Often I have wondered (if I need a redesign) Arthur/Ariadne
She wakes with her he back to him, their knees entwined and his hand knotted in her hair as he sleeps, his breathing steady and deep like a drum. This is him, she tells herself, this is Arthur. He does not stir as she leans over, untangling herself from his side to test the weight of her rook.
The totem’s verdict is conclusive and she relaxes, breathes, curses herself for questioning this. She turns to find his eyes half open, a familiar almost smile on his face. He always wakes when she does. She thinks it’s the years he’s spent on the run, making him edgy.
He knows it’s her that keeps him on edge.
“Come back to bed.” His voice is soft, tinted with the allusion of a commandment (she knows it’s a request) and she climbs back in to his arms, settling back in to the world they’ve created there.
++
They don’t always work together.
More often than not, they do. Eames is hard to shake off and Yusuf is one of the best in business, but it’s a dangerous lifestyle and to live as a criminal there’s not really an option to maintain routine. When they work as a pair, they are flawless. She creates labyrinths beyond her own expectations, her own limitations. He maps them out, guiding her as she acts as though a mini god, conceiving non-existent spaces in strangers' minds. Together, they’re unstoppable.
They’re pretty much the same apart.
There’s rarely time to miss one another, with the all consuming nature of the jobs they take on, but she knows she has been changed by the absence when they meet again; she always feels as if she is being filled, like she was an empty glass that he is pouring into with his tidy suits and knowing eyes
He engulfs her, and if she gave herself time to think, she might question how they became this way so silently. It is the logic of a dream, something that makes sense when you can’t explain how.
She, he, they do not dwell on this, merely surrender to it, the waves of their reality crashing down on them as they stand, their backs against the sea.
++
A dog, Eames once describes him as, as they stand at a hotel bar, waiting for a client. A loyal puppy that stays by their master’s side out of senseless devotion. Arthur raises an eyebrow, quirks a half smile at her, but she only just manages to send one back.
She rolls her eyes, tells Eames to shut it and orders another round of drinks as they resume their relentless banter, Arthur’s second scotch makes it so that he leans in to her back, his hand lazily brushing against the fabric covering her outer thigh as he sends retorts Eames’ way.
A puppy, he said.
Personally, she’d always thought of him more as a greyhound, sleek and elegant - wiry. Dependable, trustworthy. She slips her hand in to his and he grins at her, uninhibited. This time, her return smile comes easily.
++
It is a week later, in a totally different hotel in a totally different city, that she realises she has left her totem behind.
He kisses her neck, rolls his die across the sheets.
“Not a dream.” He tells her, his hands trailing down towards her thighs, parting them. He is her never ending kick, pulling her down, down, down. “Not a dream,” he says again, his mouth ghosting the skin of her hip, then lower, leaving her shivering. “At least,” he murmurs, hot breath against her centre as she twists her hands in to the sheets, “not my dream.”
She chokes out his name when she comes.
++
They get the rook back, buy him a new tie on an afternoon walking through Manhattan and she teases him about the time it takes to pick out just one measly pattern until he relents and his face cracks in to the sort of smile she likes to think are special, that only she gets to see, these days. Their fingers lace and they relax the rhythm of their feet. She smells fall in the air and wonders whether it’s possible she could be in love.
He is always certain, and so chooses not to think about things that cause such hassle.
++
They’re building together, twisting paradoxes round and around one another like an embrace, and she looks across at him to find he is already watching her, his sharp eyes unfathomable. The tower they’d been pushing upwards falls behind them as they collapse in to each other, the world shattering around them.
He pulls the needle tenderly from her arm when she wakes, meeting her eyes and pausing for a teetering moment before getting out of his chair and returning to his desk. She feels like she’s missed something crucial, like she’s fallen when she was meant to jump.
Her hands shake as she draws, planning a new layer for their world.
++
They don’t talk about it, what they are now, what they feel, how it happened and how they should go on, because it’s never really seems necessary. They’ve found a peace in each other that they cannot find anywhere else, an escape in one other which does not require unconsciousness. When they are alone, his heartbeat is her totem.They lie in the dark, foreheads pressed together, and eventually, she realises, she will learn all there is to know about this immaculate man.
For now, she is content with her revised notes: the way he takes his coffee, the burn of his stubble on her shoulder when he is yet to shave, the adorable pride he cannot hide when he has pressed his suit to perfection. The burning look he gets in his eyes when he’s above her, words they both know the other should say, lying unspoken between them.
She is the one loose end, the one unknown point in his existence; and she has crafted him in to her own personal labyrinth. She’s not entirely sure if she’s in love with him, or the challenges he presents.
++
When they are not on a job they move from hotel to hotel under false names with no real need to settle, their constant restlessness mixing with their unvoiced fear of being caught, of staying still enough for the real world to catch up with them. They are content, and although reality can never really satisfy their impossible needs, when they are together, they are dreamlike.
He notices, though, as he is trained to do so well, that her worlds have become more grounded. The twisted tower blocks, cascades of metal begin to be padded with suburbia, shrinking to small bungalows and parks filled with children where there were once only bohemians and sceptics (too French, he tells her irritably, you‘re always too French).
He notices, and he understands.
He hands her over her copy of the house key, lets her open the door to find the new pinpoint they’ve made on their world map, this new place which is neither hers nor his but theirs, and there is finality where there was once only a hesitant kiss, a glance across a crowded room.
She turns towards him and they’re both thinking the same thing (Synchronicity, he’d heard her joke to Eames, once, long ago; It’s a big turn on) she steps in to his space, tilts her head upwards;
“Kiss me, quick.” She whispers, and so he does.
