Originally written/posted: March 2011
Fandom: Inception (2010)
Pairing: Arthur/Eames, various other background pairings
Rating: PG
Warnings: This is a crack!fic where the group is converted to various animals; I took creative liberty in this regard and pulled multiple species from across the world. Obviously, there is nothing serious about this fic, you have been warned.
Word Count: 6,266 words
Notes: Not reread. Humor is that of a teenager in this one, so, sorry in advance lol.
Arthur has a bad feeling about this.
They were going to try and incept a fucking white, (beautiful, but that was beside the point) Siberian tiger with big, blue, creepy eyes. Arthur did not have a good feeling about this because he was small and though he could pack a scratch and fight for his own, tigers were nineteen of him. And his leg was a little sore from the fight that he had gotten into with a meerkat the other day.
He was whining now, because if there was going to be any animal that could successfully complete a job like this, it would be Arthur and his team. He was confident in their ability to perform the job; he was just afraid of the consequences if Robert (the tiger) would catch on to what was actually happening to him.
Arthur has a bad feeling about this, and he knows that it can’t end well.
It started with Saito, the elephant and king of the jungle, approaching Cobb and Arthur while they were laying out by the lake, catching the sun. It was the first time that Cobb had ever willingly gone near the lake since the tragic drowning of his beloved fennec, Mal. Cobb had wanted to go back to Egypt, where his kids were staying with their grandparents, but he wasn’t able to yet.
Apparently, someone had gotten evidence on Cobb, placing him as the person that had drowned Mal when it had really been a strong current set off by one of the elephants walking through the water.
Mal had been the only fox that Arthur had ever had the chance of knowing (she was lovely) that couldn’t swim.
It was a horrible tragedy, and Cobb was now a guarded and jaded dragon lizard who didn’t even enjoy doing regular dragon lizard things. His scales were no longer a vibrant green and yellow, but were now a faded, muddy gray and hunter green. He wasn’t nearly as suave as he was when Arthur had first met him, but his fucking wife had died so he didn’t entirely blame him, really.
Suddenly, though, the sun that they were enjoying was blocked by a huge shadow. Arthur and Cobb would never be cornered like this by a predator this time of the day (and plus they had great life insurance and lawyers that would protect their asses even if it happened) so Arthur knew it was probably Saito.
Saito, as mentioned, was the resident elephant of the jungle community (which was called The Coterie) and he was steadily becoming the emperor of the whole country of Kenya. Arthur liked Saito; he was efficient, treated his lovely animals with respect, and though he was a bit eccentric and dreamed a little too big for his liking, he had never personally targeted Arthur.
He also liked to send Arthur bugs and fruits and berries that he could eat when supplies in the jungle were running low — dry seasons kills, really — and he thought that was really great.
“Arthur,” Saito greeted, his trunk wrapping around Arthur’s tiny waist. Normally Arthur would mind, but you didn’t go against Saito. You just didn’t.
“Saito,” Arthur said, a little too fondly for his liking; Arthur has always enjoyed him rather well, so he doesn’t suppose it’s such a big deal.
“I have a job offer for you guys,” Saito said, in that ‘I’m-Saito-bitch-listen-to-me-or-I’ll-maul-you-with-my-tusks’ kind of way.
Cobb perked up a little but his eyes were still crazy, his scales still muted. “What type of offer?”
Saito literally toots his own fucking horn. That scares him because he’s wrapped up in his trunk, for badger’s sake! “It seems as if Robert is trying to take over my kingdom. He just has to kill a few more elephants and he will have convinced them that he would be a better leader than I.”
There was silence for a while.
“And as you know, I’m the most bitchin’ leader there ever was and will ever be, so this is a problem,” Saito added.
Arthur tried to nod. “I don’t see where Cobb and I come in.”
Cobb nodded his head in agreement, and attempted to bury his feet in the sand to cool off. Saito would have shrugged his shoulders if he had been able to, before eyeing Arthur with his eyes. “Remember that job I offered you guys a few weeks back, about the gazelle and the militarization?”
Arthur narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” He said curtly, because yes, he does remember, and yes, it had gone horrible, and no, he does not like to think about it.
“Even though that job was a complete failure, I’ve noticed something in you that I haven’t noticed in any other animal in my kingdom.”
“Which is?”
“That you’re the only animals here that are capable of dreaming. You’re like animals on steroids, or at least, I think. I’ve only heard about it from humans, of course, but I’ve never heard of animals that could go into dreams.”
