Keep the Car Running (25/31)
Mar. 4th, 2015 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Title - Keep the Car Running (25/31)
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 25
Eames had never done this before ever in his life. And the number of things that could be said about was increasingly small.
He drew, yes. He had always drawn. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t been scrounging for something to draw with, for something to draw on. All of his earliest memories revolved around the activity. He could recall his mother only dimly, but he could vividly remember a bright red drawing he’d made of her when he’d been a toddler. His mother had not been sentimental and had not kept his childhood scribblings for any length of time, but he still remembered that drawing as being his mother, when he thought about her.
But Eames had never drawn a serious portrait for a model who was sitting for him, and he had no idea where to start.
“Where do you want me?” Arthur asked, and Eames opened his mouth to give any number of filthy suggestions, but Arthur headed him off at the pass because Arthur knew him so well that Eames could cry with it, knew him better than Eames had ever let anyone know him. Arthur gave him that adorable look of Arthurian exasperation and said, “For the drawing, Eames.”
Eames scratched at the back of his neck—which was something he only ever did during the very rare times when he was actually nervous. He was nervous now, over drawing Arthur, and he wondered why he didn’t just press his advantage and say no and kiss Arthur past the disappointment. But, dammit, Arthur seemed to want this, Arthur looked hopeful about this, and Arthur had gone and put on a bloody three-piece suit just so Eames could peel him out of it because Eames had expressed a desire to do so, so the least Eames could do was draw a sodding sketch of him.
“I don’t know,” Eames admitted, and then tried to cover his inexperience. “Where would you like to sit? I find that seating choice reveals much about the subject.”
Arthur gave him a look that Eames didn’t know how to place—amused? fond?—and simply sat on one of the room’s armchairs. “How’s this?”
“Okay,” said Eames. “Yes. Perfect.” He sat opposite Arthur and looked from Arthur to paper, Arthur to paper. It was a bloody sketch. He could do this. He’d sketched Mycroft unthinkingly only days earlier.
Eames put his pencil to the paper tentatively, an attempt to draw the long, sinuous line of Arthur’s body, and frowned at it and turned to the next fresh page in Arthur’s notebook.
“Take off your shirt,” Arthur said.
Eames glanced up at him, cocking an eyebrow. “Are we doing some kind of role-playing thing right now?”
Arthur rolled his eyes. “I want to hear about your tattoos, and it’s easier if I can see them.”
Eames shrugged and pulled off his T-shirt, then tried to start again on Arthur’s sketch.
“Tell me about them,” Arthur said.
“What about them?”
“Everything about them. Start with the wave one on your right shoulder.”
Eames smiled a little bit, sketching Arthur from memory without even glancing at him, without even noticing it. “You would pick that one. It’s a memento from Rio.”
“Do you have a tattoo from every job?” Arthur asked, sounding surprised.
Only the ones that he wanted to remember, and he had met Arthur on that job, so it had definitely merited a tattoo. Eames didn’t say that. He just said, “No. Only some of them,” and kept sketching.
“So do you have one from the inception job?”
“The snowflakes,” Eames said, pausing long enough to indicate the swirl of snowflakes down the left side of his chest, dancing over other tattoos.
“Snowflakes?” echoed Arthur.
Eames quirked a smile at his paper. “Because my level was a blizzard.”
“You were in charge of the weather.”
“I may have been heartily sick of heat at the time I was doing that dreamshare,” responded Eames.
“I’m sorry I missed you on the skis,” remarked Arthur. “I bet it was hot.”
“I’m sorry I missed you executing a kick in zero gravity. That was doubtless hotter.” Eames regarded his sketch, and realized he was, without consciously intending it, drawing Arthur in bed. Arthur with his expression open and unguarded, with his mouth soft and lush, with his eyes heavy and dark, with his hair tumbled and alluring. It was undoubtedly Arthur—and an Arthur he now amazingly knew—but it wasn’t what he wanted. Although at least Arthur’s distraction technique had helped him draw at all.
He frowned at it and turned the page again.
“So do you design your own tattoos?” Arthur asked.
“Sometimes,” said Eames, deciding to actually glance at Arthur once in a while so he could draw the Arthur posing for him instead of the one that lived in his head.
“How do you decide what you’re going to get?”
“It comes to me in a dream,” said Eames.
“Does it?” asked Arthur, sounding surprised.
“No, of course not. I don’t know, I just decide. Is that why you don’t have any tattoos? Indecision?”
There was a moment of silence. “Eames, I’m Jewish. We can’t have tattoos. My parents would have a fit.”
Eames stopped drawing entirely and looked at Arthur for a moment, saw that he was one-hundred percent serious, and then collapsed backward into laughter, not even caring that Arthur looked vaguely offended. “Arthur. You’re a criminal. For a living. And you’re worried about your parents being upset about a tattoo? Christ, the rules you decide to pay attention to are extraordinary, petal.”
“Just because I don’t break rules just for the sake of breaking them,” grumbled Arthur.
And there it was, Eames saw suddenly. Arthur breaking through. Arthur in all his glory. “There you are,” breathed Eames, as Arthur lost a bit of his stiff posedness. No wonder Eames had been struggling. The Arthur in front of him hadn’t looked very much like the Arthur Eames knew. Arthur in his three-piece suits with the lethalness of a wolf lurking underneath it all. Arthur who could kill you a dozen different ways without a weapon but would do it politely.
Eames said, “Lean back a bit.”
Arthur slouched into the chair, a posture Eames had never seen him assume, ever.
