Chapter Text
Eames was used to heading to ground after an extraction. It was purely logical, a way to avoid unwanted attention from invariably disgruntled marks. The extraction team would ride to the airport (or train station, or bus terminal) together, the point man would confirm payment with each member separately, and then they would scatter to the four winds, never to be heard from until the next job. The fact that Eames wouldn’t consider himself friends with most of his part-time coworkers was beside the point.
The departure ritual was one of Eames’s favorite part of working with Arthur (besides the flirting – Eames, the immaculate suits – Arthur, and the endearing condescension – Arthur to Eames). Always the same line, usually accompanied by a dimpled grin. “Your money will be in your account within 24 hours, Mr. Eames.” But never the same account. Eames couldn’t remember when it began, but the process had become something of a game between the forger and his point man (and just when had Eames started thinking of Arthur as his point man?). Every job, every time, Arthur found a new and creative way of delivering the money.
One time, Eames had set up a brand new Swiss bank account under a brand new alias, just 24 hours before the job wrapped up. Arthur found it. Eames was still impressed (and possibly a little worried) every time he thought about it.
After one incredibly tedious job (which Eames had spent 90% of flirting outrageously with Arthur just to kill time), Arthur had deposited individual payments in to every single one of Eames’ accounts, alphabetically by last name, in increasing amounts that Eames eventually decoded as the Fibonacci sequence in base 8. He figured Arthur had been just as bored, and decided to take the exacting attention as a complement, even if a (not so) small part of him wished that Arthur’s boredom had manifested itself in… other ways.
Just as creative, although massively more frustrating, was the time Arthur intentionally deposited his (rather sizeable!) paycheck into an account which was under surveillance by the NSA. The sudden influx of untraceable cash naturally caused the NSA to immediately lock the account down, as well as bump the associated alias several notches up the “Most Wanted” list. Eames had been (and still was) rather pissed about that. (“You didn’t earn that one, Mr. Eames. You got lazy, and nearly cost us the job.” Just because Arthur was right didn’t mean he had to go and pull a dick move like that.)
On the latest job, which was admittedly a bit of a shit show, Arthur merely yelled “you know the drill!” across the terminal to Eames as they sprinted off in opposite directions to avoid the converging local police force. It seemed like every job lately had gone off the rails. Inception may have also been a shit show, but at least Ariadne knew how to construct proper Penrose staircases that didn’t collapse in the middle of an extraction like badly-folded origami. And if Eames never woke up with a somnacin-induced migraine from oops-I-misread-the-decimal-place-on-that-recipe chemists ever again, it would be too soon.
Thirty-seven hours, two burner phones, five plane flights, one bullet train, and three aliases later, Eames made it home to his London flat. His second phone – the one he never used on jobs and whose phone number not even Arthur had – had notified him of the deposit 36 hours ago, a new record for Arthur, although Eames docked points for reusing the account from the last job.
Exhausted and jet-lagged as he was, Eames almost stepped on the small bundle of grey and white fur huddled up on his doorstep against the drizzling London rain. A pitiful meow from the vicinity of his feet as Eames fumbled with his keys was all that distinguished the smoky fur from dusty concrete and leaden skies. The forger looked down, then reached over the cat to finish unlocking the door. Once his bags were safely in out of the rain, he knelt down to examine the sorry creature.
And what a sorry creature it was. Up close, what had appeared to be water was very clearly blood matting several patches of fur. There were numerous deep gashes, one clearly the bite from a larger animal, and at least two of which held embedded shards of glass. One leg was poking out of the cat’s tight curl, as if broken or dislocated. “What happened to you, darling?” murmured Eames, unbuttoning his jacket and removing the red-and-orange flannel shirt he had snagged passing through the Vancouver airport. “Did you go and jump out a window, or something?”
Eames knew of a veterinarian within three blocks who wouldn’t ask too many questions. (One of the many reasons he would never again house-sit for a neighbor, no matter how hot.) While Eames judged himself perfectly capable of stitching up another human being (and had done so for both himself and Arthur more times than he cared to recall, including under fire and with little more than hotel mini-bottles for both sterilization and pain relief), the small feline form seemed too delicate to risk it. Plus, judging by the pained whimpers the cat made while being wrapped in Eames’ shirt, he was afraid of more serious injuries.
There were no internal injuries, thankfully, and the leg was just badly bruised, but the various gashes required seventeen stiches, and the vet removed not two but six shards of glass from its (his, Eames was informed) side and paws. Eames was sent home with one rather drugged cat and a bottle of baby aspirin. Eames didn’t even like cats, normally. He was a dog person, the bigger the dog the better. But there was something about the cat’s dusky tuxedo, the way it looked at Eames with both pain and hope in its coffee-colored eyes, and good god he needed sleep. Right now. Forty-nine hours awake was clearly beginning to affect his better judgment. Besides, the cat would take a while to recover, so it’s not like he would be too much of a nuisance while Eames had to lay low. Although he would never admit it aloud, Eames even thought that a bit of company would be nice for once. Even if it was just a cat.