On S'appelle

He shouldn’t be worrying. He wasn’t worrying. Watching phones wasn’t worrying. It was cautionary examination. It was observation. It was his job.

There was, however, he would admit—very reluctantly—a slight, maybe too-large-for-just-colleagues, hint of concern.

It wasn’t like he expected Eames to call him in a drunk mess for the millionth time. In fact, it was rare to begin with that Eames called him with nothing but dragged on ramblings.

If Arthur was at all concerned, it should be with the fact that this phone call—this promised snippet of sober communication that Arthur has taken Eames’ word on—was to be the fourth connection of the week between them. Wasn’t that a sign of depression, a red flag for self-harm or suicide or something that would take Eames away?

Arthur dug a hand through his late morning hair. He wasn’t worrying. He was panicking. A full-blown, Arthur style, I’m-not-properly-moving-on-until-this-issue/problem/crisis-is-S-O-L-V-E-D panic.

He had five numbers he could call, one of which was fires of hell off limits. So four numbers and not the vaguest clue of which one was going to work or even if any of them would work.

Usually Arthur had a method involving numbers, had some form of this goes there and that goes here that he could always resort to in situations like this, in cases of missing information. This method had, he thought, been perfected with Eames. And it had been. It truly had been. He was the one that knew Eames had disappeared to the dirtiest part of Hungary when Cobb had lost all contact. He had been the one to drag Eames out of an unlabeled German jail cell even after Eames had been too nervous—nervous!—to remember anyone’s number to call for bail. The problem was that panic left no room for reason or undefined formulas or undefined anythings.

It was the promise that was throwing Arthur off, having him making all the wrong circular turns. He couldn’t tell if Eames wanted to be found or if he wanted to be lost. There were several occasions when Eames had disappeared and Arthur could easily recognize the signs of a man that wanted nothing more than to not exist for a month or two.

It was an absolutely unbearable feeling for Arthur to experience. In all the years they had known each other, the one thing Arthur had permanently settled about Eames was that he liked to run. He ran from a million and one things. But Arthur had, in those same years and maybe a little less, ultimately felt like the one million and second thing. The thing that came after the ones Eames ran away from. The thing, God forbid, Eames ran towards.

Arthur went through the list. He went through four voicemail messages, not leaving a single acknowledgement that he had called but waiting out all of the leave your concerns and I’ll see what I can dos. He went through all but one, all but the forbidden one that he wasn’t sure Eames even knew he had. He had typed in three of the numbers and hesitated twice when the phone buzzed and minimized the dial pad to show an incoming call.

“Darling.”

“Eames.” Arthur had to make an effort to keep the absolute relief out of his greeting.

“You called.”

“You didn’t,” Arthur returned.

“You said to call when I was sober,” Eames replied in a voice that set off more red flags than constant contact did.

“Are you drunk now?”

“Pleasantly buzzed.”

It was the sort of lie that Arthur was sure his subconscious didn’t want him to understand.

Arthur took a breath and waited for Eames to say something else. He took another breath when that didn’t happen and tried to think of how to say what he needed to.

He finally settled for, “I’m coming over” which he knew Eames translated in all of point five seconds.

“I can make it over in a half hour, darling,” Eames says.



The moment Eames walks in the door, Arthur thinks he looks like he’s got the answer to Life placed between his tongue and his teeth. There’s a strain in the air that feels like it’s made up of multiple lines of ask me about it, ask me about it. Arthur resolutely ignores this and Eames doesn’t push it, only sips the black coffee and slips into a chair across from Arthur.

“Do you remember that thing I brought up…” Eames takes a pause from letting the steam of his drink wash over him and tries to find the rest of his sentence in the air around him. “Saturday,” he finally finishes and the sentence has lost its question mark, but Arthur still answers.

“The movie?”

“Yeah, that.” Eames places his mug on a coaster and turns it until it finds its place in his own personal pattern of organization. “I remember more about it now.”

Arthur turns his own mug, which contains tea. He had not expected any apologies. Not for the drunk calls, or the unintentionally caused—he swallows a mouthful of tea and pride—concern, and most certainly not for the conversation about What Happened. Whatever apologies he wasn’t expecting, he also had not expected some miniscule outburst to show up again in a way that somehow felt heavier.

“What did you remember, Eames?”

And there must have been something he said right, because Eames is smiling and looking up at Arthur with an honest to God spark in his eyes that Arthur hasn’t seen since before that failed attempt at inception.

“I still can’t remember the title,” Eames admits. “But I do remember what’s important.” There’s some secret joke or code there, some last second flirtation Arthur pretends he doesn’t pick up on. Eames nods this odd sort of acceptance that Arthur tries not to regret.

“It’s about this guy with an identity crisis,”—and Arthur can see the smile, can hear the get this laced in thin layers between the words—“and he convinces himself he’s in love with this girl because that’s what everyone expects of him, or what they’ve told him. There might be amnesia involved, but…”—they don’t care—“The whole time he’s actually in love with this other guy and it’s like he doesn’t know this guy—I mean he really doesn’t know a single damned thing about the man,”—Arthur wonders when they stopped talking about the movie—“But he’s better when he’s with him. Not more defined—nothing can fix that. He just stops feeling like he’s drowning in lives that aren’t his.” Eames sort of pauses without meaning to, like the words are hitched in his throat and refusing to see the light of day, like it’s something he’s used to forcing back down into the deepest parts of him. But he says it anyway. “I can’t remember the title, but I have this feeling that it’s something really brilliant.”

There’s a moment of silence and Arthur sort of wonders if he should ask to kiss Eames. It feels like something he should have permission for. Then again, he thinks when he looks at Eames—really looks at Eames sitting across from him and not in Berlin or Australia or South Africa or an undefined, unmapped paper town somewhere west of nowhere, very much not running away—that nothing about them had ever been executed with verbal blessings, or any sort of blessing at all.

So Arthur moves first and he kisses Eames and Eames takes immediate action to ensure Arthur has no room and no permission to pull away any time soon.

It’s more defined than they’ve ever been and it all feels like some kind of warm that Arthur has no real memories of ever having felt before. But it’s pleasantly warm and he keeps pushing forward until it feels closer to pleasantly hot and uncomfortably held back.

Then he pulls away before he starts not being able to and Eames hesitantly lets him.

Eames is pursing his lips in a way Arthur isn’t used to seeing, but he’s already halfway to in love with it, so none of it really matters, just like none of It really mattered in the exact way Arthur thought it was supposed to. It mattered in a completely different way and it didn’t need a title. And he thinks that, ridiculously, it took a long line of drunk phone calls to point that out, because drunk phone calls weren’t normal for them, and Arthur wasn’t used to wanting to hang up the phone just long enough to go find Eames and maybe hold him too close, close enough for it to not be normal. But that didn’t matter because none of it was normal. There were no lines, there was not dictionary entry for this shit and it didn’t need a title, because they had the important things.

Eames smiles when Arthur tells him this and they’re both back to not being able to pull away.