There has always been something dark inside of Eames. Some hollow space that he's tried to fill up with whatever was handy: booze, of course, and sex with whoever was willing, and drugs for a while but not anymore, and then, now, with work. When he becomes someone else, he's realized, the parts of himself that he's afraid, no, not afraid, just reluctant to face, they fade. They don't disappear, exactly, but they press less on the edges of his consciousness and he can feel almost normal. Well, almost normal within the context of impersonating someone else inside the dreams of a person that the team is manipulating. Arthur always says that context is important.

Arthur doesn't know about the dark emptiness inside him. At least, Eames thinks that's the case. The thing with Arthur is that you can't ever be sure how much he knows. He's got a damn good poker face, and too much respect for other people's secrets to let on that he knows everything. Like with Cobb and Mal, Arthur knew everything but was standing away from it, letting Cobb deal with it his own way. Maybe that's what Arthur is doing with Eames, letting him work on himself by himself, not intruding. Eames wouldn't mind the intrusion, though.

Of course, Arthur was ex-military, too, like Eames. They got into the dream technology around the same time, even worked together a bit on an international cooperative team. But that was a long time ago, and Eames has blocked a lot of those memories for various reasons, and Arthur has never referenced that time. Arthur has never mentioned how on their first training exercise Arthur ended up having to shoot Eames in the head and Eames had woken up, and then an instant later Arthur woke up too. He'd shot himself from…something. Remorse? Fear at being alone in the terror of the dream? Something had made him do it. And Eames had locked eyes with him as the techs scrambled to unhook them, get the sedatives, slow their heartbeats. And Arthur's eyes had reflected back the worst secret parts of Eames, like Arthur had them too, and Eames had never felt anything like that.

But Arthur never mentioned it, ever. Had quietly applied for a transfer and left. Eames had gone to shit for a few days, screwing up jobs, losing his hold on his personas, drinking too much and using too much. After a while, he stopped. He remembered Arthur's eyes, and his precision, and that small secret knowledge that Arthur had killed them both out of some sort of emotion that Eames wanted desperately to understand. And so they worked together, and bantered, and held each other carefully apart, and tried very hard to appear to be fine, perfectly fine.