#21 - Kept an eye and an ear out, for faorism
Title: Kept an eye and an ear out
Recipient: faorism
Author: alostcorner
Rating: PG
Pairings: Ariadne/Yusuf
Word count: ~2300
Warnings: None
Notes: Thanks to my beta for the last minute job!
2012
Olsen, a former architect who’s old enough to be Yusuf’s father, murmurs a few confused phrases as Yusuf checks his IV line. Yusuf doesn’t pay attention to the individual words, but the fact that Olsen is sleep-talking at all gives him pause-
somniloquy can be a symptom of a growing tolerance to dream-sharing compounds. A good portion of his dreamers are already addicts when they first come to him, but watching an addiction grow under his care is always a little unnerving. Maybe that means he’s too soft for this business, but there it is.
It takes him several seconds to realise that Olsen has said Ariadne’s name, mumbled but unmistakable in and amongst the other words that are, to Yusuf, considerably less significant. Yusuf replays the memory as he moves on to the other dreamers, holding it gently and turning it over in his mind. Worry creeps down the back of his neck against his best efforts.
When Olsen reaches the end of his session, Yusuf informs him that he’ll need to make some alterations to his compound. Olsen frowns, but he agrees to wait a few days before coming in again.
Yusuf does not give in to the urge to ask if Olsen knows where Ariadne is now. And then, once Olsen has left, he does not give in to the urge to wonder about it too deeply.
2014
A woman breezes into the shop just as the light is beginning to fail, and Yusuf knows it’s her before she speaks, even though her hair is shorter and her lips are painted red and she carries herself with an icy confidence. He briefly imagines her studying Rita Hayworth movies to achieve the slow, swinging gait that sets her far apart from the half-innocent architecture student he once met four years ago on a supposedly impossible job. But he knows that it’s her all the same, because he never forgets a face, even when that face is obscured by dark glasses.
"What can I do for you, Ariadne?" he asks, as if it hasn’t been four years and he's been expecting her all day. These days, as more and more of his clients and colleagues disappear without a trace, he does his best to never get caught off-guard.
Her mouth curves at the sound of her name, and when she hangs her sunglasses in the neckline of her cotton blouse, he sees that her eyes are warm and familiar.
"I need a place to crash," she says, and a hint of uncertainty in her voice is all it takes to paint that statement as a request he can’t deny.
*
Yusuf offered her the bed, but Ariadne insisted on the settee, tucking a borrowed sheet neatly around her ankles and fluffing a cushion under her head. Now, as the first streaks of light begin to tint the sky orange, he sees that she’s taken on the posture of a starfish overnight, dangling one bare foot just above the ground, perching her other foot up on the arm of the sofa.
He saw her carefully washing off her makeup the night before, but still there’s a smudge of black at the corner of her eye that she must have missed. Her once sleek and smooth bob has become mussed during the night, and maybe the heat has helped in creating the casual waves that now fall across her forehead. Zulekha, who stared warily from the kitchen and thumped her tail on the ground the whole time Ariadne was getting settled, now follows one step behind him. She stretches her back and eyes their guest with more curiosity than distress.
Ariadne jerks awake as Zulekha leaps onto the arm of the settee, and Yusuf stifles a laugh at their mirrored expressions of surprise.
"You can go back to sleep," he assures Ariadne once he’s regained his composure. "I’m going to the dream den."
He puts a pan of water and milk on the stove once closed her eyes again, and he rummages through the cupboard for the tea leaves and sugar. While the tea comes to a boil, he cuts himself a slice of bread and spreads it thickly with orange marmalade. He leaves the loaf and the knife in what he hopes is an obvious place and leaves an empty plate and mug by the kitchen sink.
Once downstairs, he unlocks the front door for Philippe, the fifteen-year-old assistant he’s hired to mind the counter when Yusuf isn’t around, and is just on time to greet his first dreamer of the day at the side entrance.
After dusk, when Philippe’s gone home for dinner and all but the most dedicated dreamers have filtered out into the real world, they drink rich black coffee and catch up. He learns that she has her M. Arch, dove into extraction jobs right after graduation, had plans to go straight just as soon as her student loans were repaid and her retirement fund had reached a respectable balance.
"And then?" Yusuf asks.
"Going straight's just so boring, you know?"
Yusuf smiles wryly. "And getting yourself into trouble is one way to fight off monotony, am I right?"
