fic: RIP VAN WINKLE (inception)
RIP VAN WINKLE
inception. in a town that does not exist, in a desert without a name, she will turn to him and say: “I took a nap and slept for years.” all he will say is: “I know.” (a collection of moments best left to the dreamers). ariadne; arthur/ariadne. rated r. 10,265 words. post-film.
notes: um, this thing is a beast. and for once not written for the kink meme, lol. vague spoilers within, and a flagrant disregard for things like chronology and being longwinded. consider this a WHAT SORT OF AWFUL THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO THEM NEXT? sort of fic, lol. this note is terrible. it's almost 4 AM. what is my life.
i see your face when i close my eyes
i see the muscles in your legs
from the way you always rise
to the occasion of catching things that fall
like the statuettes on pedestals i tend to build too tall
but i have navigated iceland
i’ve laid my claim on portugal
i have seen into the wasteland
oh the future, oh the future
(Dragon’s Lair, Sunset Rubdown)
you see, i take the parts that i remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what i say
or love me back.
(Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, Richard Siken)
1.
She wakes to a desert landscape. The land is flat, unforgiving, long and jagged cracks through it cataloging the earth’s rebellion. Against what, she doesn’t know. Time. Memory. The shape of things.
“You’re up,” Arthur says to her. He passes her a water bottle, warm to the touch and she chokes on it as she tries to swallow it down. Her throat aches.
“I hadn’t realized I slept,” she tells him.
His smile is distant. She studies his face, the small lines around his mouth, the tense fit of his jaw and the typically kind yet dark eyes. They don't look kind in this light. She thinks she has known him forever; he looks at her as though he feels the same.
“That happens,” he says quietly, almost sad.
And then he says: “I’ve been waiting awhile.”
The wind kicks up and Ariadne tries to finish the rest of the water.
2.
- you call these dreams a cage, and he laughs at you, he laughs with the sun in his eyes, a wall of glass at his back and you are finding it hard to look at him, you are finding you have to squint, and you are trying to tell him that you both have trapped yourselves here, that you are here, you are together, but he interrupts you, tells you: I don’t want to talk about this now. So you’re not going to talk about this now, but you want to. You want the light to shine a little less, you want to look at him and not have it hurt, and it’s beginning to sound like you want a lot of things. You always thought that’s what dreams were supposed to deliver you, but they haven’t, they’ve placed you here, in his head and his house, and that’s when you hear it, it sounds like running water, and -
3.
“I’ve been looking for you.” This will be the first thing he will say to her. Ariadne will look up, she will squint into the sun. Late afternoon, and the Parisian summer heat will be stifling; she will feel sweat slicking down her back, her shirt sticking to it as she shifts in her seat. Arthur will stand over her, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, black suit, black skinny tie and a pair of sunglasses. She will smile small at him and he will sit across from her.
“You any good?” he will ask and gesture with his head toward the table between them. Ariadne will shrug at this, noncommittal. It will be a dumb question. He will have seen her totem before, he should know at the least it implies a certain knowledge of the game. There will be a lot of things Arthur should know but he doesn’t, she will think.
Arthur will reach over and grip the small white pawn between his fingers before placing it two spaces forward. He will take off his sunglasses and stare openly at her.
“Your move,” he will say.
4.
They trained her first.
At the top of the maze he called to her:
“Your name is Ariadne. You’ll never get lost in here.” And she laughed, she laughed quietly under her breath and took a step forward, the green surrounding her.
She did not call anything back. She thought she should tell him that names dictate nothing, names are a label they throw on you, stick on you, try to make sense out of you. A million, trillion years ago there might have been a woman named Ariadne and she might have led some dude out of a maze (a labyrinth, she could hear Arthur’s correcting voice in her head), but that didn’t mean anything. It didn’t add up to much here.
Her mother had thought it a pretty name. There was nothing more to that story.
It was a story that feels like it belongs to a lifetime that came several before.
5.
The plane lands and they taxi down the runway. They all look dazed, a quiet and awestruck, freshly awakened expression on each of their faces. None of them says a word.
At the baggage claim, Arthur bumps her shoulder with his arm. His shirt sleeves are rolled, jacket and garment bag slung over his shoulder. When she looks up at his face he jerks his head toward the exit.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s share a cab.”
Ariadne nods and follows him out, a careful number of paces behind him, errant travelers intervening between them but she can still see him. He holds the cab door open for her, destroying whatever attempt at subterfuge they had been half-heartedly playing at. She swallows fast, a rising lump in her throat. She feels tired, she has felt tired, days and days on end of the most restless sleep imaginable - and beyond that, she feels intractably sad. She feels as though she has committed some crime of moral character. Robert Fischer, Jr. is a person, a human being, with thoughts and ideas of his own. And now, now he has an implanted thought not of his own creation, closure found with his dead father not through natural or organic or even genuine means.
The hotel they walk into looks too much like the one they just escaped. Ariadne does not say anything, and neither does Arthur, and when he gives two false names at the front desk she is almost surprised at his general ease for the fraudulent and illegal. There are two rooms, and Ariadne decides he is not as presumptuous as she might have first supposed, and smiles.
She never sees the inside of her room.
He invites her to his, and she follows. She flops down on the end of his bed and kicks off her shoes and if he is amused, she can’t see it, his back to her as he peruses the view from the window. When he turns to face her she feels everything stupid and seemingly inconsequential she felt as they left the airport bubbling up from her.
“I don’t think,” she starts and then she stops. She looks up from the hands in her lap and he is staring at her, face in profile, the illuminated, blackened window behind him. “I don’t think this job is right for me,” she finally says.
Arthur rubs at his jaw. His eyes are still fixed on her face; she feels uncomfortable and ducks her gaze back down at her lap, only to instantly raise her own eyes again, defiance and discomfort dueling within her.
“You’re good at it,” he says, but he does not say it like a compliment. “But you already know that,” he adds.
“I feel like I have done something,” and she pauses here, voice on the edge of cracking and she knows it. She pauses and she swallows quickly, her hands flat on her thighs. “Terrible.”
“Yeah,” Arthur drawls. His lips part in a wry smile. “I remember that.”
Ariadne ignores him. “I feel like I’ve taken something from this man he can never get back,” she says quietly. Arthur frowns.
“Like what?”
She meets his gaze. “A choice.”
6.
“It’s your subconscious,” he had said, the red die rolled between his fingers. The warehouse was cold that morning and Ariadne hugged her arms around herself. “If you’re not on an honest enough basis with yourself, God only knows what it will cook up.”
God, she had thought. What a funny concept.
Later she will realize she missed the point of what he said. But not until later, much later, a later that goes by another name: too late.
7.
Neither of them sleeps that night; a quiet and drained exhaustion settles in both of them but they remain awake. They drink from the small bottles of gin the minibar provides and take to the intimate, confessional style of conversation only alcohol can produce. They do not speak of Cobb, however, and they do not speak of dreams.
He tells her about the year during undergrad he spent studying in Paris, how he knows that city grid like the back of his hand. Ariadne stores this knowledge and attempts to think of possible future ways to trick him, a dreamscape Paris with twists and turns and streets he would never expect to be there. Her scheming does not go far, her head fuzzy and laden with drink, stress. She tells him about her favorite building, at least of the ones she has seen in the real world: the old governor’s mansion in South Carolina, a building now abandoned and a relic of old-style ostentation, gaudy in a near uplifting way. This fact draws a genuine and full-bodied laugh from Arthur, an unguarded glimmer of both surprise and pleasure. “Of all the possibilities,” he says, his head shaking side to side. His chair is turned to face her lazy sprawl across the end of the bed (his bed, this is his room), his elbows braced on his thighs, an empty glass tumbler grasped in both hands between his open legs. Ariadne shrugs, not as amused as Arthur and slightly self-conscious.
“I like a building with memory,” she tells him and his face slides back into that unreadable mask, though his eyes still gleam tired and bleary.
“You like a living building,” he says, not a query, and Ariadne thinks there is judgment rich in his tone. She thinks then of his constructed dreams, her training ground, the lead-in for Fischer’s subconscious - all that careful planning, the clean lines and the flat surfaces - she can see where they diverge. But maybe that’s not entirely true. If you know someone is coming over, you clean the house. You hide the things you do not wish for them to see, your embarrassing collection of DVDs, all the dust that has collected on the bureau or the coffee table, that souvenir collection of shot glasses that made sense several margaritas in, the sports bra, the running clothes - you hide the dirt, you push the skeletons further into the closet and invite the guest inside. She is sure the subconscious is no different. A different house, a different set of keys and a different set of skeletons manifest in different, more subtle yet more horrifying ways.
She doesn’t answer him and he doesn’t say anything further. They sit in an uncomfortable silence until Arthur rises to his feet and fetches two more small bottles from the minibar. He tosses one to her with a small smirk as she catches it, and just as swiftly the former pattern of their conversation resumes itself as he settles back into his chair.
He tells her that he is getting old, that he’ll be turning thirty before the year is out. He pulls a face of mock self-deprecation, and Ariadne knows he is faking it if only because it is clear he is the sort of man who believes age can be worn with the same care and grace as a fine suit. She feeds into what he said anyway. “Age is a distinguishing trait in men,” she says, “embrace it and be thankful you’re not a member of the fairer sex.”
He laughs at that, and starts rambling off a list of names, Katharine Hepburn, Catherine Deneuve, another Catherine or Katherine thrown in for good measure, women he states only got finer with age. Ariadne teases him, accuses him of having a cougar complex. “No Lolitas for you then, huh?” she says, and she meant it as a joke. She thinks he knows that, but the look he levels her with is lacking humor despite the small smile still on his face, more from the gin than from her. His eyes are dark, but so is the room. She isn’t a Lolita, she hadn’t meant the comment as a coquettish come-on, but she feels like in its failed delivery that’s what it now sounds like. Their eyes stay locked for a moment too long and the room is warm. Arthur’s sleeves are rolled to his elbows, the twin cufflinks glinting under the lamp at the bedside table, and Ariadne is barefoot, her jacket off, shirt untucked and legs tucked under her, demure and girlish in her positioning. When Arthur clears his throat she is grateful.
“I don’t know any Lolitas,” he says, and that, she thinks, is how you properly deliver a line.
8.
On her third move she will take Arthur’s knight. He will groan, his face amused.
“Should have seen that coming, right?” he will say.
In his next move he will capture her pawn.
9.
Her father taught her to play chess at an early age, perhaps too early.
But maybe that’s how it’s always been, maybe that set the rest into motion: too soon and too young, always racing for that train that has yet to leave the platform.
She knows she will never build houses or buildings the way the rest of her class will. They will wander out into the world with their blueprints rolled under their arms and a plan congealing inside their heads. Ariadne will be the thing inside their heads. Maybe not their heads, but someone’s head. She’ll build skyscrapers with the snap and impulse of imagination, she’ll turn metal like water and make it flow through a city. She will be the god they all aspire to be, but the problem, the rub, is that no one else will know it but her. No one but the others invited to this party, and even then, it will be but a surreal memory.
She knows she won’t be like them, because how can there be that same satisfaction? She has seen the impossible, and to return, to return to this - steel girders and physics equations, this cannot intersect with that, gravity will not allow for that to stand - she does not know how you do that. She doesn’t know how Cobb did it, she knows Mal couldn’t do it (you plant the idea, and then you let them convince themselves), and she wonders after Saito as well. He fell asleep on an airplane, somewhere over the ocean, and he awoke an old man.
