undergrounds | backdated so hard/for eames

They both know he's not okay and it's long past the point where he can try claiming othetwise. Eames just dutifully undoes his waistcoat once he's solved the chain issue and everything else comes off easily. He drops his clothes on the couch next to him, electing not to look at the blood on his shirt.

Not just laying down and going to sleep is a harder call, and Eames... Well, that's exactly what he's doing.

Arthur starts to make a sound of protest, but it dies when he realizes Eames is already halfway down. He sighs again, moving on the coffee table so he's at a better angle, and then he gives Eames' wounds a once over.

"Just don't fall asleep," he says, standing up and disappearing into the kitchen again. He returns a moment later with a damp cloth, which he uses to start wiping away some dried blood as well as the fresh stuff. It's not looking pretty and he is most definitely not trying to be gentle about it.

Eames makes a noise of general discomfort which could be to do with just about anything happening right now; the cleaning, the not falling asleep, or the fact that he's not exactly laying in the most comfortable position. At least one of those is his own fault though, so he can't complain much more about it.

He does, however, shift to be in a better position for Arthur to reach the worst of it; it's really not a pretty sight. The bites are more like tears and gouges given Eames' reluctance to hold still, and then there's just the general mess from the scuffle beforehand.

In the back of his mind he's fairly certain his jacket is ruined, which is a shame because it was expensive as fuck, but it's really the least of his worries right now.

He suspected that it was vampires as soon as he smelled the blood, but the bites confirm it. Arthur tries, he really does, to ask in a non-judgemental tone, but he's just not very good at it. His default voice is sharp.

"What happened?"

Well he does turn his head to give Arthur a look at that tone of voice, and it's surprisingly spot-on considering how short of the mark everything else he's been doing has fallen so far, but he just doesn't have the energy to fight Arthur about it. He knows the difference by now anyway. Mostly.

"Seems Harris never learned to take 'no' for an answer."

Arthur takes a moment to check his tone again. He focuses on the task at hand, pressing the cloth to each wound to stop the bleeding once he's satisfied with the clean-up job.

"Why were you talking to Harris?"

"He wanted an alliance with the fae," Eames says with the tone of a man who is rapidly falling asleep, curling an arm under his head to try and get comfortable. Right now is probably the most forthcoming he's going to be, far too out of it to think about what he's saying, but he's probably not going to say anything he'll regret. Probably.

"Don't fall asleep, I might need you to move," Arthur says as he sees Eames trying to get comfortable. He moves slowly from wound to wound, starting with the largest and deepest to make sure the bleeding is stopped there first. Eames seems to have started to dry up for the most part anyway, but Arthur's slow and methodical about it. Once he doesn't see any more blood seeping out of the man on his couch, he grabs some antibiotic ointment and starts applying it with a cotton pad. You never know what some of those vampires have had in their mouth, after all.

"What did you do?"

He assumes Eames didn't just say a polite no and leave.

Why can't he just sleep? He'll be fine after sleeping, it's fine. He doesn't understand why Arthur can't understand that he should just be able to curl up and sleep for 18 hours. He sighs into his forearm and turns his head to look at Arthur, maybe looking at his face will help keep him awake.

"Told him the Court would never go for it." Maybe he wasn't exactly polite, but it was far from the kind of thing that'd inspire a reaction like this in most people. In fact Eames would go so far as to describe it as a 'gross overreaction.'

"You should have avoided him," Arthur says, dry and matter-of-fact. He still doubts that's all that went on, considering what he knows about Eames, but he leaves it at that. Eames is in too much of a state for Arthur to be chastising him or properly interrogating him about the exchange anyway.

In any case it's time to start actually applying some bandages, so Arthur gets to work on that.

Well, if it hadn't been Harris who invited him, maybe he would've. Either way, Eames has entirely checked out of this conversation. He closes his eyes again and nestles his head in the crook of his arm.

"Your voice has a really great timbre," is Eames' input on this topic instead, "when you're not being a prick."

