Tabula Rasa, 3/?
Dec. 15th, 2010 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_ragnarokArthur/Eames, Arthur/OCs, R rated.
Eames shifts easily, quickly, going through the different forms with the same ease his hands go through decks of cards.
Nothing up my sleeve, Arthur thinks, and it makes him smile because Eames doesn't even need sleeves for that. Eames hides everything in plain sight.
Eames is himself again, sprawled on Arthur's couch, smirking. He stretches extravagantly, his shirt riding up to reveal a sliver of tanned, hard stomach that Arthur is most certainly not looking at.
"Anything else?" Arthur says, because being an asshole is as good a distraction as any.
Except apparently it isn't, because Eames looks at him, and stills for a moment, the way he does only when he's either surprised or furious.
"Arthur," he says, and Arthur could have said something snappish and looked away if only his voice wasn't so fucking gentle.
Arthur stares up at the ceiling, feeling a hot flush crawl up his neck. "Yeah," he says.
"You're really not hiding this half as well as you think you do. You may as well stop trying." Eames' tapping fingers belie the lightness of his tone.
Arthur wishes he didn't know Eames was doing it on purpose, had to be doing this on purpose. Forgers trained themselves out of tells like this, everyone knew that, but sometimes manufactured emotion wasn't a lie. Sometimes it was the only way to let people know.
"Then I must have overestimated you, Mr. Eames," he says, quiet, "because I'm not trying at all."
Eames' movements are sharp as he gets up. Not angry, precisely, but wary. For once, Arthur is glad when Eames leaves.
He allows himself – for once, just this once – to be stupid and sentimental. He lets himself sit on the couch, still warm from Eames' body, relax into it and let go of himself for a little.
It's good to want, his mother used to say, and boy, was she ever wrong.
The worst thing is that he knows, he knows Eames wants the same thing. Eames could lie to Arthur, easy as breathing – easy as controlling well-placed pauses and glances, keeping the cadences of his words in line. This is what Eames does.
This is why Arthur knows Eames is being honest. Eames has no reason whatsoever to lie.
But what does that mean, telling a lie? From Arthur's point of view – Arthur, who deals in numbers and facts, in quantifiables – a lie and a mistake are one and the same. It makes no fucking difference.
Arthur doesn't believe in curses, in destiny, but he is an empiricist. You can't argue with facts. Although, in full honesty, it had taken Arthur years to stop trying.
~~
#14, Shawna Carver
"What's with all these layers?" she'd asked him, on their first date.
"The appeal of mystery," Arthur had answered, only half-kidding.
He hadn't been wearing a suit when he first saw her. If he had, he learned later, she'd never have spoken to him. But as it happened he'd been out jogging, hair floppy and clothes ridiculous, when he saw a gorgeous young woman sitting on a bench and reading.
He couldn't help tracking the title, it was just something his eyes did. He didn't even need to stop running for that. And because his brain was slower than his eyes, this being morning, he'd run another minute before he did a double take.
That did not mix well with the inertia of running, and so he'd nearly wound up being a messy pile of Arthur all over the sidewalk, but fortunately he'd always been quick on his feet. By the time he'd sorted himself out, she was looking at him, eyes bright, evidently trying very hard not to laugh.
"Hey," he said, out of breath. "Is that – is that Akhmatova in the original?"
The smile flickered, then resumed tenfold. "You read Russian?"
He smiled back at her, because he couldn't not. "I just know the alphabet," he confessed. "I don't actually understand anything, all I've read by her was in translation."
"You really should read the originals," she said, tilting her head a little. It felt almost studied, like she'd learned it in one of those stupid body-language classes; to signify sexual interest, lick your lips.
It was endearing all the same, and Arthur felt himself drawn closer, felt his head tilt to match her angle. "Maybe you could tell me about it," he said in a smooth convincing voice that didn't sound anything like him. "I could take you out to dinner sometimes?" The near-squeak there, at the end – now, that was definitely him.
Her eyes narrowed. "Depends."
"On?" He stifled the urge to tap a foot. Arthur hadn't fidgeted since high school.
Her smile widened. "On whether you impress me." She took the piece of paper she'd been using as a bookmark and scribbled something on it. "This is my e-mail," she said. "You have a three days window in which to be interesting. Good luck."
