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cicerOho! What's this? A wild title appears!
I know, I'm slightly tardy with this part. Sorry. D: This chapter just would. not. end.
Eames swings into Yusuf’s shop around noon.
The Kenyan sun is hot on his back, and he’s just finished a bowl of really excellent curry at a run-down little café down the way. Outside the shop, the streets are crowded, full of families hustling past vendors, delivery boys rattling along on their bikes.
Eames likes it, likes the careless rush of people. He’s always felt more comfortable in crowds.
Inside, Yusuf’s parlor is stuffy and cluttered, still as makeshift and ramshackle as it was two months ago. Eames knows for a fact that Yusuf could afford to renovate the whole place; in fact, he could probably afford to buy up the whole street, after what Saito’s paid them. But Yusuf apparently likes the place the way it is, and much as he himself likes frequent change, Eames can’t begrudge a man for liking the status quo.
He drops into a chair casually and puts his feet up on the table, even though Yusuf makes a face when he does that. The chair is large, and allows him to sprawls out comfortably. He shouts Yusuf’s name in the general direction of the back room, and hears an answering rattle.
Stretching out in the chair, he closes his eyes contentedly. For the first time in a fair few weeks, Eames feels perfectly at peace with the world.
And, really, that should be all the notice he needs that all hell is about to break loose.
After a moment, Yusuf comes out of the back room with a funny sort of look on his face. Eames tosses him a casual salute.
“Afternoon, mate.”
Yusuf winces, and gestures at Eames’ feet. “Not on the table, please.”
Eames relocates his feet onto the floor without complaint, but only because he considers Yusuf a friend.
“Been a few days, hasn’t it?” he remarks.
Yusuf raises an eyebrow.
More than a few days, really. It’s actually been ten days since he last saw Yusuf, but that’s not particularly unusual. Eames likes to drop in on Yusuf every now and then; he’s good for a drink and a few laughs, and Eames actually sort of enjoys listening to Yusuf ramble on about the new concoctions he’s working on.
It’s what he expects Yusuf to do now, as a matter of fact, but Yusuf just rearranges the bottles on his desk and gives Eames another odd look.
“I spoke to Cobb this morning,” he says, and Eames snorts.
“Don’t tell me he’s looking at another job already. Needs a rest, that man does.”
Eames is privately of the opinion that Cobb ought to retire outright. He is, unquestionably, the best extractor in the business, but anyone as unstable as Cobb’s become has no business messing around in the minds of others.
“No.” Yusuf taps a finger on the desk. “He sounded quite happy just being with his children.” Yusuf gives Eames another odd, almost meaningfullook.
Eames is not entirely sure what to make of that. “Well,” he says. “Good.” He puts his feet back on the table, just to make Yusuf sigh.
But Yusuf doesn’t sigh, doesn’t say anything, just keeps giving him those weird looks. It’s beginning to disturb Eames a bit, frankly. Yusuf’s never been much for silence or subtlety.
“Have I got something on my face,” he asks, pointedly, after a full ten seconds of mute staring on Yusuf’s part.
Yusuf shrugs. “Cobb wanted me to get in touch with Arthur,” he says, mildly.
Eames has had plenty of practice with manipulating his own facial expressions, hiding what he wants to, manufacturing false emotions. He may not be the luckiest gambler around, but he’s got a hell of a poker face, so it’s not too hard to give Yusuf a blank stare.
“That right?” he says, and chews on a thumbnail casually.
Yusuf, the bastard, doesn’t look half-convinced, but Eames is pretty sure there’s nothing wrong with his poker face. It’s more likely the result of all the things Eames has told him when he’s had too much to drink.
And really, Eames thinks, Yusuf should know better than to put too much stock in that. A man’s not responsible for what he says when he’s in his cups.
“She and Ariadne are still in Paris, aren’t they,” he adds offhandedly, like he doesn’t know for sure. Like he hasn’t spent the past four years tracking Arthur as best he can, as she bounces all over the globe.
“They are.” Yusuf sounds somewhat amused, like he knows perfectly well that Eames is well aware of Arthur‘s whereabouts.
Eames thinks that if Yusuf were a real friend, he’d be a bit more gracious and refrain from laughing at other people’s awkward romances. It’s really not very kind.
Yusuf drops down into the chair behind his desk and gives Eames a terribly smug look. “I heard some interesting gossip about Arthur, by the way.”
“Did you,” Eames says, and continues gnawing at a hangnail.
Yusuf looks as smug as the proverbial cat who got the cream.
“Wouldn’t you like to hear it?”
Eames would, in fact. He would like to hear it very much. But hell if he’s going to admit that, when Yusuf’s being such an absolute cunt about it.
Instead, he lifts a shoulder in a supremely casual shrug.
“Cobb must have a lot of free time these days if he’s ringing you up to share gossip.”
“Only when it’s good gossip,” Yusuf returns mildly, and gives him yet-another infuriatingly superior look.
It’s beginning to wear on Eames’ nerves, honestly.
“Well, share it, or don’t.” Eames raps his knuckles on the table meaningfully. “And if you’re not going to share, what say we get a drink?”
It’s a calculated move: surely Yusuf will spill everything he knows, then. He’s a very chatty drunk.
Yusuf sits back in his chair, steepling his fingers. His cat wanders across the desk and hops into his lap. Yusuf pets it absentmindedly.
“It seems,” he says, drawing his words out, clearly having the time of his life building up suspense. “It’s seems that Arthur is expecting.”
This is not at all what Eames was expecting to hear, and it takes several moment for the words to sink it.
Yusuf regards him smugly, clearly enjoying the show as Eames struggles to formulate a response. And Eames will most definitely have his revenge for this unfortunate little demonstration of schadenfreude, but at the same time, he finds that revenge has suddenly dropped down quite a bit on his list of priorities.
