fic: walking on my skin again (1/2)
Aug. 15th, 2010 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violacea... and lo, I dive into the deep end of Inception fic. :)
Title: walking on my skin again
Pairing: Ariadne/Arthur
Word Count: ~11,000
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: I owe a deep, deep debt of gratitude to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moryssa and rossetti, who read and gave me amazing feedback that helped certain parts of this story come together in a much better way than I ever thought possible. Thank you, ladies! ♥ The title comes from Counting Crows' "When I Dream of Michaelangelo."
Summary: After the Fischer job, Arthur disappears; Ariadne drifts and dreams. It takes some action, some advice, and a little bit of trust for either one to find themselves again.
The first time Ariadne slept after sharing Cobb's dream-prison, she dreamed of Mal.
"Do you know what it is to be a lover?" Mal asked, over and over. "To be half of a whole?"
She never responded to that, even in her own dreams. But Mal's voice continued, things she'd never said. "Do you think you're special?" she whispered, running the jagged edge of a broken champagne glass down Ariadne's arm. "Do you think you mean anything at all? You are nothing but a little girl, pretending to play with the grown-ups. Go back to school. Nobody needs you here."
Mal stabbed her with the glass. Once, twice, more times than Ariadne could count. Only when Ariadne collapsed in a bloody mess on the floor did Mal walk to the elevator and slam the gate behind her.
***
"So," Ariadne asked, somewhere between Paris and Sydney, "why do you do this?"
She and Arthur were the only two people awake in the first class cabin. Eames snored softly across the aisle, Saito was motionless in the front seat in the cabin. Yusef was supposedly watching a movie on his portable player, but his head was bent too far forward to be watching the screen. Cobb faced away from them, but the tension she'd come to associate with the set of his shoulders was nowhere in evidence. Arthur, however, was still staring intently at his laptop screen, his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked up at Ariadne's voice. "You couldn't sleep either?"
She shook her head. "Too keyed up." A half-truth. She'd been up and moving for more than 24 hours, her body screamed for sleep. When she drifted off, however, she saw a trashed hotel room and a broken glass, and phantom pain in her belly jolted her awake every time. Each time, she touched the fabric of her shirt to make sure it wasn't ripped or bloody. Arthur didn't need to know that part. She turned farther around and rested her cheek against the side of the seat. "Really, though, I'm curious. Why do you live this insane life?"
Arthur's lips turned up in a tiny smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. He leaned his head back on his headrest and stretched his arms above his head. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, creating a line of skin from chest to throat to his unshaven jaw that fascinated Ariadne for a long moment. When he looked back down and met her eyes, she felt herself blush. The low light in the cabin probably saved her from embarrassment, because he just shrugged. "I've been working with Cobb for a long time."
"How long?"
"Long enough."
She raised an eyebrow. "Fine. Sorry, didn't mean to pry."
Ariadne turned back around in her seat. A moment later, Arthur's voice drifted softly over the seat. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that." She shifted around again to look at him. His expression was unreadable. "My story's long," he said quietly, "and isn't all mine to tell." His eyes shifted towards Cobb.
"Fair enough." It wasn't like she didn't understand keeping Cobb's secrets.
Arthur looked out the window. He was silent for a long moment. Ariadne was about to turn around when he turned back to her. "I like being necessary."
She blinked. "Oh. Yeah, I get that."
"Do you?"
"More than you know."
This time, his smile was warm. He leaned forward in his seat, setting aside his computer and leaning his elbows on his knees. "You're necessary here, you know that? The things you've built ... well, I've never seen anything quite so detailed. If we win this one, it'll be because you made the dreams real enough for Fischer to believe."
Her back hurt from twisting, so Ariadne slipped out of her seat and sat on the floor next to Arthur's feet. On any other flight, the attendant would probably drag her back to her seat by her hair, but there were advantages to traveling first class with the man who owned the airline. "Thanks," she said. "Congratulate yourself, you're the one who taught me how to do it."
"Me and Cobb."
"Cobb's wrapped up in his own head." She poked Arthur's leg. "Just take the credit and move on, will you?"
He laughed. "Okay, we're both rock stars, everyone else would be lost without us."
"Exactly." Ariadne heard a noise from Eames' seat that could have been a snore, but sounded enough like a conscious snort that she tossed a "shut up" over her shoulder, just in case. Arthur grinned and reached out to tousle her hair. She leaned away, but only a little, and his hand landed on her cheek instead. He lingered for a moment, curling his fingers down her face until his index finger traced her jaw. She felt her skin go warm.
A second later, Arthur withdrew his hand, and smile faded into a thoughtful expression. Ariadne shifted to curl her legs underneath her body. So," she asked, "what are you going to do when this is all over?"
He leaned back in his seat. "I don't know. Once I see how the next few days go, then I'll figure it out."
"I don't believe you. I'm sure you have the next twenty years of your life planned out, down to the minute."
He turned to look out the window again. "You'd be surprised." After a moment of silence, he coughed and turned back to her. "What about you? Going back to school?"
She shrugged. "I haven't decided yet. Maybe? It depends on ..."
"On what?"
Doing this job right. Not getting arrested. Getting Cobb through everything without his subconscious fucking everything up. You. "Oh, a bunch of things. It's all complicated right now."
"You could say that, yeah." He tapped his fingers on his armrest, then held up a finger. "I know, we can make one small plan for after this is done."
"What's that?"
"Dinner. You and me. I know a couple of great places in L.A."
Ariadne tried to control her smile, but she was pretty sure it was wide enough to make her look completely dopey. "I'd like that."
When she crawled back into her seat, she drifted off into a comfortingly Mal-free sleep.
***
Two months after the Fischer job, Saito contacted everyone and offered them more permanent employment. He'd already paid each of them more money than Ariadne had ever dreamed of having, but he said he wanted to "have the best minds in the world on his side." Ariadne was flattered, but turned him down. "I'm already on your side, Mr. Saito," she said, shaking his hand. "But I think I want to do something else right now." A few days later, she got a call from Eames. "Going straight for a little while," he said. "Or, as straight as you can get in the upper echelon of a multi-national corporation."
"You're kidding me." She stared at her phone. "You, of all people, said yes?"
"I've been freelancing for a long time, darling. Having a steady paycheck might be novel for a while."
"You don't need a paycheck."
"Details, details."
Ariadne relayed this conversation to Yusef later, over drinks in Mombasa. "I thought for sure if one of us did it, it would be Arthur," she said, her feet up in the plush sitting room of the small house Yusef had built himself on the outside of the city.
Yusef poured her a drink and smiled. "Me too. But I learned a while back that whatever you think Mr. Eames will do, he will likely just do the opposite."
"True enough," Ariadne agreed. She shifted in her seat and looked out the window. "Where is Arthur these days, anyway?"
"Who knows?" Yusef shrugged. "I haven't seen him since that last time."
