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edenfallingThese are the next set of girl!Arthur/Eames stories I've written 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. Please note, however, that while these ficlets are in chronological order with each other, they are NOT in chronological order with the previous set -- in other words, the ficlets in the two posts overlap each other in various places. I will correct this when I am sure I'm done writing new ones and collect the whole lot to post on AO3 and ff.net.
I have given up even pretending that these are meant as proper 3-sentence fills anymore. I have also given up on my one-LJ-comment length restriction. *sigh* But whatever. The point is to have fun, right? Right. So here we go.
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1. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands / and everything works. / I am not sentimental. (Keaton, Elizabeth Bishop) (775 words)
Eames gives careful consideration to seducing Gwen. Or rather, to not seducing her, as that isn't the right word at all. There's a skid and skew to the concept that doesn't suit his intentions. He wants, oddly enough, to do this honestly, to be good. He wants to be her friend.
He wants sex, too, of course, but that's just bodies. Gwen's heart and mind and her steady presence at his back are much better things to dream of.
The best treasures are always hardest to win. Fortunately, Eames likes a challenge.
He starts small: the next time the Cobbs hire him for an extraction (they do find the best jobs, always some interesting complication that other teams decline to face), he soberly and seriously asks Gwen for her help researching the two marks' husbands. He can tail them, strike up conversations with their acquaintances, and run a basic Google search, but Gwen's the one with a PI license and a background in military signals intelligence. She can hunt down things Eames has no way to learn, and it's more efficient if they pool their investigations instead of trading summaries in group meetings with Dom and Mal.
Gwen gives him a considering look, but doesn't comment on his change of attitude. She just gets on with her job, as always. Her ability to focus is one of her more impressive gifts, Eames thinks: she will do things correctly or bust, and to Hades with anything that tries to distract her from solving the thousand little and not-so-little emergencies that sprout like weeds around any extraction.
When they finish, there's no rush to leave town; Los Angeles is huge and filled with transient visitors, and there's nothing to link them to the two lovers in their rented suite. Gwen is very good with cameras, Eames is good with stolen key cards, and Dom and Mal have a perfect excuse to be right across the corridor in their own rented love nest: they have a reservation to celebrate the anniversary of their first meeting on one of Miles's projects. They vanish behind closed doors with a bottle of champagne and conspiratorial smiles, leaving Eames and Gwen to make their more conventional escapes.
As he pushes open the stairwell door -- because Gwen has a thing about stairs and Eames isn't afraid of physical exertion -- he says, in what he hopes is a casual tone of voice, "So, job well done, congratulations to us. I'm for a drink, maybe dinner. Do you have any recommendations?"
Gwen gives him the same considering look from last week, only this time there's more weight behind her gaze. Her dark hair is out of its sleek bonds, falling free and wavy over her shoulders, and she's wearing jeans and a flowered blouse instead of her usual trousers and patterned waistcoats: less memorable, just in case. Eames has seen her in everything from sleeveless ball gowns to military fatigues in dreams, but it's different in waking life. This pretty, forgettable woman is not who Gwen chooses to be... except insofar as it is, because this is the temporary camouflage that will let her do the work she loves, lives, and breathes. The PASIV's silver case may be concealed inside a hideous purple-striped duffle bag and Gwen's gun may be likewise concealed in a belly band, but woe to anyone who forgets that either is there, just waiting for her hands to wield them.
"If we have sex, which I presume is what you're maneuvering toward, will it affect our working relationship?" Gwen asks, straightforward as ever.
Eames misses a beat. Really, it was dense of him not to expect her to catch on; discovering secrets is what she does, when she's not wrangling projections or pointing out the flaws in Dom and Mal's wilder schemes. Then he shrugs and smiles, one hand resting lightly on the central rail of the stairs. "Not on my end," he says. "I wouldn't dare to speak for you."
The corners of Gwen's mouth flicker upward for half a second before she pulls her face under control. "How uncharacteristically cautious of you," she says dryly. "Speaking of which, are you genuinely interested in dinner or would you prefer to cut to the main event?"
"...Room service, after?" Eames manages. "My hotel's just down the street."
Gwen smiles. With dimples. "Lead the way, Mr. Eames," she says, and transfers the duffle bag to his hands.
She's almost a whole flight down, boots clicking purposefully on the concrete steps, before Eames pulls himself together and scrambles to catch up.
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2. continuation of #1 (Keaton, Elizabeth Bishop) (575 words)
Eames expects Gwen to leave after she showers, slides back into her jeans and blouse (but no socks or boots, Eames can't help noticing), and shares a late dinner with him. She has her own room in a different hotel, and he can't quite wrap his head around the idea of her returning there in the morning wearing day-old clothes.
But after they get rid of the room service paraphernalia, Gwen flops onto his bed, chest propped up on a pillow, and starts flipping through television channels. "I wish it were football season already," she says wistfully. "The Stanley Cup playoffs are done, baseball's never been my thing, and tennis and golf are like watching paint dry."
"Basketball?" Eames suggests. He wouldn't have taken Gwen for a sport fan, but now that he comes to think on it, it would explain the non-musical noises he's heard from her headset now and then while she's slogging through database searches.
"The NBA and the NHL overlap seasons, give or take a couple weeks," Gwen says with a sigh. "Dammit. Oh, hey, soccer!" She brightens, stops on a channel, and waves Eames over toward the bed. "Come explain the arcane bits to me and tell me when I'm supposed to mock people for incompetence."
The two American teams aren't anywhere near the Premier League's quality of play, of course, but they're surprisingly less awful than Eames expects, considering this country can't even give football its proper name and apparently runs their regular season right through FIFA's cup season. He lies next to Gwen and over the course of an hour watches her file away his summary of the rules, clarify the squidgy bits, and eagerly adopt the grand old tradition of slagging off the refs for anything and everything under the sun.
