Made for You and Me
Title: Made for You and Me
Author: kaminagi
Rating: Gen
Pairing: Ariadne/Arthur
Summary: In which Ariadne insists that she and Arthur break into a furniture store. For an adventure in quality assurance. Hijinks ensue.
Notes: A second fill for this prompt on the Inception Kink meme: "buying a bed."
Also available on AO3
---
It's not really a problem, at least the first time they sleep together. In both senses of the expression.
Ariadne's bed is a twin-size from Ikea, which is perfect for her size. At first, the only thing Arthur complains about is the fact that she doesn't have a real mattress, because she's just stacked three foam mattress pads on top of each other and has a fitted bed sheet wrapped around them all.
When she buries her face into his shoulder, he decides it isn't that bad. The bed is piled with layers of blankets and everything feels snug and comfortable. And it's Ariadne's bed, so he thinks the pseudo-mattress isn't really a big deal after awhile. It's surprisingly long enough to accommodate Arthur's taller frame, which he didn't expect given her height.
But when it becomes apparent that they've started to spend every night together in the same bed, something less tolerable comes up.
"I don't understand how nobody brought this up before," he mutters, trying to find a comfortable position for his arm. He has one around Ariadne's waist, but there doesn't seem to be a non-awkward way to put his other arm tonight.
"None of the other guys said anything," Ariadne retorts as she burrows into him and tugs the blankets around them.
It occurs to Arthur, the unsaid weight of those words she has said so thoughtlessly. Because, he realizes, how many men have had the chance to spend enough nights with her in her bed for it to become an issue that there isn't enough space for two?
Well, it's not so bad, he thinks to himself. Ariadne shifts and he finds a good spot for his arm.
(Nobody needs to know that it helps that he's in Ariadne's bed and a lot of the time, they're both naked.)
Still, even with the cuddling to preserve space, at some point, it's inevitable. Arthur decides it's a good time when they decide to move out of Ariadne's garret and into larger place.
"We're getting a new bed," he informs her.
Ariadne frowns, but she's finding that his argument that waking up with a numb arm and the fact she's got a crick in her neck each morning is not something they want on an ongoing basis to be very persuasive.
"And an actual mattress," he adds.
Her response is to grumble something about being a student and how foam padding is cheap and sleeping on a hard bed is supposed to be good for a back. Arthur kisses her temple and tells her that her share from inception has made the price of a good mattress dirt cheap, he'll pay for it any way, and that their current regular sleeping positions makes the hard bed not at all good for their backs.
"Fine," she mumbles.
"I don't like this one."
"Well, there's a big selection."
Arthur's not terribly surprised that Ariadne rejected every single bed in Ikea (he wonders briefly if it was because he started to laugh at her uncontrolled amazement that there was an Ikea in Paris). She's still not sold on the idea of getting a new bed. The next stop was a furniture store that specializes in beds.
"I like the old one," she grumbles, dropping on a random bed and bouncing impatiently on it.
"The one you're sitting on is sturdy."
It is. Ariadne complains (tries to) because she honestly can't find any fault with it except her personal attachment to her old bed. It's queen size with a frame, has a firm mattress, and it doesn't creak when she insists on jumping on it until an employee stiffly asks her not to.
"If you don't like it," Arthur warns her, "remember the old saying - you break it, you-"
"Yeah, yeah," Ariadne grumbles, but takes his hand to step down from the bed.
He considers it a rarely won victory that she even agrees to keep looking. When they double back to it for the twentieth time, Ariadne flops down on it, rather halfheartedly telling him that she'd be okay with it. But she doesn't agree to buy it quite yet.
"I'm not thrilled with it," Ariadne mutters. "I mean, it was comfortable and I could sleep on it. It comes with a good headboard. But it's like a hotel bed, because it's not going to comfy in the right places until-"
Arthur kisses the top of her head.
"Well, if we get it, we can take the time to make it comfy in all the right places."
"I want to test it now."
Arthur blinks sleepily at her. She feels so soft and warm against him, so he's making no move to uncoil from her since she's the only reason why he's reluctantly gotten used to her narrow bed.
