Catch Me If I Fall
Dec. 29th, 2010 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fae_boleynSeries: Three Is More Than Just Company
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Ariadne/Arthur/Eames
Summary: Our trio takes care of each other. Joint fill for these two Round 11 prompts: community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/13659.html, and community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/13659.html
Just hold on to me
I'll hold on to you
It's you and me
Up against the world
It's you and me
I don't need a parachute
Baby, if I've got you
Baby, if I've got you
I don't need a parachute
You're gonna catch me
You're gonna catch if I fall
Down, down, down – Parachute, Cheryl Cole
Knife wounds hurt like hell, though the upside, Eames notes with a touch of black humor, is that no one's going to have to root around in there for the bullet like they would if he'd been shot and it wasn't a through-and-through. Small favors, and all. That does not change the fact that it fucking hurts every time he moves, being inconveniently located on his left side. Ariadne goes for the first-aid kit stashed in their safe house, but also grabs a bottle of vodka, handing it to him. “Closest thing we have to a sedative,” she tells him, face tight.
He tries to laugh, because it's a better reaction than the alternatives. But he stops abruptly when he sees Ariadne with a needle. “Ari, I don't think – you can just bandage it.” That's all he was expecting until they could get out of here anyway – Arthur left right off to take care of the people still following them and he can't do stitches anyway, it's one of the few things that completely unnerves the point man. And as far as he knows, Ariadne doesn't know how to do field medicine at all.
“I know what I'm doing,” she says, with a reassuring smile. “Seriously, though, drink some of that, because I don't want this to hurt any more than it has to.”
“Yes, ma'am,” he jokes weakly, taking a gulp and almost choking on it when she uses the antiseptic, because, shit, that burns. He feels the first prick of the needle and curses the fact that the first-aid kit isn't equipped with some kind of decent painkiller (or chloroform, even, to go old-fashioned). This safe house is one of his, just outside Brighton, so he can't even comfort himself with the idea of telling Arthur off about it later; this one's on him.
“Sorry,” Ariadne says, seeing him wince.
“Just... Tell me where you learned how,” Eames says, desperate for some kind of distraction as he takes the chance to swallow more vodka between stitches.
“My aunt Kat, she was dating a woman the summer after my senior year who ran a survival camp. My cousin Maggie – she's Aunt Kat's daughter, adopted – and I both went to Jaime's camp for two weeks in July.”
“And they taught...” He breaks off for a second, sucking in a sharp breath, then continues, “They taught suturing at a survival camp?”
“Well, no, not officially, but Jaime was a former Marine and one night she showed everyone who was interested. I thought it might come in handy, though I didn't exactly expect something like this to happen. I was thinking more along the lines of kitchen accidents.”
Eames laughs, which is a bad idea, as it pulls muscles which then tug on the wound. He bites back a yelp, his hand reaching out for something to grip. He finds it, a hand that wasn't there a moment ago, and looks up into concerned brown eyes. Arthur's hair is a mess and his face is tight as he looks down at Eames.
“I don't care if that bastard Stephen used to be your friend, next time I see him I'm putting a bullet in his head,” the point man says grimly. “He could have killed you.”
“No arguments here, darling.”
“Eames, you need to stop talking and hold still,” Ariadne says, her voice tense.
“I'm trying to distract myself; the vodka's not working very well as an anesthetic.” Not to mention, he doesn't fancy a hangover tomorrow in addition to the pain he knows he's going to have from his wound.
“Well, then we'll just have to distract you without you being the one to talk,” Arthur says. He continues in a quiet voice, murmuring in Eames' ear so he won't distract Ariadne as well. He doesn't try dirty talk – that would be distracting, but it wouldn't help Eames keep still, that's for sure. Instead, he talks quietly in Mandarin, making Eames really focus to understand – he speaks Mandarin but it's been a while, and Arthur knows that – about DESI, answering some of the questions Eames has had for years about the secretive agency that once employed him. Not too much, Eames notes with mild exasperation, but enough to keep him focused, at least until the combination of pain and alcohol knocks him out.