"Why they can't use instant replay is beyond me," Gwen says as she kills the power rather than watch the post-match analysis.
"FIFA is a strange and arcane beast of an organization," Eames admits. Then he broaches the question: "I hate to ask -- and please don't think I'm trying to impose a preference on you either way -- but are you planning to stay the night?"
"Of course," Gwen says, hooking her bare foot over his ankle. "I'm not going to waste weeks of tiptoeing around the issue. If we're doing this at all, we're doing it properly, and the sooner we figure out if we can live with each other's less attractive habits, the better."
"'Come live with me and you'll know me,' as the saying is," Eames quotes, unconsciously mimicking his father's pedantic rhythm of speech.
"I'm not telling you any of my addresses, but yes," Gwen says. Her foot is sliding slowly up the side of his calf, toenails scraping a delicate, torturous line through his trousers. There's a smile crinkled in the corner of her eye, though she's holding her mouth under firm control.
Eames rolls them so she's lying on his chest and lifts his head to kiss her. She bends down to meet him, rigid spine gone boneless and hair like a soft curtain against his cheeks and jaw, until Eames's neck begins to complain and they have to break apart for breath.
Eames cracks his neck. "Bloody ouch. Where's your pillow gone, anyway?"
As he gropes sideways for a bit of support, Gwen presses her head to his chest and laughs.
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3. continuation of #1 and #2 (Keaton, Elizabeth Bishop) (925 words)
Gwen is not a morning person. She is also a very sound sleeper, which is both useful and not in her chosen profession. On the one hand, she's not one of the unfortunates who need extra sedatives in their somnacin and thus forego the easy way out of a dream gone wrong. On the other hand, there's a reason the old saying claims there's no rest for the wicked; she has to be able to wake at the faintest sense of things gone askew, because sometimes you need to grab everything and run before trouble catches up.
On jobs, Gwen almost always sleeps on alert, even with Dom and Mal theoretically there to watch her back. They mean well, and they can fight and shoot in theory and in dreams, but she's not bone-deep sure they can make the split second choices that mean life or death in the waking world.
Eames can. She's been sure of that since they first met, when she'd thought he was a woman; the assessment holds, regardless of sex and gender.
She doesn't realize she trusts him enough to keep watch for her as well as for himself, though -- not until she wakes, blinking in surprise at the late morning angle of the sun and the horrible burnt sulfur smell coming from the en suite kitchenette of his hotel room, where she's just spent the night. And where the alarm on her phone has failed to go off at its appointed hour.
"When did you memorize my password?" she asks.
"I haven't, darling," Eames says, hasty and distracted. "I just took out the battery. People so rarely manage to sleep enough on jobs, and you looked so comfortable all stretched out that I hadn't the heart to wake you."
"You watch me sleep all the time at work," Gwen grumbles, mostly pro forma, as she rolls out of the bed and snags a complimentary white cotton bathrobe from the closet. This is a nice hotel. She may have to stay here herself the next time she's in LA.
"Yes, well, it's a bit different when we're both naked," Eames says. "No, wait, don't come over yet!"
Gwen ignores him and shoves him away from the sink, where he's running cold water over... "What on earth did you do to those poor eggs?" she demands. "How did you do it? And why?"
"You like softboiled eggs; I remember that from last autumn when the Cobbs put us up for a night. But no matter how long I boiled them, they wouldn't get soft," Eames says, almost managing to carry off nonchalance -- it's only Gwen's memory of seeing him thirty seconds ago that spoils the effect. "Then I seem to have boiled all the water off."
Gwen stares morbidly at the burned remnants of two eggs glued to the bottom of the pot by their own shells and guts. "Mr. Eames. Tell me, are raw eggs soft or hard?"
"I would say runny rather than..." He trails off. "Oh. Ha. Bit stupid of me, then."
"Ignorant," Gwen corrects. "Stupidity is incurable. Ignorance is not. Now you know better." She abandons the pot for the hotel staff to rescue. Hopefully Eames will think to leave them a sizable tip when he checks out.
"And I managed not to ruin the toast and coffee," Eames says, redirecting her attention to the tiny table under the east window. Two plates with three pieces of buttered toast each sit on either side of a cereal bowl filled with something green, purple, and a bit squashed. Violets, Gwen discovers as she strides over for a closer look. Apparently picked from somebody's yard, along with a few stray bits of grass and a lone white clover blossom; this is anything but a professional arrangement.
"I didn't know you stole flowers," she says, turning to bestow a half-smile on Eames. "At least tell me you didn't get chased off by a dog."
"I am a far better thief than that, I'll have you know. Didn't I get out and back into this room without disturbing you? As if a mere dog would be an issue," Eames says with a mock-hurt sniff. "But enough of your condescension. Shall we eat? The toast is probably going cold. I meant to wake you when the eggs were done, only, well." He shrugs expressively.
Gwen pulls out both chairs and waits for him to choose a place before she takes the other and sits.
The toast is going cold. Her hair feels oily where it straggles down her neck. Eames has neglected to shave, and his idea of pajamas is apparently a Hawaiian shirt over blue checkered boxers. (She hopes, absently, that he at least put on pants for his excursion to find eggs and flowers.) Her back is sore; it's been almost a year since she had sex and her body isn't used to those particular strains anymore.
"To the beginning of a beautiful friendship," Eames says, raising a glass of tapwater. Gwen picks up her own and clinks the rims together before she drinks.
"To good intentions," she says. "May the results continue to improve."
Eames mimes a shot to the heart. Normally Gwen would bite back her amusement -- he's too good at making people see what he wants them to see and react how he wants them to react; he doesn't need to know he's been growing on her despite the sourness of their first meeting -- but now... now she lowers her water and lets him see her smile.
