Even If It Kills Me | Inception | R | Ariadne/Dom
Title: Even If It Kills Me
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Ariadne/Dom
Rating: R
Spoilers: For the movie.
Summary: Written for a prompt from inception_kink: Ariadne finds herself becoming more like him by the day. Sometimes, she hates it. Most of the time, it can't be helped.
A/N: Angst angst angst. :|
Ariadne doesn't realize she's furious until she realizes she can't dream on her own.
She finds herself mortified after a year of dreamless sleep. The few hours she attains in the REM cycle does nothing to assuage her exhaustion, and the dreams she had cherished as a child (the one with the mechanical gorilla that chases her around the playground; the one where she makes friends with a teacup; the one where she's falling) have evaporated, like the morning dew. She wants to blame someone for this loss, this theft. She decides to blame the best thief she knows. After all, it's what he does: steal things. He stole her childhood, ripping her away from her transition between youth and adulthood to go and play with toys she should have left alone. He stole her imagination, used her creativity to create exactly what he needed to get what he wanted (there was no us, no we when it came to Dom Cobb... there was only the One Last Job and Whatever It Takes). And of course, he had stolen her heart, however unwilling Ariadne was to admit it: the shell of a man, once whole and good-but now completely detached from the waking world-had captured her. She hated him for ruining her.
Ariadne comes to hate Dom Cobb, because it's much easier than loving him.
It doesn't take long for the team to notice her switch from adoration to complete revulsion toward the extractor. Ariadne almost prides herself on how easily she can flip the switch from love to hate (somewhere in the back of Ariadne's mind, she remembers an old female professor telling her that love and hate, in terms of fervor and pitch, were rather close to each other, like a horseshoe of emotion). She can feel in the way Arthur glares at her that he wants to talk about it, but she does not allow him to press her. Cobb pretends not to notice her change in demeanor, and Ariadne uses his blase reaction to fuel her rage. Ariadne is content at the ease of it all.
She's hooked up to the PASIV machine and has a second drip of a concoction of Yusuf's that actually yielded natural dreams when she sees the iron elevator grate. At first she is petrified, afraid that somehow, against all odds, she's wormed her way back into Cobb's mind, back into his guilty subconscious. But upon a closer inspection, the elevator she sees before her is beautifully ornate, the caste iron grid woven into grape vines that Ariadne had once imagined on a church she had crafted in one of her low-level architecture seminars. The pattern of the vines made it clear: this was not Dom Cobb's elevator.
It was hers.
Terrified, she wrenches the gate open and steps inside. The walls are mirrored, and she can see her own reflection looking back at her, petrified. She looks toward the buttons. There are only three: basement, level one, and roof access.
Ariadne wants to wake up.
Instead, she presses the button marked ROOF and waits.
She feels herself rising as, in turn, her own fear bubbles upwards from the pit of her stomach. This was too much like Dom's mind to feel comfortable, to feel real. But of course, it was all in her head.
She exits the lift, and finds herself at her university. The elevator is positioned so that she's now walking down marble steps toward her favorite professor and a shadow of a man standing to his right. Not that Ariadne had recognized the darkness in Dom Cobb the first moment she had laid eyes on him. No, in the beginning, he had seemed like a doorway to opportunity. And so the shadowed man morphs before her eyes into the Dom Cobb she had idolized for too long: handsome, whole, but a fraud, someone she had crafted in her mind. The Dom Cobb before her had never existed.
She finds herself in the middle of a conversation, and the words fall out of her like drops of rain from a swollen grey cloud: "A kind of work placement?"
Dom smiles at her, and she goes weak in the knees. "Not exactly."
She hates this. "I hate you," she hisses at him. "I hate you." She says it as if it's the only true thing that's ever been spoken.
He takes her face in his hands, diverging from her memory. "You keep telling yourself that," he whispers to her, a smirk playing at his lips. He goes in to kiss her, but she pulls away.
"You're a bastard," she chokes out. "But the real you is worse." She runs back to the elevator, silently begging Yusuf to unplug her, but there's no way out until her allotted two hours are up. Slamming the grate behind her, she bangs her hand against it pathetically. The elevator moves down of its own accord to level one. Ariadne steps out, thinking it could only get worse.
