Who: Eames and Arthur What: Dealing with the truth about the party Where: Arthur's flat, Inception door When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Language, some adult themes
As always, Arthur woke up from a solid, deep black sleep that contained nothing at all. There was something heavy pressing his shoulder down into the dip of his clavicle, and his eyes felt sandy. He shifted, and a salty sweat smell and a shocking set of bruises and raw skin informed him about his night, and also about the morning. He waited again for a moment without fully opening his eyes, savoring, and then he shifted again, closer this time. Eames had a certain heavy quality to his breathing even when he wasn’t snoring, and Arthur knew exactly who was in bed with him. He lay there for a while longer, drifting in and out of sleep, until finally the sun got him right in the eyes and he was forced into full awakening.
The bedroom was full of light from the small window, the romantic view of the Seine just out of sight beyond the shifting blinds. Arthur rolled over and took in the wreckage of his apartment. He vaguely remembered opening every door, cupboard, closet and drawer when he’d gotten there, looking for something elusive, and he remembered the incredible burning crawl at the base of his spine. The burn, that push that was just for sex, just lust, pure, simple, pointless--it was mostly gone, and he felt alone in his mind again. Even Cory was asleep.
Arthur took in a breath and let it out in a soft, contented sigh. A shower and breakfast. Maybe he would cook. Did he still have anything left over from the last trip to the shop? He was thinking about omelets as he sighed again, and then he glanced over at the still sleeping brute next to him. (Okay, three omelets. Maybe four.) He nudged at Eames’ arm and started to slide out of bed, unsticking from Eames, himself, and the recently ruined sheets. He was going to need to start buying high-thread count in bulk.
Eames made a sound that was pure growl, eyes still closed and an arm draped over his eyes. He was heavy and comfortable in sleep, and his arm slapping over his face sounded like a 10-pound bag. He'd no interest in the romantic Seine, and he'd no interest in omelets (or he wouldn't until he smelled them cooking). He didn't care if he was the worst mess; he wanted to keep sleeping, and he hooked his other arm around Arthur waist as Arthur nudged. There would be no sliding, thank you very much.
Somewhere at the back of Eames' mind lived the knowledge that he'd have to actually talk to the man in bed with him if they woke, and it made him even less inclined to face the day. He growled again, shifted onto his side, and he gave up his sunlight-barrier in favor of wrapping both arms around Arthur, his great beefy weight immobilizing the man entirely.
Eames' breathing went heavy again - it only took seconds, mind - and he began to slip back into a dream about an sandy beach. Unlike Arthur, Eames still dreamed. It was an oddity in their line of work, but Eames didn't question oddities. He accepted it for what it was, the natural dreamscape, though he much preferred the engineered kind. Real dreams were rather boring, but then Eames found a great many things rather boring, and dreaming was just one thing among many.
"Not waking up," Eames muttered, gruff and growl, grip tightening and a very heavily muscled leg draping over Arthur's thigh.
“Mmfh!” Arthur said, as he was trapped down between mattress and man. “Eames,” he complained, first in a groan and then in a familiar scolding tone. He tried to roll out away but the grip was solid and Eames’ leg probably weighed half of Arthur's entire body just by itself. After a moment’s consideration, Arthur took advantage of the situation and leaned over to give the other man a brief kiss on the temple, only a whisper of a thing. The contact wasn’t even remotely sexual, only affectionate.
Then, voice rough from embarrassment at such an obvious display, Arthur pulled back and said, “Now let me go.” He caught the edge of the mattress in the four fingers of each hand and tried to separate his limbs from the tangle on the bed, comically twisting naked hips in the attempt. “Eames,” he repeated, nudging his knee into Eames’ thigh and then prodding him in the stomach with his heel. “Let me go so I can clean up. I’ll make breakfast.” He prodded again.
