Keep the Car Running (2/31)
Sep. 24th, 2014 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (2/31)
Author -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earlgreytea68
Rating - Adult
Characters - Arthur, Eames, Sherlock, John, Mycroft, Moriarty, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, Dom Cobb
Spoilers - Through "His Last Vow" in the Sherlock universe. This takes place post-movie, so I guess spoilers for "Inception"? But just for the basic fact that it's about dream thieves, nothing in this story depends overly much on the movie's plot.
Disclaimer - I don't own any of them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - If Mycroft Holmes lived in a world where people could steal information from the subconsciouses of others, tell me he wouldn't be all over that when he had Moriarty in custody.
Chapter 2
Arthur had a cell phone. A secret cell phone that only a few people knew the number to. His parents and his sister. Dom, because at about the time Arthur had let Dom sob himself to sleep on his shoulder, Arthur had thought maybe he should acknowledge that he possibly no longer behaved like he was just Dom’s point man.
And Eames. Not that Eames knew he had the secret number. Arthur knew that Eames assumed that every number he’d ever had for Arthur was a burner cell phone, specific to the job they were working. Arthur did keep a new burner cell phone for each job, so Eames’s assumption made sense. Arthur had given Eames the number, feeling like an idiot, because at the time he and Eames had worked together a grand total of twice. Arthur couldn’t believe how starry-eyed and foolish he’d felt when their paths had crossed again, but still he couldn’t resist giving Eames that little piece of himself that Eames was never even going to know about.
Eames had used it for the course of the job, and the next job they’d had together, Eames had leaned forward and said, Normally I’d at least make a pretense of buying you a drink before asking you this, but you, darling, owe me your phone number, I believe. Arthur hadn’t said, You have the secret phone number that will stick with me and always be answered; Arthur had said, Do you get phone numbers from your conquests, Eames? I thought you just made do with hurried alleyways and fake names. Eames had given him an exaggeratedly sad look and said, Darling. What you must think of me. And Arthur had said, in the world’s most blatant lie, since he had made Eames the fifth recipient of the coveted Arthur Official For Real Cell Phone Number, I don’t. And then he had written out the number of the latest burner cell phone.
So Eames didn’t know he had the super-special Arthur phone number, but Arthur felt secure enough in the knowledge that if Eames ever really, really needed him for something, Eames would call every number he’d ever had for Arthur, which would eventually lead him to the one that Arthur would answer. Keeping track of Eames could have been a full-time job, and Arthur had a full-time job, most of the time, so when he was immersed in peeling back layers of research to get at the heart of a mark and didn’t have time to send out feelers about whether Eames was causing trouble somewhere, he depended on the continued silence of his phone. (His family seldom called him, because they thought he had a Very Important Job and they hated to bother him. Dom sent him endless amounts of photo texts of the kids. Arthur had his texts on silent, and every week or so he cleaned them out and sent Dom generic appreciations of them. Not because he didn’t love the kids, but mostly because he didn’t know how to say, Yes, they’re very cute in the endless number of iterations Dom seemed to think him capable of.)
All of that was to say that Arthur should have expected that the one time in his entire life when Eames would call him between jobs, he wouldn’t call the right phone. That was Eames to a painful T.
Arthur was running point on a job he hated. Well, not true: the job was actually rather interesting as corporate espionage went. Lots of bruised alliances and boardroom dalliances and Arthur didn’t often admit that he had a weakness for soap operatic drama but he totally did. So he didn’t mind that he was spending his time wading through surveillance on the mark, because the mark was juggling three separate mistresses, and Arthur was having a fascinating time trying to determine which one the mark might be most likely to confide in.
What Arthur really didn’t like about the job was the rest of the people on the team. It was a subpar team, with a not great extractor to get the information, and a flighty architect who was building a dreamscape that Arthur suspected was shaky and unreliable. Arthur knew it was risky and reckless of him to have agreed to this team, not because they’d betray him—he’d never agree if that was the case—but because they were stupid. But Arthur was good at what he did, organizing the entire job, getting the research into comprehensible chunks and the plan into shape, and considered a less-than-sharp team to be a challenge. Besides which, he wasn’t crazy about most of the dreamsharers out there these days. If he waited for a team he wanted to work with, he’d never take any jobs. And it was true that Arthur didn’t need the money and could live the rest of his life on what he already had, even slightly extravagantly, but Arthur liked to work.
He had just taken a long, unwinding vacation to Fiji and been bored out of his skull the whole time, but told himself that he’d liked reading the collected works of Michael Ondaatje on the beach. He had flown back to the States and the job offer had been waiting for him, and he had taken it because he was vacationed out and also because the other thing waiting for him had been the rumor that Eames was in London with nothing to do, and that meant that Arthur went through his periodic go-surprise-Eames crisis wherein he fantasized thus:
He flew to wherever Eames was said to be and showed up at whatever place Eames happened to be crashing (or broke in, it depended on whether or not Eames was at home). Then he would say something stupid like, Are you as bored as I am? Can you think of anything we can do to alleviate that? And he knew that Eames would suggest something filthy and crude and delicious, because that much was obvious about Eames, and the reason why Arthur never engaged in any of his go-surprise-Eames impulses was because what he knew he would say in response to whatever innuendo Eames threw at him was: Let’s get a fabulous penthouse somewhere together made entirely of glass so we can see people coming, a shared closet where your awful clothes nestle against my nice ones and maybe my nice ones bleed over onto them and become a good influence, a bed with matching guns under our pillows and we sprawl in it lazily when we’re home on Sunday mornings and I try to do the crossword puzzle and pretend to snap at you for trying to seduce me instead, and a puppy we take with us when we’re on jobs. And Eames would say in response, staring at him, Arthur. What the fuck?
So Arthur didn’t do these things. Arthur took jobs with subpar teams instead.
Arthur bit into an apple while kicked back in his chair reading an entertaining transcript of his mark juggling simultaneous phone calls with two of his clueless mistresses, and that was when the current burner phone vibrated where he’d tossed it on the table next to the laptop.
It shouldn’t have been vibrating. What the hell could they want with him? They had gone out to pick up lunch, for Christ’s sake. Arthur thought it sourly but absently, his eyes still on the transcript as he leaned over to pick the phone up.
And then he frowned. Because he didn’t recognize the number.
Arthur leveled his chair to the floor and put the apple on the table and opened a new e-mail. As he answered the phone, he typed out, Job’s off, because he did not fuck around when his security had been so obviously compromised, and sent it to the team.
And said, “Hello?”
“Artie, dear, how are things?” said the jovial voice on the other end.
It sounded like Eames. Or rather, someone doing a very bad impression of Eames, getting everything just slightly wrong. Arthur fished for the die in his pocket and tossed it on the table. It came up four, and then four again the second time. Not a dream, then. Arthur replaced it and said, “Who’s this?” suspiciously.
“Well, now I’m just offended,” said the voice that sounded like Eames, in Eames’s accent. “It’s Eames, sweetheart.”
It wasn’t, was Arthur’s kneejerk reaction. Because Arthur knew each and every term of endearment Eames had ever called him, and dear and sweetheart didn’t make the list. And never, ever Artie, because Arthur didn’t care if Eames was his weak point, he’d graze a bullet past his weak point’s ear if he’d ever called him Artie.
“How did you get this number?” asked Arthur.
“Artie, Artie, Artie, you really do wound me with your low expectations of me.” The odd voice that sounded just like Eames kept talking, while Arthur continued to feel off-kilter with confusion. “I know it isn’t traditional for the forger to be the one doing the rounding-up, but I have got a job for you and I need a point man.”
It sounded like Eames. Exactly like Eames. Except for the odd, wrong things that weren’t Eames at all. But Arthur wasn’t in a dream. So who would call him up pretending to be Eames? This was clearly a trap. “Who’s the extractor?” asked Arthur, trying to spin the conversation out as long as he could.
“None yet. I started at the top, precious. Your choice.”
