Work Text:
Eames woke up to a familiar feeling: cold feet where the duvet had been tugged up, a dead arm, and Arthur’s eyes on him in the gloom. It must have been about four am, it was just getting light outside – the start of another summer day. It didn’t feel like summer though when Eames had a cold sweat, and Arthur felt tight and tense beside him.
“You awake?” Arthur said eventually, kicking the covers so they fell over Eames’ feet. They’d been drawn up by Arthur’s knees which were tucked against his chest. He didn’t look comfortable or well rested.
“Yeah.” Eames rolled over so that he was tucked down by Arthur’s elbow. Arthur’s shaking elbow. It wasn’t like he was quivering with fear, more like excess energy, adrenalin, something Eames was familiar with. “Can’t sleep?”
“Mmhmm,” Arthur answered.
“Did you try?”
It was a pretty fair question. As far as Eames could tell, Arthur had been dealing with his insomnia by ignoring it for so long, that it wasn’t until he started sharing a bed with someone who liked 8-10 hours a night that he was forced to deal with it. Eames wouldn’t mind it if Arthur got up, did some work, did some exercise, or filled the nighttime hours with something. Instead Arthur just sat and watched him sleep.
“No,” Arthur answered, honestly. He rubbed at his face. “I forgot.”
“Okay, well let’s just try a little bit first. Lie down.”
Arthur did, obediently, until he was stretched on his back next to Eames, arms folded over the duvet.
“Close your eyes,” Eames instructed next. Arthur did.
“Breathe with me,” Eames said slowly, imitating the heavy, slow breath of sleeping. Arthur tried valiantly, but Eames could see his hand twitching on the covers. He was exhausted.
“Good try,” Eames said, eventually, and Arthur laughed- in a sad, defeated way. “Let’s get up, come on.”
They got up, and Eames sat with Arthur while he did some work, and stroked his hair while he read endless legal documents and court transcripts and surveillance reports, and eventually, eventually, Arthur fell asleep around eight, when the city was just waking up around them.
“Christ,” Eames said to no-one in particular, because he was exhausted, Arthur was pinning him to the sofa like a dead weight, and this had to stop.
---
“Did you ever have insomnia?” he asked Yusuf, midway through a long rambling sort of phone call that had started with a job offer (Eames had turned it down) and had covered several topics in-between, including how difficult it was to forge an Australian work visa, and the best way to cheat at mahjong.
“Yes, frequently.” Yusuf was at his desk, and every now and then Eames heard the familiar squeaky roll of his chair being pushed around. “I always managed to push through though.”
“With drugs?” Eames asked. “Stupid question.”
“Well, yes, but it also requires a change in habits. You know – there’s a lot that goes into being an insomniac. It could be very straightforward – overuse of drugs, overwork - or it could be more complicated. How long has it been bothering you?”
“Only as long as I’ve been living with Arthur,” Eames said, pointedly.
“Ah,” Yusuf fell silent. “Well, that’s different.”
---
Sometimes, Arthur just didn’t get undressed. He’d spend the day working, done up right up to the top button of his collar, both his cuffs, the zippers of his neat leather ankle boots – then he’d go back to whatever hotel room or short lease rental he was sharing with Eames for the duration, and just stay like that, dressed for work.
He wouldn’t even take his shoes off to drink a glass of wine or undo his tie and collar to eat dinner, and while Eames would slowly melt into a slouched pair of sweatpants and no shirt, Arthur would still be wrapped up in a three piece suit at 2am, being reminded to undress.
“I didn’t think,” Arthur said once, as Eames undid all his buttons, non-sexually, with the efficiency of a parent stripping a child.
“You,” Eames said, tugging Arthur’s pants down, “are your own worst enemy.”
---
Arthur slept after sex, but it wasn’t something they could really build a sleep schedule around. Eames swore that if fucking became something between them that was regular and appointed, a night-time ritual, he’d shoot himself. Or something less dramatic, but equally as effective. It was as much about the not having as it was the having; about going for two weeks just living side by side, then coming together at the end of it and exploding with all the feelings that had been built up in that time.
Arthur would always, always sleep well after though, curled against Eames (the only time he did), looking ten years younger and indescribably beautiful at rest. Eames always realized then that he would let it become regular, become anything it damn well wanted to be if it helped, because he just loved Arthur that much.
