Fic - Reminders:Rockpools - Chapter IV
Arthur, then
Arthur's pillow was fighting with him. First it had insisted that it needed to go under his shoulders, leaving his head hanging down and back at an uncomfortable angle. He had managed to correct that problem but now the cursed thing had simply jumped off the bed and was laying there and, he was sure, laughing at him.
And where was Eames during all this? The man was supposed to have his back, wasn't he? Handn't they talked about that very thing, somewhere around his forth... or maybe his fifth drink? Eames was supposed to watch his back and make sure he didn't do anything too stupid while he was innee... er... inerber... hmmm... drunk. And in turn, Arthur would do the same.
He stared at the pillow and decided that his best bet was to track down Eames and remind him that dealing with sentient laughing pillows was the very foundations of such an agreement.
He was about to knock - repeatedly - on Eames's door and enforce that point of view, when his brain decided to catch up with his ears and recognise the fact that there were voices coming from behind the layers of plywood.
"Oh my darling," Mal said, clear and soft and in tones that would have cut through concrete. "Oh lovely boy, you did your best."
"I did try. I did try, Mal, I do, but -"
"Shh shh shh now, lie still, anger won't help."
"It can't help less!"
It was Eames and Mal. Talking. In Eames's bedroom.
Arthur blinked. There was something intrinsically wrong in that statement but he was definitely not sober enough to figure it out. Instead he just stood in the hallway, his eyes shifting between the closed door in front of him, and his own open door behind him. He could see his pillow peeking around the edge of it, taunting him.
"Fuck, Mal..." He heard Eames groan, his voice deep and rough. "Is it supposed to feel like that?"
"I don't know if it's supposed to. But it does. It does. And it would not be like this at all, but your heart -"
"I don't have a heart!"
"You do. Oh cheri, you do. Or you would not have endured this. I am so sorry." Mal's voice became suddenly muffled. "Oh I am so sorry, we have made this -"
"No, Mal-love, no, I came here -"
"We made it easy."
"You did make it easy," Eames said, and his voice cracked. "Darling, I never knew, this fucking liability of a situation, I never even thought, or I wouldn't have stayed."
"Don't leave because this makes it hard," Mal said in the same muffled voice. "I need you, Dom needs you, don't leave. Please don't leave."
"Not goin' nowhere," Eames said, and then there were strange choked sounds, and they must have been kissing, touching, making one another cry out, because what else could make that strange silence, broken only by those odd muffled noises?
Arthur, breaking his heart for Dom's innocence, went back to his room and his pillow, and eventually, fell asleep.
**
Eames, then
Really, next time Eames was going to make sure that Arthur stuck to beer. It would be cheaper and the bloke would probably get just as drunk.
Eames stretched out in the bed, scratching his belly as he woke up. His head didn't ache much, just a slight afterburn, but his mouth tasted like... well, rather like someone had installed old, tacky, brown shag carpet on his tongue.
It really wasn't very pleasant.
He sat up and rubbed his hands over his face. Maybe if he hurried he could get into and out of the shower, and be dressed and fortified with some strong tea before Arthur even woke up. Somehow, even though their evening had been good - a right laugh, if he were being honest - it also made him feel a bit odd.
Thank God for Cobb, and that, if you liked, was a phrase he'd never thought he'd be saying, particularly when the sun was just up and he'd deliberately gone binge-drinking.
Or rather, making sure Arthur went binge-drinking.
It wasn't as though he could have got rid of all the drinks he was supposed to have downed, was it?
But Arthur -
Well, Mal had got it, he knew that much. Darling Mal, always so ready to give chapter and verse with the worst of intentions, as long as they kept working. Eames could respect that, even if he didn't particularly respect her methods.
Fucking military, landing responsibility on people who didn't know how to deal with it.
Arthur was too young. Okay, Arthur was only about four or five years younger than he was, but he was pretty damn sure that his upbringing was a lot more sheltered... which made the age gap more like ten. And that meant... fuck, way too many years.
He pulled his brain forcibly back from sadly contemplating the differences between himself and Arthur, back to the practical - shower, shave, tea.
He got up, pulled his trousers on, grabbed some clean clothes and headed down the hallway.
He showered, and went to the kitchen, and the usual rigmarole began.
Dom leant on him, Mal removed Dom, and Arthur wasn't there.
Eames waved a hand in silent demand for an explanation.
"You came in at three, cheri," Mal said kindly, pushing more coffee at Dom.
"Hate you," Dom mumbled to the table.
"Ah," Eames said in non-coherent understanding.
They had come in at three... and Dom was tired and even more zombie-like than usual and Mal was being kind, and...
No, it still didn't make sense, but it didn't matter. He would have tea and Mal would probably feed him, and Arthur would come in, kill his hangover with strong coffee and aspirin and then the day would continue as per usual.