The last time they'd all been together - a month or so earlier, at Cobb's house. The location had made Ariadne twitchy. When she walked down the hallway into the dining room, all she could see was Mal, a carving knife in her hand and eyes devoid of any recognizable emotion. On the porch, somehow the grass outside disappeared and then she was falling, falling into oblivion, praying to wake up ... Only a hand on her back had brought her focus back to the sunny day. "You okay?" Arthur asked.
He was warm and reassuringly steady next to her, and for a moment she let herself lean against him, just to remember what was real. "Yeah," she said after a moment, stepping back and forcing a smile. "Yeah, I'm fine." She strode outside to greet Cobb's mother-in-law before she could sneak a peek at Arthur's face. She didn't need to know how unconvincing she was. All she needed to do was breathe.
Mostly, though, what she remembered about that day was Cobb's face, free of the shadows she'd come to think of as his anchor. Well, not quite free - she saw something pass across his face when he looked at the table, something she recognized. That's why she'd sent him a gift certificate to a local furniture store a couple of weeks later. "Redecorate your dining room," she wrote on the accompanying note.
When the rest of them left Cobb's house, they separated, and Ariadne had accounted for everyone but Arthur. "I wonder what Arthur is doing now," she said. "I mean, I know where the rest of us are ..."
"And where are you?" Yusef asked.
"Right now? I'm in your sitting room, wondering where you got this amazing wine."
"That's not what I meant."
Quite frankly, Ariadne didn't know where the hell she was, not really. Saito's money made it unnecessary to work for a living, and she'd only lasted two weeks back at school before boredom got the best of her. So, she traveled. With the trip to Kenya, she could now say she'd been on every continent but Antarctica. She never stayed in one place for more than a couple of weeks ... more than the length of time it took for her dreams to catch up to her. Any time she was comfortable, she would drop into dreams inside dreams inside dreams, in which she recognized the architecture but always lost her way, as if the labyrinth had a mind of its own. She always woke to sweat and a racing heart and an absolute belief that she was still inside someone else's dream. It took the weight of the chess piece, smooth and firm inside her fist, to convince her scrambled mind that she was real, real and alone and safe.
Safe. What a strange word, she thought.
Here, Ariadne took Yusef's guest room and a small vial of sedative with a grateful smile. Yusef just nodded when she asked for the latter. "Why do you think," he said, grasping her hand for a moment, "I started to brew these in the first place?"
Her sleep was deep and dreamless. When she left Mombasa, she took a bottle of the sedative with her.
***
She was the only one left alive. She knew it was a dream, knew that she only had to wake up and pick up the phone to hear Eames grumbling at her for interrupting a night on the town, or turn on CNN to see Saito taking over some company or another. But here, she stood in the hospital, bodies littering the floor around her. Even Mal - Mal, who wasn't real, who invaded Ariadne's cities and bested her time and time again - lay dead, her outstretched hand inches from Cobb's. It was quiet. There were no soldiers, no projections at all, just Ariadne and a sea of dead friends. The strong room door was open; beyond it, only nothingness. Limbo, she knew, but instead of beaches and crumbling buildings, she would find nothing. Only dead air, blackness and cold.
Maybe, to another architect, blackness would be a blank slate, a place to build a world from scratch. But a new world wouldn't bring any of them back to life ... it would just be Ariadne, playing with building blocks and making up stories inside her head.
And then the scene shifted - she dropped into another dream, without warning, only it was a memory, which Cobb told her never to do. But, she saw herself as a small child, sitting on a hardwood floor and building a castle out of Legos and abandoned tin cans. She could hear indistinct voices from another room - her parents, having conversations that always stopped short the minute she walked into the room. While her child self hummed a nameless tune and continued to build a bridge over an imaginary moat, Ariadne the adult ran to the next room ... but there she was again, on the floor, carefully placing Legos end to end. Time and time again, the door in the corner of the room led right back into the same place, until Ariadne could no longer count how many times she'd walked across the threshold. Her child self never looked up, and the voices never became distinct. Eventually, though, Ariadne would begin to feel like someone was watching her as she ran in circles. Watching and laughing.
***
Four months after the Fischer job, Yusef pointed her towards a small team in Seoul, led by an extractor who had been hired to train a local businessman in dream defense. They were happy to take on a new architect, especially one who didn't ask for an equal share of the profits. Honestly, it was a little boring - the training resembled the most basic drills Cobb and Arthur had put her through at first, only weeks of the same thing over and over again. But at least she was creating cities again, labyrinths that she knew inside and out.
She had tried to go back to school, to return to pen and paper and computer simulations and create tangible buildings made of cement and steel. She'd barely lasted two months. When Cobb called to invite her to a party - a reunion, a chance to see the people who had helped him return to his family - she terminated the lease on her apartment and bought a ticket to the States. At first, she'd been afraid to go back into the dreaming world; her unconscious dreams haunted her enough, what if she brought her demons into the job with her, just as Cobb did? But the minute she slid the IV into her wrist in Seoul, she felt like she'd come back home. This was the architecture she wanted. She didn't need a degree. She didn't need asshole contractors or picky clients or greedy partners ... she could just make a city. Make it, destroy it, build it again. And not only could she build them, but she could bring people in to see, to play, to live.
Her current coworkers didn't care if the dream labyrinth was complex; they didn't care if Ariadne built the world from scratch or if she used the same crowded city street an errant freight train had barreled down once upon a time. After a few dreams, she stopped putting the extra work into them and started using copies of the basic dream worlds Arthur had trained her in. Why waste the effort, she thought? No one would notice.
One night, she went to dinner with her three companions; the extractor started telling a story about the last job they'd done. "... and it took me a little while to recognize the guy in the suit across the room. I'd never seen him working without Cobb before."
Ariadne's head snapped up. "What?"
"Know them, do you? You know what happened to Cobb? I heard he was out of the game, but nobody seems to know why."
Ariadne ignored the question. "Where were you? You know, when you saw Arthur?"
"Oh, yeah, that's his name. He didn't talk to us. I know he saw us; probably knew we were there. I assume he was hired by the mark or something, I don't know. It was in Florida. We were trying to get this old guy to give up his bank account numbers so that his granddaughter could pay off the creditors he left behind when he decided to run away to Miami. But the day after we saw Arthur, the mark checked out of his hotel, and we never caught a trace of him again." He sighed. "I hate defaulting on a job."
The conversation drifted to other topics. Ariadne only paid half attention.
Back in her hotel room, she lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling, turning her chess piece over and over in her hand. The comfortable weight of it allowed her to breathe.
***
At first, Arthur had seemed no different than her university professors. Maybe a little younger, but still a somewhat ageless mentor whose sole purpose was to fill her head with knowledge. That was okay. She loved soaking up new ideas, and learning to exist in another person's dream was the craziest idea she'd ever come across. So, for the most part, she was patient while he led her through a laundry list of basic theory and defense. It was only when he'd started to repeat lessons she'd already learned that she started to get bored.