Later, he wakes up to find that he's been moved into the safe house's small bedroom, and that Ari and Arthur are on either side of him. Ariadne's curled against his uninjured side, as catlike as always, but her one hand is gripping a fistful of his T-shirt. Arthur's on his back, again as usual, but he usually doesn't have a light grip on Eames' hand.
And the forger would like to consider them both ridiculously sentimental, except he'd had a bad moment there himself, when Stephen – someone he'd once considered a friend, someone he can admit was his first male crush, years and years ago – shoved the knife into him. He'd been scared that this might actually be it, for a moment there. The thought of dying had never actively bothered him before; if anything it had added an extra burst of adrenaline. But now... It was the thought of leaving the two people sleeping on either side of him that scared him at that moment. He didn't want to leave them yet.
So maybe he's ridiculously sentimental as well. And maybe he's all right with that, in the long run.
~ ~ ~
It's been a long time since Ariadne's had a migraine this bad – she had them far too often in high school and her first two years of college, but they'd begun to fade her junior year, and at this point she'd considered them all but gone. The throbbing pain in her head this afternoon is making it very, very clear that she was wrong about that one.
Curling up into a ball on top of the bed, she bites back a whimper of pain, wishing the medicine would hurry up and kick in already. Despite not really expecting to need it, she's kept a bottle of the prescription she used to always have, making sure the medicine stays up to date. Just in case. Which is a good thing now, if it would bloody well start working.
I've been spending too much time with Eames, she thinks with the part of her mind that's not completely focused on how much this hurts. The medicine's not doing a damn thing, and her frustration seems to be doing nothing but making the pain even worse. God, she'd forgotten how this felt, and she's no longer used to it enough to be able to deal with it.
A hand on her chin makes her look up, wincing as the light hits her eyes. “Turn the light off,” Arthur whispers, looking behind her, presumably at Eames. The light clicks off, and she can hear footsteps approaching the bed. But that's when Arthur's fingers start making soothing circles on her temples, and the pain starts to fade just a little. There's two more hands kneading the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders, confirming that it was indeed Eames turning the light out a moment ago.
She starts to relax a little, feeling a bit better already. The medicine's starting to kick in, she thinks, but it's more the fact that her two men are trying to help her, making the pain easier to handle, that's really helping. Her eyes start to drift closed, and she doesn't fight it. Maybe when she wakes up the pain will be gone completely.
When she opens her eyes and peers at the clock, it's nearly seven at night. Shit, I'm going to have a hell of a time sleeping tonight, she thinks. Getting up and rubbing her eyes, she wanders out into the main area, finding Arthur in the kitchen. Luckily, he's only pouring a cup of coffee. “Hey,” he says, offering her a smile. “Feeling better?”
“I am, actually, yeah. Where's Eames?”
“He went to pick up dinner. We decided to try that new Thai place, is that all right?”
“You got me pad thai, right?”
“Of course.”
“Then yeah.”
He takes out another mug and a hot chocolate packet, holding it up. “Want some? I remember back at the agency, when I got awful stress headaches from too much research, my friends Ashley and Ianto used to ban me from the coffeepot and pour hot chocolate down my throat instead. That's their cure for everything from headaches to nightmares, and it works surprisingly well.”
Ariadne nods, laughing. “Did they really? I need to meet these two someday.”
“If we ever end up in Cardiff, I'm under orders to call Ianto so he can say hello, and I'm sure Ash will show up here eventually; she's the type to pop up randomly.”
“Sounds like fun.” Ariadne takes the warm mug from him and sips it, enjoying the sweet taste. “It's weird, though, I haven't had a migraine like that in years. I hope it's not dreaming that did it.”
“I doubt it, but the compounds affect everyone differently. Like with me, I've been doing this for over a decade now, and I can still dream on my own. No one else I know who's been in it that long can.” He studies her. “But you used to get them when you were younger, I'm guessing?”
“Yeah, first time was when I was twelve, and they were horrible when I was sixteen especially. They started fading when I was in college, and...” She shrugs. “Hopefully this was a one-off.”
The door opens, and Eames walks in, a large takeout bag cradled in one arm as he tosses his keys onto the coffee table. “Hey, you're looking better, love,” he says to Ariadne.
