Best of You | Inception | PG13 | Ariadne/Dom, Arthur/Eames
Title: Best of You
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Ariadne/Dom, Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG13
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Written for a prompt from inception_kink: Hospital AU, Ariadne's the new intern and Cobb's her resident.
A/N: So this just happened. IDK GUYS IDK.
"Don't you think you're a bit rough on your little ducklings," Arthur remarks casually, testing out the phrase as if it is not his own. Cobb doesn't look up from his latest chart.
"As if we had it any different. Internships are shit for a reason."
Arthur shrugs. "True."
"It makes them better."
"I'm pretty sure that Eames kid of yours is a lost cause."
"Maybe. But the girl, she's got... something. Spunk, I guess. Reminds me of me."
"Don't be such a narcissist," Arthur teases. Dom throws a pen at him. Arthur continues. "Everybody has limits, Dom. Even us. Even the interns."
"Yeah, yeah. I'll worry more about it when they start hitting the wall," Cobb smirks. "Then I'll tell them to get the fuck back on their feet and do it again, but better."
"Hard ass."
"As if you treat yours any better. At least I don't have mine pick up my dry-cleaning."
Cobb gets a page, takes a moment to assess it, and breaks into a run.
"Blood is nearly impossible to get out by hand," Arthur sighs knowingly, picking up the chart Cobb had so helpfully dropped on the floor in his haste.
-
Ariadne has been awake for thirty-six hours when the ER gets the call from an incoming ambulance that there's been a shooting on West 4th and Broadway. The dispatcher says frantically into the receiver, "Thirty-nine year old female, pregnant, with a GSW to the left chest and severe head trauma, probable concussion, possibly worse."
Ariadne is already running before her pager goes off; glancing at it quickly, she turns a corner and nearly runs into her boss. They fall into step next to each other.
"Give me info," he commands. "All I know is GSW to the heart."
"Bullet appears to have grazed but not penetrated the atrium... but it's all around bad," Ariadne huffs out as they both hurtle down the stairs to the emergency room. "Thirty-nine, pregnant, with head trauma in addition to the GSW."
"From what?" Cobb asks, more to himself than her.
They slow down to a jog in the ER just to avoid hitting the deluge of personelle that had arrived with the GSW.
"Name?" Cobb calls out before he hits trauma room one.
"Daphne Fink," Araidne tells him. Ariadne's come to find that Cobb likes giving his patients identities. Likes attaching names to faces. Ariadne thinks that maybe it makes him want to save them more, if he sort of knows them... then again, how much more personally are you going to get, once you've gone up to your elbow in their rectal cavity.
"Yusuf, who's the attending on call," Cobb calls out to a male nurse known for having the attendings schedules tattooed to the back of his eyelids.
"Browning, but he's driving in from Upstate, won't be here for a couple hours at least," Yusuf calls out from behind the gurney. Ariadne can see very little in the sea of obscenely tall people. She scuttles in front, toward the patient's face.
"Good God," she breathes in horror. "Are we sure that she doesn't have a subdural hematoma?"
"No, we're not sure," Cobb hisses at her. "Ariadne, page Arthur. Yusuf... What about trauma, or neuro? Who's on call? The Fischers?"
Ariadne runs to the nurse's hub and requests a neurology consult from Dr. Darling while Cobb whittles off more orders.
"Yeah, but Fischer and Fischer Jr. are both in the OR, both unavailable," Yusuf calls out. "Fischer senior's the only neuro attending on call tonight."
"Shit," Cobb says vehemently. "Okay, okay. Page Fisher senior anyway, tell him that when he gets a chance to high-tail it to our OR, whichever one we end up getting." Cobb looks around at the huge crowd of people surrounding the unconscious pregnant woman. He takes a deep breath and then bellows, "Get out if you're not on my team or currently bagging the patient. And someone tell me her chest tube status."
"Blood, there's blood in the lungs," Ariadne says loudly, her voice betraying little of the exhaustion and horror built up inside her. Cobb lets off another string of curses. Ariadne finds his voice comforting, her only constant in a sea of horrifyingly new situations.
"Give me pictures," Cobb yells impatiently. Yusuf lays a lead apron over the woman's belly and turns a key in the wall, flashing an x-ray.
"You're with me," he says to Ariadne, motioning her toward the computer screen where the image was loading. "Eames... where is that bastard. He should have gotten the page five minutes ago."
Once they see the cloud of blood, white and smokey on the image, Cobb's mouth is a hard line.
"We need to get her to an OR," Cobb tells a squat female nurse. "Let Nash know that we're bumping him."
"He's not gonna be happy about that," the nurse wheezes, but she darts off obediently.
"What about the baby?" Ariadne asks plainly.
"What about the baby?" Cobb snarls back, clearly also sleep deprived. "It's not far along enough to come out, she looks around twenty weeks."
"We can't..." she begins, but her brain trails off, leaving her without words. Cobb has already begun wheeling the expectant mother toward the elevator.
"Your patient is Daphne Fink, Ariadne... don't forget it," Cobb tells her harshly. Shock clearly written over her face, his expression softens a touch. "Best way to save the baby is to save the mother. Now, are you coming with me or am I doing this by myself?"
