Bookshop, if you could kindly share your headcanon on jealous!Eames with us lowly mortals, we would be eternally grateful.
My dear friend, I would love to, EXCEPT:
You know how there’s this fanon that Eames is like, gruff manly alpha male who gets extremely protective/covetous/jealous of Arthur? I love reading that, do I ever, but I don’t really necessarily buy Alpha Male Eames for myself as canon.
Like, to me Eames is very consciously the opposite of that, both because in my main headcanon Eames is genderqueer and deliberately sidestepping heteronormative masculinity, and because nothing we see of him in canon indicates that he’s anything other than deliberately casual, to a fault.
I think instead of actually going into manly man alpha possessive mode, if he saw Arthur flirting with someone else he’d react with studied, brittle indifference, and say pointedly barbed things to push Arthur away. If he and Arthur weren’t together at the time, and Eames was just unlucky enough to be dealing with a severe case of unrequited love, then I think his default mode would be ‘brittle with a side of self-destructiveness,’ at least until Arthur came and yelled at him and probably kissed him a lot because in no universe is Eames’ love for Arthur ever really unrequited. /truth (sob i ship it a lot help)
In a case where someone was hitting on Arthur in a way that made Arthur uncomfortable, I think things would get interesting really fast, because a) I see Eames being super-protective but also Arthur can fucking take care of himself, and it would be condescending for Eames to even step in.
If he did, however, for whatever reason, feel the need to step in—then, well, Eames, you’ll notice, spends a lot less time posturing than he does pointing guns and shooting people, so I think if it came to that he’d simply put a few well-chosen words to the person unlucky enough to be antagonizing Arthur, flash his beretta inside his jacket, and give them that unflinching smile we all know and love. And then they’d never touch Arthur again. :D
Overall, though, I really believe that Arthur and Eames are both so fucking hot that the only way they even make it through dreamshare without just being CONSTANTLY HIT ON BY EVERYONE AROUND THEM is that they exude a kind of unshakeable togetherness and firm bonding that subtly speaks for them and creates a kind of respectful space around each of them. Even if they aren’t aware of it, and maybe even before they’re really together: just this calm assurance that Eames is for Arthur, and Arthur is for Eames, and if you cross that dynamic, you’ll only have yourself to blame.
