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Arthur’s home boasts the trademark of a man interested in art. There’s a predominant edge of photography on display, but the moment you walk into the long foyer, he proudly displays his second-painted copy of Henri Marrionneaux’s Birds on a Wind. It’s from his later days when he traded in his strange and bizarre mix of Manet and Rockwell’s subjects, but kept the brushstrokes he seemed to have learned from Van Gogh’s paintings in the Musée D’Orsay and in the halls of the Rodin Museum.
Sometimes, as Arthur cooks dinner, he stares at the painting and imagines the young Henri shifting his weight on the creaky old wooden floors of the British Museum, sketching in moleskin as he learns his trade. He’s a young artist from the few appearances he’s made. He’s lanky and thin, boasts shaggy dark brown hair, and thick black frames.
He is, Arthur truly believes, a genius.
He owns a sketchbook of his work that sits as a table-piece in his living room. Three people have paged through it. Cobb didn’t exactly understand and just put his glass of scotch down atop it like it’s supposed to be a coaster, his ex-boyfriend flicked through it and grunted at how he preferred pornography (he became an ex very quickly after said admission) and Ariadne had stared at the sketches for a very long time at some of the more intimate sketches of legs, cocks, arms, and torsos.
“He’s good, isn’t he?”
Ariadne barely gives a noise of assent. “It’s not that he isn’t good,” she says, hedging her words with a hand pressed in the air, like she’s trying to preface her statement. “It’s just that...” she trails off and studies Arthur, pressing her lips together, and then whatever it is she’d been about to say dissipates. “It’s probably nothing.”
She returns the book, then, and leaves Arthur be.
Eames never even bothers to look at the book in all his visits.
Arthur isn’t surprised.
The man wouldn’t know good taste if it bit him in the ass and latched on before offering a rim job. If he can’t even deign to figure out that his suits are two sizes too big, Arthur holds no hope for him figuring out that Henri has more beauty and talent in his fingers than Eames has in his whole body.
Still, Arthur can’t help but be slightly disappointed that Eames doesn’t even look half-interested in the book.
“Don’t you ever collect art?” he asks one night when they’re drinking beers and going over the expenses of their latest mark, a man who Eames will be forging for in the next dream. Eames is pacing and mouthing words to himself, tapping his pencil against his palm and seemingly in a world of his own. Arthur, meanwhile, needs distraction. “You know,” he continues when Eames stares at him cluelessly. “Art.”
“What, like that silly sketchbook you have on your table?” he murmurs dismissively. “The antics of a seventeen year old and the jammed-in pages that he stuck in ten years later?”
Arthur bristles and feels the need to leap to the book’s defense, to take on Eames and dress him down as far as the work of Henri is concerned.
“Like you’ve ever done anything worthwhile,” Arthur spits out.
Eames, though, doesn’t even pause at that. He simply smiles warmly at Arthur and lifts the neck of his beer bottle in cheers to him. He smiles like Arthur hasn’t hurt him at all and the insults have rolled down his back and off of him like water off a duck. “Oh, darling,” is all he exhales reverently. “How you will never know.”
*
Eames shows up after their extraction with flecks of paint behind his ear. He walks around the room and debriefs the team – Yusuf has stayed local and is acting as their chemist and a man by the name of James takes on the architecture. James boasts that he’s somehow related to the queen – Arthur somehow doesn’t believe him. Arthur is far more concerned with watching those flecks of red, green, and orange with careful attention.
Arthur knows that Eames paints. He has three forgeries in his apartment that say so. They’re actually good, but for all that Eames taunts Arthur about imagination, forging three of Van Gogh’s pieces don’t use much of the mind.
Once, Arthur had asked Eames to sketch something for him. Something original.
They’d been tipsy and intoxicated after a job well-done with Eames’ legs sprawled over Arthur’s coffee table and Arthur’s head in Eames’ lap. With just stocking feet, Eames had pushed at the pages of the sketchbook on his table and Arthur had begged for an original sketch. “You could draw me.”
“Mm,” Eames had murmured considerately. “Why retread old territory, darling?”
And so Arthur has no sketch and he only has forgeries. He now has three flecks of paint to stare at and it’s still bugging him when the meeting finishes so much so that he rises to his feet and wanders to Eames’ side, licking his thumb and leaning forward to rub away the paint.
Or so he had intended. Instead, he swirls it into various mixed colours just behind the lobe of Eames’ ear and creates a whirlwind of brightness.
Eames closes his eyes and lets out a soft exhalation at that. For a moment, Arthur wonders if he should tell Eames about the paint and insist very firmly that he has no aspirations for getting inside Eames’ trousers.
