Disclaimer: I don't own anything!
Author's Note: At the beach all day yesterday and I'm now slightly burnt. It's been ridiculously hot this summer, more so than usual. I finally saw In Time, and I liked everything but the last...half hour or so. It kind of disappointed me.
"What could you make of that, except to suspet some intensitty in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured?"
-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Eames doesn't always have his totem on him.
The first time Eames did it, Arthur had paused, hovering over the other man as he laid the unhooked chain on the bedside table. "Eames…" He began, unsure of where he's going with this.
"Darling," The other man interrupted. "You think too much."
Arthur thought about arguing, but then he thought about it again. He'd never seen the locket—Eames' true token—not on his person. The poker chip, he'd seen lying around, but not the locket. So when he thought about it, he knew that Eames was a person who showed some things better than they could tell them, so he let Eames pull him down without a fuss.
He wasn't as surprised after that and Eames didn't do it often, but he always found it strange to wake up and look over at Eames to find his neck bare. Those mornings, Arthur had to check his own totem and, assured of reality, he would stay where he was, whether he went to back to sleep or not because if Eames without his totem woke to an empty other half of the bed, things might not turn out so well.
(In truth, he's a bit touched—and mostly surprised—that Eames trusts him that much as to allow himself to be without his foothold on reality. He also knows that he can't return the favor. He trusts Eames as much as he trusts anyone, moreso in most cases in fact, but he can't remove the dog tags from around his neck. Not for anyone.)
Eames is realistic in his imaginings.
Arthur woke fully to the sound of Eames' laughter. He'd woken a little when he felt familiar fingers running through his hair, but he'd dozed back off. Now, he blinked a little blearily up at Eames.
"What's funny?" He asked, not lifting his head from the pillow. It was a rare day that Eames was awake before him.
Eames smiled warmly, fingers still threaded in Arthur's hair. "You have grey hairs, darling."
The thought itself is strange in the way it sounded when Arthur repeated it to himself in his mind. Grey hairs? Surely he hadn't been alive long enough to earn those. He was only…God, he was turning forty in two years. He'd known it all logically, but in terms of time, he hadn't understood.
"Why's that funny?" Arthur wasn't upset. Not really. People were supposed to be when they got grey hairs, but to him, it was just like someone had told him an interesting fact. A 'huh' of interest moment.
(He thinks of Mina, if she had grey hairs yet. She's younger, but people go grey at different ages. She'd gotten married seven years ago to a junior high math teacher from Wisconsin named Jason Bishop and they had a kid. A boy named Arthur—and doesn't that sting a little, even after all this time—who has his mother's fiery disposition and sharp tongue and his father's looks. He thinks of Arthur James Reynolds, who never got a chance to worry about turning thirty or getting grey hairs. Would Arthur James Reynolds have gotten the grey hairs first? Probably not. He'd been a more carefree soul than his twin. But they might have laughed over it, might have teased each other and made a bucket list, just because they could. The thoughts still hurt.)
"Think about it. Did you ever think we'd actually live this long? Because I didn't." Eames' free hand skims Arthur's scarred side quickly before moving to the numerous other scars—all less noticeable and less severe—that had been accumulated.
Arthur hadn't. It had been some unspoken agreement between him and Eames; they were in it for the long run, but the long run wouldn't be that long. Their line of work was dangerous at best. People didn't last long. They were probably the people who'd been in dreamwork the longest now, since Miles had retired and Mal was…well. Almost twenty years devoted to it.
(Arthur tries leaving once, when he's thirty-three. He tries living a normal life from his apartment. He visits James and Phillipa—they're adults in their own right now. Philippa's in college and James is graduating high school—and walks the streets of the city. But he can't take the die out of his pocket, the red, loaded die. It's there, a familiar, worn weight. What do normal people do?
He visits New York to spend time with his sister, who's smile is a slow curl of memory and who's a museum curator now, and her husband and his niece, who's got eyes that are Emerald-City green. He stops by Vermont, drops in on his mother.
He lasts a week and three days.
He can't leave the dream-life. It's part of who he is. It's an integral part of Arthur. So the next time Eames calls him, Arthur asks if he knows anyone who needs a point man. And he can hear Eames' grin over the line. "Welcome back, darling.")
"I suppose not."
"That's what's funny. It's ironic that we're the ones still here." Out of all of their friends and work associates, they were the only ones to stick with the job this long. Others had left, for family or personal reasons, and others had died. (Eames has more tattoos now, ones that stretch and curl down his shoulders to beneath his shoulder blades, some farther down his arms, though they never touch his forearms. There is still a blank spot among all the ink, right above his heart and Arthur stops his thoughts there because he doesn't want to think about when that spot gets filled in)
Eames leaned closer, brushings his lips against Arthur's. He tasted of smoke and morning breath and last night's mint toothpaste and it feels horribly domestic. Arthur could feel his smile. "You're getting old, darling." He teased.
