The Way Up Is The Way Down | Part 1
Title: The Way Up Is The Way Down, Part 1
Pairing: Ariadne/Cobb, Arthur/Eames, Yusuf/Saito
Genre: Adventure, Romance
Warning: Potential dub-con, sexual content, swearing
Rating: R
Summary: Ariadne chose her fate. But when you're the one left behind, how do you hold on to sanity in the cruel world of limbo? Meanwhile, Dom Cobb and the rest of the team, now fugitives in the United States, are running out of time... soon, saving their fallen teammates will no longer be a feasible option. Cobb, however, is not willing to lose anyone else-and where there's a will, there's a way down.
Part 1: By Art and Force
“City of shadows and of the gradual
capitulations to the last invader
this is the final one: signed in water
and witnessed in granite and ugly bronze and gun-metal.
And by me. I am your citizen: composed of
your fictions, your compromise, I am
a part of your story and its outcome.
And ready to record its contradictions.”
-- Eavan Boland, “The Harbour”
Mal Cobb is dead for the second time.
(Mal Cobb has been dead for three years, and the shade that has been impersonating her in the widower Dominic Cobb’s dreams has at last been eradicated; she lived like a parasite, an iniquitous sponge, or some other wicked thing that worms its way into the cerebellum, taking seed there, existing to tempt and taunt-to haunt that poor shell of a man).
Dom discovers that it is impossible to perfect the art of loss. Watching Mal die, cradled in his arms, isn’t any easier than watching her jump off a roof. He lays her head in his lap, one hand around her shoulder. She’s still looking at him with the dark, lonely eyes he had worshipped for years when her spark of life fades into a dull, glassy finality that rattles him. Dom knows that his face is wet; he also notes that he’s rather beyond giving a damn. The blinders have already set in. Dom cannot bring himself to care about much about anything beyond the dead body that never was Mal Cobb in his arms. He bends down, and presses his nose into the crook of her neck. He will not let her leave her again. Not this time. There is no logic, no reason that can sway him now. He will not be moved.
“Get up, Cobb,” says a familiar voice-the voice of a girl too young to be using that tone with him, but she wears it well, like a hammy down coat from a senile grandparent or a pleasantly absent cousin. Cobb glances toward his companion, the young architect he had snatched from a life of normalcy and introduced to this world of insanity. Ariadne looks drained. Her hands are shaking. In a different moment, Dom might have pulled her into his arms and held her close, attempted to give her some piece of his own shattered inner strength-instead, he hugs a corpse. Her voice has a bite to it: from what cavernous depths inside her soul she had pulled that piece of strength, Cobb could not imagine. “We can’t stay here! The dream is collapsing,” Ariadne shouts to him.
“Saito’s still down here,” Cobb tells her blankly, matter-of-factly. Ariadne’s face contorts into a grimace of sympathy, as if she’s gleaned some secret information from the words he has neglected to speak. Distantly, Cobb finds it curious how she can read him so easily.
“She’s gone, Dom,” the young girl tells him gently. “She was never here-just a projection.”
“Don’t,” he tells her. “Don’t.” He’s not ready to fully accept it. He’s pretty certain he’ll never be fully ready. Sure, he had put on a brave face when he had confronted the shade: it was easy to tell the imposter that she was nothing compared to the real Mal, because it was true: the real Mal, the Mal he had loved so effortlessly, so deeply, had been incandescent with life and love. The shade, on the other hand, had burned everything she touched, the ashes of his memories trailing in her wake. Cobb hates himself for perverting Mal’s memory into something so corrupted, so evil. The truth is, however, Cobb only half-believes his words. Seeing the obvious depravity in the shade was a simple contrast to the Mal he loved, and with the shade dead, the disparities between the two are less pronounced. The black and white he had seen so momentarily is teasingly shifted into a collage of grey-meant to be confusing, meant to make him burn with regret.
He thinks she senses his despair, because right then, Ariadne grasps his hand. “Take Fischer and jump. I’ll find Saito.”
And then there is the girl who drew him mazes. Cobb stares at her fingers, entwined with those small appendages so casually attached to his callused hand. Ariadne. Sometimes Cobb thinks that she’s known him for years, the way she is able to see through his soul so thoroughly. There are also the quieter moments when he catches her staring at him, when he feels not only joy but also horror at the idea that he could possibly corrupt her even further. Deeper down, though, there is the hint of betrayal… the self-same betrayal he saw reflected in the shade’s eyes when it had asked him, “What is she doing here?” after Ariadne had found herself in the basement of Cobb’s memories.
What is she doing here?
Cobb looks at her incredulously once he can process her words. “No. There’s no way you’re staying here, not by yourself… you don’t know what it’s like.” And then, desperately, when he sees her stubborn nature peeking through her visage of bravado: “The only reason I survived was because I had Mal here with me! You can’t do this alone!”
Ariadne lets go of his hand abruptly.
“You’re going home, Dom,” she tells him with absolute certainty. And that’s when she raises the gun to his head.
Dom starts to back away.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks her softly.
“I know that there’s no way you’re going to leave me behind,” Ariadne tells him patiently, sadly. “It’s not in your nature. It’s why every member of our team would follow you to the ends of the earth. Even Eames,” Ariadne adds, a small laugh punctuating her words, as if she is unconsciously calculating the odds of ever seeing the forger again. “Although it sometimes may not seem like it.” Dom’s eyes stray to the gun in her hands and considers attempting to disarm her… but it is too late. “No, you won’t do this the easy way,” she continues, stepping far enough back so that Dom could not reach her even if he tried. “Don’t move, Mr. Cobb. I’m actually happy that you’re the kind of guy that would never leave me behind, not voluntarily. So.” She clears her throat. Cobb briefly wonders if she’s ever fired a gun before. “This is Plan B.”
“Let me find Saito,” Cobb implores. “This is something for me to do, Ariadne. It’s not your responsibility! Your life is just beginning. Mine’s been over for a long time.”
“Don’t give me that, Dom,” Ariadne chides, a smile twisting her lips slightly. “You have children to care for. I’ll find him,” Ariadne promises with a sense of case-closed, done-deal. She unlatches the safety of the gun, and a flicker of doubt flashes across her face. It gives Cobb a chance to hope.
“Let me stay with you,” he begs her softly. “We can do this together. We should do this together.” He’s pretty sure that any extended time in limbo will rot his brain, but this is his Last Resort. This is Dom Cobb, all-in, open hand, with everything at stake.
