Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Eames is leaving a nightclub in Gran Canaria when Ariadne phones him. He is reasonably drunk, and unreasonably irritated at the interruption.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asks her. Presumably this is not a social call. That Ariadne has this number at all is purely precaution; that she is calling him out of the blue like this doesn’t bode well.

The man whose hotel Eames was heading back to gives him a suspicious look.

“I think something’s wrong with Arthur,” Ariadne tells him without preamble.

It’s a surprisingly sobering sentence.

“There’s plenty of things wrong with Arthur, but that doesn’t explain why you’re calling me.”

Eames’ company for the evening rolls his eyes and walks off. Eames watches him go, trying to summon up some sort of disappointment, but if anything he feels vaguely relieved; this way he won’t have to watch what he says so much.

“I dunno,” Ariadne continues. “He’s just… He’s acting weird. And you know him best, so I thought I’d ask you.”

“Leaving aside for the moment that I don't think anybody knows Arthur best, I’m sure he’s fine. Job stress, you know what he’s like. Any and all instances of him being crabbier than normal can probably be chalked up to something simple, such as the mark being better than average at hiding his credit rating.”

“That’s the thing, he’s not being ‘crabbier’. The job isn’t even complicated, so I’m not sure stress is the answer. He’s just… I dunno! If anything I think he’s sad.”

“What makes you say that?” Eames hadn’t meant to ask, but the words managed to slip out anyway. He’s not concerned, that’s too strong, but he is… mildly curious. It pays to be curious in their line of work. When you share headspace with people it is good practice to keep abreast of their mental states. There is absolutely no other reason why he might be concer— curious about Arthur.

Because this is Arthur. Arthur doesn’t bring personal things to work with him. He leaves them at the door and buries whatever it is that’s bothering him in a mountain of phone transcripts, schedules and credit card receipts. He throws himself into the minutia of other people’s lives as if he could somehow drown his own personal devils in the details of somebody else’s. He uses work as a distraction, a buffer from whatever it is that he’s trying to avoid. That’s just Arthur. That’s nothing new.

Ariadne makes an inarticulate noise, a combination of frustration and worry and a lack of an answer that is any more specific. Things must be pretty bad if she feels the need to phone Eames to ask about it. But if the job is a milk run as she says, then there are no immediately obvious reasons for Arthur to be behaving out of the ordinary.

“When you say he’s ‘acting weird’, what do you mean exactly?” Eames asks. His fingers itch for something to fiddle with; a lighter, a coin, a cigarette. In the absence of any of these he stuffs his hand into his pocket.

“The practice runs are… there are things that aren't supposed to be there. Projections, that sort of thing.”

Eames lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. That happened to everybody from time to time. Sometimes it was the subconscious dealing with something. It was often sexual. Maybe Arthur was just going through a dry spell. People tended to bring in aspects of their desires when they were sexually frustrated. At some point somebody had started calling it blue balling and the term had sort of stuck, but Eames refuses to call it that.

But maybe that’s why Ariadne was finding it difficult to say what the problem was. Being treated to the sight of Arthur waking up with a hard on because his sexual desires were creeping into their practice runs might be something she found embarrassing. Maybe Arthur’s subconscious had presented them all with some overly friendly projections. Perhaps said projections been a bit handsy, that did happen sometimes.

Work in dreamshare long enough and you were privy to all sorts of little glimpses into what people liked. It wasn’t unheard of to witness somebody shagging a projection. Maybe that’s what the problem was. Maybe Ariadne and whoever else they were working with had been treated to the sight of Arthur ‘involved’ with an aspect of his own subconscious. Maybe Arthur’s subconscious had come up with something particularly graphic.

“It happens,” Eames says. “Sometimes it’s harder than normal to keep these things out of the forefront of your thoughts, I’m sure Arthur is just…”

Only that’s the thing; he’s not sure that Arthur is ‘just’ anything. There have been no slips from Arthur that he can recall. Eames can’t remember anything like that ever happening. He’s never heard a rumour of it either. There have been no flirty remarks from Arthur’s projections when they’ve worked together, no trailing fingers or sultry glances.

There have been no instances of his projections peeling each other out of their uniforms and fucking each other, which is far more than Eames can say of himself. Even now, years later, the look on Arthur’s face when he’d walked in and discovered Eames sandwiched between his then commanding officer and one of the other lieutenants is permanently inscribed into his memory.

But Arthur was too much of a professional for that. His projections were unfailingly either aloof or murderous with little room in between, and Eames can’t think of a single instance where Arthur has let a projection that deviated from that M.O slip into a dream.

No instance except—

“One of his projections said ‘yippee-ki-yay motherfucker’ yesterday,” Ariadne says reluctantly.

“That seems fairly normal for Arthur,” Eames tries, but he knows she won't fall for it.

“Then another one said ‘now I have a machine gun ho ho ho’ and obliterated Eun-Ae,” she says flatly.

“Ah.”

“Yes, ‘ah’.”

It is difficult to think about this sort of thing while his head is fuzzy with alcohol and when roughly five minutes ago Eames was dancing to Gina G, but needs must.

Because Eames knows. Through the haze of sambuca, it occurs to him that it is December. Arthur always did get a bit strange in December. Eames used to think it was just that Arthur didn’t like Christmas. He used to think that Arthur was averse to tinsel and turkey and too much cheer, because that would make sense. Arthur never gave any indication that this wasn’t the case. In fact whenever the subject came up Arthur would pull the ‘we’re here to work’ line, shutting down all talk of anything but the job with a scowl. That was usually enough to get people to drop the subject.

Eames hadn’t really thought much of it. Arthur had never been in the habit of discussing his life outside of work with anybody, even Eames, who has known him for longer than just about anybody other than Cobb. Arthur not engaging in talk about what he was doing for the festive period wasn’t suspicious. If anything, working with Arthur towards the tail end of the year was something Eames was always thankful for, because he could guarantee that Arthur wouldn’t ask him about his own plans.

Eames doesn’t like Christmas. He doesn’t like tinsel, and he’s not overly fond of turkey. He doesn’t like the false cheer that seems to pervade everything, the ‘everything is okay because it’s Christmas’, ‘good will to all men’ bullshit that seems to abound at this time of year. Not to be all ‘bah humbug’ about it, but he doesn’t do Christmas. Most wonderful time of the year his arse, it had always been awful. It was nice for everybody else, but it’s not his cup of tea. It might be nice if you had a family—or at least, a family that was actually nice—but in the absence of that it was better just to get on with it. No use crying over spilt milk.

Plus, people did strange things at this time of year. They seemed to get caught up in all the superfluous, overly positive atmosphere of it all. They listened to the same six songs on the radio and wore awful jumpers, and that was the least of it. Far worse was the insistence that, even though on an ordinary day they might ignore each other as best they could, because it was Christmas there was an expectation to make an effort, to brush everything under the rug in the name of good cheer and benevolence.

Quite what it was that made people insist on trying to paper over the cracks for Christmas Day was something Eames found rather bemusing these days. It used to bother him more. He used to try. He’d wanted to sit round a table with people he loved and enjoy their company. Even when that turned out to be a complete fantasy, he’d tried to exercise some benevolence. It was, after all, Christmas. If people couldn’t be civil to each other for one day a year because it was nice to do that, because they were family, and family meant something, then where did that leave them?

Turns out, it was all actually bollocks. What was the bloody point? All the cheer was just hollow words people said to each other to keep up appearances, at least in Eames' experience. Time together as a family is a gift? Bullshit. He’s sat through far too many excruciating family dinners to want to keep up with the charade. It seemed far too close to licensing their actions. Tolerating people's company for the alleged virtue of them being family had never sat well once he realised that.

Something about the holly and the tinsel and the feel good family values made him want to run in the opposite direction, so that’s what he’d always done since. It was preferable to avoid the whole thing until everybody returned to their senses in January. Morocco was usually a reasonably safe bet. One year he’d spent it in Delhi.

This year he was in Gran Canaria. Admittedly this was possibly a bit out of character, because clubbing had never really been his thing, but something about the noise and sheer determination to have fun made it easier, somehow. It was easy to slip into the stream of everybody else who was searching for something, let it carry him along. There were more decorations here than he might really want to see, but a few weeks of sun, sand, and sex had felt like a good idea when the thought occurred to him.

People did strange things at this time of the year, things they didn’t normally do; Eames’ family had for some reason got to December every year and made a bizarre effort to pretend they were the sort of people that wanted to spend time together for the appearance of the thing, as if the token gesture of a Christmas present excused the rest of it in any way. So Eames spending half the month wearing as little as possible and making a concerted effort to pickle himself wasn’t such a stretch when considered in that light. Call it carrying on the family tradition of making an effort in December.

Eames doesn’t do Christmas, but he is not immune to acting strangely at this time of year.

Neither, it seems, is Arthur.

At one point he’d thought that Arthur being slightly snappier than usual in December was just because he was irritated by the constant stream of Christmas music. Maybe he didn’t like seeing appalling jumpers on everybody. Maybe he didn’t like the commercialisation of it. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t anything to be suspicious of. It wasn’t out of the question that his feelings about it ran along a similar vein to Eames’ own.

But then last year Eames had realised that wasn’t true.

Well. Strictly speaking, ‘realised’ was perhaps the wrong word. It was less realised and more discovered, but that’s a technicality. The point is, Arthur didn’t dislike Christmas; Arthur loved Christmas, and that was the problem.

Eames thinks about the possibility of the rest of the dreamshare community — if a group of people with questionable morals united only by their affinity with a certain sort of technology could be called a community — discovering that Arthur is not, in fact, the miserly miserable sod he made himself out to be. He thinks about the charming selection of humans they work with finding out that, rather than the usual sexual fantasies and latent desires that usually surfaced in people’s subconsciousness, the thing Arthur had trouble suppressing was liking Christmas. He thinks about the fact that Arthur would sooner cut out his own tongue than ask for help. Eames stands there in the street while all the people that had been in the nightclub flow around him, and there really is only one option.

He tells Ariadne he’ll be there. It seems like a good idea. Eames might not do Christmas, but he feels oddly protective of Arthur’s secret. He has his suspicions about his own motives, but those are best left unexamined. Normally he would run in the other direction, but now he’s decided to do this he feels rather calm about it somehow.

He must be going soft in his old age.

He makes some space in his schedule (ignoring for the moment that his schedule for the time being consists of keeping off the radar and drifting along in a stream of anonymous expat sun-seekers trying to outrun all their atrocious past Christmases by spending the run-up to the ‘big day’ attempting to remain either drunk or unconscious) and books a flight to Vancouver.

It’ll be a bit of a shock to the system, but his liver will probably appreciate the break.

The strange thing is, even when he sobers up and questions his decision, he can’t find anything about his actions that he’d really have done all that differently. Maybe he would have taken it slightly easier on the booze that evening if he’d known he was going to get a phone call, but that’s about it.

Even when he’s somewhere over the Atlantic and still contemplating whether this is in fact a good idea, the flight punctuated with intermittent pockets of sleep and his brooding by the periodic interruption of food, he can’t shake the notion that it is.

Which is dodgy territory. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ was the sort of thing people said after everything went tits up, despite their well-meaning intentions. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ felt like the sort of thing he might say when confronted with the reality of his choices, when he was surveying the wreckage strewn about in the wake of his altruistic actions.

It’s the sort of thing he’s said to himself before, for exactly those reasons.

He hopes none of this is a premonition.

-

When the cold light of day wakes him up he’s in a hotel. A glance at the menu he finds next to the coffee maker for the restaurant next door tells him it’s called the Victorian.

Looking around, it seems like the sort of thing Arthur might like, which is an unsettling thought. Eames hadn’t been firing on all cylinders when he arrived, but if the hotel meeting with Arthur’s approval is what he’s basing his choices on then maybe the situation is worse than he thought.

He staggers to the toilet and sits down to piss. He splashes water on his face, feeling like he’s not quite with it. He really must be getting old if he wakes up feeling this groggy after a few too many sherbets and a trans-Atlantic flight.

He has no idea what time it is. On the way back towards the bed he checks he’s had the wherewithal to hang the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door before he passed out and, after a brief altercation with the Nespresso machine, sits down gingerly on the edge of the bed while it makes a series of wet gurgling sounds, coffee dribbling fitfully into a mug.

He waits for the regret to hit him. He could be in the Canary Islands still, yet here he is in Canada because Ariadne called him in a flap about Arthur. He’s here because it seemed like a good idea. Those words have bitten him on the arse more than a handful of times, and on paper this seems like it will probably be another instance of the same.

The coffee, when it’s ready, tastes burnt. He drinks it methodically, hoping that the caffeine will make him feel slightly more human, but even when he’s drained the mug he still can’t find any traces of doubt.

He showers, because he smells strongly of aeroplane and slightly of nightclub. Upon surveying the contents of his suitcase he discovers he is woefully under prepared for winter in Vancouver. The jacket he was wearing is really only suitable for the temperatures in early autumn here at best, and there are rather more tight white t-shirts than he might normally include if he was packing for work. He’d been wearing jeans; it’s not how he normally presents himself in a professional setting.

He keeps waiting for the penny to drop and to realise that this is a bad idea, or, failing that, even the dawning of the realisation that this isn’t even a good idea, but neither epiphany seems to be forthcoming.

He has a bit of a wobble over breakfast — which may or may not technically be breakfast anymore as he’d slept through the whole morning due to being double teamed by the combined horrors of jetlag and a hangover and is eating from the lunch menu — when he considers the logistics of turning up in the middle of a job like this. He needs an excuse, because Arthur will definitely ask him what the hell he’s doing here.

The job doesn’t need a forger, or something stolen, or an extra pair of hands. Arthur knows there is no logical reason for Eames to be here, and he will take great delight in demanding a suitable explanation.

The only problem is, Eames can’t think of one. His decision to dash off as he did was based on a combination of inebriation and maudlin introspection. There is probably also a certain amount of feeling like he owes Arthur a good turn, and Eames stridently insists to himself that these are the sole reasons for his sudden departure from the Yumbo Centre and his subsequent arrival in downtown Vancouver.

Arthur has bailed him out of some iffy situations in the past. That’s the sort of person Arthur is. He makes it his business to sort out other people’s shit. He’d followed Cobb on his little sabbatical, and he’d had a hand in resolving that nasty situation Eames had found himself embroiled in the other year in Bulgaria.

So Eames owes him a favour. That’s all this is. He’s paying Arthur back for all the times he’s had a hand in getting Eames out of a sticky situation. Helping Arthur keep up the ruse of being a Christmas hating Grinch seemed only fair under the circumstances. It definitely has nothing to do with the quite frankly embarrassing amount of affection he feels for Arthur, which he is absolutely not going to examine too closely.

It also isn’t something he’s going to tell Arthur, which leaves him with a bit of a conundrum on his hands.

He ponders the problem while he continues eating. He is still considering the question once he’s finished and can’t delay going out to find something warmer to wear. He hasn’t got a clue where to go to look for clothes, so he spends twenty minutes looking things up and nursing another cup of coffee before he sets out. He gets some funny looks when he steps out onto the street, because he is woefully under-dressed for the weather.