“You’re one slip of the tongue away from ‘sugarlips,’ you realize,” remarked Arthur.
“I was going to go with ‘honeysuckle’ next,” replied Eames, and at that Arthur knew it was Eames he was talking to, because Arthur would know Eames and his ridiculous, stupid, pointless banter anywhere, which meant that Eames was behaving this way because he was warning him off of something.
Arthur, thoughtful and paying very close attention, put his feet up on the desk next to his forgotten apple and said, casually, “Tell me all about this job, tulip.”
There was a pause, and Arthur could hear Eames struggling not to react to that. It was definitely Eames, and this conversation was definitely being listened to. “The job is in London,” Eames said eventually.
“Doing what?”
“Dreamsharing.”
Arthur almost laughed. Eames was the most ridiculous man he had ever met. “Illuminating,” said Arthur.
“I know, I should have led with that. I hope I haven’t led you astray with this entire conversation. Come to London, dear, and I’ll tell you the rest of it.”
He couldn’t agree too easily, he thought. He didn’t want to raise the suspicions of whoever was listening in. “I am in the middle of something.”
“Tell your tailor you’ll come back later. This is worth your while and, more importantly, interesting.”
The thing about this entire conversation was that if Eames had ever called Arthur wanting him on a job, Arthur knew instinctively he would have gotten the full seduction. Eames considered himself devastatingly charming—Arthur would only have admitted he agreed under severe torture—and he would have worked that angle hard. This conversation would have been full of purrs and low licks of phrases, of Eames wrapping Arthur’s name in that accent and making it sound like another word entirely, of the hollow flatteries Arthur knew Eames could concoct with the same ease he dreamed himself entirely different identities, of darling and love and pet and petal and not a single one of the things Eames had called him so far.
Arthur hated himself for how much he wished he’d gotten this conversation without some nameless person somewhere clearly holding a gun to Eames’s head.
“I don’t make decisions about jobs before I know what they entail,” he said.
“Of course,” agreed Eames, and waited.
“So I’d be dropping what I’m doing—”
“You own enough suits, cuddlekins,” said Eames, and Arthur winced.
“Eames. I am not at the tailor.”
“You haven’t take up yoga, have you? Actually, wait, scratch that, have you taken up yoga? I find suddenly that I would support that.”
Arthur ignored him. “And flying all the way out there just because you assure me I’d find the job interesting?”
“Well, of course, Artie,” said Eames. “Don’t you trust me?”
It was the most out-of-place thing to say in the conversation. It wasn’t the type of thing that was said out loud. Because of course Arthur trusted Eames, and vice versa. The thing that people outside of dreamsharing didn’t understand was that it depended heavily on trust. Exploiting other people’s most vulnerable states made you keenly aware of your own. Eames had left himself in Arthur’s hands over and over in the times they’d worked together, trusting him to stand lookout over him when he was defenseless. And Arthur, deep in seventeen different illegal activities, had always trusted Eames to imagine their way out of it.
But that wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about. You didn’t say to your dreamsharing team before you all went under, I’m trusting you all to be competent and not to stab me in the back. It was understood. And sometimes the trust was lacking—Arthur was in one of those situations at the moment—and it made for unhappy jobs. The very best dreamsharers got there by having reputations for being trustworthy. And Eames, for all that his natural instinct in life seemed to be to lie, always, in all situations, had an impeccable reputation for being trustworthy in a job.
Although if Arthur was being strictly honest, he’d trusted Eames the first time he’d spoken to him and had thought afterward, That is the sign of a really excellent forger.
But he heard what Eames was really saying, in this entire odd phone call. Stay far away from London. Do not get involved. I’m in trouble and you shouldn’t be, too. Trust me.
So Arthur said, “Yes, I trust you, Rupert Eames.” Message received.
Arthur hung up the burner phone, put it on the floor, and stepped on it.
The rest of his team came bursting into the room, exclamations tumbling over each other.
“What do you mean, ‘job’s off’?” from Hayes.
“Do you know how much money’s at stake?” from Lucy.
“Fuck you, not all of us have a fortune tucked away in off-shore accounts.” From Hayes again.
Arthur shrugged on his coat, straightened the knot of his tie, and said, “Security’s compromised. The job is too risky. You can do it if you like, but you’ll do it with a different point man.” He started to walk out.
Of course they wouldn’t just let him go. Idiots. Hayes flew at him and Arthur had to knock an elbow into his throat and then lift his gun to keep Lucy from following after him with her clawing nails.
Lucy’s eyes flashed mutiny at him, but Arthur didn’t care because he was holding the gun and was about to be an ocean away. Lucy wasn’t one for revenge because she couldn’t hold a thought in her head for more than a few seconds; her projections flickered so much they made Arthur dizzy, and he didn’t understand how she had ever gotten into dreamsharing. “So you’re just going to walk away?” she snarled.
Smartest thing she’d ever said, thought Arthur. Which was unkind, perhaps, but Eames had gone and gotten himself in enough trouble that he had called Arthur to warn him away, so Arthur was in an unkind mood. “Exactly. Get another point man. We’re not that far along. You can get it done. I think Mondavi’s available.”
“I don’t get it,” Lucy said, crossing her arms and ignoring the way Hayes was still choking on the floor at their feet. “How have you made it this long if you spook this easily?”
“Mondavi’s available,” Arthur repeated calmly. “And I’m walking away now.”
He tucked his gun back into place. Lucy breathed furiously but didn’t make a move for him, and Arthur walked easily away.
It was a bright, clear day, and Arthur drove himself to the airport and bought three separate tickets under three separate names. Two of them were Eames-provided aliases, which he used out of sentimentality. The third was his own name, which he used to buy the ticket to Heathrow. Because he wasn’t going there to lay low, after all.
***
Arthur never even made it through passport control in Heathrow, but he hadn’t expected to. He had spent the entire flight musing about whatever Eames had gotten himself into. Truthfully, although Eames was an enormous idiot who was almost always getting himself into pointless amounts of trouble, he was also very good at getting himself out of it. The thing about Eames was that he was the most risk-averse conman Arthur had ever met. Eames liked living too much. Which was not to say that Arthur wanted to die, but Arthur also thought if he died young and violently it would serve him right for choosing the career he had. Whereas Eames seemed to think that it would be an epic tragedy for the world to be deprived of him so soon.
Eames was excellent at dreamsharing, at forgery, at stealing things, so Arthur couldn’t imagine a job going wrong on him, and anyway dreamsharing was a small world and people knew he knew Eames and would have given him word about that. So Arthur mused about Eames’s other hobbies. Eames was a terrible gambler, but he was good at cheating every once in a while to keep his head above water, so it was unlikely to be a gambling debt gone bad. And he had a habit of leaving behind a trail of romantic conquests, but Arthur had not yet seen a single one complain, which always made Arthur conclude that Eames was both fantastic in bed and also annoying outside of bed. And somehow Eames was charming enough that he always seemed to elude the significant others of his conquests as well.
Not that it made any sense for a love affair gone wrong to insist that Eames call Arthur for help. Because that was clearly what was going on. If Eames had needed—or wanted—Arthur’s help, he would have called him and he would have asked for it. Arthur was fairly confident of that, fairly confident that Eames would have been straightforward about it, even if he didn’t know how guaranteed that help would have been. Eames hadn’t wanted to get Arthur involved. That was what every strange oddity about the conversation had been about: I’m saying one thing to you, but I’m meaning something else entirely.
So whatever it was that had happened to Eames, the object of the whole thing had been to get to Arthur. Which made Arthur somehow responsible for this whole thing, in a strange way that made him feel fidgety, anxious for the gun he’d been unable to smuggle on the plane with him. Who would have known that the way to get to Arthur was through Eames? How many people in the universe knew that? Arthur would have wagered none. Possibly Dom, who knew Arthur very well and had noticed his chattering overeagerness around Eames during the second job, before Arthur had clamped down on it. But he didn’t think Dom would have pegged it as the crush that it was.
