Inception Kink Fill: Eames/Arthur
Prompt: Eames character analysis/development/1st person explanation of what he thinks about himself falling in love with Arthur. I know theres a word for it, but i dont know what to call these fics.
... I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN SO MUCH FANFIC BEFORE.
Contradictory to what his criminal record might suggest, Eames was born to a loving, upstanding couple and raised in a nice, middle class suburb. His father had a 9 to 5 job and taught Eames how to play football on the weekends until he was old enough and good enough to go play with the kids himself. His mother stayed at home, cooking and baking until Eames took on an undoubtedly round shape, and told him bedtime stories about Arthurian knights and hapless ladies waiting for their true loves in towers. They had both tried various ways of teaching Eames his letters, but the lesson must have never stuck, because he still couldn’t spell to save his life.
He did read, though, and as a child had been exceedingly quiet. Always carrying around books about cowboys or pirates, Greek gods or Roman gladiators, Eames had fallen in love early on with the hero myth. The idea of one man or woman who was greater than all other flawed mortals filled Eames’ head with daydreams that he only felt secure in acting out late at night, when the sound of his parents’ TV had cut off and the only light in the house came from his mini-torch. The adventures he imagined and the dreams he fell into seemed so real, so much better than a middle class, suburban life that he sometimes wondered why he ever woke up from his daydreams, and then the smell of his mother’s bacon would beckon him down the stairs and he would come back to himself.
Then boarding school happened, and Eames stared at his mother’s tearful face as she hugged him goodbye and glanced occasionally to his father’s strained expression (because honestly, they didn’t have enough money for him to be going to boarding school). Their wave as they got back into the car without him, as they drove off without him, was as uplifting as the feel of chains falling off, and suddenly, he was unanchored. There was nothing to hold him back. He walked into school his mother’s son: slightly chubby, with delusions of knighthood, and an incompatibility with reality, and that Eames never really came back.
What did, when his parents came to pick him up for winter holidays, was a slightly sturdier Eames, who had learned to give as good as he got, and who had realized that if reality didn’t want to cooperate, then it was easy enough to bend and twist it until it fit better. After that, Eames was never again that quiet, fantasizing child. With every holiday came a new trick-from innocent impressions and some experience with costume and prop work to criminal forgery, lock-picking, pick-pocketing-and while his parents would never give up on him, their sweet, only child, he knew the exact moment they just had to give up caring so much or risk worrying themselves to death.
Eames thought this was the better way to go, the slow migration away from his parents, because he knew he would have to leave them one day. Besides, he didn’t know how to explain to them that all rules got a little bent and broken in the pursuit of something greater. At the age of 15, he was officially “a little too old” for his favorite stories and make-believe heroes, but he didn’t know how to explain to the adults in his life that he couldn’t let them go-couldn’t let the feeling that he could do something better go. So, he kept his aspirations quiet, internalized the values and virtues he had dreamt up as Eames, the Lone Ranger or Eames, the Caped Crusader, and worked hard to be (if not a good son) a decent child to his parents.
Then, he turned 16 years old, finished growing up and out, and Eames was no longer round or sturdy but actually built. He was intimidating, tall and muscled, and the more time he spent working out or playing football, the more attention he got from all the wrong people. For a brief moment, caught up in the sudden joy of having too many friends and the offering of living out actual adventures, he forgot all about his heroes and quiet fantasies and discomfort with the world.
It almost wasn’t a surprise when he woke up on his 17th birthday, a gun in hand, tattoos marking a year he almost couldn’t remember across his shoulders, on a dirty bed in the middle of a filthy warehouse stranded in the center of nowhere. After that, Eames never returned to school again, and life had forced him let go of those hero stories better than his father’s scolding ever could. It was too late for him to ever live such a gloried, perfect life, and that capitulation just sunk him deeper.