The thing is, when all of the real reasons Eames is in Vancouver are taken out of the equation, the only explanation that he can come up with is to say he was in the area and thought he’d drop by.

Which is a terrible explanation. They never do that. You don’t gatecrash a job in this business. You don’t show up unannounced in the middle of this kind of endeavour, it looks suspicious.

Plus, Eames doesn’t think it would go down well with Arthur, so he does the only other thing he can think of.

He calls Ariadne.

“Hi mom!” she chirps when she answers the phone.

“You’re standing right next to him aren’t you,” Eames says, walking down a street the internet had informed him might be home to the sort of shop he might find something to wear.

“I’m at work, I’ll call you back later!” she replies. It does sound fairly convincing, Eames will give her that.

She hangs up, and Eames has bought a pair of trousers and two shirts and is considering a Donegal tweed jacket by the time his phone rings again.

“Where’s Arthur?” he asks.

“Where are you?”

“Shopping,” he replies vaguely. “I didn’t have any work clothes with me.”

“And people call Arthur the vain one,” she mutters. “Anyway, don’t be obtuse, you know what I mean.”

“You asked for my help,” he offers. He feels vaguely embarrassed saying it out loud; he’s not known for his chivalry.

“Yeah but I wasn’t expecting you to actually turn up.”

“I like defying people’s expectations.” He holds a burgundy shirt up against himself, giving it a critical look in the mirror. It looks too small in the shoulders. Shame; it was silk.

She hums in response, and whether it’s because she can see right through what he’s said or she’s agreeing with his assessment he isn’t sure.

“So how are we going to do this?” he asks quickly, before she can enlighten him.

“I’ll tell him I called you.”

“You did call me. That won’t work, he’ll smell a rat. We need a better excuse or he’ll know it’s an intervention.”

“Is it an intervention?” she asks pointedly.

Eames holds up a shirt the colour of anaemic egg yolks and considers it. Then he puts it back on the rack. “That’s not the point right now. The point is we need an excuse for my presence. We need to fabricate a story, because we can’t exactly tell him you phoned me because he was behaving strangely.”

“Well in that case you’d better tell me what to say.”

Eames riffles through a rail of trousers while he thinks about this.

“How about this,” he says, passing mournfully over a pair of slate purple slacks that definitely won’t fit round his thighs. “We tell him I’m here because I need an alibi. If I’m working with you, and I have been since you started this job, then I can’t have been in Belgium when that Picasso mysteriously vanished.”

“That was you?”

“As I said, I’ve been working on this job with you in Vancouver the entire time.” Eames says sweetly.

“…Do you think he’ll buy it?”

“Yes,” he says resolutely. Eames doesn’t believe his own conviction in the slightest, because Arthur had an endearing and also concurrently infuriating habit of being not only suspicious but also frightfully officious when he wanted to be, but it’s the only thing he can think of that has more than a passing chance of working.

First rule of forgery; act confident.

Over the years Eames has come up with some little things he likes to tell people about forging. They don’t actually say much about forgery, but they sound pithy and suitably blasé enough that they get people off his back about it. They’re the sort of thing he likes to dole out when people ask him how it works, or how he does it, or how he discovered he could do it in the first place. They sound like they could be true, and they’re not untrue, but they conveniently sidestep any of the details.

This is a bit like that. He might not think that any of this will wash with Arthur, but if he says it with enough self-assurance then it just might.

-

It doesn’t wash with Arthur. The first thing out of Arthur’s mouth when Eames walks in is “what the fuck are you doing here.” It’s not even a question, more of a demand, and Eames grins in response.

“I thought you might be missing me,” he says.

“Like a hole in the head,” Arthur replies, then turns to Ariadne. “Is this anything to do with you?”

An expression of irritation settles on her face. “He asked me for a favour,” she says, levelling Eames with a look of resignation, and Eames nearly laughs. She really is turning into an excellent liar.

Arthur turns back to him. “And what favour is this?”

Eames regales him with a mostly factual story about stolen paintings. His part in it is of questionable veracity, but he tells it well, and when he gets to the bit about needing an alibi Arthur grunts as if he is hardly surprised by this turn of events.

“Well if you’re here you can make yourself useful and tell us if we’re missing anything,” Arthur tells him.

Then he seems to consider something, looking at Eames with narrowed eyes. “And no you’re not getting a cut.”

Eames smiles at him, closed-mouth and unfriendly.

Arthur stroppily busies himself with flushing another line and preparing the PASIV for a run with three rather than two. They’ll be going under with Eun-Ae, who’s extracting on this job, leaving Ariadne to keep an eye on things up here. It gives Eames a chance to watch Arthur as he bustles about.

To the untrained eye Arthur looks fine. He looks sharp and precise and severe, which is par for the course.

Only Eames is not an untrained eye. He’s been watching Arthur for years, and there is a telltale tightening around his eyes that indicates that things are not quite as fine as they appear to be. Every now and then a flicker of something else pulls at his mouth. If Eames was being unkind, he might say that Arthur has the same hounded look on his face as he’d worn when he was with Cobb.

He keeps his observations to himself, but this doesn’t bode well.

Ariadne hands him a folder with information on their mark and pictures of his offices and laboratory set up. She was right, this isn’t the sort of thing that should cause Arthur any concern. In fact it seems rather mundane; there isn’t anything about Anthony Bartosz that makes him out to be anything other than the unfortunate target of a rival enterprise who wanted what he knew.

Eames feels a ripple of something dangerously close to antipathy at the edges of his conscience; somewhere along the line this sort of job had started to leave a bit of a sour taste. Presumably this is another instance of Eames going soft in his old age.

Not that it’s enough to put him off, even if in this instance he’s not being paid.

Once they’re ready to go under Eames settles himself on a reclining office chair, rolling up his sleeve while Arthur uncoils their lines.

“What are you really doing here?” Arthur asks quietly when he gets to Eames, handing him the IV.

“As I said darling, I needed an alibi,” he replies easily, securing the line.

Arthur gives him a look that says he is not entirely convinced by this before he turns away to take the remaining chair next to Eames’.

Arthur sighs as he settles himself. “I can’t be fucked arguing with you over this,” he says,  sounding resigned, and presses the button on the PASIV.

Eames looks around. Arthur is standing twenty yards away, also looking around. He looks like he’s waiting for something. All Eun-Ae says before she walks off is that she’s going to look downstairs at reception. Ariadne telling him about how Arthur’s projections had shot her out of a practice run whilst quoting Die Hard echoes ominously in his head.

The dream is built to approximate Bartosz’s boring offices and it does, down to the bland pattern of the carpet tiles. He must remember to tell Ariadne that the slight buzzing of one of the overhead lights is a nice touch.

He makes a show of walking around the room, inspecting the view from the windows and whether the doors open onto other rooms or to blank space. It’s good. It’s still a boring office space, but it’s a good one. Very real feeling.

“What would you like me to cast my expert eye over first?” he asks when he reaches Arthur.

“Presumably you’re here to cast an eye over me,” Arthur says tersely.

“Just trying to make myself useful while I avail myself of your generosity,” Eames replies offhandedly.

Arthur gives him a sullen look. “If you must. Please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle and remain seated.”

“Killjoy,” Eames tells him, without bite.

Arthur frowns, but it lacks his usual conviction. “You’re the one who invited himself to the party; if you don’t like the house rules you’re free to leave.”

“I’ll play nicely.”

He’s almost sure he hears Arthur mutter ‘that’s what I’m afraid of’ before he stalks off towards the elevators.

Something twitches the blinds in the office across the landing. Something red. If Ariadne hadn’t tipped Eames off he might have missed it, but post box red isn’t really a colour that ordinarily turns up in corporate offices.

It goes downhill from there. In the lift, the piped music is Carol of the Bells.

“This is unusual lift music,” Eames says. It’s probably not the wisest of things to say, but he’s curious to see how Arthur will try and wriggle out of an explanation.

“I must have heard it on the radio,” Arthur replies, looking straight ahead.

“Yes that would make sense,” Eames says lightly.

Arthur doesn’t say anything else. He makes a show of inspecting various aspects of the build, but he seems distracted, like he’s waiting for something to happen.

Eames offers the occasional remark as they wander through the offices, on everything from the texture of the doors to the view from the windows.

He doesn’t mention the other things that are gradually creeping in round the edges.

They’re only little things, to begin with. A bit of tinsel draped over one of the soulless pictures on the wall that seems to be the purview of offices world over. A box of cookies in the dimly lit kitchenette area that has holly and a reindeer on the lid. A mug on one of the desks decorated with dancing Christmas puddings. Very faintly, Eames can hear Mariah Carey singing ‘all I want for Christmas is you’.

These things were not really problems, as such. Hearing a Christmas song in a dream at this time of the year was hardly that weird, the mark wouldn’t think it was suspicious.

Arthur is uncharacteristically quiet, not his usual acerbic self. The thought that he’s waiting for something to happen is loud in Eames’ head. He follows Eames around with an air of resignation. Occasionally Eames catches him giving him a questioning glance, almost like he’s wondering why Eames isn’t asking any questions.

Eames is wondering this himself. Normally he would, but the more he wanders through Arthur’s dream the more he can’t shake the feeling of concern that dogs his heels.

In another room the faint lingering smell of something sweet and cinnamony drifts through the air, and there are baubles all over the floor. They crunch under his shoes as he walks through. On the edges of his hearing, he can just about make out the faint but unmistakable sound of Wham!’s Last Christmas.

He wanders around a bit more. There is a Christmas tree in one of the smaller offices, but it is December; it might be more remarkable if there wasn’t one.

“Don’t touch that,” Arthur says all of a sudden, just as Eames is about to put his hand on the door handle into the next room.

Eames turns to look at him.

“It’s hot,” Arthur says, as if that really explained anything. He’s scowling, but it’s at the door handle rather than Eames.

“Right,” Eames says, puzzled. “Not exactly a standard feature for an office but I can overlook it this once.”

They get back in the lift. Eames feels a wave of trepidation as they descend towards the ground floor.

When they get down to the reception area, Eames is greeted with the sight of Bing Crosby sitting at a piano singing White Christmas. A man that looks distinctly like Fred Astair is trying to get Eun-Ae to dance with him.

Arguably this might just be the sort of thing Arthur’s projections do—they did tend towards the more formal end of the wardrobe spectrum—but they’re spinning each other around in the reception area, and that’s a bit much even for Arthur.

Eames turns to look at him. He isn’t sure what he expected Arthur’s reaction to be, but it definitely wasn’t the stricken twist that flickered over his face before he managed to school his expression. He almost looked like something had betrayed him, and it makes something catch under Eames’ ribs.

Eames is just about to say something, something like ‘I’m not sure we can call this overexposure to Christmas songs anymore,’ because everything he’s seen has all but confirmed his suspicions, when he catches sight of somebody in a lobster costume.

Eames is pretty sure Arthur is not familiar with the tradition of Presepe figurines, so there really is only one explanation for any of this.

“Arthur,” he says, considering how best to phrase any of this delicately.

And then an iron hits him in the face, knocking him cleanly out of the dream.

Arthur is still asleep when Eames opens his eyes.

“Well?” Ariadne asks.

Eames frowns, rubbing his face. The crunch of his nose had been horrible.

“I see your point,” he says noncommittally, mostly just for something to say while he thinks.

“What the hell is going on?”

The problem, as Eames sees it, isn’t really that both Ariadne and Eun-Ae are very much aware that something weird is going on. The problem isn’t even really that Arthur knows they know. There really is no way to pretend that Arthur’s subconscious isn’t behaving a little strangely, and if Arthur really did have a problem with them finding out then he would have called the whole thing off. If this was dangerous, then he would have put a stop to it.

So either Arthur doesn’t care about people knowing—which Eames finds hard to believe—or he is trying to pass this off as a case of overexposure. It was impossible to escape the jingles and the tinsel and the dancing Santas all over the place at this time of year, therefore the logical explanation for all this was that Arthur had reached saturation point, that this was why it was seeping into his dreams.

It would make sense. Environmental influences could be a hard thing to get a grasp on. It took a lot of practice to keep that sort of thing out of a dream, and Eames remembers with a wince a job a few years ago in which the extractor’s projections kept doing that infuriating McDonald’s whistling thing. Arthur had years of practice at keeping his preoccupations out of a dream by now, but there was a first time for everything.

He thinks of the expression on Arthur’s face when he saw his own projections dancing slowly in reception, faintly pained by what he was seeing. Something is clearly going on, and the niggling question of why this is happening now lingers around the edges of it all.

Maybe it would be better if Eames played along at this point.

Eames tells Ariadne about his theory. He has just finished telling her that this could all easily be explained by the fact that Arthur insists on going into Starbucks every morning and, short of sticking his fingers in his ears, it is all but impossible to evade Whamageddon forever, when the timer runs out Arthur and Eun-Ae wake up.

Eames smiles inanely in response to Arthur’s questioning expression. What he has just told Ariadne sounds good. It’s a nice neat explanation.

It’s also a lie.

Eames knows exactly what the problem is, and hearing one too many Christmas songs is not it.

Arthur always sidestepped most of the discussions of what he was doing outside of work, and even more so at this time of year. Most people had learned not to ask, knowing they wouldn’t get an answer. The logical assumption, based on the evidence, would be to conclude that Arthur didn’t like Christmas. It was the assumption Eames had held for years.

It is only in hindsight that this seems preposterous. He wonders why he didn’t see it sooner; he should be able to recognise a fake when he sees one, he’s been making forgeries for years.

But the fact is, it took him until last year before he realised that this was all a front that Arthur put on. An assumption he willingly let people make. A defensive suit of armour.

At the beginning of last December they were in Singapore, wrapping up a job. Eames had somehow decided it was a good idea to try and encourage Arthur to come out for the evening. He'd seemed vaguely out of sorts, and Eames could have sworn he'd seen a Christmas tree in the dream when they'd been running through it earlier. Even at the time he'd thought it was a bit odd, but hardly the strangest thing he'd seen in a dream. All the same, distracting Arthur with a the offer of a drink had seemed like a good idea. It wouldn’t have been the first time they’d done something like that, but it was hardly a regular occurrence. It had seemed… not as difficult somehow, once Cobb left, but Eames would be lying if he said it was anything approaching easy.

He’d pulled his socks up and knocked on Arthur’s hotel room door. There was no answer, but the lights were on. Eames checked his watch; it wasn’t that late, Arthur would still be awake. He knocked again, listening for a sound from inside. Maybe Arthur had gone out and left the lights on, which was a very un-Arthur-like thing to do, but stranger things had happened.

Eames listened again, leaning close to the door. He heard a thump. Then there was a muffled shout. Dread washed through him.

Naturally, Eames broke in. It crossed his mind as he flung the door open that he might be about to walk in on Arthur in a compromising situation. Maybe he was shagging somebody. Maybe he was wanking. But the worry that Arthur’s room had been compromised and he was actually trying to fend off an attacker took precedent. To hell with potential embarrassment, Arthur might be being choked to death.