She shakes her head. Dom’s stomach drops into the balls of his feet.
“Dom,” she murmurs softly. His eyes lock with hers as she calls him by his first name. She looks at him with sad eyes. “If I get lost…”
“Ariadne, please-”
“Just-just, well. Find me.”
She pulls the trigger, and Cobb’s body falls to the ground. Ariadne lays two fingers at his carotid artery to check for a pulse. The skin is still horrifyingly warm.
Nothing.
She slips the gun into the back of her pants and runs to the ledge, where Fischer’s unconscious body lies, white bag over his head.
“See you on the other side,” she murmurs. She pushes his limp unconscious form off the ledge and watches him fall down into the abyss.
“And now,” she says to herself, “the real work begins.”
Cobb feels his eyelids flutter open. He’s in the plane.
“Fuck,” he mutters softly, reaching down to un-strap himself. He glances around at the rest of the team: everyone, including Fischer, is slowly waking up… with the exception of Saito and Ariadne. Cobb’s young architect looks pleasantly unconcerned with the waking world-but Cobb knows better. He knows how easy it is to lose your sanity in the deceptive horror that is limbo. Cobb wants to shake her awake, tell her that she has saved him more than enough in this lifetime and it is time for him to return the favor.
Instead, Cobb locks eyes with Arthur, and the point man imperceptibly shakes his head from side to side: a clear no. Don’t do it Cobb, don’t do anything obvious. You’re going to get yourself arrested, are the words Arthur is desperately trying to telepathically relay to Cobb, judging by the intensity of his glare. Arthur knows that they’ve failed. The team had gone over a back-up plan, if their scheme within the dream levels did not pan out they way they envisioned… the basic gist was to get out of the airport as quickly and discretely as possible, and start driving in any direction that landed them out of federal custody.
Cobb clicks his seatbelt back into position. Maybe Ariadne would find Saito before they landed. Maybe everything would be okay.
“We will be landing in Los Angeles in approximately ten minutes,” says a disembodied voice through the loudspeaker.
“Fuck,” Cobb hears Eames spit through his teeth. “Fuck.”
When they land, Ariadne and Saito are still out cold. For a brief, horrifying second, Cobb thinks he sees a tiny red speck of blood seeping into Saito’s white shirt, just poking out from behind his suit jacket… Cobb shakes his head back and forth, looks again-and the spot is gone. Cobb now turns to Ariadne: so small in her too-large first class seat, she is curled up like a cat, arms around her knees, childlike in her unconscious innocence. He wants to pick her up and take her home, but Arthur’s tight grip on his shoulder tells him that, perhaps, is not a viable option.
“Run,” is what Arthur murmurs to Cobb as they all stand upon the plane’s final maneuver up to the gate. Cobb looks down at Ariadne, then back at Saito. Arthur’s hand shoots out and grabs Cobb’s arm before he can reach out and touch her. “They’re gone,” Arthur hisses, pulling Cobb behind him toward the exit to deplane. Cobb’s feet move of their own accord after Arthur’s own. “They’re gone. We need to move.” Cobb feels Eames moving close behind him, an unhelpful buffer between him and the people they are leaving behind.
Cobb can only recall snippets of what exactly happens next: a concerned Fischer informing the flight attendant that two of the passengers were still asleep; next, Cobb is dragged off the plane by Arthur and Eames, Yusuf trailing closely behind them with luggage dangling off him like Christmas ornaments.
When he comes back to himself, Cobb notes blithely that Arthur and Eames are mostly dragging him along, and that he keeps on looking back toward the gate, waiting for a young girl to exit.
“Fucking hell-Cobb, you could be a little more cooperative and little less of a scene-stealer in this moment,” Eames grunts at him. “And if you bloody well step on my foot again I will drop you right here and now, mark my words.”
Arthur shoots Eames a deadly glare and the forger shuts up. Cobb briefly considers stepping on Eames’s toes again for sport, and then he remembers Ariadne and the pain in his chest that seems to clench around his ribcage, a vice grip on his soul.
Ouch.
Arthur finally gets them all (well, Eames, Yusuf and Cobb) into a van with tinted windows (rented under a false name with a stolen credit card: untraceable). No one has said anything since Eames’s last outburst. Cobb’s face is unreadable, and Arthur’s worry nearly breaks his professionalism.
“We can drive through and pick the kids up on the way,” Arthur offers plaintively. Cobb doesn’t answer for a moment as he considers the temptation.
“And force them to join us on the run?” Cobb finally sighs, and one can hear the heartbreak in his voice. “They’re better off where they are.” Without me are the words that remain unsaid. “Anyway, once the authorities realize that I’ve entered the country, they’ll set surveillance on the house. Philippa and James might as well be in Alcatraz. There’s no way, Arthur.”
“Dom,” Eames begins, gripping Cobb’s arm tightly in an attempt at comfort. Cobb raises his arm, shrugging the man off.
“Eames, leave him be,” Yusuf chastises. “There’s nothing you can say to make this better, so shut up.”
Arthur’s eyebrows rise nearly into his hairline. “Dear lord, Yusuf, where did that come from?”
At first, Yusuf does not respond, allowing soft silence to buffet their troupe. Then-
“Mr. Cobb is not the only one who has lost family in this business,” Yusuf murmurs at last, an old loss darkening his words. Cobb stiffens at the revelation, but does not probe for further information. No one says anything at the outburst, but Arthur accelerates, as if by going faster he can make it better.
The landscape passes Cobb in flashes: first the city, then the suburbs, then-just desert. The view does little to distract Cobb from his despair. Cobb had successfully lost the things he had cherished most in quick succession: his freedom, his children, Ariadne, even the shade… however he denies it, his creation had meant a great deal to him; that her loss would have to be coped with silently could cripple a weaker, less distracted man… Dom Cobb, however, had other, more potent griefs to grapple with.
An odd wave of nausea passes through him, and Cobb clutches at the armrests of his chair. Eames gives a little twitch of the head and Arthur announces that they’re pulling over for the evening. They check into a hotel thirty miles outside of Vegas under the names Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan.
“And that is the last time you get to check us in to a hotel,” Arthur grows at Eames, who looks rather pleased with himself.
“What? You don’t like The Three Musketeers?” Eames asks innocently as he hands out room keys.