Ariadne moves.
-
When Ariadne stumbles out of surgery six hours later, she can't feel anything beside the ground under her feet and Cobb's hand around her thin wrist.
"She's in Fischer's hands now. We did everything we could," are the words he repeats to her, over and over. "We did everything we could."
"Did we," Ariadne murmurs. She sees Cobb nod, now beyond speech capabilities. She concurs with this sentiment and continues on down the hall in brooding silence.
They both fall wordlessly into an on-call room and Ariadne mindlessly locks the door behind them.
Cobb lifts the shirt of his scrubs, bloodied, and drops it carelessly into the bio-waste. He falls into the bottom bunk with a thud.
Ariadne considers briefly that climbing into bed with her boss is perhaps not the best idea, but sleep deprivation officially overrides the controls in her brain so that all she can come up with is, "Hnngh, pillow," and dives in after him.
-
"Ariadne," says a far away voice.
"No, sleeping now," is what she responds.
"Ariadne." A warm presence is situated behind her: it is a body cupped around her own, radiating welcome heat in the cold on-call room. She leans back into the warmth, blindly comforted.
Then she recognizes his voice.
"Oh shit," she hisses, falling out of bed and onto the floor. "Oh, God, Dr. Cobb, I'm so sorry, I don't know what I was thinking-clearly, clearly I was not thinking, there was certainly not a modicum of thought utilized-"
"Quiet," Cobb groans, throwing a pillow over his head. "Forget about it."
Ariadne stares down at Cobb in disbelief. She finds herself staring at his bare chest, which she discovers is bizarrely toned... actually, wow, Dr. Cobb is really well defined-
She shakes her head back and forth, diverting her gaze. "I really need to go. Sorry about all this, again."
"Yes," Cobb agrees, checking his pager horizontally. "Rounds are in twenty minutes."
"Seriously? Shit!" Ariadne groans, running off (but not before one last look at those abs... seriously, when did he find the time to work out?).
-
"Did I just spy you and that lovely brunette intern of yours leaving the same on-call room?" Arthur asks softly Cobb out of the corner of his mouth on the way to rounds.
"Not what you think, we both just passed out after the Fink case," Cobb whispers back. "No funny business."
"Pity," Arthur sighs.
"I do not need that kind of drama in my life right now," Cobb says under his breath as walk toward rounds. Arthur has a funny expression on his face, and Cobb puts a pin in it to ask him later about it. They enter Room 201. "Somebody competent, please present for Mr. Phillips," Cobb demands.
"Shotty Coma Guy," Eames grins, slinking into the room.
"Late," Cobb growls. "And you didn't respond to your pager last night. Scut."
"Would you believe me if I said my mum was in town from overseas?" Eames asks.
"Scut for the week," Cobb grits out. Eames shuts up.
"Ariadne, go," he says absently. She flushes and begins rounding on Coma Guy. When they finally round on Daphne Fink, Eames's eyes bulge.
"Holy shit, what ran her over?" he says in wonder.
"GSW to the chest, plus a subdural hematoma from-" Ariadne rattles off, checking Ms. Fink's chart, "what the-the hematoma's from pistol whipping. Fucking hell. This is a pregnant woman." The appalled look on her face barely contains her fury, and she turns to Cobb. A similar anger is etched upon his own visage. "Have they even found the guy who did this?"
"Not yet," Cobb says. "They haven't been able to remove the bullet from the left wall of her atrium yet, so they can't get a match on the gun."
"She's got a bullet stuck in her heart? And she's stable?" Eames breathes in wonder.
"Barely," Ariadne mutters, reviewing the vitals pouring out of the monitors surrounding the bed. "She's going to need surgery before the end of the day, mark my words."
"Baby's good?" Cobb asks offhandedly.
"Fine for now," Eames says, looking at the EKG. Arthur and Cobb's pagers go off.
"Ariadne, you're with Arthur today," Cobb decides. "Make sure someone notifies me if Ms. Fink's condition changes. Eames, let's go." Cobb turns on his heel, still clearly very angry with the MIA Eames from last night.
"Coming, darling!" Eames shouts, racing after him. Ariadne smiles shyly at Arthur. He'd always been kind to her while she'd been on his service in the past.
"Let's go find some brains to look at," Arthur grins at her wickedly.
Arthur rarely disappoints.
-
"Cobb's not a bad guy, you know," Arthur says casually while filing some paperwork. Ariadne is settled at the computer, inputing data from the last case they had diagnosed.
"Well, he tries not to show it, I guess," Ariadne laughs. Cobb's been breathing down their necks since the first day she stepped into New York Hospital, and his relentless nature had only intensified over the past six months.
"He does what he does to make you better," Arthur says simply. "He knows you're good."
Ariadne blushes. "I don't know about that-"
"You're not good enough, though." Ariadne blanches, the happy feeling that had been coursing through her veins now a pit of despair in her stomach. "Not yet, I mean. Which is why your year of intership-"
"I know, I know," she sighs. "It's the hardest part." Arthur raises an eyebrow.