Eames shook his head. “No, never mind,” and Arthur straightened. Eames regarded him, and then said slowly, “Put your ankle on your knee.”
“Which one?” asked Arthur, back to being self-conscious and very unmoving, as if Eames was taking some kind of long-exposure photograph of him.
“Your preference.”
Arthur’s left ankle settled on his knee.
Eames swallowed thickly, because there was something undeniably seductive about telling Arthur to move in exactly the way he wanted and having Arthur just do it. “Wrist on your ankle,” he told Arthur.
Arthur extended his arm carefully, as if a sudden movement might disturb the tableau Eames was creating.
“Just like that,” Eames told him, “don’t move,” and sketched him quickly. Arthur was all long lines, all sharp expensive fabric, the shape of him was important to get right, the way that Arthur so carefully and consciously chose how to fill the air around him.
Eames drew him without looking, in the end, so it was pointless that he’d made him pose, other than for the inspiration it had given him. He spent some time with Arthur’s face, with his expression, making him soft and hard all at once, the way Arthur was, once you knew him. Come closer, said Arthur’s expression, but carefully.
Eames looked down at the sketch critically, wondering if it even came close to capturing anything about Arthur, and became aware of Arthur’s harsh breaths filling the room, short and quick. Arthur was practically panting.
Eames stole a glance up at him, and the expression on his face wasn’t anything close to the expression Eames had just drawn for him. Come closer, said Arthur’s expression, now, immediately.
Eames put the notebook aside, and Arthur licked his lips and did not move an inch from the pose he was in. Eames dropped to his knees and crawled the few paces over to Arthur, which should have been ridiculous, except that he kept his eyes on Arthur’s and Arthur did not at all look like he thought it was ridiculous.
Eames reached Arthur and knelt in front of him, and moved his ankle off of his knee, planting his shoe firmly on the floor. This dislodged Arthur’s hand, which he dropped to the chair awkwardly, as if unsure where it ought to go. Eames held his gaze and spread Arthur’s legs so that he could better fit himself between them and pulled Arthur closer to the edge of the armchair. Arthur watched him with wide, dark eyes and wet, parted lips gasping shallow breaths.
Eames dropped his attention to Arthur’s tie, unknotted it with slow, painstaking precision, pulled it achingly through Arthur’s collar, the expensive whir of the fabrics brushing against each other loud in the deafening silence they were enveloped in. He looked back at Arthur when he finally finished with the tie, and Arthur’s eyes were closed, the tip of his tongue lightly resting against his lip.
Eames wanted to kiss him but resisted the urge. Instead he shrugged Arthur out of his jacket, smoothing his hands over Arthur’s shoulders and down Arthur’s chest, heaving under his touch. Eames slid each waistcoat button elegantly through its hole, watching his fingers’ progress carefully, and when it was done he stole another glance at Arthur. Arthur’s eyes were open now, watching him, heavy-lidded and hot. Arthur looked completely wrecked and Eames hadn’t even laid a finger on skin yet.
Eames unbuttoned Arthur’s shirt with the same care he’d taken with Arthur’s waistcoat. The shirt’s fabric was so expensive that its stiff heaviness actually took Eames by surprise. He tugged it out of Arthur’s trousers as best he could with Arthur’s braces in the way—how many fucking layers did he have to wear, really?—and finished unbuttoning the shirt, forcing himself to do it slowly.
And then, finally, he parted the fabric and found himself having reached skin. He thanked God that Arthur wasn’t wearing a vest, too, and laid his hands on Arthur’s stomach. Arthur’s entire body shuddered at the contact, his breathing kicking up another notch, and Eames used his hands to frame an open expanse of skin for him to lean forward and mouth against. Arthur made a sound so incredibly delicious that Eames thought he was destined to masturbate to the memory of that sound for the rest of his life.
His hands were already at Arthur’s fly, and Arthur was already achingly hard, and Eames glanced up at him to find him watching, so he held his gaze when he went down on him. Arthur gave a gasp, and his hands twitched where he’d balled them into fists on the chair, and Eames wanted to push him over the edge, wanted to disintegrate all of that Arthurian control.
Arthur arched into him, helpless, his head lolling back against the armchair, but Eames pushed his hips back down and pinned him. Arthur made a sound, desperate and almost whining, but Eames ignored him, ignored the thudding beat of his own pulse telling him to go faster, and instead forced himself to keep his breathing steady, to keep his pace slow, slow, so slow, because he remembered how he’d felt when he’d thought Arthur was getting dressed in order to halt all of this, and he had no idea how much longer he was going to have with him, and he wanted to make all of this last, damn it.
Arthur squirmed in his grasp. Eames was mostly touching the fabric that Arthur was still wearing but when he brushed against skin, it was slick with sweat.
“Eames,” Arthur gasped, his voice little more than a rasp, and Eames felt the thrill of hearing his name said by Arthur like that ripple over him. “Fucking…” Arthur sucked in air, tried again, and Eames’s hands held against the press of Arthur’s hips, anticipating the motion. “Christ,” Arthur swore.
Eames freed up his hands long enough to grab Arthur’s and place them on his head because Arthur was apparently pretending to be too polite to pull at Eames’s hair. Then he went back to pinning Arthur, to driving him pleasantly mad.
Arthur’s hands twisted painfully into Eames’s hair, immediately accepting Eames’s encouragement to do so, and his words were sobs now. “Eames—I—God—I—Jesus—oh—fuck—keep—keep—you’re—I—oh—Eames—Eameseameseameseameseameseames,” said Arthur, in one long rush of breathless sound, and Arthur’s hands were tight in Eames’s hair as if he was the only thing Arthur ever wanted to touch for the rest of his life, and Eames swallowed him down with his name ringing in his ears, dizzy intoxication.