Except Mal gave him funny meaningful looks that he didn't understand the meaning of, and then Arthur came through the kitchen and went straight out for a run, which if he felt as awful as he legitimately must, made no sense.
And then Dom looked up, all bleary-eyed, and said "Oh, Eames. Oh, man, no, Mal said, I'm so fucking sorry," and came round the table and hugged him, sleepy and warm and leaning too hard, blinking against his neck and rubbing his shoulders.
"Dom?"
"We'll fix it," Dom said firmly, and hugged him a bit more, and -
"You know what, bruv, I think it's gone beyond that," Eames said, and didn't know how unhappy he was until the words left his mouth, and Dom was practically wrapped around him, cuddling him like he was a child. Ridiculous, too-tactile Dom, who somehow never made being touched into a claustrophobic hell.
And right now, he needed that comfort more than he could say.
**
Arthur, then
God damn Eames. God damn Mal. How could she? How could they? And Dom... What could he do with that?
Arthur's head pounded with the rhythm of his running feet. He felt horrible, but it wasn't just the pain of his hangover that was running through his head.
Too many thoughts. Too many God damned thoughts.
He had thought that he and Eames were growing closer, that they-
No, that was a thought that he refused to have. This was all so fucked up that he was doing the only thing he knew how to do. He was running. Not running away, just running. It was something he did when he needed to think. He'd started when he was eleven or twelve - his family had moved to California from Illinois - and there had been too many changes in his life. Running had been an escape then, from school bullies and from his own awkwardness in a body that was growing taller but no more graceful than he had been at ten.
Later, the running had become a way to focus. He had gotten faster, gained stamina and coordination, and by the time he graduated from school and joined the Army he had become lean and wiry - his focus never better.
He seemed to excel in everything he attempted after that. He went through all his training and was moving along at a steady pace of promotion and commendation when he got moved into the Rangers. That was where he got tapped to be part of the Dream Share project.
It was a great honor to be chosen, because if "Rangers lead the way" then those who were invited to be the first to lead a new endeavor had to be the elite of the elite... or so he was told. And yes, the project had started out that way, Arthur and the thirty other Rangers that had been chosen, set to lead the way in just one more scenario - to gain enemy intelligence direct from the source, the mind of the enemy soldiers.
Unfortunately very few of his fellow rangers had the... capacity... for dreaming. They were far too grounded in reality, far too steadfast and unbending. In the end only three out of the original thirty remained. Arthur, for all his adherence to rules and regulations, somehow also had enough creativity to create and adapt.
And Arthur was the one that Mal chose to work with, although he never did know why.
Even after the cock-up that had sent Arthur to a psych-ward for two months and had him laden down with therapists he couldn't talk to and bottles of tablets that he wouldn't take, Mal had stuck by him. When the army had tried to toss him aside as useless, Mal had used her connections to make certain that his discharge was not simply general, but with honor. She was the one who had sat up with him those first few nights after he had been released, feeding him coffee and soup and wrapping him in a veritable cocoon of warmth and caring. It was something that he would never forget.
But how could he forget what he'd heard last night?
God damn it.
He turned back toward the house, his thoughts no more settled than they had been when he left. He still didn't know what he was going to do. Should he tell Dom? Or- fuck! Maybe Dom knew. He had always been indulgent of whatever Mal wanted. Would that indulgence stretch to allowing her a lover?
And the drum of his feet on the road answered what he already knew.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Because Dom would give Mal anything she wanted, anything he thought she wanted, anything she didn't know she wanted.
So if she wanted a lover?
Yes.
Dom wouldn't even turn a hair.
**
By the time Arthur reached the house and made his way around the side to the kitchen door he wasn't sure what part of him was more tired, his body or his mind. His shirt was soaked through with sweat despite the cool morning breeze and he was sure that his heart and his head were both pounding in an off-rhythm just to annoy him. He grabbed a towel off the washing machine as he passed it and wiped at his face.
Arthur was relieved that the kitchen was empty - with the exception of Dom, his head down over the morning news, coffee cup clutched in his hand like a life-line. Maybe his luck would hold and he could just trot through to the bathroom, grab a shower and then crash until he felt able to convince himself that none of the previous night had happened.
"Hey," Dom said, looking up from the paper. "So, do you feel like telling me what happened between my looking at inexplicable freezer-spoons yesterday and you getting home at three in the morning blitzed as fuck to make Eames look like he's going to be next up needing me to lock security into his brain? Because seriously, one of you on the verge of going off the deep end every time I turn my back is a bit more than I can take."
Or not, because apparently Dom wasn't going to let him, and apparently Dom really didn't know about Mal and Eames, and oh, fuck.
