Work Text:
Eames is already in the shower when Arthur wakes up to a beam of sunlight slanting directly over the upper half of his face. A thick cloud of steam is drifting out through the cracked bathroom door and if Arthur strains he can just pick out what sounds like an out of tune bastardization of 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' over the steady rush over water.
It's tempting to drag the pillow over his face and go back to sleep until a more reasonable, civilized hour, but Eames is already on the second verse, which means he only has maybe ten more minutes if he's lucky before Eames is done. Arthur burrows a little further under the covers and silently laments that the one thing Eames apparently carried into his civilian life is the habit of waking up at oh-god-just-kill-me-now o'clock every morning.
The last time Arthur had still been in bed when Eames came out of the shower, he'd ended up with Eames' thighs bracketing his hips and hands pinning down his wrists while he'd laughed and rubbed his dripping hair all over Arthur's face and neck. Then again, that had devolved into fast, clumsy frottage that had somehow led to Eames stumbling after Arthur back into the shower to fuck him against slick tiles and help him shampoo his hair. So maybe that particular memory isn't exactly a deterrent from staying in bed a little longer, but Arthur has plans for today involving Fischer's therapist and some carefully placed bugs that could be thrown completely off schedule by having Eames massage his scalp for twenty minutes under the pretense of rinsing all the conditioner out just to give them both enough time to recover for another round.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, he thinks as he blinks up at the ceiling. Really not at all, especially since Eames has one of those squishy nonslip mats in his tub and has no qualms at all about dropping to his knees on it.
Arthur pauses and blinks again as Eames starts belting out about another manic Monday, then rolls mostly smoothly onto his feet. If he hurries, he can probably fit in a quick blow job before his schedule is completely blown to hell.
Arthur is fairly certain that the first time he had sex with Eames it was an accident. He'd been four months out of basic, stationed somewhere with a name he could barely pronounce and had no chance of ever spelling correctly, and Mitchell--who had obviously seen at least one too many episodes of M*A*S*H--wanted to try out his homemade still. The stuff was caustic and about as smooth going down as rusty barbed wire, but when Mitchell pronounced the first batch finished less than two days after Arthur's first near death experience he had been first in line to offer himself as a guinea pig.
Later on Arthur would learn that most everyone who had tried Mitchell's rotgut had declared it a roaring success in that it had gotten them drunk off their asses. On a slightly more personal level, Arthur wasn't willing to give it a full five stars since it had also apparently somehow landed him in bed with a visiting British liaison.
So it was four stars at most. Three if he was feeling like channeling his inner Russian judge.
"Um," Arthur said eloquently the next morning as he scrambled to fish his boxers out from under the bed without vomiting or falling on his face. The room swayed, but his fingertips snagged on the fabric and...success!
"Um?" The liaison repeated. He was still stretched out on his cot, a thin blanket riding low on his hips and a very noticeable trail of bite marks meandering down his chest. Even with an annoying smirk and sleep crusted at the corner of one of his eyes he still managed to look like the really good porn.
"This didn't happen," he said and resolutely didn't blush at the way his voice cracked. Boxers were apparently more complicated than he'd previously thought; he managed to get one foot through a hole before hopping, stumbling, and landing hard on his ass. Not exactly the best mid-hangover maneuver.
Arthur couldn't remember the liaison's name, but he had a vague recollection of calling him Heathcliff and asking to see his how high his heights could get. He might have offered to let him call him Cathy. There was a very real possibility that he had topped out his ability to be embarrassed. That might actually come in handy if he threw up in Heathcliff's tent, which was looking to be more likely the more he remembered.
"It really didn't happen," he said vehemently as he shimmied into his underwear on the floor. He figured there was less chance of him falling over again if he was already down there.
"Of course, pet," Heathcliff said with what was probably supposed to be an innocent smile that did absolutely nothing to make his mouth look less sinful.
Arthur glared in between glancing around the small room for his socks. And his pants. Pants would be good too.
Heathcliff arched an expressive eyebrow and gave Arthur a blatant once over that absolutely did not make his toes curl a tiny bit. He made a low, pleased noise and arched his back in a long stretch that made his blanket slip low enough to expose the barest glimpse of a fingertip bruised hipbone. Arthur's mouth went dry and he kind of hated the guy a little bit.
"As long as it didn't happen, what do you say about it not happening a little more?"