Of course, it does.
She's standing in Cobb's limbo, gun suddenly in her hand, an unconscious Robert Fischer at her feet. Cobb is cradling the Shade in his arms, weeping over her frozen form. The gun is warm in Ariadne's hand, and she realizes she must have just killed her.
Ariadne is screaming at him over the sounds of the dream collapsing. Nothing seems to get through to him.
Then the memory diverges once again. Dom lets go of Mal, who slumps on the floor. Ariadne stumbles backwards, as far away from him as possible without going over the edge.
"Why is it so important to dream, Ariadne?" he asks her fiercely. Ariadne whimpers and points the gun at her head.
"Stop, stop," she cries. He stops in his path toward her but doesn't stop smiling.
"Answer me," he commands.
"Because... in my dreams, we're together," Ariadne says softly, speaking the words with a newfound meaning.
"Yes, we are," Dom smiles, and he palms the gun out of her hand and into the abyss below them. She's shaking with a mixture of terror and rage.
"Get away from me," she growls. She fights him as he takes her into his arms. "Get off me!" she shrieks.
"Shhh," he tells her. "We're together here. That's all that matters."
"Get away! Get off!" She finally lands a sharp blow in his stomach, and he's forced to release her. She races back to the elevator and sends up a prayer for some kind of relief from this self-induced hell. It doesn't come. Instead, she finds herself being lowered deeper, down into the pit.
The doors to the basement of her dreams open, and she is beyond scared. She steps out.
They're in a hotel that served as a makeshift headquarters during a routine job that had been completed years ago. Dom is sitting alone in the middle of the floor, piles of paper gathered all around him. His hair is mussed, a strand dangling in front of his right eye. He looks like he hasn't slept for days. Ariadne feels her heart heave.
He doesn't look up, but extends a hand towards his desk. "Ariadne, hand me those files, will you?" Ariadne creeps toward the desk, picks up the folder that lies upon it and hands it to him. When she does so, their fingers brush together. Cobb doesn't say a word, but Ariadne whimpers and sinks to the ground.
"I fell in love with you here," she admits in a strangled voice. "I didn't know it then, but I know it now. God, you just couldn't have left me alone?"
Dom doesn't answer her, just continues to read the file.
"Why me, Dom," she begs him, crying into her hand. "I could have lived a normal life. I could have been happy. But you came into my life and you-" She stops herself. "You're not the real Dom."
"I'm really not," the projection tells her frankly.
She gets to her feet and leaves the headquarters. She's about to close the grate to the elevator when she wakes up.
-
Cobb is leaning over her with a concerned look on his face, IV in his hand. Ariadne's face feels strange: she puts a hand to her cheek and it comes away wet. Embarrassed, she wipes away the tears quickly, efficiently.
"You were crying," he says simply, pity in his eyes. She glares at him.
"What an astute observation," she seethes, though the venom in her voice is forced.
Cobb says nothing, just drops the IV and sits in Yusuf's empty chair opposite her own.
"If you've got something to say to me, spit it out," he says, his own hackles raising. "It's not really fair for you to act this way without me knowing what exactly what's going on."
Ariadne feels her fists clenching and realizes that this is her chance to really settle the score, to show him that she's done.
"What's going on? What's going on? Oh, you know what's going on... and God, Cobb, just stop with all that fucking compassion bullshit, 'cause I'm through with it," Ariadne says, her voice shaking. She's on her feet now, looking down at him. "You made me this way. You broke me in all the places you got broken. How is that fair? What did I do?" Her wrath has boiled over now; she cannot control her words, and she doesn't want to. "You pretended that this life was some great gift you were giving me. What kind of life is this? Living in dreams?" She lets the question hang in the air before continuing on.
"It's killing me," she whispers viciously. "And it's your fault."
"You knew the risks," Cobb begins, but Ariadne cuts him off.
