Work Text:
He can tell from the ribbons of reflected light on the high, white ceiling that there's a swimming pool outside. The vertical blinds are the sort of cream colour that only highly motivated professional cleaners can keep the dust off. The paint work can't be more than a couple of years old.
Either he's safe, or he's in the hands of the most frightening sort of crime lords, the ones who don't need to hide in basements or industrial byways to do their dirty work.
The special feeling on each breath, like a screwdriver being wrenched literally between one rib and the other, confirms his suspicion that he broke one or two of them when he fell through the railing. It's a bad one, too. His first attempt at sitting up leaves him sweaty-browed and trembling, right back where he started.
Not that there's anywhere he could go with a bullet hole straight through his calf, anyway.
With an effort, he pulls back the blanket to inspect the state of it. The neat bandaging speaks of someone who doesn't wish him harm, he thinks. When he turns his head, there's a case about the right size for the PASIV tucked against the armchair opposite the sofa that Eames has been laid out on.
He scopes out the house properly. Looks fancy/simple: kitchen downstairs, along with a big living area behind full-wall windows that let in the view; probably a luxury master bedroom upstairs, spa bath, walk-in closet - nothing he'll ever see with his leg the way it is. As the magic anaesthetic of sleep starts to wear off, the throb of pain starts to dominate his senses. Just as he's starting to weigh up the damage of getting up against the horror of going the rest of the afternoon without pain killers, the front door opens.
When Arthur comes in, he's carrying a paper bag of take-away, a tray of drinks, and a big sack of ice wedged under his arm.
"That was quick," he observes once the door is closed. "How do you feel?"
"Alive," Eames tries to say, but the words catch as the inside of his throat feels like he's been swallowing knives, and that's when he remembers, hazily, that the bullet wound wasn't clean. He caught a splinter of bone among the blood, spattering the leg of his pants. He has a faint memory of the onslaught of pain - not on impact but later, during the gunfight, when he'd tried to get up on his knees and give Yasmin and Arthur better cover. A moment, later, during the ascent, Arthur's voice coming at him thickly as if through a wall, "One more step, Eames," while on the other side of him, their architect, Drake, said tightly, "We haven't got time for this."
"It's not pretty," Arthur reports as he lays down the ice and busies himself arranging his supplies on the coffee table. "But there's nothing that won't heal if you're patient."
He unzips a satiny cushion cover from an armchair, and discards the padding to fill it with ice. When he arranges it over Eames's lower ribs, the ache takes a few seconds to grab him.
"Where are the others?" he asks as soon as he can draw enough breath.
Arthur twists the top off a litre bottle of water and pops a straw in it. "Fluids first. You were bleeding for a while before we could stitch you up. I couldn't get you an IV without admitting you."
The water is like a caress running over his shredded throat. While he drinks, Arthur fills him in.
"Yasmin's got contacts in the city she's pretty sure are off the radar. She left you a note of her data. Drake's on a train, over the border by now if he's lucky. His arm's all torn up from breaking the van window, but it's nothing a good doctor can't mend once he's back home."
Arthur trades the water for a plastic topped container of lemonade, and tells Eames to take it easy when the gas makes him wheeze. "Drink up. You need the sugar. You're looking at four to five days of high-dose pain killers before you can get up, and I won't lie, I doubt that crutches will even be an option."
There's the crackle of paper, and then Arthur is feeding him fries. The salt is glorious - he gobbles them down.
"Okay, that'll do," Arthur says, resting the half-eaten bag on top of the ice pack, away from the wound. "Take this." He breaks out a pill from a battered, well-travelled sheet. "I still have to clear out the flat. I'll be back when you wake up. Don't even think about moving."
From up close, Arthur looks over-stretched, like he's going to pass out the moment he runs out of urgent tasks. He's in a royal blue polo shirt with a logo for tourists on the breast pocket, the sort of thing you can pick up off the rack outside any number of shops. There's transferred blood on the leg of his pants, a dark patch that's only obvious if you know to look for it.
Eames says, "Walk to the bus station. The inter-city service gets in just after lunch. All those bags, it looks better if you get a taxi from there."
It's Eames's job that's just fallen to pieces, after all. And there's bugger-all he can do to help, apart from dispensing orders. He's already starting to feel muddle-headed again.
"I'll keep that in mind," Arthur tells him as he pulls the door closed.
**
It's getting dark when he wakes again. He's alone. The blinds are closed and the lights above him are on, slightly dimmed.
Arthur was just subbing in as chemist, because after that badly timed terror alert, only someone with his squeaky clean passport and CIA connections could traffic everything they needed through customs without a hitch. He added a third to his fee, calling it a late engagement surcharge, although it was clearly just a petty little penalty for the inconvenience of working with Eames. Eames had agreed to it with a grin, and chalked it up as a score to settle in the fullness of time. Arthur's well and truly earning his fee now.
Eames's heart thumps fast. He can see the shiver of it under his wet shirt where the ice pack was. He's a hundred percent helpless here, if anyone works out where to find them. He'd like to have quizzed Arthur more on what this place is, what precautions he's taken.
He looks around for his phone, and spots it in smashed up pieces up on the table under the mirror. It would have been in his pocket when he fell. He thinks, a bit deliriously, of all the things he has to do. Read over Yasmin's notes from the extraction. Prepare the client report. Warn Yusuf that he'd better send someone for the PASIV if he wants it back any time this month. The frustrated jerk and tap of his good leg makes the far end of the blanket shudder like an unfriendly sea.
When Arthur finally comes downstairs, he's wearing thin grey trousers and a striped polythermal shirt.
"Expecting the rugged outdoors, were you?"
"I was in Maine," Arthur frowns. "Hiking. You didn't exactly give me a lot of preparation time."
