An Alternate Kick | Inception | NC17 | Arthur/Ariadne/Dom
Title: An Alternate Kick
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne/Cobb with a smidge of OT4 with Eames at the end.
Rating: NC17
Spoilers: For the movie.
Summary: The team is in need of a kick, and Arthur provides the friction required to wake them to reality.
A/N: Literally have been writing this in and out of class all day. Oddly enough the idea struck me in lecture. Definitely hilarious to be thinking about along with acid-base equilibria.
"I told you what his defenses could be like," Arthur reminds a sour-looking Cobb succinctly.
"Potentially," Cobb scowls, pacing around the small area the three of them-Cobb, Ariadne, and Arthur-had been afforded. "You told me that they could potentially be like this. You did not emphasize or even make it appear very likely to come across a kid with this kind of mental security." Cobb runs a hand over his gun (the barrel is empty, but even so it gives seems to him the facade of being in control-)
"Well, it isn't likely," Arthur snaps.
"Shut up, both of you," Ariadne groans. Arthur and Cobb turn to stare at her as if she's grown a third head. "Fighting isn't going to get us anywhere." She swallows a gulp, avoiding their laser-focused gazes.
"We need to retreat," Arthur says slowly, offering this option to Cobb tentatively. Cobb's face is stony.
The job had been a seemingly simple one: get in, extract, get out. The client was a wealthy CEO, and the target? His seventeen year old son. The information was regarding whether or not the boy had been cooking methamphetamine. Apparently the boy not only cooked so regularly that Ariadne had been surprised that their client had needed a goddamn extraction team to discover it, but he also used it on a regular basis. The drug was potent (read: toxic) enough to change the boy's dream-world in such a way that had frightened and disoriented Ariadne. Arthur and Cobb had merely given each other knowing looks as they had all watched one of the boy's projections sprout arms out of its side and begin crawling up the side of a now melting building, scuttling like a crab. The boy's father had chosen to omit the small fact that he had had the boy trained at a young age to capture any extractors that managed to get inside his head. One minute they had been standing in the middle of Ariadne's beautifully constructed but paradoxically warped city, the next Ariadne had found herself on the beach of a tiny island that was no more than ten feet across in diameter. Cobb and Arthur had spared a moment to gape at her and then had begun to mutter amongst themselves ("I don't think she could have stopped it from happening," she hears Arthur say softly, but Cobb gives him a look that makes her stomach drop down to her knees. She couldn't figure out what exactly had happened... what had she done wrong?)
"Well," begins Cobb. "We're in a dream within a dream. This layer of subconscious is Ben's, and up above us is Arthur's-" Ariadne recalls that the target's name is Benjamin Cauffer-"so, we need a kick." He fingers his gun and looks at Arthur. "How many bullets?" he asks and Arthur pulls out his weapon.
"Before we got here, could have sworn I had five," Arthur replies. He clicks open the barrel and peers inside. "I've only got one here, though."
"We need three," Cobb says, stating the obvious, eyes flicking from Arthur, then to Ariadne, and then back to his own useless gun. Cobb paces more intensely and, after a few minutes, pauses in his step.
"What about the Hillside approach?" he asks Arthur. Arthur dares a look at Ariadne, who is putting two and two together.
"What, did you name that plan after the Hillside strangler?" Ariadne laughs, looking at Cobb, who is staring back at her coldly. "Oh." Her eyes widen in understanding. "No, no way."
"We could shoot you," Cobb offers casually, professionally, but it still sends shivers down Ariadne's spine.
"It didn't work last time, Dom," Arthur sighs, and Dom is silent again. Arthur squints out at the horizon. "Do you see land?"
"No," says Cobb after he too peruses the seascape. "Probably isn't any." Arthur nods and lets out a deep sigh, as if bracing himself to say something rather unpleasant. Ariadne turns toward him.
"What about Tiny Tim?" Arthur asks, positing the question to the open sea. Ariadne looks at the tips of his ears and, for a second, she could swear that they had turned a pink-ish hue. She turns to Cobb now, who, ever the professional, had only widened his eyes at the suggestion for a brief moment, and then had settled into a non-committal shrug.
"Not sure if that's advisable, considering the present company," Cobb grits out through slightly clenched teeth. Ariadne cuts in, wading through the bizarre tension between the two of them.
"Do I have to get strangled?" she asks in a small voice.
"No," they both say at once, but Cobb still looks hesitant. Ariadne, bolstering herself on false bravado, straightens her back. "Then do it."
Arthur hands the gun to Cobb in response. One quick motion later, and Cobb has planted their only bullet straight between Arthur's eyes. For a moment, Ariadne feels as though she's about to be sick (she hates seeing members of the team die, even though she knows that in reality they are alive and kicking). Cobb drops the gun and puts a hand on Ariadne's shoulder.
