25. When You Grow Up Your Heart Dies 11/20
Fandom: Inception x Dark!Breakfast Club
Pairing(s): Arthur/Eames, Cobb/Mal
Summary: They went into detention with nothing in common. They witnessed something frightening that may or may not have actually happened: a dead body and blood on the walls spelling 528491. Can a nerd, a jock, a criminal, a pampered prince and basket case, brave crossing the social cliques in order to stick together and solve this mystery?
[the other parts are under the "breakfast club" tag]
Cobb waltzed Mal around the ballroom and she knew she was in trouble, but the good kind of trouble. As she looked into his soft, smiling blue eyes, she knew that this could be the beginning of the rest of her life. He treated her like she belonged here, in elegant gowns like this, in his arms like a real princess with her prince charming. She wanted it, and that’s what terrified her, that’s what made her do what she did next.
His eyes went huge as she palmed him discreetly through the front of his trousers. The prep gasped and spun her out just to get her away from him. His skin was red as he glanced frantically around to make sure no one saw that. Mal laughed loudly as she spun back into his arms.
“Are you crazy?” he hissed through a smile. Her beautiful laughter had drawn several pairs of eyes, and now the older couples were beaming and nodding as they discussed the picturesque couple the young pair made, despite her somewhat vulgar way of talking. So long as she kept her mouth shut, she was perfect. Meanwhile, couples their age whispered behind their hands and snorted.
Mal giggled, nose wrinkling. “What? Like none of them have ever done that before,” she said lowly in her French accent. Cobb licked his lips and coughed lightly. “Not in the middle of a crowded ballroom, no, I don’t think so. Didn’t I mention this is one of those insanely uptight, conservative clubs that is all about image and propriety?”
“Once or twice, I think,” Mal said, bumping noses with him and wiggling her hips a little under his hand. He laughed. “You are crazy.”
Breaking over the music and the low conversation of the dancers on the floor came sudden laughter from the far corner of the room, where the men not dancing had gathered to talk business and sports safely away from the gaggle of gossiping women at the other end. Mal looked over her shoulder and saw that Arthur stood in the middle of the pack, leading the conversation with dimples and a suave attitude that had the others (even the full grown men) in rapt attention like they were in the presence of their idol.
“Look at that!” she said happily. Cobb laughed through his nose. “Yup. Just goes to show that a fine suit and a little bullshit is all it takes to own this crowd, even for a basket case like Arthur.”
Mal hummed pensively. “The magic part is that we know he is beautiful underneath it all,” she said. Her big green eyes focused on Cobb and she smiled wickedly, eyes hooded. “Him and you both.”
A bashful laugh bubbled out of the prep and he bit his lip, but quickly owned the compliment with little humility. “Thanks.”
Mal laughed and combed her fingers over his ear. Then someone tapped him on the shoulder.
“May I cut in?” Eames asked formally. The dancing couple traded an inquisitive look and Mal shrugged. Cobb winked and handed her over. Eames swept her up in a sloppier, but no less enthusiastic, waltz. They cut a path through the crowd by no mistake.
“Game plan?” Mal asked softly.
“Fischer’s distracted,” he informed her, turning Mal to show where Ariadne was joining the dance floor with Bobby, her little face determined and bold. Mal had to give the girl major points for courage, not to mention the femme fatal thing she had going on. Mal giggled, “Sexy!”
“I know, right?” Eames agreed with a huff. Mal’s lips quirked as she looked at the jock, who then spun her to show her the crowd Arthur was working over like a pro, and then the other corner of the room, where Cobb and Saito were being equally enrapturing to the doting flock of ladies, always ready to talk about their daughters to such handsome young men. “Arthur and Cobb have captured the attention of any adult who might be monitoring doors to private parts of the house.”
As casually as their unsuited reputations had trained them to be, Mal and Eames waltzed right up to a specific door and went through it. Just before exiting the ballroom, Eames caught Arthur’s eye, and with a barely conceivable nod of his head, Arthur wished them luck. Eames spun Mal through and slipped in after her.
It was a hallway, empty and much quieter than the party.
“Which way?” Mal asked.
“Left. Stairs. Right at the top,” Eames said, copying Saito’s instructions verbatim. He took Mal’s hand to guide her, and also maybe because felt safer to hold onto someone, least alarms start flashing or bodyguards appeared to Taser them for trespassing---ridiculous notions, but they’d both seen too many spy films. She didn’t object, but tightened the grip appreciatively as they hurried up the stairs and hung a right.
“Last room on the right,” Eames said, slightly breathlessly, glancing over his shoulder. Mal looked too, but they weren’t being chased. Bobby’s bedroom door was open. They stepped in and paused like maybe laser lights crisscrossed the floor and they would need a moment to figure out the pattern.
