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They ended up hot-wiring a car and tumbling into it and careening away. Well, Eames hot-wired the car. Arthur could hot-wire a car, but he’d been a little busy cursing and dodging fucking grenades as he’d raced out with the PASIV clutched against him.
“In the future,” Eames said breathlessly, squealing the car along the packed city streets, “just leave the PASIV.”
“Do you know how much a PASIV is worth?” Arthur shot back.
“Do you know how much you’re worth?” countered Eames.
“Don’t get fucking sentimental,” Arthur snapped. “This is all your fault.”
“My fault? How?”
“I don’t know how, but my jobs all run smoothly unless you’re on them, so I’m blaming you for this one.”
Eames snorted. “That is such a blatant lie that I’m not even going to dignify it with a response.”
“Fuck,” said Arthur, as he was thrown up against the dashboard during a particularly energetic turn, “can you try not to get us killed while we try to escape getting killed?”
“Put your fucking seatbelt on,” Eames snarled.
“Don’t lecture me about road safety!” Arthur shouted, but Eames noticed that he put his seatbelt on.
Eames, his eyes darting along the mirrors, didn’t see anyone in pursuit, and started to slow their headlong escape. They had to start thinking now about what to do next, beyond the next second or minute.
“Fuck,” groaned Arthur, and Eames glanced at him. He had his eyes closed, his hands in fists in his hair. “How did we run out of there without guns?”
“That’s easily rectified,” Eames pointed out. “Luckily, we’re in America. Home of the free, land of the guns-on-every-corner. You live in a beautiful country.”
Arthur made a sound of disgust. “It’s ridiculous,” he complained. “Stupid Second Amendment.”
Eames glanced at him in surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re in favor of gun control.”
“Of course I’m in favor of gun control! There should definitely be control on who has guns! You and I, for instance, should never be able to walk into the nearest Walmart and pick up guns! Look at us! We’re dangerous criminals! And we’re just going to buy ourselves guns!”
“And a few packets of crisps,” remarked Eames, as he swung them into the parking lot of the Walmart they’d been passing. “I’m famished.”
***
“I’m afraid we can’t sell you the beer,” the kid behind the cash register said.
Eames looked at his six-pack. “What?”
“It’s Sunday. No alcohol sales on Sundays.”
“You just sold us guns,” seethed Arthur.
“Well, yeah,” said the kid. “Those we can sell on Sundays.”
“Not a big deal, pet,” Eames said to Arthur soothingly. “I don’t need the beer.”
“You shouldn’t be selling us the guns!” Arthur ranted at the poor kid. “Look at us! Do we look like people who should have guns?”
The kid looked at them. Arthur was dressed in an impeccable three-piece suit. Eames was dressed in an oxford with a tweed coat over it. Arthur had sneered about the patterns clashing, but Eames didn’t think this kid was a connoisseur of patterns.
The kid said, “To be honest, I just thought you were on your way to church.”
“And stopped to buy guns?” said Arthur.
“Okay,” said Eames, and put a hand familiarly on Arthur’s neck and rubbed his thumb behind Arthur’s ear, as if he did that all the time.
It succeeded in stunning Arthur speechless. Arthur, mouth open, stared at him.
The kid looked between them. “Wait a second. Are you guys gay?”
Which made Arthur whip his head back toward the kid. “So?” he demanded. “What would that matter? Would you refuse to sell us guns if we were gay?”
“I,” said Eames, escalating his attack on Arthur by slipping a finger into Arthur’s belt loop and hauling him close, “would like to buy a pack of cigarettes. Just give me Marlboro Lights, I suppose.”
The kid turned to grab the cigarettes. Arthur kind of slapped at Eames’s finger in his belt loop. Eames placidly settled his hand in Arthur’s pocket instead.
“Can I see your ID?” the kid asked Eames, turning back with the cigarettes.
“To buy cigarettes?” Arthur practically screeched. “He doesn’t look like he’s old enough to buy cigarettes?”
The kid looked apologetic. “We’re required to—”
“Give him your ID, petal,” Eames said, because he didn’t want to have to use his fake passport to buy cigarettes.
Arthur sighed and dug out his wallet and his own fake ID, and then caught sight of the look the kid was giving them at the use of petal and narrowed his eyes. “We are gay,” Arthur announced. “We are very gay. We are the gayest people you have ever met.”
“We are?” said Eames, surprised.
“Snookums,” said Arthur, “let’s go be gay and make out with our male parts.”
“What?” said Eames.
Arthur leaned forward and kissed him. Not actually a real kiss. No actual tongue involved. But a lot of moaning and sighing dramatically on Arthur’s part.
“Oh, sweetie pie,” simpered Arthur, “you are the best kisser ever.”