"I'm going to tell you a secret, Ariadne. It's all the hardest part. If you're expecting a cakewalk next year, think again. If you're not prepared for the next level, don't waste our time and effort. Just get out."
Ariadne's jaw seems to scrape the floor.
"If," Arthur finally continues, after a pause, "if you think you can handle it, then don't just skate through this training. Be the best." Arthur pauses, giving Ariadne a reason to hope. "Cobb thinks you can be. Don't disappoint him."
Dr. Darling leaves her there, shocked and confused. "I'll page you if I need you," he calls over his shoulder.
-
"One day, that Cobb bastard is going to get what he deserves," Eames growls into his paperwork, Ariadne eating an apple while swinging her legs back and forth beneath the desk she sits upon. "He just doesn't like me because I stand up to him."
"No," Ariadne says blithely, "he doesn't like you because you miss your pages when you're on-call."
"Shut up," Eames sniffs. "I was having a bit of, er... bathroom trouble."
Ariadne chokes on her apple. Cobb appears out of nowhere and slams a fist against her back, hard. The bit of apple dislodges.
"For seven hours?" Ariadne gasps, both due to the apple and the incredulity of Eames's statement.
"Describing your sexcapades for Ariadne, are you?" Cobb growls. "Scut for the rest of the month." Cobb stalks off, looking pleased with himself. Eames gapes at Ariadne in horror, who runs two floors away before bursting into a fit of laughter.
-
Cobb and Ariadne don't discuss what happened in the on-call room the day Ms. Fink was admitted to the hospital. It is their secret (well, Cobb knows that its theirs and Arthur's), and it's not worth bringing up. But he can't help but notice her, now that he knew what it felt like to sleep against her. For him, every innocent graze or touch between them seemed to burn his skin. Every glance that lasts too long serves as yet another warning sign, pointing toward the path of no return. He knows that it's a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea to think about her the way he wants to. Simultaneous to his lust, he recognizes her potential to be somebody great, someday. The idea of seeing her talent go to waste is one that might physically hurt him. He chooses to channel his emotions into being even harder on her.
Of course, nothing fazed Ariadne. She had quite easily gone back to square one, banished the images of her half-naked boss from her mind... Oh, who was she kidding? She would have had to invest in some pretty heavy duty brain bleach to remove her shirtless boss from her memory. Harder still to forget was the feel: his body against her own, the faint thought of a pleasant pressure from his left arm slung over her hip. Still, it was hard to crush on someone who worked her so thoroughly. Any time for daydreams had been absorbed by scut and dreamless sleep.
"Excuse me," Cobb says curtly one morning, scooting behind her. Their bodies skim against each other, and Ariadne involuntarily feels a shudder run through her. Eames quirks his eyebrows at her, but gratefully says nothing. Cobb clears his throat and demands that Ariadne recall rounds from two days ago. She gets through most of it alright (not having studied the cases a wink since rounding on them), but confuses two older patients, a man and a woman. Cobb flies off the handle.
"You give Mr. Corces Heparin and he dies! Use your head!" Cobb shouts at her. "Martha Wagner is the one with heart disease. I didn't realize you felt like like killing a patient today." He storms off, leaving Eames and Ariadne in his wake.
"Who spit in his cornflakes?" Eames jokes, but Ariadne merely growls incoherently and stomps off as well, in search of a granola bar to sooth her spirits.
-
"For the last time, your sutures are too loose," Cobb growls at her. "You might as well just get out of here, you're of no use to me."
It's what must be the seventeenth time in the past twenty-four hours that Cobb has taken a dig at her. These digs are only the most recent in a series that had begun what seemed like a year ago, but Ariadne could date their origin back to two approximately two months. Ariadne drops her needle and thread in the pan of the suture kit and backs away from the patient. She attempts to find her zen and watches Eames step in, purposefully tightening his normally sloppy stitches in an attempt to impress Cobb while his former favorite, Ariadne, crumbled before them.
No. I will not cry, not in front of them. I won't give them that sick pleasure. She stands there and waits behind Eames, face blank, devoid of emotion. She does not look at Cobb, but knows that he is worse for the wear... Nash, the rheumatology attending, had apparently ripped him a new one for rightly correcting one of Nash's diagnoses in front of a patient; what little sympathy he had earned from that encounter, however, had been quickly spent in accordance with the constant harassment he had been dealing her for the past six weeks. What had spurred on this apparently deluge of venom, she knew not.
She does not look at the patient. She looks at the wall instead, calming her quickly beating heart, willing her eyes not to fill. Blessedly, they don't.
Once the procedure is over, she finishes the rest of her scut work in quick time, just under a half hour. Dragging herself to a darkened on-call room, she closes the door behind her, strips off her scrubs, drops her pager on her discarded pile of clothing, and collapses onto the bottom bunk of the bed.
"Ow," says a horribly familiar voice. Arthur Darling rolls out from underneath her. Ariadne scrambles off the bed, clutching her light blue scrubs to her chest. The resident beneath her is blessedly semi-clothed, but Ariadne cannot help but let out a squeal of surprise.
