fuck it, this fandom's made of WIPs anyway

[the_ragnarok]

So I'm working on a thing. I might as well post bits of it.

Title: Tabula Rasa
Fandom: Inception, Arthur/Eames, pretty PG so far
Summary: Arthur fails at relationships. Eames fails at Arthur.
Notes: The cut text and the first section inspired by a children's rhyme.

#1: Nelly Crane.

She was bright-eyed and pale-haired, with freckles on the tip of her nose. She had dimples, which showed when Arthur made a tower from building blocks and said it was for her.

That was on the first day of kindergarten. On the second, Arthur gave her flowers he picked and the apple from his lunch box.

She ate the apple, but she dropped the flowers when Jerry Casely talked to her, and stepped on them when she ran to the sandbox to play with him.

At five, Arthur was far too big a boy to cry over this. It is, however, possible that he sniffled.

~~

Arthur hates to admit it, but he likes the apartment.

By all reason, he should. Dom constructed it with painstaking care, and he's known Arthur for... More than a decade now, Jesus. Dom also felt guilty for sticking Arthur in this level alone for a month, so it was basic courtesy for him to make it as comfortable as possible for Arthur.

It's got a large kitchen, a big open living-room with huge couches, a bed with an orthopedic mattress, the lighting is excellent. Arthur couldn't really complain about anything except for how he's stuck here for a month.

This wouldn't be a problem in the real world, but here – Arthur obviously can't work. He can't read (the only books he can bring into dreamspace are ones he knows by heart, and what's the point of that?). Listening to music is possible, but tricky, and frankly just not worth the effort.

Dom, considerately, left him a 50,000 pieces puzzle, but Arthur finds he develops an inability to distinguish between shades of yellow if he works on it more than fifteen minutes straight.

And then there's Eames.

"Not bad," Eames says, thoughtfully, leaning against Arthur's dining table. "Not what I'd expect for you, though."

Arthur rolls his eyes. "And what, exactly, did you expect?"

"Mmm." Eames taps his lower lip with a pen. "Something with more of a design to it, y'know? This is all so cozy."

"Maybe I like cozy." Arthur does, actually. He leans back in the recliner, smug in the knowledge Eames can't tip him over.

Eames laughs. "Yeah, that's a good one." He moves over to rifle through the book cases, which are really just for show. "What's this?" he says, delighted, pulling out a battered copy of--

"Now We Are Six," Arthur provides. "A. A. Milne. He wrote Winnie the Pooh."

Eames looks thoroughly disgusted. "Of course I know who he is, I bloody grew up on this." He opens the book. "I found a little beetle, so that beetle was his name, And I called him Alexander but he answered just the same..." He shut the book with a snap, his smile gone soft. "Good times."

Arthur sort of wants to throw Eames out. He sort of wants Eames to stay, because he's bored out of his skull. (He sort of wants to go to Eames and lick him, but that's a very bad idea and unprofessional besides.)

Eames plops down on the couch. "So what else have you got to entertain you, beside nursery rhymes?"

Arthur indicates the puzzle, lying in pieces on the living-room floor. Eames' eyes widen comically. "That's all? That horrible, horrible man, stuffing you here all alone with only-" Eames inspected the puzzle box- "the Mojave desert for company."

"I'm fine by myself," Arthur says. This is a statement of fact and said as such, but he still cringes because he can't help but hear it in his grandmother's voice, which continues, 'In the dark, in the cold, no need for you to trouble yourself, no.'

(Fact: Half of Arthur's evasion skills were perfected during family events. The other half were honed when Mal tried to get him to taste her cooking.)

"We're not meant to live alone," Eames says, and if he bursts into song Arthur will shoot him, forgery utterly crucial to the case or no.

With finality, Arthur says, "I am."

And that's meant to be the end of that conversation, except that Eames is twelve and can't resist imitating Arthur. "I am," he says, in a mocking schoolboy sort of voice.

Arthur stares at him, incredulous. "Excuse me, aren't you supposed to be a forger? That didn't sound anything like me."

At this point, Eames is supposed to say something incredibly witty that boiles down to 'That's what she said', but as it happens, he does not.

What he does is smile ruefully at Arthur and say, "Well, I've always been shite at doing you, darling," and Arthur is left slack-jawed because holy shit there was a double entendre that Eames totally ignored.

Well, hell if Arthur gives him time to amend that. "Am I hard to forge?" he asks.