Later, though, she'd told him he won her over on basis of his email address alone. He'd grumbled over all the effort he'd put into finding things for her – silly, disjointed things, close-up pictures of praying mantises and subway maps and Wikipedia articles about prime numbers – but he couldn't really resent it.
She was lovely, in every possible way, and Arthur must have known from the start it would come to this.
"Are you gay?" she'd asked him one evening, without preamble, over dinner at her place.
Arthur rolled his eyes. "It's called being gentlemanly, geez."
He was, in fact, feeling a little defensive about how they haven't had sex yet after dating for three months. It wasn't that he didn't want to, not at all, but... There was something going on that he couldn't quite put his finger on, and so Arthur exercised caution.
"Not that." Shawna looked him, grave. "Look, you can tell me." She reached for his hand.
With a sick abruptness, Arthur realized she wasn't joking. "What are you talking about?" he said, snatching his hand away without quite meaning to.
"I know already, okay?" God, why did she have to look so compassionate saying that? "I know about Adam," she said, quiet. "And, and some of the others. You really don't have anything to be ashamed of –"
With a snarl, Arthur rose and stalked over to the bookshelf. He grabbed a dictionary, opened it and laid it on the table, flipping through the pages none too gently until he found the entry for 'Bisexual'.
"Need me to marker that for you?" he said, probably more vicious than was strictly warranted, but God, he hated it when people got like that. Like they found a tidy neat label to put him under and everything else he was just didn't mean anything.
Shawna didn't flush easily, but Arthur could see the tips of her ears growing pinker, could see embarrassment in the purse of her lips and the tilt of her head, and he couldn't stand it.
"So come on, if it's so important," he said, forcibly gentling himself, reigning in his posture and his balance to speak for him: I'm here. I won't hurt you.
They went to bed, then, and Arthur half-felt he was taking on some sort of dare.
He took his clothes off for her, and she stared at him. When he was naked she took off her dress, and Arthur ached at the sight of her, finally; dark smooth skin, the elegant structure of her bones, the gentle curves of the muscles in her arms, in her thighs.
He hungered for her, and for the first time, he let her see that.
When he opened her mouth, she flinched.
Arthur stilled. "Shawna," he said, his mouth dry.
"Come over here," she said, fiercely, and dragged him into bed.
It was good; it was wonderful between them, desire stoked for ages bursting into flames. And then it was done, and she looked at him and said nothing.
"What?" he said, unnerved by the weight of her gaze.
He'd expected her to say Nothing, to circle and circle around whatever it was they weren't saying. But she looked him in the eye and said, "This wasn't what I expected."
Infuriated, Arthur very nearly spat it. "What did you expect, then?"
She looked at him, silently assessing, and said, "More."
In the end, he put his suit on, piece by piece, and slunk to his own house to sleep on the couch, fully clothed. He couldn't shake off the feeling that if he took it off he might not find anything underneath.
~~
Arthur should be more careful. He's letting himself get away with too much. He knows this. For this reason he doesn't go out, looking for Eames or otherwise.
Instead, he reads.
The books around him contain only texts he's memorized, but that's not necessarily a bad thing when he's feeling shaken and uncertain.
The book in his hands is thin with a shiny, yellow-orange cover, and Arthur tries to do the voices the way he did them when he last read this aloud. "And they carefully trained a real smart dog named Daniel," he reads, with the slight Southern drawl he likes to adopt for the narrator, "to serve as our country’s first gun-toting spaniel."
There's a slow clap coming from behind him, and Arthur doesn't have to turn around to know Eames is there.
He turns anyway, and looks, and doesn't try to guard himself at all because there's just no point any more.
Eames has a glint in his eyes, the way he always does just before doing something inadvisable. "So sorry," he says, light and fake. "Couldn't stay away."
"Don't you have a job to do," Arthur grouses, but it's futile and he knows it. He watches Eames, wary; Eames is, technically, just standing there, but it feels like he's circling Arthur.
Eames has an excellent sense of timing, a very clever understanding of the weak spots in people's armor. This has been a long time coming, and Arthur is tired of holding up, holding everything in.
It had to happen, eventually.
Arthur almost feels resigned as Eames stalks close, kneeling on the rug beside couch, his face mere inches from Arthur's. "Yeah?" Eames asks, and there's something so bright about him that Arthur can't stand to look.
Instead of answering, Arthur asks, "Can you forge me now?"
Something shifts in Eames' expression. He nods, just, and Arthur's staring at his own face.