One day, Ariadne stopped listening to him halfway through a speech. Instead, she looked around; they were training in the same office building dream they'd been entering for days. (Arthur was good at many things - creativity was not one of them, she'd figured out.) They were stopped in the middle of a large, open lobby. At the opposite end of the lobby was a sitting area made up of basic brown couches and metal tables. While Arthur was explaining about interacting with another person's projections, Ariadne wandered away. By the time he realized she wasn't standing beside him, she'd already changed the floor in the sitting area into a meadow, and was working on growing a tree out of the nearest side table. She barely noticed Arthur when he came to stand by her side. She didn't look over at him, but could sense him watching as the tree grew taller and taller, until it burst through the ceiling above and thrust branches into the cold silver lighting fixtures. The fixtures didn't shatter; they merely bent and warped themselves until they were points of light inside thick brown branches, as if she'd draped a strand of Christmas lights high above their heads.
Only when the tree was finished did Ariadne turn to look at Arthur. She held her breath, expecting a rebuke, or at the very least a frown. She did not expect to see his eye wide with wonder. "Wow," he said under his breath. "That is so cool." When he looked down at her and smiled, his eyes crinkled, and Ariadne suddenly realized he was closer to her own age than she'd thought.
Her heart skipped a beat at that smile. The smile she returned to him was slightly self-mocking (Ariadne, she thought, you really just need to get laid), but she spread her hands in surrender. "Sorry. I'm easily distracted."
"That's okay. This place needed redecorating anyway." He looked back at the meadow, which suddenly had a row of thorny bushes where a couch had been.
Ariadne felt eyes on her back; she turned around to see Arthur's projections crowding around, staring curiously at her. "Am I in trouble?" she asked.
Arthur turned around. "Nah," he said, "they'll only attack if I feel threatened, or if I'm weirded out. Once you're experienced enough, you learn how to let your subconscious in on who should be in your dream and who's an intruder."
"Ah, so Cobb's projections just attacked me because he wanted them to." Arthur nodded. "Figures." She glanced at the projections, then back at Arthur. "You're not weirded out?"
He smiled again, and she felt a funny twist inside her stomach. "No way. Can you ..."
She didn't get to hear his question, because at that point the music started. She blinked, and then she was back in the warehouse, laying on an uncomfortable chaise lounge with an IV in her arm. She pulled it out and looked over at Arthur, who was doing the same thing in the chair next to her. "You think we can at least buy some cushions for these things?" she asked, rubbing the back of her neck.
He chuckled. She stood up and held out a hand to him. He took it and pulled himself up. His hand was warm in Ariadne's; she couldn't resist squeezing, just a little, before she let go and turned towards the door. "I'm starving. Let's go get lunch."
She didn't wait to see him respond, but she felt a small rush of pleasure when she felt him walking at her back.
***
She was walking through a silent city, a maze she didn't recognize. Every step she took echoed, the sound bouncing off of buildings of all shapes, sizes, and influences. A gothic cathedral stood next to a saloon straight out of the old west, which was attached to a nondescript suburban house that resembled the one she grew up in, along every other house for a two mile radius. She ignored that house and all other buildings, until she came to a painfully modern skyscraper, a tower of glass and steel that reflected light coming from somewhere outside of Ariadne's view.
She entered the building slowly. Inside the doors, people milled around, their speech a low murmur in her ears. In the middle of the lobby, a tree grew out of the sandy colored marble tile. It was covered in twinkling white lights, and its branches extended on and on until they were tangled in the beams of the ceiling above.
Ariadne felt a name on the tip of her tongue. Her lips even formed the word, but no sound came out. She could see a door somewhere beyond the tree. It was closing as she caught sight of it, and something inside of her told her to run, to sprint for the door and fling it open. She stepped past the doorframe-
-falling. Falling through a crumbling city, praying to hear the faint strains of a song. Praying just to wake-
Outside of her tiny, dingy Seoul hotel room, she could hear the bustle of the city below. Ariadne sat next to the window and listened until she could pick up the words of an individual conversation, a heated argument in front of the restaurant across the street. The shouted cursing settled her nerves. She didn't sleep again that night, but she felt relatively peaceful as she stared out the window and reimagined the city.
***
Ariadne called her parents a couple of days after she arrived in Los Angeles, the first time she'd spoken with them in several weeks. She'd gotten so wrapped up in her newfound world that everything and everyone else had just sort of slipped away. She rehearsed the conversation in her head before she dialed the phone. She'd taken the semester off when one of her professors hooked her up with a group that was researching more environmentally-friendly ways to design office buildings. She'd been interning with them for several months, culminating in the design of a test building in Sydney. It had enough of the truth that she figured she could remember the details.
"Nice to know you're alive," her mother said, ice underneath a slow drawl.
"Sorry. I'm sorry, Mom. I just got caught up in the work I was doing. And then I was in Australia, and phone rates are killer there."
"Right. So, is your sabbatical over, then?"
"What? Oh ..." Ariadne stared at the television at the foot of her hotel bed. The screen was dark; she could see her shadowed reflection staring back at her. "Yeah, I guess. We finished our big project. The company flew us to Sydney ..."
"Since you're on the same continent as we are," her mom interrupted, "are you coming home to visit?"
A pause. Ariadne's shadow on the television leaned her head against the bed's headboard and sighed. "Sure, I'll be there in the next few days."
"Good. The church dinner is this weekend, I'm sure everyone will be happy to see you."
She'd go home, she told herself firmly once the phone was on the table next to her. She'd go home, and she'd go to the church dinner, and only when they were at a table with a dozen other people would her parents ask her how her 'sabbatical' had been. Really, she didn't know why she'd bothered to make up a cover story for a phone call in the first place.
Two nights later, she lay in her childhood bed. Somewhere down the hall, she could hear her parents murmuring to one another. Just as she'd done years ago, she quieted herself and concentrated, trying to hear what the conversation was about. Just like always, she fell asleep before any sounds resolved into words.
She didn't dream for a week. The night she woke up in a sweat, her stomach still churning from a fall she hadn't taken, she opened up her laptop and booked a flight back to Paris. She was packed and waiting for a taxi in the kitchen by the time her parents woke up.
They didn't ask.
***
It was six months after she'd left Paris for the last time before Ariadne went back to Europe, where Eames recommended her for a corporate espionage gig in Berlin. It went well, but the people she worked with were shady enough that she wasn't quite sure completing the job was the right thing to do. Ariadne walked away with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. "I just don't think I'm cut out for the criminal life," she told Eames on the phone, sitting in the back of a taxi on her way to the airport.
"Oh, I'm pretty sure that's not it," he said, yawning in her ear. Time differences still made her head hurt, especially when the International Date Line was involved. Eames was in Tokyo, so her cloudy morning was probably the middle of the night for him. She'd apologize, she thought, if she had any reason to think he'd already been in bed when she called. The loud noises in the background when he picked up said otherwise, however. To his credit, he'd immediately excused himself from wherever he was and gone to some quieter location to talk. Ariadne had discovered she could count on him for that, no matter what time of day it was. And he was the one who made the effort to track down her real cell phone number, unlike Arthur, who had simply left her with the temporary number he'd used in Paris. Not that she wanted to call Arthur at the moment.