“One of these days, you are going to get us all killed,” Arthur hisses, snatching his key from Eames bitterly.
It’s when Arthur hears Dom break the mirror above his vanity that he decides the extractor cannot be left alone that night. Dom finds that visualizing his broken reflection is a relief: he is comforted that at last, reality can finally expose his warped insides. Cobb is still looking at his shattered visage when Arthur, Yusuf, and Eames come bursting in, all three with guns at the ready. There is a moment of scuffling where Eames checks the perimeter for intruders, then silence.
“Oh, Dom,” Arthur whispers.
“I’m sorry,” Cobb apologizes vacantly.
“No, you’re not,” Eames corrects, and Cobb shrugs.
Arthur sets up shifts with the others to keep an eye on Cobb. There is no pretense about it, no false protestations about wanting to keep him company. On a certain level, Cobb appreciates his team’s honesty. On another level, he wonders if they’re still his team, and if they haven’t already defected to Arthur’s assured, albeit unimaginative, aid.
“We’re doing this so that you don’t do anything stupid,” Eames tells Cobb upon the end of his own shift (Yusuf enters the room as Eames rises to his feet).
“You don’t trust me?” Cobb says, but he knows the answer before he finishes the question. Eames and Yusuf exchange significant glances, but neither one answers the broken man.
“Would you like to use one of my compounds to try and get some sleep?” Yusuf offers, holding out a small vial full of amber liquid. “It’s quite potent. Should knock you out for at least seven hours.”
“Do you know how long seven hours is in limbo?” Cobb asks Yusuf, in near exasperation. “We’re wasting time right now. We have to go back.”
“Just take the vial, Dom,” Yusuf says softly, a knowing sadness in his voice. “We can’t do anything tonight. The police, as well as other, more dangerous entities, are crawling the streets; we have no chance of evading them right now. You know that, deep down, even if you don’t want to admit it.”
Cobb does not acquiesce aloud, merely accepts the vial and downs it. Yusuf hustles him into bed before Dom is out cold.
Yusuf flips open his phone. “He’s down,” he says matter-of-factly. Within twenty seconds, Eames and Arthur are in the hotel room: Arthur paces, while Eames chases after him, attempting to console him. With Cobb awake, the rest of the team had no chance to grieve; they could show no reaction to the loss of their architect, of their tourist. Now, however, there is time enough for lamentations while avoiding Cobb’s gaze without adding to his tremendous guilt.
“I just can’t believe she’s gone-“ is what Arthur keeps on repeating, racing from one end of the room to the other. “I-I think I need a drink. Fuck. She was good.”
“Stop,” Eames attempts, but Arthur’s not having it. Finally, Eames captures Arthur in a sort of half-hug, half-wrestling-hold embrace. “Stop it. Just, stop.”
Yusuf thinks he hears Arthur let out a great sob into Eames’s chest, but chooses to ignore it in favor of keeping his mental image of Arthur-cold, calculating, collected, but above all, professional-intact.
“I’m going to purchase a very expensive handle of vodka,” Yusuf says nonchalantly. “And then I am going to raise my glass for the dead. You may join me,” he adds.
Eames’s head twitches at the word. “They’re not dead,” he says, though his words sound more like a question than a statement.
Arthur backs away from the forger, pressing his hands against his face, as if trying to rescind the tears he had allowed to escape. Arthur ever so slightly shakes his head in Eames’s direction. “They might as well be. Cobb doesn’t realize how lucky he was to get out of limbo they way he did: the fact that he was with Mal the whole time, I think it kept him sane. If Ariadne and Saito can’t find each other, if they’re just trapped down there, with their subconscious constantly deceiving them… I just don’t know how they can survive it.”
No one responds, and Yusuf leaves to get the vodka.
It takes very little time for the three of them to get horribly drunk. Each is inclined to forget the tragedy the day had resulted in. Arthur discovers, rather sloppily, that raspberry vodka is his drink of choice; Eames discovers, also rather sloppily, that raspberry vodka is not his drink of choice.
“Hail the less than victorious dead,” Arthur hiccups, at least ten shots in. Eames gestures with his empty left hand in a small, sad salute, and Yusuf just downs his shot in recognition.
“Hail,” Eames repeats.
There is a moment of silence. “We should say something,” Eames suggests.
Arthur pours himself another drink, but Eames’s words seem to sober him. “Yes,” the point man agrees. “Your spelling might not be great, but you do have a way with words, Eames. I am nominating you to say-to say, things.”
“Seconded,” Yusuf adds under his breath.
“Well, if you lovely lads insist,” Eames says, attempting to bring himself to his feet, then reconsidering his sitting position after wobbling around a bit. Finally, he finds himself cross-legged between the chemist and the point man, with Cobb out cold on the bed behind him.
“I’ll start with our tourist, who was bloody brave when it counted,” Eames begins. “Even with a bullet lodged in his chest, he kept going. And I’m pretty sure he launched a grenade toward the end, tough little bastard. And I think… I think if he’d have woken up, he would have made the call to fix Cobb’s record, either way.”
“Tha’s-tha’s speculation,” Arthur drawls, but Yusuf raises his glass, effectively silencing Arthur.
“It’s the truth,” the chemist replies. “Saito is-was… that kind of man.” Arthur finally nods his head and raises his glass high.
“To Saito,” Eames says in salute. They all drink. A moment passes.
“Now… to the girl who spun the best webs,” Eames murmurs just loud enough to be heard over the sound of Cobb’s breathing. Arthur’s breath hitches. “May you live in our dreams forever.”
Arthur clutches at his glass tightly, eyes wide.
“Ariadne,” is what Yusuf responds with.
“I kissed her,” is what Arthur says.
Yusuf and Eames spin toward Arthur with looks of shock plastered on their faces. The humor of the moment almost drowns out the grief. “In the dream, on level two. The projections were looking at us.”
“Of course they were going to be looking at you, we were bloody doing the Mr. Charles gambit,” Eames growls. “You right git. Taking advantage of her, that is.”
“I know,” Arthur admits simply, and Eames realizes he has pressed the issue too casually.
“Cherish it,” Eames tells Arthur, who looks at the forger with an odd expression on his face. “Lucky bastard.” The point man nods and takes a sip of his drink.
Cobb rustles in his sleep, and what is left of the team decides to call it a night.
