So... There are a lot of things I have to say about this, so I hope I can remember them. I used to frequent the kinkmeme, and this was a response to a prompt from a long, long time ago. It's been filled, I think, multiple times. I had intended to write more, I know, but I don't remember what, exactly. I opened this document out of curiosity today and decided it was good as is. But anyway, it's a sort of crossover with Mysterious Skin in that Arthur and Neil are the same person. The prompt asked (I think) for Eric Preston (from Mysterious Skin) to be a mark for the team, and for this to lead to a discovery of Arthur's former life.
It's a bit slashy (some cuddling) but nothing explicit.
(Also, if anyone out there knows me from the Walking Dead fandom and is wondering where I disappeared to, sorry! I actually did start a few Walking Dead fics, and then I got into Supernatural... I haven't necessarily given it up yet! Feel free to message me!)
A long time ago, Arthur wasn't Arthur. Arthur used to be a boy named Neil, who had blue eyes and a Southern American accent and messy hair. He used to know this girl named Wendy, and this boy named Eric, and another boy named Brian. He used to be a teenage prostitute, a rent boy, and he used to be a molestation victim.
But he isn't Neil anymore. He's Arthur, brilliant, dangerous Arthur, who is still a criminal, but a better one, who makes enough money to buy beautiful, expensive suits and travel a lot. He is the best at what he does.
He likes to pretend Neil is dead, that there's nothing left of that damaged creature left in him, but it's not really true. He doesn't think about his old Little League coach very often, but everything that ever happened to Neil happened to Arthur, too. Try as he might to tamp down all the fucked-up thoughts and fears that come from Neil, he just can't do it. He puts in contacts every morning to hide blue eyes. He always locks the bathroom door tight before he showers. He fucking hates those little boxes of cereal, especially the Froot Loops. He's never been in a real relationship.
Arthur is Neil.
The best he can do is keep pretending, and to make sure no one ever finds out.
"The mark is an employee of Andric Industries," Cobb announces absently, looking down at the file in his hands. "He's pretty new to the business, but he's good, and he's on his way to the top. Andric has pretty much taken him under his wing. Gordon Kundera, Andric's business rival, wants us to get in his head. He wants us to see if we can extract any business secrets—or, just as good, any personal secrets that he might be able to exploit to get the mark on his side."
"So, pretty much the standard," Eames muses.
"Exactly. Eames, once we find something, we can possibly have you forge someone close to him. We'll have to see once we have some more information. Ariadne," Cobb begins to scan through the file, "I've got his hometown in here somewhere. We may or may not decide to use it in the dream, but just in case, it would be good for you to get a head start… Ah, here it is. Hutchinson, Kansas."
Arthur chokes on his coffee, spilling some out of the cup and down his front, spluttering as the hot liquid sprays out of his mouth and soaks through his shirt.
"Whoa, Arthur, you okay?" Ariadne asks, placing a hand on his shoulder from her seat next to him in an attempt to steady him.
Arthur wipes his face with his sleeve, holding his arms curved out in front of him and away from his wet torso. "Sorry," he mumbles, setting his cup down gingerly on the desk behind him. "Shit, sorry. Keep going, I'm just going to get some napkins…"
As he walks over to the small kitchenette on the other side of the room, he keeps a close ear on Cobb's voice. He knows it's just a coincidence; Hutchinson is a small town, but he left there years ago.
"So, tell us more about the mark. What have you got?" Eames asks casually.
"He's twenty-nine years old," says Dom, and Arthur's stomach drops into his feet. He keeps dabbing his stomach gingerly with the napkin, giving nothing away. The mark is only about a year younger than he is. There's no way in hell they didn't know each other, at least as acquaintances.
"Name's Eric Preston."
"Fuck," Arthur bites out, abandoning his futile task to lean heavily on the counter with both hands. Everything goes silent behind him.
"Sorry," he tells them without turning around, voice thick. "It's not coming out."
He can't stay here. Quickly, he retreats to the bathroom and locks the door, and then he turns the taps on the sink so he can't hear anything but the rushing water. He sticks his hands in, lets the water soak his fingers and collect in his palms. He splashes it on his face; it cools his suddenly hot skin.
Eric fucking Preston.