More frighteningly, it was someone who had known enough to get to Eames and had known the number of Arthur’s latest burner phone. Who the hell would have known both of those facts? Arthur couldn’t come up with an answer other than someone very not good who had cornered Eames sufficiently for Eames to cave and call him while desperately warning him off. Eames wasn’t terribly protective by nature. Eames had once given him a empty gun to defend himself without telling him it had no bullets in it (It’s all in your head, love—you thought you had bullets in the gun, so it was the same as having bullets in the gun. Eames had been very unconvinced by Arthur’s teeth-gritted assertion that it was definitely not the same). So if Eames was suddenly warning him off of something then he was genuinely worried in a way that alarmed Arthur.
So, having pulled together all of the facts, Arthur concluded that he wasn’t going to make it through passport control, that he was never going to get the opportunity to retrieve his gun from his checked luggage, and that Eames had better damn well appreciate all of this trouble he was going to on his behalf.
Arthur didn’t even lift an eyebrow when he was pulled aside. He let himself be frisked without a word of protest. Then he was shown into a sleek black car that pulled neatly away from Heathrow and into traffic.
Arthur had been to London before, but he’d been most places before, and he was terrible at remembering them. His world was a constant whir of changing meeting places in interchangeable locales and dreamscapes that he had to memorize and then discard by the next job. Keeping in mind shadow locations, layouts of other places, was dangerous when you were in a brand new dream and needed to know exactly where you were going next, so Arthur only remembered the place he had to remember at that moment. He didn’t remember London. So he spent much of the drive alternating between curiously watching out the window and searching the deserted back seat for something he could use as a weapon.
He came up empty on the weapon front by the time the car drew to a stop. By his guess, they were somewhere in central London. It was very busy, and all the buildings were tall, new, modern, glass. It was architecture Arthur liked, all clean, unfussy lines and well-utilized space, but Arthur barely registered it as he was led by his escorts through a lobby to an elevator. He was busy trying to plot out the place’s escape routes. He didn’t have much of a plan at present, because he didn’t know enough about what was going on, but he was taking copious notes in his head about everything. As soon as he got a moment alone, he was going to fill pages of his Moleskine with his observations, relieved that they’d let him keep it.
The elevator opened directly onto a fancy marble vestibule. Arthur took the hint he got from his escorts and stepped out. Off to his left was a sunken living room surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a to-die-for London view.
And Eames, dressed in one of those painful shirts he insisted on wearing and a wrinkled pair of pants, sat up from where he’d been lounging on the couch, spotted him, and said flatly, “I am going to fucking kill you.”
Behind Arthur his escorts, apparently unconcerned about this threat, closed the elevator door.
***
Eames had been held captive before. It generally involved being tied to some unpleasant chair, and his hands would fall asleep from cut-off circulation and his wrists would chafe against the binding, and Eames would be bored to tears waiting for whoever was holding him to make some sort of mistake. Which they always did, because there was no reason to hold Eames captive except because you were stupid, and so Eames usually benefitted from having really epically idiotic enemies.
Eames had never been held captive like this. It was a ridiculously posh hotel suite that he wouldn’t have sprung for, not even in his most flush moments. And it was alarming as fuck, because his clothes were in the wardrobe. Everything he owned, as far as he could tell. Which, granted, wasn’t much, because Eames’s life motto was travel light, live lighter. But still, Eames didn’t like the fact that most of his worldly possessions were there. It was…creepy. To give it the mildest adjective he could.
He also didn’t really like that they’d given him back his wallet and his poker chip, almost with a smirk, as if they enjoyed how powerless he would still be, even with everything he could want. They didn’t give him his mobile or his gun, and Eames liked that that at least was a concession to the fact that they thought he could do something to get away. The phone in the suite was also dead, and Eames spent a little while looking at it and wishing he knew enough about anything like that to try to fix it.
It was late by the time he’d been deposited in the hotel suite, and seeing nothing else for it, Eames ate some of the fruit that had been left in the room, cracked open the bottle of welcoming champagne, and drank himself to sleep while watching EastEnders.
When morning came, he decided to give some thought as to what the hell he was going to do. He couldn’t tell if he’d fooled Three-Piece-Suit-Government-Man with his ridiculous conversation with Arthur, but he thought he’d at least bought himself a day until Three-Piece-Suit-Government-Man realized that he’d warned Arthur to go to ground and avoid London at all costs. Once that was discovered, Eames contemplated what he ought to do. Clearly this man wanted some kind of extraction done. Eames could do an extraction. He didn’t like that he was being kidnapped into doing it, but he’d get it done if he had to. And then he’d be on his way. Definitely.
There was an entire television channel in this hotel, whatever the hotel was, showing nothing but Korean dramas, and Eames found himself embarrassingly sucked in, so he had no idea how late in the morning it was when the elevator dinged open.
He groaned internally, because to be honest he’d been rather enjoying this impromptu holiday he was on here, and he lifted himself up, and there was Arthur in his hotel suite, in one of his stupid three-piece suits.
Eames stared at him. “I am going to fucking kill you,” he said.
“Whatever,” said Arthur, clearly not taking his threat seriously and walking into the suite, down the step. “Are you hurt?”
“Am I what?” asked Eames, blinking at him.
Arthur walked over to the windows and looked out them, up and down the view of the Thames. “Are you, I don’t know, hurt? Dying? Or something?” Arthur turned and made an awkward gesture with his hand that Eames supposed was Arthur-speak for I am concerned for your well-being.
“Yes,” said Eames. “I’m dying. I’ve holed myself up in this ridiculous hotel suite because I’m dying.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know?” Arthur settled his hands in his pockets. “To call me up and call me Artie made me assume you had some sort of death wish.”
“You have the death wish,” Eames retorted. “Can you not understand a simple code? Was it not mathematical enough for your brain to comprehend? You were supposed to go anywhere but London.”
“You told me to come to London to see you.”
“Oh my God,” said Eames, and collapsed backward onto the sofa. “You cannot possibly be that idiotic. Are you that idiotic? You’ve been getting by this whole time on the fact that you look good in a suit, haven’t you?”
“Relax.” Arthur wandered away from the window, into Eames’s eyeline. “I got your message, and it was a stupid one, so I did the opposite of your message, which I’ve generally found to be the right thing to do, doing the opposite of what you say.”
Eames looked at him morosely. “I am seriously going to fucking kill you.”
“You seem fine,” remarked Arthur.
“I am being held hostage.”
Arthur glanced around them. “Could be worse. Is there anything pressing happening right now?”
“Yes. Two very pressing things. The first is my discovering that you are the world’s most idiotic person. The second is that now I’ve missed what Choi Young did to upset Yoo Eun Soo this time.” He gestured to the television.
Arthur glanced at it, then said, “Okay, you seem to have things under control here, so I’m going to take a nap, because I am jetlagged and exhausted and if I’m going to save your ass, I need some sleep.”
Eames watched him walk into the bedroom and called, “My arse doesn’t need saving.”
“No, you’re doing great in your hotel suite prison with your Asian soap operas,” Arthur called back and then walked back out into the living room. “Did you sleep in that bed last night?”
“No, I slept on the floor, but when I woke up this morning I kicked all of the blankets and sheets around on the bed just to throw people off, keep them on their toes.”
“You couldn’t have made it?” complained Arthur.
“Arthur. Darling. I’m still getting used to this new stupidity of yours, so I’m afraid I neglected to tell you this, but: This is a hotel.”
“Go to hell,” muttered Arthur, and dragged himself over to the other couch in the living room.
“Why would I make the bed in a hotel? Actually, what makes you think I ever make my bed? Do you make your bed? Of course you make your bed. You probably iron your bloody sheets, don’t you?”
“Do you ever stop talking?” Arthur asked sleepily, now curled on the couch, back facing Eames.
Eames stared at him. “Are you just going to go to sleep like that?”
“Like what?”
“Wearing a suit?”
“Yes.”
Eames paused. “You can sleep in the bed, you know.”