So Ariadne will not build houses, she will never build a bank, a corporate office building. She’ll finger the dogeared copy of The Fountainhead that sits always on the edge of her bookshelf, ready for the taking, and maybe she’ll laugh a little at Howard Roark after a couple pages, maybe she’ll commiserate: no room for dreamers in this world of ours. Ariadne won’t apply for an internship, she’ll continue to work with Arthur and with Eames, building everything out of nothing. Her classmates will have their brick and mortar, iron and steel and stone, and she’ll take the intangible.
The thought makes her sad. She can’t decide if it’s for them or for herself.
10.
In the morning they return to the airport. They both linger in front of the departures list, a bloated bank account and a new list of options.
“Well,” she says, “in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably tell you I’m planning on heading back to school.”
His face betrays nothing. “I figured you might.”
The part he was tactful enough not to say: You’ll be back. They all come back.
She comes back. Paris felt like half a memory, a place remembered wrong.
“Go ahead,” she tells him. “Lord your victory over me.”
Arthur only shakes his head, a small smile on closed lips. They are back in a hotel room again. He never turned the light on in his hotel room and a silver briefcase rests on the bed, a small suitcase on the floor.
“It’s all a little too inevitable and obvious for my tastes. I’ll save my bragging rights for later triumphs.” His smile grows this time and he stands there, stoop-shouldered yet lean from across the room, his profile lit by the lights of Manhattan. Ariadne tries to look put out, but she fails, her own smile creeping over her lips and she turns her head away, exhales in a mock angry huff, and Arthur clears his throat.
“What I’d rather talk about,” he says, “is how you knew where to find me.”
11.
The three of them - Arthur and Ariadne and Eames - team up, they start their own outfit with the occasional advisory call to a retired Cobb. The feel of the jobs they take on is completely different than before. That maddening desperation to complete the job, the danger of multiple levels, more than mere corporate enterprise or capital greed at stake - all of that is gone. She still gets to stretch her imagination, she still gets more of whatever it is she thinks she craves, and the three of them fall into an easy entropy all their own.
“Watch that one,” Eames says to her one day. A shipment has arrived and Arthur studies the package before opening it, a penknife drawn from his pocket and then shearing the mailing tape. “More wolf than dog. Hell of a damn bite, too,” and then he laughs.
12.
They are in a diner.
Arthur lifts a white mug to his lips and then pauses. “Your subconscious is wildly pedestrian,” he says. “I expected more.”
“Oh, fuck off. Not all of us dream of electric sheep.” He arches an eyebrow and finally takes a sip of his coffee. He grimaces.
“You been here before?” he asks her.
“Well,” she says, “considering this place isn’t real, being a dream and all, I’ll have to say no.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he says, but his voice is good-humored enough. “I mean, is this a real place?”
Ariadne shakes her head. It’s true: it isn’t. The diner is small, its own ecosystem seemingly contained in the small building - a smog of grease and the smell of bacon, the bad coffee in front of her, a stain at the back of the table next to a small jukebox mounted on the wall. They are in the desert, somewhere out west, a square of black asphalt just outside the front door cooking in the sun and amidst an entire stretch of sand, one stripe of black road disappearing into the horizon.
“No,” she says. “it isn’t.”
13.
“You think they got lonely?” she asked Arthur once.
He frowned slightly over the rim of his coffee cup. The model she was building sat half-finished and Arthur tore his gaze from it to look at her. “Who?”
She shrugged a little, the large warehouse suddenly a little too stuffy and a little too small, the way all awkward moments shape and shrink the space that houses them. “Cobb and Mal,” she said quickly. “They were there - they were there for so long. You’d have to get lonely, right?”
Arthur looked at her, a strange small grin on his lips. He looked at her like he understood but like she had a lot to learn. Ariadne found she did not like that.
14.
- he presses two fingers against and then in you, there is a thin layer of water inching its way across the bathroom floor, white floor, white walls, a white ceiling, and when your neck snaps back, your skull bangs against the wall, your breath echoes in the small room, there is no door, but the water seeps in, “don’t come,” he says, “don’t you dare come,” Arthur says -
15.
Arthur dreams in hallways that never end. Sleek bare walls and carpeted floors, she thinks it is a hotel, or maybe an apartment complex. There are numbered doors on either side, art deco almost in their finishes, and the lighting is dim, the lighting reminds her of the hotel of the first job, and there is a nervous jolt in the pit of her stomach.
He drinks from a glass of scotch, his room entirely too neat, and she forgot to look at the number on the door. She wants to leave the room, she wants to return to the hall and the dim lighting (it’s so bright in here, nothing like out there, walls lined with windows and white light shocking not bathing everything, a glass room, she thinks, this is a room made of glass and there is no floor), but she cannot remember the way. The number would have meaning. The number would mean something. It wouldn’t just be his birthday and it wouldn’t be a lucky number - it’d be something.
Ariadne wonders if it would be the same number that the die tells when he rolls it, when it hits the desk back at the warehouse, his hand shielding the white dots on the red.
“I like to watch,” he tells her, a nod of his head toward the window and he shakes the ice in his glass.
16.
Sometimes in his dreams they are nowhere - there is no other word for it. No shape to anything, no walls. She would say they were floating in space if it wasn’t for the over abundance of all that white light.
17.
“I can show you what I imagine you as,” he told her once. It was an abrupt statement, the sort with no discernible context to couch its arrival in.
Ariadne thinks she had been afraid. She had been so afraid. It almost felt baseless, this fear, almost a fear of herself, a fear of him, what he thought of her. Maybe it was a fear greater than that, a fear that they were meddling with things beyond their might, and not for the first time she thought of Cobb.
“Don’t you dare,” she warned. She wanted to wake up. It was with a start, she realized they already were - that this was the cafe she frequented, this was always the cafe, this was Paris, she lived here, he did not, and he had paid for her cappuccino. There was no dreaming, not now, and her fingers fumbled over the head of the chess piece buried in her right pocket, harsh edge poking at her thigh.
“You’re not curious?” he asked, and it was the worst thing he could ask her. Of course she was curious. Only the curious would flock to their line of work, only they would want to dig into the mind of another, want to see what was under the rug, at the back of the closet behind the photographs and mementos and meaningless knick knacks, bric-a-brac.
“Are you?” she asked, the question like a bullet, an obvious gesture of self-defense and Arthur’s face cracked in a knowing grin.
“Always.”
18.
There is a scar on the back of her heel from when she was eleven. She was helping to paint the outside of the house, a cornflower blue that has dramatically faded over the years, and she missed a step on the ladder’s rung and cut the thin skin open on the metal. Her shoe had filled with blood, soaked the hem of her white sock, and all that remains now is a thin white line.
She does not show it to him. He finds it on his own.
“Don’t tell me,” he says, and he traces the line with the ridge of his fingernail. “Let me guess.”
She gives him three tries and he fails each time (bicycle? he asks, and she shakes her head, and he nips at her ankle; tragic trampoline mishap? he tries, and she chuckles, his mouth at her knee, his tongue laving the indent of bone and flesh; seashell on the beach? and she moans no, his lips at her inner thigh, and he stops guessing then, and she doesn’t tell him, just as he asked).
The room heats with the both of them inside, an almost unbearable dry heat, and there is nothing outside the window but brown and dirt and the desert twilight sun.
She wakes to the warehouse, his heavy breath beside her.
“A ladder,” Arthur says from next to her, and when she turns her head he is staring directly at her.
19.
They meet in dreams, much as all lovers wish it was possible to achieve.
Neither of them dreams often of the beach. It is near impossible enough as it is to imagine a man like Arthur out of a suit, hair mussed, relaxed at last, the taut string that seemingly holds his entire tense frame upright cut. He is a man who belongs to the city, a place with damp streets and dark buildings and ladies with opened black umbrellas.
For her own peace or sanity, Ariadne retreats to a building of her own design. It is housed in a city unknown to anyone but her, the building impossibly high, the den she has created for herself juts off the highest floor with no visible means of support, a free fall for what appears miles down into gleaming urban decay. She has never been one to fear heights, and this is a fact that holds true up here. Here she can sit, she can dream (ironic, yes?) at the edge of nothing and everything, a girl with her head literally in the clouds.
It is on a Tuesday, a perfectly reasonable and empty day of the week, when she notices that three of the streets below her are covered in sand.
20.
The odd jobs continue. They stick to European rail lines, the occasional job on a Japanese airline, the really strange job on a British ocean liner. There are no real surprises. Pin numbers and bank accounts, encryption codes, and on the less technological side, secret lovers to be found out and secret lovers to be hidden, their jobs more akin to a Dashiell Hammett noir detective agency, forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.
“This is all,” Ariadne says and the considers her next words carefully, “almost too easy.
“Still waiting to see what makes the other shoe drop, eh?” Eames says.
“Gravity,” Arthur deadpans.
21.
She nearly scalds her hand on the hot, dirty dishwater sloshing in the sink’s basin. She tears her hand away quickly, water splashing too warm against the front of her shirt, and she backs away from the kitchen sink, a quiet curse under her breath.
“You have a nice place,” Arthur says behind her. Ariadne offers a quick glance over her shoulder, half a smile.
“It does the job,” she says, the statement empty.
“Nah,” he says, and she knows he is shaking his head even though she can’t see it. She scrubs at the dirty pan in the sink, tries to ignore the initial heated sting to her knuckles, the stained skin of her hands (there is black ink along the side of her hand, there is always black ink rubbed into the insides of the index and middle fingers of her right hand, black smears across graph paper). Bloated onions and peppers float in the dishwater and her kitchen still reeks of garlic and the onions, an unused stack of cold tortillas on the countertop. “Someone like you - you’re going to go beyond simple utility. Boring, I should say. I mean, you’re always choosing Paris.”
She knows what he means, what he’s almost accusing her of - so bourgeoise, he had said, inside her dream, a street in Paris and then a parlor, never visited, but rather, invented, and there they sat on velvet and his thigh was hot against her own and his fingers traced the inside of her wrist with such concentration she wondered if there was something there, or if, instead, he was placing something there. She snorts inelegantly, a strand of hair catching in her eyes, and she swats at it, a wet hand, and then it’s his hand, dry and cool, pushing her hair behind her ear.
“Need someone to dry those?” he asks, voice too close to her ear, her face, and she tries not to react.
“If you’re offering,” she says.
Later he kisses her, he kisses her first, a firm hand under her chin and she kisses him back, a quiet noise from the base of her throat, and he likes that. A hand slides under her shirt to small of her back, and it feels, it feels like nothing. Her mouth moves over his once more, the heat of his hand against her skin, but she wants more. She pulls back from him, and he leans forward, as though to chase her.
“How did we get here?” she asks then, and his eyes narrow.
“You mean metaphorically? Or literally?”
She understands it then. She can’t remember what they ate for dinner. She has no idea what time of day it is, but she knows it must be approaching late - the light entering through the parted curtains has an almost purple cast, it must be evening. She knows they ate something with peppers and onions and garlic, maybe tortillas, based solely on the evidence left behind (the evidence planted) for her to clean. And she gets it then, too: there was no before. There won’t be an after.