That left him in the position of wondering exactly which would make him the worse friend, which would have Dom hating him the most, knowing and telling or knowing and not telling.
Fuck.
This was exactly the kind of dilemma that he was supposed to be avoiding. The kind of thing that had kept him from speaking out about the things that had happened to him in the dreamscape - the cognitive dissonance between duty and honour, between friendship and truth. Arthur was glad there were no mirrors in the kitchen to reflect back the expression on his face, he probably looked just as insane as the doctors had declared him before ordering his release from the army.
"It's nothing, Dom... I... I'm hungover, okay. Just leave it."
Dom gave him an exasperated look. "Yeah, I'm known for that."
"Well -" Arthur began, hopeless deflection on the tip of his tongue, and Dom glared at him with surprising effect.
"When I've had coffee?" he clarified with a mildness very much at odds with his expression, which was more like the one Arthur tended to see while Dom worked his security magic on Arthur's tattered mental defences, down in the dreamscape.
"No," Arthur admitted. "Okay, not after two cups of coffee -"
Dom pointed meaningfully to the refilling pot.
"Yeah," Arthur said, conceding.
"So?"
"After I went to bed -"
"Interesting choice of words," Dom said with a smirk.
"Eames. And Mal." And that was as far as Arthur was prepared to go without a crowbar of some variety, and possibly it would have to be physical, because he could feel his vocal cords and his brain join in on clamping down anything else he might have said.
Dom's glare of Premonitory Doom faded out into a sort of cringe.
"Yeah. I know. Mal never learned what the phrase 'good place to stop' really means."
Arthur choked on air. "What?"
Dom stared at him. "What?"
There was a moment of mutual confusion, and then Arthur said, very carefully, "Dom, what are you talking about?"
"The same thing you are - Eames and Mal." Dom's forehead wrinkled in a frown, "Aren't I?"
There was silence filled only with the gurgling hiss of the coffee maker completing its job and a low murmur of voices from the living room. "Um... possibly?"
"Mal just kept poking at him until he said yes." Dom carried his cup over to refill it. "It's one of her talents, you know? Irresistible force."
"Oh God," said Arthur, wishing Dom would just shut up before his mind's eye was irreparably scarred. "Um..."
"And of course she figured 'hey, easier when he's drunk', because delightful though her mind is, its logic isn't one I can follow -"
"Augh," said Arthur coherently.
" - still, I don't think she had it in mind to, you know, hurt him -"
"Oh my God will you please shut up -!"
"-but for all her talents she's simply never going to be a therapist of any kind - are you okay?"
"No..." Arthur choked out. "I'm hungover and worn out... and I think I just swallowed my tongue. Really, Dominic, don't you care?"
"That you swallowed your tongue?"
"No!!"
"What the fuck is the problem?"
There was a groan from the living room, creaking noise that could only be the couch and then some soft words of encouragement.
"What is-?" There was another groan, louder this time. "That! That is my problem." Arthur waved (well, flailed, really) his hand in the direction of the living room.
"Well it's not like he didn't say she could carry on, even after last night -"
"Have you all lost your minds?"
"Probably," Dom said warily, "but I still don't know why you're so upset."
"She's your wife! Didn't you say something about -" Actually, he couldn't remember whether they had promised each other fidelity, but wasn't it sort of implicit? "And I mean they're right there!"
"How the fuck does Mal being my wife have anything to do with the fact she's a fucking awful physiotherapist and Eames is a demented British idiot who likes trying out new pain thresholds?" Dom's voice was verging into the territory of shrieking. It was a fairly unpleasant sound.
"What -"
"Er, Arthur," Dom said, and damn the bastard, he was starting to laugh, Arthur knew it. "I know what I'm talking about. Um..." he put his hand over his mouth, not quickly enough to hide the shit-eating grin that was taking over his face. "What were you talking about? And can I please, please have details?"
Arthur found himself suddenly sitting down, rather like a deflated balloon, collapsing in on himself. "I... God... I don't know, Dom."
A loud cackle escaped from behind Dom's hand, "Really, Arthur, maybe you're the one who should be jealous. Or is jealous..."
Arthur groaned loudly, laying his head down on the table and covering it with his hands. "Just don't, okay? You're all going to give me a relapse or an episode or... or something that's going to leave me locked in a room with pillows on the wall... sentient pillows that laugh at me."
"Firstly, you'd so deserve that, and secondly, my security is way better than potential relapses," Dom said, his voice shaking with what Arthur was bitterly aware was most likely an incipient giggle fit. "But sentient pillows I can work with."
Arthur lifted his head. "Don't you dare," he said, well aware that he came off as being about as threatening as a damp sparrow.
Dom smiled at him, incredibly unreassuringly, and then called through, "Hey, Eames!"