Trust Arthur to look for recreation in something orderly, an activity that can be measured in contour lines and plotted in red dots on a map. Eames thinks pissily of Declan, with his deadly uppercut and the long white scar across his chest from that speedboat crash.
Arthur's actions have a got a bit more thought behind them as he brings paper towel to wipe up the last of the melted ice off Eames's chest. He's not lurching from one task to the next like he was this morning. He patiently mops at Eames's chest, just the faintest of touches on the swelling around the break. He's thorough, of course, pulling back the t-shirt to get every last trickle.
It's about then that Eames starts to find the touch erotic. It's not something he means to do. Only the sound of Arthur's breath is intimate, and Eames has got nothing to do other than watch the swish of his eyelashes when his attention changes direction, feel the warmth from his wrist crossing the short distance between them.
"If you'd put me in hospital, they'd have me doped up and comatose. None of this personal touch."
Arthur spares a pointed look from his ministrations. "Lucky for you, I didn't know if any of your aliases were fit to be mentioned in an official record."
"One or two," Eames said. "As you could easily have found out."
"I told you, I jumped straight on a plane. There was no time to do background." He shoves himself up bad-temperedly.
He was relying on Eames's prep work then. Entirely. And look how that turned out. Not that he's over-burdened with guilt. It was sheer bad luck that blocked their exit with two security guards on their tail. A garbage trolley parked in front of a fire door in contravention of some very clear upper-case signage.
"Would you have done full recon on the cleaning ops?" he asks when Arthur comes back, with a proper ice pack this time, frosty on the outside.
"Perhaps," Arthur says, and pulls Eames's shirt back down as a barrier to the sting of ice, rearranges it so it lies straight. "Yes."
He lets that judgment sit while he settles the ice pack, then adds:
"But it doesn't necessarily happen that way every time. You don't know. It could have been one guy's fuck-up on a bad day." He shakes the blanket back into place. If he were in better condition, Eames would like to run a finger up Arthur's bicep, so clearly profiled under the fine-weave shirt, and see where that took them. "No point in looking back."
He spends the rest of the evening in the company of his laptop at the dining table, while Eames plays the low-budget suite of games on his little travel tablet for as long as he can stand to hold his arms up.
A bit after midnight, Arthur brings him his Glock and drags a chair over to rest it on, within arm's reach. "Seems to me you need it more than I do."
Then he fetches a carving knife from the kitchen and heads for the stairs. All Eames will have to look forward to is a few helpless hours of staring at the ceiling before he gets tired enough to sleep.
"You didn't do a bang-up job of covering your tracks then?" Eames calls after him.
For a second, his face darkens like he's going to unleash the furious bollocking that Eames deserves, and wants the distraction of hearing. Then the fight goes out of him and he says a bit wearily, "Look, I did the best I could with an ugly situation. If you're not happy with my work, just tell me who to call."
Eames doesn't tell him who to call, because his mental lists of "people who'd put their lives on the line to save my arse" and "people who'd spend five days fetching ice packs and changing dressings" are mutually exclusive. (The second list is made up entirely of family and, if his luck holds, Arthur.)
Arthur's doing all the right things. He's giving Eames the space he wanted, after those strange days in the wash-up of the Fischer job where they'd managed to burn through two and a half years of electric sexual tension almost quicker than it took for hotel dry cleaning to finish with their jackets; when he'd come out of the shower one morning to see Arthur repacking his suitcase into orderly piles of white and beige and brown and thought what the fuck am I doing here? He's taking care of Eames's most pressing medical needs with the same dispassionate expert touch he'd use on a build, and showing no sign of abusing his position for retribution.
But Eames is medicated, and immobilised, and in pain, and Arthur's all he's got.
**
During the night, Eames drags himself to the bathroom to use the toilet. The crawling isn't as bad as all that, so long as he moves slow and keeps the weight on his shoulders. It's the getting up and down at either end that makes him feel like his lower ribcage is getting jammed between a concrete block and a 747. He makes a bit of a mess trying to clean his teeth in the hand basin while he's sitting there, but it restores a modicum of dignity. He doesn't trust himself with the razor yet.
He's still paying in pain for that excursion when Arthur brings his breakfast and his next dose of relief. There's a sweet, drifting period afterwards, while he licks jam off his fingers as his muscles unwind from their protective clench. What follow is rapid onset boredom. He shuffles the cushions behind his head irritably.
Arthur looks up from his magazine. He's been reading in the armchair which he's moved towards the window, like someone who grew up thinking of sunlight as a finite and precious commodity.
"If you want something to do, you can start with breathing exercises."
Eames gives him the most unimpressed look he can from his supine position.
Undeterred, Arthur adds, "Rib injuries come with a risk of pneumonia. Shallow breathing creates the perfect conditions. And let me be crystal clear on this, if you come down with self-induced sequelae, you’ll be dealing with them all on your own."
That's the exact bloodless tone he uses when he's threatening a mark with having his knees shot out. It's only the countervailing evidence of the last day's patient nursing that makes the shiver in Eames's spine feel a little bit delicious.
"Is this to your clinical satisfaction?”
Arthur flicks a dissatisfied glance over the meagre rise and fall of the blanket. “You’re not even trying.”
“If I try any harder I’ll snap it clean through. Is that what you’re hoping for?”
With a sigh, Arthur lays his magazine on his chair and comes over for an inspection.
“Go on then,” he says, laying his hand just below the recently replaced ice pack and settling down on his knees. “Deep enough that I can feel your diaphragm work. Start with five.”
The first attempt ends with an excruciating wrench of pain that leaves him blinking and dazed.
“I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” Arthur says, much softer. “Come on. Try again. As deep as you can.”
Instead, he reaches out and runs the flat of his fingernail over Arthur's bottom lip. Arthur looks at him, shocked and disbelieving. Then he looks again, grading down to just insulted.