The morning sun strikes rainbows from the glass.
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4. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, "What do you understand / of love?" you ask. "Nothing," I say. "And loss?" "Nothing." / "Then why do you write about either?" / "I don't." / "I write about you." (All that bravery got us nowhere by Hemant Mohapatra) (575 words)
Eames doesn't always work in dreamshare. The average extraction doesn't really need a forger and his other talents have plenty of waking applications anyway, so he figures he might as well keep his hand in and his name relatively high on certain people's go-to lists. As a side-effect, he's never lost the ability to dream naturally.
Sometimes this is a downright nuisance, especially when his subconscious is being either sillier or more opaque than usual.
In Cape Town, while giving advice on the paperwork side of a land swindle, Eames finds himself walking through a petrified forest -- everything turned to stone from the trees to the bloody songbirds flitting among the branches, somehow frozen in midair rather than crashing and shattering on the equally petrified carpet of last year's leaves. He is holding a piece of twine that vanishes up into the sky so he can pull the moon along with him for light. He is looking for something. Just as he finds a staircase, spiraling upward into nowhere, he wakes.
In Paris as he pays for new paper stocks by forging one of Cézanne's lesser couillarde works, she is late for a piano lesson and trying desperately to remember where she put her keys. Perhaps in the refrigerator? Eames opens the door and stares blankly at the empty shelves. "None of your tricks now," she says sternly; "I know I went shopping just yesterday." Sheepishly the shelves begin to refill with satsumas. Hungry, Eames splits one open with her thumbnail and finds a bunch of violets. Then he wakes.
In London, the night after his mum's birthday, he looks out his window and realizes that everyone on the street -- everyone in the world -- is having a conversation with each other and somehow he's been left out. He pushes up the glass and leans out to join in, but he can't hear anything. Everyone is hurrying away up endless flights of stairs that lead nowhere, and no matter how fast he runs, all he can see is the trailing sole of a boot and a hint of trouser cuff vanishing around the turn. He wakes with his arm outstretched to the side of the bed, fingers grasping empty air.
In Mombasa, dozing on his new acquaintance's sofa with a cat draped over his chest, he faces a doorway filled with nothing but blue mist and a voice he knows he should recognize asks: "What do you understand of love?"
"Nothing," he says.
"And loss?"
"Nothing."
"Then why do you dream of either?"
"I don't," Eames says, and plunges through the doorway and over a cliff, where he falls past endless switchback stairs toward the grand and arid freedom of outer space. The moon turns its back as he passes.
He wakes and realizes the voice was Gwen.
Perhaps he should call, he thinks. She and Dominick Cobb are making quite a name for themselves; they might have work for him. Even if he thinks it's mad and pointless to dream of Dom ever going back to his old life, it would be good to see Gwen. He's sure she isn't smiling much these days; certainly not with dimples.
He misses her smile.
But Yusuf is frying omelets in his kitchen. The smell of food and tea distracts Eames from his thoughts. His stomach growls, and he nudges the cat to the floor and goes to fill what he thinks is his only emptiness.
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5. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, 'cuz I don't want to get over you (600 words)
One of Eames's odder quirks -- he has many, and it's impossible to say from the outside which are genuine, which are put on for effect, and which are something in between -- is that occasionally he decides not to be himself for a few hours. This is easy to deal with in a dream. Suddenly Gwen will be walking next to a teenage girl with dreadlocks and a row of piercings up her ear, or a heavyset man with a thick Chinese accent and papery skin, or any of a thousand faces and names. Some of them are people Eames has met -- people he knows and imitates in varying degrees of accuracy -- while others are pure invention.
The confusing part is when Eames shifts in waking life. Never on a job, and never in more personal moments, but sometimes Gwen will let herself in to their shared hotel room and discover, thirty seconds in to a bewildered chain of miscommunication, that regardless of the physical body she's facing, she's actually talking to a forge. Maybe Esme from Baton Rouge, who wants to know if Gwen has any suggestions on what to get her no-good nephews for Christmas this year and goes on about the Corps of Engineers and how they're always favoring New Orleans and the damn oystermen over people upstream. Or maybe to Rajesh from Mumbai who owns a business that paves private roads for Indian conglomerates and wishes the national government would cut through its corruption and inefficiencies so he could bid on proper highways, like he's seen in Europe and America. It's the same cast of thousands, just trapped in Eames's body without the liberation of dreams.
Some of them act as if they're meeting Gwen for the first time. Others she's known for years now, in a glancing way, and they treat her like old friends. None of them dislike her, though, no matter what she tries to do to shock Eames back into his own skin and memories.
"Of course the ones you meet like you," Eames says the only time Gwen brings that point up, when they're still feeling their way back into each other's lives. "Why would I make you spend time with someone disagreeable outside of a job? Besides, I like you."
"But some of your forges don't?" Gwen asks, seizing on the salient point.
Eames grimaces and turns half away, fiddling ostentatiously with his poker chip. "Yes, well, the idea is to not be me, isn't it? So my feelings about you are a bit irrelevant, except insofar as I choose which people to be when I know you're around. The others are more restricted in their playtime. They only come out in dreams."
Gwen considers this.
"If I can put up with you, and I put up with Dom for those two years, then I can put up with whatever shit you need to drag out of your head and lend your body to -- at least for an hour or three," she says after a minute. "They're only as real as I allow them to be. They won't change how I feel about you."
"There are times I think you're as mad as Cobb and Mal ever were," Eames says, his voice and expression saying very plainly and in capital letters that he's not convinced. But he puts the poker chip away and settles back down on the park bench.
