When I Paint My Masterpiece

[ifeelbetter]

Title: When I Paint My Masterpiece
Author: ifeelbetter
Warning: Rome (and my love of Rome) features prominently in this fic. And my past as an art student.
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value besides one truly awesome ukulele.
Word Count: 4,666
Summary: Arthur is and art student trying to learn something important from a trip to Italy. Eames messes with his plans.
Notes: Prompt from inception_kink meme: One of them is an artist and needs a muse.
The title comes from Bob Dylan. Unlike other fic that I title from song lyrics, this song had a LOT to do with the fic as I was writing it.



Trevi Fountain was less impressive in person, Arthur decided. He tilted his head to one side, trying to see the traces of magic that had made people believe that a virgin's guiding hand had to be involved in its creation. He straightened his head and tilted it in the other direction. He saw the celebration Pope Nichols V meant him to see but he didn't feel it.

Maybe you had to be there, he thought. He was a dutiful art student (unwilling to call himself "artist" until it felt like more like a profession than a major) so he did what all the other aspiring artists were doing in Rome: he pulled out his sketchpad and, mechanically, began to reproduce the fountain in simple graphite lines.

It felt ridiculous, like it always did, to bend over a pad of paper and pretend the world wasn't buzzing around his ears. They were statues. He couldn't believe they should be flattened and stretched by a student's pencil but he did it anyway. He did it because that's what you do.

A coin flipped over his head, spinning through the air and landing in the water with a splash. A drop or two landed on the middle of Arthur's sketch.

"Hey!" he protested. He turned to see who threw it (not to show his anger, really, more to give a dirty look and then to go back to his sketching) but found the breath catch in his throat.

"Sorry, mate," said the man (British, of course British), not apologetic at all, "But it's what you do, right? Can't stand in front of the Trevi fucking Fountain and not make a wish? Am I right?"

"It's not a wish," Arthur corrected. "Tossing a coin is supposed to guarantee a return trip. The fountain predates Three Coins in the Fountain, you know."

The man laughed, shading his eyes to look closer at Arthur. "You have no romance in your soul." He paused. "People don't wish on coins in fountains because it makes sense, you know. We do it because--strictly because--it doesn't."

Arthur snorted and moved back to his drawing.

The man took a couple of steps closer, craning his neck to see Arthur's sketch. "I suppose you know all the history and facts and whatnot about the fountain, then?" he asked, making it sound like the most tremendous waste of time.

"As a matter of fact, I do," said Arthur, bristling.

"Memorized it like a good little schoolboy, I bet," said the man. "But you don't know why you're drawing it. You don't see what the hype was all about now that you're standing in front of it."

Arthur looked up sharply. "This is the largest Baroque fountain in the city--" he started to say.

"But you're missing the magic, darling," the man said. He held a hand towards Arthur. "I'm Eames, by the by."

Arthur took the hand and shook it before his brain had a chance to stop him. "Arthur."

"Well--Arthur--" Eames dragged out his name like he thought it might be a lie or like his just enjoyed the way the syllables stretched across his lips, "May I be so bold as to offer a cure?"

"I'm not sick."

"Nonetheless. I prescribe a healthy dose of romance."

"I bet you do."

"Go find yourself an Anita Ekberg and then at least you'll understand La Dolce Vita. That'll bring you at least three steps closer to understanding why students ought to sketch themselves a copy of the Trevi Fountain when they find themselves fortuitously in Rome." Eames grinned, pulling a pair of aviator sunglasses from the pocket of his jacket.

"I have seen La Dolce Vita, you know," said Arthur.

"There's seeing and then there's seeing," Eames said, turning his back to Arthur and beginning to walk away. Then, absurdly, he began to sing as he walked: O partigiano, portami via, o bella, ciao!

Arthur was torn between blushing, fuming, and fiddling with a coin in the pocket of his jeans. He settled for tearing the page off his sketchpad, wadding it up, and tossing it into the fountain. Then he started a new sketch, one that had nothing much to do with the Trevi Fountain but had everything to do with smirks and irritation.

* * *

Arthur tried the Forum the next day because it was the next thing on his list of Important Things in Rome. There were echoes of what Eames had said the day before in his head, though, and he found himself watching the people filing around the grassy ruins as much as he sketched the ruins themselves.

"Closer, but still not what the doctor ordered," said a voice behind him. Arthur jumped--he couldn't stop himself. "Do forgive me, pet," Eames said, "I didn't mean to frighten you."

"You didn't," Arthur lied obstinately.

"You're watching the people, Arthur, but you're not falling in love. I think I told you to fall in love," Eames said, sitting down beside Arthur and pulling his sketchpad out of his hands.