Arthur smacked his lips together obnoxiously. “What would we get, if we were to perform this job?”
Saito looked at Cobb now because although he knows Arthur talked more than Cobb did, he was the leader and Arthur was simply his apprentice. “Don’t you want to go home? To see your children?”
Cobb raised his non-existent eyebrows. “You can’t fix that, King Saito, no one can. How do I know that you can deliver?”
“You can’t, but I will,” Saito said in a tone that wasn’t to be argued with. “Don’t you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old lizard, filled with sorrow and regret, with graying scales and a permanent frown, waiting to die alone? I’m offering you this so we can be young animals together. Be free and lively, and trample on our own grass without fear of someone stealing it from us.”
Cobb narrowed his eyes. “This isn’t my land.”
“No, but it’s our land. Our land that will be ruled by someone else’s paw if we do not put a stop to this!” Saito exclaimed, stomping his feet on the ground, and his trunk was flailing wildly. Arthur felt more than a little sick.
“How will you drop the charges against me?”
Saito tooted his trunk again. “Easy. I’ll trample the people that are spreading the rumors.”
Cobb narrowed his eyes, even more so than their already natural slants. “Why haven’t you done this already?”
“Jungle insurance, life insurance. The rates are too high for me to do this without having something done for me in return.”
Arthur snorted. “What’s the premise?”
“I need Robert Tiger to stop trying to take my kingdom away from me; the future of the jungle depends on this very fact. Once he becomes a new superpower, everything will crumble. And in effect, you will lose the greatest ruler, which is me. The jungle and all of its occupants need him to change his mind, Arthur and Cobb.”
“What do you need to be done?”
Saito grinned, the way that elephants only can. “Inception.”
“Impossible!” Arthur exclaimed, because it is. He should know; he’s tried it before.
“If you can steal ideas from someone’s mind, why can’t you place one there instead?”
Arthur tapped his trunk in annoyance, wanting to be put the fuck down already. “Pure inspiration is impossible.”
Finally, the lizard spoke. “It is possible.”
Arthur tilts his head in consideration. Cobb has never once lied to him before, so why would he start now? “It’s not,” he said, weakly.
“What idea do you want us to plant?”
“I want you to tell him that he doesn’t want to become king because there is only one king, and it’s an elephant’s job and not a tiger’s.”
Cobb clicks his tongue. “And if I do this, how will I know that you’re not just playing me?”
“Why, Cobb? When have I ever played you?”
And they had nothing to say to that because Saito had never done so, and Arthur knew that he never would.
They needed to assemble a team.
Luckily, Arthur and Cobb were pretty good at that.
Cobb had on his hat (which was a beret, because he insisted that he had French blood in him because of Mal. Arthur wasn’t so sure, but he definitely wouldn’t put it past him) and was packing up his lizard things that Arthur didn’t understand — rocks, sticks, and some dirt — and had packed a week worth supply of little bugs to keep his stomach full.
“Where are you going?” Arthur asks, because he’s a nosy badger and he likes to know if there’s a chance of his best friend (since baby badger hood!) dying.
“I’ve got to go find Eames.”
“Eames? No, he’s in Mombasa. That’s Cobol’s backyard.”
“It’s risk I’m going to have to take.”
“There are plenty of good thieves.”
He readjusts his beret, which he had jacked from a human boy when he wasn’t looking. “We don’t just need a thief. We need a parrot.”
“And what am I supposed to do while you’re gone?” Arthur didn’t mean to sound desperate, but he didn’t want to be left alone for a week.
“Well, we need a new architect. Check out the Arachnid School for Design and Architecture. It’s in Southern Kenya, right near your birthplace.”
Arthur squints. “Why do we need a spider?”
Cobb grins, or tries to; it just looks like a pathetic attempt at a grimace. “They build the most stable dreams and they’re the most eager to learn and create.”
Arthur sighs. “Fine. But when one of the little rats bites you, I don’t want to hear it.”
Arthur didn’t arrive at the Arachnid School for Design and Architecture until the next day because he was a lazy badger and he had to make a couple of pit stops in between. After all, he hadn’t seen mother badger for a few years, and her patience was running thin.
She, of course, didn’t know anything about Arthur’s job and what he did. She simply thought he was a humble honey badger that had left his home in search of excellence and success.
