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By the time Arthur finds him, the knife bite at the join of his neck is a clustered mound of healing scabs. Arthur can see the pockmark dimples of stitches pinning his neck to his shoulder.
The bruises that must have wrapped like thirty purple fingers around his throat are sickly yellow, now.
The wound will scar, and it is already Arthur’s least favourite of a fine and vast collection that Eames has accumulated over the years.
Eames flinches when Arthur’s eyes rake over his frame. He wants to burn through those clothes, afraid of any greenish fingers marks that might be lingering on the rest of Arthur’s most coveted pieces of Eames, too.
He holds back. Clenches his fists.
Feels a Titan’s fury.
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(I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe.)
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This is how it happens.
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Monaco doesn’t so much welcome him as accept him, littered glitter and the smell of white gold glee.
When Arthur doesn’t find him in the casinos surrounding the hotel, the unwavering constancy of concern in his stomach sky rockets into something so fierce in his chest he wants to claw it out with his bare hands.
He knows his way to Eames’ room, doesn’t need a key and doesn’t need to knock.
Well, he’s never had to knock before, and thanks to Eames’ personal thievery training it’s been a while since he’s needed a key, either.
He’s got one foot in the spacious hotel room, is still clutching the handle of the open door, when the muzzle of a gun presses hard into his temple.
A gun turning on him when he arrives unexpectedly isn’t unheard of, but it’s never made it all the way to his head before.
“Eames, it’s me,” he says calmly. The gun shivers against his skin. “It’s Arthur.”
The weapon falls away. Arthur turns his head as he closes the door fully behind him.
Eames is sleep starved and battered, and Arthur feels the breaking of his own heart before realising exactly what it is that makes him breathless and afraid.
Eames is quiet. The rims of his eyes are bloodshot and there are fading bruises around them, too. There are stitches near his hairline, three, and at least ten more holding together the knotted junction near the base of his throat, which looks in danger of infection.
There’s sweat trickling over his sallow skin. He’s glassy eyed, staring blankly at Arthur with the most awful shade of indifference Arthur has ever seen.
“So, it’s true,” Arthur says, and can’t bear the seething anger hardening his tone, can’t help the way it’s scalding his insides like burning oil.
His mouth, like his eyes, too wet.
It shouldn’t be like this, he reminds himself. (Berates himself.)
On principle, because he is Arthur and he’s the one that just knows things.
But it’s more than that of course, because this is Eames.
So, it’s true, he says, and doesn’t mask the shock because, really, he’d clung to the hope of the common sense Eames so often keeps hidden from sight.
He’d clung to the naïve assumption that Eames would still call for help, call Arthur for help, no matter what. The same way he did three years ago when Arthur’s very pleasant Thanksgiving with the Cobbs was cut short by a sixteen second phone call that was mostly gunfire seasoned with swearing, followed by a fourteen-hour flight to a concussed Englishman’s rescue.
So even if Eames and Arthur have done very little beyond argue and fuck with a vengeance for the past few occasions they’ve managed to cross paths, even if they’ve been cold and bitter since Arthur took it upon himself to play Cobb’s keeper, well.
He’d assumed in the event of abduction and torture, he would still be the one Eames would fight tooth and nail to get a message to.
Arthur dropped everything for Cobb the way he’s never quite done for Eames, but that’s only because Eames has never needed him to before.
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(Well, so Arthur had thought.)
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Eames doesn’t respond to Arthur’s accusation, nor to his being stared at like an insufficient prize turkey. He simply stares back, steely eyes not so much blind as blank, which is probably worse, and Arthur wants to shake him, wants to know why Eames didn’t call, why he didn’t sense the danger and call him before any of this could happen at all.
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Arthur shouldn’t find out Eames was injured three weeks after it happens.
He certainly shouldn’t find out from a fourth-hand nobody that Eames spent a fortnight in a drug den basement trussed up and bleeding and subject to the whims of Frankie fucking Moran and his goons, vengeance for helping enrich a rancorous rival.
Arthur had thought he’d done a good job keeping track of Eames. He’d known all about Eames taking on the Walker-Stoneley job – even if Eames hadn’t told him himself – and he’d known all about its success. As far as Arthur was aware, Eames had done his usual and packed off to somewhere close enough to wave hello to the equator, where he could lie low and sweat and make five-minute friends and gamble his fortune.
There hadn’t been a breath of a rumour of Moran being out for blood, and some of the anger bubbling in Arthur’s veins is at how easily he underestimated the man as nothing more than a two-bit thug.
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The thing is, Arthur leaves because Cobb asks and Mal dies and he loves them both in his own awkward way.
Actually, the thing is, it’s not Arthur’s fault, per say, but let’s just say this:
If he’d been paying just a bit more attention, rather than trying to forcibly forget the taste of Eames’ skin, forget the low rumble of his voice as Arthur squeezes it out of him and the look on his face that time when he saw a jaguar in Brazil, maybe Arthur would have been able to do something other than turn up three weeks too late to a rescue party that never happened.
Maybe.
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(Give me the strong places of the wilderness, which is the trees, and the churches, too, which are arbors raised by the hand of nature.)