"Test what?" he mumbles. He presses his face against her neck and kisses it. That usually distracts her.
It doesn't work. Ariadne squirms a little and shifts so she can look him in the eye. "Go test the bed at the store."
"Test what?" he repeats, figuring that sleep is still numbing his listening and comprehension skills.
She sits up, forcing him to loosen his arms. Ariadne looks mostly awake and there's a stubborn set to her jaw. The look in her eyes is strangely wild.
"Let's go to the store right now and test that bed."
There have been many moments where Ariadne has rendered him speechless with her unpredictability and brilliance. She has folded Paris in half. She has been to Limbo. She has managed to make the world's first example of edible fish and chips that were mysteriously green without intending them to be green and still tasted amazing.
This moment leaves him speechless, but not in the same way.
But while he's still completely baffled, she grabs his hand and pulls him out of bed.
"This is important," she whispers.
"I realize that, considering our profession. But do you have to do this at 3:24 AM?"
Ariadne is silent on the matter. But Arthur, as annoyed as he is, is intrigued by the challenge of breaking into the furniture store because his girlfriend wants to test a bed. Whatever that means.
The task is surprisingly easy and the security system, quite frankly, is pitiful. It's probably because stealing a bed is a rather awkward theft to perform. Arthur isn't careless or sloppy, but it's certainly not rocket science. As soon as the alarms and cameras are disabled, Ariadne drags him through the store to a specific bed. Arthur doesn't recall this one exactly, but Ariadne seems to. It occurs to him that its design is reminiscent of her old bed.
And he doesn't expect her to shove him down so abruptly and then climb atop him either.
"Hey, wait-"
She kisses him hard, straddling his waist and threading her fingers into his hair. For about five minutes (Arthur actually loses count), he's completely content to let Ariadne do whatever she wants to him on some strange bed. It's comfortable in the way an unfamiliar bed is, like a hotel bed, vaguely remembering Ariadne's words.
When she pulls away breathlessly, Arthur suppresses a groan at the loss of contact. He needs to focus.
"You said something about a test-"
Her lips return to his in an instant and her hands move to his trousers.
"You had time to put on a belt," she says irritably, before kissing him again. The belt is undone and she opens his pants impatiently, trying to undress him just enough.
Arthur's confused out of his mind at what makes this all very arousing, even though he's perfectly willing and he's getting an idea about what she wants to test. Probably better to run with it, he decides, as he pushes aside her coat and lifts the hem of her night shirt to help her along. He might be dreaming, after all.
It doesn't take long before they're both breathing hard and wind up writhing and twisting against one another, gasping and moaning. She comes apart first, and he follows soon after (at this point, he knows he is definitely not dreaming), before she collapses against him on the bed. They're a sweaty mess of limbs and disheveled clothing, exhausted and satisfied. Ariadne's face is pressed against the crook of Arthur's neck as he strokes her back, gradually coming down from his high.
"You're going to explain," he says when he can finally speak again. "Because as thrilling as this happens to be, we could have done this at home." Which would have given them the luxury of falling asleep. In a bed that was in Ariadne's apartment.
When she manages to sit up, she works on fixing their clothes and kisses him again. "Later," she says.
They sleep for the rest of the morning after their late night adventure.
(Okay, so the only hard part was making the bed they randomly had sex on look showroom-presentable again. Re-arming the place was predictably easy - it's one of Arthur's professional specialties after all.)
When Arthur wakes up, he's got an uncomfortable ache in his neck again and all of Ariadne's slender limbs are wrapped around him in the tiny narrow bed they share. He doesn't really want to move. But it's past noon, he's hungry and she'll want something to eat when she wakes up.
Somewhere between the smell of bacon on the pan and hot coffee brewing, Ariadne has gently padded out of the bedroom with the patchwork quilt wrapped around her shoulders. She rubs her hands and reaches for the grilled cheese sandwich.
"Wait-" Arthur drags the plate out of her reach. "As enjoyable as our adventure in quality assurance was, I want an explanation."
"Withholding food is not fair, sweetie," Ariadne grumbles as she runs a hand through her tangled hair.