“Is that right,” he says, finally.
Yusuf arches an eyebrow. “It seems so.”
Eames inspects his fingernails. It’s as good an excuse as any to avoid looking Yusuf in the eye.
“And Cobb told you this?”
It’s quite difficult to believe, frankly. If it’s true, then why would Cobb be spreading the news all around, to Yusuf, of all people? Cobb always struck Eames as a man who played things close to the chest, and Eames would have expected him to be a bit more concerned about the privacy of those he cared about. And Cobb most certainly cared about Arthur.
“He did,” Yusuf says. He sits back in his chair, still smiling, apparently content to wait and watch Eames’ reaction.
Eames turns the matter over in his mind.
If Cobb didn’t actually share this news…well, then Yusuf’s just making it up, isn’t he, and that’s a very poor joke, considering that Yusuf (unfortunately) knows perfectly well that Eames’ relationship with Arthur is…not entirely platonic.
A very poor joke, indeed.
Eames glares, and Yusuf looks slightly taken aback.
“Very funny,” Eames says, crisply.
In any other situation, he might have gone with the joke a bit, let Yusuf believe he was buying it, and then found a way to turn it on him in the end. It’s the sort of game Eames quite enjoys, but in this particular case…well. He doesn’t feel much like joking.
Yusuf’s expression softens, and the smug look fades away.
“I’m actually not joking, I’m afraid.” He regards Eames somewhat sympathetically, and that more than anything lets Eames know that he’s serious.
Yusuf’s not a particularly good liar, definitely not good enough to work up a convincing sympathetic manner.
Which means that he’s serious, and Cobb actually did call him up and tell him Arthur was pregnant.
…Well.
“And how does Cobb know this?” Eames demands, after a moment‘s thought.
There‘s the crux of the matter right there, Eames thinks. If Yusuf’s not having fun with him, then the question becomes, where did Cobb get his information?
Certainly Cobb isn’t playing a joke. The man doesn’t have an amusing bone in his body, and even if he did, Eames doesn’t believe for a second that he would find it funny to spread that sort of rumor about Arthur.
And Arthur…she’s got a bit of a sense of humor, Eames knows that well enough. It’s hard to get her to show it, but it’s there. Still, she’s absolutely the last woman on earth who would go around pretending to be pregnant.
So. Not Cobb, and not Arthur. Which leaves…
“He said Ariadne told him,” Yusuf shrugs.
Ah. Well then.
He wouldn’t have expected it of Ariadne, exactly. Still, she is the playful sort, so perhaps she thought it would be funny to put Cobb in a panic with a story like this.
(Eames admits to himself that he can see the humor, even if he himself doesn’t find it particularly amusing right now.)
And of course, having no sense of humor, Cobb would have taken it seriously. Which doesn’t explain why he decided to tell Yusuf, exactly, but then Cobb’s mental processes never did make a hell of a lot of sense.
“Ariadne,” he mutters, and sits back in his chair, satisfied.
Yusuf quirks an eyebrow at him again. Eames manages a somewhat-convincing smirk in return.
“She thought it would be a good joke, I suppose? Ruffle Cobb’s feather a bit? Well done, Ariadne.”
Yusuf plucks the cat from his lap, gets up, and circles the desk. He drops into the chair across from Eames, and his expression is infuriatingly gentle, like someone trying to break tragic news to a person deeply in denial.
Eames is not particularly pleased to see that sort of expression directed at him.
“I really don’t think Ariadne would joke about that,” Yusuf says, slow and tactful. He pauses, and lifts his gaze to the ceiling thoughtfully. “For one, I don’t think she’d think it was all that funny. For another, I’m pretty sure Arthur would kill her when she found out.”
That’s true enough, and Eames can’t deny it. But there’s still got to be some trick to it, some joke, because there’s simply no way that this is serious. There just isn’t.
But Eames hasn’t got anything to say to Yusuf’s reasoning, so he just picks his nails and thinks it through again, trying to figure out where the chain of information got disrupted.
If Arthur didn’t start this rumor, and Ariadne didn’t, and Cobb didn’t, and Yusuf didn’t…
Well then. Shit.
Eames thinks he’s going to need a drink, quite a few of them. Apparently it shows on his face, because Yusuf gets up and pulls out a bottle of brandy and a pair of glasses from the bottom drawer. He brings the glasses over to the table, fills them up generously, and passes one over.
Eames knocks it back quickly, swallowing against the comforting burn. It’s good brandy; perhaps he won’t have Yusuf killed over this, after all. He studies the empty glass silently for several moments.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see that Yusuf keeps looking at him, as if he’s expecting Eames to say something. Eames, however, is frankly at a loss for words at a the moment. He keeps turning the matter over and over in his mind, trying to arrange the facts into something that makes sense, something other than the obvious, and keeps coming up empty.
He thinks, suddenly, of Occam’s razor. He always liked that principle, liked it from the first time he heard it as a schoolboy. It’s an excellent concept, nice, clean, and direct: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Eames was never much for the study of logistics, but this was a simple little rule that had helped him sort complex situations out time and again. Once he’d taken up forgery, he’d applied it as best he could. The general concept was very applicable to that particular art. It helped him arrange a set of rules for himself, for his work.
They were good rules, rules he lived by. Never make any forgery any more complex than it needs to be. Paint with broad strokes and let the subject fill in the rest. The devil is in the details. Always break things down to their simplest, smallest parts and go from there.
If he were to turn this concept, the concept of simple answers, to this situation, Eames knows perfectly well what conclusion he’d have to draw. If nobody’s lying, then everyone’s telling the truth. Simple as that.