The scene that greeted Eames when he walked in was decidedly not the one he thought it was going to be.

“You could have knocked you asshole!” Arthur exclaimed, lurching up off the floor and kicking a plastic cup over.

“I did knock. You didn’t answer. And then there was a thump and a yell and I thought you were being beaten up.”

“Well I’m not.”

“Then why were you shouting?”

“I dropped the rum bottle!”

Eames took a deep breath.

Given the way Arthur had reacted it seemed more probable that Eames had walked in on him rubbing one out to some sort of niche pornography, but no. He was watching something that looked distinctly festive, and wearing pyjamas. He was wearing fluffy socks. They had reindeer on.

He was also obscenely drunk.

“What are you watching?” Eames asked. It was a pointless question, one he didn’t expect Arthur to answer, which is probably why he asked that in the first place. Arthur never answered questions he didn't want to, and it was a safer bet than asking why Arthur was in such a state; the question itself gave far less away.

Only Arthur, contrary fucker that he was sometimes, surprised him.

“Love Actually,” Arthur replied in a small voice. He was blotting ineffectively at the puddle of rum on the floor with a bath towel. It was a bit pathetic, Eames decided, but it was also making him feel, of all things, absurdly fond.

“You’re not actually supposed to answer that question,” Eames said.

Arthur gave him a look like he’s grown a second head. “Then why the fuck did you ask?”

“Give me that,” Eames said instead of answering honestly, taking the towel off him.

Arthur nearly fell sideways when Eames squatted down to scrub at the carpet, listing against the side of the bed but making no attempt to get up off the floor.

“I’m on to you,” Arthur said, a look of almost comically overdone suspicion on his face.

“Oh?” Eames said, running his hand over the carpet before he stood up. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do. Quite why he was bothered by the state in which Arthur was going to leave his hotel room wasn’t something he was willing to consider at that time.

Arthur didn’t elaborate on what he meant, and Eames wasn’t really sure what to do with the rum-soaked towel, so for lack of a better option he walked into the bathroom and dropped it on the floor of the shower.

When he walked back in Arthur was resting his head against the side of the bed, watching the television with a funny look on his face.

“Are you going to be sick?” Eames asked him.

Arthur rolled his eyes. “No.”

“Are you sure? You have a funny look on your face.”

Arthur screwed his face up and puffed his cheeks out at the same time. Then he grinned.

“You’re completely arseholed darling,” Eames told him, smiling despite himself. He still felt awash with adrenaline, relieved that he hadn’t walked in to find Arthur being bludgeoned to death or having sex with somebody, but it was tempered by something else, something decidedly more sentimental.

It was definitely not related to the way Arthur looked at the television, something soft and longing in his expression. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with the way Arthur pulled the duvet off the bed and wrapped it around himself, or the way his frightfully cute socks stuck out of the end of the cocoon.

Eames had seen Arthur drunk before, but not quite like this. He had felt almost voyeuristic, like nobody at all was meant to be witnessing Arthur in this moment of drunken vulnerability and yet here Eames was, watching him in this weakness.

Eames wasn’t quite sure what to do with any of it. It made him feel a bit uneasy, half-afraid that the ruse of callousness he’d taken to wearing had been seen through, that Arthur was indeed onto him.

“Do you want some rum?” Arthur asked him from the floor. “Have some rum.”

“I’m afraid most of it is soaking into the carpet,” Eames replied.

“Oh.” Arthur looked momentarily crestfallen. Then he brightened. “I have a minibar.”

Eames humoured him. There was something awful about the thought that in asking him to have some rum Arthur was asking him to stay. Just for a moment, Eames wanted to pretend that Arthur looked sad at the prospect of him leaving, and not at the fact he’d kicked the rest of his booze across the floor.

So he’d opened the fridge, pulled out two of the small bottles of brandy and poured them into one of the disposable tumblers from the bathroom. He’d sat down on the sofa. He’d watched Arthur extricate himself from the duvet and shuffle over to inspect the contents of the fridge, and then crow in triumph when he pulled a couple of miniature bottles of Bacardi out.

He’d asked Arthur what the plot of the film was, and Arthur recounted in a series of out of order tangents the intertwining love stories that the film was made up of. Arthur smiled when he said that there were lobsters, but that if Eames wanted to see them he’d have to watch the movie.

Eames did watch it. He watched Hugh Grant dancing around like a prat. He watched Alan Rickman make a mess of his marriage. He watched Colin Firth stumble his way through Portuguese lessons. He saw lobsters in a nativity play. The rather awful saccharine flavour of it all was slightly nauseating. It was unrealisic, and overly-sentimental, but despite himself he had to admit he felt a little bit moved when Aurélia said ‘just in cases.’

And then he’d watched as Arthur, wrapped in a duvet on the floor of his hotel room in Singapore, cried quietly at a Christmas film.

Eames didn’t do Christmas. He’d not done Christmas for years, it was all poisoned. He’d always been upfront about that; if anybody asked, he told them as much. He told them he would be spending it on a beach in Bali, or carrying on as normally as possible in Mombasa. If he wanted a change of pace he tried to orchestrate it so he was working, and when faced with the inevitable question of Christmas he told them he didn’t see what all the fuss was about, or that it was an overblown farce.

But Arthur never had. He’d always dodged talk about the festive season, never saying anything either way, and suddenly that made quite a bit of sense.

Eames didn’t ask Arthur if he was okay. Eames already felt like he wasn’t supposed to be there, not quite strong enough to leave when he’d known he should, and that feeling had only got stronger the longer he stayed. They didn’t do this sort of thing but there Eames was, clutching a flimsy plastic cup in his hand while Arthur wiped at his eyes and tried to pretend he wasn’t crying.

Eames hadn’t known how to extricate himself from the situation without letting on that he was aware. He didn’t want to get caught knowing any of Arthur’s secrets. He didn’t think Arthur would want him to know.

So he did the only thing he could think of; he pretended to be asleep.

At some point he really had fallen asleep. He’d woken up with a crick in his neck at an indeterminate hour of the night to the sound of Arthur stumbling into the bathroom and vomiting, and Eames had taken that as his cue to leave.

Arthur had looked slightly bleary eyed when he walked into the lockup they were working from the next morning, but there was nothing to suggest that he remembered seeing Eames the night before. It was difficult to say whether this was because he had no recollection of last night, or he remembered all of it and was pretending not to.

Eames watched him scowl his way through a list of phone transcripts. He clocked how many cups of coffee Arthur drank. He watched Arthur jot down various things in his notebook, and he thought about Arthur’s fluffy reindeer socks. The entire morning, Arthur didn’t look his way once.

And that, really, was the thing that gave Arthur away. It was the sort of mistake a lot of people made. Sometimes, when people were trying to hide the truth, the things they didn’t say said more than the things they did. If Arthur wanted to pretend he didn’t remember anything, he should have spoken to Eames like he normally would, rather than all but ignoring him. To be fair he hadn't really been talkative with anybody else either, which could feasibly be put down to his hangover—the tightness of his eyes was a bit of a giveaway—but to not say one word all morning was suspicious.

Eames was all but certain that Arthur remembered everything, but was choosing to pretend he didn’t.

If Arthur was a mark, Eames would have failed to correctly deduce the truth, unearth the things that made him tick. He would have ascribed an incorrect motive. Professionally, he would be loath to admit it.

If Eames hadn’t witnessed the previous night for himself he probably would have scoffed at the idea. But the appearance of the Christmas tree in the dream the day before didn't seem quite so strange all of a sudden. It was only then, as he watched Arthur flip through a series of photographs of their mark’s wife, whilst Eames remembered the soft little smile on Arthur’s face as he watched the film, that he could see how much sense it all made.

The edges of the veneer were clearly visible now that Eames had spotted them, and if Arthur was a mark Eames would have slid his fingers over the hairline joins between the pieces and figured out where to pry the edges up, expose the cheap wood underneath.

But Arthur wasn’t a mark. This interest wasn’t professional. Eames let him carry on pretending.

-

“I covered for you,” Eames tells him later, when they’re packing up for the day.

Arthur looks like he’s going to argue. He looks indignant and caught out. If Arthur had a strategy for life it might be that a good defence was a good offence, and that’s what Eames is expecting this time, too.

But then the fight goes out of him.

Arthur doesn’t say thanks, but that he isn’t protesting is proof enough. Eames doesn’t mind that Arthur doesn’t thank him, he certainly hadn’t been expecting it. In their line of work a secret was something that could be leveraged; Arthur’s silence essentially acknowledged that Eames had kept this one of Arthur’s to himself.

Eames takes a taxi back to his hotel, watching the Christmas lights flash by through the window. The unease he’s managed to keep at bay since earlier creeps back in.

It’s a puzzling situation. Eames has known Arthur a fair while now, and he has managed to keep his feelings about Christmas concealed for all that time. Arthur has always been able to keep this sort of thing out of a dream, Eames had never suspected anything prior to last year. And even last year it was a single instance of a Christmas tree; hardly the same as the overabundance of Christmas cameos and festive decorations that Arthur seemed to be struggling with this time. It's a significant difference, and Eames can’t help but feel alarmed at the change.

Then he remembers the look of betrayal he’d seen on Arthur’s face when he walked out of the lift and saw Bing Crosby sitting at the piano. A feeling of trepidation trickles through him.

He doesn’t know why Arthur had that look on his face, but he thinks he knows what it was that put it there; the thing Arthur feels betrayed by, the thing that he’s trying to hide, to avoid drawing attention to, is the bit he tries to keep buried beneath work and professionalism and ruthless efficiency.

Arthur feels betrayed by himself, and Eames can barely stand it.

-

If he was hoping that letting Arthur know that his secret was safe would somehow lessen the pressure Arthur was putting on himself, Eames was sadly mistaken.

In some ways Arthur starts behaving more like himself, but if anything the situation gets worse. He’s abrupt and brusque and snappy, nitpicking at tiny things. Ordinarily this could be considered a success, but as it coincides with the festive flavour of Arthur’s dreams kicking it up a notch it feels like a Pyrrhic victory at best.

First there is some weirdness with a man in a green alien costume and a toy, and at one point Eames is sure he sees Arnold Schwarzenegger running around outside, three floors below.

Then, when Ariadne shows them the lab she’s built where Bartosz’s discoveries had been made, Eames swears he sees Richard Attenborough walk past the doorway in a Father Christmas costume.

There are glimpses of flashing lights and festive decorations and snatches of Christmas songs that fade in and out of the dream. Arthur is bad tempered and distracted, and for every instance of something Christmassy Eames notices he is almost certain that there are another five that Arthur has hastily managed to conceal somehow.

It is impossible to ignore, even if none of it is in the foreground.

When they break for the day Ariadne looks like she’s about to chew through her pencils, and Eun-Ae is wisely keeping quiet.

It’s almost as if the harder Arthur tries to suppress this, the less he manages to actually do it.

-

“I think Arthur’s been watching Christmas movies,” Ariadne announces when Eames walks in the following morning.

Well, shit.

“Arthur doesn’t like Christmas, why would he do that?” Eames replies, arranging himself in a chair and crossing one foot over his knee.

“No listen, I’ve been thinking,” she continues. “Die Hard I could maybe excuse, it seems like something Arthur might like.” She waves a hand. “It’s got guns and things explode, you know. Anyway. My point is, yesterday his projections were definitely quoting from Miracle on 34th Street.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Eames says, because he hasn’t.

“So as far as you’re concerned ‘if you can’t accept anything on faith, then you’re doomed for a life dominated by doubt’ is a normal thing for projections to say,” she replies flatly.

“Alright there’s no need for sarcasm.”

“And then there was that whole Holiday Inn thing. Eun-Ae told me about that. You could have fucking said something Eames.”

He feels torn. On the one hand, he really doesn’t think Ariadne would ever use this to her advantage. Plus, if she knew the whole story she might have a suggestion, she was good at this sort of thing.

But it isn’t for Eames to tell. He can’t quite bring himself to reveal the heart of the matter.

Which is when Arthur walks in.

“You both look incredibly guilty,” Arthur says, looking between them.

Ariadne is completely unsubtle when she waves her hand under her jaw in a motion of silence, but Eames doesn’t really want to have this conversation either so he just plays along.

“It’s when I look innocent that you need to worry,” Eames offers.

“Let’s just get on with this,” Arthur says tersely, dumping his bag and coat over the back of a chair.

When they get down into the dream the floor of the office is covered in snow. The projections are walking around normally, but what isn’t normal is the way they’re dressed; in frock coats and bonnets and floor-sweeping skirts. Ariadne takes one look around and scarpers, clearly anticipating the worst. Outside the windows, the skyline is a higgeldy-piggeldy view over some rooftops, the sort of thing that wouldn’t look out of place in Victorian England.

It’s no stranger than anything else, really. Even the appearance of the projections isn’t that weird; by this point the fact that they’re wearing top hats and corsets isn’t really that odd, albeit only in comparison. They’re mostly silent, wandering around minding their own business. It’s all very Dickensian.

Even Kermit the Frog sitting in one of the office chairs, or Miss Piggy giving him a funny look from the other side of one of the desks, isn’t too much.

The thing that does it are the puppet vegetables, singing a jolly tune about Mr. Scrooge.

Eames has had enough. Ignoring this isn’t helping.

“You watched ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol’ last night, didn’t you?” Eames asks Arthur quietly.

“… No…”

“Come on Arthur, you can’t deny this anymore. For god’s sake, there are the meeces who haven’t got any cheeses!” Eames accuses, pointing a finger towards the huddle of mice singing away on the edge of one of the desks.

Arthur narrows his eyes at him. “How would you know about them? I thought you hated all this Christmas stuff.”

“Arthur we’re surrounded by Muppets, it’s hardly an obscure reference.” Eames sighs. “This isn’t improving. It’s not fair on anybody else. They have a job to do, and it really isn’t helped by the fact that in order to do it they have to run the gauntlet of being ripped to shreds by one of your ‘festive’ projections.”

“It’s because Christmas is so inescapable,” Arthur says weakly. “There have been advent calendars and mince pies in the shops since the end of August. I feel like my life is passing by me in the blink of an eye, and it’s not helped by the commercial juggernaut insisting that as soon as there is even a hint of fall in the air, I should be thinking about Christmas.”

“That doesn’t explain why we’re in Jim Henson’s London. In 1850. Or why you’re wearing a petticoat.”

A look of defeat flashes over Arthur’s face when he looks down at himself. “It’s the 1840s,” he says, as if ignoring the truth will make it go away.

“Don’t be a pedant.”

“Then don’t ask stupid questions,” Arthur snaps. A bonnet appears on his head as he does so. Over his shoulder, Eames sees Miss Piggy giving him a decidedly murderous glare.

“I think you’re protesting too much. I think you’re trying to throw me off the scent.”

“What are you a fucking basset hound?” Arthur retorts, then marches off with as much dignity as he can manage whilst wearing a voluminous Victorian dress.

“Never let it be said that you are anything but professional,” Eames mutters, following. He gives the now angry sounding selection of singing vegetables a wide berth.