When Cobb wakes up, he doesn’t comment on how the suite smells like alcohol or how Yusuf, Eames, and Arthur all seem rather sensitive to light and moving objects. He figures the hangover will teach them all a better lesson than he ever could, a lesson he had learned years ago: that dulling the pain doesn’t make it go away… that there is no such thing as burying the hatchet. It is a lesson that Cobb learned the hard way when Mal jumped, and was yet again reminded of when Ariadne chose to stay behind in limbo, forcing Cobb to return to reality.
Cobb doesn’t tell them about his plan until they have been on the road for about an hour.
“I’m going to get them back,” Cobb says to the rest of the team.
Arthur nearly swerves off the road.
On her first day in limbo, Ariadne buries her friends.
The moment Dom is killed (the moment she kills him), the dream stops falling apart, because it no longer belongs to him. It is her place now: her prison. Most of the buildings are beginning to morph into places that Ariadne remembers from her past: the church from her hometown, the visual arts center at her place of undergraduate study, the university square in Paris where she had learned how to sketch properly.
For a while, she sits at the table where the Cobbs had discussed Mal’s unreality. Ariadne slowly comes to the realization that her task was more than a little beyond her own capabilities. Find Saito, in this grand landscape? And not only to find him, but to convince him that this world, this place that seems so damn real, that had tricked the experienced Dom Cobb for fifty years, that had convinced Mal Cobb so completely that she had killed herself to get back to it… convince Saito that this place wasn’t real? Ariadne drags her hands down her face, steeling herself, gathering her courage. She doubts she can complete the mission, but she hasn’t got a choice: she’s got to.
She drags Dom’s body to Mal’s side, and they both lie peacefully next to one another. Ariadne thinks that in some potential future timeline, one where the shit hit the fan even more brutally than it had in the world she had known and loved, this was the possibility that Mal had been longing for. A wave of nausea hits Ariadne in the pit of her stomach and she clutches at her throat, willing herself not to throw up. Looking at his corpse is harder than she had originally imagined.
“It’s not real,” she tells herself. “Don’t do this right now.”
That’s when she decides to bury them both.
It’s a bit of an ordeal getting them both into the elevator (not the one she had taken to go floor to floor in Cobb’s dream-levels, but the actual elevator of the building they-well, really it was just Ariadne-were at the precipice of). A line of red trails underneath Cobb’s body from the gunshot she had so readily delivered. Ariadne thinks about the task ahead of her and suddenly wishes he were there with her, in the thick of it. As unstable as he had seemed throughout the process of inception, Ariadne had somehow subconsciously tied him to her own reality: how could she ever dream up the fantasies that he had inspired? To dream, to build: it was pure creation. And so she had tied him to everything she knew as real and true.
Seeing him dead was killing her resolve, so he had to disappear. A grave was the most reasonable.
She digs for what feels like days. She has no shovel, so she claws at the sandy earth with her hands until they turn bloody. First comes the pain, then her hands turn numb, and then a second wave of pain hits her and she is forced to resort to pushing away the soil with her feet. It is a less precise art, but she manages a grave deep enough for one body.
Mal goes first.
Ariadne clasps the dead woman’s face in her hands, cupping her cheeks.
“They told me you were lovely,” she tells the corpse. “The real you: I believe you were exactly the kind of woman that a man like Cobb deserves. But this perversion of you… was just a parasite. You almost killed him.” A sudden fury boils within her, and Ariadne finds herself pushing the body unceremoniously into the grave. It falls, and Ariadne hears a sickening crunch of bones snapping.
Her hands are too warped to dig another grave, so she pushes the dirt over Mal with cupped palms and decides on digging Cobb’s grave when she wakes up.
She falls asleep curled up by the grave, wishing it could have been different.
When she wakes up, Cobb’s body is gone, and her hands have been bandaged.
For a few moments, there is only the panic of his loss: this grave-digging was going to be her closure, the way that she could begin anew in this bizarre, physics-less world of the dream, of limbo itself. Severing her ties with him would give her the edge she needed to survive.
But there was no Cobb to be seen. Mal’s grave was the same, save that a mysterious hand had placed a small cross made of twigs at its head. Ariadne shudders.
“I didn’t put that there,” she whispers. She looks at her bandaged hands and feels oddly violated. Suddenly, Ariadne finds that she is choking on her own tongue, her heart beating sporadically. The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and she is truly afraid.
The unspoken words Then who did? plague her for the next three months.
“We just drove hundreds of miles away from the people who want to lock you up forever and throw away the key, Cobb,” Eames says slowly, as if talking to a child. “We are currently driving away from the men who wish to put you on death row. And you, you want to turn around and walk right into their arms.”
Eames’s neck hurts from twisting it to face Cobb, who sits calmly in the back seat next to Yusuf. The forger’s face is red with frustration at trying to get the former extractor to listen to reason.
“That wasn’t exactly the plan I had in mind,” Cobb growls back. He looks beseechingly at the rest of the team. “Come on, we owe it to Saito and Ariadne to try and rescue them. They would do the same for one of us.”
“Ariadne did do the same for one of us,” Yusuf says softly, but the sound of his words are drowned out by the tornado of anger and frustration that is Eames.
“You cannot be serious! You CANNOT be serious. Arthur,” Eames says, turning to the point man, whose face is devoid of emotion, “do something. Talk some sense into him. Them,” he adds, shooting Yusuf an evil glare, as if the chemist was encouraging a bad habit, such as thumb sucking or sleeping with the lights on.
“This could very well mean the end of all our careers,” Arthur finally says. The point man has a look in his eye that Cobb recognizes. Cobb can feel the hum of anticipation buzz within him, waiting for what he knew was coming.
“Thank you,” Eames says with a sigh of relief when Arthur does not continue… but Cobb knows better.
“That being said,” Arthur interrupts, “I’m in.” He allows a quick glance over his shoulder before flicking his turning signal. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing, Cobb.”
Cobb nods curtly. “If you don’t want in, get out now.”
No one moves. No one says a single word in response.
It’s when Arthur makes the U-turn and begins the long drive back that Cobb knows he’s won.