"Why would I do as you tell me?" Arthur asked. He grabbed for his sketchpad but Eames moved it out of his reach.

"Don't be pedestrian, you're better than that," Eames chided cheerfully. He paused on one of the sketches, his attention shifted just long enough for Arthur to steal the pad back. "You're better than I thought you'd be," Eames conceded.

"And you thought I'd be mediocre based on...?"

"Based on the fact you were born yesterday," Eames said. "What are you, ten? Twelve?"

"I'm not a child, Mr. Eames," Arthur protested. "I'm twenty-three."

"And yet you call me Mister Eames. Like a child calls their teacher."

"Like polite people call strangers whose given names they don't know."

"Point." Eames settled back, leaning languidly. It was late in the day and the light was beginning to fade, making long shadows creep up the spot of grass they were sitting on. Neither spoke for a while and Arthur turned the page in his sketchpad, surreptitiously making a copy of Eames.

He wasn't getting the angles right and the curve of the neck was all wrong but he was working fast. He hardly ever drew if he didn't intend absolute fidelity to nature but this was different. This was a man whose name he didn't really know in a city he didn't really understand and he wanted some piece of that on he page.

"In my line of work," Eames said, breaking the silence, "I study people too. And I ...reproduce them, in a way. A lot like what you do, I think."

He paused long enough that Arthur wasn't sure whether he would continue without provocation. But he didn't know what to say. "Oh?"

"I've found that accuracy is over-rated. To breathe life into the copy, you have to let go of the details. You have to..." He struggled for a word and Arthur thought it looked like someone who had the perfect word in mind but can't remember it.

"You can never reproduce reality, Mr. Eames. Art holds up the mirror to life and all but there's still glass in between," he said. He looked back at Eames and realized he'd lost his attention. Eames was watching an obnoxious American couple annoy a tour guide.

"I'm afraid duty calls," Eames said, not taking his eyes off the couple (as the woman poked the tour guide with the tip of her bright red umbrella). He stood and stretched. "We'll have to do this again sometime."

Arthur shrugged. "I'm going home in five days," he said.

He liked the way that brought Eames's attention back to him. "I'll find you before then," Eames promised.

"But you don't know my last name or where I'm staying or where I'll be--" Arthur started to say.

Unlike Arthur, Eames only shrugged with one shoulder and he did it nonchalantly where Arthur's had been sullen. "I'll just prowl around famous works of art from now till Tuesday," he said. "Bound to run into you somewhere or other."

"That is just statistically untrue," Arthur pointed out but Eames was already sauntering away. Arthur watched him move toward the tour group and begin to hang around the edges. If he hadn't been sitting next to Eames when he'd made eye contact with the obnoxious couple, he'd never have been able to pick out the pattern in Eames's behavior, to catch the way he seemed to be circling around them.

He shook hid head and ignored the group as they passed out of the Forum, back to their tour bus, an Eames casually in tow.

That night, he drew dozens of rough sketches (five minutes to a page, if that) of the way Eames's mouth quirked up at the side and the way his left ankle had sat easily hooked over his right.

* * *

Out of spite (or something he was less willing to acknowledge), Arthur hid in his hotel room the next day and pulled out his watercolors. He could do with a day in and all of his shirts had graphite smudges up the arms. It was nice to change his medium for a day.

But he painted Eames, just as he had done the rough pencil sketches. They flew out from under him, whether he wanted them to or not. He'd been criticized through all of his training for being too slow and meticulous. His teach from the after-school class he'd taken in high school would have jumped for joy if he could have seen the way Arthur was filling pages and pages, rapid-fire, now.

It had been that teacher he'd been quoting, the day before, when he told Eames that art can be a mirror to life but it can't be life. He'd had that lecture from every teacher he'd ever had. He knew it by heart by this point.

But Eames hadn't wanted to replicate reality, had he? Surely not. Even Arthur knew better and he'd once spent three days trying to get the perfect angle in his drawing of a piece of gypsum. Arthur thought of it as aiming high: you try for complete accuracy but the artist is doomed to eternal failure.

But Eames was looking back at him, now, from every page and there was nothing accurate about any of these fast-paced drawings.

He was getting lost in his own head by the late afternoon so he decided to go out, have a drink, and pretend he wasn't an artist for the rest of the evening.

He found a bar down a back alley that looked off-the-beaten-path enough to suit his sensibilities. It had red clay walls and a blinking side over the front door that said, simply, "BAR." There wasn't room for more than one or two tables in the street outside but they weren't full and Arthur claimed one.