“Am I?” Eames asked drily, accepting his change from the baffled-looking kid. “Let’s go out to our car and stick our tongues down each other’s throats and then later one of us can sodomize the other and really punch our ticket to Hell, hmm?”
“Sounds fantastic,” Arthur purred, and led Eames out of the Walmart with a hand in the pocket of his coat. Which he promptly dropped as he soon as he got outside. “This fucking place,” he sighed.
“We just got guns, cigarettes, and crisps all in one go,” Eames remarked. “And I got pawed at by a gorgeous brunette. Things could be worse.”
“I didn’t paw at you,” said Arthur, letting Eames pick another car to hot-wire.
“Well, I wouldn’t call that a kiss. In the future, you’re welcome to kiss me to prove your gayness anytime, but I want a real kiss out of it.”
“You should be so lucky,” said Arthur primly, examining his new gun while Eames got to work.
“Incidentally,” noted Eames, “he was just a kid, and you’re running a little tightly wound at the mo’. We got off relatively clean. You can take a breath.”
“We didn’t get off—”
“Arthur,” inserted Eames calmly, as the car came to life under his hands.
Arthur hmph’d at him and got in the car and slammed the door shut and rather viciously opened one of the packets of crisps Eames had grabbed.
Then Arthur said, “I grew up in a place like this.”
“Near here?” Eames said.
“No. But in a place like this. If there was one kid in that store wrestling with the idea of being different who saw me pawing at you, then I’m okay with that. I would have killed for that as a kid.” Arthur shoved some crisps into his mouth.
Eames was silent for a second. Then he said, “Okay, pet. Where to?”
***
Arthur directed them into the mountains. They stopped at a 7-Eleven at one point. “God, do we have to go to every fucking terrible American retail outlet?” Arthur groused, and then said, “But I guess, while we’re here, I’ll just grab a Slurpee,” and immediately sidled up to the machine. Eames bit down on his grin because smiling was a surefire way to get Arthur’s hackles back up and instead amused himself buying every fattening, greasy, fried, and preservative-laden food he could get his hands on.
“You’re going to die of a heart attack before we can even find a safe house,” said Arthur, curling up in the passenger seat with his Slurpee and his phone out so he could study the GPS.
“Don’t give yourself a brain freeze, love,” said Eames pleasantly, and happily bit into some fried pork rind.
Arthur kept giving directions, and as the streets got smaller and narrower and more remote, and as they rose higher into the mountains, and as it got darker and darker outside, and as the snow started to fall, Eames said, “Tell me you have an actual destination in mind and you’re not just going to drive us off a cliff.”
“I have an idea,” said Arthur. “Not one of my safe houses, but someone I know.”
“Cobb?”
“Not Cobb.”
“Darling, you only know me and Cobb, and I don’t have a safe house out here.”
“I know more people than you and Cobb!”
“You’re so adorable,” said Eames.
“Ugh,” said Arthur, “I hope you fucking choke on that pork rind.”
Eames grinned at him.
But Eames’s grins didn’t last long because the snow was serious and the roads were getting treacherous, and they were in far too remote a place for Eames to hope that the roads had been treated in any way, or that a plow would ever show up to come and rescue them if they got stuck.
Arthur said, “Fuck,” at one point and put his phone down, which Eames took as a sign that they had finally lost service.
Eames was too busy coaxing the car past a build-up of slush. “You could have told me to steal us a car with all-wheel drive,” said Eames.
“I didn’t know it was going to snow. I should have checked the forecast. Fuck, this has been a terrible day.” Arthur rubbed at his forehead. His Slurpee was long since finished, and Eames had worked his way through most of his snacks (pretending to enjoy them so he could enjoy Arthur’s disgusted outrage).
“It could have been worse,” Eames said grimly, peering through the limits of his headlights to the driving snow beyond. “It could be much, much worse.”
“Yeah,” said Arthur after a second. “You’re right.”
***
“Well,” said Eames, on a sigh, as he put the car in park and looked at the small cabin in its headlights, “I propose we just live here the rest of our lives.” Eames unclenched his fingers from around the steering wheel, rolled his tense shoulders.
Arthur snorted. “You’d go crazy in the space of a day. Do you know how far you’d have to go to get gross cigarettes?”
“You talk like you’re not a smoker,” grumbled Eames.
“I don’t smoke Marlboro Lights,” said Arthur, “Christ, I have some self-respect.”
“Well, I don’t care how I take my death sticks,” said Eames, proving the point by lighting one, “as long as they deliver some nicotine. Anyway, doesn’t Amazon deliver out here? I could just order my cigarettes via Amazon, couldn’t I?”
“Classy. And who even knows if you’re allowed to do that in this glorious country? You’d be better off ordering your guns via Amazon.”
