Everyone's a Captain Kirk (Road Trip verse) - PART 1/2
title: Everyone's a Captain Kirk
summary: That time when Arthur pretends to be a doctor so he can look after a seriously injured Eames in the hospital. And then the time when they get ambushed.
pairing: Arthur/Eames
rating: PG-13/ish (violence, injuries, language)
wordcount: 12,689
notes: I love this 'verse, guys, and I think I'll stick with it. At least, until I run out of 99 Red Balloons lyrics.
Previous parts: this is it boys, this is war | just to prove the world was here | panic bells, it's red alert
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
The last people Jacques did business with, the last people to show up in his books, were Dom, Ariadne, Arthur and Eames. As Dom and Ariadne had nothing to do with what went down in Toulouse, they were lucky enough to be crossed off Jacques' KILL list.
The man had a kill list, and Arthur and Eames, as courtesy for Toulouse, were not as lucky as Dom and Ariadne were. Their names were written on it, in red ink and underlined three times, followed by a question mark, followed by DUBLIN, followed by WASHINGTON D.C. They were being tailed. Even though Jacques was dead, he apparently still had followers, and said followers apparently were looking to settle his scores.
So when Eames and Arthur show up in what once was a factory to partake in a simple trading of information with a mutual friend of Jacques' on the outskirts of Washington D.C., the last thing they expect is a war. They bring knives, guns, tear gas, brass knuckles (Eames' new favorite toy, which he'd lifted from one of Jacques' men in Toulouse), but only because they like to be cautious. In their business, it's common to expect to have to fight for their lives, and Arthur and Eames are big on expectations.
They don't go into nearly enough in terms of preparation, though. Bullet proof vests and a string of grenades slung over a shoulder makes for poor business interactions. Clients don't like to feel threatened, so Arthur and Eames walk into the factory ridiculously unprepared for the battle that unfolds.
It's really more like an ambush, but it ends with fire, and Arthur holding the ambulance driver at gunpoint until he agrees to drive another twenty miles to get to a different hospital, one that isn't going to be crawling with their enemies.
Funny how things always work out that way, Arthur muses just before he passes out. He and Eames never seem to be able to go down without dragging they who bested them down with them. He wishes he'd thought of this before things got blown up. Arthur always seems to forget about his enemies needing hospitals too.
Then he passes out.
*
They keep Arthur for five hours of stitches, fluids and observation before releasing him. "You're free to go, Mr. Taylor," a nurse tells him, using the fake name he gave. "Get some rest."
Arthur thanks her, doing his best to sound genuine. Names, as he has come to learn, like his own Richard Taylor age 31 from Washington DC, are much easier to fake than sentiments.
He's not going anywhere, though, and he is most definitely not going to be getting any rest. Instead, he spends the better part of an hour sneaking around the hospital in search of a pair of scrubs. He changes in a supply closet, hides his own clothes in a bedpan at the back of a shelf, and walks into the ICU like he owns the place.
He's confident, professional, able to fit in almost anywhere, and no one tries to stop him. It's a relief to not have to fight anyone else that night, because once Arthur finds Eames, lying on his stomach, his entire back appearing to be torn open and bleeding down his sides and pooling onto the mattress, it wouldn't have made a difference even if people had tried to stop him.
They'd have only ended up in in beds just like Eames. Arthur would have guaranteed it.
Even in scrubs, and even with no one asking Arthur questions, doctors still look, still watch him drag a chair over to Eames' bed and takes a seat. There's one doctor in particular, a man working on a patient two beds down, who keeps glancing up at Arthur, and maybe Arthur's just being paranoid, but the doctor looks wary of him, and suspicious.
"I'm monitoring him," Arthur says. "Intern. Supposed to sit with him all night." He knows it's probably not the way hospital policy works, not the way interns work, but he can't just sit there while doctor man could very well send him off on some other job that interns are supposed to do.
"Sure," the doctor says with an indifferent shrug. "Do what you want." He goes back to work, but continues to glance up at Arthur every now and again, trying and failing to be subtle.
Out of the blue, a thought occurs to Arthur, and he quickly scrubs his hands through his hair, letting his bangs fall over the stitches on his forehead. Eames being hurt has distracted him. Eames almost dying has distracted him, and Arthur cannot see this distraction abating any time soon, not with Eames so burned that the doctors won't even bandage him right away. He figures he's going to need to start getting used to seeing Eames like this, if he's going to want to be able to concentrate on anything in the near future.
*
"Hey. Hey, Arthur."
Arthur's half asleep, his head throbbing in tandem with his heartbeat. He thinks he might have just been hearing things, but then he sees Eames blinking up at him with his one eye that isn't pressed into the pillow.
"Hey," Arthur says, leaning forward so he can hear better.
"How we doing, eh?"
"We're downtown. Safe, for now."
"Safe." Eames hums with approval. "Right, we moving?"
"No," Arthur says, amused, incredibly pleased that Eames is awake and seems to be, for his circumstances, alright. And now frowning, his forehead creasing almost comically.
"Not moving?"
"You're not going anywhere, Eames," he says. "Not for a while."
"Yeah. I know," he says, all but whimpering. "Need some clothes, though. Mine got all burned. Shirts'n shoes... pants..."
"I'll get you some," Arthur says quickly, fearing that Eames might try to get them himself.
He feels for Eames, with a lengthy recovery process spent lying on his stomach, unable to move. Knowing him, knowing their luck, knowing odds and probabilities because he's had hours sitting at Eames' bedside to think about them, it doesn't look good.
"This is good," Eames says, later that day. He sounds incredibly languid, slurring his words, too tired to even open his eyes, but he seems more alert than the last time he was awake.
"You're on a lot of morphine," Arthur tells him. "Of course it's good."
"Not what I meant."
Arthur waits, figuring that Eames is either working out what to say, or has gone back to sleep.
It turns out to be the former, for which Arthur is grateful; he's worried. He hasn't stopped worrying, actually, since waking up on his back, and the first thing he sees when he turns his head is Eames, pinned to the floor. The fact that Eames is now conscious and relatively alert is the best reminder of the fact that he hasn't died.
"You've forgiven me."
Arthur raises an eyebrow, taking everything Eames is saying with many grains of salt, considering how many drugs are being pumped through his veins in that moment. "And what have I forgiven you for?"
"Getting hurt," Eames says. "Being careless."
Clearly, the drugs are making Eames feel good enough if he's up for fantasizing, his mind sluggish and drifting from thought to thought with little more than a smile and a sigh.
"Good thing I got myself impaled," he continues, further clarifying his idea. "You'd have probably never forgiven me."
Not just impaled, Arthur wants to say, burned, he wants to say, intubated, resuscitated, because he actually died for a little while in the ambulance. Instead, he points out, "I haven't forgiven you, Eames."
"Oh," Eames breathes.
"I'm still angry," Arthur continues, smiling because in spite of himself, in spite of all those things, he's still incapable of not teasing Eames. "I just wanted to see that you're alive. And here you are. Glad that's over with."
"Hey," Eames says, his eye opening. "You gonna leave?"
"Can't," Arthur says simply. "Seeing you like this is the only thing keeping me from full-blown homicidal rage."
"Good thing, then," Eames says, coming full circle. "Getting impaled."
He closes his eye again with a happy sigh.
"Getting impaled," Arthur agrees, trying to be supportive. "Definitely a good thing," and then the sun shifts into the crack in the blinds, temporarily blinding him with spots in his eyes. When he comes back from fixing them, Eames is either asleep or ignoring him.
Arthur chooses to believe that it's the former, and slumps down until he can rest his head on the back of the plastic folding chair he's come to think of as home. It's all the rest he'll allow himself, still on guard, a lone sentinel, knowing that no one's due to check on Eames for another three hours, that is, unless he flatlines.
*
A doctor comes in when Arthur is, of all things, giving Eames a sponge bath.
"Shouldn't you be doing rounds?" she asks, taking Eames' chart off the foot of his bed.
"No," Arthur says, standing up straight, sponge in hand, dripping onto the tile floor.
The doctor blinks, taken aback. "This is your patient, then?"
"No, I just stole these scrubs to get in after visiting hours."
She gives Arthur a long, hard look, not impressed in the slightest with what Arthur only hopes she thinks is sarcasm.
"When you're finished, page Whitman, get, uh," she glances down at Eames' chart, "Mr. Bates on the list for an MRI, and I hope that the next time I see you, you'll be doing rounds like you're supposed to."
"Yes, Ma'am. Right away," Arthur replies, a throwback to his military obedience. He has no idea who Whitman is, or how to get Eames on the MRI list, or what rounds are supposed to entail, but he knows the surest way to get this doctor off his case is to agree to do whatever she wants him to.
Satisfied with Arthur's response, the doctor lingers in the doorway only another moment before disappearing, and then Arthur just stands there, sponge still dripping, not really sure what to make of his new commands.
