tight jeans and tank top in hand.
Their actor, after all, has a predilection for attractive men.
“Well?” Arthur bites out. “Aren’t you going to change?”
“You can’t hurry art,” Eames scolds and glances in the mirror. He leans forward and strips off his three layers of shirts, leaving nothing but a muscled and tattooed chest behind. Polite decency says that Arthur should look away, but he doesn’t have time to be polite.
Neither does Mal, apparently, who wolf-whistles as she enters the room. “He’s ready at the bar. Dom has got him plied with drinks. We’re just waiting on you.”
The only differences are subtle. The tattoos erase, his skin glistens slightly, as though he’s been sweating or doused with water. He pries on the jeans and the tank top, musses up his hair and spreads his arms out.
Arthur, god help him, feels nothing but jealousy.
“Aren’t you going to change?” he asks again, this time less patient than before - which is a task because he hasn’t been patient all dream.
Eames just grins and slides in - nails painted black, tongue pierced with a barbell, all subtle differences that inevitably come back to the fact that Eames is still wearing the same face - and licks his lips, giving them a glossy sheen before dragging that piercing over his lower lip in a sensual and criminal way. “He likes attractive men. I’m giving him what he wants.”
He darts in, pressing a cheeky kiss to Arthur’s cheek, before leaving to be on time for his cue.
“I told you he’s handsome,” Mal says, peering out the door to keep watch for any trouble.
*
“Stop that,” Arthur insists, when Eames just waltzes right into his dream wearing Arthur’s face.
Eames pulls a grin (more of a smirk) and shifts back into his form, giving a careless shrug. “Stop what? I’m doing exactly what Cobb asked. Be you in the event that big lug of a mobster gets trigger-happy and shoots me. There’s no sense in taking chances. Besides, I’m still here, still alive. You should be happy for me.”
“I don’t like it when you wear my body,” Arthur says, every inch of him crawling with some unnameable emotion. He’s deliberately avoiding Eames’ eyes so he doesn’t have to look at him on the off-chance that he’ll be able to name something. “It feels...”
“Dirty? Naughty? Illicit? Right?” Eames suggests with a grin. “You should be happy. All’s well that ends well and Cobb’s bringing us home. We just need to wait for the kick at this point.”
No matter how good the situation is, Arthur still can’t get over his discomfort in knowing that Eames has studied him deeply enough to impersonate him. Eames can forge him.
Eames knows what it’s like to be in Arthur’s skin.
Which means there is just the slightest chance that Eames knows exactly why Arthur acts the way he does towards the forger. That’s a thought if there ever was one to want to pull the trigger and escape the dream before all the pieces could come together.
“I just don’t like it,” he says. “Next time, be Cobb.”
“You don’t seem to like any of the faces I wear,” Eames says, as if sulking petulantly.
Arthur knows that the real crux of the matter is that he happens to like one just a tad too much.
*
“I’ve got a little blonde number I like to wear sometimes,” Eames says in their planning meeting when it comes to a scoundrel of a mark, a corporate man accused of espionage. He’s kept all the secrets locked up only in his mind and they’re going to get them out. “I think he’ll like it.”
Arthur doesn’t think twice about that innocent little statement until they enter Mal’s design and Arthur is forced to do a double-take when he sees exactly who that little blonde number is.
The one from so many dreams back.
The one who kissed him just before he called her darling.
“Eames?” Arthur barely gets out, accusatory and breathless all at once. He knows that it’s poor form to shove a woman, but that’s exactly what he does on the basis that she’s not very womanly at all once you shine the light of the real world on her. She goes stumbling back, just laughing away and winks at him. “You bastard!” he hisses. “You had no right...”
“You didn’t seem so upset,” Eames laments and flicks a grin Cobb’s way. “Come on. Let’s go before Arthur starts to doubt other realities.” Adjusting the little black dress Eames has got the woman in, Arthur watches them go, arm in arm, making a pretty picture. This leaves Mal and Arthur to watch them and she slides her arm into his, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
“L’amour, c’est très étrange, Arthur,” she whispers.
“No stranger than dreams,” he replies, instead of arguing that it’s not that at all.