Which he had, of course, but he didn’t want his mother to know how dangerous this particular question was exactly. After having a couple fillings of the local river water (it was the Nile, so it was rich and felt nice in his belly) he set off for the school, telling her that he’d see her soon. He actually meant it that time.
He was standing outside of the school, watching as the various spiders shuffled out and spotted one who was at the front of the pack. She (assuming the gender, of course) was small, but mighty, and wore a piece of grass around her neck. Her little, able body was in front of all the rest, leading the others, and he could practically bask in the brilliance that was radiating off of her.
He walks up to her humbly. Because he was a badger, it was possible that she might’ve thought that he was going to eat her. He didn’t like spiders, particularly; they were too much trouble and had a bite that could sting, but she definitely didn’t know that.
“Excuse me?” He asks, when he’s just a couple paces behind her.
Immediately, the little spider jolts to attention, the little hairs on the back of her body standing up, and she turns around to face him. “You’re going to eat me, aren’t you? You’re one of those sick bastards that like to role-play with their food before they eat it.”
Arthur snorts, because damn, the imagination on this one! “No, I’ve come here to offer you a job.”
She then looks up at him in consideration, all eight of her little eyes looking at him with such precision that he’s a little taken aback. “What kind of job?”
“Well,” Arthur drawls, because he’s a bit of an asshole like that around people he doesn’t know and likes to keep them crawling on their toes. “Go to that tree and build me the most intricate and complicated spider web you can.”
She raises one of her legs, the way that a human would raise an eyebrow. “You’re not going to tell me anything about this first?”
“I need to know you can do it,” he tells her, and then adds “but the web must also be a maze, with a start to end.”
The little spider, obviously up for a challenge, nods her head and then crawls to the tree that Arthur pointed out. She begins working, and he can tell that she has a grace to her that was no easy feat for a spider. She works flawlessly and brilliantly, in a way that Arthur would never be able to but would always envy.
Once she was done, there was no question what his answer was going to be.
“What’s your name?”
“Ariadne,” she says, and Arthur cackles in his skeptical, honey badger way. “Is that some pun at Arachnid?”
She glares at him and pricks him with her fangs, luckily not deep enough to inject venom. “No! My parents were hipsters.”
Arthur chuckles, and then has to nod, because really, that just explains everything.
When Cobb arrives back from Mombassa, there’s not just one extra animal with him; there are two. That puzzles Arthur, because he had remembered Cobb only going there for Eames. Eames, the annoying parrot that only Eames could be, was of course with him, but there was also a koala with him too.
“Who’s the koala?” Arthur had asked as soon as he had gotten close enough for them to hear.
Eames squawks, “that’s no way to greet our newest team member, Arthur.”
Arthur rolls his eyes, or the best he could with eyelids like his. “Shut up, Eames.”
Cobb cuts in. “Cut out the loving banter,” he says dryly and motions with his head towards the koala. “This is Yusuf. He’s going to be our chemist.”
Arthur narrows his eyes. It seemed he has been doing that a lot lately. “But we already have one.”
Eames clicks his beak together a couple of times. “You probably do Arthur, and because you love order and formation,” he breaks his train of dialogue with another squawk. “This is probably severely terrible for you. But he uses eucalyptus leaves to make the sedatives. They’re more stable and more reliable.”
Arthur walks up to Yusuf and sniffs him. “Do you trust him?”
Ariadne squeaks from behind Arthur, her eyes wide in shock. “Arthur! He’s right there! You might upset him.”
Cobb nods. “I do. I’ve seen his work, Arthur. He’s the best of the best.”
Eames looks at Arthur pointedly. “He’s my best mate. Be rude to him and I’ll chop your spiny little legs off.”
“You’re all beak and no action. You’re a horrible parrot,” Arthur says offhandedly, not really fazed by his threat because he knows that he wasn’t going to do anything.
“Not my beak x it is that I am a parrot, xx.”
Arthur snorts, “did he really just say x out loud?”
Everyone turns their backs toward Arthur and Eames, and Arthur can’t even begin to fathom why.
Ariadne does end up biting Cobb, and it’s nothing short of glorious and beautiful and everything in between.
It happens when Cobb and Ariadne go under for the first time, together. It’s Ariadne’s first run for being in a dream, and she’s nervous and energetic rolled into one. Arthur should’ve known that was a bad place to start off, but he shook it off, because it was just Ariadne.
