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Fic: Perfect Symmetry
HEY LOOK, I WROTE SOME FIC!! I'm not broken after all! \o/
Perfect Symmetry
Arthur/Eames | 2000 words | PG-13
It wasn’t art, only a coping mechanism, something that steadied his mind with its simplicity.
or, Arthur draws Eames a lot.
Based on this prompt, but especially this AMAZING art by anonymous. Thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bookshop for bringing said art to my attention, and also to themoononastick and sorrynotsorry for betaing.
The habit manifested itself in high school; Arthur could barely get through AP calculus without wanting to kill himself by the end of class, and the only thing that managed to keep him focused was sketching the guy two rows over. He was a wrestler—Colby, Arthur remembered, his name was Colby—stocky and wide across the shoulders, with a nose a little too large for his face and a scar just behind his ear. Arthur spent the entire semester memorizing his face with crude block figures over and over, until he had pages upon pages of drawings intermingled with numbers and equations. By the end of term, Arthur had an A in the class, and Colby’s face had started to become recognizable through the scribbles.
Arthur took the final, then went home that evening and shredded his notes.
He barely spoke more than five words to Colby that year, and then graduation came.
In college, there were doodles of his history professor before Arthur left school for the army, then tiny, tiny sketches in the corners of his first black leather Moleskine during his initial briefings on dreamshare. Arthur had had the notebook for two years before filling it with PASIV drawings, notes on projections, engineering equations—and sketches of a young MI6 agent who smiled like he’d never trusted anyone in his life.
It wasn’t art, only a coping mechanism, something that steadied his mind with its simplicity. He could go for hours, ballpoint pen scraping back and forth against the page, only to realize belatedly that the lines had formed a face, a portrait. Sometimes he’d even go as far as to add Eames’ shirt and jacket, the little checks in the plaid of his tie.
“Arthur, do have anything you’d like to add?” he heard his commanding officer ask.
He shaded in the slope of Eames’ shoulders. “No, sir,” Arthur replied stoically. He glanced up a moment later; Eames was watching him, brow pinched in thought.
The next day, Arthur drew the crinkle of Eames’ forehead over his notes on paradoxes.
Eames left a month later, and Arthur meant to throw away the notebook. There wasn’t any point to keeping it, after all; he’d be going into the field soon, his notes all but committed to memory.
The Moleskine, however, stayed with him. The drawings did, too.
Instead, Arthur doodled here and there, nothing like his early days in dreamshare. He made his initials into penrose stairs, something he drew over everything when he was feeling especially stressed. He filled the first Moleskine and started on another, stashing the original away on a bookshelf in his apartment. It was the only one he kept.
Then, seven years after those first months training in top secret military facilities, he met Eames again. This Eames was older, but the flashing, hyper-alertness in his blue eyes was still the same, if a bit tempered. He smiled at Arthur, pretending he didn’t remember him, but Arthur knew; the tic in Eames’ jaw meant he remembered everything about Arthur, or as much as he’d learned. Eames was a forger now, but that didn’t mean he could hide everything.
Arthur watched Eames pace the floor of their hotel suite, makeshift headquarters until something bigger could be found (Budapest was sorely lacking in rental space), his hands gesturing with the grace of a dancer as he mapped out his idea for the extraction.
Arthur never wrote down Eames’ ideas. Instead, he drew his hands.
And so it went for a few years. Eames would float in and out of Arthur’s life like an autumn leaf, and Arthur’s notebook slowly became littered with various Eames incarnations: a scruffy, dirty goatee in Sicily; whip-thin and gaunt in Dublin; blond, shaggy hair in Rio; a thug in Sydney. Arthur never looked at them once they were completed, smudges of ink on his fingers the only reminder that he’d committed these versions to paper.
Once, in Seattle, Arthur let himself imagine what it would be like to sketch Eames’ forges. The next day, he came very close to burning his Moleskine altogether.
“Sometimes I think you barely know the sound of my voice, you so rarely listen to it,” Eames said to him in Chicago. They were strapping up for the extraction, Arthur’s chair beside his.
Arthur thought of the little notebook sitting innocently in the pocket of his jacket. “I listen,” was all he replied before the serum sank into his bloodstream.
