Arthur had a certain image in the dreamshare community, especially among those who had never worked with him.
He was cold. He was calculating. He was mean.
All of it gave Eames a bit of a laugh whenever he heard it because Arthur wasn’t really any of those things. Eames had known Arthur longer than either of them would ever admit to anyone other than Mal, and only her because she’d been the one to introduce them. Knowing Arthur that long meant that Eames had seen pretty much every side of him; happy, sad, angry, grief-stricken.
Eames had watched him train architects and extractors with a patience of a saintly preschool teacher. He’d stood next to him at Mal’s funeral while Arthur stared blankly ahead, tears rolling down his face. Eames had been on the receiving end of more than a few smiles he’d have sworn could light up all of Paris. He’d caused Arthur to scoff and roll his eyes more times than he could count.
The Arthur he knew was warm and bright, like a late spring morning.
The cold, calculating, cruel version of Arthur that lived like a ghost in the dreamsharing zeitgeist he’d only seen once.
It had been a job gone bad, because even before Mal went to limbo jobs still went bad sometimes. Arthur was running point with Mal extracting, Dom building, and Eames forging; a solid team that had stolen secrets worth billions together. The client had been the one to sell them out, cold feet or a guilty conscience or some other nonsense Eames had no time for. In the middle of the extraction, they’d all been woken by security guards with guns trained on them and the client standing in the background.
Mal had smooth-talked their way out with promises of a job free of charge to the man who had formerly been their mark, sealing the deal by whispering the secret that they’d been sent to get in his ear. They’d gotten out with a new target and a chip on each of their shoulders, Arthur more than the rest of them.
Arthur had become someone different in those tense ten minutes. Eames had been too preoccupied in the moment to see it happen but over the following weeks as they’d prepped for their new job he saw it. Arthur worked longer hours, he didn’t laugh at anyone’s jokes and barely gave Mal a smile when she’d asked for one point-blank. Eames could see him running every scenario through his mind over and over again, considering every possibility and every angle until he found what he'd been looking for.
At the very least that job went well. They got what they needed, they got out, and the mark was none the wiser. The same day, just an hour after Mal had delivered the goods, news broke of an embezzling scandal perpetrated by the client that had screwed them over.
It was quite the scandal too. Millions of dollars gone, some revealed to have been in overseas bank accounts, some just gone. There was a secret second family in Vermont and another mistress in LA. There were private planes rented with company money, a yacht that the double-crossing-client had collected insurance money on a year before due to a fire turned up in a boat slip rented by his cousin who had been dead for over a decade, and bribes to judges and congressmen for everything from speeding tickets to legislation on what constituted a “hazardous material”. Three days later the former client was found dead in their home.
Some of it Eames knew was a fabrication. He recognized the secret second wife as another forger who had just had a baby and was taking some time off from dreaming but apparently not from working. The yacht looked a lot like one Eames had seen Arthur staking out one night when he’d been too curious for his own good and followed him. The embezzling and bribes he was pretty sure were real because that was how they were supposed to get paid in the first place.
The next time Eames saw him Arthur was back to the same old Arthur he’d always known, laughing at Mal’s jokes and having a small collection of things on the corner of his desk that Eames had thrown at him from across the room. He was the same man who would teach Ariadne everything from totems to how to build a proper maze and let Phillipa kick him in the shins when she blamed him for Dom not being at her mother’s funeral.
So no, Arthur wasn’t cold or calculating or mean so long as you didn’t piss him off.