A/N: Nolan owns these guys, except for the cheese man. Joss owns him. Also, now there's a sequel!
"Method."
This was the last time Arthur would ever help anyone with anything, ever. And he was going to make Eames pay.
He'd said he needed some help polishing one of his new characters because the most important part of the writing process was editing, or some shit like that. and Arthur had agreed even though he got the feeling that Eames didn't like him very much, or else he was just a general asshole, because they had a big job coming up next month and the verisimilitude of this character might be the difference between spending the summer at a resort in Bali and rotting away in a Moroccan prison.
It was a Friday afternoon and they'd had maybe a little too much to drink. Cobb said he was going to sit this one out; he'd been a little too shaken at the end of the last job and Arthur knew it was probably something about Mal, but he wasn't going to say anything to him about it. The man had to figure his shit out on his own or else it would never happen. So Cobb supervised them and they hooked into a basic hide-and-seek cityscape. The object was to identify Eames among a large group of projections and see how believable his reactions were. It ought to be easy.
Arthur stood in the lobby of an Indonesian-themed casino where Eames' subconscious had apparently projected a bustling social soiree for maximum obfuscation. An overly-attentive waiter offered him a tray of hors-d'oeuvres and he glanced at it, waved a hand at him, and turned away. There was something about the man's face, though, something that bothered him, and Arthur turned back to him (mousy, he thought, mousy and a little too old) only to find that the tray now held sad-looking slices of American cheese.
"Oh come on," Arthur scoffed at the waiter, "you cannot be serious. You've got to do better than that, man."
At that the waiter turned to him and stared, and so did a couple of passersby and Arthur shivered a little, he always did when this happened. The waiter had the cold dead eyes of a shark. Arthur coughed and said "No, thank you, I'm not hungry," and the waiter and the other two projections stopped staring.
He breathed a sigh of relief and meandered away to the pit.
Arthur settled at a craps table, noticing that the chips had the same design as the place in Vegas where he'd gotten arrested. He smirked.
"Can I blow on your dice?" someone cooed from over his shoulder. Arthur let out a short barking laugh that he managed to turn into something charming when he caught sight of her.
The woman was slight, with an elegantly long neck and an interesting hairstyle that made her look something like a bird. And her eyes were just a little too far apart. Arthur smiled.
"Do I know you?" he asked her. She blushed, which was just adorable, and laughed with a throaty richness that took him completely by surprise. There was something in the tone that was very Eames, but it was still genuinely feminine. He wondered if Eames had a sister.
The woman replied, "I don't think we've ever met," which struck him as funny. Arthur grinned his best grin at her. If the object of the exercise was to see how convincing a forgery she was, he reasoned, this was going to be a piece of cake. He was a master at flirting. And the more realistic the character, the easier it was to forget that he was actually flirting with another dude.
This line of thinking got him as far as hotel room, and it was only then the that the awkwardness started to creep in.
Arthur wondered how far Eames was going to go with this. It wasn't the idea of having sex in a constructed dream that bothered him, because everyone did that. It was the third thing he'd done after learning how the dream process worked. But with this woman it would be crossing a line maybe, since Eames was a coworker, if not an actual friend. It would be bad for business. At least that was what Arthur told himself, up until the point she started kissing him.
She was warm, he thought as he held her by her skinny waist. She was warm and her mouth was soft and she was wearing some vaguely fruit-flavored lip gloss and she exhaled a little sigh that was just lovely and perfect and right. Arthur leaned back against the door and she followed him, and when he played with the hair at the nape of her neck it felt exactly like real hair, and she sighed again into his ear. He wondered with a stab of paranoia if maybe he'd got the wrong person, and this was not Eames at all but some hyper-realistic projection. Or maybe this woman was the memory of an actual human being. He'd seen Mal show up before, he knew it was possible, and the idea of hooking up with Eames' sister or ex-girlfriend or dead wife felt like a violation.
"Penny for your thoughts," she whispered, and pressed into him with her perfect breasts and her bony hips and Arthur just knew she had a great ass under that satiny whatever she was wearing, and he had to do this in the spirit of teamwork because no one wanted to die in a Moroccan prison. As he reached up to unzip her dress, the woman pressed her palm against the front of his trousers and he inhaled sharply. There was something wrong with this, Arthur knew, her hand felt too good like that, too firm, and under the lip gloss and the softness of her neck he caught the scent of some sharp woodsy fragrance that a blonde in a casino would not wear.
She was nibbling on his earlobe and he squinted at the mirror on the bathroom door and it was all her, dress half-undone and his hands fumbling at her, but then she did something with her fingers that made him gasp and in his peripheral vision Arthur saw dark cropped hair and a broad back and an immaculate suit. He shuddered and wrapped his arms around Eames' neck.
He smelled like woodsy cologne and cigarettes and Arthur felt the scrape of stubble on his face and jesus, he was already getting hard when Eames grabbed a handful of his hair and tugged a little, laughing softly. But it wasn't funny anymore, Arthur realized, and just as he was starting to be okay with that Eames bit his lip and broke away from him and laughed and laughed.
"You cocksucker!" Arthur yelled once he woke to Edith Piaf and the ratty apartment. Cobb blinked in confusion but Arthur shoved past him to where Eames was lying on the couch and pulled the needle out of his arm. He tried to take a swing at him but Cobb stopped him, asking "What the hell just happened?"
Arthur growled as Eames stretched luxuriantly, smirking.
"Oh cheer up, princess, wasn't it good for you too?" Cobb snorted at this and let him go; Arthur lunged forward and got a good hit in but missed Eames' nose, which he was trying to break. Eames grabbed his arm and pulled him closer and whispered "Don't worry, I'll make it up to you."
Arthur froze. He then walked with determined calm to the other side of the living room and got a beer from the cooler and refused to let his face betray any emotion. Cobb was cracking up now, as he heard Eames' version of events.
He was going to kill him. Slowly.