She shook her head to clear it, and realized Eames was still talking. "You're the kind of person every criminal organization needs."
"Oh yeah? What kind is that?"
"An honest one." He chuckled. "Honest and passionate. Sounds strange, but those are the two qualities a truly successful thief needs. You need to have a reason to do what you do, something that drives you, and you need to be able to sell it to other people in a way they'll believe. Nobody believes a liar."
"Unless they're talking to you."
This time, Eames laughed outright. "I only lie when I'm getting paid to, darling. If I lied to the people I worked with, I'd be in jail or dead by now. Tricky, though, isn't it? Everyone has to have a line."
"Maybe I just hit my line."
"No, you didn't. You're just missing the passion part of the equation." He paused to speak to someone in Japanese. Ariadne smiled. His grasp of the language had improved over the past few months, but he still stumbled over unfamiliar sounds and occasionally stopped to mutter, "Bugger, what was that word ..." When he was done, he came back to the conversation. "What was I saying?"
"Passion. And if this turns out to be a come-on, I'm hanging up."
"Perish the thought. I know your interests lie elsewhere."
"Shut up." She felt herself reddening. "Did you have a point?"
"Maybe that is the point. No, wait," he said, as Ariadne started to take the phone away from her ear, "hear me out. All irritating fussbudgets in expensive suits aside, when we started, you were passionate about learning how to create and manipulate dream worlds. Our adventures with Fischer turned everyone on their heads, even those of us who have done that sort of thing a million times." He paused. "I haven't been in a dream since."
"Really?" She switched the phone to her other ear, staring at it curiously. "You haven't?"
"Not once. Don't know that I want to. That's not true," he immediately corrected. "I do. It just seems like anything else is going to be a little two-dimensional after all that."
"I'll take that as a compliment to my skills," she said, and was rewarded with a chuckle. Then she turned serious again. "Do you really want to do something as crazy as that job again? You have fun with that, count me out."
"I want a challenge. Working for Saito is one, in a way. I've never worked inside a corporation before. Learning the particular politics and games is fun. It's going to become a pain in my ass very quickly, though, I have to say. I only hope Saito doesn't hold it against me when I disappear. He's a good ally to have." Eames fell silent, and Ariadne knew that a response wasn't necessary, or even welcome. He kept her focused, and she kept his secrets. It was an arrangement that worked for both of them.
The taxi pulled up to the airport, and Ariadne juggled the phone again as she paid the driver and pulled her luggage into the terminal. "You're saying I need a challenge."
"Exactly."
"And what would that be?"
"How should I know? Do I look like your fairy godfather?" She snorted, and he continued. "You're going to have to come up with your own challenges, Ariadne. Even if it's just getting off your ass and going to look for Arthur, though god only knows why you'd ever want to do that."
"I don't want to look for Arthur," she said.
"And here I called you an honest person just a few minutes ago."
"Shut up." She sighed and leaned against a wall. "I have to go, I have a plane to catch."
"Where are you off to?"
"New York. No reason," she said, before he could ask. "Just felt like it."
"Find yourself a reason, darling. Either that, or come to Tokyo, we could amuse ourselves by kidnapping poor innocent university students and learning all their deep, dark secrets."
Ariadne laughed, as she was meant to. "University students don't have deep, dark secrets. The only things you'd learn would be where they keep their drug stash and which one of their girlfriend's friends they slept with."
"I know, that's why I don't do it." He sighed dramatically. "Okay, then, come visit for the amazing seafood restaurant down the street from me."
"That's a more tempting offer. I'll call you from New York."
Ariadne hung up the phone with a smile on her face; knocking her out of her own thoughts was one of the many things Eames was good for.
***
She'd accidentally spilled her guts some months ago, back when she and Eames had met up in some little Italian town on the Mediterranean. He spent the evening buying bottle after bottle of wine at a tiny restaurant. By the time the owners kicked them out, Ariadne was somewhat more than three sheets to the wind. Eames, to her frustration, barely seemed tipsy. "Body mass," he said, slipping an arm around her shoulders to keep her upright. "Also, I have a decade's head start on building a tolerance."
"Old man," she grumbled, leaning against him. He laughed. She sighed. "You don't feel the same as he does."
"As who does?"
"Arthur."
"Oh, and have you been getting drunk with him often?"
"No, never." She pulled away from Eames and walked ahead of him. The street was empty but for them - by this time of night, most upstanding residents were long in their beds. She turned around and walked backwards, facing him. "He didn't give me the chance. Just left."
Eames grabbed her shoulders and spun her back around. She stumbled, but he caught her before she went off the curb. "He's a cad."
"No, no, it wasn't like that." But then she sighed and leaned against him again. "I kinda wish it was."
"Your taste in men is abysmal, my dear."
"Fuck off. Your taste in women isn't anything to brag about. What was the name of that girl in your hotel room again?"
"I have no idea," Eames admitted cheerfully.
"Her voice could have shattered glass. How did you stand it?"
"Thankfully, she wasn't much of a talker during sex."
"I miss sex," Ariadne said mournfully. "Haven't had any since I was back at school."
"Jesus. Why not?"
She shrugged. The movement would have caused her to topple over if Eames hadn't had an arm around her. "Nobody ever appeals to me."
"You are pathetic, you know that?"
Ariadne tried to shove him, but ended up feeling the rough cobblestones with her ass instead. She patiently waited for him to stop laughing - okay, to stop laughing quite so loudly - before holding her hands up. He pulled her back to standing. "Seriously, you and Arthur?"
"Not me and Arthur. That's the problem."
One corner of Eames's mouth twisted upwards, and he ran a thumb over her cheek before letting her go. "Then he's a moron. Which we already knew, quite frankly."
They walked in silence for a few minutes. Then, Ariadne's curiosity got the better of her. "Do you know where he is?"
"Me? Really, you think he'd call me up to chat or something?"
"No, I just ..." She shrugged, this time managing to keep her balance. The wine must have been wearing off, she thought. "You know more people than I do. You might have heard something."
"Strangely enough, love, I've been keeping my nose out of the extraction business recently. Honestly, though, even when I was talking to people, I didn't hear his name come up. I wonder if he's even still working."
"He's working."
"You're right, he's not really qualified for anything else, is he? Except maybe a butler. He'd make an awesome butler, waiting on some little old lady and her tiny rat-dog."
For some reason that struck Ariadne as the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and she laughed until she was sitting with her back against the nearest building, completely out of breath. Nothing was quite as funny the next morning, though, when her head felt like a freight train had just run through. Eames had politely provided her with a pair of designer sunglasses and a bottle of water the size of her head, but had never let her mope about Arthur again. She was more grateful than she'd ever admit to him.
