Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Arthur knows things. It’s part of his job. It’s part of him.

So he knows he’s good at things. Self-awareness, clear cataloging of one’s strengths and weaknesses, is a necessary part of surviving, in the business and out (but especially in). And it brings a sense of security, not entirely false, ticking through the list of stuff he knows he doesn’t have to worry about. He can say he’s good at guns, seven formal martial arts and mixtures thereof, learning to speak languages like several regional natives, getting rid of figurative and literal bodies, juggling, hiding his tracks, uncovering those of others, architectural paradoxes. Figuring out how to get into or out of any given situation within five seconds while minimizing fatalities.

He’d like to say he’s good at compartmentalizing.

Instead, he mentally multitasks, which sounds useful, but appearances aren’t trustworthy. Case in point: the last two fucking weeks.

Breaking it down into percentages is pointless, but at any given time his attention is split about four ways. There’s whatever he’s supposed to be doing, the work in front of him or the next item on the list; right now, it’s the mark’s cell phone transcripts, skimming to get a feel for how frequently Robert Fischer contacts whom and when. There’s the undercurrent of what he’d rather be doing (sleep, always sleep). There’s the going-on-three-year-long subprocess on Dom, a call-and-response of where’s Dom?—he can answer that. What’s he doing? Arthur can answer that, or he can find out. How fucked is he getting himself? Answer: variable or unknowable, depending on the day, hour, and depth in dreamspace; right now, under Saito’s supervision, he’s probably only getting worse where people can’t see him. But Arthur has the PASIV, right on the table between his desk and the door.

Finally, there’s whatever he’s bracing himself for at the moment.

“A little bird told me you’d had a gun on our architect, couple days back.”

Like that.

Arthur feels his molars click together as he swivels his desk chair. Against the doorway of the office he claimed, Eames leans with his arms folded, sleeves rolled to the elbow, collar open and features arranged… pleasantly.

“Smoke,” says Arthur, nodding toward the doors, and gets up. Eames will get it or he won’t (but he will); he’ll follow or he won’t (but he will). It’s a tell, he knows. Since he started intelligence work, he’s kept a pack on his person at all times during a job, topside or under, no matter how many layers, because a cigarette is a social engineering tool, currency, and cover story all in one convenient little cylinder. However, Arthur doesn’t smoke on his own initiative unless he needs one to maintain control, which Eames probably clocked on the first job he joined in on after Mal. Telegraphing a state of mind via partaking in a socially acceptable habit offers more dignity than several of the more obvious alternatives, he’s decided.

So whatever. He has a tell. Most people do. He makes sure his footsteps are silent, and instead of just letting the door fall shut he holds it.

Eames, on his heels like Arthur knew he would be, reaches for it as well, so Arthur lets go of the external handle.

The odd soft smile as Eames eases the door closed feels like a mistake. Arthur shouldn’t be on the receiving end of anything so kind. It’s meant for Ariad—Ari, the five-foot-nothing rookie with a thing for research and a hell of a cover story, sleeping off her Ativan on a tabletop ten feet and a brick wall away.

It’s approaching noon, first day of April—apropos, Eames being where he shouldn’t—and the sun is warm if the temperature isn’t. Arthur leads to the side of the warehouse opposite Ari’s office, lighting his cigarette off a match as he goes and reflexively passing both pack and matchbook to Eames. Then he stands, head down, for the first deep inhale and the last moment of relative quiet. Eames leans against the wall. He’s good at that, making the rest of the world seem like it exists to hold him up.

“So,” he says, on a cloud of smoke. “Pulling a gun on the little bird.”

The nickname takes Arthur a moment. Finch. Right.

And she is little, physically. Which isn’t to say she’s harmless, see previous point regarding last two weeks, which is— “I told you,” says Arthur instead, still looking at the paving. “Nearly shot her. I said so when you came up.”

“Yes, but there’s a bit of a difference, isn’t there,” Eames replies, conversationally light and casual, “in what could very well have been your typical flair for hyperbole and a girl saying you’d threatened to shoot her.”

A spike of pain shoots up his jaw this time when he bites down. “You gonna get to the point?” He glances sidelong and Eames is watching him, that thing when he goes distant and steely like Arthur’s still a fascinating new specimen even when he’s three feet away after eight years.

“I’d like to hear from you,” he says, lightyears off despite the look like he’s watching Arthur under a microscope, “what happened.”

Like a teenager, he kicks the concrete with one toe. “She tell you?”