*
When the inception job is completed, Arthur feels weary. He doesn’t want to see trains or elevators, he doesn’t want to even think of having a shared dream for a least a month. He doesn’t want to look at Eames and not know what face he’s going to get. He thinks of Mal, all those years ago, telling him how strange love is - how strange dreams are - and he just stares at Eames as he practices his card tricks, keeping his fingers fast and fresh.
“You never know when you need to pull a con in the real world,” is all he says.
Arthur is still staring when he says, “take me sometime,” the words slipping out before he even realizes that he’s said them. Eames stops dead in his tracks and stares his way and Arthur’s not sure what’s so wrong about what he’s said. “What?”
“You just don’t have the face for it,” is Eames’ careful reply.
“I can change as much as you can.”
“No, you can’t,” Eames replies all too easily. “Just like I can’t do half the job that you could on a pair of paradoxical stairs.”
He goes back to playing with his cards and leaves Arthur to begin concocting up images and angles and theories, something that could prove Eames wrong, just to show that he can wear a different face as well as any forger.
*
The next time they’re in a shared dreamspace isn’t for a job. Arthur’s asked Yusuf to put Eames under as soon as he slipped into a dream and then joined along, concentrating and focusing until when he looks in the mirror, there’s a diminutive brunette there, all sulky pouts and dark skin. An image of what Arthur is not. Another face.
He navigates Eames’ subconscious carefully, trying not to lose his costume as he tries to find Eames, who is waiting on a bridge that looks as though it’s been cobbled together with pieces of Paris, New York, and Tokyo.
Eames is sitting on the edge with arms crossed and Arthur makes a concerted effort to keep up the mask.
“Forgery’s not just about the face, darling,” Eames says, looking at Arthur dead in the eye, making the call from ten feet away. Arthur slips and becomes himself one more time, frustrated and not understanding. He toys with pushing Eames off the bridge from where he’s precariously perched, forcing him to wake up, but his curiosity (and his perfectionism) gets the better of him.
He stops when he’s a foot away, back in an impeccable suit. “How did you know?”
“You can’t just build from nothing,” Eames criticizes, reaching out and touching coarse fingers to Arthur’s cheek. “Your eyes, the same. Your walk, not changed. The way you glance over your shoulder as if checking for danger. You’re not just wearing an outfit when you forge someone. You get under their skin and you become them, no matter what kind of danger that puts you in.”
Arthur wants to ask what kind of danger he’s in now, with Eames’ fingers on his cheek, but he settles for staring at him and ignoring all the aspects and projections around him. “How can you be so sure my eyes were the same?”
“If you think I’ve worked years with you and not noticed your eyes, you’re an idiot. And as dull as you can occasionally be, you’re not an idiot, Arthur,” Eames chides quietly. “I’m going to wake up now. And when I do, I do hope you remember this.” And without another word of warning, he uncrosses his arms and tips backwards, plummeting off the steep bridge and crashing into the waves below.
Arthur wakes and stares at Eames, not sure what his next move is, though he’s sure that it will come to him in time.
*
The blonde number turns up one more time and this is in Arthur’s personal dreamspace. At first, he thinks it only a projection until he remembers that Eames had been beside him as he had slipped under the veil. “I prefer your face,” Arthur finally says, years too late. “When it’s just us in here. I don’t want to see her face. I prefer yours.” In the blink of an eye, Eames sheds the disguise and becomes himself once more, to Arthur’s great relief.
“It took you long enough to admit it,” is all Eames has to say on the matter, easing close in a mirror image of how he had so many years ago, fingers on his cheek, a kiss impending if Arthur doesn’t move. He lets history repeat itself with a slightly different outcome and leans forward into the kiss, memorizing lips and feel so that he can never be tricked.
So that he can wear Eames’ skin and know what it’s like on the other side.
When Eames eases away, his fingers are still on Arthur’s cheek. “You know, I rather like those eyes of yours. It would be quite a shame if you did think you had to change them,” he says.
“If you keep your face when we’re in here,” Arthur says, gesturing to the expanse of untold and unending worlds around them, “then I won’t change either.”
“I believe you have yourself a deal.”
Arthur should know better than to make deals with conmen, forgers, and thieves (especially when they’re all rolled up into one), but he can’t bring himself to care too much as he’s pulled into something of a paradoxical kiss. Never-ending, not sure where it starts and where it cuts off, and makes him feel as if the floor is prone to just give out on him at any moment.