The light flickers in from the window shades, falling unbidden on Ariadne’s closed eyes. She flicks a wrist at the shade and it snaps shut, enclosing her in darkness once again. She pulls the covers up over her head, but it’s no use: she has always had trouble going back to sleep after being awakened. She stumbles out of bed, reaching blindly for a toothbrush, which she promptly shoves into her mouth, vigorously brushing it against her teeth. She pulls the t-shirt she had been wearing as makeshift pajamas over her head and shimmies out of her panties, letting both articles of clothing fall to the floor. She then walks to the door of the shower, opens it and steps inside, her bare skin prickly in the early morning cold. She turns the handle of the shower and instantly hot water gushes out. She lets the water hit her cheek for a long minute before turning her head sideways and finally inhaling a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
It’s the normalcy of limbo that surprises Ariadne. Now aware how similar this place is to the real world, Ariadne knows how easy it could be to confuse the two. She feels a bizarre, unwanted connection with Mal-a woman who had not been strong enough, who had allowed limbo to get the better of her-and it makes the pit of her stomach sink, as though her body physically knows something that her brain had yet to recognize. Time has no meaning here-Ariadne realizes that she has a mission, but there is little point in rushing herself. She has stopped counting the days since Cobb’s body had disappeared-had it been a week, or a month?
She turns off the water and lets the glass around her defog slowly before exiting the stall. She wraps a white towel around her body, letting her wet hair drip down her back freely. A window stands at the end of the long bathroom, exposing the rest of the world-a sky clear as day, a horizon in the distance that seems to hug the curvature of the Earth-and Ariadne momentarily finds herself captivated.
It’s when she’s looking out that same window that she first feels it: it’s a strange, ominous feeling that makes her shudder. At first, she thinks she’s imagining things. But she gets the same feeling at that window each morning when she steps out of that shower: that dark feeling that someone was watching her. She knew her worries were absurd; knew that the only other person, only other real person down below in this man-made, self-imposed hell was Saito, and if he was watching her, wasn’t that a good thing? Didn’t she want to find him in the first place?
When she finally discovers the complex on the hill, a fortress that was too clean-cut, too smooth for her tastes-basically, a place not her own in a world sprung from her imagination-she knows that she has to get inside. She’s not sure why exactly, she can’t put words to the feeling that she has every time she takes a step closer to what is pretty much a castle blighting the landscape around it-
Suddenly, she sees something in her periphery: for a moment she thinks she sees a man, tall, blond, smirking at her like a cat that’s just swallowed a mouse. For a second, she thinks she knows him.
She decides that turning around is a better idea, and she lies in bed for hours on end until the nervous, creeping anxiety dissipates from her gut.
When it happens again (the flash of flesh beside her on the climb up the hill toward the tower), she grits her teeth and bores through the nearly overwhelming panic that radiates through her being. She pushes onward, falling to hands and knees against the rocky crag. It’s when she thinks that someone’s caught her ankle in a vice grip that she lets out a scream (a broken one at that, because she’s refrained from using her vocal chords for so long) and lets the forces masquerading as gravity pull her down the rock face and back onto the beach where she had begun her ascent. She whips her head around sharply, sweat dripping down the back of her neck, goose-bumps rising on the skin of her arms and legs, searching desperately for the perpetrator-but there’s no one there.
The third time she attempts the climb, she reaches the top. Then she is promptly knocked unconscious by a couple of Japanese soldiers carrying machine guns.
When Ariadne wakes up, she’s sitting at a long table in a mirrored room. A familiar face stares back at her from across the table: a long streak of white dances cruelly around the man’s brow, lightning-shaped and blinding.
“Saito,” Ariadne breathes.
“So you know my name,” the man says archly. “Clever girl. Tell me yours, and tell me why you were trespassing on company property. My property, to be precise.”
“Saito, it’s Ariadne,” she cries out plaintively. “I work for you. I’m here to-“
“Here to what, Miss Ariadne?” Saito interrupts. “Steal from me? Many men and women have attempted that in the past… they have also failed.”
“I don’t want anything of yours,” Ariadne says, head spinning. “I’m here for you.”
“Oh, kidnapping? That is rich,” Saito says, a wry smile appearing on his lined visage.
“This place isn’t real, Saito,” Ariadne finally blurts out. Saito barks out a laugh, waves a hand, and a guard appears behind her with a silver knife.
“Not real? Tell me, child, does this feel real enough to you?” Saito hisses. The guard grabs her by the wrist and cuts a small but deep incision across her wrist. Ariadne hisses, recoiling her arm into her body. Blood erupts from the wound, and the pain from it is indeed heady.
“Pain,” Ariadne breathes, repeating the words of a dear friend, “is in the mind.”
“You are delusional,” Saito concludes. “Get out of my house. This place isn’t real, girl? What gives you the right to say that this place isn’t real?” Ariadne is dragged bodily from the room. “You yourself don’t fully buy what you’re trying to fool me into believing! You think I would not notice your hesitation?”
“Wait!” Ariadne pleads. “Let me explain!”
“I am no imbecile, girl; do not treat me as one,” Saito says with finality. When his guards throw her out the door, Ariadne is left nursing a wounded arm and clutching a deflated sense of conviction.
The walk home is long, full of uncertainty and doubt. Had she imagined the whole operation? Had she dreamed up these fantastic men who had whisked her off and taken her on daring adventures of questionable legality?
Where did reality end and dreams begin? The line that she had drawn in the sand between the two worlds has somehow been erased. By who, she does not know.
What she does know is that someone is watching her (even on her journey home she can feel his eyes bearing into the back of her neck, but she dares not turn around and face him, not yet). What she does know is that soon, she’s going to meet him.
And indeed, that’s the realization that sends shivers down her spine.
The drive back to LA is punctuated by sighs and grumblings coming from Eames, clearly stemmed from his winter of discontent. He has elected to switch seats with Yusuf in order to more thoroughly drill into Cobb’s head exactly how horrible an idea it is to go back for Ariadne and Saito.
“We are all going to die in the process, Cobb; does that not matter to you?” Eames asks, practically begging him to reconsider.
“How many times do I have to tell you: we are not leaving them behind,” Cobb shoots back, aggravated. “This is a volunteer only job, anyway. I’m perfectly content to go in alone.” The expectant look on Cobb’s face, however, says otherwise. Cobb knows there is no way to do this without the rest of his team. Convincing them would be the easy part.
When they finally find shelter for the night, the arguing gets even more emphatic. Eames, hissing curses, follows Cobb into his room with Yusuf and Arthur on their tails.