Part 2
Title: walking on my skin again
Pairing: Ariadne/Arthur
Word Count: ~11,000
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: I owe a deep, deep debt of gratitude to
moryssa and rossetti, who read and gave me amazing feedback that helped certain parts of this story come together in a much better way than I ever thought possible. Thank you, ladies! ♥ The title comes from Counting Crows' "When I Dream of Michaelangelo."Summary: After the Fischer job, Arthur disappears; Ariadne drifts and dreams. It takes some action, some advice, and a little bit of trust for either one to find themselves again.
The first time Ariadne slept after sharing Cobb's dream-prison, she dreamed of Mal.
"Do you know what it is to be a lover?" Mal asked, over and over. "To be half of a whole?"
She never responded to that, even in her own dreams. But Mal's voice continued, things she'd never said. "Do you think you're special?" she whispered, running the jagged edge of a broken champagne glass down Ariadne's arm. "Do you think you mean anything at all? You are nothing but a little girl, pretending to play with the grown-ups. Go back to school. Nobody needs you here."
Mal stabbed her with the glass. Once, twice, more times than Ariadne could count. Only when Ariadne collapsed in a bloody mess on the floor did Mal walk to the elevator and slam the gate behind her.
***
"So," Ariadne asked, somewhere between Paris and Sydney, "why do you do this?"
She and Arthur were the only two people awake in the first class cabin. Eames snored softly across the aisle, Saito was motionless in the front seat in the cabin. Yusef was supposedly watching a movie on his portable player, but his head was bent too far forward to be watching the screen. Cobb faced away from them, but the tension she'd come to associate with the set of his shoulders was nowhere in evidence. Arthur, however, was still staring intently at his laptop screen, his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked up at Ariadne's voice. "You couldn't sleep either?"
She shook her head. "Too keyed up." A half-truth. She'd been up and moving for more than 24 hours, her body screamed for sleep. When she drifted off, however, she saw a trashed hotel room and a broken glass, and phantom pain in her belly jolted her awake every time. Each time, she touched the fabric of her shirt to make sure it wasn't ripped or bloody. Arthur didn't need to know that part. She turned farther around and rested her cheek against the side of the seat. "Really, though, I'm curious. Why do you live this insane life?"
Arthur's lips turned up in a tiny smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. He leaned his head back on his headrest and stretched his arms above his head. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, creating a line of skin from chest to throat to his unshaven jaw that fascinated Ariadne for a long moment. When he looked back down and met her eyes, she felt herself blush. The low light in the cabin probably saved her from embarrassment, because he just shrugged. "I've been working with Cobb for a long time."
"How long?"
"Long enough."
She raised an eyebrow. "Fine. Sorry, didn't mean to pry."
Ariadne turned back around in her seat. A moment later, Arthur's voice drifted softly over the seat. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that." She shifted around again to look at him. His expression was unreadable. "My story's long," he said quietly, "and isn't all mine to tell." His eyes shifted towards Cobb.
"Fair enough." It wasn't like she didn't understand keeping Cobb's secrets.
Arthur looked out the window. He was silent for a long moment. Ariadne was about to turn around when he turned back to her. "I like being necessary."
She blinked. "Oh. Yeah, I get that."
"Do you?"
"More than you know."
This time, his smile was warm. He leaned forward in his seat, setting aside his computer and leaning his elbows on his knees. "You're necessary here, you know that? The things you've built ... well, I've never seen anything quite so detailed. If we win this one, it'll be because you made the dreams real enough for Fischer to believe."
Her back hurt from twisting, so Ariadne slipped out of her seat and sat on the floor next to Arthur's feet. On any other flight, the attendant would probably drag her back to her seat by her hair, but there were advantages to traveling first class with the man who owned the airline. "Thanks," she said. "Congratulate yourself, you're the one who taught me how to do it."
"Me and Cobb."
"Cobb's wrapped up in his own head." She poked Arthur's leg. "Just take the credit and move on, will you?"
He laughed. "Okay, we're both rock stars, everyone else would be lost without us."
"Exactly." Ariadne heard a noise from Eames' seat that could have been a snore, but sounded enough like a conscious snort that she tossed a "shut up" over her shoulder, just in case. Arthur grinned and reached out to tousle her hair. She leaned away, but only a little, and his hand landed on her cheek instead. He lingered for a moment, curling his fingers down her face until his index finger traced her jaw. She felt her skin go warm.
A second later, Arthur withdrew his hand, and smile faded into a thoughtful expression. Ariadne shifted to curl her legs underneath her body. So," she asked, "what are you going to do when this is all over?"
He leaned back in his seat. "I don't know. Once I see how the next few days go, then I'll figure it out."
"I don't believe you. I'm sure you have the next twenty years of your life planned out, down to the minute."
He turned to look out the window again. "You'd be surprised." After a moment of silence, he coughed and turned back to her. "What about you? Going back to school?"
She shrugged. "I haven't decided yet. Maybe? It depends on ..."
"On what?"
Doing this job right. Not getting arrested. Getting Cobb through everything without his subconscious fucking everything up. You. "Oh, a bunch of things. It's all complicated right now."
"You could say that, yeah." He tapped his fingers on his armrest, then held up a finger. "I know, we can make one small plan for after this is done."
"What's that?"
"Dinner. You and me. I know a couple of great places in L.A."
Ariadne tried to control her smile, but she was pretty sure it was wide enough to make her look completely dopey. "I'd like that."
When she crawled back into her seat, she drifted off into a comfortingly Mal-free sleep.
***
Two months after the Fischer job, Saito contacted everyone and offered them more permanent employment. He'd already paid each of them more money than Ariadne had ever dreamed of having, but he said he wanted to "have the best minds in the world on his side." Ariadne was flattered, but turned him down. "I'm already on your side, Mr. Saito," she said, shaking his hand. "But I think I want to do something else right now." A few days later, she got a call from Eames. "Going straight for a little while," he said. "Or, as straight as you can get in the upper echelon of a multi-national corporation."
"You're kidding me." She stared at her phone. "You, of all people, said yes?"
"I've been freelancing for a long time, darling. Having a steady paycheck might be novel for a while."
"You don't need a paycheck."
"Details, details."
Ariadne relayed this conversation to Yusef later, over drinks in Mombasa. "I thought for sure if one of us did it, it would be Arthur," she said, her feet up in the plush sitting room of the small house Yusef had built himself on the outside of the city.
Yusef poured her a drink and smiled. "Me too. But I learned a while back that whatever you think Mr. Eames will do, he will likely just do the opposite."
"True enough," Ariadne agreed. She shifted in her seat and looked out the window. "Where is Arthur these days, anyway?"
"Who knows?" Yusef shrugged. "I haven't seen him since that last time."
