inception: you know this life (i know your type)
1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it’s over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
you know this life (i know your type)
arthur/saito. 10 short pieces. they live this life like there are no rules.
1. Justin Mauriello - What A Fool Believes
The first time after the Fischer inception that they met was when Saito showed up, unasked, to Arthur's rented apartment in Sydney with a new tuxedo draped on one arm and a bottle of champagne in the other. Arthur is in a threadbare tshirt and a pair of linen pants that he borrowed from Yusuf and never returned, and he raises an eyebrow so high it almost disappears into his hairline which, despite all his protestations, is indeed starting to recede.
"You already paid me," Arthur says, and then turns red when he thinks about what he's said.
"Consider this a chance for a bonus," Saito murmurs, and starts tugging at the bottom of Arthur's shirt as if he's always been used to being this close to Arthur.
They go to a cocktail party, but first Saito makes Arthur drink almost the entire bottle of champagne on the limo ride there. Arthur doesn't know how it happens but he's so pleasantly buzzed that he doesn't notice Saito's hand on the small of his back, the crook of his elbow, the swell of his ass, until he plays it back the next morning, hung over and half-naked in Saito's hotel bed.
"Jesus, they probably thought I was your--" Arthur starts, but doesn't finish, and Saito barks out a laugh, predatory.
He touches Arthur's bare skin for the first time that morning. Arthur has no complaints.
2. Conjure One - Extraordinary Ways
Two months later Saito gets involved in some nasty sumo fixing fiasco that Arthur knows nothing about and cares even less. He doesn't even hear about it until Saito shows up at his door, unruffled except for an ashy tear across the sleeve of his lovely slate-gray suit. "What happened to you?" Arthur says, unceremoniously hanging up on a rambling Eames.
"Car explosion," Saito growls, shrugging. "How many people know you live here?"
"No one knows I live here," Arthur says. "An exchange student from America named Christopher Yeazell lives here."
"Good," Saito says, and passes out right into Arthur, almost giving Arthur a concussion in the process.
Christopher Yeazell's apartment building mysteriously catches on fire a week later. By then Arthur and Saito are in Atami. "I left my third favorite suit there, you know," Arthur says, relaxing into the hot water of the outdoor bath.
"I'll buy you three more," Saito tells him and slaps him across the head with a towel.
3. QURULI - C'mon C'mon
The party is too hip to be arranged by Saito himself-- too many young people, too many peacock feathers affixed to girls' eyelashes, and the music too much like something Arthur comes across in a record store hidden three levels down in a subway basement. He suspects it was probably planned by one of the army of miniskirted, permed, and manicured ladies Saito calls his secretaries but Arthur knows are more like the finely honed and unused swords Saito keeps in his Kyoto house-- deadly, secretive, and never allowed to rust.
Arthur snags a cocktail off the plate of a passing waiter-- sake and something else, pomegranates probably, for the color-- and scans the crowd. Saito is sitting at the bar, in a nicely tailored blazer but also in jeans, which is just weird enough that Arthur doesn't recognize him the first time. Saito is chatting up the bartender, but Arthur knows he's been keeping an eye on Arthur. When Arthur starts to advance, Saito smiles with the corner of his mouth closest to Arthur.
"So?" Saito says, smoothly transitioning out of Japanese.
"You fucking liar," Arthur replies, just as smoothly.
"You found out," Saito says, quirking his mouth just a little bit more.
"If you wanted to see me, you didn't have to invent a mark," Arthur tells him. "You could have just called." He downs the rest of the cocktail just to see Saito's eyes flicker towards his mouth, and grins.
4. Alan Parsons Project - The Three of Me
You need to stop, Arthur tells him frantically. 2AM in Bangalore. Saito smiles, and Arthur can hear the teeth through the cell phone.
In good time, Mr. Arthur, Saito tells him, and hangs up.
*
He sees traces of Saito's hand everywhere. A car and anonymous chauffeur picking him up from the airport when he didn't ask for it. The security guard that is too easy to bribe. A manila envelope full of computer passwords. Flight logistics, blueprints, one time Arthur even arrives in his team's HQ to find a set of duplicate keys, wrapped in a silk tie, sitting on his laptop.
Saito has fingers everywhere, Cobb warned him, and Arthur had thought that what made him charming, and maybe it did when Saito was their employer.
Now, he doesn't know what to think.
*
If he's been asking questions, I haven't heard him, Eames mutters over a glass of whiskey. But then again, if Saito were asking questions, we wouldn't hear unless he wanted us to.
