don't think

best arthur and eames fics | #5 | pet by ladyvader

“’Thing is,’ he started, trying for conversational, ‘He… he held me really tight, Ari.’ His eyes burned and burst over into thick tears that poured down over his fingers as he buried his face in his hands.

‘He held me really tight.’  He sobbed and curled into himself, Ari curling around him and muttering stupid, soothing things (that he knew weren’t true but she hoped might help just the same) into his hair, and some distant part of him reflected calmly that Ariadne was right. When he cried it felt like the end of the world.’

For Kelsey, for her birthday, I’m so sorry it’s late love!

Arthur/Eames Mob Au: Betrayal - Where Arthur, part of a small wealthy gang need information from High-Town gang leader, Eames. Arthur’s ready to take on the job as a mole, until he realises that maybe he’s bitten off more than he can chew.

Arthur accepts the job. He’s not sure why, knows he could pass it down to one of the lackeys, gear them up with wires and cameras and still get the information they need, but he doesn’t. Instead, Cobb and Ariadne give him the brief, set him up with the gear, a run-down of the subject, the gangs weaknesses, their layout, and before he knows it he’s in a beat-down car on his way to the gangs latest hide-out.

It doesn’t look fancy from the outside Arthur notices when he pulls up outside. It’s a basic warehouse with peeling paint and broken windows, a few cars parked in front, and two heavy guys with guns and hard faces standing at the door. He briefly wonders why they’re not being more careful, trying to look inconspicuous, before one of them lifts his hand to his ear, his lips moving and then he turns and looks straight at Arthur, head tilted to the side before he nods, mouth moving again.

But knowing that they were in fact completely alone and she was free to talk was a relief; Arthur was obviously much more relaxed now that there wasn’t a chance she could be overheard or walked in on as they had been last night, though thinking of it like that made it seem like they were doing something they shouldn’t be.

His lips curled up in a much wider smile when she said where she worked for a living, “That music…that was you the whole time? Christ, I was hearing you play and singing along. You’re a pretty good player. But then again I don’t expect many hustler’s to pay attention,” he was purposefully taunting her this time, ignoring the way he could feel a slight tension in his body from her at what she was saying. Not that he understood why she would feel self conscious about talking about herself, the narcissist that he was.

It was a little difficult to pay attention to the road once she started moving, but it turned out to be easy for him to ignore her point of view with some concentration and his well practiced ability to multitask. That and a little motivation from the fact that he nearly missed the person to the right of him squeezing themselves in front of him without signalling.

“Professional bachelor, thanks.” He said. “I tried dating this girl once, it was nice for a while, until her husband got involved. I would have been fine with polygamy, but sadly that’s a lifestyle not cut out for everyone. Especially not jealous husbands in possession of firearms.”

Contrary to what anyone would believe about him, he didn’t favor talking about himself all that much. It was a form of narcissism he thankfully didn’t possess, and was one of the things he disliked about many people. The bitter irony being that that was the only way to get to know someone.

His compliment drew her mouth up in an almost smile, but the underhanded remark following it turned the action into a sharp smirk. “No, I suppose not.”

So his worrying about her being a married woman had a purpose, then.

“Maybe he would have been more open about it if you hadn’t slept with his wife before bringing it up?” she mused, opening the fridge and pulling out a container of yogurt. “Then again maybe not. Hopefully you learned your lesson.”

She leaned back against the counter and peeled open her yogurt as Ben spoke. But as soon as he’d voiced his question, she lost all interest in her snack.

Arthur’s stomach fluttered with butterflies, her heart suddenly beating faster. 

“When I was 10 I think, or 11, I went ice skating. My parents took me out to the pond on Wickery, it was frozen over for the Winter and there were some other families there... I didn’t know how to skate, they were teaching me, and just as I got going, I guess I was moving too fast and I couldn’t stop, and... God, I ran into the bank and fell, and I hit my head on a tree trunk that’d fallen in a storm. Just smacked right into it. Cracked my skull, the next thing I knew I was in the hospital.... Shit, I still have the scar.”

He looked around the room when he was certain she was gone, alone again and wondering. He wasn’t even certain how he knew she was gone, he could still feel her…presence in the back of his mind, but their connection had a wall dividing them that he couldn’t see or hear anything no matter how he tested it.

Heaving a sigh, he downed the rest of his beer and scrubbed a hand through his hair as he tromped back to the front room and began turning off the lights, something he could have done from the master bedroom but which gave him time to wind down and think.

More than anything he was confused. Just what the hell this whole thing was supposed to be and why for that matter eluded him. Why was he hearing this woman’s voice in his head, and why were they connected, and why him for that matter? His whole life he’d been working to keep people out of his head and here there was one that had been planted there with no discernible way to get her out.