"I was a child! You, you were older, you should have known better. You had the experience, you could have predicted what damage you'd do me. But no. You don't give a shit about anything except yourself. You're a fucking user, you know that? You used me."
Dom's got his head in his hands. Ariadne doesn't stop.
"The only reason I'm still here is because I can't fucking do anything else," she cries, tears now streaming down her face. "I'm useless at real life; the only thing I could think about in class was the dream. This shit is the only thing I'm good for now. There is no going back for me. But you fucking knew that, you knew it even when we were first sitting in that cafe, and you let me fall for it... hook, line, and sinker. I hope you choke."
She thinks she sees Dom heave an erratic sigh that she's come to associate with her own crying, but no, it couldn't be: in her fantasies of telling Cobb off, he's never cried.
She fingers her chess piece, finds the imperfection, and whimpers. He's breaking her heart all over again.
"Jesus Christ, I'm so, so sorry," Dom whispers. "I know, I shouldn't have taken you... I should have protected you. You were so young, so bright-"
"You're not supposed to cry," Ariadne says, almost affronted.
"I've ruined you," Dom says quietly. "How can I not grieve?"
A silence passes between them. Ariadne sinks back into her chair, her rage trickling away, leaving remorse and anguish. She puts her own head in her hands, fingers over her tear-stained face: a mirror image of Cobb.
"You want to know the worst part," Ariadne murmurs. Cobb grunts. "Even now, even though I hate you so much... even after everything you did-" her voice is getting higher and higher- "I still fucking love you."
She's said it. It's done, it can't be taken back. It feels good to have it out of her, like ripping off a band-aid.
"We can add that to the list of ways I've debauched you," Cobb says, his eyes now on hers. He doesn't look away. Neither does she.
"Did you just say that you love me?" Cobb asks her.
"'And you shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart,'" Ariadne quotes at him. "You made me crooked. I can't help it."
He takes her hand.
"I can't give you what you want," he tells her softly. "And I'm sorry for it."
"I know," Ariadne says bitterly. She wants to shake his hand off, but his touch is like fire on her cold hands. "I know you can't love me back. That's why all this-loving you... it's tearing me apart."
"Is there anything I can do?" Dom asks her, his eyes black with sorrow.
"It hurts so much, losing my heart to you," she hiccups. His brows furrow in extreme sympathy. "It's not easy, you know. You're so tangled, I'm all tied up in your web." She pauses, then looks up at him. "But I think, maybe, if I knew... once..."
She leans forward.
"Kiss me."
The look on his face is hesitant, as if he knows a bad idea when he hears one. She doesn't care. She wants to burn away the sorrow, and this is the only way she knows how.
His lips are softer than she had imagined, the pressure behind them more urgent than she could ever have known. She opens her mouth to his, and, after a moment, he envelopes her mouth with his own, hugging her body in close, sitting her on top of his lap. It's all extraordinarily bittersweet: the way his teeth catch on her lips, the way her breath radiates across his cheek. She knows that this is their last hurrah, the final death toll on the fantasy she has kept bottled up inside her for nearly three years. She pulls down his unbuttoned flannel, letting it pool around his waist. He, in turn, runs a hand under her shirt and, in a quick tug, lifts her tee-shirt over her head. Ariadne wants to cry, but she stops herself, forcing her mind and body to savor this, remember this experience... because she knows that there will be another button added to her elevator, another floor added to her building of memories.
Remember this forever, she tells herself once he's pushing himself into her. He's whispering, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," over and over again. She lets the tears fall into the crook of his neck as he moves back and forth.
When it's done, there is no cuddling or contented napping. Ariadne pulls back on her clothes without a word.
"My heart was shattered years ago. I don't think it can love anyone anymore," Cobb murmurs in apology, placing a hand on the small of her back. She jumps away at his touch, shuddering.
"I quit," is all she says. She pulls her shirt on over her head and walks away: away from Dom Cobb, away from the dream.
She knows her resolve won't last. She knows that within a month, she'll be crawling back to Cobb, begging him to just forget what happened, to forget everything, to just please, please let her build again-
But for now, she'll walk away, and leave Cobb to pick up the pieces of the broken heart she's leaving behind. It's the best she can do.
