Re: Eames/Holly: dreaming
Of the two, E looked closer to starving. He was whippet-thin, the thick knots of bone that were his wrists and his collarbones were sharp as knives and his face was narrow. It took the smile to soften it. But E wasn't starving, the flash at his wrists said he was thriving, not striving. But he knew how to calculate a day so it began and ended the same way, all right enough. He shouldered quartermaster as easily as he'd shouldered everything else in the dream, and he was prepared to defend the blatant untruth when the door shook and the room soaked in alcoholic sweat.
Point of fact, E knew that too. But he dropped down promptly, knees to floor and crawling under the tight space. He was, if you thought about it, father, uncle, grandfather or brother at a push. There were rarely others. "Angry, is he?" E whispered. His voice didn't carry very far, the careful pitch of somebody who'd learned that lesson the hard way.
He looked at the boy, his eyes bright as beetles in the dark of the underbed. There was probably a spring nestled on top of his elbow and he was all angles like a folded umbrella. E hadn't hidden from anyone in a long time, since he was small and fat and cockier than the boy jammed in under rot. E thought about it, for a minute. Under the flash, his knuckles were rawboned red. He didn't know what it was in the dream, whether it had teeth instead of fists, but he doubted it.
E began to scramble back out from under the bed, and the pugilistic tilt of a body used to getting hit and hitting crouched down by the bedside.