Daniel & Eames: dreams Who: Daniel and Eames What: Dreaming collectively Warnings: nada.
The vans were gone now.
The dream clinic had its fatted client-list, an influx of the insomniacs and the desperate, the bored very wealthy housewives and the businessmen who couldn’t dream without a little hand-holding to get them there. Now they had a rush of those who saved to dream, who had toured the city in a van of manufactured sugar-plums and folderols bland enough to appeal to a very broad church. Eames loathed those dreams rather more than any other, darling. He objected in principle to rinsing people who desperately needed the money to keep the lights on, bread on the table, the rent-check in the mail to the landlord and the electric bill from turning red on its way to the breakfast table. He took it personally, which meant, darling, he volunteered.
It was a dangerous proposition, to volunteer. It showed engagement which Eames had determined he hadn’t the least interest in showing. But after the success of the vans, there was a flutter of experimentation with parties. With dreaming in broadcast and after several days of lying in cool, blue light with the pump hissing a new concoction into his veins, Eames drove back in a sleek efficiency of German engineering to the little house in the center of the woods and ate a very expensive steak, drank half a bottle of equally expensive wine and after a cigar, and a period of time spent sitting on the deck beyond the plate-glass windows, looking at nothing, he fell asleep with the shades pulled drawn against the buttery sunshine.
It may have been the dosage. It could have been half a dozen other things besides, darling, but the point was Eames’s walls were cracked. There had been a snake, at one point, a winnowing past steely defences by something wearing the memories of someone he had once known. Eames’s dream ought to have been contained, precise. Boxed in, but it was sticky and thready and fulsome as cotton candy twined over a paper cup.
The dream, what dream it was, was a house. It was a particular kind of house with pebble-dashing peculiar to the sort of building thrown up cheaply in the sixties and seventies, a drab brown with a dull and ugly roof and a squat sort of feeling to it. The street outside, because the man standing there was stood, looking at the house head-on, was empty but it echoed with the sound of people, activity that ought really to have filled it. There was the slap of a football along tired tarmac and the shouts and hoots of kids playing. There was the sound of a car, and the boisterous teenage cat-calls of boys crossing the divide into men with an aimlessness that was no jobs, and no expectations on the horizon.
The man in the street stood beneath the arch of a lamppost. It was daylight, verging on dusk and a grim sort of gray to the day that threatened thin rain, spitting in the next minute or two.
A swing-set, in a scrubby patch of tarmac fenced off to the side, was idly swinging. The man wore the kind of shoes that cost as much as the house probably did yearly in rent and he was smoking a cigar.
Daniel stood in the middle of the street. Being neither of imposing stature nor of intense purpose, he did so languidly, with both ease and confidence. It was a dream, and he was dressed in the fine attention of his youth: a brushed coat of fine forest green, with shoulders tapered down and collar high at the back of the neck. It opened at the center of his waist, displaying a fabric lining embroidered with tiny, elegant pink florals and green buds. He wore a matching top hat brushed to a shine, a neckcloth of linen wrapped in black, and he carried a gold-topped walking stick that he most certainly did not need to walk. Daniel was a great believer in the arts, in adventure, in the fine point of a pen and the ping of a note, but he didn't create any of those things himself. By contrast, then, he was an experiencer, a taster, a creature that benefited from the passions of others, offering only his attention and his appreciation (in varying forms) in return.
He unleashed this rapt characteristic upon his surroundings. A hard jawline, shaven clean and brushing the linen, rotated over his shoulder as he took in the inoffensive brownstones without comprehension. They were no more familiar to him than the sound of the cars, or the bounce of modern vinyl and leather. Daniel looked down under his patent shoes, leather trimmed just for the shape of his toes where they tucked in beyond the space of his boot, and inspected the gray paved road.
And then he looked up. Perhaps to another, the dusk would be uninteresting and unassuming. The gray purple would be simply disappointing, the brightness of spring and potential coming to and end. But the sun was still there, fading as it was under the pressure of petrichor, and he felt it. Paying no mind to his position in the exact center of the ghostly road, he shifted his stick to the opposite hand in a gesture of long practice, and tipped his hat first back, and then off, letting it swing in the cage of his fingers as he put his head back and lifted his eyes skyward. The dusk glinted around him, and he stared into it until his eyes watered.