"Knowing Arthur," Cobb tells her softly, "he'll do me first." He pauses. "If there was any other way..." She pales.
"What's going to happen to us," she breathes. He shakes his head.
"You made your bed, now sleep in it," Cobb chides. "I was all for strangling. Besides, if I tell you, you're going to panic, and that could prevent the kick itself from working." He says his last few words in a deliberately calm voice. "Breath, Ariadne." She lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
Suddenly Cobb's face contorts into a grimace, and he falls to all fours. Ariadne's eyes widen and she sinks down onto her knees.
"Told you," Cobb says in what sounds like an oddly husky voice, but Ariadne is sure she's imagining it. Still, she blanches at the sight of Dom Cobb at the mercy of an invisible force. He shudders, breathing hard now. "Arthur is nothing if not proficient," is the last thing she hears him say before his eyes go glassy and his body stills. She feels for a pulse: nothing.
There is a small voice in the back of Ariadne's head that has a guess at what exactly Tiny Tim means.
"They cannot be serious," she hears herself say.
-
Arthur wakes up in a wicker chair and immediately turns to Dom, out cold to his right. Ariadne is to his left; her mouth is slightly open so that he can see the white of her teeth between her pink lips. He briefly considers waking her first but decides against it, his conscience looming over his shoulder like a shadow. Arthur quickly unbuckles Dom's belt and slides it out of his belt loops in one fluid motion. Unbuttoning and unzipping Dom's trousers, Arthur whispers a muttered apology and rubs his hands together a couple of times before reaching into Dom's pants.
Jerking another man off still feels extraordinarily bizarre to Arthur, though, of course, it is not the first time. Somehow, he is not surprised to find that, upon recounting the times that he's brought another person to climax, the only man that he has performed the service for was one Dom Cobb (running count: seven; number of times performed for the Tiny Tim kick: six; number of times Arthur drank a bottle tequila with Dom Cobb in the wee hours of the morning: one; number of times he will be repeating that experience: zero).
When Dom comes, a wet spot appearing in the crotch of his pants (Arthur is pleased to note that it doesn't take an inordinate amount of time), Arthur slips his hands out of Dom's pants and makes for the sink. Arthur can hear Dom grunt and shake himself awake. Arthur dunks his hands underneath the spigot and then makes his way toward Ariadne. Arthur props her knees wide, shrugs off his jacket, then lays it atop her thighs, providing what seemed to be a modicum of privacy. It all looks rather absurd, as if Arthur's some kind of back-alley gynecologist, and Arthur hears Dom suppress a poorly disguised laugh.
"Hop to it, then. The next kick should be coming in about five minutes," Dom says to Arthur's back. "Go."
Arthur, now on the clock, quickly strips away Ariadne's pants and panties in one quick pull. He leans into her, hands now groping in the dark. He decides to look not below, but above, at her sleeping visage.
"Come for me," he whispers.
-
Ariadne feels something low in her stomach, a feeling radiating from between her legs up through her pelvic area. She groans, crossing her legs. "I am so going to kill them-" she moans, and somewhere above her deft hands hit a particularly sensitive spot. "Hnnnggh. Scratch that. A thank you is probably in order." She claws her fingers at the ground, sand catching under her finger nails. It is an odd sight, a young girl coming to fruition beside two dead bodies. Odder still, Ariadne thinks nothing of it.
She can feel it coming: Tiny Tim, she thinks back, thoughts fractured by ghostly pleasure, the small one, the little death, la petite mort.
Her breath catches in her throat as she comes.
-
Arthur is sitting between her legs when he awakens. The minute he's sure she's awake, he starts apologizing.
"I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, you can kill me later, sorry," he says, raising his hands in a defensive position. She can see her own juices on his finger-tips and blushes. He raises an eyebrow and stands.
Non, je ne regrette rien
C'est payé, balayé, oublié
Je me fous du passé
"There she is," Dom sighs. "What a fucking day." He pats Arthur on the back and lays a firm hand on Ariadne's shoulder, who shudders slightly under his touch (her recent encounter had left her a little touch sensitive).
"Dom," she says, right before she feels the kick reel her in. He looks down at her. "Why would you ever strangle someone if you've got Tiny Tim up your sleeve?"
-
She's grinning as they all awaken in their respective chairs, each of them solidly planted in reality. Dom and Arthur are staring at her, once again, like she's grown a third head.
"The cojones on you, kid," Dom breathes at last, breaking the silence. Eames looks over his newspaper at them all, hitting the stop button on the stereo with an elbow.
"What's this all about?" he asks, interest peaked. Arthur shoots him an evilly satisfied look.
"We had to use an alternate escape method." Arthur doesn't give any other hints, but the shock on Eames' face is proof enough that he knows.
"You would use that one on my off day," Eames says shortly, miffed. "Bastards." He folds over his paper. "Fancy round two?"
