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“…then she just shoved the child at me,” Ariadne carried on, wild hands drawing Arthur’s eyes to her even as he tries to pretend not to listen, “I mean not like handed gently, shoved like a sack of dirty laundry.”“It sounds like a lovely family dinner,” Eames says, popping an almond into his mouth, “it sounds like more than three words were exchanged among the lot of you which is more than I can say for my Christmas. What about you, darling?”Arthur looks up from his work to the conversation he had been studiously ignoring for the past ten minutes.“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” he says simply before he looks back down and makes a better effort of looking busy. He hides a wistful smile at how long it took them to come up with that lie. Years of fumbling through the gift giving and tree-trimming when all along they could have just reminded people they were Jewish, and then none of them had the heart to take tree-trimming away from Harry and they’d all just taken to hanging dreidels haphazardly about the branches.“But you did go back and visit your family, didn’t you?” Ariadne asks, her voice tilting in that way that gives away her uncertainty. Ariadne can always sense when she’s put her foot in it, she just hasn’t mastered backing away when she does.“No,” he says, soft but firm and without looking up, “they’re gone.”Eames, bag of almonds still held loose and casual in his hand, stands on the beat that would have made the silence awkward and strolls over to sit on Arthur’s desk, ass right on top of his open books.“You’ll strain your eyes,” he says and then continues softly enough to keep from Ari’s ears, “how much longer are you going to pretend to be reading?”Arthur glances up, but doesn’t allow himself the smile that he feels building in his chest.“About as long as we’re chit-chatting about family,” he mutters, “since I have nothing to say on the matter.”“I’m sure she didn’t know it was a sensitive subject,” Eames outright whispers, “I certainly didn’t. I’m sorry if-““It’s fine,” he says decidedly and then a bit louder for Ariadne to hear, “it’s fine. There’s nothing to tip toe around. Can we get back to work now?”Ariadne nods from where she’d made herself small in her embarrassment, shuffling over to share her notes with Arthur and leave the awkwardness behind them.
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It was beyond strange and an exercise Arthur had never given him leave to do, but here was Eames morphing his face minutely like a real life composite sketch, reading Arthur’s every twitch and flinch like hot-cold calls as to his accuracy. The cheeks just a bit rounder at the tops and his nose a little softer, a flinch. Getting warmer.“Eames,” he grinds out, “you need to stop immediately.”“Just hang on, pet,” he says, voice unchanged and making the whole thing even more eerie, “it won’t take but another minute.”Arthur turns away, exasperated, “Go practice with Ari-““Ariadne is too young,” Eames says, following him around a whole half foot shorter than him – too short before he fixes it, “it’s too easy to go back to puberty on a face like that. Not good practice.”Arthur turns his face away finding it more and more difficult to look at Eames’ transformed face, “Eames I swear –““There,” he says, “by the tone of your annoyance and the step back you just took – I am damn close aren’t I?”Arthur looks and tries not to shudder in what Eames must guess to be the regular discomfort of being confronted by one’s own younger face. It is almost right, so close to right, that Arthur comforts himself in the small inconsistencies that tell him Eames doesn’t have an actual picture to go from. He hasn’t found anything on them. It’s just mentalism and parlor tricks that let him become Arthur’s adolescent self.“But I’m missing something crucial,” he hums, “is it just the voice? No, it’s your eyes that aren’t buying it… did you wear glasses is that it?”“Eames, you’ve had your fun," he says, grabbing him by the skinny arm, "now stop this.”It's too late though, the strong tone of confusion coming from behind him tells him it's much too late, “Tommy?”“Fuck,” Arthur whispers.“Bloody hell Arthur," Eames says, looking over his shoulder, looking up over his shoulder at the height of her, "since when are your projections so-““Shut up,” he snaps, but he’s not sure who he’s talking to right now.“Tommy," she says, as if she's just come up the stairs and found something out of place, "where the hell have you been?”“Turn back now,” Arthur says to Eames, to her - he's not sure. He says it through clenched teeth, not turning around.“Tommy,” she says again from somewhere to his left. Her voice dances the way it does when she’s hurt and confused, when feelings assuage her and her training hasn’t prepared her for them, “how could you leave the mission-“The shot startles her, he knows, because it shuts her up. But it doesn’t make her go away. It only makes her come closer and emboldens her to act. She nearly rips his arm off, no doubt intent on doing just that – and when they finally look at each other the shock is the same. She’s still tall and stunning and terrifying and just as he remembers her. He’s not. The boy she's looking for is crumpled at their feet with a neat hole through his head. Blood is pooling and tacking up his hair. It was too short. That's all Eames had gotten wrong. It didn't look like a girl's. “Tommy? Why did you… why did you kill Tommy?”“Because Sally,” he says, sounding too young, younger than he ever was, “Tommy was already dead.”