Arthur has taken the same route as Ariadne, their footsteps in the snow giving them away. She’s headed off towards the elevator shafts, their locations the thing they are ostensibly down here to finalise.

Eames takes his time following. He pokes around some of the offices, and as he wanders he considers the problem of Arthur. In one room there are piles of cushions, a rather tenuous looking den made of blankets standing in the middle of the floor. In another he has to fight his way through densely packed Christmas trees, accompanied by the faint tinkling of delicate glass baubles. In one room Sniffles the Mouse is dancing around endlessly all by himself.

He goes to open the door to another room, but the sound of laughter from inside, combined with a voice that is unmistakably Arthur’s, puts Eames off turning the handle. He is oddly apprehensive of who he’d find in there having what sounds like a good night; it sounds far too much like his own laughter for him to face it.

Everything has the faded look of memory, the same way an often-read letter will have soft creases in the paper, the odd spot where the ink has faded or run or had a splash of coffee blur some of the words. Eames wanders from room to room and he can’t escape the feeling that these are things that Arthur both cherishes and resents, memories of things that don’t exist anymore or snippets of things he regrets in some way. In every room he is greeted by another of Arthur’s unexpressed hopes that have gathered in the rooms like dust, swept aside and shut off to the sidelines. It’s somehow tragic.

Then he walks into another room and sees Mal. Mal as she was, smiling and alive, and Eames can hardly bear to look at her, at the joy on her face as she and Dom fall about laughing at something only they can hear, something Arthur clearly witnessed at some point. The detail of it is lost to time, the words not even important, but this replay of them in these moments plays on a loop in Arthur’s subconscious, endless echoes of their happiness that Arthur has shut away down here, as if by doing so he could hold grief at arm’s length.

He moves on. The last door Eames opens is onto a family sitting around a table.

The way the cramped room is decorated is about forty years out of date, and the furnishings have seen better days. An old man twists the end of a Christmas cracker, and when he offers the other end to one of the children that isn’t wearing a paper hat he pretends to be surprised when he is beaten by a four year old. There is a dog sitting at the end of the table, practically vibrating with excitement at the prospect of a piece of meat from somebody’s plate.

One of the children is unmistakably Arthur, the ears and the serious way he’s cutting his food giving him away even then. There is a resemblance between him and the old man that can only be familial. Clearly it’s his grandfather, and when he says something that Eames can’t make out Arthur grins easily, the old man smiling at his response.

Eames swallows.

They’re all smiling. The lights in the room are refracting like headlights in the rain, like candlelight through tears, lit up by the golden glow of nostalgia and loss, and Eames is transfixed by the unfamiliarity of it all. He can recognise what this is—a family in nature and not just name—but it is knowledge of a theory rather than of fact. This past is another country; not only is it different but Eames is an immigrant, watching to see how they do things here. This is not the sort of history he is versed in.

Eames’ interruption, when the projections notice, is not welcome. They turn to him, a man with a carving knife in his hand and a woman cutting up pieces of potato for a small child, and they walk towards him. The younger version of Arthur looks at him with accusing eyes and Eames turns around and runs, following the twin sets of Arthur and Ariadne’s footprints in the snow, down towards the lift shafts.

When he gets to the bottom of the stairs the room is full of a mixture of film stars and strangers. There is a band playing music, and Fred Astair isn’t so much dancing with Ariadne as he is moving her around like a marionette, swinging around the floor in some sort of ghastly approximation of jollity.

The projections are wearing party hats, and there are streamers in the air, but nobody is smiling. The assembled Muppets in the room glare at Eames with silent reproach. Even the vegetables are silent now. It’s actually rather unsettling, their unblinking, emotionless eyes somehow managing to convey a capacity for violence, despite only being made of ping-pong balls.

In a bizarre sort of way it feels familiar, the incongruity of the paper party hats combined with the stony expressions of the projections oddly reminiscent of Eames’ own Christmases past.

Arthur seems to have regained control of the Victorian aspect of his clothing, but there is a soft-looking red scarf wrapped around his neck that wouldn’t normally be there. He turns to look at Eames when he walks in, a wince of guilt on his face.

“Arthur…” Eames starts, but he doesn’t know how to continue.

He wants to tell Arthur that wanting isn’t something to be ashamed of, and neither is grief. He wants to say he’s seen the way all the things that Arthur has tried to run from are still here, shut into side rooms and relegated to a place that maybe Arthur thinks he can control, or at least pretend does not exist. He wants to say that denial won’t help, that maybe some things are better out in the open, but he would be so monumentally hypocritical in saying so that the words stick in his throat.

Behind him, the lift dings. With a feeling of foreboding he can’t explain, Eames turns to look.

Something shuffles out, towering and hooded, the room growing darker as it takes up more of the space, like even the light can’t escape.

It doesn’t speak, and there is nothing dramatic about the slow entrance, a slow, chilling, inexorable incursion, but Eames can’t shake the feeling of dread that descends through him at the sight.

It points a bony finger at Arthur, and the temperature in the room plummets. It is as if every fragment of cheer is being sucked out of the air, the colour leaching out of the brightly coloured decorations, as if in the presence of this being joy is a figment of the imagination, a half-remembered dream of hope that is no longer possible here. Even the music seems to change to minor notes, the jubilant tune of ‘Let’s Start the New Year Right’ sounding sombre and forlorn.

Eames is frozen, caught in the mist that seems to be descending, filled with a sense of hopelessness.

Perhaps stupidly, all he can think is that it is one of those peculiarities of the English language that he can think of being filled with something that in itself is an absence. But then maybe that was part of the irony; Eames has been filled with an absence of love for years.

Arthur looks distraught, like he wishes he was anywhere else, knowing that all this stems from him and yet seemingly unable to put a stop to it.

Eames tries to speak, but speaking seems to have become an impossibility, everything slowing down in the cold, narrowing to an inevitable future of silence and lonely despair.

Then Ariadne shoots Fred Astair, and all hell breaks loose.

A homicidal looking Santa that looks suspiciously like Richard Attenborough aims an M4 at Eames’ head, and the Muppets collectively launch themselves at Ariadne, smothering her with fabric and hair made of faux fur. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a pair of figures descending the staircase.

He isn't sure if it's the gun pointed at his face or the sight of Mal that breaks whatever spell had bound him, but whatever it is does a surprisingly good job of shocking Eames out of his torpor.

“Arthur Father Christmas is about to blow my bloody brains out, I think we might have to call this off!” Eames bellows, taking a hasty step backwards. Arthur’s projections and Arthur himself have shot him out of a dream on numerous occasions, but that isn’t what this is about. This is about the look of anguish on Arthur’s face as he watches Mal walk down the stairs, arm in arm with Dom and still laughing. This is about the smiling grandfather that steps out of the lift and holds out a Christmas cracker towards Arthur, about the way the woman from the scene of Arthur’s past wraps her arms around Arthur’s shoulders and his face crumples. This is about the echoes of Eames’ own laughter behind a closed door.

Outside above the weird wobbly Victorian skyline, something that Eames can only describe as a portal swirls open, the glass in the windows shattering. The wind roars, and all the ghosts of Arthur’s past go flying through the air, ripped from the building by the force of the gale.

“I don’t think this is a case of Arthur hearing too many Christmas songs!” Ariadne yells as she is pulled out of the window, all the snow and the brass band and the Muppets being sucked inexorably towards the swirling maw outside. The spectre of Christmas Yet To Come is consuming everything, even the watery winter sunlight, and the last thing Eames remembers thinking as he is pulled relentlessly closer oblivion is that he regrets not opening that door, not checking to see if it really was himself he could hear laughing, tucked away in a side room of Arthur’s dreams.

Chapter Text

Eames gasps out of the dream, swallowing air like somebody saved from drowning. He fights the instinct to shut his eyes again, taking measured breaths and allowing his rapid heart rate to slow, willing the dream to fade, but the nauseating spinning sensation of being pulled into the vortex is slow to leave, the sucking feeling of despondency even more so. His brain keeps insisting that the threat is real when logically he knows it was a dream, higher brain function slow to reassert itself over primitive fear responses. His instinct was to close his eyes again, as if by doing so an interior reality would assert itself, but the lingering influence of being in somebody else’s head meant that the impulse wasn’t sound, a safety signal gone haywire.

He lies there breathing the stuffy air and stares straight up at the ceiling, following the contours of the ducting for the air-con system over and over in the same order. The office they’re in is lit up pink by the setting winter sun, vertical blinds casting long shadows on the walls, and the presence of a colour that couldn’t exist in that desolate wasteland is a welcome reminder that he is no longer asleep, wandering a glimpse of a future not yet come to pass.

He taps the tips of his fingers against his sternum, hands cold despite the air-con belting out dry heat. The urge to close his eyes again gets the better of him and he looks out at that wasteland again, stretching on and on with no change, dead grass and a sunless grey-white sky, a foregone conclusion devoid of joy, and even when he opens them again the feeling is hard to shake.

He tries to remember the sensation of sunlight on his face, the smell of hyacinths, the sound of laughter. The insistence is an act of defiance, an obstinate assertion that those things were his real memories, trying to dispel the nightmare vision of everything in existence being consumed by the anthropomorphisation of grief for a lonely future, but the life leeching cold of the dream lingers. It feels like endless sadness, bleak and shadowless, a dreary acceptance of hopelessness that gnaws incessantly, eroding the contours of his optimism. It seeks with sharp fingers, cold and hungry, plucking restlessly at the thin protection of his dogged insistence that Arthur’s imagined future wasn’t real.

“What’s going on?” Eun-Ae demands. “You still have almost another minute on the clock.”

“Arthur happened,” Ariadne replies. She sounds distracted, low and flat, like Arthur’s dream has affected her in the same way. Eames listens to the sounds of her sitting up: the creak of her chair; a sigh; the way she stands and immediately starts tidying the mess of card stock and tape on one of the desks. She sounds like she’s trying to appear more upbeat than she feels, like the lingering feeling of desolation isn’t just affecting Eames, stubbornly insisting that bad dreams hold no sway here even though they both know that isn’t true.

Eames risks a glance at Arthur; he’s still asleep, a slit of vermilion sunlight bisecting his cheek, just touching his right eyelid. There is a hurt looking frown on his face, his breathing erratic, and Eames feels a swell of guilt at the sight of Arthur’s distress clearly visible on his face, unguarded and apparent to anybody who looks.

Arthur’s frowns are familiar, certainly more so these days than his smiles, but that wasn’t always true. He’d always had a tendency towards sharp at times, but there was a barbed edge to him recently that was new, and he spoke less. Eames isn’t sure when that changed; the development predated Singapore, but it didn’t predate Mal, or Cobb. It didn’t predate the Fischer job, though the few smiles Eames can recall from that period were mediated by a sense of tense and deliberate practicality, tempered with relief.

It also didn’t predate the sound of locked-off laughter Eames can hear echoing in his head from the dream. Even without opening that door he knows it was him he could hear in there with Arthur. He remembers that evening as a series of snapshots: a job, a success, a suit; an ongoing in-joke at the expense of the architect. He vividly remembers the amused curve of Arthur’s smile around the mouth of a beer bottle, and the loss of it is stark.

Arthur’s breathing changes suddenly. Eames looks away, fighting the impulse to watch him wake up. He desperately wants to ask him what’s going on, but they have just been thrown out of a dream by the manifestation of Arthur’s throttled grief; the thought of demanding an answer from him right now for what the hell was going on felt almost cruel.

Eames wants to ask him if he’s okay, but the likelihood of him doing so is small; old habits are hard things to break. He lets Arthur stand up without interruption and start tidying things like he normally does, looking at the ceiling and following the tangle of wires and ventilation housing rather than looking at Arthur. According him this semblance of space isn’t much, but it’s the best Eames can do for the moment.

Anybody who worked in dreamshare long enough learnt two things: they learnt to watch, and to guard their expressions, especially on the exit. Usually there was a moment on the edge of sleep when people’s emotions were clearly visible on their faces, not quite managing to control their expressions. The things people didn’t say often spoke for them. Even an absence revealed an outline; a black hole was visible because of the way it affected everything else rather than because of its own properties.

There is little privacy in dreamshare, and the feeling of waking up and not knowing where to look is not unfamiliar. In some instances it was partly because somebody had just treated the rest of their team to the equivalent of a peep show; usually pornographic, often revealing some aspect of themselves they resisted or suppressed in some way, some latent inclination that they were not really conscious of.

Eames is a thief, and opportunity is everywhere. There were dividends to be gained from picking up the things that people dropped when their hands are full, the fluttering details of their fears and affections that fall to the floor like ten pound notes escaping from a wallet, just waiting for somebody to pick them up.

Waking up was a strangely intimate thing to witness, and normally Eames relishes the chance to observe this awkward disclosure; he’s certainly watched Arthur wake up before. Only this time it leaves him feeling uncomfortable, oddly voyeuristic but with none of the thrill. It just felt intrusive, like he was taking advantage in some way.

Lying there, listening to the sounds of Arthur tidying up, the uncanny sensation of being on the edge of something pulls at him. There is a chasm where the things he won’t admit should be, but there is a stirring in the air around the edges, a distortion in the light. This outline isn’t new, the centre still uncharted, but Eames knows the form it traces; he’d recognise his own reflection anywhere. He’s not sure who he’s trying to fool; it’s ages since the rest of him coalesced around the space the words should occupy, clearly visible, but somehow he still can’t come clean, the void a yawning drop.

It was there when Arthur turned up last year in the middle of that nasty business in Bulgaria, the bit between his teeth and a put-upon scowl on his face. It was there when they woke up on the plane after Fischer, when Arthur’s relief was almost blinding. It was there when Eames watched Mal tell Arthur she was pregnant, when Dom showed him a picture of James as a baby. It was there when they stood on a cliff edge in a dream, when Arthur asked him what would happen if they jumped and there was no ground for them to hit, if they fell endlessly into thin air until they woke up or went mad.

In all honesty the cracks probably appeared the first time they surfaced from a dream, the shocked awe on Arthur’s face rupturing the ground beneath Eames’ feet.

He shifts in his seat. Sometimes the things people don’t say speak for them, and it’s as true for Eames as anybody. The void calls, but Eames has been filled with this absence for years, and there is safety in a lie. The space where the words should be gapes, drawing the eye in the same way as the ghosts of Arthur’s past, light leaching out of the landscape the longer Eames keeps it all strangled in his chest. It was uncanny, compelling, drawing him to look over the edge even though he knows the dangers, but the words won’t come.

Eames listens to Arthur sitting up, folding his chair away. He listens to the sound Arthur’s boots make on the floor as he steps towards the PASIV, the slithery sound of the lines being flushed. He listens to the way Arthur’s actions manage to almost conceal the truth, the snatched quality to the way he grabs at things giving away his tension, like at any moment he’s expecting to be interrogated for an explanation of what the hell just happened.

It leaves a bitter taste. Arthur anticipating having to defend himself when Eames inevitably questions him is a stinging accusation, not because it’s absurd but because it’s probable. Asking for an explanation for why they’re in this situation is what Eames would normally do, but he finds he doesn’t want to this time. He doesn’t even want to look at Arthur right now, even though the desire to submit to the ingrained habit of watching burns like a lungful of air when the surface is too far away to reach, self-preservation at odds with reason.