"Fuck off, Dom!"
"Sentient pillows!"
"Fuck off!"
"It's Arthur's idea..."
"Oh well, nothing ever goes wrong with those," Eames said with more sarcasm than Arthur thought was really merited, "so great, yeah, do that - and Arthur, darling, are they going to be like the crab, and can they kill Mal too, not just Dom?"
"Yes," said Arthur venomously.
"Fantastic," said Eames, and then "Mal, STOP doing that."
Arthur stomped out to the living room then toward the hallway, "You're all hopeless. I'm going for a shower, and with any luck you'll all have fucked off by the time I get back."
"Dominic, you've hurt Arthur's feelings," Mal scolded, bending Eames's fingers back in a slow, gentle flex.
"Arthur! Don't leave me..." Eames snarled, trying to jerk his hand away, "Dammit, Mallorie! That hurts!"
"My wife, the Mistress of Pain." Dom chortled.
"All have fucked off," Arthur repeated with emphasis.
It wasn't until he was halfway through his shower that he realized he was laughing just as hard as Dom had been, and was thoroughly grateful for the fact that the shower door and the water would block out any sound.
Laughing to himself from insane relief wasn't exactly something that would reassure Dom as to his sanity, after all.
**
Dom, now
"These are the best pancakes ever!" James announced, shoving another bite into his mouth, because of course, after eating decidedly off guacamole, throwing up all over two beds and spending the rest of the night sticking his toes into Dom's kidneys, he now felt perfectly fine. "Can I have some more?"
"James, swallow before you speak," Dom said for probably the fifth time since breakfast had started.
"You already had four," Philippa complained. "Leave some for the rest of us."
"There is plenty of batter," Saito said calmly, "but perhaps, James, it would be best if you stop now. I am certain that you do not wish to repeat your... experiences of last evening."
No-one else did, certainly, Dom thought with a stifled laugh.
"May I have one more, dad?" Philippa made puppy eyes at Dom until he slid the pancake on his plate off onto hers. "These really are good, Mr. Saito. I wish you lived here with us. Then we could have pancakes every morning!"
"You are assuming that were I to live here, I would be devoting my entire existence to your whims," Saito said quellingly.
"Yep!" Philippa said cheerfully. Dom snorted.
"And that would be why no-one ever does want to live here with us, Pip," he pointed out. Using sarcastic logic on small children might be a low form of entertainment, but it was how he got through most of his days.
"People mostly do so want," said Philippa with her own incontrovertible brand of logic. "Even when they go back to France and don't say goodbye." The last came out with a definite pout.
"They're going to France to - they've gone to France to - well, there's Ari's coffee, and -" Dom gave up. "We're all going to France soon to see them, so it doesn't matter," he finished, in what really wasn't his finest moment of linear argument, but seemed to satisfy Philippa, at least for the moment.
"Yay, Ari is a good twat," James said happily, and Dom was treated to the rare and delightful spectacle of Saito snorting tea out through his nose.
**
Eames, then
"Hey... we'll work on it. You just have to get in the Zen," Arthur bumped his shoulder against Eames's as they walked out of the shooting range.
"My targeting is fine, Arthur," Eames said, amused despite himself. He really didn't need consolation for what Arthur supposed were his inadequacies - as long as he could make kill-shots, the rest was pretty irrelevant, as far as he was concerned. And the underground garage had more than proved his abilities on that score. "Anyway, I don't need to be able to put a bullet into a flea's arse. That's what I have you for."
Arthur snorted, pulling out his keys and unlocking the trunk of the car. They had been at the range for a couple of hours, joking around, going through several dozen targets each and hundreds of rounds of ammo. It still amazed Eames that the military could dismiss Arthur, declare him crazy, but no one thought of taking away his weapons.
Bloody Americans...
Of course, it was entirely possible that they had taken away Arthur's weapons and then Arthur had simply laid his hands on more. Eames really didn't think either option was completely out of the question.
"Keys," he said instead of pursuing that line of thought, just to make Arthur glare at him and cross his arms as though that was any sort of defence. "Arthur. Public roads. You and speed limits. The nice little agreement you have. Keys."
"Fine," Arthur grumbled, putting their weaponry into the trunk, and then handed Eames the keys. "This isn't always going to work, you know?"
Eames just smirked, and climbed behind the steering wheel. It still seemed roundabout and backwards to be sitting on the left side of the car, but the small victory after his defeat on the range made it all worthwhile.
"Straight home or someplace else?"
"It's hot. How about a swim? Mal and Dom are going to be gone until Tuesday anyway so we have a work free weekend." Arthur stretched in the passenger seat. "I could teach you to body surf..."
"Pass..."
Arthur sighed. "You already know how, don't you?" It wasn't as exasperated as it might have been.
