A Well-Defined Function
.
...Seduction via arithmetic.
Seduction. Via arithmetic.
I got nothing. Also this is supremely nerdy. AGAIN.
Title: A Well-Defined Function
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Inception
Characters: Arthur, Eames.
Words: 3500
Rating: Hard R, of the sexy variety. Not worksafe.
Warnings: Arithmetic. Music nerdery. Also Oliver Sacks, who should not be referenced in anyone’s porn, but I am strange.
Apologies to: Gödel, Escher, and Bach.
Summary: Eames is smarter than Arthur thinks. Arthur is smarter than Eames gives him credit for.
art by pinstripesuit
A Well-Defined Function
inception
“You’re just going to sit there, aren’t you.”
It shouldn’t shock Arthur, so it doesn’t shock Arthur, and he manages to keep his chair on two legs and not look up from the compelling clinical tale of Stephen D., aged 22, medical student. Better that than looking at Eames. He’s looked at Eames enough today. “I was enjoying myself.”
“Of course you were, alone and assured at last.” The condescension in Eames’ tone is about as evident to Arthur as the slap of his boots and pant legs on the warehouse floor. Well, looks like Arthur was the sensible one-or equally insensible, at least, in not having brought an umbrella. Eames would probably construe his own actions as daring. Irreverent. Something. “No sign of it letting up, though, so unless you’re prepared to spend another day in that suit you’ll have to pull an umbrella out of your arse.”
“You tell me if this is reality, Eames.” Arthur turns the page. He agrees uncomfortably with Stephen D.’s assessment of the predatory instincts of humanity.
Eames barely gets his dripping fingertips onto Arthur’s hair before Arthur lashes one arm back and hits him with the book. Hard. Well, at least the water only got on the cover, not the pages. He goes back to reading. “Don’t touch me.”
Eames whistles through his teeth, but complies enough. Arthur is aware, between the next two pages, of Eames half-circling him, nonchalantly trailing water from Arthur’s comfortably precarious chair to the dry-erase board. “So, has she slapped him for it?”
“Who slapped who for what?”
“For mistaking her for a hat.”
Arthur rolls his eyes, which takes them off the book long enough to actually see Eames at the board. Eames has his back turned, which reveals just how wet the dark green leather jacket was and, to some extent, still is. His hair is matted into spikes. Arthur stops looking. “Are you trying to make me think you haven’t read it, or just being an ass?”
Eames doesn’t answer aside from laughing.
“Don’t erase that.” Arthur glowers just enough to see Eames pull his hand away from the whiteboard. Good.
“You’re going to remember it anyway,” Eames says.
“Your trust in me is extremely reassuring.”
“Who needs a Blackberry when you have your very own Point Man?” Condescension drips off Eames, presumably like the condensation. “And not just any Point Man, but the paradoxical Arthur, an M-16 in a three-piece-suit. Do you have a self-targeting system, pet? Infrared? The ability to distinguish between hostile targets and harmless British expatriates looking for a little respite from the rain?”
Whatever the correct answer to that is, Arthur just tells him, again, “Don’t erase it.”
Eames snickers. That’s always disconcerting. “And what number was I about to erase?”
“One hour and forty minutes.”
“That being?”
“One hundred minutes. Five times twenty. Look higher on the chart, you’ll see why.” One would think Eames had that memorized by now, insufferably smart as they both know he is.
“You’ll forgive me if I can’t wrap my head around it.”
“I didn’t think you were after my forgiveness.”
“Your indulgence, then.”
Arthur resumes the story of Stephen, now Dr., D. He knows that Eames is threatening to erase the whole damned chart if Arthur declines to give him the attention he thinks he deserves. Never mind. Arthur will redraw it.
“And what’s a hundred minutes on level three, Darling?”
Arthur turns the page. “Thirty three hours and twenty minutes. And that’s if you mean after a hundred minutes on level two as opposed to level one.”
“Say I don’t.”
“Twenty-seven days and twenty one hours.”
Apparently his skill with multiplying by factors of twenty has the beneficial side effect of silencing Eames. For a few precious seconds, Arthur hears only two different speeds of rain, the pummel on the warehouse windows and the unsteady drip of Eames’s clothes onto the concrete floor. It even lasts long enough for Arthur to turn another page. Perhaps he has something going here.
“See, it’s not the factoring it up that gets me,” Eames says, the heel of his shoe squelching as he shifts. “It’s the factoring down. How do you divide by sixty and then twenty four so quickly?”
“About as quickly as you figured out my methods. It’s not hard.” Also, Arthur doesn’t precisely remember how. If he thinks about it he can break it down to twos and threes and simple primes, but the calculation itself is instinct now. He shrugs, and reads.