“This is a dream,” she says. The disappointment that accompanies the statement is strong, stronger than she expected.
“Okay,” he says, and then she knows for sure.
“You’re not really him,” she whispers along his jaw, and his silence serves as an affirmation.
She kisses him anyway, and he kisses her back.
(She thinks he says, "I'm here," but she swallows it whole).
22.
He kisses her in Paris, the sacrilege ripe on both their tongues.
In the dreams, she realizes now, his mouth never tasted of anything. They would kiss, a simulacrum of what she believed a kiss should feel like, an extrapolation of that small, chaste offering of his from the beginning and she was lying without ever fully realizing it. He kisses her in Paris. He kisses her in Paris and she thinks he has an unhealthy appetite for irony or blasphemy, but maybe she does too.
Their job is to invade the dreams of others.
He kisses her full on the mouth on a street corner, the lamplight casting hollow shadows on his face, making him look more anonymous and older than he actually is. When he kisses her, similar to the dream, his mouth does not taste like anything in particular, but not because it is vague, not because she cannot imagine that detail. He tastes like something without name - a man, like thick muscle, almost a copper tang to him, and Ariadne finds herself greedy, hungry for more of this, and opens her mouth wide.
23.
She does most of her practice runs on her own these days. An implicit and unspoken trust has seemed to have situated itself among the three of them, and in particular, between Arthur and Ariadne. When Arthur asks her about the models she has created, when he wants to see the mazes she has drawn, what it is she is planning and how she thinks it will work, it is less a superior overlooking the work of someone lower on the totem pole, but a genuine curiosity and interest in her work.
She goes into the dream alone, their warehouse (smaller here, less available real estate in New York and the entire place reeks of fish) empty and abandoned and she settles down easily into the chair and closes her eyes.
They are in the desert again. There is a small hotel, wedged in a line of buildings, the windows boarded up and a small neon sign blinks VACANT, VACANT, an open invitation to the weary traveler. Arthur is in the black suit and there is a toothpick stuck between his teeth; he offers her a crooked smile when he sees her, a small pool of sweat collecting at the base of his throat.
“You’ve been waiting long?” she asks him, and her cheeks redden, whether from the evening sun or her own embarrassment for such a mindless question, she couldn’t say.
“Long enough,” he says tightly. He grabs her hand then and they take the three steps to the porch of the hotel (BED & BRE K ST, the sign reads). The woman behind the desk is missing teeth, her mouth a black cavity, and a tinny can-can plays on the record player behind her. Arthur doesn’t say anything and either does Ariadne, the woman just hands him an oversized key, a key that looks comically fake and Arthur nods his thanks, turns towards the stairs. There is a gun slid into the back of his pants, over his vest, and Ariadne sees the grip, the flash of suspenders, as he turns and the air from the fan catches his jacket.
He opens the door for her; she forgets to check the number outside. But it doesn’t matter, she thinks. It doesn’t matter that the floorboards creak as she steps to the bed, it doesn’t matter when he pulls her body down to his and he kisses her, something authoritative in the snap of his hands onto her upper arms, the limbs bony enough for his hands to encircle them completely and it makes her moan.
(It matters that the floorboards creak. It matters that the building is old and whines with the arrival of another).
Her hands are inside the collar of his shirt when the door opens.
“Arthur?” she says quietly. He stands in the doorway and she cannot make out the expression on his face. His cheeks are flushed, and she cannot bring herself to imagine the scene through his eyes: Ariadne sprawled out across his lap, across her made-up version of himself, his hands on her body. She doesn't state the obvious: you followed me here.
He swallows. She can see the dip and bob of his throat from across the room. He shuts the door behind him.
“I like to watch,” he says in a quiet voice; the Arthur beneath her presses his hips to hers.
She fucks her projection of Arthur and he watches. Her hips move of their own accord, her hands tremble against skin that is not his, and he watches her. He watches her so carefully, his eyes leaving her face for seconds at a time, taking in the way she throws her leg over his, the way her hands slide into his hair. Ariadne could never explain why she does it. A challenge, perhaps. A near defiant need to prove something, more likely. She rides him and he watches, and she bites her bottom lip, screws her eyes shut as she comes.
When she wakes, when he wakes, she hurries from the room, her jacket bundled under her arm and her cheeks flushed. They don’t speak of this for a long time, though he finally tells her, his breath warm with scotch, his concept of personal space and proximity skewed by the same scotch on his breath, that he finds her projection of him fascinating -
“This is how you see me?” he asks, an obvious note of surprise there. She had not expected that from him; he usually disguises himself better.
When he asks her again if she’d like to meet her other self (such as he calls her), she snaps a little. “Why?” she asks, temper too quick, “You like her better?”
The frown is sudden on his face.
“Are you paying attention at all?” he asks her, and that’s the last they speak of it.
24.
“How long have you been in Paris?” he will ask her. Ariadne’s fingers will still be on the black rook and she will fix him with a withering stare. Arthur will laugh.
“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to. It’s annoying,” she will say, her tone a little too haughty, but Arthur will laugh anyway.
“Fair point,” he will say, and she will take her hand off the rook.
25.
In her dream, there is a loft in New York City she has never seen before. This is a New York she has never seen before. If she had to name it, she thinks she’d call it New York At The End Of The World, because that’s how it feels, a modern yet destroyed city couched in sloping sand dunes. The roof is missing from the loft, just exposed beams stretched across the top, and then the sky. There are birds roosting in the eaves, like this is a fallen cathedral and they are the new parishioners, she the keeper of this house, this wrecked house. The furniture is destroyed and the wood floor scuffed. There is a mattress in the center of the room and they both are lying on it. The sky is pink, threatening red. She can smell smoke. She can also smell him, and sweat, the both of them combined.
She can smell the sand, the desert, ash. They are still in the desert, she realizes with a start. Arthur’s body is sticky against her own, and she wants to tell him this, she wants to tell him that she understands where they are now, but just then his hands have come to encircle her neck, they are squeezing, Arthur is saying, “Shh, shhh,” and Ariadne had not realized she was crying. The last thing she hears is his apology, a tired and broken little thing, an “I’m so sorry,” edged out by a near desperate, “We can’t stay here,” and she wonders what he’ll do once she’s gone.
She thinks he’ll probably jump.
26.
There is a time when a job goes bad, a job goes real bad once. There’s probably a rule of thumb somewhere to never tangle with the Russians, but the promised pay was good, their travel expenses high, the rent steep, and as Eames always says, a flash of that goddamn poker chip: money talks.
The three of them go in together, but only Arthur and Ariadne go on to the next level.
Things go wrong in the easiest and most obvious of ways. Ariadne is shot in the leg, and for a moment that stretches far too long with too much blood and an unbelievable amount of pain, she cannot understand how this couldn’t be real, how this, the pain, her blood, the strained look on Arthur’s face, because she realizes now, she is shouting, she is afraid, so afraid -
she is screaming, she is yelling, “shoot me! shoot me!”
And he does. He cocks the gun first and he looks her in the eye and there’s nothing there. Maybe that’s what surprises her most; it’s not the sharp crack as the trigger is pulled and the sudden and mercifully brief blast of pain, not the sudden terror that maybe they have been wrong this entire time, and this is the real world, this here is real, and he has just killed you and then, then -
She wakes.
“Wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” Eames drawls. Ariadne smiles small, her face flushed in a cold sweat.
27.
- you wander down the hall, you take a step forward, and he is waiting for you - at the end of the hall he is waiting, and here he always waits, and if they say that patience is a virtue, and if he waits for you in dreams, you wonder, you wonder how that translates into reality, you wonder what that says about his subconscious, about the man he really is. He waits for you. You walk to him. And he looks at you, dispassionate dark eyes, eyes seemingly without depth, and at the same time, too much of it. He’s the shark in the tank, and you don’t know what that means, but you approach him. You come to him and you want to say a lot of things, you want to say I love you without knowing if you mean it. You want to say to him: I love you, I’ve come for you, let’s stay here for awhile, and you think that he will say: this has been a story always about love, but he won’t mean you. He won’t be speaking of you, because he knows, he has seen it, the wrong end of the telescope, the wrong, the right angle to glance at this. He saw Cobb and he saw Mal, and this is about love, he would say, but this is also about destruction. He’ll look at you with those dark eyes, the shark eyes, you call them, in this world and the next, and you will know, you will know in the same way that he knows this is a story about love, that there are a great many things he has taken and dropped, there are a great many things he has dropped down the well and into the river and he is still waiting for them to hit bottom. You come to him anyway.
28.
She dreams of the desert again. There is a coyote in the distance and evening is fast approaching, a dry wind kicking up the dust and she leans against the back of a pick-up truck. There’s a drum of gasoline in the bed of the truck and she’s got a book of matches in her hand.
She thinks she’s supposed to light one, and then drop it. She can smell the gas.
Arthur is there, dressed in a black suit. Like an undertaker, she thinks, and considers the matches in her hand. The dust has painted the bottom part of his trousers, a layer of reddish dust that smears when his fingers brush and beat at it, and he abandons the task with a small sneer on his face.
“We gonna do this our what, love?” Eames calls from behind her, and she turns quickly. Eames stumbles as he walks towards her, his hand fumbling to get his belt back through the appropriate loop, his fly down and then remedied. “Needed a whizz,” he says as explanation and waggles his eyebrows. Arthur is still standing in the middle of the road and Ariadne has yet to make a decisive move in either direction.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she says, and she realizes it is true. Everything feels intangible here in the desert, the road ahead shimmering in the oppressive evening heat.
29.
She sees his projection of herself by accident. It is on a job, they are working on a job, and then suddenly, inexplicably, there she is. It’s like looking into a mirror and getting back nothing you have given in return.
The figure that stands before her is more woman than girl, proud in a way Ariadne would never describe herself as. Her clothes are neat, but her hair is messy, messy in such a terrifyingly familiar way. Her hair sits the way it does after coming in from outside, the wind fighting with her and ultimately winning, a strand over her forehead and down into her eyes. The other woman pushes it away and smiles, a hint of shyness there, and yes, Ariadne thinks, that’s about right.
A construct who knows she is a construct. That’s right. Arthur would create her like that - knowing and almost feline, like himself, full of guile and tricks, and even though she is a product of his own subconscious, a merging of memory and desire, imagination, she can still find ways to trip him up, to trick him.
When Ariadne looks over her shoulder Arthur is there, a look of horror on his face that most likely matches her own, and is this how Cobb looked too? Is this what Cobb’s face looked like that first time, that very first time, back before he even met her, back before he knew her name or Fischer’s name, when inception was still a buried dirty word, a curse, an albatross around his outstretched neck? It’s the face of someone so used to control who has suddenly lost it.
“I don’t know what she’s doing here,” he says, voice tight, and the construct’s eyes have narrowed (oh god, her eyes have narrowed, and what has he done with her while he sleeps? what has he done with her when she’s not here to watch and not here to know? what has she done to him? he understood this first, he told her this first, but she wasn’t listening, she hadn’t noticed it as something strange when she should have - that’s a mistake, Cobb would tell her unkindly, but Cobb is out the game, Cobb fabricated a nightmare that consumed him, that bled through the lines of real and imagined, and that has to be what they are playing at here, her face in duplicate as it watches him).