“Not as such. Only that there’d been a discussion,” say Eames, casual and cool, which is the fucking worst, when Arthur already knows he’s an idiot, when the only reasonable result of his bullshit should be losing a good architect and earning Dom’s lightning-storm wrath until he forgets to care again. People should be tearing into him for not knowing when to fucking quit, he should be facing assault charges, and instead Ari’s sacked out in her office because she’s staying and Eames is— “Arthur.” A little sharp, enough that Arthur looks back up at him. “You tell me.” And that part is gentle, and the gentleness is for him, and he doesn’t deserve—

“I fucked up. That enough?” He nearly growls it.

“I said tell, darling—”

The endearment is like acid. “I said I fucked up. You wanna know the date? Put it on your calendar?” Arthur drags on his cigarette to shut himself up, to stop fucking bleeding all his ugliness and incompetence in words— “You’ll wanna celebrate it, Arthurian Fuckup Day—”

“Get your head out your arse a bloody minute,” says Eames, so sharply that that makes Arthur shut up when the cigarette couldn’t. “What I’ve got is watching Cobb escape some bounty hunters, hearing Nash sold out and bloody disappeared, and you threatening to shoot an unknown quantity.” Then he shuts his mouth, raises his eyebrows, and somehow slouches further.

After eight years, he doesn’t need to say I assume there’s some kind of a connection, or that’s not like you, or so you fill in the blanks, or I’m going to stand right the fuck here until you spit it out. He doesn’t need to Holmes it out, displaying his deductions like a spread of cards, because he knows Arthur is refocusing, reviewing from that dataset, rather than his own. And Eames doesn’t rush him, because he knows Arthur is working out what does and doesn’t need to be said, and how linear he should be about it.

It’s fucking infuriating, and it’s a relief, and if Eames weren’t both at once he wouldn’t be himself.

Arthur lights his second cigarette off the butt of the first one. “On the Cobol job, Cobb’s Mal showed up. Two levels down. Shot me.” He doesn’t look at Eames; it’s still such a mindfuck, Mal in Dom’s head with her favorite mother-of-pearl-inlaid switchblade and now, apparently, a Sig Sauer. But pain, she had said, except it wasn’t her, just Dom’s idea of her. Pain is in the mind. And judging by the décor… “Kneecap. Cobb tapped me out. Nash’s bullshit backfired. Saito offered to let Cobb kill him.”

At that, he does look at Eames, watches his eyes widen and his eyebrows rise further. So he doesn’t know the depth of Saito’s sadistic streak, yet. Whatever happened in Mombasa hadn’t illustrated that. “So that’s one architect. Cobb brings in Ariadne Finch, girl wonder. I run her info. Proclus bought her phone. Her real ID—not enough there. Family crap, but nothing real on her.”

The people Arthur can’t find background on—that’s because they’re under protection stronger than he can manipulate, or because it’s been drilled into them to give nothing. Which implies, in either case, that they’re hiding some major shit. Intelligence connections, criminal connections, operative training. Anywhere from informant to assassin.

Unless, that is, and Eames knows the same things Arthur does, the person just values their privacy and knows a bunch of infosec geeks.

The Venn diagram slice of people involved in dreamshare who care that much about security, but who aren’t into some major shit, such as international law enforcement or global intelligence or organized crime (that is, other organized crime), is—sparsely populated. It might be just one, that he can think of, aside from the grad student in the workshop.

“Projection’s moved on to firearms, then,” says Eames, thoughtful.

“The P232.” Not Mal’s favorite. She’d once described Sig Sauers as vulgar, despite the little semiauto being the most convenient for leg holsters (which she also hated—the femme fatale thing that marks inevitably projected onto her). “Think I preferred when sh—when it stuck to knives.”

Eames glances at him, at the slip. Between them, away from Dom, they keep to clinical, depersonalizing terms: the projection, it. “Cobb’s Mal” is the only way her name comes into it. But Arthur remembers seeing her from across the ballroom of the palace he’d dreamed Saito into, the fleeting joy of it, thinking trust Mal to show up a bunch of billionaires in that gown—before Dom’s Mal looked directly at him, smiled in a way Mal never would have, not at Arthur, and spoke one word, one syllable. And then Saito’s projections had grabbed him, and then Dom’s projection had followed him into the conference room and coolly instructed its former husband and its progenitor to put his gun down.

And then held its own to his head.

The mirror-universe familiarity of it—just another job, just Mal waking me up—that, and the fucking wrongness of every inch of the palace, and Dom ignoring his warning about Saito’s suspicion, and spotting the projection over Dom’s shoulder on the terrace—those had been worse than the explosion in his knee.