Afterward Arthur collapsed bonelessly backward and his grip on Eames’s hair eased up, although he left his hands loosely resting there.
Eames nosed his way up Arthur’s body, licking and kissing and nibbling and biting as he went.
“Eames,” said Arthur, on a sex-drunk happy sigh, and carded his hands through Eames’s hair.
“Arthur,” Eames mumbled in reply into Arthur’s breastbone.
“Eames,” said Arthur again, still petting at him, his voice still so blurry and soft around the edges that Eames wanted to burrow into it like a blanket.
“Arthur,” said Eames, kissing underneath Arthur’s freshly shaven jaw.
“Eames,” said Arthur, and now his fingers splayed across Eames’s head, nudged Eames in for a kiss.
“Darling,” Eames said, and Arthur smiled, sloppy and sated and a little bit dazzled and a little more dazzling with his dimples all full-power like that, and kissed him.
“Eames,” said Arthur, hands now cupping Eames’s jaw, holding him in place, licking into the kisses.
Love, Eames thought but didn’t say.
But it didn’t matter: Arthur kissed him like he’d said it, anyways.
***
“This is unprecedented,” remarked Mycroft, standing just outside the sitting room doorway.
Sherlock glared at him. “Well, aren’t you going to barge in and make yourself at home the way you usually do?”
“You summoned me.” Mycroft looked endlessly amused. Mycroft was smirking.
“You’ve actually gained weight since the last time I saw you,” said Sherlock sourly.
Mycroft’s smirk didn’t waver as he finally entered the room. “What’s this all about, brother dear?”
“You’re gaining weight at an alarming rate these days,” continued Sherlock.
“Hello, John,” said Mycroft pleasantly.
John said, “One of your criminals stole my mobile.”
That got rid of the smirk, so Sherlock was grateful John had mentioned it.
“Honestly,” said Mycroft, clearly gearing up for a lecture, “this isn’t a game with Moriarty and I wish you’d stop treating it that way.” Mycroft was frowning at Sherlock because Mycroft was always frowning at Sherlock.
“I’m not treating it like a game,” Sherlock snapped.
“You let Eames steal John’s mobile,” Mycroft pointed out.
Sherlock ignored that. “Stop blackmailing them and let them go,” he said.
Mycroft lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and developed yet another crush on yet another criminal.”
John made a sound that was almost a snort but could also have been characterized as a squeak. Sherlock glared at Mycroft, glanced at John, who was studiously examining the wallpaper, and then looked back at Mycroft.
“It’s not going to end well,” Sherlock insisted.
“Fascinating to me, that you of all people are warning me something with Moriarty isn’t going to end well.”
“He’s serious, Mycroft,” John inserted. “This thing Moriarty’s doing, they can’t really get around it safely. They actually showed up here and threw all of that drug down the sink, that’s how serious they are about the danger.”
Mycroft looked at Sherlock. “So they eliminated the danger to you? First intelligent thing they’ve done.”
“You’re not going to get anything out of Moriarty’s head,” Sherlock shouted at him, frustrated. “You were never going to get anything out of Moriarty’s head.”
“You’re the one who lost to Moriarty,” said Mycroft evenly. “Not me. I will break him eventually. I will learn what he knows.”
“And you don’t care how many people get hurt in the process?” John demanded, sounding furious, because John got furious over things like that.
Mycroft said, his eyes steadily on Sherlock as if John hadn’t spoken, “I focus on the number of people his knowledge will save. What’s this all about, Sherlock? Don’t tell me you’re worried about them; you never waste energy worrying about other people.”
“I don’t care what happens to them, I just don’t like to share Moriarty,” Sherlock bit out, striving for loftiness.
Mycroft’s eyes were narrow and deductive and Sherlock hated him. He watched them flicker meaningfully toward John, making sure Sherlock noticed, and then back to Sherlock. “Don’t think of them as some sort of symbolic representation of your situation. They’re not.” And then Mycroft, damn him, turned and insufferably walked away.
Sherlock waited until he heard the door close before hurling a book against the wall.
“What the hell was he on about at the end there?” John asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Sherlock seethed, and steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips.
“So what do we do now?” said John, after a second.
“We make sure this Moriarty dreamshare never takes place.”
“Why, all of a sudden, are you so worried about this? It’s not because Eames and Arthur cut you out of the whole thing, is it? Because if this is all about your wounded ego—”
“This is all about the fact that it isn’t going to work and it’s a waste of everyone’s time and, apparently, sanity,” Sherlock retorted. “And you should understand that, you hate to waste people, you’re always so worried about people.”
John looked at Sherlock. He looked so quizzical, so curious, so confused. He said, “Why would they be a symbolic representation of you?”
Sherlock decided to pretend to be too deep in thought to respond to that inquiry.
***
Arthur was curled toward him, sleeping deeply, hair tumbled over his forehead and pristine white shirt crumpled beyond all recognition.
Eames was not sleeping at all. He was lying wide awake, staring up at the ceiling, refusing to let himself behave like a love-struck teenager and watch Arthur sleep. He was thinking of Arthur kissing his way over Eames’s tattoos, lazy licks of lips and tongue, demanding incoherent stories from him about them, keeping his shirt on by Eames’s request, because there was something unspeakably filthy to him about being sprawled in a bed underneath Arthur in an unbuttoned white dress shirt. Eames was never going to be able to look at button-down white dress shirts ever again.