“I’d still need paper.”
“Maybe if you actually counted the relative time on all the levels you wouldn’t have this problem.”
“It’s not a problem, it’s a requirement.”
“It’s a problem when you have to take time out of the job to make the calculation.” Arthur reads the post-script tragedy of a man who lost his sense of smell and convinced himself he hadn’t. “What do you do when I’m not around?”
They both know the answer to that, but Eames is the one that says it. “Find someone else to bother. What’s a level-one hour in limbo?”
“Three hundred and thirty three days and eight hours.”
“Well, that’s tidy.”
“Twenty-four goes into eight thousand by way of seven thousand nine hundred and ninety two. They’re all eights. Try something harder. Besides, that only works if we assume limbo to obey the rules for level four, which we don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we can’t map it without someone going back down there and I’m not up for it. Are you?”
“Which makes a real hour-”
“Eames, just tell me what you’re doing.”
A laugh with wet edges snaps through the air. “What does a man have to do to get you out of your pretty little head?”
Arthur answers honestly, “Try.”
Eames’ footsteps circle him again, slogging through the water he’d already left behind. Arthur keeps his eyes on the book and his chair legs off the floor, tense in the shoulders and Achilles tendons. Rain falls, which is no distraction at all, and the words on the page blur like the walls of a dream when Eames’ dripping fingers brush behind Arthur’s ears. Arthur flinches (and does not let himself drop the chair back to the floor), then defiantly moves back into place. It’s impossible to stop Eames from doing anything. Well, maybe not impossible, but rarely worth the effort. And Eames’ nails are strangely clean and blunt, shaped, possibly even manicured. It’s strange. Good. Familiar.
“Thirty four times twenty seven,” he says, low. Not a whisper, just an extremely private statement.
Arthur attempts to keep reading about a hypothetical Donald’s hypothetical murdered girlfriend. “Nine hundred and eighteen.”
“Times five hundred six.”
That takes a moment, but, “Four hundred sixty four thousand five hundred and eight.”
“We should have you along to plant false safe combinations in the heads of marks.” Eames’ touch circles, the same brief roughness as his laughter. His fingers are pressed hard into the hollow just between Arthur’s ears and jaw, which is slacker now, and slicker than he wants it to be. Eames is going to drip all over Arthur’s collar. Arthur could care a great deal more than he actually does. “Divided by fourteen.”
“Thirty three thousand,” Arthur starts, and pauses to breathe when Eames thumbs take either side of his neck and nudge in, smooth under his collar. “-one hundred-seventy nine and change.”
“And change,” Eames repeats. Arthur feels the laughter, on his shoulders, against the back of his head. “At least tell me whether it’s pence or American.”
Arthur turns the page, even if he isn’t reading anymore. The words stare back at him. They might have eyes. He tries to find them between paragraphs. He breathes, and thinks, and says, “If you start giving me grade school word problems, this ends right now.”
His fingers knead Arthur’s neck and skull. Arthur keeps his eyes open, even if he’s not seeing anything. “I’ll hold off any mention of the relative speed of any trains,” Eames says, and now it’s a whisper, but one done in his throat, not on his lips. “Thirty eight thousand one hundred twenty seven divided by fourteen.”
“Two thousand,” Arthur starts, slipping into the rhythm of Eames’ hands, “seven hundred, twenty three, shy of a half.” He lets his head loll forward, blinks his eyes back open. God, that feels good. “I might be making this up, you know.”
“It sounds right,” Eames says. “And I can check after if you think it’s so important. Let’s get back to dreams, shall we? All factors of twenty, yes?”
The heat of Arthur’s collar can’t be all Eames’ fault. “Yes.”
“What’s the margin of error? One real second? One level one second?”
Arthur lets the book fall into his lap for one of some kind of second. It’s a mistake, letting anything touch him there right now. Christ. “Less. Ah. One level-one second is closest. Timing the kicks on the lower levels is more forgiving. It’s less than that though, something like-” Eames’ palms are on him, now, pulling the skin of Arthur’s throat taut, stifling the sounds that try to escape it. Or creating new ones. Arthur definitely didn’t intend to whimper like that. “-seven hundred milliseconds. Just more than two thirds. Not quite three quarters. On level one.”
About as long as it takes for Eames to make a hm sound that Arthur can feel on the back of his head. “And you can hear that in Edith Piaf?”
“When you’ve heard that song as much as I have you can hear the voice of god in it.” Eames’ fingers jab at the pressure point where Arthur’s ear curves away from his head and Arthur’s eyes blare open at the heat, the pressure. “-Je ne regrette rien,” he tries to say, and then once he says it tries to make sure it doesn’t sound like an invitation, “is played on that recording at about quarter equals eighty. So there’s a hard beat every two thirds of a second. That’s one of the reasons we picked the song.”
