"Are you watching porn?"
"No," Eames snarls, hand halfway to the mute button, wavering before letting it fall. He's answered too quickly, out of habit and now he is just going to have to deal with it. He posits a different explanation: "I am having sex with someone who isn't you."
"Who's moaning?" Yusuf asks, sounding challenging and amused.
"My sexual partner," Eames says. He'd immediately taken his hand off of his cock, and his already taxed mood was getting worse by the second.
"As long as your sexual partner recognizes that answering my calls mid-coitus clearly takes precedence," Yusuf says, and Eames can hear the bastard smiling.
"One does what one must," Eames replies.
"This is the one where the guy with the beard goes down on his girlfriend for like an hour, isn't it," Yusuf says, and it didn't really sound like a question. "Isn't it kind of predictable after so many rewatches?"
"I hate you," Eames says.
"I'm sorry," Yusuf is probably saying, but Eames doesn't know for sure because he is too busy hanging up on him with aplomb.
Yusuf could have let them go crazy. They could have very easily dropped into limbo, his mind unspooling like so much thread, spending a millennia there before his body woke up. Of course he's angry at Yusuf.
"I didn't know things could go like that," he says, half-pleading, as if Eames is the one who should see reason. "I don't go into the field."
"You know what kind of danger is worth three million Euros to keep quiet about," Eames bites out.
"I may have had a little suspicion," Yusuf says, too calm. "But I was blinded by the knock of opportunity. Think of how many shiny things I could buy you with three million Euros."
"Hard to appreciate anything shiny when you're in a persistent vegetative state, eh, Yusuf?"
Yusuf is a scientist. He knows you don't take unknowns for granted, and you certainly don't work under the hypothesis of the criminally deranged. Of course Eames doesn't forgive him.
Eames avoids the house in Mombasa, as he must when he's not happy with Yusuf. Yusuf's tunics are in the closet there, and Yusuf's overnight supplies are tidy on the side of Eames' sink, and his pantry is always in disarray because Yusuf is always looking from some item he insists he's seen on the shelves, and he'll systematically drag everything out to find it, but Yusuf is always less eager to put the space back in order. If Eames goes home to Mombassa, he will trip on his own baking soda in the kitchen, and he doesn't know if it will make him laugh or cry.
Instead, he stays a week in an apartment in Seoul. He loves the floor-up heating, the bustle of the military base, the keen eyes of taxi drivers. On the third day, a toblerone comes in the mail. He ignores it for a very respectable four hours before he peels back the foil to break off a triangle.
It's one of the blue ones, not just honey but salted caramel and almonds and he's hardly about to deny himself when Yusuf can't even seehimself being snubbed.
Yusuf calls again that night, but Eames gets a hold of his hands before they can snap up the call.
Yusuf leaves a voicemail.
"Eames," he says, sounding off-balance and a little drunk: unpunctuated, "there's a lot of money here, and you're not here to help me enjoy it but you could be because your brain didn't turn to scrambled egg. Cobb, he's, I know you hate him, but you brought him to me, you asked me to show him my dream den so I thought he was at least nominally vouched for. And you're brilliant. Of course I didn't have to worry."
Yusuf is breathing a little at the end of the message, like he's run out of steam, but he's not sure yet that he's ready to let go of his unsteady lifeline to Eames. Like he knows that Eames will stand here, frozen in his spot until the line goes dead. A little like time travel, Eames thinks, with a dry mouth.
He stays on the move, taking flights on whims before turning right back around, makes himself dizzy with his own perpetual migration. Mostly he makes it in and out of cities relatively undetected, but in Russia there's no flight out until the next day so he stops at a two-room inn and tries to get some sleep. He doesn't realize until halfway through his restless night that the second pillow, the one he isn't sleeping on, is full of paintbrushes.
He doesn't have any reception, but when he makes it back to the next place where he does — which is Rio because Eames loves the sun there, has no bad memories there if he doesn't count getting shot on the job with the actress, which he doesn't — he makes a call.
"Arthur. What the hell," because with the timeframe he's been keeping, burning airplane tyres for the hell of it to outrun his anger, he can't think of anyone who could have tracked him down and made those arrangements.
"I'm a mercenary researcher, Eames," Arthur says, sounding bored. "Nothing personal."
"Kindly stay out of my love life."
"Like I said, I have no burning desire to hire Russian mooks to fill your hotel with rose petals. Your love life paid me seventy five grand for half an hour's worth of searching, and another hour to coordinate a favor."
"Paintbrushes," Eames says, sounding flat in his own ears.
"I assume, based on your itinerary for the last three weeks, that you haven't been very receptive to grovelling voicemails and flowers," Arthur says, wry. "What's a man to do?"
"Fuck off," Eames growls.
"Hey," Arthur says. "If this is all about limbo—"
Eames interrupts him with a sharp sound. "I assume you've forgiven Cobb, then. No harm no foul?" He can feel something nasty building up inside him, getting away from him like a loose train. "You always did come running back."
"Bad form," Arthur says, icy. "And as a matter of fact, it's not no harm no foul, but you know Cobb and I aren't like that."
