#4 for the wips ask game is apartment!verse, what will hypothetically one day be a collection of arthur/eames fic involving apartments, because i really like apartments. this is from a fic i started for inceptionbingo'21 where eames used to live in the apartment arthur uses as his safe house and for ~currently unresolved plot hole reasons~ still has a key.
The toilet flushes, and the bathroom door opens.
Arthur’s got his gun out and pointed before he registers that it’s Eames. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly, putting it down.
“Not the first time I’ve been greeted like this, darling,” says Eames, trying his best to zip up surreptitiously. Arthur notices, and rolls his eyes and makes a gesture like he’s about to pick his gun back up.
“Seriously,” says Arthur, seriously, putting the gun away. “What the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”
“Your—?” says Eames. He looks around. “Your apartment, huh.”
“What other explanation could there be for me standing in an apartment that you think you live in?” says Arthur flatly.
“It’s a dream?” Eames tries. “A for fun dream?”
“You broke into my apartment because you’re pissed at me again for something,” Eames suggests, doing something with his face as he says it. It isn’t cute. It really isn’t cute.
Plus, if the breaking in part was ignored, the statement is accurate. Arthur is certainly pissed at Eames again in the current moment, for something. And he’s definitely been pissed at Eames before.
“Yeah I’m pissed at you,” says Arthur, picking up his takeout. It’d fallen on the floor and tipped right over but mercifully none of his curry had spilled. “Come on. I’m having dinner and you’re answering my questions.”
He sets it down on the counter, reaches for a cupboard and opens it and behind him Eames says incredulously, “You put bowls in there?”
Arthur flips around. “Yes? You have a problem with that?”
Eames is squinting. “That’s where the cups go, Arthur. Cups and mugs on top. Bowls go on a lower shelf.” He sounds like he’s in pain.
“Eames,” says Arthur. “Shut up and microwave rice. It’s in the Tupperware in the fridge.” He starts rustling around in a drawer for spoons.
“You’re going to feed me,” says Eames, pleased.
“I doubt you’d be willing to talk otherwise,” says Arthur, instead of admitting that this is the admittedly batshit culmination of one of his longest-held and most cherished dreams. Twenty-year-old Arthur would be losing his fucking mind at the idea of having dinner in one of his apartment with Eames, regardless of context.
#6 is actually titled the way you see me is not really which i'd forgotten, and explores why arthur would give up so much of his life for cobb when he doesn't seem to like him very much at the point that we meet them in the film.
It’s eleven in the morning, and Arthur’s forking over the last $40 he has to be allowed to check in early. He thinks about the flat, scrubby land they’d passed in the last few days that his mind had dragged a name for out of the annals of sixth grade ecology vocab: chaparral.
He counts out the fives onto the counter, his attention half on the paper-soft wrinkle of the bills in his hand, more than half on Dom slouched and dead-eyed, draped in the corduroy jacket Arthur had bought him for his and Mal’s March anniversary. He’s needed 110% of every part of himself except his libido for the last six days.
Jesus, he thinks like a reflex. How has it only been six days?
He’d bought Mal a perfume that spring as a joke, and he’d seen the delicate bottle left open on the hotel desk when he’d showed up in Los Angeles for Dom, gleaming amber in the afternoon light. They hadn’t waited for the authorities to threaten them. Arthur had grabbed Dom’s hand like he had the right to, and ran.
Later, they'd get off the bus at the kind of highway-side motel that people fall asleep in when they want to be forgotten.
“Have you ever read Neruda, Dom,” says Arthur of five years ago, on the bold threshold of drunk, still a PhD student halfway in love with the young psychology professor whose class his friend is TA-ing for. His wine glass drips condensation onto the skin at the juncture between his thumb and forefinger; he shivers, involuntary. The clamor of the department party is so distant.
“Without knowing how, or when, or from where,” Dom quotes gravely, swirling his wine in its glass. The part of Arthur’s mind that had wanted to be an English major jumps to wonder why Dom chose to begin there, to forgo the preceding I love you.
Perhaps he meant it as a hint — lead the audience to fill in the gaps and thus focus on the absent piece themselves. Perhaps, Arthur self-corrects, the curtains were blue because the author’s own curtains were blue. Familiarity. So it goes: one turns to comfort and stability in moments of uncertainty.