Eames made a sound that was all pleased teddy bear at the affectionate peck, but it didn't soften him up enough to make him release his captive. He grinned, eyes still closed, when Arthur attempted calisthenics to escape. "No," he said, fingers closing around Arthur's ankle when he poked that heel against his stomach. He tugged Arthur’s leg up instead, hooking it around his own hip, and he made a pleased sound that rumbled in his chest. "I've no intention of moving, and neither have you," he assured Arthur, as if that was that, as if all the decisions on the matter had been quite made, thank you. His hand slid from where it had been on Arthur's ankle, down and down over Arthur's shin, the back of his knee, the back of his thigh, and then his arse. Those calloused fingers remained there, on Arthur's arse, petting lazily.
Arthur wasn’t struggling all that much, but he’d still almost managed to slide off the side of the bed before he was tugged backward on his stomach. He laughed out loud when he ended up back where he’d started, though this time he was reversed, with his weight on the opposite elbow. Arthur didn’t laugh like that all that much, and he compounded the event by laughing again as Eames made a sound like a sleepy bear. He looked a lot like one, too. With his hair all over the place, Arthur had no doubt he looked like some kind of skinny raccoon, but he didn’t care quite that much, particularly after the affectionate hand slid over his skin. He made a pleased murmur, but he reminded himself that he was about to get up. He did feel sticky and Arthur had never cared for feeling unkempt. Curling up in Eames’ direction, Arthur made the soft, contented sigh again at the roof of his mouth before saying, “I am moving.” He ducked his head, the circle of his body tight enough that he managed to maneuver his forehead against Eames’ chin even with one heel over Eames’ hip. He made it look quite comfortable. “I want breakfast, Eames,” he added, accompanying the complaint with a faint nudge of fingers on the other man’s arm.
Eames smirked a sleep-thick smirk, one that barely moved his lips, but that was paired with a low sound that wordlessly conveyed smugness. "Darling, you should have said so," he replied and, after an exaggerated yawn, he rocked his body into Arthur's. He closed one hand over Arthur's bicep, the other over Arthur's thigh, and he attempted to roll the other man onto his side, using nothing but the force in his hands and the press of his weight. He rolled onto his side at the same time, and he tugged Arthur into the crook of his arm, as if moving him was nothing at all. His goal was to get Arthur's arse against his groin, where he was morning-hard. "Breakfast, darling," he asked, a hand sliding down over Arthur's hips and along the cleft of his arse. In the back of his mind, he knew he should let Arthur wash, and they should talk over a very hot cuppa, which Arthur would (no doubt) throw in his face. He deserved that, but it rather wasn't what he wanted, and Eames was consistent about one thing in life - putting what he wanted first. And right then, he wanted to bury his cock in the other man and pretend nothing needed discussing at all. Maybe if he simply didn't mention it for a terribly long while, it would all simply cease to matter.
All this yawning and smug smirks didn’t fool Arthur one bit, and at first he let Eames roll him about just to see what the larger man was doing. Arthur made muffled little sounds of protest, mostly just to hear the noise and make sure Eames was aware that he was plenty awake and aware, thank you very much. Arthur let his ankle slide off Eames’ hip and was dead weight under the big hands right up until he was pressed against the curve of Eames’ knee and hip. At that point Arthur knew perfectly well what Eames was doing, and he made a thoughtful little humming noise at the feel of long fingers and warm flesh against the curve of his buttocks.
However, Arthur wasn’t about to have early morning sex while he was hungry and sticky. Maybe once he’d been softened with a bagel and a lot of hot water, but not before Eames was fully awake enough to enjoy the process. Flexing his heels in a long stretch that went all the way up his spine, Arthur contracted every nerve, closing the curve of his ass and deepening the line between spine and legs. It put some distance between him and Eames’ body, and he lifted Eames’ middle finger off his hip using the leverage of his knuckle, gentle but insistent. “I mean the kind your people like to fry up and mine like to toast,” he chuckled.
