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edenfallingThese are the 13 girl!Arthur/Eames stories I've written so far for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
be_themoon in caramelsilver's Three Sentence Ficathon 2011, in what I think is internal chronological order. I have decided that girl!Arthur's name is Gwen, mostly because I couldn't find a name starting with A that I liked so I grabbed something obviously associated even if it sounds completely different. *grin*
(As you will see, I failed beyond belief at the whole three-sentence thing with these ficlets. But still! They are all short enough to fit into a single LJ comment... even though one ficlet comes within about fifty characters of the limit. *sigh*)
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1. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur, making it in the business (250 words)
Point one: Anyone who assumes a former Marine doesn't know how to fight, how to assess a situation gone fubar and make a plan to get out (with or without achieving the mission objective, because while she's a perfectionist, she's also not stupid or willing to sacrifice her team or herself for no reason), and how to gather and analyze intelligence, is a Grade A fucking idiot, and Gwen has no time for them; she will do her part of the job, walk away, and spread word that so-and-so is an idiot who can't recognize talent when he sees it. As her reputation grows, her evaluation carries more and more weight.
Point two: Sexual harassment earns broken fingers or bruised ribs in reality, and a very, very, painful death in the dream; after Iraq and Afghanistan, Gwen knows a lot of ugly ways to die. Word gets around.
Point three: It helps to have another woman around, even if Mal has never been to war and has never quite learned to see guns as anything beyond slightly unreal toys; she is still brilliant and fierce, she's trained Dom to respect her and all other women by extension, she laughs and flings her arms around Gwen and drags her off on mad quests and lunches and library tours and shopping sprees, and she creates a space where Gwen can let down her guard and just be, if only between jobs (because jobs are different, even if she doesn't have to fight Dom to get her opinions heard). Those moments of grace keep her sane.
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2. Prompt: Inception, alwaysagirl!Arthur/Eames, I dreamed a lot bigger (325 words)
The first time Gwen meets Eames, they're two levels down and Eames is auditioning for Mal and Dom's newest experiment -- openly shifting from shape to shape at a steady rate of one a minute and waiting to see how fast it will take untrained and unmilitarized minds to catch on to the anomaly. When Mal says, "Yes, excellent, now let us discuss the petty financial details," Eames settles down into a woman's skin: Caucasian, brunette, a bit blocky around the shoulders and waist but perfectly, obviously female in gait and word choice and attitude. Gwen watches Eames pull a Sig Sauer P230 from nowhere with skilled fingers, demonstrating her ability to escape any unintended consequences of the trials, and thinks, finally. Someone else who slogged her way through the military, through the shadier aspects of dreamshare, through the general shit life throws on women who care more about competence than gender presentation.
Eames tilts her head toward Gwen as Mal and Dom wander off talking about architecture and the uses of the pathetic fallacy, and says, "So what will you be doing during all this nonsense? It seems a waste of your skills."
"Someone has to keep the lovebirds safe while they take notes," Gwen says dryly.
Eames laughs and makes her handgun disappear. "Point for you. So tell me, when's your next extraction job likely to come up? The good professors Cobb can't be getting all their funding from grants, not with the way your military came down like a ton of bricks on the dreamshare. I've heard rumors about you three for years, and I'd love to watch you in proper action, not just babysitting."
"We'll see, Ms. Eames," Gwen says, as the warning music begins to play, eerie and drawn-out almost beyond recognition. She smiles more warmly than she often does with strangers, and wonders if the forger might be interested in coffee some afternoon.
Then they wake and she sees the man.
Dreams hurt when they break.
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3. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, it goes off like a gun brighter than the sun (525 words)
People who assume Gwen is uptight and cold are simply unobservant idiots, Eames thinks; they see her suits, her guns, the severe knot of her dark hair, and read her professionalism if it were the only truth of her self. Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention can see the depth of her protectiveness toward the Cobbs and their daughter, can watch her slouch and tip back her chairs and roll up her sleeves without any care for her image or the wrinkles she makes in her shirts, can catch the sly jokes she makes at the expense of less talented or less prepared teammates (or, be fair, at his expense, because somehow they seem to have got off on the wrong foot after that first dream). She's economical with her emotional expression, to be sure, but calm isn't the same as cold. Eames rather admires her restraint, even as he needles her to bring out flashes of stronger emotion.
Then comes the dream where everything goes wrong: the mark turns out to have been repressing decades of hatred toward her sister, which rather ruins Eames's forge; the second level collapses, sending Eames and the good professors Cobb back up to the first, where Gwen is shocked to see them wake early with curses on their lips; Dom refuses to write off the job (something about departmental politics, funding changes, and a possibly unwise clandestine deal with a federal agency) and so he and Gwen hastily hash out a plan that involves a lot more improvising than Eames expects; and somehow this results in Eames and Gwen bursting into a dragon's cave armed with magical grenades and bayonets while the Cobbs sneak around the back to the treasure.
As she swings down from the dragon's severed neck, Gwen smiles at Eames, and it's so blinding and real he thinks she might as well have stabbed him in the heart. She has dimples. She's the most dangerous woman he knows (yes, even more than Mal or his mum, though only by a whisker in the latter case). He wants to spend the rest of his life making her smile like that again.
"Darling, has anyone ever told you you're beautiful covered in blood?" he asks, his mouth running away from him as it sometimes does. Most likely she'll take the compliment the wrong way, hear it as another dig instead of awestruck admiration, but Eames can't help himself. He has no idea what expression is on his face right now: most unprofessional of him.
Luck is with him; Gwen laughs. "You would be the first to express that sentiment, Mr. Eames," she says. "Grab your weapons and help me take care of the horde of angry villagers coming up the path."
(They pull off the job, but in the grand scheme of things, Eames can't really bring himself to care about such petty details as that. The important thing is that he slung an arm around Gwen's shoulders as the dream collapsed, and for two seconds she let him. He's had worse beginnings than that.)
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4. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, come back and we'll take them all on (150 words)
"Darling, I may have run into the tiniest bit of inconvenience," Eames says over the crackling of an unstable connection and the piece of shit headset that was all Gwen could find on short notice when someone who shall remain namelessEames broke her customized one.
Gwen tightens her grip on the steering wheel, waiting for the condescension she's learned is inevitable from men who fancy themselves in love with her: the same tired old 'for your safety' chauvinism masquerading as chivalry (which is just a nicer word for the same trap, anyway).
"Come and save me?" Eames says instead, and reels off an address and a sitrep so fast anyone else would have needed to make him repeat it. Then he hangs up, trusting her to have his back.
Gwen wheels her rented car around and bares her teeth at the world. This one -- this one, she thinks she'll keep.
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5. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, she hears of Mal's death from halfway around the world (775 words)
"Take a vacation, Guinevere, before you burn out," Mal says on New Year's Eve. "We all need a little down time and Dom and I aren't planning anything that needs your talents this semester, only some deep diving with each other as the subject." Dom agrees, dangling James upside-down by his ankles to hear the boy shriek with laughter.
