[Inception] Miss Miles
prequel. because i like the idea of Mal and Eames being school friends.
warnings: pre-movie (slightly AU?). taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. language: pg (for bloody).
pairing: none/gen (background Mal/Dom at the end).
timeline: oh, jeez...um...maybe ten years pre-movie? a little less?
disclaimer: Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.
notes: 1) another one of the foundational fears: leaving everything you know. even for someone who's usually strong-minded and independent, leaving behind everything and everyone is disarming and disorienting. 2) i apologize for the rustiness of my French; small glossary after the notes. Eames, by the way, completely bungles his attempt to say "i don't speak French." it's "je (ne) parle pas français." 3) Eton is a very prestigious boys' secondary (ages 13-18) school in England. it's pretty expensive, unless you get in on an academic or music scholarship. 4) i'm always a little surprised by how much Americans use given names. in much of the rest of the world (including England) you're more likely to call your schoolmates (or coworkers) by their surnames. 5) "smashed" is british for "drunk." see also "pissed" or "sloshed." 6) "torch" is british for "flashlight." 7) Mal the fangirl. you're welcome.
French mini-glossary:
"T'égares?" = "You lost?" (informal) i've been told this is an abnormal/grammatically incorrect phrasing. clearly, i know weird people. edited to...
"Perdu?" = "Lost?" (informal)
"Vachement beau garçon." = "Bloody handsome boy." (informal)
"Ça en valait la colère de Papa." = "It was worth Papa's anger." (informal)
"je sais pas où" = "I-don't-know-where"
Miss Miles
Picture an old, well-respected university, an art school, in Paris. Picture a building full of long halls and stepped classrooms and squared stairwells bathed in sunlight. Picture a young man, the right age to be giving school another go, perhaps after a brief stint in some country’s military.
He looks very anxious and out of his depth.
He’s lost, mostly because he can’t speak a single blessed word of French, and he’s trying very hard to locate his first class.
And a girl approaches him, as girls are wont to do (he draws them like flies to honey, no matter what he does, and he wishes like hell it would work on men instead).
“Perdu?” she says, with bright, curious eyes.
For a fleeting moment, he’s tired and terrified and incredibly homesick. But he can’t go home. He can never go home again. “I’m so sorry,” he sighs, rubbing at his right eye. “Je ne…parlez…ah, I don’t speak French.”
She laughs. She has a beautiful laugh. “That’s okay,” she assures him. “A lot of the students here don’t. Are you lost?”
“Oh, thank God. Yes. I’m-I am so, so lost,” he tells her, and feels shamefully close to tears. “I’m trying to get to classical architecture, with Miles.”
There’s a mischievous sort of twinkle in her eyes, and she takes his hand. “I’m going that way. Come on, we’re late.”
They duck into a classroom while the grey-haired professor is checking attendance. The man’s as English as can be, from his spectacles to his shabby cardigan to his ringing Cockney voice, and somehow the homesickness isn’t so bad anymore.
The pretty girl tugs the lost young man into the fifth row, wrangles him into the seat next to hers.
The professor eyes them over his spectacles as he finishes the list. “Mister Eames, is it?” he says.
“Yes, sir,” the young man answers on Eton-trained auto-pilot. “Sorry, sir.”
“Nevermind. It can be a bit overwhelming, the first day. Miss Miles, on the other hand, was clearly dawdling about the corridors.”
Eames eyes the pretty girl, who is making no attempt to hide her grin. “I was making sure nobody was lost,” she says. “If I’d been here any sooner, poor Eames would still be out there.”
The professor conveys his opinion of that story with a disdainful sniff and sets about starting the lesson.
“It’s all right,” the girl whispers. “Papa only pretends to be strict. I’m Mallorie Miles. What’s your name?”
A name hovers on his tongue…a name he has to unlearn now. “Sean Eames,” he says instead.
“Vachement beau garçon,” she mumbles, and shakes his hand. “Ça en valait la colère de Papa.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Haven’t learnt French in the past five minutes. What’d you say?”