Then it began to rain, and he slowly lowered his chin. His expression was not to be described. He put on his hat, deftly, slowly. The stick shifted back to his right hand. He began to walk toward the man under the lamppost. The lanquidity was gone, though the grace was not. When he was in distance, he popped the stick up in his grasp perhaps two inches, and brought it in an arch up to the brim of his hat, not quite touching, but indicating it, as if the stick were a hand and the hand about to doff the whole thing, in an antique greeting ages gone.
The sun would not fade. This moment was teetering on the cusp, an imprecise fraction of time frozen and installed in memory. The daylight was not important to Eames, whose dream it was and so it became a fixed point underneath the roil of memory and dream as they lazily sloped and twined around one another with only the backdrop to navigate by. The rain came, a slithering sort of damp that hardly seemed worth an umbrella but was wet all the same.
Eames, who had the cigar, stood within rain that was as familiar, darling, as the crop of houses and the scrubby grass. His shirt was cotton of a thick, satiny weave that soaked up damp like a sponge and held it in a darkening of color from a lavender to a deeper, more saturated mauve. He was himself, darling, because Eames even dreaming this deeply did not go far enough back to peel off layers of himself, epidermis like orange peel to get to the heart of whatever moment this dream held cupped within it. But he was dreaming deeply enough that he ought to have had alarms, shutters, the dream clipped off sharply at source and the landscape abruptly washed out. But he didn’t. The snake, you see, darling. Instead the dream held Daniel as carefully as an egg, with a shell that could shatter under sustained pressure.
He saw the man. Eames who had the cigar in his fingers and dropped it in a terrible display of butterfingers as he did. This was not his dream and he knew that instantly. Eames, darling, if we’re sharing secrets, liked history. He liked it in brief stints, in audiobooks listened to inside that German car. He liked the hard, sharp parts of history that sent men over battlefields and shaped empires and he liked the secrets unearthed through the erosion time performed on history. But he couldn’t have told you what period Daniel was from. He hadn’t the foggiest, he knew it was old, and he knew (with the sharp precision that was noticing fabric, and angles, and carriage and the completeness of this package) that it was authentic.
He waited until the man cleared close enough and then Eames moved. Sleekly. It was an economical series of motions and he had reached for Daniel’s hand - the one on the stick - with every intention of holding his wrist so he could make no use of the stick while still being held still.
“Hello, darling.” Eames was pure drawl. It was knee-jerk, stood here in front of a row of houses that were common as muck, but he was cut-glass perfect and neutrally expensive in voice. Close-to, because Eames was close-to by then, brilliant blue eyes and a sharp look on his face that said motion in any direction suddenly at that point would be a very bad idea indeed, “What are you up to? This is my home, not yours.” The question was very soft, and very casual and he smiled, gently.
The daylight was everything to a vampire, who had not felt it in hundreds of years. He basked in it, and though the dream was without the real texture of reality (and oh, he knew the difference) he could feel the warmth, the implication of humanity and normality. It made his lizard brain relaxed, even empathic, and most suited to meeting new acquaintances on the premise of favor. He meandered through the rain, and Daniel's self-image and function of self was thoroughly defined, making his interaction with Eames' reality a totality. The droplets of rain left divots of black in his green velvet jacket, and drops sparkled in his hair before slicking it to ebony. His pale skin was flushed with the moisture, and his eyes were bright in the fresh smell of Bond Street cologne.
Daniel inhaled, thinking to scent both cigar and man. He did not struggle against the restriction of grip, but held his end of the stick as Eames held his. Daniel looked down between them at the dropped cigar, expecting to see it sputtering in growing puddles, and then looked back up, into Eames' face. "How do you do, my good man," Daniel said, politely. He smiled at the big man, who looked like a laborer to his ancient eye. The question seemed to surprise him.