After, they remain on the train. It stops somewhere over the German border - Bad Bentheim is called over the loudspeaker in three different languages - and Ariadne stares out the window. Arthur stares at her. She can feel it; she can catch the corner of his reflection in the window to her right.
“You knew that would happen,” she says quietly, her eyes still on the window, on the empty train tracks that stretch beyond that. Arthur does not comment. Ariadne closes her eyes, just for a moment, just a second, and then she turns to face him.
“What were you expecting me to learn?” she asks.
“Nothing,” he says, hollow and uncharacteristic, and maybe her estimation of him is wrong. It can’t be. He’s the one with the numbers and these days he’s the one calling the shots. He understands order and consequences, he was the first to fear Cobb, the first to fear Mal, and he knows, he knows what’s at stake.
The train begins to move.
30.
“The work is good?” This is what Cobb asks her first. “The work is good?” She thinks it’s a terrible first question, a terrible lead for a conversation. It’s the sort of question you ask an acquaintance at a dinner party, not that she has been to many dinner parties, real ones, at least, but she can imagine them. Maybe she is only an acquaintance to Cobb now. Maybe whatever bizarre dynamic they had cooked up in the recesses of his mind was limited to that space.
“The work is good,” she parrots back. Her voice sounds flat, even to her, and if Cobb notices, he doesn’t mention it. They lull into silence, not entirely companionable. She has not turned on any of the lamps in her flat and she stands at the darkened window, looks out at the city under her. New York City. Eames sang Frank Sinatra tunes during their shared cab ride, and Ariadne had smiled, silently at war with the inexplicable amount of dread growing within her.
“You keep it on you?” he asks then. “At all times? You keep it with you?” And she knows what he is asking, her fingers tracing the object as he speaks, but she finds his sudden fatherly concern more worrisome than comforting.
“Yeah,” she says, “Don’t worry. I got it.” Ariadne feels petulant now and presses her forehead against the window. The glass is cold or her face is heated, maybe both. She sighs.
“You guys will make a good team,” he says distractedly. In the background a small child shouts followed by another child’s yell, a deeper yet more feminine timbre to the voice.
“You sound busy,” Ariadne says quickly, at the same moment Cobb asks, “Was there something you wanted?” And she thinks there was. She really thinks there was something she wanted, but for the life of her she can’t think of what it was, how she could possibly phrase it. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind, she could say, but people don’t say that. She couldn’t say that to him; she can’t even say it to herself.
“No, I just,” she stumbles. “We’re back in the States. Figured I’d give you a call, see how the real world is treating you and all.”
“Don’t tell me where you are,” he says then, and she wasn’t going to. This was a mistake, she thinks. “I need to go see about my wife,” he says, and Ariadne balks, hopes it nothing more than a Freudian slip, but she hangs up all the same.
She is too afraid to ask what he means by that.
31.
They are in a large warehouse store, one of those home do-it-yourself outfits: riding lawnmowers at the front of the store next to gas grills, charcoal grills hidden behind them, rakes mounted on the wall next to shovels and spades, something almost macabre in the glint of metal against the red wall. To her right is a wall of paint chips, a diluted mini-rainbow, the stench of paint reaching her even from afar.
She turns left, and then she turns right.
Shower displays stretch for what looks like miles. Fake showers done up in white and beige and an awful shade of avocado green, enclosed on only three sides, the showerhead and the faucet clearly connected to nothing at all. She walks among them, empty porcelain and tile, her shoes echoing on the concrete floor.
In front of her is a tiger. It is a dream, she tells herself, a note of panic rising despite herself, it is a dream. it is -
- and then you are in a shower, a real shower, one with a glass door that slides shut and running water and as far as you know, there is not a line of similar yet non-identical model showers stretching to the right and left of you. This is your bathroom, your bathroom at home, you can recognize the faded flowers on the tile and the stale smell of used cleaning products and cheap lavender soap. Arthur butts his head against the side of your face, his hair wet yet still slicked back, his body warmed from the water, and from you, you imagine, he smells like the same lavender, and
Cobb was wrong. This is what you think. Cobb wanted to ascribe a linear pattern, a chronology, to dreams - he wanted to write a story, but that’s not how dreams work. That’s not how real dreams work, the sleeping dreams, the dreams that occur organically because you’re so damn tired, because your body has chosen sleep, not the needle. Maybe there are patterns. Maybe that was their responsibility, to find the patterns and make sense of them, but it’s not a straight line you travel and you know it. In a dream a man does not just walk into a bar - scratch that, a man does not just take a cab or take a train or drive himself, tip the valet, tip the cab driver and then walk into a bar - and walk up to another person, a man for a con, a woman for a fuck, and together they take the stairs, they take an elevator, each detail provided and rich - the feel of the bend of an elbow, the skin at the small of her back, the smell of the elevator, the number of steps it takes to reach the hotel room, the size of the bed, the size of the minibar and so on and so forth - no, no, you think. You cling to Arthur’s shoulders, his body wiry and lean, straining against yours. To you he feels an opaque version of himself, vague if only because your imagination does not know how to flesh him out in this particular situation. You don’t have enough resources for this. You don’t know if he is wiry and lean under those suits or just skinny (you think he has to be wiry and lean, you’ve seen the way he can move, the need for muscle and strength). You were in a warehouse store, there was a tiger, and now you are here, now you are home, you want it to be home, but the man with you is a stranger, the man with you isn’t real, and maybe the man is the tiger and you’ve brought the wild home with you -
32.
History repeats itself. This is a cliche lesson Cobb should have reiterated before he left: history repeats itself. It can repeat itself in such mundane, dull and obvious ways, manifest in the pattern of chance and consequences - if you play with fire you will get burnt.
They both are circling the table now. This house is real, she tells herself. The front porch sags under the weight of too much history, and at night Arthur hisses in her ear, “you wanted a place that was alive.” He says it like he’s punishing her, punishing the both of them, and for what she can’t understand, but she thinks they’ve earned it.
Nights in the desert are cold and brutal, brutal as the days that stretch with the rising sun until the baked earth around them becomes unnaturally bleak.
The first time they make love (and she wants to call it that, she doesn’t think any other term is apt, something wholly reverential and tender in the movement of him against her, him into her, any other phrase would be blasphemous) is in the desert. There is a full moon, the entire stretch of desert lit as though for a pagan ritual, her body pale and bright and his own tanned, his hands noticeably darker against her skin. And it is him, she thinks, not too far gone, not yet, fully aware that in New York there is a warehouse and inside this warehouse the two of them are asleep in uncomfortable chairs, that it was Arthur who put the needle in her arm, it was Arthur who asked, “are you ready?” that it is him who is murmuring in her ear small snippets of his own ad-lib poetry, his body blotting out the moon and the stars above them.
He hisses in her ear: you wanted a place that was alive.
33.
When they sleep together for the first time in the real world, it is a far less strange experience than she expected it would be.
It feels just as real as it had then - his cock the same weight and shape in her hand (but different, so different than her own projection, and maybe that’s what he meant when he asked her, “This is how you see me?” but she knows that wasn’t it, not it at all), and he fills her the same, their bodies stick in the same places where sweat pools and slicks.
The difference this time: the ache between her thighs is real, that place between her legs red and swollen and used, a physical reminder instead of just the mental, and she likes that. She likes the tired pull of muscle when she stands, hamstrings protesting, tailbone sore. The marks his hands leave around her hips and between her thighs last for days, and as for the small bite mark she leaves him with, just below his collarbone, easy to cover with a shirt and they both know this - she has no idea how long the bruise persists.
Her imagination can fill in that part.
(Under him she tells herself, this is real, this is real, this is ours, this is real. She listens for the sounds of the city outside her window, and they come to her, a base line, a rhythm, the current under the percussion of his hips against hers, the slap of sweat-stained skin on skin, the needy noises he culls from her, the multiple and unnecessary syllables he adds to her name as he buries his mouth into the crook of her neck, this is real, this is real. When she wakes she will need to wash the sheets and she will need to brush her teeth, wash between her legs and find the used condom he unceremoniously dropped on the floor after - dreams do not provide for any of this, a siren wails and a car horn blares, she thinks she can hear the distant beat of a helicopter, the rush of tires on rain slick streets. This is real, she tells his mouth, his cheek, her lips ghosting over his closed eyes, and he groans, long fingers and wide hands easily cradling her hips and her spine, closing over her breasts and her throat, and she never would have imagined the constellation of freckles across his back, she wouldn’t know his ribs are that visible beneath his skin, the anatomical mapping of muscle across his abdomen, but it’s all there, he is there, he is real and she is real, and she watched him cast that die three times when he thought she wasn’t looking, and maybe her fears are his fears too, so she tells him, she repeats herself, the words running together until it sounds like nonsense, until the entire concept is nonsense -
this is real. This is real).
34.
She is back at the beginning again. Arthur calls from far in the distance, somewhere in the green, and she wants to call back, but she doesn’t.
She thinks she will venture inside that maze, all that inviting green. She takes a step forward and thinks of New York. She takes another step and does not think of anything at all. The garden is peaceful, quiet. There is a couple sitting on a bench, their hands entwined and they do not notice her as she passes.
She reaches into her pocket.
She doesn’t dream much anymore.
35.
His mouth will be near cruel when he says, “Check.”
Ariadne will pause and consider Arthur, his crisp suit, the sweltering afternoon. She will think she has not been paying enough attention.
Her eyes will remain on his mouth.
36.
- he holds you by the hair against the glass, against that pane of what looks like open air, and yes, you are back in the glass room again, yes, you have left the white room, and you never thought he would dream like this, did you? this absence of color - everything white and light, and when it’s not that, it’s black, it’s dark, nothing like the hallway you traveled down to get to him, nothing like that hall you enter every time you enter his dreams, and you wonder if he placed that hall there for you - if he thought, Ariadne would like this, so he gave it to you, he created it for you, and you like the soft carpet under your feet and you like the dim lighting, ominous and warm all at once, the dark walls, the doors, the doors on either side, the doors that seem to never end, but you never open any of them - maybe he places them as a test and you have failed, maybe he placed them there as a test and you passed, able to curtail your own curiosity in the face of so much unknown, maybe bits and pieces of himself linger behind each and every door, but you only get the Arthur in the glass room. You get the Arthur at the end of the hall who takes you to the glass room, a metal spiral staircase that twists and rises in the center, but you never climb it. If you ever reach the top it’s because he placed you there and he wants you there, you think there will be more glass up there. He kisses you now and you are sure that means this is almost over. He kisses you and there is a city out there, a city out there lit up because you both willed it into being, daylight gone, the white is gone - the glass room is dark and empty and the window is cold against your bare back. This is his dream, you tell yourself, and open your mouth a little wider, this is his dream, you can come back from this, this is his dream, this is his -
37.
The chess piece will fall.
“Checkmate,” he will say and grin wide, boyish, suddenly young and a little too proud. Ariadne will smile as well, hold her hands up in defeat but she will have forgotten what had been at stake. The bishop will still stand untouched on the table.
Arthur will stand and she will follow him; he will remind her that he knows the city well. Their fingers may brush, and she will smile and so will he, both their faces hidden from one another. They will go left, they will go right.