Arthur can feel Eames eye him critically, and he shifts uncomfortable in the bar stool. Whatever he wants, Arthur, Eames says, too warm in Arthur's ear, he's probably going to get. So just give in already.
Fuck off, Arthur snaps, shoving at his shoulder.
Then Saito walks into the bar, and Eames raises his hand in an easy greeting. Took you long enough, Eames calls out, grinning. He was just getting violent.
How much did he pay you? Arthur hisses. Eames doesn't even dignify that with an answer.
5. Pedro the Lion - A Simple Plan
Cobb orders a patty melt and fries. Arthur orders a salad and a Coke, watching Cobb eat, the way he keeps turning, absently, to one side, like he's too used to keeping James from getting ketchup on his t-shirt. It makes him smile, but it's a little sad. He doesn't know when Cobb got so used to having his kids around, and he doesn't know when he got so used to not having Cobb around.
"Eames tells me--" Cobb begins, then, flushing, merely wipes his hands on a napkin.
"Eames doesn't know shit," Arthur says.
"You don't know what Saito is up to," Cobb tells him, earnest, wrinkling his forehead. "He's probably just playing you, Arthur. You should be--"
"I can take care of myself," Arthur snaps.
6. Ultra Orange and Emmanuelle - Touch My Shadow
Arthur is the one who buys the Ferrari Enzo. Saito is the one who wants to go touge racing in Akagiyama. It's a near miss to falling to death when Saito shoves Arthur into the railing about three-fourths of the course in, and when Arthur tears out of his car at the end, fuming, he's so hopped up on adrenaline and fear that he doesn't feel it when Saito slams him into the bonnet of his car.
Saito's mouth is furious, darker than the night on Arthur's jaw, and even more dangerous, and Arthur gives as good as he gets, and it is the best sex either one of them has ever had.
7. Le Futur Pompiste - Don't Let Go
Saito has this fantasy. Two of them, actually. In one he adopts Arthur as a son and grooms him to take care of the Proclus subsidiaries. He'd teach him Japanese, how to pronounce Saito's name properly, how to separate the bones of a fish from the flesh without ruining the skeleton, how to seiza during a tea ceremony and unfold just as gracefully. He'd brush all the brash American out of him, tone it down to something so unbearably restrained that it's its own kind of seduction. He imagines the two of them at board meetings, the way they would seem like family, but deeper than family, like Arthur was merely a piece of Saito broken off and purified to lethality.
In the other one, he doesn't even bother with the adoption. He just makes Arthur his own, secretly, where no one else can see, like tending a secret garden, delighting in the singular act of possession, secluding him away from Cobb, from dream heists, from the world.
The second one is the most dangerous, and he only ever tells Arthur the first, and Arthur just snorts when he hears it.
I could have you all to myself, Saito wants to tell him, make him afraid, but he doesn't.
8. Hem - Leave Me Here
One morning they're in Amanohashidate and it rains. Arthur wakes up alone, to the sound of the open window, the rain hitting the great expanse of water that makes Amanohashidate the bridge to heaven, the smell of forests faraway, still and dark.
He searches frantically for Saito. They're in one of Saito's friends' residences, something once built for the seclusion of rich man's wife turned to Buddhism. There's a wide balcony in the back, and Arthur sometimes finds Saito there, smoking, his ankle cross over a knee, his expression vacant, but not this morning. This morning, Saito is in the garden, wearing a simple cotton yukata. One shoulder is sagging from the water, almost slipping away, and he is barefoot.
"Saito, what the hell," Arthur calls from the balcony, and when Saito looks back at him, it is like he is not even seeing Arthur.
"When is Cobb getting here?" Saito asks, in Japanese. Arthur stares back, stunned. "When is he coming for me?" Saito demands.
"I'm here for you," Arthur tells him dumbly, and he tastes the rain water in his mouth, and it is bitter and sweet at the same time, and Saito doesn't smile.
9. Garbage - Sleep Together
When Saito has ideas, he explains them in incredible specificity. Which fabrics he wants to use to bind up Arthur's wrists, which ones for the blindfold. How many lashes, exactly, of the rope. Which chair he'd like Arthur to bend over, and which armrest he'd like Arthur to grip. How many times he's going to come on Arthur's face, and at how many fingers he wants Arthur to shove up his own ass, and for how long before he's going to let Arthur come.
When Arthur has ideas, he doesn't explain anything. He just waltzes into Proclus headquarters, chats with the receptionist, and nonchalantly takes tea to Saito's office. "When are you done here?" he asks, and Saito will raise an eyebrow, and ask, "What do you have planned?" and Arthur will shrug, so Saito will fold up his papers and adjust his tie, and watch the heat flicker in Arthur's eyes.