“All the way through,” Arthur said one morning as he came awake in Eames’ arms. He wasn’t stupid, he noticed it too. He had a page at the back of his work notebook, he thought Eames hadn’t spotted it, just for keeping track of how many hours of sleep he got. He highlighted the nights that followed sex, an interesting little tally of all their scattered moments of passion.
“It’s the magical soporific qualities of my penis,” Eames commented. “The answer to a perfect night’s sleep.”
---
There were no nightmares. Arthur, like Eames and everyone else in the business, had stopped dreaming naturally a long time ago. Eames wondered if that made it worse, that Arthur had no outlet for his anxieties. He had once confided that when he was younger, in foster homes, before the military, he had gone through phases of the worst nightmares imaginable - ripped apart by faceless shadows and consumed, mouthful by mouthful by the mandibles of skittering predators.
Natural sleep for Arthur came in phases of one month every few - for a month he was allowed to live like an ordinary human being, before the schedule of sleeplessness descended again, for just as long as he could bear. Eames tried to find a pattern to it - but Arthur was an insomniac when he was working, when he was resting, when Eames was there, and when he wasn’t.
“Don’t you think I’ve been trying to work this out my whole life?” Arthur shouted once, when they argued about it. “This problem didn’t just magically appear when I started living with you!”
The worst part was, Arthur was right. He was so good at coping on no sleep, or fractured sleep, or sleep at odd hours, that Eames barely noticed even when Arthur was going through a phase of sleeplessness. It was only on those occasional nights when Eames woke up with cold feet and found Arthur watching him, that he discovered anything was wrong.
---
“I think you should try a sleep clinic,” Ariadne said one night over big glasses of wine. Eames liked to invite her round to help berate Arthur about things like that, because Ariadne was very much Arthur’s foil - a voice of reason he quite often listened to, even before Eames. Eames might have been jealous, but he had never really based his relationship with Arthur on being reasonable.
“What can they tell me that I don’t already know?” Arthur said. “I’m awake all the time.”
“The point is though, you’re not.” Ariadne wiggled her fingertip. “It feels like you are, but you do sleep for moments, without resting, you sleep eventually - something physiologically must change between when you can and can’t sleep.”
“A couple of nights of sleeping with a heart monitor on and a camera watching isn’t going to answer that,” Arthur said, pouring another glass. Alcohol solved the problem, temporarily, but Eames wasn’t fond of the idea of Arthur downing a bottle of wine a night in the name of sleep. He was pretty certain Arthur wasn’t either, and that once upon a time, he may have already tried it.
“It’s like you don’t want to get better,” Ariadne commented, a comment only she could ever get away with.
“You’re probably right,” Arthur said bitterly, and that was the last they discussed of it that evening.
---
Eames spent 500 euros for a woman called Arrow to teach him how to do massages. It was not one of the many skills he had picked up over the years - unless sexy massages counted. He was adept at sexy massages, but actual massage required far more skill and a lot longer than a weekend to learn, which is what Eames had allowed himself. He did his best, though, and it was enough.
“This is,” Arthur mumbled into the towel, “this is really good.”
“Yeah?” Eames managed. He was concentrating pretty hard, because there was all sorts of stuff to remember about how to do each muscle and what directions to rub and so on and so forth. The plane of Arthur’s back, previously just one of Eames’ favourite sights, had become a physical puzzle. Eames liked puzzles.
“I mean, I have had massages before,” Arthur said, “but you know it’s always like, like,” he trailed off.
“Mm?” Eames said quietly.
“Like, ‘when are you going to finish touching me?’,” Arthur continued, dreamily. “But I don’t mind you touching me forever.”
“That’s really sweet,” Eames said, moving down to the muscles of Arthur’s lower back. “But my hands really are starting to hurt.”
“You should give them a massage,” Arthur suggested, then laughed. It did help him sleep, but it wasn’t really something Eames was capable of doing every night, or indeed something Arthur wanted him to do every night.
“Novelty sleep,” Arthur said, later on. “It’s all well and good but I just want to lie down and sleep every day without a hassle, like you do.”
“I could put you through SAS training,” Eames suggested. “That helped me.”
“I just want to sleep,” Arthur murmured, “not sleep while being waterboarded on top of a mountain during a blizzard.”