“Ah.” It sounds too amused to be a sigh but Arthur thinks, somewhere, that’s what Eames did. Technically. “So when you’re counting when to kick us-”
“It’s between the strong and the weak beat for that second,” Arthur answers.
Eames’ hand rakes through Arthur’s hair. It’s not condescension, not petting. Encouragement? “And that’s how much time on the level below?”
“Fourteen seconds.”
“About as much time as it takes to make sure the bomb goes off.”
“Yes.” Arthur didn’t mean to gasp that. He stares, down. His knuckles are white on the book’s cover.
Both of Eames’ hands are in Arthur’s hair, now, massaging hard circles onto his scalp, and if Arthur wants to complain about how he’s cracking the gel and getting him all wet, now would be the time. He doesn’t, not when it actually feels this good. The chair is tipping forward. Arthur rights it, straightens it back onto its angle and braces his toes on the concrete floor.
“And on the third level down?”
“Complicated,” Arthur says. Breathes. Pants. “It’s the same fourteen seconds, depending on when the level two kick actually happened. Never base something you’re doing on level three on the promises of level one, the same way you wouldn’t base level two on reality.”
“And where are we now, Arthur?”
“Reality,” he says, and isn’t sure if he should be glad that the tremor in his voice isn’t one of hesitation.
He can feel Eames smirking down at him like a sculptor over a choice marble slab.
Eames’ palms are drier, but now they’re just slightly sticking from the rehydrated gel in Arthur’s hair. He cups Arthur under the jowl again, left hand, two fingers nudging against the bulge in Arthur’s throat. Tapping. Quarter equals eighty. Arthur’s pulse is faster. Eames could break Arthur’s neck and it would probably be real, Arthur could stop him before he tried, and he still won’t move.
“I don’t regret anything, you know,” Eames says. It’s a whisper. Arthur can barely hear it over the rain.
The words come out of Arthur stifled, one at a time, as if Eames’ hand needs to coax them. “Keep asking.”
Those fingers keep drumming, evoking the brass that isn’t playing, isn’t heralding Arthur to kick himself out of a dream. Eames’ hands come down on Arthur’s shoulder and neck and knead pitilessly, hard enough that the chair wobbles on its two functioning legs. “So the margin of error between levels two and three leaves how much time, at most, to comply with the kick on level one?”
“Subtract-” Arthur stifles a moan. The book falls into his lap again, his hands trapped between the pages. The frisson that shoots down from the base of his neck swells to heat where the spine of the book rests on his groin. “Subtract a hundred milliseconds to wake up. That’s all it takes, we’re all trained enough to-ah, to limit it to that. Subtract another hundred milliseconds on the same level for the dreamer having to set the music up in the first place. Assume that in that half a second, the person from level three woke up on level two. That’s all. That’s all it ever is. You-can’t see it from level one, you just have to trust them.”
“But we don’t all count the way you do.” Eames’ voice is hoarse, as rough as his hands. The chair is shaking, protesting being tilted back this way for so long.
“You trust me,” Arthur tells him, “it’s my job to make you trust me.”
Eames’ hand is down the front of Arthur’s waistcoat, pinching him through his shirt. It’s been so long, so goddamned fucking long-Arthur holds on, keeps the chair suspended, even as Eames asks him, “And if it took you an hour on your level to go back down and fish me out-”
“That depends on how long you can wait, doesn’t it.”
“I’m not a very patient man.”
“I have evidence to the contrary.”
“An hour,” Eames repeats.
“Twenty. Twenty to reestablish. It wouldn’t take me that long. Even less to get you out. Harder.”
Eames takes the reins of that double-entendre and probably ruins Arthur’s shirt, Arthur can hear the residual hair gel sticking to the fabric, but he twists and Arthur feels the scrape through too many layers of clothing. His legs flinch, spread. The book slips between them. “The number of letters in my first name?”
“Five,” Arthur manages, barely. “Same as your last.”
His hand cards, sharp, through Arthur’s hair, and tugs. “Percent of your skin I’ve touched?”
“I’m-not a computer, Eames.”
He laughs. The sound flares behind Arthur’s eyes, in his chest, in his groin. “Time it will take me to get to a place where you’ll let me get your trousers off?”
“Irrelevant.” Arthur lets the chair legs down. They slam onto the concrete, echo off the glass, drown out the rain. “Start here.”