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“James has stopped asking about her,” Dom says, without needing to explain, “and Phillipa doesn’t ask because she knows it makes me… I should be better for them. I should be able to talk about her with them.”They’re sitting on Dom’s back porch watching James and Phillipa play and laugh and jump and fall and run. The older he gets, the more that children fascinate him.“It’ll get easier,” Arthur tells him. He says it firmly, with authority. It’s what Dom likes about him, he knows, the fact that he always sounds so certain.“Maybe. But they’ll never have a mother,” he says softly. Arthur doesn’t bring up the vague idea that Dom might someday meet someone else. Stranger things have happened, much stranger, but it doesn’t seem like the right thing to say.Instead he says, “I never had a mother. I think I turned out okay.”Dom blinks, clearly startled.“I didn’t know,” he says, though it’s redundant between them. He knows Dom can count on a single hand the number of times Arthur has divulged any information from before they met. He knows Dom resents him for it, for how much Arthur knows and how little he tells in return. He doesn’t know why he finds it easier now. He doesn’t know why he wants to tell Dom everything - almost everything – that he’s kept close to his chest for so long.“My father did alright,” he starts. He doesn’t know where to go from there.“He did a hell of a job, Arthur,” Dom says as he lays a hand on his shoulder. Arthur forgets that even as an adult, people still find him young. See him parentally. Dom probably thinks of him as a younger brother or something like it.He gives Dom a shy smile, too young too close too much like things used to be. He forgets, sometimes, that he has a different part to play. He’s not young and out to figure out what that means anymore. He’s in control, he’s in command of a one-man mission.“My aunt and uncle helped,” he says, words slipping loose out of him like the hair strands from Phillipa’s hair, “just like you have Mile and Marie. And you have me. They have me.”Dom squeezes his shoulder, where Arthur hadn’t noticed his hand still lay. He stands to pick up James from where he’s made himself comfortable for a nap right on the dewy grass and Arthur is almost too distracted by them to notice Phillipa climb wordlessly onto his lap.He looks at her, smiling and silent. She looks back at him, grinning and silent.Oh, he thinks, I miss this.Oh, he realizes, I want this.