He listens to the sounds of Arthur busying himself with necessary tasks, and the scenes Arthur couldn’t keep out of the dream creep back in around the edges of his thoughts. None of the things Arthur dreamt were recent, the echoes of Cobb and Mal probably a good ten years in the past. The occasion of Eames being in that room with Arthur must be at least four years ago, and the thought makes his chest ache. That these are memories Arthur traverses in fondness doesn’t seem fair, somehow, and the fact that none of them are recent just makes it worse. How long has it been since somebody put a smile on Arthur’s face, as opposed to a frown? How long has it been since somebody did something for him just because it would make him laugh?

Asking the question feels like looking in a mirror when he’s awake, met with his own unavoidable reflection and not being able to look away from the void. It feels like stepping off a cliff, like taking a leap not knowing how big the drop is, perversely drawn to the edge despite his creeping fear, l'appel du fucking vide.

An uneasy, tight sensation settles under his skin. Not looking at Arthur is a courtesy. There is safety in secrets. Lies could keep you safe. Picking up the things people unwittingly reveal is a thing that has always stood him in good stead. Getting out first required staying one step ahead, and if that meant using every last thing to his advantage then Eames would do it. He’ll watch to see what useful things people drop when they’re still in that liminal space of not quite conscious, caught in the weird vulnerability of that halfway point between asleep and awake.

The things people don’t say can speak volumes, and sometimes actions speak louder than words. Arthur’s unwavering concentration on flushing the PASIV is all but shouting, but Eames doesn’t look. He doesn’t watch to see whether anything else flickers over Arthur’s face, whether his fingers tighten momentarily on the handle of the case, or clench at his sides.

If not looking at Arthur in this moment means Arthur gets to keep his secrets, Eames will do it. He will carry on looking at the ducting for the air-con, following the insulated wires from the light fittings across the water stained ceiling, because he doesn’t need to see. He doesn’t need to rip back the veneer. He is not compelled to go through Arthur’s wallet and steal the things that he holds close.

All the same, he can’t shake the sensation that he is trying to convince himself of a partial truth, that he isn’t looking at Arthur because he knows how much he will give away if he does, as obvious as a child covering their eyes and hoping nobody will see them.

He looks at the ceiling. He takes a deep breath, still trying to dispel the lingering sensation of despair that Arthur’s dream has left behind, insisting that the deliberately recalled sensations of warm sun and a sea breeze over salt-drenched skin were more real.

All too soon the weight of expectation is too much. He swings his legs over the side of the chair, forcing himself to sit up and try and shrug off the residual lassitude from the dream.

Nobody says anything. Eun-Ae looks between them all, narrow eyed at their unscheduled exit from the dream. Ariadne is giving him a look that is presumably supposed to be significant, but Eames doesn’t want to talk about this in hushed whispers. It was bad enough as it was; discussing Arthur as if he wasn’t even in the room didn’t sit right.

Arthur doesn’t look at any of them, busying himself with disconnecting various tubes from the PASIV. There is a pink flush staining his cheeks and down his neck, the only thing that seems out of the ordinary.

He probably feels embarrassed. For years Arthur has been the person to pull people up on the things they bought into a dream with them. He tells people in no uncertain terms that if they can’t get a grip on their own projections then they have no place in somebody else’s head. He keeps people to schedule, organises logistics, liaises with suppliers. He calls people out on their time-wasting, and he makes a point of finalising even the smallest details, leaving as little as possible to chance.

His good reputation is earned. Work with Arthur and the chances of everything going according to plan increased tenfold. Eames isn’t sure he’s ever told him that, not with any sincerity. If he said anything now it would probably sound like an attempt at consolation, something Arthur would interpret as mockery. Arthur was probably waiting for jeering, that of all the things he couldn’t suppress it was Christmas songs and Muppets that got the better of him. It was hardly dignified, and it would almost certainly damage his reputation. That alone might have been enough to ensure he tried to downplay his thoughts about Christmas, but it falls short of being an explanation.

When they first met it felt like Arthur was nagging for the sake of it, as if he liked the sound of his own voice and the power trip and being a jumped up little twat about things. It felt like Arthur was taking his self-perceived lack of imagination out on the people that did have one, being an officious, irritating little jobsworth because he didn’t have the creativity to do anything else and was envious of those who did.

Eames can remember the first time Arthur pointed out a couple of Eames’ projections snogging each other, shirts pushed up under their armpits and oblivious to their audience.

“Those aren’t meant to be there,” Arthur said curtly, watching them. At the time Arthur’s regulation haircut made his ears appear to stick out more than they normally did, and one of the projections had a remarkably similar affliction. The other one was rubbing his hands over his close shaved head, licking his face and biting at the smug slope of his mouth, the furrow on his forehead as he kissed a projection that looked uncannily similar to Arthur not so much concentration as it was reverence.

Bit of a giveaway even then, really.

“Oh? You seem to like them though,” Eames had replied, watching the way the tips of Arthur’s ears pinked.

Arthur glanced at him, a look of irritation on his face. “Get rid of them.”

“Killjoy,” Eames had said, prickling at being pulled up for the slip, slightly taken aback by the wonder on the face of his own projections at the sight of each other.

He recalls it now with the sensation of the ground falling away beneath his feet, a tide washing the sand out from under him as he stands on the shore. The memory of the peeled back honesty on the faces of those familiar strangers felt like stepping out into thin air, bearing witness to aspects of himself stripped of doubt. The projections looked like they were powerless to stop themselves reaching out with reverent fingers and brushing them over what they could see in front of them, liberated of the panic that the things they touched were going to crumble, or maybe just brave enough to risk it.

Arthur had frowned, but he didn’t tell him again, at least not about that. He’d pulled Eames up on all sorts of other things since though, from out of place architecture to the inclusion of memories. He was always quick to point things out, but slowly a different picture had emerged; gradually, Eames had started to realise that Arthur didn’t delight in picking things apart because he liked putting people down. Arthur’s observations could be blunt, but they weren’t critical without cause. They weren’t said to make him look better at somebody else’s expense.

It was because he cared. For every time Arthur pulled somebody up on an errant projection or lackadaisical approach to timekeeping, there were others where he said something complimentary about their hard work. He was a hard taskmaster, but he rewarded people for their efforts. At first Eames had mistaken it for condescension, and perhaps sometimes it was, but the assumption probably said more about himself than it did about Arthur. Arthur’s bossiness wasn’t a result of a superiority complex, more a need to make sure he came up to standard, make sure he could make sure.

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that theirs was a dangerous business. One small slip and people could end up dead, or a vegetable, or… changed, and somewhere along the way Arthur reminding him to stay on track had started to feel like concern for his well being rather than annoyance at his transgressions. There was something parental in it. Arthur’s troubleshooting had started to feel tender, like he was looking out for other people so they could get on with the business of being brilliant; Eames only had to think of Cobb to know the truth of that.

It had probably always been the case, but Eames had been young and cocksure and had taken his criticism at face value. Ironic, really, when nothing about Eames himself was face value, not if he could help it.

Eames fiddles with the buttons on his shirt, watching the way Arthur keeps his head down and concentrates on the task he has set himself, trying to continue to ignore the things that he feels. A wave of sadness seeps through him that he can’t overlook. Eames tells himself that maybe it’s the lingering atmosphere of the dream, but he doesn’t think he can kid himself well enough to believe it.

How long has it been since the woman in the dream wrapped her arms around Arthur? Years, probably, in reality. How long had it been since somebody nagged him to do something, not because they were annoyed but just because they cared? At what point had Arthur started caring this way, reminding people of their obligations or the things that needed doing, inviting criticism for insisting that the things nobody wanted to do got done. There was something grown up about the way Arthur kept people to task, a shouldering of responsibility. It was a strange thing to think of being asked these things as symbolic of care, but maybe they could be. They could be gentle.

Watching Arthur keep his chin up and carry on, it strikes him as being a different sort of self-sufficiency to the expedient sort that Eames learned. Presumably somebody in Arthur’s past had parented him, looked out for him, and that’s as true of the grandfather in the dream with the Christmas cracker as it was Mal. Somewhere along the line Arthur had learnt that there might be something valuable in being asked to do something by somebody who cared, and it is not a language Eames remembers being taught.

He watches Arthur snap the PASIV case closed, wiping over various surfaces and rattling the sharps box. He’s making more noise than he normally would doing these things, a clatter that he’s deliberately trying to make louder than his concerns. It feels overly compensatory, like the everyday sounds of familiar tasks are more welcome than his thoughts.

The things that Arthur grieved for were the way that things had been, as if they were things he missed, things he cherished, a past he would revisit again if he could, and no wonder. So much of what Eames had seen when they were in his dream was longing for what was, what had already gone. The things Arthur had been unable to keep out of the dream were the people and places and times that have already passed, the tone of it suffused with something soft and golden.

The look on Arthur’s face when the echoes of Mal and Dom and everybody else converged in the dream is a haunting image in Eames’ mind, as lasting as the look of betrayal on Arthur’s face when all the Christmas decorations remained firmly present even when he tried to suppress them. Shutting it all out didn’t seem to be working, at least not anymore.

The Santas and carols and trappings of Christmas that had filled his dreams seemed symptomatic rather than the cause of the problem. It was all a bit Freudian. The ubiquitousness of it all at this time of year perhaps acted as a catalyst. The constant barrage of adverts and films and the blithe insistence of Christmas cheer might be poignant reminders of loss. Every tree and bit of tinsel and happy families greeting each other on doorsteps with bags of gifts might feel like a slap in the face. It made sense that Arthur tried to distance himself from it; much easier to try and block it out than be constantly reminded of the things he didn’t have.

It might be hard to carry on as normal when at every turn there was another reminder of the things that were gone, the people that were never coming back. It might be harder still when the attempt at distancing only served to make it more apparent. The way Eames sees it, Arthur has been trying to conceal his real feelings about Christmas, and part of the problem might be how hard Arthur is trying to resist this. He’s been trying to convince himself that he doesn’t like any of it, and he’s been trying far too hard. Ignoring the television every time it showed people around a table or knocking on doors with wreaths on, probably even just the over the top perfume adverts, that didn’t seem to be helping, not in the long term. It might mean that Arthur avoided it in that instance, but ultimately it was still there, and Arthur knew it.

He recalls the look of betrayal on Arthur’s face when Mal walked down the stairs, as if despite his best efforts he couldn’t do anything about it. It might feel like he couldn’t outrun grief, a preoccupation that crept into his dreams. It might feel traitorous, like even trying his hardest wasn’t good enough if all it achieved was a spiralling loss of control, if all the things that Arthur had tried to keep at arm's length came crashing back in.

With a pang of uneasy sadness Eames remembers that night in Singapore, the way Arthur had wrapped himself in a blanket on the floor and cried. Looking back, it had the air of giving in somehow, ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. Eames can’t shake the notion that Arthur might have berated himself for the weakness of watching something like that, like it was a dirty habit he couldn’t resist, beset with morning after guilt at his failing.

How long had it been since Arthur started ignoring the things that hurt, keeping himself busy not just because he liked working but as a coping mechanism? As if he could somehow escape the inconvenience of grief? And that is familiar territory, like looking in a mirror. It is a fake Eames can tell from the real thing, but it’s strange to consider the similarity when so many of the things that Eames mourns are the things that never came to pass, the things that could have been.

The echoes of his own laughter from the dream they’ve not long woken up from reverberate through him. Arthur has closed the door on that too, relegated it to the past, shut it away separate even from the remembered warmth of childhood and the people he has loved who are gone. It’s a past that feels too far away to return to, and a future that never happened, both things paradoxically true.

A twist of humourless mirth pulls at his mouth, because even now he’s trying to fool himself. Arthur was far from the only one to try and keep things at arms length, afraid of the outcome, but Eames is a forger, and he’s one of the best; pretending to be somebody he’s not is instinct as much as skill, and he’s had decades of practice.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Arthur announces, interrupting his train of thought. “Which means you have approximately five minutes to talk about this without worrying about offending me.”

Arthur looks around the room at them all, like he’s expecting a dispute, but nobody stops him. Eames watches him leave the room, his resignation audible in the way he closes the door softly behind him.

“Now what?” Eun-Ae asks, arms crossed over her chest and watching the door. “Bartosz is due at the hospital in two days.”

“I can try and negotiate a different time frame for the extraction,” Ariadne says, “but I’m not making any promises. They won’t want to push this back. Everybody wants to go home for the holidays, including the sort of people that pay us to break into somebody’s head.” She sighs. “And anyway, it probably depends on Arthur, he was the one who negotiated the terms.”

“I’m not sticking around if this is going to run over by more than a week,” Eun-Ae says with an air of finality.

Ariadne looks at him questioningly. “Eames?”

He holds his hands up. “Not my circus,” he says. The job really is nothing to do with him. If anything it’s an inconvenience at this stage, but he’s not going to interfere with that aspect of it, no matter how much he thinks they should just cut their losses and bail.

“You only say something when it suits you,” Ariadne says.

Eames shrugs; she’s not wrong. Besides, he’s always admired the sharp edge of her honesty, even when it’s him that’s under the knife.

Ariadne grits her teeth. “I’ll see what they say. It might be better if we just call the whole thing off.”

The pulse of relief Eames feels at the words is premature, but he can’t deny he’d much rather that was the outcome.

Ariadne glances over at the door Arthur had disappeared through. “I think Arthur would rather it was you that stuck around as opposed to us…” she says hesitantly.

“I’m not sure that’s true, but I’ll take one for the team.”

“Since when were you a team player?” She frowns at him, head tipped to one side slightly. There is something considering in her expression, and what could easily be a flash of pity, there and gone in half a second. “You know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

He smiles, more a habitual stretching of the mouth than anything approaching amusement. “Dum spiro, mentior.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, but unfortunately for you I’m pretty sure you’re the best person for this. In fact I’d go as far as to say I trust you, as uncomfortable as that might be for you.”

The comment is almost too close to home for comfort. There is a slight smirk to the way she says the last part, as clear an indication as any that she can see right through him, and it leaves him feeling defensive.

“Rookie error,” he says. “Don’t trust a forger.”

She smiles, thinly but not meanly. “That’s an ad hominem.”

Eames doesn’t really have anything to say to that, retreating to silence while Ariadne and Eun-Ae finish gathering their belongings together. Just as they’re leaving, Ariadne holds her hand up to the side of her face in an approximation of a phone, mouthing ‘call me’ and shooting a look of concern in the direction of the toilets before closing the door behind them with a click.

There are wet spots on Arthur’s collar when he emerges, and the top two buttons of his shirt are undone, like he’s been splashing his face with water. Given the timing it seems reasonable to assume he’d waited for Ariadne and Eun-Ae to leave before he came out, and it sets something like nervousness skittering through Eames’ chest.