When he was raped and beaten, that Christmas Eve twelve or so years ago, at first, he was devastated—to an extent. He never really understood, even with the dread that settled deeper into him with every fucked-up sexual encounter he had in the city, that something like that could happen to him. He was shocked, and that was the driving force behind his emotional state the morning after—when he woke up on the cold ground, taking the subway back to his and Wendy's apartment, sobbing on the bathroom floor. But he went home, and seeing his mom and Eric had soothed him. He sank himself into familiarity—the familiarity of his home, yes, but also of Coach's house, of Brian, sick and disgusting as it was—and lied about what happened, and he could almost just wave it off, pretend that it didn't mean anything or that it didn't happen or whatever.
It all came crashing down on him when he went back to New York. It killed him, to be in that dark, grey city that once held so much excitement and promise and was now just dangerous. What had happened to him there was essentially the same as what Coach had done to him when he was a child, but at the same time, it felt monumentally different. Neil knew that what had happened to him when he was a kid was wrong and perverted, and not love, and not okay, but he couldn't help the way it had made him feel, back then. He had been special. And now, it was a part of him that he couldn't get rid of.
But this was different. He'd been manhandled, abused, raped upside-down in a running shower so he could barely breathe and beaten with a shampoo bottle and called a slut, and he was no longer in control of anything. He'd been so fucking cocky because all the shitheads in Kansas who bought him were so fucking vanilla, and hey, he was getting paid to get off. And then he thought, just one more John, it'll be fine.
So, he went back to New York and everything fell the fuck apart. He stopped writing to Eric, didn't talk much to Wendy, never called his mother. He quit work at the sandwich shop and did drugs and kept whoring himself out, because he needed the money and didn't know how to stop, and honestly, he wanted so much to not give a shit.
And one day, a small team of dreamsharers paid him more money than he'd ever seen in his life to watch over their sleeping bodies as they performed an extraction in an abandoned building. And one of them, for whatever reason, looked at him for a long time, scrutinized him, asked him if he wanted to join them, to learn what they do.
Desperate, unable to continue on like he was for much longer, he said yes.
After he became Arthur, when he was skilled in this sort of crime, he erased every trace of Neil's existence. That first small team he'd ever had contact with—the only people who knew who Arthur was before—had been killed by an angry client three years after his induction into dreamshare.
Neil, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.
And Arthur, unlike Neil, is competent enough to handle himself in dangerous situations. He is no longer afraid of the men who come after him in the night—because they're coming for a different reason, now.
Arthur doesn't want to admit it, but he is still afraid of the same things he was back then. Sitting in this bathroom, remembering the things that happened to him, he is shaking. Thinking about Eric, about having to go into Eric's mind, see him again—he doesn't think there's a way. He doesn't think he can.
And, dear god, what if Eric recognizes him? What if Dom and Eames and Ariadne find out what he used to be?
Slowly, Arthur turns the taps off and dries his face and hands.
Back out in the main part of the warehouse, Ariadne asks him if he is all right. He smiles at her, a decent approximation of a real, genuine expression, and says lightly, "Yeah. The shirt's ruined, though. I have another in my desk."
He changes, and then he listens to Dom give what remains of his spiel, and then he gets to work. The research is not difficult; none of the paperwork on Eric is hidden or destroyed (not like Neil's), and he knows what to look for, where to find it. He knows there is no longer any paper trail that will reveal his role in Eric's life, so he doesn't have to concentrate on filtering out anything incriminating.
So while he's pulling up files, he uses most of his brainpower to think up a plan of action. He can't just quit the job—too suspicious. He has to think of a foolproof reason just to not go down into the dream, where Eric will surely recognize him.
"We'll need a lookout, Dom," he says later, after he's pulled up enough information at least for a preliminary brainstorming session. "Andric's not fucking around. He keeps tabs on all of his most important associates, and the mark is definitely a top priority. There's a good chance we'll be found out before we can finish the job."
Arthur is the most logical choice to stay out of the dream, and Dom already knows it. Eames's talents would be wasted in the waking world, Cobb is the extractor, and it would be too dangerous for Ariadne.
This is a regular part of Arthur's job. He is precise and deadly and will not fail. He doesn't even have to volunteer.