Because there's no point in not doing so, Arthur yields to temptation and grabs Eames – grabs himself – by the hair, wrenching the forgery's head back. Arthur looks himself in the eyes.
His eyes are dark; Arthur knows this, but they've never seemed so blank to him, reflecting but unyielding, unlike Eames' own changeable eyes. The forgery's expression is blank, the expression Arthur wears when he's angry or confused or any of a hundred different emotions.
Eames is still under his hands. It's not Eames' stillness, which comes of the control you learn when you've caused damage once too often by moving in an untimely manner. Nor Arthur's, which is his default, which is tense and alert and waiting to strike.
It's not even the stillness of the Straight Man, of the archetype, a rigidity which is part of the face one must present to the world at times.
It's a blankness. It's nothing at all, and it's terrifying.
It's what Arthur looks like, to anyone who can see.
Arthur doesn't close his eyes, doesn't look away. "Change back," he tells Eames, steady and unwavering.
Then it's Eames' hair under Arthur's hand, stiff with too much gel, warm scalp underneath, and Arthur can breath again. He lowers his mouth to meet Eames, who surges up to him.
It has to be good, Arthur resolves. If it happens now, just now, it has to be perfect. Arthur can stand it if this turns from a hope into a memory, but the thought of it becoming a bad memory makes him want to grind his teeth.
He sinks them into Eames' shoulder instead, savagely pleased as Eames yelps and grabs Arthur harder, pulling them close. He ravages Eames' mouth, touches everywhere, greedy because there's no such thing as a second chance.
Eames shifts to follow him, and as he moves his form shifts, as well. Arthur can't tell if he's doing this on purpose, whether Eames is trying to tell him something or is just all over the place, overcome by manic glee that he's finally getting his way.
As he pushes inside Eames (God, he loves dreams, loves it when they just flow into position) Arthur moans, "Yes."
Arthur catches Eames' sharp, startled gaze right before he comes. By the time he's recovered, sated and sticky from Eames' come where it sprayed all over his stomach, the look is gone.
That doesn't matter. This is hardly Arthur's first time in this particular game. He knows exactly what Eames had been thinking.
It makes him prickly, and so, when Eames purrs at him, "Another go, darling?" Arthur says
"No, thanks, no," wipes himself on the sheet and gets up.
Eames is looking at him, unscrutable. "Another forging lesson, then?"
It feels almost like a concession, which makes Arthur unreasonably angry. "I should pay you, then," he says.
Eames stretches and makes a noncommittal noise. Possibly he's trying to distract Arthur. Arthur's mood is not improved by the fact that it's working.
"I've never slept with anyone more than once," Arthur says, with cold deliberation, and by Eames' sudden lack of movement he knows he hit his target precisely.
~~
#6-11, Belle Alvarez, Tina Kowalski, Donnie, Alan Boleyn, Unknown, Unknown
He'd met Belle at a party, where she amused him by cracking bad puns, raised his hopes by fluttering her eyelashes at him, crushed them by introducing Arthur to her boyfriend, then raising them again by casually letting a mention of an open relationship slip.
She rose from Arthur's bed half naked and crying. "I can't do this," she sobbed. "I can't, I feel so horrible, I can't – "
Arthur, at a loss, ended up calling her boyfriend for her. In the end, it turned out Belle just wasn't cut out for non-monogamous relationships. Her boyfriend gave him an apologetic shrug and took her home, a solicitous arm thrown around her shoulders.
Tina he'd met at a friend's house on a Friday night potluck supper. She had huge brown eyes and a shy smile, and she touched Arthur's arm as they left and asked him to take her home.
She started crying before they even made it to the bed. Arthur, after much coaxing, discovered the problem was a crisis of faith.
"I don't even know what I want," Tina said, sniffling. Arthur held out a handkerchief for her, which she accepted with gratitude and used to mop out the corners of her eyes.
I don't know what you want, either, Arthur wanted to say, but didn't.
"I mean, my mom tells me, find a nice, Jewish boy," Tina said. "And – and I want to have fun, but I try and I just feel like I'm doing something wrong, something I shouldn't."
"I'm Jewish, you know." Arthur really wished he didn't have to keep telling people that.
"Yeah, but I didn't know that when I came home with you," Tina said, and that kind of sealed the conversation.
When Arthur whined to Chrissy about this, she chose to point out, "One: Two bad dates aren't a pattern."
