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ladderax“Arthur, look,” Eames called gaily.
“Is it important?” Arthur grumbled. “I think I already know the answer, but what is it?”
They were practicing, preparing for another extraction case. A mob boss wanted to know if one of his caporegimes had turned FBI informant. Eames was forging the capo’s youngest daughter, a bright, ebullient girl and the man’s most trusted confidant.
He’d already seen Eames in her skin, and it was, as usual, an eerie simulacrum. He had the lively eyes and pensive smile Arthur had seen when he observed and taped her drinking cappuccinos at her favorite café in Providence. He held his cigarette at the same angle, pulled at his lip when stressed like she did. And it was hard to get a face to obey you. They had wills of their own. They required obedience training, just like wompats and Earth dogs. It had taken Nilor Premak months to approximate human facial expressions, just to understand the whys and wherefores and to account for the strange new weight of that skin.
Arthur knew that dreams cast a Gaussian veil over everything, heightened any sense of beauty, made the imperfect and inaccurate look more real than the real itself. But he was still in awe.
The awe never shook, even when he was awake, even when it should have been shaken. So much for discipline.
“Well?” Eames asked, turning around, allowing Arthur to look at himself.
To his horror, Eames-Arthur was wearing not the outfit Arthur was wearing today, well-fitting trousers and an oxford with a cabled black cardigan, but one he’d worn son their first job together. The khaki pants were too baggy, especially at the crotch, and the polo shirt was a loud orange. It was a poor approximation of Dom’s old clothing, before he’d really understood what someone his age and in his position ought to wear.
He’s mocking me, the bastard, Arthur seethed.
“Mr. Eames,” he said, stalking over and leaning next to Eames’s ear, “next time, instead of attempting to unsettle me by ridiculing my clothing or being so childish as to forge my appearance, I would appreciate it if you would express your contempt for me openly. So that we could resolve our problems like men instead of sitcom characters.”
Eames imitated the tight press of Arthur’s lips after he had finished a sentence he thought particularly profound, like a smug facial full-stop. He tipped his chin in the air, set his shoulders, looked utterly supercilious as he turned back towards the mirror.
“Arthur,” Eames droned, “this paranoid Sideshow Bob routine of yours was sweet, but it’s getting boring. Do you really think you’re so important to me that I sit at home making a list of ways to get under your skin? Please, do calm down, so that we can finish this and get home. Allright?”
Arthur just glared at him and walked away, ready for the kick. He knew that part of the reason he could be so witheringly hostile to Eames, or so dismissive, depending on the circumstance, was because he didn’t want to know what Eames looked like when he was kind. And he didn’t want to offer himself, in friendship or otherwise, and be turned away.
A Cardassian didn’t expose his or her innermost needs, at least without ulterior motives. And for him there were none. He wanted all those things he didn’t want, wanted them desperately.
Of course, the irony of it was that by showing Eames his hostility and irritation, he was acting exactly like a Cardassian in love. If they were on Cardassia, he’d be laughed at for acting so meltingly lovesick.
*
He didn’t see Eames for two years after that. In the meantime, he learned what Sideshow Bob was. He learned how not to use so much pomade. He learned to stop biting blood out of his knuckles while waiting for some slow, grainy image to spring out of the glacial welter of the Earth’s Internet (Cardassia, he noted with sad pride, had already had neural interfaces for 200 years while humans were still struggling with this Google shit.)
He castigated himself sometimes for not trying everything he could try. He had read reports of time-stranded people occasionally getting off of primitive planets by using atomic power to reopen the rifts that had stranded them. But how would he even be able to locate the rift? He’d tried to build an astrometric computer once, in his small rented apartment in Boston; he failed absurdly. The components didn’t even exist yet on Earth, or hadn’t been refined. And then, even with his connections in the criminal underground, the idea of getting an atomic weapon for himself was laughable.
Perhaps a more audacious agent, a better agent, would have tried.
He didn’t feel particularly audacious, especially after Mal died. Dom was gutted, razed, a grey spectre of himself made even more spectral by the stress of running. After what Dom had done for him, it was all he could do to make sure that the man ate.