“You don’t know what you’re going to find in there,” Eames says, fists clenched as if bracing for impact. Arthur closes the door behind him with a soft click, the only person left who seems to consider secrecy an important value in their scheming. “You don’t know what she’ll be like. She might not want to leave. She might not even have the capacity to want things anymore, Dom. You have my deepest sympathies, but there must be a small, tiny part of your brain that realizes when it’s dancing with the impossible. You are walking into the unknown here with no plan, no strategy-”
Yusuf puts an arm out toward Eames’s shoulder to stop him, but it is too late: Dom’s rage, fused with his unending guilt, has at last reared its ugly head. Eames has tickled the sleeping dragon and would have to face the consequences.
“You’re asking for a plan?” Dom hisses at Eames.
Eames looks indignant. “Yeah!” he responds, voice growing louder. “I don’t think that’s too much too ask for.”
“It doesn’t matter if I have a plan or not! I’m going in, I’m finding her, and I’m bringing her back!” Cobb says, arms gesturing aggressively.
“We all want her back, Dom, but if you go in practically blind you are just plain asking to-” Eames bites back, but Cobb cuts him off, pressing Eames up against the wall of the motel room. At this sudden movement, Arthur is on his feet as well. Eames’s eyes dart toward the point man, then back at the extractor, who has his arm pressed up against Eames’s Adam’s apple.
“Asking for what?” he growls in the forger’s face.
“Asking,” Eames spits back, “to get lost in limbo. Again. And bloody hell, Cobb, it’s like you enjoy pressing me up against things,” Eames says suggestively. The pressure of Cobb’s arm against Eames’s neck recedes slightly as Eames continues: “Don’t you recall how that little diversion ended? It’s almost like you want to go back there, like this world just isn’t enough fun for you anymore, is it-”
In a moment, Eames is on the floor. It takes a shocked Arthur exactly four seconds to connect Cobb’s bloody fist with Eames’s darkened mouth; when he does realize what has happened, his gun is out, pointed at the wall between the two. He points the gun at neither of them, but at the same time, he is really pointing the gun at both of them. Cobb looks especially shocked, as if he had never imagined Arthur could pull a gun on him in the real world. Eames looks shocked as well, but more surprised at Arthur’s defense of him against Cobb than at the gun resting in the point man’s palm.
“You’re not yourself right now. Sit,” Arthur commands, looking at Cobb. Cobb glares back, looks down at his bloodied hand, and then turns his back on Eames. He sits.
“We are all on the same team here,” Arthur says, allowing a novel weariness to creep into his voice. He places the gun carefully back into the waistband of his belt. “We all want her back.”
“Them,” Yusuf adds softly. Cobb turns to him swiftly.
“What?” Cobb growls sharply in confusion.
“Them,” Yusuf repeats. “We all want them back. Ariadne and Saito.”
Cobb’s back stiffens. “Yeah,” Cobb agrees after a moment. “Yeah. That’s what we meant.”
Pairing: Ariadne/Cobb, Arthur/Eames, Yusuf/Saito
Genre: Adventure, Romance
Warning: Potential dub-con, sexual content, swearing
Rating: R
Summary: Ariadne chose her fate. But when you're the one left behind, how do you hold on to sanity in the cruel world of limbo? Meanwhile, Dom Cobb and the rest of the team, now fugitives in the United States, are running out of time... soon, saving their fallen teammates will no longer be a feasible option. Cobb, however, is not willing to lose anyone else-and where there's a will, there's a way down.
Part 1: By Art and Force
“City of shadows and of the gradual
capitulations to the last invader
this is the final one: signed in water
and witnessed in granite and ugly bronze and gun-metal.
And by me. I am your citizen: composed of
your fictions, your compromise, I am
a part of your story and its outcome.
And ready to record its contradictions.”
-- Eavan Boland, “The Harbour”
Mal Cobb is dead for the second time.
(Mal Cobb has been dead for three years, and the shade that has been impersonating her in the widower Dominic Cobb’s dreams has at last been eradicated; she lived like a parasite, an iniquitous sponge, or some other wicked thing that worms its way into the cerebellum, taking seed there, existing to tempt and taunt-to haunt that poor shell of a man).
Dom discovers that it is impossible to perfect the art of loss. Watching Mal die, cradled in his arms, isn’t any easier than watching her jump off a roof. He lays her head in his lap, one hand around her shoulder. She’s still looking at him with the dark, lonely eyes he had worshipped for years when her spark of life fades into a dull, glassy finality that rattles him. Dom knows that his face is wet; he also notes that he’s rather beyond giving a damn. The blinders have already set in. Dom cannot bring himself to care about much about anything beyond the dead body that never was Mal Cobb in his arms. He bends down, and presses his nose into the crook of her neck. He will not let her leave her again. Not this time. There is no logic, no reason that can sway him now. He will not be moved.
“Get up, Cobb,” says a familiar voice-the voice of a girl too young to be using that tone with him, but she wears it well, like a hammy down coat from a senile grandparent or a pleasantly absent cousin. Cobb glances toward his companion, the young architect he had snatched from a life of normalcy and introduced to this world of insanity. Ariadne looks drained. Her hands are shaking. In a different moment, Dom might have pulled her into his arms and held her close, attempted to give her some piece of his own shattered inner strength-instead, he hugs a corpse. Her voice has a bite to it: from what cavernous depths inside her soul she had pulled that piece of strength, Cobb could not imagine. “We can’t stay here! The dream is collapsing,” Ariadne shouts to him.
“Saito’s still down here,” Cobb tells her blankly, matter-of-factly. Ariadne’s face contorts into a grimace of sympathy, as if she’s gleaned some secret information from the words he has neglected to speak. Distantly, Cobb finds it curious how she can read him so easily.
“She’s gone, Dom,” the young girl tells him gently. “She was never here-just a projection.”
“Don’t,” he tells her. “Don’t.” He’s not ready to fully accept it. He’s pretty certain he’ll never be fully ready. Sure, he had put on a brave face when he had confronted the shade: it was easy to tell the imposter that she was nothing compared to the real Mal, because it was true: the real Mal, the Mal he had loved so effortlessly, so deeply, had been incandescent with life and love. The shade, on the other hand, had burned everything she touched, the ashes of his memories trailing in her wake. Cobb hates himself for perverting Mal’s memory into something so corrupted, so evil. The truth is, however, Cobb only half-believes his words. Seeing the obvious depravity in the shade was a simple contrast to the Mal he loved, and with the shade dead, the disparities between the two are less pronounced. The black and white he had seen so momentarily is teasingly shifted into a collage of grey-meant to be confusing, meant to make him burn with regret.