"What's the harm?" Eames points out, nudging his knuckle against Arthur's jaw. "Come here.”
Arthur flutters a withering look somewhere off to the side, as if he's disgusted with himself. "You’re setting new standards for ridiculous here.”
But when Eames grasps the neck of his t-shirt between two fingers, it doesn’t take much force to bend him down.
The first connection of skin on skin is electric. Not like a shock, but a low crackle that builds as Arthur brushes their lips together, as if he’s curious but uncommitted. A full day of immobility has left Eames’s nerves unnaturally sensitive. It’s unbearably erotic to be teased this way, Arthur’s breath easing intimately over his skin. Eames feels his mouth fall open, he hears the fleshy, unguarded sound when he does it. And then Arthur is kissing his bottom lip. Slow, considered little touches along the swell of it, back along the lower edge, a gentle drag as he squeezes the meat of it, then follows up with the first hot swipe of the tip of his tongue.
Eames’s breath puffs out of him, startled. His palms and scalp and groin are all tingling, as if his body has been craving this outside the reach of his conscious thoughts. Or perhaps it’s just the relief of feeling something that isn’t pain. He grasps around, in the limited space his bent elbow allows, for some bit of Arthur he can reach and ends up with the back of his hand pressed into Arthur’s chest, where he can feel the lean muscle through the time-worn cotton, and the calm rhythm of his heart.
Arthur dips into his mouth and withdraws, keeping it shallow, holding back until Eames’s urgency starts to ease a bit. Eames tilts up into his mouth, and their tongues brush together at last. It can’t turn into much with their mouths at crossed angles, but his blood is hot with the excitement of the forbidden. As if they’re doing something far more improper than playing around with a job still on the brink. When the tip of his tongue strokes at the underside of Arthur’s, the unhurried pace of it makes him more breathless than anything. It could be the barbiturate residue at work in his neural system. He could kiss Arthur like this all afternoon, slip from blissful pauses back to these startling flickers of connection.
They didn’t do much of this, the first time round. Too busy shoving each other into walls and tables and, occasionally, a mattress. He’d had an obstinate greyish bruise on the juncture of his neck and shoulder for nearly two weeks after that last day, when he’d packed himself into a taxi, while Arthur was down at reception providing another round of performance specifications for the sort of pillow he preferred, and hopped the first flight over the border.
But this, it's as much as his battered body can take right now, and everything he needs. Their mouths are getting heated as they slide together. It's harder and harder to tell where the taste of his own mouth ends and Arthur's mouth begins.
Eventually, Arthur pulls back, not making a fuss. He puts a hand back over Eames’s diaphragm and, after a few moments' observation, says “There. That’s more like it.”
He can feel the pain, faintly, beneath the pleasant fizz of arousal in his blood, and the narcotic comfort of being touched. It’s not as bad as before.
Without another word, Arthur shifts Eames’s most recent water bottle into easy reach and goes back to his magazine. He wears a frown, as if forcing himself to concentrate. It’s impossible to miss how he sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and lets it go again. Eames finds himself mirroring the action. Then he allows himself a pretty satisfied grin and reaches for the remote control.
**
That afternoon, he refuses the painkiller that Arthur brings him. There's a bit of an argument, but the more Arthur presses him to take a pill that faintly impairs his judgment and leaves him sleepily compliant, the more determined he becomes not to take it. Eventually, Arthur lets him switch it for three aspirin, then disappears from the house again. They have another argument about whether he should take the Glock. Eames wins that one. He takes it.
He spends the afternoon watching BBC World News until the repetition of content starts to feel like a hallucinated future in which the same series of countries are repeatedly bombed, or liberated, or engulfed by riots. Time moves at a snail's pace without the deadening effect of real drugs. He starts plotting ways to get out of the country, up to and including getting a death certificate and shipping himself home in a body bag so that no-one questions his inability to move.
"How did it go?" he hears himself asking the moment Arthur opens the door.
Arthur gives his shopping bags a questioning glance. "Fine. No problems. I can speak a little Spanish, you know."
As it happens, Arthur's Spanish is technically proficient and even comfortably colloquial. He resents Arthur's appropriation of the very European habit of false humility.
"No tail?"
"Just a couple of guys in black fedoras and long coats. A white van with a dish on the roof. Jesus."
He stalks out of the room, in the direction of the kitchen.
Eames doesn't think he can look at the shadow of the blinds against the far wall for one second longer. They're striped like prison bars.
He raises his voice. "Excuse me for wanting to stay alive, Arthur. You might have noticed I'm in a less than optimal position for self defence just now."
Arthur returns to the room to hold out his Glock, waggling it obviously. He lays it across Eames's chest, and lifts his hand to curl it around the butt.
"Less than optimal," he says, stripped wryly of inflection. "That's how MI5 trained you, is it?"
And then he's gone again, leaving Eames to point the gun at the light fitting, at the window, at every goddamn shadow stripe on the wall, itching to pull the trigger.
Later, however, there's a sizzling sound from the kitchen, and the smell of meat. His appetite comes to life with a bang. Not long afterwards, he's got a bowl of carved-up chicken breast sitting on a neat bed of salad. Arthur puts a small jar within reach.
"What's this?"
Arthur shrugs. "No idea. It looked like fun. I think it's about twelve different kinds of chilli pepper. I'd say go easy on it."
He watches Arthur slather the stuff liberally over his serving, but decides that caution is the better part of valour when it comes to his own stomach lining. The protein goes to his head like wine, after a day and a half sustaining his injured body on the fries and packet soup Arthur managed to grab on his first shopping run. He wolfs it down, only to find Arthur watching him in bemusement.
"That's the secret, is it?" he asks between mouthfuls. "A few pieces of fried chicken fillet turns you practically dewy-eyed. I've never seen you look so happy."