"I can tell when I'm not wanted," Gwen says with a smile, and emails Eames to say she'll be available for freelance jobs until May after all.
Mal is right; the vacation is wonderful. Even if Gwen and Eames spend half their time on two-bit extractions, they spend the other half playing tourist in a way they so rarely could in the military and still don't often have time for given the time crunch that accompanies most jobs.
They're in Florence when she checks her email and sees a message from Dom -- but the subject line doesn't look urgent and Eames is making terrible faces over the table in a marvelous but fearsomely expensive restaurant, so Gwen slips her phone back into the pocket of her leather jacket and pokes Eames in the nose. "Didn't your mother ever tell you your face would freeze that way?" she asks, and bites back her smile when he grins and shakes his head.
Later they head back to their equally expensive hotel, a bottle of wine held carelessly in the strong fingers of Eames's left hand and a bag of pastries tucked under Gwen's arm. He's singing under his breath, probably Verdi, and Gwen breathes in the crisp February air and thinks she must bring Mal here someday when the children are old enough to appreciate the trip.
Eames disappears into the bathroom -- "Got to freshen up; back in a tick" -- and Gwen takes the opportunity to check her neglected email.
When Eames reappears, she's already half-packed.
"What--?" he starts to ask.
"Mal's dead," Gwen says, her voice flat and wrong even to her own ears. "Suicide, but she rigged it to implicate Dom. If I'm not there, he'll panic and do something stupid, and I owe it to Mal not to let him."
"Stupid like what?" Eames asks, his own voice maddeningly calm, though Gwen can see his hands shaping fists at his sides.
Gwen zips her suitcase and fastens the pathetic TSA-approved padlock. "He's going to run. Mal handled most of the job searches -- the only less than legal person besides me that Dom knows enough to trust is Joel Hauer, and he spooks at the first hint of smoke. The last thing I need is to have Dom listed as an international fugitive."
Eames moves forward and touches her cheek, redirecting her attention from her briefcase and the PASIV to his face. "Gwen, I'm an international fugitive. So Dom runs and has to set up shop in another country under another name. So what? Give it a month or three and take the children to him. They speak French; set them up somewhere in Provence. Nothing simpler."
Gwen closes her eyes and leans into the palm of his hand for a moment. Then she straightens and steps away. "What works for you and me doesn't work for everyone. I don't want to help Dom escape. I want to prove him innocent. He has a life; he shouldn't have to throw it away. Philippa and James don't deserve to grow up in hiding. They deserve to keep their mother's name."
"Gwen--" Eames begins.
"I'll call you," Gwen says, interrupting whatever persuasion he was going to attempt. "Give my apologies to Signor Matrisciano, but I doubt I'll make the job next week. Not until I have this mess squared away and Dom safe at home where he belongs."
"As you wish," Eames says, and Gwen nods, attention fixed on making the earliest flight reservation she can find.
It isn't until she finds Eames's phone number disconnected and all his aliases come up blank that she realizes his voice was too light and tense to be trusted. "That bastard," she says, staring at the cursor mocking her on the computer screen. The first sign of real trouble, and he doesn't stay to have her back, or even to fight it out; he just runs. That's not the person she thought she knew. Was the Eames she liked -- the Eames she loved -- ever real, or only another mask?
Then she's chasing after Dom, trying to keep him from throwing away his damn fool life in some twisted idea of penance for Mal, and she has no time to think about her own loss.
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6. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, I know you've been burnt but every fire is a lesson learned (275 words)
Eames calls Gwen two weeks after the Fischer job -- uses a burner phone, disguises his voice, and leaves a message pretending he's making a job offer on behalf of Louie Ramos out of Albuquerque so she'll call him back; he knows her pride will force her to at least hear him out for the duration of one call if she's the one who dialed.
"I was wrong," he says, and nothing more.
There's a long silence... and then she sighs and says, "I wasn't blameless either, Eames, but you didn't have to overreact like that. I know what you want, but I don't know if we can trust each other that way again."
"We can't," he admits. "And that's for the best, don't you think? We were younger and stupid and thought love meant we understood more about each other than we actually did. Now we know where more of the lines are, and we know we need to talk when things go sideways instead of simply assuming the other will jump the way we ourselves would. Let's give it a try, Gwen -- unless you're too scared?"
"Shameless manipulation only works when the party under manipulation is an idiot or in love," Gwen growls, but Eames can hear the amusement under the annoyance, and he smiles at his cheap little excuse for a mobile phone.
"I rather think those are mutually inclusive states of being, darling," he says. "So, Albuquerque on Thursday? Fly under the alias you used from Sydney and I'll meet you at the airport."
He hangs up.
She'll be there or she won't, and either way, he'd rather live in hope for three days than listen to her reject him now.
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7. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, survivors (725 words)
Now and again they work on the side of the angels, though rarely officially. This time it's the grieving parents of a kidnap victim who are convinced they know who took their ten-year-old daughter but can't legally touch him for lack of evidence.
"You know it's unlikely for Aliesha to still be alive six months later," Eames says gently as Gwen copies the parents' extensive research to a flash drive. "Despite a few sensational cases, long-term captivity is by far the exception."
"I know," Mrs. Jackson says, hands clasped in her lap and fierce eyes brilliant with unshed tears. "I just want the truth."
"What will you do when you have it?" Gwen asks, not looking up from the computer.
Mrs. Jackson exchanges a troubled look with her husband. "We'll cross that bridge when we get there," Mr. Jackson says after a moment, pulling his wife closer to his side on their faded sofa.
"Mmm," Gwen says. "I have the data. We'll call you when we're done. Good afternoon."
As Eames settles into the passenger seat of Gwen's latest rental car, he asks, "So how did you find this job, and how are they affording your price? Contract law and firefighting don't pay that well."
"Mr. Jackson's sister JaBrea was in the Marines with me," Gwen says, glaring at the suburban streets as if they might explode with insurgents or IEDs at the drop of a hat. "I met him at her funeral. Apparently she told a few carefully disguised stories at family reunions, and he knew enough to read between the lines; he was Army."
"Ah." Eames is silent for the rest of the drive.
The extraction itself is almost textbook: Gwen times his schedule, they catch him while he sunbathes in his fenced back garden, and they only need one level to coax him into spilling the details of Aliesha's fate... as well as his three other victims. Gwen makes a terrifying Grim Reaper, Eames thinks as he sheds Aliesha's skin and shoots himself out of the dream.
Gwen takes another minute to surface. Eames wonders what she's doing down with the mark. Then he swallows and decides he doesn't particularly need to know.
When Gwen wakes, smooth and fast, he's already cleaned up every sign of their presence except the PASIV itself and the tarp covering the chair where Gwen slept. Eames busies himself clearing the last traces while Gwen heads into the mark's study and begins booting up his computer.