---
Eames bought a new mattress, a very expensive one, and nearly reopened his slowly healing bullet wound lugging it up the stairs himself. Arthur noticed the moment he got in of course, the bed was a few millimeters higher and didn’t have a nice dent in one side where Eames liked to lie.
“Is this about me not sleeping?” Arthur prompted, cutting straight to the chase.
“Well yes and also because it’s apparently a dream to fuck on.” Eames patted the bed cheerfully.
“A dream,” Arthur repeated. “Ha ha.”
It was though. Didn’t help much with the sleeping.
---
Eventually Eames sort of gave up. He slept as he usually did, and Arthur did his own thing, and some days that meant sitting sleepless in the dark and there was nothing much to be done about it.
The next time Eames woke up and found him like that, midwinter and bundled up in quilts and blankets, he got up and sat too- the two of them hunched together.
“What are you doing anyway? When you’re like this.”
“Just thinking,” Arthur said eventually, tucking his feet in under Eames’ thigh.
“What about?” Eames slid his hand under the duvet at Arthur’s nape to play with his hair. It curled there when he didn’t slick it down and it was ridiculously soft, the softest substance in Eames’ world.
“Stuff,” Arthur said, childish. He puffed an annoyed little breath.
“Want to share?” Eames said, and he saw the cogs turning, like Arthur was deciding if he was brave enough to actually do that. A lot of their relationship still- still was intensely cryptic to Eames, but he knew enough to know that Arthur was frightened of it. At first Eames had been bothered by that, but he had come to understand that it was just how Arthur was - that it was a measure of how much worth he had attached to their relationship. To them.
“Yeah, okay,” Arthur said slowly, and he did. He was thinking about their next job, concerned that the hiring party wanted to pay in cash, complaining about exchange rates. Then he was worrying over Eames’ bullet wound scar- which Eames let him feel carefully for any signs of adhesion. It wasn’t just worry though- he was thinking about Ariadne’s grad school project, and how she reminded him of one of his friends in New York, and how he liked the pattern of one of her red scarves- how he wanted a tie like it, but was afraid he looked bad in bright ties.
“You do look bad in bright ties,” Eames murmured, and Arthur’s retort was lost in laboured breathing, his head curling to rest against Eames’ shoulder. He was asleep, just like that.
The next morning he just stared balefully as Eames made coffee.
“It took about ten minutes,” Eames said, eventually, because he knew Arthur was just waiting for him to make a comment. “Why didn’t we try that before?”
“What if I’m worrying about something secret,” Arthur complained. “I do still- actually have secrets you know.”
“We can have sex on those nights,” Eames answered practically. “It works out perfectly.”
---
It didn’t work perfectly of course. Some nights even talking didn’t help, but something changed - Arthur seemed to want to make the effort, like having found a solution had given him a reason to try. He would sleep for weeks on end, and then when he didn’t, he was calmer, because he knew that eventually he would be able to sleep again.
“It’s like a lifetime movie,” Ariadne told Eames, as he cooked her dinner. He had just spent ten minutes putting Arthur to sleep over the phone. In Tokyo, it was nearly midnight, and Arthur had passed out mumbling about how much it would cost him to get his suit laundered. “Seriously - over invested business man is cured of a lifetime of insomnia by lackadaisical artistic boyfriend.”
“I’m not lackadaisical!” Eames protested, dripping sauce all over the counter when he gestured with his spoon. “And Arthur is a career criminal. He is to businessmen what sharks are to seals.”
Ariadne was employing her favourite trick - covering her face with her glass of wine so he couldn’t see her smirking. Eames let her, because he was fairly certain the bolognese was beginning to stick to the bottom of the pan.
---
“You know,” Arthur said, crawling under the duvet. He was in shorts and a T-shirt, Eames’ favourite of his, soft and well-worn and grey. He dropped onto his belly, face pressed into the pillow, looking sideways up at where Eames was still getting undressed.
“I know?” Eames prompted. Arthur wrinkled his nose as if he was maybe regretting starting the thread of conversation.
“Just, I dont know,” he yawned. “I sometimes wonder how I coped without you.”
“Really.” Eames grinned, sliding in beside him. They didn’t touch, but Arthur’s arm was curled loose in the space between them.
“Shut up, that isn’t a good thing,” Arthur grumbled, but by the time Eames was settled down and ready to argue back, he was fast asleep.