The last time they'd all been together - a month or so earlier, at Cobb's house. The location had made Ariadne twitchy. When she walked down the hallway into the dining room, all she could see was Mal, a carving knife in her hand and eyes devoid of any recognizable emotion. On the porch, somehow the grass outside disappeared and then she was falling, falling into oblivion, praying to wake up ... Only a hand on her back had brought her focus back to the sunny day. "You okay?" Arthur asked.
He was warm and reassuringly steady next to her, and for a moment she let herself lean against him, just to remember what was real. "Yeah," she said after a moment, stepping back and forcing a smile. "Yeah, I'm fine." She strode outside to greet Cobb's mother-in-law before she could sneak a peek at Arthur's face. She didn't need to know how unconvincing she was. All she needed to do was breathe.
Mostly, though, what she remembered about that day was Cobb's face, free of the shadows she'd come to think of as his anchor. Well, not quite free - she saw something pass across his face when he looked at the table, something she recognized. That's why she'd sent him a gift certificate to a local furniture store a couple of weeks later. "Redecorate your dining room," she wrote on the accompanying note.
When the rest of them left Cobb's house, they separated, and Ariadne had accounted for everyone but Arthur. "I wonder what Arthur is doing now," she said. "I mean, I know where the rest of us are ..."
"And where are you?" Yusef asked.
"Right now? I'm in your sitting room, wondering where you got this amazing wine."
"That's not what I meant."
Quite frankly, Ariadne didn't know where the hell she was, not really. Saito's money made it unnecessary to work for a living, and she'd only lasted two weeks back at school before boredom got the best of her. So, she traveled. With the trip to Kenya, she could now say she'd been on every continent but Antarctica. She never stayed in one place for more than a couple of weeks ... more than the length of time it took for her dreams to catch up to her. Any time she was comfortable, she would drop into dreams inside dreams inside dreams, in which she recognized the architecture but always lost her way, as if the labyrinth had a mind of its own. She always woke to sweat and a racing heart and an absolute belief that she was still inside someone else's dream. It took the weight of the chess piece, smooth and firm inside her fist, to convince her scrambled mind that she was real, real and alone and safe.
Safe. What a strange word, she thought.
Here, Ariadne took Yusef's guest room and a small vial of sedative with a grateful smile. Yusef just nodded when she asked for the latter. "Why do you think," he said, grasping her hand for a moment, "I started to brew these in the first place?"
Her sleep was deep and dreamless. When she left Mombasa, she took a bottle of the sedative with her.
***
She was the only one left alive. She knew it was a dream, knew that she only had to wake up and pick up the phone to hear Eames grumbling at her for interrupting a night on the town, or turn on CNN to see Saito taking over some company or another. But here, she stood in the hospital, bodies littering the floor around her. Even Mal - Mal, who wasn't real, who invaded Ariadne's cities and bested her time and time again - lay dead, her outstretched hand inches from Cobb's. It was quiet. There were no soldiers, no projections at all, just Ariadne and a sea of dead friends. The strong room door was open; beyond it, only nothingness. Limbo, she knew, but instead of beaches and crumbling buildings, she would find nothing. Only dead air, blackness and cold.
Maybe, to another architect, blackness would be a blank slate, a place to build a world from scratch. But a new world wouldn't bring any of them back to life ... it would just be Ariadne, playing with building blocks and making up stories inside her head.
And then the scene shifted - she dropped into another dream, without warning, only it was a memory, which Cobb told her never to do. But, she saw herself as a small child, sitting on a hardwood floor and building a castle out of Legos and abandoned tin cans. She could hear indistinct voices from another room - her parents, having conversations that always stopped short the minute she walked into the room. While her child self hummed a nameless tune and continued to build a bridge over an imaginary moat, Ariadne the adult ran to the next room ... but there she was again, on the floor, carefully placing Legos end to end. Time and time again, the door in the corner of the room led right back into the same place, until Ariadne could no longer count how many times she'd walked across the threshold. Her child self never looked up, and the voices never became distinct. Eventually, though, Ariadne would begin to feel like someone was watching her as she ran in circles. Watching and laughing.
***
Four months after the Fischer job, Yusef pointed her towards a small team in Seoul, led by an extractor who had been hired to train a local businessman in dream defense. They were happy to take on a new architect, especially one who didn't ask for an equal share of the profits. Honestly, it was a little boring - the training resembled the most basic drills Cobb and Arthur had put her through at first, only weeks of the same thing over and over again. But at least she was creating cities again, labyrinths that she knew inside and out.
She had tried to go back to school, to return to pen and paper and computer simulations and create tangible buildings made of cement and steel. She'd barely lasted two months. When Cobb called to invite her to a party - a reunion, a chance to see the people who had helped him return to his family - she terminated the lease on her apartment and bought a ticket to the States. At first, she'd been afraid to go back into the dreaming world; her unconscious dreams haunted her enough, what if she brought her demons into the job with her, just as Cobb did? But the minute she slid the IV into her wrist in Seoul, she felt like she'd come back home. This was the architecture she wanted. She didn't need a degree. She didn't need asshole contractors or picky clients or greedy partners ... she could just make a city. Make it, destroy it, build it again. And not only could she build them, but she could bring people in to see, to play, to live.
Her current coworkers didn't care if the dream labyrinth was complex; they didn't care if Ariadne built the world from scratch or if she used the same crowded city street an errant freight train had barreled down once upon a time. After a few dreams, she stopped putting the extra work into them and started using copies of the basic dream worlds Arthur had trained her in. Why waste the effort, she thought? No one would notice.
One night, she went to dinner with her three companions; the extractor started telling a story about the last job they'd done. "... and it took me a little while to recognize the guy in the suit across the room. I'd never seen him working without Cobb before."
Ariadne's head snapped up. "What?"
"Know them, do you? You know what happened to Cobb? I heard he was out of the game, but nobody seems to know why."
Ariadne ignored the question. "Where were you? You know, when you saw Arthur?"
"Oh, yeah, that's his name. He didn't talk to us. I know he saw us; probably knew we were there. I assume he was hired by the mark or something, I don't know. It was in Florida. We were trying to get this old guy to give up his bank account numbers so that his granddaughter could pay off the creditors he left behind when he decided to run away to Miami. But the day after we saw Arthur, the mark checked out of his hotel, and we never caught a trace of him again." He sighed. "I hate defaulting on a job."
The conversation drifted to other topics. Ariadne only paid half attention.
Back in her hotel room, she lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling, turning her chess piece over and over in her hand. The comfortable weight of it allowed her to breathe.
***
At first, Arthur had seemed no different than her university professors. Maybe a little younger, but still a somewhat ageless mentor whose sole purpose was to fill her head with knowledge. That was okay. She loved soaking up new ideas, and learning to exist in another person's dream was the craziest idea she'd ever come across. So, for the most part, she was patient while he led her through a laundry list of basic theory and defense. It was only when he'd started to repeat lessons she'd already learned that she started to get bored.
