fic: walking on my skin again (2/2)
Aug. 15th, 2010 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violaceapart 1
Ariadne visited Cobb when she was in the States. She hadn't really spent much time with the kids the last time she was there, but this time, she spent an entire day sitting in their plush playroom (a large art and activity table sat in the middle of the room, where a dining table had once been) drawing an elaborate set of monster pictures for James. Whenever she finished sketching one, she handed it to James to color, and by the time Cobb came to check on them for dinner, the bottom half of one wall was nearly covered in colorful monsters. "This one lives in a castle," James told his father, pointing to a picture. "Ari told me so. He's a good monster, he protects little kids from bad dreams." James gestured to another picture. "See, in this one he's eating a big snake that bit someone in a nightmare. Chomp chomp, all gone!" James scissored his hands in a wild alligator-like movement, and Cobb laughed. It transformed his face - Ariadne felt like she was looking at a completely different man than the one who had recruited her a year earlier.
Later, she and Cobb sat out the porch and watched the kids chase each other around in the waning evening light. "Arthur was here a few weeks ago," he said casually. "He asked if I still talked to you."
"You know, he could call and ask me personally how I'm doing if he really wanted to know."
"Or you could call him."
"With what number? The only one I ever had for him was disconnected a long time ago."
"Ah." Cobb fell silent for a few minutes. They watched Phillippa do cartwheels on the grass. She had reached the opposite end of the yard when Cobb spoke again. "He's not doing very well. He'd kill me if he knew I told you that, but it's the truth. He's not ..." Cobb's brow furrowed, and Ariadne got the sense he was choosing his words carefully. "The things he's good at, they aren't really suited for working alone. I don't know why he's trying."
Ariadne took a couple of breaths. She imagined she heard the remnants of an old conversation drifting through her brain. "Trust is hard," she said after a moment. "Trusting other people is harder for some than it is for others."
Cobb smiled. "You're not wrong." As they watched James attempt to replicate his sister's gymnastics, he changed the subject. "Thank you." At her confused expression, he gestured out at James. "For the drawings. He's been having nightmares lately, and damned if I know how to deal with them. You'd think I would, with all the experience I have on the subject."
"You said you don't dream any more." Cobb nodded, and Ariadne continued. "Unconscious dreams are a whole different animal. I don't think I realized that until I started having nightmares myself. But ..." She shrugged. "I don't know. I guess you just keep living when you're awake, and eventually the monsters in your head start to scare you less." Then, Ariadne smiled, and waved at James when he noticed her looking at him. "But having someone else help you re-imagine the monsters helps too."
She stayed another week. Cobb and the kids saw her off at the airport; before she left, she laid a hand on Cobb's arm. "Tell Arthur my phone number's still the same. You know, if he feels like using it."
"I will."
Over the next month, Ariadne got two different calls from blocked phone numbers. Each time, the caller hung up the minute she said hello. She wondered.
***
"What do you know?" Mal whispered. She and Ariadne were alone in the dining room. Outside, the wind howled and buildings crumbled to dust. Mal sat at the table, pointing the knife casually in Ariadne's direction. "Reality is such a strange thing, is it not? You pretend that whatever is going on in your head is not real, until it takes over and becomes the only thing you know for sure."
Ariadne took a step backwards and looked over her shoulder. Behind her, where there should have been a hallway - perhaps an elevator - she saw only black. "What are you now," Mal continued, "now that it's over? What good are you?" She gestured to the looming blackness with the knife. "Go on, little architect, what can you make of that?"
Ariadne looked into the blackness. Panic bubbled up in her chest, but she gamely stepped forward towards it-
-and woke up in a hotel room in Tokyo. She reached for her phone without thinking. "Hey," she said when she heard Eames' voice. "You know anyone who needs an architect right now?"
***
They separated at the airport after the Fischer job, but Ariadne wasn't surprised when Arthur showed up at her hotel room door. "I think we had a date," he said, leaning against the door frame in chinos and a white shirt that was once again distractingly undone at the top two buttons.
Ariadne had almost forgotten. She put a hand to her hair, piled up on top of her head, and blushed. "Yeah, let me shower, will you? Twenty minutes."
"Really? I have never met a woman who can be ready in twenty minutes."
"Start a timer. If I make it, you're buying."
When she saw him again in the lobby, he looked at his watch. "Twenty-two and a half minutes, actually." He stood up, taking in Ariadne's plain blue sundress, the first dress she'd worn since her ex-roommate's wedding the year before. After a moment, he smiled and offered his arm. "But I was planning on buying anyway."
They drove a rental car to Santa Monica, where Arthur led her into a restaurant that boasted the same clean lines and elegance as he built in his dreams. The food was amazing, and Ariadne found herself telling Arthur stories from her childhood. "So," she said as they took the last bites of their dinner, "I drew a huge floor plan of our high school, and my friend Paul drew these caricatures of all our least favorite teachers in the classrooms. We typed up a bunch of our least favorite quotes from those teachers, so they wouldn't recognize our handwriting, and snuck into school the night before our last day of school and taped it up over the trophy case in the main hallway. The entire school was laughing about it within an hour the next morning. I think everyone knew it was me and Paul, but we had all but graduated, so punishing us wouldn't have done any good. And," she finished, an evil grin on her face, "the last time I was home, I saw my old vice principal, and and she told me that she still has the drawing hanging up in her office."
Arthur laughed. "I hadn't pegged you for a troublemaker."
"Really? I joined up with you lot without worrying too much about ethics or getting caught, you should have figured that out at some point." She sat back and allowed their waiter to take away her plate. "What about you? What kind of kid were you in high school?"
"Eh, it was a long time ago. I was shorter and my clothes were a lot dirtier, that's pretty much all I remember." He shrugged. "What happened to your friend Paul?"
"You're really good at avoiding questions," she pointed out, as the waiter left their table with their dessert order.
"What do you mean?"
"I've asked you at least half a dozen questions tonight about your life, but you always turn them back to me without saying anything important. If you don't want to talk to me, just say so."
Arthur brought his wine glass to his lips and took a long, slow drink. Ariadne tried not to get distracted by the movement of his Adam's apple. When he put the glass down, he met her eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm just not used to anyone asking."
"Well, I am. So what gives?"
He paused for a moment. "There's not much to tell," he said. "Grew up in a normal family, went to college, bounced around for a while, did some things that didn't work, and finally met Cobb and Mal. You know the rest."