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If there was one thing Arthur could never get used to it was the concept that the human body was so frail that it on occasion completely broke down and made one feel as if one the edge of death before bouncing back to its regularly scheduled health. He went to great lengths to avoid this kind of thing but spending any amount of time with anyone under the age of 10 was the kind of concession that was bound to get someone sick. Arthur hated being sick.“Damn it James,” he muttered to himself as he burrowed deeper into his comforter, “it’s a good thing you’re adorable.”Resigning himself to at least 72 hours of aches, pains, and undignified leaks of bodily fluids at the very least Arthur could comfort himself in bearing his humiliation and suffering in solitude. Which was of course the moment Eames let himself through the door.“Darling,” he gasped, much too loud for Arthur’s taste. “Look at the state of you, not even a weapon at hand. I could’ve been anyone.”“Not anyone can get through my security so quietly,” Arthur grumbles from his warm hiding place.“Anyone worth their salt and their ability to murder you could, petal, now what’s all this. You should have called me in sick and not left us to worry that you’d been kidnapped.”“I’m perfectly sure I texted Dom to let him know his offspring had done this to me,” Arthur says, though he’s not certain how clear his words are through his pillow. After that there isn’t much that Arthur remembers. At some point he remembers the warmth of tea, the cool press of a moist towel against his brow, and the quiet rumble of Eames muttering nonsense or Shakespeare somewhere beside him. Later, delirious from whatever was in that tea no doubt, he recalls that he said too much.“The first time I was sick, my whole family got sick,” he’d mumbled against Eames’ knee, “it was totally worth it.”“Why so, darling?”“’Cause I caught it from Dina,” he says with a doubtless ridiculously slurred smile.“Dina? Why, Arthur, here I thought you had an actual gold star somewhere on your person. Was that a habit of yours?”“Getting’ sick?”“Kissing girls,” Eames clarifies, all too gleefully.“Sure,” he admits, clearly high on whatever Eames has given him, “I was a pervy little twerp.”Eames laughs, loud and boisterous and perfect. The warmth of it makes him shiver in his sweaty sheets.“Aren’t you just full of wonders,” Eames says softly, pushing the sweat slicked hair back from Arthur’s forehead.“All the wonders of the universe,” he mutters, “but I like this place the best.”“What’s so special about this old dump,” Eames wonders out loud, probably referring to the nondescript apartment where Arthur has crawled up to die. Thankfully he still has his wits about him enough not to correct the other man. He doesn’t trust himself not to say more than his life is worth, so he feigns to fall back asleep instead. He can’t be sure, of course, that the warmth he feels over his cheek is not a wave of fevered heat. As long as he’s sick he’ll allow himself this one impossible thought. Of all the places in all the worlds that he has ever been in and all the lives he has ever lived, only once has he ever met Eames.
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“Stop being dramatic,” he says, quiet and firm. God, Arthur hates causing a scene. It’s the one good thing about being alone in the world – when people are in your life they inevitably cause a scene.“Darling, we don’t have to talk about your past. I got it. It makes you an even bigger arse than you usually are. But that doesn’t foreclose a conversation on our future-““Eames,” he scoffs and wishes there were still something of whiskey left in his glass, “what is wrong with you. We don’t have a future. We don’t even have a relationship.”“You know at one point I’m going to ignore the fact that you’re being purposefully hurtful and I’m going to knock a few teeth out,” Eames says, getting too close.“Fine,” he says as he pushes away from the bar, “let’s go.”“Oh,” Eames says, completely unaffected, “he’s a brawler now.”“You wanna make scene, let’s make a scene,” he says too loudly. He’s catching the attention of patrons and it’s going to get him kicked out and he can’t care. His voice is running too high and his words are too casual and the carefully studied mid-Atlantic is slipping away from him. Maybe he is drunk.Eames crowds up against him, somehow placating him while making it clear that he can meet a punch if he gets one.“You’ve lost your cool, pet, now I’m thoroughly concerned.”“You well fucking should be,” Arthur mutters, distracted by the warmth of the other man’s chest.“Just tell me what I said – I might even try not to say it again.”“Just stop,” Arthur says with an all too half-hearted shrug, “just stop talking and asking and digging. Just punch me or leave me but stop-““Darling,” Eames says quietly wrapping an arm and a coat around him. He puts up a short struggle but Eames manages to get him outside and push him up, gentle and firm, against the wall.“It’s over,” Arthur says quietly, eyes shut so tight they sting.“What’s over, darling?“This,” he says, hand flailing wildly between them. Then he moves his hand more blatantly around him, “all this.”“Will you look at me?”“No,” he says, swallowing around the tightness in his throat, “no it’s over. The part where there’s home at the end of the day, where mistakes are allowed, where there’s laughter, and innocence. It’s over.”“And who told you that?” Eames whispers back.“My family is gone,” he says, opening his eyes even though they burn, “so all that’s gone.”“Arthur-““Stop selling me dreams, Eames,” Arthur says, blinking away the sting in his eyes and pushing away from the wall, “I’m in the business.”