Arthur doesn’t say anything, walks stiffly back over to one of the desks and carries on tidying up for a minute or so. There is a defensiveness to his posture, like he’s waiting for an accusation to be levelled at him. Eames lets him hang for a moment, waiting to see if Arthur will decide that ripping the plaster off is the better option and start talking, but it feels unnecessarily harsh under the circumstances. Arthur will maintain his stoicism indefinitely rather than talk about it given half a chance, perpetuate everything with truncated actions and a stubborn adherence to silence, so Eames speaks first.

“Well that was a bit of a shambles,” Eames says, voice laced with false cheer.

“Fuck off,” Arthur mutters, coiling a length of PVC tube in his hands.

Eames doesn’t reply right away, watching the way Arthur winds the tubing in his hands, neatly tucking the ends under. He pulls the lid off a tub of disinfectant wipes rather than fiddling with the flip top, dropping it with a plasticky clatter on the desk and wiping over the PASIV housing.

There are probably more important things to be doing, but this is what Arthur does; falling back on necessary tasks when he doesn’t know what else to do, as if he could crowd the negative out of the picture by filling the view with the requisite. And that’s another thing Eames recognises in them both; the attempt at distraction. The method might be somewhat different, but it’s a taste of the same flavour.

“What are you going to say to Mullaney?” Eames asks him.

“Nothing at all.”

“Surely you don’t intend to continue with the job knowing that Father Christmas might shoot the mark in the face at a crucial moment. You’d be the first person to pull the plug if this was somebody else, but just because it’s you it’s okay?”

“Of course it’s not okay, but—” Arthur snaps his mouth shut, the rest of the sentence bitten off.

“But?”

“But you win, are you fucking happy?”

“I haven’t won anything,” Eames replies, somehow upset by the accusation.

“Then why won’t you leave this alone?” Arthur asks, dropping the tubing and turning to face Eames properly.

Arthur sounds pained and disbelieving, like he can’t think of another reason for why Eames might be bothering with this, and it catches in Eames’ throat. There is something almost desperate in the way Arthur asks, and the urge to be honest feels almost physical, makes Eames’ fingers twitch with the unused impetus.

Eames is a forger, and he’s good at it; he’s been pretending for as long as he can remember. He has assumed an air of callous disregard for years, and it’s worked. It’s worked so well that Arthur believes it. For all his astuteness and shrewd observation, Arthur still can’t seem to comprehend that Eames cares, and it would be funny if it wasn’t actually sort of sad.

Telling Arthur the truth might be somewhat satisfying, but Eames can’t fight the knee-jerk reaction to lie, to keep it all close to his chest. Telling Arthur that his concern stemmed from something other than a heightened sense of professional curiosity, that this was different, that might be the better option. If nothing else the look on Arthur’s face might be worth it. But old habits are hard to break, and honesty always felt too revealing.

Second rule of forgery; when questioned, lie.

“Because your assistance would be appreciated in maintaining the credibility of my alibi,” Eames says politely.

Arthur rolls his eyes at the tone. “You’re usually self-sufficient when it comes to that sort of thing, why do you need my help this time?”

“Don’t want to appear too predictable, that’s how you get caught.”

“God forbid you are predictable,” Arthur mutters, then scowls at him. “And you didn’t answer the question.”

“Because you’re the best.”

“Flattery only works when it’s not completely disingenuous.”

“It’s not disingenuous,” Eames says, almost affronted, because that was one of the only honest things he’s said in the course of this conversation, and that’s the bit that Arthur has taken exception to.

“Cut the crap Eames, you’re usually better at subterfuge than this.”

He swallows the sarcastic retort that lies are easier when it’s his own skin he’s trying to save rather than somebody else’s; it would be too much like showing his hand.

“Because I owe you a favour for pulling my arse out of the fire in Plovdiv?” he tries.

“That’s better, but why don’t you try the truth for a change.”

The way Arthur is looking at him is a challenge, an accusation; it’s probably a fair one.

“Because you’re not okay, and you’re a liability like this,” Eames says quietly, watching Arthur to see how it lands. He’s pretty sure that appealing to Arthur’s stunted sense of self-compassion won’t yield favourable results so he goes for the throat, aiming the comment right at Arthur’s professionalism. “If you want to be in a position to deliver the secrets of Bartozs’ brain to Mullaney in a few days' time then you need to get a grip on this.”

That isn’t why Arthur needs to get a grip on this, and it’s debatable whether ‘getting a grip on it’ is what Arthur needs to do at all, but too much honesty would be out of character. Eames is willing to trade in truths occasionally, and in this instance it strikes him as a good deal, but he’s never been in the habit of spending gratuitously.

Arthur sighs. He presses his fingertips against his eyelids. He nods once before turning back to the abandoned PASIV, its guts spilling out all over the desk. The acquiescence is more than Eames thought he was going to get. He thought this would be another hard-won battle to get Arthur to cut himself a bit of slack. Quite why Arthur has given in without much of a fight is perhaps odd, but Eames isn’t about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth; if it means Arthur is going to let him try and help then he’ll take it, even if the show of cooperation is only a sugar coating over his mulish adherence to duty.

Eames weighs the odds. He considers just coming out with it. Having gotten even a small amount of agreement out of Arthur at the suggestion that he wasn’t okay he might be amenable to Eames being truthful about his motives, but something holds him back.    Chances are, Arthur would reject assistance if it specifically came from a place of Eames wanting to help. Arthur would be suspicious of the sudden change of motive.

Asking Arthur why this was an issue all of a sudden would be clumsy, and probably cause more problems than it solved. Arthur would get stroppy, Eames would get defensive, and they’d end up arguing when what Eames really wanted to do was get him to stop trying to keep such a tight rein on himself, because it really wasn’t helping.

Arthur could be as stubborn as hell when he wanted to be, would doggedly try and tackle this the same way he always had if he thought there was a chance it might work, as if sweeping everything under the proverbial rug was ever going to work when it hadn’t done previously. Eames considers the merit of reminding him that repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results had a name and it wasn’t ‘persistence’, but he doesn’t feel like drawing attention to his own adherence to habit. There is every chance that Arthur will retaliate by highlighting it, and then he won’t have a leg to stand on.

Maybe eventually Arthur would realise that just ignoring it wouldn’t make the problem go away, but it might take him a while to concede to the truth. It might mean that Arthur persisted in trying to do this job even though it was a bad idea. Maybe the dulcet tones of Mariah Carey and the presence of Muppets wouldn’t ruin the job, but it was a risk. And even if it did work, even if they did pull it off with the handicap of Arthur’s subconscious inserting tinsel and Christmas jumpers into the dream, it would probably only be a matter of time before the rest of the vulturous dreamshare community got wind of it. Then Arthur would gain a reputation for that rather than for being brilliant. He would always be the guy who populated a job with singing vegetables.

Which wasn’t a prospect Eames was keen to see actualised, but that was somehow the least of it. Gaining a reputation for that would be unfortunate, but the real problem was that Arthur wasn’t okay. If they managed to complete the job even with this in the background, then, knowing Arthur, he would consider that to be satisfactory. It might mean that by May, when Christmas seemed like a long way off, Arthur could feasibly assume that the problem had gone away. By June, Arthur might feel like ignoring everything had worked. It might feel a bit too much like beating this, as if it was ever something that needed to be beaten.

It might also mean that, even if they pulled it off, if somehow Arthur managed to kibosh his own subconscious into compliance and keep any and all instances of anything Christmas related out by sheer force, this continued to be an issue. By the time October rolled around, and little reminders started appearing in the shops again, then it might mean that this started to become an issue again. When it was just the occasional Christmas advert it was simple enough to change the television channel, but by November even changing the channel only meant you were watching a different advert. It would never really go away, like black mould that had just been painted over rather than treated properly, steadily darkening shadows under the paint that needed another coat from time to time.

The tactic Arthur was employing wasn’t working, but he was just stubborn enough to keep trying it anyway. Shutting everything out all the time was counterproductive. If anything, trying the opposite of this seemed like a better idea. If this was partly down to the fact that Arthur was trying to squash all of his feelings into oblivion, then maybe the answer was actually less pressure than more. He needed a different approach.

But Arthur probably wouldn’t like Eames trying to help. He probably thought it was bad enough that anybody knew at all, and it seemed unlikely that Arthur would be open to suggestions, or particularly enthusiastic about assistance. If he thought Eames was trying to help, that would probably be enough reason for him to refuse it. If he thought Eames was trying to help because he was worried then that would probably be untenable.

Luckily Eames is rather good at obscuring his motives. If pretending this is about an alibi means Arthur is going to let Eames do something for him, then he will. Maybe the pretence is necessary. Arthur might require the semblance of subterfuge in order to justify letting Eames do this; taking that away right now might be more hindrance than help. Even if the pretence is only skin deep, the illusion might mean that Arthur lets him get away with it.

“So about this alibi,” Eames says. They’re both well-versed in deflection, and Arthur is more than proficient at reading between the lines. That Arthur is letting Eames talk him into this has been easier to achieve than he thought it would be, and Eames doesn’t want to push for too much and end up shooting himself in the foot. “I feel like I need to make it realistic.”

Arthur glances over his shoulder. “I suspect I’m going to regret this, but go on.”

“Well,” Eames says, hoping this works and feeling a swirling nervousness in his stomach. “Maybe we’re in Vancouver for a job, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go out and see some of the sights.”

“The sights,” Arthur says flatly. “You mean the totem poles and a trip up the Lookout?”

“I was thinking something a bit more… festive.” Eames swallows. He’s probably being far too obvious about this, and he’s conscious of not wanting to over-egg the pudding, but having started down this route he feels a strange sense of commitment. “It’s nearly Christmas, right? Maybe we can go to the Christmas Market, as ghastly as that sounds. And we’re… We’re mates. We can keep it casual. Just two mates enjoying the season.”

“I’m not sure we have the sort of friendship where we go to Christmas markets together.”

“We might do, they don’t know that.”

“That’s… tenuous. Realistically we’d have to be a bit more involved than ‘mates’ for that to be believable. Two people who are ‘mates’ don’t just take a day off in the middle of a job to ‘casually’ go to the Christmas market.”

“Well,” Eames says, both warming to the idea and terrified of it at the same time, because given the circumstances the very last thing he thought Arthur would do was suggest they were something more to each other than they were. “I do need to make this believable. Just in case. Blend in, look natural, that sort of thing.”

“Natural for you, or natural for everybody else? Because they’re two different things.”

Eames smiles, both for the look of it and because Arthur baiting him like this is an improvement on the gritted teeth and furrowed forehead that he’s worn for most of the day.

“Who’s to say what’s natural for me?” he says. “For all they know I might be the sort of person who enjoys Build-A-Bear shops and pantomimes.”

Arthur looks momentarily horrified. “I am not going to a Build-A-Bear shop with you.”

Eames blinks, quirks his mouth at Arthur in amusement. “That implies you’d be amenable to seeing a panto.”

“Every day working with you is a goddamned panto.”

“Okay, no Build-A-Bear and no pantomime,” Eames says, waving a hand airily. “Perhaps that’s a bit much. Maybe we’re still a bit unsure of each other, first time trying to balance working together with this new development, that sort of thing. Maybe this is the first flowering of our budding relationship—”

“Oh my god shut up,” Arthur interrupts, making a face of distaste at the phrasing.

“And we’re both a bit nervous of ballsing it up,” Eames finishes, hearing the hesitant honesty in what he’s just said. It feels a bit too much like the truth for it to be a comfortable lie.

Arthur gives him a complicated look. “It’s been thirty seconds and I am already regretting this.”

“Humour me.”

Arthur lets out a put-upon sigh. “I’m not going to get out of this am I?”

“No, you might as well give up now while you still have some dignity,” Eames tells him as he stands up, reaching for his coat where it’s hanging over the back of a chair.

“Pretty sure I lost that somewhere between Mariah Carey playing on repeat and my projection of Miss Piggy deciding you were a threat,” Arthur replies in a critical tone. “But sure, fine, let’s go.”

“Careful, you don’t want to sound too enthusiastic.”

Arthur gives him an overblown fake smile, which could more accurately be called a grimace.

“Don’t pull that face where we’re going, you’ll scare people.”

“Fuck off.”

“That’s the spirit,” Eames says, shrugging his coat on. “I’ll pick you up about eleven tomorrow.”

-

Eames makes several stops on the way back to his hotel. He tries not to examine his actions too closely, because the doubt will set in if he does, but he feels rather pleased with himself by the time he gets back, clutching a couple of shopping bags with the furtive self-consciousness of somebody up to no good.

He stashes the bags in the bottom of the chest of draws and phones Ariadne.

“Well?” she asks.

Eames lies back on the bed, looking at the exposed brickwork of the chimney breast. “Point to you, I think you were right in the first instance when you said you thought he was sad.”

“You shouldn’t have doubted me in the first place.”

“It wasn’t really doubt, more reluctance.” In the background he can hear a television, the jumbled onslaught of Christmas adverts audible even now.

“…This is about all the Christmas stuff, isn’t it?” Ariadne asks hesitantly.

“Kind of,” he answers evasively. He doesn’t really want to spill all of Arthur’s secrets, but thankfully she doesn’t press the issue.

She sighs down the phone. “What are you going to do about it?”

The truth is, Eames doesn’t really know. He’s making it up as he goes along, unsure how much of what he’s thinking to do is going to help.

“I thought… Maybe if he’d just let himself have a bit of what he’s trying to suppress, it might help. Instead of trying to pretend he hates all this Christmas stuff, maybe if he just… you know, decorated a tree, or didn’t lie about the fact that he likes Christmas jumpers would mean that it’s not constantly at the forefront of his thoughts all the time. But you know what he’s like, he’s not going to do that for himself. Which means it’s fallen to me.”

Ariadne doesn’t answer right away, and even though this is a phone call and Eames is by himself in his hotel room he feels decidedly visible, overlooked and exposed.

“If you have a better idea then this is time you should let me in on it,” he says, trying not to sound defensive. The sound of the television in the background almost feels accusatory.

“I knew I was right to trust you,” Ariadne says, sounding hesitant, not unsure of what she’s saying but perhaps unsure of how it will be received.

It’s easier to listen to when she’s not looking at him, but it’s not exactly pleasant.

“I hope you’re right,” Eames hears himself say. “Don’t want to go to all this effort and find that Kermit is still patrolling the perimeter of Arthur’s mind when you take Bartosz under.”

Eames can’t bring anybody back. He can’t make it so the people Arthur wants to see and be with can be there, but he can take him out for the day under the guise of maintained ruse. Because Eames is a forger. He’s excellent at lies.

-

Eames is at least honest enough to admit that it’s a relief when Arthur opens the door on the second knock.

“I was half expecting to find that you’d run off in the middle of the night in order to get out of this,” Eames tells him.

He still isn’t sure how much of his justification — if any — Arthur believes, so he’s tried to put it out of mind, but it is with mixed success. If Arthur is playing along with the story then that will do, and the question of the significance of any of this if Arthur doesn’t believe a word Eames has said will have to wait until Eames is alone and can have a panic about it in private.

“I said I’d help,” Arthur replies, sounding vaguely offended.

