Eames woke himself up by turning over onto his bad shoulder, an experience he wouldn’t recommend to anyone.
The searing agony was good. He wasn’t dead, for one thing, and he was conscious enough to experience the pain, plus it meant that Brownlow had actually listened to Eames’s garbled, slurring, half-incomprehensible pleadings not to overdose him with too many painkillers (had Arthur heard this? Even as he groaned and struggled into a seated position he was starting to calculate). His mind was foggy with sleep and pain and the last vestiges of a fever, but nothing else. It was good, but it was also bad, and waves of nausea crashed over him; he made it to a perched position on the side of the bed and had to sit, swallowing and breathing heavily, for several minutes before he was certain he wouldn’t spew.
All of this had been conducted through instinct rather than any conscious thought; his brain was scrambling to catch up to his body, running on fumes, saying get up, move, go. Pouring sweat, he held himself still, reminded himself fiercely that - as far as his fuzzy memory could recall - this was Arthur’s place. It was - a quick glance around confirmed - Arthur’s room. It had been here, in Arthur’s inner sanctum, that Brownlow had opened up his shoulder and rebroken his fingers, and Eames faintly remembered, with dawning horror, that it may, in fact, have been Arthur who forced water down his throat and took his temperature every few hours and made him take the antibiotics. Eames grimaced. That was worse than his throbbing shoulder and hand and - Jeez - ribs.
Still, there was no time to waste on self-pity. If he was awake and together, that meant he had likely outstayed his welcome. He ran his hand down his face - at least half a week’s worth of beard, and then some - and, with some effort, stood, then waited for the spots to die down and the room to stop spinning. To the bathroom, then, blind to many of the defining features of the room, a piss, and then a good hard look at himself in the mirror.
Well. He didn’t look his best.
Even after doing his teeth and splashing water one-handed over his face, he looked like he had been run over by a truck. The muscle he had put on for his last job - real life, topside forgery meant he couldn’t change his appearance in the blink of an eye, but in his experience weight did that very effectively for him when worn in the right way - was more defined than bulk now and his face was thinner under the growth of beard. He scratched it contemplatively. He wasn’t necessarily a vain man, not in the way that counted, and there were benefits to a changed appearance. Maybe he would make it to Mombasa alive after all.
He managed his jeans and gave up at the thought of getting the old plaid shirt over his shoulder, which was painful enough to turn him pale whenever he mistakenly twisted in the wrong way; there was, as always, that creeping temptation, the obvious answer that lingered in the back of his mind, sending out seeking tendrils in search of weakness, and Eames wasn’t stupid enough to imagine that he would always be able to resist, but for now he swallowed a handful of aspirin from the nightstand - certainly more than the recommended - and padded, barefoot, in the direction of what he hoped would be a kitchen. A cup of tea, another glass of water, and just one last glimpse of Arthur, Arthur here, with his books and his warm wood panelling and his Spiderman decor, that was all he asked for before he made himself scarce.