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“Arthur!”From the glee in Ariadne’s voice he can only imagine that she didn’t politely use his restroom without snooping around his room and has found something that delights her.“What is it,” Eames says as his bruised face peeks up from the sofa.“You stay down,” Arthur chastises before he turns to Ariadne, “and you-““Arthur,” she practically squeals, holding a little zip lock bag in her hand and dangling it.“Were you not going to share?”“Share what,” Eames says as he leans up once again, “oh darling. In a zip lock bag, how street.”“What were you doing in my sock drawer,” Arthur deadpans.Eames gasps, “In your sock drawer?”“Like a teenager,” Ariadne says, practically giggling.“Try rolling it, I dare you,” Arthur says, turning away from the ridiculous people whom he had for ridiculous reasons, given refuge in his favorite apartment.“Arthur?” Ari calls out again.“Yes?”“Do you… know that your pot is basil?”“Yes,” Arthur says evenly as he busies himself at the bookshelf to hide his blush, “because it isn’t pot. It’s basil.”“Petal,” Eames comments in that tone of perfect nonchalance, “if we’re bringing condiments into the bedroom I think I’d like to be consulted.”“Why do you keep basil in a little baggy in your sock drawer?”“And how exactly are we supposed to implement it in our activities?”“It’s a…” Arthur starts before cutting himself off. What is it really? Not a tradition but an odd little idiosyncrasy?Apartment to apartment, city to city, drawer to drawer; he never allowed himself to over think it as he poured rosemary or oregano – in a pinch, basil – into a plastic zip lock and hid it in his sock drawer. He was undoubtedly embarrassed at the stupidity of it and the fact that it served no purpose but to linger in the past. The little bags of spices were a memory reproduced by force, over and over again, so that every morning as he riffled for socks it would spark small and warm in his mind. His shoddy excuses about marijuana, his family’s shock and outrage at his culinary secrets, their demands for proper food. But how can he explain such a vibrant silly thing? What place is there in this new life for such absurd sentimentality?“Never mind,” he finally says, then almost as an afterthought and with poorly masked hope he asks, “Are you hungry?”
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“Why do you always have to be so-”
Weird. Stupid. Obtuse. Out of touch.
Arthur had met a great many people who called him a great many things, but every time he braced himself for abuse it was always August’s voice that assailed him. Eames words couldn’t hurt as much, to be sure. For one, Arthur was no longer an infatuated 14-year-old boy. More importantly, Eames wasn’t a terrifying 15-year-old girl who seemed to know so much about the world that had alluded him. No, Eames was just irritated by what years of “too weird” and “so strange” had made Arthur become. Now he was straight laced and disciplined, he didn’t let anyone see a hair out of place. It took him perhaps too long to figure out that no one liked that either, but at least no one messed with him this way.“So what, Mr. Eames,” he says – too calm, probably, all wrong.“So… air-tight-sealed, Jesus Christ, they could throw you into space and you’d be fine, you know?”As much as the words shocked Arthur he couldn’t help but smile, though he did do his best to recover and mask it. Space travel approved, indeed.“See? There you are. Why would you hide a smile from me when I’ve already seen every inch of your body-”The words are enough to cure Arthur of the smile all together, “You can’t be implying that you bare your soul to just anyone you’ve ever slept with-”“I’m implying that we’re well fucking more than two people who slept with each other,” Eames bites back.Arthur busies himself buttoning the cuffs of his shirt and keeping resolutely turned away from the other man.“I told you to stop-”“Selling you dreams and blowing smoke up your arse, yes. Well understood, pet. I’m only trying to have a blasted conversation that doesn’t end in you shuttering off and leaving me in our dirty sheets,” Eames rages, his voice rising, “I haven’t whored for a while and I’m not keen on the feeling without the cash, luv.”The words hang heavy, weighing down on Arthur’s chest.“So how about you stop,” Eames continues, “stop stringing me along like a school girl if you want to do the Bond thing and fuck off after we’re done.”“I’m not,” he starts quietly, curses his legs for shaking as if this were frightening at all. He’s seen and done so much, how is it that words and feelings still get the better of him above all? Eames hands are warm, firm but not angry, just there. They stop his shoulders from shaking.“If I’m pushing something you’re not interested in, darling,” he starts.“You’re not,” he answers just as softly as before. Maybe that’s all he can do anymore, point out all the things he does not want and does not feel, for fear of what he does.“If I told you a story,” he tries, voice quivering despite himself, “a story you knew was a lie.”“Why would I know?”“Because you always know,” Arthur answers, with more bemusement than he’d like.“Then why would you lie?”Arthur stops and sits on the bed. He hums that question over in his mind.“Because all I have anymore is that lie and I don’t have a truth I can give you. Would you trust me still, would you still… would you? If the best of my life was a lie?”