"That is the lamest version of a life story I've ever heard." She frowned. "Do you have any siblings? What was your major in college? What kinds of things do you do in your free time? Was it always just you and Cobb and Mal working together before Mal died? I don't care, I just want to hear something, anything."
He reached across the table and laid a hand on her wrist. Her heartbeat thudded up into her throat. For a moment, Arthur's eyes shone; he looked like he was about to say something, but then he shut his mouth and looked down at the table. When he looked back up, his eyes had lost that glimmer. "You know the important things."
"Like what? I know you're good at your job. I know you're loyal to Cobb. I know you like expensive suits and expensive wine. I know you can find information on anyone on the planet if you really want to. I know you're American, that is, if you haven't modified your accent somewhere along the way. Otherwise ... what do I know? You haven't told me anything."
Arthur withdrew his hand and leaned back in his chair. "There are more important things than petty little facts."
"Like trust?"
Ariadne knew she'd scored a hit when he visibly flinched. It didn't make her feel any better. "I trust you."
An awkward silence fell. After a few minutes, Ariadne put her napkin on the table and stood up. "I need to go to the ladies room. I'll be right back."
When she came back to the table, a large slice of chocolate cake lay in front of her seat. Arthur was methodically eating his tiramisu. She picked up her fork; her hand shook enough that she nearly dropped it into the cake. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "I didn't mean ..."
He didn't say anything. She looked down at the table and began to eat, tasting nothing. She paused, her fork halfway to her mouth, when he finally spoke. His voice was low enough that Ariadne had to lean forward to hear him. "I didn't notice there was a problem with Mal. He didn't tell me anything, not until after she was gone. We were working with an old friend of mine, Benjamin. He was just learning how to dream when Cobb had to run. I was still training him when Cobb called and asked us to fly to Istanbul and meet him. I maxed out my credit card to get tickets for me and Benjamin. When Cobb told us what had gone down, Benjamin freaked out. He went back to the States, and we didn't hear anything from him for months. It was our second job - our second illegal job, in Oslo. Benjamin called, and I told him where we were. I told him what we were doing. I'd known him for years, I didn't even think twice." Arthur paused to stab the last piece of his dessert with his fork. It made a loud clanking sound that made Ariadne jump in her chair. "It was the closest we ever came to getting arrested. I didn't make that mistake again."
They didn't talk again until they were in the car, flying down the half-empty freeway at a speed that made Ariadne check every dark spot for lurking cops. "You didn't deserve that," Arthur said into the silence.
She turned away from the window. "What?"
"I'm sorry. You didn't deserve all that." He took a deep breath. "I'm leaving tomorrow," he said suddenly. "I got a call about a job earlier today. I ... well, I don't do well when I'm not working." His slow exhale told Ariadne that the admission had cost him something.
"Oh. Do you need any help?" she asked impulsively. "With the job?"
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "I don't think these are the kind of people you'd want to work with. And I think they already have an architect."
"Oh." She looked back out the window. "Okay."
When they reached Ariadne's hotel, Arthur parked and walked her into the lobby. Just inside the door, however, he stopped and cupped Ariadne's cheek with his hand. She leaned into the gesture instinctively. He didn't say anything, just searched Ariadne's face with large, unreadable brown eyes long enough for her to shift nervously from foot to foot. Then, he let out a slow breath, and leaned down. The kiss to her other cheek was feather-light. His lips lingered just long enough to send an electric pulse across her skin. He pulled away slowly, and Ariadne watched his eyes open and focus on her face again. "Goodbye, Ariadne," he murmured.
She didn't say anything when he walked away. After talking with Cobb all those months later, she wondered if she should have.
***
Eames gave her some phone numbers - "People I trust," he told her, "as much as I trust anyone in this business" - and after a couple of weeks of various conversations, Ariadne got a job offer from a corporation in Vancouver. The Canadian firm had been secretly hired to dream-train US soldiers. "The program was officially discontinued several years ago," the colonel in charge told her, "but 'official' is only a matter of the right paperwork."
"Who gave you my name?" she asked. "Just curious."
"You came highly recommended by several people around the world." Ariadne was surprised at the names he gave her; none of them were of the small group of people she called friends. "You've got quite the reputation," the colonel said. "They all say you're the best architect working today."
"Huh." She shrugged, but pleasure bloomed in her belly, causing her to smile and duck her head. "Well, I'll try to live up to that."
She settled in remarkably quickly; her job was to create labyrinths that resembled the environments that soliders were likely to encounter, and populate those mazes with as many obstacles as she could come up with. She built craggy mountains that hid caves full of rebel insurgents, tightly packed cities in which snipers lurked on every rooftop, sleepy villages full of residents designed to unnerve and obstruct every move a foreign soldier made. Her pride and joy, however, turned out to be the desert terrain that didn't look like a maze at all. The officers she first showed the dream to were confused as they looked out over a smooth, barbarically hot expanse of sand. "This isn't a maze," one said, turning to Ariadne.
"You don't think so?" She gestured forward. "The allied base is three kilometers to the west. You have a compass. All you have to do is make it there before we wake up." The three officers took off to the west, while Ariadne sat in the shade at the small oasis she'd built for the instructors and waited for the music to kick in.
When they woke, all three men stared at Ariadne with growing respect. "We walked in circles," the man who'd first questioned her admitted. "It took me three times to realize that I was staring at the same sand dune. But, there was a small rock formation at the top, it looked exactly the same. How do you build a maze with no walls?"
She grinned. "It's not about walls. It's about misdirection. It's about teaching the subject to observe everything."
The officer shook his head as he pulled the IV out of his arm. "Wow. I hope we're paying you what you're worth."
Ariadne didn't feel the need to mention that she didn't need the army's money. Everyone considered something different to be the most valuable form of appreciation. The respectful nods she began to receive from the people she passed in the halls were her something.
One day, she took the colonel and his aide into a wintery landscape. They stood on a hill and stared at a familiar hospital building down below. "Where is this?" the colonel asked.
It's where we did the impossible. Where I fell into limbo. Where I fell into nothing.
A small voice in the back of her head responded. Where I saved Fischer and Cobb and maybe Saito, in a way. Me. I did that.
"Nowhere," Ariadne replied absently. "Something from a long-ago dream."