“I'm feeling better. And I'm starving,” she adds, taking the bag from him and peering inside.
“Yeah, she's better,” Arthur quips. For that little jibe, she throws his chopsticks at his head instead of handing them to him, but she's not really angry. The teasing is just part of how they are, just part of what makes her home anyplace her boys happen to be.
~ ~ ~
Arthur wakes with a choked gasp, lurching out of bed and only just making it to the bathroom. Nothing actually comes up, he just spends ten minutes dry-heaving over the toilet bowl, hands clinging to the porcelain. “Fuck,” he whispers when he catches his breath, moving to lean against the wall. He draws his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them.
He hadn't been in Afghanistan long before Alex recruited him for DESI, only three months, but it was long enough. Long enough to see shit he wished he'd never seen, long enough to have a scar down his back where shrapnel hit him when someone bombed his convoy. And long enough to have one of the Taliban's men shoot him in the knee. He still carries a scar there too. And later, in dreams, the same knee was a favored target of projections, especially shade Mal.
The nightmares are usually a mix of being back in the desert and some of his worse dream experiences. Like tonight, he was back in the convoy, only when the bomb hit, instead of being thrown through the air like he was, he found himself suddenly in the middle of a crowd of projections, being ripped apart. He rolls his die across the bathroom tile, relief crashing through him when he looks down to see six white dots. He hates that he can never tell, with real dreaming. He knows people who can; Alex used to say that part of what drew her to lucid dreaming was that she always knew she was dreaming, even in normal sleep. Of course, Alex can't dream anymore. None of them from the old days can, except for him.
Arthur doesn't exhibit many of the traditional symptoms of PTSD these days, and hasn't for a long time. DESI put him through rigorous therapy sessions to get rid of them. The real breakthrough was lucid dreaming; something about the effects of Somnacin on him made most of his problems go away. True, he's a little more obsessed with controlling his environment than he was before, but he was always like that to some extent. He doesn't jump at the sound of backfiring cars, he doesn't have mood swings or flashbacks. He just has these fucking dreams. It's bad enough with just them, thank you very much.
“Arthur?” He looks up to see Eames in the doorway. The other man hesitates for just a moment before coming in and sinking down next to Arthur, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. Arthur hesitates for a moment, then leans into Eames' hold.
“Still?” Eames asks. He's seen this before – the first time was before Fischer, in a hotel room in Shanghai. Arthur was worse then, he tended to wake up screaming.
“Not as much as I used to, but yeah. At least it was just a memory mash-up tonight,” he says quietly. “Sometimes it's you or Ari, or Dom, and that's a hell of a lot worse.”
“Well, we're all here and fine, you, me, and Ari. I'm sure if we called Cobb he'd be wicked pissed at the phone ringing at two AM, but he'd be alive and well.”
“Yeah, I know. Like I said, tonight wasn't that bad, really, by my standards. I just wish the fucking Somnacin made me stop dreaming like it did everyone else. I never seem to have good dreams either, which makes it worse.”
Eames tightens his hold slightly and they don't say anything for a few minutes, until Ari peers into the doorway. “Nightmare again?” she asks. Both of them nod and she walks in to join the,m, sitting on Arthur's other side and resting her head on his shoulder, taking his hand in both of hers.
Arthur won't go back to sleep tonight – he never can once his nightmares wake him up – but neither will his lovers. They stay up with him, and that chases away more demons than anything else ever could.
Link to the next installment: fae-boleyn.livejournal.com/13087.html
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2010-12-29 09:18 pm (UTC)-Ellie
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Date: 2010-12-30 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-30 12:29 am (UTC)Excellent job hon!
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Date: 2010-12-30 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 11:21 am (UTC)The three of them together on a bed. 'nough said.
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Date: 2010-12-30 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 02:06 am (UTC)Also, I adore your icon.
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Date: 2010-12-31 02:17 am (UTC)(also, I am the cuddles/chicken soup/sutures OP, in case you were wondering. lol. OP identification fail.)
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Date: 2010-12-31 02:33 am (UTC)For me it depends on what the doubt is over, and Wikipedia can be useful too.
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Date: 2011-02-01 05:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-10 03:05 am (UTC)