Mal scanned the clean and tidy room and huffed. “Weird guy. This room is too clean.”
Eames laughed. “The Fischer’s have a maid. Bobby complains all the time about not having privacy. She keeps finding his porn and telling him mom.”
The pair shared a delighted chuckle over the naughty information. But then Mal’s eyes flicked over the room once more, and her amusement waned. “So no sanctuary-can’t trust his own room to be safe. I can see how that can push a kid into madness.”
“I still don’t know about him actually paying your step brother to do that,” Eames said as he started unceremoniously opening drawers. They were looking for Bobby’s old phone, the one with the ominous phone number which the swimmer claimed to have lost weeks ago. Eames wanted to believe him, but a pit in the bottom of his stomach wouldn’t let him. It all just made too much sense. But he kept talking to beat that fear back. “I mean, for one thing, it’s not like Bobby gets an allowance like half of Saito’s. His parents are pretty thrifty compared to, you know, all the other rich people.”
Mal went to the closet and started inspecting the inside of each shoe on the rack and said what the jock was fearing. “Life is shitty sometimes, O. It’s unfair and it’s ugly. Just because we want to love someone and believe they are good, it doesn’t make it so. Me and my father had to learn that the hard way.”
The jock’s eyes moved down her arms to the cigar burns on her wrists. Mal’s jaw tightened and she pulled the shoe rack over, spilling all fifteen pairs of shoes into the floor. Eames blanched. “The fuck you doing? Put it back! They’ll know we’ve been here!”
“Good. I want them to know. I want everyone responsible for this shit to know it’s not okay to ruin people’s lives!” She ripped all the clothes from the hangers by fistfuls, throwing them every which way. Eames watched her snarling attack for several moments before the anger possessed him too and he dragged the drawer in his hand out of its tracks and up ended it.
It felt good to wreck something this neat and orderly. Like his life had been before last Saturday: close to perfect, and then torn to pieces, haunted every night by the image of a dead girl, hunted by a faceless killer, taunted with the idea that the killer could be as close as a best friend. As a brother.
It was not okay. And he didn’t want the world to keep pretending like it was. So Eames upended every drawer, only barely remembering to look through the contents for any evidence before going to the next item to wreck.
Together, he and the criminal worked around the room and met in the middle, breathing heavily, tear streaked and still empty handed. Mal felt infinitely better-nothing like a good vandalism to really unleash the heavy stuff. She lifted the skirt of her long gown to kick a few DVDs around and overturn a heavy school book before she noted that Eames was shaking.
She double looked him. “O?”
A short but heavy breath escaped him, and Mal stepped back in alarm. The jock was just about to cry. “O?” she asked again. Then in a fit of she didn’t know what-maternal instinct? Basic human compassion? (Jesus what was happening to her?) She put her arms around the jock and squeezed. “Hey,” she said. He lifted his arms and held back. “Hey,” she crooned again. “It’s okay.”
“No it’s not, it’s all shit,” he rasped. “All of it.”
“Not all of it,” she insisted, latching onto that bigger thing that had been in her chest for the last couple of days. “I take back what I said earlier, it’s not all ugly. There is beauty in it too. Like Dom. And Arthur. Don’t you think Arthur is beautiful?”
He trembled, but it turned out to be repressed laughter. “Yes. God, he’s too beautiful to be real, I think.”
She giggled, but the honesty with which the jock spoke was something she couldn’t touch it was so pure, so like a white hot stove, she avoided it. Despite the moment being in critically serious territory, Mal couldn’t sabotage like she had downstairs. It was just a friendship blossoming here, anyway. Not something that would kill her and make her brand new like what Cobb promised in the way he touched her.
She felt the upset jock calm down, and after a moment, he pulled away, embarrassed and drying his eyes. He cleared his throat and went pointedly back to looking through the mess. “Thanks, Mal. I needed a hug.”
“Any time, O,” she said fondly. The all American athlete was quickly becoming her favorite.
“Hey,” he said suddenly, lifting something large and heavy out of the pile. A trapper-keeper. He unzipped it and flipped it open. An obscenely thick sheaf of paper was stuffed into the three rings, covered in Bobby Fischer’s handwriting. He thumbed through the book. “It’s a journal or something!”
Mal clapped and said something in French. Eames closed and zipped the notebook, suddenly back to spy mod. He looked all around, like there might be cameras. “Let’s go.”
“How are we going to get out with this thing, it’s huge,” she said.
“Here, put it under your dress.”
“What?” she asked, batting his hands away. He looked up at her. “Walk with it between your knees or something.”