"Dare I ask?" Eames says once he has everything neatly bundled up in their nondescript gym bags.
"I'm making a bookmark list of all news reports on the four victims," Gwen says. "Backdated, of course. Where's a good place to hide some printouts -- somewhere the police will find them, but won't seem too obvious?"
"Are we staging a home invasion turned deadly, then?" Eames asks as he starts examining the mark's house with a new purpose.
Gwen doesn't bother answering rhetorical questions.
When they leave, she calls the Jacksons long enough to say, "He did it. We took care of him." Then she sets about transferring her data to a new phone and destroying the old one. Eames drives in silence, taking interstate 80 west with no real destination in mind. He finds an exit when the sun sets and checks them in to a chain motel.
"She was ten years old," Gwen says abruptly, abandoning her half-opened suitcase and sitting on the ugly floral bedspread. "Ten. The other three were younger. Who does that? Who thinks of that?"
"He won't do it again," Eames says, sitting down beside her in his stocking feet and his hair disarranged from pulling off his undershirt. "You made very sure of that." He touches her gently, just a brush of fingers along her side, waits for her to set the rules of the night.
Gwen is the one who pulls him down into a kiss, who strips off his trousers and pants and has her way with him. Eames goes willingly, gives her what he can. It's not enough -- nothing could be, in the face of the world's uncaring cruelty -- but it's life screaming in the face of the void that while they're here, they'll do the best they can to burn away the dark.
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8. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, let's join forces / we've got our guns and horses (700 words)
It's generally a pleasure helping Ariadne find her feet in the dreamshare -- the more women the better, as far as Gwen's concerned, and Ariadne is good, both with the physical structure of the dreams and with finding a subject's psychological pressure points. But sometimes the younger woman gets in over her head, still reacting to things like an honest civilian instead of a criminal or a soldier, and Gwen feels honor-bound to haul her back to solid ground.
Eames finds the entire process hilarious.
"What is it this time?" he asks, lounging on the bed of his terrible little Mombasa apartment, which Gwen only agrees to visit because it's easier to deal with Yusuf in person when she can visually remind him of her gun and ability to kill him barehanded if he pulls any shit like he did on the Fischer job. (Dom's instructions or not, you don't fuck with your team like that; Gwen has a long memory and a high price for forgiveness.)
Gwen sighs. "Recreational dreaming, she says. Some mad scientist type out in Arizona has come up with a formula that deters projections from attacking. The downside is that the effect involves destroying belief in the dream -- you're always aware it's not real, even if you've never tried dreamshare before, so it's useless for extractions. On the other hand, the entertainment possibilities it opens..." She shrugs.
"All the joy and none of the pain or the practicality," Eames agrees, laughter dancing in his eyes. "So what scenarios has your petite protégé come up with, and what's gone wrong to make her call you in?"
"She wouldn't tell me over the phone," Gwen says, still annoyed. There's rational caution and then there's irrational paranoia and/or keeping important information from your allies for kicks, and neither of the latter options is acceptable. She'll have to give Ariadne another lecture when they arrive in Phoenix.
-----
"You're making a first-person immersion dream based on Cowboys vs. Aliens," Gwen says flatly.
Ariadne nods. "Pretty much. Except while I can get the landscape and the buildings right, I'm having trouble with the weapons and tactics. You and Eames were military, right? Can you help?"
Gwen elbows Eames to keep him from making sarcastic comments. "Who did you promise the finished plans to and when are they due?" she asks.
Ariadne tells her, and Gwen fights the urge to clap a hand over her eyes. "Next time, ask me first," she says. "Hell, ask Dom first -- he doesn't have a third of my contacts, but even he knows better than to deal with Jimmy Tores." She watches Ariadne swallow nervously and asks, morbidly, "Did he threaten your body or your family?"
"Both," Ariadne admits. "Well, at first. Then I pulled a gun on him and he backed off on the personal stuff. But he knows where my mom and stepdad live, and my little sister's name."
Gwen and Eames exchange a speaking look. "We'll take care of it, pixie," Eames promises. "We'll fix up your little shoot-out dream too, while we're at it. But I think it's time you and I have a talk about false identities and Gwen starts erasing your life."
For a moment Ariadne looks like she's going to protest, but good sense overrides emotion and she sighs. "Yeah, all right. I can tell Mom and Cassie I'm in witness protection or something -- that's enough of an excuse so I can keep in touch, right?"
"For now," Gwen allows. Her suitcase finally appears on the baggage claim carousel, and she snags it to lie on the cart beside Eames's luggage. "But that can wait. At the moment I want coffee, dinner, and a look at your little guns and horses dilemma." She grins, suddenly feeling like a little girl again. "I always wanted to be a cowboy. Killing aliens is icing on the cake."
Eames makes a finger gun and mimes shooting her, then blows imaginary smoke off his index finger and grins.
Gwen pulls him in for a kiss.
"Get a room, guys!" Ariadne whines cheerfully, and starts to hurry off with the baggage cart. Eames breaks the kiss to chase after her, and Gwen tips back her head and laughs.
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9. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, they're the best in the business but even the best make mistakes (500 words)
"Should've known-- should've seen the way he-- should've been paying attention to the money, not to-- should've done my job-- should've--"
Gwen is muttering to herself, a half-coherent litany of blame, as she ties strips of her shirt around the bullet wound in Eames's left upper arm -- through and through, thank whatever saints look out for disreputable forgers, but the exit wound must be a monster -- and presses her left knee on the pad of his own shirt where it's stuffed into the hole in his side. There's no exit wound there, and god only knows what the bullet hit inside.
"Darling. Shush. Hurts," Eames manages to say before blood loss and pain catch up and drag him under.
-----
"Not your fault," he croaks when they take out the infernal breathing tube. He's in hospital -- under a false name, of course; Gwen's too good to lose her presence of mind no matter how personal the crisis -- and judging by the lack of uniformed officers of the law outside his door, Gwen's spun a tale convincing enough to turn any suspicion away. Mugging, most likely. They don't exactly look like the sort of people who'd be involved in a shoot-out down a back alley in Detroit, even though that's closer to the truth.
"If not mine, then whose?" Gwen asks, sitting ramrod straight in the plastic torture device masquerading as a chair. "And don't say yours -- you were paying attention to the mark, like you were supposed to. It's my job to vet the team and my job to turn up any potential complications. I should have realized what Mr. Alameda was tangled in. I should have noticed that Olson had found better money elsewhere, especially once he stopped acting out to get my attention."
"You broke. Fingers," Eames points out. "Would shut most. People up. Fast."
"Yes, well," Gwen says, looking away. "Still."
"Shit. Happens," Eames manages. He coughs, deep, wracking spasms that trigger stabbing pain in his arm and a sort of nauseating heat in his abdomen. Gwen hurries over to hold his hand and press down on his ribs until he wrestles his rebellious lungs into submission.