"I do know that," Eames says, feeling sobered and regretting his ugliness already.
"I wanted to be, once," Arthur says, and that surprises Eames. He's made snide insinuations before, to be sure, but he never actually looked at Arthur and thought that idiot wants to be hitting that other idiot. Possibly because Arthur was clearly half-friend and half exasperated caregiver for a lot of the time he's been familiar with him, and before that he was clearly taken in by Mal the same way everyone who met her was; Eames is not used to missing those kind of details. He wonders where Arthur's wanting fits in the timeline. "Don't fuck things up with someone you're on paintbrush terms with."
"Thanks," Eames says, a little shell shocked. He kept a few of them, but not the whole pillow case. He toys with one before he puts it away, tucked into the side pocket of his battered duffel bag.
Between the two of them, Yusuf is the responsible adult. For the majority of their acquaintance, Eames has been the one that has close calls and needs to lie low, the one that gets scraped up and knocks on Yusuf's door for illicit painkillers he synthesizes himself.
Yusuf has dozens of people who rely on him and his dream den. He's stationary. Eames is the one who orbits him, comes home to land between jobs.
Yusuf can't ignore his patients to come chase Eames down. He is being childish by staying away, he knows, and yet. He skips from city to city for two weeks. Toblerones seem to follow him like a childhood pet. He eats most of them, but he returns to sender one of them, just to let him know where he can find him for a few days.
He gets a letter in the mail, overnighted shipping, thick stationary that doesn't give easily in his hands, the seafoam envelope as textured as linen. Inside, in Yusuf's messy, left-handed scrawl: come the fuck home.
Later that night, sitting in a bar, a man steps up beside him, timid but sweet-faced. Eames finds himself appraising, considering it an option, before realization hits him like cold water on his skin. It is probably time to go back home.
"We could have gone insane," Eames says.
Yusuf looks startled. He's got a paper bag in the crook of his arm, heavy and wrinkled in his grip, and it hits the floor as Yusuf almost trips over himself to get to Eames. "Yes," he says, looking ashamed.
"But we didn't," Eames continues.
"No," Yusuf agrees. "We didn't."
Eames has spread out his supplies across the table while he'd waited, heavy cardstock and calligraphy pens, six lighters and a set of graphite pencils. He'd been working while he waited.
Yusuf takes a minute to examine the pile, and then scans the rest of the living room, because he's good at assessing how long Eames plans to set up camp here by the amount of his belongings, even when Eames has done his best to tuck them out of sight. This time, he has brought a month's worth of clutter that has followed him from safehouse to safehouse. There is a little stack of empty packages of chocolate flattened into a stack.
Yusuf the steadfast, Yusuf the straight man in a comedy of errors. "I dragged you into the field," Eames acknowledges.
Yusuf doesn't agree or disagree with him. "I missed you," he says instead.
Eames doesn't have to say me too, because he's here, standing in Yusuf's home, where Eames has his shoes with the best arch support, and his painting supplies in Yusuf's lab, and where every other month Aesthetica comes in the mail, addressed to Yusuf. The last one is still on the table with its plastic wrap on, left out for him.
"I'm sorry," Eames says instead.
"That's my line," Yusuf says. He is dark under his eyes, but looks lovely, a rumpled and unshaven oasis of sanity.
"I fucked up when I didn't explain to you that Dom Fucking Cobb is batshit insane. And I never meant for you to go under with us," Eames says, and moves closer to Yusuf. Yusuf who waited, Yusuf who made a mistake.
"Cobb didn't really go into the details of limbo, but he did say that when—" Yusuf says, and Eames put a finger to the plush warmth of his mouth.
"Shh," he says, "I am trying to blame all of my unhappiness on my least favorite person in the world."
"Dom Fucking Cobb," Yusuf agrees, grinning beneath Eames' hand.
"Dom Fucking Cobb," Eames repeats, and finally, finally, slides his face to Yusuf's, delaying only a moment to put his nose into the curls at Yusuf's temple before moving his mouth to his. They kiss slow and steady, Eames so stupidly glad to be back, and Yusuf so tense beneath his hands, the dormant muscles of his broad back springing to stark relief under his hands.
Eames gets them to Yusuf's bedroom without letting go of him, the warm bulk and soft eyes practically magnetized for his hands after spending a month lonely and a little hurt. He pulls Yusuf over him like a duvet, relishing the weight and heft of him.
"Ah," Yusuf sighs, which is the same sound he makes when he sinks into a bath that is just the right temperature. He's been hard from almost the minute Eames first kissed him, insistent through his trousers, but now Eames can feel it even more prominently against his stomach.
"Eager?" he teases.
"We didn't during inception," Yusuf reminds him, and that's right, they hadn't, because they'd been running on too little time and too much caffeine and they'd tried the night before they went Sydney to Los Angeles and Eames had fallen asleep with his cock out. Not his finest hour, meaning it's been five weeks for both of them, maybe six. Time runs a little unchecked without Yusuf, steady as a sundial, to keep him Gregorian.
"Sorry about that," Eames says, dragging his teeth against the generous curve of Yusuf's lower lip.