Not that he’s ruled out lying or trickery, per se. He makes it matter of habit to never rule that sort of thing out completely.
Still, he has to admit that there doesn’t seem to be any particular motive for anyone to lie about this, no reason, no benefit. Yusuf’s perfectly correct; if this is in fact a game, and Arthur found out about it, there’d be absolute hell to pay. And surely Cobb and Ariadne know her well enough to know that.
Yusuf refills his glass, and Eames sips this one slowly, silently. He’s developing a bit of a headache, and he doesn’t think it’s going to go away any time soon.
“I think she’s telling the truth,” Yusuf says, again, gently. Then, “You should call her.”
“Grill Ariadne for the gory details, hm?” Eames downs the rest of his glass in a swallow.
It’s not a terrible idea. He hasn’t spoken to Ariadne since they parted at the airport, but surely she’s the same well of information she always was. Couldn’t hurt, really, to catch up with her, see what all this was about.
“No,” Yusuf says pointedly. “I meant Arthur.”
Ah, thinks Eames. That is, of course, an option. Probably the better one. Best to go straight to the source, and all that.
And yet…somehow, Eames strongly suspect he will not be going that route.
Of course, it’s not cowardice, exactly. It’s…well.
He’ll have to get back to that.
Yusuf plucks the half-empty glass from his fingers and tops it up again.
Eames begins to wonder if Yusuf is trying to lull him into a drunken stupor so he can freely use Eames’ unconscious body as a testing subject for whatever new compound he’s come up with. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Come on!” Yusuf urges, pushing the refilled glass across the table and into Eames’ waiting hands. “Drink up! Celebratory drink, and all that!”
“Celebratory?” he echoes faintly.
Yusuf gives him another pitying, you’re-not-fooling-anyone look. Eames discovers that, while he enjoys directing those looks at others, it’s not half as much fun when you’re on the receiving end.
“Is it someone else’s, then?” Yusuf asks politely, in a tone that suggests that he’s ready to offer more sympathetic drinks if the answer is yes.
Eames would really, really like to feign ignorance and pretend that he has no idea what Yusuf is driving at, but he’s suddenly far too tired to play this game. He tips the drink back.
“Who knows?” he mutters into the brandy.
And there’s the truth of it. Who knows, indeed. It’s not as if he and Arthur have any sort of…understanding, or anything of that nature. Far from it. Sure, they might sleep together now and again, when it the mood takes them. Whenever Eames can persuade her to let him underneath her crisp designer skirts. But that’s all. It’s enough, Eames tells himself.
They are not at all exclusive, is the thing. He hasn’t got any reason to suspect that Arthur’s kept herself just for him. So if she actually, somehow, is (dear God, he can hardly think the words) pregnant…well. No reason to expect that he’s involved at all.
Yusuf pats his shoulder. “You should call her,” he says, again.
“Don’t you think she should call me?” Eames sounds a good deal more petulant than he’d like, but he thinks it’s a fair enough point.
If he does have any sort of role to play in this, it seems like Arthur should’ve been to one to give him a call. It’s not as if she couldn’t find him. She can find damn near anyone, when she wants to, and it’s not like he’s been lying particularly low.
Yusuf just shrugs, good-naturedly. “Don’t ask me, my friend. I can’t say that I’ve ever been in this situation.” He offers Eames another glass of brandy, but Eames waves it off distractedly.
He’d like another glass, several more glasses in fact, but he’d also like to be able to make it home under his own power. He likes Yusuf quite a bit, but he can feel a deep personal crisis bearing down on him, and he’d rather like to be alone when he succumbs to it.
Eames stands abruptly. Yusuf, who had been patting him on the shoulder again (apparently under the mistaken impression that this was somehow helpful) nearly topples over. Eames walks out of the shop without another word.
“Call her!” Yusuf shouts after him. Eames ignores him.
Fortunately, Yusuf isn’t the sort of man to take offense to an abrupt departure, or to stand on ceremony. It wouldn’t matter much if he was, though. Eames can’t particularly bring himself to care about observing social niceties right now.
He shoulders his way through the thick crowds and wends his way slowly homeward. He’s just tipsy enough that he can still walk steadily enough, and doesn’t have any trouble working the lock on his door, but his thoughts are blurring a bit, making it slightly difficult to think clearly.
The numbness is pleasant relief.
Eames shuts the door behind him, locks it, and drops heavily onto the slightly dilapidated couch. He’d been meaning to replace it. Meaning to move someplace nicer, in fact, now that he had ample means to do so. But he’d gotten used to his old flat, and the more he thought about it, the more moving had begun to seem like more trouble than it was worth.
His cell phone is in his pocket. He fingers the edges carefully.
He could call Ariadne right now. He has no idea what time it was in Paris, and doesn’t particularly feel up to doing the math to work out the time zones, but it doesn’t really matter. She started all this, apparently, by running off and telling Cobb, from whom the gossip had spread. It’s her own fault, if people wind up calling her in the middle of the night to demand answers.
The cell phone hangs in his hand like a leaded weight. He pulls it out, drops it on his lap, and scrubs a hand over his face.
He is not nearly sober enough to have this conversation, he is well aware. He’s a good liar, of course; an excellent bluffer even when three sheets to the wind, and if he wanted to put in the effort, Eames is sure he could spin a story that would have Ariadne telling all she knows and asking no awkward questions. But he’s tired, and thinking about Arthur, about the last time he saw her, is doing something to violent to his heart rate.
And he’s trying very hard not to count the days back to that night, the night he took her back to his hotel room and spread her out on the nice clean sheets, but he’s doing the mental math anyway, and remembering that they hadn’t bothered with a condom, and that’s about to really give him a heart attack, so he punches in Ariadne’s number and presses ‘send’.