Daniel's eyebrows went up. He looked to either side on the empty street, looking for the sources of echoes, but they were long gone, or not there to begin with. "I haven't the slightest. I've never been here before. Quite remarkable." His voice trailed off, reflective. Remembering himself, he glanced back at Eames, and then gave his stick a little tug, to reappropriate it back under his arm. He coughed, as if to remind Eames of the polite way one could be about it without more embarrassment to either party.
The street was poor as muck. The men who lived here had jobs, if they had jobs, that took sweat. Eames wouldn’t have taken it at all personally to be measured on the spread of shoulders and height, darling. There was, in the echoes and the dimming sunlight no room for glitter, for effect. Even in a dream, and Eames was not nearly as skilled with texture as his compatriots. He layered, darling, but he layered in a deliberate way and this was Eames dreaming for himself instead of for anyone else.
The man had waded in. Eames took in a breath that seemed to expand him, chest and shoulders outward as if bracing against onslaught and the man’s greeting was a buffer. A surprising one. Eames’s hand on the stick went if not slack then at least not as steely. Vaughn, darling, had known she was in the clutches of his dream and had twined about it as if her fingers were already sticky with it. The dream cleaved to the man, but it did not cleave to him. It held him, dabbling rain on his shoulders.
“No, darling. You wouldn’t. They’re all gone these days.” Eames let the stick go, and smiled. It was utterly shameless, that smile. It entirely ignored the fact he’d held the man still by virtue of the tool. Eames didn’t feel badly. This was his dream, he simply had a passenger. How he had a passenger he didn’t know, but the dream held him as fast as it held Daniel and that was the snake and the crack or the substance that had dripped into his veins, too.
“Who are you, darling?”
Daniel tugged a couple more times, more amused than annoyed and freed the stick. He tucked it under his arm and set one hip to the side, the shine of the knob of the stick just visible in the crook of his elbow. It glinted when his eyes glinted.
"I wouldn't what," he asked, confused, eying the man doubtfully for the first time, and wondering if it was only a conversation of nonsense that he was in for. Grown men didn't call other grown men 'darling' except in very specific situations. Daniel's eyebrows quirked back toward his ears in total amusement, but he didn't mention it yet otherwise.
"Daniel Webster, Lord Everly. At your service." He said it without elaboration, without even looking at Eames' face to see how the man took the title, which was a courtesy title (for your education) and meant virtually nothing. If you spoke to his peers (no pun intended), they would say by question of birth, it probably meant even less. None of them were there, however, and the man who introduced himself did so without thinking. He was occupied with the picture of brownstone to his left, the way the bricks fit together, and his expression was reflective. The deliberate layers were something he saw, but he didn't know what he saw.
Eames liked names. They reminded him of sweet wrappers, the shiny colored kind that came in twists around chocolate in tins at Christmas. They could be swapped far too easily to be taken firmly as handholds on someone but people invested so much in them. It was delightful. He ignored the stick the minute he’d decided to let it go. But he marked the gleam in the stranger’s eyes. Eames, darling, had no shame about using dream as a web to trap shadows and a little of Daniel’s mannerisms were already caught in that place between memory, instinct and dream.
“You wouldn’t know the street, darling. Or the place. Not your kind of affair, I’ll bet.” Eames had no problem with the word darling, it flecked in the back of his throat in a rough coat of borderline London estuary. In his dreams, darling, Eames had no need of pinning himself to class for the duration of a conversation. He wasn’t going to bugger the man in the street of small squat houses, not even if he asked nicely.
The gentry liked to write themselves down in books. Peerages and robes and scandals, neatly wrapped in newspaper. Eames hadn’t memorized all the titles under the sun, he didn’t need to. A peerage rarely ran much to money anymore. And money was what it took for private dreaming. He knew it wasn’t Earl something, which would have been grander and it wasn’t a Lord of a county or part of the country that was rich and green. No, darling. That title meant less than a sailor’s fuck but he had the name wrapped up in the title.
He was unreadable. There was a hovering smile, one tied politely around a glint of his own that was pure mischief. A fraction too long of a second, “Are you, darling? How nice for me.”