He bit back another 'Um' before it could slip out and told himself that the only reason he nodded and scrambled to crawl back into Heathcliff's cot was because getting up close and personal would make it that much easier to read his dog tags. Obviously he'd need to know his real name in order to effectively avoid him in the future.
It was just practical.
A few weeks into the Fischer job, Ariadne looks up from the model she's been fiddling with and says, "You and Eames are adorable. How long have you been together?" with a guileless smile that has Arthur's instincts screaming It's a trap! in a full on Admiral Ackbar. He really has no answer for that--Together? In what universe?--so he just stares at her until a puzzled line appears between her eyebrows and she slowly turns back to her work.
That night while he's rubbing Eames' feet and Eames is picking the pepperoni off of Arthur's half of the pizza so he can have the delicious greasy flavor without actually eating the meat, Arthur says, "Ariadne's a good architect, but I wonder if her powers of observation are good enough to keep her alive in this business."
"Oh?" Eames wiggles his toes and Arthur takes the silent cue to dig the ball of his thumb into the arch of his foot. Eames tenses up for a moment before sagging almost bonelessly back against the headboard with a happy little groan. "What makes you say that?"
"She just seems to get these strange ideas sometimes."
"You know us artsy types, love," says Eames as he pulls his foot out of Arthur's grasp and lightly drags it over the zipper of his trousers. He quirks a wicked eyebrow at Arthur. "We're all about seeing and doing things a little bit differently."
"Are you now?"
"Yes," Eames says very seriously. He snags a hold of Arthur's ankle to keep him more or less where he seems to want him and presses down a little more firmly, barely more than a tease. "Personally, I blame the scarves. You can only tie yourself up in one so many times before it starts to give you ideas."
Caught somewhere between a laugh and a moan, Arthur flops back and pushes his hips up against that sweet pressure.
"Go on," he says with an imperious wave of his hand. "Show me these 'ideas' of yours."
An hour later the pizza is on the floor and Arthur can't remember what they were talking about before. Somehow he can't bring himself to give a shit.
Sometime in between getting out of the army and being brilliant enough to pull off an actual inception, Arthur and Eames acquired over a dozen apartments and houses between the two of them. The key situation was one of those things Arthur never really thought about. It wasn't that he was adverse to introspection or personal reflection or any of those other things the army shrinks had tried to get him to do; it was just that he spent all his time when he was working pouring and agonizing over every last minuscule detail. When he was on his own time, he preferred to turn his brain off and veg. Anything deeper or more complicated than Harry Potter or the latest Kardashian escapade was usually right out.
All this to say that he had keys to all of Eames' residences and Eames had keys to all of his and Arthur never spent any time thinking about the fact. At first they'd gone through the pretense of hotel rooms and keeping separate places in the same cities, but they always ended up in bed together anyway. It was just more expedient to assume an open invitation was on the table.
So, when Arthur came across Tobias in L.A., he took him home to Eames' apartment without a second thought.
When the two of them stumbled through the door, dripping wet from a sudden summer shower and more than a little unkempt, Eames looked up from the book he was reading and gaped for a moment before pressing his mouth into a thin line.
"Are you having me on? Because I'm not laughing."
Arthur clasped Tobias even tighter and lifted his chin. "Not a joke. Is this going to be a problem?"
"Darling," Eames tried, obviously doing his best to look only at Arthur. "I think you might regret this is all."
"I would never regret Tobias," Arthur said firmly, because he was quite certain about that and Eames needed to understand that as soon as possible.
"Oh," Eames said with a grimace. "So it has a name then?"
"Of course he does," Arthur said. "Everyone needs a name."
"Arthur," said Eames. It was obvious he was trying to stay firm on the issue, but just then Tobias yawned impossibly wide and laid his head on Arthur's shoulder and something in Eames' expression crumbled. "Fine. If you really want him, then fine."
And, just like that, Arthur had a cat.
It just happened to live at an apartment with Eames' name on the lease.
These days Arthur separates his life into two simple periods: Before Mal and After Mal.
BM, he and Mal had had the occasional disagreement that usually ended in them getting drunk and harassing Dom and Eames into fetching snacks for them. AM, there are some days he's so fucking mad at Mal that he can taste it like pennies in the back of his mouth, getting more metallic and bitter until he wants to hate her, wants to take every good memory he has of her and her friendship and her warmth and bury it under the betrayal he feels at her leaving them.
BM, Eames was never more than a phone call away. AM, he still isn't.