After all, he thinks, if he’s going to perish from an Arthur-induced heart attack, he may as well have the full story.
The phone rings twice, two agonizingly long rings, and then Ariadne picks up.
“Eames?”
She sounds delighted that he’s called, and of course that’s all very gratifying. More importantly, she doesn’t sound like she’s been woken out of a sound sleep, which is excellent, because presumably she’ll be more willing to chat.
“Hello, love.”
He’s never pretended to be a particularly humble man, though most of the bluster and swagger honestly is for show. Still, Eames is continually impressed by his own ability to fake a convincingly casual tone while he’s hyperventilating on the inside.
“How’s tricks?” he asks, his tone deliberately cheerful.
Well done, old man, he thinks, feeling absurdly pleased with himself. Good show. He’d known his acting abilities were quite good, but he hadn’t known that he could successfully maintain his composure whilst calling up an old colleague to try to nonchalantly suss out whether or not he’d gotten someone pregnant.
You really did learn something every day, he thinks.
“Eames! Hey! I haven’t seen you in ages! Where are you?”
Ariadne’s bright, joyful voice floats over the phone line, and it helps make the smile Eames had pasted on his face (always easier to make yourself sound cheerful when you’re smiling!) a little less forced.
“Still hanging around with Yusuf, the old bum. He’d be lost without me.”
Ariadne laughs. “Oh yeah, I bet. You’re sure it’s not the other way around?”
Eames draws up, affects a scandalized tone.
“My dear lady! You cut me to the very quick! I’ll have you know I’ve been on my very best behavior since we parted ways.”
He is faintly depressed to realize that this is actually more or less the truth. There simply hasn’t been much to do in the past weeks, and once you’ve done something as limit-shattering as pulling of a successful inception, the bar for excitement is set tragically high.
That is, of course, the source of the recurrent episodes of malaise he’s experienced recently. He is not pining, no matter what Yusuf says. What would Yusuf know about those sorts of things anyway, Eames thinks uncharitably.
“I think,” Ariadne says, still giggling, “Maybe your standards for good behavior are a little different from everyone else’s?”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” Eames responds negligently. He measures his words carefully, trying to sort out a casual segue. “And what of you, then? What misbehavior have you been up to recently?”
Ariadne lets out a gusty, dramatic sigh.
“Nothing!” She sounds distinctly put out by that fact, amusingly enough. “Just work. Arthur and I are doing a job here in Paris, nothing big. Pretty much a run of the mill business thing, you know?”
“Right.” The afternoon sun has slanted into the windows, directly into Eames’ eyes. He considers getting up to close the blinds, then dismisses the idea, as it requires entirely too much effort. He has a feeling he‘s going to be needing all the energy he‘s got. “So. No excitement on your end, then?”
An incriminating silence falls on the other end of the line, and Eames privately congratulates himself on another successful job.
“Ariadne?” he sings out, after a few seconds have passed. “Come now, love, have to share the good gossip.”
Ariadne groans faintly.
“You know, don’t you,” she says, faintly.
Eames allows a note of smugness to creep into his voice; it’s what she’s expecting, after all.
“May’ve heard a whisper or two.”
Ariadne groans again. “Damn it. I only told Cobb! Arthur’s going to kill me…”
She probably is, Eames thinks, and that’s about as far as his mental process takes him before he hits a brick wall and refuses to go any further.
“How did you hear?” Ariadne demands, finally.
Eames drums his fingers nervously along his thigh. It’s an unforgivably obvious tell, but there’s no one here to see it.
“Cobb passed the word along to Yusuf, evidently.”
Ariadne makes a rude sound.
“Jerk. I told him not to tell anyone else!”
Eames can’t help a slight, sincere quirk of the lips. “Really?” he asks mildly. “And I don’t suppose Arthur told you not to tell anyone, did she?”
There’s another short silence. Then Ariadne mutters, “Shut up.”
“She is going to kill you,” he agrees cheerfully. Privately, he thinks he may not be far behind, if his suspicions pan out.
Ariadne makes a distressed sound.
“Aren’t pregnant women supposed to get really tired?” she asks hopefully. “Maybe she’ll be too tired to murder me.”
“Depends,” Eames says evenly. “How far along is she?”
There they are, conversation turned exactly where he wants it. Smooth as silk. He really is good at this game, he thinks. Unfortunately, he can’t quite bring himself to be very proud right now.
“She said seven weeks. So, not very far. And she doesn’t seem all that tired. She doesn’t even have morning sickness.” Ariadne pauses. “Maybe if I buy her a lot of cute baby clothes she’ll spare me.”
“Bribery is always worth a try,” Eames assures her.
He ticks the weeks off on his fingers. Seven…seven weeks ago, he was…well. He was in the hotel with Arthur, is where he was.
Well. Fuck.
“I suppose I’d better let you go make out your will,” he says, because suddenly he really can’t be on the phone with Ariadne anymore. There is a very large bottle of vodka in the kitchen, and Eames intends to empty it by nightfall.
He is very carefully not thinking about what he will do after that.
“Okay.” Ariadne sounds slightly puzzled by his abruptness, but evidently shrugs it off. “But seriously, don’t tell anyone else, okay? And don’t let Yusuf tell anyone else either. I mean it!”
“Mum’s the word, darling.”
Eames switches off his phone entirely and drops it between the sofa cushions.
The vodka is nice and chilled, and the seal breaks open with a quick twist.
Eames almost gets out a glass, but then thinks he might as well go straight for the bottle.
And that’s the last coherent thought he has for a good twelve hours.
Onto the next part...
Looks like Sunday and Thursday are going to be the update days for this, so expect the next bit up on Thursday. As always, thanks much for reading and commenting! ♥
I know, I'm slightly tardy with this part. Sorry. D: This chapter just would. not. end.