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Eames has been looking for glimpses of the life Arthur used to live. He catches it sometimes; when Arthur looks wistful in the kitchen, when he blurts out a burst of information and looks inexplicably shy, in those little moments where he tucks imaginary stray hair behind his ears and digs his hands into his pockets. The glimpses are rare and precious and Eames wants more of them, so he sits outside the bathroom where Arthur is showering, and listens to the snippets of song that he does not recognize coming from within.
Oh, this planet sucks, and it makes me wanna cry. Yeah, I said this planet sucks oh and it makes a poor boy wanna cry.
Eames leans his head back against the door and smiles as Arthurs words fade into the hum of a rockabilly tune he doesn’t recognize. By the time Arthur is out, damp legs at eye level with Eames, he’s bursting to ask. He wants to ask about Arthur’s family, his neurotic father, his brusque nurturing aunt, his wise idiot of an uncle. He wants to ask about the little wonders of his life and the big heartbreaks. He wants to ask where they are, when they left, how he lost them.“What on Earth are you doing, Eames?”He looks up at Arthur, the planes of him, the rivulets of water falling thoughtless and careless over his skin. Eames chokes on the inevitability of loving someone half-unknowable, to adore the multitudes he can’t even comprehend.“Trying to figure you out darling,” he says, leaning forward, pressing his lips to the damp scattered hair on his calf, “and promptly giving up on it.”
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It is a rare sight to see Eames truly fidget. He’s used to seeing Eames toy idly with a pen or pick at his nails or dust invisible lint from his loud looking shirt, but always there is the confidence and the comfort that all of it is an act. Now, seeing the involuntary manner in which Eames’s ring finger curls and stretches as he sits ramrod straight at his side, he decides he doesn’t like the sight of Eames in genuine discomfort.He moves his hand slow and certain to grasp the other man’s and curls his fingers gentle and firm until the nervous movement stops and Eames’s hand goes still in Arthur’s.“In case you’ve forgotten this was your idea and you’re under no obligation to subject yourself to it,” Arthur murmurs. The sheer opportunity to be contrary, he knows, will soothe Eames’s nerves more than anything else.“Nonsense,” he mutters under his breath, “the bloodhounds have already scented us in the air.”Just as he says so the gates to the estate open and Eames retrieves his hand to clench it around the shining black steering wheel. He’s seen so much of this world now that things like this should fail to impress him, but the ostentatious manor is surrounded by perfectly green land that seems to go on forever, the kind of green he thinks he might have seen before from very far away. He likes to think that even as they journeyed here, he had looked upon their then temporary new home and been taken with a particularly bright spot of green where a boy so much younger and a little bit older than him ran away from tutors and well knotted ties. He didn’t have eyes at the time, he recalls instantly, and must be thinking of a fragment of data that his human mind has run wild with. The man who answers the door makes Eames relax infinitesimally, which means among other things that he is not related to Eames in any way. He looks to be in his mid-60s and with a measure of vanity that makes him attractive in that silver-fox sort of way that he hopes to achieve some day. He tries not to be alarmed when he realizes that from attire to mannerisms, the resemblance between himself and this man are not negligible.“Charlie!”“Young man,” the older man says with a careful balance of polite deference and paternal joy tinging his accent, “you have been away a very long time.”“Can you blame me?”“Never, dear boy,” he responds with a barely contained sigh, “come in – you are expected. This must be Mr. -”“Charlie, this is Arthur,” Eames says easily.“Just Arthur,” he says smoothly, reaching forward to shake the man’s hand.“Well just Arthur, I hope this one has not embarrassed himself terribly and made a mockery of all that fine education.”“He most certainly has,” Arthur says with a smile.