She snorted. “That’ll be even more obvious with me wobbling through the crowd like I have to pee!”
He snickered, “Well, any other plans?”
She chewed on her lip and shrugged one shoulder. “Well, we have the good old fall back.”
“Which is?”
“Misdirection-haven’t you ever wondered how I managed to steal that Championship cup right out of the gym last year?”
Eames laughed hollowly at the memory of the scandal. The cup had turned up a week later with a bonsai growing out of it. Mal was infamously behind it all. The truly spectacular part was that the little tree was still there and being grafted to look like a minotaur, so she had a legacy.
“While everyone else is looking one way, we run the other way,” Mal said, speaking in a strained whisper as they moved down the hallway at a fast pace.
“Well, I’d love to be throwing another penalty shot in the last five seconds of the biggest game of the year, but this isn’t really the place for a random game of ball.”
“But it is a ball, and we really need to get out of here fast, since we...” they both looked over their shoulders at the door retreating behind them. Then Mal grabbed his arm, stopping him at the top of the stairs. “Oh, I have a perfect plan!” she said excitedly.
...
Arthur had, by Mr. Fischer Sr.’s reckoning, earned a flute of champagne for being such a splendid young man. He took it gratefully and downed the foreign, fizzy drink. He’d just ran out of clever jokes and said all that he knew and understood about the stock market from his crash course on it an hour ago, so the teenager busied himself with the drink and cast his eyes casually around the room, pulse pounding in his ears. Eames and Mal had been gone for too long, and now Cobb and Saito were missing too. Both had extracted themselves from the fawning ladies with their phones in hand and disappeared.
Bobby was now in the middle of his second dance with Ariadne-a dance he probably wouldn’t have asked for if Saito hadn’t strolled over to ask for her in order to stall some more. Their competitive friendship being what it was Ariadne had had to do very little manipulation to keep Fischer dancing with her, Bobby sweeping her away again just to spite Saito.
She now moved around the floor with Bobby, her eyes huge and her moth gaping like a fish-as she was utterly out of scripted lines like Arthur was. The two tiny but talented deceivers were on their own, desperately trying to hide their unique, eccentric feathers from this stuffy lot least they draw too much attention and someone asked who they were and how they got in here.
“Arthur,” Eames said, suddenly at his shoulder.
Spitting slightly into his glass, Arthur dried his chin and looked at his boyfriend. “Eames!”
Eames ignored the other suits, even Saito’s father, who asked a very direct question about championships. The team captain held out his hand to Arthur. “Care to dance?”
“What?” Arthur asked, eyes wide. Before getting out of the car, Saito and Cobb had given very subtle but clear instructions for the two of them to blend in as much as possible. Maybe it was the champagne, maybe it was because Arthur really didn’t give a fuck, or maybe it was just the look in Eames’ eye (deep in his grey gaze was a look that Arthur felt all the way through) but the basket case shoved his champagne glass into the nearest prep’s chest and took Eames’ hand with a happy smirk. “Okay.”
Only after that did he realize the music was for a tango.
“Uh, Eames, what are you doing?” Arthur asked breathlessly as the crowd parted for them with laughter. Boys will be boys-the adults automatically believed this to be some sort of practical joke, some display for the girls, a comical upheaval for the night.
“Distraction, darling, now sell it.”
“But do you even know how to tango?”
On cue, the music started and Eames took the first dramatic step reminiscent (if not at all accurate) of all the tango scenes in the movies. He made sure to smolder, which drew delighted giggles from all the girls, and fully belly laughs from the guys, and a shiver from Arthur.
“I think it was you who taught me that dancing is 95% acting like you know what you’re doing, and the rest being sexy enough to get away with it.”
Arthur laughed as he allowed Eames to lead him around the floor, the pair of them throwing everything they knew about the dance into it. Arthur, apparently, knew a great deal of it-or at least, he was damn good at faking it. In no less than a minute, the pair of young men fell into a heated dance of passion that held the entire crowd’s gawking laughter. One woman, Fischer’s step mother, started shouting about dares ruining nice evenings and how even very talented actors should obey the laws of custom-but everyone else was getting a pretty good kick out of it. The kids from their class were getting that extra special kick of seeing a rumor confirmed, and knowing that it wasn’t a game-that O Eleven was dancing with his boyfriend.
Cell phones recorded and took pictures of this outing, including Saito’s and Ariadne’s, when they should have been running with Mal and Cobb, who’d cut out of the place the second the band struck up the ominous first notes.
Eames wasn’t thinking so much about the crowd as the raging hard-on he was battling for the sake of the public setting. Arthur was too, Eames could feel it when his sloppy dance frame slotted their bodies together-or when Arthur wrapped his leg around him or leaned into him seductively, all the while mirroring Eames’ deadly smolder in a poker face that was killing the jock on the inside. They were both trembling and beginning to sweat, and having the time of their short lives.