Eames learned how to really throw a punch, and how to really shoot a man. He could plan heists, but he wasn’t good with details, and conning people was so much easier. After a few years, he had tried basically everything to get high, and when it proved to be a ridiculous disappointment, he came up with his own ways. He worked with a theater production far away from his suburban home, and when they weren’t looking, he borrowed their props and costumes and walked the streets as someone else. Eames, the Insurance Salesman and Eames, the Bank Representative weren’t as much fun as Indiana Eames had been in his childhood dreams, but they made him enough money to pay off the broom closet he rented.
He had only wished he had known beforehand that being a good conman didn’t mean he was well-hidden. There was always a need for a good con, a good thief, and there weren’t enough guns in the empire to protect him from those who were looking. Eventually, he just had to take a deep breath and tell himself it was another job, and if that didn’t stop the night terrors and late night vomiting, then there was always another drug.
Then, when he was 26 years old, the alarm went off. The group he was with had gotten leaked reports about a new drug the U.S. military had synthesized. Somnacin was supposed to give people the greatest experience, the feeling of building and destroying worlds with a thought, of being anything you wanted, anywhere you wanted, and even perpetually high, Eames knew that was worth looking into. He had spent his whole life wanting to be someone else, and then a good part of his career doing just that, and yet he was never quite satisfied. Reality always felt like an ill-fitting skin that weighed him down, and he had spent whole years of his life wishing he could forget that-the way he had when he had been 16 and stupid.
So maybe he was a little careless with the job. Maybe he didn’t quite sell the role enough. Or maybe it was because the lieutenant in charge of the project was too slick and too clever by half to fall for it. Arthur, as the man introduced himself later when Eames was practically breaking his bones seizing from the pain of withdrawal, had been working on this project since he had finished Basic. He had an Architect named Dom, who was still showing him the ropes of how everything worked, and one of the creators of the drug and device, Miles, had experiments to continue. They had no conman, Arthur told him, hadn’t realized they needed one until now.
Eames figured it was the pain’s fault that he couldn’t understand a single word coming out of Arthur’s mouth.
Eventually, after all the sweat and tears and vomit, all of which Arthur was patiently present for, Eames could finally sit up. Slumped against his cell’s concrete wall, still holding on tenuously to his sanity, Eames stared up at a quiet, neat Arthur and for the first time in a long time felt ashamed. “It’ll be all right, Mr. Eames,” Arthur told him, as if he could read his mind. It was the closest thing to a lie Arthur would ever tell him.
The training began, and Eames almost felt like he was living his crime years all over again, except sober and perfectly, excruciatingly aware. He was still sticking needles into himself all the time, still being used by others for goals that were not his own, but some days he woke up and felt better. Some days, he would go under and Dom would build a strange amalgam of Paris and Rome and London to impress Mal-Miles’ daughter and Dom’s bride to be, Eames was sure. Some days, he would sit down to tea with Miles and remember his father fondly. Some days, he would watch the people walking around the compound so closely and tear up, because he had never been so grateful to be sober, so thankful to be able to observe the subtle nuances of one nameless guard’s nod compared to another.
Some days, Eames would be coiled up so tight, trying to stick to the schedule Arthur had made for him-because routine was the only thing keeping him sane and sober and stable-and Arthur would suddenly appear with his morning smoothie as if he had known how close Eames had come to cracking.
Then, other days, he did the impossible: Like the time he first took on Arthur’s image in the dreamscape, and Mal’s eyes had gone wide with wonder and Dom’s squinty eyes and careful ears hadn’t been able to tell the difference. Eames practiced every day from then on, cycling through Playboy models and celebrities from the 1950s and his old neighbors he barely remembered. He built new people and old dreams, and it was like he was remembering all of his heroes again. Eames knew he would never have that fire again, the burning passion and desire to have something more and bigger and now, but he thought the calm he had regained was worth it.
The smile Arthur gave him, the overly conscious pat on the back, and the soda and lime they shared later that night definitely was.