Ariadne raises her eyebrows questioningly. "Who said anything about trouble?"
"Something brought you here in a rush," Yusuf says, folding his hands in his lap.
Ariadne sighs a little and adjusts the cuffs of her blouse. "A few weeks back, I shot an architect in the shoulder, and it turned out he had a few friends with nothing better to do than to run me out of Stockholm," she says. "It's been a good excuse for a vacation, but everything I owned was in that apartment. Everything I have with me now, I bought in the last two weeks." She rubs her hands over her face so that her voice is muffled and her makeup smudges; Yusuf can see that she's applied concealer under her eyes.
"Did he deserve it?" he asks, trying to imagine Ariadne shooting anyone as casually as her tone suggests.
"He was an asshole," she murmurs. "Thought just because I was half his age and woman..." She breathes out once, heavily through her nose. "In this business, apparently, a fragile little girl like me needs a man to take care of her."
"It's a dangerous business," Yusuf murmurs, trying not to put any weight to the statement. "And you’re not exactly a body builder."
"I know that," she says, but the words have no heat. "I can handle myself. I’ve been doing this on and off for four years."
Yusuf takes a long sip of his coffee, draining the cup. "That certainly is a long time," he says. "Don't your parents miss you?"
She scoffs. "Didn't I ever tell you about my family when we were on the Fischer job?"
"Not that I recall."
She runs a hand through her hair. "Maybe some other time, then. But suffice to say that I'm not missed."
Yusuf just raises his eyebrows.
"I'll be out of your hair soon," she promises. Before he can protest, she raises her hand and adds, "I can't just sit in your room, eating your food and playing Tetris on my phone for the rest of my days. I need to keep on the move for the sake of my sanity."
"I respect that," he tells her. "I've been in Mombasa for a long time. It used to be that I'd pack up and move the den after three years at the most."
"What's kept you here so long?"
"Routine, mostly. I've built a reputation here. But I worry that I'm growing too comfortable here. This business gets more and more dangerous every day."
Ariadne nods. "I heard a rumour that Arthur cut a deal with the American authorities about a year back and sold out whatever extractor he was working with at the time."
"But really, what would you have done in his situation?"
"Probably the same thing," Ariadne says without a moment's hesitation.
*
To his nephews Aatif (eight and a quarter) and Nasir (ten next month), he is Cool Uncle Yusuf, who travels the world with his tabby cat and sends them foreign candy bars and bank notes at Eid. To their mother, he is an eccentric man who has either never grown up or who is going through an extremely early and prolonged mid-life crisis. Safa is a respected pediatrician at a respectable clinic in Birmingham, and she can't understand why her little brother decided to leave an excellent job at Pfizer to take over a barely-solvent apothecary practice, changing his mailing address every few years but never accepting visitors, and never showing any interest in dating or marriage or starting a family.
Some people are in this game for the money or the glamour. They take the extraction jobs, build fantasies for and then steal from the obscenely wealthy. They retire early, cashing in their investments and spending their early fifties lounging on some beach that they've probably dreamed up a million times over.
Chemists get their moments in the spotlight, but running a dream den and manufacturing modified Somnacin won't get you a summer home in the Phillippines. Which isn't something Yusuf's wants really, because he's always had simple enough tastes, and besides, Mombasa is beautiful enough all year round. But there are times when the going gets rough and he has to dip into savings just to keep the local authorities from closing down his shop entirely- and it's then that he looks at the picture beside his bed, sees his sister and her sons grinning at him, their mouths reddened by the melting popsicles in their hands, and he feels incredibly exhausted.
Ariadne asks about the photo after she's brushed her teeth for the night. And Yusuf tells her the names of the people in the picture and their relation to him, but he isn't sure what degree of detail is appropriate to this conversation and this friendship.
And suddenly, he realises that he's halfway through a story about the last time he spoke with Safa-eight months ago, calling from a stolen cell phone- and Ariadne is grinning through it all.
*
The next morning, Yusuf sets a piece of paper by her plate with a list of things to see in Mombasa, a rough map sketched out on the back. He's marking the way to the Old Town when she enters the kitchen.
"I hope I didn't wake you," he says with a smile, passing the paper over.
"I'm just a light sleeper." She looks down at the map and the list, reading intently.
"So you don't have to play Tetris all day again."