Eames grimaces. "The bloody hardest."

Worse and worse. "I've seen forgers... imitate me," Arthur says, cautious. "Could you try?"

Obligingly, Eames shifts into Arthur. Arthur gets up, walks around him, feels his brow wrinkling. "Looks fine," he says.

Eames rolls his eyes. Arthur makes a mental note to do that less, as apparently it makes him look like a teenager. "Well, that's not too difficult, is it?" Eames says in his own voice. "The difficult part is the actions, the mannerisms," this said in Arthur's voice.

Arthur frowns. "I see what you're talking about." There's something not quite right about the voice coming out of Eames' mouth. And his hands – Eames is fidgeting. Arthur never fidgets.

Eames changes back. "There it is," he says, spreading his hands. "You're not an easy man to forge, love."

Arthur raises both eyebrows. "I wouldn't think I'd be that difficult."

Eames looks mournful. "You wouldn't, but that's because – forgive me, dearest, but it's true – you know absolutely nothing about forging."

Arthur is forced to acknowledge this. But. "Could you teach me?"

Eames' face knotted into a perplexed expression. "Forging? I highly doubt it, if you don't already know."

Arthur waves that off with a gesture. "Not the practice. The theory." He looks Eames in the eye, even and steady. "Even if there's nothing official about it, I'd be pretty surprised if you haven't figured out a thing or two."

Eames folds his arms on his chest and smirks at him, from which Arthur gathers he's intrigued. "And what's in it for me? That's my livelihood you want to poke your fingers into."

Eames is testing him, Arthur knows. For a reaction, for a give. And maybe, this time, Arthur will let him have some.

"I'll tell you a secret," Arthur tells him, and by the gleam in Eames' eye he knows he was right.

~~

#12, Benjamin Blake:

Arthur woke up in a strange bed, sweat drying on him, dizzy from only four hours of sleep.

He felt fucking fantastic.

He stretched, got up and wandered downstairs, lazy and contented. This was his first time at Ben's house, so it took him a while to find the kitchen and figure out the coffee maker.

He heard a muffled noise behind him and turned, this being before he'd learned to assume all noises were hostile in source. As it happened, it was Ben, sitting next to the dining table with his head pillowed over his hands.

"Ben?" Arthur went to him, careful. "Is everything all right?"

Ben looked up at Arthur, his eyes red with misery. Arthur could now see he was clutching a bible. "Arthur," he said. "Have you ever considered repenting your wickedness and turning to Christ?"

"I'm Jewish," Arthur said, stupefied, and that was how he ended up on the street wearing only his underwear.

~~

"So. What's it to be, love?" Eames is smirking at him, cleaning his fingernails with a penknife. Arthur considers all the damage he could deal Eames with it, and gives it up as ineffective.

"You could start with telling me why I'm difficult to forge," Arthur says, and because sometimes it's fun to be mean to Eames, "difficult for you, I mean."

"You wound me," Eames says, with only half of his usual theatrics. "Also, I'll take my payment in advance, please."

Arthur narrows his eyes. "Really."

Eames nods.

Arthur thinks. "What do you want to know?" But Eames smiles and wags his finger.

"None of that, love." He sounds far too cheerful for Arthur's peace of mind. "You choose what to tell me."

Arthur purses his lips. This means he can keep anything he particularly cares about secret, but he doubts it's his best interests Eames has in mind. "I prefer to work alone," Arthur says.

Eames leans closer to him. "But that's hardly a secret, now, is it? You've told me as much not ten minutes ago."

He did, actually. Arthur considers. "I don't believe in God."

Eames stares at him, incredulous. "That's just not true. I know you're Jewish, Cobb told me."

So this was Eames' angle. "Well, I'm not going along with this if you're just going to discredit everything I say."

Arthur could, in theory, explain to Eames why what Cobb told him and what Arthur had just said weren't contradictory in the least, but he's really not in the mood for a debate about faith versus tradition versus some fucking respect for those who came before you. Arthur had yet to see Eames grasp the meaning of 'respect', anyway.

Eames blinks, and backs away very slightly. "All right. How about this. I'll tell you something now, and you'll owe me for that. Free sample, yeah?"

"Fine." Arthur sits back in his chair and looks at Eames. "Do I get to decide what you tell me?"

Eames shrugs. "If you want."

"Tell me why you can't forge me," Arthur says, too quickly. Eames stares at him, and he flinches. "What? It's a valid question."