"Explanation first." But he relents and holds half a sandwich near her mouth. Ariadne frowns, but opens her mouth and chomps on it.
"I'm not an animal," she says between bites.
"Well, I wanted to see you do something adorable," Arthur responds in a dry voice.
"You think everything I do is adorable," she counters, "or stupid or amazing or dumbfounding or-"
"I'll concede on all those points," he murmurs agreeably, but he's not going to give in quite yet.
When she finishes swallowing and mournfully eyes the coffee that Arthur finally decides to give her after seeing her expression, she looks right at him with a rather embarrassed look.
"This whole thing, buying a new bed, it scares me."
He remains silent, nodding for her go on.
"When I moved here, I actually brought over that bed from my house back home. I had reassemble it and everything, but it was comforting, you know? I felt safe every night."
Arthur pushes the sandwich on the plate towards her and adds some bacon strips and some green salad with cherry tomatoes. Ariadne stares down at it; her thoughts clearly aren't on eating at the moment.
"I know it's ridiculously sentimental, but it's mine, you know," she goes on in a small voice. Her eyes lift up and a small crooked smile graces on her face. "You should feel honoured that you're the only person I've let share my bed on a regular basis."
Oh, he is. Very much so.
"And last night...?"
That's when she shoves some salad in her mouth, her face flushing. It's not the sex or anything that's embarrassing her, Arthur knows that.
"I was upset about the bed thing and then you said making it comfy and there was me being impulsive and not being able to sleep..." she trails off and looks up again. "And I was tired of this, so... I guess I thought maybe we could do something to make me like getting a new bed."
There's a part of Arthur that understands why she doesn't want a new bed and another part of him that feels chagrined because it feels a bit like an excuse not to get one. But she's given him a level of trust and intimacy that she's afforded no one else and he's reciprocated that.
Arthur leans over and kisses her forehead.
"Thank you for telling me this," he says. "I'm afraid I'm still insisting on getting a new bed for our new place. But I have an idea."
So they buy the bed they, uh, defiled. "Christened." Whatever.
Ariadne seems fine with it. "At least we know it's really sturdy," she says slyly, which just confuses the hell out of the sales clerk.
She chooses the new sheets, but her patchwork quilt finds its way to the new bed along with a new Australian wool-down duvet. It had always been way too big for her little twin-size bed to begin with, so it becomes a perfect fit for the queen-size.
"This is kinda weird," Ariadne points out.
"I think it's nice," Arthur replies. He really does.
It's a lazy rainy Saturday morning, and Arthur has discovered since living with Ariadne that there's nothing better than staying in bed all day, keeping each other all warm and cozy with her quilt wrapped around them. It's a really nice quilt, still fluffy yet worn in just the right places, even if it doesn't match anything else. It's comforting. He can see why she's really attached to it.
"No, not the quilt." She shifts slightly, drumming her fingers on his shoulder, and then sliding closer to him. "Though yeah, I like that. I meant my old bed."
It's sitting in the room they've converted into her studio-office. Arthur reasons it's so she can use it to take naps if she needs a break from work. All the extra mismatched pillows have found their places there, along with the comforter that was supposed to match the sheets for their new bed.
And it's not like they can't still sleep on it. It's useful to have a spare bed to test a new level. And, you know, for cuddling. They do a lot of "cuddling" there.
"Is it really?" Arthur remarks, playing with one of her curls. "How do you like this bed, though?"
What they've discovered with the new bed is that Arthur is not waking up with a crick in his neck and Ariadne really likes the extra leg room. The extra room in general actually. Especially, when she's mad at him because now she can roll over and sulk until he gives in and crawls over the extra thirty or so centimetres to apologize.
But there are still things that stay the same. She still likes to sleep with her head against his shoulder and he finds her scent lingers in the blankets they wrap around themselves. And there's still probably too many pillows. But it's warm and soft, especially when she's in his arms at night.
"Hmm... you know, I guess I like it," Ariadne murmurs. "You know why?"
"Tell me."
She's silent, just for a moment. He waits, watching her draw invisible designs on his shoulder, her face still hidden against his chest.
"Because it's our bed."
When she lifts her head and smiles, he decides he can't really argue with that.