“I’m not sleeping in your unmade bed, it’s disgusting,” sulked Arthur.
“Suddenly you’re fussy about where you sleep?”
“I’m not fussy about where I sleep when I sleep for a job. When I sleep for me? Yes, I’m fussy about where I sleep.”
Eames sighed, and he told himself he was sighing because he was so annoyed that Arthur was there, but actually it was kind of nice to have Arthur curled up on the other couch. It was almost homey. They never sat around watching television together when they were on jobs; they just worked all the time. Eames had seen Arthur sleep lots of times, but never normal sleep. This whole thing was novel and surprisingly nice.
And Arthur would have ideas about their predicament. Or at least say skeptical, condescending things about Eames’s ideas. Eames was weirdly looking forward to that.
Eames tried to pay attention to his Korean drama that he had been so fixated on, but Arthur’s presence was incredibly distracting and eventually Eames said, “No, but seriously: Why are you here?”
He’d thought Arthur was sleeping, so he didn’t expect an answer, but he got one anyway. “You called me,” he said.
***
Eames got the duvet from the bed and tossed it over Arthur because that was just the sort of nice bloke he was, no need to read anything into that whatsoever. Halfway through the next episode of the Korean drama the elevator dinged and Eames sat up and luggage was thrust into the vestibule and then the elevator left again. Eames recognized Arthur’s nondescript luggage and settled himself back down onto the couch and checked his watch and wondered how long he should let Arthur sleep. He decided just long enough to let his body clock reset a bit. Dreamsharers were used to wonky body clocks; Arthur would be fine with a bit of a catnap. And Eames was getting hungry and therefore nervous, because it reminded him that he and Arthur were not on holiday together, they were being held prisoner for some reason that neither of them knew.
So Eames gave Arthur ninety minutes and then walked over to his couch and knelt beside it and considered the best way to wake him. He was facing out now, and he looked rumpled and surprisingly innocent, not at all like the man Eames had watched coolly break someone’s nose when they had been tracked down by an unjustifiably disgruntled client. Eames had always suspected that Arthur was younger than he looked, that part of the reason he was always dressed so stiffly and kept his hair so ruthlessly slicked back was to give the impression of age and maturity. Looking at him asleep, with his hair tumbling forward onto his forehead, Eames saw why he did it.
“Hey,” Eames whispered, and Arthur didn’t stir. “Psst!” Arthur snuffled but didn’t wake. Eames wondered abruptly if he was dreaming, hated to interrupt a dream if he was having one. He paused, hesitating, but Arthur frowned in his sleep, and if Arthur was dreaming, it wasn’t a good one, Eames decided.
“Arthur,” he said, keeping his voice low, and reached out a hand to nudge at Arthur’s shoulder.
Arthur moved with electric quickness for someone who Eames knew had just been asleep, pinning Eames’s arm back painfully with one hand while his other hand flailed for a gun that was nowhere near.
“It’s me, it’s me, it’s me,” Eames protested, and Arthur let go of his arm. “Ow,” he said, flexing his fingers experimentally.
“Sorry,” said Arthur, pushing his hair off his forehead. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“Wake you up? Christ, you must be an utter joy to sleep with.”
Arthur blinked dark eyes at him and said nothing, which unaccountably made Eames hate him.
“I didn’t want you to sleep anymore,” Eames said. “You’ll throw off your adjustment to this time zone.”
Arthur lifted his eyebrows to say he knew how stupid that sounded.
“Plus,” Eames went on, “I thought you were here to work.”
“Right. The Save Eames’s Ass job,” said Arthur, and sat up and pushed away the duvet and yawned and scrubbed his hand over his face and pushed his hair back again, although it immediately fell back forward.
Eames stared at him, because Arthur had never, ever, ever woken up from a dreamshare like this. Arthur woke up from dreamshares put together and unmistakably Arthur. Eames didn’t know what to do with this yawning bundle of cozy adorableness.
Wrong. He knew exactly what to do with it. It involved seeing how sleepily Arthur would kiss back, how pliant he would be if Eames leaned forward at just that moment, how soft and sleep-warm his skin would taste except for the bite of the stubble across his cheeks and chin. Eames had never seen Arthur so not sharp in his entire life. He wondered if he was always like this when he wasn’t working, if the people who got to know Arthur outside of a professional capacity knew him like this, and how those people got to be this lucky? Suddenly Eames thought being hit by a mysterious black car was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because somehow it had led to this moment of seeing this particular side of Arthur.
Arthur seemed oblivious to the tangle of Eames’s thoughts. Arthur scrubbed a thoughtful hand over his face and said, “Do you have, like, a decent razor? I’ve never understood what it is you do to maintain exactly that concentrated level of rakish stubble.”
“I’m just naturally dashing,” Eames managed, making room so Arthur could stand.
Arthur stretched. His tie was askew. Eames stared at Arthur’s askew tie. Eames loved when Arthur’s ties were askew. He considered it the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Arthur with an askew tie was like any other person completely and utterly naked. Eames’s mouth was literally watering.
Arthur tugged at his waistcoat to straighten it and said, “Odds you have anything here that would even halfway fit me? I’m dying for a shower.”
“Oh,” Eames remembered abruptly. “Your luggage is here.”
“What?” Arthur turned instinctively toward the vestibule, and then he smiled. He lit up at the sight of his luggage. His luggage provoked dimples. Eames had never been jealous of a stupid sodding suitcase before. Arthur made the filthiest, most obscene noise of pleased delight and practically bloody skipped his way over to his things. “When did they bring this? I slept through it?” Arthur patted his suitcase fondly and lingeringly, almost a fucking caress, and Eames felt all sorts of irrational jealousy and thought that he might actually throw Arthur’s luggage out a window if he could manage to open one of them.
“It wasn’t an event,” said Eames, making himself stand and behave like a halfway-normal person. “They just shoved it off the lift.”
“I’m going to take a shower,” Arthur proclaimed, slinging one bag over his shoulder and pulling the other one after him into the lounge area. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”
Eames lifted his eyebrows. “You’re giving me homework?”
“Of course I’m giving you homework.” Arthur tucked his hand into his suit coat.
“Once a point man,” said Eames.
Arthur ignored him. He pulled out one of those little notebooks he was taking constant notes in, and a pencil to go along with it, and handed them both to Eames.
“Arthur,” said Eames. “Your diary? You can’t mean this, darling. You’ll regret it. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“I want you to write down everything that’s happened so far, every detail.”
Eames was busy sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, looking with fascination at Arthur’s crowded handwriting. “It says things. I always thought it would just say ‘Arthur Cobb’ over and over again with little hearts.”
Arthur sighed heavily. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
“That makes two of us,” Eames rejoined. “But no, it actually says things. Things other than ‘Everyone around me is an idiot. I am the only intelligent person to have ever existed on the planet. Eames is so very fit; I adore those beautiful shirts he wears.’”
“If you get tired of listening to the sound of your voice,” said Arthur, heading toward the bedroom with his luggage, “feel free to branch out of character and do something actually useful.”
“I shall write down everything I know,” Eames assured him, “with specificity.”
Arthur paused on the threshold of the bedroom, looked back at him, and narrowed his eyes. Eames smiled with the innocent sunniness he knew he’d perfected.
Then Arthur sighed and scowled and disappeared into the bedroom. With both pieces of luggage. Damn it, Eames had been intending to spend Arthur’s shower searching through his luggage so he could see what about it made Arthur go into the paroxysms of pleasure that other men reserved for blowjobs.
“You need to bring both pieces of your luggage into the bathroom with you?” Eames called to him.
“Yes!” Arthur called back, and Eames heard the bathroom door close and then lock.
“Did you honestly just lock the bathroom door?” Eames shouted, offended.
“Once a thief, Mr. Eames!” Arthur shouted back, and then the shower turned on.