The next day, Ben couldn’t concentrate like he normally could. His day-to-day schedule was fairly relaxed even for a full time bachelor, but even going to the gym couldn’t help him keep his mind off of the girl his head, nor even when he was with his friends for a dinner party, he found his thoughts returning to Arthur.

Even thinking about her so much, he almost missed the opportunity to talk to her. He was behind the wheel and eyeballing the time on his stereo and muttering along to the music, wondering how he should even go about this. He curiously tested their connection when he was at a red light, and was surprised when it opened automatically.

She responded almost immediately. He couldn’t get over how it sounded like she was directly beside him. As he was driving, he concentrated on the road rather than on the faint outline he could see of her, obviously standing in front of a mirror putting on makeup. Even the barest glimpse of her was enough to make him think this wasn’t such a bad thing.

It was a bit of a challenge doing her makeup while Ben drove. It was just too easy to want to concentrate on the road, the traffic, and the steering wheel with one hand loosely gripping it. After going through four makeup wipes to fix her recurring mistakes, she heaved a sigh and began dropping her makeup in her purse to do it later.

“It doesn’t afford me much time to see Robert, but. It makes me happy.”

Smiling at his reflection from her - very - positive reaction, he felt himself relax even further, even going so far as to give her a lascivious wink after hearing her sigh in approval, which prompted her into actually speaking.

“Every day is a modeling opportunity,” he joked, sipping his beer and turning away from the mirror. He had to wonder what it looked like, with him standing in his living room talking to someone that wasn’t there. It wasn’t exactly the strangest thing he’d ever been caught doing, but it couldn’t have looked all that good on its own. “But no,” he continued. “My modeling days are left far behind in my youth. What about you? What do you do?”

He didn’t get an answer though, as he heard someone entering his room, and whipped his head around. No, not his room, her room. He took in the sight of the man standing looking towards him with bleary eyed confusion. That must have been Robert. Ben looked him up and down. He was attractive, in a feminine sort of way, all sharp lines and sinewy limbs that Ben couldn’t manage even if he was being paid to do so. If he spoke, would Robert hear him?

He took another slow sip of his beer as he listened to Arthur talk to him, her voice taking on a noticeably different quality to it, like she was painting a different version of herself for him, which made him frown slightly, but shrugged it off as none of his business.

“Does he not know how to knock?” Ben wondered aloud, not caring that he was talking while they were. So what?

She covered her mouth to smother the snicker she almost let loose. “That’s fair, I guess. And that leaves me an hour before work, so we can talk while I get ready.”

Snagging a towel from the closet, Arthur very nearly began to unbutton the rest of her blouse before she realized that Ben might catch a glimpse of something she didn’t want him seeing. Hastily, she bade him good-night.

“Til tomorrow,” she whispered, and closed the strange mental veil between them. In the mirror, she caught a candid smile on her face, and it immediately fell to a simple line.

As she rid herself of her work clothes and stepped in the shower, vaguely wondering why Ben’s voice in her head instilled the giddy pleasure in her that it did.

-

The next time she heard Ben’s voice was in the same place it’d left her the night before. Arthur leaned over the counter with a steady hand poised at one eye, a mascara brush in her fingers and her lips parted in concentration. A feeling like a soft breeze through the window greeted her, and Arthur quirked a smile.

But a promise was a promise, and so he padded across the apartment to the nearest mirror that would offer a full view of his face and most of his chest. Being the vain individual that he was, mirrors and reflective surfaces littered his loft in abundance.

Without any sort of decorum or fanfare, he walked right up to it and peered at himself, giving his overly pale appearance a once over and wishing he hadn’t taken so many pills so he wouldn’t be seeing his own reflection in a blurred fashion. He knew he was a looker, even somewhat disheveled as he was and sporting a shadow on his jaw.

“Oh,” she said dumbly, glad that she’d turned away from the mirror with the way she was gawking. He looked tired, like he’d had a long day, and maybe had a few drinks in him as well. There was a looseness to him, a casual, languid slouch in the angle of his shoulders and tilt of his head. Arthur thought he looked like a GQ model, and let out a wistful sort of sigh of appreciation.

After a moment, she realized she needed to say something. “Your face is... Really very nice.”

The look that earned her made her backpedal a little, and she laughed. “That is to say, all of you is nice. But yes, your face is nice. Do you model at all...?”

The door pushed open, and Arthur jumped about a mile. She spun on her heel to find Robert looking strangely at her from the doorway. Though she hadn’t really be doing anything wrong, her face heated like a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Robert looked around the room, tired and squinting. “Were you talking to someone?”

The lie fell from Arthur’s lips alarmingly easy. “Just myself, sorry. I know you have to get up early, and you were sleeping. Um, I just had a few drinks after work, it was a long day, and I was giving myself a pep talk.”

It sounded beyond lame even to herself, but Robert seemed to accept it. He gave a small, half smile. “Come to bed, it’s late.”