"Ice chip?" she asks. Eames nods, and sucks gratefully on the numbing coldness, letting the water trickle down his abused throat at its own pace.
"Job? Olson?" he asks after a minute.
"The job's a washout, but I kept the first half of the fee as payment for not telling us who else might be looking for Mr. Alameda. As for Olson, he's out of reach," Gwen says between clenched teeth. "I can't take on a whole Mexican drug cartel by myself -- and no, the two of us wouldn't do any better, stop giving me that look. But the second he gets complacent..." She snaps her mouth shut, her dark brows drawn down into a vicious hunting mask.
"Together," Eames says, squeezing her hand.
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10. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, there's a drumming noise inside my head and it starts when you're around (300 words)
"You are impossible to ignore," Eames announces one night as he carries groceries into Gwen's New York studio apartment. "I feel you should be aware of this."
Gwen looks up from the couch, where she's been comfortably watching Monday night football -- the Giants vs. the Vikings; she'd be more torn between loyalty to her home state and to her adopted city if the Vikings were any good this year -- and says, "I'm not sure if I should take that as a compliment or an insult."
"Oh, you fade away very smoothly on a job," Eames says with a wave of his hand as he sets the groceries on the counter and begins to unpack the canvas bag. "On a personal level, however, it's maddening how you stick in a man's mind. Rather like an incessant beat saying 'Gwen, Gwen, Gwen' until I can't take it and have to ravish your body to drown out the infernal drums."
Gwen reaches sideways and raps on the coffee table -- tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap -- waiting for Eames to catch the reference.
"I am not the bloody Master," he says after a moment, but the annoyance is a paper-thin mask over amusement. "Since when do you watch Doctor Who anyhow?"
"Since I live in a science fiction film," Gwen says. "We invade dreams for a living. The more I know about what other people have imagined, the more possibilities I have to play with. Besides, David Tennant was easy on the eyes -- nothing quite like a rumpled Brit." She grins at Eames's outraged expression.
"He's a bleeding Scot," Eames says, voice rising to a ridiculous pitch. "And I'll show you rumpled!"
He tips Gwen off the couch onto the floor and proceeds to rumple them both.
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11. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, in a dream you can change anything - including yourself (425 words)
They fool around in dreams sometimes -- everyone does; anyone who says otherwise is lying (or asexual, Gwen points out whenever Eames raises the issue) -- but not very often. The main appeal of sex in dreams is the impossible, and they're both more than happy with what they have.
But now and then, Eames has a crazy thought he can't unstick from his head until they try it.
Like now: "Have you ever thought about having sex as a man?" he says casually as he and Gwen stroll through Ariadne's mockup of the final scene of Planet of the Apes (the original, of course, none of that tedious remake). "Or having sex while I'm a woman? Maybe even both?"
Gwen's forehead wrinkles in thought. "I can't say that I have," she says. "Why? Do you want to?"
Eames shrugs.
"You want to," Gwen concludes. "Well, I suppose we could try. I'm not much use at forgery, but I can do the basic exercises. That should serve, unless you'd prefer a man with muscles on his muscles, a blond, or something else other than me if I'd been born with a Y chromosome."
"Why would I want anyone but you?" Eames asks.
"My question exactly," says Gwen, but she frowns, closes her eyes, and seems to shiver all over like a photograph in a stiff breeze... and then a man is standing in her place: a bit taller, a bit broader in the shoulders, and with short hair combed back from his face instead of Gwen's long hair pulled back into a messy bun and held with a ballpoint pen. The trousers, the shirt, and the waistcoat are the same, simply retailored for a flatter chest and slimmer hips.
"Brilliant, darling," Eames says, and slips into the shape he wore when he first met Gwen: himself as a woman, a bit blocky and plain, but with a decent chest and a pleasant curve to her hips and arse if she does say so herself. "What shall I call you?" she asks in her new voice. "Surnames are beautifully gender-neutral, but Gwen won't quite work for a man."
The familiar stranger across from her purses his lips for a moment. "Oh, why not Arthur," he says in an unexpectedly deep voice, and smiles. He kept Gwen's dimples, Eames notices in delight.
"Well then, darling, let's find somewhere a bit less likely to get sand in unmentionable places," Eames says, and waits for Arthur to dream them up a bed.
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12. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, I won't lose him (175 words)
It's a game they play sometimes: on slow days between jobs, while exploring the layouts of new dreams, even during extractions when they're drawing the subject's attention away from the theft of precious secrets. Eames changes and changes and changes, and Gwen finds him. Always. Inevitably.
"What gives me away?" he asks one imaginary evening on the watchtower of a castle straight out of Escher. "Tell me, darling; it's a matter of professional interest. If you can spot me, someday someone else will figure out the trick and then where will I and all the other forgers be?"
Gwen just smiles and tips them over the edge.
As they fall toward death and waking, she whispers the truth to the screaming wind: "I find you because I refuse to lose you. That's all." And in dreams, a strong enough will can rewrite reality. Her little secret, and she'll never let on how desperately she needs Eames at her side, how much of the world she'd burn to keep him there.
They wake curled into each other's arms, and Gwen silences his questions with a kiss.
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13. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, I have loved not wisely but too well (350 words)
"Do you ever think we'll end up like the Cobbs?" Eames asks one night as he's arranging himself in bed -- yet another hotel on yet another job, and they're not getting any younger. His knees and ankles aren't particularly happy with him today.
"Mmm. I dunno. You mean married with children, or Shakespearean tragedy?" Gwen asks, her voice soft and thick with incipient sleep.
"Either. Both."
"Won't be a single mother, an' I won't raise a child in our current lifestyle," Gwen says. "Can you see y'self picking one name? Settling down?"
Eames tries to imagine this. They do have a few home bases, as it were -- his flat in Mombasa, Gwen's flat in New York City, the beach house Gwen bought in California so she'd have somewhere to stay when visiting the Cobbs after James was born and they ran out of guest rooms. And the idea of less time on airplanes is appealing. But to lose the freedom to pick up and go, whenever and wherever he wants, with only the need to keep Gwen aware of his movements...
"Not yet, at any rate," he admits.
"S'much for option one. As for tragedy..." Gwen rolls over in Eames's arms and presses the tips of her fingers to his throat, her eyelids sliding downward despite her effort to meet his gaze in the faint light seeping under the bathroom door. "If I died an' you had some reason to believe it was your fault -- won't be your fault, course, but I know you -- anyway, 'f I died, could you let me go?"
"Yes," Eames says. This part, he's thought about before, more often than he'd like, and no matter how much it hurts, he won't go down Dominick Cobb's path of self-destruction. "It would hurt like hell and back, but I'd find a way to make peace."
Gwen nods to herself. "Have to make sure I die first, then," she mumbles, and falls asleep.
Eames stares into the darkness for a long, long time.