"These are extenuating circumstances," Eames informs him, unruffled and basking in the afterglow of an excellent meal.
"Extenuating."
"Highly."
"Are you going to lick your fingers?"
Eames does, but only later when Arthur is putting away the dishes.
For a little while, the blissed-out satisfaction of a full belly keeps his trials at bay, but as the afternoon wears on, his busted ribs start to protest the strain of propping himself up to eat, and then the chilli starts to do its predictable, diabolical work. It's not long before all he can think about is the shooting pain up his shin bone, the squeeze that feels like boulders crushing his chest.
"Need anything?" Arthur asks, concerned, as he passes through the room wielding a street directory.
Eames grunts in reply. He sees Arthur move forward, pause, and come back again, this time with his attention properly settled on Eames.
"Okay then. Breathing exercises."
Arthur plays it so straight. It's impossible to guess whether there's a thread of innuendo in there, a reference to yesterday. If he still had the Glock, he'd like to make a point with it right now. Arthur's the worst kind of tosser to play this game right now, when Eames can barely stand to breathe.
"Eames." If there was anything flirtatious in there, it's been quashed now. "I thought I made it clear that wallowing is not an option here. Breathing exercises. Come on."
"Get fucked."
Eames turns his head towards the sofa back and wallows. It feels like days since he got a break from pain.
There's a stressed sounding sigh, then he's alone again. The shadow bars have vanished, replaced by a draining tropical heat, the tension of an imminent thunderstorm that refuses to break. Eames is pretty sure he won't survive another day of this.
**
When he shakes himself out of a shallow, feverish dream (featuring a collapse in a factory level that buried him under tonnes of steel machinery), Arthur is back in the room. He's over by the window, thumbing his way through something on his tablet. Always work with Arthur, he thinks.
"Yasmin's data looks good," Arthur says, without turning, a few minutes later.
Eames frankly doubts it can be good enough to justify the way his ribs feel, like an iron spreader was being applied to force a distance between them. A distance, it feels now, big enough for a fist to pass through.
"I'll leave it for you to look through."
When Arthur is gone, the tablet sits there, a source of distraction. He knows he's going to pick it up, in the end.
**
"Okay," says Arthur resolutely from the door. "This is not negotiable."
In his hands is a tray loaded with a small plate of chicken, a glass of water, and a single pill on a saucer.
"Your dressing needs changing tonight, and there's no way you want to go through that straight."
Eames gives him a good, protracted glare, but when left alone, he bites the pill in two and swallows the larger portion, and after a moment the smaller one too.
He does his best to think about other things during the awful process of bandages and old gauze being peeled off the oozing bullet wound in his calf. During the bit where he can feel the tug it takes to dislodge it, he closes his eyes and … well, he means to think about Mick, the kickboxer he spent a bruised and reckless week with on the most suicidal slopes at Courchevel. But Arthur's breathing is thick with concentration, unguarded, and he can't help the way it takes him back to that LA hotel room, Arthur's hand pressed into the steam on the bathroom mirror as Eames slipped into him.
He's glad of the painkillers after that, when he has to sit up and soak his calf in a bucket of warm, salty water that stings like acid. But like any pain, when it's over, it leaves a gift of endorphins and relief.
"How's that?" Arthur asks as he wraps the leg in a towel to dry. "Okay?"
Eames is sweaty across the brow, but the tentacles of pain which were shooting out every which way from the calf wound are starting to recoil now, and his ribs are positively glowing at the chance to lie down again. The numbing embrace of the pill is deepening, starting to quench his nerve endings one by one like candles. He can only faintly feel Arthur's hand where it rests over the towel.
"Thirsty," he says.
Arthur retrieves the lightweight wax cup from the first day, filled with water and a straw, and holds it out, but Eames finds his thirst has vanished. Instead, he slips one finger under the top button of Arthur's shirt and lightly pulls.
"Yes," he contradicts Arthur's expression lazily, maintaining the encouraging pull on his shirt. "If you make me lean up, it's going to undo a lot of hard work."
So Arthur gets down on one knee and deposits the cup on the floor somewhere while Eames draws him in and kisses him.
It's like picking up where they left off before. The kiss is unhurried and intuitive, this time. They hit a nice rhythm, accidental and familiar all at once. With a fingertip touching the uncushioned blade of Arthur's jaw, Eames remembers the very different mood from LA, all those little bites like Arthur had given him, like he couldn't decide whether to sever the jugular or bleed him out slow. Now, he's kissing with nothing but the soft swell of his lips, which go gently as they glide over Eames's mouth. Infused with a slow-witted affection, he manages to wind his fingers through the lush curl behind Arthur's ear. He winds it idly as their kiss goes on, deepening into the first hot brush of tongues that makes him sigh and lean up for more.
The drugs, the easing of pain, something is making him sentimental as he strokes his knuckle along the edge of Arthur's cheek bone. Arthur pauses, breath stuttering, then goes back to the same easy rhythm.
He was always a little disappointed that he never heard from Arthur after the Fischer job. Back at home, over all those long nights reacquainting himself with the smoky delights of his local bar, he'd expected some sort of overture disguised as a casual job offer. Maybe a text enquiring whether there was any chance he might be coming through California over the summer. Even a pointed email complaining about the bottle of Dom Perignon Eames had charged to their hotel room on his way out the door. Arthur was a problem solver. If he'd wanted Eames half as much as it had appeared, there would have been some sort of pursuit. Instead, he'd let Eames go, and never said another word about it. Eames had had cause to wonder, since, if the suffocation he’d started to feel – the fear of being compartmentalised like Arthur’s tool kit and chiselled, chip by determined chip, into the sort of neat and predictable person Arthur liked to let into his life – perhaps had been entirely warranted.