They had been under for a few minutes and Yusuf was off perfecting a compound that they were going to need for the job. Arthur had decided that he had liked Yusuf by day two. He was fast, stable, and incredibly intelligent; the koala reminded him a lot of himself, which was why Arthur supposed he liked him so much.
And Eames, on the other hand, was being the annoying parrot that he was. He was looking at Arthur from across the warehouse where he was perched. Arthur had never liked Eames, even from the beginning. He was lazy, messy, and insufferable. And the fucking beak on that thing.
His beak didn’t fit his face, and it was totally (not) attractive. It shouldn’t have been attractive.
Arthur had never been attracted to another species before, and he wasn’t going to start now.
Eames caught Arthur’s eye, like he always did whenever Arthur was looking at him, and winked. Arthur’s blood boiled, but not in the way that he expected it to.
And then, finally, Cobb and Ariadne were waking up. Ariadne wakes up first, gasping, the little strand of grass around her neck shaking violently because her little body was. She has a dazed, confused look in her eyes, and she looks like she wants to bite (kill) something.
She doesn’t say anything, not for a while, and she doesn’t explode like Arthur expects her to. She simply sits, perched on her chair for a long moment, before going up to Cobb, biting him hard on the leg and glares. “If that happens again, I’m not going to be so generous when it comes to the whole venom bit.”
Cobb glares at her and shakes his head. “Yeah,” he says lamely instead of fighting her, and then walks away, his scales more grey than they were when they went under.
“What happened?” Arthur asks, because he feels like he has to.
“This crazy ass fox attacked me out of nowhere and killed me! It was terrifying. I didn’t like seeing my eight limbs torn off, one at a time.”
Arthur bites his lip for a moment. “So you’ve met Mal.”
“The fox has a name?”
“That’s Cobb’s wife.”
“Where is she?” She snorts, and Arthur doesn’t get mad at her because she simply does not know.
“No… Mal’s dead.”
She looks taken aback for a moment, her eight eyes wide with shock, and maybe a little remorse and regret. “What was she like?”
Arthur shrugs his shoulders (or as much as he could, because he was a badger, and nothing more) and simply walks away. The memories were too strong, and the pain ran too deeply. He just couldn’t deal with it when he was about to start preparing for the biggest job of their careers.
(She was lovely.)
On the fourth night of research, Eames comes to his portion of the warehouse. The warehouse was old and was rotting from the inside out, but it had been long since abandoned by humans so they didn’t have to worry about any two legged creatures intruding.
They’re sectioned off into sleeping quarters; they had decided early on that it was much safer to sleep here than in their natural environments where they were previously sleeping. Arthur had one of the corners that was sectioned off by a cubicle. In the cubicle was a single human shoe, a men’s size 15, and the top was undone so only a little flap hung loose. Arthur used that as a blanket to keep himself warm.
Arthur was the runt, the smallest of all his mother’s cubs. He had always been the smallest. He didn’t mind it, because he could do things that his siblings — and other animals — couldn’t do. He liked that he was so small; it gave him a larger margin to impress animals. Because of his size, other animals didn’t expect him to be able to defend himself.
They also didn’t expect him to achieve anything great, but he had already done that.
He was snuggles into the shoe, and it was comfortable and it was warm; it was everything that Arthur needs to doze off. But then he hears the squawk, the quiet little sound from Eames, and he know, he knows that he isn’t going to get to sleep anytime soon.
He opens his eyes and sees Eames on the top of his cubicle. It’s two in the morning and Arthur can’t help but wonder why he’s still awake. “Eames?”
Eames flies down, like only a parrot can, and lands beside Arthur’s shoe. “Arthur?”
Arthur wanted to ignore him, and go sleep, because it was late and he was tired and he knew it was going to be a long day tomorrow. But no matter how much he hated Eames, or no matter how much he disliked him and didn’t want him around, Arthur had always been rubbish at saying no to him.
“Eames,” he repeats groggily; he was on the brink of sleep and he was going to doze off soon if Eames didn’t get on with it.
Eames leans down and pokes the top of Arthur’s head with his beak. Arthur knows by the sound of Eames’ voice that something was wrong with the parrot. He settles next to Arthur’s head; normally something like this would bother Arthur, but something was not settling right in his stomach. “I can’t sleep.”
Arthur clicks his tongue and then sits up, running his paw through his fur in a feeble attempt to clean himself. “Aren’t parrots nocturnal?”