But pain. So cold. Mal in life had always slipped in a sign, verbal or gestural or just a quirk of her eyebrow—she’d wiggled her ears once before shooting him out of a job going to shit. But pain. But pain.

Arthur has had kind of enough of pain, at the hands of something that looks like her.

“Cobb’s slipping, then.” Eames looks at the end of his cigarette; Arthur hands him the pack. “Which—thus Miles. As our little bird said you’d corroborate.”

I’m not anyone’s, she’d nearly snarled, and then cringed as if he’d wound up to hit her. “Miles introduced her to Cobb.” His own voice sounds wrong, too flat, because they still haven’t gotten to—

“Stop, Arthur.” Low and soft. “She’s had no lasting damage.”

He laughs. It sounds ugly. “She’s sleeping off benzos. Because that’s so—”

“Yes, actually, it is typical, to some extent,” Eames says, clipped and precise and actually irritated, “because she’d not have access to the medication without a history of needing it. Unless she’s sourcing it black-market, which she’s not.” As we both know, and don’t pretend otherwise, he doesn’t say. “She’s caring for herself after an upset, which we rather gave her—”

“I gave her.”

“Would you shut it. You’re not going to get any of that from me.”

Which is the problem. Eames refuses to enact shit he doesn’t have good reason to, and he apparently doesn’t think he has good reason to rip Arthur apart. Despite the fact that Arthur’s done nothing but fuck up with the architect because he’s too in his head and too paranoid and too shaken by Dom’s Mal. He lectured the new girl after the projection had stabbed her in the chest, threatened to kill her, then let her think he’d just leave her with a murderer—which Eames is; they both are; Arthur had just forgotten—because he’s too cavalier when he’s distracted, exactly like he shouldn’t be, he should be triply cautious, and he’s not, he’s never been, and if Ari gets a clue and leaves like she should it’s going to be—

Eames backhands his upper arm. Not hard. “I can hear you thinking.”

“We’re gonna lose her,” he says, and doesn’t realize he believes it until it’s out there, audible. If Ari leaves, then dreamshare will be one hell of an architect poorer… but architects can be found. If Ari stays, despite the laundry list of reasons Arthur’s given her not to—she’ll go anywhere, everywhere, right over the edge into the depths where Mal had played like the human subconscious was a sun-warmed sea. If she stays, it’s because dreaming has got its hooks in her, and she wasn’t an addict before, but she is now.

Like Dom, like Mal had been, like Arthur himself.

This time, Eames grabs, fingers around Arthur’s bicep, and grips hard enough that it almost hurts. “Get out of there, Arthur.”

If it were anyone else in the world, they’d be on the pavement with a gun to the head.

But it’s Eames, repeating with a little shake, “Get out.” A little more softly, he says, “Come along.” Shorthand, Eames knowing the tide patterns of Arthur’s mind and seeing when he’s floundering, throwing a rope. This time—like all the other times—Arthur takes it, shakes himself and throws down his cigarette end. “You’ve got to start listening, you know, when that one tells you things,” Eames adds. “She told me off properly about my approach. Indicated that the caution was an insult to her intelligence. And that was after she’d taken the Ativan.”

“Huh.” It’s a good mental image, the little—not young—nerd in sneakers bleary with sedatives and giving Eames a dressing-down. “How much did she swear?”

“Essentially nonstop.” Eames drops his hand. “And you heard her earlier. Not going to run.”

Arthur looks at him sideways and says nothing.

“Right.” It’s like he deflates as he slumps back against the bricks, a slight Velcro-like noise as the masonry catches a different part of his shirt fabric. Arthur doesn’t need to say that’s the fucking problem, and Eames doesn’t need to sneer of course you consider that a fucking problem. Instead, Eames says something else, something obvious, with a sigh. “Well, early days. Who knows.”

Me, Arthur doesn’t answer. Logically, he knows he doesn’t; he just has a feeling, has had a feeling, ever since they got out of that fucking helicopter and Saito had the fucking gall to use Philippa and James as a carrot, that the job’s fucked. Dragging a complete rookie into a doomed job—but gut feelings aren’t facts. They’re not. They’re just things Arthur tends to trust, because his are right.

“Get the fuck out of there,” Eames snaps. “Unless you’ve come to enjoy the brooding? The entirety of dreamshare’s got me down as some dramatic; it’s like they’ve selective blindness to you mooning about like a one-man Shakespearean tragedy.”