Eames' soft laughter brings him back into the moment, hardly any more than little huffs of breath that Eames no sooner lets slip before suppressing. After he stops laughing, his eye, the one that isn't pressed into the pillow, still shines with amusement, his mouth cracked into what could have been a smile, if not for all the morphine that is currently rendering Eames's face incapable of normal expression.
"It's not funny," Arthur admonishes quietly, feeling the corners of his own mouth tugging upwards. He only lets the smile happen because he knows Eames can't turn his head to see him indulging in it.
That night, the patient two beds down from Eames crashes. A code is called, and Arthur watches doctors as they charge paddles, barking out commands, trying to save the patient. Arthur watches them stop, watches them look at the clock, cover the body and take the bed away, and then bring back a new bed, where Arthur watches them set up a new patient.
Eames sleeps on.
*
Twice a day, they roll Eames onto his side to inspect his abdomen, where the pipe had gone straight through. Other than that, he's kept on his front so his back can heal.
Arthur quickly learns, by watching other doctors and nurses, how to change Eames' bandages, a daily routine of slowly peeling back the bloody strips, cleansing the burns and stitched cuts, and applying fresh ones, soaked in medication. On the third day of his charade of pretending to be a doctor, Arthur enlists a nurse to help him do it himself.
Eames sleeps through most of it, still heavily medicated. Arthur spares occasional glances at his face, the half he can see, and about midway through the process, he looks up to see Eames' eye open, glassy and looking at nothing in particular.
He's breathing, of course, and twitching under Arthur's hands, but in that one moment, Eames looks dead.
"Hey," Arthur says, trying to get his attention, to snap him out of that blank, chilling stare.
"Hey," Eames says back, his eye lazily drifting until it falls on Arthur. Still alive.
"Go back to sleep," Arthur says, his voice clipped to keep any relief from slipping out. Wouldn't want to worry Eames, after all. "Nothing to see here."
"Like hell," Eames says, shutting his eye and frowning. "You know, I was planning to put," he pauses, drawing in a slow breath, "ten-thousand miles between us," another breath, "after the job. At least."
"I know," Arthur lies, this being the first he's heard of Eames' plan to leave him.
"You must be happy, then" Eames says, his eye still shut tight. "Happy I got impaled."
"Go to sleep," Arthur says again. "You're on drugs. You don't make sense."
"Fucking hurts," Eames whimpers.
"That's why you're on drugs. Go back to sleep."
"Go to sleep, Eames, that's what you always tell me" Eames says, voice sing-songy, like he's about to drift off anyway.
Only once his breathing evens out does Arthur believe he's truly gone back to sleep. He looks up to find the nurse, a tall woman, looking down at him with a questioning look on her face.
"You two know each other?"
Arthur blinks; "Nope," he tells her, and goes back to work.
*
Visiting hours in the ICU are few and far between, but Arthur takes what he can get, changing into his own clothes and slicking his hair back, then leaving for a few hours when visiting is up to avoid suspicion. He goes back to the hotel room he'd rented to grab a few hours of sleep, then packs an overnight bag to bring back to the hospital, where he changes into scrubs in a bathroom and goes back to Eames, who is still asleep.
It's a full day of changing clothes and avoiding responsibilities that come with the scrubs, and it's not the easiest to keep track of with a big distraction lying face down on a bed right in front of him. So one day, after a week, Arthur forgets to change, and ends up wearing his scrubs into the cafeteria.
No sooner has he set his tray down on a table, a flock of doctors converge upon him, dragging chairs over until they have him surrounded.
"Hey," says a pretty brunette. The others nod, echoing her sentiments.
"Hi," Arthur says, slowly closing his hand around his plastic fork.
"So, who are you?" The man to Arthur's left blurts it out so suddenly that Arthur flinches.
He must have looked a little helpless and terrified for at least a second, because the brunette jumps in to his rescue.
"What Ian means is, where did you do your internship? You're new here, none of us know you."
"Oh," Arthur says, politely acknowledging the question before while twisting his fork in his spaghetti, trying to look like he doesn't want to be disturbed.
"So where did you do your internship?" Ian asks, persistent.
"Uh, Mount Sinai," Arthur says, remembering the hospital where he'd spent a few days the last time he'd been shot a few years back.
"Really," says another doctor, a man in glasses who looks about thirteen years old.
"Yes, really," he says, and just in case he isn't making it clear that he'd like to be left alone, he starts to eat, closing his mouth around what is probably too much spaghetti because these doctors don't seem all too perceptive of subtlety.
"Well, we've never seen you before," says the brunette. "I'm Ellie."
Arthur nods in acknowledgment, his mouth full.
"Why aren't you ever on rounds?" asks Ian, leaning forward, showing interest. "How'd you get out of it?"
Their suspicion is unsettling. Arthur chews, swallows too quickly, and coughs. "I'm doing a specialty," he chokes out, hoping that hospitals have specialties.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Um, burns," he says, thinking of Eames' main injuries. As hospital-savy as Arthur decidedly is not, he would put money on the fact of there being no such thing as a specialty in impalement.
The girl nods, eager for Arthur to continue. "Burns. Wow, that's incredible. I didn't even know they had a specialty here."
"They do," Arthur says curtly, and then decides that he isn't hungry anymore. "Excuse me."
"Oh, well... bye!" Ellie calls after Arthur as he retreats at a fast walk. One bite of spaghetti is more than enough to live on.
*
"Eames? You awake?"
"Mmph," Eames says, followed by, "no."
"They're moving you out of Intensive Care," Arthur says quietly.
"Brilliant," Eames says, taking no notice of the fact that he's currently in an elevator, his bed having already been rolled halfway through the hospital. "What do I need to do?"
"Um, nothing?" Arthur says, amused. "I just thought you'd want to know."
"Ah. Thank you Arthur," he murmurs, and, as Arthur has come to know by the way his voice trails off into a low, contented sigh, drifts back to sleep.
As it turns out, Eames' relocation brings him to the hospital's burn unit, validating Arthur's made-up story in the cafeteria, the one where he, as a doctor, specializes in the care and treatment of burns. Arthur has already spent hours on internet, research, as well as many more hours watching the doctors who have actually been taking care of Eames.
He learns quickly.
In a burn-specific clinic, Arthur feels safe and protected from the vast and ominous rest of the hospital, with it's doctors always trying to get him to do actual doctorly things. Rounds, for example, do not exist here, not in this wonderful land of ointments and skin grafts, free internet and private rooms. Better visiting hours, too, much more accommodating than the ICU, which does actually make sense to Arthur, however unwilling he is to admit it (seeing as how he's cheated the system).
As a result of being able to visit more, he can, in turn, spend less time pretending to be a doctor to keep from getting kicked out, as well as less time worrying that he might have to actually perform doctorly duties. After all, if you dress up as a doctor in a hospital, you should be prepared to be treated like one.
Arthur, uncharacteristically, wasn't prepared. He was too busy worrying about Eames flatlining to put any more thought into his plan than 'find some scrubs.'
Out of intensive care, Eames' doctors slowly start to bring him off the morphine, which leaves him restless and in pain. He is awake more, and his agitation, already bad enough with him being unable to get up, gets worse.
He also picks up an infection, although whether from his trip across the hospital or Arthur's own carelessness remains to be seen. It will continue to remain to be seen, because Eames' spiking fever makes him delusional enough to think himself well enough to get out of bed, and so Arthur has more important things to do than worry about whose fault it is.
Stitches are torn, bandages are bled through, and Eames has to be strapped down by his ankles and wrists while the doctors undo the damage he's done to himself. Arthur has only just put on latex gloves, ready to help, when he realizes that he's not wearing scrubs, and that these doctors here have already seen his face, so he can't very well run out and change into them without them knowing.
So he deals with it, and as a consequence, gets kicked out of the room as soon as one of Eames' doctors takes a second to look up from the blood and bandages. Arthur spends the night in the waiting room, his laptop warm on his thighs, reading up on infection, fevers, skin grafts, and how long it normally takes to recover from them.
"So. Eames," Arthur asks him the next day, when he's allowed back into the room. "Where were you headed? Where were you planning to go?"
"Not now, Arthur" Eames says, his voice weak. "Can't you ask me again when I'm not dying of the plague?"
"It's an infection," Arthur tells him. "You just have a fever."
"Feels like I'm dying, though," he snaps back, tugging at his restraints, which he still thinks he's healthy enough to do.
"Sorry," Arthur says, not sorry at all. Angry, actually, and getting angrier by the second. "My bad, really. I just wanted to check with you now, before I come in one of these days to find that you've made a rope out of bed sheets and climbed out the window."
