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inception fic: a million miles

Because this was originally a meme fic (the one where you write a drabble for ten songs), so it jumps around in time a lot, but considering NONE of the sections qualified as drabbles and I cheated so heavily I figured I might as well give up the ghost and just post it as regular ol' fic.  It's for zelost_mind, who isn't in this fandom, but who wanted teenage Eames in a leather jacket making out with a girl.

Girl!Yusuf is entirely Archie Panjabi in my brain.  And now I really want some crazy Inception crossover where Kalinda Sharma (if you are not watching The Good Wife, you should watch just for Kalinda's character) is a forger and has a ridiculous rivalry with Eames, and they do little more than constantly one-up each other and fuck up each other's plans.  (And have lots of forger sex.)


a million miles
inception; girl!yusuf/eames, girl!yusuf/arthur (implied arthur/eames); ~4700 words; all the men that Yusuf has let into her bed have been a mistake.

She's a freeloader, on scholarship at King's School in Canterbury.  Tuition alone costs more than her mother makes in a year at the small off-license her parents own in Leeds, and most of the darling patronage of the school never let her forget it.  But King's likes boasting high exam results and most of the the braindead trust fund fodder that occupy the school's hallowed halls can't pull grades high enough to maintain their reputable academic standards, so they pad it with the best and brightest from the publics, imported from across the country.  She knows why she's here, but that's fine.  She's not too proud to take what's offered to her.

The smoke heats her lungs when she inhales.  This is her own rebellion, a habit she picked up from her roommate this year, and she's going to have to break it before she heads home for the hols, because her mother might have accepted her pierced ears, but smoking is a bridge too far.  She sighs, flicking at the filter to shake loose the ash.

He's there like a shadow, creeping across the ground until he's only a few feet from her, the air heavy with the smell of smoke and what she thinks might be some of his lingering cologne.  He's playing hooky too, apparently, the rest of the grounds empty save for the rugby team practicing on the field past Mann's Hall.

He sweeps her body with his eyes once, like he's taking stock, and Yusuf thinks this might be the first time he's ever really looked at her, always too busy staring off into space or aggravating their teachers in class.  She doesn't appreciate the way his mouth ticks when he stops briefly on her chest, the generous curve under the pressed white shirt of her uniform.

"Got one to spare?" Eames asks, motioning to her ciggy.

"No," Yusuf says, slipping the half-full pack into her pocket.  Eames smiles his crooked smile and leans against the brick beside her.








Arthur calls in February.  It's cold and there's snow on the ground, a fact she grumbles roughly at him when he starts talking about the heat in Amman.  She tries to imagine Arthur in shorts and a t-shirt, but all she can see is him dressed in his best three piece knee deep in sand, sweating with a pleasant little red burn to his skin.

"You should talk to him," Arthur says over the line, an unexpected and generally unwanted suggestion.  Something has prompted this, but she doesn't want to know what it is; Arthur's the type to know better.  She hasn't spoken to Eames in the better part of a year, though there was a small parcel with no return address sitting in her letterbox on her birthday, a set of Arthur's cufflinks and a shipping manifest inside, indicating the arrival date of a new centrifuge.

"Have you?"

The only reply is silence, but she knows the truth.  It's almost funny that Arthur thinks she would be cross.

If Arthur's anything, it's intuitive, and he quickly shifts the conversation when she makes it clear that this topic is yet another thing they're not going to talk about.  In this way, her relationship with Arthur is similar to Eames, though Arthur still pushes and pries while Eames has long since learned her stubborn streak is nothing to be fussed with.

"I got your package," Arthur says, referring to the somnacin shipment she had sent out earlier in the week, a special blend designed for depth and clarity without sedation.  "Thanks for mixing the stuff so quickly.  The chemist I usually hire has gone off the grid."  She knows the chemist he's talking about, and Arthur has the grace not to mention that Anton hasn't gone off the grid so much as taken a couple bullets in the back and ended up six feet under.  This is why she only deals with the best, reputable dreamsharers that guard their chemists identities like trade secrets; chemists are known for being the vulnerable links in the dreamsharing world, less mobile and hidden than their dreaming counterparts.

"Remember, only 50 milliliters of it per session," Yusuf says, watching the snow fall outside her window, the large flakes airy and soft, like they're floating instead of falling.  She's growing tired of England, tired of the cold.  "And only one session a day on this stuff.  The garfield root I used to replace the sedative is hard on the system."