Of course, things could never stay the same. With everyone’s skills finely tuned, it was time to start up the training program. Eames didn’t like the amount of people who had invaded their space, ruining his routine, relabeling him as a “Forger” rather than a conman, and if Arthur hadn’t been there to talk him down, to share disgusting smoothies with him in the morning, he would have collapsed again. Instead, he went along with it: going under and getting hunted down-pretending to be some wanted terrorist and getting used to being shot again and again.
After 80 days of being shot and blown up and tortured to death, Eames couldn’t do it anymore. Dom and Mal, who were architects and never actually had to go in anywhere dangerous, stayed blissfully oblivious, but Arthur saw. Arthur saw everything. “It’s my job,” he told Eames one morning, his eyes roving over the deep bags beneath Eames’ eyes and the dissatisfaction in his stance. The fragile way he held himself spoke of deeply engrained PTSD.
“I can’t even dream anymore,” Eames mumbled. He had used to want to be someone else, anyone else, and now they were ruining it for him. There was no joy in studying the exact way a terrorist might walk or shoot an RPG, because the soldiers who would inevitably shoot him in the face wouldn’t care. He was just a nameless, faceless target. “I used to dream a lot,” he told Arthur, feeling his memories slip away.
Later, Arthur told Ariadne that the PASIV device began as a military project that was eventually, ostensibly shut down. He never told her that most of the reason why was because Arthur had stolen the first working prototype, walking into Eames’ cell in the middle of the night saying, “We’re leaving,” like the coolest action hero Eames had ever seen on a big screen. Dom, Mal, and Miles never told anyone they had helped.
Arthur definitely never mentioned being the mastermind behind the mass theft of PASIV devices and Somnacin formulas worldwide, from every single nation currently working with the technology, because then they would have never gotten away with hiding in Nice, France. He never told Eames that maybe this was all for his sake, but Eames could read it in Arthur’s eyes anyway, and he was pretty sure his gratefulness was present in every pore of his being.
It took Eames six months to recover, to not feel so trapped and abused anymore. He went back to his carefully structured routine, working out with Arthur and overusing the blender, and if he couldn’t dream naturally, the PASIV device let him live out all his fantasies.
None of which could live up to Arthur, who had slowly relaxed out of his military bearing.
“I love France,” Arthur told him one day, spontaneously, as they sat on their veranda with pain au chocolat and tea. They went to the beach, and Arthur took black and white photographs to develop and mount on the walls. Arthur bought new suits, bought Eames new suits, and ruled that it was better for them both if he just picked Eames’ outfit every day. Eames began to remember what it was like to be normal again, teased Arthur in case the man missed the joys of military harassment, and was inspired to start using pet names by the French (at least he didn’t actually call Arthur his little cabbage).
When they got bored, and Dom and Mal had finally managed to remove themselves from military obligations, they started up the extraction business all by themselves, and if the less-than-legal industry Arthur had helped pioneered bothered the man, he said nothing about it. Rather, he just replied to Eames’ taunt with his dry wit and replaced his dress blues for three piece suits.
And somewhere along the way, in between the forced detox and the terrible smoothies and the times Arthur kicked his ass at judo. Between the childhood dreams and the teenage idealism and the disillusionment of his 20s, Eames realized he had definitely lost his faith in hero stories.
Luckily he had gained Arthur, who was so much better. Arthur could be all James Bond suave, detached and stoic, all attention to details with his hair slicked back. He could be trashy in high couture jeans with bad French pick up lines, trolling bars off the Champs-Elysee with Eames after particularly good jobs. Arthur was heroic in every dream they ever shared together, buying them a few crucial extra minutes with a broadsword or a Sherman tank or just by throwing himself into a mob of vicious, zombie projections. He was pretty much what Eames had been dreaming about all his life, before he lost his ability to dream, and everything Eames had wanted to be, until he could be anyone he wanted and realized he just wasn’t cut out for it.
Eames never lost this realization, this hero worship, even through Mal’s death and Dom’s loss of sanity. He knew that when Arthur put him on a plane for Mombasa and stayed behind, it was more of Arthur needing to save Dom than pushing Eames away. It still hurt for a few years.