Arthur straightens reflexively, realizes he’s about to say something completely stupid, and decides to roll with it; he squares his shoulders and gives his best on-the-job frown. “I don’t moon, Mr. Eames.”

And that snaps them both back into place, Arthur the consummate professional and Eames who leers and says, “But imagine what you could charge if you did, darling,” and beneath the gleam in his eyes the warmth underneath it, the steadiness, the quiet there you are and here I am, even when we’re not is right there. It banks the last of the nerves, for now. As it has, since longer than he can remember.

As it will.

He has a feeling about that.

Chapter Text

Eric Amesbury-Scott’s flat is... nice. Amesbury-Scott in general is nice. In the sort of way you expect of a hyphenated Oxbridge lawyer who cultivates his scruff and has his collars starched and scuba-dives for fun. Which, well, Eames is fairly used to other people’s lives, and he does quite enjoy the diving (his Instagram has nearly 200 followers, after only eight weeks, based only on some strategic hashtagging). Regardless, it’s getting to be a little wearing, all this rounded-edges blandness. Not to say that he’ll be pleased when Fischer Sr. kicks it, aside from the little leftover frisson of anti-monopolistic fuck-the-Man feelings he’d ridden on until he found himself on his tenth consecutive corporate espionage job in dreamshare with no end in sight. Difficult to hold onto strong sociopolitical-economic principles when one’s among the men and women and others maneuvering and occasionally stabbing each other behind the curtains, it turns out.

In any case, on Thursday morning when Eames has returned to Amesbury-Scott’s flat after an early swim, he’s just had time to boil water for tea when the alert goes on one phone (Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, because he is a cultured bastard, thank you), the second beeps with a text message from Saito’s contact still slogging away in the Fischer Morrow offices, and the third chimes for the arrival of an email in the inbox Amesbury-Scott used with the office.

“Well, if you’ve all had your say—”

The first (his phone), done with its sonata, rings promptly, or rather starts singing, because Eames’s ringtone for Arthur is the vocal from some gloomy-yet-glib grungy track off whichever Soundgarden thing. Sped up so Chris Cornell sounds like a chipmunk, of course. Given everything I could to blow it to hell and gone, blow it down and blow up the outside— “Darling,” says Eames, as he picks up the third phone to read the email (to the entire company; he’s considered an affiliate, under the terms of his contract, until two months after the conclusion of his consultancy) and pokes at the second’s ping to glance at the text.

“You saw.” Arthur’s voice is flat and just the least rough with tiredness. It’s near eleven o’clock yesterday in Paris.

“Seeing. Give me a mo’—lord, corporate grief practices—ah, here we go, service in LA Thursday. Meanwhile, per Ms. Fei, Junior’s PA is discussing jet scheduling before Wednesday.” Which they’ll take care of, which means Saito will—a simple matter of wiping a few transcontinental flights, private and public, by bureaucratic red tape or hacking or just bribing a few maintenance workers to hit some important things with wrenches. Eames doesn’t particularly care, and he suspects Saito doesn’t either, secure in the knowledge that his wishes will be realized. A strange man. Not a good or a bad one, that Eames can tell, not yet; merely, and certainly, a strange one.

“Saito—” Arthur goes faintly muffled as he repeats the data. Then a pause, and then he’s clear again. “Says his people are on it.”

“You’re with him?” There’s a thought. Although the man’s married, with a mistress or three hanging about, and really, Arthur’s far too fastidious to go mucking about with that— “How have you spent your evening, darling?”

Arthur says, curt and distracted, “Logistics,” without an iota of response to the verbal eyebrow-waggling, and that’s what makes Eames sit up and really pay attention. “Boss is still at the site. Heading over.”

What Cobb might be doing at the workshop at this hour—

And Arthur being distracted snaps into focus. He’d left the PASIV at the workshop, two hours ago, he’d left a text to say so, and—oh, bloody buggering fuck—

The call ends and Eames stares out the kitchen window, phone to his ear, for something like half a minute before he comes to and tosses it on the counter. “Madman,” he mutters, and isn’t certain who he’s referring to.