"Did I say anything?" Eames says, all too innocent for someone whose face was, not a moment ago, fairly radiating 'Full of ourselves, aren't we?'. "All right. Arthur, do you know why I don't think you can be taught forging?"

"Because I'm a crappy actor," Arthur says.

Eames smiles at him, looking genuinely pleased. "I wouldn't have put it quite so bluntly, but yes. You have, however, mastered the poker-face, the deadpan expression. You are the ultimate straight man." He leers at Arthur, but only a little. Arthur makes a get-on-with-it gesture.

"And so, the forging amateur," Eames says, some emphasis on that last word, "will take you at face value. The straight man is an archetype, and archetypes are bloody easy to do. Only," Eames raises his water glass to punctuate, "you aren't actually an archetype."

Arthur can't help grinning. "What gave me away?"

"Well-" Eames waves towards Arthur's legs, raised as he he leans back in the recliner. "This, for once. You talk like a schoolteacher and sit like a schoolboy. You act like you've got no bloody sense of humor at all, until some idiot says something ridiculous and then you make everyone laugh at them without changing expression once."

Arthur tries very hard not to be pleased by that.

"And then," Eames shakes a finger at him, "you smile, and you have dimples."

"I can't help my face," Arthur says, feeling monumentally silly.

"Ah, but there's no reason you should want to," Eames says. "It's a perfectly delightful face. At any rate – do you understand?"

Arthur nods, slowly. "You can't forge what I appear to be on a casual glance, because it's not actually true. But you can't forge me, because..." He trails off, unsure.

Eames studies him, his gaze open and frank. "Because I don't really understand you." It sounds like an admission.

Hence, secrets, Arthur thinks. He knew Eames would be interested in that. "And how do you come to understand a person?"

Eames smirks. "That's for next lesson. Meanwhile – pay up, darling."

Arthur could bargain. Arthur could argue and he'd make good points, and anyway he already got the answer he really wanted.

Instead he says, "I used to bite my fingernails."

Eames brightens at that. "An oral fixation, Arthur? I wouldn't have thought that." Absurdly, that seems to make him even happier. "And no displacement activity, either. How did you give it up?"

Arthur shrugged. "I just did."

~~

#8, Melanie Stein:

"Ugh. Don't *do* that!" She smacked his hand down and frowned. "I hate it when you do that."

Arthur lowered his hand, resisting the urge to pick at his loose thumbnail. "Sorry."

She looked at him balefully. "Honestly, some days. Promise me you'll stop that."

"I promise," he said, but already knew it wouldn't matter. He'd promised to stop leaving the toilet seat up, and to close the toothpaste tube after he used it, and not to leave his dirty socks on the floor. He'd kept all of those promises, and it made no difference. She just found something new to yell at him about.

Why do you keep trying to pick fights with me? He wanted to ask her, but he didn't. He knew she wouldn't have an answer.

Later, in the bus station, shouldering the bag with his meager possessions on the journey back to his own damn dorm room, where he could be the dirty fucking slob he wanted to be (profanity hers), his hand rose to his mouth, and he dropped it with a twitch.

He did promise.

~~

When Eames leaves, Arthur takes a walk.

The level Arthur's stuck in is, in design, somewhere between a small town and a suburb: the houses all scream of yuppie design, but they're regularly interspersed with small shops selling quaint, useless things like clocks and candles.

The lawn to Arthur's left is home to gnome making a rude gesture. Arthur crushes his urge to wave at the ugly thing, but allows himself to break into a smile. He's missed Dom's designs.

Around the corner is a cafe, too distinctly French in atmosphere to blend in perfectly, but there's something weirdly organic about how it fits in. It doesn't make one think wait, that's not right; it rather makes Arthur think about pretentious customers and the business owners who cater to them.

Arthur sits. He's pretty sure the cafe is there for him, too, since Dom and the mark aren't supposed to frequent this part of the dream. Also because as soon as he sits down the waitress plunks a mug of tea in front of him, steaming hot, just the way he likes it.
"Enjoy," she says with a wink. She looks a little like Jenny Greenfield, on whom Arthur had the world's biggest crush in tenth grade. This may account for Arthur's distraction, which is the reason he nearly jumps when he realizes Eames is sitting across from him.

Projection or actuality? It's hard to say, sometimes. Arthur's projections of Eames tend to the ridiculous, obvious caricatures of the man, but he'd seen a few that were startlingly realistic. And, of course, it could be Dom's projection.