It's very odd, Arthur thinks, that Eric Preston has shown back up in his life in such a corporate setting. He remembers the piercings, the dyed streaks in his hair, black lipstick.
There is no real explanation that he can find for this change—the change itself is documented, but there's no event that he can dig up that caused it. Just after Arthur got into dreamshare and dropped off the map, Eric Preston moved to New York and lived with Wendy. He did nothing in particular for a while. Two years later, he enrolled in community college. After that, he transferred into some prestigious business school. He's been in low-level positions since he graduated, got picked up by Andric a year ago.
Seeing his photo is unnerving. He gels his curly, dark hair back. The holes in his ears have closed up. No makeup. Arthur remembers being Neil and kissing those lips and feeling nothing.
Down in the dream, they can't find the mark. Eames is supposed to be forging Wendy, a friend of Eric's he met in Hutchinson. His best friend.
The team has split up in the hopes of finding him. Eames has made his way to a park in the middle of town, and his forge should be up, really, but he can't find Eric at all and he figures it doesn't matter if the mark can't see him. There's only one projection here, a young man sitting on a swing. He looks—odd, for a projection, just sitting and waiting. Waiting for something.
Eames, propelled by curiosity, moves forward until his feet are crunching on gravel, and the projection turns and looks at him.
Eames stops dead in his tracks, squints, and says, "Arthur?"
Arthur looks at him, furrowing his eyebrows, for a second, before his face smoothes and he smiles. "My name's Neil." He takes the time to light a cigarette, maintaining eye contact as he can, and continues, "But if you pay me, I can be whoever you want me to be."
Eames says nothing. This—person—has dark blue eyes, and is younger and even lither than Arthur, and he is dressed much more casually than Eames has ever seen him—but otherwise, he is the spitting image. Arthur, despite his many talents, does not know how to forge, not even to that small extent, so it isn't him. This has to be a projection.
A projection who is propositioning him. No—more than that, a projection who is trying to sell sex to him, and who looks exactly like a young Arthur.
"How 'bout it?" Neil asks in his drawling accent, taking a slow drag on his cigarette and resuming his cocky smile. He looks Eames up and down and waits.
"No," Eames manages to stutter after a moment.
Neil's smile falls and his voice turns cold. "Then fuck off, asshole, I'm working." He turns around again and steadfastly ignores Eames, who moves to sit on the next swing.
"Do you know Eric?"
Neil doesn't answer until he's taken a long drag on his cigarette. He pulls it out of his mouth and says shortly, "Yeah," and then blows out the smoke, squinting eyes scanning the surrounding area for something.
"D'you know where he is?"
A car drives up, then, in the distance, moving slow. The driver is watching them. Neil stands abruptly and strides over to the car. Eames watches him lean over close to the open window to talk to the man inside, whose hand sneaks out and quickly caresses his elbow, and then round the hood to climb into the passenger seat.
Eames takes a minute to wonder what in the hell that could possibly have been, feeling bemused but also a little bit sick, before continuing his search for the mark.
By the time he wakes, blinking his eyes open in the dusty backroom of the warehouse, the sick feeling in his stomach has intensified and he's now thoroughly upset. The job went fine, but the whole time he was down there he couldn't stop thinking about that damn projection, the one with Arthur's face, and it very nearly made him fuck things up badly.
He sits up and seeks out Arthur, who is standing nearby with his gun at the ready, looking out the door of the room.
Eames yanks out the needle and stands, crossing the room to Arthur's side in three angry strides. Behind them, Dom and Ariadne are still slowly waking.
"Do you want to tell me what the hell that was about down there?" Eames spits, holding a hand out toward the PASIV. Arthur stares at him, bewildered.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the projection, Arthur, the fucking projection who looked exactly like you!"
Arthur pales and says nothing for a second. Finally, he pulls himself together and retorts, "The mark must have seen me somewhere."
"Bullshit!"
"What's going on over there, guys?" Dom asks, voice bordering on dangerous, while Ariadne winds up the tubing, stealing glances at them. Eric is still sleeping on his chair.