Arthur knows it's not fair, needling at Eames when he's vulnerable. He knows, but still he persists. "Can't ask you anything when you're not here," he adds. After all, it makes him feel better, picking fights that he knows he'll win. It also keeps Eames talking, which means that Eames doesn't go quiet and his eyes don't go glassy and Arthur doesn't keep thinking he's dead.
Eames all but snarls at him, teeth clenched. "You think I'm going anywhere now?"
"You'll be out of here in no time," Arthur lies. "Hopefully after your wounds have all closed up, unless you want to bleed all over your clothes."
Arthur is really assuring himself more than Eames, who is too distracted by being sick and in pain for it to do him much good. Eames, who didn't have to see himself run through with a pipe, didn't have to watch himself die in the ambulance, gasping back to life riding a surge of electrical current.
Being laid up, drugged and feverish, having slept through most of the ordeal thus far, Eames has had it easy, and Arthur would have given anything to have been able to switch places with him. After all, he's already been laid up once before, with Eames waiting for him to recover. It wasn't so bad.
"A vast improvement, as you're probably thinking," Eames says, shivering, his whole body glistening with sweat. "You hate my clothes."
"Did I say say that?" Arthur says. "Did you hear me say that?"
"Stop talking," Eames says. "Please, stop. God, it's so hot."
The fact that Arthur was too angry to notice when Eames' shivering stopped makes him even angrier, and he violently tears off the blankets he'd buried Eames under, throwing them onto the floor like they've offended him.
"Ice?" he says, already on his way across the room to get some.
"Please," Eames says, and Arthur is back with ice packs, setting them onto the back of Eames' neck, the side of his face, his shoulders, and the small of his back. He drops the argument there, stops talking, even, not wanting to miss when Eames starts to shiver again.
Somewhere between ice packs and Arthur's resolve, Eames falls asleep.
*
"Scoot over," Arthur says, putting a hand on Eames' left shoulder, just about the only part of his back that isn't burned and bandaged. He's still warm, radiating heat into Arthur's palm, but his fever had broken earlier that morning.
No longer restrained, Eames utilizes his practically nonexistent mobility to make room for Arthur's laptop, which is put down right in front of his face, because there's only so much room on a hospital bed.
What with Eames lying on his stomach, he can't see the T.V. mounted on the wall by the bathroom door, and Arthur sympathizes. Which is why he spent nearly three hours putting together a playlist of stupid clips he's found on Youtube.
Eames reaches with his left hand, but gives up at the tug in his I.V. and decides to just drop his hand onto the keyboard instead. The windows on the screen all fly off to the sides.
"Hands off, or I'm shutting it down," Arthur admonishes, an empty threat, but Eames removes his hand nevertheless.
Leaning over from behind, Arthur adjusts the computer, setting everything up again, tilting the screen down so Eames can see.
It begins with the Double Rainbow Guy. Arthur contemplated putting in the video of the little kid saying 'blood', but came to the eventual consensus that it might be just a little too insensitive, even for Eames. Definitely 'no funny'.
The Bed Intruder song sends Eames over the edge, his laughter cutting off in a barely contained shout as he probably has pulled a couple more of his stitches, which sends Arthur fumbling to pause the video.
"Eames. Shit, I'm sorry."
"No. Fuck," Eames says, his eyes screwed tight. "Jesus, Arthur."
Arthur grabs onto Eames' hand, squeezing tight. He isn't really sure why he does it, knows it isn't going to help at all. But in that instant, Eames is in pain, and Arthur just wants to remind him that he's still there. Even though Eames, obviously, knows.
Still, Arthur's furious, furious at himself for overlooking something so stupid. He puts on a Netflix marathon of Deadliest Catch instead, coming around to sit on the other side of the bed. Halfway through the first episode, Arthur starts running his fingers through Eames' hair, twisting and tickling. It isn't until four episodes in, when a greenhorn falls overboard, that Arthur realizes he's no longer furious.
*
Days go by, and the bandages lessen, catheters are removed, doses are lowered, and Eames is pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, shaking with the effort of holding his own weight.
Arthur finds it incredibly disquieting how difficult this seems to be for him to do, the simple action of getting up, and finds himself muttering his own form of encouragement with the hopes of Eames finding strength in it. "Come on, we don't have all day."
Eames throws a quick look over his shoulder. "Not now, Arthur. I'm having a moment."
"Right. Sorry. Go on." Arthur inclines his head.
"What are you smirking at?" Eames says. "You think you're so tough, not getting shiskabobbed?"
"That's... disgusting," Arthur says, taking a second to rid his mind of the mental image Eames' words have just conjured up. "If you've forgotten, I didn't get out entirely unscathed either."
"Oh yes, of course. Your, ah, stitches."
"Seven stitches, yes," Arthur says, putting a hand on Eames' chest, clean, uninjured skin, to help him up more. "And the concussion."
"And the concussion," Eames echoes, sitting back on his heels, actually sitting up, tipping his head to the side until something pops. He sighs, happily. "Oh god, I can move."
Arthur feels stupid and useless just standing by the bed, ready to help but not knowing how. "Careful," he says quietly, and is rewarded with a smile as Eames twists around to look at him.
"I know," he says, shifting experimentally until he goes too far, hissing with pain and turning back around quickly.
Arthur hates how wrong this moment is, the chasteness of it all. Never mind the fact that Eames was badly hurt, never mind that Arthur can hardly touch him anymore. They had been close, once upon a time. They'd slept with each other. Arthur knows that the fact that he's even there, in the hospital, the fact that he's been with Eames this whole time, speaks volumes on how much he cares.
It's infuriating, though.
Every time, every single time they manage to swallow their pride and try to move forward with their relationship - or whatever it is they're calling whatever it is they have - circumstances that never cease to extenuate keep setting them back to where they started.
"Are you in pain?" Arthur asks, although he can tell from the shallow way Eames is breathing that he is.
"Very much," Eames says. At least he isn't trying to be macho about it and lie, not when Arthur can read him like a book he's spent the last couple of years working with and occasionally having sex with.
"Didn't want to say anything about it?" Arthur prompts.
Eames shrugs, looking sheepish. "Didn't want to complain," he corrects.
"Here, give me your hands. Let me help you," Arthur says, and, taking care not to touch Eames' IV, helps him sit with his legs hanging off the side of the bed.
"You're in a hospital," Arthur reminds him. "You've been burned, impaled, and even died for a little bit. I think you've earned the right to complain."
"I'm alive," Eames says. "Nothing to complain about."
It's a mindset that is so distinctly Eames, and one that Arthur wishes he could adopt for himself. He's a bit more active, though, in how he deals with things. Where Eames just blindly accepts his fate, laughing at the good and bad alike, Arthur does things about it.
"Don't get excited," Arthur warns as a preface to his gently pushing Eames legs apart, just wide enough for him to slip in between then.
"Arthur," Eames says, matter of fact, "this isn't helping."
"I mean it. You pull your stitches, I'm backing off."
Eames licks his lips. "Come on. Blue balls on top of having my back nearly burned clean off? And impalement? Hardly sounds fair."
Arthur just takes him in, craning his neck down to look at him because he's standing so close, not touching him except where Eames' thighs are straddling his hips.
"I'll be good," Eames says, giving Arthur a little squeeze with his legs. "I promise."
Arthur starts with his hands on either side of Eames' face, deeming everything below the neck too dangerous to touch without causing him any pain. He takes care not to pull or make Eames reach for him, bringing his face in, bringing his mouth to Eames. It feels so good to kiss him. Just the taste of him is almost enough to make Arthur forget himself, throw Eames back down onto the bed and climb on top of him. But it's been so long that Arthur can hardly remember a time before the hospital, before he could hardly bring himself to even touch Eames, let alone kiss him.
Eames kisses back like he's starving, like he's drowning and the only air he can get is hiding in Arthur's lungs. When his tongue comes into play, Arthur moans into Eames' mouth, shutting his eyes, twisting his fingers in Eames' hair to keep from dragging them down Eames' chest.
Arthur's about to run out of air when Eames jerks away, pulling his head back and smiling down at Arthur, lips glistening with saliva. "Missed me, have you?" He looks incredibly pleased with himself.
"Just think of it as positive reinforcement," Arthur says, running his tongue along the inside of his mouth and tasting Eames. He enjoys being smug. "You're up, you're not whining, you're not bleeding... I'm just encouraging you." He nips at Eames' bottom lip. "Keep it up."
"That's a load of shit," Eames says, his lips ghosting over Arthur's cheek and Arthur turns so his mouth finds Eames' again. He wants so very much to agree with Eames, wants to tell him that he really has missed him, and that he will continue to miss him until he is 100% back to being himself and not careful or drugged or in pain every time he moves.
Arthur wants to tell him, but it would only be redundant. Plus, he would have to stop kissing Eames in order to do so.
So he says nothing, content to keep kissing until Eames needs to lie back down again.