---
Author: kaminagi
Rating: Gen
Pairing: Ariadne/Arthur
Summary: In which Ariadne insists that she and Arthur break into a furniture store. For an adventure in quality assurance. Hijinks ensue.
Notes: A second fill for this prompt on the Inception Kink meme: "buying a bed."
Also available on AO3
---
It's not really a problem, at least the first time they sleep together. In both senses of the expression.
Ariadne's bed is a twin-size from Ikea, which is perfect for her size. At first, the only thing Arthur complains about is the fact that she doesn't have a real mattress, because she's just stacked three foam mattress pads on top of each other and has a fitted bed sheet wrapped around them all.
When she buries her face into his shoulder, he decides it isn't that bad. The bed is piled with layers of blankets and everything feels snug and comfortable. And it's Ariadne's bed, so he thinks the pseudo-mattress isn't really a big deal after awhile. It's surprisingly long enough to accommodate Arthur's taller frame, which he didn't expect given her height.
But when it becomes apparent that they've started to spend every night together in the same bed, something less tolerable comes up.
"I don't understand how nobody brought this up before," he mutters, trying to find a comfortable position for his arm. He has one around Ariadne's waist, but there doesn't seem to be a non-awkward way to put his other arm tonight.
"None of the other guys said anything," Ariadne retorts as she burrows into him and tugs the blankets around them.
It occurs to Arthur, the unsaid weight of those words she has said so thoughtlessly. Because, he realizes, how many men have had the chance to spend enough nights with her in her bed for it to become an issue that there isn't enough space for two?
Well, it's not so bad, he thinks to himself. Ariadne shifts and he finds a good spot for his arm.
(Nobody needs to know that it helps that he's in Ariadne's bed and a lot of the time, they're both naked.)
Still, even with the cuddling to preserve space, at some point, it's inevitable. Arthur decides it's a good time when they decide to move out of Ariadne's garret and into larger place.
"We're getting a new bed," he informs her.
Ariadne frowns, but she's finding that his argument that waking up with a numb arm and the fact she's got a crick in her neck each morning is not something they want on an ongoing basis to be very persuasive.
"And an actual mattress," he adds.
Her response is to grumble something about being a student and how foam padding is cheap and sleeping on a hard bed is supposed to be good for a back. Arthur kisses her temple and tells her that her share from inception has made the price of a good mattress dirt cheap, he'll pay for it any way, and that their current regular sleeping positions makes the hard bed not at all good for their backs.
"Fine," she mumbles.
"I don't like this one."
"Well, there's a big selection."
Arthur's not terribly surprised that Ariadne rejected every single bed in Ikea (he wonders briefly if it was because he started to laugh at her uncontrolled amazement that there was an Ikea in Paris). She's still not sold on the idea of getting a new bed. The next stop was a furniture store that specializes in beds.
"I like the old one," she grumbles, dropping on a random bed and bouncing impatiently on it.
"The one you're sitting on is sturdy."
It is. Ariadne complains (tries to) because she honestly can't find any fault with it except her personal attachment to her old bed. It's queen size with a frame, has a firm mattress, and it doesn't creak when she insists on jumping on it until an employee stiffly asks her not to.
"If you don't like it," Arthur warns her, "remember the old saying - you break it, you-"
"Yeah, yeah," Ariadne grumbles, but takes his hand to step down from the bed.
He considers it a rarely won victory that she even agrees to keep looking. When they double back to it for the twentieth time, Ariadne flops down on it, rather halfheartedly telling him that she'd be okay with it. But she doesn't agree to buy it quite yet.
"I'm not thrilled with it," Ariadne mutters. "I mean, it was comfortable and I could sleep on it. It comes with a good headboard. But it's like a hotel bed, because it's not going to comfy in the right places until-"
Arthur kisses the top of her head.
"Well, if we get it, we can take the time to make it comfy in all the right places."
"I want to test it now."
Arthur blinks sleepily at her. She feels so soft and warm against him, so he's making no move to uncoil from her since she's the only reason why he's reluctantly gotten used to her narrow bed.