Arthur rolled his eyes. "Oh really?" He brushed a thumb against the creases along the corners of Eames' eyes, familiarly gray, and at the faint lines along his face, from sorrow and laughter both. "And what are these, old man?"
Eames laughed, close enough to Arthur that he felt it vibrating on his skin. "Touché."
Eames met Mal before he knew about dreamwork.
Mal was the one to tell him the story. "I warn you now, it sounds like we're part of a bad movie with Journey as the soundtrack." She'd laughed.
Arthur had smiled. "Did you meet on a train at midnight?"
"No, but it didn't take long for it to be midnight. He sat across from me at dinner because there were no other empty tables."
Arthur listened to her story, strangely fascinated. He knew nothing of Eames as he'd been Before the military. He listened as she told him that Eames had told her that he had been on his way into Dublin from Sligo to help his cousin set up his bar and she'd been in Lisburn staying with a friend for a few weeks. He listened when she told him of how he'd been charming and how his hair had been a bit longer then and he'd been clean-shaven for the most part and how, when she asked about his family, he'd proudly pulled out his wallet to show her a photograph of Sherallyn and Amara, nearly ten months old at the time.
(It's a strange picture, but Arthur likes it. Likes the glimpse into a different man, less broken, less hurt, less haunted.)
Once, they were on the same train themselves in the reverse, out of Dublin into Lisburn. It had been just after a job and they decided to lie low before getting out of the country. Arthur remembered eating with Eames and Eames' eyes had kept wandering to the same spot across the car. Arthur had decided not to mention it. Everyone was entitled to secrets. (Dom isn't the only one haunted by Mal's ghost, after all.)
Arthur James Reynolds still haunts Eames' nightmares.
Dreams and nightmares are two different things; anyone in the dream business will tell you that. Since they'd first had to share a bed, years and years ago when they were younger, they'd accepted that the other came with their own baggage.
(Eames knew that from the beginning. He saw the raw scars splattered across Arthur's side. No one wasn't traumatized by whatever had caused it)
Arthur lashes out in the midst of a nightmare. He's caught Eames more than once and Eames had woken bruised for it. Once, Eames tried holding him down, but that had only made Arthur react more violently. These days, Eames doesn't even try to wake him; Arthur's talent for keeping a dream stable apparently works in his own mind, on his own nightmares. (It's a terrifying thought, never being able to wake up until the nightmare had run its course)
When Eames has a nightmare, he shrinks a bit into himself, but Arthur's tried to help him out of it before and gotten almost tossed off the bed and a bruised gut for his trouble. So now, when he wakes because of his soldier's sense—still there after all these years and it goes off like a buzzing hornet's nest—he manages to convince himself to stay awake, sometimes having to maneuver his way out of Eames' arms to do so, and lean against the headboard until Eames wakes on his own.
When Eames does wake, sometimes he doesn't know where he is (Arthur hated that feeling, knew it all too well because sometimes, he looks around, not even after waking up, and doesn't know where he is. Those times, he reaches for his dog tags and the die that he always keeps nearby—the die is just a precaution, a distraction for the outside world, though it still functions as a totem. But his tags, those are absolutely his and are always his anchor—and have to carefully retrace his steps to know how he got to where his was at that moment)
Eames will open his eyes and his entire body tenses, hand reaching beneath his pillow, which makes Arthur relax a little because if Eames reached underneath Arthur's pillow, he wouldn't find a totem. He'd find a gun. Arthur looks away while Eames convinces himself this isn't a dream. He knows how the poker chips works, knows that looking inside his locket works better for Eames than the chip does, but—to Arthur—reaffirming reality is a private experience.
After that, Eames gets up, slowly, onto his elbows, eyes following the lines of Arthur's body up to his face and, most of the time, he'll smile a little and wish him good morning. But sometimes, he'll go pale and he'll tense up again.
"…Arthur?" He asks tentatively.
Those times, Arthur leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead and another light one to his lips. "It's me," he'll reassure him, though he doesn't know that his actions reassure Eames more than his words.
(Eames could still see him, tanned and sharp-edged in the desert heat. A smile as sharp as his brother's suits—one that didn't belong on that oh-so-familiar face—before Arthur James Reynolds neared, sometimes strolling closer like a man on a walk around the park and other times, a predatory movement. Once—and only once—it was too-close to seductive and that time, when Eames woke up, he hadn't dared look up at Arthur, had kept his eyes closed and his face in the pillow for about five minutes, reaffirming where he was and trying to convince himself that nightmares weren't real because once Arthur James Reynolds comes up to him in a nightmare, the same thing happens. The world shatters into a hundred thousand mirror shards and Eames watches himself die by that familiar face in a hundred thousand ways, a hundred thousand times)
So when Arthur bends down to kiss him, he knows he's in reality because Arthur James Reynolds' ghost in his mind doesn't do gentle or tender. And, once, he'd thought the same of Arthur.