That would be a lie, though.
“What are you doing, Arthur?” Eames asks with soft bemusement, not even bothering to open his eyes.
Arthur exhales and wishes he carried around varnish with him so he could wipe away the paint and make Eames a blank canvas once more for Arthur to mark him. He withholds stupid comments like that and arranges his features in careful disregard for anything close to the matter, electing to be as dismissive as possible when he speaks. “You had a mark near your suit-collar.”
“Ah, yes,” Eames laughs, the sound throaty and sinful and endless, “and we all know we can’t possibly damage my suits, now can we?”
He wanders away and Arthur’s fingers twitch when he sees that he’s missed just the tiniest fleck of green.
*
He stays with Eames six months after the Paint Incident and wonders at being barred from the second bedroom down the hall. The house is already surprising. It’s a house for one with a yard and a lovely woman named Annie who comes in and puts on tea for Eames before sprucing up the lower level. The second bedroom has been locked and Arthur has been shown to the guest room with a warning that the other room is not to be touched.
He wants to fiercely protest being cast as the Belle to Eames’ Beast, but he accedes to the request because he’s putting Eames out for the night due to his run-in with the law after failing to vacate the premises quickly enough after his last extraction.
He considers picking the lock of the room, but he hears music inside and Eames rambling away on his mobile and so Arthur tucks away the pins he’s got in his hands and presses his ear to the door instead.
“Oh, honestly, Margaret,” Eames is sighing, loudly enough that Arthur can’t be blamed for eavesdropping when the eaves are as loud as a shouting child in an empty room in this case. “Just because the museum is calling you endlessly doesn’t mean you call me.”
Arthur rolls his eyes. Of course Eames is planning to rob a museum. Eames has used a woman named Margaret before as his liaison to get information and Arthur’s always felt poorly for the woman – he tells himself that he pities her because it eases the jealousy he actually feels.
“Well, then don’t tell them four pieces when I’ve only got three of the bloody things.”
Eames sighs.
“Fine. They can have a fourth. What do they want?”
The conversation quiets after that and Arthur pries himself away from the door, only giving the room one last considerate look when he sees blue flannel fabric peeking out from under the doorway. He’ll look into the room the next time he’s in London and laying low in Eames’ place.
*
Arthur receives the brief press release that gets puts out to Henri’s mailing list and sees that he is opening his next show at Tate Modern with a special surprise. For the first time in ten years, Henri has elected to paint a subject rather than the post-war work influenced by so many British painters that he’s taken a liking to. There are rumours flooding the internet in regards to the subject. Some imagine it’s Henri’s parents (who are purportedly wealthy) and some say it’s a lovely lost love that slipped away.
There are some connections at the museum who say that they are entirely wrong and the subject is filled with grief and loss and love.
Arthur believes the latter sources given that he knows them best and they’re the ones who have managed to see the painting. It’s Richard Jones, the curator of the exhibit and Arthur’s old friend from school, who lets him into the museum the night before it’s supposed to open.
“I just had to let you see it,” Richard says hurriedly as he presses a hand to Arthur’s back and rushes him along. “I heard the boys told you what it was about, but when I saw it...well, I had to call you straightaway.”
They rush right along down long hallways and Arthur is forced to a stop by Richard’s arms when they reach the Marrionneaux exhibit.
There is one painting that is covered by a sheet and Richard takes a deep breath.
“Arthur, is there something you haven’t told us?” he’s asking while he’s busy unveiling the painting with all the due care a new piece is afforded.
Arthur wants to ask why on earth he would even think so until he looks up and sees the painting. It’s of a man wearing a long coat with a gun in his hands. He is facing down enormous steel gates opened to heaven and hell. His head is bowed to the ground and his free hand is twined with another – male, possibly female, Arthur thinks it’s been deliberately left vague.
The brushstrokes are chaotic, like this has been done in the nick of time.
It could have been any man except for the fact that his face is angled slightly back towards the viewer and those features are the very same that Arthur sees in the mirror every day.
“We have visitors?” comes a foreign voice from behind him, softly accented with Parisian undertones and the distant nature of an aloof man. Arthur turns and regards Henri Marrionneaux and suddenly Arthur has a hundred questions he wants to ask, but he’s busy staring at the cigarette in Henri’s fingers and the crush of his lips around the cigarette with every pull.
Arthur swallows hard and turns to Richard. “Can we have some privacy?”
Richard skitters off, leaving Arthur to approach Henri with slow, measured steps, not sure he can believe any of this.
He has the feeling he’s not going to be able to persist in his denial as he watches glasses pulled off and tucked away and a familiar hand (ash dug into the fingernails) reach up to pull off the brown wig.