She smiles, rises on her toes and kisses him once on each cheek, and then, after a moment's thought, leaves a light peck squarely on his lips. As she falls back on her heels, he follows her mouth down and kisses back just once. When he pulls away, he sees that she's blushing faintly, and he can't help thinking that a woman who can't kiss a man without blushing really shouldn't be looking to become a career criminal.
He has a strict non-interference policy with his dreamers and his colleagues, but he's always felt compelled to advise his friends, and he can't help saying, "Really, Ariadne, a brilliant girl like you could make a name for herself in a much more traditional career path."
"Yeah," she says, the colour going out of her cheeks, "yeah, I know." She's still smiling, but she's taken a step back. She folds the paper into quarters and drops it into the pocket of her trousers.
She goes out at half-past eight and doesn't come back all day. She leaves behind the outfit she arrived in and a few pieces of identification with someone else's name printed on them.
After three days, Yusuf finds a scrap of paper in a cupboard, behind the sugar.
Nothing personal, but I really did have to get a move on, it says. Thanks for everything. It's nice to be able to trust someone.
Yusuf keeps the note in his pocket for the next week or so, transferring it every time he changes his clothes. And then, one day, it falls from his hand and blows out an open doorway, and he has more important things to do than to chase paper down the street.
2016
Aatif and Nasir haven't given him much time to sleep, and so at breakfast time, he's shuffling aimlessly around Safa's kitchen in search of coffee when the phone rings.
"Hello?"
"Some kid called my office looking for you. A fast talker. Her name's Adrienne or Arianna or something, I couldn't make it out. I hope she's not some long-lost daughter of yours, or we're going to have to have a serious chat when I get home."
"It's Ariadne," he says with his eyes half-closed and his voice even. "And she's an old friend."
"She sounds too young to be a girlfriend, but I trust you'll enlighten me once I'm off duty."
"Of course."
"I gave her your cell and told her to call this afternoon, so that you can get over your jet lag before your little reunion. And so that I can meet her, of course."
Safa hangs up before he can respond. She always was intent on having the last word.
Yusuf savours the hours that the boys are at school. He bathes and dresses and then spends the rest of the morning applying for jobs. He maintains a learned degree of calm and doesn't wonder too deeply. He might be going straight, but that's a skill that it won't hurt to carry over.
Recipient: faorism
Author: alostcorner
Rating: PG
Pairings: Ariadne/Yusuf
Word count: ~2300
Warnings: None
Notes: Thanks to my beta for the last minute job!
2012
Olsen, a former architect who’s old enough to be Yusuf’s father, murmurs a few confused phrases as Yusuf checks his IV line. Yusuf doesn’t pay attention to the individual words, but the fact that Olsen is sleep-talking at all gives him pause-
somniloquy can be a symptom of a growing tolerance to dream-sharing compounds. A good portion of his dreamers are already addicts when they first come to him, but watching an addiction grow under his care is always a little unnerving. Maybe that means he’s too soft for this business, but there it is.
It takes him several seconds to realise that Olsen has said Ariadne’s name, mumbled but unmistakable in and amongst the other words that are, to Yusuf, considerably less significant. Yusuf replays the memory as he moves on to the other dreamers, holding it gently and turning it over in his mind. Worry creeps down the back of his neck against his best efforts.
When Olsen reaches the end of his session, Yusuf informs him that he’ll need to make some alterations to his compound. Olsen frowns, but he agrees to wait a few days before coming in again.
Yusuf does not give in to the urge to ask if Olsen knows where Ariadne is now. And then, once Olsen has left, he does not give in to the urge to wonder about it too deeply.
2014
A woman breezes into the shop just as the light is beginning to fail, and Yusuf knows it’s her before she speaks, even though her hair is shorter and her lips are painted red and she carries herself with an icy confidence. He briefly imagines her studying Rita Hayworth movies to achieve the slow, swinging gait that sets her far apart from the half-innocent architecture student he once met four years ago on a supposedly impossible job. But he knows that it’s her all the same, because he never forgets a face, even when that face is obscured by dark glasses.
"What can I do for you, Ariadne?" he asks, as if it hasn’t been four years and he's been expecting her all day. These days, as more and more of his clients and colleagues disappear without a trace, he does his best to never get caught off-guard.
Her mouth curves at the sound of her name, and when she hangs her sunglasses in the neckline of her cotton blouse, he sees that her eyes are warm and familiar.