During the Fischer job, the drawings changed. There were now full pages of only Eames’ profile, not just corners and half-sketches over numbers and addresses. Arthur spent the last hour of the flight to LA penciling the image of Eames as Browning, his hand shaking slightly from exhaustion and the remnants of pure unadulterated adrenaline. He wasn’t thinking at all when the captain made the final landing announcement; he sighed and dropped the Moleskine carelessly into the side pocket of his leather satchel, though he normally kept it stored away in one of the zippered panels. But his notebook’s safety was the last thing on his mind; all Arthur wanted in the world at that moment was a shower and a bed.
Fischer was long gone by the time Eames approached Arthur at the baggage claim of LAX. He smiled crookedly, holding his right hand out.
“To a job well done,” Eames said quietly, but his eyes held a tentativeness Arthur had never seen before.
Arthur shook his hand, Eames’ grip hard and solid, warm. They held a beat too long, and Arthur wondered if Eames could feel his heart beating faster.
“Are you staying in LA?” Arthur asked.
“For tonight. My flight to London doesn’t leave until tomorrow evening.”
Arthur nodded, his satchel sliding off his arm to land with an ungraceful thump on top of Eames’ carry-on. It fell onto its side, as if miming Arthur’s own exhaustion.
Eames laughed softly. “Shall I offer to find you a cab, or can one still operate as a zombie?”
“No, I’m fine.” Arthur gave him a smile, a genuine one, because they wouldn’t be seeing each other again. Perhaps ever. “Be careful.”
“I always am.” He paused for moment, mouth open as if poised to say more, but finally Eames shook his head and turned away, shouldering his bag.
They parted ways without saying another word, and Arthur pretended to be relieved.
That evening in his Anaheim hotel room, Arthur went to take out his Moleskine. He was going to trash the thing for good this time and move on. If Cobb could start another chapter of his life with a clean page, then so could he.
Only the Moleskine wasn’t in his bag.
Arthur sat on the edge of his bed, staring into the empty pocket of his satchel.
On the bedside table, his cell began to ring. The number was unknown.
Arthur knew before he answered. “Eames?”
“I...believe I have something of yours. A black notebook, perhaps?” His voice was quiet, just shy of a whisper.
Arthur’s stomach clenched. “It was an accident. It must’ve fallen out at the airport.”
“Yes, well.” Eames paused, cleared his throat.
And Arthur knew, again, before he asked. “You opened it, didn’t you?”
Eames said, softly, “I never took you for an artist.”
“I’m not,” Arthur said, hating the heat that crept into his cheeks. “That’s not art, that’s—”
“This is isn’t your first set of drawings, is it? You’ve been at this for a while now.”
He dropped his head into his hand. “It’s really none of your business, Eames.”
“My face is all over your notebook. Perhaps I have a little bit of a personal investment.”
“That’s private property.”
“Which somehow ended up inside my carry-on.”
“I said it was an accident.”
“Then let me return it to you.”
I’d rather you burned it. “I’ll—that’s not necessary. I’ll buy another one.”
Eames paused for several moments. “You’d give these up so easily?” he finally asked.
“Eames, it’s nothing, just a bunch of fucking doodles, all right? I’m sorry you had to see them, but just—please, just pitch the damn thing and don’t worry about it.”
Another long bout of silence stretched out over the line, until Eames sighed and replied, “All right,” and hung up.
Arthur rolled onto his side on the bed and set his phone on the nightstand. He told himself it was for the best; he’d never be able to destroy the drawings himself, anyway.
He didn’t sleep at all.
At three in the morning, he heard a quiet knock at his door.
Blearily, Arthur rubbed at his eyes, ignoring the fact that he’d tried to sleep in his clothes. He tugged his tie off on the way to the door, stomach rumbling absently to remind him he hadn’t eaten all day.
Through the peep hole, he saw Eames standing on the other side of the door, arms crossed tightly over his chest. He was in a long-sleeved navy t-shirt and black track pants, his hair in his eyes—an incarnation of Eames Arthur had never seen before. It made him strangely nervous.
“What is it?” he asked through the door.
“Arthur, open the door,” Eames said, voice low, resigned, exhausted.
“It’s three in the goddamn morning.”
“And yet you’re still awake. Open the door.”
Arthur rested his forehead against door frame, sighing deeply. His muscles were beginning to ache from lack of sleep. Slowly, he turned the locks and undid the chain, a steady, anxious pulse pounding in his chest.
He held the door open and said, “How did you find me so fast?” He’d paid cash for the room, took two different cabs to the hotel.
But his question was lost as Eames backed him up against the adjacent wall, cupping Arthur’s cheeks in his broad hands and kissing him soft and chastely on the mouth.
