Luke cornered Alex the moment she opened the bathroom door, "What's forging?"

"Ew, Luke. Were you standing out here the whole time?" She made a face, frowning and suspicious, "Why do you need to know about forging?"

"Why do you need to know why I need to know?" Luke shot back.

Alex rolled her eyes, but gave in, never really one to refuse answers to questions she knew. "Well, forging is about making stuff. Usually metal work? Like, you'd forge a sword or a shield."

Luke nodded his head, thinking about what he had overheard when he'd gone to call his uncle and Eames down for dinner, "So, hypertheoretically, if someone had been talking about forging a person..."

"I think you meant 'hypothetically', and, what, like forging a suit of armor?"

Luke's head swiveled to look up at Arthur, who had just appeared at the top of the stairs, and his eyes went wide while muttering in near reverence, "Or a robot." He backed away slowly and then spun around, darting into the living room as Haley came in through the front door.

Alex's face scrunched up in confusion and she looked to her uncle for support. "I swear, you and I are the only normal people in this family."

"Hah," Haley scoffed, "Normal? I'm sorry, but how many parties have you not gone to because you were too busy," and here she curled her fingers in imitation of quotation marks, "'studying'?"

Arthur and Eames half-followed half-herded the bickering girls through the living room and towards the dining table where Phil and Claire were setting out chicken alfredo and garlic bread.

"And anyways," Haley continued as she slipped into her seat at the table, chin held high and smirk on her face, "I bet Uncle Arthur was one of the popular kids." She looked ahead to where said uncle was taking a seat across from her. "You were probably even voted class president, weren't you?"

Alex looked at her sister in disgust as she sat next to her, taking the seat across from Eames, "Student council is a responsibility, not a popularity contest."

"Oh, really, Alex? Is that why Mackenzie won? Because she's so responsible?''

Alex gaped and muttered a nearly inaudible, "Oh my god, that explains so much."

"Quiet down, girls," Phil said as he took a seat at one end of the table.

Claire, sitting at the other end, nodded sharply, "That's right, listen to your father, Haley, Alex, it's rude to-."

"Your Uncle Arthur may not have been elected president," Phil interrupted, "but he did go to prom with the guy who was."

Arthur looked between father and daughters, aware that technically the conversation was about him, but unsure of whether or not he was actually expected to participate. He kept his face decidedly blank; it had been years since he'd been faced with a family dinner and concluded that the best course of action would be to take a moment to simply observe and re-familiarize himself with the setting.

That was, of course, the moment that Eames came to the opposite conclusion and opened his mouth to contribute, "I'm not surprised, actually. I've always said that Arthur was 'the Michelle to my Barack'. He knows where true power lies."

"You've always said that, really," Arthur drawled.

Eames' only response was to shoot him a sickly sweet smile.

"Yeah," Phil smiled, "They even used to lock themselves away in his room for extra student council planning sessions. Arthur always was a busy worker bee..." he trailed off, lost in his memories.

"Um..." Haley tilted her head in suspicion, "exactly who were 'they'?"

"Your uncle and Trent Shackleford, the student body... presi-" he slowly turned to look at his younger brother with a dawning horror of realization, "-dent."

Arthur downed half the contents of his wineglass as his two nieces shrieked in stereo, "UncleArthur!"

Luke poured ketchup over his pasta, completely uninterested the drama affecting the rest of the table, but paying close attention to whether or not Arthur and Eames were actually ingesting food like normal human beings.

Haley pointed her fork at her dad, "You and Mom wouldn't let me close the door when Dylan was over, but you were perfectly fine with your little brother locking himself in his room with his boyfriend? You are such a hypocrite!"

Claire got up from the table and uncorked another bottle of wine.

Phil spluttered at his oldest daughter, "I didn't... they weren't even going out, prom was their first date." He turned back to his brother, aghast, "Prom was your first date, right?"

Arthur continued to eat his food calmly, refusing to acknowledge the flush heating the back of his neck nor the way Eames was biting his lip in an attempt to hide his laughter. "Prom was definitely the first time we went out on a date," he answered carefully, avoiding his older brother's eyes as he flashed back to an entire semester of sexual experimentation with-because Haley hadn't been wrong-the most popular guy in school.

Phil didn't look terribly convinced, but then, Arthur had always had crippling inability to lie when directly confronted by his only sibling.

"So, Arthur," Claire said as she finally returned to her seat, a quarter of the wine bottle conspicuously gone, "Why don't you tell us how you and Eames met?"

Arthur was grateful for the change in topic. So grateful, in fact, that he accidentally told the truth.