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More to come ifbe_themoon gives me more prompts!
be_themoon in caramelsilver's Three Sentence Ficathon 2011, in what I think is internal chronological order. I have decided that girl!Arthur's name is Gwen, mostly because I couldn't find a name starting with A that I liked so I grabbed something obviously associated even if it sounds completely different. *grin*(As you will see, I failed beyond belief at the whole three-sentence thing with these ficlets. But still! They are all short enough to fit into a single LJ comment... even though one ficlet comes within about fifty characters of the limit. *sigh*)
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1. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur, making it in the business (250 words)
Point one: Anyone who assumes a former Marine doesn't know how to fight, how to assess a situation gone fubar and make a plan to get out (with or without achieving the mission objective, because while she's a perfectionist, she's also not stupid or willing to sacrifice her team or herself for no reason), and how to gather and analyze intelligence, is a Grade A fucking idiot, and Gwen has no time for them; she will do her part of the job, walk away, and spread word that so-and-so is an idiot who can't recognize talent when he sees it. As her reputation grows, her evaluation carries more and more weight.
Point two: Sexual harassment earns broken fingers or bruised ribs in reality, and a very, very, painful death in the dream; after Iraq and Afghanistan, Gwen knows a lot of ugly ways to die. Word gets around.
Point three: It helps to have another woman around, even if Mal has never been to war and has never quite learned to see guns as anything beyond slightly unreal toys; she is still brilliant and fierce, she's trained Dom to respect her and all other women by extension, she laughs and flings her arms around Gwen and drags her off on mad quests and lunches and library tours and shopping sprees, and she creates a space where Gwen can let down her guard and just be, if only between jobs (because jobs are different, even if she doesn't have to fight Dom to get her opinions heard). Those moments of grace keep her sane.
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2. Prompt: Inception, alwaysagirl!Arthur/Eames, I dreamed a lot bigger (325 words)
The first time Gwen meets Eames, they're two levels down and Eames is auditioning for Mal and Dom's newest experiment -- openly shifting from shape to shape at a steady rate of one a minute and waiting to see how fast it will take untrained and unmilitarized minds to catch on to the anomaly. When Mal says, "Yes, excellent, now let us discuss the petty financial details," Eames settles down into a woman's skin: Caucasian, brunette, a bit blocky around the shoulders and waist but perfectly, obviously female in gait and word choice and attitude. Gwen watches Eames pull a Sig Sauer P230 from nowhere with skilled fingers, demonstrating her ability to escape any unintended consequences of the trials, and thinks, finally. Someone else who slogged her way through the military, through the shadier aspects of dreamshare, through the general shit life throws on women who care more about competence than gender presentation.
Eames tilts her head toward Gwen as Mal and Dom wander off talking about architecture and the uses of the pathetic fallacy, and says, "So what will you be doing during all this nonsense? It seems a waste of your skills."
"Someone has to keep the lovebirds safe while they take notes," Gwen says dryly.
Eames laughs and makes her handgun disappear. "Point for you. So tell me, when's your next extraction job likely to come up? The good professors Cobb can't be getting all their funding from grants, not with the way your military came down like a ton of bricks on the dreamshare. I've heard rumors about you three for years, and I'd love to watch you in proper action, not just babysitting."
"We'll see, Ms. Eames," Gwen says, as the warning music begins to play, eerie and drawn-out almost beyond recognition. She smiles more warmly than she often does with strangers, and wonders if the forger might be interested in coffee some afternoon.
Then they wake and she sees the man.
Dreams hurt when they break.
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3. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, it goes off like a gun brighter than the sun (525 words)
People who assume Gwen is uptight and cold are simply unobservant idiots, Eames thinks; they see her suits, her guns, the severe knot of her dark hair, and read her professionalism if it were the only truth of her self. Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention can see the depth of her protectiveness toward the Cobbs and their daughter, can watch her slouch and tip back her chairs and roll up her sleeves without any care for her image or the wrinkles she makes in her shirts, can catch the sly jokes she makes at the expense of less talented or less prepared teammates (or, be fair, at his expense, because somehow they seem to have got off on the wrong foot after that first dream). She's economical with her emotional expression, to be sure, but calm isn't the same as cold. Eames rather admires her restraint, even as he needles her to bring out flashes of stronger emotion.
Then comes the dream where everything goes wrong: the mark turns out to have been repressing decades of hatred toward her sister, which rather ruins Eames's forge; the second level collapses, sending Eames and the good professors Cobb back up to the first, where Gwen is shocked to see them wake early with curses on their lips; Dom refuses to write off the job (something about departmental politics, funding changes, and a possibly unwise clandestine deal with a federal agency) and so he and Gwen hastily hash out a plan that involves a lot more improvising than Eames expects; and somehow this results in Eames and Gwen bursting into a dragon's cave armed with magical grenades and bayonets while the Cobbs sneak around the back to the treasure.
As she swings down from the dragon's severed neck, Gwen smiles at Eames, and it's so blinding and real he thinks she might as well have stabbed him in the heart. She has dimples. She's the most dangerous woman he knows (yes, even more than Mal or his mum, though only by a whisker in the latter case). He wants to spend the rest of his life making her smile like that again.
"Darling, has anyone ever told you you're beautiful covered in blood?" he asks, his mouth running away from him as it sometimes does. Most likely she'll take the compliment the wrong way, hear it as another dig instead of awestruck admiration, but Eames can't help himself. He has no idea what expression is on his face right now: most unprofessional of him.
Luck is with him; Gwen laughs. "You would be the first to express that sentiment, Mr. Eames," she says. "Grab your weapons and help me take care of the horde of angry villagers coming up the path."
(They pull off the job, but in the grand scheme of things, Eames can't really bring himself to care about such petty details as that. The important thing is that he slung an arm around Gwen's shoulders as the dream collapsed, and for two seconds she let him. He's had worse beginnings than that.)
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4. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, come back and we'll take them all on (150 words)
"Darling, I may have run into the tiniest bit of inconvenience," Eames says over the crackling of an unstable connection and the piece of shit headset that was all Gwen could find on short notice when someone who shall remain nameless
Gwen tightens her grip on the steering wheel, waiting for the condescension she's learned is inevitable from men who fancy themselves in love with her: the same tired old 'for your safety' chauvinism masquerading as chivalry (which is just a nicer word for the same trap, anyway).
"Come and save me?" Eames says instead, and reels off an address and a sitrep so fast anyone else would have needed to make him repeat it. Then he hangs up, trusting her to have his back.
Gwen wheels her rented car around and bares her teeth at the world. This one -- this one, she thinks she'll keep.
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5. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, she hears of Mal's death from halfway around the world (775 words)
"Take a vacation, Guinevere, before you burn out," Mal says on New Year's Eve. "We all need a little down time and Dom and I aren't planning anything that needs your talents this semester, only some deep diving with each other as the subject." Dom agrees, dangling James upside-down by his ankles to hear the boy shriek with laughter.