This time, she went into the dream during the training. She stood quietly in a corner of the room (Mal had been there before her, dropped to the ground and shot Robert Fischer dead) and watched four soldiers blow the door to the vault she'd once built to house the deepest secret Fischer never had. She hadn't been around to see what he found in there, but the soldiers found a vault full of weapons and computers. Their whooping and hollering echoed through the entire facility. Ariadne smiled, and the shadowy ghost of Fischer's body stretched out on the floor disappeared from her mind's eye.
When her contract was up, she found herself in demand, with four different job offers to choose from. "Apparently," she told Eames later, "the US military is good for your reputation."
"Being good at your job is good for your reputation. The military just yells louder than everyone else."
Ariadne laughed. "Well," she said, "it's just nice to be needed, no matter who it is that needs me."
***
In the end, she went back to Paris. The professor - Miles, he insisted she call him, now that she was no longer his student - was starting up a new program to research the effect of dream states on a person's conscious mind. "This was once my world," he said, staring around the familiar warehouse that Ariadne somehow thought of as her personal ground zero. "I stopped my research entirely when my daughter died. But perhaps it's time to begin again. Perhaps I can keep someone else from her fate."
Ariadne looked at the photo of Mal that Miles propped up on his desk in the warehouse. The woman in the picture was beautiful, with laughing eyes and a squirming baby Phillippa in her lap. "I wish I'd met her," she said, only lying a little.
Miles smiled sadly. "So do I. You would have liked her."
Ariadne instinctively put a hand on her belly, but she felt no pain. The woman in that photo had never stabbed her, in dreams or reality, had never said a word to Ariadne. "Tell me about her," she asked.
He did. She heard about Mal's first school science project, the time in her teens when she'd disappeared for three days straight to hitchhike to Switzerland with friends, how clueless Cobb had been when Mal decided he was going to be hers. "The rest of us had a running bet on how long it would take him to realize she was flirting with him. Eventually, though, she got tired of waiting - one day, he woke up from a dream to find her sitting on his legs, staring at him. 'You're taking me to dinner tonight,' she said. 'Wear a suit.' When I saw the way he looked at her as she walked away, I knew he'd be my son-in-law someday." Miles smiled fondly, with just a hint of sadness. Ariadne instinctively reached over and patted his arm. He put a hand over hers. "I still miss her every day, you know."
Ariadne had a fleeting thought of the crazy-eyed shade she'd encountered in dreams, but the image faded in the presence of a vibrant photo of a beautiful woman.
Ariadne had a boyfriend for a while - an Australian doing his PhD in medieval history in Paris. The companionship was nice. He was nice. He took her out to dinner twice a week, where they talked about their families and told stories about irritating college roommates and debated about German philosophers and comic book movies. Their relationship only lasted two months. Ariadne tried to let him down easy, but ended up sitting in the warehouse with Miles one evening after a good dinner and a really bad argument. "I don't know what's wrong with me," she said, sighing. "He's a perfectly good guy."
"I'm pretty sure you're not the kind of woman who will ever settle for a 'perfectly good' anything." He tapped the photo of Mal and winked at Ariadne. "You remind me of someone else that way."
Ariadne made a face at the photo when Miles's back was turned, but in reality, the Mal of Miles's memory was so much friendlier than the Mal trapped in Cobb's mind. "You weren't half of anything, were you?" she murmured to the picture. "Men are just kind of dumb."
She designed labyrinths for Miles, complex mazes that volunteer subjects explored day after day. Miles allowed her to go into the dreams and observe sometimes; she preferred to go in with the newest recruits. No matter how many dreams she created, she never lost that jolt of pleasure when someone walked into one of her worlds with their mouth agape. "You made all this?" one woman asked her, as they stared at a jungle full of stone ruins that looked like they'd been built by some ancient mystical civilization. "You made it all up in your head?"
"It's not that hard," Ariadne replied, "once you get the hang of it."
"No," the woman said, "This is kind of like walking into a Van Gogh painting. I could probably imitate it, but it'd never live up to the original."
"Genuine inspiration," she said softly as the woman walked away. Some of her old classmates had approached architecture as a science, as angles to be learned and numerical limits to be obeyed. Ariadne had always considered it an art. It was true, architecture was a different kind of creativity, full of lines and rules and standards. But, she looked around the jungle, smelled the damp remnants of a rain that would have fallen, had this landscape existed an hour ago. "No rules here," she murmured, running her hand down the trunk of a tree. "Just me."
***
It was fall - nearly two years since they got on a plane to Sydney to start the Fischer job. Ariadne was the last person out of the warehouse, after spending the whole day working on a complicated new dream for Miles' most experienced research subjects. She walked out to see a gorgeous sunset casting shadows across the Paris streets. She smiled as she locked the door - and gasped when she turned back around to find someone standing just a couple of feet behind her. Then she looked up at his face, and stared. "Arthur?"
"Ariadne." He had his hands in his pockets; he was dressed casually, in a striped shirt and leather jacket, his hair was longer and fell in wavy locks around his face. He looked younger than he'd ever looked, if she didn't notice the shadowy circles underneath his eyes. "How are you?"
How was she? I'm happy, she thought, and only felt a twinge of a lie. It wasn't even a lie ... it was just a small portion of a larger truth.
She didn't answer. Instead, she stepped closer and looked him in the eye. "Where've you been?"
He shrugged. "Here and there."
Ariadne shook her head. "If that's the kind of conversation we're still having, I'm going to get dinner."
She started to walk away, her pulse hammering in her throat, but his voice stopped her. "I've been everywhere, pretty much. I just came from the States. I saw Dom and the kids."
"Did Phillippa get you to sing with her?"
Arthur laughed. "She did. It's impossible to say no to her." When Ariadne turned around, he was still smiling. "I brought her a book of Beatles songs for her to learn on guitar. I figured she'd have to wait a couple of years to get into it, but by the time I left, she'd figured out half a song. I think Dom's got a rock star in training over there."
"I know he does. He brought them over to visit Miles a few months back, and she spent the whole time learning the words to all the French pop songs she heard on the radio." She put her hands on her hips. "What brings you back to Paris, Arthur?"
He was silent for a long moment. "I wanted to talk to you," he finally said, his voice low and soft on the evening breeze.
"What?" She stepped closer. "After all this time? You could have called, you know."
She watched him flinch. "I know. I'm sorry."