He wasn’t sure he understood human grief. Cardassians took death seriously, certainly; they mourned their dead. They avenged their dead when necessary. But death was a joyous event when someone died in the service of the state or passed peacefully after a long life of such service. He’d seen some among his people become unhinged, those of them who took a loved one’s death as a personal slight rather than the necessary and unavoidable event it was, but they were the exception to those who accepted death calmly.
Well, Dom’s grief was complicated, too, by his loss of his children. That was something Arthur could understand mourning. To lose control of the education of one’s children was akin to a death on Cardassia. And Arthur enjoyed taking part in that education too. He’d longed, absurdly, to teach James and Phillippa Kardasi, so he would have someone to speak it with who would ask no questions, at least at first.
And he’d been fond of Mal. She was a shrewd woman. She had a curious mind, and she never trusted without proof. Arthur would not have minded one more conversation with her, her hands animated and her eyes shining, in the airy kitchen of that old cottage on the beach. Even if it had to be infused with the wretched smell of human bread baking.
*
He’d been selfish. Dom needed a forger, and he’d tried to dissuade him, just because he didn’t particularly want to remember how he’d felt about that man. What happened to duty? The nation-state governments of this world were inefficient, backwards, not worth serving, so Arthur was fortunate he’d found someone worthy of loyalty.
But he remembered how jarring it had been, seeing Eames animating his own face. His face that wasn’t his. The eyes he’d had since birth looking out from a mask of flat, putty-colored human skin.
What had perhaps bothered him the most was not the haughty expression Eames had imitated. What had bothered him was the flash he’d caught in those eyes, a brief but unmistakable look of distance, of tired lostness.
Was I imagining it?
He’d tried to avoid provoking Eames during this job. He hadn’t had the energy to, and he preferred his new ability to appear more seamlessly lighthearted and affable without overdoing it. (One of his higher-ups in the order, one Garak, was quite a master of overdoing it. And it could be charming. But this wasn’t the place.) He’d even told Eames that he was impressed, which the other man had interpreted as condescension. Fine.
Now it was over. Dom was returning to his children.
Arthur didn’t have an excuse to follow him. He’d been Dom’s partner in illegal extraction, his protector when he was on the run, but now he was more than experienced, could work on his own, could live on his own.
He stood in the terminal, lacking the resolve even to push his trolley forward. Money wasn’t the issue. He could afford to buy separate homes in five separate cities, including Tokyo. But at the very least he didn’t know which of the five to buy first.
“Taking a nap? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you slept standing up,” Eames said, coming up behind him.
“No, I’m just—“ He didn’t know what he was just.
“So where’s home?”
“Oh—Boston,”
“You sure about that?” Eames asked.
“Well, it’s a strange thing not to be sure about,” Arthur replied lethargically.
“It’s much less strange than you’d think,” said Eames. “Well, at the very least you should eat first.”
“I probably should.”
“Well, that’s a start. Come on then.” Eames beckoned him to follow. He couldn’t really stop himself.
*
Oh no. He couldn’t let Eames see him eat.
It wasn’t that he ate strangely anymore. He’d learned when to use a knife and fork and when it was acceptable to eat with one’s hands. The problem was that he still hadn’t gotten over his dislike of most Earth foods, and now that he knew that Eames could read his face, he was certain that he’d catch on to how subtly disgusted he must look as he chewed.
If Eames knew, though—which Arthur was sure he did—he didn’t say anything as they ate in the restaurant of the Chateau Marmont. In fact, he really didn’t say much of anything.
Arthur despaired. Perhaps he and Eames really had nothing to say to each other.
“Mr. Eames,” he asked, finally, after minutes upon minutes of excruciating near-silence, “what do you think of aliens?”
“Aliens?” Eames asked amusedly, empty fork tines lingering on the edges of his soft lips. It looked a bit like a tease. “Like, do they exist?”
“Well, that.”
“I think if they do exist they’re nothing we would even recognize. They probably look like chairs, or cactuses, or salad. No, Mr. Hollander, I think the closest we’ll ever come to meeting aliens is exploring our own minds.”
Arthur wanted to laugh.
“What do you think? Are we destined to be pulling green-skinned birds from space before the century’s up?”
“Oh, no green-skinned women for me, thank you,” Arthur tried to sound nonchalant.
The check arrived.
“I’m thinking of staying in LA for a few days,” Eames offered casually, putting his credit card down. “If you’re still not sure where you’re going, maybe you should stay around. It seems like a good place to be in limbo.“
*
He had really no idea how it happened.