Still, a few years away helped him. Eames refocused, relearned how to live without Arthur. He still had to follow a routine, but he could dress badly and act as smarmily British as he wanted. After meeting with Yusuf and doing his own jobs, he didn’t think he was doing too badly, but when Dom found him for The Job, he realized how wrong he was.
Arthur, of course, never changed. There was a nice constancy to the man which could only come from supreme confidence. It was as if Arthur had long ago decided who he wanted to be and had already wrestled reality into capitulating and letting him be exactly that. Not that Eames worshipped Arthur on a pedestal (although yes, yes, he did) and thought the man had no faults, but he had long ago accepted that he was too deeply, blatantly in love to care about them.
Or, as Ariadne had helpfully pointed out one day, “You are so whipped.”
“That’s not always a bad thing, is it?” he replied, eyebrow cocked.
“Not at all,” she replied, “but you could at least act guilty and try to deny it, sparing the feelings of us, the single people.”
“Or at least stop kicking Arthur so lovingly,” Yusuf threw in, not looking up from his dear, expensive chemicals. “You look like a big, colorblind teddy bear with a first grade crush.”
Well, Eames hadn’t befriended Yusuf because he pulled his punches.
Arthur, for his part, kept his mind on the job. He endured Eames’ nostalgic taunts and tricks and carefully did not pay attention when Eames tried flirting with other people. It was only in the small details that he was affectionate, like how Arthur always had coffee prepared for him in the morning or how Eames could get away with being unbearable without having his tongue actually cut out.
Or how Arthur sneaked into Eames’ hotel room at nights and slept curled around Eames’ much larger body.
Better yet, how Arthur had promised, the day before they got on the flight to LA that after The Job, everything could be peaceful again. They could go to France, and Arthur would wear jeans instead of waistcoats, and the badly formulated smoothies would make a vicious comeback.
Eames had lost his ability to dream a long time ago, but when he woke up the next morning to an outfit already picked out for him, he could remember vague wisps of a fantasy. He might have given up his daydreams of being a mythic hero, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have one in his French flat every day for the rest of his life, reminding him that there was no one else he’d rather be but himself.
... I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN SO MUCH FANFIC BEFORE.
Contradictory to what his criminal record might suggest, Eames was born to a loving, upstanding couple and raised in a nice, middle class suburb. His father had a 9 to 5 job and taught Eames how to play football on the weekends until he was old enough and good enough to go play with the kids himself. His mother stayed at home, cooking and baking until Eames took on an undoubtedly round shape, and told him bedtime stories about Arthurian knights and hapless ladies waiting for their true loves in towers. They had both tried various ways of teaching Eames his letters, but the lesson must have never stuck, because he still couldn’t spell to save his life.
He did read, though, and as a child had been exceedingly quiet. Always carrying around books about cowboys or pirates, Greek gods or Roman gladiators, Eames had fallen in love early on with the hero myth. The idea of one man or woman who was greater than all other flawed mortals filled Eames’ head with daydreams that he only felt secure in acting out late at night, when the sound of his parents’ TV had cut off and the only light in the house came from his mini-torch. The adventures he imagined and the dreams he fell into seemed so real, so much better than a middle class, suburban life that he sometimes wondered why he ever woke up from his daydreams, and then the smell of his mother’s bacon would beckon him down the stairs and he would come back to himself.
Then boarding school happened, and Eames stared at his mother’s tearful face as she hugged him goodbye and glanced occasionally to his father’s strained expression (because honestly, they didn’t have enough money for him to be going to boarding school). Their wave as they got back into the car without him, as they drove off without him, was as uplifting as the feel of chains falling off, and suddenly, he was unanchored. There was nothing to hold him back. He walked into school his mother’s son: slightly chubby, with delusions of knighthood, and an incompatibility with reality, and that Eames never really came back.