Eames scoffs, if a bird could even do such a thing. “No,” he says curtly.
“Why can’t you sleep?”
Eames shrugs. “I’m scared about tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was the day that they trapped Robert and gave him the sedative to put him under. Arthur was scared, too, because he was always scared when it came to doing work on big animals that could easily kill him with one swipe. But he hadn’t shown it, he never did. He was Arthur, and he was supposed to be strong, never-am-I-scared. Arthur, the Honey Badger. He also didn’t want to worry his team members because Cobb and Eames (and Yusuf, and Ariadne by now) knew that if Arthur was ever scared, and showed it, then it was horrible.
Eames just stares at him with those beady bird eyes of his, and Arthur feels himself coming undone. He had a weird way of making Arthur’s stomach churn with something that he didn’t recognize.
“We’re all scared about tomorrow,” Arthur finally says. It is true, everyone is scared. Arthur knows that Eames knows that, and he doesn’t quite understand why Eames is even here in the first place.
And for the first time since Arthur could remember, he finds that he’s not really bothered by his presence.
“I know,” Eames agrees. “I just wanted someone’s company right now, yeah?” He squawks again and Arthur can tell that he’s uncomfortable that he’s even having this situation right now, so he does something that he never thought he’d do.
“I know,” Arthur repeats, and no one hears the me too at the end of Arthur’s statement, but they might as well had, because it was definitely there.
He crawls out of his shoe and scoots closer to Eames. He cuddles into Eames’ side, and he can feel Eames’ surprise shake through his body, but he doesn’t mind it. Arthur’s never been a touchy-feely badger; he’s always been somewhat of an independent animal, but Eames needs him and he’s not going to run away like he usually would. He’s going to stay there and snuggle up next to Eames and keep him warm. He might even go as far as to tell Eames that everything is going to be okay, and that they’re going to pull off tomorrow without a catch.
And Arthur might never be able to admit it to himself, but he needs Eames as much as Eames needs him.
They fall asleep like that; Arthur curled up under Eames’ wing, their breaths filling up Arthur’s small cubicle. And if that was the most comfortable sleep that he had ever had, he contributes it to it being because it wasn’t as cold as it usually was that night, and it was totally not because Eames was curled up next to him.
The next morning is a fiasco.
Ariadne is crawling around yelling about how her worlds going to end, and that Robert’s going to crush her with his paw before they even get him under. She’s also insisting that her and Cobb are meant to be together (because Cobb is total reference to a cobweb and it was also obvious that his parents were upset that they weren’t blessed with a lovely spider like herself). Yusuf is going around mumbling about how he might’ve just ate all of the eucalyptus leaves that were meant to go toward the compound that they were using today.
Cobb is worshiping a shrine of Mal, and Arthur knew that Cobb was trying to find away to weasel his way out of this one, maybe to run away. But the prospect of getting to see his children again was what kept him here. Eames was flapping around squawking about how his feathers weren’t preened correctly and that would bother him so much that he wouldn’t be able to actually complete his part of the job.
And Arthur, well, Arthur was just scared.
This was not going to end well, Arthur could sense it.
It’s easier than they thought it would be to corner Robert and to give him the compound. Robert, because he thinks he’s royal blood, drinks from a big leaf that’s fallen off of a tree instead of the lake. Once he’s gone of to piss or do whatever it is that tigers do before they drink, they quickly drop the sedative in and disappear back into the brush of the Savannah.
He’s out in less than a twenty seconds, and it’s easier to have Saito pick him up with his trunk and to move him into the warehouse (where it would be safer to put him under so others wouldn’t realize that a huge ass tiger and other animals were hooked up to a strange device).
After Saito drops him to the ground — quite carelessly — it’s time for them to get set up. Ariadne goes under first to construct the dream and to make sure that nothing’s out of place. And then it’s time for the team (minus Yusuf) to go under and to get into their positions. Afterwards, Yusuf and Robert come under and it begins.
The dream is simple, because over the years Cobb and Arthur have realized that doing a simple dream when it comes to animals usually worked out the best. The plan is for the team to have put Robert into the Savannah and to make him realize that he doesn’t want to rule anything, that it’s not his calling. Eames is going to forge Robert’s father (because that’s the animal that he wants to impress the most) and is going to tell him that he doesn’t want his son to become leader of anything. He just wants his son to settle down with a nice tigress and to have lots of grandcubs for him.