*
As usual, Arthur and Eames have only just begun to rekindle their seemingly inevitable romance when the enemy catches up with them. Of course, of course it would be the day after Arthur and Eames kissed, not even twenty-four hours after their first step in the right direction. This is going to set them back weeks, Arthur can just feel it.
The attack on the hospital is so late in coming that Arthur legitimately wants to ask his attackers, point blank, why they even bothered, just before he shoots them, point blank, in the heads.
Arthur's had time to orient himself with the hospital's emergency codes, so he knows, just from the sequence of numbers that pop up on his stolen pager, that there are men, with guns, and they're tearing the hospital apart.
"Eames? You up?" he says says, seconds later, when the sirens kick in.
"Sort of," Eames mutters, lifting his head up from the pillow and squinting against the lights. "Fire drill?"
Arthur drops to the floor, reaching for the two handguns he'd taped to the underside of Eames' bed on the day he was moved out of the ICU. "Not yet," he says, and comes up to press one of the guns into Eames' hand, taking care to wrap his fingers around it in a proper grip. He tucks the second one in the back of his pants.
Eames has to be exhausted, fuzzy with sleep, drowsy with medication, but he rubs at his eyes, then looks at the gun.
"Get yourself up," Arthur advises, tone clipped as he recites the plan that he's only just come up with, having only about fifteen seconds to think. "Take your time, don't hurt yourself, but we need to move. Fast," he adds, stressing the word with painstaking deliberation, as if there was ever any question as to how urgent and dire the situation was.
Arthur thinks he hears screaming, even with the sirens and the fact that the burn unit is relatively closed off from the rest of the hospital. He ignores it for the time being, crossing the room in three long strides to drag over a wheelchair that's been gathering dust by the window. He lines it up with Eames' bed and locks the wheels.
"Get in the chair if you can, but stay in the room," he continues, Eames turning his head to follow Arthur as he flits around the room like a hummingbird.
The last part of the plan, it's the important part, and Arthur comes in close to say it, making sure he has Eames' total focus. "Eames, I mean it: wait here."
"Understood," Eames says. He's starting to push himself up when Arthur takes off, having nothing left to instruct.
Everything else between them remains unspoken, the way they both know it needs to be when they're being pursued, when they're being attacked, when they need to be efficient and nothing more. All in all, it's one of his quicker debriefs, if not the quickest, and he's on the move in under a minute, shutting the door to Eames' room and taking off at a sprint, white lab coat flapping behind him.
*
Arthur's only a little out of breath when he gets to the balcony overlooking the hospital lobby, where a group of about 30 people are huddled together on the floor. Two men are on their feet, circling like vultures. Somewhere below, a baby is screeching in tandem with the alarms.
Arthur ducks behind a wall, scrubbing his hands viciously through his gelled hair to further disguise himself. So now, hair in face, he walks back to the railing and stops, in plain fucking sight.
"Oh," he says, trying to project his voice down to the men below. "Oh, god!"
He's spotted instantly, two guns snapping up to aim at him.
"Hands in the air! Now!" One of the men shouts up at him, Arthur already obliging as the man runs up the stairs.
"I... I - oh, god!" Arthur says, trying not to roll his eyes at how pathetic he's coming across. But he needs to be pathetic if he wants to get close enough, if he wants to get close enough, fast enough.
Arthur's assailant grabs his wrists with one hand, brandishing a gun in the other. "Looks like you picked the wrong balcony to hide out on."
"Please don't kill me, oh god," Arthur chokes, the bones of his wrists rubbing together painfully.
From the balcony above the lobby, he hadn't seen anyone else with guns, anyone else hiding. He'd made sure to get a good look before being led downstairs with the muzzle of a gun digging into his lower back. Arthur tries not to move too much, not to do anything but walk in as straight a line as he can manage, lest he slip and the man discover the firearm he has hidden in his own pants.
"Say anything, doc," the man says to Arthur, "and I will kill you." Then he shoves him roughly down into the crowd of hostages sitting on the floor. He keeps his head down, lets his hair hang over his face, so he can look around without seeming suspicious.
To his left, there's a man clutching a crying baby in his arms. To his right, a pretty brunette, shaking with silent crying.
"Hey," Arthur whispers, peering through his hair. "Ellie. Hey. Remember me?"
"Spaghetti," she whispers back right away, not missing a beat. "Specialty in burns."
"Keep your head down, try not to move your mouth too much," Arthur advises, more grateful than he's ever been for the crying baby to whisper under. "I need your help."
"You're not a doctor," she says at the exact same time, hushed but admonishing nonetheless. "Nobody calls it that, you know. Specialty in burns? Stupid..."
Arthur grimaces, wondering how long she'd known, if she told anyone. He snaps out of it quickly, recognizing it as useless.
"You're right," he says. "I still need you, though."
She says nothing, alert and seemingly willing. Arthur takes a second to assimilate the facts to the forefront of his mind so he can put them into words to tell the girl. "After I take these two out, I'm going to need you to run. I'll cover you, but you have to go first. Up the stairs."
"What?" Ellie hisses, incredulous.
"Down the first hallway on the left," Arthur continues anyway, his mind set on the plan, "all the way to the end, up the elevator to the burn unit."
"Wait," she says, and Arthur can hear the growing skepticism in her voice, "did you say take them out?"
"Do you need me to say it again?" Arthur counters, now starting to worry that Ellie isn't going to help him.
But then she nods, her ponytail bouncing. "Burn ward. Right. I know how to get there."
Arthur would feel more comfortable hearing her repeat his directions back to him, wants more time to try and read her, to discern whether she's still on his side, or if she'll just head for the doors the moment they're clear.
But it would take more time than he's willing to spare.
"I can't do this without you," he says at last, and he means it. Then, without preamble, Arthur stands up.
The men spring into action out of their languid patrolling of the area, leaping up and pointing their guns once again at Arthur.
"Looks like someone wants to be made an example out of," one of them says.
"Sit down or I blow your head off!" shouts the other.
Ah, Arthur thinks, the good enemy bad enemy routine. Although this assault, as far as Arthur can see, is too scrambled together for these men to have given it much, if any, consideration at all.
"My patients," Arthur says, deliberately speaking too quietly for the men to hear, hoping that at least one of them will come closer.
"What's that, now?" Says the second.
"I have patients," Arthur mumbles. "They need me."
The first man comes closer, until he has to step over one of the people sitting on the floor, so he and Arthur are face to face. Success.
"Do they really?"
"Yes," Arthur says, not meeting his eyes. "They're sick."
"Well," the man drawls, clearly enjoying himself. "Doctor. What do you suppose I do about this?
"Please, let me get back to my patients."
"We're just here to look. Once we find what we're looking for, we'll be out of your hair. All of you. Why won't anyone here just tell me where you're keeping Eames?"
It couldn't be a more perfect set-up.
"That's my patient," Arthur blurts out quickly. "He's one of mine."
The man closer to the doors looks relieved, his grip on his gun loosening ever so slightly.
"Well," the man in Arthur's face smiles. "You've just become my new best friend."
"I'm not taking you to him. If that's what you think," Arthur adds, then risks looking up, because his hair is in his face and he needs to look at least a little more defiant if he wants to piss off his attacker.
Apparently, that was all it took for the first stage of Arthur's plan to succeed. Without any more warning than a twitch on his face (a twitch that, of course, Arthur notices), the man swings the butt of his gun up and smashes it into Arthur's face. Arthur sees stars, disoriented, but it lasts only for a second, after which he lunges forward, following the momentum of the swinging gun.
This throws the man off his footing, making it easy for Arthur to slip his finger onto the trigger and pull before the man by the door has even realized what's happening. He falls, blood spraying out of his abdomen. Arthur shoots him once more, in the leg, before yanking the gun out of the first man's hands and turning it on him.
"How many are you?" Arthur says, aiming right between his eyes.
Flat on his back, the man doesn't even seem to notice the gun pointed at him. "I'm afraid that's none of your business, Doctor."
Arthur shoots him in the gut, then points to his forehead once again. "How many are you? I really don't have time for this."
"Twenty-five," the man gasps, struggling not to scream. "Eight more inside, looking for your guy. Teams at every exit in case you try to escape. You'll never even make it into the parking lot.
"Great. Now tell me who hired you."
Arthur endures only six seconds of the man's laughter, blood bubbling in his mouth, before shooting him in in the thigh, to keep him down.
With their captives rendered useless, the hostages all spring up as one and run for the exit. Arthur watches them go, deflating a little as he alters his plan. He can't leave, not with that many people threatening the hospital, and Eames can't stay, not with that many people searching for him.
Then Arthur hears someone call form the balcony, "Hey, spaghetti!"
Ellie is at the top of the stairs, shrugging out of her lab coat, dropping it on the floor and kicking it out of the way with her sneakers. Ready to run. Perfect.
"You said you'd cover me," she says. "Right?"