There was a ripple and a shimmer, like light off the surface of a bubble and the dream slid sideways. A balcony, very large and wide like a courtyard, just off a hall that held the residue of a birthday or celebration, one very grand and old. There was music playing, strings over brass and the sunshine was old and very yellow, a late summer’s evening.
Eames smiled into Daniel’s eyes. “More your thing, I should think.”
Daniel noticed that a name was not offered in return for his own, a breach of etiquette in the extreme, and his chin ticked sideways about half an inch before his eyelids closed ever so slightly, a shutter on the glint and his thoughts. Some of that early goodwill was draining away quickly, perhaps in the face of the other man's expression, which was constructed and unreadable without honesty. Daniel was not afraid, or even angry, in the face of this lack of reaction, but he felt a certain disappointment. The spuriousness of the conversation was vanishing rapidly, and the immediate response of the other man, even be it thoughtless confrontation, was the only honest thing that had happened since that arrival.
Daniel did not like the new place. There was music, of course, and Daniel liked music. In fact, the pretty private balcony was there as if designed for him, which was why he didn't like it. It felt unreal. A dream constructed for himself. There was no foreignness to it. He might have made such a dream for himself, and it would have been far better with his sticky memories and ugly realities. Yes, the echoing street would have been much better.
The dark eyes did not smile back. "Do you?" he said, quite neutrally. He dropped the stick from the curve of his arm, so when he turned away he would not hit his companion with it. Only the sunshine was an easy sell here, warm and full and without comparison. Daniel put his back to the hall, where the false concerto might be playing, and he put his face up to the sky with his eyes closed.
Daniel thought of the many neighborhoods into which he had not been welcome. He did not resent it; he knew, even then, that his class did not tie him to the privilege of any location he chose, certain Parisian streets coming immediately to mind, where clean shoes were unusual to the point of insulting. But at least the brick neighborhood had been real. It did not need him there. The concert hall did. He ignored it.
Eames knew within seconds that the concert hall did not resonate. He had intended it as a plucked string, a note to hold in a hollow place with something of pleasure tied to it. The place was real, darling because Eames had wandered through it for a wedding once. Some terrific occasion, where he had discarded his neck-tie and ruined the line of an excellent suit by putting his hands in his pockets. But it did not resonate with Daniel Webster, Lord Everly and Eames’s face held the reality of someone who had spun a creation from molten sugar only for it to ooze before it had caused any pleasure.
“I’m very wrong,” Eames observed in a voice a little throaty and dry-humored. The sunshine went down like a whore in a ship full of sailors, he could see that much, darling. But the venue didn’t, and Eames observed Daniel with a look that was both sharply observant and a degree of wistful: he didn’t often get it wrong. He wasn’t taking Daniel back to the street. It was personal. It was a cracked shard in the wall and Daniel, Lord Everly wasn’t a wriggling asp or a dream of a woman he had once known very pleasant memories of.
The heat rippled. It leaked, spiralling warmer and warmer and the sunshine dripped gold onto all surfaces. The sound rushed in to replace the music: a cacophony of people talking, shouting, yelling, laughing, scooters hooting, the buzz of motor-vehicles, a sound-system blaring through a play-list and the heat baked the back of the neck until the skin felt tender.
It was another balcony, but this one was small and leaned over the outskirts of the street market that was lively with people. Mumbai was clotted with people if you leaned over too far, and the balcony doors were open, the screens pushed back and it opened onto a small apartment made up of two rooms: an obvious sitting room with a padded bench, and a cushioned window seat and a pile of similar soft furnishings thrown about on the floor; and the next divided from the first by a wooden screen and a gauze curtain. The latter, smaller very obviously contained a bed and not much else. There were possessions scattered about. Eames was not and had never been a tidy man. There were a series of half-drunk water glasses, cups of tea on various surfaces, and a folded newspaper tossed onto the cushions of the bench. There were very few books: a very slim volume sitting on a teak shelf alongside a set of carved animals that would, if you looked, darling, prove to be Rudyard Kipling and a couple of other thicker books stacked neatly by the foot of the bench and one by the bed. There was however, a notebook tossed haphazardly on a small table that held an empty, very pretty stained-glass vase and an apple. There was music playing in here, very different from the music out there. It was quiet and reflective laid over the top.