"All right," Arthur conceded. "What's two?"
"Two," Chrissy said, expertly twisting her hair into tiny knots, "maybe, I don't know. If you're just looking for sex, maybe you shouldn't start having intimate soul-baring conversations with people."
Arthur rolled his eyes. "I do not. Do you even know me?"
Chrissy gave him a wry look. "Better than you know me. Quick, what's my favorite color?"
It was a trick question that Arthur refused to answer to, mostly because he didn't know the answer. But he did take Chrissy's advice to heart when Chrissy's hipster friends dragged him along to a club.
He spotted the guy sitting across the bar, and only a shouted exchange of names and heated glances took place before they were in a back alley, rubbing against each other, frantic.
"Oh," Donnie sobbed against him, "Oh, oh," and with a belated start Arthur realized that this was not a sex noise.
No, Donnie was actually crying.
Arthur pulled away, cautious, patting Donnie's head. "Uh. Are you okay?"
Donnie raised his eyes and rasped, "Really not," and Arthur slunk back into the party.
"No, seriously," Chrissy's friend Ronnie said later when Chrissy was regaling everyone with Arthur's romantic woes (against, it should be mentioned, Arthur's explicit objections). "You can't possibly be that bad in bed."
"Fuck you," Arthur said, more glum than angry because frankly he was starting to question this himself.
So it was that he ended up on a date with Chrissy's friend Alan, who gave Arthur an amused look and said, "Funny, you don't look hopeless."
"Yeah, I did hear that's supposed to be funny," Arthur said. "Strange how it isn't." But thank goodness, Alan laughed at that, and Arthur honestly thought he had a fucking chance until Alan looked aside and turned ghost-white.
"My ex," Alan'd explained later, eyes heavy-lidded from the late hour and the vodka they'd been swilling. "Fuck. I can't believe I'm still in love with her." He laughed, self-deprecating. "I'm such a train wreck."
"What're you here for, then?" Arthur was trying hard not to slur.
"You, my friend," Alan pointed the bottle at him, "are meant to be my rebound fuck. My first step on the road to recovery."
Arthur hummed and said, "In that case, let's get therapeutic."
Afterwards, Alan quietly said, "It didn't work."
Arthur said, "Yeah, didn't think so," and shooed Alan gently away so he could at least get some fucking sleep.
The time after that he didn't even bother with names, just found a party, found a girl who wasn't too drunk and was quite happy to wrap her legs around Arthur's waist as he fucked her against the wall.
He spotted her again when he next went prowling. She lifted a bottle at him in mock-salute and looked away. Arthur sighed and let the next guy who bought him a drink drag him to behind the club's back entrance for quick and dirty blow-jobs.
He didn't bother looking for that guy the next time he went there. Arthur was many things, but slow learner wasn't one of them.
~~
Eames shifts easily, quickly, going through the different forms with the same ease his hands go through decks of cards.
Nothing up my sleeve, Arthur thinks, and it makes him smile because Eames doesn't even need sleeves for that. Eames hides everything in plain sight.
Eames is himself again, sprawled on Arthur's couch, smirking. He stretches extravagantly, his shirt riding up to reveal a sliver of tanned, hard stomach that Arthur is most certainly not looking at.
"Anything else?" Arthur says, because being an asshole is as good a distraction as any.
Except apparently it isn't, because Eames looks at him, and stills for a moment, the way he does only when he's either surprised or furious.
"Arthur," he says, and Arthur could have said something snappish and looked away if only his voice wasn't so fucking gentle.
Arthur stares up at the ceiling, feeling a hot flush crawl up his neck. "Yeah," he says.
"You're really not hiding this half as well as you think you do. You may as well stop trying." Eames' tapping fingers belie the lightness of his tone.
Arthur wishes he didn't know Eames was doing it on purpose, had to be doing this on purpose. Forgers trained themselves out of tells like this, everyone knew that, but sometimes manufactured emotion wasn't a lie. Sometimes it was the only way to let people know.
"Then I must have overestimated you, Mr. Eames," he says, quiet, "because I'm not trying at all."
Eames' movements are sharp as he gets up. Not angry, precisely, but wary. For once, Arthur is glad when Eames leaves.
He allows himself – for once, just this once – to be stupid and sentimental. He lets himself sit on the couch, still warm from Eames' body, relax into it and let go of himself for a little.