"Didn't think you made a habit of sleeping with residents," Arthur groans. Ariadne is frozen in mortification. He knew. And God, had he grossly misunderstood. "Now's the part where you get out so I can resume the sleep I so desperately require." She flings on her clothes and flees.
"Interns..." Arthur groans on her way out the door. "Fucking hell."
The last thing she hears form the on-call room is a low "Did she see me?" that Ariadne could easily have identified had she not be so furiously preoccupied.
And then of course, of all people, she runs smack into Cobb. Ariadne knows what she must look like, disheveled mess that she's sure she is. She puts on a brave face and stares him down.
"You know what," she says, cornering him. "I actually need a word with you." Cobb raises both his eyebrows. "If you think I won't report you to someone about your incessant harassment over the past few months, you've got another thing coming," she growls with stolen confidence. "So back off."
When Cobb does not respond, merely stares at her in incredulity, she scampers off tout suite.
He watches her walk away with a half-open jaw. Eames exits a nearby on-call room, looking sleepily mussed.
"Bloody hell... Women, eh?" Eames laughs, staring after Ariadne.
"Shut up," Cobb growls, gathering his things and running after her.
-
Ariadne finds a deserted stairway and decides that yes, it is a perfectly alright place to have a good cry. She sits on the landing and brings her legs in to her chest, heaving the deep breaths that accompany heavy sobs.
She hears the door open, too soon, too soon! and quickly tries to wipe the tears from her face.
"Hey," says a gruff voice from the head of the stairs.
"My allergies are really bad right now," Ariadne tells Cobb stuffily. "Just so you're aware."
He walks down the stairs and sits next to her on the landing.
"I'm sorry." Her neck nearly snaps, she turns so fast to goggle at him. She's never heard him say those words before to anyone (except to, perhaps, a grieving family member). "I'm out of line."
She wipes her eyes again, then leans against his shoulder. After a moment, she asks, "Do you think I can do this?"
"Become a doctor, you mean?" Cobb asks her. She nods. "Yeah, you'll get through it. Most do, once they've gotten this far." But the words sound sad.
"Why do you sound so disappointed when you say that?" she sniffs.
"Because you deserve," Cobb begins. He stops himself. "I think... among others," he adds on quickly, "that you could achieve greatness, Ariadne. Not just become a doctor. Become a great doctor. And to do that... you don't just go through the motions. You rise to the occasion." He runs a hand through his hair. "It's hard. Harder than anything any of your friends will ever have done. It's more emotionally taxing than any other job out there. But Ari," he says, displacing his shoulder with a large hand. "If... no, when you pull it all off... you'll know that all the shit you went through for it... it'll all have been worth it."
Blearily, she smiles at him. He wipes a stray tear from her chuck with his thumb. They remain there for a moment, transfixed in each other's stares, until the sound of a door slamming wakes them from their reveries.
Cobb jumps to his feet, holding out a hand for Ariadne. She declines it, standing up on her own.
"I'll try to tone it down," Cobb tells her as they ascend the stairs. "But know that I only do it to make you that much closer to perfection." With those final words he scoots off, leaving Ariadne in a daze of Dom Cobb that she doesn't think will ever go away.
-
The next few months fly by gloriously quickly, and before Ariadne knows it, the big day, July 1st, hits her like a ton of bricks. She's graduated from her internship, accepted a residency at Mount Sinai hospital, and published a few research papers along the way (co-written and using techniques she had pioneered in harmony with one Dr. Dom Cobb). When Arthur asks her if she'll miss New York Hospital, she shrugs her shoulders and nods. "Probably more than I realize," she admits. "The idea of being a resident in a brand new hospital is a little daunting."
"You'll do great, love," Eames chides, sidling up alongside Arthur. "Anyways, it's not like we're continents away. You're just a hop, skip, and a taxi ride away from a shoulder to cry on."
"Thanks, Eames," Ariadne laughs. Cobb walks up to the group of them, all smiles.
"Hey," Ariadne says warmly.
"Hey yourself," Cobb says, grinning at her.
"So... I guess, I'm not your intern anymore," Ariadne says slowly.
"I guess not," Cobb says, a twinkle in his eye. "But I wouldn't say you've ditched me for good."
"What is that supposed to me," Arthur says flatly. Cobb shoots him a brief glance. "Oh, good Lord," Arthur groans. "You didn't."
"Mount Sinai's research opportunities regarding the sleep-wake homeostasis mechanism are extraordinarily intriguing," Cobb says casually, but Ariadne's heart has already quickened, aware of something her brain has yet to register. "They've offered me a part-time residency and sleep lab specialist opportunity. Arthur, it was too good to pass up."
"You're kidding me!" Ariadne says in a small shriek of joy, jumping and wrapping her arms around Cobb. She lingers a moment too long, and then slips down from her tip toes. He catches her fingertips before she can escape his radius.
"I bet they pay you better there," Eames guesses.
Ariadne gives Cobb a sly look.
"I left something in the on-call room," she announces to them all.
"Me too," says Cobb immediately. They practically hit a run in their hurry.