"I need a place to crash," she says, and a hint of uncertainty in her voice is all it takes to paint that statement as a request he can’t deny.
*
Yusuf offered her the bed, but Ariadne insisted on the settee, tucking a borrowed sheet neatly around her ankles and fluffing a cushion under her head. Now, as the first streaks of light begin to tint the sky orange, he sees that she’s taken on the posture of a starfish overnight, dangling one bare foot just above the ground, perching her other foot up on the arm of the sofa.
He saw her carefully washing off her makeup the night before, but still there’s a smudge of black at the corner of her eye that she must have missed. Her once sleek and smooth bob has become mussed during the night, and maybe the heat has helped in creating the casual waves that now fall across her forehead. Zulekha, who stared warily from the kitchen and thumped her tail on the ground the whole time Ariadne was getting settled, now follows one step behind him. She stretches her back and eyes their guest with more curiosity than distress.
Ariadne jerks awake as Zulekha leaps onto the arm of the settee, and Yusuf stifles a laugh at their mirrored expressions of surprise.
"You can go back to sleep," he assures Ariadne once he’s regained his composure. "I’m going to the dream den."
He puts a pan of water and milk on the stove once closed her eyes again, and he rummages through the cupboard for the tea leaves and sugar. While the tea comes to a boil, he cuts himself a slice of bread and spreads it thickly with orange marmalade. He leaves the loaf and the knife in what he hopes is an obvious place and leaves an empty plate and mug by the kitchen sink.
Once downstairs, he unlocks the front door for Philippe, the fifteen-year-old assistant he’s hired to mind the counter when Yusuf isn’t around, and is just on time to greet his first dreamer of the day at the side entrance.
After dusk, when Philippe’s gone home for dinner and all but the most dedicated dreamers have filtered out into the real world, they drink rich black coffee and catch up. He learns that she has her M. Arch, dove into extraction jobs right after graduation, had plans to go straight just as soon as her student loans were repaid and her retirement fund had reached a respectable balance.
"And then?" Yusuf asks.
"Going straight's just so boring, you know?"
Yusuf smiles wryly. "And getting yourself into trouble is one way to fight off monotony, am I right?"
Ariadne raises her eyebrows questioningly. "Who said anything about trouble?"
"Something brought you here in a rush," Yusuf says, folding his hands in his lap.
Ariadne sighs a little and adjusts the cuffs of her blouse. "A few weeks back, I shot an architect in the shoulder, and it turned out he had a few friends with nothing better to do than to run me out of Stockholm," she says. "It's been a good excuse for a vacation, but everything I owned was in that apartment. Everything I have with me now, I bought in the last two weeks." She rubs her hands over her face so that her voice is muffled and her makeup smudges; Yusuf can see that she's applied concealer under her eyes.
"Did he deserve it?" he asks, trying to imagine Ariadne shooting anyone as casually as her tone suggests.
"He was an asshole," she murmurs. "Thought just because I was half his age and woman..." She breathes out once, heavily through her nose. "In this business, apparently, a fragile little girl like me needs a man to take care of her."
"It's a dangerous business," Yusuf murmurs, trying not to put any weight to the statement. "And you’re not exactly a body builder."
"I know that," she says, but the words have no heat. "I can handle myself. I’ve been doing this on and off for four years."
Yusuf takes a long sip of his coffee, draining the cup. "That certainly is a long time," he says. "Don't your parents miss you?"
She scoffs. "Didn't I ever tell you about my family when we were on the Fischer job?"
"Not that I recall."
She runs a hand through her hair. "Maybe some other time, then. But suffice to say that I'm not missed."
Yusuf just raises his eyebrows.
"I'll be out of your hair soon," she promises. Before he can protest, she raises her hand and adds, "I can't just sit in your room, eating your food and playing Tetris on my phone for the rest of my days. I need to keep on the move for the sake of my sanity."
"I respect that," he tells her. "I've been in Mombasa for a long time. It used to be that I'd pack up and move the den after three years at the most."
"What's kept you here so long?"
"Routine, mostly. I've built a reputation here. But I worry that I'm growing too comfortable here. This business gets more and more dangerous every day."
Ariadne nods. "I heard a rumour that Arthur cut a deal with the American authorities about a year back and sold out whatever extractor he was working with at the time."
"But really, what would you have done in his situation?"
"Probably the same thing," Ariadne says without a moment's hesitation.