“Excellent! Put this on.” He holds out a bag towards Arthur, who looks dubiously between Eames’ outstretched hand and the false cheer on his face. “You need to look the part.”

Arthur peers into the bag, then scowls at him.

Admittedly a jumper with a big reindeer face on the front might have been a step too far, but Arthur’s fluffy socks are still a clear picture in his head. Besides, even if Arthur doesn’t look pleased, Eames is pretty sure he is.

“If I’m wearing that monstrosity, what are you wearing?”

Eames gestures at himself, at his decided lack of anything festive.

Arthur wrinkles his nose slightly. “You’re the one who said you wanted this to be believable, I find it hard to believe that if I’m the sort of guy who wears this jumper then you’re not the sort of guy who does too.”

“Maybe I just prefer a more tasteful approach.”

“Since when?”

“I think you’ll find that the wearing or not wearing of festive items of clothing is not the most important thing here. Nobody will notice my lack of horrid jumper.”

Arthur gives Eames a look of satisfaction. “And I think you’ll find that it’s the little details that make things look real. If you’re not going to put in any effort then this isn’t worth shit. So it’s entirely up to you. Either you wear a Christmas sweater, or I stay here and watch the hockey, your choice.”

Which is how Eames finds himself in a thrift store for the second time in as many days. Arthur is merciless, and he tries to get Eames to buy just about the worst thing he can find seemingly on a matter of principle, a weird lumpy thing with demented looking snowmen parading across the front that’s executed in some rather questionable colour choices, but unfortunately it’s far too small.

The jumper he ends up with is relatively tasteful — relatively being the operative word — with a big green Christmas tree across the belly. It’s handmade, and there are baubles picked out in yellow and red. It probably took hours and hours for somebody to painstakingly knit it, only for it to wind up here and for Eames to buy it under duress. It was probably a gift to somebody at some point, made with love. Maybe somebody had unwrapped it on Christmas day and been hideously disappointed with the very uncool thing their grandmother had made for them. They might also have worn it under duress, then taken it off and never worn it again, stuffed it in a drawer with the vague assurance that they would grow into it. That’s probably where it stayed, unearthed every now and again only to be passed over until somehow it ended up here.

Eames rubs his thumb over the stitches. It’s still a Christmas jumper, and therefore he is opposed to it on a matter of principle, but he can still appreciate the work that went into it. It was well made. It was probably a very warm item of clothing.

“It’s no good staring at it,” Arthur says.

“What?”

“You’re looking at it like it’s done something to personally offend you.”

“It has,” Eames says, blinking. “It’s a Christmas jumper.”

“Just buy it and let’s get on with this, we haven’t got all day.”

“On the contrary, all day is exactly what we do have. And anyway, a shopping trip seems like just the sort of thing we might do if we were actually taking a day off from the job and enjoying the fledging of our new relationship.”

“Do you really have to word it like that?”

“Yes darling I do,” Eames tells him with mock solemnity.

Arthur grimaces, which is exactly what Eames was going for.

He also insists that Eames put the jumper on right away, claiming it wasn’t fair that he had to walk around looking like the seasonal aisle of Target threw up on him when Eames was allowed to wear his normal clothes. Which is a bit of an exaggeration, but Eames lets him get away with it.

“We look like a right pair,” Eames says when they get back outside, looking at their reflections in the shop window. The glass makes the reindeer emblazoned across Arthur’s middle look slightly malevolent.

“I thought that was kind of the point,” Arthur remarks.

“Well, yes, except I was aiming for ‘pair of dashing gentlemen’, not ‘pair of bellends’,” Eames replies, grimacing at the jumper he’s wearing again.

“Speak for yourself,” Arthur says, looking them both over in the reflection. “I make ‘tacky Christmas sweater’ look good.”

“You make most things look good,” Eames says before he really stops to think about it. Arthur does look good. He’s wearing a heavy blue wool overcoat and a finely woven scarf the colour of a good malbec. If Arthur was really that bothered by the jumper he probably would have buttoned his coat up, but he hasn’t. His hair is loose, and to the untrained eye it gives him the illusion of softness, but that’s a veneer too. Arthur isn’t soft. He isn’t yielding. He doesn’t give up. He will stick when folding would be wiser. He will push until something breaks, which is precisely why they’re in this situation, and Eames is terrified that this time the thing Arthur breaks will be himself.

He’s expecting the comment to be either ignored or rebutted, but Arthur surprises him. He smiles, and says thanks, like accepting compliments from Eames is something he’s used to. Then he reaches out and straightens Eames’ collar, brushing his hands over the lapels of his jacket.

Eames smiles instinctively, not quite sure what to make of it.

“Green suits you,” Arthur tells him, fingers still fiddling with the roll of his collar.

Arthur is pretending that this is all normal. He’s accepting it because it isn’t real. But Eames didn’t say it because their ruse for the day required it. He didn’t say it because they are play acting at being boyfriends. He said it because he wasn’t quick enough to snap his teeth closed, the words slipping out anyway, and now they’re out in the open he can’t take them back. Arthur would naturally assume that Eames didn’t mean it, and that’s for the best, but at the same time it all feels a bit like a skinned knee, stinging and superficial but somehow more painful than a gut wound.

‘Thank you’ would be the appropriate thing to say right now, but the words don’t seem to want to leave Eames’ mouth. It’s what their adopted roles for the afternoon require, and yet he can’t. He’s supposed to be pretending, but ‘thank you’ would feel like an honest answer to a dishonest statement, and he can’t quite manage to make himself say it.

“We could get a taxi,” he says instead.

If Arthur is bothered by the lack of gratitude he doesn’t show it, insisting they walk. He claims it’s because a taxi is a waste of money. Why Arthur cares about that sort of thing doesn’t really make sense, but Eames isn’t about to argue.

It’s overcast, the cloud low, the sort of day where it feels like it never gets properly light. It should be a rather grim afternoon, but it makes all the lights seem to glow more brightly in the gloom, and even Eames has to admit the effect is rather cheering, bringing some much needed brightness to everything.

Arthur is quiet, and Eames can see him looking at the shop windows as they pass, at the seasonal window displays and lights twinkling everywhere, even in the middle of the day. He seems thoughtful, like he’s mulling things over, like left to his own devices he’d rather be by himself than accompanying Eames on a fake date. And it’s not that Eames thought Arthur was going to have some sort of miraculous temperament change and start embodying all the things he’s managed to convince almost everybody he’s indifferent to, but all the same, this pensiveness isn’t quite what he had in mind. Maybe it’s because they’re pretending to be a couple that has put him in this mood.

“I’ve never been to Vancouver before,” Eames says, when they’ve been walking in silence for ten minutes.

“I have,” Arthur says absently. “I did a job here with Mal and Dom once, not long after they got married.”

The seemingly casual statement is probably anything but. Eames is an idiot. Arthur wouldn’t be bothered by pretending to be in a relationship with him, it’s just part of the job, and one that he’d suggested in the first place. It was just something to get on with, like disassembling the PASIV and cleaning the lines. Playing along with Eames’ tenuous excuse for a fake date wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was the same now as it was in the dream; it was the people that were gone.

Being in Vancouver was probably part of the problem, perhaps why this was an issue now rather than at any point previously. The reason Arthur tried to ignore all the Christmas stuff in the first place was because it reminded him of the past. Insisting he put on the silly reindeer jumper was only ever going to make the loss more apparent, remind him of the fact that he had nobody to spend it with, and Eames can’t compete with that.

Arthur stops suddenly outside a clothing boutique, the mannequins wearing smart leather boots and ludicrously expensive socks.

“I forget you knew them then, sometimes,” Arthur says, talking at the window. “Feels like I’m the only person who remembers what they were like back then.”

His breath makes the window fog slightly. “We didn’t really know the half of it. We’d convinced this guy that we could get the information he wanted, but it was still mostly theory.” He snorts quietly, the window clouding a bit more with the exhale. “I’ll never forget the look on Mal’s face when we woke up and Dom had managed to find the information in the mark’s head. I wasn’t sure if she was going to punch him or kiss him.”

“Knowing Mal it was probably both.”

Arthur’s face twists, a mixture of amusement and sadness. “Yeah,” he says, then reaches out with a gloved finger, drawing a smiley face on the fogged window.

And this really isn’t what Eames had in mind. Arthur seems to be sliding rapidly towards melancholy introspection. This is supposed to be fun. Eames is supposed to be trying to get Arthur to let himself have a nice time. It was probably very naive to think that being surrounded by kitsch knick-knacks and strudel and sodding candy canes would be enough to get Arthur’s subconscious to calm down with the Christmas thing, but it was the only thing Eames could think of that he thought might help. And admittedly the notion that a trip to the Christmas market would fix everything was probably overly optimistic, but this seems like it’s making things worse.

He’d thought if he could get Arthur to let himself have a bit of the thing he was trying to avoid, then his brain would stop trying to supply it for him. He’d been hoping that if Arthur let himself think about elephants rather than trying not to then the elephant would stop clamouring for attention by covering itself in Christmas lights, but so far all he’s managed to do is remind Arthur of Mal and make him sad that she’s gone.

Eames knows he is a poor substitute. He can’t compare with any of the things Arthur misses, but even if he manages to give Arthur one good memory of this time of year that is current, then this will have been a success. He bumps his shoulder against Arthur slightly. It could conceivably be accidental, but it isn’t.

“Come on,” he says. “The overpriced mulled wine isn’t going to drink itself.”

“No, sure,” Arthur says too quickly, and steps away.

Before Eames can really think about it he leans forward, breathing against the window next to the faint face Arthur had drawn. He draws another face, this one also smiling, and then hurriedly catches up and tries not to think about it too much.

Arthur seems to cheer up slightly after that. It might be a front, but Eames will take it for the time being. He comments on the shop windows and he disputes Eames’ sense of direction.

“I know that cities built on grid systems are anathema to your British sense of order, but the market is north east of here. All the streets in the downtown area run northeast-southwest. This,” Arthur says, pointing at the sign above their heads, “is a lane. Those run northwest, ergo, we’re going the wrong way.”

It’s exactly the sort of thing Arthur would know, and exactly the sort of thing Eames will take the piss out of.

“Ergo, there might be something interesting down there,” Eames says.

“It’s probably no more interesting than anything along here, and it has the added disadvantage of being the wrong way.”

“Come on darling, where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I left it in my hotel room,” Arthur says. “It didn’t go with my outfit.”

“One of these days I’m going to insist that you let me lead you off in entirely the wrong direction.”

“You can try,” Arthur replies, turning and striding off down the road perpendicular to the one Eames thought they should be taking. “I have a very good internal compass.”

Eames smiles at his retreating back then hurries to catch up, shoving his hands in his pockets and letting Arthur steer them in whichever direction he chooses. It’s… nice. Not the Christmas crap; the number of dancing Santas they pass in shop windows is bordering on criminal, but walking along the road with Arthur and bickering about nothing in particular, that’s nice. Even if it’s not really real, it’s nice seeing Arthur gradually relax a bit. It’s nice seeing him forget to be standoffish. It’s nice seeing the enjoyment that he is gradually forgetting to conceal play out across his face.

It’s so nice that Eames can’t think of another word for it, stuck on nice because he is too busy watching the way Arthur's expression softens when they pause to look through the window of a bookshop at a selection of children’s books arranged in a semicircle, lit up with fairy lights. There are polar bears and reindeer and little snow covered houses and a Christmas tree covered in tiny little candles that twinkle gently. A train snakes in and out of the books, and every two minutes or so it goes around the track again, the light on the front of it sweeping over a snowy vista made of wadding.

“My grandma used to make a window display every year,” Arthur says, watching the train loop around the display again. “She spent ages on it. My grandfather was a carpenter, and he used to use all the little off-cuts he’d gathered to make a different shop or house each year and give it to her as a gift.”

Something in what Arthur says makes him pause. Arthur isn’t normally one for sharing stories like this, and it is just out of the ordinary enough that it catches Eames off-guard, a memory floating up from somewhere in response.

“Mine put a tiger in her’s,” he says, and Arthur looks at him sharply.

Maybe it’s because it’s related to Christmas, and maybe it’s because he’s said something about the past, Eames isn’t really sure. He doesn’t really talk much about either, but standing there in the street with the little train going round and round the bookshop window, Eames finds the past is closer than it usually is, far closer than he normally allows it to get.

“There was a big bay window at the front of the house with a table in it,” he says quietly. “Every year in December she’d cover it in fake snow and put a nativity on it. Not sure why Jesus was being born in the snow mind you. Anyway, one year she bought this bloody huge cuddly tiger toy at a car boot, and she and her cub went to live in the bay window. And then they just sort of stayed there when the nativity set came out again every year, surrounded by Mary and Joseph and the donkey in the snow…”

When he glances at Arthur he is giving him a funny look, part perplexed and part pained, and it makes Eames feel self-conscious. They don’t talk about things like this, and yet here they are discussing the finer points of their respective grandmother’s Christmas traditions. Eames isn’t sure why he said anything at all, but suddenly he could smell that room again, see the sun-faded cushions and the tiger cub in the window. Suddenly he was eight again, the past closer than the present, and this truth felt like a good price to pay for one of Arthur’s, one memory in exchange for another rather than something of Arthur’s he’d stolen.

Arthur gives him a lingering look. He seems like he’s about to say something else, but then he takes a deep breath. He takes one last look at the little train going around the track, and then he smiles slightly at them both in the reflection.

“Come on,” he says. “You said something about mulled wine.”

“That I did,” Eames says, seizing on the cue.

They fill the rest of the walk with talk about previous jobs and their various acquaintances, Arthur bitching about current Somnacin supply issues and the lack of reliable alternatives.

The walk seems to be over too quickly, and there is a queue for the market when they get there, put-upon parents trying to rein in excited children and couples standing in line so they can part with twenty dollars each to get in.

“Now don’t forget, we’re supposed to be a couple,” Eames says, muttering to Arthur as they get in line.

Arthur gives him a look. Eames can’t decide if it’s a look that says ‘I’m secretly enjoying this because I love Christmas and I can barely contain my excitement so I’m overcompensating with terseness to try and disguise it’, or it’s a look that says ‘you’re a moron’, but Arthur doesn’t argue. Hell, he was the one who suggested that particular part of the story in the first place, and Eames still can’t quite decide why.

It’s true that playing at being a couple gives the whole thing an air of legitimacy. Going to the Christmas market is the sort of thing two people in a relationship might do.

It’s also true that the need for it is perhaps tenuous at best. Eames is pretty sure that nobody associates the alias he was in Belgium under with the passport he travelled to Canada on, but it pays to be cautious. He does feel a niggle of guilt over getting Arthur to agree to this under false pretences, but he’s also half convinced that Arthur knows it’s a false pretence, which would make this quandary mostly theoretical; if Arthur knew the need for an alibi was mostly complete bollocks then it is difficult to decide how dishonest any of this actually is.

Only that way madness lies, and the queue for an overpriced Christmas attraction is hardly the time or place for that sort of thinking.

“You’re paying,” Arthur says, looking at the price list as they join the line.