"My little duckings," Eames sighs to Arthur, resting his head on Arthur's shoulder. "All grown up."
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Ariadne/Dom, Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG13
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Written for a prompt from inception_kink: Hospital AU, Ariadne's the new intern and Cobb's her resident.
A/N: So this just happened. IDK GUYS IDK.
"Don't you think you're a bit rough on your little ducklings," Arthur remarks casually, testing out the phrase as if it is not his own. Cobb doesn't look up from his latest chart.
"As if we had it any different. Internships are shit for a reason."
Arthur shrugs. "True."
"It makes them better."
"I'm pretty sure that Eames kid of yours is a lost cause."
"Maybe. But the girl, she's got... something. Spunk, I guess. Reminds me of me."
"Don't be such a narcissist," Arthur teases. Dom throws a pen at him. Arthur continues. "Everybody has limits, Dom. Even us. Even the interns."
"Yeah, yeah. I'll worry more about it when they start hitting the wall," Cobb smirks. "Then I'll tell them to get the fuck back on their feet and do it again, but better."
"Hard ass."
"As if you treat yours any better. At least I don't have mine pick up my dry-cleaning."
Cobb gets a page, takes a moment to assess it, and breaks into a run.
"Blood is nearly impossible to get out by hand," Arthur sighs knowingly, picking up the chart Cobb had so helpfully dropped on the floor in his haste.
-
Ariadne has been awake for thirty-six hours when the ER gets the call from an incoming ambulance that there's been a shooting on West 4th and Broadway. The dispatcher says frantically into the receiver, "Thirty-nine year old female, pregnant, with a GSW to the left chest and severe head trauma, probable concussion, possibly worse."
Ariadne is already running before her pager goes off; glancing at it quickly, she turns a corner and nearly runs into her boss. They fall into step next to each other.
"Give me info," he commands. "All I know is GSW to the heart."
"Bullet appears to have grazed but not penetrated the atrium... but it's all around bad," Ariadne huffs out as they both hurtle down the stairs to the emergency room. "Thirty-nine, pregnant, with head trauma in addition to the GSW."
"From what?" Cobb asks, more to himself than her.
They slow down to a jog in the ER just to avoid hitting the deluge of personelle that had arrived with the GSW.
"Name?" Cobb calls out before he hits trauma room one.
"Daphne Fink," Araidne tells him. Ariadne's come to find that Cobb likes giving his patients identities. Likes attaching names to faces. Ariadne thinks that maybe it makes him want to save them more, if he sort of knows them... then again, how much more personally are you going to get, once you've gone up to your elbow in their rectal cavity.
"Yusuf, who's the attending on call," Cobb calls out to a male nurse known for having the attendings schedules tattooed to the back of his eyelids.
"Browning, but he's driving in from Upstate, won't be here for a couple hours at least," Yusuf calls out from behind the gurney. Ariadne can see very little in the sea of obscenely tall people. She scuttles in front, toward the patient's face.
"Good God," she breathes in horror. "Are we sure that she doesn't have a subdural hematoma?"
"No, we're not sure," Cobb hisses at her. "Ariadne, page Arthur. Yusuf... What about trauma, or neuro? Who's on call? The Fischers?"
Ariadne runs to the nurse's hub and requests a neurology consult from Dr. Darling while Cobb whittles off more orders.
"Yeah, but Fischer and Fischer Jr. are both in the OR, both unavailable," Yusuf calls out. "Fischer senior's the only neuro attending on call tonight."
"Shit," Cobb says vehemently. "Okay, okay. Page Fisher senior anyway, tell him that when he gets a chance to high-tail it to our OR, whichever one we end up getting." Cobb looks around at the huge crowd of people surrounding the unconscious pregnant woman. He takes a deep breath and then bellows, "Get out if you're not on my team or currently bagging the patient. And someone tell me her chest tube status."
"Blood, there's blood in the lungs," Ariadne says loudly, her voice betraying little of the exhaustion and horror built up inside her. Cobb lets off another string of curses. Ariadne finds his voice comforting, her only constant in a sea of horrifyingly new situations.
"Give me pictures," Cobb yells impatiently. Yusuf lays a lead apron over the woman's belly and turns a key in the wall, flashing an x-ray.
"You're with me," he says to Ariadne, motioning her toward the computer screen where the image was loading. "Eames... where is that bastard. He should have gotten the page five minutes ago."
Once they see the cloud of blood, white and smokey on the image, Cobb's mouth is a hard line.
"We need to get her to an OR," Cobb tells a squat female nurse. "Let Nash know that we're bumping him."
"He's not gonna be happy about that," the nurse wheezes, but she darts off obediently.
"What about the baby?" Ariadne asks plainly.
"What about the baby?" Cobb snarls back, clearly also sleep deprived. "It's not far along enough to come out, she looks around twenty weeks."
"We can't..." she begins, but her brain trails off, leaving her without words. Cobb has already begun wheeling the expectant mother toward the elevator.
"Your patient is Daphne Fink, Ariadne... don't forget it," Cobb tells her harshly. Shock clearly written over her face, his expression softens a touch. "Best way to save the baby is to save the mother. Now, are you coming with me or am I doing this by myself?"