"I can tell when I'm not wanted," Gwen says with a smile, and emails Eames to say she'll be available for freelance jobs until May after all.
Mal is right; the vacation is wonderful. Even if Gwen and Eames spend half their time on two-bit extractions, they spend the other half playing tourist in a way they so rarely could in the military and still don't often have time for given the time crunch that accompanies most jobs.
They're in Florence when she checks her email and sees a message from Dom -- but the subject line doesn't look urgent and Eames is making terrible faces over the table in a marvelous but fearsomely expensive restaurant, so Gwen slips her phone back into the pocket of her leather jacket and pokes Eames in the nose. "Didn't your mother ever tell you your face would freeze that way?" she asks, and bites back her smile when he grins and shakes his head.
Later they head back to their equally expensive hotel, a bottle of wine held carelessly in the strong fingers of Eames's left hand and a bag of pastries tucked under Gwen's arm. He's singing under his breath, probably Verdi, and Gwen breathes in the crisp February air and thinks she must bring Mal here someday when the children are old enough to appreciate the trip.
Eames disappears into the bathroom -- "Got to freshen up; back in a tick" -- and Gwen takes the opportunity to check her neglected email.
When Eames reappears, she's already half-packed.
"What--?" he starts to ask.
"Mal's dead," Gwen says, her voice flat and wrong even to her own ears. "Suicide, but she rigged it to implicate Dom. If I'm not there, he'll panic and do something stupid, and I owe it to Mal not to let him."
"Stupid like what?" Eames asks, his own voice maddeningly calm, though Gwen can see his hands shaping fists at his sides.
Gwen zips her suitcase and fastens the pathetic TSA-approved padlock. "He's going to run. Mal handled most of the job searches -- the only less than legal person besides me that Dom knows enough to trust is Joel Hauer, and he spooks at the first hint of smoke. The last thing I need is to have Dom listed as an international fugitive."
Eames moves forward and touches her cheek, redirecting her attention from her briefcase and the PASIV to his face. "Gwen, I'm an international fugitive. So Dom runs and has to set up shop in another country under another name. So what? Give it a month or three and take the children to him. They speak French; set them up somewhere in Provence. Nothing simpler."
Gwen closes her eyes and leans into the palm of his hand for a moment. Then she straightens and steps away. "What works for you and me doesn't work for everyone. I don't want to help Dom escape. I want to prove him innocent. He has a life; he shouldn't have to throw it away. Philippa and James don't deserve to grow up in hiding. They deserve to keep their mother's name."
"Gwen--" Eames begins.
"I'll call you," Gwen says, interrupting whatever persuasion he was going to attempt. "Give my apologies to Signor Matrisciano, but I doubt I'll make the job next week. Not until I have this mess squared away and Dom safe at home where he belongs."
"As you wish," Eames says, and Gwen nods, attention fixed on making the earliest flight reservation she can find.
It isn't until she finds Eames's phone number disconnected and all his aliases come up blank that she realizes his voice was too light and tense to be trusted. "That bastard," she says, staring at the cursor mocking her on the computer screen. The first sign of real trouble, and he doesn't stay to have her back, or even to fight it out; he just runs. That's not the person she thought she knew. Was the Eames she liked -- the Eames she loved -- ever real, or only another mask?
Then she's chasing after Dom, trying to keep him from throwing away his damn fool life in some twisted idea of penance for Mal, and she has no time to think about her own loss.
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6. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, I know you've been burnt but every fire is a lesson learned (275 words)
Eames calls Gwen two weeks after the Fischer job -- uses a burner phone, disguises his voice, and leaves a message pretending he's making a job offer on behalf of Louie Ramos out of Albuquerque so she'll call him back; he knows her pride will force her to at least hear him out for the duration of one call if she's the one who dialed.
"I was wrong," he says, and nothing more.
There's a long silence... and then she sighs and says, "I wasn't blameless either, Eames, but you didn't have to overreact like that. I know what you want, but I don't know if we can trust each other that way again."
"We can't," he admits. "And that's for the best, don't you think? We were younger and stupid and thought love meant we understood more about each other than we actually did. Now we know where more of the lines are, and we know we need to talk when things go sideways instead of simply assuming the other will jump the way we ourselves would. Let's give it a try, Gwen -- unless you're too scared?"
"Shameless manipulation only works when the party under manipulation is an idiot or in love," Gwen growls, but Eames can hear the amusement under the annoyance, and he smiles at his cheap little excuse for a mobile phone.
"I rather think those are mutually inclusive states of being, darling," he says. "So, Albuquerque on Thursday? Fly under the alias you used from Sydney and I'll meet you at the airport."
He hangs up.
She'll be there or she won't, and either way, he'd rather live in hope for three days than listen to her reject him now.
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7. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, survivors (725 words)
Now and again they work on the side of the angels, though rarely officially. This time it's the grieving parents of a kidnap victim who are convinced they know who took their ten-year-old daughter but can't legally touch him for lack of evidence.
"You know it's unlikely for Aliesha to still be alive six months later," Eames says gently as Gwen copies the parents' extensive research to a flash drive. "Despite a few sensational cases, long-term captivity is by far the exception."
"I know," Mrs. Jackson says, hands clasped in her lap and fierce eyes brilliant with unshed tears. "I just want the truth."
"What will you do when you have it?" Gwen asks, not looking up from the computer.
Mrs. Jackson exchanges a troubled look with her husband. "We'll cross that bridge when we get there," Mr. Jackson says after a moment, pulling his wife closer to his side on their faded sofa.
"Mmm," Gwen says. "I have the data. We'll call you when we're done. Good afternoon."
As Eames settles into the passenger seat of Gwen's latest rental car, he asks, "So how did you find this job, and how are they affording your price? Contract law and firefighting don't pay that well."
"Mr. Jackson's sister JaBrea was in the Marines with me," Gwen says, glaring at the suburban streets as if they might explode with insurgents or IEDs at the drop of a hat. "I met him at her funeral. Apparently she told a few carefully disguised stories at family reunions, and he knew enough to read between the lines; he was Army."
"Ah." Eames is silent for the rest of the drive.
The extraction itself is almost textbook: Gwen times his schedule, they catch him while he sunbathes in his fenced back garden, and they only need one level to coax him into spilling the details of Aliesha's fate... as well as his three other victims. Gwen makes a terrifying Grim Reaper, Eames thinks as he sheds Aliesha's skin and shoots himself out of the dream.
Gwen takes another minute to surface. Eames wonders what she's doing down with the mark. Then he swallows and decides he doesn't particularly need to know.
When Gwen wakes, smooth and fast, he's already cleaned up every sign of their presence except the PASIV itself and the tarp covering the chair where Gwen slept. Eames busies himself clearing the last traces while Gwen heads into the mark's study and begins booting up his computer.
"Dare I ask?" Eames says once he has everything neatly bundled up in their nondescript gym bags.