It's another one of those things Arthur tends to just accept without really thinking about.
Right now, Eames is off shadowing Browning while Arthur's still stuck in Paris running Ariadne through additional training before he takes off for Australia at the end of the week. It sucks.
Paris is one of those things Arthur liked a lot more BM.
The day starts out shitty and just goes downhill from there. He's tired and fed up with Dom's brooding and wants to punch something when he accidentally sneaks up on Ariadne and Yusuf in the kitchenette in time to hear Yusuf finish a sentence, "...has always acted like a little bitch when his wife isn't around to keep him distracted."
His glare is sharp enough to cut glass, because only he's allowed to talk about Dom that way; coming from anyone else it's beyond an asshole thing to say. After Ariadne pulls him aside and says, "Yusuf didn't mean anything by it. I think we're all just missing Eames about now," and pats his arm with a significant little look that he can't read, he's still pissed off and puzzled on top of it.
That afternoon when Ariadne brings yet another world down around their ears and it's either call for a break or take up drinking, Arthur texts Eames that he's washing his hands of this entire fucking mess and moving to Tibet to be a monk. Less than two minutes later there's a single picture in his inbox. It doesn't fix anything, doesn't actually make anything better, but he still feels inexplicably lighter when he helps Ariadne slide the needle into the crook of her elbow and prepares to follow after her.
There was a job in Moscow that Arthur would end up forever referring to as 'That Cluster Fuck Where Dom Almost Got Us All Killed Over A Meatball Sub'. The entire story was ridiculous and convoluted to the point were it resembled a Three Stooges skit more than real life. Dom always accused Arthur of exaggerating whenever he brought it up.
He really wasn't.
While Dom was busy being kidnapped and belligerently arguing that no one with any self respect would ever use a fork and knife on a sandwich, Arthur and Eames were being woken up by their hotel room door being kicked open. There were bullets, at least two different knives, a pet monkey, and far too much yelling about somebody's mother involved. They ended up escaping out the window and down the fire escape with two and a half pairs of shoes and only one pair of pants between them.
The job was officially a bust and the first priority was to get the hell out of Dodge. There were contingency plans in place for things like this. Since neither of them were Dom in a snit, they actually followed the plan.
The radio silence from Eames left Arthur more jumpy and on edge than knowing somebody was probably hunting him down to try to kill him. People tried to kill him all the time; having Eames shut up and leave him alone for more than twelve hours at a time was a hell of a lot rarer.
Halfway through the first week, Arthur realized that in the confusion of the attack he'd somehow ended up wearing Eames' dog tags.
Three weeks later in L.A. Arthur was just coming out of the shower when he heard the door creak open. He snagged his gun off of the pedestal sink and crept down the hallway toward the entrance wearing nothing but Eames' dog tags and several rivulets of dripping water.
Eames, who looked like ten different kinds of hell and didn't appear to have much more energy than it took to cradle Tobias up against his chest, took the whole armed and naked thing in stride, barely batting an eyelash before he pulled Arthur into a tight, one armed hug. Tobias yowled in protest and took off to hide in the bedroom, but Arthur just pulled Eames in closer until he could feel the press of his own tags underneath Eames' thin t-shirt.
"I'm not dead," Eames murmured into the damp curve of Arthur's neck.
Arthur, too giddy from what he would never acknowledge as relief--feeling relief would mean he was actually worried and being worried meant he somehow doubted that Eames would be fine--to bother with anything as trivial as appropriate timing, immediately quipped back, "Look, just get in the cart."
Eames snorted a laugh in a way that was absolutely not attractive or endearing and let Arthur drag him back toward the shower as he insisted, "I'm feeling better. I think I'll go for a walk!"
If asked by one of the two people he would actually deign to answer, he would say that he was too distracted by all the yay-we're-still-alive sex and force feeding Eames until he didn't look like an underage twink anymore to switch their tags back to their proper owners.
(Dom was fine. He lured his captor into a sense of false security by bonding with him over strawberry cheesecake and escaped by knocking the guy unconscious with a spring form pan while he was teaching Dom how to make a perfectly light, fluffy one. Honestly, he just really needed to stop bitching about them leaving him behind already.)
The inception works. Things still aren't perfect. Mal is dead, Dom and the kids have more issues than Vogue, and their upstairs neighbor who was cat-sitting Tobias let him develop a truly disturbing addiction to tuna laced with catnip. Their worlds have been turned inside out and upside down and sometimes it still hurts just to breathe he misses the old days so much.