Ariadne moves.
-
When Ariadne stumbles out of surgery six hours later, she can't feel anything beside the ground under her feet and Cobb's hand around her thin wrist.
"She's in Fischer's hands now. We did everything we could," are the words he repeats to her, over and over. "We did everything we could."
"Did we," Ariadne murmurs. She sees Cobb nod, now beyond speech capabilities. She concurs with this sentiment and continues on down the hall in brooding silence.
They both fall wordlessly into an on-call room and Ariadne mindlessly locks the door behind them.
Cobb lifts the shirt of his scrubs, bloodied, and drops it carelessly into the bio-waste. He falls into the bottom bunk with a thud.
Ariadne considers briefly that climbing into bed with her boss is perhaps not the best idea, but sleep deprivation officially overrides the controls in her brain so that all she can come up with is, "Hnngh, pillow," and dives in after him.
-
"Ariadne," says a far away voice.
"No, sleeping now," is what she responds.
"Ariadne." A warm presence is situated behind her: it is a body cupped around her own, radiating welcome heat in the cold on-call room. She leans back into the warmth, blindly comforted.
Then she recognizes his voice.
"Oh shit," she hisses, falling out of bed and onto the floor. "Oh, God, Dr. Cobb, I'm so sorry, I don't know what I was thinking-clearly, clearly I was not thinking, there was certainly not a modicum of thought utilized-"
"Quiet," Cobb groans, throwing a pillow over his head. "Forget about it."
Ariadne stares down at Cobb in disbelief. She finds herself staring at his bare chest, which she discovers is bizarrely toned... actually, wow, Dr. Cobb is really well defined-
She shakes her head back and forth, diverting her gaze. "I really need to go. Sorry about all this, again."
"Yes," Cobb agrees, checking his pager horizontally. "Rounds are in twenty minutes."
"Seriously? Shit!" Ariadne groans, running off (but not before one last look at those abs... seriously, when did he find the time to work out?).
-
"Did I just spy you and that lovely brunette intern of yours leaving the same on-call room?" Arthur asks softly Cobb out of the corner of his mouth on the way to rounds.
"Not what you think, we both just passed out after the Fink case," Cobb whispers back. "No funny business."
"Pity," Arthur sighs.
"I do not need that kind of drama in my life right now," Cobb says under his breath as walk toward rounds. Arthur has a funny expression on his face, and Cobb puts a pin in it to ask him later about it. They enter Room 201. "Somebody competent, please present for Mr. Phillips," Cobb demands.
"Shotty Coma Guy," Eames grins, slinking into the room.
"Late," Cobb growls. "And you didn't respond to your pager last night. Scut."
"Would you believe me if I said my mum was in town from overseas?" Eames asks.
"Scut for the week," Cobb grits out. Eames shuts up.
"Ariadne, go," he says absently. She flushes and begins rounding on Coma Guy. When they finally round on Daphne Fink, Eames's eyes bulge.
"Holy shit, what ran her over?" he says in wonder.
"GSW to the chest, plus a subdural hematoma from-" Ariadne rattles off, checking Ms. Fink's chart, "what the-the hematoma's from pistol whipping. Fucking hell. This is a pregnant woman." The appalled look on her face barely contains her fury, and she turns to Cobb. A similar anger is etched upon his own visage. "Have they even found the guy who did this?"
"Not yet," Cobb says. "They haven't been able to remove the bullet from the left wall of her atrium yet, so they can't get a match on the gun."
"She's got a bullet stuck in her heart? And she's stable?" Eames breathes in wonder.
"Barely," Ariadne mutters, reviewing the vitals pouring out of the monitors surrounding the bed. "She's going to need surgery before the end of the day, mark my words."
"Baby's good?" Cobb asks offhandedly.
"Fine for now," Eames says, looking at the EKG. Arthur and Cobb's pagers go off.
"Ariadne, you're with Arthur today," Cobb decides. "Make sure someone notifies me if Ms. Fink's condition changes. Eames, let's go." Cobb turns on his heel, still clearly very angry with the MIA Eames from last night.
"Coming, darling!" Eames shouts, racing after him. Ariadne smiles shyly at Arthur. He'd always been kind to her while she'd been on his service in the past.
"Let's go find some brains to look at," Arthur grins at her wickedly.
Arthur rarely disappoints.
-
"Cobb's not a bad guy, you know," Arthur says casually while filing some paperwork. Ariadne is settled at the computer, inputing data from the last case they had diagnosed.
"Well, he tries not to show it, I guess," Ariadne laughs. Cobb's been breathing down their necks since the first day she stepped into New York Hospital, and his relentless nature had only intensified over the past six months.
"He does what he does to make you better," Arthur says simply. "He knows you're good."
Ariadne blushes. "I don't know about that-"
"You're not good enough, though." Ariadne blanches, the happy feeling that had been coursing through her veins now a pit of despair in her stomach. "Not yet, I mean. Which is why your year of intership-"
"I know, I know," she sighs. "It's the hardest part." Arthur raises an eyebrow.