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne/Cobb with a smidge of OT4 with Eames at the end.
Rating: NC17
Spoilers: For the movie.
Summary: The team is in need of a kick, and Arthur provides the friction required to wake them to reality.
A/N: Literally have been writing this in and out of class all day. Oddly enough the idea struck me in lecture. Definitely hilarious to be thinking about along with acid-base equilibria.
"I told you what his defenses could be like," Arthur reminds a sour-looking Cobb succinctly.
"Potentially," Cobb scowls, pacing around the small area the three of them-Cobb, Ariadne, and Arthur-had been afforded. "You told me that they could potentially be like this. You did not emphasize or even make it appear very likely to come across a kid with this kind of mental security." Cobb runs a hand over his gun (the barrel is empty, but even so it gives seems to him the facade of being in control-)
"Well, it isn't likely," Arthur snaps.
"Shut up, both of you," Ariadne groans. Arthur and Cobb turn to stare at her as if she's grown a third head. "Fighting isn't going to get us anywhere." She swallows a gulp, avoiding their laser-focused gazes.
"We need to retreat," Arthur says slowly, offering this option to Cobb tentatively. Cobb's face is stony.
The job had been a seemingly simple one: get in, extract, get out. The client was a wealthy CEO, and the target? His seventeen year old son. The information was regarding whether or not the boy had been cooking methamphetamine. Apparently the boy not only cooked so regularly that Ariadne had been surprised that their client had needed a goddamn extraction team to discover it, but he also used it on a regular basis. The drug was potent (read: toxic) enough to change the boy's dream-world in such a way that had frightened and disoriented Ariadne. Arthur and Cobb had merely given each other knowing looks as they had all watched one of the boy's projections sprout arms out of its side and begin crawling up the side of a now melting building, scuttling like a crab. The boy's father had chosen to omit the small fact that he had had the boy trained at a young age to capture any extractors that managed to get inside his head. One minute they had been standing in the middle of Ariadne's beautifully constructed but paradoxically warped city, the next Ariadne had found herself on the beach of a tiny island that was no more than ten feet across in diameter. Cobb and Arthur had spared a moment to gape at her and then had begun to mutter amongst themselves ("I don't think she could have stopped it from happening," she hears Arthur say softly, but Cobb gives him a look that makes her stomach drop down to her knees. She couldn't figure out what exactly had happened... what had she done wrong?)
"Well," begins Cobb. "We're in a dream within a dream. This layer of subconscious is Ben's, and up above us is Arthur's-" Ariadne recalls that the target's name is Benjamin Cauffer-"so, we need a kick." He fingers his gun and looks at Arthur. "How many bullets?" he asks and Arthur pulls out his weapon.
"Before we got here, could have sworn I had five," Arthur replies. He clicks open the barrel and peers inside. "I've only got one here, though."
"We need three," Cobb says, stating the obvious, eyes flicking from Arthur, then to Ariadne, and then back to his own useless gun. Cobb paces more intensely and, after a few minutes, pauses in his step.
"What about the Hillside approach?" he asks Arthur. Arthur dares a look at Ariadne, who is putting two and two together.
"What, did you name that plan after the Hillside strangler?" Ariadne laughs, looking at Cobb, who is staring back at her coldly. "Oh." Her eyes widen in understanding. "No, no way."
"We could shoot you," Cobb offers casually, professionally, but it still sends shivers down Ariadne's spine.
"It didn't work last time, Dom," Arthur sighs, and Dom is silent again. Arthur squints out at the horizon. "Do you see land?"
"No," says Cobb after he too peruses the seascape. "Probably isn't any." Arthur nods and lets out a deep sigh, as if bracing himself to say something rather unpleasant. Ariadne turns toward him.
"What about Tiny Tim?" Arthur asks, positing the question to the open sea. Ariadne looks at the tips of his ears and, for a second, she could swear that they had turned a pink-ish hue. She turns to Cobb now, who, ever the professional, had only widened his eyes at the suggestion for a brief moment, and then had settled into a non-committal shrug.
"Not sure if that's advisable, considering the present company," Cobb grits out through slightly clenched teeth. Ariadne cuts in, wading through the bizarre tension between the two of them.
"Do I have to get strangled?" she asks in a small voice.
"No," they both say at once, but Cobb still looks hesitant. Ariadne, bolstering herself on false bravado, straightens her back. "Then do it."
Arthur hands the gun to Cobb in response. One quick motion later, and Cobb has planted their only bullet straight between Arthur's eyes. For a moment, Ariadne feels as though she's about to be sick (she hates seeing members of the team die, even though she knows that in reality they are alive and kicking). Cobb drops the gun and puts a hand on Ariadne's shoulder.