He murmurs an acknowledgment into the phone as she hears the rustling of paper over the line.  It stops suddenly, the squeak of a chair instead, as if he's leaning back, and she imagines the long lines of his body tilted back against leather.  "Listen, I'm going to be in London in a couple weeks.  If you're available, I was thinking about drinks?  A thank you," Arthur says.  "For the somnacin."

Yusuf's slept with Arthur a few times since Barcelona, usually when he's passing through London on his way to somewhere else, a couple days of layover so he can sort out accounts, and it's always good.  Really good.  Arthur's the least selfish man in bed that she's ever met, and it's hard to say no to him when he gets his fingers on you; she feels the ghost of them from the last time even now, months later, the strength of his hands around her wrists.  But it was a mistake a year ago, a mistake every time after, and it's still a mistake now.  All the men that Yusuf has let into her bed have been a mistake, none greater than the ones she has loved.

She doesn't need to reply; she has a sneaking suspicion that Arthur knew exactly what her answer was going to be before he asked.

His voice is warm and amused, but she can hear the light disappointment.  Everything she hears is intentional, something he wants to hear, wants her to know; Arthur is deliberate in everything he does.  "Thought it was worth a try."

The small box containing Arthur's cufflinks is sitting on the narrow mantle above the fireplace.  "I've got something of yours," Yusuf says.  "From an old friend.  I'll post it to your Lisbon box."









"Yusuf," Eames says with a smile pressed against the side of her throat, clearly pleased with the livid hickey she can feel him sucking into the skin there.  She knows exactly what he's about to say, only surprised that it's taken him this long to figure out this pressure point.  Eames is all about the give and take, about testing the waters carefully, learning responses.  "A boy's name, idnit?"

"Sod off," Yusuf hisses back, tangling her fingers in the collar of his stupid leather jacket, the same leather jacket she's pretty sure she saw the headmaster take off of Eames and lock up in his office yesterday.  She's learned long ago that locks and rules are no match for Eames, who has respect nor patience for either.  "Not all of us were blessed with a pedestrian name, Ch-"

Sinking his teeth into the tender skin of her shoulder, she lets out a sour whine, pulling roughly at his short hair.  Their given names are a pressure point for them both: a family legacy, his from a father he loathes.  "Eames," he says after he's licked what is sure to be a lovely set of teeth marks set into her flesh.

She wants to tell him that Eames sounds like the name of a bloody butler, but she can't bring herself to form the words when his fingers push at the seam of the crotch of her jeans and he lets himself fall to his knees.  They're against a tree in the estate next to the school, acres of empty farmland all around.

"You're going to get kicked out," she sighs.  She might have curried enough favour to get caught out after curfew with a boy, but the same does not extend to him.

"If I only get kicked out for doing what I'm about to do," he says with a smile, looking up at her as her jeans come down with her knickers, "I'll be sorely disappointed."

In the end, Eames doesn't get kicked out.  He takes the blame though, lets himself get caught so she can get away when the prefect catches their scent sneaking back onto the grounds, taking a route that ensures she'll slip by unnoticed and he'll be found out.  He doesn't get kicked out, but the school gets a brand new rugby field courtesy of his father.









She knows the moment she wakes in Arthur's bed that she's made a terrible, terrible mistake.

They'd been celebrating the successful completion of a job in Barcelona.  She's been working on and off with them for a couple months, usually just mixing their somnacin, but she's been the outside operator on the last few jobs, Eames satisfied with her newly developed hand-to-hand and weapons skills (a product of Arthur's training using the PASIV) to let her be involved in scenarios with the threat of danger.  They'd gotten roaring drunk after Eames had slipped away to take a call and hadn't come back, and when Arthur had snaked his hand between her thighs at the bar, snugged it right up against her and leaned over so his mouth brushed her ear when he told what he wanted to do to her, she'd let him, too dizzy with the cheap alcohol to think about more than the hand getting her off under the table in the dimly-lit bar.

They both fuck other people; she's known for a long while that Eames gets around, that he's fucked plenty of women and a number of men (and she's pretty sure that Arthur is included in that small handful), that they've never had any claim on one another.  But she knows she's crossed a line here, that she has tread into territory with a history, and that as much as Eames had goaded and teased her over her thing for Arthur, it was never something he genuinely enjoyed.