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Ariadne/Dom
Rating: R
Spoilers: For the movie.
Summary: Written for a prompt from inception_kink: Ariadne finds herself becoming more like him by the day. Sometimes, she hates it. Most of the time, it can't be helped.
A/N: Angst angst angst. :|
Ariadne doesn't realize she's furious until she realizes she can't dream on her own.
She finds herself mortified after a year of dreamless sleep. The few hours she attains in the REM cycle does nothing to assuage her exhaustion, and the dreams she had cherished as a child (the one with the mechanical gorilla that chases her around the playground; the one where she makes friends with a teacup; the one where she's falling) have evaporated, like the morning dew. She wants to blame someone for this loss, this theft. She decides to blame the best thief she knows. After all, it's what he does: steal things. He stole her childhood, ripping her away from her transition between youth and adulthood to go and play with toys she should have left alone. He stole her imagination, used her creativity to create exactly what he needed to get what he wanted (there was no us, no we when it came to Dom Cobb... there was only the One Last Job and Whatever It Takes). And of course, he had stolen her heart, however unwilling Ariadne was to admit it: the shell of a man, once whole and good-but now completely detached from the waking world-had captured her. She hated him for ruining her.
Ariadne comes to hate Dom Cobb, because it's much easier than loving him.
It doesn't take long for the team to notice her switch from adoration to complete revulsion toward the extractor. Ariadne almost prides herself on how easily she can flip the switch from love to hate (somewhere in the back of Ariadne's mind, she remembers an old female professor telling her that love and hate, in terms of fervor and pitch, were rather close to each other, like a horseshoe of emotion). She can feel in the way Arthur glares at her that he wants to talk about it, but she does not allow him to press her. Cobb pretends not to notice her change in demeanor, and Ariadne uses his blase reaction to fuel her rage. Ariadne is content at the ease of it all.
She's hooked up to the PASIV machine and has a second drip of a concoction of Yusuf's that actually yielded natural dreams when she sees the iron elevator grate. At first she is petrified, afraid that somehow, against all odds, she's wormed her way back into Cobb's mind, back into his guilty subconscious. But upon a closer inspection, the elevator she sees before her is beautifully ornate, the caste iron grid woven into grape vines that Ariadne had once imagined on a church she had crafted in one of her low-level architecture seminars. The pattern of the vines made it clear: this was not Dom Cobb's elevator.
It was hers.
Terrified, she wrenches the gate open and steps inside. The walls are mirrored, and she can see her own reflection looking back at her, petrified. She looks toward the buttons. There are only three: basement, level one, and roof access.
Ariadne wants to wake up.
Instead, she presses the button marked ROOF and waits.
She feels herself rising as, in turn, her own fear bubbles upwards from the pit of her stomach. This was too much like Dom's mind to feel comfortable, to feel real. But of course, it was all in her head.
She exits the lift, and finds herself at her university. The elevator is positioned so that she's now walking down marble steps toward her favorite professor and a shadow of a man standing to his right. Not that Ariadne had recognized the darkness in Dom Cobb the first moment she had laid eyes on him. No, in the beginning, he had seemed like a doorway to opportunity. And so the shadowed man morphs before her eyes into the Dom Cobb she had idolized for too long: handsome, whole, but a fraud, someone she had crafted in her mind. The Dom Cobb before her had never existed.
She finds herself in the middle of a conversation, and the words fall out of her like drops of rain from a swollen grey cloud: "A kind of work placement?"
Dom smiles at her, and she goes weak in the knees. "Not exactly."
She hates this. "I hate you," she hisses at him. "I hate you." She says it as if it's the only true thing that's ever been spoken.
He takes her face in his hands, diverging from her memory. "You keep telling yourself that," he whispers to her, a smirk playing at his lips. He goes in to kiss her, but she pulls away.
"You're a bastard," she chokes out. "But the real you is worse." She runs back to the elevator, silently begging Yusuf to unplug her, but there's no way out until her allotted two hours are up. Slamming the grate behind her, she bangs her hand against it pathetically. The elevator moves down of its own accord to level one. Ariadne steps out, thinking it could only get worse.