He'll find out soon enough.
10. mas4 - Wanna Rude Boy (Kara vs. Rihanna)
The Black Rider has the best winnings record at the noodle shop dreamcade. Four months after Mr. Suits, as all the kids call him, shows up, he completely decimates The Black Rider's record in a three-way shoot-out between a seventeen year old otaku, a yakuza, and a matori officer that traumatizes the seventeen year old so badly he never comes back.
Tadashi finds the whole thing vaguely hilarious and Arthur has to bribe him with however much miso ramen Tadashi could ever want in his life to keep the kid from telling Saito about it.
So two weeks later, when Arthur goes under and finds himself face to face with a matte black riding helmet, he grunts, "Tadashi, you motherfucker," and revs his engine as hard as he can.
The Black Rider wins, of course, humiliatingly easily, and doesn't even spare Arthur a backwards glance when he walks away. Arthur wakes up screaming in the filthiest English he knows, to the shock of the other people in the dreamcade, but Saito has already left. Arthur barely contains himself taxiing to Saito's house. Saito opens the door too quickly to have been doing anything but waiting for Arthur with a glass of Scotch in one hand. "You're too easy," he tells Arthur, smiling crookedly and putting his arm against the doorframe to lean into Arthur.
Arthur shuts him up with a kiss.
A/N: I cheated in three ways. One, I actually created a list of pairings I wanted to write, and then used a random number generator to pick one, and ended up with Arthur/Saito, haha. Second, I didn't actually allow my iPod to generate random songs, mostly because right now it's loaded up with about five years worth of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue shows. So instead I let Mediamonkey generate 10 songs on DJ-mode, and then cut out a 35 minute ambient track (because that would be cheating) and a Radio Free Mars Talks (because c'mon). Third, I totally had to linger on drabble 10 because I needed it to end with Arthur getting his ass handed to him, and I spent about a minute of that song reading the opening pages of The Big Under instead of writing. Well. I hope it was fun at least. ♥ This really is just quick and dirty writing, isn't it? I swear one day I will actually write something of substance for this fandom.
Oh, yeah, the cut text? JYJ - Ayyy Girl feat Kanye West and Malik Yusuf. You know it, baby.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it’s over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
you know this life (i know your type)
arthur/saito. 10 short pieces. they live this life like there are no rules.
1. Justin Mauriello - What A Fool Believes
The first time after the Fischer inception that they met was when Saito showed up, unasked, to Arthur's rented apartment in Sydney with a new tuxedo draped on one arm and a bottle of champagne in the other. Arthur is in a threadbare tshirt and a pair of linen pants that he borrowed from Yusuf and never returned, and he raises an eyebrow so high it almost disappears into his hairline which, despite all his protestations, is indeed starting to recede.
"You already paid me," Arthur says, and then turns red when he thinks about what he's said.
"Consider this a chance for a bonus," Saito murmurs, and starts tugging at the bottom of Arthur's shirt as if he's always been used to being this close to Arthur.
They go to a cocktail party, but first Saito makes Arthur drink almost the entire bottle of champagne on the limo ride there. Arthur doesn't know how it happens but he's so pleasantly buzzed that he doesn't notice Saito's hand on the small of his back, the crook of his elbow, the swell of his ass, until he plays it back the next morning, hung over and half-naked in Saito's hotel bed.
"Jesus, they probably thought I was your--" Arthur starts, but doesn't finish, and Saito barks out a laugh, predatory.
He touches Arthur's bare skin for the first time that morning. Arthur has no complaints.
2. Conjure One - Extraordinary Ways
Two months later Saito gets involved in some nasty sumo fixing fiasco that Arthur knows nothing about and cares even less. He doesn't even hear about it until Saito shows up at his door, unruffled except for an ashy tear across the sleeve of his lovely slate-gray suit. "What happened to you?" Arthur says, unceremoniously hanging up on a rambling Eames.
"Car explosion," Saito growls, shrugging. "How many people know you live here?"
"No one knows I live here," Arthur says. "An exchange student from America named Christopher Yeazell lives here."
"Good," Saito says, and passes out right into Arthur, almost giving Arthur a concussion in the process.
Christopher Yeazell's apartment building mysteriously catches on fire a week later. By then Arthur and Saito are in Atami. "I left my third favorite suit there, you know," Arthur says, relaxing into the hot water of the outdoor bath.
"I'll buy you three more," Saito tells him and slaps him across the head with a towel.