“Anything you say, sugarplum.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Arthur warns, and the look of distaste on his face at the endearment almost makes Eames smile.

They take a few shuffling steps forward. Even in the short time they’ve been in the queue more people have joined the line behind them. At this rate it’s going to be heaving in there and it’s only just after lunchtime.

“Really though, twenty bloody dollars? That’s daylight robbery,” Eames says.

“That’s a bit rich coming from you. Aren’t we here because of one of your ‘daylight robberies’?

“Well, yes, but at least mine have some skill involved. This is just extortion.”

“You’re just jealous that you didn’t think of it.”

Eames sniffs. “I know you don’t really mean that. I happen to know you think rather highly of my professional skills, even if they do result in the occasional need for an alibi.”

Arthur doesn’t reply. He’s looking around at the people, at the lights and the few stalls they can see from where they’re standing, the cloying smell of sugar and waffles in the air. Eames isn’t certain, but he’s pretty sure Arthur looks vaguely excited. Hopefully it’s not just wishful thinking.

They shuffle forwards, and Eames stuffs his hands into his pockets to try and warm his fingers up. He has to admit that he’s secretly glad of the extra jumper he’d been forced into buying; it’s colder than he anticipated, and the jacket he’d bought the other day wasn’t really cutting it.

“What do you want to see first?” Eames asks him. He’d not really thought beyond getting Arthur to agree to this, and now he’s firmly into ‘winging it’ territory.

“Well because we had to make a detour and find you something appropriate to wear, it’s now past lunch. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to buy me a hot dog.”

“Bratwurst,” Eames says. “I’m detecting a distinctly German theme to the decorating, surely it’s going to be bratwurst, not a hot dog.”

“Ass,” Arthur says, but there is the faint hint of a smile at the edges of his mouth.

“I don’t think they sell that here.”

Arthur snorts a laugh. It makes something both squeeze and relax in Eames’ chest.

Even if Arthur is only playing along with this to get Eames to leave him alone, he seems genuinely okay this morning. After he got over whatever it was he was thinking outside the sock shop, he’s been rather good company. Eames would even go as far as saying it’s been an enjoyable start to the day, which is in many ways better than he was expecting.

Hopefully this means that the plan — such as it is — is going to work. If nothing else Arthur does seem more relaxed, so it’s definitely a good start. And even if Arthur is just humouring him, putting up with this in order to try and convince Eames he’s fine and to leave him alone, then hearing him laugh is something. Even if all Eames manages is temporary comic relief then that’s a success, of sorts.

Once they get in, forty dollars lighter before they’ve even started, Arthur makes a beeline for a stall imaginatively called ‘Bratwurst Haus’.

“See, told you; bratwurst,” Eames tells him. “Though I’m not sure what I think of the name.”

“What would you have called it?”

He considers. “Eames’ Special Sausages.”

“Bratwurst,” Arthur says seriously.

“Pedant.”

“Of course,” Arthur replies. And then he smirks. “I’m sure your sausage is very special. Titular, even.”

“Of course,” Eames echoes, Arthur’s tone catching him slightly off guard.

Eames listens to him ordering for both of them, accepting the lager and bratwurst Arthur hands him in short order. He even offers to pay, telling Arthur he can get the mulled wine when he frowns at not splitting it evenly.

“I suppose I should be glad you weren’t struck with the desire to go to ‘Squid Feast’,” Eames says around a mouthful, looking around at some of the other food vendors in search of a distraction.

Arthur shrugs, sucking the foam off his pint. “It’s early, I might want squid later.”

Eames pulls a face. “You’re on your own with that one, if I’m paying these prices I’d rather come back to the house of sausage.”

“I thought ‘Meat Pie Haus’ might be more your style,” Arthur says pertly.

“Charming, I take you out to Eames’ Special Sausages and you insult me, how’s that for gratitude.”

“It keeps you grounded,” Arthur says, then bites off a mouthful of pork and sauerkraut.

It’s easy to pretend. Too easy. Eames watches Arthur inhale two bratwurst and a lager, and it all feels too easy. It doesn’t seem right that all it took for Arthur to lighten up was stuffing a lager into his hand and a bit of light innuendo. It feels like picking up a ‘get out of jail free’ card in Monopoly. It feels like cheating, and the very fact that Eames feels conflicted about that at all is noteworthy.

But then, this wasn’t real. This was a job, Eames reminds himself. As far as Arthur is concerned, this little trip out was probably a means to an end, adding verisimilitude to Eames’ alibi, and probably closer to how Eames feels when he’s tailing a potential forge than an afternoon with his boyfriend. Arthur seems to be happy enough spending the day this way because there is a purpose to it, and Eames needs to remember that. This isn’t a social occasion.

Eames is used to pretending. Pretending was easy, habitual, and lies weren’t difficult, slipping off the tongue with an after taste of satisfaction. It was safer to lie, an instinctive response to a threat, and the best lies contained an element of the truth, an inversion. This was no different, but what is different is the ratio. Standing there watching Arthur wipe the back of his hand across his mouth, the uncomfortable sensation that there is more truth in this lie than others is hard to ignore. Eames isn’t here because he needs an alibi, and the excuse is so thin it’s practically see through, and yet Arthur is going along with it. It must be blindingly obvious that Eames isn’t here because he needs Arthur’s help but because he wants to be. It must be very clear that the alibi is just an excuse, and it must be almost laughable how inept Eames is at this sort of thing.

Honesty was never his strong point. Even Eames’ truths tried to pass under the guise of falsehood. Eames knows this. And he knows that the only dishonest part about any of this thing he’s attempting with Arthur is the thin skin of needing an alibi. Everything else is just him.

Maybe there was a certain sort of balance in that. He’s let Arthur keep his lie, the safety of subterfuge. In pretending this was about something else Arthur didn’t have to explain. Maybe it was only natural that in order to let Arthur keep his lies Eames had to give up one of his own. They could overlook the fact that this was about Eames wanting to do something to help and pretend it was a way to stay out of prison.

Admitting it even to himself feels clumsy, like his shoes are too big and he keeps tripping over them when he tries to walk. He feels like he’s exposing a weak point. At every turn it feels like he is circling closer to the edge of something, unable to make himself turn around and run from danger, moth to a flame.

The thought itches. His first instinct is to run. Instinctively he wants to lie, and old habits are hard to break, but this is a second chance.

He elbows Arthur lightly. “Save some room for waffles.”

“It’s just two hot dogs and a beer,” Arthur replies. “It’ll take more than that to fill me up, I hope you bought one of your good wallets with you.”

“Bratwurst,” Eames says. Then shrugs. “And I can always find another wallet if this one doesn’t have sufficient funds to keep you fed.”

Arthur burps in reply.

“Come on,” Eames says. “I’ve spent forty dollars getting us in here, I don’t want to stand around watching you stuff yourself full of overpriced food all day.”

That’s a lie too, but it’s an easy one. The unfortunate truth is, he would stand around watching Arthur eating bratwurst all day. He’d buy him another one, and another lager, if it meant that it kept that awful look of self-betrayal off Arthur’s face. If it means the hounded look that Arthur has worn for a while now eased off slightly then Eames would buy him a hundred bloody hot dogs, but that truth is far too telling.

Arthur sets off without another word towards where the gift stalls are, shoulders set like he’s about to confront some particularly recalcitrant projections, but when Eames catches up to him he’s standing in front of the first stall he reached, looking down at the carved wooden ornaments.

He has his hands in his pockets, and Eames slips his arm through Arthur’s when he stops next to him. He can always blame it on the swiftly consumed pint if need be, but if Arthur is bothered by the proximity at all he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t pull away, and the lack of any clue about what he’s thinking leaves Eames feeling slightly out of his depth.

He looks around. They don’t look out of place at all. There are couples looking at wreaths and laughing. There are excited children, and parents treating themselves to a mulled cider. It is not a place Eames ever thought he would find himself, let alone with Arthur, and it’s weird, but it’s also weirdly nice. They’re not even talking much, but after this morning the quiet is almost welcome. It’s entirely out of the ordinary, and it’s built on a lie, but then that was par for the course, the only typical thing about this atypical day.

Arthur doesn’t say anything, walking slowly down the row of stalls with their arms linked. Gradually he can feel Arthur relax slightly next to him, but Eames still feels vaguely on edge, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Arthur to ask him what the hell they’re doing here. He keeps waiting for the game to be up, but then this game was in many ways Arthur's devising. He was the one who suggested they pretend to be a couple, and Eames still can’t quite decide why.

But as they wander along slowly, looking at the lights and the smiling families and the kitschy decorations, Arthur’s elbow bumping against him every now and again, Eames is quite willing to carry on pretending. Pretending was easy, he was always pretending, and if it meant that he got to catch another glimpse of the bits of himself that Arthur tried to keep wrapped up all the time then he will carry on pulling the wool over his eyes.

Over the top of the stalls Eames sees the top of a wooden pyramid come into view, decorated with strings of lights and angel figurines, and he nudges Arthur in the ribs.

“I spy the mulled wine,” he says, indicating the pyramid with a tilt of his head. He gives Arthur a debonair smile which is only skin deep before steering them towards it.

He buys two, handing Arthur the mug and watching as he wraps his fingers around it, inhaling fragrant steam and taking a sip before wandering off towards more stalls.

Somewhere between the first mulled wine and when they pause in front of a table displaying a selection of felted decorations, the flush of alcohol warming his cheeks, Eames feels himself start to relax slightly. Admittedly the booze probably helps, but so does the shy little smile on Arthur’s face when he looks at the felted gingerbread people and reindeers on the table.

If this was real, Eames supposes, this is the point that he’d ask if Arthur wanted one of the reindeers for their Christmas tree. If they really were a couple, he might go ahead and buy one anyway, try and manage it without Arthur realising, just because the way he was looking at the ornaments was as if it was lifting a weight off his shoulders somehow, a lightness in his expression that Eames didn’t know he was missing until he saw it had returned.

He considers buying them both another mulled wine. If one had put this warm flush across Arthur’s cheekbones then two might mean he started laughing, but something makes him pause. He isn’t sure. For a gambling man, Eames had never been much for inordinate odds. A sure win, honest or otherwise, or at least one he wouldn’t miss the loss, that was much more his speed. But standing there, tongue burnt because he’d taken a huge mouthful of mulled wine before he let it cool down enough, he wants to see whether this will pay off. He wants to risk it all, step out into the void and see how far he falls.

He starts with another mulled wine. Arthur’s resulting smile is easy, eyes crinkling at the corners, and when Eames holds out the second glass to him his gloved fingers drag over the back of Eames’ hand. It feels like a win.

They stop to listen to carols. They comment on the crap decorations and end up in the queue for waffles, lured in by the smell, sweet and cloying. He listens to Arthur order for both of them, everything warm and fuzzy around the edges.

He wants more. He’d wanted to see if another mulled wine would make Arthur laugh, but it’s not enough. He also wants to see if he likes roast chestnuts and hot cider. The glimpses he’s seen of Arthur underneath his habitual veneer of professionalism make him want to peel back more of it. He wants to see if Arthur likes to decorate with mistletoe. He wants to see how Arthur would react if Eames bought him a stocking with a big green patchwork ‘A’ on the front, hung it from the mantelpiece and filled it with oranges and joke gifts. He wants to buy him one of those awful elf hats and see if it makes his ears stick out, and it isn’t until he is standing in front of a hat stand trying to decide whether to get red or green that he catches himself.

None of this is real.

It’s like a bubble bursting, everything suddenly going from twinkling and bright to being drab and false. The carousel, that a minute ago looked bright and festive, now looks old and tired, paint wearing thin on the horses ears where people have been holding on. The smell of sugar and waffles turns sickly rather than sweet. They’ve been hiding behind the safety of subterfuge all day and suddenly the glamour has fallen away.

Arthur wanders over to stand next to him, moving scarves around on a rail.

“Do you think Ariadne would like one of these?” Arthur asks, and Eames doesn’t know if this is him pretending or if he’s genuinely asking, unable to see where pretend Arthur ends and the real one begins but knowing he wishes the line didn’t exist.

“Do you want a hat?” Eames forces himself to ask, not looking at Arthur. “Bet it’ll make you look adorable.”

Only Arthur doesn’t play along. He doesn’t crinkle up his face in indignation. He’s standing close enough to touch, and this time it’s Arthur who links their arms together, sliding his hand down until his gloved hand is in Eames’ coat pocket with Eames’ hand, and Eames can’t stop looking at the stupid hats. It feels like forgetting his role when he’s meant to be forging, dropping out of character in the middle of a dream and getting gunned down by surprised projections.

“What’s that face for?” Arthur asks him. He sounds concerned, like he’s bothered that maybe Eames isn’t enjoying itself, and the thought of this concern being an act is awful after the wine and the lager and the cloying sweet taste of sugary waffles, vaguely nauseating.

“Do you have indigestion?” Arthur continues. “Did you eat too many bratwurst?”

“I— No,” Eames says, frustrated with himself, with this stupid plan, with the thought that it was ever going to work at all.

“You need a better coat,” Arthur says.

“What?”

“Your hands are cold,” Arthur says, pulling his hand out of Eames’ pocket.

Then Arthur is pulling his gloves off, trying to shove one of them onto Eames cold-stiff fingers and failing miserably, thumb going down the index finger and ring finger trying to get into the same hole as the little one. Arthur starts laughing at his ministrations, snorting at his glove stretched over Eames’ hand as he tries to fix it and Eames can’t tell what his own expression is doing, amused and gutted and helpless all in one because this isn’t how this is supposed to go. It’s supposed to be him taking care of Arthur, taking him out and getting him to cut himself some slack, pretending Arthur is the sort of person who lets himself have the things he wants in the hope that he will start doing it in reality rather than just when he’s under duress, and yet Arthur is still the one looking out for him.

Eames looks around. It’s almost dark and he’d not even noticed it happening, too caught up in trying to unearth another one of Arthur’s reclusive smiles. Around them the crowd has shifted from families with children to couples pressed together in the cold, snapping heart-shaped padlocks closed in the display and smiling at each other, or wandering underneath the twinkling lights of what calls itself Lovers Lane, and suddenly the truth is undeniable.

He doesn’t want to lie anymore. Not to Arthur, not to himself. But what is he supposed to do with the burgeoning honesty that is pressing up underneath his diaphragm when lies have always had his back, when truth was never reliable, never the thing that paid off. Lying was easier, knee-jerk, protective. Lying had kept him alive. He’s been trying to fool himself for years and it’s a hard habit to break, but with a sharp stab of something shameful and hot, child-like, he realises he wants to be honest. Maybe there is another way.

“Right!” he exclaims, as if the element of surprise was going to help him. “I’ve had enough of this commercial Christmas crap.”

“This commercial Christmas crap was your idea,” Arthur points out, still struggling with the glove.

“Never mind about that. We should do something else.”

Arthur’s fingers still, suspicion flattening his mouth. “What do you suggest?”

“Arthur,” Eames proclaims, pulling Arthur’s glove off his hand and lacing their fingers together. “Get your glad rags on; we’re going dancing.”