The arms of Eames’ leather jacket are still wet. Arthur knows this because they’re around him, pinning him to the chair. It’s too balanced on four legs, too easy, too stable, but with Eames’ thick deft hands uncoupling Arthur’s belt and then shoving right down the front of his pants, all thoughts of stable incinerate in Arthur’s mind. Someone swats the book away. There’s still cloth between them, Arthur’s underwear, the tails of his shirt and the hem of his undershirt, but that didn’t stop Eames on Arthur’s chest and it apparently won’t stop him here either.
Eames’ mouth is behind Arthur’s ear, his stubble so rough where his fingers had been just the same before. He bites. Arthur yells, sees red, reaches back to grab him by the hair and hold him in place, remind him who’s the stronger. “I’m not out of my head, Eames,” he warns, thrusting up into his grip, struggling as if to dig himself even deeper.
“Yes, but you’re in the palm of my hand,” he laughs, licking the shell of Arthur’s ear. “That’s a step along the way.”
Arthur could hit him for that. Arthur does hit him for that. He also doesn’t stop writhing, pushing more of himself into Eames’ grasp, and, frankly, giving him more to hold on to. “If you make any more inane puns this ends now.”
“And here I thought I’d get the chance to say I wished I were your problem set.”
Arthur demands, “Why,” and stretches himself almost out of the chair, pulling Eames down. Slippery bastard.
“Because then I’d be wicked hard and you’d be doing me on the desk.” He gets his other hand down Arthur’s shorts. “Or on the whiteboard. Or just in your head.”
Arthur moans, despite himself, despite this, despite everything. “This isn’t in my head,” he says.
Eames draws him out, envelops him, palms, pulls-he knows Arthur’s body so well, too well, and when Arthur saw in dreams just once how well he couldn’t sear the image from his mind. “Yes,” Eames whispers, stroking him harsh and nearly desperate, “yes, love, but are you out of it?”
Arthur lets go of Eames with only one hand, brings it down into his lap, over his pocket. The corner of the die is cold, so cold compared with Eames’ hands, and digs into Arthur’s thigh.
Instead of going for it, he arches up, lets his world burn red. “Test that,” he says, grabs Eames’ splayed left hand and claws it between the knuckles.
“Anything,” Eames drawls, on the heels of a gasp. Arthur swells at the sound. Eames’ thumb roils about the head of Arthur’s cock. “How much time has passed since I laid a hand on you?”
God, yes, that- “Specificity, Eames.”
“Since we last did this.” There’s a pulse to his voice, it counters the one of his hand, accentuates it and strengthens it and Arthur thinks, remember this. Remember now. “Since you had me in that quaint little flat in your head.”
His one hand grasps Arthur tight, tapping at the base-his other hand takes him too, splays on his inner thigh, gets him by the balls. Arthur gropes to follow it, slams his fingers against the spread of Eames’ bones, lets Eames’ knuckles damn near fuck his palm. “One year,” he grits out, head thrown back against Eames’ wet shoulder. “One year, three m-one hundred and six days-”
“Hours, darling.” He twists. Arthur can feel him grinding against the back of the chair.
“Ten-”
The muscles in Eames’ arm draw taut. Arthur thinks he can feel every single one of them, through leather and cotton and ruined wool. “Minutes?”
Arthur comes before he can answer.
He can tell, when he comes down, when he sags boneless into the chair, that there’s sweat mixed with the water dripping down from Eames’ hair. He looks up, actually takes in the sight of Eames, flushed and probably still unattended to, draped upside-down over Arthur’s chair, with all the lights of the ceiling to halo and blur and contour him. It darkens the laughter in Eames’ eyes, the corners of his smile, the crook of his nose, but the humid and entirely human slickness of his skin catches more light than it deserves.
“Between twenty and fifty five,” Arthur says, still breathless, “depending on if you’re counting from start or finish.”
Eames laughs, plants an upside-down, chaste peck right between Arthur’s eyes, and comes up smirking far too much for a man who is still definitely hard. “Please tell me you actually kept a clock, or else I’ll sic Oliver Sacks on you. He can write a new chapter about the fascinating case of Arthur D., who can count anything you give him but consistently underestimates his own value in the eyes of others.”
Of course he’s actually read The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
Oddly enough, that makes this easier.
Arthur glowers, and slides out of the chair and Eames’ persistent hold before Eames can say anything else. He turns around on his knees. The suit’s already a mess. He doesn’t care. “You can sit,” he says firmly, declining to dignify that with an answer, “or I can knock the chair out of the way and let you keep ruining this suit while I suck you off.”
“Whichever challenges you more, love,” Eames says, opening his arms, and with it all of his posture. Arthur suppresses the instincts to just kill him and be done with it. “Unless you want to keep discussing the weather and the time.”
Arthur grabs him behind the knees and jams his nails in. “Maybe I do.”