3. QURULI - C'mon C'mon
The party is too hip to be arranged by Saito himself-- too many young people, too many peacock feathers affixed to girls' eyelashes, and the music too much like something Arthur comes across in a record store hidden three levels down in a subway basement. He suspects it was probably planned by one of the army of miniskirted, permed, and manicured ladies Saito calls his secretaries but Arthur knows are more like the finely honed and unused swords Saito keeps in his Kyoto house-- deadly, secretive, and never allowed to rust.
Arthur snags a cocktail off the plate of a passing waiter-- sake and something else, pomegranates probably, for the color-- and scans the crowd. Saito is sitting at the bar, in a nicely tailored blazer but also in jeans, which is just weird enough that Arthur doesn't recognize him the first time. Saito is chatting up the bartender, but Arthur knows he's been keeping an eye on Arthur. When Arthur starts to advance, Saito smiles with the corner of his mouth closest to Arthur.
"So?" Saito says, smoothly transitioning out of Japanese.
"You fucking liar," Arthur replies, just as smoothly.
"You found out," Saito says, quirking his mouth just a little bit more.
"If you wanted to see me, you didn't have to invent a mark," Arthur tells him. "You could have just called." He downs the rest of the cocktail just to see Saito's eyes flicker towards his mouth, and grins.
4. Alan Parsons Project - The Three of Me
You need to stop, Arthur tells him frantically. 2AM in Bangalore. Saito smiles, and Arthur can hear the teeth through the cell phone.
In good time, Mr. Arthur, Saito tells him, and hangs up.
*
He sees traces of Saito's hand everywhere. A car and anonymous chauffeur picking him up from the airport when he didn't ask for it. The security guard that is too easy to bribe. A manila envelope full of computer passwords. Flight logistics, blueprints, one time Arthur even arrives in his team's HQ to find a set of duplicate keys, wrapped in a silk tie, sitting on his laptop.
Saito has fingers everywhere, Cobb warned him, and Arthur had thought that what made him charming, and maybe it did when Saito was their employer.
Now, he doesn't know what to think.
*
If he's been asking questions, I haven't heard him, Eames mutters over a glass of whiskey. But then again, if Saito were asking questions, we wouldn't hear unless he wanted us to.
Arthur can feel Eames eye him critically, and he shifts uncomfortable in the bar stool. Whatever he wants, Arthur, Eames says, too warm in Arthur's ear, he's probably going to get. So just give in already.
Fuck off, Arthur snaps, shoving at his shoulder.
Then Saito walks into the bar, and Eames raises his hand in an easy greeting. Took you long enough, Eames calls out, grinning. He was just getting violent.
How much did he pay you? Arthur hisses. Eames doesn't even dignify that with an answer.
5. Pedro the Lion - A Simple Plan
Cobb orders a patty melt and fries. Arthur orders a salad and a Coke, watching Cobb eat, the way he keeps turning, absently, to one side, like he's too used to keeping James from getting ketchup on his t-shirt. It makes him smile, but it's a little sad. He doesn't know when Cobb got so used to having his kids around, and he doesn't know when he got so used to not having Cobb around.
"Eames tells me--" Cobb begins, then, flushing, merely wipes his hands on a napkin.
"Eames doesn't know shit," Arthur says.
"You don't know what Saito is up to," Cobb tells him, earnest, wrinkling his forehead. "He's probably just playing you, Arthur. You should be--"
"I can take care of myself," Arthur snaps.
6. Ultra Orange and Emmanuelle - Touch My Shadow
Arthur is the one who buys the Ferrari Enzo. Saito is the one who wants to go touge racing in Akagiyama. It's a near miss to falling to death when Saito shoves Arthur into the railing about three-fourths of the course in, and when Arthur tears out of his car at the end, fuming, he's so hopped up on adrenaline and fear that he doesn't feel it when Saito slams him into the bonnet of his car.
Saito's mouth is furious, darker than the night on Arthur's jaw, and even more dangerous, and Arthur gives as good as he gets, and it is the best sex either one of them has ever had.
7. Le Futur Pompiste - Don't Let Go
Saito has this fantasy. Two of them, actually. In one he adopts Arthur as a son and grooms him to take care of the Proclus subsidiaries. He'd teach him Japanese, how to pronounce Saito's name properly, how to separate the bones of a fish from the flesh without ruining the skeleton, how to seiza during a tea ceremony and unfold just as gracefully. He'd brush all the brash American out of him, tone it down to something so unbearably restrained that it's its own kind of seduction. He imagines the two of them at board meetings, the way they would seem like family, but deeper than family, like Arthur was merely a piece of Saito broken off and purified to lethality.