Now, though, he's kissing Eames like his heart is all in it. His tongue strokes tenderly across Eames's top lip, dips in to flit over the tip of his tongue, a sweet little tease that makes him crave more than his body can handle right now. He finds Arthur's hand resting lightly over his chest and encircles his wrist, rubbing gently at the pulse point. This is his gun hand, the hand that shot them out of their tight corner three days ago. The hand that maybe killed a man. Eames feels impossibly tender towards that hand, wants to be reminded of its steady grip, its deadly aim.
But not just now. He knows how to play a long game. He turns his face a fraction, just enough to be discouraging.
"This has got to stop," Arthur says, immediately, his eyes flicking open.
He doesn't meet Eames's gaze as he throws himself into action, standing up to pack items back in his medikit. Eames watches him force a roll of bandage angrily through a too-small gap in the zip.
"Are we done then?" Eames asks.
"Yes we are," Arthur says fiercely, right before he freezes and glances down to confirm that Eames's leg needs rebandaging.
With clenched jaw, Arthur gets back down on his knees, sticking to the far end of the sofa, to finish the job. He's rough with the bandage, working in jerky, hurried strokes, and appears to ignore every part of Eames above the knee. His hands are still unsteady by the time he pins the end of the roll in place.
"I'm glad you're here," Eames tells him as he is standing up, mission accomplished. It sounds a little dreamy, but it feels like the note he wants to hit.
Arthur just looks at him wearily and says, "Don't."
**
The next day, it's like the floor has been sewn with mines around a one-metre radius from Eames's couch.
Arthur brings water when asked, or tea, or the children's puzzles from an in-flight magazine. Driven by boredom, Eames circles random letter strings in the find-a-word and tries to put them into a sentence.
"Have you ever owned a xalaok, Arthur? You'd know how to get one into the country without a permit, if anybody would."
Arthur sits in his strip of sunlight across the room and passes him things from a safe distance. It's mildly insulting, that he seems to think Eames is a threat to the sanctity of his person.
Arthur was the one who didn't know how to keep his distance. The first night they spent in LA, Arthur offered him a spare toothbrush, straight out of the packet, like that was an act of foresight Eames was going to be seduced by. A day in, he had asked the first of several questions about Eames's home, opening the door to an invitation that Eames could not have been more greatly disinclined to offer. Arthur was particular, and he worked with glacial patience at getting things how he wanted them. Eames was not about to be wrangled into being Arthur’s sometimes boyfriend, skeevy forger by day and companionable lover by night. He was nimble, knew how to slip free of that sort of expectation.
Eames has an image of the sort of person he could love. Someone with no sense of self-preservation. Someone who can give him, every day, the feeling of Cobb dropping into his life with a psychological conundrum and an armed chase. There have been a few men who fitted that image. Arthur turned out not to be one of them.
He liked Arthur well enough in the few days they were together. He's smart and limber, and not afraid to pull up a screencap from a porn video and ask Can you hold that for more than a minute? But outside the bedroom, he's too used to carrying a team in his hands. His instincts are all the wrong kind. He gravitates toward safety. If he takes a risk, he has to push against the grain of himself to do it. He takes no joy in it.
Arthur finds a thin, flat book and lays it over Eames's diaphragm in place of his hand.
"When you can see it move, then you're working hard enough."
"Thank you, Arthur," he says. "I'm sure I shall find that both healing and entertaining."
**
It's a skewed sort of existence when he measures his success by how many times he has to stop, trembling on hands and knees, before he can make it to the bathroom and subject himself to the ordeal of dragging himself up onto the toilet. He's stopped beside the bannister of the staircase, head swimming, when a chance echo carries Arthur's voice down to him.
"It was a month away," he's saying with badly stifled anger, "when I agreed to it. Thursday is not achievable." A moment passes. "Go ahead then. They can do the job without me."
Faintly, he hears pacing footsteps, then abruptly they stop.
"That was a done deal." Arthur's voice has compressed into the sort of dangerous hiss that Eames is grateful not to be on the receiving end of. "Informant status – not to be touched by local law enforcement. It's too late – it's too late for conditions now. If you revoke his status, he'll be exposed. Dead. If you want me in on this, you need to do better."
Whatever the other participant says must long-winded and, ultimately, persuasive.
"You can keep your motherfucking moral high ground," Arthur concludes bitterly. "You're as bad as they are. The only difference is the picture on your badges."
**
"Give me a name to call," Arthur says when he comes downstairs, a little later. "Someone who can fetch and carry for you."
"Lined up a job, have you?"
"Someone who can be here tomorrow."
The flinty expression on Arthur's face tells him not to push. "Who's the client?"
"Eames."
"Maybe I'd like to make a counter-offer."
Arthur snorts at that. "You can't. It's government."
Arthur doesn't work for government anymore, Eames is aware. Because government always turns out to be CIA, and he finds their methods distasteful. While Eames sympathises with the sentiment, he rolls his eyes at the sanctimonious way Arthur usually puts it.
"Which arm?"
"State Department, technically."
"Technically. And actually?"
"Actually, I've downloaded everything off your sim. I can start with Aidan and move on from there, if you like."
Aidan was running an adventure tour company in Chile, last Eames had heard. Fast water, sharp rocks, long periods outside the cell phone network. But there are other names he doesn't especially want called.
He already knows who he can count on. His sister's branch of the family is the most feckless and unlucky of them all. His twenty-one year old niece will come and look after him ... for the right price.
"Steph then. Let me do the talking."
**
For the whole of Tuesday and into Wednesday morning, Arthur continues to act as if Eames was surrounded by his own personal no-man's-land. If he has any more unfriendly conversations with his CIA handler, he takes them out of earshot. From the bloody-minded persistence Eames has applied to the task of piecing together the details of Arthur's job, he's fairly certain the job is in Dubai, the target is the scion of a well-connected Saudi family, and he can guess that the subject is likely to be financing or training for terrorism.