Deep breath. The backhanded compliment doesn't test his patience too much, but he's having a hard time not pressing this Raymond Harris issue, and Eames is making it difficult to have a conversation given the fact that he seems to be passing out as they speak.

"I'm trying to make sure you don't bleed out," he says, "I think that cancels out me being a prick."

Eames hums softly, a quiet "mm" that does sound a little like he agrees, though Eames may just be hearing what he wants at this stage, who's to say?

"Why?" He asks after another moment or two, because now Arthur's said it in so many words, Eames doesn't exactly understand why he'd bother with this. The injuries might be serious but they're not fatal; as far as Eames can tell, just sending him on his merry way or even taking him home would've been a lot easier.

Arthur's busy smoothing down a bandage over one of the milder gouges. It's one of the last that might need one, the rest won't open back up too badly, and if they do they'll dry up quickly. He waits a moment for Eames to elaborate and then glances at his face, raising an eyebrow.

"Why what?"

"Why are you helping?" It's not that he doesn't understand basic decency, it's something Eames banks on quite regularly, but they've never operated in a way that would make him expect it from Arthur. They're not friends, they've never been anything approaching kind to eachother... but maybe that just says a lot about Eames instead of Arthur.

Arthur frowns as if the question is strange for him and he draws back a little. He supposes it's partly a holdover from the army - you can't let a teammate keep bleeding because they need to be in fighting form the next day. He almost says that Eames would do the same for him, but he doesn't know that to be true, and once he thinks about it he supposes it's probably not. Eames has seen many humans come and go, so he probably wouldn't put any extra effort into making sure one of them didn't go a little earlier than expected. The thought of that makes him feel a little small, so he takes a deep breath and finds something else to say.

"It would take a lot of work to find another contact as high up in the courts as you," he says. He can tell it's cold as soon as it comes out of his mouth, but right now he resents Eames a little for the hypothetical lack of help he would receive if the tables were turned, and he doesn't elaborate or take it back.

It gets a small chuckle out of Eames, evidently not feeling hard done by by the chilliness of it. He doesn't know if he believes it entirely — he knows Arthur well enough to know he rarely shares the entirety of his feelings on any topic without being pushed — but it's also hard to think of another way to ask him about it.

"The first time we had sex," he continues on after a moment, and it's an inelegant way to pursue tge topic but really he's just saying things as they occur to him, "you said you wanted to be able to trust me."

It's a question, even if he doesn’t phrase it like one, curiosity about what that meant and why he'd want it. Mostly if it's a human thing or an Arthur thing.

Arthur still feels small, suddenly so aware that he has an immortal being laid out on his couch. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Eames is as old as he is, that he doesn't look at life or relationships or anything quite the same, and it's making Arthur uneasy right now.

"I did," he says, trying to keep his voice level. He's done bandaging for now but he doesn't pack up, too anxious about what's to come. He knows Eames is asking for more information, but he has to brace himself, compose it in his head first.

"I guess I just wanted to know that at least one thing about you was sort of human," he says with a shrug, "that you were subject to some of the same... needs."

He knows that sounds dumb, so he elects to start packing away his things then, focusing on putting everything neatly back in its place rather than the conversation they're having right now.

Eames opens his eyes again, looking at Arthur with an entirely baffled expression. His eyes are heavy and lidded and it's hard for him to focus, but he's heard enough of what Arthur said to know he doesn't understand what he's being told right now.

"I don't follow," he answers after a moment's silence. What needs? A sex drive? Arthur's interrupted him enough times to know he's got a fairly loud one of those.

Arthur scoffs at himself dismissively and shakes his head, looking down at what he's doing. "I mean, that night I really just wanted to sleep with you, but..."

He hits pause on the cleaning up, leaning forward on his knees, clasping his hands together loosely. He takes a deep breath and shrugs before he goes on:

"I'm never going to trust you not to betray me. I'm not that stupid. I just thought I could understand you better if I could see you like that, if I could tap into something... human. Just sex and no bargaining. Something that wasn't just for fun but still wasn't..."