He wasn't all the surprised when Eames sauntered down the street. He ought to have been surprised, he told himself. But he wasn't.

"Off the clock, then?" Eames said. "No sketching past 5PM?"

"Something like that," Arthur said.

"I see you've moved on to paint." Eames tapped his own nose when Arthur raised an eyebrow at him. "You've got cerulean on your nose."

Arthur rubbed at his nose and found that he did, indeed, have some leftover cerulean blue on his nose. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it."

Arthur took a sip of the wine, watching Eames watch him. "Are you off the clock?" he asked. He thought it sounded bold.

"For the moment, yes." Eames's eyes narrowed slightly. "I wonder what you think I do."

"What makes you think I think anything about what you do?" Arthur asked. Eames seemed to like the answer.

"What was the cerulean for?" Eames asked, jolting the topic onwards and upwards. "The water at the Trevi Fountain? The sky over the Forum?"

"Could be."

"You haven't taken my advice and fallen in love with a blue-eyed siren, have you?"

"No."

"So no 'eyes like the sea after a storm' in today's painting?"

"Grown men don't quote The Princess Bride, Eames," Arthur said haughtily.

"Grown men don't recognize quotes from The Princess Bride, then. Oh, wait. I suppose you're excluded from that rule because you're a cherub."

"I'm plenty grown," Arthur said. He had no grasp on the conversation. It was like trying to hold a snake or a hose that kept whipping away without him.

"I don't suppose you'd let me do some exploratory research to prove the point?" Eames asked, leering. Arthur had never seen such baldfaced leering before.

"No."

"Worth a try." Eames drained his wine. "Come along, pet, places to go."

"Where are we going?" Arthur asked without seeing that his phrasing had implied agreement.

"Everywhere. I've only got your for four more days, I'd be a fool to settle for less than everything Rome has to offer." Eames reached threw a couple notes down on the table and started walking down the cobblestoned street.

Arthur was following him before he realized he had made the decision to. Something about Eames made him feel in technicolor, even if it was just annoyance. It wasn't but even if it had been simple annoyance, Arthur would have reveled in just that.

* * *

Arthur really did wonder what kind of career prepared Eames with the skills necessary to break into the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in the middle of the night. He lit a candle and cupped his hand over the tiny flame as he and Arthur walked as quietly as possible through the echoing chapel.

Arthur had to keep wondering when it turned out that Eames knew who Saint Catherine of Siena was, could quote her, and could point the way towards her tomb with a jerk of his head.

"Why do you know that?" Arthur asked. He figured it was better to ask than to wonder.

"Know what?" Eames asked, his voice hushed.

"That thing. The quote. What was it?"

"She said, 'Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee.' She was talking to her confessor."

"That. Why do you know that?" Arthur asked.

"It came up. Professionally," Eames said, mysteriously. Arthur tried not to show how curious he was on his face but probably, judging by Eames's smirk, he didn't succeed.

"Fine. Don't tell me," he said peevishly.

"Don't be petulant, darling. It'll only encourage me," Eames said. He handed the candle to Arthur and pulled a flask out of his pocket. "You are legal to drink, aren't you?"

"Fuck off," said Arthur, taking the proffered flask. He took an extra long swig from it before handing it back, just to show he could.

They sat on the floor beside Michelangelo Buonarroti's Christ Redeemed and passed the flask back and forth, the candle flickering on the floor in front of them. Arthur tried to memorize the way the light played on Eames's face so that he could get the perfect color for the shadow on his throat. He kept losing the conversation--the wild jumps Eames kept making that seemed meant as traps and coaxes at the same time--until he gave up, forgot to memorize the colors and shapes.

That was when he allowed Eames to goad him into honest laughter. And he kept ducking his head to hide the broad, silly smile he kept finding on his own face.

When Eames left him, much later, and he made his way back to hotel room, he found that he'd memorized the scene anyway, even without trying.

* * *

Eames showed him how to drink proper espresso the next day, shouting across a crowd of people in butchered Italian. They spent the rest of the day walking, no destination in mind.

Eames showed no signs of leaving again, not like those first two days when he'd been "working." Arthur's curiosity grew and grew but he bit his tongue. He was enjoying himself, more than he ever had before, and he was starting to wonder how delicate the precarious balance he and Eames had struck was. He started to wonder whether three days was enough for...whatever it was.

* * *

When Arthur opened his hotel door the next day, he found Eames asleep on the floor. He was sitting with his back against the wall, his head nodding forwards slightly, his knees drawn up.

Arthur poked him with his foot.

"This could be interpreted as stalker behavior," he pointed out.

Eames yawned broadly. "Sorry, pet, there was a misunderstanding at the office. I just wanted to make sure no one...got the wrong idea about you."