"Test what?" he mumbles. He presses his face against her neck and kisses it. That usually distracts her.
It doesn't work. Ariadne squirms a little and shifts so she can look him in the eye. "Go test the bed at the store."
"Test what?" he repeats, figuring that sleep is still numbing his listening and comprehension skills.
She sits up, forcing him to loosen his arms. Ariadne looks mostly awake and there's a stubborn set to her jaw. The look in her eyes is strangely wild.
"Let's go to the store right now and test that bed."
There have been many moments where Ariadne has rendered him speechless with her unpredictability and brilliance. She has folded Paris in half. She has been to Limbo. She has managed to make the world's first example of edible fish and chips that were mysteriously green without intending them to be green and still tasted amazing.
This moment leaves him speechless, but not in the same way.
But while he's still completely baffled, she grabs his hand and pulls him out of bed.
"This is important," she whispers.
"I realize that, considering our profession. But do you have to do this at 3:24 AM?"
Ariadne is silent on the matter. But Arthur, as annoyed as he is, is intrigued by the challenge of breaking into the furniture store because his girlfriend wants to test a bed. Whatever that means.
The task is surprisingly easy and the security system, quite frankly, is pitiful. It's probably because stealing a bed is a rather awkward theft to perform. Arthur isn't careless or sloppy, but it's certainly not rocket science. As soon as the alarms and cameras are disabled, Ariadne drags him through the store to a specific bed. Arthur doesn't recall this one exactly, but Ariadne seems to. It occurs to him that its design is reminiscent of her old bed.
And he doesn't expect her to shove him down so abruptly and then climb atop him either.
"Hey, wait-"
She kisses him hard, straddling his waist and threading her fingers into his hair. For about five minutes (Arthur actually loses count), he's completely content to let Ariadne do whatever she wants to him on some strange bed. It's comfortable in the way an unfamiliar bed is, like a hotel bed, vaguely remembering Ariadne's words.
When she pulls away breathlessly, Arthur suppresses a groan at the loss of contact. He needs to focus.
"You said something about a test-"
Her lips return to his in an instant and her hands move to his trousers.
"You had time to put on a belt," she says irritably, before kissing him again. The belt is undone and she opens his pants impatiently, trying to undress him just enough.
Arthur's confused out of his mind at what makes this all very arousing, even though he's perfectly willing and he's getting an idea about what she wants to test. Probably better to run with it, he decides, as he pushes aside her coat and lifts the hem of her night shirt to help her along. He might be dreaming, after all.
It doesn't take long before they're both breathing hard and wind up writhing and twisting against one another, gasping and moaning. She comes apart first, and he follows soon after (at this point, he knows he is definitely not dreaming), before she collapses against him on the bed. They're a sweaty mess of limbs and disheveled clothing, exhausted and satisfied. Ariadne's face is pressed against the crook of Arthur's neck as he strokes her back, gradually coming down from his high.
"You're going to explain," he says when he can finally speak again. "Because as thrilling as this happens to be, we could have done this at home." Which would have given them the luxury of falling asleep. In a bed that was in Ariadne's apartment.
When she manages to sit up, she works on fixing their clothes and kisses him again. "Later," she says.
They sleep for the rest of the morning after their late night adventure.
(Okay, so the only hard part was making the bed they randomly had sex on look showroom-presentable again. Re-arming the place was predictably easy - it's one of Arthur's professional specialties after all.)
When Arthur wakes up, he's got an uncomfortable ache in his neck again and all of Ariadne's slender limbs are wrapped around him in the tiny narrow bed they share. He doesn't really want to move. But it's past noon, he's hungry and she'll want something to eat when she wakes up.
Somewhere between the smell of bacon on the pan and hot coffee brewing, Ariadne has gently padded out of the bedroom with the patchwork quilt wrapped around her shoulders. She rubs her hands and reaches for the grilled cheese sandwich.
"Wait-" Arthur drags the plate out of her reach. "As enjoyable as our adventure in quality assurance was, I want an explanation."
"Withholding food is not fair, sweetie," Ariadne grumbles as she runs a hand through her tangled hair.
"Explanation first." But he relents and holds half a sandwich near her mouth. Ariadne frowns, but opens her mouth and chomps on it.