He thinks she senses his despair, because right then, Ariadne grasps his hand. “Take Fischer and jump. I’ll find Saito.”
And then there is the girl who drew him mazes. Cobb stares at her fingers, entwined with those small appendages so casually attached to his callused hand. Ariadne. Sometimes Cobb thinks that she’s known him for years, the way she is able to see through his soul so thoroughly. There are also the quieter moments when he catches her staring at him, when he feels not only joy but also horror at the idea that he could possibly corrupt her even further. Deeper down, though, there is the hint of betrayal… the self-same betrayal he saw reflected in the shade’s eyes when it had asked him, “What is she doing here?” after Ariadne had found herself in the basement of Cobb’s memories.
What is she doing here?
Cobb looks at her incredulously once he can process her words. “No. There’s no way you’re staying here, not by yourself… you don’t know what it’s like.” And then, desperately, when he sees her stubborn nature peeking through her visage of bravado: “The only reason I survived was because I had Mal here with me! You can’t do this alone!”
Ariadne lets go of his hand abruptly.
“You’re going home, Dom,” she tells him with absolute certainty. And that’s when she raises the gun to his head.
Dom starts to back away.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks her softly.
“I know that there’s no way you’re going to leave me behind,” Ariadne tells him patiently, sadly. “It’s not in your nature. It’s why every member of our team would follow you to the ends of the earth. Even Eames,” Ariadne adds, a small laugh punctuating her words, as if she is unconsciously calculating the odds of ever seeing the forger again. “Although it sometimes may not seem like it.” Dom’s eyes stray to the gun in her hands and considers attempting to disarm her… but it is too late. “No, you won’t do this the easy way,” she continues, stepping far enough back so that Dom could not reach her even if he tried. “Don’t move, Mr. Cobb. I’m actually happy that you’re the kind of guy that would never leave me behind, not voluntarily. So.” She clears her throat. Cobb briefly wonders if she’s ever fired a gun before. “This is Plan B.”
“Let me find Saito,” Cobb implores. “This is something for me to do, Ariadne. It’s not your responsibility! Your life is just beginning. Mine’s been over for a long time.”
“Don’t give me that, Dom,” Ariadne chides, a smile twisting her lips slightly. “You have children to care for. I’ll find him,” Ariadne promises with a sense of case-closed, done-deal. She unlatches the safety of the gun, and a flicker of doubt flashes across her face. It gives Cobb a chance to hope.
“Let me stay with you,” he begs her softly. “We can do this together. We should do this together.” He’s pretty sure that any extended time in limbo will rot his brain, but this is his Last Resort. This is Dom Cobb, all-in, open hand, with everything at stake.
She shakes her head. Dom’s stomach drops into the balls of his feet.
“Dom,” she murmurs softly. His eyes lock with hers as she calls him by his first name. She looks at him with sad eyes. “If I get lost…”
“Ariadne, please-”
“Just-just, well. Find me.”
She pulls the trigger, and Cobb’s body falls to the ground. Ariadne lays two fingers at his carotid artery to check for a pulse. The skin is still horrifyingly warm.
Nothing.
She slips the gun into the back of her pants and runs to the ledge, where Fischer’s unconscious body lies, white bag over his head.
“See you on the other side,” she murmurs. She pushes his limp unconscious form off the ledge and watches him fall down into the abyss.
“And now,” she says to herself, “the real work begins.”
Cobb feels his eyelids flutter open. He’s in the plane.
“Fuck,” he mutters softly, reaching down to un-strap himself. He glances around at the rest of the team: everyone, including Fischer, is slowly waking up… with the exception of Saito and Ariadne. Cobb’s young architect looks pleasantly unconcerned with the waking world-but Cobb knows better. He knows how easy it is to lose your sanity in the deceptive horror that is limbo. Cobb wants to shake her awake, tell her that she has saved him more than enough in this lifetime and it is time for him to return the favor.
Instead, Cobb locks eyes with Arthur, and the point man imperceptibly shakes his head from side to side: a clear no. Don’t do it Cobb, don’t do anything obvious. You’re going to get yourself arrested, are the words Arthur is desperately trying to telepathically relay to Cobb, judging by the intensity of his glare. Arthur knows that they’ve failed. The team had gone over a back-up plan, if their scheme within the dream levels did not pan out they way they envisioned… the basic gist was to get out of the airport as quickly and discretely as possible, and start driving in any direction that landed them out of federal custody.
Cobb clicks his seatbelt back into position. Maybe Ariadne would find Saito before they landed. Maybe everything would be okay.
“We will be landing in Los Angeles in approximately ten minutes,” says a disembodied voice through the loudspeaker.
“Fuck,” Cobb hears Eames spit through his teeth. “Fuck.”
When they land, Ariadne and Saito are still out cold. For a brief, horrifying second, Cobb thinks he sees a tiny red speck of blood seeping into Saito’s white shirt, just poking out from behind his suit jacket… Cobb shakes his head back and forth, looks again-and the spot is gone. Cobb now turns to Ariadne: so small in her too-large first class seat, she is curled up like a cat, arms around her knees, childlike in her unconscious innocence. He wants to pick her up and take her home, but Arthur’s tight grip on his shoulder tells him that, perhaps, is not a viable option.
“Run,” is what Arthur murmurs to Cobb as they all stand upon the plane’s final maneuver up to the gate. Cobb looks down at Ariadne, then back at Saito. Arthur’s hand shoots out and grabs Cobb’s arm before he can reach out and touch her. “They’re gone,” Arthur hisses, pulling Cobb behind him toward the exit to deplane. Cobb’s feet move of their own accord after Arthur’s own. “They’re gone. We need to move.” Cobb feels Eames moving close behind him, an unhelpful buffer between him and the people they are leaving behind.
Cobb can only recall snippets of what exactly happens next: a concerned Fischer informing the flight attendant that two of the passengers were still asleep; next, Cobb is dragged off the plane by Arthur and Eames, Yusuf trailing closely behind them with luggage dangling off him like Christmas ornaments.
When he comes back to himself, Cobb notes blithely that Arthur and Eames are mostly dragging him along, and that he keeps on looking back toward the gate, waiting for a young girl to exit.
“Fucking hell-Cobb, you could be a little more cooperative and little less of a scene-stealer in this moment,” Eames grunts at him. “And if you bloody well step on my foot again I will drop you right here and now, mark my words.”