Author -
earlgreytea68Rating - Adult
Characters - Arthur, Eames, Sherlock, John, Mycroft, Moriarty, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, Dom Cobb
Spoilers - Through "His Last Vow" in the Sherlock universe. This takes place post-movie, so I guess spoilers for "Inception"? But just for the basic fact that it's about dream thieves, nothing in this story depends overly much on the movie's plot.
Disclaimer - I don't own any of them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on.
Summary - If Mycroft Holmes lived in a world where people could steal information from the subconsciouses of others, tell me he wouldn't be all over that when he had Moriarty in custody.
Chapter 2
Arthur had a cell phone. A secret cell phone that only a few people knew the number to. His parents and his sister. Dom, because at about the time Arthur had let Dom sob himself to sleep on his shoulder, Arthur had thought maybe he should acknowledge that he possibly no longer behaved like he was just Dom’s point man.
And Eames. Not that Eames knew he had the secret number. Arthur knew that Eames assumed that every number he’d ever had for Arthur was a burner cell phone, specific to the job they were working. Arthur did keep a new burner cell phone for each job, so Eames’s assumption made sense. Arthur had given Eames the number, feeling like an idiot, because at the time he and Eames had worked together a grand total of twice. Arthur couldn’t believe how starry-eyed and foolish he’d felt when their paths had crossed again, but still he couldn’t resist giving Eames that little piece of himself that Eames was never even going to know about.
Eames had used it for the course of the job, and the next job they’d had together, Eames had leaned forward and said, Normally I’d at least make a pretense of buying you a drink before asking you this, but you, darling, owe me your phone number, I believe. Arthur hadn’t said, You have the secret phone number that will stick with me and always be answered; Arthur had said, Do you get phone numbers from your conquests, Eames? I thought you just made do with hurried alleyways and fake names. Eames had given him an exaggeratedly sad look and said, Darling. What you must think of me. And Arthur had said, in the world’s most blatant lie, since he had made Eames the fifth recipient of the coveted Arthur Official For Real Cell Phone Number, I don’t. And then he had written out the number of the latest burner cell phone.
So Eames didn’t know he had the super-special Arthur phone number, but Arthur felt secure enough in the knowledge that if Eames ever really, really needed him for something, Eames would call every number he’d ever had for Arthur, which would eventually lead him to the one that Arthur would answer. Keeping track of Eames could have been a full-time job, and Arthur had a full-time job, most of the time, so when he was immersed in peeling back layers of research to get at the heart of a mark and didn’t have time to send out feelers about whether Eames was causing trouble somewhere, he depended on the continued silence of his phone. (His family seldom called him, because they thought he had a Very Important Job and they hated to bother him. Dom sent him endless amounts of photo texts of the kids. Arthur had his texts on silent, and every week or so he cleaned them out and sent Dom generic appreciations of them. Not because he didn’t love the kids, but mostly because he didn’t know how to say, Yes, they’re very cute in the endless number of iterations Dom seemed to think him capable of.)
All of that was to say that Arthur should have expected that the one time in his entire life when Eames would call him between jobs, he wouldn’t call the right phone. That was Eames to a painful T.
Arthur was running point on a job he hated. Well, not true: the job was actually rather interesting as corporate espionage went. Lots of bruised alliances and boardroom dalliances and Arthur didn’t often admit that he had a weakness for soap operatic drama but he totally did. So he didn’t mind that he was spending his time wading through surveillance on the mark, because the mark was juggling three separate mistresses, and Arthur was having a fascinating time trying to determine which one the mark might be most likely to confide in.
What Arthur really didn’t like about the job was the rest of the people on the team. It was a subpar team, with a not great extractor to get the information, and a flighty architect who was building a dreamscape that Arthur suspected was shaky and unreliable. Arthur knew it was risky and reckless of him to have agreed to this team, not because they’d betray him—he’d never agree if that was the case—but because they were stupid. But Arthur was good at what he did, organizing the entire job, getting the research into comprehensible chunks and the plan into shape, and considered a less-than-sharp team to be a challenge. Besides which, he wasn’t crazy about most of the dreamsharers out there these days. If he waited for a team he wanted to work with, he’d never take any jobs. And it was true that Arthur didn’t need the money and could live the rest of his life on what he already had, even slightly extravagantly, but Arthur liked to work.
He had just taken a long, unwinding vacation to Fiji and been bored out of his skull the whole time, but told himself that he’d liked reading the collected works of Michael Ondaatje on the beach. He had flown back to the States and the job offer had been waiting for him, and he had taken it because he was vacationed out and also because the other thing waiting for him had been the rumor that Eames was in London with nothing to do, and that meant that Arthur went through his periodic go-surprise-Eames crisis wherein he fantasized thus:
He flew to wherever Eames was said to be and showed up at whatever place Eames happened to be crashing (or broke in, it depended on whether or not Eames was at home). Then he would say something stupid like, Are you as bored as I am? Can you think of anything we can do to alleviate that? And he knew that Eames would suggest something filthy and crude and delicious, because that much was obvious about Eames, and the reason why Arthur never engaged in any of his go-surprise-Eames impulses was because what he knew he would say in response to whatever innuendo Eames threw at him was: Let’s get a fabulous penthouse somewhere together made entirely of glass so we can see people coming, a shared closet where your awful clothes nestle against my nice ones and maybe my nice ones bleed over onto them and become a good influence, a bed with matching guns under our pillows and we sprawl in it lazily when we’re home on Sunday mornings and I try to do the crossword puzzle and pretend to snap at you for trying to seduce me instead, and a puppy we take with us when we’re on jobs. And Eames would say in response, staring at him, Arthur. What the fuck?
So Arthur didn’t do these things. Arthur took jobs with subpar teams instead.
Arthur bit into an apple while kicked back in his chair reading an entertaining transcript of his mark juggling simultaneous phone calls with two of his clueless mistresses, and that was when the current burner phone vibrated where he’d tossed it on the table next to the laptop.
It shouldn’t have been vibrating. What the hell could they want with him? They had gone out to pick up lunch, for Christ’s sake. Arthur thought it sourly but absently, his eyes still on the transcript as he leaned over to pick the phone up.
And then he frowned. Because he didn’t recognize the number.
Arthur leveled his chair to the floor and put the apple on the table and opened a new e-mail. As he answered the phone, he typed out, Job’s off, because he did not fuck around when his security had been so obviously compromised, and sent it to the team.
And said, “Hello?”
“Artie, dear, how are things?” said the jovial voice on the other end.
It sounded like Eames. Or rather, someone doing a very bad impression of Eames, getting everything just slightly wrong. Arthur fished for the die in his pocket and tossed it on the table. It came up four, and then four again the second time. Not a dream, then. Arthur replaced it and said, “Who’s this?” suspiciously.
“Well, now I’m just offended,” said the voice that sounded like Eames, in Eames’s accent. “It’s Eames, sweetheart.”
It wasn’t, was Arthur’s kneejerk reaction. Because Arthur knew each and every term of endearment Eames had ever called him, and dear and sweetheart didn’t make the list. And never, ever Artie, because Arthur didn’t care if Eames was his weak point, he’d graze a bullet past his weak point’s ear if he’d ever called him Artie.
“How did you get this number?” asked Arthur.
“Artie, Artie, Artie, you really do wound me with your low expectations of me.” The odd voice that sounded just like Eames kept talking, while Arthur continued to feel off-kilter with confusion. “I know it isn’t traditional for the forger to be the one doing the rounding-up, but I have got a job for you and I need a point man.”
It sounded like Eames. Exactly like Eames. Except for the odd, wrong things that weren’t Eames at all. But Arthur wasn’t in a dream. So who would call him up pretending to be Eames? This was clearly a trap. “Who’s the extractor?” asked Arthur, trying to spin the conversation out as long as he could.
“None yet. I started at the top, precious. Your choice.”
“You’re one slip of the tongue away from ‘sugarlips,’ you realize,” remarked Arthur.
“I was going to go with ‘honeysuckle’ next,” replied Eames, and at that Arthur knew it was Eames he was talking to, because Arthur would know Eames and his ridiculous, stupid, pointless banter anywhere, which meant that Eames was behaving this way because he was warning him off of something.