"We met a year after I graduated from West Point. We were on opposing teams, beta testing new tech." Arthur didn't mention the fact that those "opposing teams" were the U.S. military versus an organized group of thieves determined to acquire a PASIV. Eames hadn't even experienced a shared dream at that point in his life. He had only been interested in the challenge of forging quality military ID cards and passports after the increased security that followed 9/11.

"Wow," Alex murmured, "Dad never mentioned the fact that you went to West Point." She perked up suddenly, "Wait, wait, let me grab my notebook, this would be perfect for my assignment," and shot out of her chair and the room.

"Sooo," Haley looked from her uncle to Eames, "you two have kind of been together for a while then."

"We-" Arthur began, but then had a moment of clarity and complete understanding that he hadn't experienced since Phil had married Claire and Arthur had married the world of dreaming. He snapped his gaze to his brother, knowing exactly how he'd misunderstand the situation, "No, Phil, Eames and I've known each other for a while, yes, but we weren't in a... relationship until recently."

"Like prom was your first date?"

Haley cringed and slipped out of her chair, tugging Luke along and intercepting a confused Alex at the stairs with a hissed, "Trust me, you don't want to be in there right now."

Arthur flinched, "Technically, with a given definition of 'date'."

Phil shook his head, pushing his chair back with a stony face, "I always thought we were Mary-Kate and Ashley." His voice was accusing and dripping with disappointment and suddenly Arthur felt all of eight years old, "But apparently we're not. Instead, turns out I'm Nancy Drew solving cases by myself while you're off with the Hardy Boys."

"Phil." And Arthur knew he was more articulate than this. That there had been a time when they had been close. Inseparable. Arthur stood and faced his brother, "...we're still Mary-Kate and Ashley."

Phil shook his head once more, but pulled him in for a hug, "Not right now we're not." He pulled away, "Cam and Mitch are coming over early for the barbecue tomorrow and I still haven't cleaned the grill. So I think I'm just gonna go to bed."

He said his "goodnight"s and headed up the stairs.

Eames cleared his throat, "Dinner was delicious, Claire, thank you."

Claire took a swig of wine straight from the bottle before passing it over to Eames, "Welcome to the family." Her eyes flickered towards Arthur, who was opening the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard.

Eames thought he saw a brief flash of smug victory on her face before she made a comment about how she'd tell the kids to come back and clean up because 'really, Eames, don't bother, you're a guest'. So he joined Arthur where he was sitting on the steps leading from the back porch down to the grassy lawn and let out a slow exhale. "Well, that certainly could have gone worse."

Arthur gave him a tired look, "Are you kidding me? Phil hasn't been that upset with me since I told him that I'd been the one moving the planchette when we'd play with his ouija board."

Eames shifted to the step above and behind Arthur, hands coming up to massage tense shoulders, "I know this has all been utterly humiliating for you, Mary-Kate, but if it's any consolation, I had your family completely mischaracterized in my head. I've never been more pleased to be so wrong. Your brother is fascinating."

"Not much of a consolation, actually," Arthur sighed, head rolling forward as Eames' thumbs pressed into the base of his skull. "And I was Ashley.

Eames chuckled, "Tomorrow we'll get you back in the good graces of your darling big brother, but for now I'll settle for the story behind why you and your sister-in-law don't get along." He felt Arthur stiffen beneath his fingers only to loosen a moment later.

"I may have gotten drunk at their engagement party and then cornered and threatened her."

Eames let out a huff of laughter, "'You hurt him, I hurt you'? How perfectly cliche."

"Yes, well. At this point I'm just hoping to wake-up back in London and find that this night was just an anxiety-fuelled dream stemming from the fact that I haven't called home in a while."

"Don't be daft," Eames leaned in close to kiss the shell of an ear, "you know you can't dream naturally."

There was a crash behind them and they both twisted around to look, Arthur instinctively reaching for where he'd usually keep his gun.

Luke was standing with silverware scattered around him and a surprised 'oh' on his face, "Uhhh, sorry, man, I'm just so clumsy, ha. Ha." He quickly gathered up the utensils and beelined for his sister.

"Hey, Alex. Can computers dream naturally?"

Alex didn't bother turning away from the sudsy sink water, yawning, "No."

Luke peered out the sliding doors to where it looked like Eames had resumed his inspection of the back of their Uncle Arthur's head and neck. "No," he murmured, "and robots probably can't either."

okay, so this chapter is a bit more ridiculous than I had planned it to be. This should really be titled 'adventures in attempting to write a comedy'