Work Text:
1 (the beginning)
The only sound in their hotel room the faint noise of traffic outside. The low hum fills Arthur’s head and leaves no place for any thoughts. It’s grey and empty, just like the light flowing through the curtains.
Eames is lying next to him and the subtle movement of his chest with every breath is the only thing indicating he’s not dead. (Arthur is almost too grateful for that.)
It’s good to see Eames is breathing – because Arthur is suffocating. There is a heavy weight on his chest that is crushing him, pushing him down to the ground and deep under it. Arthur knows he should cry for help, but he doesn’t. He can’t.
Because Eames will wake up soon and Arthur will have to go on, acting as if the weight was never there in the first place.
It always surprises him just how easily he can do that.
2 (together)
Arthur is a river. Always going forward, slowly and silently shaping things to suit him before anyone notices anything.
Eames is an ocean: vast and furious and strangely calm and mesmerising at the same time.
Everything Arthur does draws him closer to Eames. Inevitably. Arthur knows it and so does Eames. It’s one of the things they never talk about. (One of the many things.)
They are a force of nature and they can't be stopped.
Once, when Arthur was much younger, he saw a forest on fire. Everything was hot and bright and deadly. Arthur remembers being terrified by it, the heat drying his throat and burning in his eyes. And most of all, he remembers someone explaining him that was what force of nature meant.
3 (freedom should probably feel different)
Eames calls them friends. His friends are ready to kill him if he ever makes a mistake. Eames' world consist of one simple equation: one miscalculated step equals one bullet through his head.
After a few years, Arthur can recognise a dozen of people following Eames everywhere. They always sit a few tables away at a restaurant, walk a dog on the other side of the street. They look like bankers, students, housewives, teachers, but their eyes are glass: cold and sharp and empty. It's the only thing they all have in common, the only thing that gives them away. Arthur would recognise eyes like these anywhere.
He sees them in every mirror he looks into.
4 (north, south, west, east)
They are in Copenhagen.
Arthur knows everything can be broken, but sometimes it amazes him just how easily it can happen.
They are in Rio de Janeiro.
They are in Sydney.
Eames gets in trouble and Arthur has too many things to shout out loud, so he doesn't open his mouth at all.
They are in Morocco.
They are in Zürich.
The client doesn't pay. Eames loses his temper. Arthur takes care of the mess (and the body).
They are in Vancouver.
After the extraction, Eames drags Arthur across the city into his favourite bar. It's snowing and Eames is drinking one shot after another and Arthur is trying to delete the memory of Eames' head being mashed into bloody pulp by a hammer.
In the morning Arthur is gone and Eames doesn't remember the desperate words whispered into his ear.
They are in Kabul.
Everything goes well, but the air between them is heavier than lead.
They are in Tijuana.
Arthur's body is covered in sweat thick as honey. The heat is suffocating and so is Eames’s presence. (Or absence, for that matter.)
They are in Cairo.
They are in Prague.
They are in thousands of cities and sometimes Arthur can’t even tell which are the real ones. They run from one place to another, sometimes hiding, sometimes hunting, chasing.
It’s only that: be the hunter or become the prey. It’s simple, easy, black and white. (And the fact that Arthur wonders which side they are on most of the time probably doesn’t matter at all.)
5 (bang bang bang bang bang)
“Eames?”
Silence.
“Eames?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you – do you ever…just…never mind. Go back to sleep.”
“Hmm.”
Silence.
Do you ever think all we do is useless? Do you ever get too fucking scared to close your eyes at night? Do you ever doubt anything? Eames? Do you think we can get out of this alive? Eames?
It’s 3:49 am and it starts to rain.
6 (mistakes made)
"What the fuck was that?" Arthur yells as he jumps out of the chair. He does it with too much force and the needle in his forearm rips his skin open.
Eames blinks at him. "I improvised, darling."
Arthur yells at him until his throat burns and his lungs sting.
The silence stretches and Arthur realises there are three other people in the room.
Without another word, Arthur turns around and walks out of the building.
He shivers as the cold wind meets his skin and wraps around him, but it's not the cold air that makes him shiver; it's the sound of footsteps behind him.
"You're bleeding," Eames says quietly.
Arthur would laugh if he could.
7 (mistakes yet to happen)
Eames gets shot in dreams. Six, seven times – times Arthur knows about.
Eames gets shot in real life. Arthur doesn’t keep count. (He does.)
Sometimes, when Arthur closes his eyes, he can see the dark wet patch blooming on the white fabric of Eames’s shirt. He can still hear the loud bang and the deafening silence that followed.
It’s easier to pretend it was all just dreams. To pretend not to see the scars on Eames’s skin, not to feel the unnatural smoothness of them under his fingers.
Arthur is good at pretending.
8 (hate and fate)
Sometimes, the air around them feels toxic. And Arthur knows exactly where the source of the poison is.
It’s between them – in every word that never leaves Arthur’s lips, in every touch that is too rough (or too gentle – and somehow, that is even worse), in every bruise on Eames’s skin. It wraps around them like a spider’s web, tight and impossible to shake off.
Every now and then, Arthur wonders whether it is that poison that keeps them together.
Every now and then Arthur prays it isn’t.
9 (mm)
In his other life (the one that ended ages ago), Arthur was a different person. He was normal – a student with a few unimportant friends and four grey walls with a single light bulb and a broken mirror he called his home.
In his other life, he had nothing. (Nothing means nothing to lose.)
Now Arthur can have everything in an instant. And he could lose it just as easily.
“It’s just the way things are,” Eames once told him.
Arthur thinks Eames was probably talking about that man he’s just shot in the head. A mission, nothing less, nothing more.
Arthur’s death will probably be someone’s mission, too.
zero
When they kiss (and fuck and love and just are) Arthur feels complete. Except sometimes, he feels empty instead.
And when they fall and fight and tear each other apart Arthur feels complete, too.
And then once (or twice or twenty times), Arthur runs away. He leaves everything behind and takes a plane to the other side of the world. He pretends to be someone else. Someone who can’t kill a man in a heartbeat. Someone who doesn’t dream, who doesn’t need to dream.
Someone who doesn’t come back to Eames.
(But then, he returns. He always does.)