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When Eames shambles into the safe house outside of London—which tends to double as an office considering how much traffic it gets amongst the six of them—he finds a red light blinking on the phone. He eyes it, then throws his coat over the back of a chair, slouches into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, and returns to collapse on the couch, stretching out. Lazily, he reaches out a hand and punches the play button, then tilts his head back and closes his eyes.
The first message is from Dom, short and simple, the gist of which is dammit Eames, stop burning your cell phones, I’ve got a job for you. The second is from Ariadne, meant for Saito, and he grins when he hears her say: Saito, fire your secretary, bitch hung up on me again and I’m going to start charging you for every minute I have to spend listening to her voice. He only half-listens to the rest of that message and completely tunes out the third, which is from Yusuf to Dom about a new chemical he’s developing.
The fourth one, left barely twenty minutes earlier, is from Arthur.
“Well, I was hoping to catch at least one of you, because god knows none of you can stay out of trouble,” Arthur says, and Eames grins without opening his eyes. “But I’m sure one of you will show up soon enough and hear this. It will probably be you, Eames. You had to know that the Halliway deal was going to go south, that’s why none of the rest of us would touch it. Idiot.” Eames snorts. Arthur is absolutely correct, of course, and the Halliway deal did go south, ergo his presence in safe house number five. “Just stay low for a couple of weeks, and don’t get into trouble.”
“Yes mum,” Eames grumbles aloud, and wishes that Arthur were here so that they could do their routine of nagging-and-insults in person. (It is much better in person, mostly because it tends to end in heavy groping.)
Arthur’s message continues. “Whoever gets this first though, make sure the others hear it as well?”
Eames opens his eyes and very slowly starts to sit up.
“Yusuf, open the clinic. Ask Saito for the funding, you know he'll give it to you. If anyone is going to make the advancements, it's you. Saito, give him the funding. And stop buying us expensive things for no reason—we’re past the point where bribery is keeping us around. You would have to pay us to get us to leave. Dom…you are one of the most infuriating men that I have ever met, but you are also one of the best I have ever known. Tell James and Phillipa that their uncle Arthur loves them.”
Eames leans forward, grasping the edge of the cushion tightly and trying to push down the panic. This is a goodbye. He knows goodbyes when he hears them, has heard them while holding dying men, has said them himself a few times in impossible situations. Arthur doesn’t believe in goodbyes, he knows, not unless he is sure.
Arthur’s voice keeps talking, and Eames becomes suddenly aware of the low background noise, a dull roar, a choked scream, a sob, all of it distant, nearly hidden beneath the timbre of Arthur’s speech. Arthur himself sounds perfectly composed, but now that he is paying attention, Eames recognizes the tension in his voice, the strictly controlled calm. It terrifies him. “Ariadne,” Arthur says, “you are brilliant. Don’t ever let yourself think otherwise, because without you, we wouldn't be what we are. You made us..." he pauses. Eames can picture him, with that short, sharp shake of his head, the frustrated can't the get words out one. "Keep an eye on everyone—we know better than anyone else that they’re all hopeless.”
Arthur takes a breath, the sound of it ragged over the phone. “Eames,” he says, and Eames digs his fingernails into the fabric beneath him, holding tight, because if he doesn’t he might tip fully into this nightmarish realm where Arthur is saying goodbye and means it. “Remember Sydney, Eames.”
Fuck, he thinks wildly, followed immediately by no. He remembers Sydney, of course he does. Sydney is everything. Sydney is sunsets and sunrises and time slowing between the two, until everything is gold-washed and red and perfect. Sydney is firsts: the pressure of lips that are soft and warm, the heat of flesh as clothing falls away from it, the slick wet slide of Arthur’s tongue down the curve of his neck, the quick, sure movements of fingers, the stretching moments where there was nothing but them. Sydney is sunlight and no guns, no games, no dreams. Sydney is reality, more than any totem can ever certify. Sydney is I need you, I want you, I missed you. Sydney is I love you.
Sydney is goodbye.
“No,” he says, surprised to hear it aloud, but he supposes that screaming it inside his head is enough to make it emerge.
“I—“ Arthur says, his voice faltering, “you’ll find a notebook hidden above the third ceiling tile to the left of the door in my bedroom in the flat in Paris. Eames, you know where it is. It has everything you’ll need. I just—I want you all to know what you mean to me. I—“ his voice breaks into a low, guttural sob and Eames reaches instinctively for the phone, reaches to offer comfort, reaches to help and ends up with his hand hovering over the phone receiver, paused in mid-air. In the background, the roaring gets louder. “Goodbye,” Arthur says, his voice shaking.
There is a long pause, filled with the sound of the roar, an ominous bang, and a muffled sound like fingers fumbling to find the disconnect button, before there is a click and then nothing at all.
Eames stares at the phone. He cannot move, can barely breath, cannot find what is necessary for motion or functional thought. He just thinks of course I remember Sydney, you stupid fuck and I’m going to kill you when I get my hands on you and he said goodbye, he never says goodbye and this is not real.
The phone rings, the sound shrill and startling. He jumps to answer it, sure that it can only be one person. Of course it’s Arthur, Arthur who will feel like a complete idiot for being so over-dramatic and Eames will immediately go find him, fish him out of whatever mess he’s in, yell at him, and then press him to a bed and hold him tight and not let go.
“Arthur, you fucking idiot—“ he growls into the receiver.
“Eames,” Ariadne cuts him off before he can get any further, her voice unusually grave. His fingers tighten around the phone and his mind gives a curious dizzying lurch, one that makes him blink away black spots that swim before his eyes. “Turn on the news.”
“Ari—“
“It’s about the plane that Arthur is supposed to be on.”
No. “What?” he says, refusing to give voice to the terror that is screaming inside of him.
“It went down, Eames. His plane went down.” Ariadne’s voice cracks.
Goodbye, he hears Arthur say. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, he hears over and over again, his mind putting it on loop until he is drowning in that single word, in the way that Arthur’s voice wavers and breaks, in the gasping little breath that he takes, in the choked sob at the end because Arthur has to be perfectly controlled even when he’s fucking about to die.
The phone hits the wall and breaks, clattering to the ground. Eames stares at his now empty hands, can’t remember the action of throwing it, just knows that Ariadne’s voice has been cut off the same way that Arthur’s was and that he is now alone. He sits perfectly still for a moment, and everything around him is quiet, even his own mind.
He reaches across and hits the play button on the machine.
He needs to hear it again. He needs to hear Arthur. He needs to listen to his voice and pretend that it’s not true, that none of it is real.
“Well, I was hoping to catch at least one of you—“ Arthur’s voice says, and Eames closes his eyes.
“No,” he whispers aloud. “No.”
(Arthur’s voice keeps saying goodbye, no matter how many times he plays it.)