++
She starts studying philosophy in her free time, something which amuses him no end, and he snorts when he finds a copy of Descartes on her side of the bed.
“Oh sure,” he scoffs, “nothing gives you more grounding in reality than a paranoid Italian.” She throws a pillow at his head, but she’s laughing with him.
She turns a page now, book in her hands and feet on his lap as they rest companionably upon their second-hand sofa, the light fading slowly from the room as dusk falls around them. She looks up as he massages her feet absently, his mind obviously else where.
God, she finds herself thinking, he’s beautiful. As if catching up on her thoughts, he turns to her, smiling - and when did that get so easy for him? The tense angles of his face loosening as he gains laughter lines with age - she feels overwhelmed, misses the question he is asking her.
“Sorry?”
“I said, is it working? ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Is it proof enough of your own existence? Should I put on some Piaf?” He is all mischief and ease and she’s missed this happening around her (unless, of course, the sudden epiphany is actually just a jump in a dream and- No.) So she shuffles forward, climbs in to his lab and studies his face as his thumbs stroke the crooks of her elbows. Symmetry.
“I’m pink.” She tells him, solemnly, “Therefore I’m spam.” And she catches his laughter with her mouth.
++
There are days when things are not easy, when there is mistrust and anger and memories invading their sanctuary, days when she catches him rolling his totem and thinks she sees disappointment in his face. Days where the toast burns and it’s pissing it with rain and the mark has fucking insane security and they have to run, but that simply reassures her that this is reality, that they are not Cobb and Mal and even when she wakes from her simplest dreams panting, terrified of finding the wrong reality, he is always there, and she is always relieved.
++
She takes a plane to England, texts him from London. The artwork is very militaristic, and everyone’s ironic. I’ll be home soon. And he misses her in a way which makes him feel uneasy, makes him want to question what risks he’s allowed himself to take for her.
He stops himself, terrified of what might be through the veil they’ve covered themselves with. Unable to stay in the house, he books a ticket on the next flight to LA.
He catches himself staring at a woman wearing a decorative scarf in the row across from him, a habit that Ariadne had abandoned years ago on a visit to Cairo during a heat wave. He adores her neck; yet he can’t help longing for the days when it was a hidden treasure, a gift to be unwrapped during the first desperate months of their time together, when there had been lust and longing and airport public toilets with cubicles that were too goddamn small.
He’s thinking about how delicate her hands are, and the exquisite taste of the skin behind her ear, and all at once the plane has landed and he never used to get disorientated.
Cobb is waiting to meet him with the kids, who once unleashed run towards him, more excited at the implication of presents than him, he is sure.
He feels relaxed for the first time since she left as James wraps his arms around his neck, Phillipa squealing as he tickles her. Cobb is smiling, laughing, and it suddenly hits him how bizarrely this unexpected new world order has come around. He does not allow himself the time to think about it further.
++
They have sex on the couch, his trousers ringing ridiculously round his ankles and they both laugh until it hurts once the initial frenzy is over. She grins, kissing him sloppily and still giggling against his lips as he tries and fails to step out of his pants completely, falling in to her and she holds him, cupping his face in her hands ,gasping for breath as a new wave of hilarity hits.
“Oh,” She says, her words lined with mirth and affection (love), “oh, I missed you.”
He grips on to her suddenly, his hands suddenly tight on her hips. He does not reply, but his tongue pushes in to her mouth with a foreign urgency she does not know, or has forgotten in the years of comfort and slow, gentle embraces.
++
She has never affected his job performance. If anything, she enhances it, and so it shakes him more than he would care to admit when it happens, half way through a basic extraction case. She’s caught, there’s a knife sliding along her arm and she looks at him through her pain, bracing herself for the shot she trusts him to fire.
He hesitates.
What if, he thinks, and it’s enough time for Eames to do the shooting instead before anyone else knows there’s a problem. She’s safe, he tells himself, heart in his throat, she’s alive. He tosses his die just in case - just to make sure.
He gets the job done.
++
He watches the rise and fall of her chest as she sleeps, counting breaths like points in a case; memorising them as crucial facts of the here and now, and next time it happens, he shoots without even blinking.
The architect doesn’t even need to be there, anyway.
++
“Darling,” She begins, and he stirs from his gentle drowsing, opening his eyes to watch her trace landscapes across his chest with her fingers, “did you ever stop to think that I might just be the woman of your dreams?”
There’s a pause in which he does not say a lot of things. The pause says yes, yes and it terrifies me, because I love you too much to let go, and it ends with a quirk of his lips.
“Darling,” He tells her, and he can tell she’s choosing not to hear what the silence meant just as much as he is, “if you were the woman of my dreams, you’d have much larger breasts.” He chokes for breath as she punches him the chest, and that’s the last they speak of it.
++
Small breasts aside, he thinks, she’s the closest thing to perfection he can find with all his years of striving towards it, with his polished shoes and immovable hair. She leaves her underwear on the bathroom floor and snores like an old bear when she’s overtired. She never listens to his ideas and she’s still too French and he never, never has to say he loves because he’s fairly certain it’s beyond that, but he does anyway, on the steps of a would-be Louvre with a scarf at her neck and the sun at their backs.
“Well,” She says in response, “this is the city of love, môn cher. “ And kisses him, to say thank you, and I love you too, and it’s settled.
They walk along streets that aren’t real, bending the world to their will and he hears wedding bells from a nearby church, catches the eye of a projection of a little girl with her eyes and his chin, running after a ball. He’s not sure whose dream is whose anymore, they have somehow managed to wield together to make something new, something just outside the borders of what is conceivable.
They wake in their separate lawn chairs and clasp hands, not totems, as they bump back down in to the world.