Of course, it does.
She's standing in Cobb's limbo, gun suddenly in her hand, an unconscious Robert Fischer at her feet. Cobb is cradling the Shade in his arms, weeping over her frozen form. The gun is warm in Ariadne's hand, and she realizes she must have just killed her.
Ariadne is screaming at him over the sounds of the dream collapsing. Nothing seems to get through to him.
Then the memory diverges once again. Dom lets go of Mal, who slumps on the floor. Ariadne stumbles backwards, as far away from him as possible without going over the edge.
"Why is it so important to dream, Ariadne?" he asks her fiercely. Ariadne whimpers and points the gun at her head.
"Stop, stop," she cries. He stops in his path toward her but doesn't stop smiling.
"Answer me," he commands.
"Because... in my dreams, we're together," Ariadne says softly, speaking the words with a newfound meaning.
"Yes, we are," Dom smiles, and he palms the gun out of her hand and into the abyss below them. She's shaking with a mixture of terror and rage.
"Get away from me," she growls. She fights him as he takes her into his arms. "Get off me!" she shrieks.
"Shhh," he tells her. "We're together here. That's all that matters."
"Get away! Get off!" She finally lands a sharp blow in his stomach, and he's forced to release her. She races back to the elevator and sends up a prayer for some kind of relief from this self-induced hell. It doesn't come. Instead, she finds herself being lowered deeper, down into the pit.
The doors to the basement of her dreams open, and she is beyond scared. She steps out.
They're in a hotel that served as a makeshift headquarters during a routine job that had been completed years ago. Dom is sitting alone in the middle of the floor, piles of paper gathered all around him. His hair is mussed, a strand dangling in front of his right eye. He looks like he hasn't slept for days. Ariadne feels her heart heave.
He doesn't look up, but extends a hand towards his desk. "Ariadne, hand me those files, will you?" Ariadne creeps toward the desk, picks up the folder that lies upon it and hands it to him. When she does so, their fingers brush together. Cobb doesn't say a word, but Ariadne whimpers and sinks to the ground.
"I fell in love with you here," she admits in a strangled voice. "I didn't know it then, but I know it now. God, you just couldn't have left me alone?"
Dom doesn't answer her, just continues to read the file.
"Why me, Dom," she begs him, crying into her hand. "I could have lived a normal life. I could have been happy. But you came into my life and you-" She stops herself. "You're not the real Dom."
"I'm really not," the projection tells her frankly.
She gets to her feet and leaves the headquarters. She's about to close the grate to the elevator when she wakes up.
-
Cobb is leaning over her with a concerned look on his face, IV in his hand. Ariadne's face feels strange: she puts a hand to her cheek and it comes away wet. Embarrassed, she wipes away the tears quickly, efficiently.
"You were crying," he says simply, pity in his eyes. She glares at him.
"What an astute observation," she seethes, though the venom in her voice is forced.
Cobb says nothing, just drops the IV and sits in Yusuf's empty chair opposite her own.
"If you've got something to say to me, spit it out," he says, his own hackles raising. "It's not really fair for you to act this way without me knowing what exactly what's going on."
Ariadne feels her fists clenching and realizes that this is her chance to really settle the score, to show him that she's done.
"What's going on? What's going on? Oh, you know what's going on... and God, Cobb, just stop with all that fucking compassion bullshit, 'cause I'm through with it," Ariadne says, her voice shaking. She's on her feet now, looking down at him. "You made me this way. You broke me in all the places you got broken. How is that fair? What did I do?" Her wrath has boiled over now; she cannot control her words, and she doesn't want to. "You pretended that this life was some great gift you were giving me. What kind of life is this? Living in dreams?" She lets the question hang in the air before continuing on.
"It's killing me," she whispers viciously. "And it's your fault."
"You knew the risks," Cobb begins, but Ariadne cuts him off.
"I was a child! You, you were older, you should have known better. You had the experience, you could have predicted what damage you'd do me. But no. You don't give a shit about anything except yourself. You're a fucking user, you know that? You used me."