One day, Ariadne stopped listening to him halfway through a speech. Instead, she looked around; they were training in the same office building dream they'd been entering for days. (Arthur was good at many things - creativity was not one of them, she'd figured out.) They were stopped in the middle of a large, open lobby. At the opposite end of the lobby was a sitting area made up of basic brown couches and metal tables. While Arthur was explaining about interacting with another person's projections, Ariadne wandered away. By the time he realized she wasn't standing beside him, she'd already changed the floor in the sitting area into a meadow, and was working on growing a tree out of the nearest side table. She barely noticed Arthur when he came to stand by her side. She didn't look over at him, but could sense him watching as the tree grew taller and taller, until it burst through the ceiling above and thrust branches into the cold silver lighting fixtures. The fixtures didn't shatter; they merely bent and warped themselves until they were points of light inside thick brown branches, as if she'd draped a strand of Christmas lights high above their heads.
Only when the tree was finished did Ariadne turn to look at Arthur. She held her breath, expecting a rebuke, or at the very least a frown. She did not expect to see his eye wide with wonder. "Wow," he said under his breath. "That is so cool." When he looked down at her and smiled, his eyes crinkled, and Ariadne suddenly realized he was closer to her own age than she'd thought.
Her heart skipped a beat at that smile. The smile she returned to him was slightly self-mocking (Ariadne, she thought, you really just need to get laid), but she spread her hands in surrender. "Sorry. I'm easily distracted."
"That's okay. This place needed redecorating anyway." He looked back at the meadow, which suddenly had a row of thorny bushes where a couch had been.
Ariadne felt eyes on her back; she turned around to see Arthur's projections crowding around, staring curiously at her. "Am I in trouble?" she asked.
Arthur turned around. "Nah," he said, "they'll only attack if I feel threatened, or if I'm weirded out. Once you're experienced enough, you learn how to let your subconscious in on who should be in your dream and who's an intruder."
"Ah, so Cobb's projections just attacked me because he wanted them to." Arthur nodded. "Figures." She glanced at the projections, then back at Arthur. "You're not weirded out?"
He smiled again, and she felt a funny twist inside her stomach. "No way. Can you ..."
She didn't get to hear his question, because at that point the music started. She blinked, and then she was back in the warehouse, laying on an uncomfortable chaise lounge with an IV in her arm. She pulled it out and looked over at Arthur, who was doing the same thing in the chair next to her. "You think we can at least buy some cushions for these things?" she asked, rubbing the back of her neck.
He chuckled. She stood up and held out a hand to him. He took it and pulled himself up. His hand was warm in Ariadne's; she couldn't resist squeezing, just a little, before she let go and turned towards the door. "I'm starving. Let's go get lunch."
She didn't wait to see him respond, but she felt a small rush of pleasure when she felt him walking at her back.
***
She was walking through a silent city, a maze she didn't recognize. Every step she took echoed, the sound bouncing off of buildings of all shapes, sizes, and influences. A gothic cathedral stood next to a saloon straight out of the old west, which was attached to a nondescript suburban house that resembled the one she grew up in, along every other house for a two mile radius. She ignored that house and all other buildings, until she came to a painfully modern skyscraper, a tower of glass and steel that reflected light coming from somewhere outside of Ariadne's view.
She entered the building slowly. Inside the doors, people milled around, their speech a low murmur in her ears. In the middle of the lobby, a tree grew out of the sandy colored marble tile. It was covered in twinkling white lights, and its branches extended on and on until they were tangled in the beams of the ceiling above.
Ariadne felt a name on the tip of her tongue. Her lips even formed the word, but no sound came out. She could see a door somewhere beyond the tree. It was closing as she caught sight of it, and something inside of her told her to run, to sprint for the door and fling it open. She stepped past the doorframe-
-falling. Falling through a crumbling city, praying to hear the faint strains of a song. Praying just to wake-
Outside of her tiny, dingy Seoul hotel room, she could hear the bustle of the city below. Ariadne sat next to the window and listened until she could pick up the words of an individual conversation, a heated argument in front of the restaurant across the street. The shouted cursing settled her nerves. She didn't sleep again that night, but she felt relatively peaceful as she stared out the window and reimagined the city.
***
Ariadne called her parents a couple of days after she arrived in Los Angeles, the first time she'd spoken with them in several weeks. She'd gotten so wrapped up in her newfound world that everything and everyone else had just sort of slipped away. She rehearsed the conversation in her head before she dialed the phone. She'd taken the semester off when one of her professors hooked her up with a group that was researching more environmentally-friendly ways to design office buildings. She'd been interning with them for several months, culminating in the design of a test building in Sydney. It had enough of the truth that she figured she could remember the details.
"Nice to know you're alive," her mother said, ice underneath a slow drawl.
"Sorry. I'm sorry, Mom. I just got caught up in the work I was doing. And then I was in Australia, and phone rates are killer there."
"Right. So, is your sabbatical over, then?"
"What? Oh ..." Ariadne stared at the television at the foot of her hotel bed. The screen was dark; she could see her shadowed reflection staring back at her. "Yeah, I guess. We finished our big project. The company flew us to Sydney ..."
"Since you're on the same continent as we are," her mom interrupted, "are you coming home to visit?"
A pause. Ariadne's shadow on the television leaned her head against the bed's headboard and sighed. "Sure, I'll be there in the next few days."
"Good. The church dinner is this weekend, I'm sure everyone will be happy to see you."
She'd go home, she told herself firmly once the phone was on the table next to her. She'd go home, and she'd go to the church dinner, and only when they were at a table with a dozen other people would her parents ask her how her 'sabbatical' had been. Really, she didn't know why she'd bothered to make up a cover story for a phone call in the first place.
Two nights later, she lay in her childhood bed. Somewhere down the hall, she could hear her parents murmuring to one another. Just as she'd done years ago, she quieted herself and concentrated, trying to hear what the conversation was about. Just like always, she fell asleep before any sounds resolved into words.
She didn't dream for a week. The night she woke up in a sweat, her stomach still churning from a fall she hadn't taken, she opened up her laptop and booked a flight back to Paris. She was packed and waiting for a taxi in the kitchen by the time her parents woke up.
They didn't ask.
***
It was six months after she'd left Paris for the last time before Ariadne went back to Europe, where Eames recommended her for a corporate espionage gig in Berlin. It went well, but the people she worked with were shady enough that she wasn't quite sure completing the job was the right thing to do. Ariadne walked away with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. "I just don't think I'm cut out for the criminal life," she told Eames on the phone, sitting in the back of a taxi on her way to the airport.
"Oh, I'm pretty sure that's not it," he said, yawning in her ear. Time differences still made her head hurt, especially when the International Date Line was involved. Eames was in Tokyo, so her cloudy morning was probably the middle of the night for him. She'd apologize, she thought, if she had any reason to think he'd already been in bed when she called. The loud noises in the background when he picked up said otherwise, however. To his credit, he'd immediately excused himself from wherever he was and gone to some quieter location to talk. Ariadne had discovered she could count on him for that, no matter what time of day it was. And he was the one who made the effort to track down her real cell phone number, unlike Arthur, who had simply left her with the temporary number he'd used in Paris. Not that she wanted to call Arthur at the moment.