-
---
-
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...Seduction via arithmetic.
Seduction. Via arithmetic.
I got nothing. Also this is supremely nerdy. AGAIN.
Title: A Well-Defined Function
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Inception
Characters: Arthur, Eames.
Words: 3500
Rating: Hard R, of the sexy variety. Not worksafe.
Warnings: Arithmetic. Music nerdery. Also Oliver Sacks, who should not be referenced in anyone’s porn, but I am strange.
Apologies to: Gödel, Escher, and Bach.
Summary: Eames is smarter than Arthur thinks. Arthur is smarter than Eames gives him credit for.
art by pinstripesuit
A Well-Defined Function
inception
“You’re just going to sit there, aren’t you.”
It shouldn’t shock Arthur, so it doesn’t shock Arthur, and he manages to keep his chair on two legs and not look up from the compelling clinical tale of Stephen D., aged 22, medical student. Better that than looking at Eames. He’s looked at Eames enough today. “I was enjoying myself.”
“Of course you were, alone and assured at last.” The condescension in Eames’ tone is about as evident to Arthur as the slap of his boots and pant legs on the warehouse floor. Well, looks like Arthur was the sensible one-or equally insensible, at least, in not having brought an umbrella. Eames would probably construe his own actions as daring. Irreverent. Something. “No sign of it letting up, though, so unless you’re prepared to spend another day in that suit you’ll have to pull an umbrella out of your arse.”
“You tell me if this is reality, Eames.” Arthur turns the page. He agrees uncomfortably with Stephen D.’s assessment of the predatory instincts of humanity.
Eames barely gets his dripping fingertips onto Arthur’s hair before Arthur lashes one arm back and hits him with the book. Hard. Well, at least the water only got on the cover, not the pages. He goes back to reading. “Don’t touch me.”
Eames whistles through his teeth, but complies enough. Arthur is aware, between the next two pages, of Eames half-circling him, nonchalantly trailing water from Arthur’s comfortably precarious chair to the dry-erase board. “So, has she slapped him for it?”
“Who slapped who for what?”
“For mistaking her for a hat.”
Arthur rolls his eyes, which takes them off the book long enough to actually see Eames at the board. Eames has his back turned, which reveals just how wet the dark green leather jacket was and, to some extent, still is. His hair is matted into spikes. Arthur stops looking. “Are you trying to make me think you haven’t read it, or just being an ass?”
Eames doesn’t answer aside from laughing.
“Don’t erase that.” Arthur glowers just enough to see Eames pull his hand away from the whiteboard. Good.
“You’re going to remember it anyway,” Eames says.
“Your trust in me is extremely reassuring.”
“Who needs a Blackberry when you have your very own Point Man?” Condescension drips off Eames, presumably like the condensation. “And not just any Point Man, but the paradoxical Arthur, an M-16 in a three-piece-suit. Do you have a self-targeting system, pet? Infrared? The ability to distinguish between hostile targets and harmless British expatriates looking for a little respite from the rain?”
Whatever the correct answer to that is, Arthur just tells him, again, “Don’t erase it.”
Eames snickers. That’s always disconcerting. “And what number was I about to erase?”
“One hour and forty minutes.”
“That being?”
“One hundred minutes. Five times twenty. Look higher on the chart, you’ll see why.” One would think Eames had that memorized by now, insufferably smart as they both know he is.
“You’ll forgive me if I can’t wrap my head around it.”
“I didn’t think you were after my forgiveness.”
“Your indulgence, then.”
Arthur resumes the story of Stephen, now Dr., D. He knows that Eames is threatening to erase the whole damned chart if Arthur declines to give him the attention he thinks he deserves. Never mind. Arthur will redraw it.
“And what’s a hundred minutes on level three, Darling?”
Arthur turns the page. “Thirty three hours and twenty minutes. And that’s if you mean after a hundred minutes on level two as opposed to level one.”
“Say I don’t.”
“Twenty-seven days and twenty one hours.”
Apparently his skill with multiplying by factors of twenty has the beneficial side effect of silencing Eames. For a few precious seconds, Arthur hears only two different speeds of rain, the pummel on the warehouse windows and the unsteady drip of Eames’s clothes onto the concrete floor. It even lasts long enough for Arthur to turn another page. Perhaps he has something going here.
“See, it’s not the factoring it up that gets me,” Eames says, the heel of his shoe squelching as he shifts. “It’s the factoring down. How do you divide by sixty and then twenty four so quickly?”
“About as quickly as you figured out my methods. It’s not hard.” Also, Arthur doesn’t precisely remember how. If he thinks about it he can break it down to twos and threes and simple primes, but the calculation itself is instinct now. He shrugs, and reads.