The bedroom, darling, was a mess. Clothes and so on. It wasn’t the echoing street but nor was it impersonal. The rooms haunted Eames’ dreams not simply because he could remember them like breathing but because they were probably the closest to home he remembered feeling.
He stood on the balcony in the heat of Indian sunshine and breathed deeply. The inhale was memory, a paucity compared to the real thing. He didn’t turn his head or look at what Daniel made of his landscape, Eames didn’t think, darling he could stand it.
“Eames.” Said the man. “This is mine, darling. If you’re going to be difficult about it, perhaps tell me what you want, next time.” Lazy, and with good humor poured into the statement like caramel.
"I might have said," Daniel replied politely, "had you asked." He did not have the cane anymore, nor the hat, and there was a rustle of thin leaves as he dislodged the newspaper on the bench to take its place. He sighed as he sat, the speed slow and unhurried, the lick of his tongue against the back of his teeth finishing the sound one of satisfaction as Debussy echoed chords into a cherished space. "Delighted," he said, nodding, when Eames introduced himself.
The place was loud, and Daniel came from a world in which music was always associated with the presence of musicians and instruments, so most of his initial attention was to find the source of the quiet strains, which he did quickly enough. Then he concentrated on the crowd outside the window, an alien horde full of color and busy life. There was no antagonism to the place, the screech of bus brakes, the rattle of conversation and the smell of saffron from the food carts. It looked like foreign mayhem to him, and he was glad not to be out in it. This inner sanctum was better.
He spread his feet a little, nudging a fallen coat that was on the floor with one fitted shoe. His costume was entirely different now; in the sticky haze of the Indian air he was a dab of roughened indigo blue, which came from a coat with wide, flapping lapels and poorly-carved wood buttons. There were dried bloodstains on the cuffs and collar of the old coat, utterly at odds with the weather. It had been washed many times with harsh soap, as had his undyed shirt, which hung open under a loose handkerchief-like draping around his neck. A shapeless rust-colored hat poked out of one of his pockets.
He was unshaven and his hair was astonishingly long, curling in cherubic enthusiasm to stick to the sides of his neck and over his shoulders. The effect was to make him look much younger despite the facial hair. His dark eyes were more tired and grim than before, but peaceful, even sublime, in the unwavering sunshine. He looked like an ink print out of A Tale of Two Cities: Sydney Carton at the guillotine, the martyr resigned. He leaned forward, plucked the notebook off the table, and opened it on his crossed knee. "This feels better," he said, of the place.
Eames could feel Daniel as much as he could hear him with his back turned. That was the room, darling. The yield for someone else’s presence, ribboning like treacle rolling from the back of a spoon. He looked out on a sky saturated beyond blue that was ordinarily yellowed with smog squinting into the strong sunshine. The air was glutted with moisture and heat and Eames wore linen; a salmon pink shirt and cream colored pants and looked as comfortable swimming in the Indian heat as he did in the street and in the concert hall. He put his back to the window and stepped into his own inner-room with feet that were startlingly bare under the folds of expensive woven.
“I rarely ask, darling.” There was no apology in his voice. Eames didn’t think of the place as loud and the moment the shutters were slid closed on the balcony’s sun-drenched stone, the room’s own quiet and studied contemplation expanded to fill the space: dreams, darling, abhorred vacuums in an utter denial of physics. The street-noise was faint, despite the open windows and the tumult below.
Eames contemplated his guest. No idea on the costume. He clearly had never looked at an ink-print out of a Tale of Two Cities: he could probably replicate the garb but with the imprecision of an echo rather than a good forgery. Eames hadn’t the inclination to mimic. He was very solidly himself in his own dream, perhaps here he had the swarthiness of long afternoons sitting in thick sunshine. His complexion had the color of weak tea. He narrowed in on the differences he could discern in the traveller; the thick tumble of hair and the cast of Daniel’s eyes.