That explains Arthur's distaste. For these sorts of stakes, the intelligence services act as if they wielded the very sword of St Peter. There will certainly be no room for quibbling about the ratio between ends and means. If a complicated technique like extraction fails, they always have cruder tools: a hungry dog, a bag full of rocks, a wet cloth.
When Eames had been out in the field, that sort of approach got you psych-assessed straight off the front line and into a glorified sentry role, opening car doors for some lowly consul in a volatile but strategically insignificant backwater. These days it appears to have entered into the standard curriculum.
By some stroke of luck, the only free power socket appears to be in the living area, so Eames gets the entertainment of watching Arthur iron a two shirts and a pair of trousers, angled as close as the power cord allows to the natural light from the window.
The repetitive motions and the slow hiss of steam seem to loosen the knot of tension Arthur has worked himself into over the last day.
Ironing would have a philosophical appeal for a man like that: the geometric challenge of breaking down an irregularly shaped surface area into the required stripes of action. Back and forth, with no part gone over more than once, and no part neglected. He watches Arthur nuzzle the pointed tip of the iron into the nook underneath one wing of the collar, tending the fabric right up to the stitching. Arthur is fastidious about the things under his care.
It's slow work with the little travel iron. Eames watches the shift in Arthur's shoulder-blades as he smoothes out one of the sleeves and goes to work.
"This is the sort of job where you need to keep up appearances, is it?"
Arthur turns to give him a critical glance.
"There's only one sort of job."
There's a hiss and sputter from the iron as it glides through a few more strokes.
"As your loud colonial wardrobe proves you're well aware." Arthur lifts the sleeve up to check the other side and flips the shirt over. "An idiot living it up abroad, who could blunder harmlessly into any corner of the world."
It's a good day for Eames, today. The swelling around his leg wound is finally getting better rather than worse, the pain is down to an ever-present ache, and he's quite enjoying the clear-headedness of another drug-free morning. He's not himself yet, but he could do a pretty good job of faking it, if he had to.
"Is that what you think of me?"
"I think you know how to work a smart cover."
Sometimes, on a job, an unexpected chemistry between the location, the prospects of success and the personalities in play produces an evening where one beer turns into half a dozen, and professional colleagues lounge on borrowed furniture and start to open up like old friends. He has a sense for which teams it will happen on. It feels like one of those days.
"Is that all?"
Arthur drapes the shirt on a hanger and shakes out a pair of trousers. He turns up the iron and holds the palm of his hand near its face to test the heat.
"I think you have an abnormally high pain threshold." He tests the iron again and finds it satisfactory. "You were shooting from the knees with a puddle of blood around you. That gangway you fell from was ten feet high. When I saw you go over, I thought—"
Eames waits three full strokes of the iron before he prompts, "You thought?"
"I thought, you fucking idiot. You should have brought me in from the start, and then none of this would have happened."
Eames is contemplating whether to say that he hadn't thought Arthur would accept, even though he knows full well that, in the end, when he'd badly needed help to salvage a job veering off the rails, he hadn't hesitated to presume on some lingering attraction on Arthur's part. One way of looking at it, that's just part of being a professional, knowing whose loyalties you can presume on, and how far, and for how long.
"And then I thought, how I am going to get his body out with the alarm going off and probably a car full of armed backup on the way." Arthur has gone still, as if drawn back into the memory. His voice drops to a hush. "And then, there you were. Shooting."
Arthur hisses a curse and jerks the iron off the fabric. He holds the trousers up to inspect them, as if glad of the distraction. The moment is still a bit sombre. Eames doesn't ask himself how much he'd risk to get a body repatriated, or which of his colleagues he'd do it for.
"You know what I thought?" He waits for the shift in Arthur's shoulders that says he's interested. "I thought, fucked if I'm putting up with the insufferable twats in Paul fucking Smith a second time to replace this pair of trousers."
Arthur laughs, as intended. It gives him an unexpected twinge of tenderness, the strangely intimate combination of Arthur laughing and Arthur ironing.
"You know you can get the whole range online, right?" Arthur says later, when he's unplugging the iron and setting it on the side table to cool. "If you ever lose another pair. I think the attitude is here to stay, though."
Arthur vanishes for a bit, making industrious sounds upstairs. Eames twitches his good foot bad-temperedly as his gaze flicks from the inadequate distraction of the turned-down television to the slow-moving path of the shadows on the walls. It makes everything worse to know that Arthur is packing for departure. Leaving him simmering here in this unbearably boring house, alone until Steph's early morning arrival.
When he looks at the landscape view out the windows, all he can think is how on the other side of the house is a city full of shady bars, and hired guns, and all the usual range of criminal morality. Somehow, the routine of the last few days had obscured that disquieting fact.
He watches Arthur come back down the stairs and deposit his bags by the door. If he knows Arthur, there'll be a taxi ordered for a hotel down the street, one more safeguard on their location. Eames feels around on the floor for the magazine he discarded earlier to give him something to focus on while Arthur makes one of his last-minute tours of the premises, checking for forgotten items or new hazards.
There's a high wall on the street side – he knows because he made Arthur describe the security arrangements in detail the moment his head was clear enough to process it. On the hill side, with the view, he can see it for himself when he shifts his feet gingerly onto the floor and sits up. It's low enough for one man to boost another on top of. And between there and here, there's nothing but a pane of glass. With the light on, he's been a sitting duck every night so far. He's going to have to get Arthur to shut the blinds before he leaves.
It costs him more than expected to get his leg resettled. He's given in and reached for the new jar of pills when Arthur, with an exasperated exhale, takes it from his hand.
"Do you want to give yourself an ulcer?" He goes to the kitchen, still muttering. "Self-induced sequelae. What does it take to make you listen?"
When he comes back, he's carrying another egg and tomato sandwich, and a glass of water. He lays it on the table and kneels down.