“I wish you’d told me sooner,” Eames murmured, thumb sweeping across Arthur’s chin.
“Told you what?” Arthur gasped, overwhelmed by the gentleness of Eames’ mouth juxtaposed with the solid, unyielding strength pressing him against the wall.
Eames’ reply was to lick Arthur’s lips apart with careful ease, opening his mouth to delve inside and take away every last one of Arthur’s secrets. His tongue traced the edge of Arthur’s teeth, the slick curve of his inner lip, and Arthur wondered if Eames was trying to memorize him the way Arthur memorized the lines of Eames’ cheeks, his nose, the blunt convex slope of his chin.
He didn’t need the Moleskine to remember Eames. All the important details were already burned into Arthur’s brain.
“I brought it back to you.” Eames pulled back, breathed the words against Arthur’s mouth as if reading his thoughts.
Arthur suddenly realized that he was clinging to the front of Eames’ shirt, one leg slotted between Eames’ thighs. He shook his head, flexed his fingers in the soft cotton, feeling warm muscle underneath. “You didn’t have to, I told you—”
“You’re bloody insane if you think I’m going to destroy physical evidence that you do, in fact, possess a heart.” Eames pressed closer, nuzzling his face into Arthur’s neck and sighing as if he couldn’t help himself.
Arthur let his eyes close. “They’re just...just scribbles, random shit, I—”
“Fucking hell, are you trying to make me fall more hopelessly in love with you?” Eames growled into the soft skin behind Arthur’s ear, making Arthur shudder and bite his lip against a moan.
They didn’t talk anymore after that, save for the moment Eames cried out Arthur’s name and Arthur gasped, “Yes.”
Long after, when they were naked and tangled in hotel sheets and each other, Arthur kissed his way over the dizzying swirls of Eames’ tattoos that mapped the dips and valleys of his muscles. He’d never seen them like this before, up close and intimate, and he silently catalogued them in his mind.
Eames hummed contentedly. “You can, you know. I won’t mind,” he whispered, fingertips tripping through the mussed strands of Arthur’s hair.
Arthur paused to roll his eyes.
But eventually he crawled out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxers, and went in search of some hotel stationery and a pen.
The Moleskine could wait until another time.
Perfect Symmetry
Arthur/Eames | 2000 words | PG-13
It wasn’t art, only a coping mechanism, something that steadied his mind with its simplicity.
or, Arthur draws Eames a lot.
Based on this prompt, but especially this AMAZING art by anonymous. Thank you to
bookshop for bringing said art to my attention, and also to themoononastick and sorrynotsorry for betaing.The habit manifested itself in high school; Arthur could barely get through AP calculus without wanting to kill himself by the end of class, and the only thing that managed to keep him focused was sketching the guy two rows over. He was a wrestler—Colby, Arthur remembered, his name was Colby—stocky and wide across the shoulders, with a nose a little too large for his face and a scar just behind his ear. Arthur spent the entire semester memorizing his face with crude block figures over and over, until he had pages upon pages of drawings intermingled with numbers and equations. By the end of term, Arthur had an A in the class, and Colby’s face had started to become recognizable through the scribbles.
Arthur took the final, then went home that evening and shredded his notes.
He barely spoke more than five words to Colby that year, and then graduation came.
In college, there were doodles of his history professor before Arthur left school for the army, then tiny, tiny sketches in the corners of his first black leather Moleskine during his initial briefings on dreamshare. Arthur had had the notebook for two years before filling it with PASIV drawings, notes on projections, engineering equations—and sketches of a young MI6 agent who smiled like he’d never trusted anyone in his life.
It wasn’t art, only a coping mechanism, something that steadied his mind with its simplicity. He could go for hours, ballpoint pen scraping back and forth against the page, only to realize belatedly that the lines had formed a face, a portrait. Sometimes he’d even go as far as to add Eames’ shirt and jacket, the little checks in the plaid of his tie.
“Arthur, do have anything you’d like to add?” he heard his commanding officer ask.
He shaded in the slope of Eames’ shoulders. “No, sir,” Arthur replied stoically. He glanced up a moment later; Eames was watching him, brow pinched in thought.
The next day, Arthur drew the crinkle of Eames’ forehead over his notes on paradoxes.
Eames left a month later, and Arthur meant to throw away the notebook. There wasn’t any point to keeping it, after all; he’d be going into the field soon, his notes all but committed to memory.