“Where are you from? Sticky fingers, darling.” Eames’s voice was lazy but it brimmed with something under the surface. He didn’t snatch at the notebook. Leafed open, the handwriting he knew from where he stood on the threshold, would be unreadable to most. It was labored, cursive that strained and bilged in places, cramped and tight in others. It was effortful and the sentences such as they were, were tight and short and the hand heavy and black. It was notation, a series of words that would, if put together with a memory, conjure a visual image. A woman conjured by the slant of her neck, the cast of her hand, the blue glass beads she played with between her fingers. A man, by his short dry cough.
Everything in the book was visual, darling. That was the only reason Eames would write anything down.
“Nosy, aren’t you?” It was almost pleased.
It wasn't an apology that Daniel was looking for, nor was he even certain what the offense had been, and Eames might even have been lowered in his opinion if the man had offered one. He smiled through the creases in several days' of beard at the other man, a small smile but one that was there nevertheless. "The place is better," he repeated. "I have never been here. We are in the east?" The lilt of his voice was in question, but he didn't really have the curiosity to fuel it. It seemed to be a noise to fill the space, to allow Eames to do the same if he chose. Daniel had to know that he was not actually where he was sitting, because he drew one finger around the rough surface of a coat button and viewed it with sober familiarity before transferring his attention to the notebook.
He turned a page, intrigued by the short, impenetrable descriptions. He asked no questions about them, however. Instead he answered Eames: "London, Paris. Milan. Everywhere, nowhere. Why do you ask?" He didn't think the answer particularly mattered, and that Eames' question was not unlike his own a moment ago. Nothing in the space was real except each man to themselves, and Daniel didn't hasten to either conversation or action as he sat there.
Daniel looked up from the notebook to Eames. He pondered him in return, searching what memory was available to him to try to place him. Nothing came to mind. Eames was a stranger in a strange land, rough and wide in his silhouette and keen in his gaze. The closest Daniel could come was a man and his brother he had met in Ireland, in his mother's town. They had told him she was gone, over ale. They'd been somewhat kind about it, and it put Eames in a good place in Daniel's disjointed mind. There was a lot of damage there, and his appearance made that obvious. He pushed his hand through the mess of his hair at the base of his neck.
Daniel put the notebook back on the table. "Are you nosy?
No, Daniel had never been here before. There were a scarce number of people who had been in this environment aside from Eames and even fewer who had dreamed it with him. They could be counted on one hand. Eames offered impressions, suggestions of the truth when he trod on the threshold of other people’s dreams. This one was saturated, too impregnated with memory to be anything less than a facsimile of truth. Eames prowled. That was the only word for it, the pacing of his own space but it was more restful than that. It was like rubbing a finger along the familiar to soothe.
“We’re in India, darling.” His voice was thick and throaty, he said the word with care and cultivation, as if it were the conclusion to a joke or a story woven to climax. “Mumbai to be precise. Perhaps you call it Bombay.” He watched Daniel fiddle with his button and study it with sober intent, and god knows where the wardrobe came from, but it was important.
“London, perhaps. You don’t sound like any Londoner I’ve heard but I expect you’re a,” here he hissed in a breath, the parlayance common to the tradesmen the world over, the inhale before a costly approximation. Eames’s cheeks flexed with the smile, it was rather warmer. “Good couple of hundred out of date for me.”
He turned to the little kitchen, an enameled kettle that Eames flicked the stove for, unconcerned and unhurried. Tea, darling, and he opened a little gilted tin and inhaled on the remembrance of spiced chai, warm and crumbling in the air. Eames closed his eyes to do it, and it was as close as a dream could take you to sensation.
He laughed. It was a rumble in the back of his throat, “Yes, darling. Incredibly.” There wasn’t much purchase on Eames. He circled now, around the bench as the kettle throttled on the stove, and sat in the opposite chair to the bench, hitching the linen of his trousers at the thighs to do so, in what looked like an unconscious gesture to accommodate breadth and tailoring. Eames looked at Daniel under the thatch of his own brow. In the golden, steeped-tea light, Eames was gold and blue and cream, the light fell thick across his face in stripes.