Eames was never going to be able to…
Arthur clearly thought the entire Moriarty job was a bad bet, not one he would have taken under any other circumstances. Arthur would have walked away, and Arthur wasn’t walking away because of Eames.
Eames dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and listened to Arthur’s heavy, even breathing, deep enough that Eames could feel the brush of his exhalations, and swore silently in myriad different languages. He wanted this to be his life, desperately, and instead he had Arthur in all of his debauched perfection sleeping trustingly next to him only because they were about to do a job that would probably leave them both insane. Because of Eames.
Eames looked over at Arthur, at the moue his lips formed in sleep. Arthur never let his lips get so lush and obscene in wakefulness, kept them pressed into thin lines from which no dimples could escape. Eames looked at the wonder of him the way he was, all of him, and Eames got out of bed.
Arthur stirred but he didn’t try to kill Eames, and Eames thought that showed a display of trusting progress that he couldn’t deal with at all.
“Eames?” Arthur said into his pillow, not even opening his eyes, and the fact of Arthur letting himself be sleepy enough to refuse to open his eyes made Eames feel like he was in danger of suffocating right there.
“I get first shower this time,” Eames told him around the lump in his throat, keeping his voice low and soothing. “Go back to sleep, I’ll wake you when I’m done.”
“Mmm,” said Arthur, and turned his head further into the pillow.
Eames crept around retrieving clothing and then glanced over at Arthur. He seemed to be sound asleep.
Eames took the world’s quickest shower, efficiently scrubbing himself clean before dressing just as quickly. When he slid out of the bathroom, Arthur still seemed to be sound asleep, and Eames the con artist with ingrained survival instincts thought it was time to make his speedy and silent getaway.
Eames the lovesick idiot who had spent too many years of his life pining for the man nearly naked in the bed in the room next door stopped and wrote a note first.
***
Arthur woke to silence. And instead of realizing immediately how suspicious that was, he wasted some time by turning his face into the pillow and breathing deeply. He wanted to snuggle back under the covers and let the world fall away, he thought, and because Arthur slept for a job, he didn’t normally feel that way about sleeping.
Actually, he really wanted to snuggle back under the covers with Eames, and he was annoyed Eames wasn’t in bed anymore and was dreading getting up and going back to the real world where he did not snuggle under covers with Eames. Eames was used to this, used to fucking people and pretending nothing had happened the next day. The idea of just sitting across from Eames, facing him, and working, as if nothing had changed between them, made dread settle cold and hard in Arthur’s stomach. Arthur was no forger: he wasn’t sure he was a good enough actor to pull any of this off.
Arthur eventually forced himself out of bed. The suite was still quiet, so he took advantage of the reprieve of having to awkwardly face Eames and showered. He dressed with the same care he’d shown toward the outfit he’d worn for Eames to draw. It wasn’t very far off his usual morning routine, and yet afterward he considered all of it to be a waste of valuable time. It wasn’t until he was perfectly put together that he finally stepped out into the suite’s living area.
It was empty. He’d expected to find Eames watching one of his Korean dramas on the television, but instead Eames was nowhere to be seen.
“Eames?” Arthur called, but he’d already been distracted by the sight of his notebook on the coffee table. Arthur glanced around, didn’t see Eames anywhere. And, again, instead of being suspicious about that, he gave in to his curiosity and tugged the notebook over to him, flipping toward the back.
The first sketch he came upon was clearly Arthur, but Arthur like he had never seen himself before, lazy and sated, throwing bedroom eyes up from the paper. Arthur stared at it—because surely he didn’t actually look that way—then swallowed thickly before turning the page.
The next sketch was the one he’d been expecting, him posed carefully in the chair, except that Eames’s drawing managed to make it look like a completely natural choice on his part, not artificial at all, as if someone had just happened upon him that way. His eyes were dark and sharp, daring, inviting and closed-off all at the same time, dry and sardonic but with a spark of good humor, serious as death and yet warm with promise. Arthur stared down at his own image without comprehension. Was that really how Eames saw him? Like that? Because Arthur wasn’t sure he’d expected the complexity of the drawing, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it now that he had it in front of him.
So Arthur turned the page, because that was easier than dealing with the drawing, and that was when the bottom dropped out of his day.
Arthur—was how it began. And then it went on. Arthur—When you have recovered from all the fantastic sex that’s tangled up your brain, you’ll realize I’ve done the only logical thing. –E. P.S. I am sorry, love. Forgive me—eventually—.
Arthur stared at the note. He stared harder at the note. Then he threw the notebook down and shouted, “Eames!”
No answer.
Just as he’d known there wouldn’t be.
Arthur glanced around the suite and realized that Eames had taken the PASIV with him. “Son of a bitch,” said Arthur passionately.
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 25
Eames had never done this before ever in his life. And the number of things that could be said about was increasingly small.
He drew, yes. He had always drawn. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t been scrounging for something to draw with, for something to draw on. All of his earliest memories revolved around the activity. He could recall his mother only dimly, but he could vividly remember a bright red drawing he’d made of her when he’d been a toddler. His mother had not been sentimental and had not kept his childhood scribblings for any length of time, but he still remembered that drawing as being his mother, when he thought about her.
But Eames had never drawn a serious portrait for a model who was sitting for him, and he had no idea where to start.