It's good to want, his mother used to say, and boy, was she ever wrong.
The worst thing is that he knows, he knows Eames wants the same thing. Eames could lie to Arthur, easy as breathing – easy as controlling well-placed pauses and glances, keeping the cadences of his words in line. This is what Eames does.
This is why Arthur knows Eames is being honest. Eames has no reason whatsoever to lie.
But what does that mean, telling a lie? From Arthur's point of view – Arthur, who deals in numbers and facts, in quantifiables – a lie and a mistake are one and the same. It makes no fucking difference.
Arthur doesn't believe in curses, in destiny, but he is an empiricist. You can't argue with facts. Although, in full honesty, it had taken Arthur years to stop trying.
~~
#14, Shawna Carver
"What's with all these layers?" she'd asked him, on their first date.
"The appeal of mystery," Arthur had answered, only half-kidding.
He hadn't been wearing a suit when he first saw her. If he had, he learned later, she'd never have spoken to him. But as it happened he'd been out jogging, hair floppy and clothes ridiculous, when he saw a gorgeous young woman sitting on a bench and reading.
He couldn't help tracking the title, it was just something his eyes did. He didn't even need to stop running for that. And because his brain was slower than his eyes, this being morning, he'd run another minute before he did a double take.
That did not mix well with the inertia of running, and so he'd nearly wound up being a messy pile of Arthur all over the sidewalk, but fortunately he'd always been quick on his feet. By the time he'd sorted himself out, she was looking at him, eyes bright, evidently trying very hard not to laugh.
"Hey," he said, out of breath. "Is that – is that Akhmatova in the original?"
The smile flickered, then resumed tenfold. "You read Russian?"
He smiled back at her, because he couldn't not. "I just know the alphabet," he confessed. "I don't actually understand anything, all I've read by her was in translation."
"You really should read the originals," she said, tilting her head a little. It felt almost studied, like she'd learned it in one of those stupid body-language classes; to signify sexual interest, lick your lips.
It was endearing all the same, and Arthur felt himself drawn closer, felt his head tilt to match her angle. "Maybe you could tell me about it," he said in a smooth convincing voice that didn't sound anything like him. "I could take you out to dinner sometimes?" The near-squeak there, at the end – now, that was definitely him.
Her eyes narrowed. "Depends."
"On?" He stifled the urge to tap a foot. Arthur hadn't fidgeted since high school.
Her smile widened. "On whether you impress me." She took the piece of paper she'd been using as a bookmark and scribbled something on it. "This is my e-mail," she said. "You have a three days window in which to be interesting. Good luck."
Later, though, she'd told him he won her over on basis of his email address alone. He'd grumbled over all the effort he'd put into finding things for her – silly, disjointed things, close-up pictures of praying mantises and subway maps and Wikipedia articles about prime numbers – but he couldn't really resent it.
She was lovely, in every possible way, and Arthur must have known from the start it would come to this.
"Are you gay?" she'd asked him one evening, without preamble, over dinner at her place.
Arthur rolled his eyes. "It's called being gentlemanly, geez."
He was, in fact, feeling a little defensive about how they haven't had sex yet after dating for three months. It wasn't that he didn't want to, not at all, but... There was something going on that he couldn't quite put his finger on, and so Arthur exercised caution.
"Not that." Shawna looked him, grave. "Look, you can tell me." She reached for his hand.
With a sick abruptness, Arthur realized she wasn't joking. "What are you talking about?" he said, snatching his hand away without quite meaning to.
"I know already, okay?" God, why did she have to look so compassionate saying that? "I know about Adam," she said, quiet. "And, and some of the others. You really don't have anything to be ashamed of –"
With a snarl, Arthur rose and stalked over to the bookshelf. He grabbed a dictionary, opened it and laid it on the table, flipping through the pages none too gently until he found the entry for 'Bisexual'.
"Need me to marker that for you?" he said, probably more vicious than was strictly warranted, but God, he hated it when people got like that. Like they found a tidy neat label to put him under and everything else he was just didn't mean anything.
Shawna didn't flush easily, but Arthur could see the tips of her ears growing pinker, could see embarrassment in the purse of her lips and the tilt of her head, and he couldn't stand it.
"So come on, if it's so important," he said, forcibly gentling himself, reigning in his posture and his balance to speak for him: I'm here. I won't hurt you.
They went to bed, then, and Arthur half-felt he was taking on some sort of dare.