Ariadne closed her eyes to steady herself. She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket; the chess pawn toppled reassuringly inside her hand, and she nodded to herself. When she opened her eyes, Arthur had a ghost of a smile on his face. He pulled a hand out of his pocket to show her his small red die. When she stepped closer, she could see the tiny marks on his palm where the edges of the die had pressed against his skin. "Okay," Ariadne said, "you have a hundred words to tell me why you're suddenly here right now. Go."
Arthur curled his fingers, and the top-heavy die tumbled awkwardly down to his wrist. He snapped his hand quickly and caught it before it fell to the ground. He pocketed the die, looked back at Ariadne, and took a breath. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I freaked out a little bit after the Fischer job. I screwed up. If you guys hadn't been able to rescue Fischer and Saito, it would have been my fault."
"Why, because you aren't omniscient? That's stupid."
He shook his head. "I ..." He shrugged and looked at a distant point over Ariadne's shoulder. "I'm not used to messing up like that. Not when it matters so much. I freaked, I guess."
"Join the club." She stepped even closer to him. When he looked back at her again, she poked him in the chest. "I had nightmares for months," she blurted, without thinking. She hadn't told anyone about the dreams. "Mal. Limbo. All sorts of messed up shit. It sucked."
He grabbed her hand. "I'm sorry."
"Stop saying that. It's not your fault." His fingers were warm around hers, and without thinking, she laced them together and held his hand between them. "You still haven't told me why you're here now."
"I was talking to Cobb. He said some things ... well, some things that made sense. And I've been thinking about you." Arthur squeezed her hand. "Yes, there's a lot more to the story than that. I'll tell it, if you have the time."
Ariadne stayed there for a moment, letting the warmth of his body, so close to hers, fill her with a surprising calm. Then, she let go of his hand and turned to walk away. "Come on," she said after a few steps, without looking back. "I'm starving."
She couldn't hear his footsteps in the low bustle of traffic, but she knew he was there all the same.
Later in the evening, as she cleaned the last of dinner off her plate, she looked at Arthur. "You've been alone all this time," she said.
He shrugged. "Mostly. I worked with other people here and there, but nothing permanent. I worked with Cobb for a long time, from the time I started working in dreams. It's hard to get used to the idea of trusting someone else like that."
"What about outside of work?"
Arthur's smile was more than a little self-mocking, and he looked down at his plate. "There's life outside of work? I haven't had that in a long time."
"You need a hobby."
He looked up at her; his eyes were dark and glittery, and she suppressed a shiver. "You have something in mind?"
It's not that easy, she told her body. It disagreed strongly. "Not right now, I don't."
The self-mocking smile returned, and he leaned back in his seat. "Fair enough."
By the time they left the restaurant, darkness had fallen, and a stiff breeze blew cold on Ariadne's face. She didn't protest when Arthur wound an arm around her shoulders; instead, she wrapped her arm around his waist and pointed them both in the direction of her apartment. "You've done well for yourself," he said as they walked. "I'm glad."
"It took a while to get here."
"It always does."
A block away from her building, she stopped him and stepped away. "So, where do you go from here?" she asked.
"I don't know," Arthur admitted. "I don't have anything lined up. There are a few jobs out there, but nothing sounds appealing right now."
Ariadne swallowed, then spoke without allowing herself to think. "You could stay here. We're getting more and more research subjects every day. Miles is running himself ragged trying to run the basic dream training and compile all the research, and I kind of suck at training. I'm one of those people who would rather just do it myself then explain how I do it." She forced herself to take a breath and waited.
He searched her face, then looked down at the pavement. When he looked up at her, his eyes were unreadable. "You want me to work with you."
"Yeah." She gave him a small smile. "We need you."
Arthur stuck his hands in his pockets. "We?" he asked softly.
Ariadne felt a familiar tug inside her chest. "Yes, 'we'." Impulsively, she stepped forward and leaned up on her toes. She heard his intake of breath when she laid her hands on his chest and pressed her lips lightly to his, but his hands came out of his pockets to grasp her arms. The chaste kiss lasted only a second, but Ariadne felt something warm settle inside her when she stepped back. "I did miss you," she said. "I'd like you to stick around. If you want to."
"I want to." Slowly, the corners of his mouth turned upwards. "Hey, you know what my college major was?" he asked suddenly.
"No, what?"
"Art history. My parents didn't think I'd ever find a paying job." He shrugged. "Now they have the vacation home they always dreamed about. They don't ask where the money comes from."
Ariadne laughed. "Neither do mine. It's okay, because I wouldn't tell them anyway."
"Me either." Arthur stepped backwards, but the smile remained on his face. "See you tomorrow?" he asked.
"Yeah, see you tomorrow." She stepped backwards, but didn't turn around right away. "It'll be good to work with you again."
"Yeah." He nodded. "Yeah, it will."
The next morning, Arthur stood outside the warehouse door when she arrived. She unlocked the door and welcomed him in with a smile.
***
In the springtime, when the weather was once again warm enough to leave the windows open at night, Ariadne drifted to sleep and dreamed of Mal.
They sat on the steps of Ariadne's apartment building, watching James and Phillippa play tag on the sidewalk below. "Do you know what it is to be half of a whole?" Mal asked. This time, her voice was light, almost teasing.
"No," Ariadne replied, "because I'm a whole all to myself. I always have been."
"Don't you want to be necessary to someone else's life?"
Ariadne thought for a moment. "I want to be needed. There's a difference."
Mal smiled. "Good girl," she whispered, kissing Ariadne on the temple.
And then she and the children were gone, and Ariadne was alone on the steps. She looked up at the buildings in front of her and began to rearrange them randomly, watching as each stone structure groaned and cracked and eventually bent to Ariadne's will. She pushed the buildings aside until a park appeared in the middle of the block. People on the street – projections, people, what did it matter in an actual dream? – stopped to stare as a large tree began to grow in the middle of the park. Ariadne skipped across the street. At the edge of the park, she stopped next to a group of gaping onlookers. "Because I'm the architect," she said to them. "That's why."
When she woke, she breathed in a sweet-smelling breeze. She could almost pick out the scent of the flowers she'd grown in her dream park. Arthur's arm was heavy and warm across her belly, his breathing soft and even. Ariadne turned over and snuggled closer to him, kissing his bare shoulder as sleep claimed her once again.