“I’d still need paper.”
“Maybe if you actually counted the relative time on all the levels you wouldn’t have this problem.”
“It’s not a problem, it’s a requirement.”
“It’s a problem when you have to take time out of the job to make the calculation.” Arthur reads the post-script tragedy of a man who lost his sense of smell and convinced himself he hadn’t. “What do you do when I’m not around?”
They both know the answer to that, but Eames is the one that says it. “Find someone else to bother. What’s a level-one hour in limbo?”
“Three hundred and thirty three days and eight hours.”
“Well, that’s tidy.”
“Twenty-four goes into eight thousand by way of seven thousand nine hundred and ninety two. They’re all eights. Try something harder. Besides, that only works if we assume limbo to obey the rules for level four, which we don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we can’t map it without someone going back down there and I’m not up for it. Are you?”
“Which makes a real hour-”
“Eames, just tell me what you’re doing.”
A laugh with wet edges snaps through the air. “What does a man have to do to get you out of your pretty little head?”
Arthur answers honestly, “Try.”
Eames’ footsteps circle him again, slogging through the water he’d already left behind. Arthur keeps his eyes on the book and his chair legs off the floor, tense in the shoulders and Achilles tendons. Rain falls, which is no distraction at all, and the words on the page blur like the walls of a dream when Eames’ dripping fingers brush behind Arthur’s ears. Arthur flinches (and does not let himself drop the chair back to the floor), then defiantly moves back into place. It’s impossible to stop Eames from doing anything. Well, maybe not impossible, but rarely worth the effort. And Eames’ nails are strangely clean and blunt, shaped, possibly even manicured. It’s strange. Good. Familiar.
“Thirty four times twenty seven,” he says, low. Not a whisper, just an extremely private statement.
Arthur attempts to keep reading about a hypothetical Donald’s hypothetical murdered girlfriend. “Nine hundred and eighteen.”
“Times five hundred six.”
That takes a moment, but, “Four hundred sixty four thousand five hundred and eight.”
“We should have you along to plant false safe combinations in the heads of marks.” Eames’ touch circles, the same brief roughness as his laughter. His fingers are pressed hard into the hollow just between Arthur’s ears and jaw, which is slacker now, and slicker than he wants it to be. Eames is going to drip all over Arthur’s collar. Arthur could care a great deal more than he actually does. “Divided by fourteen.”
“Thirty three thousand,” Arthur starts, and pauses to breathe when Eames thumbs take either side of his neck and nudge in, smooth under his collar. “-one hundred-seventy nine and change.”
“And change,” Eames repeats. Arthur feels the laughter, on his shoulders, against the back of his head. “At least tell me whether it’s pence or American.”
Arthur turns the page, even if he isn’t reading anymore. The words stare back at him. They might have eyes. He tries to find them between paragraphs. He breathes, and thinks, and says, “If you start giving me grade school word problems, this ends right now.”
His fingers knead Arthur’s neck and skull. Arthur keeps his eyes open, even if he’s not seeing anything. “I’ll hold off any mention of the relative speed of any trains,” Eames says, and now it’s a whisper, but one done in his throat, not on his lips. “Thirty eight thousand one hundred twenty seven divided by fourteen.”
“Two thousand,” Arthur starts, slipping into the rhythm of Eames’ hands, “seven hundred, twenty three, shy of a half.” He lets his head loll forward, blinks his eyes back open. God, that feels good. “I might be making this up, you know.”
“It sounds right,” Eames says. “And I can check after if you think it’s so important. Let’s get back to dreams, shall we? All factors of twenty, yes?”
The heat of Arthur’s collar can’t be all Eames’ fault. “Yes.”
“What’s the margin of error? One real second? One level one second?”
Arthur lets the book fall into his lap for one of some kind of second. It’s a mistake, letting anything touch him there right now. Christ. “Less. Ah. One level-one second is closest. Timing the kicks on the lower levels is more forgiving. It’s less than that though, something like-” Eames’ palms are on him, now, pulling the skin of Arthur’s throat taut, stifling the sounds that try to escape it. Or creating new ones. Arthur definitely didn’t intend to whimper like that. “-seven hundred milliseconds. Just more than two thirds. Not quite three quarters. On level one.”
About as long as it takes for Eames to make a hm sound that Arthur can feel on the back of his head. “And you can hear that in Edith Piaf?”
“When you’ve heard that song as much as I have you can hear the voice of god in it.” Eames’ fingers jab at the pressure point where Arthur’s ear curves away from his head and Arthur’s eyes blare open at the heat, the pressure. “-Je ne regrette rien,” he tries to say, and then once he says it tries to make sure it doesn’t sound like an invitation, “is played on that recording at about quarter equals eighty. So there’s a hard beat every two thirds of a second. That’s one of the reasons we picked the song.”