Eames swings into Yusuf’s shop around noon.
The Kenyan sun is hot on his back, and he’s just finished a bowl of really excellent curry at a run-down little café down the way. Outside the shop, the streets are crowded, full of families hustling past vendors, delivery boys rattling along on their bikes.
Eames likes it, likes the careless rush of people. He’s always felt more comfortable in crowds.
Inside, Yusuf’s parlor is stuffy and cluttered, still as makeshift and ramshackle as it was two months ago. Eames knows for a fact that Yusuf could afford to renovate the whole place; in fact, he could probably afford to buy up the whole street, after what Saito’s paid them. But Yusuf apparently likes the place the way it is, and much as he himself likes frequent change, Eames can’t begrudge a man for liking the status quo.
He drops into a chair casually and puts his feet up on the table, even though Yusuf makes a face when he does that. The chair is large, and allows him to sprawls out comfortably. He shouts Yusuf’s name in the general direction of the back room, and hears an answering rattle.
Stretching out in the chair, he closes his eyes contentedly. For the first time in a fair few weeks, Eames feels perfectly at peace with the world.
And, really, that should be all the notice he needs that all hell is about to break loose.
After a moment, Yusuf comes out of the back room with a funny sort of look on his face. Eames tosses him a casual salute.
“Afternoon, mate.”
Yusuf winces, and gestures at Eames’ feet. “Not on the table, please.”
Eames relocates his feet onto the floor without complaint, but only because he considers Yusuf a friend.
“Been a few days, hasn’t it?” he remarks.
Yusuf raises an eyebrow.
More than a few days, really. It’s actually been ten days since he last saw Yusuf, but that’s not particularly unusual. Eames likes to drop in on Yusuf every now and then; he’s good for a drink and a few laughs, and Eames actually sort of enjoys listening to Yusuf ramble on about the new concoctions he’s working on.
It’s what he expects Yusuf to do now, as a matter of fact, but Yusuf just rearranges the bottles on his desk and gives Eames another odd look.
“I spoke to Cobb this morning,” he says, and Eames snorts.
“Don’t tell me he’s looking at another job already. Needs a rest, that man does.”
Eames is privately of the opinion that Cobb ought to retire outright. He is, unquestionably, the best extractor in the business, but anyone as unstable as Cobb’s become has no business messing around in the minds of others.
“No.” Yusuf taps a finger on the desk. “He sounded quite happy just being with his children.” Yusuf gives Eames another odd, almost meaningfullook.
Eames is not entirely sure what to make of that. “Well,” he says. “Good.” He puts his feet back on the table, just to make Yusuf sigh.
But Yusuf doesn’t sigh, doesn’t say anything, just keeps giving him those weird looks. It’s beginning to disturb Eames a bit, frankly. Yusuf’s never been much for silence or subtlety.
“Have I got something on my face,” he asks, pointedly, after a full ten seconds of mute staring on Yusuf’s part.
Yusuf shrugs. “Cobb wanted me to get in touch with Arthur,” he says, mildly.
Eames has had plenty of practice with manipulating his own facial expressions, hiding what he wants to, manufacturing false emotions. He may not be the luckiest gambler around, but he’s got a hell of a poker face, so it’s not too hard to give Yusuf a blank stare.
“That right?” he says, and chews on a thumbnail casually.
Yusuf, the bastard, doesn’t look half-convinced, but Eames is pretty sure there’s nothing wrong with his poker face. It’s more likely the result of all the things Eames has told him when he’s had too much to drink.
And really, Eames thinks, Yusuf should know better than to put too much stock in that. A man’s not responsible for what he says when he’s in his cups.
“She and Ariadne are still in Paris, aren’t they,” he adds offhandedly, like he doesn’t know for sure. Like he hasn’t spent the past four years tracking Arthur as best he can, as she bounces all over the globe.
“They are.” Yusuf sounds somewhat amused, like he knows perfectly well that Eames is well aware of Arthur‘s whereabouts.
Eames thinks that if Yusuf were a real friend, he’d be a bit more gracious and refrain from laughing at other people’s awkward romances. It’s really not very kind.
Yusuf drops down into the chair behind his desk and gives Eames a terribly smug look. “I heard some interesting gossip about Arthur, by the way.”
“Did you,” Eames says, and continues gnawing at a hangnail.
Yusuf looks as smug as the proverbial cat who got the cream.
“Wouldn’t you like to hear it?”
Eames would, in fact. He would like to hear it very much. But hell if he’s going to admit that, when Yusuf’s being such an absolute cunt about it.
Instead, he lifts a shoulder in a supremely casual shrug.
“Cobb must have a lot of free time these days if he’s ringing you up to share gossip.”
“Only when it’s good gossip,” Yusuf returns mildly, and gives him yet-another infuriatingly superior look.
It’s beginning to wear on Eames’ nerves, honestly.
“Well, share it, or don’t.” Eames raps his knuckles on the table meaningfully. “And if you’re not going to share, what say we get a drink?”
It’s a calculated move: surely Yusuf will spill everything he knows, then. He’s a very chatty drunk.
Yusuf sits back in his chair, steepling his fingers. His cat wanders across the desk and hops into his lap. Yusuf pets it absentmindedly.
“It seems,” he says, drawing his words out, clearly having the time of his life building up suspense. “It’s seems that Arthur is expecting.”
This is not at all what Eames was expecting to hear, and it takes several moment for the words to sink it.
Yusuf regards him smugly, clearly enjoying the show as Eames struggles to formulate a response. And Eames will most definitely have his revenge for this unfortunate little demonstration of schadenfreude, but at the same time, he finds that revenge has suddenly dropped down quite a bit on his list of priorities.
