Re: [Dream Training]
Eames was messy. Exceptionally messy. The house in the woods collected detritus, and that was to say nothing for the apartment he had had in Mumbai and the one before that in Paris, where he'd temporarily moored himself with Vaughn for the length of a job in an apartment mostly broken shutters, expensive sheets and forgotten half-empty coffee cups. It drove other people, when other people turned up in Eames's space, rather mad. But it meant he didn't much mind white and clean; it reminded him vaguely of hospitals but Eames had never spent significant amounts of time staying in one.
He stopped examining the walls when the woman walked in, looking as if perhaps she'd been lost on the way from the bland, scrupulous offices that probably sheltered half a dozen sharp-minded, terrifyingly clever people like Arthur. That was until Eames looked at her face, which he did with the casual gleaning of a pickpocket taking a wallet, leisurely and in full scrutiny.
She was calm. Calmer than he'd expected. Very pretty, but less pneumatic than his own preferred blank canvas, but attractive in motion in a way that required observation to replicate. That, and she hid her intelligence under a pretty, polite sort of look that Eames admired, purely for the canniness of it.
Eames spoke after a moment or two watching her, and his gaze glided upward to the spot on her temple that she'd tapped. "There's a chemistry to it. How far to take you under, how long to take you under for," he said thoughtfully, a little vaguely, but Eames had never given the impression to anyone that he actually understood the mix of chemicals involved, or that he cared. He did, but Eames gave the impression that everything was remarkably easy and it didn't take exceptional work, darling.
"It's easier to mix them this way than that way, I suppose. Probably," that to the idea of Arthur. Eames didn't like the idea of Arthur in his head any more than Arthur probably liked Eames in his, and Arthur would, Eames believed, take full advantage of any upper hand he had to ensure Eames didn't do anything. He laughed, a warm, unfolding sort of sound unsuited to sterile surrounds.
"Hannah will do, darling. Unless you'd like to be Smith. Do you?"