***

There’s nothing for Eames or Amesbury-Scott to do. He emails Browning and some of the higher-ups in legal with personal condolences, showers, and stares at Amesbury-Scott’s wardrobe of safe neutrals and good materials and pleasant mild stripes with half a mind to simply burn all of it. He won’t, of course; it’ll all go to charities, once the job’s over (if the job’s over) while Eames is scrubbing his own sites. Amesbury-Scott’s a useful alias to cultivate, and a cross-whatever move would be an excellent reason for him to go over all philanthropic and who-needs-these-worldly-possessions. Then again, if he likes Sydney, which Eames isn’t yet sure he doesn’t, it may be worth just extending the rent, or putting things in storage, or—

This is the problem when he’s alone. He drifts, every thought diverging into about ninety others, a sort of Mandelbrot stasis of half-plans and cobweb ideas. In the absence of things to do, cons to run or teammates to bother or details to practice. He could practice, he supposes, he could practice Browning down to his last variation, but he knows the forge. It’s at the point where further refinement will stifle it. He can’t touch it.

So he drifts. He sits at the kitchen counter with tea and gazes unseeing out the window. Before Wednesday means a Tuesday flight, and he knows Saito’s recently acquired airline runs morning flights out of Kingsford-Smith, which gives him five days to pack, and on general principle he refuses to begin such an enterprise with more than forty-eight hours on the clock. He drifts, until helium-Chris Cornell splits the silence of the flat—just a snippet, blow it to hell, a text—and Eames dives for the phone.

LB coming with.

He stares at it for a moment. There aren’t any other LBs that Eames is aware of, but Ari—let alone Ariadne—has no reason to—she’s not even run the kicks—she probably could, thinking of it, except the first-level van escape, but—

Eames hits call.

It goes to voicemail, immediately, which is noteworthy, and enough of a surprise that Eames simply says, “Well—er—later, I suppose,” before he hangs up.

Now he drifts with purpose, which is to say he sits in the middle of Amesbury-Scott’s sofa, chin on his hand and elbow on his knee, and glares at the corner of the coffee table. Ari, Ariette Vickers, Ariadne Finch, in the field. Actively, because it’s not possible to be passive when you’re in someone’s head for a bloody week, let alone the months and years of the lower levels—although they have the kicks. A rookie with no physical or defense training whatsoever, in the field, for fucking inception. A rookie with issues, unless Eames has misread the entire thing altogether, which is implausible, and oh, fuck this job…

Well, at least the little bird can ski. At the very least.

The second phone rings, apparently (he notices) about twenty minutes after Arthur’s text. Ted, the sort of COO of Saito’s lake property, which is odd, but—“Morning, Ted.”

“Eames! The boss—” that being Saito— “wants to know if you’re free tomorrow, afternoon through evening.”

He takes the phone from his ear and stares at it, then replies, “My time is his, of course.” Maybe a little more silkily than he could get away with, if it were anyone who’d known him longer than a couple months.

“That so? Good, good—we’ve got a diving instructor, this bloody terror of a woman, Cassandra but if you call her anything but Cass she’ll skin you alive—anyway, she’s arriving at half-past two. The boss said you might want to help one of your coworkers with a training session?”

That slides into place more neatly than it doesn’t. Saito is…involved, somehow, in this, in Ari’s involvement, and that’s fascinating. “Did he happen to mention when my coworker would be coming?”

“Ah, bit of uncertainty there—they’ll be driving straight over from Bankstown, apparently. That’s the boss and your colleague, a Miss—”

Eames interrupts, heartily enough that if the phone’s tapped, no one’s getting her name. “Our beloved intern! Wonderful little dear.” Sorry, little bird. “And Bankstown, that’s the civil airport?”

“Certainly is,” replies Ted, with the breeziness of someone entirely unaware they’re being milked for information. “Landing’s scheduled for two, but you know how these things go. About three-quarters of an hour out from the property, so we’ll send the car for you at—”

“How about this,” says Eames, using his best impression of someone doing favors. The drive from the CBD to the property is an hour in entirely the wrong direction, if he’s to get Ari alone for a bit of an interrogation. “How about you have the car here a bit after one, so I can meet this Cass character and give our intern a familiar face. She’s a tough little thing, but she’s rather used to Europe, so—”

“Sure, mate, sure. Car at one, then.” Ted pauses, then says warmly, “Good of you, thinking of her.”

“Someone’s got to,” Eames finds himself replying, rather more sincerely than he’d expect himself to say such a thing, and—well, that’s something to consider.

The call ends with a little more pleasantry-exchanging, and Eames settles a little more comfortably on the sofa, arms flung across the back of it. Saito’s driver will have an itinerary, and Eames will have to persuade him to deviate from that, but it shouldn’t be terribly difficult. Money talks, and Eames is excellent at taking the fall for potential lapses in propriety. All my fault, you know, I’m terribly stubborn, not to mention quite persuasive—irresistible, even, if you’ve asked the correct demographics… Which gives him forty-five minutes of a limo ride with the little bird to sort things out.