She shook her head to clear it, and realized Eames was still talking. "You're the kind of person every criminal organization needs."
"Oh yeah? What kind is that?"
"An honest one." He chuckled. "Honest and passionate. Sounds strange, but those are the two qualities a truly successful thief needs. You need to have a reason to do what you do, something that drives you, and you need to be able to sell it to other people in a way they'll believe. Nobody believes a liar."
"Unless they're talking to you."
This time, Eames laughed outright. "I only lie when I'm getting paid to, darling. If I lied to the people I worked with, I'd be in jail or dead by now. Tricky, though, isn't it? Everyone has to have a line."
"Maybe I just hit my line."
"No, you didn't. You're just missing the passion part of the equation." He paused to speak to someone in Japanese. Ariadne smiled. His grasp of the language had improved over the past few months, but he still stumbled over unfamiliar sounds and occasionally stopped to mutter, "Bugger, what was that word ..." When he was done, he came back to the conversation. "What was I saying?"
"Passion. And if this turns out to be a come-on, I'm hanging up."
"Perish the thought. I know your interests lie elsewhere."
"Shut up." She felt herself reddening. "Did you have a point?"
"Maybe that is the point. No, wait," he said, as Ariadne started to take the phone away from her ear, "hear me out. All irritating fussbudgets in expensive suits aside, when we started, you were passionate about learning how to create and manipulate dream worlds. Our adventures with Fischer turned everyone on their heads, even those of us who have done that sort of thing a million times." He paused. "I haven't been in a dream since."
"Really?" She switched the phone to her other ear, staring at it curiously. "You haven't?"
"Not once. Don't know that I want to. That's not true," he immediately corrected. "I do. It just seems like anything else is going to be a little two-dimensional after all that."
"I'll take that as a compliment to my skills," she said, and was rewarded with a chuckle. Then she turned serious again. "Do you really want to do something as crazy as that job again? You have fun with that, count me out."
"I want a challenge. Working for Saito is one, in a way. I've never worked inside a corporation before. Learning the particular politics and games is fun. It's going to become a pain in my ass very quickly, though, I have to say. I only hope Saito doesn't hold it against me when I disappear. He's a good ally to have." Eames fell silent, and Ariadne knew that a response wasn't necessary, or even welcome. He kept her focused, and she kept his secrets. It was an arrangement that worked for both of them.
The taxi pulled up to the airport, and Ariadne juggled the phone again as she paid the driver and pulled her luggage into the terminal. "You're saying I need a challenge."
"Exactly."
"And what would that be?"
"How should I know? Do I look like your fairy godfather?" She snorted, and he continued. "You're going to have to come up with your own challenges, Ariadne. Even if it's just getting off your ass and going to look for Arthur, though god only knows why you'd ever want to do that."
"I don't want to look for Arthur," she said.
"And here I called you an honest person just a few minutes ago."
"Shut up." She sighed and leaned against a wall. "I have to go, I have a plane to catch."
"Where are you off to?"
"New York. No reason," she said, before he could ask. "Just felt like it."
"Find yourself a reason, darling. Either that, or come to Tokyo, we could amuse ourselves by kidnapping poor innocent university students and learning all their deep, dark secrets."
Ariadne laughed, as she was meant to. "University students don't have deep, dark secrets. The only things you'd learn would be where they keep their drug stash and which one of their girlfriend's friends they slept with."
"I know, that's why I don't do it." He sighed dramatically. "Okay, then, come visit for the amazing seafood restaurant down the street from me."
"That's a more tempting offer. I'll call you from New York."
Ariadne hung up the phone with a smile on her face; knocking her out of her own thoughts was one of the many things Eames was good for.
***
She'd accidentally spilled her guts some months ago, back when she and Eames had met up in some little Italian town on the Mediterranean. He spent the evening buying bottle after bottle of wine at a tiny restaurant. By the time the owners kicked them out, Ariadne was somewhat more than three sheets to the wind. Eames, to her frustration, barely seemed tipsy. "Body mass," he said, slipping an arm around her shoulders to keep her upright. "Also, I have a decade's head start on building a tolerance."
"Old man," she grumbled, leaning against him. He laughed. She sighed. "You don't feel the same as he does."
"As who does?"
"Arthur."
"Oh, and have you been getting drunk with him often?"
"No, never." She pulled away from Eames and walked ahead of him. The street was empty but for them - by this time of night, most upstanding residents were long in their beds. She turned around and walked backwards, facing him. "He didn't give me the chance. Just left."
Eames grabbed her shoulders and spun her back around. She stumbled, but he caught her before she went off the curb. "He's a cad."
"No, no, it wasn't like that." But then she sighed and leaned against him again. "I kinda wish it was."
"Your taste in men is abysmal, my dear."
"Fuck off. Your taste in women isn't anything to brag about. What was the name of that girl in your hotel room again?"
"I have no idea," Eames admitted cheerfully.
"Her voice could have shattered glass. How did you stand it?"
"Thankfully, she wasn't much of a talker during sex."
"I miss sex," Ariadne said mournfully. "Haven't had any since I was back at school."
"Jesus. Why not?"
She shrugged. The movement would have caused her to topple over if Eames hadn't had an arm around her. "Nobody ever appeals to me."
"You are pathetic, you know that?"
Ariadne tried to shove him, but ended up feeling the rough cobblestones with her ass instead. She patiently waited for him to stop laughing - okay, to stop laughing quite so loudly - before holding her hands up. He pulled her back to standing. "Seriously, you and Arthur?"
"Not me and Arthur. That's the problem."
One corner of Eames's mouth twisted upwards, and he ran a thumb over her cheek before letting her go. "Then he's a moron. Which we already knew, quite frankly."
They walked in silence for a few minutes. Then, Ariadne's curiosity got the better of her. "Do you know where he is?"
"Me? Really, you think he'd call me up to chat or something?"
"No, I just ..." She shrugged, this time managing to keep her balance. The wine must have been wearing off, she thought. "You know more people than I do. You might have heard something."
"Strangely enough, love, I've been keeping my nose out of the extraction business recently. Honestly, though, even when I was talking to people, I didn't hear his name come up. I wonder if he's even still working."
"He's working."
"You're right, he's not really qualified for anything else, is he? Except maybe a butler. He'd make an awesome butler, waiting on some little old lady and her tiny rat-dog."
For some reason that struck Ariadne as the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and she laughed until she was sitting with her back against the nearest building, completely out of breath. Nothing was quite as funny the next morning, though, when her head felt like a freight train had just run through. Eames had politely provided her with a pair of designer sunglasses and a bottle of water the size of her head, but had never let her mope about Arthur again. She was more grateful than she'd ever admit to him.
Part 2