"I'm making a bookmark list of all news reports on the four victims," Gwen says. "Backdated, of course. Where's a good place to hide some printouts -- somewhere the police will find them, but won't seem too obvious?"
"Are we staging a home invasion turned deadly, then?" Eames asks as he starts examining the mark's house with a new purpose.
Gwen doesn't bother answering rhetorical questions.
When they leave, she calls the Jacksons long enough to say, "He did it. We took care of him." Then she sets about transferring her data to a new phone and destroying the old one. Eames drives in silence, taking interstate 80 west with no real destination in mind. He finds an exit when the sun sets and checks them in to a chain motel.
"She was ten years old," Gwen says abruptly, abandoning her half-opened suitcase and sitting on the ugly floral bedspread. "Ten. The other three were younger. Who does that? Who thinks of that?"
"He won't do it again," Eames says, sitting down beside her in his stocking feet and his hair disarranged from pulling off his undershirt. "You made very sure of that." He touches her gently, just a brush of fingers along her side, waits for her to set the rules of the night.
Gwen is the one who pulls him down into a kiss, who strips off his trousers and pants and has her way with him. Eames goes willingly, gives her what he can. It's not enough -- nothing could be, in the face of the world's uncaring cruelty -- but it's life screaming in the face of the void that while they're here, they'll do the best they can to burn away the dark.
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8. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, let's join forces / we've got our guns and horses (700 words)
It's generally a pleasure helping Ariadne find her feet in the dreamshare -- the more women the better, as far as Gwen's concerned, and Ariadne is good, both with the physical structure of the dreams and with finding a subject's psychological pressure points. But sometimes the younger woman gets in over her head, still reacting to things like an honest civilian instead of a criminal or a soldier, and Gwen feels honor-bound to haul her back to solid ground.
Eames finds the entire process hilarious.
"What is it this time?" he asks, lounging on the bed of his terrible little Mombasa apartment, which Gwen only agrees to visit because it's easier to deal with Yusuf in person when she can visually remind him of her gun and ability to kill him barehanded if he pulls any shit like he did on the Fischer job. (Dom's instructions or not, you don't fuck with your team like that; Gwen has a long memory and a high price for forgiveness.)
Gwen sighs. "Recreational dreaming, she says. Some mad scientist type out in Arizona has come up with a formula that deters projections from attacking. The downside is that the effect involves destroying belief in the dream -- you're always aware it's not real, even if you've never tried dreamshare before, so it's useless for extractions. On the other hand, the entertainment possibilities it opens..." She shrugs.
"All the joy and none of the pain or the practicality," Eames agrees, laughter dancing in his eyes. "So what scenarios has your petite protégé come up with, and what's gone wrong to make her call you in?"
"She wouldn't tell me over the phone," Gwen says, still annoyed. There's rational caution and then there's irrational paranoia and/or keeping important information from your allies for kicks, and neither of the latter options is acceptable. She'll have to give Ariadne another lecture when they arrive in Phoenix.
-----
"You're making a first-person immersion dream based on Cowboys vs. Aliens," Gwen says flatly.
Ariadne nods. "Pretty much. Except while I can get the landscape and the buildings right, I'm having trouble with the weapons and tactics. You and Eames were military, right? Can you help?"
Gwen elbows Eames to keep him from making sarcastic comments. "Who did you promise the finished plans to and when are they due?" she asks.
Ariadne tells her, and Gwen fights the urge to clap a hand over her eyes. "Next time, ask me first," she says. "Hell, ask Dom first -- he doesn't have a third of my contacts, but even he knows better than to deal with Jimmy Tores." She watches Ariadne swallow nervously and asks, morbidly, "Did he threaten your body or your family?"
"Both," Ariadne admits. "Well, at first. Then I pulled a gun on him and he backed off on the personal stuff. But he knows where my mom and stepdad live, and my little sister's name."
Gwen and Eames exchange a speaking look. "We'll take care of it, pixie," Eames promises. "We'll fix up your little shoot-out dream too, while we're at it. But I think it's time you and I have a talk about false identities and Gwen starts erasing your life."
For a moment Ariadne looks like she's going to protest, but good sense overrides emotion and she sighs. "Yeah, all right. I can tell Mom and Cassie I'm in witness protection or something -- that's enough of an excuse so I can keep in touch, right?"
"For now," Gwen allows. Her suitcase finally appears on the baggage claim carousel, and she snags it to lie on the cart beside Eames's luggage. "But that can wait. At the moment I want coffee, dinner, and a look at your little guns and horses dilemma." She grins, suddenly feeling like a little girl again. "I always wanted to be a cowboy. Killing aliens is icing on the cake."
Eames makes a finger gun and mimes shooting her, then blows imaginary smoke off his index finger and grins.
Gwen pulls him in for a kiss.
"Get a room, guys!" Ariadne whines cheerfully, and starts to hurry off with the baggage cart. Eames breaks the kiss to chase after her, and Gwen tips back her head and laughs.
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9. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, they're the best in the business but even the best make mistakes (500 words)
"Should've known-- should've seen the way he-- should've been paying attention to the money, not to-- should've done my job-- should've--"
Gwen is muttering to herself, a half-coherent litany of blame, as she ties strips of her shirt around the bullet wound in Eames's left upper arm -- through and through, thank whatever saints look out for disreputable forgers, but the exit wound must be a monster -- and presses her left knee on the pad of his own shirt where it's stuffed into the hole in his side. There's no exit wound there, and god only knows what the bullet hit inside.
"Darling. Shush. Hurts," Eames manages to say before blood loss and pain catch up and drag him under.
-----
"Not your fault," he croaks when they take out the infernal breathing tube. He's in hospital -- under a false name, of course; Gwen's too good to lose her presence of mind no matter how personal the crisis -- and judging by the lack of uniformed officers of the law outside his door, Gwen's spun a tale convincing enough to turn any suspicion away. Mugging, most likely. They don't exactly look like the sort of people who'd be involved in a shoot-out down a back alley in Detroit, even though that's closer to the truth.
"If not mine, then whose?" Gwen asks, sitting ramrod straight in the plastic torture device masquerading as a chair. "And don't say yours -- you were paying attention to the mark, like you were supposed to. It's my job to vet the team and my job to turn up any potential complications. I should have realized what Mr. Alameda was tangled in. I should have noticed that Olson had found better money elsewhere, especially once he stopped acting out to get my attention."
"You broke. Fingers," Eames points out. "Would shut most. People up. Fast."
"Yes, well," Gwen says, looking away. "Still."
"Shit. Happens," Eames manages. He coughs, deep, wracking spasms that trigger stabbing pain in his arm and a sort of nauseating heat in his abdomen. Gwen hurries over to hold his hand and press down on his ribs until he wrestles his rebellious lungs into submission.
"Ice chip?" she asks. Eames nods, and sucks gratefully on the numbing coldness, letting the water trickle down his abused throat at its own pace.
"Job? Olson?" he asks after a minute.