After that, they’ll put him under a second time (a dream within a dream) and his projection of his father should tell him the same exact thing.
Then, once the idea is planted, the only thing left to do is wait for the idea to actually grow.
“Ariadne’s under,” Arthur hears Cobb tell him. He’s listening, but he’s not really listening either, because he has all of this anxiety about the job that he wasn’t letting himself feel until now.
The possibility of the job failing is dawning on Arthur, and he never expected it to be this strong. But it was, and he couldn’t control it now. He shakes it off as best as he could though, because now Eames was staring at him with an expression that he couldn’t quite recognize. Arthur is almost positive that it was worry.
He walks up to Eames, butts his belly with his head, and then offers a smile that isn’t quite a smile, but isn’t quite anything else. “We’ll be fine,” he says.
Eames’ expression is unreadable. “We will,” he agrees.
And then it’s Yusuf who’s hooking them up to cords and the PASIV. Everything goes black and Arthur can’t really think anymore.
When Arthur opens his eyes again, he’s in the middle of the Savannah and not in the warehouse where he had fallen asleep. The Savannah is bright and colorful, and it’s everything that they had planned out. The brush is a little denser than it actually is out in the wild; they made it that way so they could easily maneuver around and hide from Robert and the other animal projections.
Once they find everyone, (Yusuf was stuck in a lake, something about not using the bathroom before they went under- it made Arthur livid) they start to try and track down Robert. It is easy enough; he is playing out in the water with another tiger, one that no one on the team recognizes. They knew that Ariadne had populated the area with animals so that it’d look more realistic, so they aren’t disheartened by it.
Eames is off somewhere, working on the forgery of Robert’s father, so Arthur isn’t worried about him. What he is worried about is how they were going to pull it off. It seemed simple enough when they were planning it out and doing the trial runs, but no one here was a real tiger, so it wasn’t exactly as realistic as it would’ve been if someone was.
They sit there wait. Ariadne is a jittering mess of spider nerves. Yusuf is watching them with worried, beady eyes, mumbling something about ‘if I so much as get a scratch, I’ll poison everyone’. Cobb is looking at Arthur with soulless, dead eyes, and everything that had given Arthur false confidence crumbled.
Eames returns about thirty minutes later as a beautiful, golden tiger, with broad, dark stripes, and piercing, blue eyes. He is large in stature and there was something in his eyes that screamed ‘danger’, but Arthur had always been drawn to something that scared him.
He bends down and nuzzles Arthur’s cheek with his nose. “Robert will run you down hard if he finds out you’re here.”
Arthur grins, tight and no doubt looking odd on a badger. “And I shall lead him on a merry chase.”
Eames makes a noise that isn’t recognizable deep in his throat and licks Arthur’s tummy, making Arthur go up into the air before landing on the ground again. Arthur glares at him, but it’s not filled with malice, but with something totally different, something completely unexpected.
“Just don’t die on me,” he says after a moment, and they both know that it really means ‘’I can’t bare to lose you’’. Arthur understands, because he just realized that he couldn’t bare to lose Eames, either.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” Arthur says instead, and he’s rewarded with a grin that makes his stomach do flips upside down.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
It all falls apart on the second level.
Eames, Arthur realizes, is flawless in his forge, and Robert literally eats up everything Eames tells him. He’s even sure that he can hear the tiger mumble ‘Yes, Master’ in reference to Eames, and it gives him hope. Eames comes back to them after knocking Robert out with some of the sedative that had been hidden by Ariadne out in the dense grass.
He looks proud and incredibly smug, and Arthur was, too. This was off to a great start. The hard part was over with, now it’s just smooth sailing from here.
Or so he thought.
The second level starts out just as fine as the first; everything had a place and everything is in its place and is in order.
And then, suddenly, it all breaks.
It is Cobb who stepped a little too close far too soon, that makes Robert snap his head and growl because he knew Cobb, and he also knew that Cobb wouldn’t get that close to him unless something was wrong. Arthur sees it happen with his own eyes; he sees his best friend get torn to pieces, lizard scales and his insides flying everywhere.
Arthur is sick to his stomach and he wants to run, because he knows that this job has failed and he doesn’t want to get torn to pieces too. But most of all, Eames is right behind Cobb, and he knows that Eames is going to be next. He doesn’t want to see Eames get killed in the way that Cobb had.