He shrugs again as he avoids going down the route of baldly saying there's no emotion to what they do. It's fun now, but it wasn't for fun that night. It was just raw and fueled by frustration and anger. He looks down at Eames and wonders if he'll even remember any of this with the state he's in, and he lets out a sigh as he sits back up.

"It worked, a little."

If he had the mental faculties to really think about what Arthur's saying, Eames might laugh about the idea that he's so beholden to bargaining and double-dealing that he can't have sex without it. Eames is a lucky one, he's not an ogre or a kelpie, and the fact that he looks human makes his life easier on a lot of different levels, but it also means he's never considered how fundamentally inhuman he is, or how much so people think he is.

Nobody's ever said as much to him anyway. Not without it being an insult.

Right now though? He still doesn't entirely get it, and it feels like he's just falling short of the mark. He sighs, feeling like he's young and struggling to understand humanity all over again. With added exhaustion and a growing headache and just a whole lot of pain all over his body and he feels cold which is a weird feeling for him if he's honest.

He shakes his head, as much as he can right now, and frowns up at Arthur. Murmuring a quiet apology because he still doesn't get it.

Arthur gives him a sigh for his trouble, putting his hand on Eames' chest in a show of sympathy and reassurance and maybe a touch of affection. He's not even sure he knows what he's talking about, so it's almost a relief that Eames can't get into this right now.

"You should get some sleep," he says. "You're going to feel awful in the morning."

With that, he pushes himself up, puts a few more things away in the case and then closes it up to carry it back to the kitchen. He comes back to flick the light off and then makes to leave. He's tired too, from the party and the bit of booze and from having to talk to Eames and from being frustrated about Harris, so he's going to lie down and sleep as long as possible.

Finally.

Eames barely takes a minute to fall asleep, curling up on the couch and pulling his jacket around himself in a makeshift blanket. He sleeps for a solid 12 hours like a log, barely moving in his sleep. There's the odd bout of snoring but otheriwise he might as well be dead for how heavily and how long he sleeps.

When he does wake up, it's with a groan as he sits up and puts his head in his hands. He doesn't remember coming back to Arthur's at first, and looks around the room because he's on the couch instead of in the bed which means he definitely didn't get any last night. Which probably makes sense because everything hurts and he has a headache and he's so hungry he feels like he could eat everything in the whole world.

There's more grey in his hair and the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth are a little more pronounced, but of course he's got no way to know about that. Mostly he's concerned with dragging himself up and to the kitchen in the hope that Arthur's put on like an entire pot of coffee at some point so that he doesn't have to put in any more work than getting a mug and pouring it out.

Arthur's never one to be caught without a pot of coffee ready to go first thing in the morning, so it's already brewed and ready in the carafe when Eames wakes up. Arthur himself has been up and grabbed himself a cup already, hiding out in his room with his laptop, since he usually works from the couch. He took a glance at Eames when he did, noting the extra grey but mostly checking to see if he bled through any of his bandages. The cushions may have to be dry-cleaned, which is never fun, but it's not like Arthur can take back any of his good will.

He hears Eames moving around down the hall but doesn't move right away. It's partly because he's engrossed with what he's reading but partly because he wants to give Eames the opportunity to leave if he wants. The man is so awkward with gratitude and all other feelings actually and Arthur doesn't want to put him in a weird situation after the night he had.

Eames isn't in any state to be going anywhere just yet, and he does feel kind of obliged to thank Arthur for helping him. He doesn't remember much except being mad that Arthur wouldn't let him sleep, but judging by the bandage on his neck he's struggling not to pick at, and likely others he can't see, he did a lot.

First things first though, he pours himself a coffee and practically downs the entire thing in one go while he snoops through Arthur's fridge and cupboards for things he can just eat without actually cooking them-- he'll make lunch or something when he feels less woozy and sick.

If Arthur thinks Eames is above just taking a slice of bread and eating it straight out of the bag, he has another thing coming.

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