~*~
Ariadne visited Cobb when she was in the States. She hadn't really spent much time with the kids the last time she was there, but this time, she spent an entire day sitting in their plush playroom (a large art and activity table sat in the middle of the room, where a dining table had once been) drawing an elaborate set of monster pictures for James. Whenever she finished sketching one, she handed it to James to color, and by the time Cobb came to check on them for dinner, the bottom half of one wall was nearly covered in colorful monsters. "This one lives in a castle," James told his father, pointing to a picture. "Ari told me so. He's a good monster, he protects little kids from bad dreams." James gestured to another picture. "See, in this one he's eating a big snake that bit someone in a nightmare. Chomp chomp, all gone!" James scissored his hands in a wild alligator-like movement, and Cobb laughed. It transformed his face - Ariadne felt like she was looking at a completely different man than the one who had recruited her a year earlier.
Later, she and Cobb sat out the porch and watched the kids chase each other around in the waning evening light. "Arthur was here a few weeks ago," he said casually. "He asked if I still talked to you."
"You know, he could call and ask me personally how I'm doing if he really wanted to know."
"Or you could call him."
"With what number? The only one I ever had for him was disconnected a long time ago."
"Ah." Cobb fell silent for a few minutes. They watched Phillippa do cartwheels on the grass. She had reached the opposite end of the yard when Cobb spoke again. "He's not doing very well. He'd kill me if he knew I told you that, but it's the truth. He's not ..." Cobb's brow furrowed, and Ariadne got the sense he was choosing his words carefully. "The things he's good at, they aren't really suited for working alone. I don't know why he's trying."
Ariadne took a couple of breaths. She imagined she heard the remnants of an old conversation drifting through her brain. "Trust is hard," she said after a moment. "Trusting other people is harder for some than it is for others."
Cobb smiled. "You're not wrong." As they watched James attempt to replicate his sister's gymnastics, he changed the subject. "Thank you." At her confused expression, he gestured out at James. "For the drawings. He's been having nightmares lately, and damned if I know how to deal with them. You'd think I would, with all the experience I have on the subject."
"You said you don't dream any more." Cobb nodded, and Ariadne continued. "Unconscious dreams are a whole different animal. I don't think I realized that until I started having nightmares myself. But ..." She shrugged. "I don't know. I guess you just keep living when you're awake, and eventually the monsters in your head start to scare you less." Then, Ariadne smiled, and waved at James when he noticed her looking at him. "But having someone else help you re-imagine the monsters helps too."
She stayed another week. Cobb and the kids saw her off at the airport; before she left, she laid a hand on Cobb's arm. "Tell Arthur my phone number's still the same. You know, if he feels like using it."
"I will."
Over the next month, Ariadne got two different calls from blocked phone numbers. Each time, the caller hung up the minute she said hello. She wondered.
***
"What do you know?" Mal whispered. She and Ariadne were alone in the dining room. Outside, the wind howled and buildings crumbled to dust. Mal sat at the table, pointing the knife casually in Ariadne's direction. "Reality is such a strange thing, is it not? You pretend that whatever is going on in your head is not real, until it takes over and becomes the only thing you know for sure."
Ariadne took a step backwards and looked over her shoulder. Behind her, where there should have been a hallway - perhaps an elevator - she saw only black. "What are you now," Mal continued, "now that it's over? What good are you?" She gestured to the looming blackness with the knife. "Go on, little architect, what can you make of that?"
Ariadne looked into the blackness. Panic bubbled up in her chest, but she gamely stepped forward towards it-
-and woke up in a hotel room in Tokyo. She reached for her phone without thinking. "Hey," she said when she heard Eames' voice. "You know anyone who needs an architect right now?"
***
They separated at the airport after the Fischer job, but Ariadne wasn't surprised when Arthur showed up at her hotel room door. "I think we had a date," he said, leaning against the door frame in chinos and a white shirt that was once again distractingly undone at the top two buttons.
Ariadne had almost forgotten. She put a hand to her hair, piled up on top of her head, and blushed. "Yeah, let me shower, will you? Twenty minutes."
"Really? I have never met a woman who can be ready in twenty minutes."
"Start a timer. If I make it, you're buying."
When she saw him again in the lobby, he looked at his watch. "Twenty-two and a half minutes, actually." He stood up, taking in Ariadne's plain blue sundress, the first dress she'd worn since her ex-roommate's wedding the year before. After a moment, he smiled and offered his arm. "But I was planning on buying anyway."
They drove a rental car to Santa Monica, where Arthur led her into a restaurant that boasted the same clean lines and elegance as he built in his dreams. The food was amazing, and Ariadne found herself telling Arthur stories from her childhood. "So," she said as they took the last bites of their dinner, "I drew a huge floor plan of our high school, and my friend Paul drew these caricatures of all our least favorite teachers in the classrooms. We typed up a bunch of our least favorite quotes from those teachers, so they wouldn't recognize our handwriting, and snuck into school the night before our last day of school and taped it up over the trophy case in the main hallway. The entire school was laughing about it within an hour the next morning. I think everyone knew it was me and Paul, but we had all but graduated, so punishing us wouldn't have done any good. And," she finished, an evil grin on her face, "the last time I was home, I saw my old vice principal, and and she told me that she still has the drawing hanging up in her office."
Arthur laughed. "I hadn't pegged you for a troublemaker."
"Really? I joined up with you lot without worrying too much about ethics or getting caught, you should have figured that out at some point." She sat back and allowed their waiter to take away her plate. "What about you? What kind of kid were you in high school?"
"Eh, it was a long time ago. I was shorter and my clothes were a lot dirtier, that's pretty much all I remember." He shrugged. "What happened to your friend Paul?"
"You're really good at avoiding questions," she pointed out, as the waiter left their table with their dessert order.
"What do you mean?"
"I've asked you at least half a dozen questions tonight about your life, but you always turn them back to me without saying anything important. If you don't want to talk to me, just say so."
Arthur brought his wine glass to his lips and took a long, slow drink. Ariadne tried not to get distracted by the movement of his Adam's apple. When he put the glass down, he met her eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm just not used to anyone asking."
"Well, I am. So what gives?"
He paused for a moment. "There's not much to tell," he said. "Grew up in a normal family, went to college, bounced around for a while, did some things that didn't work, and finally met Cobb and Mal. You know the rest."