"I'm not an animal," she says between bites.
"Well, I wanted to see you do something adorable," Arthur responds in a dry voice.
"You think everything I do is adorable," she counters, "or stupid or amazing or dumbfounding or-"
"I'll concede on all those points," he murmurs agreeably, but he's not going to give in quite yet.
When she finishes swallowing and mournfully eyes the coffee that Arthur finally decides to give her after seeing her expression, she looks right at him with a rather embarrassed look.
"This whole thing, buying a new bed, it scares me."
He remains silent, nodding for her go on.
"When I moved here, I actually brought over that bed from my house back home. I had reassemble it and everything, but it was comforting, you know? I felt safe every night."
Arthur pushes the sandwich on the plate towards her and adds some bacon strips and some green salad with cherry tomatoes. Ariadne stares down at it; her thoughts clearly aren't on eating at the moment.
"I know it's ridiculously sentimental, but it's mine, you know," she goes on in a small voice. Her eyes lift up and a small crooked smile graces on her face. "You should feel honoured that you're the only person I've let share my bed on a regular basis."
Oh, he is. Very much so.
"And last night...?"
That's when she shoves some salad in her mouth, her face flushing. It's not the sex or anything that's embarrassing her, Arthur knows that.
"I was upset about the bed thing and then you said making it comfy and there was me being impulsive and not being able to sleep..." she trails off and looks up again. "And I was tired of this, so... I guess I thought maybe we could do something to make me like getting a new bed."
There's a part of Arthur that understands why she doesn't want a new bed and another part of him that feels chagrined because it feels a bit like an excuse not to get one. But she's given him a level of trust and intimacy that she's afforded no one else and he's reciprocated that.
Arthur leans over and kisses her forehead.
"Thank you for telling me this," he says. "I'm afraid I'm still insisting on getting a new bed for our new place. But I have an idea."
So they buy the bed they, uh, defiled. "Christened." Whatever.
Ariadne seems fine with it. "At least we know it's really sturdy," she says slyly, which just confuses the hell out of the sales clerk.
She chooses the new sheets, but her patchwork quilt finds its way to the new bed along with a new Australian wool-down duvet. It had always been way too big for her little twin-size bed to begin with, so it becomes a perfect fit for the queen-size.
"This is kinda weird," Ariadne points out.
"I think it's nice," Arthur replies. He really does.
It's a lazy rainy Saturday morning, and Arthur has discovered since living with Ariadne that there's nothing better than staying in bed all day, keeping each other all warm and cozy with her quilt wrapped around them. It's a really nice quilt, still fluffy yet worn in just the right places, even if it doesn't match anything else. It's comforting. He can see why she's really attached to it.
"No, not the quilt." She shifts slightly, drumming her fingers on his shoulder, and then sliding closer to him. "Though yeah, I like that. I meant my old bed."
It's sitting in the room they've converted into her studio-office. Arthur reasons it's so she can use it to take naps if she needs a break from work. All the extra mismatched pillows have found their places there, along with the comforter that was supposed to match the sheets for their new bed.
And it's not like they can't still sleep on it. It's useful to have a spare bed to test a new level. And, you know, for cuddling. They do a lot of "cuddling" there.
"Is it really?" Arthur remarks, playing with one of her curls. "How do you like this bed, though?"
What they've discovered with the new bed is that Arthur is not waking up with a crick in his neck and Ariadne really likes the extra leg room. The extra room in general actually. Especially, when she's mad at him because now she can roll over and sulk until he gives in and crawls over the extra thirty or so centimetres to apologize.
But there are still things that stay the same. She still likes to sleep with her head against his shoulder and he finds her scent lingers in the blankets they wrap around themselves. And there's still probably too many pillows. But it's warm and soft, especially when she's in his arms at night.
"Hmm... you know, I guess I like it," Ariadne murmurs. "You know why?"
"Tell me."
She's silent, just for a moment. He waits, watching her draw invisible designs on his shoulder, her face still hidden against his chest.
"Because it's our bed."
When she lifts her head and smiles, he decides he can't really argue with that.
---