"Me? What do I have to do with anything?" Arthur held a hand out.

Eames took it but stood mostly on his own steam, leaving his hand just sort of sitting in Arthur's. "Honestly, I don't really know," Eames said.

And that was an answer Arthur could have devoted a lot of brainpower to if Eames would give him the breathing space.

"You're not mafia, are you?" he asked, just to be sure.

"No."

"But you slept outside my door in case the guy in the cubicle next to yours thinks I'm in on whatever it is you do."

"That about sums it up, yes."

Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. The outline of what Eames did outside of the past three days was shaping up into something that Arthur, as a clever young man whose mother raised him right, ought to have been running away from. He knew it, he could see where the fear should be, but he wasn't feeling it. Not in the slightest.

"Can I paint you?" he said. He'd meant to say something about breakfast.

Eames's face was hard to read. It looked like the perfect midway point between something affectionate and something utterly perplexed.

"Do you dream?" Eames asked.

Arthur blinked. His question had been weird, granted, but Eames's seemed weirder.

"Of course I dream," he said. "Everyone dreams."

"What do you dream about, I wonder?" Eames asked, more to himself than Arthur.

"I hardly ever remember them." Arthur was beginning to wonder if this was Eames's way of saying no.

"Why'd you want to paint me, Arthur?" Eames asked. "What does that mean to you? I know what I want from people I make copies of but I don't know what it means to you."

"I don't want to make a copy of you. That's not what a painting is." Arthur felt a bit stupid saying something so obvious.

"Isn't it?" Eames was still holding Arthur's hand and Arthur had almost forgotten about it until he ran his thumb, just-so-slightly, back and forth.

"Why did you ask me if I dream?"

"Why did you ask me if you could paint me? You never asked before."

Ah. So Eames knew Arthur had been surreptitiously drawing him. He would have had to be blind to miss it, now that Arthur thought about it. "I only have you for two more days," he said.

Eames chuckled. "Yeah, alright. Go on and paint me."

* * *

"I wouldn't mind doing the full monty," Eames said. "We could go all Titanic with this."

"Shut up. I just want your face." Arthur threw a wadded up piece of paper at him.

"Oh, Arthur. You should have said."

"Shut up." Arthur raised an eyebrow at Eames. "And keep still."

"I can't keep still when I'm this thoroughly bored." Eames stuck out his tongue.

"So tell me what you do. When you make your copies of people." Arthur met Eames's eyes over the edge of his canvas. "Tell me all about your way, the one that's so much less boring than mine."

"I'm not so mechanical about it, for one thing," Eames said. "You think you're painting with the paintbrush and the paints and the canvas. I know better."

"Oh?"

"If I were...reproducing you, for example," Eames said and Arthur noted the euphemism, wondered what reproducing was shorthand for, "I'd never keep you across the room from me. I'd keep you where I could touch you, somewhere close enough to see all your details."

"That doesn't seem very productive. Painting has to be about the product. I can't paint you by not painting."

"My way's not so much about the visible. It's about the shape of the person, really. The way I work, it's more important to know whether a man puts his socks on before his trousers than it is to know what color his trousers are, if you know what I'm saying."

Arthur carefully laid his brush on the table. "I don't know what you're saying," he admitted.

"Let's say you see a friend on the street, someone you don't expect to see in Rome, someone you haven't seen in years," Eames said. "It's not their clothes or their hair that you recognize, right? Those things change. It's something more fundamental, something that can't change, that you recognize."

"Are you talking about souls now?" Arthur asked. He had moved to the side of the easel, leaning against the table. He was watching Eames entirely, fidgeting in his own attentiveness.

"No, not quite. I don't know if I know anything about souls. I'm talking about pieces of a person that change and pieces that don't." Eames was watching Arthur carefully but, as he had been told, not moving. He was like a cat hunting.

"Whether a man puts his trousers on before his socks is a thing that doesn't change? But the trousers themselves do? Is that what you're saying?"

"Exactly." Eames was still watching him and Arthur found himself edging closer. "If I saw you, even in twenty years time, I'd recognize you. I'd know you by the way you tuck your hair behind your ear or the way you cover your smiles or the way you aim higher than you ever expect to achieve."

"Superficial, Eames. All your points are superficial. And useless. You can't paint a man putting on his socks before his trousers." Arthur was standing directly in front of Eames then.

"I never said I was a painter."

Arthur had worn a tie that day because that shirt seemed to need one. He was glad of it, then, when Eames used it to pull him down towards him.

