Work Text:
Eames makes it through morning assembly before he ditches, slipping out the doors that back up onto the woods behind the high school. He walks a couple miles to a diner Arthur took him to once and orders breakfast, sitting at the counter. Eggs, pancakes, bacon, coffee. The waitresses are nice. No one asks why he’s not in school.
He doesn’t even do anything, just walks around. There’s a reservoir down the road from the diner; he smokes through half a pack, watching the ice, just starting to crack and go slushy at the edge. It’s almost spring, but the weather is still grey and wintery. Eames has a heavy jacket and good gloves and he doesn’t start to get cold until almost five. He buys a big cup of coffee and starts home, but it’s a long walk, and he’s chilled through by the time he walks up the driveway.
Arthur is home, heating up a frozen pizza in the oven and working through some kind of flowchart on taped together pieces of graph paper. The whole house is warm and smells like pepperoni; Arthur says,
"hey," not looking up. He looks tired and his shirt is untucked, kind of wrinkled. Eames shifts on his feet, feeling unaccountably guilty; Arthur works a lot, all the time, wakes up before sunrise to go running and is usually standing in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee, still in his running clothes, when Eames shuffles past to the bathroom, barely awake. Arthur is home by six almost every day, but he usually works a little at night while Eames does homework or watches tv, and Eames sometimes lies in bed and listens to him, on the phone late at night, the low, measured tones of the voice he uses for work.
"You want me to make some salad or something?" Eames says.
"Yeah, okay," Arthur says absently, penciling in some notes at the edge of one sheet. There’s half a head of lettuce and some carrots and a bunch of early cucumbers Mal gave them from the greenhouse. Eames washes them and cuts them up and puts them in a bowl on the table; Arthur works silently, concentrating.
"Sorry," he says, when Eames puts the pizza down on the table. "I really need to get this done."
"I have homework," Eames says. He has a bunch of problems due in Trig tomorrow and a vocab test to study for and he has to come up with some sample topics for his American History paper. They eat silently, working. Eames finishes his homework and gets out this French poetry book Mal gave him to read. It’s too hard, and he has to spend a lot of time looking up words, but Mal had put her hands around his, holding the book, and said, "I hope you will try to read this for me," and Eames is pretty sure that there’s a bunch of sex stuff in it. He’s puzzling through another boring poem when Arthur throws down the pencil and says,
"There, that’s done," sighing in relief. Eames pushes the last slice of pizza towards him. "Sure you don’t want it?" he says.
"No, you take it," Eames says. He ate most of it while Arthur was working.
"Thanks," Arthur says. He pulls off a piece of pepperoni and puts it in his mouth. "Why’d you skip school today?" he says.
"I--" Eames says. His mouth tastes sour. Arthur smiles wryly.
"Yeah," he says, "they call you when your kid just disappears from school."
"Oh," Eames says.
"So--" Arthur says expectantly. "Did you have a test you didn’t study for or--"
"No," Eames says.
Arthur takes a bite of his pizza, chewing thoughtfully.
"I just didn’t feel like going," Eames says. Arthur will never get it, what it’s like to have to sit in too-small classrooms, every day, he probably loved school, sat in the front row in his neat clothes and never felt like mouthing off or just fucking jumping out a window.
"Okay," Arthur says. He takes another bite of pizza, and Eames fidgets in his seat, wondering when Arthur will just get on with it and tell him how disappointed he is, how he'd better not do it again.
"Is someone messing with you?" Arthur says quietly.
"What?"
"You know, pushing you around," he looks at Eames' face and his mouth tilts down. "Calling you names."
"No," Eames says, annoyed. Arthur told him to fly under the radar and he does, every day. No one pushes him around; barely anyone’s even noticed he exists. "I told you, I just didn’t want to go, that’s all." His voice comes out too loud, sullen.
Arthur scratches his eyebrow. "Okay," he says. He pulls a piece of note paper out of one of his folders and pushes it across the table. It begins, "Dear Principal Hoffman--"
"You know I can write these for myself, right?" Eames says. Arthur has caught him practicing before, Arthur’s spiky script, Mal’s smooth girly handwriting, and mostly he just twitches an eyebrow up and says something like,
"I don’t connect my ‘r’s like that."
"Yes," Arthur says. "But you don’t know that I told Mrs. Hoffman that you had an optometrist appointment."
"You--you lied?"
"Figured you had a good reason not to go," Arthur says, shrugging.
"I didn’t," Eames says. "I just fucked off because I wanted to."
"Well, did you miss anything important?"
"Nah," Eames says. "Well, Miss Davis had on, like, this little pink fuzzy sweater," he admits.
"Yeah?" Arthur says, looking kind of interested.
"Yeah, it was--you know, she has nice tits," Eames says, and Arthur actually nods in agreement before catching himself and saying,
"Don’t mess around with your teachers."
"I could get her," Eames says. Miss Davis is young and cute and wears pink lipstick and gives Eames extra help if he comes by during her free period. He leans in the doorway a little sometimes. She looks. "She likes me."
"I’ll bet," Arthur says. "Don’t. She could lose her job."
"Fine, okay," Eames says. He was just joking around. "I bet she’d go out with you."