She slides out of the bed slowly, a master at the morning after slip-out.  She thinks Arthur might already be awake anyway, his breathing suspiciously shallow, but he has the decency to feign sleep at least, avoid the awkward conversation for her sake.

Eames is waiting for her outside Arthur's hotel door.









She only sees Eames a few times over the years she's in school, lost in the wash of possibility that Cambridge offers.  She doesn't expect him to accept the spot at the University of Edinburgh, and he doesn't disappoint, disappearing with the sizable trust fund he wasn't supposed to have access to until his twenty-fifth birthday, his father's forged signature on the financial documents the last straw for his family.  But she gets letters like clockwork in her student box, unsigned with no return address, various country stamps inked over the postage.  China.  South Africa.  Brazil.  Greece.  Yusuf doesn't need his name to know who they're from; she'd recognize his handwriting anywhere, the polished script of a gilded education.  The stories are grandiose and entirely Eames, trouble and danger and terrible decisions intertwined in a way she has only known Eames to ever pull off with such finesse. 

She's halfway through her second semester when he sends her a photograph of his first tattoo, followed in quick secession by the second, third, and forth.  By the time he visits her for the first time during her second year, his shoulders are covered with an impressive amount of ink.  He lets her touch it, an inquisitive prodding of her fingers before he pins her down on her dorm bed.

Eames doesn't show up for her graduation, just her parents and an uncle visiting from Goa, seated together a few rows from the front.  Her father cries and her mother looks disapprovingly at the length of her skirt, and Yusuf finds herself missing him in that moment more than any other.

He doesn't make it to her graduation when she receives her PhD either, already a man with a sullied name and an open Interpol arrest warrant, but when she gets back to her flat, there's a beautiful black elephant pendant on a long silver chain sitting on her bed in a soft, velvet case.  When she puts her hand to the sheets of her bed, the pillow rumpled with sleep, she can feel the body heat still trapped there.










No matter what Eames tells people, Yusuf moves to Mombasa first.  There's a growing apothecary trade in Kenya, one of the few countries left in the world that doesn't have strict laws regarding the manufacture and sale of somnacin and other drugs used in PASIV devices.  She's grown tired of English weather, and after her mother dies in the spring, she sells the small family shop in Leeds and moves down to the sunny sands of Africa.  There's nothing left for her in London.

She's sure Arthur is funneling her work, because as soon as she sets up shop, she's got more customers than she knows what to do with.  They're all long-term PASIV users looking to dream, trying to find safe ways to go deeper.  It's not only the loss of dreaming in itself, but also the increasing tolerance to somnacin that makes a dreamsharer more and more desperate to dream, and Yusuf builds herself a sterling reputation as a chemist that can tailor compounds to counter somnacin tolerance, to offer users a chance to dream again.

She's been in Mombasa for almost nine months when he shows up like some rabid dog on her doorstep, an innocuous, unimportant day in December.  She opens the door on the third knock and feels her stomach launch up into her throat when she spots him leaning against the side of her doorway, his hands resting in his pockets.

Yusuf wants to be angry with him, wants to punish him for being such a stubborn son of a bitch, but all she feels is a mix of pain and overwhelming relief, like she's been holding her breath for two years, her lungs waiting for a reprieve.  Regret is something she hasn't seen from Eames before, a foreign emotion, and it's written all over his face.  Yusuf's pretty sure she's wearing it too.

Pushing off the wall, he steps into the doorway until there's only a foot of space between them.  He's a little thicker, more substantial than the last time she saw him, a light brush of stubble stretched across his face like he hasn't shaved in a few days.  "I'm sorry," he says, his voice sincere and open, vulnerable in a way he never is.  His hand reaches out for the small elephant pendant around her neck and uses it to pull her into him. 

His fingers spread across the flare of her hips, tugging them to his as his face drops into the crook of her shoulder.  Inhales deeply, like he's smelling her.  "Yusuf," he says.

Later, in her bed, his hand rests over her naked breast, a thumb pressing up toward her collarbone.

"You're still seeing him," Eames says coolly, but it's not an accusation, just a suspicion looking for confirmation.