"The job's a washout, but I kept the first half of the fee as payment for not telling us who else might be looking for Mr. Alameda. As for Olson, he's out of reach," Gwen says between clenched teeth. "I can't take on a whole Mexican drug cartel by myself -- and no, the two of us wouldn't do any better, stop giving me that look. But the second he gets complacent..." She snaps her mouth shut, her dark brows drawn down into a vicious hunting mask.
"Together," Eames says, squeezing her hand.
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10. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, there's a drumming noise inside my head and it starts when you're around (300 words)
"You are impossible to ignore," Eames announces one night as he carries groceries into Gwen's New York studio apartment. "I feel you should be aware of this."
Gwen looks up from the couch, where she's been comfortably watching Monday night football -- the Giants vs. the Vikings; she'd be more torn between loyalty to her home state and to her adopted city if the Vikings were any good this year -- and says, "I'm not sure if I should take that as a compliment or an insult."
"Oh, you fade away very smoothly on a job," Eames says with a wave of his hand as he sets the groceries on the counter and begins to unpack the canvas bag. "On a personal level, however, it's maddening how you stick in a man's mind. Rather like an incessant beat saying 'Gwen, Gwen, Gwen' until I can't take it and have to ravish your body to drown out the infernal drums."
Gwen reaches sideways and raps on the coffee table -- tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap -- waiting for Eames to catch the reference.
"I am not the bloody Master," he says after a moment, but the annoyance is a paper-thin mask over amusement. "Since when do you watch Doctor Who anyhow?"
"Since I live in a science fiction film," Gwen says. "We invade dreams for a living. The more I know about what other people have imagined, the more possibilities I have to play with. Besides, David Tennant was easy on the eyes -- nothing quite like a rumpled Brit." She grins at Eames's outraged expression.
"He's a bleeding Scot," Eames says, voice rising to a ridiculous pitch. "And I'll show you rumpled!"
He tips Gwen off the couch onto the floor and proceeds to rumple them both.
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11. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, in a dream you can change anything - including yourself (425 words)
They fool around in dreams sometimes -- everyone does; anyone who says otherwise is lying (or asexual, Gwen points out whenever Eames raises the issue) -- but not very often. The main appeal of sex in dreams is the impossible, and they're both more than happy with what they have.
But now and then, Eames has a crazy thought he can't unstick from his head until they try it.
Like now: "Have you ever thought about having sex as a man?" he says casually as he and Gwen stroll through Ariadne's mockup of the final scene of Planet of the Apes (the original, of course, none of that tedious remake). "Or having sex while I'm a woman? Maybe even both?"
Gwen's forehead wrinkles in thought. "I can't say that I have," she says. "Why? Do you want to?"
Eames shrugs.
"You want to," Gwen concludes. "Well, I suppose we could try. I'm not much use at forgery, but I can do the basic exercises. That should serve, unless you'd prefer a man with muscles on his muscles, a blond, or something else other than me if I'd been born with a Y chromosome."
"Why would I want anyone but you?" Eames asks.
"My question exactly," says Gwen, but she frowns, closes her eyes, and seems to shiver all over like a photograph in a stiff breeze... and then a man is standing in her place: a bit taller, a bit broader in the shoulders, and with short hair combed back from his face instead of Gwen's long hair pulled back into a messy bun and held with a ballpoint pen. The trousers, the shirt, and the waistcoat are the same, simply retailored for a flatter chest and slimmer hips.
"Brilliant, darling," Eames says, and slips into the shape he wore when he first met Gwen: himself as a woman, a bit blocky and plain, but with a decent chest and a pleasant curve to her hips and arse if she does say so herself. "What shall I call you?" she asks in her new voice. "Surnames are beautifully gender-neutral, but Gwen won't quite work for a man."
The familiar stranger across from her purses his lips for a moment. "Oh, why not Arthur," he says in an unexpectedly deep voice, and smiles. He kept Gwen's dimples, Eames notices in delight.
"Well then, darling, let's find somewhere a bit less likely to get sand in unmentionable places," Eames says, and waits for Arthur to dream them up a bed.
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12. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, I won't lose him (175 words)
It's a game they play sometimes: on slow days between jobs, while exploring the layouts of new dreams, even during extractions when they're drawing the subject's attention away from the theft of precious secrets. Eames changes and changes and changes, and Gwen finds him. Always. Inevitably.
"What gives me away?" he asks one imaginary evening on the watchtower of a castle straight out of Escher. "Tell me, darling; it's a matter of professional interest. If you can spot me, someday someone else will figure out the trick and then where will I and all the other forgers be?"
Gwen just smiles and tips them over the edge.
As they fall toward death and waking, she whispers the truth to the screaming wind: "I find you because I refuse to lose you. That's all." And in dreams, a strong enough will can rewrite reality. Her little secret, and she'll never let on how desperately she needs Eames at her side, how much of the world she'd burn to keep him there.
They wake curled into each other's arms, and Gwen silences his questions with a kiss.
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13. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, I have loved not wisely but too well (350 words)
"Do you ever think we'll end up like the Cobbs?" Eames asks one night as he's arranging himself in bed -- yet another hotel on yet another job, and they're not getting any younger. His knees and ankles aren't particularly happy with him today.
"Mmm. I dunno. You mean married with children, or Shakespearean tragedy?" Gwen asks, her voice soft and thick with incipient sleep.
"Either. Both."
"Won't be a single mother, an' I won't raise a child in our current lifestyle," Gwen says. "Can you see y'self picking one name? Settling down?"
Eames tries to imagine this. They do have a few home bases, as it were -- his flat in Mombasa, Gwen's flat in New York City, the beach house Gwen bought in California so she'd have somewhere to stay when visiting the Cobbs after James was born and they ran out of guest rooms. And the idea of less time on airplanes is appealing. But to lose the freedom to pick up and go, whenever and wherever he wants, with only the need to keep Gwen aware of his movements...
"Not yet, at any rate," he admits.
"S'much for option one. As for tragedy..." Gwen rolls over in Eames's arms and presses the tips of her fingers to his throat, her eyelids sliding downward despite her effort to meet his gaze in the faint light seeping under the bathroom door. "If I died an' you had some reason to believe it was your fault -- won't be your fault, course, but I know you -- anyway, 'f I died, could you let me go?"
"Yes," Eames says. This part, he's thought about before, more often than he'd like, and no matter how much it hurts, he won't go down Dominick Cobb's path of self-destruction. "It would hurt like hell and back, but I'd find a way to make peace."
Gwen nods to herself. "Have to make sure I die first, then," she mumbles, and falls asleep.
Eames stares into the darkness for a long, long time.
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More to come if
be_themoon gives me more prompts!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-31 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-02 06:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-01-07 02:28 am (UTC)Starting to read more of your other fics now through your LJ (really love your style of writing) also read your post on critics united, hope they havent deleted any of your fics and theyve stopped bothering you now. :) x