"I'm going to tell you a secret, Ariadne. It's all the hardest part. If you're expecting a cakewalk next year, think again. If you're not prepared for the next level, don't waste our time and effort. Just get out."
Ariadne's jaw seems to scrape the floor.
"If," Arthur finally continues, after a pause, "if you think you can handle it, then don't just skate through this training. Be the best." Arthur pauses, giving Ariadne a reason to hope. "Cobb thinks you can be. Don't disappoint him."
Dr. Darling leaves her there, shocked and confused. "I'll page you if I need you," he calls over his shoulder.
-
"One day, that Cobb bastard is going to get what he deserves," Eames growls into his paperwork, Ariadne eating an apple while swinging her legs back and forth beneath the desk she sits upon. "He just doesn't like me because I stand up to him."
"No," Ariadne says blithely, "he doesn't like you because you miss your pages when you're on-call."
"Shut up," Eames sniffs. "I was having a bit of, er... bathroom trouble."
Ariadne chokes on her apple. Cobb appears out of nowhere and slams a fist against her back, hard. The bit of apple dislodges.
"For seven hours?" Ariadne gasps, both due to the apple and the incredulity of Eames's statement.
"Describing your sexcapades for Ariadne, are you?" Cobb growls. "Scut for the rest of the month." Cobb stalks off, looking pleased with himself. Eames gapes at Ariadne in horror, who runs two floors away before bursting into a fit of laughter.
-
Cobb and Ariadne don't discuss what happened in the on-call room the day Ms. Fink was admitted to the hospital. It is their secret (well, Cobb knows that its theirs and Arthur's), and it's not worth bringing up. But he can't help but notice her, now that he knew what it felt like to sleep against her. For him, every innocent graze or touch between them seemed to burn his skin. Every glance that lasts too long serves as yet another warning sign, pointing toward the path of no return. He knows that it's a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea to think about her the way he wants to. Simultaneous to his lust, he recognizes her potential to be somebody great, someday. The idea of seeing her talent go to waste is one that might physically hurt him. He chooses to channel his emotions into being even harder on her.
Of course, nothing fazed Ariadne. She had quite easily gone back to square one, banished the images of her half-naked boss from her mind... Oh, who was she kidding? She would have had to invest in some pretty heavy duty brain bleach to remove her shirtless boss from her memory. Harder still to forget was the feel: his body against her own, the faint thought of a pleasant pressure from his left arm slung over her hip. Still, it was hard to crush on someone who worked her so thoroughly. Any time for daydreams had been absorbed by scut and dreamless sleep.
"Excuse me," Cobb says curtly one morning, scooting behind her. Their bodies skim against each other, and Ariadne involuntarily feels a shudder run through her. Eames quirks his eyebrows at her, but gratefully says nothing. Cobb clears his throat and demands that Ariadne recall rounds from two days ago. She gets through most of it alright (not having studied the cases a wink since rounding on them), but confuses two older patients, a man and a woman. Cobb flies off the handle.
"You give Mr. Corces Heparin and he dies! Use your head!" Cobb shouts at her. "Martha Wagner is the one with heart disease. I didn't realize you felt like like killing a patient today." He storms off, leaving Eames and Ariadne in his wake.
"Who spit in his cornflakes?" Eames jokes, but Ariadne merely growls incoherently and stomps off as well, in search of a granola bar to sooth her spirits.
-
"For the last time, your sutures are too loose," Cobb growls at her. "You might as well just get out of here, you're of no use to me."
It's what must be the seventeenth time in the past twenty-four hours that Cobb has taken a dig at her. These digs are only the most recent in a series that had begun what seemed like a year ago, but Ariadne could date their origin back to two approximately two months. Ariadne drops her needle and thread in the pan of the suture kit and backs away from the patient. She attempts to find her zen and watches Eames step in, purposefully tightening his normally sloppy stitches in an attempt to impress Cobb while his former favorite, Ariadne, crumbled before them.
No. I will not cry, not in front of them. I won't give them that sick pleasure. She stands there and waits behind Eames, face blank, devoid of emotion. She does not look at Cobb, but knows that he is worse for the wear... Nash, the rheumatology attending, had apparently ripped him a new one for rightly correcting one of Nash's diagnoses in front of a patient; what little sympathy he had earned from that encounter, however, had been quickly spent in accordance with the constant harassment he had been dealing her for the past six weeks. What had spurred on this apparently deluge of venom, she knew not.
She does not look at the patient. She looks at the wall instead, calming her quickly beating heart, willing her eyes not to fill. Blessedly, they don't.
Once the procedure is over, she finishes the rest of her scut work in quick time, just under a half hour. Dragging herself to a darkened on-call room, she closes the door behind her, strips off her scrubs, drops her pager on her discarded pile of clothing, and collapses onto the bottom bunk of the bed.
"Ow," says a horribly familiar voice. Arthur Darling rolls out from underneath her. Ariadne scrambles off the bed, clutching her light blue scrubs to her chest. The resident beneath her is blessedly semi-clothed, but Ariadne cannot help but let out a squeal of surprise.