“Are you here because she was?” This he wanted to know, even if the kettle began to judder.
Daniel, accustomed to being in his own space and used to being angry and uncomfortable in others’, watched Eames pace with bemused interest. He was not angry, nor did he feel discomfort outside of his territory. Eames did not make him feel hostile, hungry, or anxious, and the noises outside were just that, noises. The light filtered into the pale gauze on the windows, and Daniel felt it like a very old, blind cat, and was content. The only thing he did not like was the taste of Parisian mud and glass in the back of his mouth; it must come with the costume.
The old vampire smiled at the man. “I did live in London for a time, though not as long as you might think. We had a country estate that I was gone from as soon as I could hire horses, and from there Europe; though never this far south. I heard nothing of their wine, and did not care to bother with the weather.” He smiled again at the triviality of youth, and circled a blunt pale finger around the wooden button once more.
“All intelligent people,” Daniel said, “are nosy. If they are not inquisitive about the business of their neighbors, than they are dull, and enjoy dullness.” This sounded like something from a tea room those hundreds of years ago.
Daniel arched a dark eyebrow. Dried blood chipped from the hairs. “She? Who is she?” His curiosity was genuine.
Eames was rarely angry or uncomfortable in other people’s spaces. Forger, not an architect but a place held fragments and crumbs of a person, like powder residue, make-up smeared on a pillow-case. He would ordinarily have liked to be alone, or with someone highly specific, or someone picked up temporarily for a night in a bar who would leave when Eames felt like tossing them out of the place. It was personal, this space. It had indentations where memory had pressed its fingers too long and left the dream softened, yielding in places. He disliked, rather a lot, Daniel sitting in dirt on his sofa but the dirt probably was embedded in the clothes. Eames liked the clothes not at all.
“You’re old, darling.” Eames rose again, only to attend to the tea. He spoke matter-of-factly, but with a glean of interest like a sunbeam. “Why did you throw over the country estate? Do you not like money?” He watched the button, not out of particular interest but because the gesture suggested the button had an importance its elderly state did not recommend itself for.
He fussed with the tea. Eames liked it a particular way. He wouldn’t ever say so - well, not to people he didn’t have the familiarity with to understand how Eames liked his tea - but he was particular and he took care now. It steeped, and it filled the air with the thickening cloud of spices, and Eames laughed at the piece of prosaic wisdom from the very dirty man speckled with blood sitting on his sofa.
“And you’re not dull, darling? Are you going to be filthy the whole time you’re here? You might leave a mark,” Eames, pristine in cream stood with a cup of tea in his hands and a wrinkle of concern in his forehead.
“She. Vaughn. A dreamer, like me.” He had no concern in the dream and it showed.
It was not quite dirt in that long jacket. It was age, or mud, smeared into the threads and soaked there will blood and sweat and fear. The creature inside the jacket seemed an incredible anomaly, as if someone crazed and mad belonged under the buttons, and not the sedate English gentleman that regarded Eames from over the lapels. "I am old," he agreed. "The estate was not mine, until my grandfather died, and by then I was dead too, and forgot about it until it was too late to go back." His tone was conversational. Daniel was not afraid in the dream, either.
Daniel watched the tea with enraptured interest. It was spicier than he expected, as he was accustomed to a black so prevalent that it was the definition of tea more than the exotic greens or delicate reds. "Money has never been a concern for me." He was not ashamed of it, but presented the fact. Daniel knew, from his experience in the dusky neighborhood and from the broad edge of Eames' tongue, that he was not in like company. He did not apologize, nor expect Eames to do so. This was rather modern of him.
Daniel frowned when he was not presented with his own cup, but did not resent it or grow angered the way he had over the opera house. "I do not know who she is," he said, shrugging. He fingered the cuff of the stained coat, lightly at first and then with increasing pressure. Clingy. "It seems so. I apologize." It was a little stiff, the apology.
