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The thing is, they might be about to die.
Eames presses his back to the back of a hopefully-sturdy crate and listens to the sound of gunfire and wishes for numerous things, like a time machine or a teleportation device or a gun that hasn't run out of bullets. Or that his heartbeat weren't so deafeningly loud.
Arthur, having ducked behind the same crate as Eames for much the same reason, mutters something unpleasant about their client, his father and a splintered piece of wood. That their client is at the source of the twenty armed persons who burst into their warehouse-workplace some minutes previously is only a guess, but it's a good guess and in moments like this, it's nice to have a named individual to curse.
"Vicious," Eames says, and Arthur cocks him a grim slant of a smile.
And it's probably adrenaline. Adrenaline and fear and the need to cling to life. Adrenaline and that smile, and the heat of a mutual passion that's come through its early, anxious fervour and now burns with a strong, consistent flame. Or it's a demon or malefic deity that briefly takes control of Eames' voice -- which might be more likely, because what he says is out of keeping with everything he thinks about the world.
He says, "When we get out of this, let's get married."
And the even greater mystery, the real testament to the force of fear and hot blood against the brain, is that Arthur presses his palm to the back of Eames' hand on the floor, his palm wet, his touch all conviction, and he says, "Yeah, we should."
*
They get out alive -- as does the rest of the team -- and relatively unharmed. It's a bit of a miracle. They split up for three weeks and then rendezvous in a bar in another country, where they drink to continued existence and their extractor, who picks up the tab. Back at Arthur's hotel room, deep into the night, Eames sprawls across the foot of the bed in his clothes and falls asleep with Arthur slumped half on top of him, both too drunk to fuck.
Eames wakes in the morning to the sound of someone else's alarm through the wall, and stays awake, despite his contrary efforts. He feels sticky and stiff, but not too badly hungover. He takes a shower and then, feeling generous, he wakes Arthur up with a good-morning blowjob. Neither has mentioned Eames' proposal and, as the days and then weeks and months go by, neither does.
*
It takes, to be precise, one year, one month and seventeen days. They're in Goa, lying low after a job gone right, indulging in heat and beauty and nothing to do. Eames lounges in a sofa and watches Arthur, who is lying on his front on the floor, knees bent, ankles crossed, English-language newspaper spread in front of him, eyes narrow, head at a tilt. The air conditioning runs meekly against the midday sun. Eames' thoughts come slow and thick as syrup.
He reminisces, aloud, about old jobs. The divergent and similar features of warehouses around the world, and the various whims of architects. Arthur says little, but interjects here and there with corrections. The pages of his paper begin to go unturned.
It's a natural progression, for Eames, from jobs in general to near-misses and narrow escapes, which leads him to one particular escape, one year and one month and seventeen days ago. He cuts off at the thought of his proposal, and the silence lacks the hazy, heat-steeped quality it formerly held.
Arthur turns onto his back, arms crossed beneath his head, and says, "Was it something you wanted? To get married?"
Eames would say no, it never has been, except that he remembers the high, clear pitch of his certainty in that one, strange moment -- he has remembered it often -- and although marriage itself is not precious to him, he thinks, here is something that might be. And though he could still say that it was nothing, with Arthur, he can't or won't.
He laughs. "Your proposal lacks something on mine."
Arthur shrugs a lazy, full-body shrug. "Did you want a ring in a cake?"
"No," says Eames, "I want it written across the sky."
And -- it is an easy course for them to take -- this remark sets off an extended discussion on the practicalities and aesthetic virtues of skywriting as a means of marriage proposal, in comparison with other and homelier methods.
*
"Ring in the bathroom -- around the neck of my toothbrush, in the morning," Eames suggests, on a flight to Jakarta the next week.
"Too mundane," Arthur says, without looking away from the aeroplane window.
"Tastefully unshowy. Romantic, but with a sense of humour. A playful wink at the conventionality of modern courtship."
Arthur hmms and appears to consider either Eames' reasoning or the scenery. "Ring on the dresser," he eventually says. "With a post-it note saying, 'engagement ring,' and an arrow."
"Too pleased with itself," says Eames. "Too knowing. But better than a cake, I'll grant you."
*
"I could stage another life-or-death situation," Arthur suggests, at the Jakarta airport baggage claim. "A group of armed men and lots of shooting. And resilient crates."
"If I wasn't in on the plan, I might shoot someone," Eames points out.