"Didn't think you made a habit of sleeping with residents," Arthur groans. Ariadne is frozen in mortification. He knew. And God, had he grossly misunderstood. "Now's the part where you get out so I can resume the sleep I so desperately require." She flings on her clothes and flees.
"Interns..." Arthur groans on her way out the door. "Fucking hell."
The last thing she hears form the on-call room is a low "Did she see me?" that Ariadne could easily have identified had she not be so furiously preoccupied.
And then of course, of all people, she runs smack into Cobb. Ariadne knows what she must look like, disheveled mess that she's sure she is. She puts on a brave face and stares him down.
"You know what," she says, cornering him. "I actually need a word with you." Cobb raises both his eyebrows. "If you think I won't report you to someone about your incessant harassment over the past few months, you've got another thing coming," she growls with stolen confidence. "So back off."
When Cobb does not respond, merely stares at her in incredulity, she scampers off tout suite.
He watches her walk away with a half-open jaw. Eames exits a nearby on-call room, looking sleepily mussed.
"Bloody hell... Women, eh?" Eames laughs, staring after Ariadne.
"Shut up," Cobb growls, gathering his things and running after her.
-
Ariadne finds a deserted stairway and decides that yes, it is a perfectly alright place to have a good cry. She sits on the landing and brings her legs in to her chest, heaving the deep breaths that accompany heavy sobs.
She hears the door open, too soon, too soon! and quickly tries to wipe the tears from her face.
"Hey," says a gruff voice from the head of the stairs.
"My allergies are really bad right now," Ariadne tells Cobb stuffily. "Just so you're aware."
He walks down the stairs and sits next to her on the landing.
"I'm sorry." Her neck nearly snaps, she turns so fast to goggle at him. She's never heard him say those words before to anyone (except to, perhaps, a grieving family member). "I'm out of line."
She wipes her eyes again, then leans against his shoulder. After a moment, she asks, "Do you think I can do this?"
"Become a doctor, you mean?" Cobb asks her. She nods. "Yeah, you'll get through it. Most do, once they've gotten this far." But the words sound sad.
"Why do you sound so disappointed when you say that?" she sniffs.
"Because you deserve," Cobb begins. He stops himself. "I think... among others," he adds on quickly, "that you could achieve greatness, Ariadne. Not just become a doctor. Become a great doctor. And to do that... you don't just go through the motions. You rise to the occasion." He runs a hand through his hair. "It's hard. Harder than anything any of your friends will ever have done. It's more emotionally taxing than any other job out there. But Ari," he says, displacing his shoulder with a large hand. "If... no, when you pull it all off... you'll know that all the shit you went through for it... it'll all have been worth it."
Blearily, she smiles at him. He wipes a stray tear from her chuck with his thumb. They remain there for a moment, transfixed in each other's stares, until the sound of a door slamming wakes them from their reveries.
Cobb jumps to his feet, holding out a hand for Ariadne. She declines it, standing up on her own.
"I'll try to tone it down," Cobb tells her as they ascend the stairs. "But know that I only do it to make you that much closer to perfection." With those final words he scoots off, leaving Ariadne in a daze of Dom Cobb that she doesn't think will ever go away.
-
The next few months fly by gloriously quickly, and before Ariadne knows it, the big day, July 1st, hits her like a ton of bricks. She's graduated from her internship, accepted a residency at Mount Sinai hospital, and published a few research papers along the way (co-written and using techniques she had pioneered in harmony with one Dr. Dom Cobb). When Arthur asks her if she'll miss New York Hospital, she shrugs her shoulders and nods. "Probably more than I realize," she admits. "The idea of being a resident in a brand new hospital is a little daunting."
"You'll do great, love," Eames chides, sidling up alongside Arthur. "Anyways, it's not like we're continents away. You're just a hop, skip, and a taxi ride away from a shoulder to cry on."
"Thanks, Eames," Ariadne laughs. Cobb walks up to the group of them, all smiles.
"Hey," Ariadne says warmly.
"Hey yourself," Cobb says, grinning at her.
"So... I guess, I'm not your intern anymore," Ariadne says slowly.
"I guess not," Cobb says, a twinkle in his eye. "But I wouldn't say you've ditched me for good."
"What is that supposed to me," Arthur says flatly. Cobb shoots him a brief glance. "Oh, good Lord," Arthur groans. "You didn't."
"Mount Sinai's research opportunities regarding the sleep-wake homeostasis mechanism are extraordinarily intriguing," Cobb says casually, but Ariadne's heart has already quickened, aware of something her brain has yet to register. "They've offered me a part-time residency and sleep lab specialist opportunity. Arthur, it was too good to pass up."
"You're kidding me!" Ariadne says in a small shriek of joy, jumping and wrapping her arms around Cobb. She lingers a moment too long, and then slips down from her tip toes. He catches her fingertips before she can escape his radius.
"I bet they pay you better there," Eames guesses.
Ariadne gives Cobb a sly look.
"I left something in the on-call room," she announces to them all.
"Me too," says Cobb immediately. They practically hit a run in their hurry.
"My little duckings," Eames sighs to Arthur, resting his head on Arthur's shoulder. "All grown up."