“Is that right,” he says, finally.
Yusuf arches an eyebrow. “It seems so.”
Eames inspects his fingernails. It’s as good an excuse as any to avoid looking Yusuf in the eye.
“And Cobb told you this?”
It’s quite difficult to believe, frankly. If it’s true, then why would Cobb be spreading the news all around, to Yusuf, of all people? Cobb always struck Eames as a man who played things close to the chest, and Eames would have expected him to be a bit more concerned about the privacy of those he cared about. And Cobb most certainly cared about Arthur.
“He did,” Yusuf says. He sits back in his chair, still smiling, apparently content to wait and watch Eames’ reaction.
Eames turns the matter over in his mind.
If Cobb didn’t actually share this news…well, then Yusuf’s just making it up, isn’t he, and that’s a very poor joke, considering that Yusuf (unfortunately) knows perfectly well that Eames’ relationship with Arthur is…not entirely platonic.
A very poor joke, indeed.
Eames glares, and Yusuf looks slightly taken aback.
“Very funny,” Eames says, crisply.
In any other situation, he might have gone with the joke a bit, let Yusuf believe he was buying it, and then found a way to turn it on him in the end. It’s the sort of game Eames quite enjoys, but in this particular case…well. He doesn’t feel much like joking.
Yusuf’s expression softens, and the smug look fades away.
“I’m actually not joking, I’m afraid.” He regards Eames somewhat sympathetically, and that more than anything lets Eames know that he’s serious.
Yusuf’s not a particularly good liar, definitely not good enough to work up a convincing sympathetic manner.
Which means that he’s serious, and Cobb actually did call him up and tell him Arthur was pregnant.
…Well.
“And how does Cobb know this?” Eames demands, after a moment‘s thought.
There‘s the crux of the matter right there, Eames thinks. If Yusuf’s not having fun with him, then the question becomes, where did Cobb get his information?
Certainly Cobb isn’t playing a joke. The man doesn’t have an amusing bone in his body, and even if he did, Eames doesn’t believe for a second that he would find it funny to spread that sort of rumor about Arthur.
And Arthur…she’s got a bit of a sense of humor, Eames knows that well enough. It’s hard to get her to show it, but it’s there. Still, she’s absolutely the last woman on earth who would go around pretending to be pregnant.
So. Not Cobb, and not Arthur. Which leaves…
“He said Ariadne told him,” Yusuf shrugs.
Ah. Well then.
He wouldn’t have expected it of Ariadne, exactly. Still, she is the playful sort, so perhaps she thought it would be funny to put Cobb in a panic with a story like this.
(Eames admits to himself that he can see the humor, even if he himself doesn’t find it particularly amusing right now.)
And of course, having no sense of humor, Cobb would have taken it seriously. Which doesn’t explain why he decided to tell Yusuf, exactly, but then Cobb’s mental processes never did make a hell of a lot of sense.
“Ariadne,” he mutters, and sits back in his chair, satisfied.
Yusuf quirks an eyebrow at him again. Eames manages a somewhat-convincing smirk in return.
“She thought it would be a good joke, I suppose? Ruffle Cobb’s feather a bit? Well done, Ariadne.”
Yusuf plucks the cat from his lap, gets up, and circles the desk. He drops into the chair across from Eames, and his expression is infuriatingly gentle, like someone trying to break tragic news to a person deeply in denial.
Eames is not particularly pleased to see that sort of expression directed at him.
“I really don’t think Ariadne would joke about that,” Yusuf says, slow and tactful. He pauses, and lifts his gaze to the ceiling thoughtfully. “For one, I don’t think she’d think it was all that funny. For another, I’m pretty sure Arthur would kill her when she found out.”
That’s true enough, and Eames can’t deny it. But there’s still got to be some trick to it, some joke, because there’s simply no way that this is serious. There just isn’t.
But Eames hasn’t got anything to say to Yusuf’s reasoning, so he just picks his nails and thinks it through again, trying to figure out where the chain of information got disrupted.
If Arthur didn’t start this rumor, and Ariadne didn’t, and Cobb didn’t, and Yusuf didn’t…
Well then. Shit.
Eames thinks he’s going to need a drink, quite a few of them. Apparently it shows on his face, because Yusuf gets up and pulls out a bottle of brandy and a pair of glasses from the bottom drawer. He brings the glasses over to the table, fills them up generously, and passes one over.
Eames knocks it back quickly, swallowing against the comforting burn. It’s good brandy; perhaps he won’t have Yusuf killed over this, after all. He studies the empty glass silently for several moments.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see that Yusuf keeps looking at him, as if he’s expecting Eames to say something. Eames, however, is frankly at a loss for words at a the moment. He keeps turning the matter over and over in his mind, trying to arrange the facts into something that makes sense, something other than the obvious, and keeps coming up empty.
He thinks, suddenly, of Occam’s razor. He always liked that principle, liked it from the first time he heard it as a schoolboy. It’s an excellent concept, nice, clean, and direct: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Eames was never much for the study of logistics, but this was a simple little rule that had helped him sort complex situations out time and again. Once he’d taken up forgery, he’d applied it as best he could. The general concept was very applicable to that particular art. It helped him arrange a set of rules for himself, for his work.
They were good rules, rules he lived by. Never make any forgery any more complex than it needs to be. Paint with broad strokes and let the subject fill in the rest. The devil is in the details. Always break things down to their simplest, smallest parts and go from there.
If he were to turn this concept, the concept of simple answers, to this situation, Eames knows perfectly well what conclusion he’d have to draw. If nobody’s lying, then everyone’s telling the truth. Simple as that.