They’d ended up checking into the same hotel—different suites, of course—and after drinks in the bar Eames had offered to escort him home, making jokes about chivalry. Eames was a bit buzzed—Arthur would even have gone so far as to say he was drunk. Arthur was not.
Of course. It would have taken twenty more bottles of that whiskey to get Arthur even tipsy. The whole not human thing.
Eames had begun making jokes that Arthur was a nerd, and that the only way to get in his pants was to seduce him with alien movies. Arthur had made weak protests, but Eames had sat himself down on the huge taupe leather couch in the suite’s living room, flicked on the TV, and begun scrolling through the list of Pay-Per-View movies.
“Ooh, Predators. You’ll like this one, Arthur. Hopefully you’ll like it enough to let me..”
He leaned over towards Arthur, and Arthur pulled away.
“Eames, you’re so drunk.”
“Not so drunk I can’t appreciate a good Predator. Takes one to know one, I guess,” he smiled.
“Oh, stop. Please, please stop.” Arthur stood up.
“So what, you’re suddenly not attracted to me?”
“Who said I was attracted to you?”
“Everything about you said you were attracted to me downstairs. The way you smiled at me? The way you looked at me? Jesus, I’d been waiting six years for any indication that there was a human being under there and not some sad robot.”
“Eames, you are so drunk. Robots don’t get sad.”
“They don’t? And you’re an authority on robots?”
“Of course not! I don’t know anything about robots!”
“You are so adorable right now. I never thought I’d actually hear myself say that, but you are.”
“Eames—“
“Have you ever heard the story of the weeping princess? No, no, let me finish. It’s a story I heard when I was a kid. In a faraway kingdom—you know the kind—a king had a beautiful daughter who cried all the time. And he sent out a decree that he would split his kingdom with the young man who could make his daughter stop crying. If they failed, of course, they’d be executed. So all these cocky young lads, they come out, thinking, how hard can it be to make a girl smile? They do all sorts of things—make jokes, do stunts buy her imitation Burberry—and she just keeps crying. Finally, one of the boys says he knows exactly how to make the young thing stop crying, and may he please borrow the king’s scepter.
The king’s reluctant, but he hands it over. And the kid says, Your Highness, I’m about to end your misery. And then he brings the scepter down over her head. And her head cracks open, with a dull metal thud. And all these gears pop out. See, she was a robot. A sad robot.”
“And this has what to do with me?”
“You were my sad robot. I was always trying to get some sort of reaction out of you, trying to make you laugh, or at least make you angry. And then angry wasn’t good enough. When it was over, you still had that distant look in your eyes. Oh, Arthur--”
Eames was looking into his eyes, suddenly, and tentatively touching the back of his fingers to Arthur’s cheek. He must have been looking especially weak at that moment to elicit such an urgent reaction.
“Don’t feel sorry for me. Just fuck me,” Arthur snapped.
Eames looked surprised.
“Yes, your highness.”
*
Eames leaned in and was kissing him.
It was so soft and relentless, the pulsing of those wildly overgrown lips. Eames’s hand cupped the top of his arm gently, and his other hand was on the back of Arthur’s neck.
Arthur felt the alien follicles on the back of his neck thrill at the contact. He wanted to throw his entire surface area around Eames at once, overwhelm him, give every touch receptor on his body way too much to process.
“Please,” he heard himself saying. “Yes. Oh.”
“Yeah?” Eames said softly, his eyes dazed and gentle. “You really want me?”
“I do,” Arthur said. “Really. I really fucking do.”
“Oh, God,” Eames moaned, and touched his lips to Arthur’s neck.
It was like an explosive went off in his skin.
Pleasure ripped through that naked nerve, radiating to his shoulder and face and the back of his head. His eyes squeezed shut, trying to focus, trying to maintain some control. And Eames just kept kissing him there. Kept kissing him there, hot, satiny mouth stroking the most vulnerable part of him.
He had to tell him to stop. He couldn’t tell him to stop.
And then it was too late. He was coming in his pants, feeling the wetness and the hot shame. He felt exposed.
“Arthur?” Eames asked. “Are you allright?”
He leapt away from Eames, standing up.