"So are you," she lobs back.  The last time she had seen Arthur, a brief meet up in London a few weeks before she moved down to Kenya, she had smelled Eames's fingerprints all over him, in the dark bruises she found on his wrists and thighs, in the bright flicker of his eyes as he dropped to his knees in front of her, reaching up to pull down her knickers.  She hadn't meant to sleep with Arthur, not after abstaining for as long as she had; the mistake had been in accepting his offer of dropping off her payment in person, along with one of her scarves that Eames had sent to him in the post.

"Not anymore," Eames says, his voice gravely and sore.  Yusuf moves to sit up, enough of a change that Eames's hand has no choice but to fall away, but he searches with his fingertips until he finds her hip and hangs on with a strength that makes her wince.










She's been staring at the same three pages of her dissertation for the past twelve hours, unable to focus; it's on the impact of therapeutic somnacin use on ischemic and hypoxic injury of the brain, and Yusuf is bogged down in the section on oxygen radicals.  She has always preferred the hands-on part of her research, more interested in test tubes than word documents.  The therapeutic uses of somnacin is a new and growing field of biochemistry, and it had taken a year for the university to approve her dissertation proposal; somnacin is still classified as a prohibited substance under the law, and almost impossible to acquire legally in most western countries, even for research.  She had used the last of her supply in an experiment before Christmas.

The knock at her door that finally pushes her out of her haze turns out to be Eames.  It's the first time she's seen him in nearly a year and half, even though they spoke on the phone a month ago when he was in Cyprus, running with a crew operating out Nicosia.  She knows why he's here, though - she saw the obituary in the The Times a few days ago.  His father's funeral had been held shortly thereafter, and she didn't expect Eames to attend, far too much bad blood between him and his family for him to, but she knew he'd come back to England, that despite the strained relationship with his father, the years of simmering animosity, Eames has too much loyalty not to.

Yusuf brushes her mouth across his cheek in greeting when he joins her in her living room.  He drapes his jacket across the back of her old armchair, watching her carefully.  He looks tired and broken, much quieter than his usual self.  She pours them both cups of tea from the pot that's still piping hot on her counter, and he takes it from her with a curious look.

He's staring at the emptiness of her left hand, the platinum and diamond not where he expects them to be.  Eames is the sort to notice everything, and it's not hard to see that only one person lives here, the half-empty cupboards and single size shoes bundled near the door.  She's stopped seeing him here too, like his clothes had never occupied the space next to hers in the closet, his aftershave and cologne on the small shelves beside the mirror in the bathroom.

"It didn't take," Yusuf says, pushing down the hurt that still lives in her chest over Andrew.  She's not sure if it's the loss of him or the fact that she's failed at something so spectacularly.  She had said yes with only half of her heart, the other half a world away invading dreams, something they had both known but thought they could work through.  In the end, they couldn't.

There's no relief on his face, but she imagines it there, knows it would probably be there if it wasn't overwhelmed with exhaustion.  He'd been as happy as he needed to be for her when she told him about her engagement, but Yusuf's always been able to see through his forges, in this world or the next.  "When?" Eames asks.

"A couple months ago."

"You didn't tell me."  He sounds almost hurt, but he plays it off as casual curiosity, leaning his hip into her counter.

"I didn't tell anybody," Yusuf says.  It had taken her six weeks to break the news to her mother, still worried about her fragile health after the death of Yusuf's father, something she hasn't told Eames about either.  She's grown more secretive over the years, and she wonders if it's a way to punish him, the one thing he hates most being when she keeps secrets from him. 

She takes a sip of her tea and sets the cup down on the kitchen counter next to the cutting board covered in slices of fresh lemon.  The smell of it is everywhere, sour and sharp.  He is watching her with dark eyes, tracking her like a mark.  "Are you okay?"

There's no answer, only Eames sliding closer, stealing all the space between them.  A thief in all things.

This is the first time sex with Eames is a melancholy affair, and she kisses him as he slides inside her, trying to make him smile.  He doesn't, hiding his face against her throat as he fucks her, his hips the only part of him that is steady, a precise beat against her while everything else shakes like he can barely hold himself together.

Eames isn't there when she wakes up, his smell still caught in the sheets, but his coat and shoes gone.  There's a box wrapped in thick brown paper on her kitchen table.  When she opens it, she finds three half-litre bottles of pure, undiluted somnacin inside.









Eames is an excellent teacher.