What did, when his parents came to pick him up for winter holidays, was a slightly sturdier Eames, who had learned to give as good as he got, and who had realized that if reality didn’t want to cooperate, then it was easy enough to bend and twist it until it fit better. After that, Eames was never again that quiet, fantasizing child. With every holiday came a new trick-from innocent impressions and some experience with costume and prop work to criminal forgery, lock-picking, pick-pocketing-and while his parents would never give up on him, their sweet, only child, he knew the exact moment they just had to give up caring so much or risk worrying themselves to death.
Eames thought this was the better way to go, the slow migration away from his parents, because he knew he would have to leave them one day. Besides, he didn’t know how to explain to them that all rules got a little bent and broken in the pursuit of something greater. At the age of 15, he was officially “a little too old” for his favorite stories and make-believe heroes, but he didn’t know how to explain to the adults in his life that he couldn’t let them go-couldn’t let the feeling that he could do something better go. So, he kept his aspirations quiet, internalized the values and virtues he had dreamt up as Eames, the Lone Ranger or Eames, the Caped Crusader, and worked hard to be (if not a good son) a decent child to his parents.
Then, he turned 16 years old, finished growing up and out, and Eames was no longer round or sturdy but actually built. He was intimidating, tall and muscled, and the more time he spent working out or playing football, the more attention he got from all the wrong people. For a brief moment, caught up in the sudden joy of having too many friends and the offering of living out actual adventures, he forgot all about his heroes and quiet fantasies and discomfort with the world.
It almost wasn’t a surprise when he woke up on his 17th birthday, a gun in hand, tattoos marking a year he almost couldn’t remember across his shoulders, on a dirty bed in the middle of a filthy warehouse stranded in the center of nowhere. After that, Eames never returned to school again, and life had forced him let go of those hero stories better than his father’s scolding ever could. It was too late for him to ever live such a gloried, perfect life, and that capitulation just sunk him deeper.
Eames learned how to really throw a punch, and how to really shoot a man. He could plan heists, but he wasn’t good with details, and conning people was so much easier. After a few years, he had tried basically everything to get high, and when it proved to be a ridiculous disappointment, he came up with his own ways. He worked with a theater production far away from his suburban home, and when they weren’t looking, he borrowed their props and costumes and walked the streets as someone else. Eames, the Insurance Salesman and Eames, the Bank Representative weren’t as much fun as Indiana Eames had been in his childhood dreams, but they made him enough money to pay off the broom closet he rented.
He had only wished he had known beforehand that being a good conman didn’t mean he was well-hidden. There was always a need for a good con, a good thief, and there weren’t enough guns in the empire to protect him from those who were looking. Eventually, he just had to take a deep breath and tell himself it was another job, and if that didn’t stop the night terrors and late night vomiting, then there was always another drug.
Then, when he was 26 years old, the alarm went off. The group he was with had gotten leaked reports about a new drug the U.S. military had synthesized. Somnacin was supposed to give people the greatest experience, the feeling of building and destroying worlds with a thought, of being anything you wanted, anywhere you wanted, and even perpetually high, Eames knew that was worth looking into. He had spent his whole life wanting to be someone else, and then a good part of his career doing just that, and yet he was never quite satisfied. Reality always felt like an ill-fitting skin that weighed him down, and he had spent whole years of his life wishing he could forget that-the way he had when he had been 16 and stupid.
So maybe he was a little careless with the job. Maybe he didn’t quite sell the role enough. Or maybe it was because the lieutenant in charge of the project was too slick and too clever by half to fall for it. Arthur, as the man introduced himself later when Eames was practically breaking his bones seizing from the pain of withdrawal, had been working on this project since he had finished Basic. He had an Architect named Dom, who was still showing him the ropes of how everything worked, and one of the creators of the drug and device, Miles, had experiments to continue. They had no conman, Arthur told him, hadn’t realized they needed one until now.
Eames figured it was the pain’s fault that he couldn’t understand a single word coming out of Arthur’s mouth.