“This was a mistake. You have to go.”
“Is it important?” Arthur grumbled. “I think I already know the answer, but what is it?”
They were practicing, preparing for another extraction case. A mob boss wanted to know if one of his caporegimes had turned FBI informant. Eames was forging the capo’s youngest daughter, a bright, ebullient girl and the man’s most trusted confidant.
He’d already seen Eames in her skin, and it was, as usual, an eerie simulacrum. He had the lively eyes and pensive smile Arthur had seen when he observed and taped her drinking cappuccinos at her favorite café in Providence. He held his cigarette at the same angle, pulled at his lip when stressed like she did. And it was hard to get a face to obey you. They had wills of their own. They required obedience training, just like wompats and Earth dogs. It had taken Nilor Premak months to approximate human facial expressions, just to understand the whys and wherefores and to account for the strange new weight of that skin.
Arthur knew that dreams cast a Gaussian veil over everything, heightened any sense of beauty, made the imperfect and inaccurate look more real than the real itself. But he was still in awe.
The awe never shook, even when he was awake, even when it should have been shaken. So much for discipline.
“Well?” Eames asked, turning around, allowing Arthur to look at himself.
To his horror, Eames-Arthur was wearing not the outfit Arthur was wearing today, well-fitting trousers and an oxford with a cabled black cardigan, but one he’d worn son their first job together. The khaki pants were too baggy, especially at the crotch, and the polo shirt was a loud orange. It was a poor approximation of Dom’s old clothing, before he’d really understood what someone his age and in his position ought to wear.
He’s mocking me, the bastard, Arthur seethed.
“Mr. Eames,” he said, stalking over and leaning next to Eames’s ear, “next time, instead of attempting to unsettle me by ridiculing my clothing or being so childish as to forge my appearance, I would appreciate it if you would express your contempt for me openly. So that we could resolve our problems like men instead of sitcom characters.”
Eames imitated the tight press of Arthur’s lips after he had finished a sentence he thought particularly profound, like a smug facial full-stop. He tipped his chin in the air, set his shoulders, looked utterly supercilious as he turned back towards the mirror.
“Arthur,” Eames droned, “this paranoid Sideshow Bob routine of yours was sweet, but it’s getting boring. Do you really think you’re so important to me that I sit at home making a list of ways to get under your skin? Please, do calm down, so that we can finish this and get home. Allright?”
Arthur just glared at him and walked away, ready for the kick. He knew that part of the reason he could be so witheringly hostile to Eames, or so dismissive, depending on the circumstance, was because he didn’t want to know what Eames looked like when he was kind. And he didn’t want to offer himself, in friendship or otherwise, and be turned away.
A Cardassian didn’t expose his or her innermost needs, at least without ulterior motives. And for him there were none. He wanted all those things he didn’t want, wanted them desperately.
Of course, the irony of it was that by showing Eames his hostility and irritation, he was acting exactly like a Cardassian in love. If they were on Cardassia, he’d be laughed at for acting so meltingly lovesick.
*
He didn’t see Eames for two years after that. In the meantime, he learned what Sideshow Bob was. He learned how not to use so much pomade. He learned to stop biting blood out of his knuckles while waiting for some slow, grainy image to spring out of the glacial welter of the Earth’s Internet (Cardassia, he noted with sad pride, had already had neural interfaces for 200 years while humans were still struggling with this Google shit.)
He castigated himself sometimes for not trying everything he could try. He had read reports of time-stranded people occasionally getting off of primitive planets by using atomic power to reopen the rifts that had stranded them. But how would he even be able to locate the rift? He’d tried to build an astrometric computer once, in his small rented apartment in Boston; he failed absurdly. The components didn’t even exist yet on Earth, or hadn’t been refined. And then, even with his connections in the criminal underground, the idea of getting an atomic weapon for himself was laughable.
Perhaps a more audacious agent, a better agent, would have tried.
He didn’t feel particularly audacious, especially after Mal died. Dom was gutted, razed, a grey spectre of himself made even more spectral by the stress of running. After what Dom had done for him, it was all he could do to make sure that the man ate.