"I'd pay extra to allow for the risk." Arthur's expression is solemn -- almost perfect, except for a thin gleam of amusement in his eyes.
"I'm sure you would." Eames heaves a melodramatic sigh. "But even so, it would never be the same. It would feel stale, a second time."
Arthur's face changes momentarily, so that he looks as though he's trying to decide something, or even as though he wonders if Eames could be serious, at his heart. And then he says, "Unless you did shoot someone," and Eames, surprised, barks out a laugh.
*
The following Tuesday, they spend a considerable amount of time discussing puzzle-proposals. They're in the tedious early stages of an extraction -- Eames has been watching hour upon hour upon hour of surveillance footage of the mark walking down streets and occasionally into buildings; Arthur has been buried in reams of credit card bills. They're in relative privacy: Ariadne is currently plugged into the PASIV, while their extractor, Kikani, is in an adjoining room, deeply absorbed in a phone conversation with her preferred chemist -- who will be making a delivery but not joining them on the job -- over compounds and pricing.
"There must be a way," Eames says, "of encoding, 'will you marry me?' into a killer sudoku."
Between them, he and Arthur come up with seven. The sixth, in particular, is quite ingenious.
"But I think a crossword," Arthur says, "might be more suitable."
"Romance-themed?" Eames says.
"No."
"It could be ironically cheesy."
"Definitely no," Arthur says. "Maybe not a crossword."
"Kama sutra-themed, perhaps," Eames says, and then a slight motion catches the corner of his eye, and he turns and sees Ariadne, now in the waking world, sitting neatly upon her recliner, spectating.
"This is interesting," she says.
"Oh," Eames says. He explains: "An ongoing joke."
"Ah," says Ariadne.
Arthur goes back to work, or pretends to.
Eames slouches back in his chair, puts his feet up on his table, and does his utmost best -- which is excellent -- to exude a total absence of awkwardness and discomfort. "If you ever need to propose to someone," he says, "we're becoming quite the experts."
*
The joke persists.
It becomes a sort of hobby. Arthur starts collecting articles about creative and unusual proposals, organised electronically with a handy tagging system. Eames looks into mid-twentieth century encryption methods, which are fascinating in their own right, he tells several people, and which would lend any proposal a lovely vintage sheen.
Every couple should have shared interests. In addition to sex.
They spend a whole week, on and off, tossing about ideas for proposing whilst skydiving. The expense, the extravagance, the danger and the thrill of it all seem very them. Eames is particularly taken with the thought that they could steal the plane -- he's sure they could convince someone, or pay them enough, to drive it.
By the end of the week, however, both he and Arthur are hankering for something more down to earth. Messages on the radio, perhaps. Or a scavenger hunt in Kruger Park.
*
They go eight months kept apart. It's just the way things turn out -- the only way to avoid it would be for one of them to go a long while without work, which neither wants for himself or the other. Eames wonders, at the back of his mind, if this could end things between them. He tries not to think about it. He very much hopes not.
They keep in touch, though their conversations are full of blanks for the things they can't say about their respective jobs. Eames wants to tell Arthur about Ariadne's dreamscapes, their paradoxes and sharp realism, but he can't even mention that she's there.
They neither of them even knows where the other is, quite exactly. They've agreed that it's best if they don't. Eames listens hungrily for clues in Arthur's bland remarks on his hotel room and the quality of the coffee.
They come up with a number of proposal ideas to suit their current situation, and begin testing them out.
The highlight, for Eames, comes six months in. Arthur sends an encrypted message that can only be solved with reference to the section from five minutes and twelve seconds to six minutes exactly in the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra's recording of Finlandia. Decrypted, the message reads, ROMANTIC OFFER OF MARRIAGE. For the following few weeks, Eames can't stop humming snippets of Finlandia, and of Sibelius' second and fifth symphonies, too, both of which he's very fond of.
Ariadne catches him plotting a reply whose encryption will depend on certain differences between the Ashkenazy and the Ravel orchestrations of Pictures at an Exhibition. He's in the warehouse at night -- he likes the expanse of it -- and she's popped back, having left hours ago, for a spot of insomniac dreaming.
She looks thoughtfully at Eames' workspace, and he doesn't attempt to hide the sheet of paper on which he's written, PASSIONATE AGREEMENT TO WED.
She sits herself on a table, crosses her legs and says, "You two," and leans forward on her elbows, as if to get a closer look at the nature of Arthur and Eames' relationship. "Marriage never seemed like your thing."