And to think, Eames had thought himself no good at paradoxes.
There could be hope for the both of them yet.
pairing: arthur/eames, mal/cobb
rating: pg
disclaimer: I don't own them at all.
word count: 2524
summary: Arthur's known Eames for a while now and he's always wearing different faces, hiding the one Arthur prefers to see.
Strange is nothing new to them. Strange just means that they’re at work, doing the job. The first time that Arthur feels something strange that he can’t explain, though, happens when they’re performing an extraction on a local bank manager in Tucson. It doesn’t register as strange until he wakes and sees one additional cord lying bodiless, yet used, like there was something there to begin with. Except that when he awakes, there’s only the mark, Nash, and Cobb in the room, no extra body. Arthur rubs at his eyes and tries to remember what happened, digging out details from a dream he barely recalls.
“Everything okay?” Nash asks as he readies the kick. Arthur’s been forcibly ejected from the job, a knife through the heart by a testy security guard.
Arthur concentrates and thinks of the customer in the bank. He thinks of the way she’d looked at him on the way to the vault, as if she could pick out that he didn’t belong. He must have been adjusting the dreamscape too obviously. He’ll have to pare down his little hints and small adjustments if he doesn’t want the next job to go awry.
He remembers green eyes and dark hair, a wink, and then nothing.
“I think I’m getting obvious,” Arthur says, prying the hook-up from his arm and shifting to gesture to Cobb and the mark. “They’ll be finished soon. The vault was just opening. We’ll be done soon.”
“Good.”
“Yeah,” Arthur agrees uneasily and turns to look at the abandoned cord, not yielding any further answers the more he looks at it.
*
“I never expected to meet a guy like you in a place like this.”
Arthur knows that something here is wrong. He’s distracted from his lookover of the bar to sight Cobb, Nash, Mal, and the mark, and he’s looking for the new guy that Cobb’s brought in, swearing that they could use a thief. According to the law, they’re all upstanding fine citizens and this man, this Eames, he’s apparently something of a dastardly bastard - or that was how Mal put it with a rueful grin.
“Though,” Mal had murmured, sliding her fingers through Cobb’s hair and fixing it lovingly. “He is handsome.”
“I’m going to get jealous.”
“I don’t think I’m his type,” had been her reply, mimicking Cobb’s cadence before stealing a kiss. She glances past Cobb and gives Arthur a knowing grin, though he hasn’t got the first idea what to do with it. He’s jolted from the memory by a soft hand on his chest.
“Am I boring you?” the blonde girl asks with a slightly hurt look on her face, as though somehow he’s committed a criminal offence. The loaded die in his pocket feels the wrong weight and Arthur takes comfort in placing himself in a dream.
Arthur fixes a charming smile on his face. “No, darling,” he promises her. “I was just looking for a friend.”
The wicked grin she gives to him precedes the kiss and Arthur breathes out a contented sigh as he gives in and at least accepts that the work is being done as he keeps an eye out. That’s his job on this particular run and nothing more. He’ll find Eames later, ask him why on earth he hadn’t been where he was expected.
She parts from the kiss and strokes delicate fingers over his face. “Is he nice, your friend?”
“I barely know him. Though, some say he’s handsome.”
“You should always form your own opinions,” is the girl’s thought on the matter. “Even about their looks.”
*
It turns out, annoyingly enough, that Eames is handsome. Of course, he’s also incredible irritating a good portion of the time, which seems to balance out the karmic scales. They’re preparing for a dalliance into the mind of a young actor who knows more than he should about his director. The director is paying them to extract just how much is known.
Cobb warns them not to build from memories.
It turns out their forger isn’t quite so fastidious with the rules. Arthur’s stepped into the dream expecting to see a falsified projection. He’s never seen the transformation before his eyes, but he’s been tasked to get Eames into costume and in place and is impatiently pacing with the tight jeans and tank top in hand.
Their actor, after all, has a predilection for attractive men.
“Well?” Arthur bites out. “Aren’t you going to change?”