The Moleskine, however, stayed with him. The drawings did, too.
Instead, Arthur doodled here and there, nothing like his early days in dreamshare. He made his initials into penrose stairs, something he drew over everything when he was feeling especially stressed. He filled the first Moleskine and started on another, stashing the original away on a bookshelf in his apartment. It was the only one he kept.
Then, seven years after those first months training in top secret military facilities, he met Eames again. This Eames was older, but the flashing, hyper-alertness in his blue eyes was still the same, if a bit tempered. He smiled at Arthur, pretending he didn’t remember him, but Arthur knew; the tic in Eames’ jaw meant he remembered everything about Arthur, or as much as he’d learned. Eames was a forger now, but that didn’t mean he could hide everything.
Arthur watched Eames pace the floor of their hotel suite, makeshift headquarters until something bigger could be found (Budapest was sorely lacking in rental space), his hands gesturing with the grace of a dancer as he mapped out his idea for the extraction.
Arthur never wrote down Eames’ ideas. Instead, he drew his hands.
And so it went for a few years. Eames would float in and out of Arthur’s life like an autumn leaf, and Arthur’s notebook slowly became littered with various Eames incarnations: a scruffy, dirty goatee in Sicily; whip-thin and gaunt in Dublin; blond, shaggy hair in Rio; a thug in Sydney. Arthur never looked at them once they were completed, smudges of ink on his fingers the only reminder that he’d committed these versions to paper.
Once, in Seattle, Arthur let himself imagine what it would be like to sketch Eames’ forges. The next day, he came very close to burning his Moleskine altogether.
“Sometimes I think you barely know the sound of my voice, you so rarely listen to it,” Eames said to him in Chicago. They were strapping up for the extraction, Arthur’s chair beside his.
Arthur thought of the little notebook sitting innocently in the pocket of his jacket. “I listen,” was all he replied before the serum sank into his bloodstream.
During the Fischer job, the drawings changed. There were now full pages of only Eames’ profile, not just corners and half-sketches over numbers and addresses. Arthur spent the last hour of the flight to LA penciling the image of Eames as Browning, his hand shaking slightly from exhaustion and the remnants of pure unadulterated adrenaline. He wasn’t thinking at all when the captain made the final landing announcement; he sighed and dropped the Moleskine carelessly into the side pocket of his leather satchel, though he normally kept it stored away in one of the zippered panels. But his notebook’s safety was the last thing on his mind; all Arthur wanted in the world at that moment was a shower and a bed.
Fischer was long gone by the time Eames approached Arthur at the baggage claim of LAX. He smiled crookedly, holding his right hand out.
“To a job well done,” Eames said quietly, but his eyes held a tentativeness Arthur had never seen before.
Arthur shook his hand, Eames’ grip hard and solid, warm. They held a beat too long, and Arthur wondered if Eames could feel his heart beating faster.
“Are you staying in LA?” Arthur asked.
“For tonight. My flight to London doesn’t leave until tomorrow evening.”
Arthur nodded, his satchel sliding off his arm to land with an ungraceful thump on top of Eames’ carry-on. It fell onto its side, as if miming Arthur’s own exhaustion.
Eames laughed softly. “Shall I offer to find you a cab, or can one still operate as a zombie?”
“No, I’m fine.” Arthur gave him a smile, a genuine one, because they wouldn’t be seeing each other again. Perhaps ever. “Be careful.”
“I always am.” He paused for moment, mouth open as if poised to say more, but finally Eames shook his head and turned away, shouldering his bag.
They parted ways without saying another word, and Arthur pretended to be relieved.
That evening in his Anaheim hotel room, Arthur went to take out his Moleskine. He was going to trash the thing for good this time and move on. If Cobb could start another chapter of his life with a clean page, then so could he.
Only the Moleskine wasn’t in his bag.
Arthur sat on the edge of his bed, staring into the empty pocket of his satchel.
On the bedside table, his cell began to ring. The number was unknown.
Arthur knew before he answered. “Eames?”
“I...believe I have something of yours. A black notebook, perhaps?” His voice was quiet, just shy of a whisper.
Arthur’s stomach clenched. “It was an accident. It must’ve fallen out at the airport.”
“Yes, well.” Eames paused, cleared his throat.
And Arthur knew, again, before he asked. “You opened it, didn’t you?”
Eames said, softly, “I never took you for an artist.”