Arthur, thoughtful and paying very close attention, put his feet up on the desk next to his forgotten apple and said, casually, “Tell me all about this job, tulip.”
There was a pause, and Arthur could hear Eames struggling not to react to that. It was definitely Eames, and this conversation was definitely being listened to. “The job is in London,” Eames said eventually.
“Doing what?”
“Dreamsharing.”
Arthur almost laughed. Eames was the most ridiculous man he had ever met. “Illuminating,” said Arthur.
“I know, I should have led with that. I hope I haven’t led you astray with this entire conversation. Come to London, dear, and I’ll tell you the rest of it.”
He couldn’t agree too easily, he thought. He didn’t want to raise the suspicions of whoever was listening in. “I am in the middle of something.”
“Tell your tailor you’ll come back later. This is worth your while and, more importantly, interesting.”
The thing about this entire conversation was that if Eames had ever called Arthur wanting him on a job, Arthur knew instinctively he would have gotten the full seduction. Eames considered himself devastatingly charming—Arthur would only have admitted he agreed under severe torture—and he would have worked that angle hard. This conversation would have been full of purrs and low licks of phrases, of Eames wrapping Arthur’s name in that accent and making it sound like another word entirely, of the hollow flatteries Arthur knew Eames could concoct with the same ease he dreamed himself entirely different identities, of darling and love and pet and petal and not a single one of the things Eames had called him so far.
Arthur hated himself for how much he wished he’d gotten this conversation without some nameless person somewhere clearly holding a gun to Eames’s head.
“I don’t make decisions about jobs before I know what they entail,” he said.
“Of course,” agreed Eames, and waited.
“So I’d be dropping what I’m doing—”
“You own enough suits, cuddlekins,” said Eames, and Arthur winced.
“Eames. I am not at the tailor.”
“You haven’t take up yoga, have you? Actually, wait, scratch that, have you taken up yoga? I find suddenly that I would support that.”
Arthur ignored him. “And flying all the way out there just because you assure me I’d find the job interesting?”
“Well, of course, Artie,” said Eames. “Don’t you trust me?”
It was the most out-of-place thing to say in the conversation. It wasn’t the type of thing that was said out loud. Because of course Arthur trusted Eames, and vice versa. The thing that people outside of dreamsharing didn’t understand was that it depended heavily on trust. Exploiting other people’s most vulnerable states made you keenly aware of your own. Eames had left himself in Arthur’s hands over and over in the times they’d worked together, trusting him to stand lookout over him when he was defenseless. And Arthur, deep in seventeen different illegal activities, had always trusted Eames to imagine their way out of it.
But that wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about. You didn’t say to your dreamsharing team before you all went under, I’m trusting you all to be competent and not to stab me in the back. It was understood. And sometimes the trust was lacking—Arthur was in one of those situations at the moment—and it made for unhappy jobs. The very best dreamsharers got there by having reputations for being trustworthy. And Eames, for all that his natural instinct in life seemed to be to lie, always, in all situations, had an impeccable reputation for being trustworthy in a job.
Although if Arthur was being strictly honest, he’d trusted Eames the first time he’d spoken to him and had thought afterward, That is the sign of a really excellent forger.
But he heard what Eames was really saying, in this entire odd phone call. Stay far away from London. Do not get involved. I’m in trouble and you shouldn’t be, too. Trust me.
So Arthur said, “Yes, I trust you, Rupert Eames.” Message received.
Arthur hung up the burner phone, put it on the floor, and stepped on it.
The rest of his team came bursting into the room, exclamations tumbling over each other.
“What do you mean, ‘job’s off’?” from Hayes.
“Do you know how much money’s at stake?” from Lucy.
“Fuck you, not all of us have a fortune tucked away in off-shore accounts.” From Hayes again.
Arthur shrugged on his coat, straightened the knot of his tie, and said, “Security’s compromised. The job is too risky. You can do it if you like, but you’ll do it with a different point man.” He started to walk out.
Of course they wouldn’t just let him go. Idiots. Hayes flew at him and Arthur had to knock an elbow into his throat and then lift his gun to keep Lucy from following after him with her clawing nails.
Lucy’s eyes flashed mutiny at him, but Arthur didn’t care because he was holding the gun and was about to be an ocean away. Lucy wasn’t one for revenge because she couldn’t hold a thought in her head for more than a few seconds; her projections flickered so much they made Arthur dizzy, and he didn’t understand how she had ever gotten into dreamsharing. “So you’re just going to walk away?” she snarled.
Smartest thing she’d ever said, thought Arthur. Which was unkind, perhaps, but Eames had gone and gotten himself in enough trouble that he had called Arthur to warn him away, so Arthur was in an unkind mood. “Exactly. Get another point man. We’re not that far along. You can get it done. I think Mondavi’s available.”
“I don’t get it,” Lucy said, crossing her arms and ignoring the way Hayes was still choking on the floor at their feet. “How have you made it this long if you spook this easily?”
“Mondavi’s available,” Arthur repeated calmly. “And I’m walking away now.”
He tucked his gun back into place. Lucy breathed furiously but didn’t make a move for him, and Arthur walked easily away.
It was a bright, clear day, and Arthur drove himself to the airport and bought three separate tickets under three separate names. Two of them were Eames-provided aliases, which he used out of sentimentality. The third was his own name, which he used to buy the ticket to Heathrow. Because he wasn’t going there to lay low, after all.
***
Arthur never even made it through passport control in Heathrow, but he hadn’t expected to. He had spent the entire flight musing about whatever Eames had gotten himself into. Truthfully, although Eames was an enormous idiot who was almost always getting himself into pointless amounts of trouble, he was also very good at getting himself out of it. The thing about Eames was that he was the most risk-averse conman Arthur had ever met. Eames liked living too much. Which was not to say that Arthur wanted to die, but Arthur also thought if he died young and violently it would serve him right for choosing the career he had. Whereas Eames seemed to think that it would be an epic tragedy for the world to be deprived of him so soon.
Eames was excellent at dreamsharing, at forgery, at stealing things, so Arthur couldn’t imagine a job going wrong on him, and anyway dreamsharing was a small world and people knew he knew Eames and would have given him word about that. So Arthur mused about Eames’s other hobbies. Eames was a terrible gambler, but he was good at cheating every once in a while to keep his head above water, so it was unlikely to be a gambling debt gone bad. And he had a habit of leaving behind a trail of romantic conquests, but Arthur had not yet seen a single one complain, which always made Arthur conclude that Eames was both fantastic in bed and also annoying outside of bed. And somehow Eames was charming enough that he always seemed to elude the significant others of his conquests as well.
Not that it made any sense for a love affair gone wrong to insist that Eames call Arthur for help. Because that was clearly what was going on. If Eames had needed—or wanted—Arthur’s help, he would have called him and he would have asked for it. Arthur was fairly confident of that, fairly confident that Eames would have been straightforward about it, even if he didn’t know how guaranteed that help would have been. Eames hadn’t wanted to get Arthur involved. That was what every strange oddity about the conversation had been about: I’m saying one thing to you, but I’m meaning something else entirely.
So whatever it was that had happened to Eames, the object of the whole thing had been to get to Arthur. Which made Arthur somehow responsible for this whole thing, in a strange way that made him feel fidgety, anxious for the gun he’d been unable to smuggle on the plane with him. Who would have known that the way to get to Arthur was through Eames? How many people in the universe knew that? Arthur would have wagered none. Possibly Dom, who knew Arthur very well and had noticed his chattering overeagerness around Eames during the second job, before Arthur had clamped down on it. But he didn’t think Dom would have pegged it as the crush that it was.