Gwen slings her arm across his shoulders and presses her toes down on his shoe. Mine, the gesture says. She's not letting him slip away, not this time.
He'll figure it out sooner or later.
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6. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, and this part was for her does she remember? (475 words)
Gwen doesn't get a lot of physical mail -- she's not usually in one place long enough to make that practical, for one, most of her friendlier acquaintances aren't the sort of people to send silly cards on occasions Hallmark is trying to promote, for another, and, of course, she has a permanent hold on her mail except when she brings a crate around to the post office to haul away the junk circulars and political whining -- but she does have mailboxes at her beach house and her apartment, if only for the look of things.
Currently there is an envelope clipped to the lid of the mailbox with a clothespin. It has no stamp and no address, just a heart scrawled in red crayon. Gwen pulls it off and tucks it into her briefcase and continues on her way to Dom's house. She and Ariadne agreed that he shouldn't be left alone around Valentine's Day (around his anniversary, damn him and Mal both for being hopeless romantics), and it's her turn to babysit him and the kids tonight.
Once she has Philippa and James safely tucked into bed and Dom presumably safe in the shower (Gwen's keeping an ear out, though; bathrooms are dangerous, especially to people who aren't exactly sober and aren't exactly sane), she takes out the mysterious card and slits it open with her pocketknife.
Inside is an uncolored pen-and-ink sketch of a flower, helpfully labeled 'VIOLET' for the non-botanically inclined. The shape of the letters is unfamiliar, but that means nothing. The paper itself smells faintly of the cologne Eames wears when not on a job, and really, who else would hand deliver a valentine to her when he's meant to be in Singapore soothing the paranoia of the People's Action Party by extracting any hidden agendas of the Worker's Party MPs.
She turns the heavy paper over. On the back, in the chicken scratch handwriting he uses when writing private notes only he and she will ever see -- Gwen doesn't know if it's his real hand, or even if he still has any writing that's unstudied, but this is hers and that's good enough -- Eames has scribbled: flowers for my lady; do you remember?
Gwen thinks about the clump of violets in a cereal bowl he'd improvised as a centerpiece when he tried to surprise her with breakfast in bed after their first night together. She smiles.
I have never seen anyone so thoroughly ruin a soft-boiled egg, she texts him. Love you.
The shower cuts off. Gwen puts the picture and her phone away and goes to tuck Dom into bed like the sad lost boy he is when Mal's absence stabs him anew.
In the morning, she wakes up to a chime from her phone, and finds Eames's answer: ♥
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7. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, We are pirates. We move in nautical miles. / Each other's anchors, each other's buoys (Catch A Body by Ilse Bendorf) (525 words)
Secrecy has been drummed into their minds, carved into their bones, mixed into their breath and blood -- first by the regulations of military, then by the law of the underworld. If anyone knows a truth about you, that's a lever; it can move you, and not always in directions you want to go. Better to be unknown, untouched, unanchored: boats running free before the storm with no compass or course that anyone else can chart. It's the closest you can get to guaranteed survival.
-----
"If I'd been born a boy, my mother wanted to name me Arthur," Gwen says one evening as she lies sideways on her couch, flicking rapidly from channel to channel until she finds a hockey game. "Well, really she preferred Lancelot or Gawain, and Niniane for a girl, of all horrible things, but my aunt talked sense into her at the hospital so I didn't spend my childhood as Ninny Levine."
"Your father didn't get a vote?" Eames asks, turning with a plate and dishtowel in his hands.
"He removed himself from the picture five months earlier," Gwen says. "Drunk driving -- smashed straight into a tree at the side of the driveway. Probably just as well in the end, even if money did get tight without him."
"Ah," says Eames, and opens a cupboard over the sink to put the last plate away.
He buys her a Father's Day card in June and smiles at her utterly perplexed expression.
-----
"I never worry about missing confession in Mombasa," Eames says as they sit at an airport bar, delayed by a vicious string of summer thunderstorms. "Or anywhere else, for that matter, except when I visit my mum or I'm with you in New York. You live too close to St. Joseph's. Makes all my childhood guilt come rushing back despite my better sense."
"I like Prospect Heights," Gwen says unrepentantly. "It's attractive, it has history, and I can visit the Brooklyn Museum any time I want. You can deal with the guilt."
"I still think you should move to Manhattan," Eames grumbles, waving the bartender over and asking for a screwdriver. "What? It has orange juice; that's a fruit. I'm being healthy," he says in response to Gwen's skeptical eyebrows.
She looks up the church's hours for weekday mass and leaves a printout taped to her bathroom mirror the next time he visits.
He doesn't go, but after the sun dies in glory behind the skyline of Manhattan in Gwen's western window, he pulls the blinds and murmurs, "Ave amata, gratia plena, benedicta tu in mulieribus," butchering the Hail Mary while he undresses her by candlelight. It's not Gwen's religion in any sense of the word, but she raises her arms and gives him this night.
-----
If anyone knows a truth about you, that's a lever; this is true. But sometimes the direction you need to go isn't the one you would have chosen on your own, and sometimes it gets tiring running lonely on the wings of the storm. Sometimes it's worth the danger to exchange signal flares, put down anchors, and remind each other how to live instead of just survive.
/////
(I think I got the right word and declension in Eames's improvisational Latin -- amatae being the vocative case of amata: loved one, beloved (woman)? -- but I neither speak nor read Latin myself, so please forgive me if I screwed up.)
ETA 12/12/11:kanjoku tells me that the vocative of amata is amata; amatae would be plural. I have changed Eames's dialogue accordingly. Thank you!