“Yes, I expect so,” Charlie agrees with a smile before turning to Eames, “your mother has asked for a service in the conservatory.”“Death warmed over it is,” Eames mumbles, only to be flicked in the ear by the older man. Arthur can’t hold back his laugh and Eames can’t contain the smile that it produces. The way Charlie looks at them makes Arthur run his fingers over the top of his ears although his hair is held perfectly in place. Eames’s mother, would terrify some people, he’s sure – but she doesn’t seem more than curious to him. She holds herself with all the pride of her station in life, unearned and engrained, looking at Eames with the expression of someone contemplating a room painted in an unpleasant shade. She holds out her hand for both her son and Arthur to kiss and he notes the whiff of expensive and impermanent perfume on her wrists. She gives the appearance of someone smoking but there is nothing held between her fingers except a single polished ring.She reminds him of the kind of woman Mary pretended to be, back when he learned the most human thing they could possibly do was to pretend to be someone they were not.“He must be quite serious about you to bring you all this way,” is the first thing she says to him after she stirs her tea in a nearly menacing way.“He is standing right here mother, should I call for nan to remind you of your manners?”“I only mean after your displeasure at Christmas I truly didn’t expect to see you again until the next, if at that,” she says with a nearly non-existent shrug.Eames takes a seat and he follows suit, watching him pour his own tea like whiskey with a gentle dismissal of the tight-lipped girl standing nearby. Eames doesn’t offer him any or make a move to pour him a cup just as aggressively, Eames knows how much he loathes Earl Grey and isn’t of a particular state to mind offending.“Mother,” Eames says, a marked lack of patience or trying in his tone, “I think Arthur deserves to know where I come from.”He doesn’t take it to heart, not like an accusation, but it is a sort of confession. This matters so much to Eames – as much as the secret thing hidden in the shoebox under his dorm room bed three levels deep – and yet he has stopped asking it of him. He has taken what scraps Arthur has given him, a few names and short descriptions, and called it a day. He has accepted that this act of throwing open the door to the place and the people from where he came, will not be reciprocated.The conversation is as tight and rootless as Eames had promised, and only the polite dismissal of his mother and the return of Charlie bring a soothing balm to Eames’s nerves. Once Eames has hugged the older man with a fierceness that reminds Arthur of home, they climb back into the small aggressive car. He wets his lips as he watches the countryside silently go by, before covering Eames’s hand on the stick shift and whispers for him to stop.Eames does, after a moment, reluctant to look at Arthur while they sit still.“I know that was difficult,” he says softly, “and I know how much it meant for you to do that for me. I wish I could do the same.”“That’s not why-““I know. I know that.”“Can you just tell me one thing?”Arthur swallows, wants to say yes, wants to stop denying Eames.“Was it better than that for you? It…it must have been. It must … it can be, can’t it? You said there was laughter – and innocence.”“There was, it can be,” he says, reaching for Eames’s hand once again with relief coursing through him at how easily the words come to him, “there was chaos and surprise and warmth and confusion. It was a mess – we were a mess – we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing. But I loved them. They loved me. We figured it out together.”He can’t bring himself to say anything else. To tell Eames that he’ll take care of everything, that he has all the research necessary to know how to make a family the right way, that he’ll make that a reality for him some day. That they’ll figure it out together. The idea of muddling through the incoherence of this world with someone else again sets a panic in his chest so he doesn’t say anything. He brings Eames’s hand to his lips and kisses it, infuses the facsimile of the cold deference to his mother with the comfort that Eames craves and he is terrified to feel again.