And oh, what things there are to be sorted.

Eames drifts again, thinking.

***

Blow up the outside blow up the outside blow up the— Eames lunges for his phone. “Saito signed off,” says Arthur, without so much as a hello, in this voice like Eeyore, but after Eeyore’s heard a horrifically dark joke and perhaps just recovered from a case of road rage. “We talked.”

“Did you, now.”

There’s a moment of quiet, other than the noise of fabric on fabric—Arthur taking off his tie? Waistcoat? In any case, back in his hotel. Arthur inhales audibly and starts, “It—” And stops. “There’s—” And stops. “Dom’s worse than—” Finally, he pulls himself together, as his tone distorts like he’s finally undoing the top button of his shirt after a long day, pressing a bit into his own trachea. “Look. Dom’s been going under on his own.”

He'd thought it, wondered about it, but the confirmation is—unpleasant. In the way that a hollow-point bullet to the midsection is unpleasant. “Oh, bloody—”

“Ari followed him tonight. She was at the shop, what, an hour ago now, and… whatever was down there, it scared Dom bad enough that—” Arthur stops and swallows. “It wasn’t the first time. Miles wanted her on the job, she says to watch him. And she talked Dom into it. Took thirty seconds. If that.”

He sounds actually shaken, in the dull robotic sort of way Arthur goes when he’s shaken but not able to do anything about it. “‘Whatever was down there,’” Eames repeats, carefully.

“I—fuck, Eames.” A ragged little laugh, dead and empty like a record scratching, and if Eames were on the correct bloody continent he’d be at Arthur’s in minutes, fuck whatever time it is there. “The projection’s down there. I just—fuck. I can’t—think about it. Not now, with the job in—”

“Don’t you dare start apologizing.” He doesn’t mean to snap it, but he does. “You don’t need to hear it. It’s the little bird’s job to hear it and deal with it. Not yours.”

Another moment ticks past, and Eames realizes after several seconds that he’s holding his breath. He’s destroying every rule of their get-your-shit-together game, which is a game, even if it’s a deadly serious one sometimes. They don’t state the obvious, they don’t show their work, they each know the other is thinking through everything, and Eames is sitting here on Amesbury-Scott’s beige sofa literally telling Arthur what his job isn’t.

Then Arthur exhales. “It’s not,” he says. Echoing the obvious. And then he goes on: “I know Dom, but Miles knows dreamshare, knows the—the more fucked-up parts, from Marie, and if he thinks Dom requires the full attention of a less involved party in the field, then I defer to his expertise.” The veneer of formality he puts on to enact having his shit together, tone smooth and rich and nearly suave, entirely in control.

Eames has no idea what to say.

“In any case,” says Arthur, after a moment, in a lighter version of his business voice, “I’d called to discuss the first kick, because you might have an in somewhere on the ground.”

“Ah. Afraid our patron’s beaten you to that one.” Eames clears his throat, puts on his poshest vowels and says, “We’ve been invited to his lordship’s house on the lake for a session with a diving instructor, at three o’clock in the afternoon tomorrow.”

“You—” Another of Arthur’s phones beeps, a default-sounding text alert, and there’s a little clatter as he fumbles it off whatever surface. The poor dear’s probably not slept properly in months, and now— “Huh. Text from her. Saito’s flying her in private. Then diving. Or, okay, she actually says scuba something whatever, with about half as many letters, but the gist is she’s set for the first level.” He sighs, one of his rare ones that actually accompanies a vocalization, a comedic-sounding dropping whine like a children’s show character overacting. “One less thing.”

“One thing fewer,” says Eames, to be an arse.

Arthur laughs, a little less horribly than he had before, and then goes quiet. There’s just the sound of them breathing at each other, before—in the smallest voice he’s heard from Arthur since Mal—Arthur says, “Hey, Eames?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Could—look, if—take care of her, okay?”

Do you think she truly needs that? he thinks, and When’s the last time you’ve asked me to care for a colleague? he thinks, and I’d far rather take care of you, he thinks, but that’d be destroying the game and a good eight years besides, and instead, Eames replies, “I will. When you get in—”

“I’ll call.” Arthur sounds defeated, the way Arthur does, letting his voice fry in his throat instead of smoothing it out. “I—look, Eames, thanks.”

He hangs up before Eames can reply, which is probably just as well, because if he’d waited until Eames thought up an answer, it’d be gone three in Paris.

Eames sighs and flings together a text for Ari.