“Where do you want me?” Arthur asked, and Eames opened his mouth to give any number of filthy suggestions, but Arthur headed him off at the pass because Arthur knew him so well that Eames could cry with it, knew him better than Eames had ever let anyone know him. Arthur gave him that adorable look of Arthurian exasperation and said, “For the drawing, Eames.”
Eames scratched at the back of his neck—which was something he only ever did during the very rare times when he was actually nervous. He was nervous now, over drawing Arthur, and he wondered why he didn’t just press his advantage and say no and kiss Arthur past the disappointment. But, dammit, Arthur seemed to want this, Arthur looked hopeful about this, and Arthur had gone and put on a bloody three-piece suit just so Eames could peel him out of it because Eames had expressed a desire to do so, so the least Eames could do was draw a sodding sketch of him.
“I don’t know,” Eames admitted, and then tried to cover his inexperience. “Where would you like to sit? I find that seating choice reveals much about the subject.”
Arthur gave him a look that Eames didn’t know how to place—amused? fond?—and simply sat on one of the room’s armchairs. “How’s this?”
“Okay,” said Eames. “Yes. Perfect.” He sat opposite Arthur and looked from Arthur to paper, Arthur to paper. It was a bloody sketch. He could do this. He’d sketched Mycroft unthinkingly only days earlier.
Eames put his pencil to the paper tentatively, an attempt to draw the long, sinuous line of Arthur’s body, and frowned at it and turned to the next fresh page in Arthur’s notebook.
“Take off your shirt,” Arthur said.
Eames glanced up at him, cocking an eyebrow. “Are we doing some kind of role-playing thing right now?”
Arthur rolled his eyes. “I want to hear about your tattoos, and it’s easier if I can see them.”
Eames shrugged and pulled off his T-shirt, then tried to start again on Arthur’s sketch.
“Tell me about them,” Arthur said.
“What about them?”
“Everything about them. Start with the wave one on your right shoulder.”
Eames smiled a little bit, sketching Arthur from memory without even glancing at him, without even noticing it. “You would pick that one. It’s a memento from Rio.”
“Do you have a tattoo from every job?” Arthur asked, sounding surprised.
Only the ones that he wanted to remember, and he had met Arthur on that job, so it had definitely merited a tattoo. Eames didn’t say that. He just said, “No. Only some of them,” and kept sketching.
“So do you have one from the inception job?”
“The snowflakes,” Eames said, pausing long enough to indicate the swirl of snowflakes down the left side of his chest, dancing over other tattoos.
“Snowflakes?” echoed Arthur.
Eames quirked a smile at his paper. “Because my level was a blizzard.”
“You were in charge of the weather.”
“I may have been heartily sick of heat at the time I was doing that dreamshare,” responded Eames.
“I’m sorry I missed you on the skis,” remarked Arthur. “I bet it was hot.”
“I’m sorry I missed you executing a kick in zero gravity. That was doubtless hotter.” Eames regarded his sketch, and realized he was, without consciously intending it, drawing Arthur in bed. Arthur with his expression open and unguarded, with his mouth soft and lush, with his eyes heavy and dark, with his hair tumbled and alluring. It was undoubtedly Arthur—and an Arthur he now amazingly knew—but it wasn’t what he wanted. Although at least Arthur’s distraction technique had helped him draw at all.
He frowned at it and turned the page again.
“So do you design your own tattoos?” Arthur asked.
“Sometimes,” said Eames, deciding to actually glance at Arthur once in a while so he could draw the Arthur posing for him instead of the one that lived in his head.
“How do you decide what you’re going to get?”
“It comes to me in a dream,” said Eames.
“Does it?” asked Arthur, sounding surprised.
“No, of course not. I don’t know, I just decide. Is that why you don’t have any tattoos? Indecision?”
There was a moment of silence. “Eames, I’m Jewish. We can’t have tattoos. My parents would have a fit.”
Eames stopped drawing entirely and looked at Arthur for a moment, saw that he was one-hundred percent serious, and then collapsed backward into laughter, not even caring that Arthur looked vaguely offended. “Arthur. You’re a criminal. For a living. And you’re worried about your parents being upset about a tattoo? Christ, the rules you decide to pay attention to are extraordinary, petal.”
“Just because I don’t break rules just for the sake of breaking them,” grumbled Arthur.
And there it was, Eames saw suddenly. Arthur breaking through. Arthur in all his glory. “There you are,” breathed Eames, as Arthur lost a bit of his stiff posedness. No wonder Eames had been struggling. The Arthur in front of him hadn’t looked very much like the Arthur Eames knew. Arthur in his three-piece suits with the lethalness of a wolf lurking underneath it all. Arthur who could kill you a dozen different ways without a weapon but would do it politely.
Eames said, “Lean back a bit.”
Arthur slouched into the chair, a posture Eames had never seen him assume, ever.
Eames shook his head. “No, never mind,” and Arthur straightened. Eames regarded him, and then said slowly, “Put your ankle on your knee.”
“Which one?” asked Arthur, back to being self-conscious and very unmoving, as if Eames was taking some kind of long-exposure photograph of him.
“Your preference.”
Arthur’s left ankle settled on his knee.
Eames swallowed thickly, because there was something undeniably seductive about telling Arthur to move in exactly the way he wanted and having Arthur just do it. “Wrist on your ankle,” he told Arthur.
Arthur extended his arm carefully, as if a sudden movement might disturb the tableau Eames was creating.
“Just like that,” Eames told him, “don’t move,” and sketched him quickly. Arthur was all long lines, all sharp expensive fabric, the shape of him was important to get right, the way that Arthur so carefully and consciously chose how to fill the air around him.