There's one easy way to check. "Forge something," Arthur tells him.

Eames blinks but changes, willingly enough, into the mark's wife. Their waitress, who was bringing another cup of tea, startles visibly and nearly spills the entire contents of her tray on Eames.

"How entertaining," Eames says in Mrs. Kitts' faint Connecticut accent. "I think perhaps we'd better leave before the service mangles us further, dear."

Not having to pay for drinks, Arthur reflects, is one of the better things about dream worlds. Soon they're strolling down the street, which has subtly shifted into something more commercial looking. The stores they're passing boast fresh fruits and vegetables, bags of dry beans and rice and spices, fresh-baked bread and cookies.

"Somebody must be hungry," Eames says, amused.

"Not me." A projection hurries past Arthur, knocking into him in the process. "Maybe the mark is. Maybe that's what has his subconscious all riled up."

Eames chuckles. "No, I'm actually afraid that would be me."

Arthur slants a look at him.

Eames' smile is secretive, almost coy. It looks absolutely nothing like him and utterly the same as every picture of Mrs. Kitts. "Now, darling, payment in advance. I did give you a free sample." His accent is slipping – moreover, his word usage is.

Eames is doing this on purpose, Arthur realizes. Which means the reason Kitts' subconscious won't accept them is that something is off with Eames' forgery. But try as Arthur might, he can't see anything wrong with it.

Against his better intentions, Arthur is curious. He's also more than a little annoyed with Eames, who should know better than to play stupid games with Arthur.

"I was in the debate team in high school," Arthur tells him. "Now can you do something before they shove me into traffic?"

"There isn't any traffic," Eames says, but something subtle about him changes. The projections near them mellow out visibly.

"Traffic can be arranged," Arthur mutters darkly. "All right. What did you do?"

"Watch closely, pet." Eames winks at him, and dissolves.

Where Eames stood, there's now a blob of color in a vaguely feminine shape. It looks a bit like an impressionistic painting, except awful. It also moves wrong, in a way Arthur can't define but feels right down in his bones.

The projections around them are oblivious, going about their own business.

"This had better be worth what you're inflicting on my eyes," Arthur says levelly.

The Eames-blob smirks at him and somehow solidifies into something close enough to human that it doesn't make Arthur want to hurl. "Notice any reaction?"

"There wasn't any reaction." Arthur frowns. "Which is noteworthy, because you were attacked for doing a spot-on imitation and ignored while doing-" he waves at Eames – "That."

Eames is himself again, and the smile he grants Arthur is warm. "Precisely. Arthur, please describe our dear Mr. Kitts."

This is what Arthur does for a living. "Bald, middle-aged, wears glasses – ah." He thinks he's starting to see Eames' point.

"And doesn't see terribly well even with them. Whereas you, Arthur, have extremely good eyesight." Eames taps him on the forehead.

"Hence, Kitts' subconscious expects to see Mrs. Kitts as a blur." Arthur nods to himself. "All right. But there was something else. You - " He gropes for words, runs the image again in his head. What was different, what should have-- "You were moving wrong."

Eames' eyebrows rise. "Very good, Arthur." His face returns to their usual, insufferably benign expression. "But not quite good enough. Since you've seen for yourself how his facial recognition abilities are like, you'll understand why Kitts tells people apart mostly by the way they move. In my first impression of Mrs. Kitts I'd moved like I would for a generic female form. Like so."

It doesn't seem like Eames is actually moving, but suddenly he looks like he's smaller, and Arthur could swear there was more of a curve to his hips.

"However, it transpires that Mrs. Kitts, despite all her charm, has all the physical grace of a mountain gorilla. Like so." The way Eames moves now isn't very different, Arthur realizes, than the way Eames moves when he's not on a job. It's careless and sloppy and unpleasant for Arthur to watch.

"Now, mind you." Eames is himself again, walking too close to Arthur for comfort. "I can't forge just the mark's perceptions, easy as that would be, because I don't work solo and the reactions of those I worked with would give me away. What I generally have to do is merge the perception into the reality, which is harder than it looks."

Arthur nods. He remembers this, actually, from the test run they did before the first time they worked with Eames. Eames had forged Dom. Arthur had scoffed at his work as utterly unrealistic and lacking, until Eames showed Arthur the movie footage his Dom impression was based on.