“I’m not,” Arthur said, hating the heat that crept into his cheeks. “That’s not art, that’s—”
“This is isn’t your first set of drawings, is it? You’ve been at this for a while now.”
He dropped his head into his hand. “It’s really none of your business, Eames.”
“My face is all over your notebook. Perhaps I have a little bit of a personal investment.”
“That’s private property.”
“Which somehow ended up inside my carry-on.”
“I said it was an accident.”
“Then let me return it to you.”
I’d rather you burned it. “I’ll—that’s not necessary. I’ll buy another one.”
Eames paused for several moments. “You’d give these up so easily?” he finally asked.
“Eames, it’s nothing, just a bunch of fucking doodles, all right? I’m sorry you had to see them, but just—please, just pitch the damn thing and don’t worry about it.”
Another long bout of silence stretched out over the line, until Eames sighed and replied, “All right,” and hung up.
Arthur rolled onto his side on the bed and set his phone on the nightstand. He told himself it was for the best; he’d never be able to destroy the drawings himself, anyway.
He didn’t sleep at all.
At three in the morning, he heard a quiet knock at his door.
Blearily, Arthur rubbed at his eyes, ignoring the fact that he’d tried to sleep in his clothes. He tugged his tie off on the way to the door, stomach rumbling absently to remind him he hadn’t eaten all day.
Through the peep hole, he saw Eames standing on the other side of the door, arms crossed tightly over his chest. He was in a long-sleeved navy t-shirt and black track pants, his hair in his eyes—an incarnation of Eames Arthur had never seen before. It made him strangely nervous.
“What is it?” he asked through the door.
“Arthur, open the door,” Eames said, voice low, resigned, exhausted.
“It’s three in the goddamn morning.”
“And yet you’re still awake. Open the door.”
Arthur rested his forehead against door frame, sighing deeply. His muscles were beginning to ache from lack of sleep. Slowly, he turned the locks and undid the chain, a steady, anxious pulse pounding in his chest.
He held the door open and said, “How did you find me so fast?” He’d paid cash for the room, took two different cabs to the hotel.
But his question was lost as Eames backed him up against the adjacent wall, cupping Arthur’s cheeks in his broad hands and kissing him soft and chastely on the mouth.
“I wish you’d told me sooner,” Eames murmured, thumb sweeping across Arthur’s chin.
“Told you what?” Arthur gasped, overwhelmed by the gentleness of Eames’ mouth juxtaposed with the solid, unyielding strength pressing him against the wall.
Eames’ reply was to lick Arthur’s lips apart with careful ease, opening his mouth to delve inside and take away every last one of Arthur’s secrets. His tongue traced the edge of Arthur’s teeth, the slick curve of his inner lip, and Arthur wondered if Eames was trying to memorize him the way Arthur memorized the lines of Eames’ cheeks, his nose, the blunt convex slope of his chin.
He didn’t need the Moleskine to remember Eames. All the important details were already burned into Arthur’s brain.
“I brought it back to you.” Eames pulled back, breathed the words against Arthur’s mouth as if reading his thoughts.
Arthur suddenly realized that he was clinging to the front of Eames’ shirt, one leg slotted between Eames’ thighs. He shook his head, flexed his fingers in the soft cotton, feeling warm muscle underneath. “You didn’t have to, I told you—”
“You’re bloody insane if you think I’m going to destroy physical evidence that you do, in fact, possess a heart.” Eames pressed closer, nuzzling his face into Arthur’s neck and sighing as if he couldn’t help himself.
Arthur let his eyes close. “They’re just...just scribbles, random shit, I—”
“Fucking hell, are you trying to make me fall more hopelessly in love with you?” Eames growled into the soft skin behind Arthur’s ear, making Arthur shudder and bite his lip against a moan.
They didn’t talk anymore after that, save for the moment Eames cried out Arthur’s name and Arthur gasped, “Yes.”
Long after, when they were naked and tangled in hotel sheets and each other, Arthur kissed his way over the dizzying swirls of Eames’ tattoos that mapped the dips and valleys of his muscles. He’d never seen them like this before, up close and intimate, and he silently catalogued them in his mind.
Eames hummed contentedly. “You can, you know. I won’t mind,” he whispered, fingertips tripping through the mussed strands of Arthur’s hair.
Arthur paused to roll his eyes.
But eventually he crawled out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxers, and went in search of some hotel stationery and a pen.
The Moleskine could wait until another time.
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