"Okay," he says. He removes the Glock from his waistband and puts that on the table too. "I can't fly with it. So it's better off here."
He pauses. If he's waiting for Eames to argue, he needn't bother. The gun can stay. Arthur looks like he's about to add something, but doesn't. He's flexing his thighs to get up when Eames grabs him by the wrist. He changes direction immediately, and Eames barely has to pull to get him leaning down.
The only coherent thought he has for a while is that the way Arthur kisses is the way he does everything. Quietly, persistently good. He's keeping it light for now, leaving just enough space for their lips to brush together with every move. It occurs to him, as Arthur’s hand steadies his chin to switch the angle into a more open mouthed connection, that he could possibly have fucked up their first round quite spectacularly.
He doesn’t try to banish the thought, hide it away. It’s only the product of frustration, and a mind starting to atrophy with inactivity. A a moment later, the thought has slipped away, because the swipe of Arthur’s tongue in his mouth is starting to remind him of sex, and his body forgets its many impairments and react as if that might be where they’re headed. His breath catches as he leans up, chasing Arthur’s mouth, and jerks the swollen muscle over his broken ribs.
“Take it easy,” Arthur says as his hand creeps up to cover Eames’s eyes. His other hand slides up Eames’s windpipe and skips to his mouth. Arthur’s thumb traces lightly over his bottom lip, barely denting its surface. The touch glides over his wet skin.
He would never have had the patience for this sort of pace, back then. Bluff as he might, he couldn't make himself share Cobb and Arthur's dangerous insouciance about how close they'd all come to shredding their minds in that dream level. In the wash-up of the Fischer job, he'd been dogged by a
deep uneasiness that could only be banished by constant distraction – unsleeping background noise. He’d forgotten it until now. The constant itch in his bones, as if he’d been resurrected into a body that no longer quite fit him.
There’s an excruciating, light-headed moment as Arthur bends down again, opens Eames’s jaw with that same light touch, and kisses his top lip, tiny dabs of contact, and audible erotic click with each damp parting of skin. Blinded, with his jaw in a firm grip, he feels it as a much more powerful gesture, and a shiver of surprise and arousal runs through him as he twists his arm to get contact with the back of Arthur’s head so he can press their mouths together properly. “Jesus, Eames—“ Arthur says in a wheeze, as if recovering from a blow to the diaphragm, and Eames likes that disoriented sound of that on a man like Arthur, wants to hear it again.
Arthur's breathing heavily when he pulls back at last. He leaves his hand over Eames's throat while he regathers himself, then stands up and extends the handle on his travel case.
"Keep your head down," he says from the doorway. "And call Yasmin if it's a hands-down emergency. There's a couple of old fraud charges I could get wiped out for her."
The house isn't quite as dreary as expected, when he has it all to himself.
**
It's got to be well past midnight when his phone rings.
So sorry, Steph tells him. She went to a party in Brighton last night, and that meant she had to borrow a car to get back to Gatwick, which of course she did, but she was speeding all the way and when the cops puller her over, it turned out her friend's car had been unregistered for a year. She hitched a ride with a truck and almost made it – but no amount of tears would convince them to open the counter for her with half an hour until takeoff. She'd book another one, she assures him ardently, but all her cards are maxed out and she's still waiting for the cash for her last stint of work, some tatts she designed for friends on their wedding day.
It's all right, he tells her, ears pricked for any sounds of threat from the darkness outside. Probably for the best. He can take care of himself.
It's a long night after that. There's no way he's calling Yasmin. It's bad enough she had to endure the performance he put on in the back of the van, between when the numbness of adrenalin wore off and the point where he passed out for good.
He thinks about who else he can call. The friends he knows from his early years in espionage are quietly resentful of his failure to bring them in on the supposed pots of gold in dreamshare; even at the best of times, they are the sort of people around whom a smart man sleeps with one eye open. He let go of his childhood friendships once his home-coming drinks started to be dominated by talk about the real estate market and the cost of a decent pram. None of his exes are what you would call soft-hearted, and a few of them will probably hang up the moment they recognise his voice. He thinks Mark might be the closest thing to fond of him, but last he heard, Mark was on assignment in Syria, running logistics for a new relief centre. Even if Eames could convince him to come here, the asking would enliven expectations that Eames can't be bothered deflecting.
He does pull up Arthur's number on the screen of his new cell phone, and ask himself whether he has enough sway there to get him to pull his government job and come back. What exactly he would have to put on the table to get him to do it, and whether or not he'd follow through on what he promised. The conclusion he comes to is that there are too many unknowns to make that gamble worthwhile.
The thing about Arthur is he works by intellect, not emotion. He gathers facts and holds onto them forever, facts and results. Every new potential outcome is measured against past experience, to filter out what is likely from what is far-fetched. On the rare occasions when Arthur gets it wrong, it's because of a twist of circumstances outside the range of his research; never because he over-played the facts he had at his disposal.
Arthur never forgets a lesson, and the lesson Eames taught him was to expect nothing.
He puts the phone away. He did this to himself, and he's damn well going to take care of it. The night is too full of unidentifiable noises for a wanted man to get back to sleep, but the daylight leaves slightly less anxious.
He's going to start with a shower, so he feels human again. By the time he comes back, all he can do is pop two of the pills, ulcers be damned, and pass out back on the couch.
**
When he wakes up, abruptly, in the late afternoon, Arthur is asleep in the armchair. The airline tags are still attached to his travel case.
He must be wiped out because Eames has watched three muted episodes of a soap opera before he stirs and says, "What happened to your niece?"
"Missed her flight."
Eames watches enviously as he sits up and stretches his back, with his elbows pointed out in a t shape.
"What happened to your job?"