And Arthur runs to her.
part 2
summary: That time when Arthur pretends to be a doctor so he can look after a seriously injured Eames in the hospital. And then the time when they get ambushed.
pairing: Arthur/Eames
rating: PG-13/ish (violence, injuries, language)
wordcount: 12,689
notes: I love this 'verse, guys, and I think I'll stick with it. At least, until I run out of 99 Red Balloons lyrics.
Previous parts: this is it boys, this is war | just to prove the world was here | panic bells, it's red alert
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
The last people Jacques did business with, the last people to show up in his books, were Dom, Ariadne, Arthur and Eames. As Dom and Ariadne had nothing to do with what went down in Toulouse, they were lucky enough to be crossed off Jacques' KILL list.
The man had a kill list, and Arthur and Eames, as courtesy for Toulouse, were not as lucky as Dom and Ariadne were. Their names were written on it, in red ink and underlined three times, followed by a question mark, followed by DUBLIN, followed by WASHINGTON D.C. They were being tailed. Even though Jacques was dead, he apparently still had followers, and said followers apparently were looking to settle his scores.
So when Eames and Arthur show up in what once was a factory to partake in a simple trading of information with a mutual friend of Jacques' on the outskirts of Washington D.C., the last thing they expect is a war. They bring knives, guns, tear gas, brass knuckles (Eames' new favorite toy, which he'd lifted from one of Jacques' men in Toulouse), but only because they like to be cautious. In their business, it's common to expect to have to fight for their lives, and Arthur and Eames are big on expectations.
They don't go into nearly enough in terms of preparation, though. Bullet proof vests and a string of grenades slung over a shoulder makes for poor business interactions. Clients don't like to feel threatened, so Arthur and Eames walk into the factory ridiculously unprepared for the battle that unfolds.
It's really more like an ambush, but it ends with fire, and Arthur holding the ambulance driver at gunpoint until he agrees to drive another twenty miles to get to a different hospital, one that isn't going to be crawling with their enemies.
Funny how things always work out that way, Arthur muses just before he passes out. He and Eames never seem to be able to go down without dragging they who bested them down with them. He wishes he'd thought of this before things got blown up. Arthur always seems to forget about his enemies needing hospitals too.
Then he passes out.
*
They keep Arthur for five hours of stitches, fluids and observation before releasing him. "You're free to go, Mr. Taylor," a nurse tells him, using the fake name he gave. "Get some rest."
Arthur thanks her, doing his best to sound genuine. Names, as he has come to learn, like his own Richard Taylor age 31 from Washington DC, are much easier to fake than sentiments.
He's not going anywhere, though, and he is most definitely not going to be getting any rest. Instead, he spends the better part of an hour sneaking around the hospital in search of a pair of scrubs. He changes in a supply closet, hides his own clothes in a bedpan at the back of a shelf, and walks into the ICU like he owns the place.
He's confident, professional, able to fit in almost anywhere, and no one tries to stop him. It's a relief to not have to fight anyone else that night, because once Arthur finds Eames, lying on his stomach, his entire back appearing to be torn open and bleeding down his sides and pooling onto the mattress, it wouldn't have made a difference even if people had tried to stop him.
They'd have only ended up in in beds just like Eames. Arthur would have guaranteed it.
Even in scrubs, and even with no one asking Arthur questions, doctors still look, still watch him drag a chair over to Eames' bed and takes a seat. There's one doctor in particular, a man working on a patient two beds down, who keeps glancing up at Arthur, and maybe Arthur's just being paranoid, but the doctor looks wary of him, and suspicious.
"I'm monitoring him," Arthur says. "Intern. Supposed to sit with him all night." He knows it's probably not the way hospital policy works, not the way interns work, but he can't just sit there while doctor man could very well send him off on some other job that interns are supposed to do.
"Sure," the doctor says with an indifferent shrug. "Do what you want." He goes back to work, but continues to glance up at Arthur every now and again, trying and failing to be subtle.
Out of the blue, a thought occurs to Arthur, and he quickly scrubs his hands through his hair, letting his bangs fall over the stitches on his forehead. Eames being hurt has distracted him. Eames almost dying has distracted him, and Arthur cannot see this distraction abating any time soon, not with Eames so burned that the doctors won't even bandage him right away. He figures he's going to need to start getting used to seeing Eames like this, if he's going to want to be able to concentrate on anything in the near future.
*
"Hey. Hey, Arthur."
Arthur's half asleep, his head throbbing in tandem with his heartbeat. He thinks he might have just been hearing things, but then he sees Eames blinking up at him with his one eye that isn't pressed into the pillow.
"Hey," Arthur says, leaning forward so he can hear better.
"How we doing, eh?"
"We're downtown. Safe, for now."
"Safe." Eames hums with approval. "Right, we moving?"
"No," Arthur says, amused, incredibly pleased that Eames is awake and seems to be, for his circumstances, alright. And now frowning, his forehead creasing almost comically.
"Not moving?"
"You're not going anywhere, Eames," he says. "Not for a while."
"Yeah. I know," he says, all but whimpering. "Need some clothes, though. Mine got all burned. Shirts'n shoes... pants..."
"I'll get you some," Arthur says quickly, fearing that Eames might try to get them himself.
He feels for Eames, with a lengthy recovery process spent lying on his stomach, unable to move. Knowing him, knowing their luck, knowing odds and probabilities because he's had hours sitting at Eames' bedside to think about them, it doesn't look good.
"This is good," Eames says, later that day. He sounds incredibly languid, slurring his words, too tired to even open his eyes, but he seems more alert than the last time he was awake.
"You're on a lot of morphine," Arthur tells him. "Of course it's good."
"Not what I meant."
Arthur waits, figuring that Eames is either working out what to say, or has gone back to sleep.
It turns out to be the former, for which Arthur is grateful; he's worried. He hasn't stopped worrying, actually, since waking up on his back, and the first thing he sees when he turns his head is Eames, pinned to the floor. The fact that Eames is now conscious and relatively alert is the best reminder of the fact that he hasn't died.
"You've forgiven me."
Arthur raises an eyebrow, taking everything Eames is saying with many grains of salt, considering how many drugs are being pumped through his veins in that moment. "And what have I forgiven you for?"
"Getting hurt," Eames says. "Being careless."
Clearly, the drugs are making Eames feel good enough if he's up for fantasizing, his mind sluggish and drifting from thought to thought with little more than a smile and a sigh.
"Good thing I got myself impaled," he continues, further clarifying his idea. "You'd have probably never forgiven me."
Not just impaled, Arthur wants to say, burned, he wants to say, intubated, resuscitated, because he actually died for a little while in the ambulance. Instead, he points out, "I haven't forgiven you, Eames."
"Oh," Eames breathes.
"I'm still angry," Arthur continues, smiling because in spite of himself, in spite of all those things, he's still incapable of not teasing Eames. "I just wanted to see that you're alive. And here you are. Glad that's over with."
"Hey," Eames says, his eye opening. "You gonna leave?"
"Can't," Arthur says simply. "Seeing you like this is the only thing keeping me from full-blown homicidal rage."
"Good thing, then," Eames says, coming full circle. "Getting impaled."
He closes his eye again with a happy sigh.
"Getting impaled," Arthur agrees, trying to be supportive. "Definitely a good thing," and then the sun shifts into the crack in the blinds, temporarily blinding him with spots in his eyes. When he comes back from fixing them, Eames is either asleep or ignoring him.
Arthur chooses to believe that it's the former, and slumps down until he can rest his head on the back of the plastic folding chair he's come to think of as home. It's all the rest he'll allow himself, still on guard, a lone sentinel, knowing that no one's due to check on Eames for another three hours, that is, unless he flatlines.
*
A doctor comes in when Arthur is, of all things, giving Eames a sponge bath.
"Shouldn't you be doing rounds?" she asks, taking Eames' chart off the foot of his bed.
"No," Arthur says, standing up straight, sponge in hand, dripping onto the tile floor.
The doctor blinks, taken aback. "This is your patient, then?"
"No, I just stole these scrubs to get in after visiting hours."
She gives Arthur a long, hard look, not impressed in the slightest with what Arthur only hopes she thinks is sarcasm.
"When you're finished, page Whitman, get, uh," she glances down at Eames' chart, "Mr. Bates on the list for an MRI, and I hope that the next time I see you, you'll be doing rounds like you're supposed to."
"Yes, Ma'am. Right away," Arthur replies, a throwback to his military obedience. He has no idea who Whitman is, or how to get Eames on the MRI list, or what rounds are supposed to entail, but he knows the surest way to get this doctor off his case is to agree to do whatever she wants him to.
Satisfied with Arthur's response, the doctor lingers in the doorway only another moment before disappearing, and then Arthur just stands there, sponge still dripping, not really sure what to make of his new commands.