Eames laughs and agrees, "It isn't."
"But that's a lot of work to put into a kind of joke," Ariadne says.
The three encryption programmes running on Eames' computer, as well as the scribbled notes, sheets of music and three books on Modest Mussorgsky with which he's surrounded himself, somewhat bear her out.
"It's just--" She leans further forwards, and presses her lips together. "Yusuf is running a pool on whether you're actually going to do it -- um, get married -- and when."
"Don't put money on it," Eames advises.
"Thanks." She grins. "Don't tell him I asked." And she heads off to the PASIV and leaves Eames to his codes.
If Eames didn't rather like Yusuf -- and rather depend upon his goodwill and chemical talents -- he would now proceed to find out everything he can about this pool, and work out how to game it to maximum remunerative advantage. As it is, he only emails Yusuf to tell him that he's relying awfully heavily on their friendship, and to ask for a cut in the profits.
*
In June, they go to Lapland for nine white nights. Eames likes the lucent, sleepless feel the world takes in the far north at this time. It has an aching reality that gets him forgetting his totem, or why he would need one. And Arthur, too, seems to relish the endless light.
It takes some doing, but for their last but one day, Eames orders samples of twenty different kinds of cake to be delivered to their idyllic log cabin. He and Arthur have, in the course of continued shared wit, collected a fair few potential engagement rings by now, and they try out how they would look embedded in the various types of crumb, and consider what the pitfalls of baking a ring in a cake might be.
Eames phones his brother for the first time in over a year and gets the recipe for a cake his parents used to make, and swallows his nostalgia, or tries. He and Arthur mix up the batter and sink one of their rings into its centre, in the tin. It sinks all the way down in the process of baking, and when they upend the finished cake onto a plate, the ring peeps through the surface. It looks foolish and sweet.
The cake itself is not bad, if not the cake of Eames' childhood. They eat a small amount, having already eaten a quite large amount of cake overall.
Of course, the cake-proposal genre is unoriginal and tired. This kind of proposal could never be for them, they both agree; even if either of them felt a serious, well-considered will to propose, this wouldn't be how he would do it.
It's nice to think about, though, somehow. A restaurant or a balcony at sunset, or something home-made and sentimental or disastrous. It could be nice.
*
They get themselves drunk. Perhaps because it's so near to the end of their holiday. Perhaps because they haven't in a while.
Eames toys with three of their rings. It's past midnight, and through their windows, on one side of the room, the sky is dim, while on the other, the horizon is gold, the sun low. Eames slides one of the rings onto his finger, and sees that Arthur is watching him.
"Looks all right," Eames says. He holds his hand out, fingers straight, and then curls it into a fist to see how the ring looks like that.
Arthur nods. He swigs his beer.
"Fits all right," Eames says, though he's aware that they've been through all this before. He remembers, blurrily, a long, smart, sparkling conversation on the merits and demerits of this ring.
"I chose it," Arthur says, and drinks again.
*
Eames drowses for a while. When he wakes, he feels -- not sober, but no longer drunk. Only warm and smudged around the edges.
Arthur is lying on his back on the bed, eyelids drooping. Eames touches Arthur's forehead, and Arthur pushes himself up to lean back against the wall at the head of the bed. He says, "Hi," and touches Eames' hand where Eames is still wearing the ring.
"Hi." Eames sits himself next to Arthur, arse on top of a pillow. He puts his hand with the ring on his knee. "Still looks all right," he says.
"Mm." Arthur smiles and looks exhausted, and rather soft-edged himself. "What would it feel like?" he says. "What'd it be like, to know, more than you can know, I always want to be with this person?" He touches Eames' hand again, and looks into space. He might be asking himself, as much as Eames.
Eames thinks of the moment of his proposal, and wonders if it ever was the way he now remembers. He's always thought the truth must be that it was all heat and fear, nothing more. But he's learnt the habit of thinking of it otherwise, nevertheless. He wonders what Arthur was thinking back then, and how he remembers it now.
"I don't know," Eames says.
"I guess we'll stick together," Arthur says.
Eames wants them to. He thinks, he loves Arthur more than he has words to express.
"Probably," he says. "I think -- probably."
It's half past five am. All the curtains are open. The sun shines in from low in the east.
"Breakfast," Arthur suggests.
Eames agrees. "Anything but cake."
"Coffee," Arthur says, the way some people might say happiness or tea.
Eames follows him to the kitchen. He thinks, he'll leave the ring on, at least for now.