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“Tommy? TOMMY?”What he could do, should do, God why hasn’t he yet, is walk away. She’s already behind him, even if he’s frozen. Even if his feet have fallen through the hard pavement underneath. Even if Eames is already five strides past and only now just realizing he’s lost Arthur’s step at his side.Eames turns, slow enough to look casual and quick enough to be panicked. Arthur can see Eames seeing him, taking in his deer in headlights look and the expression on her face as she says it again. Softer. Uncertain.“Tommy?”He could should and hasn’t kept walking, but there are other options. He could fall on that old tried and true cliché and say, ‘I’m sorry ma’am, you must be mistaken’. But he can’t, not really, you can’t turn around and face the closest thing you ever had to a mother and say it isn’t you.He turns, and he knows, he just knows, that Eames is falling into place beside him just a step behind. Not out of protectiveness or suspicion but out of sheer unstoppable curiosity.“Tommy,” she breathes out, reaching out a hand to touch his cheek without a hint of hesitation. He lets her. He has no right not to let her, “Tommy for God’s sake we thought –““I know. I’m sorry,” he says, clenching his hands around the urge to tuck hair that isn’t there behind his ears, “That’s what I wanted you to think.”“Tommy,” she says again, like she’s tasting a flavor from her youth. Like she hasn’t said it in decades.“Are they,” he starts, but then he thinks better of it. What is he going to ask? Are they alive? He knows they are. Are they okay? He knows it’s relative.Beside him Eames is still, in front of him she is awed. Things did always awe her in a way that fit her neatly into his family. Humanity fascinated her, no matter how native she found herself to it.“Mary, this is Eames,” he says, for lack of anything better to say after fifteen years, “Eames this is Dr. Mary Albright. I was in love with her as a boy and I lost my virginity to her niece. I think she’s still my stepmother.”“Tommy,” she says, sounding as reproachful as she usually did to their antics, “you’re going to come with me now. We’re going home, I’m not letting you slip through my fingers like this.”“You can’t,” he says as coldly as he can, “and I can’t. I did this for a reason, you have to believe that.”“I can. I do, believe you. But no reason is reason enough to let your family think you’re dead for fifteen years, Tommy. I’m sure your husband agrees.”“We’re not – I’m just the boyfriend,” Eames says weakly from his stunned pose. Surely, he never imagined that they would come face to face with the tightly locked secret in a broken-down convertible on an abandoned hill at the edge of Arthur’s mind. Surely, he’s never heard any of Arthur’s aliases be said with such certainty and familiarity and authority – unmistakably the name hidden beneath all the others.“I can’t keep this from your father, Tommy. From Sally and Harry. The little cousins that you’ve never met,” she says, so close to tears that it shakes up all the memories of her hard hitting bluntness and he wonders what else has been shrouded by weak human memory, “I can’t keep this from your family.”“Dr. Albright,” Eames says, for lack of Arthur’s voice, “this is my personal number. I know you don’t know a whit about me, but I can swear to you I won’t let Tommy disappear from your family again. Just give him some time. Please. He has his reasons, don’t let all of these years be for nothing.”Mary reaches out to take the coffee shop receipt with Eames’ latest burner and Arthur’s stomach clenches at the ease with which Eames said his name and saved his ass. He watches her and she watches him and the passing of the years on her face are striking even though she is still fearsome and handsome where she stands.Clutching the paper in one hand she reaches out the other to touch his cheek again. He can’t help it, he leans into the touch like it will take him home.“We did everything possible to find you Tommy, where have you been hiding?”“Running from the technological arc,” he whispers, “see the Aztecs weren’t missing it they were hiding.”“Tommy,” she says, just one more time, “you have five days. God help me we will scour this city to find you.”He knows it’s empty, even if she doesn’t. He knows that he can walk three steps down the street and they would never find him, start testing brilliant magnificent Dr. Albright for dementia and get a little sad when they think about him. He knows, even if she doesn’t. But the trouble is now Eames knows too – and there’s nothing Tommy or Arthur or all the king’s men can do about it.