"Possibly," Eames agreed blandly, starting the car.
Arthur sighed, put-upon to the nth degree, and then shook his head. "Someday, you're going to have to give me a list, you know."
"Of all my good qualities? Arthur, you wound me. My accomplishments couldn't fit on a list, never mind my good qualities."
"Oh, so like your many, many irritating qualities, then."
"Yep," Eames said cheerfully.
It was odd, Eames thought, the more he and Arthur snarked at each other, the happier they were in each other's company. It wasn't that there was no pretence between them, it was that the pretence seemed more like a window than a wall. Mal was lovely, coddling and berating them equally. Dom was his brother - the old affectionate appellations of his less reputable days - bruv, he called Dom when the other man was at his most adamant, his most consoling; mate, when it was Dom who needed bolstering - had escaped him more than once. They were people he knew he could trust (odd enough for him), but Arthur... fuck... he didn't even know what Arthur was to him yet. He wanted to find out, but was terrified of the idea at the same time.
They arrived home, and climbed out of the car.
"We can leave the stuff in the trunk until later. I'll clean it all after dinner." Arthur moved towards the back of the house, tugging off his shirt. "Hey... last one to the beach has to cook."
And of course, he broke into a run, leaving Eames standing for a solid three seconds before he went into action.
"You're so going to lose, Eames!" Arthur shouted as he dashed for the beach steps.
"Not if I can help it." Eames shouted back... and ran, forgoing the steps to dive right off the side of the hill.
"You fucking lunatic!" Arthur yelled, catching up with him too late to win the cooking bet. "What the hell were you -" And then he took in Eames's wholly undamaged appearance, and cut himself off mid-rant. "Show me," he said gleefully.
Eames grinned at him. "My pleasure," he said.
He was pretty sure it would be, too.
They spent the entire weekend leaping from things as Eames taught Arthur the basics of parkour - utilizing the roof, the hillside, the top of the car - vaulting and tumbling until they were too exhausted to do more than lie in the grass and laugh at each other.
That was where Mal and Dom found them when Tuesday rolled around, in the middle of the back yard, both sprawled out in exhausted victory on the rather scrubby patch of lawn that would one day be a garden, smiling in their sleep.
Mal gloated for hours' worth of blood-drawing, samples, and chemical charts over the fact that exercise apparently caused natural dreaming to start re-emerging, Dom made vague and strangely pointed remarks about relaxation, and Arthur returned to his usual nicely-homicidal state of being before the day was out.
Eames, to his own surprise, rather regretted that.
**
Dom, now
Dom had sent the kids off to do their morning chores - get dressed, brush their teeth - normally the routine would include making their beds but with James's late night regurgitation extravaganza that would have to wait until Dom could help them.
"I hope the kids aren't overwhelming you," Dom shook his head as he carried the last of the plates into the kitchen. "They can be a bit... trying."
"I find your children to be... most delightful," Saito professed.
"Okay..." Dom allowed, "delightfully trying then."
A small smile played around the edges of Saito's lips.
"And they're very distracting," Dom continued. "I meant to ask why you're even here? I'm sure it's not just to make pancakes."
"I came for a party." Saito was as imperturbable as always. "I stayed for the coffee." He almost smiled. "Though not in the way one usually means that."
"You were managing Eames, before that." Dom didn't mean to sound quite as censorious as he did, but it was hard not to remember, sometimes, hard - impossible his mind whispered - not to superimpose the images of the past onto what he had regained in the present. The first time he had met Eames, the man had written on water for him, and later killed for him (he could have left me there, Dom always thought, he could have taken the PASIV and left me there, and no-one would have been the wiser), he had worked with them through Mal's impromptu turn as a physiotherapist and Arthur disappearing into the dreamscape to rebuild his military-broken defences; through Dom's development of a wholly new skill - extraction, though hardly anyone called it that back then - and Dom could no more forget those days than he could forget the woman who had been at the centre of them.
It might have been Mal who had broken Eames, but it was Dom who was left alive to carry the blame of her actions. The other half of his heart, of his soul, of his mind - how could he not take on alone what should have been hers to carry with his help?
Part of him would always flinch away, as it did from thoughts of Miles and what he had done to them all, from knowing that one of those he had so briefly and so delightedly called his family was being forced again into actions that were just far enough from their own volition to verge on coercion.
"I was managing them all," Saito said without a trace of apology. "Someone had to. Left alone, it would have fallen to you. That would have been unfair."
"And it was you they called for help, anyway." That was the part Dom, weirdly, didn't mind. It had actually been a relief, once he had heard Arthur's summary of the entire Paris debacle of melted and water-logged and haunted flats, rejected kisses and broken noses and Ariadne's turn as a matchmaking harpy, not to have been involved from the outset.