“Let me shower first, and then I’ll be there.”

Robert retreated then, and Arthur waited a moment before reaching into the shower to turn the water on. She whispered, “Alright, I think this is goodnight. When can I talk to you tomorrow?”

He saw her look down, and quickly look back up as she realized what she was showing him was a bit more literal than he’d expected.

“Wasn’t exactly expecting company myself either, doll,” he drawled humorously as he walked to his fridge and fished out a beer from the bottom shelf behind the old takeout cartons. He felt like a peeping Tom watching her walk through her house, up to what was undoubtedly a bedroom, the bed where a lumpy mass that didn’t move told him her husband must have been fast asleep. It became all too real to him then, this woman had a life and a husband and was someone in the world separate from him. His brain couldn’t have come up with all of these minute details without some kind of give to let him know it was a farce.

Thankfully she dived into another room and closed the door to separate herself from the sleeping man, and they were in a sense alone again in a bathroom. Ben waited patiently, rolling his eyes when she asked him to close his eyes, but he did, and after a long moment spent where he could feel her fingers running through his scalp…her scalp, thoroughly weirding him out, she gave the okay, and Ben opened his eyes.

Fumbling to regain her confidence, Arthur turned away from the mirror and crossed her arms over her chest. She kept her eyes on the closet door, half open and showing only stacks of clean towels rather than her reflection. 

They couldn’t possibly be related, siblings or otherwise. His mom had died giving birth to him, and his dad, well his dad could have easily fathered a dozen other kids across the globe for all he knew, but Ben had a feeling deep in his gut like he knew they weren’t related, and so he shook his head, forgetting again that she couldn’t see him.

“I’m an only child, sorry to disappoint you.” He took a seat at the bar styled counter of his kitchen and settled his chin in the palm of his hand, drumming the fingers of his other on the marble top. “You know, if I believed in that sort of thing I would suggest that maybe we shared a past life or something. Then again maybe we’re part of a government experiment and this is all just a dream we’re sharing, but if that’s the case I would think they’d militarize that and make some money doing it, not experiment with ordinary people. So I’m out of ideas as far as explaining what this is.”

It hadn’t struck him to ask her what she looked like, and the idea of getting to see her interested him a hell of a lot more than talking did. Ben was the sort of individual who needed to see something to know it was real, and seeing Arthur face to face would prove whether or not she was real.

With a strange bout of nervous energy, she shot up from the couch and ran a hand over her hair to get a feel for its state, and then she licked her lips, searching for her shoes. Should she even put her shoes on? Her heels gave her an extra three inches, but would he notice? Did it matter if he noticed? Would they even be able to see each other in a mirror, did it work like that?

She looked down at her chest to see how far up her shirt was buttoned, and realized he could see exactly where she was looking. “Ahhh, um. Alright. Sorry, I’m just home from work, I’m a bit of a wreck.”

There was a full length mirror in the en suite, but Robert was sleeping in the bedroom. She didn’t wan to wake him up. “Alright, we’ll have to be quiet. Very quiet.”

Arthur held her bottom lip tight between her teeth as she crept up the stairs and pushed her bedroom door open. She stared hard at Robert, watching the slow rise and fall of his shoulders for a moment to make sure he wasn’t waking up, and then she made a break for the bathroom. The door clicked shut behind her and, as an extra precaution, she shoved a towel along the bottom edge of the floor. It made her feel like she was doing something bad, something Robert wouldn’t like. But this was only the pursuit of a genuine curiosity-- she wanted to see the face of the voice in her head.

"Close your eyes,” she said quietly. “Really, close them. For a second.”

Once the layered view of Ben’s apartment disappeared, she stepped in front of the full-length mirror bolted to the back of the bathroom door. Arthur combed her fingers quickly through her mass of dark chestnut hair and smoothed the front of her pencil skirt from waist to knee. 

He flicked his cigarette out into the air and rubbed his hand through his hair. There was no logical way he could explain this other than that he was having a stroke or some kind of mental breakdown. But if he was going crazy, he might as well buckle himself in and enjoy the ride down the rabbit hole and go along with the voice in his head.

“You’re fiery enough, you don’t need my help,” he said as he picked his way slowly back into his apartment to locate his phone on the counter, nearly tripping over a potted plant as he did. His apartment was empty for once, without the humdrum of activity that usually filled it on a Friday night. He kept a clean place by principle, neat and organized and mostly empty of the sentimental clutter that filled most people’s homes. Not that he cared what Arthur would think about his house.

“Mm. Alright, so we’re in the same time, just of course in different zones. That’s that figured out at least,” she observed, walking around her house in slow, careful steps to try and get used to the double vision. “I guess next might be to figure out what it is we’ve got in common that’s made us this way...?”

We need a forger.