Eventually, after all the sweat and tears and vomit, all of which Arthur was patiently present for, Eames could finally sit up. Slumped against his cell’s concrete wall, still holding on tenuously to his sanity, Eames stared up at a quiet, neat Arthur and for the first time in a long time felt ashamed. “It’ll be all right, Mr. Eames,” Arthur told him, as if he could read his mind. It was the closest thing to a lie Arthur would ever tell him.
The training began, and Eames almost felt like he was living his crime years all over again, except sober and perfectly, excruciatingly aware. He was still sticking needles into himself all the time, still being used by others for goals that were not his own, but some days he woke up and felt better. Some days, he would go under and Dom would build a strange amalgam of Paris and Rome and London to impress Mal-Miles’ daughter and Dom’s bride to be, Eames was sure. Some days, he would sit down to tea with Miles and remember his father fondly. Some days, he would watch the people walking around the compound so closely and tear up, because he had never been so grateful to be sober, so thankful to be able to observe the subtle nuances of one nameless guard’s nod compared to another.
Some days, Eames would be coiled up so tight, trying to stick to the schedule Arthur had made for him-because routine was the only thing keeping him sane and sober and stable-and Arthur would suddenly appear with his morning smoothie as if he had known how close Eames had come to cracking.
Then, other days, he did the impossible: Like the time he first took on Arthur’s image in the dreamscape, and Mal’s eyes had gone wide with wonder and Dom’s squinty eyes and careful ears hadn’t been able to tell the difference. Eames practiced every day from then on, cycling through Playboy models and celebrities from the 1950s and his old neighbors he barely remembered. He built new people and old dreams, and it was like he was remembering all of his heroes again. Eames knew he would never have that fire again, the burning passion and desire to have something more and bigger and now, but he thought the calm he had regained was worth it.
The smile Arthur gave him, the overly conscious pat on the back, and the soda and lime they shared later that night definitely was.
Of course, things could never stay the same. With everyone’s skills finely tuned, it was time to start up the training program. Eames didn’t like the amount of people who had invaded their space, ruining his routine, relabeling him as a “Forger” rather than a conman, and if Arthur hadn’t been there to talk him down, to share disgusting smoothies with him in the morning, he would have collapsed again. Instead, he went along with it: going under and getting hunted down-pretending to be some wanted terrorist and getting used to being shot again and again.
After 80 days of being shot and blown up and tortured to death, Eames couldn’t do it anymore. Dom and Mal, who were architects and never actually had to go in anywhere dangerous, stayed blissfully oblivious, but Arthur saw. Arthur saw everything. “It’s my job,” he told Eames one morning, his eyes roving over the deep bags beneath Eames’ eyes and the dissatisfaction in his stance. The fragile way he held himself spoke of deeply engrained PTSD.
“I can’t even dream anymore,” Eames mumbled. He had used to want to be someone else, anyone else, and now they were ruining it for him. There was no joy in studying the exact way a terrorist might walk or shoot an RPG, because the soldiers who would inevitably shoot him in the face wouldn’t care. He was just a nameless, faceless target. “I used to dream a lot,” he told Arthur, feeling his memories slip away.
Later, Arthur told Ariadne that the PASIV device began as a military project that was eventually, ostensibly shut down. He never told her that most of the reason why was because Arthur had stolen the first working prototype, walking into Eames’ cell in the middle of the night saying, “We’re leaving,” like the coolest action hero Eames had ever seen on a big screen. Dom, Mal, and Miles never told anyone they had helped.
Arthur definitely never mentioned being the mastermind behind the mass theft of PASIV devices and Somnacin formulas worldwide, from every single nation currently working with the technology, because then they would have never gotten away with hiding in Nice, France. He never told Eames that maybe this was all for his sake, but Eames could read it in Arthur’s eyes anyway, and he was pretty sure his gratefulness was present in every pore of his being.
It took Eames six months to recover, to not feel so trapped and abused anymore. He went back to his carefully structured routine, working out with Arthur and overusing the blender, and if he couldn’t dream naturally, the PASIV device let him live out all his fantasies.
None of which could live up to Arthur, who had slowly relaxed out of his military bearing.