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And that is that, until and unlessbe_themoon gives me more prompts. In which case you damn well bet I will fill them. :-)
be_themoon in caramelsilver's Three Sentence Ficathon 2011, in what I think is internal chronological order. Please note, however, that while these ficlets are in chronological order with each other, they are NOT in chronological order with the previous set -- in other words, the ficlets in the two posts overlap each other in various places. I will correct this when I am sure I'm done writing new ones and collect the whole lot to post on AO3 and ff.net.I have given up even pretending that these are meant as proper 3-sentence fills anymore. I have also given up on my one-LJ-comment length restriction. *sigh* But whatever. The point is to have fun, right? Right. So here we go.
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1. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands / and everything works. / I am not sentimental. (Keaton, Elizabeth Bishop) (775 words)
Eames gives careful consideration to seducing Gwen. Or rather, to not seducing her, as that isn't the right word at all. There's a skid and skew to the concept that doesn't suit his intentions. He wants, oddly enough, to do this honestly, to be good. He wants to be her friend.
He wants sex, too, of course, but that's just bodies. Gwen's heart and mind and her steady presence at his back are much better things to dream of.
The best treasures are always hardest to win. Fortunately, Eames likes a challenge.
He starts small: the next time the Cobbs hire him for an extraction (they do find the best jobs, always some interesting complication that other teams decline to face), he soberly and seriously asks Gwen for her help researching the two marks' husbands. He can tail them, strike up conversations with their acquaintances, and run a basic Google search, but Gwen's the one with a PI license and a background in military signals intelligence. She can hunt down things Eames has no way to learn, and it's more efficient if they pool their investigations instead of trading summaries in group meetings with Dom and Mal.
Gwen gives him a considering look, but doesn't comment on his change of attitude. She just gets on with her job, as always. Her ability to focus is one of her more impressive gifts, Eames thinks: she will do things correctly or bust, and to Hades with anything that tries to distract her from solving the thousand little and not-so-little emergencies that sprout like weeds around any extraction.
When they finish, there's no rush to leave town; Los Angeles is huge and filled with transient visitors, and there's nothing to link them to the two lovers in their rented suite. Gwen is very good with cameras, Eames is good with stolen key cards, and Dom and Mal have a perfect excuse to be right across the corridor in their own rented love nest: they have a reservation to celebrate the anniversary of their first meeting on one of Miles's projects. They vanish behind closed doors with a bottle of champagne and conspiratorial smiles, leaving Eames and Gwen to make their more conventional escapes.
As he pushes open the stairwell door -- because Gwen has a thing about stairs and Eames isn't afraid of physical exertion -- he says, in what he hopes is a casual tone of voice, "So, job well done, congratulations to us. I'm for a drink, maybe dinner. Do you have any recommendations?"
Gwen gives him the same considering look from last week, only this time there's more weight behind her gaze. Her dark hair is out of its sleek bonds, falling free and wavy over her shoulders, and she's wearing jeans and a flowered blouse instead of her usual trousers and patterned waistcoats: less memorable, just in case. Eames has seen her in everything from sleeveless ball gowns to military fatigues in dreams, but it's different in waking life. This pretty, forgettable woman is not who Gwen chooses to be... except insofar as it is, because this is the temporary camouflage that will let her do the work she loves, lives, and breathes. The PASIV's silver case may be concealed inside a hideous purple-striped duffle bag and Gwen's gun may be likewise concealed in a belly band, but woe to anyone who forgets that either is there, just waiting for her hands to wield them.
"If we have sex, which I presume is what you're maneuvering toward, will it affect our working relationship?" Gwen asks, straightforward as ever.
Eames misses a beat. Really, it was dense of him not to expect her to catch on; discovering secrets is what she does, when she's not wrangling projections or pointing out the flaws in Dom and Mal's wilder schemes. Then he shrugs and smiles, one hand resting lightly on the central rail of the stairs. "Not on my end," he says. "I wouldn't dare to speak for you."
The corners of Gwen's mouth flicker upward for half a second before she pulls her face under control. "How uncharacteristically cautious of you," she says dryly. "Speaking of which, are you genuinely interested in dinner or would you prefer to cut to the main event?"
"...Room service, after?" Eames manages. "My hotel's just down the street."
Gwen smiles. With dimples. "Lead the way, Mr. Eames," she says, and transfers the duffle bag to his hands.
She's almost a whole flight down, boots clicking purposefully on the concrete steps, before Eames pulls himself together and scrambles to catch up.
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2. continuation of #1 (Keaton, Elizabeth Bishop) (575 words)
Eames expects Gwen to leave after she showers, slides back into her jeans and blouse (but no socks or boots, Eames can't help noticing), and shares a late dinner with him. She has her own room in a different hotel, and he can't quite wrap his head around the idea of her returning there in the morning wearing day-old clothes.
But after they get rid of the room service paraphernalia, Gwen flops onto his bed, chest propped up on a pillow, and starts flipping through television channels. "I wish it were football season already," she says wistfully. "The Stanley Cup playoffs are done, baseball's never been my thing, and tennis and golf are like watching paint dry."
"Basketball?" Eames suggests. He wouldn't have taken Gwen for a sport fan, but now that he comes to think on it, it would explain the non-musical noises he's heard from her headset now and then while she's slogging through database searches.
"The NBA and the NHL overlap seasons, give or take a couple weeks," Gwen says with a sigh. "Dammit. Oh, hey, soccer!" She brightens, stops on a channel, and waves Eames over toward the bed. "Come explain the arcane bits to me and tell me when I'm supposed to mock people for incompetence."
The two American teams aren't anywhere near the Premier League's quality of play, of course, but they're surprisingly less awful than Eames expects, considering this country can't even give football its proper name and apparently runs their regular season right through FIFA's cup season. He lies next to Gwen and over the course of an hour watches her file away his summary of the rules, clarify the squidgy bits, and eagerly adopt the grand old tradition of slagging off the refs for anything and everything under the sun.