Arthur swipes a hand down his face, picks up an empty water glass and puts it down again. "The mark postponed his day surgery. A last-minute thing. Unlucky."
Luck is not a factor to which Arthur usually attributes the success or failure of his jobs. The word strikes him as conspicuous.
"Why? Why did he cancel his surgery?"
Arthur glances from his case, to the shells of last night's pills.
"The best thing is for both of us to be on a flight today. There's good seats to Dubai, or Frankfurt for somewhere central." He hesitates. "Or if you want me to book you all the way home, you'll need to tell me where you're going."
On top of all the grounds for frustration Eames's already has, this feels like an ambush. He's tempted to take the Frankfurt option, even though it's twelve hours in the wrong direction. But it's going to take a stupefying dose of barbiturate to even leave the house, and there are limited routes that will get him where he needs to go.
"Havana," he says bitterly. "I'd be obliged if you could arrange a flight via Caracas. I prefer to avoid Mexican border control when I can."
"Obliged," Arthur repeats, clearly disappointed in something more than Eames's choice of itinerary. "I'll see what I can do."
He has a dim, nightmarish recollection of the trip to the airport, the unbearable pressure of the taxi seatbelt, the jolt of the wonky old wheelchair, and the first horrific leg of his journey. They part ways at the gate in Caracas. Arthur looks distracted, as if his mind has already switched to his next destination. Eames wants to ask where that is, but he's already circulating the last dose he can take before facing the scrutiny of the Cuban immigration desk, and all he manages to say is "Cheers".
**
It takes him two full days to flush the wooziness out of his system and calm the exacerbated damage to his rib injury. Two days flat on his back with nothing to do but grit his teeth and grow to loathe the smudges of water-damaged plaster on the ceiling.
After that, there's a gradual improvement. His downstairs neighbour, a tour guide he's happily helped out with English translations from time to time, brings him essentials from the shop, and the occasional bowl of beans and rice, or sliced pineapple. If her ad hoc nursing is no match for Arthur's, it's no problem. Every day he needs less and less help.
He doesn't even think about returning to work. But he does think about the last job, and what went wrong.
**
Eames is still getting about with a cane when he answers a knock on his door and finds Arthur on the landing.
"I have a meeting in Sao Paolo on Tuesday," is the first thing he says. "So I thought I'd drop these off."
He holds out a pastel striped shopping bag that make Eames want to roll his eyes. In it are three pairs of the chinos he was shot in, in grey, olive and dark blue.
"You shouldn't have to put up with insufferable twats," Arthur says, "on top of everything else."
They both know that Arthur can't have come on a direct flight from home, or travelled on his official US passport. Eames's third-storey flat out in Vedado is a fifteen minute cab ride from the city centre. Once directed to the right country, it probably wasn't that hard to track him down, since there are few means for foreigners to take up residence here and his sporadic consulting work to the Canadian embassy would have been well within the grasp of Arthur's government contacts.
"How are the ribs, by the way?"
"Better."
He must have left his bags at a hotel room somewhere – probably one of the leaky former colonial mansions in the Old Town. There is a choice here. He never needs to cross this threshold.
Arthur waits, looking more confident than he has any right to be. As if he can see how, on the occasional slow morning, Eames has imagined Arthur standing at his kitchen window with the sliver of view over the Malecon, or sipping aged rum to the sultry accompaniment of a trumpet on jam night in his favourite bar. How he's pictured the fit of Arthur in this flat, and failed to convince himself either way.
"I suppose I should offer you a drink, for your trouble."
"Don't feel obliged." Arthur smiles, easy. "The bar at my hotel makes a good mojito." He shifts his weight as if about to turn back to the stairs. "I'm glad you're up and about."
"Arthur," he says, harder than he means to. "Come in and have a fucking drink."
He lets Arthur juice the limes, in the end, while he sits down and takes the weight off his leg. With two swift slices of the knife, he squeezes them out with his bare hands, tucking the skins into the glasses with the sugar and mint and crushing them together with the handle of a wooden spoon. It looks improvised, but the thought of Arthur trawling You Tube clips for the perfect casually-thrown-together mojito also has its charm. Eames pours the rum, and makes it generous. Arthur clinks the base of his glass against Eames's and leans against the counter.
While they drink, it's satisfying to watch Arthur take in all the architectural flourishes that drew Eames to this building, and this city. The Art Deco curves on the balcony corners. The stepped cornices. The bare wood flooring that's unexpectedly sober inside the pastel green exterior. The airy dimensions, and the patches of modern renovation that stand out like careless ink blots. Arthur's gaze flicks back to the hallway and the front door, flanked with fluted columns and topped by a stained glass sunburst that is unrestrained Cuban Baroque.
"Anything goes here, huh?"
He sips his drink lightly, like a man with a leisurely afternoon ahead of him, and puts it down.
Eames shrugs. "The rules are different."
He gives himself a few moments' reflection before he gets to his feet. It's every bit as satisfying as he imagined, pulling Arthur into his arms, the narrow span of his torso a perfect, neat fit. When they kiss this time, Arthur's hand comes to rest over the hinge of his jaw, subtly angling them into a deeper connection. They're good at it now. Like all their past kisses have worn them into a shape that fits.
Arthur's mouth is smoky and sweet from the rum. The taste has faded by the time they ease out of the kiss. When he opens his eyes, over Arthur's shoulder is his cherished Malecon view, a fragment of open sea that promises fresh air and liberty.
"The rules are different," he backtracks. "But you get used to it."
Arthur's finger trails behind his ear, down the back of his neck, and under the collar of his shirt, shifting the mood heatedly. Eames wonders if the sex will be different now, with time and patience, with street chatter and salty breezes coming in the window.
"Yeah," Arthur says, laughing as he twists to accommodate Eames's suddenly urgent need to kiss his way into the crook of his neck and rest there, contented. "I think I could."
**