Eames groaned, and he rolled onto his back. His expression was one of frustration, because who didn't like morning sex? He'd no intention of getting up. Arthur could wash, and he could toast up whatever he liked, Eames wasn't moving. Another grumble, and he closed his eyes and settled deeper into the pillows and blankets, the settling a very clear indication of his intentions. He might have stirred for sex, but not for the prospect of the conversation that awaited. Eames was no bloody masochist, and he'd put that off for as long as he could fucking manage, thank you quite kindly.
Arthur let Eames roll away, feeling more like he’d lost than like he’d won, but still intent on his purpose nonetheless. He chuckled again, taking advantage of the extra space to roll onto his back and stretch one more time. He hadn’t been to the gym in days, and he felt stiff no thanks to the much battered bruises down most of his body. He sat up and eyed some of the ones he could see with interest, as usually his body just made dream injuries real and he never much saw the color on his skin unless he’d been sparring. Arthur looked over at Eames in his nest of sheets and briefly considered another biting kiss, but in the end he just rolled off the edge of the bed for the shower. Maybe he would shower and then soak in a clean tub of water. Maybe he would shower, make breakfast, and then soak in a tub of water.
Clean and thoroughly enjoying the scrubbed feel of his skin and the softness bestowed by a lot of steaming water coming down on his head at once, Arthur put on an assembly of clothing that made him feel human and sharp. He didn’t like the remnants left by what he had been at that party, something soft as wet paper and more inviting than soft silk. Arthur liked his wants wrapped up firmly in pressed cotton, even in the kitchen, where he found four sausages packed with basil and eggs he could cook with chopped tomatoes and onion. He put away the wine, tidied his living room, and closed all his cupboards. If he had been a different kind of man, he would have hummed to himself, but the rhythmic scrape of the spatula on the pan would have to do. “Get up,” he called into the next room, “or I eat your half.”
Eames had fallen back asleep while Arthur washed and dressed, and it was with great reluctance that he admitted (to himself, if not to the man in the kitchen) that even he couldn't sleep through the banging and clattering in the kitchen. He rolled onto his back, and he tried not to ponder how much he dreaded the conversation that was sure to follow. But there was nothing for it, and he sat up when Arthur called for him to get up, legs off the side of the bed and one hand rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Eames didn't immediately reply. He padded into the bathroom (heavily enough that the sound likely carried to Arthur and his bloody bangers), and he shut the door and washed. He actually climbed beneath the stream of water, but washing was perfunctory for Eames, and he was out again within minutes, slipping on a pair of trousers he'd left at the flat during the past year. He didn't bother with a shirt, and he had no pants to speak of, and he only slicked his wet hair out of his face as he padded barefoot into the kitchen, a day's stubble darkening his jaw. "Darling, you've been a horrid host this morning," he explained, walking up behind Arthur and wrapping two arms that had not been sufficiently dried about the other man's waist.
It was a last ditch effort, you see. If Eames could distract Arthur, perhaps talking would not be necessary at all. "Is there coffee, love?" he asked mouth against the cotton that covered Arthur's shoulder. They really should have just bloody stayed in bed, and Eames wondered how challenging it would be to get Arthur out of that shirt.
Arthur had been plating the omelets like an over-enthusiastic sous chef, standing against the counter and doing things like arranging the sausage next to a sprig of green that didn’t belong there. He looked up so he could watch Eames walk past on his way into the kitchen, savoring the fact that he could do it rather blatantly and not hide it under a veil of sarcasm. There was always time to do that when there were other people around.
He made a disapproving noise in the back of his throat when Eames came up for a wet hug. “Don’t you know how to use a towel?” he asked, smiling through the sting of the comment. He twisted to indicate an espresso machine that looked like it might belong in a futuristic torture chamber. Arthur had already made himself a cafe latte and distracted himself by attempting to draw leaves in the foam while the sausage cooked. He would have adored watching Eames attempt to make an espresso, and he turned to grin at the man against his shoulder. “You’re a bear in the morning.”