“You can’t hurry art,” Eames scolds and glances in the mirror. He leans forward and strips off his three layers of shirts, leaving nothing but a muscled and tattooed chest behind. Polite decency says that Arthur should look away, but he doesn’t have time to be polite.
Neither does Mal, apparently, who wolf-whistles as she enters the room. “He’s ready at the bar. Dom has got him plied with drinks. We’re just waiting on you.”
The only differences are subtle. The tattoos erase, his skin glistens slightly, as though he’s been sweating or doused with water. He pries on the jeans and the tank top, musses up his hair and spreads his arms out.
Arthur, god help him, feels nothing but jealousy.
“Aren’t you going to change?” he asks again, this time less patient than before - which is a task because he hasn’t been patient all dream.
Eames just grins and slides in - nails painted black, tongue pierced with a barbell, all subtle differences that inevitably come back to the fact that Eames is still wearing the same face - and licks his lips, giving them a glossy sheen before dragging that piercing over his lower lip in a sensual and criminal way. “He likes attractive men. I’m giving him what he wants.”
He darts in, pressing a cheeky kiss to Arthur’s cheek, before leaving to be on time for his cue.
“I told you he’s handsome,” Mal says, peering out the door to keep watch for any trouble.
*
“Stop that,” Arthur insists, when Eames just waltzes right into his dream wearing Arthur’s face.
Eames pulls a grin (more of a smirk) and shifts back into his form, giving a careless shrug. “Stop what? I’m doing exactly what Cobb asked. Be you in the event that big lug of a mobster gets trigger-happy and shoots me. There’s no sense in taking chances. Besides, I’m still here, still alive. You should be happy for me.”
“I don’t like it when you wear my body,” Arthur says, every inch of him crawling with some unnameable emotion. He’s deliberately avoiding Eames’ eyes so he doesn’t have to look at him on the off-chance that he’ll be able to name something. “It feels...”
“Dirty? Naughty? Illicit? Right?” Eames suggests with a grin. “You should be happy. All’s well that ends well and Cobb’s bringing us home. We just need to wait for the kick at this point.”
No matter how good the situation is, Arthur still can’t get over his discomfort in knowing that Eames has studied him deeply enough to impersonate him. Eames can forge him.
Eames knows what it’s like to be in Arthur’s skin.
Which means there is just the slightest chance that Eames knows exactly why Arthur acts the way he does towards the forger. That’s a thought if there ever was one to want to pull the trigger and escape the dream before all the pieces could come together.
“I just don’t like it,” he says. “Next time, be Cobb.”
“You don’t seem to like any of the faces I wear,” Eames says, as if sulking petulantly.
Arthur knows that the real crux of the matter is that he happens to like one just a tad too much.
*
“I’ve got a little blonde number I like to wear sometimes,” Eames says in their planning meeting when it comes to a scoundrel of a mark, a corporate man accused of espionage. He’s kept all the secrets locked up only in his mind and they’re going to get them out. “I think he’ll like it.”
Arthur doesn’t think twice about that innocent little statement until they enter Mal’s design and Arthur is forced to do a double-take when he sees exactly who that little blonde number is.
The one from so many dreams back.
The one who kissed him just before he called her darling.
“Eames?” Arthur barely gets out, accusatory and breathless all at once. He knows that it’s poor form to shove a woman, but that’s exactly what he does on the basis that she’s not very womanly at all once you shine the light of the real world on her. She goes stumbling back, just laughing away and winks at him. “You bastard!” he hisses. “You had no right...”
“You didn’t seem so upset,” Eames laments and flicks a grin Cobb’s way. “Come on. Let’s go before Arthur starts to doubt other realities.” Adjusting the little black dress Eames has got the woman in, Arthur watches them go, arm in arm, making a pretty picture. This leaves Mal and Arthur to watch them and she slides her arm into his, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
“L’amour, c’est très étrange, Arthur,” she whispers.
“No stranger than dreams,” he replies, instead of arguing that it’s not that at all.
*
When the inception job is completed, Arthur feels weary. He doesn’t want to see trains or elevators, he doesn’t want to even think of having a shared dream for a least a month. He doesn’t want to look at Eames and not know what face he’s going to get. He thinks of Mal, all those years ago, telling him how strange love is - how strange dreams are - and he just stares at Eames as he practices his card tricks, keeping his fingers fast and fresh.