Eames drew him without looking, in the end, so it was pointless that he’d made him pose, other than for the inspiration it had given him. He spent some time with Arthur’s face, with his expression, making him soft and hard all at once, the way Arthur was, once you knew him. Come closer, said Arthur’s expression, but carefully.
Eames looked down at the sketch critically, wondering if it even came close to capturing anything about Arthur, and became aware of Arthur’s harsh breaths filling the room, short and quick. Arthur was practically panting.
Eames stole a glance up at him, and the expression on his face wasn’t anything close to the expression Eames had just drawn for him. Come closer, said Arthur’s expression, now, immediately.
Eames put the notebook aside, and Arthur licked his lips and did not move an inch from the pose he was in. Eames dropped to his knees and crawled the few paces over to Arthur, which should have been ridiculous, except that he kept his eyes on Arthur’s and Arthur did not at all look like he thought it was ridiculous.
Eames reached Arthur and knelt in front of him, and moved his ankle off of his knee, planting his shoe firmly on the floor. This dislodged Arthur’s hand, which he dropped to the chair awkwardly, as if unsure where it ought to go. Eames held his gaze and spread Arthur’s legs so that he could better fit himself between them and pulled Arthur closer to the edge of the armchair. Arthur watched him with wide, dark eyes and wet, parted lips gasping shallow breaths.
Eames dropped his attention to Arthur’s tie, unknotted it with slow, painstaking precision, pulled it achingly through Arthur’s collar, the expensive whir of the fabrics brushing against each other loud in the deafening silence they were enveloped in. He looked back at Arthur when he finally finished with the tie, and Arthur’s eyes were closed, the tip of his tongue lightly resting against his lip.
Eames wanted to kiss him but resisted the urge. Instead he shrugged Arthur out of his jacket, smoothing his hands over Arthur’s shoulders and down Arthur’s chest, heaving under his touch. Eames slid each waistcoat button elegantly through its hole, watching his fingers’ progress carefully, and when it was done he stole another glance at Arthur. Arthur’s eyes were open now, watching him, heavy-lidded and hot. Arthur looked completely wrecked and Eames hadn’t even laid a finger on skin yet.
Eames unbuttoned Arthur’s shirt with the same care he’d taken with Arthur’s waistcoat. The shirt’s fabric was so expensive that its stiff heaviness actually took Eames by surprise. He tugged it out of Arthur’s trousers as best he could with Arthur’s braces in the way—how many fucking layers did he have to wear, really?—and finished unbuttoning the shirt, forcing himself to do it slowly.
And then, finally, he parted the fabric and found himself having reached skin. He thanked God that Arthur wasn’t wearing a vest, too, and laid his hands on Arthur’s stomach. Arthur’s entire body shuddered at the contact, his breathing kicking up another notch, and Eames used his hands to frame an open expanse of skin for him to lean forward and mouth against. Arthur made a sound so incredibly delicious that Eames thought he was destined to masturbate to the memory of that sound for the rest of his life.
His hands were already at Arthur’s fly, and Arthur was already achingly hard, and Eames glanced up at him to find him watching, so he held his gaze when he went down on him. Arthur gave a gasp, and his hands twitched where he’d balled them into fists on the chair, and Eames wanted to push him over the edge, wanted to disintegrate all of that Arthurian control.
Arthur arched into him, helpless, his head lolling back against the armchair, but Eames pushed his hips back down and pinned him. Arthur made a sound, desperate and almost whining, but Eames ignored him, ignored the thudding beat of his own pulse telling him to go faster, and instead forced himself to keep his breathing steady, to keep his pace slow, slow, so slow, because he remembered how he’d felt when he’d thought Arthur was getting dressed in order to halt all of this, and he had no idea how much longer he was going to have with him, and he wanted to make all of this last, damn it.
Arthur squirmed in his grasp. Eames was mostly touching the fabric that Arthur was still wearing but when he brushed against skin, it was slick with sweat.
“Eames,” Arthur gasped, his voice little more than a rasp, and Eames felt the thrill of hearing his name said by Arthur like that ripple over him. “Fucking…” Arthur sucked in air, tried again, and Eames’s hands held against the press of Arthur’s hips, anticipating the motion. “Christ,” Arthur swore.
Eames freed up his hands long enough to grab Arthur’s and place them on his head because Arthur was apparently pretending to be too polite to pull at Eames’s hair. Then he went back to pinning Arthur, to driving him pleasantly mad.
Arthur’s hands twisted painfully into Eames’s hair, immediately accepting Eames’s encouragement to do so, and his words were sobs now. “Eames—I—God—I—Jesus—oh—fuck—keep—keep—you’re—I—oh—Eames—Eameseameseameseameseameseames,” said Arthur, in one long rush of breathless sound, and Arthur’s hands were tight in Eames’s hair as if he was the only thing Arthur ever wanted to touch for the rest of his life, and Eames swallowed him down with his name ringing in his ears, dizzy intoxication.
Afterward Arthur collapsed bonelessly backward and his grip on Eames’s hair eased up, although he left his hands loosely resting there.
Eames nosed his way up Arthur’s body, licking and kissing and nibbling and biting as he went.
“Eames,” said Arthur, on a sex-drunk happy sigh, and carded his hands through Eames’s hair.
“Arthur,” Eames mumbled in reply into Arthur’s breastbone.
“Eames,” said Arthur again, still petting at him, his voice still so blurry and soft around the edges that Eames wanted to burrow into it like a blanket.