But, as it always has and always will, life moves on.
Bit by bit, things slot into new places. Eames goes with him to visit Mal's grave and shrugs helplessly at a nearby funeral while Arthur flings profanities like shrapnel at her headstone. He doesn't bring up the possibility of relocating to any of his places and the one time he goes on vacation, Eames is right there with him. It takes over a month, but they wean Tobias off of the kitty crack and back onto his insanely expensive prescription food that Eames insists on. Every night they tumble into bed together and usually they have sex, but sometimes they don't and Arthur gains a whole new appreciation for spooning. One afternoon while they're having sex, Arthur pauses. He braces his hands on Eames' chest partially for balance and partially to keep him from moving for a second.
"Wait, wait," Arthur grinds out, head tipping back on a groan when Eames sneaks in a quick thrust. Arthur smacks his side hard and tries for a glare that he just knows is completely ruined by the inevitable flush on his cheeks. "I said wait. Don't let me forget to add laundry detergent to the grocery list."
Eames rolls his eyes, grips Arthur's hips hard, and rolls his hips in a way makes Arthur clench down tight around his cock and bite his lip to keep from whining.
"Is that all?" Eames, the bastard, sounds unnaturally calm with barely more than a hitch in his breath. "I already added it earlier."
And it's not even weird, because apparently things like grocery lists are just part of their lives now.
It's about seven months after the inception when the card comes in the mail. It's just an invitation for James' birthday, nothing that should give Arthur any kind of pause.
Except it's addressed to both of them, like it's a foregone conclusion that they'll both be here. Like Arthur lives here. With Eames.
Arthur doesn't indulge in a lot of introspection or personal reflection or any of those other things the army shrinks had tried to get him to do, but as he walks into the living room, he can't help but piece together some things that seem like they should be glaringly obvious.
Eames is by the window with an easel. He's just goofing around with a stick of charcoal and Tobias is stretched out on his back across his thighs. The buttons of his shirt are undone and every time Eames leans forward, Tobias reaches up a paw to bat at Arthur's dog tags that are hanging around his neck, the same way they have for the better part of a decade now.
Arthur's knees suddenly feel a little weak and he slumps down onto the creamy leather couch he picked out himself when he declared Eames' apartment hideously dorm room chic and forced him to redecorate.
"Eames?" His voice is little more than a croak and Eames' head whips around so fast that Arthur thinks he might hear something crack. "I'd know if we were, you know, married or something, right? At the very least we would have gotten a toaster in the mail as a tip off?"
The expression on Eames' face is identical to the blank, overly innocent one Tobias had adopted after Arthur found his favorite suit jacket shredded on the closet floor.
"Eames," Arthur asks again, and god damn it, is this what a panic attack feels like?
"Look," Eames says, his eyes on the floor as he shifts Tobias off of his lap. He pauses, shifts like he isn't sure how to continue, and pushes to his feet with an uncommon lack of grace. His charcoal stained hands hover in the air between them like he wants to sketch out the answer, but after what feels like a short eternity of him working his jaw and not actually saying anything, he sinks down next to Arthur on the couch and says, "I thought you knew."
"Oh," Arthur says quietly.
Eames scrubs his hand over his face, smearing it with streaks of sooty black, and it maybe makes Arthur feel a little warm and tingly.
Oh.
The muscles in Eames' neck and shoulders are visibly tense and for once there's nothing teasing or mocking in the miserable little downturn of the corners of his mouth. Very carefully, Arthur reaches out and rests his hand on top of his dog tags on Eames' chest.
"I think," he says slowly, "that a hell of a lot of people owe us some fucking presents."
Eames' lips twitch and then he's grinning and draping himself all over Arthur in another shameless imitation of Tobias. "Mal gave us a blender," he points out.
Arthur huffs, barely able to keep the smile off his face. "The one that makes the really good frozen margaritas?"
"Yeah," Eames says against the little spot right behind Arthur's ear. He nuzzles it, then gives it anip for good measure.
"Okay," Arthur breathes as he grabs at Eames' arm and tries to drag him even closer. "She's forgiven, but everyone else needs to get their asses down to Crate & Barrel immediately."
"I'll send out a threatening e-mail letting them know first thing tomorrow."
"Knew there was a reason I accidentally married you," Arthur says with a laugh and uses his dog tags to pull Eames in for a kiss.