The forge and the recording were completely identical, down to the last detail. When viewed side by side, Arthur couldn't tell them apart. But as soon as he was looking at Eames alone, Arthur was 100% certain something wasn't right.

Arthur, who knew about optical illusions, had begrudgingly accepted that Eames was as good as his opinion of himself. Truth be told, he has yet to let Arthur down, although he'd never actually say as much.

"So," Eames says. "Forging lesson number two: don't make it right, make it feel right. It's very similar to the ideas of architecture, actually."

Arthur scowls. Of course it is; of course it's something Arthur should have been able to understand by himself.

At he hasn't told Eames anything that was actually important.

~~

#3, Roger Martin

Jenny was Arthur's next-door neighbor. Jenny liked to walk around barefoot in the summer and hum snatches of tunes. Jenny wanted to learn to play the guitar but never had the discipline, so Arthur learned to play for her.

Roger was Jenny's boyfriend, but it was Arthur Jenny liked to talk to for hours.

And not just talk. She would take Arthur by the hand to the empty stretch of land behind their houses, sit with him in grass so tall it hid both their faces from anyone who would come looking. Would push Arthur to the ground, crawl on top of him and kiss him until they were both breathless.

"You have a boyfriend," Arthur said. It was as much statement of fact as protest.

"But I want to kiss you." Not as in, You, not Roger. Jenny liked to kiss, and Jenny did what she liked.

It got awkward after a while. Roger would stare at Arthur in Debate, and Arthur would – not flush and look away, no, he had more control than that even in junior high – stare at Roger blankly. But he felt awkward. And told Jenny so, which in hindsight was a mistake of epic proportions.

When Jenny brought Roger to the field behind their houses, Arthur felt like he'd been slapped. He gritted his teeth and smiled, because there was no point in doing otherwise. Jenny always got her way in the end.

He didn't expect, as all three of them hid in the grass (Roger's movements ungainly, Arthur's practiced, and Jenny's infused with the everyday grace of everything she did), for Jenny to kiss him. But he let her, and kissed her back.

As she pulled back, looking satisfied, Arthur registered the wary look on Roger's face. Arthur would have expected shock, but apparently Jenny had explained some things to Roger in advance.

Not all of them, though, because when Jenny said, "Now you kiss Arthur," Roger's jaw dropped. So would Arthur's if he weren't at peace with the fact that Jenny was insane.

"I'm not gay," Roger said numbly.

"So?" Jenny looked irritated. "It's just a kiss, don't be such a baby."

Arthur knew from experience it would be useless to try to explain to Jenny why refusing to kiss anyone could be for any reason better than a childish hangup. He sighed, feeling put upon, and waited for Roger to bow to the inevitable.

Roger kissed him.

More exactly: Roger touched his lips to Arthur's, almost disgusted. Almost shy. Arthur moved his mouth over Roger's, feeling reckless, because why not?

At which Roger made a noise, and Arthur found himself in the familiar position of being pinned to the ground and kissed. He heard Jenny's soft laughter, heard the rustle of cloth that meant she had taken her shirt off. Roger kept kissing Arthur, clinging to him in a mindless sort of way. Arthur wrapped his arms around Roger and smiled into their mouths.

That was when Jenny's parents found them.

Arthur's parents just laughed about it, but Jenny ended up having to go to a different school and the next time Arthur ran into Roger between classes Roger shoved him into the lockers and growled at Arthur, "Stay the fuck away from me."

~~

Kitts is, technically, their client as well as their mark. He's an aspiring point man, who hired Dom to militarize him and Arthur to teach him the rudiments of the profession.

What Kitts doesn't know is that his potential employer, who gave him Dom's number and Arthur's email, is paying them double to divulge to her anything interesting they find, most importantly any conflict in loyalties. Since Kitts was a government agent before turning to a life of dream-crime, it's not an unfounded assumption.

When Arthur got his mail, he sent back him a list of names and photos and wrote, "Start with their social security numbers. Write to me when you know their weaknesses and we'll take it from there."

(Arthur did add a few useful search key-words and databases for Kitts to use. He's not a total hardass.)

The important fact here being, Kitts has never actually seen Arthur. To the best of Arthur's knowledge – which is pretty damn good, if he does say so himself – Kitts has no idea what Arthur looks like. For this reason, Arthur can sit on a park bench and be entertained by the sight of Kitts' projections tearing Dom apart. It's not that he's so petty as to still be angry at Dom for that bullet to the kneecap, except for how he kind of is. But only a little.