“Ah.” It sounds too amused to be a sigh but Arthur thinks, somewhere, that’s what Eames did. Technically. “So when you’re counting when to kick us-”
“It’s between the strong and the weak beat for that second,” Arthur answers.
Eames’ hand rakes through Arthur’s hair. It’s not condescension, not petting. Encouragement? “And that’s how much time on the level below?”
“Fourteen seconds.”
“About as much time as it takes to make sure the bomb goes off.”
“Yes.” Arthur didn’t mean to gasp that. He stares, down. His knuckles are white on the book’s cover.
Both of Eames’ hands are in Arthur’s hair, now, massaging hard circles onto his scalp, and if Arthur wants to complain about how he’s cracking the gel and getting him all wet, now would be the time. He doesn’t, not when it actually feels this good. The chair is tipping forward. Arthur rights it, straightens it back onto its angle and braces his toes on the concrete floor.
“And on the third level down?”
“Complicated,” Arthur says. Breathes. Pants. “It’s the same fourteen seconds, depending on when the level two kick actually happened. Never base something you’re doing on level three on the promises of level one, the same way you wouldn’t base level two on reality.”
“And where are we now, Arthur?”
“Reality,” he says, and isn’t sure if he should be glad that the tremor in his voice isn’t one of hesitation.
He can feel Eames smirking down at him like a sculptor over a choice marble slab.
Eames’ palms are drier, but now they’re just slightly sticking from the rehydrated gel in Arthur’s hair. He cups Arthur under the jowl again, left hand, two fingers nudging against the bulge in Arthur’s throat. Tapping. Quarter equals eighty. Arthur’s pulse is faster. Eames could break Arthur’s neck and it would probably be real, Arthur could stop him before he tried, and he still won’t move.
“I don’t regret anything, you know,” Eames says. It’s a whisper. Arthur can barely hear it over the rain.
The words come out of Arthur stifled, one at a time, as if Eames’ hand needs to coax them. “Keep asking.”
Those fingers keep drumming, evoking the brass that isn’t playing, isn’t heralding Arthur to kick himself out of a dream. Eames’ hands come down on Arthur’s shoulder and neck and knead pitilessly, hard enough that the chair wobbles on its two functioning legs. “So the margin of error between levels two and three leaves how much time, at most, to comply with the kick on level one?”
“Subtract-” Arthur stifles a moan. The book falls into his lap again, his hands trapped between the pages. The frisson that shoots down from the base of his neck swells to heat where the spine of the book rests on his groin. “Subtract a hundred milliseconds to wake up. That’s all it takes, we’re all trained enough to-ah, to limit it to that. Subtract another hundred milliseconds on the same level for the dreamer having to set the music up in the first place. Assume that in that half a second, the person from level three woke up on level two. That’s all. That’s all it ever is. You-can’t see it from level one, you just have to trust them.”
“But we don’t all count the way you do.” Eames’ voice is hoarse, as rough as his hands. The chair is shaking, protesting being tilted back this way for so long.
“You trust me,” Arthur tells him, “it’s my job to make you trust me.”
Eames’ hand is down the front of Arthur’s waistcoat, pinching him through his shirt. It’s been so long, so goddamned fucking long-Arthur holds on, keeps the chair suspended, even as Eames asks him, “And if it took you an hour on your level to go back down and fish me out-”
“That depends on how long you can wait, doesn’t it.”
“I’m not a very patient man.”
“I have evidence to the contrary.”
“An hour,” Eames repeats.
“Twenty. Twenty to reestablish. It wouldn’t take me that long. Even less to get you out. Harder.”
Eames takes the reins of that double-entendre and probably ruins Arthur’s shirt, Arthur can hear the residual hair gel sticking to the fabric, but he twists and Arthur feels the scrape through too many layers of clothing. His legs flinch, spread. The book slips between them. “The number of letters in my first name?”
“Five,” Arthur manages, barely. “Same as your last.”
His hand cards, sharp, through Arthur’s hair, and tugs. “Percent of your skin I’ve touched?”
“I’m-not a computer, Eames.”
He laughs. The sound flares behind Arthur’s eyes, in his chest, in his groin. “Time it will take me to get to a place where you’ll let me get your trousers off?”
“Irrelevant.” Arthur lets the chair legs down. They slam onto the concrete, echo off the glass, drown out the rain. “Start here.”