In the other one, he doesn't even bother with the adoption. He just makes Arthur his own, secretly, where no one else can see, like tending a secret garden, delighting in the singular act of possession, secluding him away from Cobb, from dream heists, from the world.
The second one is the most dangerous, and he only ever tells Arthur the first, and Arthur just snorts when he hears it.
I could have you all to myself, Saito wants to tell him, make him afraid, but he doesn't.
8. Hem - Leave Me Here
One morning they're in Amanohashidate and it rains. Arthur wakes up alone, to the sound of the open window, the rain hitting the great expanse of water that makes Amanohashidate the bridge to heaven, the smell of forests faraway, still and dark.
He searches frantically for Saito. They're in one of Saito's friends' residences, something once built for the seclusion of rich man's wife turned to Buddhism. There's a wide balcony in the back, and Arthur sometimes finds Saito there, smoking, his ankle cross over a knee, his expression vacant, but not this morning. This morning, Saito is in the garden, wearing a simple cotton yukata. One shoulder is sagging from the water, almost slipping away, and he is barefoot.
"Saito, what the hell," Arthur calls from the balcony, and when Saito looks back at him, it is like he is not even seeing Arthur.
"When is Cobb getting here?" Saito asks, in Japanese. Arthur stares back, stunned. "When is he coming for me?" Saito demands.
"I'm here for you," Arthur tells him dumbly, and he tastes the rain water in his mouth, and it is bitter and sweet at the same time, and Saito doesn't smile.
9. Garbage - Sleep Together
When Saito has ideas, he explains them in incredible specificity. Which fabrics he wants to use to bind up Arthur's wrists, which ones for the blindfold. How many lashes, exactly, of the rope. Which chair he'd like Arthur to bend over, and which armrest he'd like Arthur to grip. How many times he's going to come on Arthur's face, and at how many fingers he wants Arthur to shove up his own ass, and for how long before he's going to let Arthur come.
When Arthur has ideas, he doesn't explain anything. He just waltzes into Proclus headquarters, chats with the receptionist, and nonchalantly takes tea to Saito's office. "When are you done here?" he asks, and Saito will raise an eyebrow, and ask, "What do you have planned?" and Arthur will shrug, so Saito will fold up his papers and adjust his tie, and watch the heat flicker in Arthur's eyes.
He'll find out soon enough.
10. mas4 - Wanna Rude Boy (Kara vs. Rihanna)
The Black Rider has the best winnings record at the noodle shop dreamcade. Four months after Mr. Suits, as all the kids call him, shows up, he completely decimates The Black Rider's record in a three-way shoot-out between a seventeen year old otaku, a yakuza, and a matori officer that traumatizes the seventeen year old so badly he never comes back.
Tadashi finds the whole thing vaguely hilarious and Arthur has to bribe him with however much miso ramen Tadashi could ever want in his life to keep the kid from telling Saito about it.
So two weeks later, when Arthur goes under and finds himself face to face with a matte black riding helmet, he grunts, "Tadashi, you motherfucker," and revs his engine as hard as he can.
The Black Rider wins, of course, humiliatingly easily, and doesn't even spare Arthur a backwards glance when he walks away. Arthur wakes up screaming in the filthiest English he knows, to the shock of the other people in the dreamcade, but Saito has already left. Arthur barely contains himself taxiing to Saito's house. Saito opens the door too quickly to have been doing anything but waiting for Arthur with a glass of Scotch in one hand. "You're too easy," he tells Arthur, smiling crookedly and putting his arm against the doorframe to lean into Arthur.
Arthur shuts him up with a kiss.
A/N: I cheated in three ways. One, I actually created a list of pairings I wanted to write, and then used a random number generator to pick one, and ended up with Arthur/Saito, haha. Second, I didn't actually allow my iPod to generate random songs, mostly because right now it's loaded up with about five years worth of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue shows. So instead I let Mediamonkey generate 10 songs on DJ-mode, and then cut out a 35 minute ambient track (because that would be cheating) and a Radio Free Mars Talks (because c'mon). Third, I totally had to linger on drabble 10 because I needed it to end with Arthur getting his ass handed to him, and I spent about a minute of that song reading the opening pages of The Big Under instead of writing. Well. I hope it was fun at least. ♥ This really is just quick and dirty writing, isn't it? I swear one day I will actually write something of substance for this fandom.
Oh, yeah, the cut text? JYJ - Ayyy Girl feat Kanye West and Malik Yusuf. You know it, baby.