"That is the lamest version of a life story I've ever heard." She frowned. "Do you have any siblings? What was your major in college? What kinds of things do you do in your free time? Was it always just you and Cobb and Mal working together before Mal died? I don't care, I just want to hear something, anything."
He reached across the table and laid a hand on her wrist. Her heartbeat thudded up into her throat. For a moment, Arthur's eyes shone; he looked like he was about to say something, but then he shut his mouth and looked down at the table. When he looked back up, his eyes had lost that glimmer. "You know the important things."
"Like what? I know you're good at your job. I know you're loyal to Cobb. I know you like expensive suits and expensive wine. I know you can find information on anyone on the planet if you really want to. I know you're American, that is, if you haven't modified your accent somewhere along the way. Otherwise ... what do I know? You haven't told me anything."
Arthur withdrew his hand and leaned back in his chair. "There are more important things than petty little facts."
"Like trust?"
Ariadne knew she'd scored a hit when he visibly flinched. It didn't make her feel any better. "I trust you."
An awkward silence fell. After a few minutes, Ariadne put her napkin on the table and stood up. "I need to go to the ladies room. I'll be right back."
When she came back to the table, a large slice of chocolate cake lay in front of her seat. Arthur was methodically eating his tiramisu. She picked up her fork; her hand shook enough that she nearly dropped it into the cake. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "I didn't mean ..."
He didn't say anything. She looked down at the table and began to eat, tasting nothing. She paused, her fork halfway to her mouth, when he finally spoke. His voice was low enough that Ariadne had to lean forward to hear him. "I didn't notice there was a problem with Mal. He didn't tell me anything, not until after she was gone. We were working with an old friend of mine, Benjamin. He was just learning how to dream when Cobb had to run. I was still training him when Cobb called and asked us to fly to Istanbul and meet him. I maxed out my credit card to get tickets for me and Benjamin. When Cobb told us what had gone down, Benjamin freaked out. He went back to the States, and we didn't hear anything from him for months. It was our second job - our second illegal job, in Oslo. Benjamin called, and I told him where we were. I told him what we were doing. I'd known him for years, I didn't even think twice." Arthur paused to stab the last piece of his dessert with his fork. It made a loud clanking sound that made Ariadne jump in her chair. "It was the closest we ever came to getting arrested. I didn't make that mistake again."
They didn't talk again until they were in the car, flying down the half-empty freeway at a speed that made Ariadne check every dark spot for lurking cops. "You didn't deserve that," Arthur said into the silence.
She turned away from the window. "What?"
"I'm sorry. You didn't deserve all that." He took a deep breath. "I'm leaving tomorrow," he said suddenly. "I got a call about a job earlier today. I ... well, I don't do well when I'm not working." His slow exhale told Ariadne that the admission had cost him something.
"Oh. Do you need any help?" she asked impulsively. "With the job?"
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "I don't think these are the kind of people you'd want to work with. And I think they already have an architect."
"Oh." She looked back out the window. "Okay."
When they reached Ariadne's hotel, Arthur parked and walked her into the lobby. Just inside the door, however, he stopped and cupped Ariadne's cheek with his hand. She leaned into the gesture instinctively. He didn't say anything, just searched Ariadne's face with large, unreadable brown eyes long enough for her to shift nervously from foot to foot. Then, he let out a slow breath, and leaned down. The kiss to her other cheek was feather-light. His lips lingered just long enough to send an electric pulse across her skin. He pulled away slowly, and Ariadne watched his eyes open and focus on her face again. "Goodbye, Ariadne," he murmured.
She didn't say anything when he walked away. After talking with Cobb all those months later, she wondered if she should have.
***
Eames gave her some phone numbers - "People I trust," he told her, "as much as I trust anyone in this business" - and after a couple of weeks of various conversations, Ariadne got a job offer from a corporation in Vancouver. The Canadian firm had been secretly hired to dream-train US soldiers. "The program was officially discontinued several years ago," the colonel in charge told her, "but 'official' is only a matter of the right paperwork."
"Who gave you my name?" she asked. "Just curious."
"You came highly recommended by several people around the world." Ariadne was surprised at the names he gave her; none of them were of the small group of people she called friends. "You've got quite the reputation," the colonel said. "They all say you're the best architect working today."
"Huh." She shrugged, but pleasure bloomed in her belly, causing her to smile and duck her head. "Well, I'll try to live up to that."
She settled in remarkably quickly; her job was to create labyrinths that resembled the environments that soliders were likely to encounter, and populate those mazes with as many obstacles as she could come up with. She built craggy mountains that hid caves full of rebel insurgents, tightly packed cities in which snipers lurked on every rooftop, sleepy villages full of residents designed to unnerve and obstruct every move a foreign soldier made. Her pride and joy, however, turned out to be the desert terrain that didn't look like a maze at all. The officers she first showed the dream to were confused as they looked out over a smooth, barbarically hot expanse of sand. "This isn't a maze," one said, turning to Ariadne.
"You don't think so?" She gestured forward. "The allied base is three kilometers to the west. You have a compass. All you have to do is make it there before we wake up." The three officers took off to the west, while Ariadne sat in the shade at the small oasis she'd built for the instructors and waited for the music to kick in.
When they woke, all three men stared at Ariadne with growing respect. "We walked in circles," the man who'd first questioned her admitted. "It took me three times to realize that I was staring at the same sand dune. But, there was a small rock formation at the top, it looked exactly the same. How do you build a maze with no walls?"
She grinned. "It's not about walls. It's about misdirection. It's about teaching the subject to observe everything."
The officer shook his head as he pulled the IV out of his arm. "Wow. I hope we're paying you what you're worth."
Ariadne didn't feel the need to mention that she didn't need the army's money. Everyone considered something different to be the most valuable form of appreciation. The respectful nods she began to receive from the people she passed in the halls were her something.
One day, she took the colonel and his aide into a wintery landscape. They stood on a hill and stared at a familiar hospital building down below. "Where is this?" the colonel asked.
It's where we did the impossible. Where I fell into limbo. Where I fell into nothing.
A small voice in the back of her head responded. Where I saved Fischer and Cobb and maybe Saito, in a way. Me. I did that.
"Nowhere," Ariadne replied absently. "Something from a long-ago dream."