He took his clothes off for her, and she stared at him. When he was naked she took off her dress, and Arthur ached at the sight of her, finally; dark smooth skin, the elegant structure of her bones, the gentle curves of the muscles in her arms, in her thighs.
He hungered for her, and for the first time, he let her see that.
When he opened her mouth, she flinched.
Arthur stilled. "Shawna," he said, his mouth dry.
"Come over here," she said, fiercely, and dragged him into bed.
It was good; it was wonderful between them, desire stoked for ages bursting into flames. And then it was done, and she looked at him and said nothing.
"What?" he said, unnerved by the weight of her gaze.
He'd expected her to say Nothing, to circle and circle around whatever it was they weren't saying. But she looked him in the eye and said, "This wasn't what I expected."
Infuriated, Arthur very nearly spat it. "What did you expect, then?"
She looked at him, silently assessing, and said, "More."
In the end, he put his suit on, piece by piece, and slunk to his own house to sleep on the couch, fully clothed. He couldn't shake off the feeling that if he took it off he might not find anything underneath.
~~
Arthur should be more careful. He's letting himself get away with too much. He knows this. For this reason he doesn't go out, looking for Eames or otherwise.
Instead, he reads.
The books around him contain only texts he's memorized, but that's not necessarily a bad thing when he's feeling shaken and uncertain.
The book in his hands is thin with a shiny, yellow-orange cover, and Arthur tries to do the voices the way he did them when he last read this aloud. "And they carefully trained a real smart dog named Daniel," he reads, with the slight Southern drawl he likes to adopt for the narrator, "to serve as our country’s first gun-toting spaniel."
There's a slow clap coming from behind him, and Arthur doesn't have to turn around to know Eames is there.
He turns anyway, and looks, and doesn't try to guard himself at all because there's just no point any more.
Eames has a glint in his eyes, the way he always does just before doing something inadvisable. "So sorry," he says, light and fake. "Couldn't stay away."
"Don't you have a job to do," Arthur grouses, but it's futile and he knows it. He watches Eames, wary; Eames is, technically, just standing there, but it feels like he's circling Arthur.
Eames has an excellent sense of timing, a very clever understanding of the weak spots in people's armor. This has been a long time coming, and Arthur is tired of holding up, holding everything in.
It had to happen, eventually.
Arthur almost feels resigned as Eames stalks close, kneeling on the rug beside couch, his face mere inches from Arthur's. "Yeah?" Eames asks, and there's something so bright about him that Arthur can't stand to look.
Instead of answering, Arthur asks, "Can you forge me now?"
Something shifts in Eames' expression. He nods, just, and Arthur's staring at his own face.
Because there's no point in not doing so, Arthur yields to temptation and grabs Eames – grabs himself – by the hair, wrenching the forgery's head back. Arthur looks himself in the eyes.
His eyes are dark; Arthur knows this, but they've never seemed so blank to him, reflecting but unyielding, unlike Eames' own changeable eyes. The forgery's expression is blank, the expression Arthur wears when he's angry or confused or any of a hundred different emotions.
Eames is still under his hands. It's not Eames' stillness, which comes of the control you learn when you've caused damage once too often by moving in an untimely manner. Nor Arthur's, which is his default, which is tense and alert and waiting to strike.
It's not even the stillness of the Straight Man, of the archetype, a rigidity which is part of the face one must present to the world at times.
It's a blankness. It's nothing at all, and it's terrifying.
It's what Arthur looks like, to anyone who can see.
Arthur doesn't close his eyes, doesn't look away. "Change back," he tells Eames, steady and unwavering.
Then it's Eames' hair under Arthur's hand, stiff with too much gel, warm scalp underneath, and Arthur can breath again. He lowers his mouth to meet Eames, who surges up to him.
It has to be good, Arthur resolves. If it happens now, just now, it has to be perfect. Arthur can stand it if this turns from a hope into a memory, but the thought of it becoming a bad memory makes him want to grind his teeth.
He sinks them into Eames' shoulder instead, savagely pleased as Eames yelps and grabs Arthur harder, pulling them close. He ravages Eames' mouth, touches everywhere, greedy because there's no such thing as a second chance.
Eames shifts to follow him, and as he moves his form shifts, as well. Arthur can't tell if he's doing this on purpose, whether Eames is trying to tell him something or is just all over the place, overcome by manic glee that he's finally getting his way.