Eames only held the cup. The tea was made to his own precise liking, but he moved now, across the room with the slow slink of a leonine creature and held it out. It would have been hard not to, darling, given the guest’s attention was poured into the cup as much as the faint spice of chai. Old he had no doubt. The precision of whether the coat was dirty, or mired in blood or age didn’t exactly matter to Eames. He cared only that it was abjectly ugly, beyond the vague suggestion of who Daniel was in wearing it. It was ugly, and it was an affront to his eyes in the cupped-pearl of the Indian rooms, and he thought of offering something - hedonistically expensive linen, perhaps - in exchange for tossing the jacket over the side of the window.
“You’re dead, are you, darling?” Eames circled back to the kettle and the second of two cups. They were cups, the delicacy of china on a flat saucer. They were rather plain, as cups-and-saucers went, but they were such. Eames liked solid tea in a mug, brewed thick and dark and he liked chai to darken the sides of a bone-china cup. “I’ve a lot of money as it happens.” There was no affront, rather a look of huge amusement on Eames’ face as he returned with his own cup, and sat. He occupied space without sprawling, and he studied Daniel’s face without bothering to hide it.
“She’s a dreamer. By trade. Dead, probably. I think they all are, apart from me.” Eames blew on his tea gently, until it ruffled like a tide. “If you’re here, darling, it’s my fault. I block most of you out.”
Daniel didn't hesitate in taking the cup, and his smile was serenely delighted, though not really grateful, as if Eames' delay in handing the thing over was just happenstance. Like destiny was just going to hand it all over eventually someday. Yet after he had it, he curled his fingers all the way around the cup, first his right hand, and then left, until the cup was nearly invisible in the square lines of his knuckles and fingertips. He sniffed at the chai, savoring the steam first. "It smells like a pastry." Then he sipped, and seemed surprised at the lack of sugar, and also the solidarity and subtlety of flavor in this, a non-reality.
He did not answer the question about being dead, nor did he feel like he needed to. Daniel felt no particular surprise at the information that Eames was well off in this world, nor any particular judgment to the reverse. It was simply news, the carrying-on of conversation. "From what trade, sir?"
There was much to be learned from Daniel's face in this state. He was distracted by the tea, and relaxed. His profile was weary instead of hardened, brows stained and heavy over eyes very young and unlined. There was a bizarrely youthful aimlessness to him, as if the cheap whitewash, old blood and graveyard mud (if that was what it was) clinging to his old coat was a shell lately cracked. "Then," he said, "I will soon wake up." He sipped.
He would. It was an inevitability, as was the moment that the dream would stretch too far around the presence of another and pop like a soap-bubble. But in the here and now, darling, Daniel’s delight in tea was observable, like a particularly fanciful artwork propped up in an odd corner as a surprise. It was an effective response to what was layered and layered memory, a millefeuille of sensation that had the softened resonance of paper put in direct sunlight until it was all warm gold and faded. Here, in the underneath, Eames understood the crack, darling. He understood the flinch in walls, the wriggled, serpentine flash of silver. Here, in dreamed India, he was closer to the courtyard. It was at once further under than the courtyard and closer up than the street in an unmentionable part of the UK, like the pages of book eaten through by worm.
Under here, darling, Eames understood how the underneath had altered. It had shaped irreversibly, or in such a way it could not be unbuilt or made, skin reforming where there was open wound. It took stitches.
He smiled. It was warm, naughty humor worn as candidly and as comfortably as if he’d stretched out, toed off both shoes and made himself languid. He was watching Daniel effectively, making a study underneath sandy lashes as he appeared to regard the surface of the chai and instead catalogued the difference relaxation made to the man. It was a rum piece of theater.
“Dreaming, darling,” he said gently. Trades, as they went, and he didn’t think Daniel in his coat would know it well. “That’s how I made my money. I’m rolling in it.” He looked at Daniel, assessing. “If you want to finish your cup you’re going to need to keep still.” There was a faint strain around the blue eyes: concentration. The bubble was wavering. And then, gently it burst.