"Eames—"
I don't fucking believe that, Arthur, because it was you, but younger. And the projection was different than the others, it was alone, it was waiting for—something. His mind wouldn't have created you differently like that, it wouldn't—"
"Eames, come on, we have to get out of here," Dom starts, and then Ariadne is calling, "He's waking up!" Eames turns abruptly and sees her trying frantically to roll out and prepare a line again, but it's too late. Eric Preston's eyes are open. Before Ari can put him under again, his eyes roam over the room and they settle on Arthur, who seems stunned.
"Neil?" Eric murmurs, and then he's asleep.
That night, after returning the mark to where he belongs without further incident and clearing out the warehouse, Eames returns to the hotel room he's sharing with Arthur to find the man sitting on the edge of his bed, his hands loosely clasped, his head hanging down.
Neither of them says anything for a little while, but Eames stands by the closed door and waits. Finally, Arthur takes a deep breath in and begins.
"I knew Eric Preston when I was younger. I… I grew up in Hutchinson. He was my friend." He lifts his head. "Did—what was I doing? In the dream?"
Eames doesn't know how to break it gently. He walks over to his own bed and sits facing Arthur. "You were sitting in the park. You… asked if I wanted to pay to have sex with you."
Arthur's face crumbles—he lets out a quick breath as though he's been punched in the gut and leans over again, letting his head fall onto his hands.
"Then a car drove by… and you got in it."
Silence overtakes them then, lingering for some time. Eames watches the other man, waits patiently.
Arthur sits up and looks Eames in the eye after a while, looking resigned. "I was a prostitute," he says. "From the time I was fifteen. I wasn't forced into it—I could probably have found another job—but I was young and stupid and really, really fucked up and I thought it was cool."
"Why?" Eames asks, trying to be supportive. It's hard—he's appalled. He's confused. Arthur winces.
"I was… molested when I was really young. My Little League coach would bring me home sometimes 'cause my mom was too busy or whatever. I didn't—I didn't know what was happening and after a while, y'know, it became part of my life. I was special to him. I liked—feeling special."
Eames doesn't—can't—say anything. Arthur continues, voice rising in volume as he goes.
"I know, it's fucked up, it's so fucked up, and I hate it. But for a really long time, that's who I was. I couldn't even hate him for a long time. And I was such—I was such a fucking slut—"
He's almost yelling now, and Eames reaches out to take hold of his hand and quiet him.
"Don't," he snaps. "Don't say that."
Arthur doesn't seem to be able to stop at this point, in a normal volume, voice breaking.
"I moved to New York when I was eighteen, Eames, and I was gonna stop, I was, because the guys that I was letting fuck me, I was getting scared. They were worse than the guys in Kansas, they were dangerous. I decided to take one last fucking job—" He cuts himself off and buries his face in his hands, letting a sob take over his body.
Eames immediately moves to be next to him, tentatively places his hands on those shaking shoulders. Arthur leans into him as he cries.
After he calms down, his tears coming slower and his sobs reduced to hitched breaths, he uncurls himself and continues. "The guy took me to his place, made me sniff some coke, started to smack me around. I started to suck him off but he was choking me… I finally got away and locked myself in the bathroom, but he got in… he hit me so I fell into the tub… and he… raped me… He was hitting me with a shampoo bottle, calling me a slut…"
He breaks off again. Eames gently guides Arthur's head to rest back under his chin, but his own arms are shaking a little.
"That was… the first time anyone ever treated me that way—everyone always told me how—beautiful I was, even Coach. I felt like I was indestructible, and then… God, how could I have been so stupid, Eames?"
"You weren't stupid, darling," Eames sighs, heartbroken.
"I kept doing it," Arthur whispers. "I did drugs and I kept fucking strangers for money." Eames's fingers tighten in his jacket. "I think I wanted to die, Eames. But I was too scared."
He turns a little and presses his face in Eames's neck and the older man's arms tighten around him. The forger hushes and murmurs at him, but Arthur doesn't cry anymore—he just closes his eyes and relaxes into the strong body beside him. Eames rubs a strong thumb behind Arthur's ear, over the nape of his neck.
"Dreamshare saved me," Arthur mumbles sleepily. "I erased everything that even hinted at Neil McCormick's existence. But it still hurts, Eames, I still can't…"
"Shh, Arthur, it's alright. Go to sleep now, hm? I'll be right here."
So Arthur falls asleep in Eames's arms.