Eames eyed the machine with distaste. He had no idea how to work the bloody thing, and he'd no intention of approaching the complicated looking contraption. Instead, he moved back against the counter, leaning against it with his hands on the edge of the flat surface. He watched Arthur's back a moment, watched the nuanced movement of muscles beneath fabric as Arthur worked on drawing leaves in that entirely unnecessary and ridiculous foam. And then he sighed, and the sigh was a rather guilty and long-suffering one, and Arthur had likely known him well enough to recognize it for what it was. "We should talk, darling." There. He'd said it, and he was likely going to end up wearing the bloody coffee shortly.
Arthur turned the heat off the stove and picked up his latte (the leaves were just swirls now, and not worth keeping when it smelled this good) to cross the kitchen toward the espresso machine. He was in a good enough mood to make Eames a few shots and then throw it in a mug of hot water just to see him grumble about it. He eased one hip against the counter next to the refrigerator and caught the look on Eames face seconds before the other man opened his mouth. The smile disappeared, fog on a hot day evaporating into nothing, just slowly enough that one could see it happening as Arthur realized what that phrase meant. Arthur’s eyes flicked up and down Eames’ body as if something there might give him a clue to what was coming, whatever bad thing was coming. “Okay.”
Eames didn't grumble. He took the mug, and he set it on the counter, and he crossed his arms over his chest in a decade's old gesture of defensiveness. He was poised for a fight. One of the ones where Arthur listened to nothing he said, and where Arthur insisted that he'd known this relationship was a bloody fuck up from the start. This moment, here, was one of main reasons Eames steered clear of anything with expectations, because he always ended up right back here, no matter how much he intended not to. It wasn't even entirely his fault this time, but he didn't expect that to matter terribly much. "I was gluttony at the bloody gathering, and I wasn't as resilient as you were about resisting," he rushed, all those British syllables running into one another. "I've already spoken to the people I was with, let them know I was in a bloody relationship. It's unimportant, darling," he insisted. "It meant utter nothing, bollocks." His posture screamed out his expectations, that Arthur wouldn't believe him.
The defensive posture threw up little alarms in all of Arthur’s instincts. He didn’t run the cons like Cobb did but he knew the body language, and his own immediately reacted. His grip on the latte got a little tighter and he brought his chin up a couple millimeters to focus keenly on Eames’ face, knowing there wasn’t anything else to see on the rest of him. It took him a couple seconds to get through the accent, which got so thick without warning that Arthur blinked twice, but he got there eventually, and the moment was visible. Surprise rippled out through Arthur’s face, parting his lips and lowering his brows over wider eyes. “But you said you didn’t do that. Have unimportant... how many?” He cut himself off and this time the brows went up instead of down.
Arthur's sentences didn't make a lot of sense to Eames, so he focused on the question instead. Two. Both Vegaside. A man, and woman." He watched Arthur's face when he replied, refusing to look away, despite the defensive posture giving away the fact that he likely wanted to badly. "I wanted everything, Arthur. It didn't matter what, and nothing satisfied. I got a hundred bloody tattoos. I ate. I drank. I did bloody E. Nothing was enough, and nothing mattered, and I didn't so much as stick around for a 'by your leave ' afterward."
Arthur’s face flickered with an initial influx of emotion, all of them fast, young, and angry. Some of it was jealousy, but most of it was anger, very simple and clear. There was no immediate target for it, and though his voice increased in volume he didn’t actually move to put the cup down. “Nothing mattered. So this gluttony, this wanting everything, did it include me?” His gaze hardened as he tried to look deeper into Eames’ face, trying to understand how this whole damn thing worked. “Did you look for me?” It was a clear question, and it was obvious by the way Arthur’s body shifted in a thousand small ways that he was braced for a blow.
"I realized everything I found wasn't what I wanted, but I wasn't thinking enough to remember my own bloody name, Arthur. It was all instinct, as if my brain simply vanished otherwise. I remember thinking it wasn't satisfying, that someone else would be, but that you weren't there, and I kept searching for whatever would make me feel satisfied, which I never bloody found," Eames explained, and he dragged his hands through his still-damp hair. "I know. I didn't have your bloody-self control, but had I been me, I would have found you and just fucked your brains out for the evening, Arthur." He moved forward, a rushed unfolding of the arms over his chest, and he closed his hands on Arthur's forearms. "It was instinct, darling, without thought. That's all."