“Arthur,” said Eames, kissing underneath Arthur’s freshly shaven jaw.
“Eames,” said Arthur, and now his fingers splayed across Eames’s head, nudged Eames in for a kiss.
“Darling,” Eames said, and Arthur smiled, sloppy and sated and a little bit dazzled and a little more dazzling with his dimples all full-power like that, and kissed him.
“Eames,” said Arthur, hands now cupping Eames’s jaw, holding him in place, licking into the kisses.
Love, Eames thought but didn’t say.
But it didn’t matter: Arthur kissed him like he’d said it, anyways.
***
“This is unprecedented,” remarked Mycroft, standing just outside the sitting room doorway.
Sherlock glared at him. “Well, aren’t you going to barge in and make yourself at home the way you usually do?”
“You summoned me.” Mycroft looked endlessly amused. Mycroft was smirking.
“You’ve actually gained weight since the last time I saw you,” said Sherlock sourly.
Mycroft’s smirk didn’t waver as he finally entered the room. “What’s this all about, brother dear?”
“You’re gaining weight at an alarming rate these days,” continued Sherlock.
“Hello, John,” said Mycroft pleasantly.
John said, “One of your criminals stole my mobile.”
That got rid of the smirk, so Sherlock was grateful John had mentioned it.
“Honestly,” said Mycroft, clearly gearing up for a lecture, “this isn’t a game with Moriarty and I wish you’d stop treating it that way.” Mycroft was frowning at Sherlock because Mycroft was always frowning at Sherlock.
“I’m not treating it like a game,” Sherlock snapped.
“You let Eames steal John’s mobile,” Mycroft pointed out.
Sherlock ignored that. “Stop blackmailing them and let them go,” he said.
Mycroft lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and developed yet another crush on yet another criminal.”
John made a sound that was almost a snort but could also have been characterized as a squeak. Sherlock glared at Mycroft, glanced at John, who was studiously examining the wallpaper, and then looked back at Mycroft.
“It’s not going to end well,” Sherlock insisted.
“Fascinating to me, that you of all people are warning me something with Moriarty isn’t going to end well.”
“He’s serious, Mycroft,” John inserted. “This thing Moriarty’s doing, they can’t really get around it safely. They actually showed up here and threw all of that drug down the sink, that’s how serious they are about the danger.”
Mycroft looked at Sherlock. “So they eliminated the danger to you? First intelligent thing they’ve done.”
“You’re not going to get anything out of Moriarty’s head,” Sherlock shouted at him, frustrated. “You were never going to get anything out of Moriarty’s head.”
“You’re the one who lost to Moriarty,” said Mycroft evenly. “Not me. I will break him eventually. I will learn what he knows.”
“And you don’t care how many people get hurt in the process?” John demanded, sounding furious, because John got furious over things like that.
Mycroft said, his eyes steadily on Sherlock as if John hadn’t spoken, “I focus on the number of people his knowledge will save. What’s this all about, Sherlock? Don’t tell me you’re worried about them; you never waste energy worrying about other people.”
“I don’t care what happens to them, I just don’t like to share Moriarty,” Sherlock bit out, striving for loftiness.
Mycroft’s eyes were narrow and deductive and Sherlock hated him. He watched them flicker meaningfully toward John, making sure Sherlock noticed, and then back to Sherlock. “Don’t think of them as some sort of symbolic representation of your situation. They’re not.” And then Mycroft, damn him, turned and insufferably walked away.
Sherlock waited until he heard the door close before hurling a book against the wall.
“What the hell was he on about at the end there?” John asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Sherlock seethed, and steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips.
“So what do we do now?” said John, after a second.
“We make sure this Moriarty dreamshare never takes place.”
“Why, all of a sudden, are you so worried about this? It’s not because Eames and Arthur cut you out of the whole thing, is it? Because if this is all about your wounded ego—”
“This is all about the fact that it isn’t going to work and it’s a waste of everyone’s time and, apparently, sanity,” Sherlock retorted. “And you should understand that, you hate to waste people, you’re always so worried about people.”
John looked at Sherlock. He looked so quizzical, so curious, so confused. He said, “Why would they be a symbolic representation of you?”
Sherlock decided to pretend to be too deep in thought to respond to that inquiry.
***
Arthur was curled toward him, sleeping deeply, hair tumbled over his forehead and pristine white shirt crumpled beyond all recognition.
Eames was not sleeping at all. He was lying wide awake, staring up at the ceiling, refusing to let himself behave like a love-struck teenager and watch Arthur sleep. He was thinking of Arthur kissing his way over Eames’s tattoos, lazy licks of lips and tongue, demanding incoherent stories from him about them, keeping his shirt on by Eames’s request, because there was something unspeakably filthy to him about being sprawled in a bed underneath Arthur in an unbuttoned white dress shirt. Eames was never going to be able to look at button-down white dress shirts ever again.
Eames was never going to be able to…
Arthur clearly thought the entire Moriarty job was a bad bet, not one he would have taken under any other circumstances. Arthur would have walked away, and Arthur wasn’t walking away because of Eames.
Eames dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and listened to Arthur’s heavy, even breathing, deep enough that Eames could feel the brush of his exhalations, and swore silently in myriad different languages. He wanted this to be his life, desperately, and instead he had Arthur in all of his debauched perfection sleeping trustingly next to him only because they were about to do a job that would probably leave them both insane. Because of Eames.
Eames looked over at Arthur, at the moue his lips formed in sleep. Arthur never let his lips get so lush and obscene in wakefulness, kept them pressed into thin lines from which no dimples could escape. Eames looked at the wonder of him the way he was, all of him, and Eames got out of bed.