"Knowing Arthur," Cobb tells her softly, "he'll do me first." He pauses. "If there was any other way..." She pales.
"What's going to happen to us," she breathes. He shakes his head.
"You made your bed, now sleep in it," Cobb chides. "I was all for strangling. Besides, if I tell you, you're going to panic, and that could prevent the kick itself from working." He says his last few words in a deliberately calm voice. "Breath, Ariadne." She lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
Suddenly Cobb's face contorts into a grimace, and he falls to all fours. Ariadne's eyes widen and she sinks down onto her knees.
"Told you," Cobb says in what sounds like an oddly husky voice, but Ariadne is sure she's imagining it. Still, she blanches at the sight of Dom Cobb at the mercy of an invisible force. He shudders, breathing hard now. "Arthur is nothing if not proficient," is the last thing she hears him say before his eyes go glassy and his body stills. She feels for a pulse: nothing.
There is a small voice in the back of Ariadne's head that has a guess at what exactly Tiny Tim means.
"They cannot be serious," she hears herself say.
-
Arthur wakes up in a wicker chair and immediately turns to Dom, out cold to his right. Ariadne is to his left; her mouth is slightly open so that he can see the white of her teeth between her pink lips. He briefly considers waking her first but decides against it, his conscience looming over his shoulder like a shadow. Arthur quickly unbuckles Dom's belt and slides it out of his belt loops in one fluid motion. Unbuttoning and unzipping Dom's trousers, Arthur whispers a muttered apology and rubs his hands together a couple of times before reaching into Dom's pants.
Jerking another man off still feels extraordinarily bizarre to Arthur, though, of course, it is not the first time. Somehow, he is not surprised to find that, upon recounting the times that he's brought another person to climax, the only man that he has performed the service for was one Dom Cobb (running count: seven; number of times performed for the Tiny Tim kick: six; number of times Arthur drank a bottle tequila with Dom Cobb in the wee hours of the morning: one; number of times he will be repeating that experience: zero).
When Dom comes, a wet spot appearing in the crotch of his pants (Arthur is pleased to note that it doesn't take an inordinate amount of time), Arthur slips his hands out of Dom's pants and makes for the sink. Arthur can hear Dom grunt and shake himself awake. Arthur dunks his hands underneath the spigot and then makes his way toward Ariadne. Arthur props her knees wide, shrugs off his jacket, then lays it atop her thighs, providing what seemed to be a modicum of privacy. It all looks rather absurd, as if Arthur's some kind of back-alley gynecologist, and Arthur hears Dom suppress a poorly disguised laugh.
"Hop to it, then. The next kick should be coming in about five minutes," Dom says to Arthur's back. "Go."
Arthur, now on the clock, quickly strips away Ariadne's pants and panties in one quick pull. He leans into her, hands now groping in the dark. He decides to look not below, but above, at her sleeping visage.
"Come for me," he whispers.
-
Ariadne feels something low in her stomach, a feeling radiating from between her legs up through her pelvic area. She groans, crossing her legs. "I am so going to kill them-" she moans, and somewhere above her deft hands hit a particularly sensitive spot. "Hnnnggh. Scratch that. A thank you is probably in order." She claws her fingers at the ground, sand catching under her finger nails. It is an odd sight, a young girl coming to fruition beside two dead bodies. Odder still, Ariadne thinks nothing of it.
She can feel it coming: Tiny Tim, she thinks back, thoughts fractured by ghostly pleasure, the small one, the little death, la petite mort.
Her breath catches in her throat as she comes.
-
Arthur is sitting between her legs when he awakens. The minute he's sure she's awake, he starts apologizing.
"I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, you can kill me later, sorry," he says, raising his hands in a defensive position. She can see her own juices on his finger-tips and blushes. He raises an eyebrow and stands.
Non, je ne regrette rien
C'est payé, balayé, oublié
Je me fous du passé
"There she is," Dom sighs. "What a fucking day." He pats Arthur on the back and lays a firm hand on Ariadne's shoulder, who shudders slightly under his touch (her recent encounter had left her a little touch sensitive).
"Dom," she says, right before she feels the kick reel her in. He looks down at her. "Why would you ever strangle someone if you've got Tiny Tim up your sleeve?"
-
She's grinning as they all awaken in their respective chairs, each of them solidly planted in reality. Dom and Arthur are staring at her, once again, like she's grown a third head.
"The cojones on you, kid," Dom breathes at last, breaking the silence. Eames looks over his newspaper at them all, hitting the stop button on the stereo with an elbow.
"What's this all about?" he asks, interest peaked. Arthur shoots him an evilly satisfied look.
"We had to use an alternate escape method." Arthur doesn't give any other hints, but the shock on Eames' face is proof enough that he knows.
"You would use that one on my off day," Eames says shortly, miffed. "Bastards." He folds over his paper. "Fancy round two?"