Not that he’s ruled out lying or trickery, per se. He makes it matter of habit to never rule that sort of thing out completely.
Still, he has to admit that there doesn’t seem to be any particular motive for anyone to lie about this, no reason, no benefit. Yusuf’s perfectly correct; if this is in fact a game, and Arthur found out about it, there’d be absolute hell to pay. And surely Cobb and Ariadne know her well enough to know that.
Yusuf refills his glass, and Eames sips this one slowly, silently. He’s developing a bit of a headache, and he doesn’t think it’s going to go away any time soon.
“I think she’s telling the truth,” Yusuf says, again, gently. Then, “You should call her.”
“Grill Ariadne for the gory details, hm?” Eames downs the rest of his glass in a swallow.
It’s not a terrible idea. He hasn’t spoken to Ariadne since they parted at the airport, but surely she’s the same well of information she always was. Couldn’t hurt, really, to catch up with her, see what all this was about.
“No,” Yusuf says pointedly. “I meant Arthur.”
Ah, thinks Eames. That is, of course, an option. Probably the better one. Best to go straight to the source, and all that.
And yet…somehow, Eames strongly suspect he will not be going that route.
Of course, it’s not cowardice, exactly. It’s…well.
He’ll have to get back to that.
Yusuf plucks the half-empty glass from his fingers and tops it up again.
Eames begins to wonder if Yusuf is trying to lull him into a drunken stupor so he can freely use Eames’ unconscious body as a testing subject for whatever new compound he’s come up with. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Come on!” Yusuf urges, pushing the refilled glass across the table and into Eames’ waiting hands. “Drink up! Celebratory drink, and all that!”
“Celebratory?” he echoes faintly.
Yusuf gives him another pitying, you’re-not-fooling-anyone look. Eames discovers that, while he enjoys directing those looks at others, it’s not half as much fun when you’re on the receiving end.
“Is it someone else’s, then?” Yusuf asks politely, in a tone that suggests that he’s ready to offer more sympathetic drinks if the answer is yes.
Eames would really, really like to feign ignorance and pretend that he has no idea what Yusuf is driving at, but he’s suddenly far too tired to play this game. He tips the drink back.
“Who knows?” he mutters into the brandy.
And there’s the truth of it. Who knows, indeed. It’s not as if he and Arthur have any sort of…understanding, or anything of that nature. Far from it. Sure, they might sleep together now and again, when it the mood takes them. Whenever Eames can persuade her to let him underneath her crisp designer skirts. But that’s all. It’s enough, Eames tells himself.
They are not at all exclusive, is the thing. He hasn’t got any reason to suspect that Arthur’s kept herself just for him. So if she actually, somehow, is (dear God, he can hardly think the words) pregnant…well. No reason to expect that he’s involved at all.
Yusuf pats his shoulder. “You should call her,” he says, again.
“Don’t you think she should call me?” Eames sounds a good deal more petulant than he’d like, but he thinks it’s a fair enough point.
If he does have any sort of role to play in this, it seems like Arthur should’ve been to one to give him a call. It’s not as if she couldn’t find him. She can find damn near anyone, when she wants to, and it’s not like he’s been lying particularly low.
Yusuf just shrugs, good-naturedly. “Don’t ask me, my friend. I can’t say that I’ve ever been in this situation.” He offers Eames another glass of brandy, but Eames waves it off distractedly.
He’d like another glass, several more glasses in fact, but he’d also like to be able to make it home under his own power. He likes Yusuf quite a bit, but he can feel a deep personal crisis bearing down on him, and he’d rather like to be alone when he succumbs to it.
Eames stands abruptly. Yusuf, who had been patting him on the shoulder again (apparently under the mistaken impression that this was somehow helpful) nearly topples over. Eames walks out of the shop without another word.
“Call her!” Yusuf shouts after him. Eames ignores him.
Fortunately, Yusuf isn’t the sort of man to take offense to an abrupt departure, or to stand on ceremony. It wouldn’t matter much if he was, though. Eames can’t particularly bring himself to care about observing social niceties right now.
He shoulders his way through the thick crowds and wends his way slowly homeward. He’s just tipsy enough that he can still walk steadily enough, and doesn’t have any trouble working the lock on his door, but his thoughts are blurring a bit, making it slightly difficult to think clearly.
The numbness is pleasant relief.
Eames shuts the door behind him, locks it, and drops heavily onto the slightly dilapidated couch. He’d been meaning to replace it. Meaning to move someplace nicer, in fact, now that he had ample means to do so. But he’d gotten used to his old flat, and the more he thought about it, the more moving had begun to seem like more trouble than it was worth.
His cell phone is in his pocket. He fingers the edges carefully.
He could call Ariadne right now. He has no idea what time it was in Paris, and doesn’t particularly feel up to doing the math to work out the time zones, but it doesn’t really matter. She started all this, apparently, by running off and telling Cobb, from whom the gossip had spread. It’s her own fault, if people wind up calling her in the middle of the night to demand answers.
The cell phone hangs in his hand like a leaded weight. He pulls it out, drops it on his lap, and scrubs a hand over his face.
He is not nearly sober enough to have this conversation, he is well aware. He’s a good liar, of course; an excellent bluffer even when three sheets to the wind, and if he wanted to put in the effort, Eames is sure he could spin a story that would have Ariadne telling all she knows and asking no awkward questions. But he’s tired, and thinking about Arthur, about the last time he saw her, is doing something to violent to his heart rate.
And he’s trying very hard not to count the days back to that night, the night he took her back to his hotel room and spread her out on the nice clean sheets, but he’s doing the mental math anyway, and remembering that they hadn’t bothered with a condom, and that’s about to really give him a heart attack, so he punches in Ariadne’s number and presses ‘send’.