He will realize he is lost. She will wonder how they will ever get back to the desert.
fin.
inception. in a town that does not exist, in a desert without a name, she will turn to him and say: “I took a nap and slept for years.” all he will say is: “I know.” (a collection of moments best left to the dreamers). ariadne; arthur/ariadne. rated r. 10,265 words. post-film.
notes: um, this thing is a beast. and for once not written for the kink meme, lol. vague spoilers within, and a flagrant disregard for things like chronology and being longwinded. consider this a WHAT SORT OF AWFUL THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO THEM NEXT? sort of fic, lol. this note is terrible. it's almost 4 AM. what is my life.
i see your face when i close my eyes
i see the muscles in your legs
from the way you always rise
to the occasion of catching things that fall
like the statuettes on pedestals i tend to build too tall
but i have navigated iceland
i’ve laid my claim on portugal
i have seen into the wasteland
oh the future, oh the future
(Dragon’s Lair, Sunset Rubdown)
you see, i take the parts that i remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what i say
or love me back.
(Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, Richard Siken)
1.
She wakes to a desert landscape. The land is flat, unforgiving, long and jagged cracks through it cataloging the earth’s rebellion. Against what, she doesn’t know. Time. Memory. The shape of things.
“You’re up,” Arthur says to her. He passes her a water bottle, warm to the touch and she chokes on it as she tries to swallow it down. Her throat aches.
“I hadn’t realized I slept,” she tells him.
His smile is distant. She studies his face, the small lines around his mouth, the tense fit of his jaw and the typically kind yet dark eyes. They don't look kind in this light. She thinks she has known him forever; he looks at her as though he feels the same.
“That happens,” he says quietly, almost sad.
And then he says: “I’ve been waiting awhile.”
The wind kicks up and Ariadne tries to finish the rest of the water.
2.
- you call these dreams a cage, and he laughs at you, he laughs with the sun in his eyes, a wall of glass at his back and you are finding it hard to look at him, you are finding you have to squint, and you are trying to tell him that you both have trapped yourselves here, that you are here, you are together, but he interrupts you, tells you: I don’t want to talk about this now. So you’re not going to talk about this now, but you want to. You want the light to shine a little less, you want to look at him and not have it hurt, and it’s beginning to sound like you want a lot of things. You always thought that’s what dreams were supposed to deliver you, but they haven’t, they’ve placed you here, in his head and his house, and that’s when you hear it, it sounds like running water, and -
3.
“I’ve been looking for you.” This will be the first thing he will say to her. Ariadne will look up, she will squint into the sun. Late afternoon, and the Parisian summer heat will be stifling; she will feel sweat slicking down her back, her shirt sticking to it as she shifts in her seat. Arthur will stand over her, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, black suit, black skinny tie and a pair of sunglasses. She will smile small at him and he will sit across from her.
“You any good?” he will ask and gesture with his head toward the table between them. Ariadne will shrug at this, noncommittal. It will be a dumb question. He will have seen her totem before, he should know at the least it implies a certain knowledge of the game. There will be a lot of things Arthur should know but he doesn’t, she will think.
Arthur will reach over and grip the small white pawn between his fingers before placing it two spaces forward. He will take off his sunglasses and stare openly at her.
“Your move,” he will say.
4.
They trained her first.
At the top of the maze he called to her:
“Your name is Ariadne. You’ll never get lost in here.” And she laughed, she laughed quietly under her breath and took a step forward, the green surrounding her.
She did not call anything back. She thought she should tell him that names dictate nothing, names are a label they throw on you, stick on you, try to make sense out of you. A million, trillion years ago there might have been a woman named Ariadne and she might have led some dude out of a maze (a labyrinth, she could hear Arthur’s correcting voice in her head), but that didn’t mean anything. It didn’t add up to much here.
Her mother had thought it a pretty name. There was nothing more to that story.
It was a story that feels like it belongs to a lifetime that came several before.
5.
The plane lands and they taxi down the runway. They all look dazed, a quiet and awestruck, freshly awakened expression on each of their faces. None of them says a word.
At the baggage claim, Arthur bumps her shoulder with his arm. His shirt sleeves are rolled, jacket and garment bag slung over his shoulder. When she looks up at his face he jerks his head toward the exit.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s share a cab.”
Ariadne nods and follows him out, a careful number of paces behind him, errant travelers intervening between them but she can still see him. He holds the cab door open for her, destroying whatever attempt at subterfuge they had been half-heartedly playing at. She swallows fast, a rising lump in her throat. She feels tired, she has felt tired, days and days on end of the most restless sleep imaginable - and beyond that, she feels intractably sad. She feels as though she has committed some crime of moral character. Robert Fischer, Jr. is a person, a human being, with thoughts and ideas of his own. And now, now he has an implanted thought not of his own creation, closure found with his dead father not through natural or organic or even genuine means.
The hotel they walk into looks too much like the one they just escaped. Ariadne does not say anything, and neither does Arthur, and when he gives two false names at the front desk she is almost surprised at his general ease for the fraudulent and illegal. There are two rooms, and Ariadne decides he is not as presumptuous as she might have first supposed, and smiles.
She never sees the inside of her room.
He invites her to his, and she follows. She flops down on the end of his bed and kicks off her shoes and if he is amused, she can’t see it, his back to her as he peruses the view from the window. When he turns to face her she feels everything stupid and seemingly inconsequential she felt as they left the airport bubbling up from her.
“I don’t think,” she starts and then she stops. She looks up from the hands in her lap and he is staring at her, face in profile, the illuminated, blackened window behind him. “I don’t think this job is right for me,” she finally says.
Arthur rubs at his jaw. His eyes are still fixed on her face; she feels uncomfortable and ducks her gaze back down at her lap, only to instantly raise her own eyes again, defiance and discomfort dueling within her.
“You’re good at it,” he says, but he does not say it like a compliment. “But you already know that,” he adds.
“I feel like I have done something,” and she pauses here, voice on the edge of cracking and she knows it. She pauses and she swallows quickly, her hands flat on her thighs. “Terrible.”
“Yeah,” Arthur drawls. His lips part in a wry smile. “I remember that.”
Ariadne ignores him. “I feel like I’ve taken something from this man he can never get back,” she says quietly. Arthur frowns.
“Like what?”
She meets his gaze. “A choice.”
6.
“It’s your subconscious,” he had said, the red die rolled between his fingers. The warehouse was cold that morning and Ariadne hugged her arms around herself. “If you’re not on an honest enough basis with yourself, God only knows what it will cook up.”
God, she had thought. What a funny concept.
Later she will realize she missed the point of what he said. But not until later, much later, a later that goes by another name: too late.
7.
Neither of them sleeps that night; a quiet and drained exhaustion settles in both of them but they remain awake. They drink from the small bottles of gin the minibar provides and take to the intimate, confessional style of conversation only alcohol can produce. They do not speak of Cobb, however, and they do not speak of dreams.
He tells her about the year during undergrad he spent studying in Paris, how he knows that city grid like the back of his hand. Ariadne stores this knowledge and attempts to think of possible future ways to trick him, a dreamscape Paris with twists and turns and streets he would never expect to be there. Her scheming does not go far, her head fuzzy and laden with drink, stress. She tells him about her favorite building, at least of the ones she has seen in the real world: the old governor’s mansion in South Carolina, a building now abandoned and a relic of old-style ostentation, gaudy in a near uplifting way. This fact draws a genuine and full-bodied laugh from Arthur, an unguarded glimmer of both surprise and pleasure. “Of all the possibilities,” he says, his head shaking side to side. His chair is turned to face her lazy sprawl across the end of the bed (his bed, this is his room), his elbows braced on his thighs, an empty glass tumbler grasped in both hands between his open legs. Ariadne shrugs, not as amused as Arthur and slightly self-conscious.
“I like a building with memory,” she tells him and his face slides back into that unreadable mask, though his eyes still gleam tired and bleary.
“You like a living building,” he says, not a query, and Ariadne thinks there is judgment rich in his tone. She thinks then of his constructed dreams, her training ground, the lead-in for Fischer’s subconscious - all that careful planning, the clean lines and the flat surfaces - she can see where they diverge. But maybe that’s not entirely true. If you know someone is coming over, you clean the house. You hide the things you do not wish for them to see, your embarrassing collection of DVDs, all the dust that has collected on the bureau or the coffee table, that souvenir collection of shot glasses that made sense several margaritas in, the sports bra, the running clothes - you hide the dirt, you push the skeletons further into the closet and invite the guest inside. She is sure the subconscious is no different. A different house, a different set of keys and a different set of skeletons manifest in different, more subtle yet more horrifying ways.
She doesn’t answer him and he doesn’t say anything further. They sit in an uncomfortable silence until Arthur rises to his feet and fetches two more small bottles from the minibar. He tosses one to her with a small smirk as she catches it, and just as swiftly the former pattern of their conversation resumes itself as he settles back into his chair.
He tells her that he is getting old, that he’ll be turning thirty before the year is out. He pulls a face of mock self-deprecation, and Ariadne knows he is faking it if only because it is clear he is the sort of man who believes age can be worn with the same care and grace as a fine suit. She feeds into what he said anyway. “Age is a distinguishing trait in men,” she says, “embrace it and be thankful you’re not a member of the fairer sex.”
He laughs at that, and starts rambling off a list of names, Katharine Hepburn, Catherine Deneuve, another Catherine or Katherine thrown in for good measure, women he states only got finer with age. Ariadne teases him, accuses him of having a cougar complex. “No Lolitas for you then, huh?” she says, and she meant it as a joke. She thinks he knows that, but the look he levels her with is lacking humor despite the small smile still on his face, more from the gin than from her. His eyes are dark, but so is the room. She isn’t a Lolita, she hadn’t meant the comment as a coquettish come-on, but she feels like in its failed delivery that’s what it now sounds like. Their eyes stay locked for a moment too long and the room is warm. Arthur’s sleeves are rolled to his elbows, the twin cufflinks glinting under the lamp at the bedside table, and Ariadne is barefoot, her jacket off, shirt untucked and legs tucked under her, demure and girlish in her positioning. When Arthur clears his throat she is grateful.
“I don’t know any Lolitas,” he says, and that, she thinks, is how you properly deliver a line.
8.
On her third move she will take Arthur’s knight. He will groan, his face amused.
“Should have seen that coming, right?” he will say.
In his next move he will capture her pawn.
9.
Her father taught her to play chess at an early age, perhaps too early.
But maybe that’s how it’s always been, maybe that set the rest into motion: too soon and too young, always racing for that train that has yet to leave the platform.
She knows she will never build houses or buildings the way the rest of her class will. They will wander out into the world with their blueprints rolled under their arms and a plan congealing inside their heads. Ariadne will be the thing inside their heads. Maybe not their heads, but someone’s head. She’ll build skyscrapers with the snap and impulse of imagination, she’ll turn metal like water and make it flow through a city. She will be the god they all aspire to be, but the problem, the rub, is that no one else will know it but her. No one but the others invited to this party, and even then, it will be but a surreal memory.
She knows she won’t be like them, because how can there be that same satisfaction? She has seen the impossible, and to return, to return to this - steel girders and physics equations, this cannot intersect with that, gravity will not allow for that to stand - she does not know how you do that. She doesn’t know how Cobb did it, she knows Mal couldn’t do it (you plant the idea, and then you let them convince themselves), and she wonders after Saito as well. He fell asleep on an airplane, somewhere over the ocean, and he awoke an old man.