"Why they can't use instant replay is beyond me," Gwen says as she kills the power rather than watch the post-match analysis.
"FIFA is a strange and arcane beast of an organization," Eames admits. Then he broaches the question: "I hate to ask -- and please don't think I'm trying to impose a preference on you either way -- but are you planning to stay the night?"
"Of course," Gwen says, hooking her bare foot over his ankle. "I'm not going to waste weeks of tiptoeing around the issue. If we're doing this at all, we're doing it properly, and the sooner we figure out if we can live with each other's less attractive habits, the better."
"'Come live with me and you'll know me,' as the saying is," Eames quotes, unconsciously mimicking his father's pedantic rhythm of speech.
"I'm not telling you any of my addresses, but yes," Gwen says. Her foot is sliding slowly up the side of his calf, toenails scraping a delicate, torturous line through his trousers. There's a smile crinkled in the corner of her eye, though she's holding her mouth under firm control.
Eames rolls them so she's lying on his chest and lifts his head to kiss her. She bends down to meet him, rigid spine gone boneless and hair like a soft curtain against his cheeks and jaw, until Eames's neck begins to complain and they have to break apart for breath.
Eames cracks his neck. "Bloody ouch. Where's your pillow gone, anyway?"
As he gropes sideways for a bit of support, Gwen presses her head to his chest and laughs.
---------------
3. continuation of #1 and #2 (Keaton, Elizabeth Bishop) (925 words)
Gwen is not a morning person. She is also a very sound sleeper, which is both useful and not in her chosen profession. On the one hand, she's not one of the unfortunates who need extra sedatives in their somnacin and thus forego the easy way out of a dream gone wrong. On the other hand, there's a reason the old saying claims there's no rest for the wicked; she has to be able to wake at the faintest sense of things gone askew, because sometimes you need to grab everything and run before trouble catches up.
On jobs, Gwen almost always sleeps on alert, even with Dom and Mal theoretically there to watch her back. They mean well, and they can fight and shoot in theory and in dreams, but she's not bone-deep sure they can make the split second choices that mean life or death in the waking world.
Eames can. She's been sure of that since they first met, when she'd thought he was a woman; the assessment holds, regardless of sex and gender.
She doesn't realize she trusts him enough to keep watch for her as well as for himself, though -- not until she wakes, blinking in surprise at the late morning angle of the sun and the horrible burnt sulfur smell coming from the en suite kitchenette of his hotel room, where she's just spent the night. And where the alarm on her phone has failed to go off at its appointed hour.
"When did you memorize my password?" she asks.
"I haven't, darling," Eames says, hasty and distracted. "I just took out the battery. People so rarely manage to sleep enough on jobs, and you looked so comfortable all stretched out that I hadn't the heart to wake you."
"You watch me sleep all the time at work," Gwen grumbles, mostly pro forma, as she rolls out of the bed and snags a complimentary white cotton bathrobe from the closet. This is a nice hotel. She may have to stay here herself the next time she's in LA.
"Yes, well, it's a bit different when we're both naked," Eames says. "No, wait, don't come over yet!"
Gwen ignores him and shoves him away from the sink, where he's running cold water over... "What on earth did you do to those poor eggs?" she demands. "How did you do it? And why?"
"You like softboiled eggs; I remember that from last autumn when the Cobbs put us up for a night. But no matter how long I boiled them, they wouldn't get soft," Eames says, almost managing to carry off nonchalance -- it's only Gwen's memory of seeing him thirty seconds ago that spoils the effect. "Then I seem to have boiled all the water off."
Gwen stares morbidly at the burned remnants of two eggs glued to the bottom of the pot by their own shells and guts. "Mr. Eames. Tell me, are raw eggs soft or hard?"
"I would say runny rather than..." He trails off. "Oh. Ha. Bit stupid of me, then."
"Ignorant," Gwen corrects. "Stupidity is incurable. Ignorance is not. Now you know better." She abandons the pot for the hotel staff to rescue. Hopefully Eames will think to leave them a sizable tip when he checks out.
"And I managed not to ruin the toast and coffee," Eames says, redirecting her attention to the tiny table under the east window. Two plates with three pieces of buttered toast each sit on either side of a cereal bowl filled with something green, purple, and a bit squashed. Violets, Gwen discovers as she strides over for a closer look. Apparently picked from somebody's yard, along with a few stray bits of grass and a lone white clover blossom; this is anything but a professional arrangement.
"I didn't know you stole flowers," she says, turning to bestow a half-smile on Eames. "At least tell me you didn't get chased off by a dog."
"I am a far better thief than that, I'll have you know. Didn't I get out and back into this room without disturbing you? As if a mere dog would be an issue," Eames says with a mock-hurt sniff. "But enough of your condescension. Shall we eat? The toast is probably going cold. I meant to wake you when the eggs were done, only, well." He shrugs expressively.
Gwen pulls out both chairs and waits for him to choose a place before she takes the other and sits.
The toast is going cold. Her hair feels oily where it straggles down her neck. Eames has neglected to shave, and his idea of pajamas is apparently a Hawaiian shirt over blue checkered boxers. (She hopes, absently, that he at least put on pants for his excursion to find eggs and flowers.) Her back is sore; it's been almost a year since she had sex and her body isn't used to those particular strains anymore.
"To the beginning of a beautiful friendship," Eames says, raising a glass of tapwater. Gwen picks up her own and clinks the rims together before she drinks.
"To good intentions," she says. "May the results continue to improve."
Eames mimes a shot to the heart. Normally Gwen would bite back her amusement -- he's too good at making people see what he wants them to see and react how he wants them to react; he doesn't need to know he's been growing on her despite the sourness of their first meeting -- but now... now she lowers her water and lets him see her smile.