He wasn’t sure he understood human grief. Cardassians took death seriously, certainly; they mourned their dead. They avenged their dead when necessary. But death was a joyous event when someone died in the service of the state or passed peacefully after a long life of such service. He’d seen some among his people become unhinged, those of them who took a loved one’s death as a personal slight rather than the necessary and unavoidable event it was, but they were the exception to those who accepted death calmly.
Well, Dom’s grief was complicated, too, by his loss of his children. That was something Arthur could understand mourning. To lose control of the education of one’s children was akin to a death on Cardassia. And Arthur enjoyed taking part in that education too. He’d longed, absurdly, to teach James and Phillippa Kardasi, so he would have someone to speak it with who would ask no questions, at least at first.
And he’d been fond of Mal. She was a shrewd woman. She had a curious mind, and she never trusted without proof. Arthur would not have minded one more conversation with her, her hands animated and her eyes shining, in the airy kitchen of that old cottage on the beach. Even if it had to be infused with the wretched smell of human bread baking.
*
He’d been selfish. Dom needed a forger, and he’d tried to dissuade him, just because he didn’t particularly want to remember how he’d felt about that man. What happened to duty? The nation-state governments of this world were inefficient, backwards, not worth serving, so Arthur was fortunate he’d found someone worthy of loyalty.
But he remembered how jarring it had been, seeing Eames animating his own face. His face that wasn’t his. The eyes he’d had since birth looking out from a mask of flat, putty-colored human skin.
What had perhaps bothered him the most was not the haughty expression Eames had imitated. What had bothered him was the flash he’d caught in those eyes, a brief but unmistakable look of distance, of tired lostness.
Was I imagining it?
He’d tried to avoid provoking Eames during this job. He hadn’t had the energy to, and he preferred his new ability to appear more seamlessly lighthearted and affable without overdoing it. (One of his higher-ups in the order, one Garak, was quite a master of overdoing it. And it could be charming. But this wasn’t the place.) He’d even told Eames that he was impressed, which the other man had interpreted as condescension. Fine.
Now it was over. Dom was returning to his children.
Arthur didn’t have an excuse to follow him. He’d been Dom’s partner in illegal extraction, his protector when he was on the run, but now he was more than experienced, could work on his own, could live on his own.
He stood in the terminal, lacking the resolve even to push his trolley forward. Money wasn’t the issue. He could afford to buy separate homes in five separate cities, including Tokyo. But at the very least he didn’t know which of the five to buy first.
“Taking a nap? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you slept standing up,” Eames said, coming up behind him.
“No, I’m just—“ He didn’t know what he was just.
“So where’s home?”
“Oh—Boston,”
“You sure about that?” Eames asked.
“Well, it’s a strange thing not to be sure about,” Arthur replied lethargically.
“It’s much less strange than you’d think,” said Eames. “Well, at the very least you should eat first.”
“I probably should.”
“Well, that’s a start. Come on then.” Eames beckoned him to follow. He couldn’t really stop himself.
*
Oh no. He couldn’t let Eames see him eat.
It wasn’t that he ate strangely anymore. He’d learned when to use a knife and fork and when it was acceptable to eat with one’s hands. The problem was that he still hadn’t gotten over his dislike of most Earth foods, and now that he knew that Eames could read his face, he was certain that he’d catch on to how subtly disgusted he must look as he chewed.
If Eames knew, though—which Arthur was sure he did—he didn’t say anything as they ate in the restaurant of the Chateau Marmont. In fact, he really didn’t say much of anything.
Arthur despaired. Perhaps he and Eames really had nothing to say to each other.
“Mr. Eames,” he asked, finally, after minutes upon minutes of excruciating near-silence, “what do you think of aliens?”
“Aliens?” Eames asked amusedly, empty fork tines lingering on the edges of his soft lips. It looked a bit like a tease. “Like, do they exist?”
“Well, that.”
“I think if they do exist they’re nothing we would even recognize. They probably look like chairs, or cactuses, or salad. No, Mr. Hollander, I think the closest we’ll ever come to meeting aliens is exploring our own minds.”
Arthur wanted to laugh.
“What do you think? Are we destined to be pulling green-skinned birds from space before the century’s up?”
“Oh, no green-skinned women for me, thank you,” Arthur tried to sound nonchalant.
The check arrived.
“I’m thinking of staying in LA for a few days,” Eames offered casually, putting his credit card down. “If you’re still not sure where you’re going, maybe you should stay around. It seems like a good place to be in limbo.“
*
He had really no idea how it happened.