Arthur stirred but he didn’t try to kill Eames, and Eames thought that showed a display of trusting progress that he couldn’t deal with at all.
“Eames?” Arthur said into his pillow, not even opening his eyes, and the fact of Arthur letting himself be sleepy enough to refuse to open his eyes made Eames feel like he was in danger of suffocating right there.
“I get first shower this time,” Eames told him around the lump in his throat, keeping his voice low and soothing. “Go back to sleep, I’ll wake you when I’m done.”
“Mmm,” said Arthur, and turned his head further into the pillow.
Eames crept around retrieving clothing and then glanced over at Arthur. He seemed to be sound asleep.
Eames took the world’s quickest shower, efficiently scrubbing himself clean before dressing just as quickly. When he slid out of the bathroom, Arthur still seemed to be sound asleep, and Eames the con artist with ingrained survival instincts thought it was time to make his speedy and silent getaway.
Eames the lovesick idiot who had spent too many years of his life pining for the man nearly naked in the bed in the room next door stopped and wrote a note first.
***
Arthur woke to silence. And instead of realizing immediately how suspicious that was, he wasted some time by turning his face into the pillow and breathing deeply. He wanted to snuggle back under the covers and let the world fall away, he thought, and because Arthur slept for a job, he didn’t normally feel that way about sleeping.
Actually, he really wanted to snuggle back under the covers with Eames, and he was annoyed Eames wasn’t in bed anymore and was dreading getting up and going back to the real world where he did not snuggle under covers with Eames. Eames was used to this, used to fucking people and pretending nothing had happened the next day. The idea of just sitting across from Eames, facing him, and working, as if nothing had changed between them, made dread settle cold and hard in Arthur’s stomach. Arthur was no forger: he wasn’t sure he was a good enough actor to pull any of this off.
Arthur eventually forced himself out of bed. The suite was still quiet, so he took advantage of the reprieve of having to awkwardly face Eames and showered. He dressed with the same care he’d shown toward the outfit he’d worn for Eames to draw. It wasn’t very far off his usual morning routine, and yet afterward he considered all of it to be a waste of valuable time. It wasn’t until he was perfectly put together that he finally stepped out into the suite’s living area.
It was empty. He’d expected to find Eames watching one of his Korean dramas on the television, but instead Eames was nowhere to be seen.
“Eames?” Arthur called, but he’d already been distracted by the sight of his notebook on the coffee table. Arthur glanced around, didn’t see Eames anywhere. And, again, instead of being suspicious about that, he gave in to his curiosity and tugged the notebook over to him, flipping toward the back.
The first sketch he came upon was clearly Arthur, but Arthur like he had never seen himself before, lazy and sated, throwing bedroom eyes up from the paper. Arthur stared at it—because surely he didn’t actually look that way—then swallowed thickly before turning the page.
The next sketch was the one he’d been expecting, him posed carefully in the chair, except that Eames’s drawing managed to make it look like a completely natural choice on his part, not artificial at all, as if someone had just happened upon him that way. His eyes were dark and sharp, daring, inviting and closed-off all at the same time, dry and sardonic but with a spark of good humor, serious as death and yet warm with promise. Arthur stared down at his own image without comprehension. Was that really how Eames saw him? Like that? Because Arthur wasn’t sure he’d expected the complexity of the drawing, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it now that he had it in front of him.
So Arthur turned the page, because that was easier than dealing with the drawing, and that was when the bottom dropped out of his day.
Arthur—was how it began. And then it went on. Arthur—When you have recovered from all the fantastic sex that’s tangled up your brain, you’ll realize I’ve done the only logical thing. –E. P.S. I am sorry, love. Forgive me—eventually—.
Arthur stared at the note. He stared harder at the note. Then he threw the notebook down and shouted, “Eames!”
No answer.
Just as he’d known there wouldn’t be.
Arthur glanced around the suite and realized that Eames had taken the PASIV with him. “Son of a bitch,” said Arthur passionately.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2015-03-05 02:19 am (UTC)*rendered speechless*
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Date: 2015-03-05 10:52 am (UTC)And that's about all you'll get out of me for a while I'm afraid -sobs-
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Date: 2015-03-05 08:55 pm (UTC)I think it's called a sneak. Or a squort.
Eames the lovesick idiot who had spent too many years of his life pining for the man nearly naked in the bed in the room next door stopped and wrote a note first.
*gasps* NO NO NO DON'T LEAVE A NOTE I'M IN THE SHERLOCK FANDOM I KNOW THAT HORRIBLY SAD THINGS HAPPEN WHEN SOMEONE LEAVE NOTES TO HIS BELOVED ONE.
P.S. I am sorry, love.
*gulps* He said love this time. In his farewell letter. Damn.
Oh my God the cliffanger. The sexy scene was so hot and the "Eames / Arthur / darling / unsaid-but-very-much-thought-love" was so sweet and then... ANGST HAPPENS. Eames does his own Reichenbach Fall and Sherlock is going to think of him and Arthur as a symbolic representation of himself and John even more and he's going to want to help and go into Moriarty's mind and... Aaargh, next Thursday (it's Thursday for me because of the sodding time difference) can't come too soon. It's a good thing I know that happy endings are guaranteed with you. But in the meanwhile there are six chapters left and so much room for Horrible Angst!
P.S. Reading the last chapter of Next Big Thing then this chapter in a row was an interesting experience. Emotional big dipper! :D