After all, he thinks, if he’s going to perish from an Arthur-induced heart attack, he may as well have the full story.
The phone rings twice, two agonizingly long rings, and then Ariadne picks up.
“Eames?”
She sounds delighted that he’s called, and of course that’s all very gratifying. More importantly, she doesn’t sound like she’s been woken out of a sound sleep, which is excellent, because presumably she’ll be more willing to chat.
“Hello, love.”
He’s never pretended to be a particularly humble man, though most of the bluster and swagger honestly is for show. Still, Eames is continually impressed by his own ability to fake a convincingly casual tone while he’s hyperventilating on the inside.
“How’s tricks?” he asks, his tone deliberately cheerful.
Well done, old man, he thinks, feeling absurdly pleased with himself. Good show. He’d known his acting abilities were quite good, but he hadn’t known that he could successfully maintain his composure whilst calling up an old colleague to try to nonchalantly suss out whether or not he’d gotten someone pregnant.
You really did learn something every day, he thinks.
“Eames! Hey! I haven’t seen you in ages! Where are you?”
Ariadne’s bright, joyful voice floats over the phone line, and it helps make the smile Eames had pasted on his face (always easier to make yourself sound cheerful when you’re smiling!) a little less forced.
“Still hanging around with Yusuf, the old bum. He’d be lost without me.”
Ariadne laughs. “Oh yeah, I bet. You’re sure it’s not the other way around?”
Eames draws up, affects a scandalized tone.
“My dear lady! You cut me to the very quick! I’ll have you know I’ve been on my very best behavior since we parted ways.”
He is faintly depressed to realize that this is actually more or less the truth. There simply hasn’t been much to do in the past weeks, and once you’ve done something as limit-shattering as pulling of a successful inception, the bar for excitement is set tragically high.
That is, of course, the source of the recurrent episodes of malaise he’s experienced recently. He is not pining, no matter what Yusuf says. What would Yusuf know about those sorts of things anyway, Eames thinks uncharitably.
“I think,” Ariadne says, still giggling, “Maybe your standards for good behavior are a little different from everyone else’s?”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” Eames responds negligently. He measures his words carefully, trying to sort out a casual segue. “And what of you, then? What misbehavior have you been up to recently?”
Ariadne lets out a gusty, dramatic sigh.
“Nothing!” She sounds distinctly put out by that fact, amusingly enough. “Just work. Arthur and I are doing a job here in Paris, nothing big. Pretty much a run of the mill business thing, you know?”
“Right.” The afternoon sun has slanted into the windows, directly into Eames’ eyes. He considers getting up to close the blinds, then dismisses the idea, as it requires entirely too much effort. He has a feeling he‘s going to be needing all the energy he‘s got. “So. No excitement on your end, then?”
An incriminating silence falls on the other end of the line, and Eames privately congratulates himself on another successful job.
“Ariadne?” he sings out, after a few seconds have passed. “Come now, love, have to share the good gossip.”
Ariadne groans faintly.
“You know, don’t you,” she says, faintly.
Eames allows a note of smugness to creep into his voice; it’s what she’s expecting, after all.
“May’ve heard a whisper or two.”
Ariadne groans again. “Damn it. I only told Cobb! Arthur’s going to kill me…”
She probably is, Eames thinks, and that’s about as far as his mental process takes him before he hits a brick wall and refuses to go any further.
“How did you hear?” Ariadne demands, finally.
Eames drums his fingers nervously along his thigh. It’s an unforgivably obvious tell, but there’s no one here to see it.
“Cobb passed the word along to Yusuf, evidently.”
Ariadne makes a rude sound.
“Jerk. I told him not to tell anyone else!”
Eames can’t help a slight, sincere quirk of the lips. “Really?” he asks mildly. “And I don’t suppose Arthur told you not to tell anyone, did she?”
There’s another short silence. Then Ariadne mutters, “Shut up.”
“She is going to kill you,” he agrees cheerfully. Privately, he thinks he may not be far behind, if his suspicions pan out.
Ariadne makes a distressed sound.
“Aren’t pregnant women supposed to get really tired?” she asks hopefully. “Maybe she’ll be too tired to murder me.”
“Depends,” Eames says evenly. “How far along is she?”
There they are, conversation turned exactly where he wants it. Smooth as silk. He really is good at this game, he thinks. Unfortunately, he can’t quite bring himself to be very proud right now.
“She said seven weeks. So, not very far. And she doesn’t seem all that tired. She doesn’t even have morning sickness.” Ariadne pauses. “Maybe if I buy her a lot of cute baby clothes she’ll spare me.”
“Bribery is always worth a try,” Eames assures her.
He ticks the weeks off on his fingers. Seven…seven weeks ago, he was…well. He was in the hotel with Arthur, is where he was.
Well. Fuck.
“I suppose I’d better let you go make out your will,” he says, because suddenly he really can’t be on the phone with Ariadne anymore. There is a very large bottle of vodka in the kitchen, and Eames intends to empty it by nightfall.
He is very carefully not thinking about what he will do after that.
“Okay.” Ariadne sounds slightly puzzled by his abruptness, but evidently shrugs it off. “But seriously, don’t tell anyone else, okay? And don’t let Yusuf tell anyone else either. I mean it!”
“Mum’s the word, darling.”
Eames switches off his phone entirely and drops it between the sofa cushions.
The vodka is nice and chilled, and the seal breaks open with a quick twist.
Eames almost gets out a glass, but then thinks he might as well go straight for the bottle.
And that’s the last coherent thought he has for a good twelve hours.
Onto the next part...
Looks like Sunday and Thursday are going to be the update days for this, so expect the next bit up on Thursday. As always, thanks much for reading and commenting! ♥