Arthur shakes his head, but he’s smiling faintly. "I’m not dating your teachers," he says.
"You dressed up pretty nice for parent-teacher night, is all I’m saying."
"No I didn’t," Arthur says, which is true. He’d gone straight from work in his normal clothes, tie a little loose at the end of the day, jacket unbuttoned, but Eames knows what he looked like next to all the frumpy boring moms and sad-sack dads in pleated khakis.
"She’s cute, though, right?" he says. Miss Davis has has big brown eyes and wears pretty scarves in her hair. Eames thinks about Arthur’s fingers, untying her scarf, Arthur’s mouth, pressing a hot little kiss right above her turtleneck sweater.
"Yeah, she’s cute," Arthur admits.
They wash the dishes in companionable silence, Eames drying and putting them away, and then they watch an episode of Law and Order, sprawled out on the couch. Eames is tired from walking around in the cold all day and heads for his bedroom after that, but Arthur says,
"Wait a second, please," and Eames stops.
"You lose credit if you have more than 20 absences," Arthur says; he’s fiddling with the remote control, not looking up.
"I know," Eames says. Arthur told him to read the school handbook, and when he didn’t, he read it out loud to him in ten page increments while they were driving over to Mal and Dom’s. "So?"
"So, it will seriously inconvenience me if I have to dick around petitioning the school board for an exception," Arthur says, looking up at him. "And--"
"Man, I heard you," Eames says. "It was just one day--"
"Yeah, but New Jersey," Arthur says, nonsensically. "And I thought you wanted to come to Seattle, that’s another three days at least, and I couldn’t schedule it across your break."
"What?"
"Did Dom not talk to you?" Arthur says slowly. "We need a fourth for both jobs. I thought--"
"You want me to work a real job with you?" Eames says.
"Of course, that was always--" Arthur stops, and then says, carefully, "You’re not obligated. If you don’t want to, we can make other arrangements."
Eames hesitates. He wants to, but the jobs Arthur and Mal and Cobb do are dangerous. He thinks about Arthur’s face, if he fucks up. He thinks about the time Arthur came home with a bandaged arm and a huge bruise ringing his throat and told Eames he was fine, not to worry about it.
"Maybe you should get someone else," he says. "I just--I don’t want to be in the way."
Arthur nods, slowly. "All right," he say. "That’s fine."
"I’ll just--good night." Eames is in the doorway of his bedroom before Arthur says,
"Wait." When Eames turns around, Arthur’s standing, his arms crossed. Eames sighs. He knew Arthur was brassed off about Eames skipping school, but he doesn’t get why Arthur waited until now to yell at him about it. He drags himself back into the living room.
"Sit down," Arthur says. Eames sits, hunching over so he doesn’t have to look at Arthur’s face. "Do you know how many people can do what you do?" Arthur says. His voice is low and a little angry. Eames stares at the floor.
"No," he says, unwillingly. "Lots, I guess."
"Maybe," Arthur says. "You’re the first one I’ve ever met."
"No," Eames says. "Mal can--"
"Mal can make herself a little younger or a little older. She can look like her mother and her brother and sometimes like Dom, but she can’t do his voice right. She is very, very good."
"Oh," Eames says.
"But you can do a hell of a lot better than that, can’t you," Arthur says. He sits down on the coffee table, his knees nearly knocking into Eames’ and waits until Eames looks up at him.
"Yes," Eames says, because that’s what Arthur seems to want him to say.
"Almost anyone can change their appearance a little," Arthur says, speaking quickly now. "And some people can even make themselves into a generic type--a little girl, an old man. But it’s extremely difficult to convincingly copy a real person, even if it’s someone you know very well. And to copy a stranger well enough to convince their--their husband, their mother--" he shakes his head, and Eames remembers, Mal putting a stack of photographs down in front of him and saying "Today, we will try something new, hm?" and Arthur saying
"Mal--" a warning.
"Just to try," Mal said, lifting one hand and giving Eames a gentle smile. "Just to try."
Eames shakes his head. "I don’t even--I just do it," he says. "It’s not anything--"
"Listen to what I’m telling you," Arthur says. "It hasn’t ever been done before, what you can do." Eames feels the blush start at his chest and sweep up slowly over his throat and cheeks, and Arthur’s still talking. "Do you think I would ever ask you to join on a job if I thought you were a risk or a liability?" he says harshly. "If I thought you’d be in the way?"
"No," Eames says, his voice wavering, feeling stupid. Arthur seems to really look at him then, and the awful tension goes out of his face.
"Okay," he says. "So--think about it. Let me know in the morning."
Eames nods. There’s a hot lump in his throat and he’s afraid of what he’ll say if he looks at Arthur. After a minute, Arthur stands up and slips past him back into the kitchen, where Eames hears the radio flick on to some late night call-in show Arthur never listens to.
*
Arthur still says to him, "I know you can do better than that," after a lousy grade or a shitty punch, still says "Don’t get cocky." He corrects Eames' table manners, his parallel parking, the way he shines his shoes and irons his shirts, tells him to cut it back with the weights until he can run a sub-6 mile, but he offers compliments, too. They’re almost aways stiff or obviously rehearsed, but they’re real. Eames is starting to see that Arthur will never lie to him.