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It's no secret Eames has done a lot of pretty reprehensible things in his time. It comes in his title. Extractor. Forger. He's the one who has to slide right up to the mark, pry their mind wide open when some pretty architecture and a couple of charming extractors aren't enough.
You don't grow a conscience when you're masquerading as a man's wife. Carefully seducing him to make him a little more pliable. Make it a little easier to get your hands on those sought after blueprints.
Or posing as someone's dead child. Weaponizing their grief to make their business secrets just a little more accessible.
And sometimes he's just a pretty face in a crowd. A distraction and nothing more.
He'd like to be able to say that sometimes he felt guilty for this, that it weighed down on him and sometimes he wasn't sure he could keep on in this business. But in his waking life, Eames has never been one for telling tales.
***
There's a part of him that always gets excited when a job goes ever so slightly pear-shaped. Not enough that it's something that can't be sorted and dealt with, but enough that it amps up the challenge.
It's the sudden sense of urgency, of running against the clock. It brings a palpable shock of adrenaline that runs through the whole team. Every time.
Nowhere near enough to make him even consider messing things up on purpose - Eames takes his job far more seriously than anything else in life, every job has to be done to the highest standard - but he'll admit to occasionally taking jobs with less than stellar teams for the challenge that comes with it.
He wouldn't like to be called a thrillseeker. Mostly because sometimes it'd be damn hard to deny.
***
In the circles he runs in, there's often been a lot of conjecture about why Eames never runs with a team anymore.
Some people posited the idea of some great tragedy in his past, (the same reason, an ex once assumed, that he never seems to talk about himself in any great detail. He couldn't bring himself to care enough to confirm or deny it.) The other, more popular reason, is simply that he's far too exhausting to be around for any great length of time.
The fact of the matter was, however, quite simple. He couldn't stay still. Found it stifling. He'd noticed it after living a few years stateside, after a little while he was always restless, itching for the next job that would let him just go somewhere. Anywhere. The further away from "home" the better. He just had the nature of a drifter about him. Though rather better dressed than the average.
Once he uprooted, suddenly life made a hell of a lot more sense to him. It was a good thing he figured it out too, honestly he'd been starting to wonder that he was deficient somehow. God forbid it should turn out he was afflicted with some disorder beyond his chronic over-abundance of confidence. That would have been rather tragic. Luckily, he only needed to worry about keeping his passports straight.
It was probably a good thing he'd managed to stumble into such a well paying profession, else he'd never be able to keep his life in order.