More frighteningly, it was someone who had known enough to get to Eames and had known the number of Arthur’s latest burner phone. Who the hell would have known both of those facts? Arthur couldn’t come up with an answer other than someone very not good who had cornered Eames sufficiently for Eames to cave and call him while desperately warning him off. Eames wasn’t terribly protective by nature. Eames had once given him a empty gun to defend himself without telling him it had no bullets in it (It’s all in your head, love—you thought you had bullets in the gun, so it was the same as having bullets in the gun. Eames had been very unconvinced by Arthur’s teeth-gritted assertion that it was definitely not the same). So if Eames was suddenly warning him off of something then he was genuinely worried in a way that alarmed Arthur.
So, having pulled together all of the facts, Arthur concluded that he wasn’t going to make it through passport control, that he was never going to get the opportunity to retrieve his gun from his checked luggage, and that Eames had better damn well appreciate all of this trouble he was going to on his behalf.
Arthur didn’t even lift an eyebrow when he was pulled aside. He let himself be frisked without a word of protest. Then he was shown into a sleek black car that pulled neatly away from Heathrow and into traffic.
Arthur had been to London before, but he’d been most places before, and he was terrible at remembering them. His world was a constant whir of changing meeting places in interchangeable locales and dreamscapes that he had to memorize and then discard by the next job. Keeping in mind shadow locations, layouts of other places, was dangerous when you were in a brand new dream and needed to know exactly where you were going next, so Arthur only remembered the place he had to remember at that moment. He didn’t remember London. So he spent much of the drive alternating between curiously watching out the window and searching the deserted back seat for something he could use as a weapon.
He came up empty on the weapon front by the time the car drew to a stop. By his guess, they were somewhere in central London. It was very busy, and all the buildings were tall, new, modern, glass. It was architecture Arthur liked, all clean, unfussy lines and well-utilized space, but Arthur barely registered it as he was led by his escorts through a lobby to an elevator. He was busy trying to plot out the place’s escape routes. He didn’t have much of a plan at present, because he didn’t know enough about what was going on, but he was taking copious notes in his head about everything. As soon as he got a moment alone, he was going to fill pages of his Moleskine with his observations, relieved that they’d let him keep it.
The elevator opened directly onto a fancy marble vestibule. Arthur took the hint he got from his escorts and stepped out. Off to his left was a sunken living room surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a to-die-for London view.
And Eames, dressed in one of those painful shirts he insisted on wearing and a wrinkled pair of pants, sat up from where he’d been lounging on the couch, spotted him, and said flatly, “I am going to fucking kill you.”
Behind Arthur his escorts, apparently unconcerned about this threat, closed the elevator door.
***
Eames had been held captive before. It generally involved being tied to some unpleasant chair, and his hands would fall asleep from cut-off circulation and his wrists would chafe against the binding, and Eames would be bored to tears waiting for whoever was holding him to make some sort of mistake. Which they always did, because there was no reason to hold Eames captive except because you were stupid, and so Eames usually benefitted from having really epically idiotic enemies.
Eames had never been held captive like this. It was a ridiculously posh hotel suite that he wouldn’t have sprung for, not even in his most flush moments. And it was alarming as fuck, because his clothes were in the wardrobe. Everything he owned, as far as he could tell. Which, granted, wasn’t much, because Eames’s life motto was travel light, live lighter. But still, Eames didn’t like the fact that most of his worldly possessions were there. It was…creepy. To give it the mildest adjective he could.
He also didn’t really like that they’d given him back his wallet and his poker chip, almost with a smirk, as if they enjoyed how powerless he would still be, even with everything he could want. They didn’t give him his mobile or his gun, and Eames liked that that at least was a concession to the fact that they thought he could do something to get away. The phone in the suite was also dead, and Eames spent a little while looking at it and wishing he knew enough about anything like that to try to fix it.
It was late by the time he’d been deposited in the hotel suite, and seeing nothing else for it, Eames ate some of the fruit that had been left in the room, cracked open the bottle of welcoming champagne, and drank himself to sleep while watching EastEnders.
When morning came, he decided to give some thought as to what the hell he was going to do. He couldn’t tell if he’d fooled Three-Piece-Suit-Government-Man with his ridiculous conversation with Arthur, but he thought he’d at least bought himself a day until Three-Piece-Suit-Government-Man realized that he’d warned Arthur to go to ground and avoid London at all costs. Once that was discovered, Eames contemplated what he ought to do. Clearly this man wanted some kind of extraction done. Eames could do an extraction. He didn’t like that he was being kidnapped into doing it, but he’d get it done if he had to. And then he’d be on his way. Definitely.
There was an entire television channel in this hotel, whatever the hotel was, showing nothing but Korean dramas, and Eames found himself embarrassingly sucked in, so he had no idea how late in the morning it was when the elevator dinged open.
He groaned internally, because to be honest he’d been rather enjoying this impromptu holiday he was on here, and he lifted himself up, and there was Arthur in his hotel suite, in one of his stupid three-piece suits.
Eames stared at him. “I am going to fucking kill you,” he said.
“Whatever,” said Arthur, clearly not taking his threat seriously and walking into the suite, down the step. “Are you hurt?”
“Am I what?” asked Eames, blinking at him.
Arthur walked over to the windows and looked out them, up and down the view of the Thames. “Are you, I don’t know, hurt? Dying? Or something?” Arthur turned and made an awkward gesture with his hand that Eames supposed was Arthur-speak for I am concerned for your well-being.
“Yes,” said Eames. “I’m dying. I’ve holed myself up in this ridiculous hotel suite because I’m dying.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know?” Arthur settled his hands in his pockets. “To call me up and call me Artie made me assume you had some sort of death wish.”
“You have the death wish,” Eames retorted. “Can you not understand a simple code? Was it not mathematical enough for your brain to comprehend? You were supposed to go anywhere but London.”
“You told me to come to London to see you.”
“Oh my God,” said Eames, and collapsed backward onto the sofa. “You cannot possibly be that idiotic. Are you that idiotic? You’ve been getting by this whole time on the fact that you look good in a suit, haven’t you?”
“Relax.” Arthur wandered away from the window, into Eames’s eyeline. “I got your message, and it was a stupid one, so I did the opposite of your message, which I’ve generally found to be the right thing to do, doing the opposite of what you say.”
Eames looked at him morosely. “I am seriously going to fucking kill you.”
“You seem fine,” remarked Arthur.
“I am being held hostage.”
Arthur glanced around them. “Could be worse. Is there anything pressing happening right now?”
“Yes. Two very pressing things. The first is my discovering that you are the world’s most idiotic person. The second is that now I’ve missed what Choi Young did to upset Yoo Eun Soo this time.” He gestured to the television.
Arthur glanced at it, then said, “Okay, you seem to have things under control here, so I’m going to take a nap, because I am jetlagged and exhausted and if I’m going to save your ass, I need some sleep.”
Eames watched him walk into the bedroom and called, “My arse doesn’t need saving.”
“No, you’re doing great in your hotel suite prison with your Asian soap operas,” Arthur called back and then walked back out into the living room. “Did you sleep in that bed last night?”
“No, I slept on the floor, but when I woke up this morning I kicked all of the blankets and sheets around on the bed just to throw people off, keep them on their toes.”
“You couldn’t have made it?” complained Arthur.
“Arthur. Darling. I’m still getting used to this new stupidity of yours, so I’m afraid I neglected to tell you this, but: This is a hotel.”
“Go to hell,” muttered Arthur, and dragged himself over to the other couch in the living room.
“Why would I make the bed in a hotel? Actually, what makes you think I ever make my bed? Do you make your bed? Of course you make your bed. You probably iron your bloody sheets, don’t you?”
“Do you ever stop talking?” Arthur asked sleepily, now curled on the couch, back facing Eames.
Eames stared at him. “Are you just going to go to sleep like that?”
“Like what?”
“Wearing a suit?”
“Yes.”
Eames paused. “You can sleep in the bed, you know.”
“I’m not sleeping in your unmade bed, it’s disgusting,” sulked Arthur.
“Suddenly you’re fussy about where you sleep?”
“I’m not fussy about where I sleep when I sleep for a job. When I sleep for me? Yes, I’m fussy about where I sleep.”