“You’re such an angry American,” said Eames. “Are we getting out of this car? Or are you waiting for me to propose to you properly? I’m not going down on one knee in the bloody blizzard, darling, so it’ll have to wait until we get inside.”
Arthur sighed and looked at the house. “Thanks for doing the driving and stuff. You know. Stealing the car. That stuff.”
Eames blinked in surprise. “Yeah. No problem.”
“For not, like, leaving,” said Arthur abruptly. “For waiting for me to get out of there with the PASIV. Thanks.” And then Arthur got out of the car before Eames could reply to that.
Eames, after a second, shut off the car and followed Arthur up to the steps to the house’s front porch, where Arthur took a key from underneath the flowerpot on the windowsill next to the door.
“Crack security,” Eames commented. “This house is definitely Cobb’s.”
Arthur ignored him and opened the door and went to turn the lights on.
Nothing happened.
“No electricity, darling?” drawled Eames mildly.
“Fucking Cobb,” spat out Arthur.
***
It became clear that Cobb did not keep safe houses up to Arthur’s standards.
“He doesn’t even have proper candles,” said Arthur.
“Yes, but this is very romantic,” said Eames, in the flickering sea of tea lights.
“Ugh,” said Arthur, and went in search of blankets.
Eames tried to set a fire in the fireplace; Eames had a lot of skills but making a fire wasn’t one of them.
“Stop,” Arthur said, batting his hand away as he dropped the blankets down in front of him. “That is actually painful to watch.”
Eames let Arthur take over, lifting his eyebrows in appreciation. “Were you a Boy Scout, darling?”
“No,” said Arthur. “I didn’t approve of their stance on LGBTQ issues. I taught myself how to make a fire. They don’t have the market cornered on wilderness preparedness.”
Eames regarded him curiously. “You’re an activist. I had no idea you were so political.”
“We can come up with another plan in the morning,” Arthur said to the fire he’d coaxed into existence. “For tonight, though, this is going to have to do.”
“Well, you know,” said Eames, “we can always cuddle together for warmth.”
“No,” said Arthur primly, and went into the cabin’s one bedroom and shut the door.
***
Eames woke to a dying fire in the fireplace and a blast of cold air underneath his bundle of blankets caused by the form of one Arthur worming his way in.
“Not a single fucking word,” grumbled Arthur, and stuck his cold feet between Eames’s calves.
Eames yelped involuntarily. “Fuck, you’re freezing.”
“There wasn’t a fireplace in the bedroom,” said Arthur, around teeth that were chattering uncontrollably.
“Bloody idiot,” muttered Eames, and hauled him in against him. Arthur’s nose, where it collided with Eames’s neck, was like ice. “Idiot,” Eames said again. “Do you think I waited for you today just to let you freeze yourself to death now?”
“Shut up,” said Arthur, shivering against Eames, tucking his hands up underneath Eames’s shirt, which proved Arthur was in dire straits, because he would never have done any of this willingly if it hadn’t been a last resort.
“Darling,” Eames huffed against Arthur’s temple, and then stroked his hand down Arthur’s back. Arthur didn’t move away, didn’t protest. “Darling, darling,” Eames murmured on a sigh. “Did you think there was any chance I wouldn’t wait for you? That I wouldn’t be there with your getaway car when you needed me?”
He didn’t think Arthur was going to answer, Arthur was silent for so long. Then Arthur said, his voice small and aimed directly into Eames’s skin. “No. It never even occurred to me that you wouldn’t be there. That’s what’s so terrifying. I stopped to grab the PASIV instead of running out because I knew you would be there, you’d have an escape route waiting, and that gave me time to— What was I doing? What if you hadn’t? I can’t believe I—”
“Darling Arthur,” Eames said. “If I’m not there waiting with an escape route for you when you’re in trouble, it means I’m dead. Do you understand?”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“I mean it.”
“Me, too. Because that’s what I thought, that if you weren’t there waiting, it would mean you were dead, and so I didn’t really care as much what happened to me if that was true because I know you, and I know Cobb, and of the two of you…”
“I hope you’re going to say that you prefer me.”
“I hate you less,” said Arthur carefully.
“That’s so gay of you,” Eames said. “That’s the gayest thing you’ve ever said.”
“Shut up,” Arthur said, but Eames could hear the smile in it.
“Give me a real kiss. A real kiss like gay men do with their male parts and their male tongues.”
“Will there be sodomy later?”
“Only if it’s the filthy sort that would make a church crumble around us.”
“Is there another kind?” asked Arthur.
***
In the morning, by the over-bright light of sunshine on new snow, Eames realized that the house’s generator had a switch, and the house was warm and toasty by that night.
They still cuddled together.
Eames didn’t say a word about it. Neither did Arthur. Mouths being otherwise occupied.