Eames' soft laughter brings him back into the moment, hardly any more than little huffs of breath that Eames no sooner lets slip before suppressing. After he stops laughing, his eye, the one that isn't pressed into the pillow, still shines with amusement, his mouth cracked into what could have been a smile, if not for all the morphine that is currently rendering Eames's face incapable of normal expression.
"It's not funny," Arthur admonishes quietly, feeling the corners of his own mouth tugging upwards. He only lets the smile happen because he knows Eames can't turn his head to see him indulging in it.
That night, the patient two beds down from Eames crashes. A code is called, and Arthur watches doctors as they charge paddles, barking out commands, trying to save the patient. Arthur watches them stop, watches them look at the clock, cover the body and take the bed away, and then bring back a new bed, where Arthur watches them set up a new patient.
Eames sleeps on.
*
Twice a day, they roll Eames onto his side to inspect his abdomen, where the pipe had gone straight through. Other than that, he's kept on his front so his back can heal.
Arthur quickly learns, by watching other doctors and nurses, how to change Eames' bandages, a daily routine of slowly peeling back the bloody strips, cleansing the burns and stitched cuts, and applying fresh ones, soaked in medication. On the third day of his charade of pretending to be a doctor, Arthur enlists a nurse to help him do it himself.
Eames sleeps through most of it, still heavily medicated. Arthur spares occasional glances at his face, the half he can see, and about midway through the process, he looks up to see Eames' eye open, glassy and looking at nothing in particular.
He's breathing, of course, and twitching under Arthur's hands, but in that one moment, Eames looks dead.
"Hey," Arthur says, trying to get his attention, to snap him out of that blank, chilling stare.
"Hey," Eames says back, his eye lazily drifting until it falls on Arthur. Still alive.
"Go back to sleep," Arthur says, his voice clipped to keep any relief from slipping out. Wouldn't want to worry Eames, after all. "Nothing to see here."
"Like hell," Eames says, shutting his eye and frowning. "You know, I was planning to put," he pauses, drawing in a slow breath, "ten-thousand miles between us," another breath, "after the job. At least."
"I know," Arthur lies, this being the first he's heard of Eames' plan to leave him.
"You must be happy, then" Eames says, his eye still shut tight. "Happy I got impaled."
"Go to sleep," Arthur says again. "You're on drugs. You don't make sense."
"Fucking hurts," Eames whimpers.
"That's why you're on drugs. Go back to sleep."
"Go to sleep, Eames, that's what you always tell me" Eames says, voice sing-songy, like he's about to drift off anyway.
Only once his breathing evens out does Arthur believe he's truly gone back to sleep. He looks up to find the nurse, a tall woman, looking down at him with a questioning look on her face.
"You two know each other?"
Arthur blinks; "Nope," he tells her, and goes back to work.
*
Visiting hours in the ICU are few and far between, but Arthur takes what he can get, changing into his own clothes and slicking his hair back, then leaving for a few hours when visiting is up to avoid suspicion. He goes back to the hotel room he'd rented to grab a few hours of sleep, then packs an overnight bag to bring back to the hospital, where he changes into scrubs in a bathroom and goes back to Eames, who is still asleep.
It's a full day of changing clothes and avoiding responsibilities that come with the scrubs, and it's not the easiest to keep track of with a big distraction lying face down on a bed right in front of him. So one day, after a week, Arthur forgets to change, and ends up wearing his scrubs into the cafeteria.
No sooner has he set his tray down on a table, a flock of doctors converge upon him, dragging chairs over until they have him surrounded.
"Hey," says a pretty brunette. The others nod, echoing her sentiments.
"Hi," Arthur says, slowly closing his hand around his plastic fork.
"So, who are you?" The man to Arthur's left blurts it out so suddenly that Arthur flinches.
He must have looked a little helpless and terrified for at least a second, because the brunette jumps in to his rescue.
"What Ian means is, where did you do your internship? You're new here, none of us know you."
"Oh," Arthur says, politely acknowledging the question before while twisting his fork in his spaghetti, trying to look like he doesn't want to be disturbed.
"So where did you do your internship?" Ian asks, persistent.
"Uh, Mount Sinai," Arthur says, remembering the hospital where he'd spent a few days the last time he'd been shot a few years back.
"Really," says another doctor, a man in glasses who looks about thirteen years old.
"Yes, really," he says, and just in case he isn't making it clear that he'd like to be left alone, he starts to eat, closing his mouth around what is probably too much spaghetti because these doctors don't seem all too perceptive of subtlety.
"Well, we've never seen you before," says the brunette. "I'm Ellie."
Arthur nods in acknowledgment, his mouth full.
"Why aren't you ever on rounds?" asks Ian, leaning forward, showing interest. "How'd you get out of it?"
Their suspicion is unsettling. Arthur chews, swallows too quickly, and coughs. "I'm doing a specialty," he chokes out, hoping that hospitals have specialties.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Um, burns," he says, thinking of Eames' main injuries. As hospital-savy as Arthur decidedly is not, he would put money on the fact of there being no such thing as a specialty in impalement.
The girl nods, eager for Arthur to continue. "Burns. Wow, that's incredible. I didn't even know they had a specialty here."
"They do," Arthur says curtly, and then decides that he isn't hungry anymore. "Excuse me."
"Oh, well... bye!" Ellie calls after Arthur as he retreats at a fast walk. One bite of spaghetti is more than enough to live on.
*
"Eames? You awake?"
"Mmph," Eames says, followed by, "no."
"They're moving you out of Intensive Care," Arthur says quietly.
"Brilliant," Eames says, taking no notice of the fact that he's currently in an elevator, his bed having already been rolled halfway through the hospital. "What do I need to do?"
"Um, nothing?" Arthur says, amused. "I just thought you'd want to know."
"Ah. Thank you Arthur," he murmurs, and, as Arthur has come to know by the way his voice trails off into a low, contented sigh, drifts back to sleep.
As it turns out, Eames' relocation brings him to the hospital's burn unit, validating Arthur's made-up story in the cafeteria, the one where he, as a doctor, specializes in the care and treatment of burns. Arthur has already spent hours on internet, research, as well as many more hours watching the doctors who have actually been taking care of Eames.
He learns quickly.
In a burn-specific clinic, Arthur feels safe and protected from the vast and ominous rest of the hospital, with it's doctors always trying to get him to do actual doctorly things. Rounds, for example, do not exist here, not in this wonderful land of ointments and skin grafts, free internet and private rooms. Better visiting hours, too, much more accommodating than the ICU, which does actually make sense to Arthur, however unwilling he is to admit it (seeing as how he's cheated the system).
As a result of being able to visit more, he can, in turn, spend less time pretending to be a doctor to keep from getting kicked out, as well as less time worrying that he might have to actually perform doctorly duties. After all, if you dress up as a doctor in a hospital, you should be prepared to be treated like one.
Arthur, uncharacteristically, wasn't prepared. He was too busy worrying about Eames flatlining to put any more thought into his plan than 'find some scrubs.'
Out of intensive care, Eames' doctors slowly start to bring him off the morphine, which leaves him restless and in pain. He is awake more, and his agitation, already bad enough with him being unable to get up, gets worse.
He also picks up an infection, although whether from his trip across the hospital or Arthur's own carelessness remains to be seen. It will continue to remain to be seen, because Eames' spiking fever makes him delusional enough to think himself well enough to get out of bed, and so Arthur has more important things to do than worry about whose fault it is.
Stitches are torn, bandages are bled through, and Eames has to be strapped down by his ankles and wrists while the doctors undo the damage he's done to himself. Arthur has only just put on latex gloves, ready to help, when he realizes that he's not wearing scrubs, and that these doctors here have already seen his face, so he can't very well run out and change into them without them knowing.
So he deals with it, and as a consequence, gets kicked out of the room as soon as one of Eames' doctors takes a second to look up from the blood and bandages. Arthur spends the night in the waiting room, his laptop warm on his thighs, reading up on infection, fevers, skin grafts, and how long it normally takes to recover from them.
"So. Eames," Arthur asks him the next day, when he's allowed back into the room. "Where were you headed? Where were you planning to go?"
"Not now, Arthur" Eames says, his voice weak. "Can't you ask me again when I'm not dying of the plague?"
"It's an infection," Arthur tells him. "You just have a fever."
"Feels like I'm dying, though," he snaps back, tugging at his restraints, which he still thinks he's healthy enough to do.
"Sorry," Arthur says, not sorry at all. Angry, actually, and getting angrier by the second. "My bad, really. I just wanted to check with you now, before I come in one of these days to find that you've made a rope out of bed sheets and climbed out the window."
Arthur knows it's not fair, needling at Eames when he's vulnerable. He knows, but still he persists. "Can't ask you anything when you're not here," he adds. After all, it makes him feel better, picking fights that he knows he'll win. It also keeps Eames talking, which means that Eames doesn't go quiet and his eyes don't go glassy and Arthur doesn't keep thinking he's dead.