Up until the contact, Arthur hadn’t moved, but the touch lit him up like fire. He brought both elbows up in an explosion of movement, pushing back to escape the grip and bouncing off the edge of the counter on a painful bruise without thinking. The cup in his hand slid violently up in the air and splashed hot foam and espresso over the kitchen and Arthur’s arm as well as Eames’. He barely noticed. “Don’t touch me right now,” he said, not coldly but warm, emotion pulsing the tendons in his neck as he kept yanking it up to try to force thought through his reaction. He was trying to listen, and not backing away but shifting, and he tossed the cup into the sink from enough distance that it cracked on contact. “How come your instinct finds you other people?” He knew Eames didn’t have a preference of sex or gender, something about his mercurial personality, the same one that allowed him to shift from person to person in dreams, but somehow two people hurt more than one. “Any person, apparently?”
Eames had known this would happen. That this would play out in precisely this manner. He took a tired step back, moving further away than he'd been previously, and he didn't make any attempt to renew contact. "Nothing I say is going to bloody change this, Arthur, and I can't explain why the fucking hotel did what it did. I've no explanation for why you could think and resist, when I couldn't remember my bloody name. I've no idea, but it has nothing to do with who I am now, and I can't make you see that either. Yes, I'm a randy sod, but I've not done a bloody thing since I've been with you, and that should count more than what some blasted hotel made me do one evening." And now he was angry. It always came down to this, didn't it? Arthur didn't trust him, and now he'd trust him even less, and it wasn't like the past could be erased or changed. What had happened, had happened, and there was nothing to bloody do about it.
Arthur needed something to do with his hands, because he was volatile when he was angry and he had to get the burn out somehow. He realized just then that it was similar to the burn from last night, the one that was starting to get hold in the back of his brain. He started yanking at the button on the inside of his right wrist, vaguely thinking of the stain seeping through his shirt to the elbow. “I don’t know why the hotel did things it did either. If you’d told me I have problems with lust twenty-four hours ago I would have laughed in your face, but here I am, and I really topped off your night, I bet,” Arthur finished, viciously. “You might not have been yourself last night, or more yourself, or whatever, but you were this morning. Would you have slept with me again without telling me this? Just now?” He left off his button and pointed at the bedroom, wet sleeve loose over the blue veins of his right arm.
Eames watched all those frenetic movements with a growing feeling of misery. This was only getting bloody worse. When Arthur's hands started darting about like that, things always got worse. He groaned, and he wished for a bloody shirt, even as Arthur fought with his. He didn't pace, though he wanted to. "Yes, because that party didn't bloody matter. Nothing that happened there mattered. Dammit, Arthur, why must it always be doubt with you? Why can't you just bloody accept that I want you, and be done with it. Yes! I slept with two sad sods, and I can't even remember their bloody faces. Do you understand? They don't fucking matter. Your problems with lust don't matter. The hotel doesn't dictate our bloody lives, and it might as well have never happened. That's how important it was!
The jealousy and the hurt, small splinters of it in his eyes, entirely gave way to anger. It was not unlike the defensive anger he’d shown Cobb in a rainy Los Angeles that didn’t exist, the anger that he used when he knew he had made a mistake but would not be railroaded because of it. “Yes? Yes you would have slept with me before you told me because you knew, you knew, Eames, that I would take this badly. So you would have slept with me and that would have mattered?” He made a sharp movement with one arm that had absolutely no purpose, and his hair was starting to dry so it slid wild down the side of his jaw as his expression tightened and his chest expanded with the effort at staying in one place.