Robert saunters toward Eames’ back, and Arthur wants to tell Eames’ to run, to fly away, but he knows that Eames can’t see him and Arthur can’t reach him unless he runs like lighting across the Savannah. He may be a badger, but he’s simply not that fast. He watches as Robert swipes Eames’ back, and hears the cry that Eames lets out. He doesn’t move, he just lays there on the ground and Robert dives in, and it’s all claws and teeth and tiger roars.
He doesn’t hear anything from Eames again.
Arthur lets out a sound that he hadn’t known that he was capable of making, and Robert turns toward him, all cat malicious smiles and blood trickling down his fur. He brings his paw up and licks Eames’ blood from his claws, looking into Arthur’s eyes, because he knows that Eames was someone that was important to Arthur.
And then Robert’s charging at Arthur. He pounces and he feels the initial tear of flesh and muscle before everything goes black
When Arthur wakes up, he’s not a badger anymore. He has thumbs that work and can pick up things, and he has skin and no fur. In a hurry, he reaches for his wrist to pull out the IV that is obviously there, but it isn’t, and he’s confused and worried. He’s hot and sweaty and he’s starting to panic.
He reaches his long, able fingers up to run through his hair, which is messy with sweat. The place he’s in smells like old whiskey and cigarettes and he can faintly smell the notes of Eames’ cologne.
Where the fuck is he?
“Lose something, pet?” He hears Eames’ voice, Eames’ actual voice, and Arthur could kiss the man if he wasn’t so confused.
He looks over to his right and sees Eames, human Eames, all hard lines, tanned skin, and beautiful, soft lips. His hair is dripping wet from a shower, and he can’t help but notice how beautiful Eames actually is in his panic. Arthur doesn’t remember anything, for a moment. He only remembers his name, and Eames’ name too.
“You’re not a parrot,” Arthur says intelligently.
Eames beams “Not my beak x it is that I am a parrot, xx.”
Arthur narrows his eyes. “Fuck.” He runs his hands through his hair in a feeble attempt to calm his nerves. “Fuck, you came in?”
Eames smirks and lets his fingers dance up the length of Arthur’s arm and is delighted when Arthur doesn’t shake him off. “No, but you were quite vocal when you slept today.”
“Shit. So you heard everything?”
Eames, instead of giving him a straight answer, simply says, “you really think I’m a parrot?”
Arthur doesn’t smile completely, but the corners of his mouth twitch. Eames takes that as a small victory. “You’re definitely incessant as one. And sometimes you squawk when you’re annoyed.”
Eames snorts. “You’ve never complained about it before,” he winks.
Arthur throws a punch into his shoulder. “Really? Can’t the sexual innuendoes stay at bay? It’s bad enough that I was stuck as a honey badger.”
He’s cut off by Eames laughing, clutching his stomach, and rolling on the bed. He laughs for a while, tears appearing at the edges of his eyes from laughing so much. Arthur punches him in the gut. His laugher slows.
“You were a honey badger?” Eames asks.
“Yes.”
Eames clicks his tongue in thought. “Cobb?”
“A dragon lizard,” Eames chuckles, and then Arthur adds, “that wore a beret.”
Eames bites his lip to cease his laughter for a few moments, and then speaks again, much to Arthur’s embarrassment. “What were the rest of the team?”
Arthur sighs, because really, he got himself into this one, so it’s not like he could blame Eames for this. “Ariadne was a spider that wore a piece of grass as a scarf, and Yusuf was a koala bear and we used eucalyptus leaves for the sedatives.”
He blinks for a while. “And let me guess, it was the Fischer job, wasn’t it?”
Arthur nods, and then realizes something. “Were you singing in the shower?”
Eames looks at him in confusion. “I always sing in the shower.”
“It carried into the dream,” Arthur clarifies, because that’s really not something that he wanted to hear. Eames sounded like something that resembled a dying cat when he sang, and Arthur reminded him of that fact whenever he would catch him singing around the house.
Eames smirks, “my shower head is incredibly impressive.”
“Not when you’re singing Shania Twain, it’s not.”
Eames glares at him, but there’s no real heat and instead gets a smirk that speaks a thousand words, a thousand words that Arthur didn’t want to hear, because he knew what was coming next. “I ain’t going to act politically correct, no no, I only wanna have a good time!”
And then, in a little rage, and possibly something entirely different, Arthur jumps on him.
fanficition cove 
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