Five times Eames didn't want to kill someone and one time he did.

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I can't believe I never posted this here! This is, ah, the one and only time (so far anyway) I wrote Inception fic, and it was for some anon prompty thing a while back. Anyway, it's five times fic and here it is.

The first time Eames had to kill someone he did it like he was ripping off a band-aid. It had to look that way: cold, calculating, practiced. No one could know it was his first time. One thrust of his knife, sharp and true, between ribs and right into the heart. It went perfectly. But after it was over, Eames couldn't take a shower hot enough to stop the shakes.

The next time, it was kill or be killed. The job hadn't even started, and it was by far the worst reconnaissance Eames's old team had ever done. The one piece of information they got right was the mark's name. Too bad they didn't know a whit about his brown belt in karate. Eames didn't like to think about how lucky he was to get in the one shot that let him slip behind and wrap a thin line of piano wire around the mark's neck. Even now his fingers twitch, just a little, whenever he sees a baby grand.

The third time, Eames got some practice with a sniper rifle. Clean shot, nice and easy. He was actually a little glad he didn't have to go in hand to hand. He might've taken a punch or two right to the face from that enormous Ukrainian, and clearly that would have been a terrible shame. He jokes about the third time, only because out of all five, it was the one that had the least emotion attached.

He doesn't talk about the fourth time. Ever. Mentioning it is the sure fire way to end any conversation he's in. There are plenty of rumors about what happened that time, but no one's foolish enough to mention them to him.

The fifth time, he had a target, but if you had to get technical, Eames didn't actually do the job. The hand-to-hand combat lasted what felt like half an hour. Maybe it was minutes. Eames had a better grasp of time than most people, even the ones who been in deep before. But after too many gut punches, and knuckles raw from crashing against flesh-covered bones, it felt like ages. It ended when a slip in his own blood pitched the other man right off through the hole in the railing he'd made half a minute before.

Not one of those times did he ever actually want to do it. Killing was a messy business and more importantly, Eames didn't like doing it, especially as a means to an end. It was sometimes part of the job, and so he did it.

Only once did he feel not one whit of guilt, not a niggle of remorse. It was a job gone wrong. The mark realized what they were up to and woke from the induced sleep in a bloody rage the likes of which Eames hadn't seen since the massacre in Chechnya. By the time Eames woke up, the mark had already laid Arthur out. The sight of him, unconscious, bloody and maybe not breathing flipped a switch Eames himself didn't know was there.

He doesn't remember it clearly; it was a haze of anger and blood. Two minutes and one single gunshot to the head later, and Eames was holstering an over-sized gun, and checking Arthur's pulse. When the other man came to and questioned the scene, Eames's only response was, "I thought you were dead, so I killed him."

No one asks about that time either. Arthur's the only one who knows, and he doesn't have to ask.