Eames didn't say anything at all, not a bloody word. He stared, and then he slammed the flat of his palm on the counter hard enough for the sound to reverberate through the space, and damn but his hand bloody stung. His jaw was tightened, and he was losing his last thread of bloody patience. And Eames, Eames wasn't the sort of bastard to stay around when things got this bad. No, he fled. He left jobs that got too messy, and this was a bloody mess. "Fine. I'm a cheating, heartless bastard. Anything else before I go?" Because that was a bloody low blow. He hadn't changed, and having sex with Arthur wasn't any bloody violation because of what had happened. He was still the same man he'd been on the morning the hotel dragged him in and mucked about with his brains.
Arthur didn’t care about Eames' patience. This time he wasn’t trying to earn the man’s attention, he wasn’t trying to keep him close, this time, he was trying to figure out what kind of person he was, and he was jumping to angry conclusions because he knew that he wasn’t going to be able to think about anything but Eames cavorting with other faceless people for weeks. He knew because it had happened before, every time Eames got a new lover in the years that they had worked together and Arthur noticed. It didn’t occur to him in his anger that Eames wasn’t acting like he’d gotten a new lover at all. “Answer the question, Eames, I think I deserve a few minutes of you standing there and bothering to yell about it,” Arthur snapped back.
"What bloody question?" Eames demanded.
“Would you have slept with me while you were putting this off, while you were thinking about telling me about the two other people you fucked last night?” The manner of the question made it obvious that even Arthur acknowledged that when he’d first come home there wasn’t a lot of choice involved for either of them.
"YES! Because nothing has changed, Arthur. I intended to tell you when I first got here, but that ended up being pointless, and if it didn't matter then, then why did it bloody matter at all?" Eames demanded, because this was ridiculous. "You can't be angry at me about the bloody hotel, so you have to be angry about that?" he huffed, shoving away from the counter and wishing very much that it had been a chair, so there could be a resounding clatter of chair legs.
Arthur felt like his ribs were bending outward under the pent-up energy of his anger, and the hot water of the shower was starting to wear off, leaving a great number of bruises that worsened his control over his emotions. “Because it does matter to me, it matters to me that you tell me the truth, and not telling me is just like lying because you know I’m not going to like it. And don’t get me wrong, I can be fucking angry with you about the hotel, Eames. And I don’t give a damn if it makes sense.”
"I didn't want this," Eames insisted, pointing a finger at Arthur, his entire arm shaking as he lifted it. "Because I know you don't bloody trust me, and I knew this was going to happen. Can you blame me for not wanting to fucking tell you? It wasn't me, and you're acting as if it was, and I'm bloody done, Arthur. Has it not occurred to you that I might be angry too? That I might be bloody livid at the hotel, at these journals, and whatever the bloody fucking hell this is, for taking my control away?" His breath rattled his chest and, with that, he bloody turned and stormed from the kitchen and toward the door.
Arthur had to stand back for Eames to get to the door, and he did it, not even allowing the man to brush past him on his way out because he knew how satisfying any physical action would be when he was on the warpath to the door. Arthur knew very well Eames’ propensity to run when things got difficult, and he was too angry to bother stopping him. Instead he just raised his voice with a frustration that meant he wanted to get out as much anger as he could while the man was still in the room. “I don’t give a damn about your anger, either. I don’t care how hard it was for you that you had to fuck a couple people, because you have absolutely no idea what it was like trying to get out of there in one piece when all I wanted was for someone to take me apart.” Arthur wanted to throw something, but it seemed petty. He wanted to hit Eames but by this time there was just his back, and even Arthur wasn’t going to hit someone from behind. Besides, he was having difficulty seeing all of a sudden.
Eames stopped, and he wanted to turn. He did. But he didn't allow himself to do it, even if he heard the emotion in Arthur's voice. It would just be more of the same argument, and his bloody feelings were hurt over that comment of Arthur's about not caring. He didn't want to think about anyone tearing Arthur apart, either, because it just made him angry, and he didn't need any more anger just then, not at anything. He knew his own temper, and his own boundaries, and he just needed to fucking walk away. Which is what he did, after forcing his feet to move. He walked forward, almost tore the bloody door off its hinges, and stormed out of the flat and into the hallway, into the body and mind of that clueless oaf who knew nothing about anything.