As he pushes inside Eames (God, he loves dreams, loves it when they just flow into position) Arthur moans, "Yes."
Arthur catches Eames' sharp, startled gaze right before he comes. By the time he's recovered, sated and sticky from Eames' come where it sprayed all over his stomach, the look is gone.
That doesn't matter. This is hardly Arthur's first time in this particular game. He knows exactly what Eames had been thinking.
It makes him prickly, and so, when Eames purrs at him, "Another go, darling?" Arthur says
"No, thanks, no," wipes himself on the sheet and gets up.
Eames is looking at him, unscrutable. "Another forging lesson, then?"
It feels almost like a concession, which makes Arthur unreasonably angry. "I should pay you, then," he says.
Eames stretches and makes a noncommittal noise. Possibly he's trying to distract Arthur. Arthur's mood is not improved by the fact that it's working.
"I've never slept with anyone more than once," Arthur says, with cold deliberation, and by Eames' sudden lack of movement he knows he hit his target precisely.
~~
#6-11, Belle Alvarez, Tina Kowalski, Donnie, Alan Boleyn, Unknown, Unknown
He'd met Belle at a party, where she amused him by cracking bad puns, raised his hopes by fluttering her eyelashes at him, crushed them by introducing Arthur to her boyfriend, then raising them again by casually letting a mention of an open relationship slip.
She rose from Arthur's bed half naked and crying. "I can't do this," she sobbed. "I can't, I feel so horrible, I can't – "
Arthur, at a loss, ended up calling her boyfriend for her. In the end, it turned out Belle just wasn't cut out for non-monogamous relationships. Her boyfriend gave him an apologetic shrug and took her home, a solicitous arm thrown around her shoulders.
Tina he'd met at a friend's house on a Friday night potluck supper. She had huge brown eyes and a shy smile, and she touched Arthur's arm as they left and asked him to take her home.
She started crying before they even made it to the bed. Arthur, after much coaxing, discovered the problem was a crisis of faith.
"I don't even know what I want," Tina said, sniffling. Arthur held out a handkerchief for her, which she accepted with gratitude and used to mop out the corners of her eyes.
I don't know what you want, either, Arthur wanted to say, but didn't.
"I mean, my mom tells me, find a nice, Jewish boy," Tina said. "And – and I want to have fun, but I try and I just feel like I'm doing something wrong, something I shouldn't."
"I'm Jewish, you know." Arthur really wished he didn't have to keep telling people that.
"Yeah, but I didn't know that when I came home with you," Tina said, and that kind of sealed the conversation.
When Arthur whined to Chrissy about this, she chose to point out, "One: Two bad dates aren't a pattern."
"All right," Arthur conceded. "What's two?"
"Two," Chrissy said, expertly twisting her hair into tiny knots, "maybe, I don't know. If you're just looking for sex, maybe you shouldn't start having intimate soul-baring conversations with people."
Arthur rolled his eyes. "I do not. Do you even know me?"
Chrissy gave him a wry look. "Better than you know me. Quick, what's my favorite color?"
It was a trick question that Arthur refused to answer to, mostly because he didn't know the answer. But he did take Chrissy's advice to heart when Chrissy's hipster friends dragged him along to a club.
He spotted the guy sitting across the bar, and only a shouted exchange of names and heated glances took place before they were in a back alley, rubbing against each other, frantic.
"Oh," Donnie sobbed against him, "Oh, oh," and with a belated start Arthur realized that this was not a sex noise.
No, Donnie was actually crying.
Arthur pulled away, cautious, patting Donnie's head. "Uh. Are you okay?"
Donnie raised his eyes and rasped, "Really not," and Arthur slunk back into the party.
"No, seriously," Chrissy's friend Ronnie said later when Chrissy was regaling everyone with Arthur's romantic woes (against, it should be mentioned, Arthur's explicit objections). "You can't possibly be that bad in bed."
"Fuck you," Arthur said, more glum than angry because frankly he was starting to question this himself.
So it was that he ended up on a date with Chrissy's friend Alan, who gave Arthur an amused look and said, "Funny, you don't look hopeless."
"Yeah, I did hear that's supposed to be funny," Arthur said. "Strange how it isn't." But thank goodness, Alan laughed at that, and Arthur honestly thought he had a fucking chance until Alan looked aside and turned ghost-white.