So when the song ended, and the entire room was silenced, it wasn’t by any conscious choice of theirs, it just happened; they began to make out
The conscious choices came later, when the more conservative members of the club flew into an outrage and began shouting, and Arthur started shouting back, and Bobby started shouting at his mother, and girls started crying, and fathers started threatening, and Eames shoved the first person who tried to escort him bodily off the premises.
The scuffle ended with both of them dumped into the grass outside the gate by the very same beefy bodyguards Eames had feared would kill him for going upstairs. From the open door of the house fifty yards away, they could still hear Mrs. Fischer and her friends shrieking. The gate slammed. A few minutes later, the front door of the house closed, silencing the old bat’s piercing cries of abominations.
Eames lay on the ground, looking up at the night sky, at the edge of the clouds that blocked over half the stars and the moon. He could feel the cold of the night and the dew of the grass seeping into Saito’s clothes, but he didn’t care. His eyes stung and the words from inside still echoed in his head.
“Hey, are you okay?” Arthur asked, sitting up. He stood and dusted his pants. If he’d been in his own clothes, he’d of started rolling around in the grass. Instead, he folded his arms against the shivers he had that were not from cold, and he pushed his shiny toe into Eames’ thigh. “Owen? Breathe!”
Eames gasped and drew in a staggered breath. “No.”
“Hey,” Arthur said, letting anger thicken his voice. “Fuck them, alright? Now get up before I-“ he cut off and kicked at the air. Eames blinked away the fuzzy vision and sniffed. “Before you what?”
Arthur paced back and forth, hands on his lips, livid. “Before I freak out! You’re closing off or something and it’s freaking me out! Get up and shout or cry or dance or laugh or something! Please!”
Eames took another peek at Arthur. His clothes were ruffled and slightly grass stained, and his hair had been rearranged in the scuffle, or he’d run his hands through it backwards or something, because it stood in every direction and was just long enough to tickle his eyelashes. His face was pale and the expression so open and terrified, that Eames did feel something. He felt like he would never be as brave about any of this as Arthur was.
The jock pushed himself into a sitting position, dragged a knee up to rest his elbow on, and scratched his forehead. “I’m sorry-I-just give me a minute okay?”
Arthur looked annoyed and opened his mouth, but the gate clattered open again, and Saito and Ariadne rushed out. Eames stood and brushed at the dampness on his clothes as the geek threw her arms around each of them. “Oh my God, guys, are you okay?” she asked. She hugged Eames second so she didn’t let go of him all the way, just dropped and arm and turned to look back at Arthur, “That was so scary! I can’t believe they said all those things! What total assholes! But you really told them, Arthur!”
“Thanks,” Arthur said. Eames nodded. He had been brilliant, and had made all the right points. Eames had said nothing. He didn’t feel very good. Saito stood as a silent as the night around them, looking displeased with the world he claimed.
Close behind them many others were leaving the party early too, so the crowd migrated down the street to where Saito had parked. Mal and Cobb jumped out of the Hummer. Cobb had his phone in his hand. “Guys! I just heard, Christ, are you okay?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Arthur said, glancing at Eames again.
“Did you get it?” Saito asked Mal, changing the topic for his captain’s sake. She shook out of it, and lifted the heavy trapper-keeper triumphantly. “What kind of petty thief do you take me for?”
“What is that?” Ariadne asked readily. Arthur was glad for the distraction as well and turned his attention to it.
“We haven’t started reading it yet,” Cobb said. “I thought we should all do it together.”
“Thanks, but you guys go ahead without me,” Eames said. “I just want to go home.”
Like a paper airplane folded wrong, the usual frenzy over the latest lead or evidence dropped to the cold pavement and an awkward silence fell on the breakfast club. Then Saito said casually, with all the skills of a future host to billion-dollar business parties, “Of course, no problem. But let me drive you there. It’s too dangerous for any of us to walk alone at night.”
But especially the two of you, he didn’t say it, but it was the understood second thought as they climbed back into the hummer. Eames took the front seat again, and Arthur sat behind the driver’s side so he could see his boyfriend’s face. Because just now, he wasn’t sure if he had a boyfriend anymore.
Mal took the seat next to Arthur and put her arm around him reassuringly.
Cobb cleared his throat after the car went into motion with the same hurtful silence riding along. He switched on the interior light for the backseat and opened the book on his thigh. Ariadne tugged it over until they could both see, and she began to read it.
Eames hunkered low in his seat and shut his eyes.
Chapter 12