This time, she went into the dream during the training. She stood quietly in a corner of the room (Mal had been there before her, dropped to the ground and shot Robert Fischer dead) and watched four soldiers blow the door to the vault she'd once built to house the deepest secret Fischer never had. She hadn't been around to see what he found in there, but the soldiers found a vault full of weapons and computers. Their whooping and hollering echoed through the entire facility. Ariadne smiled, and the shadowy ghost of Fischer's body stretched out on the floor disappeared from her mind's eye.
When her contract was up, she found herself in demand, with four different job offers to choose from. "Apparently," she told Eames later, "the US military is good for your reputation."
"Being good at your job is good for your reputation. The military just yells louder than everyone else."
Ariadne laughed. "Well," she said, "it's just nice to be needed, no matter who it is that needs me."
***
In the end, she went back to Paris. The professor - Miles, he insisted she call him, now that she was no longer his student - was starting up a new program to research the effect of dream states on a person's conscious mind. "This was once my world," he said, staring around the familiar warehouse that Ariadne somehow thought of as her personal ground zero. "I stopped my research entirely when my daughter died. But perhaps it's time to begin again. Perhaps I can keep someone else from her fate."
Ariadne looked at the photo of Mal that Miles propped up on his desk in the warehouse. The woman in the picture was beautiful, with laughing eyes and a squirming baby Phillippa in her lap. "I wish I'd met her," she said, only lying a little.
Miles smiled sadly. "So do I. You would have liked her."
Ariadne instinctively put a hand on her belly, but she felt no pain. The woman in that photo had never stabbed her, in dreams or reality, had never said a word to Ariadne. "Tell me about her," she asked.
He did. She heard about Mal's first school science project, the time in her teens when she'd disappeared for three days straight to hitchhike to Switzerland with friends, how clueless Cobb had been when Mal decided he was going to be hers. "The rest of us had a running bet on how long it would take him to realize she was flirting with him. Eventually, though, she got tired of waiting - one day, he woke up from a dream to find her sitting on his legs, staring at him. 'You're taking me to dinner tonight,' she said. 'Wear a suit.' When I saw the way he looked at her as she walked away, I knew he'd be my son-in-law someday." Miles smiled fondly, with just a hint of sadness. Ariadne instinctively reached over and patted his arm. He put a hand over hers. "I still miss her every day, you know."
Ariadne had a fleeting thought of the crazy-eyed shade she'd encountered in dreams, but the image faded in the presence of a vibrant photo of a beautiful woman.
Ariadne had a boyfriend for a while - an Australian doing his PhD in medieval history in Paris. The companionship was nice. He was nice. He took her out to dinner twice a week, where they talked about their families and told stories about irritating college roommates and debated about German philosophers and comic book movies. Their relationship only lasted two months. Ariadne tried to let him down easy, but ended up sitting in the warehouse with Miles one evening after a good dinner and a really bad argument. "I don't know what's wrong with me," she said, sighing. "He's a perfectly good guy."
"I'm pretty sure you're not the kind of woman who will ever settle for a 'perfectly good' anything." He tapped the photo of Mal and winked at Ariadne. "You remind me of someone else that way."
Ariadne made a face at the photo when Miles's back was turned, but in reality, the Mal of Miles's memory was so much friendlier than the Mal trapped in Cobb's mind. "You weren't half of anything, were you?" she murmured to the picture. "Men are just kind of dumb."
She designed labyrinths for Miles, complex mazes that volunteer subjects explored day after day. Miles allowed her to go into the dreams and observe sometimes; she preferred to go in with the newest recruits. No matter how many dreams she created, she never lost that jolt of pleasure when someone walked into one of her worlds with their mouth agape. "You made all this?" one woman asked her, as they stared at a jungle full of stone ruins that looked like they'd been built by some ancient mystical civilization. "You made it all up in your head?"
"It's not that hard," Ariadne replied, "once you get the hang of it."
"No," the woman said, "This is kind of like walking into a Van Gogh painting. I could probably imitate it, but it'd never live up to the original."
"Genuine inspiration," she said softly as the woman walked away. Some of her old classmates had approached architecture as a science, as angles to be learned and numerical limits to be obeyed. Ariadne had always considered it an art. It was true, architecture was a different kind of creativity, full of lines and rules and standards. But, she looked around the jungle, smelled the damp remnants of a rain that would have fallen, had this landscape existed an hour ago. "No rules here," she murmured, running her hand down the trunk of a tree. "Just me."
***
It was fall - nearly two years since they got on a plane to Sydney to start the Fischer job. Ariadne was the last person out of the warehouse, after spending the whole day working on a complicated new dream for Miles' most experienced research subjects. She walked out to see a gorgeous sunset casting shadows across the Paris streets. She smiled as she locked the door - and gasped when she turned back around to find someone standing just a couple of feet behind her. Then she looked up at his face, and stared. "Arthur?"
"Ariadne." He had his hands in his pockets; he was dressed casually, in a striped shirt and leather jacket, his hair was longer and fell in wavy locks around his face. He looked younger than he'd ever looked, if she didn't notice the shadowy circles underneath his eyes. "How are you?"
How was she? I'm happy, she thought, and only felt a twinge of a lie. It wasn't even a lie ... it was just a small portion of a larger truth.
She didn't answer. Instead, she stepped closer and looked him in the eye. "Where've you been?"
He shrugged. "Here and there."
Ariadne shook her head. "If that's the kind of conversation we're still having, I'm going to get dinner."
She started to walk away, her pulse hammering in her throat, but his voice stopped her. "I've been everywhere, pretty much. I just came from the States. I saw Dom and the kids."
"Did Phillippa get you to sing with her?"
Arthur laughed. "She did. It's impossible to say no to her." When Ariadne turned around, he was still smiling. "I brought her a book of Beatles songs for her to learn on guitar. I figured she'd have to wait a couple of years to get into it, but by the time I left, she'd figured out half a song. I think Dom's got a rock star in training over there."
"I know he does. He brought them over to visit Miles a few months back, and she spent the whole time learning the words to all the French pop songs she heard on the radio." She put her hands on her hips. "What brings you back to Paris, Arthur?"
He was silent for a long moment. "I wanted to talk to you," he finally said, his voice low and soft on the evening breeze.
"What?" She stepped closer. "After all this time? You could have called, you know."
She watched him flinch. "I know. I'm sorry."