So Ariadne will not build houses, she will never build a bank, a corporate office building. She’ll finger the dogeared copy of The Fountainhead that sits always on the edge of her bookshelf, ready for the taking, and maybe she’ll laugh a little at Howard Roark after a couple pages, maybe she’ll commiserate: no room for dreamers in this world of ours. Ariadne won’t apply for an internship, she’ll continue to work with Arthur and with Eames, building everything out of nothing. Her classmates will have their brick and mortar, iron and steel and stone, and she’ll take the intangible.
The thought makes her sad. She can’t decide if it’s for them or for herself.
10.
In the morning they return to the airport. They both linger in front of the departures list, a bloated bank account and a new list of options.
“Well,” she says, “in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably tell you I’m planning on heading back to school.”
His face betrays nothing. “I figured you might.”
The part he was tactful enough not to say: You’ll be back. They all come back.
She comes back. Paris felt like half a memory, a place remembered wrong.
“Go ahead,” she tells him. “Lord your victory over me.”
Arthur only shakes his head, a small smile on closed lips. They are back in a hotel room again. He never turned the light on in his hotel room and a silver briefcase rests on the bed, a small suitcase on the floor.
“It’s all a little too inevitable and obvious for my tastes. I’ll save my bragging rights for later triumphs.” His smile grows this time and he stands there, stoop-shouldered yet lean from across the room, his profile lit by the lights of Manhattan. Ariadne tries to look put out, but she fails, her own smile creeping over her lips and she turns her head away, exhales in a mock angry huff, and Arthur clears his throat.
“What I’d rather talk about,” he says, “is how you knew where to find me.”
11.
The three of them - Arthur and Ariadne and Eames - team up, they start their own outfit with the occasional advisory call to a retired Cobb. The feel of the jobs they take on is completely different than before. That maddening desperation to complete the job, the danger of multiple levels, more than mere corporate enterprise or capital greed at stake - all of that is gone. She still gets to stretch her imagination, she still gets more of whatever it is she thinks she craves, and the three of them fall into an easy entropy all their own.
“Watch that one,” Eames says to her one day. A shipment has arrived and Arthur studies the package before opening it, a penknife drawn from his pocket and then shearing the mailing tape. “More wolf than dog. Hell of a damn bite, too,” and then he laughs.
12.
They are in a diner.
Arthur lifts a white mug to his lips and then pauses. “Your subconscious is wildly pedestrian,” he says. “I expected more.”
“Oh, fuck off. Not all of us dream of electric sheep.” He arches an eyebrow and finally takes a sip of his coffee. He grimaces.
“You been here before?” he asks her.
“Well,” she says, “considering this place isn’t real, being a dream and all, I’ll have to say no.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he says, but his voice is good-humored enough. “I mean, is this a real place?”
Ariadne shakes her head. It’s true: it isn’t. The diner is small, its own ecosystem seemingly contained in the small building - a smog of grease and the smell of bacon, the bad coffee in front of her, a stain at the back of the table next to a small jukebox mounted on the wall. They are in the desert, somewhere out west, a square of black asphalt just outside the front door cooking in the sun and amidst an entire stretch of sand, one stripe of black road disappearing into the horizon.
“No,” she says. “it isn’t.”
13.
“You think they got lonely?” she asked Arthur once.
He frowned slightly over the rim of his coffee cup. The model she was building sat half-finished and Arthur tore his gaze from it to look at her. “Who?”
She shrugged a little, the large warehouse suddenly a little too stuffy and a little too small, the way all awkward moments shape and shrink the space that houses them. “Cobb and Mal,” she said quickly. “They were there - they were there for so long. You’d have to get lonely, right?”
Arthur looked at her, a strange small grin on his lips. He looked at her like he understood but like she had a lot to learn. Ariadne found she did not like that.
14.
- he presses two fingers against and then in you, there is a thin layer of water inching its way across the bathroom floor, white floor, white walls, a white ceiling, and when your neck snaps back, your skull bangs against the wall, your breath echoes in the small room, there is no door, but the water seeps in, “don’t come,” he says, “don’t you dare come,” Arthur says -
15.
Arthur dreams in hallways that never end. Sleek bare walls and carpeted floors, she thinks it is a hotel, or maybe an apartment complex. There are numbered doors on either side, art deco almost in their finishes, and the lighting is dim, the lighting reminds her of the hotel of the first job, and there is a nervous jolt in the pit of her stomach.
He drinks from a glass of scotch, his room entirely too neat, and she forgot to look at the number on the door. She wants to leave the room, she wants to return to the hall and the dim lighting (it’s so bright in here, nothing like out there, walls lined with windows and white light shocking not bathing everything, a glass room, she thinks, this is a room made of glass and there is no floor), but she cannot remember the way. The number would have meaning. The number would mean something. It wouldn’t just be his birthday and it wouldn’t be a lucky number - it’d be something.
Ariadne wonders if it would be the same number that the die tells when he rolls it, when it hits the desk back at the warehouse, his hand shielding the white dots on the red.
“I like to watch,” he tells her, a nod of his head toward the window and he shakes the ice in his glass.
16.
Sometimes in his dreams they are nowhere - there is no other word for it. No shape to anything, no walls. She would say they were floating in space if it wasn’t for the over abundance of all that white light.
17.
“I can show you what I imagine you as,” he told her once. It was an abrupt statement, the sort with no discernible context to couch its arrival in.
Ariadne thinks she had been afraid. She had been so afraid. It almost felt baseless, this fear, almost a fear of herself, a fear of him, what he thought of her. Maybe it was a fear greater than that, a fear that they were meddling with things beyond their might, and not for the first time she thought of Cobb.
“Don’t you dare,” she warned. She wanted to wake up. It was with a start, she realized they already were - that this was the cafe she frequented, this was always the cafe, this was Paris, she lived here, he did not, and he had paid for her cappuccino. There was no dreaming, not now, and her fingers fumbled over the head of the chess piece buried in her right pocket, harsh edge poking at her thigh.
“You’re not curious?” he asked, and it was the worst thing he could ask her. Of course she was curious. Only the curious would flock to their line of work, only they would want to dig into the mind of another, want to see what was under the rug, at the back of the closet behind the photographs and mementos and meaningless knick knacks, bric-a-brac.
“Are you?” she asked, the question like a bullet, an obvious gesture of self-defense and Arthur’s face cracked in a knowing grin.
“Always.”
18.
There is a scar on the back of her heel from when she was eleven. She was helping to paint the outside of the house, a cornflower blue that has dramatically faded over the years, and she missed a step on the ladder’s rung and cut the thin skin open on the metal. Her shoe had filled with blood, soaked the hem of her white sock, and all that remains now is a thin white line.
She does not show it to him. He finds it on his own.
“Don’t tell me,” he says, and he traces the line with the ridge of his fingernail. “Let me guess.”
She gives him three tries and he fails each time (bicycle? he asks, and she shakes her head, and he nips at her ankle; tragic trampoline mishap? he tries, and she chuckles, his mouth at her knee, his tongue laving the indent of bone and flesh; seashell on the beach? and she moans no, his lips at her inner thigh, and he stops guessing then, and she doesn’t tell him, just as he asked).
The room heats with the both of them inside, an almost unbearable dry heat, and there is nothing outside the window but brown and dirt and the desert twilight sun.
She wakes to the warehouse, his heavy breath beside her.
“A ladder,” Arthur says from next to her, and when she turns her head he is staring directly at her.
19.
They meet in dreams, much as all lovers wish it was possible to achieve.
Neither of them dreams often of the beach. It is near impossible enough as it is to imagine a man like Arthur out of a suit, hair mussed, relaxed at last, the taut string that seemingly holds his entire tense frame upright cut. He is a man who belongs to the city, a place with damp streets and dark buildings and ladies with opened black umbrellas.
For her own peace or sanity, Ariadne retreats to a building of her own design. It is housed in a city unknown to anyone but her, the building impossibly high, the den she has created for herself juts off the highest floor with no visible means of support, a free fall for what appears miles down into gleaming urban decay. She has never been one to fear heights, and this is a fact that holds true up here. Here she can sit, she can dream (ironic, yes?) at the edge of nothing and everything, a girl with her head literally in the clouds.
It is on a Tuesday, a perfectly reasonable and empty day of the week, when she notices that three of the streets below her are covered in sand.
20.
The odd jobs continue. They stick to European rail lines, the occasional job on a Japanese airline, the really strange job on a British ocean liner. There are no real surprises. Pin numbers and bank accounts, encryption codes, and on the less technological side, secret lovers to be found out and secret lovers to be hidden, their jobs more akin to a Dashiell Hammett noir detective agency, forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.
“This is all,” Ariadne says and the considers her next words carefully, “almost too easy.
“Still waiting to see what makes the other shoe drop, eh?” Eames says.
“Gravity,” Arthur deadpans.
21.
She nearly scalds her hand on the hot, dirty dishwater sloshing in the sink’s basin. She tears her hand away quickly, water splashing too warm against the front of her shirt, and she backs away from the kitchen sink, a quiet curse under her breath.
“You have a nice place,” Arthur says behind her. Ariadne offers a quick glance over her shoulder, half a smile.
“It does the job,” she says, the statement empty.
“Nah,” he says, and she knows he is shaking his head even though she can’t see it. She scrubs at the dirty pan in the sink, tries to ignore the initial heated sting to her knuckles, the stained skin of her hands (there is black ink along the side of her hand, there is always black ink rubbed into the insides of the index and middle fingers of her right hand, black smears across graph paper). Bloated onions and peppers float in the dishwater and her kitchen still reeks of garlic and the onions, an unused stack of cold tortillas on the countertop. “Someone like you - you’re going to go beyond simple utility. Boring, I should say. I mean, you’re always choosing Paris.”
She knows what he means, what he’s almost accusing her of - so bourgeoise, he had said, inside her dream, a street in Paris and then a parlor, never visited, but rather, invented, and there they sat on velvet and his thigh was hot against her own and his fingers traced the inside of her wrist with such concentration she wondered if there was something there, or if, instead, he was placing something there. She snorts inelegantly, a strand of hair catching in her eyes, and she swats at it, a wet hand, and then it’s his hand, dry and cool, pushing her hair behind her ear.
“Need someone to dry those?” he asks, voice too close to her ear, her face, and she tries not to react.
“If you’re offering,” she says.
Later he kisses her, he kisses her first, a firm hand under her chin and she kisses him back, a quiet noise from the base of her throat, and he likes that. A hand slides under her shirt to small of her back, and it feels, it feels like nothing. Her mouth moves over his once more, the heat of his hand against her skin, but she wants more. She pulls back from him, and he leans forward, as though to chase her.
“How did we get here?” she asks then, and his eyes narrow.
“You mean metaphorically? Or literally?”
She understands it then. She can’t remember what they ate for dinner. She has no idea what time of day it is, but she knows it must be approaching late - the light entering through the parted curtains has an almost purple cast, it must be evening. She knows they ate something with peppers and onions and garlic, maybe tortillas, based solely on the evidence left behind (the evidence planted) for her to clean. And she gets it then, too: there was no before. There won’t be an after.