Dom's got his head in his hands. Ariadne doesn't stop.
"The only reason I'm still here is because I can't fucking do anything else," she cries, tears now streaming down her face. "I'm useless at real life; the only thing I could think about in class was the dream. This shit is the only thing I'm good for now. There is no going back for me. But you fucking knew that, you knew it even when we were first sitting in that cafe, and you let me fall for it... hook, line, and sinker. I hope you choke."
She thinks she sees Dom heave an erratic sigh that she's come to associate with her own crying, but no, it couldn't be: in her fantasies of telling Cobb off, he's never cried.
She fingers her chess piece, finds the imperfection, and whimpers. He's breaking her heart all over again.
"Jesus Christ, I'm so, so sorry," Dom whispers. "I know, I shouldn't have taken you... I should have protected you. You were so young, so bright-"
"You're not supposed to cry," Ariadne says, almost affronted.
"I've ruined you," Dom says quietly. "How can I not grieve?"
A silence passes between them. Ariadne sinks back into her chair, her rage trickling away, leaving remorse and anguish. She puts her own head in her hands, fingers over her tear-stained face: a mirror image of Cobb.
"You want to know the worst part," Ariadne murmurs. Cobb grunts. "Even now, even though I hate you so much... even after everything you did-" her voice is getting higher and higher- "I still fucking love you."
She's said it. It's done, it can't be taken back. It feels good to have it out of her, like ripping off a band-aid.
"We can add that to the list of ways I've debauched you," Cobb says, his eyes now on hers. He doesn't look away. Neither does she.
"Did you just say that you love me?" Cobb asks her.
"'And you shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart,'" Ariadne quotes at him. "You made me crooked. I can't help it."
He takes her hand.
"I can't give you what you want," he tells her softly. "And I'm sorry for it."
"I know," Ariadne says bitterly. She wants to shake his hand off, but his touch is like fire on her cold hands. "I know you can't love me back. That's why all this-loving you... it's tearing me apart."
"Is there anything I can do?" Dom asks her, his eyes black with sorrow.
"It hurts so much, losing my heart to you," she hiccups. His brows furrow in extreme sympathy. "It's not easy, you know. You're so tangled, I'm all tied up in your web." She pauses, then looks up at him. "But I think, maybe, if I knew... once..."
She leans forward.
"Kiss me."
The look on his face is hesitant, as if he knows a bad idea when he hears one. She doesn't care. She wants to burn away the sorrow, and this is the only way she knows how.
His lips are softer than she had imagined, the pressure behind them more urgent than she could ever have known. She opens her mouth to his, and, after a moment, he envelopes her mouth with his own, hugging her body in close, sitting her on top of his lap. It's all extraordinarily bittersweet: the way his teeth catch on her lips, the way her breath radiates across his cheek. She knows that this is their last hurrah, the final death toll on the fantasy she has kept bottled up inside her for nearly three years. She pulls down his unbuttoned flannel, letting it pool around his waist. He, in turn, runs a hand under her shirt and, in a quick tug, lifts her tee-shirt over her head. Ariadne wants to cry, but she stops herself, forcing her mind and body to savor this, remember this experience... because she knows that there will be another button added to her elevator, another floor added to her building of memories.
Remember this forever, she tells herself once he's pushing himself into her. He's whispering, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," over and over again. She lets the tears fall into the crook of his neck as he moves back and forth.
When it's done, there is no cuddling or contented napping. Ariadne pulls back on her clothes without a word.
"My heart was shattered years ago. I don't think it can love anyone anymore," Cobb murmurs in apology, placing a hand on the small of her back. She jumps away at his touch, shuddering.
"I quit," is all she says. She pulls her shirt on over her head and walks away: away from Dom Cobb, away from the dream.
She knows her resolve won't last. She knows that within a month, she'll be crawling back to Cobb, begging him to just forget what happened, to forget everything, to just please, please let her build again-
But for now, she'll walk away, and leave Cobb to pick up the pieces of the broken heart she's leaving behind. It's the best she can do.