“You look stupid,” Arthur breathes out when he’s presented with Eames. Eames, who is still wearing black eyeliner and smoking a clove cigarette. Eames, who is standing before a painting of Arthur and signed by one of Arthur’s favourite artists.
Eames, who is looking at Arthur with grief and such loss and such love.
“You’re not talented enough to be Henri,” Arthur accuses, basking in the steady wash of denial that’s so comfortable over his skin. “You couldn’t possibly have the time or the inclination or the desire to paint the things he does. You couldn’t have painted those landscapes with such boredom,” he accuses, recalling the first sketches in the book he’d bought at auction, “or those subjects with such detail,” he goes on, knowing that his denial is falling away even as he speaks. “Or those bright colours like no one’s ever lived life the way you have.” He knows, now, that it can’t be anyone but Eames and now he wants to see into those locked rooms and wants to touch all the pastels and dark colours on Eames’ pallet and let Eames run his brush over Arthur’s skin. “You can’t possibly imagine how I’ve put you on a pedestal until no one could compare. No one could invoke the beauty that you did in a subject’s eyes or the slight abstract of a landscape because accuracy bored you and you were just upset that you weren’t born an Impressionist,” he says, speaking more in the last minute than he has done in hours. “No one could sketch body parts like you do and manage to infuse them with such attentive caring that they had to belong to some...”
“To someone very dear,” Eames finishes for him.
Arthur drifts closer and pries the empty frames from Eames, throwing them onto the tiled floor and relishing in the sound of them scattering away. He takes the wig next and shoves it aside as he runs his fingers slowly up the lapels of Eames’ suit jacket and brings him closer by slow inching steps.
“Everyone’s going to see this tomorrow,” he warns, his voice barely louder than a secretive whisper. “Everyone’s going to see me.”
“Everyone is going to see an avenging angel bent on wreaking havoc and justice to those who deserve it,” Eames says with a smirk. “Do you know I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours? Bloody museum wanted a fourth piece and it took all night to study you while you slept and perfect your profile.”
Arthur presses his lips together tightly and glares at Eames.
It loses some of the power behind it when Arthur stops to realize they’re inches apart and his fingers are still wrapped up in Eames’ lapels, breathing hard and staring at him while he breathes in the heady scent of cloves from Arthur’s breath. “Why do you have to wear a stupid disguise?”
“Because I don’t want the price on my head interfering with doing something I love,” Eames says very matter-of-factly, reaching over to brush his thumb against Arthur’s neck and stroke up and down slowly with the deliberate intention of teasing. “I wasn’t hiding, if that’s what you thought this was. I just wanted to keep a beloved part of me out of harm’s way,” he says and now Arthur’s not sure what (or who) they’re talking about.
Arthur keeps Eames close to him and closes his eyes as he thinks back to the sketchbook resting on his table. “Everyone is going to see this tomorrow?”
“Everyone,” Eames agrees. “I’m sorry you’re no longer safe.”
“Do you think I care when you and I can more than handle it?” is all Arthur can demand as he takes one last look at the painting and twines one hand with Eames to consider how it looks when glanced at in front of its artistic doppelganger.
Eames really does have some talent.
*
The next time Arthur sees Eames with paint on his body it’s because they’ve drunkenly stumbled into Eames’ workroom and Arthur had stood there with a beer bottle clutched in his hands while leering at Eames. “Strip,” he’d demanded and Eames had slowly taken off every inch of clothing before divesting Arthur of his suit as well, laying him back on messy piles of painter’s sheets and amidst half-started canvasses.
With only his fingers, Eames had begun to paint an opus on Arthur’s chest, his fingerstrokes short and sharp and unlike his other work. He creates a whole world on Arthur’s torso alone and earns flecks on his ass and his shoulders and splattering down his back like a treasure map.
He finishes and smears his full palm over the work, sliding it around Arthur’s back to clutch him close as he kisses him.
The smell of the paint and Eames’ lips on his make Arthur feel heady and light.
And in the morning, there is a sketch lying folded beside Arthur – who is wrapped securely in blankets and amongst Eames’ pieces of art. He opens it and finds an original sketch of him as he sleeps. Some of the lines wander the page and some trail off into nowhere, but it’s him and it’s by Eames’ hand and it’s called DARLING.
“You really are a genius,” is all Arthur has to say when Eames returns to his workspace with coffee, tea, and paint splattered all over his body. Arthur reaches up to grasp hold of Eames’ boxers – the only piece of clothing he has on – and tugs him back down for a second round before he asks Eames to construct him another world of imagination on the blank canvas of his body.