"It was," Saito admitted. "I really do owe them more than money, you know? We have become... friends."
He said it almost as if it were a question and the tone made a slight frown shift over Dom's face. "Of course you have. They wouldn't have bothered to call if you weren't."
Saito nodded and started rinsing off the breakfast dishes.
"No... stop." Dom turned off the taps. "You cooked, I clean up."
"I do not mind."
"Nope, that's how it works with friends," Dom's lip twitched. "It's all fair trade with no money involved."
"Ah." Saito took a step back from the sink, holding up his hands. "I concede."
Dom managed, somehow, not to roll his eyes. "Yeah, your concessions are amazing," he agreed. "Ugh, how does syrup do this? No, don't give me an answer, it was rhetorical and despairing and I don't really want to know."
"I believe I should have used hot water," Saito said.
"Yeah, there's some part of 'I don't want to know' that -" An evil, wonderful supposition came to Dom, and he started to grin. "You've never washed dishes before, have you?"
"Possibly not," Saito said.
"Because you've never actually had to, hah, this is awesome. And pretty fucking funny. And brings me right back to why are you here, rinsing off dishes incredibly badly, when you have, like, an entire new company to be buying up or tearing down or whatever?"
The silence was a bit disconcerting, and Dom turned his head to see that Saito actually seemed to be having to think about the answer, which was - well, worrying, considering the man usually had an answer for everything before you'd so much as finished the question.
"I am not entirely sure," Saito said eventually, and Dom was catapulted back to his early days in the house for a completely different reason, as though he were once again watching Arthur work out why he was staying when he felt it was pointless, that nothing would help.
"Okay," Dom said easily, because that much he had learned, first from Arthur and then from Eames, that people sometimes wanted to give more and couldn't, had no idea how to start and needed someone else to make the approach.
Mal, we got another one. I wish you could see.
"Okay," Saito said, more hesitantly.
Dom turned back to the dishes, and watched, from the corner of his eye, Saito observing how he did it. He had no doubt that by the next mealtime, there would somehow be a more efficient way to get everything rinsed and packed in the dishwasher.
He was kind of looking forward to it.
**
Eames, then
Americans were different, horribly, similarly (oh, divided by a common language, how terribly true), incomprehensibly different, Eames thought often.
Or perhaps it was just this group of Americans that was different.
More experimental (Dom), more thrillingly fascinated (Mal), more steadfastly ruthless (Arthur) and at the same time more childlike than those who worked in and with the dreamscape back home. Watching them was akin to watching teenagers have sex for the first time (granted Arthur, at least, wasn't that far from his teenage years, but still) - it was a bit clumsy and a bit awkward, and at times almost painful, but you came out satisfied in the end.
But Dom and Mal were in no way childlike in their aims, despite their ebullience.
Mal used their bodies as nothing more than sets of colliding atoms, fascinated by the way the dreamshare played with her new concoctions. Dom, untrammelled now by what any man might think of his attempts, went deeper and deeper into their psyches, pulling out inventions once designed by the hind brain to protect, and making weaponry from those same fears.
It was very trying, at times tiring, but always interesting, as they began to learn about each other, to recognize who was the dreamer from the setting of the dream.
Arthur seemed to have a love of opulence, combined with sleek lines and no clutter. Functional and beautiful and verging on extravagance, but with no comfort to his created landscapes anywhere.
Mal's dreams were the exact opposite - a little hazy, a little indefinite, and always warm, soft, an embrace of the mind, rather like falling into a world that was a perpetual vacation.
Only Dom's dreams were unpredictable, his style changing as if he either couldn't make up his mind or was trying to keep them on their toes.
And so far Eames had not volunteered to dream for them, still uncertain of the trust level in either direction.
He forged what they asked for, forged Arthur's generals, incongruous in their stark demands within the rich housing of his expensive hotels; forged Mal's exquisites, men and women both as she set the lilting scene; changed his appearance faster than Dom's scenarios, as he wrapped the clock around itself.
He never built until Mal asked him.
Had she demanded, had she made it a condition, he would have refused and walked away, but Mal was cleverer than that.
Mal came to him in the middle of the night, yawning and half-asleep, and asked him for a dreamworld, a fantasy-life.
"You want what, sweetheart?" Eames looked up from where he had been lounging on the couch watching an old movie that was almost more commercials than plot.
"A fantasy," Mal repeated. "Something for relaxation. Some place happy to carry with me into my real dreams."
"Can't sleep?" he asked. Mal's latest Somnacin mix had been a bit of a bomb.
"I think that may be the wrong word," Mal said dismally, and flopped down beside him on the couch, stealing his freshly-opened beer and taking a long drink from the bottle. "Oh, it is sometimes so nice to be underclass."
