Work Text:
Sometimes it still hurt.
It was dull, a barely there ache that only came to the fore when Eames stopped working long enough to start thinking. He knew that still wearing a ring on a chain under his shirts wasn't helping him. Knew he should take it off and leave it someplace safe, so it could gather dust until he could piece himself together. But he doesn't. Instead he holds his hand over his chest when a call comes too close and reminds himself that needing time doesn't mean there isn't anything to come back to. That maybe he should keep himself physically whole in case there is.
He thinks, sometimes, of what it is he has to go back to. It's been a long time since he called anyplace home. He hadn't called his parent's houses home, or the academy he'd spent so much of his youth in. The military had been close to one, but had been a far cry from one as well. Home was a rickety flat in Mombasa, a garish one in Paris. A little house in Spain, and a grand one in Istanbul. They had been home, for a little while. Now home is wherever the next job is, wherever the next call takes him. Colder, and crueler maybe, but he knew it was probably better in the long run.
He had been reckless, for months on end, driving himself to extremes as he worked whatever job came his way, be it something quick and dirty and dangerous, real world or in the dream. He loses himself to the work, to the masks, to the work. He collaborates with people in Sao Paulo, Cairo, Munich, Kiev. He thrives for a while, on the danger of it all, the rush. His reputation begins to shift, eventually, from a talented forger, or towards a good man to have in a fight, and he realizes that he'd like to be in one piece, or as close to one as he can be by the time he hits 40. He realizes that he'd even like to make it to 40. So he slows down. Picks his jobs carefully. He avoids names he knows. Ariadne. Yusuf. Even Arthur. Perhaps especially Arthur, though he refuses to admit that even to himself. He falls in with better crowds, new faces. And he builds himself a little niche in an almost legitimate circle of teams he flits through when needed. But something still feels like it's missing most days, even if he does his best to cast aside the feeling and enjoy his work. People know where to find him if they need him, and it's satisfying in its own way.
He's gruffer than he had been, looks more tired and haggard around the edges. He loses a little of the tone and a lot of the tan he'd worked so hard to gain. Let's his beard grown in a bit rather than keep himself looking anything close to suave. He doesn't look at all the laughing, near care free man he'd been not all that long ago. He knows he doesn't have anyone but himself to blame for that, but he moves on the best he can, wrapping himself in hideous prints and mismatched oversized clothing so that people will remember the colors instead of his face, the prints instead of the exact timber of his voice. It might be a step back, but it feels nearly freeing some days.
It's when he wakes up one day and feels good, somehow, underneath everything, not achey or dull or lost that he realizes that maybe time did heal wounds. That maybe he had been right to go when he had, and that maybe he really was going to come out the other side of this thing in one piece. He knows then that he'll be okay. Maybe they all will. He smiles at nothing for the first time in a long time and thinks that maybe things will turn out better than he thought.
So he waits. Works and waits and keeps on going.