Eames all but snarls at him, teeth clenched. "You think I'm going anywhere now?"
"You'll be out of here in no time," Arthur lies. "Hopefully after your wounds have all closed up, unless you want to bleed all over your clothes."
Arthur is really assuring himself more than Eames, who is too distracted by being sick and in pain for it to do him much good. Eames, who didn't have to see himself run through with a pipe, didn't have to watch himself die in the ambulance, gasping back to life riding a surge of electrical current.
Being laid up, drugged and feverish, having slept through most of the ordeal thus far, Eames has had it easy, and Arthur would have given anything to have been able to switch places with him. After all, he's already been laid up once before, with Eames waiting for him to recover. It wasn't so bad.
"A vast improvement, as you're probably thinking," Eames says, shivering, his whole body glistening with sweat. "You hate my clothes."
"Did I say say that?" Arthur says. "Did you hear me say that?"
"Stop talking," Eames says. "Please, stop. God, it's so hot."
The fact that Arthur was too angry to notice when Eames' shivering stopped makes him even angrier, and he violently tears off the blankets he'd buried Eames under, throwing them onto the floor like they've offended him.
"Ice?" he says, already on his way across the room to get some.
"Please," Eames says, and Arthur is back with ice packs, setting them onto the back of Eames' neck, the side of his face, his shoulders, and the small of his back. He drops the argument there, stops talking, even, not wanting to miss when Eames starts to shiver again.
Somewhere between ice packs and Arthur's resolve, Eames falls asleep.
*
"Scoot over," Arthur says, putting a hand on Eames' left shoulder, just about the only part of his back that isn't burned and bandaged. He's still warm, radiating heat into Arthur's palm, but his fever had broken earlier that morning.
No longer restrained, Eames utilizes his practically nonexistent mobility to make room for Arthur's laptop, which is put down right in front of his face, because there's only so much room on a hospital bed.
What with Eames lying on his stomach, he can't see the T.V. mounted on the wall by the bathroom door, and Arthur sympathizes. Which is why he spent nearly three hours putting together a playlist of stupid clips he's found on Youtube.
Eames reaches with his left hand, but gives up at the tug in his I.V. and decides to just drop his hand onto the keyboard instead. The windows on the screen all fly off to the sides.
"Hands off, or I'm shutting it down," Arthur admonishes, an empty threat, but Eames removes his hand nevertheless.
Leaning over from behind, Arthur adjusts the computer, setting everything up again, tilting the screen down so Eames can see.
It begins with the Double Rainbow Guy. Arthur contemplated putting in the video of the little kid saying 'blood', but came to the eventual consensus that it might be just a little too insensitive, even for Eames. Definitely 'no funny'.
The Bed Intruder song sends Eames over the edge, his laughter cutting off in a barely contained shout as he probably has pulled a couple more of his stitches, which sends Arthur fumbling to pause the video.
"Eames. Shit, I'm sorry."
"No. Fuck," Eames says, his eyes screwed tight. "Jesus, Arthur."
Arthur grabs onto Eames' hand, squeezing tight. He isn't really sure why he does it, knows it isn't going to help at all. But in that instant, Eames is in pain, and Arthur just wants to remind him that he's still there. Even though Eames, obviously, knows.
Still, Arthur's furious, furious at himself for overlooking something so stupid. He puts on a Netflix marathon of Deadliest Catch instead, coming around to sit on the other side of the bed. Halfway through the first episode, Arthur starts running his fingers through Eames' hair, twisting and tickling. It isn't until four episodes in, when a greenhorn falls overboard, that Arthur realizes he's no longer furious.
*
Days go by, and the bandages lessen, catheters are removed, doses are lowered, and Eames is pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, shaking with the effort of holding his own weight.
Arthur finds it incredibly disquieting how difficult this seems to be for him to do, the simple action of getting up, and finds himself muttering his own form of encouragement with the hopes of Eames finding strength in it. "Come on, we don't have all day."
Eames throws a quick look over his shoulder. "Not now, Arthur. I'm having a moment."
"Right. Sorry. Go on." Arthur inclines his head.
"What are you smirking at?" Eames says. "You think you're so tough, not getting shiskabobbed?"
"That's... disgusting," Arthur says, taking a second to rid his mind of the mental image Eames' words have just conjured up. "If you've forgotten, I didn't get out entirely unscathed either."
"Oh yes, of course. Your, ah, stitches."
"Seven stitches, yes," Arthur says, putting a hand on Eames' chest, clean, uninjured skin, to help him up more. "And the concussion."
"And the concussion," Eames echoes, sitting back on his heels, actually sitting up, tipping his head to the side until something pops. He sighs, happily. "Oh god, I can move."
Arthur feels stupid and useless just standing by the bed, ready to help but not knowing how. "Careful," he says quietly, and is rewarded with a smile as Eames twists around to look at him.
"I know," he says, shifting experimentally until he goes too far, hissing with pain and turning back around quickly.
Arthur hates how wrong this moment is, the chasteness of it all. Never mind the fact that Eames was badly hurt, never mind that Arthur can hardly touch him anymore. They had been close, once upon a time. They'd slept with each other. Arthur knows that the fact that he's even there, in the hospital, the fact that he's been with Eames this whole time, speaks volumes on how much he cares.
It's infuriating, though.
Every time, every single time they manage to swallow their pride and try to move forward with their relationship - or whatever it is they're calling whatever it is they have - circumstances that never cease to extenuate keep setting them back to where they started.
"Are you in pain?" Arthur asks, although he can tell from the shallow way Eames is breathing that he is.
"Very much," Eames says. At least he isn't trying to be macho about it and lie, not when Arthur can read him like a book he's spent the last couple of years working with and occasionally having sex with.
"Didn't want to say anything about it?" Arthur prompts.
Eames shrugs, looking sheepish. "Didn't want to complain," he corrects.
"Here, give me your hands. Let me help you," Arthur says, and, taking care not to touch Eames' IV, helps him sit with his legs hanging off the side of the bed.
"You're in a hospital," Arthur reminds him. "You've been burned, impaled, and even died for a little bit. I think you've earned the right to complain."
"I'm alive," Eames says. "Nothing to complain about."
It's a mindset that is so distinctly Eames, and one that Arthur wishes he could adopt for himself. He's a bit more active, though, in how he deals with things. Where Eames just blindly accepts his fate, laughing at the good and bad alike, Arthur does things about it.
"Don't get excited," Arthur warns as a preface to his gently pushing Eames legs apart, just wide enough for him to slip in between then.
"Arthur," Eames says, matter of fact, "this isn't helping."
"I mean it. You pull your stitches, I'm backing off."
Eames licks his lips. "Come on. Blue balls on top of having my back nearly burned clean off? And impalement? Hardly sounds fair."
Arthur just takes him in, craning his neck down to look at him because he's standing so close, not touching him except where Eames' thighs are straddling his hips.
"I'll be good," Eames says, giving Arthur a little squeeze with his legs. "I promise."
Arthur starts with his hands on either side of Eames' face, deeming everything below the neck too dangerous to touch without causing him any pain. He takes care not to pull or make Eames reach for him, bringing his face in, bringing his mouth to Eames. It feels so good to kiss him. Just the taste of him is almost enough to make Arthur forget himself, throw Eames back down onto the bed and climb on top of him. But it's been so long that Arthur can hardly remember a time before the hospital, before he could hardly bring himself to even touch Eames, let alone kiss him.
Eames kisses back like he's starving, like he's drowning and the only air he can get is hiding in Arthur's lungs. When his tongue comes into play, Arthur moans into Eames' mouth, shutting his eyes, twisting his fingers in Eames' hair to keep from dragging them down Eames' chest.
Arthur's about to run out of air when Eames jerks away, pulling his head back and smiling down at Arthur, lips glistening with saliva. "Missed me, have you?" He looks incredibly pleased with himself.
"Just think of it as positive reinforcement," Arthur says, running his tongue along the inside of his mouth and tasting Eames. He enjoys being smug. "You're up, you're not whining, you're not bleeding... I'm just encouraging you." He nips at Eames' bottom lip. "Keep it up."
"That's a load of shit," Eames says, his lips ghosting over Arthur's cheek and Arthur turns so his mouth finds Eames' again. He wants so very much to agree with Eames, wants to tell him that he really has missed him, and that he will continue to miss him until he is 100% back to being himself and not careful or drugged or in pain every time he moves.
Arthur wants to tell him, but it would only be redundant. Plus, he would have to stop kissing Eames in order to do so.
So he says nothing, content to keep kissing until Eames needs to lie back down again.