* * *

Arthur had never felt like such a cliche before. Since he was an art student who decided to fly to Italy to study at the feet of the masters, this was saying something. But a whirlwind romance with a swarthy foreigner with a dark secret on his week-long trip abroad? That was a bit much, even for him.

So, after a lot of in between (and there was quite a lot of it--on the floor beside Arthur's easel, in the hallway, on the sofa, then, finally, in the bedroom), Arthur took stock of his situation.

Thirteen hours left.

He still didn't know Eames's first name. He knew tons, epic amounts, really, about him but he didn't have the basics down.

"You're some kind of con man, aren't you?" he asked. His head was resting in the crook of Eames's arm, Eames's fingers weaving through his hair.

"More or less," Eames said. "But not quite."

"It's something dangerous, though."

"Yes." Eames craned his head to look at Arthur's face. "Does that bother you?"

The answer should have been a yes. "No."

"You're a strange one," said Eames affectionately. "A bit mad, even."

"You're one to talk."

Eames chuckled. Arthur didn't bother to hide the smile that spread across his face.

"I'm leaving in thirteen hours," Arthur said.

Eames pressed a kiss into his temple. "I know."

* * *

Arthur's flight had a layover in Brussels. There was turbulence through the entire first leg of the journey, making Arthur's stomach churn. The plane was too cramped and his knees were bumped viciously by the flight attendant's trolley more times than Arthur could count on one side and the grumpy man on his other side.

A baby began to cry at the back of the plane. Arthur wondered why he'd bothered to get up that morning.

* * *

His teachers waxed poetic about his new style. They said he was darker than he had been before and some remarked, with smug satisfaction, on the speed of his lines.

And Eames had been right. The pieces of him that showed up in Arthur's dreams weren't the changeable things, like the vivid (and horrific) yellow shirt or the greasy part of his hair. It was something a lot more ethereal. It was like there were edges of a smirk around corners and coins that glittered in arches over Arthur's head. He could hear the coin land in the water, could feel the spray (too much spray, really) on his fingers but he'd turn and no one would be standing where Eames ought to have been.

He wondered if his dreams had always been this fragmented.

It was the edges of Eames that made it into the painting. It turned out that you can paint the way a man puts on his trousers before his socks (Arthur had seen that for himself, that last morning). It just has to happen out of the corner of your eye.

* * *


There came an evening when Arthur's art was displayed for all the world (or the elite upper echelon of New York's art crowd) to see. Arthur found he couldn't be bothered to attend after all, no matter what his mother or the gallery owner had shouted at him through his phone.

He was in his studio instead, sitting on the floor and chewing on the end of one of his brushes.

He didn't hear the door open or the footsteps cross the room towards him. The first he knew of Eames being in the room was the candle, already lit, that he put on the floor in front of Arthur.

"Most people show up for their own exhibition," Eames pointed out. "If one is being fêted, one ought to be there for the fête."

"Maybe I hate cheese squares," Arthur said.

There was an angry bruise healing on Eames's jawline. "Maybe you're just emo," Eames said.

Arthur ran a finger across the bruise, careful not to press. Eames still drew his breath sharply. "Hard day at the office?" Arthur asked.

"Something like that," Eames said. His grin was still there, the cocky one, but Arthur could see hesitancy in the edges of it. Maybe he could see the corners of Eames better now because that was all he'd had, in his dreams.

"Arthur, I--" Eames started to say, sounding all serious and Arthur couldn't let that stand. So he took hold of Eames's lapels (tweed, for fuck's sake) and pulled him towards him, kissing him solidly.

"Did you want to stay this time?" he asked bluntly.

"This time, Arthur? If I remember correctly, you did the leaving last time."

"This time, next time, whatever," Arthur said. "Are you staying?"

"I really am dangerous, darling. You'd never be safe."

"I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Don't be pedestrian, Mr. Eames."

"I'll be secretive and bring home the worst ruffians you'll ever meet. Your mother will hate me."

Arthur shrugged. "Irrelevant. Try harder."

Eames sighed. "I didn't come here to try to convince you not to take me, you know."

"That's the spirit," Arthur said, grinning.

* * *

It turned out almost all of Eames's warnings were moot. Arthur fit right into the little team Eames worked with and, once the concept had had enough time to sink in, was wonderfully adept at the lessons in militarizing his subconscious. The only time someone did manage to sneak into Arthur's dreams, they were quickly slaughtered by gleefully violent (and fantastically well-armed) projections.

But mostly he painted and Eames forged and, in between, they made a really impressive masterpiece.



I AM NOW UP-TO-DATE WITH MY KINK_MEME FICS. JUST IN TIME FOR THE NEXT ROUND, WHAT.

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