Miles giggles softly behind her hand. “Ask me again someday.”
He never remembers to ask her again, but her words will be crystal clear in dreams, and he’ll keep thinking to himself that he should ask someone.
Miles is his first friend as Sean Eames, and she latches on fiercely.
She won’t let him sequester himself in his cramped little room at the student hostel. She shows him where to go to shop for groceries; where to go for good, cheap food; where to go to get drunk around people who will understand him when he slurs out his home address because he’s so falling-down smashed that he needs to be trundled off in a wheelbarrow. She makes him join clubs with her, takes him to see famous buildings, famous statues, famous bridges. She introduces him to her family (her mother, Marie, instantly adores him), and after the term ends she invites him (kidnaps him, really) for Christmas.
A week into Eames’ second term, they’re staring up at Notre Dame’s rose window.
“What are you running from, Eames?” she asks him.
He glances at her, but she’s still watching dust motes dancing through the beams of colored light. “Nothing at the moment, Miles,” he replies.
“Oh, you’re such a liar,” she says. “Or do you really think you’ve managed to outrun whatever-it-is? Your old life, maybe?”
“If I’m running from my old life, perhaps there’s a reason, Miles.”
“Was it very important?”
“The reason? Oh, yes.”
“No, the thing you stole.” She regards him placidly but expectantly.
Eames will never end up finding out how Miles knows he’s a thief.
He swallows thickly and looks back up at the window. “I’ve stolen a lot of things in my time.”
“Gold? Jewels? Paintings?” Giggling, she hugs his arm. “Or were you a spy? Stealing big manila folders in the dead of night with a torch between your teeth…”
“You’ve been watching too many films,” he laughs.
“Perhaps it was something a little more French in nature, mm?” she purrs with sly, knowing eyes. “For untameable passion, you stole the virtue of some poor girl?”
He flinches.
She leans closer and waggles her eyebrows at him. “Or some poor boy?”
“Well, I won’t deny stealing more than my fair share of other boys’ virtue,” he confesses.
Miles bounces with glee and utters a wholly inappropriate giggle right in the middle of all the austerity and solemnity of the most famous cathedral in all of France. “I knew it!” she growls, nose scrunching happily like a stalking tiger’s.
“Yes, yes, you know all,” he tells her in a tone of exaggerated placation.
They stand together for a long time in the dusty rainbow light, cuddled together like turtledoves, like lovers.
“Well, no matter what you’re running from, you can always come home to me, Eames,” she sighs against his shoulder.
Oh, how he loves dear, sweet Miles.
He presses his nose to her hair (she smells like water-lilies and vanilla). “You’re far too good to me, Miles. You simply must outlive me, dear-I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“And what if I fell in love with someone?” she asks. “What if I got married, and he took me away? To England…to America…to…je sais pas où!”
“Hmm, well, I still don’t know French, so that last one could be quite nice to visit.”
She laughs again, bumps him with her hip. “You smart-aleck.” Then she smiles up at him and rubs his shoulder through his coat. “You’ll be all right.”
Two years later, they’ll meet a man named Dominic Cobb. It’ll be love at first sight for Miles, and even if the two of them make Eames physically ill sometimes with their doting, he’ll be happy for her. Cobb will marry Miles and take her away to America, and Eames will realize that he’s somehow relearned how to get by on his own (how to get into trouble on his own). When he gets tired and terrified and homesick and has to leave behind another name (name after name after name), he’ll think of Mrs. Cobb (‘No, darling, Mal-Mrs. Cobb just sounds so old.’) and remember the way she rubbed his shoulder, and he’ll know that as long as he still has the name Eames to come home to, he’ll be all right.
.End.
merianmoriarty has my formal permission to pimp my fics on various comms (if/when i ever abandon deviantART, i'll go ahead and join the comms myself and take care of getting things posted in the right places). no one has permission to re-post this ANYWHERE, but feel free to share or link.
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