*
To his nephews Aatif (eight and a quarter) and Nasir (ten next month), he is Cool Uncle Yusuf, who travels the world with his tabby cat and sends them foreign candy bars and bank notes at Eid. To their mother, he is an eccentric man who has either never grown up or who is going through an extremely early and prolonged mid-life crisis. Safa is a respected pediatrician at a respectable clinic in Birmingham, and she can't understand why her little brother decided to leave an excellent job at Pfizer to take over a barely-solvent apothecary practice, changing his mailing address every few years but never accepting visitors, and never showing any interest in dating or marriage or starting a family.
Some people are in this game for the money or the glamour. They take the extraction jobs, build fantasies for and then steal from the obscenely wealthy. They retire early, cashing in their investments and spending their early fifties lounging on some beach that they've probably dreamed up a million times over.
Chemists get their moments in the spotlight, but running a dream den and manufacturing modified Somnacin won't get you a summer home in the Phillippines. Which isn't something Yusuf's wants really, because he's always had simple enough tastes, and besides, Mombasa is beautiful enough all year round. But there are times when the going gets rough and he has to dip into savings just to keep the local authorities from closing down his shop entirely- and it's then that he looks at the picture beside his bed, sees his sister and her sons grinning at him, their mouths reddened by the melting popsicles in their hands, and he feels incredibly exhausted.
Ariadne asks about the photo after she's brushed her teeth for the night. And Yusuf tells her the names of the people in the picture and their relation to him, but he isn't sure what degree of detail is appropriate to this conversation and this friendship.
And suddenly, he realises that he's halfway through a story about the last time he spoke with Safa-eight months ago, calling from a stolen cell phone- and Ariadne is grinning through it all.
*
The next morning, Yusuf sets a piece of paper by her plate with a list of things to see in Mombasa, a rough map sketched out on the back. He's marking the way to the Old Town when she enters the kitchen.
"I hope I didn't wake you," he says with a smile, passing the paper over.
"I'm just a light sleeper." She looks down at the map and the list, reading intently.
"So you don't have to play Tetris all day again."
She smiles, rises on her toes and kisses him once on each cheek, and then, after a moment's thought, leaves a light peck squarely on his lips. As she falls back on her heels, he follows her mouth down and kisses back just once. When he pulls away, he sees that she's blushing faintly, and he can't help thinking that a woman who can't kiss a man without blushing really shouldn't be looking to become a career criminal.
He has a strict non-interference policy with his dreamers and his colleagues, but he's always felt compelled to advise his friends, and he can't help saying, "Really, Ariadne, a brilliant girl like you could make a name for herself in a much more traditional career path."
"Yeah," she says, the colour going out of her cheeks, "yeah, I know." She's still smiling, but she's taken a step back. She folds the paper into quarters and drops it into the pocket of her trousers.
She goes out at half-past eight and doesn't come back all day. She leaves behind the outfit she arrived in and a few pieces of identification with someone else's name printed on them.
After three days, Yusuf finds a scrap of paper in a cupboard, behind the sugar.
Nothing personal, but I really did have to get a move on, it says. Thanks for everything. It's nice to be able to trust someone.
Yusuf keeps the note in his pocket for the next week or so, transferring it every time he changes his clothes. And then, one day, it falls from his hand and blows out an open doorway, and he has more important things to do than to chase paper down the street.
2016
Aatif and Nasir haven't given him much time to sleep, and so at breakfast time, he's shuffling aimlessly around Safa's kitchen in search of coffee when the phone rings.
"Hello?"
"Some kid called my office looking for you. A fast talker. Her name's Adrienne or Arianna or something, I couldn't make it out. I hope she's not some long-lost daughter of yours, or we're going to have to have a serious chat when I get home."
"It's Ariadne," he says with his eyes half-closed and his voice even. "And she's an old friend."
"She sounds too young to be a girlfriend, but I trust you'll enlighten me once I'm off duty."
"Of course."
"I gave her your cell and told her to call this afternoon, so that you can get over your jet lag before your little reunion. And so that I can meet her, of course."
Safa hangs up before he can respond. She always was intent on having the last word.
Yusuf savours the hours that the boys are at school. He bathes and dresses and then spends the rest of the morning applying for jobs. He maintains a learned degree of calm and doesn't wonder too deeply. He might be going straight, but that's a skill that it won't hurt to carry over.