Dom dies. Arthur sips his tea.

An hour later Dom reappears next to Arthur, looking thoroughly disgruntled. "You could at least pretend not to enjoy that."

Arthur widens his eyes. He knows that doesn't actually make him look innocent, but he can try. "Enjoy what?"

Dom narrows his eyes at him. Arthur holds his gaze. At last, Dom sighs. "Why do I even bother?"

Arthur shrugs. "Search me."

"Don't bloody tempt me," Dom says, but now Arthur recognizes faint traces of Eames' voice.

Arthur stands up, abruptly. "What are you doing." His voice is flat; it's nothing like a question.

Eames flows back into himself, grinning at Arthur like the asshole he is. "Having a bit of fun." His voice sharpens a bit. "Nothing worse than what you were doing, I'm sure."

Arthur mimes confusion. "I was just sitting here."

The look Eames gives him is sharp as well. "If you don't want me to play games, don't start them."

"It's not like it was me shredding Cobb," Arthur says for clarification's sake. "Look, if you knew how many times he got me shot--"

"Not to the exact number," Eames says, something like concession in his voice. "But somewhere in the triple digits. About three hundred and ten, yeah?"

"I. Uh." Arthur blinks at him. "How the fuck do you know that?"

"Research, Mr. Eames," Eames says in Arthur's own voice.

Arthur's taken aback. "That's. Actually much better than last time."

Eames rolls his eyes, but Arthur can tell he's pleased. "It's three words. I've heard you use them often enough. Please don't insult my skills, Arthur."

"Yeah, I'd rather insult your tie, anyway," Arthur shoots back, almost automatically. "I mean, are those impressonistic snowmen or what--"

Eames stands up. "Lovely as it is to have you mocking my sartorial choices," he says, almost clipped, "I am actually here in a professional capacity. So if you don't mind," he shoves past Arthur, "goodbye."

Arthur sits back. One of them kicked his cup of tea over, and it's spilling into the grass.

~~

A few hours later, he's pacing in his dream-apartment, rubbing his hands together against the sudden chill of the dream. He's still trying to figure our what the ever-living fuck happened.

He's startled out of his thoughts by a knock on the door. Arthur peers out the window – no crowd of projections closing in, that's good. But he knows Dom has to spend every minute he's in this level with the mark, which means this has to be –

Eames stands on his doorstep, holding a cup of tea. Arthur gestures him in, cautious.

"I think I should apologize," he tells Eames. He has no idea what he should apologize for, but Eames isn't the type to throw hissy fits for no reason.

Eames looks rueful. "In fact, I came to do just that." He hands Arthur the tea, and adds, "apologize, that is. And ask you if you wanted to continue our little lessons."

Of course Arthur does. What else does he have to occupy himself with? Even watching Dom dies horribly gets boring (or, to be honest, gut-churning awful) after a while.

"I'm a horrible person," Arthur says to the silence between them.

Eames' expression isn't quite a smile. "Is that meant to be a secret?"

Arthur laughs, short and devoid of humor. "No. Just an observation."

Comments

[labseraph.livejournal.com]

So many instances I nearly spewed my drink on my monitor, thank you for the giggles. Like these.

(Fact: Half of Arthur's evasion skills were perfected during family events. The other half were honed when Mal tried to get him to taste her cooking.)

[...]

"I'm Jewish," Arthur said, stupefied, and that was how he ended up on the street wearing only his underwear.

I adore your little reflections of Arthur. He appears straightforward and easy, yet with subtle undercurrents that you captured perfectly.

"This, for once. You talk like a schoolteacher and sit like a schoolboy. You act like you've got no bloody sense of humor at all, until some idiot says something ridiculous and then you make everyone laugh at them without changing expression once."

[...]

"I'm a horrible person," Arthur says to the silence between them.

Eames' expression isn't quite a smile. "Is that meant to be a secret?"

Arthur laughs, short and devoid of humor. "No. Just an observation."

♥♥♥

[the_ragnarok]

OMG somebody read this? /stupefied

He appears straightforward and easy, yet with subtle undercurrents that you captured perfectly.

Thank you! This is exactly what I'm trying to do with this.

[anatsuno]

I second that comment. :D

And now I can't wait for more, eventually. No, I lie of course: I can wait. Happily.

[the_ragnarok]

heh. I need to finish this at some point. when I'm not so distracted by all the SHINY THINGS.