“You never know when you need to pull a con in the real world,” is all he says.
Arthur is still staring when he says, “take me sometime,” the words slipping out before he even realizes that he’s said them. Eames stops dead in his tracks and stares his way and Arthur’s not sure what’s so wrong about what he’s said. “What?”
“You just don’t have the face for it,” is Eames’ careful reply.
“I can change as much as you can.”
“No, you can’t,” Eames replies all too easily. “Just like I can’t do half the job that you could on a pair of paradoxical stairs.”
He goes back to playing with his cards and leaves Arthur to begin concocting up images and angles and theories, something that could prove Eames wrong, just to show that he can wear a different face as well as any forger.
*
The next time they’re in a shared dreamspace isn’t for a job. Arthur’s asked Yusuf to put Eames under as soon as he slipped into a dream and then joined along, concentrating and focusing until when he looks in the mirror, there’s a diminutive brunette there, all sulky pouts and dark skin. An image of what Arthur is not. Another face.
He navigates Eames’ subconscious carefully, trying not to lose his costume as he tries to find Eames, who is waiting on a bridge that looks as though it’s been cobbled together with pieces of Paris, New York, and Tokyo.
Eames is sitting on the edge with arms crossed and Arthur makes a concerted effort to keep up the mask.
“Forgery’s not just about the face, darling,” Eames says, looking at Arthur dead in the eye, making the call from ten feet away. Arthur slips and becomes himself one more time, frustrated and not understanding. He toys with pushing Eames off the bridge from where he’s precariously perched, forcing him to wake up, but his curiosity (and his perfectionism) gets the better of him.
He stops when he’s a foot away, back in an impeccable suit. “How did you know?”
“You can’t just build from nothing,” Eames criticizes, reaching out and touching coarse fingers to Arthur’s cheek. “Your eyes, the same. Your walk, not changed. The way you glance over your shoulder as if checking for danger. You’re not just wearing an outfit when you forge someone. You get under their skin and you become them, no matter what kind of danger that puts you in.”
Arthur wants to ask what kind of danger he’s in now, with Eames’ fingers on his cheek, but he settles for staring at him and ignoring all the aspects and projections around him. “How can you be so sure my eyes were the same?”
“If you think I’ve worked years with you and not noticed your eyes, you’re an idiot. And as dull as you can occasionally be, you’re not an idiot, Arthur,” Eames chides quietly. “I’m going to wake up now. And when I do, I do hope you remember this.” And without another word of warning, he uncrosses his arms and tips backwards, plummeting off the steep bridge and crashing into the waves below.
Arthur wakes and stares at Eames, not sure what his next move is, though he’s sure that it will come to him in time.
*
The blonde number turns up one more time and this is in Arthur’s personal dreamspace. At first, he thinks it only a projection until he remembers that Eames had been beside him as he had slipped under the veil. “I prefer your face,” Arthur finally says, years too late. “When it’s just us in here. I don’t want to see her face. I prefer yours.” In the blink of an eye, Eames sheds the disguise and becomes himself once more, to Arthur’s great relief.
“It took you long enough to admit it,” is all Eames has to say on the matter, easing close in a mirror image of how he had so many years ago, fingers on his cheek, a kiss impending if Arthur doesn’t move. He lets history repeat itself with a slightly different outcome and leans forward into the kiss, memorizing lips and feel so that he can never be tricked.
So that he can wear Eames’ skin and know what it’s like on the other side.
When Eames eases away, his fingers are still on Arthur’s cheek. “You know, I rather like those eyes of yours. It would be quite a shame if you did think you had to change them,” he says.
“If you keep your face when we’re in here,” Arthur says, gesturing to the expanse of untold and unending worlds around them, “then I won’t change either.”
“I believe you have yourself a deal.”
Arthur should know better than to make deals with conmen, forgers, and thieves (especially when they’re all rolled up into one), but he can’t bring himself to care too much as he’s pulled into something of a paradoxical kiss. Never-ending, not sure where it starts and where it cuts off, and makes him feel as if the floor is prone to just give out on him at any moment.
And to think, Eames had thought himself no good at paradoxes.
There could be hope for the both of them yet.