The arms of Eames’ leather jacket are still wet. Arthur knows this because they’re around him, pinning him to the chair. It’s too balanced on four legs, too easy, too stable, but with Eames’ thick deft hands uncoupling Arthur’s belt and then shoving right down the front of his pants, all thoughts of stable incinerate in Arthur’s mind. Someone swats the book away. There’s still cloth between them, Arthur’s underwear, the tails of his shirt and the hem of his undershirt, but that didn’t stop Eames on Arthur’s chest and it apparently won’t stop him here either.
Eames’ mouth is behind Arthur’s ear, his stubble so rough where his fingers had been just the same before. He bites. Arthur yells, sees red, reaches back to grab him by the hair and hold him in place, remind him who’s the stronger. “I’m not out of my head, Eames,” he warns, thrusting up into his grip, struggling as if to dig himself even deeper.
“Yes, but you’re in the palm of my hand,” he laughs, licking the shell of Arthur’s ear. “That’s a step along the way.”
Arthur could hit him for that. Arthur does hit him for that. He also doesn’t stop writhing, pushing more of himself into Eames’ grasp, and, frankly, giving him more to hold on to. “If you make any more inane puns this ends now.”
“And here I thought I’d get the chance to say I wished I were your problem set.”
Arthur demands, “Why,” and stretches himself almost out of the chair, pulling Eames down. Slippery bastard.
“Because then I’d be wicked hard and you’d be doing me on the desk.” He gets his other hand down Arthur’s shorts. “Or on the whiteboard. Or just in your head.”
Arthur moans, despite himself, despite this, despite everything. “This isn’t in my head,” he says.
Eames draws him out, envelops him, palms, pulls-he knows Arthur’s body so well, too well, and when Arthur saw in dreams just once how well he couldn’t sear the image from his mind. “Yes,” Eames whispers, stroking him harsh and nearly desperate, “yes, love, but are you out of it?”
Arthur lets go of Eames with only one hand, brings it down into his lap, over his pocket. The corner of the die is cold, so cold compared with Eames’ hands, and digs into Arthur’s thigh.
Instead of going for it, he arches up, lets his world burn red. “Test that,” he says, grabs Eames’ splayed left hand and claws it between the knuckles.
“Anything,” Eames drawls, on the heels of a gasp. Arthur swells at the sound. Eames’ thumb roils about the head of Arthur’s cock. “How much time has passed since I laid a hand on you?”
God, yes, that- “Specificity, Eames.”
“Since we last did this.” There’s a pulse to his voice, it counters the one of his hand, accentuates it and strengthens it and Arthur thinks, remember this. Remember now. “Since you had me in that quaint little flat in your head.”
His one hand grasps Arthur tight, tapping at the base-his other hand takes him too, splays on his inner thigh, gets him by the balls. Arthur gropes to follow it, slams his fingers against the spread of Eames’ bones, lets Eames’ knuckles damn near fuck his palm. “One year,” he grits out, head thrown back against Eames’ wet shoulder. “One year, three m-one hundred and six days-”
“Hours, darling.” He twists. Arthur can feel him grinding against the back of the chair.
“Ten-”
The muscles in Eames’ arm draw taut. Arthur thinks he can feel every single one of them, through leather and cotton and ruined wool. “Minutes?”
Arthur comes before he can answer.
He can tell, when he comes down, when he sags boneless into the chair, that there’s sweat mixed with the water dripping down from Eames’ hair. He looks up, actually takes in the sight of Eames, flushed and probably still unattended to, draped upside-down over Arthur’s chair, with all the lights of the ceiling to halo and blur and contour him. It darkens the laughter in Eames’ eyes, the corners of his smile, the crook of his nose, but the humid and entirely human slickness of his skin catches more light than it deserves.
“Between twenty and fifty five,” Arthur says, still breathless, “depending on if you’re counting from start or finish.”
Eames laughs, plants an upside-down, chaste peck right between Arthur’s eyes, and comes up smirking far too much for a man who is still definitely hard. “Please tell me you actually kept a clock, or else I’ll sic Oliver Sacks on you. He can write a new chapter about the fascinating case of Arthur D., who can count anything you give him but consistently underestimates his own value in the eyes of others.”
Of course he’s actually read The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
Oddly enough, that makes this easier.
Arthur glowers, and slides out of the chair and Eames’ persistent hold before Eames can say anything else. He turns around on his knees. The suit’s already a mess. He doesn’t care. “You can sit,” he says firmly, declining to dignify that with an answer, “or I can knock the chair out of the way and let you keep ruining this suit while I suck you off.”
“Whichever challenges you more, love,” Eames says, opening his arms, and with it all of his posture. Arthur suppresses the instincts to just kill him and be done with it. “Unless you want to keep discussing the weather and the time.”
Arthur grabs him behind the knees and jams his nails in. “Maybe I do.”
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