"It's easy," he says, standing in front of her like a wall.  They're both still in their uniforms even though they've snuck off the grounds to walk into town.  Yusuf scratches at the edge of her itchy kilt, the hem resting just above her knees.  "The trick to lifting a wallet is to distract from the loss of weight or the pressure of a hand by applying tactile pressure somewhere else."  He reaches out with a large, agile hand and runs his thumb along her throat, smiling at the way she responds to it, a small tremor in her hand that she can't hold back.  After, he holds up the small tube of lip gloss he liberated from her jacket pocket, handing it back as Yusuf tucks her hair behind her ears.  "They won't notice a hand in their pocket or a quick brush of skin if their attention is thoroughly focused elsewhere."

He takes the wallet from the pocket of his jacket and tucks it into the back pocket of his pants instead, right over the swell of his ass.  His smile is a challenge now, daring her.  She's never been the type to back down and she's certainly not about to start now.

Yusuf puts her hand on his ribs, a soft, but demanding palm on the flat stretch of his torso, her fingers nudging toward where she knows his nipple is lying under the thin cotton layer of his shirt, the crest of King's School stitched over the opposite breast.  She doesn't miss the way he sucks in a silent breath, just a minute change in his breathing, but it's followed by a tenseness in his muscles that gives away enough that she smiles.  Eames is trying hard to cover the small tells, but she knows her touch is affecting him.  It makes her feel powerful in a way she's not able to fully articulate, more of a warmth that settles in her lower spine and tingles along her arms.

Her hand is still on his chest when she holds up his wallet between two fingers, tipping it toward him until he takes it, nodding his head.

"Well done, pet," he says.

Later, when she pays for the small bags of crisps and bottles of Lucozade with the ten pound note she lifted from his wallet before she handed it back over to him, he lets out a sharp laugh in front of the bewildered shopkeeper and leans over to press a chaste kiss just below her ear.









They part ways at LAX along with the rest of the team, Dom disappearing like a flash of light to see his children and Saito whisked off by his security, several men in black suits with wide shoulders and severe faces.  She sees Arthur flash a quick smile and nod in her direction before he trails after the pretty new architect, his hands tucked into his pockets.  They don't speak, but Eames catches her eye before she ducks into her cab, standing farther up the curb with his suitcase in front of him, the collar of his black shirt unbuttoned and spread, the pink skin stretched over his collarbone visible between.

He won't come find her and she won't try to find him.  He's cross with her for keeping Dom's secret, an anger she has earned.  She hadn't thought there'd be a risk, trusted Arthur's reconnaissance and the pleading of a man with nothing left.  There's no way that Eames doesn't know that she would never put him at risk, but in the tradition of most of their sorted relationship together, it's not the obvious that hurts him.  He's mad with her for keeping secrets, for keeping things from him, even though his hypocrisy is deep in that regard.  The only difference is that she doesn't ask him for his secrets; she isn't sure he'd give them anyway, and she's not the type to ask.

Yusuf can see him still watching her as the cab pulls away, whisking her to a hotel she'll stay at under an assumed name, order room service and stay in bed for however long it takes to book a flight out of this place.

She only spends two days in Los Angeles before she hops a flight back to Mombasa with a layover in Cairo to meet with a contact.  She's got enough money now that she could buy most of the somnacin on the planet, spend the rest of her days camped out on a white sand beach.  But she returns to Mombasa, to her small shop and her regular patrons, the men and women who fill her basement to dream together.  She works harder now, formulates more complex compounds with sharper clarity and greater depth, if only because her work is fuelled solely by the challenges she sets for herself.  Money is no longer a concern.

Six weeks after the job, she arrives at her flat door above the shop only to find it unlocked.  When she enters, nothing appears different, all her belonging still scattered around the small space.  It's only when she enters the bedroom that she spots the difference.  Eames is shirtless in between her sheets, nothing but skin and ink.  She notices a fresh tattoo on his back, right up in the tight space between his neck and back.  A small elephant, identical to the one hanging off the chain around her neck, the pendant she never takes off.

She watches him sleep for a moment, the peace of natural sleep, no projections to fight off, no secrets to steal or ideas to implant.  This feels a million miles away from where they started a thousand years ago.

Her own shirt is discarded on the floor with her pants before she climbs into her bed with him, her body finding the curve of his and bending around it.  She presses a quick kiss to the base of his skull, the skin there warm with sleep.

He wakes up.