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Here’s the truth:
Eames has never fully trusted Dominick Cobb.
The thought of him pushing Mal off that balcony is so preposterous that if it’s ever so much as insinuated in his presence, he’s more than happy to break a few noses over the issue. But really, that’s more for the sake of Mallorie’s memory than Dominick’s honour.
It just doesn’t sit right with Eames that people would think her capable of marrying a complete psychopath.
(A deranged egotist, yes, but not a psychopath.)
Unlike Arthur, Eames is easily ready to believe that Cobb had a hand in putting her up on that balcony in the first place, even if he’s not sure how exactly.
This is one of the many reasons Eames protests Arthur’s departure in June 2008, but it isn’t the only one.
The truth is this:
Eames is in love with Arthur.
Eames loves him, and for this reason, covets him fiercely.
This did not happen overnight. The point is that it happened nonetheless. Even before Eames trusted him, he loved him.
Does this make sense? Perhaps not, yet Eames works with dreams. Impossibilities are the only certainties in his world.
Eames had trusted Arthur implicitly. Not even Arthur jetting off to babysit his newly widowed mentor could break that trust.
(It’s wounded of course, but bruises, they don’t scar.)
When Eames takes on the Walker-Stoneley Job, he thinks about calling Arthur. Only, they are not on perfect terms. In over a year now they’ve seen each other only thrice, and spoken barely more than that.
Eames knows Arthur is trying to freeze him out.
Eames, who is proud and yes, quite vain, is not going to shed tears over this, because he has faith in the trust they have built.
It stings, but even so, he’s been stung plenty before.
When the Walker-Stoneley Job is over, Eames drinks five gin and tonics and six glasses of merlot, then writes a string of increasingly unreadable texts to Arthur, all of which end up in his draft box.
When he is caught unawares two days later by Frankie Moran and his Alistratov boys, when there is a small penknife embedded in the taut meat of his thigh and there’s a bag over his head and his zip tied hands are numb, digging into the small of his back, Eames thinks of Arthur.
When the drugs clogging his arteries like fatty syrup to keep him amenable loosen their hold on his mind as his captors’ supply runs out fast, when his mind clears enough for him to feel the cold ground of the basement and the raw flesh of his wrists and ankles, and the deep violent ache of humiliation, Eames counts all the ways Arthur will tear these motherfuckers apart.
Eames, who is proud and vain, likes to think he doesn’t really need anyone to save him.
Eames, who is actually very pragmatic most of the time, doesn’t mind being the damsel so long as it’s Arthur playing the knight.
But here’s the thing:
Arthur doesn’t come.
Eames, who has been lying on a basement floor and maybe screaming too much by the scrubbed rasp of his throat for what he will later discover is almost two weeks, appreciates the duality of the battered damsel and dashing knight being played simultaneously by a man who makes his living being lots of different people.
Eames – who, yes, cons the youngest of his captors into slurred, starving friendship in stilted Russian only to break his neck at the first opportunity – sets fire to the place as he escapes, just to help warm his extremities.
Eames, who plays his part well as the fearsome knight and then collapses in true damsel style before he can quite make it to a safehouse but thankfully not before calling for backup from a woman who owes him her life three times over, considers fashioning himself a medal of honour for his outstanding achievement.
When he is free, stitched up by efficient, not quite tender hands, recovering and self-pitying and commiserating, he recedes into himself and ends up, unsurprisingly, in a magical land of sunshine and gambling, alone with no one to help rescue his fast depleting bank balances.
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The thing is, when Mal jumped, Arthur was there to pick up Cobb from the police station after he was kept in for questioning all night and half the day.
When Eames is abducted, assaulted, tortured, Arthur turns up three weeks after Eames orchestrates his own ruthless escape.
But really, the thing is much simpler than that.
Eames will love Arthur until he dies. Not even death will actually stop the love he has for Arthur from existing. It will be its own force, like a thunderstorm, vast and loud and inescapable.
But Eames will never quite trust Arthur implicitly ever again.
The re-forging of their trust will leave a mighty scar as cold and visible as the one on his throat where the blade bit too deep, gouged him like a carvery prize as he, helpless, trembled in submission, sluggish and stuffed full of a paralysing cocktail, the withdrawal of which was an Irvine Welsh novel in its own right.
It will be visible in the pale shade of surprise that colours their every greeting after time spent apart.
It will be visible in the way Eames sleeps a little further across the bed.
It will be visible in the empty bottles Arthur will find, not often but very much there, a definitive marker of pain that Eames wore like armour in the first years of their meeting, now roughly tugged back on, ill-fitting and shameful.
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But there is something else.
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(And it is vital that you make note of this.)
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Arthur and Eames are not unhappy, despite this baggage they tow.
Misery, though not necessarily a solo sport, rarely sticks to them. These are demons they are comfortable keeping company.
Arthur and Eames are in fact very happy.
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(Ghosts do not haunt, they regress.)
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This is important, too.
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When Eames dies, he sees Arthur’s tear-stricken face and he feels Arthur’s fumbling hands palming the blood back into his body and he tastes death like dirty seawater and he smells the thunderstorm outside as it rages its fierce lament.
But he hears Edith Piaf, and that is a good thing.
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