"Is it really, thank you very much, dearest Mallorie."
Mal laughed. "You know just what I mean. Tonight I want a club, Eames. Take me dancing."
So he created, just for her, his film-based image of a thirties Berlin club, created for her a smoke haze and the sound of Gershwin and slow, silken movement with a partner who was nothing like her lovely golden boy Dom, or even his direct opposite Arthur. He gave her the time and the place and the fear she craved, and he gave her a beautiful lover who would one day be taken away and killed, gave her someone that she could love and desire to protect and never save. He gave her, not a man, but a woman to adore, a woman who smoked with her right hand and killed with her left.
He gave her violence and bruises and tears and failure, he gave her a woman of pain to love and admire and emulate and relinquish to death.
He gave her all that she longed to be, gave her the perfect gift for a lover of drugged time.
And Mal woke up gasping with desire and went back to Dom.
Eames crept away to sleep on the beach. He had fallen just a little bit in love with Mal that night, he knew, had found himself becoming part of something larger, and the thoughts of belonging to Mal, to Dom, and to Arthur were so overwhelming that he could not bear to be so close.
But he went back, in the morning, and let Dom fall asleep on him and let Mal take over making the coffee and let Arthur laugh at everything that was becoming a falsehood.
Because Mal was travelling far beyond them all.
He hoped that someone else realized it, that Dom realized it, that anyone, anyone who wasn't him realised it, because Mal was a fantastic soul that needed all of them to keep herself properly grounded, needed his fantasias and Arthur's meticulous plans and oh God, Dom's love, more than anything, Dom's love - and if they failed her, then all their hearts would be broken.
**
"Make me a dream, Eames."
"Darling Mal, it's three in the morning."
"Please? I'm so tired. I feel so sick."
And Eames felt his eyes drop to the small swell of her belly, and -
"Mal."
"Please."
He built her worlds.
He gave her the Belle Epoque and Berlin clubs, Paris at the fin-de-siecle, Italy when it was still divided, London before the Great Fire, Egypt when they were building the Pyramids, Rome in its old pomp and glory.
He gave her Demosthenes and his pebbles, gave her Alexander in India, weeping for having reached the end of the world.
He let her console Alexander, argue against Demosthenes, walk through the streets of Troy.
He let her play Helen, and stood watching, a faceless guard that no projection would care about, while she let her spun-gold, unreal hair fall about her, still Mal beneath it all, their lovely dark Mal, and danced with sandalled feet among the priestesses.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
They never talked about their Troy's Hector, unsmiling beneath his dark hair, his fabled helmet always caught beneath his arm. Hector, who should never have appeared in the scenario Mal had chosen here, their security. Hector who came to them in Arthur's guise, watchful and silent, narrow-shouldered and too lean beneath his heavy gold-chased armour.
Eames's projection, Eames's unintentional and self-installed security, the one thing that even Dom and all his expertise had never been quite able to eradicate from the depths of his mind.
There were some things that even dreamers never mentioned to one another.
Night after white insomniac night, Eames gave Mal things that had never existed, plunged into the depths of his memories of Kipling's tales for a leafy world filled with ruins and elephants and tigers, gave her mist-wrapped layered gardens and gave her, in place of the dancing, the war that raged for ten years over a beautiful woman, outside an impossible wall.
He gave her the rage of gods and the peace of dragons.
Stories and legends, picture-books from his childhood schooling.
"Eames, do you see? We could use this, we could put something into a mind, not take it away, do you see?"
"Try it," he dared her.
"I will. Shall I do it for you? " Her eyes twinkled up at him. "Shall I change the world for you, mon ami, mon petit affecteux?"
"Never for me, Mal," Eames shook his head. "I bend things enough on my own to allow them to be bent for me."
And Mal, Mal who was carrying within her the beginnings of the child who would one day be Philippa, took his face in her hands and whispered -
"Trust me, my darling."
And he did.
And she gave him Arthur.
And he ran.
**
Dom, now
Dom put a movie on for the kids - The Three Musketeers - the 1978 version, because the others were 'crap', (and thankyouverymuchMiles for that) - and pulled clean bedding out of the cupboard to make their beds. Saito lounged in the doorway, apparently relaxed, but Dom could feel his eyes watching every move he made.
Yeah, making beds was probably another life skill that Saito had probably never had to contend with. If Dom felt evil later and Saito was still around, he might get the man to help him put the kids to bed. That would be one experience he'd never forget.
On the other hand, Dom thought he might spare Saito the miracles of laundry on this particular occasion - he still wasn't entirely sure handwashing wasn't going to be needed, and he felt dirty dishes and mysteriously superglue-like syrup were more than enough education in the fine art of not being completely revolted by things that were once ordinary household objects for one day.