They’d ended up checking into the same hotel—different suites, of course—and after drinks in the bar Eames had offered to escort him home, making jokes about chivalry. Eames was a bit buzzed—Arthur would even have gone so far as to say he was drunk. Arthur was not.
Of course. It would have taken twenty more bottles of that whiskey to get Arthur even tipsy. The whole not human thing.
Eames had begun making jokes that Arthur was a nerd, and that the only way to get in his pants was to seduce him with alien movies. Arthur had made weak protests, but Eames had sat himself down on the huge taupe leather couch in the suite’s living room, flicked on the TV, and begun scrolling through the list of Pay-Per-View movies.
“Ooh, Predators. You’ll like this one, Arthur. Hopefully you’ll like it enough to let me..”
He leaned over towards Arthur, and Arthur pulled away.
“Eames, you’re so drunk.”
“Not so drunk I can’t appreciate a good Predator. Takes one to know one, I guess,” he smiled.
“Oh, stop. Please, please stop.” Arthur stood up.
“So what, you’re suddenly not attracted to me?”
“Who said I was attracted to you?”
“Everything about you said you were attracted to me downstairs. The way you smiled at me? The way you looked at me? Jesus, I’d been waiting six years for any indication that there was a human being under there and not some sad robot.”
“Eames, you are so drunk. Robots don’t get sad.”
“They don’t? And you’re an authority on robots?”
“Of course not! I don’t know anything about robots!”
“You are so adorable right now. I never thought I’d actually hear myself say that, but you are.”
“Eames—“
“Have you ever heard the story of the weeping princess? No, no, let me finish. It’s a story I heard when I was a kid. In a faraway kingdom—you know the kind—a king had a beautiful daughter who cried all the time. And he sent out a decree that he would split his kingdom with the young man who could make his daughter stop crying. If they failed, of course, they’d be executed. So all these cocky young lads, they come out, thinking, how hard can it be to make a girl smile? They do all sorts of things—make jokes, do stunts buy her imitation Burberry—and she just keeps crying. Finally, one of the boys says he knows exactly how to make the young thing stop crying, and may he please borrow the king’s scepter.
The king’s reluctant, but he hands it over. And the kid says, Your Highness, I’m about to end your misery. And then he brings the scepter down over her head. And her head cracks open, with a dull metal thud. And all these gears pop out. See, she was a robot. A sad robot.”
“And this has what to do with me?”
“You were my sad robot. I was always trying to get some sort of reaction out of you, trying to make you laugh, or at least make you angry. And then angry wasn’t good enough. When it was over, you still had that distant look in your eyes. Oh, Arthur--”
Eames was looking into his eyes, suddenly, and tentatively touching the back of his fingers to Arthur’s cheek. He must have been looking especially weak at that moment to elicit such an urgent reaction.
“Don’t feel sorry for me. Just fuck me,” Arthur snapped.
Eames looked surprised.
“Yes, your highness.”
*
Eames leaned in and was kissing him.
It was so soft and relentless, the pulsing of those wildly overgrown lips. Eames’s hand cupped the top of his arm gently, and his other hand was on the back of Arthur’s neck.
Arthur felt the alien follicles on the back of his neck thrill at the contact. He wanted to throw his entire surface area around Eames at once, overwhelm him, give every touch receptor on his body way too much to process.
“Please,” he heard himself saying. “Yes. Oh.”
“Yeah?” Eames said softly, his eyes dazed and gentle. “You really want me?”
“I do,” Arthur said. “Really. I really fucking do.”
“Oh, God,” Eames moaned, and touched his lips to Arthur’s neck.
It was like an explosive went off in his skin.
Pleasure ripped through that naked nerve, radiating to his shoulder and face and the back of his head. His eyes squeezed shut, trying to focus, trying to maintain some control. And Eames just kept kissing him there. Kept kissing him there, hot, satiny mouth stroking the most vulnerable part of him.
He had to tell him to stop. He couldn’t tell him to stop.
And then it was too late. He was coming in his pants, feeling the wetness and the hot shame. He felt exposed.
“Arthur?” Eames asked. “Are you allright?”
He leapt away from Eames, standing up.
“This was a mistake. You have to go.”