*
As usual, Arthur and Eames have only just begun to rekindle their seemingly inevitable romance when the enemy catches up with them. Of course, of course it would be the day after Arthur and Eames kissed, not even twenty-four hours after their first step in the right direction. This is going to set them back weeks, Arthur can just feel it.
The attack on the hospital is so late in coming that Arthur legitimately wants to ask his attackers, point blank, why they even bothered, just before he shoots them, point blank, in the heads.
Arthur's had time to orient himself with the hospital's emergency codes, so he knows, just from the sequence of numbers that pop up on his stolen pager, that there are men, with guns, and they're tearing the hospital apart.
"Eames? You up?" he says says, seconds later, when the sirens kick in.
"Sort of," Eames mutters, lifting his head up from the pillow and squinting against the lights. "Fire drill?"
Arthur drops to the floor, reaching for the two handguns he'd taped to the underside of Eames' bed on the day he was moved out of the ICU. "Not yet," he says, and comes up to press one of the guns into Eames' hand, taking care to wrap his fingers around it in a proper grip. He tucks the second one in the back of his pants.
Eames has to be exhausted, fuzzy with sleep, drowsy with medication, but he rubs at his eyes, then looks at the gun.
"Get yourself up," Arthur advises, tone clipped as he recites the plan that he's only just come up with, having only about fifteen seconds to think. "Take your time, don't hurt yourself, but we need to move. Fast," he adds, stressing the word with painstaking deliberation, as if there was ever any question as to how urgent and dire the situation was.
Arthur thinks he hears screaming, even with the sirens and the fact that the burn unit is relatively closed off from the rest of the hospital. He ignores it for the time being, crossing the room in three long strides to drag over a wheelchair that's been gathering dust by the window. He lines it up with Eames' bed and locks the wheels.
"Get in the chair if you can, but stay in the room," he continues, Eames turning his head to follow Arthur as he flits around the room like a hummingbird.
The last part of the plan, it's the important part, and Arthur comes in close to say it, making sure he has Eames' total focus. "Eames, I mean it: wait here."
"Understood," Eames says. He's starting to push himself up when Arthur takes off, having nothing left to instruct.
Everything else between them remains unspoken, the way they both know it needs to be when they're being pursued, when they're being attacked, when they need to be efficient and nothing more. All in all, it's one of his quicker debriefs, if not the quickest, and he's on the move in under a minute, shutting the door to Eames' room and taking off at a sprint, white lab coat flapping behind him.
*
Arthur's only a little out of breath when he gets to the balcony overlooking the hospital lobby, where a group of about 30 people are huddled together on the floor. Two men are on their feet, circling like vultures. Somewhere below, a baby is screeching in tandem with the alarms.
Arthur ducks behind a wall, scrubbing his hands viciously through his gelled hair to further disguise himself. So now, hair in face, he walks back to the railing and stops, in plain fucking sight.
"Oh," he says, trying to project his voice down to the men below. "Oh, god!"
He's spotted instantly, two guns snapping up to aim at him.
"Hands in the air! Now!" One of the men shouts up at him, Arthur already obliging as the man runs up the stairs.
"I... I - oh, god!" Arthur says, trying not to roll his eyes at how pathetic he's coming across. But he needs to be pathetic if he wants to get close enough, if he wants to get close enough, fast enough.
Arthur's assailant grabs his wrists with one hand, brandishing a gun in the other. "Looks like you picked the wrong balcony to hide out on."
"Please don't kill me, oh god," Arthur chokes, the bones of his wrists rubbing together painfully.
From the balcony above the lobby, he hadn't seen anyone else with guns, anyone else hiding. He'd made sure to get a good look before being led downstairs with the muzzle of a gun digging into his lower back. Arthur tries not to move too much, not to do anything but walk in as straight a line as he can manage, lest he slip and the man discover the firearm he has hidden in his own pants.
"Say anything, doc," the man says to Arthur, "and I will kill you." Then he shoves him roughly down into the crowd of hostages sitting on the floor. He keeps his head down, lets his hair hang over his face, so he can look around without seeming suspicious.
To his left, there's a man clutching a crying baby in his arms. To his right, a pretty brunette, shaking with silent crying.
"Hey," Arthur whispers, peering through his hair. "Ellie. Hey. Remember me?"
"Spaghetti," she whispers back right away, not missing a beat. "Specialty in burns."
"Keep your head down, try not to move your mouth too much," Arthur advises, more grateful than he's ever been for the crying baby to whisper under. "I need your help."
"You're not a doctor," she says at the exact same time, hushed but admonishing nonetheless. "Nobody calls it that, you know. Specialty in burns? Stupid..."
Arthur grimaces, wondering how long she'd known, if she told anyone. He snaps out of it quickly, recognizing it as useless.
"You're right," he says. "I still need you, though."
She says nothing, alert and seemingly willing. Arthur takes a second to assimilate the facts to the forefront of his mind so he can put them into words to tell the girl. "After I take these two out, I'm going to need you to run. I'll cover you, but you have to go first. Up the stairs."
"What?" Ellie hisses, incredulous.
"Down the first hallway on the left," Arthur continues anyway, his mind set on the plan, "all the way to the end, up the elevator to the burn unit."
"Wait," she says, and Arthur can hear the growing skepticism in her voice, "did you say take them out?"
"Do you need me to say it again?" Arthur counters, now starting to worry that Ellie isn't going to help him.
But then she nods, her ponytail bouncing. "Burn ward. Right. I know how to get there."
Arthur would feel more comfortable hearing her repeat his directions back to him, wants more time to try and read her, to discern whether she's still on his side, or if she'll just head for the doors the moment they're clear.
But it would take more time than he's willing to spare.
"I can't do this without you," he says at last, and he means it. Then, without preamble, Arthur stands up.
The men spring into action out of their languid patrolling of the area, leaping up and pointing their guns once again at Arthur.
"Looks like someone wants to be made an example out of," one of them says.
"Sit down or I blow your head off!" shouts the other.
Ah, Arthur thinks, the good enemy bad enemy routine. Although this assault, as far as Arthur can see, is too scrambled together for these men to have given it much, if any, consideration at all.
"My patients," Arthur says, deliberately speaking too quietly for the men to hear, hoping that at least one of them will come closer.
"What's that, now?" Says the second.
"I have patients," Arthur mumbles. "They need me."
The first man comes closer, until he has to step over one of the people sitting on the floor, so he and Arthur are face to face. Success.
"Do they really?"
"Yes," Arthur says, not meeting his eyes. "They're sick."
"Well," the man drawls, clearly enjoying himself. "Doctor. What do you suppose I do about this?
"Please, let me get back to my patients."
"We're just here to look. Once we find what we're looking for, we'll be out of your hair. All of you. Why won't anyone here just tell me where you're keeping Eames?"
It couldn't be a more perfect set-up.
"That's my patient," Arthur blurts out quickly. "He's one of mine."
The man closer to the doors looks relieved, his grip on his gun loosening ever so slightly.
"Well," the man in Arthur's face smiles. "You've just become my new best friend."
"I'm not taking you to him. If that's what you think," Arthur adds, then risks looking up, because his hair is in his face and he needs to look at least a little more defiant if he wants to piss off his attacker.
Apparently, that was all it took for the first stage of Arthur's plan to succeed. Without any more warning than a twitch on his face (a twitch that, of course, Arthur notices), the man swings the butt of his gun up and smashes it into Arthur's face. Arthur sees stars, disoriented, but it lasts only for a second, after which he lunges forward, following the momentum of the swinging gun.
This throws the man off his footing, making it easy for Arthur to slip his finger onto the trigger and pull before the man by the door has even realized what's happening. He falls, blood spraying out of his abdomen. Arthur shoots him once more, in the leg, before yanking the gun out of the first man's hands and turning it on him.
"How many are you?" Arthur says, aiming right between his eyes.
Flat on his back, the man doesn't even seem to notice the gun pointed at him. "I'm afraid that's none of your business, Doctor."
Arthur shoots him in the gut, then points to his forehead once again. "How many are you? I really don't have time for this."
"Twenty-five," the man gasps, struggling not to scream. "Eight more inside, looking for your guy. Teams at every exit in case you try to escape. You'll never even make it into the parking lot.
"Great. Now tell me who hired you."
Arthur endures only six seconds of the man's laughter, blood bubbling in his mouth, before shooting him in in the thigh, to keep him down.
With their captives rendered useless, the hostages all spring up as one and run for the exit. Arthur watches them go, deflating a little as he alters his plan. He can't leave, not with that many people threatening the hospital, and Eames can't stay, not with that many people searching for him.
Then Arthur hears someone call form the balcony, "Hey, spaghetti!"
Ellie is at the top of the stairs, shrugging out of her lab coat, dropping it on the floor and kicking it out of the way with her sneakers. Ready to run. Perfect.
"You said you'd cover me," she says. "Right?"
And Arthur runs to her.
part 2