“This is a dream,” she says. The disappointment that accompanies the statement is strong, stronger than she expected.
“Okay,” he says, and then she knows for sure.
“You’re not really him,” she whispers along his jaw, and his silence serves as an affirmation.
She kisses him anyway, and he kisses her back.
(She thinks he says, "I'm here," but she swallows it whole).
22.
He kisses her in Paris, the sacrilege ripe on both their tongues.
In the dreams, she realizes now, his mouth never tasted of anything. They would kiss, a simulacrum of what she believed a kiss should feel like, an extrapolation of that small, chaste offering of his from the beginning and she was lying without ever fully realizing it. He kisses her in Paris. He kisses her in Paris and she thinks he has an unhealthy appetite for irony or blasphemy, but maybe she does too.
Their job is to invade the dreams of others.
He kisses her full on the mouth on a street corner, the lamplight casting hollow shadows on his face, making him look more anonymous and older than he actually is. When he kisses her, similar to the dream, his mouth does not taste like anything in particular, but not because it is vague, not because she cannot imagine that detail. He tastes like something without name - a man, like thick muscle, almost a copper tang to him, and Ariadne finds herself greedy, hungry for more of this, and opens her mouth wide.
23.
She does most of her practice runs on her own these days. An implicit and unspoken trust has seemed to have situated itself among the three of them, and in particular, between Arthur and Ariadne. When Arthur asks her about the models she has created, when he wants to see the mazes she has drawn, what it is she is planning and how she thinks it will work, it is less a superior overlooking the work of someone lower on the totem pole, but a genuine curiosity and interest in her work.
She goes into the dream alone, their warehouse (smaller here, less available real estate in New York and the entire place reeks of fish) empty and abandoned and she settles down easily into the chair and closes her eyes.
They are in the desert again. There is a small hotel, wedged in a line of buildings, the windows boarded up and a small neon sign blinks VACANT, VACANT, an open invitation to the weary traveler. Arthur is in the black suit and there is a toothpick stuck between his teeth; he offers her a crooked smile when he sees her, a small pool of sweat collecting at the base of his throat.
“You’ve been waiting long?” she asks him, and her cheeks redden, whether from the evening sun or her own embarrassment for such a mindless question, she couldn’t say.
“Long enough,” he says tightly. He grabs her hand then and they take the three steps to the porch of the hotel (BED & BRE K ST, the sign reads). The woman behind the desk is missing teeth, her mouth a black cavity, and a tinny can-can plays on the record player behind her. Arthur doesn’t say anything and either does Ariadne, the woman just hands him an oversized key, a key that looks comically fake and Arthur nods his thanks, turns towards the stairs. There is a gun slid into the back of his pants, over his vest, and Ariadne sees the grip, the flash of suspenders, as he turns and the air from the fan catches his jacket.
He opens the door for her; she forgets to check the number outside. But it doesn’t matter, she thinks. It doesn’t matter that the floorboards creak as she steps to the bed, it doesn’t matter when he pulls her body down to his and he kisses her, something authoritative in the snap of his hands onto her upper arms, the limbs bony enough for his hands to encircle them completely and it makes her moan.
(It matters that the floorboards creak. It matters that the building is old and whines with the arrival of another).
Her hands are inside the collar of his shirt when the door opens.
“Arthur?” she says quietly. He stands in the doorway and she cannot make out the expression on his face. His cheeks are flushed, and she cannot bring herself to imagine the scene through his eyes: Ariadne sprawled out across his lap, across her made-up version of himself, his hands on her body. She doesn't state the obvious: you followed me here.
He swallows. She can see the dip and bob of his throat from across the room. He shuts the door behind him.
“I like to watch,” he says in a quiet voice; the Arthur beneath her presses his hips to hers.
She fucks her projection of Arthur and he watches. Her hips move of their own accord, her hands tremble against skin that is not his, and he watches her. He watches her so carefully, his eyes leaving her face for seconds at a time, taking in the way she throws her leg over his, the way her hands slide into his hair. Ariadne could never explain why she does it. A challenge, perhaps. A near defiant need to prove something, more likely. She rides him and he watches, and she bites her bottom lip, screws her eyes shut as she comes.
When she wakes, when he wakes, she hurries from the room, her jacket bundled under her arm and her cheeks flushed. They don’t speak of this for a long time, though he finally tells her, his breath warm with scotch, his concept of personal space and proximity skewed by the same scotch on his breath, that he finds her projection of him fascinating -
“This is how you see me?” he asks, an obvious note of surprise there. She had not expected that from him; he usually disguises himself better.
When he asks her again if she’d like to meet her other self (such as he calls her), she snaps a little. “Why?” she asks, temper too quick, “You like her better?”
The frown is sudden on his face.
“Are you paying attention at all?” he asks her, and that’s the last they speak of it.
24.
“How long have you been in Paris?” he will ask her. Ariadne’s fingers will still be on the black rook and she will fix him with a withering stare. Arthur will laugh.
“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to. It’s annoying,” she will say, her tone a little too haughty, but Arthur will laugh anyway.
“Fair point,” he will say, and she will take her hand off the rook.
25.
In her dream, there is a loft in New York City she has never seen before. This is a New York she has never seen before. If she had to name it, she thinks she’d call it New York At The End Of The World, because that’s how it feels, a modern yet destroyed city couched in sloping sand dunes. The roof is missing from the loft, just exposed beams stretched across the top, and then the sky. There are birds roosting in the eaves, like this is a fallen cathedral and they are the new parishioners, she the keeper of this house, this wrecked house. The furniture is destroyed and the wood floor scuffed. There is a mattress in the center of the room and they both are lying on it. The sky is pink, threatening red. She can smell smoke. She can also smell him, and sweat, the both of them combined.
She can smell the sand, the desert, ash. They are still in the desert, she realizes with a start. Arthur’s body is sticky against her own, and she wants to tell him this, she wants to tell him that she understands where they are now, but just then his hands have come to encircle her neck, they are squeezing, Arthur is saying, “Shh, shhh,” and Ariadne had not realized she was crying. The last thing she hears is his apology, a tired and broken little thing, an “I’m so sorry,” edged out by a near desperate, “We can’t stay here,” and she wonders what he’ll do once she’s gone.
She thinks he’ll probably jump.
26.
There is a time when a job goes bad, a job goes real bad once. There’s probably a rule of thumb somewhere to never tangle with the Russians, but the promised pay was good, their travel expenses high, the rent steep, and as Eames always says, a flash of that goddamn poker chip: money talks.
The three of them go in together, but only Arthur and Ariadne go on to the next level.
Things go wrong in the easiest and most obvious of ways. Ariadne is shot in the leg, and for a moment that stretches far too long with too much blood and an unbelievable amount of pain, she cannot understand how this couldn’t be real, how this, the pain, her blood, the strained look on Arthur’s face, because she realizes now, she is shouting, she is afraid, so afraid -
she is screaming, she is yelling, “shoot me! shoot me!”
And he does. He cocks the gun first and he looks her in the eye and there’s nothing there. Maybe that’s what surprises her most; it’s not the sharp crack as the trigger is pulled and the sudden and mercifully brief blast of pain, not the sudden terror that maybe they have been wrong this entire time, and this is the real world, this here is real, and he has just killed you and then, then -
She wakes.
“Wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” Eames drawls. Ariadne smiles small, her face flushed in a cold sweat.
27.
- you wander down the hall, you take a step forward, and he is waiting for you - at the end of the hall he is waiting, and here he always waits, and if they say that patience is a virtue, and if he waits for you in dreams, you wonder, you wonder how that translates into reality, you wonder what that says about his subconscious, about the man he really is. He waits for you. You walk to him. And he looks at you, dispassionate dark eyes, eyes seemingly without depth, and at the same time, too much of it. He’s the shark in the tank, and you don’t know what that means, but you approach him. You come to him and you want to say a lot of things, you want to say I love you without knowing if you mean it. You want to say to him: I love you, I’ve come for you, let’s stay here for awhile, and you think that he will say: this has been a story always about love, but he won’t mean you. He won’t be speaking of you, because he knows, he has seen it, the wrong end of the telescope, the wrong, the right angle to glance at this. He saw Cobb and he saw Mal, and this is about love, he would say, but this is also about destruction. He’ll look at you with those dark eyes, the shark eyes, you call them, in this world and the next, and you will know, you will know in the same way that he knows this is a story about love, that there are a great many things he has taken and dropped, there are a great many things he has dropped down the well and into the river and he is still waiting for them to hit bottom. You come to him anyway.
28.
She dreams of the desert again. There is a coyote in the distance and evening is fast approaching, a dry wind kicking up the dust and she leans against the back of a pick-up truck. There’s a drum of gasoline in the bed of the truck and she’s got a book of matches in her hand.
She thinks she’s supposed to light one, and then drop it. She can smell the gas.
Arthur is there, dressed in a black suit. Like an undertaker, she thinks, and considers the matches in her hand. The dust has painted the bottom part of his trousers, a layer of reddish dust that smears when his fingers brush and beat at it, and he abandons the task with a small sneer on his face.
“We gonna do this our what, love?” Eames calls from behind her, and she turns quickly. Eames stumbles as he walks towards her, his hand fumbling to get his belt back through the appropriate loop, his fly down and then remedied. “Needed a whizz,” he says as explanation and waggles his eyebrows. Arthur is still standing in the middle of the road and Ariadne has yet to make a decisive move in either direction.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she says, and she realizes it is true. Everything feels intangible here in the desert, the road ahead shimmering in the oppressive evening heat.
29.
She sees his projection of herself by accident. It is on a job, they are working on a job, and then suddenly, inexplicably, there she is. It’s like looking into a mirror and getting back nothing you have given in return.
The figure that stands before her is more woman than girl, proud in a way Ariadne would never describe herself as. Her clothes are neat, but her hair is messy, messy in such a terrifyingly familiar way. Her hair sits the way it does after coming in from outside, the wind fighting with her and ultimately winning, a strand over her forehead and down into her eyes. The other woman pushes it away and smiles, a hint of shyness there, and yes, Ariadne thinks, that’s about right.
A construct who knows she is a construct. That’s right. Arthur would create her like that - knowing and almost feline, like himself, full of guile and tricks, and even though she is a product of his own subconscious, a merging of memory and desire, imagination, she can still find ways to trip him up, to trick him.
When Ariadne looks over her shoulder Arthur is there, a look of horror on his face that most likely matches her own, and is this how Cobb looked too? Is this what Cobb’s face looked like that first time, that very first time, back before he even met her, back before he knew her name or Fischer’s name, when inception was still a buried dirty word, a curse, an albatross around his outstretched neck? It’s the face of someone so used to control who has suddenly lost it.
“I don’t know what she’s doing here,” he says, voice tight, and the construct’s eyes have narrowed (oh god, her eyes have narrowed, and what has he done with her while he sleeps? what has he done with her when she’s not here to watch and not here to know? what has she done to him? he understood this first, he told her this first, but she wasn’t listening, she hadn’t noticed it as something strange when she should have - that’s a mistake, Cobb would tell her unkindly, but Cobb is out the game, Cobb fabricated a nightmare that consumed him, that bled through the lines of real and imagined, and that has to be what they are playing at here, her face in duplicate as it watches him).