The morning sun strikes rainbows from the glass.
---------------
4. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, "What do you understand / of love?" you ask. "Nothing," I say. "And loss?" "Nothing." / "Then why do you write about either?" / "I don't." / "I write about you." (All that bravery got us nowhere by Hemant Mohapatra) (575 words)
Eames doesn't always work in dreamshare. The average extraction doesn't really need a forger and his other talents have plenty of waking applications anyway, so he figures he might as well keep his hand in and his name relatively high on certain people's go-to lists. As a side-effect, he's never lost the ability to dream naturally.
Sometimes this is a downright nuisance, especially when his subconscious is being either sillier or more opaque than usual.
In Cape Town, while giving advice on the paperwork side of a land swindle, Eames finds himself walking through a petrified forest -- everything turned to stone from the trees to the bloody songbirds flitting among the branches, somehow frozen in midair rather than crashing and shattering on the equally petrified carpet of last year's leaves. He is holding a piece of twine that vanishes up into the sky so he can pull the moon along with him for light. He is looking for something. Just as he finds a staircase, spiraling upward into nowhere, he wakes.
In Paris as he pays for new paper stocks by forging one of Cézanne's lesser couillarde works, she is late for a piano lesson and trying desperately to remember where she put her keys. Perhaps in the refrigerator? Eames opens the door and stares blankly at the empty shelves. "None of your tricks now," she says sternly; "I know I went shopping just yesterday." Sheepishly the shelves begin to refill with satsumas. Hungry, Eames splits one open with her thumbnail and finds a bunch of violets. Then he wakes.
In London, the night after his mum's birthday, he looks out his window and realizes that everyone on the street -- everyone in the world -- is having a conversation with each other and somehow he's been left out. He pushes up the glass and leans out to join in, but he can't hear anything. Everyone is hurrying away up endless flights of stairs that lead nowhere, and no matter how fast he runs, all he can see is the trailing sole of a boot and a hint of trouser cuff vanishing around the turn. He wakes with his arm outstretched to the side of the bed, fingers grasping empty air.
In Mombasa, dozing on his new acquaintance's sofa with a cat draped over his chest, he faces a doorway filled with nothing but blue mist and a voice he knows he should recognize asks: "What do you understand of love?"
"Nothing," he says.
"And loss?"
"Nothing."
"Then why do you dream of either?"
"I don't," Eames says, and plunges through the doorway and over a cliff, where he falls past endless switchback stairs toward the grand and arid freedom of outer space. The moon turns its back as he passes.
He wakes and realizes the voice was Gwen.
Perhaps he should call, he thinks. She and Dominick Cobb are making quite a name for themselves; they might have work for him. Even if he thinks it's mad and pointless to dream of Dom ever going back to his old life, it would be good to see Gwen. He's sure she isn't smiling much these days; certainly not with dimples.
He misses her smile.
But Yusuf is frying omelets in his kitchen. The smell of food and tea distracts Eames from his thoughts. His stomach growls, and he nudges the cat to the floor and goes to fill what he thinks is his only emptiness.
---------------
5. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, 'cuz I don't want to get over you (600 words)
One of Eames's odder quirks -- he has many, and it's impossible to say from the outside which are genuine, which are put on for effect, and which are something in between -- is that occasionally he decides not to be himself for a few hours. This is easy to deal with in a dream. Suddenly Gwen will be walking next to a teenage girl with dreadlocks and a row of piercings up her ear, or a heavyset man with a thick Chinese accent and papery skin, or any of a thousand faces and names. Some of them are people Eames has met -- people he knows and imitates in varying degrees of accuracy -- while others are pure invention.
The confusing part is when Eames shifts in waking life. Never on a job, and never in more personal moments, but sometimes Gwen will let herself in to their shared hotel room and discover, thirty seconds in to a bewildered chain of miscommunication, that regardless of the physical body she's facing, she's actually talking to a forge. Maybe Esme from Baton Rouge, who wants to know if Gwen has any suggestions on what to get her no-good nephews for Christmas this year and goes on about the Corps of Engineers and how they're always favoring New Orleans and the damn oystermen over people upstream. Or maybe to Rajesh from Mumbai who owns a business that paves private roads for Indian conglomerates and wishes the national government would cut through its corruption and inefficiencies so he could bid on proper highways, like he's seen in Europe and America. It's the same cast of thousands, just trapped in Eames's body without the liberation of dreams.
Some of them act as if they're meeting Gwen for the first time. Others she's known for years now, in a glancing way, and they treat her like old friends. None of them dislike her, though, no matter what she tries to do to shock Eames back into his own skin and memories.
"Of course the ones you meet like you," Eames says the only time Gwen brings that point up, when they're still feeling their way back into each other's lives. "Why would I make you spend time with someone disagreeable outside of a job? Besides, I like you."
"But some of your forges don't?" Gwen asks, seizing on the salient point.
Eames grimaces and turns half away, fiddling ostentatiously with his poker chip. "Yes, well, the idea is to not be me, isn't it? So my feelings about you are a bit irrelevant, except insofar as I choose which people to be when I know you're around. The others are more restricted in their playtime. They only come out in dreams."
Gwen considers this.
"If I can put up with you, and I put up with Dom for those two years, then I can put up with whatever shit you need to drag out of your head and lend your body to -- at least for an hour or three," she says after a minute. "They're only as real as I allow them to be. They won't change how I feel about you."
"There are times I think you're as mad as Cobb and Mal ever were," Eames says, his voice and expression saying very plainly and in capital letters that he's not convinced. But he puts the poker chip away and settles back down on the park bench.
Gwen slings her arm across his shoulders and presses her toes down on his shoe. Mine, the gesture says. She's not letting him slip away, not this time.