“I love France,” Arthur told him one day, spontaneously, as they sat on their veranda with pain au chocolat and tea. They went to the beach, and Arthur took black and white photographs to develop and mount on the walls. Arthur bought new suits, bought Eames new suits, and ruled that it was better for them both if he just picked Eames’ outfit every day. Eames began to remember what it was like to be normal again, teased Arthur in case the man missed the joys of military harassment, and was inspired to start using pet names by the French (at least he didn’t actually call Arthur his little cabbage).
When they got bored, and Dom and Mal had finally managed to remove themselves from military obligations, they started up the extraction business all by themselves, and if the less-than-legal industry Arthur had helped pioneered bothered the man, he said nothing about it. Rather, he just replied to Eames’ taunt with his dry wit and replaced his dress blues for three piece suits.
And somewhere along the way, in between the forced detox and the terrible smoothies and the times Arthur kicked his ass at judo. Between the childhood dreams and the teenage idealism and the disillusionment of his 20s, Eames realized he had definitely lost his faith in hero stories.
Luckily he had gained Arthur, who was so much better. Arthur could be all James Bond suave, detached and stoic, all attention to details with his hair slicked back. He could be trashy in high couture jeans with bad French pick up lines, trolling bars off the Champs-Elysee with Eames after particularly good jobs. Arthur was heroic in every dream they ever shared together, buying them a few crucial extra minutes with a broadsword or a Sherman tank or just by throwing himself into a mob of vicious, zombie projections. He was pretty much what Eames had been dreaming about all his life, before he lost his ability to dream, and everything Eames had wanted to be, until he could be anyone he wanted and realized he just wasn’t cut out for it.
Eames never lost this realization, this hero worship, even through Mal’s death and Dom’s loss of sanity. He knew that when Arthur put him on a plane for Mombasa and stayed behind, it was more of Arthur needing to save Dom than pushing Eames away. It still hurt for a few years.
Still, a few years away helped him. Eames refocused, relearned how to live without Arthur. He still had to follow a routine, but he could dress badly and act as smarmily British as he wanted. After meeting with Yusuf and doing his own jobs, he didn’t think he was doing too badly, but when Dom found him for The Job, he realized how wrong he was.
Arthur, of course, never changed. There was a nice constancy to the man which could only come from supreme confidence. It was as if Arthur had long ago decided who he wanted to be and had already wrestled reality into capitulating and letting him be exactly that. Not that Eames worshipped Arthur on a pedestal (although yes, yes, he did) and thought the man had no faults, but he had long ago accepted that he was too deeply, blatantly in love to care about them.
Or, as Ariadne had helpfully pointed out one day, “You are so whipped.”
“That’s not always a bad thing, is it?” he replied, eyebrow cocked.
“Not at all,” she replied, “but you could at least act guilty and try to deny it, sparing the feelings of us, the single people.”
“Or at least stop kicking Arthur so lovingly,” Yusuf threw in, not looking up from his dear, expensive chemicals. “You look like a big, colorblind teddy bear with a first grade crush.”
Well, Eames hadn’t befriended Yusuf because he pulled his punches.
Arthur, for his part, kept his mind on the job. He endured Eames’ nostalgic taunts and tricks and carefully did not pay attention when Eames tried flirting with other people. It was only in the small details that he was affectionate, like how Arthur always had coffee prepared for him in the morning or how Eames could get away with being unbearable without having his tongue actually cut out.
Or how Arthur sneaked into Eames’ hotel room at nights and slept curled around Eames’ much larger body.
Better yet, how Arthur had promised, the day before they got on the flight to LA that after The Job, everything could be peaceful again. They could go to France, and Arthur would wear jeans instead of waistcoats, and the badly formulated smoothies would make a vicious comeback.
Eames had lost his ability to dream a long time ago, but when he woke up the next morning to an outfit already picked out for him, he could remember vague wisps of a fantasy. He might have given up his daydreams of being a mythic hero, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have one in his French flat every day for the rest of his life, reminding him that there was no one else he’d rather be but himself.