The torments of hell via small children, however, he could and would bestow with glee.
He had only just managed to get a clean undersheet, which had suddenly taken on all the properties of Elastigirl (and oh, how Dom wished his mind didn't automatically make that reference) onto Philippa's bed when the phone rang.
"Phone!" James sang out.
No-one, of course, made any move to pick up.
It rang again and again there was the call, "Phone, dad!"
"Pip, could you get that please?"
"Dad, the movie..." she protested as the phone rang for a third time.
"Philippa!"
He heard the loud sigh that meant his daughter was feeling much put upon, and then the bellowed announcement, "Dad, it's Uncle Eames!"
Dom gave up, dumped the rest of the bedclothes on the end of James's bed, and went to get the phone himself.
"Hi, Eames," he said a bit flatly. "I'm kind of in the middle of something -"
"And I'm kind of deaf," Eames said, sounding as though he were underwater, before his voice cleared, and Dom realised he had been talking away from the phone, probably trying to shake the noise out of his head. "Pip inherited Mal's lungs, then, did she?"
"Yes," Dom said miserably. He hoped Eames's ears were ringing loudly.
"Lovely," Eames said, actually sounding sympathetic. Then again, he'd been on the receiving end of Mal's tirades as much as anyone. "So, we went to the coffee thing, the - yes thank you Arthur I fucking know it's a cafe shut up - and Arthur, you'll be thrilled to hear, sampled all the different blends, and so I'm calling you to regretfully inform you that while this has all been perfectly lovely, I am going to have to kill him."
"What happened?" Dom was puzzled.
"He sampled All. The. Blends." Eames repeated slowly. "They have at least thirty."
"Thirty-four." Dom could hear Arthur through the phone and then a blast of music.
"No... no, Arthur, no-one wants to hear bloody Britney Spears played that loudly... or at all, really." Eames sighed. "He's probably going to be awake for a week and bouncing off the walls for at least the next ten to twelve hours. And I get to be here for all of it, Dominic, are you listening to me?"
There were some thumps and Arthur calling, "Dance with me, Eames. This is a great song!"
"Yes, Arthur," Eames's voice continued blandly, "you have the moves like Jagger... now shut the fuck up."
"They make them with syrups," Arthur rambled on, and Dom heard a dull bang that spoke of head-plus-phone meeting wood. He tried not to laugh.
"Yes, yes they do," Eames mumbled.
"So really, more like thirty seven. And they gave me a free flask of it!"
"Oh, fucking hell, God, no, no, what -"
"Kill him," Dom said quickly. "It's fine."
Eames's familiar mad cackle made Dom want to shake the ringing out of his ears, but it was better than the clattering hollowness of the phone banging on the table, so he figured he'd take what he could get.
"Other than asking for prior consent for justifiable homicide," he said quickly, to the background of clashing hard plastic that suggested Arthur had found the CD collection, and was discarding most of it onto the floor as unsuitable (Dom wasn't looking forward to finding out, even from thousands of miles away, what Arthur currently would consider suitable, but he suspected he wasn't going to have much choice in the matter) "what did you want?"
"Just checking to see if you know when you're arriving," Eames said.
"Oh, God Eames!" Arthur's voice was closer, and running at about eighty miles per hour. "I just figured out the best way to burn some of this off."
"Probably by the end of the week," Dom answered. "I have to get the house closed up and arrange for Miles and Marie to keep James and Pip."
"Arthur... I'm on the phone... no, you can't just..." Eames's voice suddenly went down an octave. "Or maybe you can... yeah... that's... um... uhhhhhh... er... yeah... a week... right? Arthur... you... fuck..."
"Yes a week ohGodnostopbye," Dom said, and hung up in a hurry. "Arthur, you fuck," he repeated with an entirely different emphasis, and then realised he was talking to his ceiling, where the shotgun blast's damage had long since been repaired.
"What are you laughing at?" Saito asked curiously, emerging into the hallway.
Dom shook his head. "Plus ça change," he said, and didn't know who he was talking to, or even if it mattered any more, because Mal was there, she was always there, and she wasn't trapped in a dreamworld that had long since killed her, she was with him, she lived in him, and they had been the same person for so long that it wasn't surprising he'd forgotten that part.
"Plus c'est la même chose?" Saito asked in bewilderment. "What is the same, Dominic?"
"Everything," Dom said, and smiled. "Nothing."
"I... see," Saito said, in tones that suggested anything but.
Dom just smiled at him. "Still staying for coffee?" he asked lightly, and was amused and pleased when Saito gave him a rather surprised attempt at a smile in return.
"If you're still offering," he said solemnly, "then yes. I think I should like that very much."
"Good," Dom said, and went back in to fight the good fight.
With the bedclothes.
FIN