He'll figure it out sooner or later.
---------------
6. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, and this part was for her does she remember? (475 words)
Gwen doesn't get a lot of physical mail -- she's not usually in one place long enough to make that practical, for one, most of her friendlier acquaintances aren't the sort of people to send silly cards on occasions Hallmark is trying to promote, for another, and, of course, she has a permanent hold on her mail except when she brings a crate around to the post office to haul away the junk circulars and political whining -- but she does have mailboxes at her beach house and her apartment, if only for the look of things.
Currently there is an envelope clipped to the lid of the mailbox with a clothespin. It has no stamp and no address, just a heart scrawled in red crayon. Gwen pulls it off and tucks it into her briefcase and continues on her way to Dom's house. She and Ariadne agreed that he shouldn't be left alone around Valentine's Day (around his anniversary, damn him and Mal both for being hopeless romantics), and it's her turn to babysit him and the kids tonight.
Once she has Philippa and James safely tucked into bed and Dom presumably safe in the shower (Gwen's keeping an ear out, though; bathrooms are dangerous, especially to people who aren't exactly sober and aren't exactly sane), she takes out the mysterious card and slits it open with her pocketknife.
Inside is an uncolored pen-and-ink sketch of a flower, helpfully labeled 'VIOLET' for the non-botanically inclined. The shape of the letters is unfamiliar, but that means nothing. The paper itself smells faintly of the cologne Eames wears when not on a job, and really, who else would hand deliver a valentine to her when he's meant to be in Singapore soothing the paranoia of the People's Action Party by extracting any hidden agendas of the Worker's Party MPs.
She turns the heavy paper over. On the back, in the chicken scratch handwriting he uses when writing private notes only he and she will ever see -- Gwen doesn't know if it's his real hand, or even if he still has any writing that's unstudied, but this is hers and that's good enough -- Eames has scribbled: flowers for my lady; do you remember?
Gwen thinks about the clump of violets in a cereal bowl he'd improvised as a centerpiece when he tried to surprise her with breakfast in bed after their first night together. She smiles.
I have never seen anyone so thoroughly ruin a soft-boiled egg, she texts him. Love you.
The shower cuts off. Gwen puts the picture and her phone away and goes to tuck Dom into bed like the sad lost boy he is when Mal's absence stabs him anew.
In the morning, she wakes up to a chime from her phone, and finds Eames's answer: ♥
---------------
7. Prompt: Inception, girl!Arthur/Eames, We are pirates. We move in nautical miles. / Each other's anchors, each other's buoys (Catch A Body by Ilse Bendorf) (525 words)
Secrecy has been drummed into their minds, carved into their bones, mixed into their breath and blood -- first by the regulations of military, then by the law of the underworld. If anyone knows a truth about you, that's a lever; it can move you, and not always in directions you want to go. Better to be unknown, untouched, unanchored: boats running free before the storm with no compass or course that anyone else can chart. It's the closest you can get to guaranteed survival.
-----
"If I'd been born a boy, my mother wanted to name me Arthur," Gwen says one evening as she lies sideways on her couch, flicking rapidly from channel to channel until she finds a hockey game. "Well, really she preferred Lancelot or Gawain, and Niniane for a girl, of all horrible things, but my aunt talked sense into her at the hospital so I didn't spend my childhood as Ninny Levine."
"Your father didn't get a vote?" Eames asks, turning with a plate and dishtowel in his hands.
"He removed himself from the picture five months earlier," Gwen says. "Drunk driving -- smashed straight into a tree at the side of the driveway. Probably just as well in the end, even if money did get tight without him."
"Ah," says Eames, and opens a cupboard over the sink to put the last plate away.
He buys her a Father's Day card in June and smiles at her utterly perplexed expression.
-----
"I never worry about missing confession in Mombasa," Eames says as they sit at an airport bar, delayed by a vicious string of summer thunderstorms. "Or anywhere else, for that matter, except when I visit my mum or I'm with you in New York. You live too close to St. Joseph's. Makes all my childhood guilt come rushing back despite my better sense."
"I like Prospect Heights," Gwen says unrepentantly. "It's attractive, it has history, and I can visit the Brooklyn Museum any time I want. You can deal with the guilt."
"I still think you should move to Manhattan," Eames grumbles, waving the bartender over and asking for a screwdriver. "What? It has orange juice; that's a fruit. I'm being healthy," he says in response to Gwen's skeptical eyebrows.
She looks up the church's hours for weekday mass and leaves a printout taped to her bathroom mirror the next time he visits.
He doesn't go, but after the sun dies in glory behind the skyline of Manhattan in Gwen's western window, he pulls the blinds and murmurs, "Ave amata, gratia plena, benedicta tu in mulieribus," butchering the Hail Mary while he undresses her by candlelight. It's not Gwen's religion in any sense of the word, but she raises her arms and gives him this night.
-----
If anyone knows a truth about you, that's a lever; this is true. But sometimes the direction you need to go isn't the one you would have chosen on your own, and sometimes it gets tiring running lonely on the wings of the storm. Sometimes it's worth the danger to exchange signal flares, put down anchors, and remind each other how to live instead of just survive.
/////
(I think I got the right word and declension in Eames's improvisational Latin -- amatae being the vocative case of amata: loved one, beloved (woman)? -- but I neither speak nor read Latin myself, so please forgive me if I screwed up.)
ETA 12/12/11:
kanjoku tells me that the vocative of amata is amata; amatae would be plural. I have changed Eames's dialogue accordingly. Thank you!---------------
And that is that, until and unless
be_themoon gives me more prompts. In which case you damn well bet I will fill them. :-)
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Date: 2011-12-12 05:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-12 05:47 am (UTC)