After, they remain on the train. It stops somewhere over the German border - Bad Bentheim is called over the loudspeaker in three different languages - and Ariadne stares out the window. Arthur stares at her. She can feel it; she can catch the corner of his reflection in the window to her right.
“You knew that would happen,” she says quietly, her eyes still on the window, on the empty train tracks that stretch beyond that. Arthur does not comment. Ariadne closes her eyes, just for a moment, just a second, and then she turns to face him.
“What were you expecting me to learn?” she asks.
“Nothing,” he says, hollow and uncharacteristic, and maybe her estimation of him is wrong. It can’t be. He’s the one with the numbers and these days he’s the one calling the shots. He understands order and consequences, he was the first to fear Cobb, the first to fear Mal, and he knows, he knows what’s at stake.
The train begins to move.
30.
“The work is good?” This is what Cobb asks her first. “The work is good?” She thinks it’s a terrible first question, a terrible lead for a conversation. It’s the sort of question you ask an acquaintance at a dinner party, not that she has been to many dinner parties, real ones, at least, but she can imagine them. Maybe she is only an acquaintance to Cobb now. Maybe whatever bizarre dynamic they had cooked up in the recesses of his mind was limited to that space.
“The work is good,” she parrots back. Her voice sounds flat, even to her, and if Cobb notices, he doesn’t mention it. They lull into silence, not entirely companionable. She has not turned on any of the lamps in her flat and she stands at the darkened window, looks out at the city under her. New York City. Eames sang Frank Sinatra tunes during their shared cab ride, and Ariadne had smiled, silently at war with the inexplicable amount of dread growing within her.
“You keep it on you?” he asks then. “At all times? You keep it with you?” And she knows what he is asking, her fingers tracing the object as he speaks, but she finds his sudden fatherly concern more worrisome than comforting.
“Yeah,” she says, “Don’t worry. I got it.” Ariadne feels petulant now and presses her forehead against the window. The glass is cold or her face is heated, maybe both. She sighs.
“You guys will make a good team,” he says distractedly. In the background a small child shouts followed by another child’s yell, a deeper yet more feminine timbre to the voice.
“You sound busy,” Ariadne says quickly, at the same moment Cobb asks, “Was there something you wanted?” And she thinks there was. She really thinks there was something she wanted, but for the life of her she can’t think of what it was, how she could possibly phrase it. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind, she could say, but people don’t say that. She couldn’t say that to him; she can’t even say it to herself.
“No, I just,” she stumbles. “We’re back in the States. Figured I’d give you a call, see how the real world is treating you and all.”
“Don’t tell me where you are,” he says then, and she wasn’t going to. This was a mistake, she thinks. “I need to go see about my wife,” he says, and Ariadne balks, hopes it nothing more than a Freudian slip, but she hangs up all the same.
She is too afraid to ask what he means by that.
31.
They are in a large warehouse store, one of those home do-it-yourself outfits: riding lawnmowers at the front of the store next to gas grills, charcoal grills hidden behind them, rakes mounted on the wall next to shovels and spades, something almost macabre in the glint of metal against the red wall. To her right is a wall of paint chips, a diluted mini-rainbow, the stench of paint reaching her even from afar.
She turns left, and then she turns right.
Shower displays stretch for what looks like miles. Fake showers done up in white and beige and an awful shade of avocado green, enclosed on only three sides, the showerhead and the faucet clearly connected to nothing at all. She walks among them, empty porcelain and tile, her shoes echoing on the concrete floor.
In front of her is a tiger. It is a dream, she tells herself, a note of panic rising despite herself, it is a dream. it is -
- and then you are in a shower, a real shower, one with a glass door that slides shut and running water and as far as you know, there is not a line of similar yet non-identical model showers stretching to the right and left of you. This is your bathroom, your bathroom at home, you can recognize the faded flowers on the tile and the stale smell of used cleaning products and cheap lavender soap. Arthur butts his head against the side of your face, his hair wet yet still slicked back, his body warmed from the water, and from you, you imagine, he smells like the same lavender, and
Cobb was wrong. This is what you think. Cobb wanted to ascribe a linear pattern, a chronology, to dreams - he wanted to write a story, but that’s not how dreams work. That’s not how real dreams work, the sleeping dreams, the dreams that occur organically because you’re so damn tired, because your body has chosen sleep, not the needle. Maybe there are patterns. Maybe that was their responsibility, to find the patterns and make sense of them, but it’s not a straight line you travel and you know it. In a dream a man does not just walk into a bar - scratch that, a man does not just take a cab or take a train or drive himself, tip the valet, tip the cab driver and then walk into a bar - and walk up to another person, a man for a con, a woman for a fuck, and together they take the stairs, they take an elevator, each detail provided and rich - the feel of the bend of an elbow, the skin at the small of her back, the smell of the elevator, the number of steps it takes to reach the hotel room, the size of the bed, the size of the minibar and so on and so forth - no, no, you think. You cling to Arthur’s shoulders, his body wiry and lean, straining against yours. To you he feels an opaque version of himself, vague if only because your imagination does not know how to flesh him out in this particular situation. You don’t have enough resources for this. You don’t know if he is wiry and lean under those suits or just skinny (you think he has to be wiry and lean, you’ve seen the way he can move, the need for muscle and strength). You were in a warehouse store, there was a tiger, and now you are here, now you are home, you want it to be home, but the man with you is a stranger, the man with you isn’t real, and maybe the man is the tiger and you’ve brought the wild home with you -
32.
History repeats itself. This is a cliche lesson Cobb should have reiterated before he left: history repeats itself. It can repeat itself in such mundane, dull and obvious ways, manifest in the pattern of chance and consequences - if you play with fire you will get burnt.
They both are circling the table now. This house is real, she tells herself. The front porch sags under the weight of too much history, and at night Arthur hisses in her ear, “you wanted a place that was alive.” He says it like he’s punishing her, punishing the both of them, and for what she can’t understand, but she thinks they’ve earned it.
Nights in the desert are cold and brutal, brutal as the days that stretch with the rising sun until the baked earth around them becomes unnaturally bleak.
The first time they make love (and she wants to call it that, she doesn’t think any other term is apt, something wholly reverential and tender in the movement of him against her, him into her, any other phrase would be blasphemous) is in the desert. There is a full moon, the entire stretch of desert lit as though for a pagan ritual, her body pale and bright and his own tanned, his hands noticeably darker against her skin. And it is him, she thinks, not too far gone, not yet, fully aware that in New York there is a warehouse and inside this warehouse the two of them are asleep in uncomfortable chairs, that it was Arthur who put the needle in her arm, it was Arthur who asked, “are you ready?” that it is him who is murmuring in her ear small snippets of his own ad-lib poetry, his body blotting out the moon and the stars above them.
He hisses in her ear: you wanted a place that was alive.
33.
When they sleep together for the first time in the real world, it is a far less strange experience than she expected it would be.
It feels just as real as it had then - his cock the same weight and shape in her hand (but different, so different than her own projection, and maybe that’s what he meant when he asked her, “This is how you see me?” but she knows that wasn’t it, not it at all), and he fills her the same, their bodies stick in the same places where sweat pools and slicks.
The difference this time: the ache between her thighs is real, that place between her legs red and swollen and used, a physical reminder instead of just the mental, and she likes that. She likes the tired pull of muscle when she stands, hamstrings protesting, tailbone sore. The marks his hands leave around her hips and between her thighs last for days, and as for the small bite mark she leaves him with, just below his collarbone, easy to cover with a shirt and they both know this - she has no idea how long the bruise persists.
Her imagination can fill in that part.
(Under him she tells herself, this is real, this is real, this is ours, this is real. She listens for the sounds of the city outside her window, and they come to her, a base line, a rhythm, the current under the percussion of his hips against hers, the slap of sweat-stained skin on skin, the needy noises he culls from her, the multiple and unnecessary syllables he adds to her name as he buries his mouth into the crook of her neck, this is real, this is real. When she wakes she will need to wash the sheets and she will need to brush her teeth, wash between her legs and find the used condom he unceremoniously dropped on the floor after - dreams do not provide for any of this, a siren wails and a car horn blares, she thinks she can hear the distant beat of a helicopter, the rush of tires on rain slick streets. This is real, she tells his mouth, his cheek, her lips ghosting over his closed eyes, and he groans, long fingers and wide hands easily cradling her hips and her spine, closing over her breasts and her throat, and she never would have imagined the constellation of freckles across his back, she wouldn’t know his ribs are that visible beneath his skin, the anatomical mapping of muscle across his abdomen, but it’s all there, he is there, he is real and she is real, and she watched him cast that die three times when he thought she wasn’t looking, and maybe her fears are his fears too, so she tells him, she repeats herself, the words running together until it sounds like nonsense, until the entire concept is nonsense -
this is real. This is real).
34.
She is back at the beginning again. Arthur calls from far in the distance, somewhere in the green, and she wants to call back, but she doesn’t.
She thinks she will venture inside that maze, all that inviting green. She takes a step forward and thinks of New York. She takes another step and does not think of anything at all. The garden is peaceful, quiet. There is a couple sitting on a bench, their hands entwined and they do not notice her as she passes.
She reaches into her pocket.
She doesn’t dream much anymore.
35.
His mouth will be near cruel when he says, “Check.”
Ariadne will pause and consider Arthur, his crisp suit, the sweltering afternoon. She will think she has not been paying enough attention.
Her eyes will remain on his mouth.
36.
- he holds you by the hair against the glass, against that pane of what looks like open air, and yes, you are back in the glass room again, yes, you have left the white room, and you never thought he would dream like this, did you? this absence of color - everything white and light, and when it’s not that, it’s black, it’s dark, nothing like the hallway you traveled down to get to him, nothing like that hall you enter every time you enter his dreams, and you wonder if he placed that hall there for you - if he thought, Ariadne would like this, so he gave it to you, he created it for you, and you like the soft carpet under your feet and you like the dim lighting, ominous and warm all at once, the dark walls, the doors, the doors on either side, the doors that seem to never end, but you never open any of them - maybe he places them as a test and you have failed, maybe he placed them there as a test and you passed, able to curtail your own curiosity in the face of so much unknown, maybe bits and pieces of himself linger behind each and every door, but you only get the Arthur in the glass room. You get the Arthur at the end of the hall who takes you to the glass room, a metal spiral staircase that twists and rises in the center, but you never climb it. If you ever reach the top it’s because he placed you there and he wants you there, you think there will be more glass up there. He kisses you now and you are sure that means this is almost over. He kisses you and there is a city out there, a city out there lit up because you both willed it into being, daylight gone, the white is gone - the glass room is dark and empty and the window is cold against your bare back. This is his dream, you tell yourself, and open your mouth a little wider, this is his dream, you can come back from this, this is his dream, this is his -
37.
The chess piece will fall.
“Checkmate,” he will say and grin wide, boyish, suddenly young and a little too proud. Ariadne will smile as well, hold her hands up in defeat but she will have forgotten what had been at stake. The bishop will still stand untouched on the table.
Arthur will stand and she will follow him; he will remind her that he knows the city well. Their fingers may brush, and she will smile and so will he, both their faces hidden from one another. They will go left, they will go right.
He will realize he is lost. She will wonder how they will ever get back to the desert.
fin.