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He thinks that objectively there isn’t anything strange about the scene unfolding in front of him except perhaps that the normalcy of it all feels both feigned and natural at once. Arthur stepped through the door of a mid-range hotel room full of people and then he wasn’t Arthur anymore. The people’s faces showed the full range of emotion, from a contained shaking anger, to a pure shock, to a childlike joy. There were children, held by the man in the fantastic fur coat and they seemed unfamiliar with Arthur-who-wasn’t-Arthur but concerned by the distress of the adults in the room.“Tommy.”“Dick.”“Tommy.”“Harry.”“Tommy.”“Sally.”“Harry.”“Dick.”“Sally.”“Harry.” “Alright that’s enough. Tommy,” Dr. Mary Albright says, “where on Earth have you been, Tommy?”Arthur who isn’t Arthur at all just now but Tommy whom Eames has never met and isn’t sure about answers in the most un-Arthur-like way, “I…around?”“Around? Around? Do you have any idea what this family has been through,” the old man named Dick shouts, “We sold the car and got a hybrid! We had to move out of the attic because Sally got herself impregnated! Harry went viral on YouTube!”“I’m sorry,” Tommy-Not-Arthur says seeming to mean it.“Oh, he’s sorry!”“Yeah, Dick, he’s sorry,” Dr. Albright interrupts, “He’s your son and you haven’t seen him in fifteen years and he’s sorry.”“Hey Tommy,” the man in the fabulous coat says, smiling shyly and setting the children down, “we missed ya.”“I missed you too Harry,” this man in front of him says, “I missed you all a lot.”Harry hugs Tommy and Eames’s skin itches and he wants to go, but there is a tall and stunning woman coming closer. Eames has seen her before, in his Arthur’s dreams of Tommy.“Tommy,” she says, and sounds regal and unmistakably militant, “that was a crap thing to do, Tommy.”“I know,” he says, “I know that. I’m so – I’m so sorry Sally.”Her voice manages to walk a tight-rope between anger and grief, “We were going to go but then we didn’t because, because you wanted to stay remember? And then you left us. And we couldn’t go because what if you came back?”“I came back,” Tommy-Maybe-Arthur whispers.
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Tommy Solomon disappeared in his sophomore year of college. At first there wasn’t much alarm raised as Tommy Solomon had disappeared before, most notably for three months in his freshman year. No one at the school truly worried until two weeks later his family showed up asking after him with a mixture of confusion and fear.Flyers went up and vigils were held and then, after a fashion, people forgot. Boys run away from college and into wild lives all the time and when they don’t do that they disappear into the roads or into rivers or simply into the dark. People forget. But Tommy’s family never forgot.“He’s not dead!” his father was known to scream for weeks, at his siblings, at his wife, at the random passersby as he picked up his mail, “He’s not dead, he’s just in a different location!”After a year or perhaps too, Dick Solomon didn’t scream at random passersby anymore, but he was known to mutter to himself in the mornings while sitting across a blue chair that remained stubbornly empty, “Just in a different location.”-He looks down at the family picture with a familiar little smile, “Is this…?”“When they moved out of the attic into our new home, your father insisted,” Dr. Albright explains, “no one’s allowed to sit on it except the children. Uncle Tommy’s chair.”“I was only trying to protect them,” the man whispers. Mary knows that he isn’t Tommy anymore, not in the way that boys become men, but in the way that people like the Solomons fit themselves into new lives and new faces.“I know. I understand, Tommy. Living with this secret is hard work. But I always thought the mission required you stay together.”“The mission,” he half laughs, “ages since I’ve heard about the mission.”“Does the man currently being subjected to the full Solomon interrogation know about the mission?”“Eames barely even knew about Tommy,” he confesses, “I don’t know if he would…”Mary takes his hand, this man that was once a boy named Tommy, “He would. He will. He’ll love you. Something tells me he’s a man with a past as well, so what if yours involves a few hundred years in space?”