Eames sighed, and he told himself he was sighing because he was so annoyed that Arthur was there, but actually it was kind of nice to have Arthur curled up on the other couch. It was almost homey. They never sat around watching television together when they were on jobs; they just worked all the time. Eames had seen Arthur sleep lots of times, but never normal sleep. This whole thing was novel and surprisingly nice.
And Arthur would have ideas about their predicament. Or at least say skeptical, condescending things about Eames’s ideas. Eames was weirdly looking forward to that.
Eames tried to pay attention to his Korean drama that he had been so fixated on, but Arthur’s presence was incredibly distracting and eventually Eames said, “No, but seriously: Why are you here?”
He’d thought Arthur was sleeping, so he didn’t expect an answer, but he got one anyway. “You called me,” he said.
***
Eames got the duvet from the bed and tossed it over Arthur because that was just the sort of nice bloke he was, no need to read anything into that whatsoever. Halfway through the next episode of the Korean drama the elevator dinged and Eames sat up and luggage was thrust into the vestibule and then the elevator left again. Eames recognized Arthur’s nondescript luggage and settled himself back down onto the couch and checked his watch and wondered how long he should let Arthur sleep. He decided just long enough to let his body clock reset a bit. Dreamsharers were used to wonky body clocks; Arthur would be fine with a bit of a catnap. And Eames was getting hungry and therefore nervous, because it reminded him that he and Arthur were not on holiday together, they were being held prisoner for some reason that neither of them knew.
So Eames gave Arthur ninety minutes and then walked over to his couch and knelt beside it and considered the best way to wake him. He was facing out now, and he looked rumpled and surprisingly innocent, not at all like the man Eames had watched coolly break someone’s nose when they had been tracked down by an unjustifiably disgruntled client. Eames had always suspected that Arthur was younger than he looked, that part of the reason he was always dressed so stiffly and kept his hair so ruthlessly slicked back was to give the impression of age and maturity. Looking at him asleep, with his hair tumbling forward onto his forehead, Eames saw why he did it.
“Hey,” Eames whispered, and Arthur didn’t stir. “Psst!” Arthur snuffled but didn’t wake. Eames wondered abruptly if he was dreaming, hated to interrupt a dream if he was having one. He paused, hesitating, but Arthur frowned in his sleep, and if Arthur was dreaming, it wasn’t a good one, Eames decided.
“Arthur,” he said, keeping his voice low, and reached out a hand to nudge at Arthur’s shoulder.
Arthur moved with electric quickness for someone who Eames knew had just been asleep, pinning Eames’s arm back painfully with one hand while his other hand flailed for a gun that was nowhere near.
“It’s me, it’s me, it’s me,” Eames protested, and Arthur let go of his arm. “Ow,” he said, flexing his fingers experimentally.
“Sorry,” said Arthur, pushing his hair off his forehead. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“Wake you up? Christ, you must be an utter joy to sleep with.”
Arthur blinked dark eyes at him and said nothing, which unaccountably made Eames hate him.
“I didn’t want you to sleep anymore,” Eames said. “You’ll throw off your adjustment to this time zone.”
Arthur lifted his eyebrows to say he knew how stupid that sounded.
“Plus,” Eames went on, “I thought you were here to work.”
“Right. The Save Eames’s Ass job,” said Arthur, and sat up and pushed away the duvet and yawned and scrubbed his hand over his face and pushed his hair back again, although it immediately fell back forward.
Eames stared at him, because Arthur had never, ever, ever woken up from a dreamshare like this. Arthur woke up from dreamshares put together and unmistakably Arthur. Eames didn’t know what to do with this yawning bundle of cozy adorableness.
Wrong. He knew exactly what to do with it. It involved seeing how sleepily Arthur would kiss back, how pliant he would be if Eames leaned forward at just that moment, how soft and sleep-warm his skin would taste except for the bite of the stubble across his cheeks and chin. Eames had never seen Arthur so not sharp in his entire life. He wondered if he was always like this when he wasn’t working, if the people who got to know Arthur outside of a professional capacity knew him like this, and how those people got to be this lucky? Suddenly Eames thought being hit by a mysterious black car was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because somehow it had led to this moment of seeing this particular side of Arthur.
Arthur seemed oblivious to the tangle of Eames’s thoughts. Arthur scrubbed a thoughtful hand over his face and said, “Do you have, like, a decent razor? I’ve never understood what it is you do to maintain exactly that concentrated level of rakish stubble.”
“I’m just naturally dashing,” Eames managed, making room so Arthur could stand.
Arthur stretched. His tie was askew. Eames stared at Arthur’s askew tie. Eames loved when Arthur’s ties were askew. He considered it the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Arthur with an askew tie was like any other person completely and utterly naked. Eames’s mouth was literally watering.
Arthur tugged at his waistcoat to straighten it and said, “Odds you have anything here that would even halfway fit me? I’m dying for a shower.”
“Oh,” Eames remembered abruptly. “Your luggage is here.”
“What?” Arthur turned instinctively toward the vestibule, and then he smiled. He lit up at the sight of his luggage. His luggage provoked dimples. Eames had never been jealous of a stupid sodding suitcase before. Arthur made the filthiest, most obscene noise of pleased delight and practically bloody skipped his way over to his things. “When did they bring this? I slept through it?” Arthur patted his suitcase fondly and lingeringly, almost a fucking caress, and Eames felt all sorts of irrational jealousy and thought that he might actually throw Arthur’s luggage out a window if he could manage to open one of them.
“It wasn’t an event,” said Eames, making himself stand and behave like a halfway-normal person. “They just shoved it off the lift.”
“I’m going to take a shower,” Arthur proclaimed, slinging one bag over his shoulder and pulling the other one after him into the lounge area. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”
Eames lifted his eyebrows. “You’re giving me homework?”
“Of course I’m giving you homework.” Arthur tucked his hand into his suit coat.
“Once a point man,” said Eames.
Arthur ignored him. He pulled out one of those little notebooks he was taking constant notes in, and a pencil to go along with it, and handed them both to Eames.
“Arthur,” said Eames. “Your diary? You can’t mean this, darling. You’ll regret it. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“I want you to write down everything that’s happened so far, every detail.”
Eames was busy sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, looking with fascination at Arthur’s crowded handwriting. “It says things. I always thought it would just say ‘Arthur Cobb’ over and over again with little hearts.”
Arthur sighed heavily. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
“That makes two of us,” Eames rejoined. “But no, it actually says things. Things other than ‘Everyone around me is an idiot. I am the only intelligent person to have ever existed on the planet. Eames is so very fit; I adore those beautiful shirts he wears.’”
“If you get tired of listening to the sound of your voice,” said Arthur, heading toward the bedroom with his luggage, “feel free to branch out of character and do something actually useful.”
“I shall write down everything I know,” Eames assured him, “with specificity.”
Arthur paused on the threshold of the bedroom, looked back at him, and narrowed his eyes. Eames smiled with the innocent sunniness he knew he’d perfected.
Then Arthur sighed and scowled and disappeared into the bedroom. With both pieces of luggage. Damn it, Eames had been intending to spend Arthur’s shower searching through his luggage so he could see what about it made Arthur go into the paroxysms of pleasure that other men reserved for blowjobs.
“You need to bring both pieces of your luggage into the bathroom with you?” Eames called to him.
“Yes!” Arthur called back, and Eames heard the bathroom door close and then lock.
“Did you honestly just lock the bathroom door?” Eames shouted, offended.
“Once a thief, Mr. Eames!” Arthur shouted back, and then the shower turned on.
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no subject
Date: 2014-10-01 02:07 am (UTC)I had mostly forgotten how much I loved Eames as a character, and completely forgotten about that accent of his that makes me swoon. So of course on reading this chapter, now I read everything hearing his voice in my head and that is so fantastic!
I am loving this so much and I am so excited for whatever may come next!
no subject
Date: 2014-10-01 03:09 am (UTC)Glad you're enjoying this! :-)