"I've had worse encounters with people I loved less," Yusuf says, and Eames' dick, which has been Yusuf's exclusive property for years, ever since a stretch of accidental monogamy that turned into intentional monogamy as naturally as a turned page, surges the rest of the way toreally fucking interested, because he is an idiotic romantic. He likes to hear it. He's also a competitive bastard that grew up in a silent household, and I love you still sounds like winning to him.
Yusuf rolls his hips, groaning as their cocks meet, clothed but desperate like an airport hug at the landing gates.
Eames wants to pull Yusuf's clothes off, wants to get him down to skin and fur and scraping teeth but he's also glad to be luxuriating here, even if he's at risk for coming in his pants like a sixth former, Yusuf's hands twisting in his hair, fingertips dragging across Eames' scalp.
Eames is too hot, neck and wrists, a little squashed by Yusuf and sweaty between his shoulderblades but desperately glad to be there. By the time Yusuf leans up to get Eames' shirt off, gently manhandling him in a way that makes Eames' spine go liquid, he is practically panting.
"Easy, killer," Yusuf says, and slides his mouth around the slick head of Eames' cock. Eames is immediately flailing, legs unfolding to wrap around Yusuf's torso, feeling the bow and bend of Yusuf's back under his calves. Yusuf's mouth is hot and liquid around him, and he is shifting under him, unable to keep still under the feverish heat of Yusuf's full attention.
After Eames finishes, Yusuf presses his face to the soft slope of Eames' stomach, nose almost touching the come on his belly. He breathes in and out heavily through his mouth, ruffling the trail of brown hair below his navel. At some point, Yusuf's trousers and pants must have come off, and he can feel Yusuf's cock, rock hard against Eames' leg.
Eames cards his hands through Yusuf's hair for a minute before he says, "Come on, you've got to be ready to pop."
"Yes, but," Yusuf sighs, turning his head to kiss the ridge of Eames' jutted hipbone, only ever visible when he reclines.
"Come on," Eames says, and gropes for the bottle on the bedside table, pushing at Yusuf's shoulder to move him out of the way before pouring a lot — maybe too much — right in the place below his softening cock where his thighs are pressed together and then uses his hand to slide between them.
"There's going to be so much lube in my sheets," Yusuf laments.
"Stop thinking with your brain," Eames demands, and pulls him back on top of him.
It is one of his favorite things, Yusuf's cock between his thighs, although he is usually hard when they do this, usually comes with his cock snug between both of their bellies, but this time he isn't, can focus completely and without distraction on Yusuf, already losing composure as he moves in the slick place between Eames' thighs, pressed together.
Eames wraps his hands around the back of Yusuf's neck, pays close attention to the curve of his stubbled cheek, the rasp in his voice as he says his name, over and over, as though he's making up for all the times he hasn't said it for the last four weeks, the flex of his strong, broad shoulders as he moves, into and around and on top of him, intoxicating and Eames is so so lost in him, adrift somewhere off the coast of the rest of the world.
When Yusuf comes, cock pulsing in the snug, slick space between Eames' thighs, he sets his teeth against Eames' collar, and Eames' cock starts to get interested again.
Afterwards, Yusuf has a hand in the crook of Eames' elbow, not cuddling him but touching him at two or three points, "I've been working on a better benzodiazepine sleeping pill for you."
"I thought we didn't do gestures," Eames smirks, eyes on the spinning ceiling fan above them.
Yusuf gave a pointed look to the other side of his bedroom, where there was a gorgeous replica (or maybe the original — not knowing, Eames knew, was the most interesting part to him) of The Kiss.
"Alright, alright," Eames says, kissing down Yusuf's chest, sinking his teeth into places still raw from his beard, hours earlier.
"You're welcome," Yusuf grouses.
"Thank you for the custom barbiturates."
"They're not barbiturates!" Yusuf yelps, sounding scandalized.
"Tomato, potato," Eames says, nosing around Yusuf's groin, affectionate but with no real intent. After coming twice, neither of them is likely to be roused again, but honestly, a month was too long to stay away, and Eames is eager to make up for lost time.
"They are not the same," Yusuf says.
Eames is silent, and after a few minutes, Yusuf speaks again, "I put a bed in the cat's room."
"We are not moving into the cat's room," Eames says, too loud.
"No," Yusuf says. "But maybe next time you can banish me there and give me the silent treatment from here like a proper adult."
"Alright," Eames says. He presses his face close to Yusuf's groin to give his cock a friendly nuzzle.
"Alright?" Yusuf repeats, as if he hadn't really expected Eames to give in, and certainly not without a fight.
"Yeah," Eames says. "I've been away long enough to cover most of our future fights."
"Good."
"And a lot of my toblerones melted before and reshaped before they got to me."
"Sorry," Yusuf says.
Eames doesn't want Yusuf to be sorry anymore. He links their fingers with one hand, and pats the top of Yusuf's hand with his other. "It's okay. Most of them didn't."
Yusuf is grinning, teeth bright in the low light. He gives Eames a squeeze. "Good to know."