"My ex," Alan'd explained later, eyes heavy-lidded from the late hour and the vodka they'd been swilling. "Fuck. I can't believe I'm still in love with her." He laughed, self-deprecating. "I'm such a train wreck."
"What're you here for, then?" Arthur was trying hard not to slur.
"You, my friend," Alan pointed the bottle at him, "are meant to be my rebound fuck. My first step on the road to recovery."
Arthur hummed and said, "In that case, let's get therapeutic."
Afterwards, Alan quietly said, "It didn't work."
Arthur said, "Yeah, didn't think so," and shooed Alan gently away so he could at least get some fucking sleep.
The time after that he didn't even bother with names, just found a party, found a girl who wasn't too drunk and was quite happy to wrap her legs around Arthur's waist as he fucked her against the wall.
He spotted her again when he next went prowling. She lifted a bottle at him in mock-salute and looked away. Arthur sighed and let the next guy who bought him a drink drag him to behind the club's back entrance for quick and dirty blow-jobs.
He didn't bother looking for that guy the next time he went there. Arthur was many things, but slow learner wasn't one of them.
~~
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2010-12-15 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 06:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 01:03 am (UTC)"I've never slept with anyone more than once," Arthur says
And the thing is, it wasn't even intentional. And more than that, it didn't even seem because Arthur was a bad lay. I mean, of all those people he'd had sex with, they all seemed to have some emotional hang-ups - which made me wonder, was Arthur, like, some kind of magnet for the emotionally stunted?^^ LOL poor boy >_<
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Date: 2010-12-16 06:46 am (UTC)Magnet... :D I'll write more and we'll find out, hm?
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Date: 2010-12-16 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 06:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-12 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-30 03:39 am (UTC)Suffice it to say - I loooove this universe!
I love the glimpses we get into Arthur's past via his varied trials with relationships. I think it's quite sad to see all the rejections (staring all the way back in KINDERGARTEN!) piled one after the other, each so very detailed and present in Arthur's mind. I also love the juxtaposition we're getting of Arthur's past and his and Eames's current relationship. Arthur has been dealt heaps of rejections over the years and he is met with someone who is genuinely interested in him and I think that part of Arthur (a part that is hidden from himself) is drawn to Eames because of that interest and that the draw is both "he likes me" but also "when is he going to get tired of me?". Arthur at this point is just setting himself up completely for failure before anything can even start as, since it's all he's known, it's all he's come to expect.
Also, if I can quote at you for a second:
You talk like a schoolteacher and sit like a schoolboy.
That was the most perfect summation of Arthur I've seen yet in this fandom. BRILLIANT! :D
I love Eames in this story as well (obviously or I don't think I'd be here gushing at you! :D). I love that he's assigned himself the role of keeping Arthur company while he's stuck somewhere for a month but he's also using the opportunity to get to know Arthur, someone that titillates and mystifies him on a daily basis. There is obviously a sexual attraction there but I love Eames trying to get a glimpse into who Arthur really is. I also liked how he laid it on the table for Arthur - Because I don't really understand you. - and leaves it at that for the moment. There is so much more that Eames could say to Arthur at that moment but it's not the right moment and he keeps it casual, cool; he's conscious of keeping Arthur in a comfort zone for as long as possible.
Little things I loved were: how Arthur gave up biting his nails (because he promised), how Arthur's projections of Eames aren't always caricatures, Mr. Kitts's perception being a bit off because of his problematic eyesight and how important movement becomes and ... OK and about a dozen other things but this is a ridiculously long, rambling comment and I should probably just delete it all and say "I love this! Please write more!" but I'm going to risk the embarrassment and send you all of this because you should know that this is a really amazing universe and even if you don't continue it - though, obviously, I really really really hope you do! :D - it will remain in my top ten for Favorite Inception Fics! :D
Thank you so much for writing this and sharing! \o/
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Date: 2011-04-13 08:35 am (UTC)Arthur at this point is just setting himself up completely for failure before anything can even start
Yup. Pretty much the point of the whole thing, and the only way I could find the basic premise believeable. :D
Again, thank you. And I'm glad you didn't delete it.
I really wanted to put in things about perception and how it changes tactics in dreamsharing - I actually have three separate theories as to how it works (the what-you-see-is-what-you-get one used here, one where the dreamer fills in their own details, and another one I may use for a fic in the future, so :]) I'm so glad you enjoyed that. I love worldbuilding!