Ariadne closed her eyes to steady herself. She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket; the chess pawn toppled reassuringly inside her hand, and she nodded to herself. When she opened her eyes, Arthur had a ghost of a smile on his face. He pulled a hand out of his pocket to show her his small red die. When she stepped closer, she could see the tiny marks on his palm where the edges of the die had pressed against his skin. "Okay," Ariadne said, "you have a hundred words to tell me why you're suddenly here right now. Go."
Arthur curled his fingers, and the top-heavy die tumbled awkwardly down to his wrist. He snapped his hand quickly and caught it before it fell to the ground. He pocketed the die, looked back at Ariadne, and took a breath. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I freaked out a little bit after the Fischer job. I screwed up. If you guys hadn't been able to rescue Fischer and Saito, it would have been my fault."
"Why, because you aren't omniscient? That's stupid."
He shook his head. "I ..." He shrugged and looked at a distant point over Ariadne's shoulder. "I'm not used to messing up like that. Not when it matters so much. I freaked, I guess."
"Join the club." She stepped even closer to him. When he looked back at her again, she poked him in the chest. "I had nightmares for months," she blurted, without thinking. She hadn't told anyone about the dreams. "Mal. Limbo. All sorts of messed up shit. It sucked."
He grabbed her hand. "I'm sorry."
"Stop saying that. It's not your fault." His fingers were warm around hers, and without thinking, she laced them together and held his hand between them. "You still haven't told me why you're here now."
"I was talking to Cobb. He said some things ... well, some things that made sense. And I've been thinking about you." Arthur squeezed her hand. "Yes, there's a lot more to the story than that. I'll tell it, if you have the time."
Ariadne stayed there for a moment, letting the warmth of his body, so close to hers, fill her with a surprising calm. Then, she let go of his hand and turned to walk away. "Come on," she said after a few steps, without looking back. "I'm starving."
She couldn't hear his footsteps in the low bustle of traffic, but she knew he was there all the same.
Later in the evening, as she cleaned the last of dinner off her plate, she looked at Arthur. "You've been alone all this time," she said.
He shrugged. "Mostly. I worked with other people here and there, but nothing permanent. I worked with Cobb for a long time, from the time I started working in dreams. It's hard to get used to the idea of trusting someone else like that."
"What about outside of work?"
Arthur's smile was more than a little self-mocking, and he looked down at his plate. "There's life outside of work? I haven't had that in a long time."
"You need a hobby."
He looked up at her; his eyes were dark and glittery, and she suppressed a shiver. "You have something in mind?"
It's not that easy, she told her body. It disagreed strongly. "Not right now, I don't."
The self-mocking smile returned, and he leaned back in his seat. "Fair enough."
By the time they left the restaurant, darkness had fallen, and a stiff breeze blew cold on Ariadne's face. She didn't protest when Arthur wound an arm around her shoulders; instead, she wrapped her arm around his waist and pointed them both in the direction of her apartment. "You've done well for yourself," he said as they walked. "I'm glad."
"It took a while to get here."
"It always does."
A block away from her building, she stopped him and stepped away. "So, where do you go from here?" she asked.
"I don't know," Arthur admitted. "I don't have anything lined up. There are a few jobs out there, but nothing sounds appealing right now."
Ariadne swallowed, then spoke without allowing herself to think. "You could stay here. We're getting more and more research subjects every day. Miles is running himself ragged trying to run the basic dream training and compile all the research, and I kind of suck at training. I'm one of those people who would rather just do it myself then explain how I do it." She forced herself to take a breath and waited.
He searched her face, then looked down at the pavement. When he looked up at her, his eyes were unreadable. "You want me to work with you."
"Yeah." She gave him a small smile. "We need you."
Arthur stuck his hands in his pockets. "We?" he asked softly.
Ariadne felt a familiar tug inside her chest. "Yes, 'we'." Impulsively, she stepped forward and leaned up on her toes. She heard his intake of breath when she laid her hands on his chest and pressed her lips lightly to his, but his hands came out of his pockets to grasp her arms. The chaste kiss lasted only a second, but Ariadne felt something warm settle inside her when she stepped back. "I did miss you," she said. "I'd like you to stick around. If you want to."
"I want to." Slowly, the corners of his mouth turned upwards. "Hey, you know what my college major was?" he asked suddenly.
"No, what?"
"Art history. My parents didn't think I'd ever find a paying job." He shrugged. "Now they have the vacation home they always dreamed about. They don't ask where the money comes from."
Ariadne laughed. "Neither do mine. It's okay, because I wouldn't tell them anyway."
"Me either." Arthur stepped backwards, but the smile remained on his face. "See you tomorrow?" he asked.
"Yeah, see you tomorrow." She stepped backwards, but didn't turn around right away. "It'll be good to work with you again."
"Yeah." He nodded. "Yeah, it will."
The next morning, Arthur stood outside the warehouse door when she arrived. She unlocked the door and welcomed him in with a smile.
***
In the springtime, when the weather was once again warm enough to leave the windows open at night, Ariadne drifted to sleep and dreamed of Mal.
They sat on the steps of Ariadne's apartment building, watching James and Phillippa play tag on the sidewalk below. "Do you know what it is to be half of a whole?" Mal asked. This time, her voice was light, almost teasing.
"No," Ariadne replied, "because I'm a whole all to myself. I always have been."
"Don't you want to be necessary to someone else's life?"
Ariadne thought for a moment. "I want to be needed. There's a difference."
Mal smiled. "Good girl," she whispered, kissing Ariadne on the temple.
And then she and the children were gone, and Ariadne was alone on the steps. She looked up at the buildings in front of her and began to rearrange them randomly, watching as each stone structure groaned and cracked and eventually bent to Ariadne's will. She pushed the buildings aside until a park appeared in the middle of the block. People on the street – projections, people, what did it matter in an actual dream? – stopped to stare as a large tree began to grow in the middle of the park. Ariadne skipped across the street. At the edge of the park, she stopped next to a group of gaping onlookers. "Because I'm the architect," she said to them. "That's why."
When she woke, she breathed in a sweet-smelling breeze. She could almost pick out the scent of the flowers she'd grown in her dream park. Arthur's arm was heavy and warm across her belly, his breathing soft and even. Ariadne turned over and snuggled closer to him, kissing his bare shoulder as sleep claimed her once again.
~*~
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-08-17 10:59 pm (UTC)