Arthur shoots Eames a deadly glare and the forger shuts up. Cobb briefly considers stepping on Eames’s toes again for sport, and then he remembers Ariadne and the pain in his chest that seems to clench around his ribcage, a vice grip on his soul.
Ouch.
Arthur finally gets them all (well, Eames, Yusuf and Cobb) into a van with tinted windows (rented under a false name with a stolen credit card: untraceable). No one has said anything since Eames’s last outburst. Cobb’s face is unreadable, and Arthur’s worry nearly breaks his professionalism.
“We can drive through and pick the kids up on the way,” Arthur offers plaintively. Cobb doesn’t answer for a moment as he considers the temptation.
“And force them to join us on the run?” Cobb finally sighs, and one can hear the heartbreak in his voice. “They’re better off where they are.” Without me are the words that remain unsaid. “Anyway, once the authorities realize that I’ve entered the country, they’ll set surveillance on the house. Philippa and James might as well be in Alcatraz. There’s no way, Arthur.”
“Dom,” Eames begins, gripping Cobb’s arm tightly in an attempt at comfort. Cobb raises his arm, shrugging the man off.
“Eames, leave him be,” Yusuf chastises. “There’s nothing you can say to make this better, so shut up.”
Arthur’s eyebrows rise nearly into his hairline. “Dear lord, Yusuf, where did that come from?”
At first, Yusuf does not respond, allowing soft silence to buffet their troupe. Then-
“Mr. Cobb is not the only one who has lost family in this business,” Yusuf murmurs at last, an old loss darkening his words. Cobb stiffens at the revelation, but does not probe for further information. No one says anything at the outburst, but Arthur accelerates, as if by going faster he can make it better.
The landscape passes Cobb in flashes: first the city, then the suburbs, then-just desert. The view does little to distract Cobb from his despair. Cobb had successfully lost the things he had cherished most in quick succession: his freedom, his children, Ariadne, even the shade… however he denies it, his creation had meant a great deal to him; that her loss would have to be coped with silently could cripple a weaker, less distracted man… Dom Cobb, however, had other, more potent griefs to grapple with.
An odd wave of nausea passes through him, and Cobb clutches at the armrests of his chair. Eames gives a little twitch of the head and Arthur announces that they’re pulling over for the evening. They check into a hotel thirty miles outside of Vegas under the names Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan.
“And that is the last time you get to check us in to a hotel,” Arthur grows at Eames, who looks rather pleased with himself.
“What? You don’t like The Three Musketeers?” Eames asks innocently as he hands out room keys.
“One of these days, you are going to get us all killed,” Arthur hisses, snatching his key from Eames bitterly.
It’s when Arthur hears Dom break the mirror above his vanity that he decides the extractor cannot be left alone that night. Dom finds that visualizing his broken reflection is a relief: he is comforted that at last, reality can finally expose his warped insides. Cobb is still looking at his shattered visage when Arthur, Yusuf, and Eames come bursting in, all three with guns at the ready. There is a moment of scuffling where Eames checks the perimeter for intruders, then silence.
“Oh, Dom,” Arthur whispers.
“I’m sorry,” Cobb apologizes vacantly.
“No, you’re not,” Eames corrects, and Cobb shrugs.
Arthur sets up shifts with the others to keep an eye on Cobb. There is no pretense about it, no false protestations about wanting to keep him company. On a certain level, Cobb appreciates his team’s honesty. On another level, he wonders if they’re still his team, and if they haven’t already defected to Arthur’s assured, albeit unimaginative, aid.
“We’re doing this so that you don’t do anything stupid,” Eames tells Cobb upon the end of his own shift (Yusuf enters the room as Eames rises to his feet).
“You don’t trust me?” Cobb says, but he knows the answer before he finishes the question. Eames and Yusuf exchange significant glances, but neither one answers the broken man.
“Would you like to use one of my compounds to try and get some sleep?” Yusuf offers, holding out a small vial full of amber liquid. “It’s quite potent. Should knock you out for at least seven hours.”
“Do you know how long seven hours is in limbo?” Cobb asks Yusuf, in near exasperation. “We’re wasting time right now. We have to go back.”
“Just take the vial, Dom,” Yusuf says softly, a knowing sadness in his voice. “We can’t do anything tonight. The police, as well as other, more dangerous entities, are crawling the streets; we have no chance of evading them right now. You know that, deep down, even if you don’t want to admit it.”
Cobb does not acquiesce aloud, merely accepts the vial and downs it. Yusuf hustles him into bed before Dom is out cold.
Yusuf flips open his phone. “He’s down,” he says matter-of-factly. Within twenty seconds, Eames and Arthur are in the hotel room: Arthur paces, while Eames chases after him, attempting to console him. With Cobb awake, the rest of the team had no chance to grieve; they could show no reaction to the loss of their architect, of their tourist. Now, however, there is time enough for lamentations while avoiding Cobb’s gaze without adding to his tremendous guilt.
“I just can’t believe she’s gone-“ is what Arthur keeps on repeating, racing from one end of the room to the other. “I-I think I need a drink. Fuck. She was good.”
“Stop,” Eames attempts, but Arthur’s not having it. Finally, Eames captures Arthur in a sort of half-hug, half-wrestling-hold embrace. “Stop it. Just, stop.”
Yusuf thinks he hears Arthur let out a great sob into Eames’s chest, but chooses to ignore it in favor of keeping his mental image of Arthur-cold, calculating, collected, but above all, professional-intact.
“I’m going to purchase a very expensive handle of vodka,” Yusuf says nonchalantly. “And then I am going to raise my glass for the dead. You may join me,” he adds.
Eames’s head twitches at the word. “They’re not dead,” he says, though his words sound more like a question than a statement.
Arthur backs away from the forger, pressing his hands against his face, as if trying to rescind the tears he had allowed to escape. Arthur ever so slightly shakes his head in Eames’s direction. “They might as well be. Cobb doesn’t realize how lucky he was to get out of limbo they way he did: the fact that he was with Mal the whole time, I think it kept him sane. If Ariadne and Saito can’t find each other, if they’re just trapped down there, with their subconscious constantly deceiving them… I just don’t know how they can survive it.”
No one responds, and Yusuf leaves to get the vodka.
It takes very little time for the three of them to get horribly drunk. Each is inclined to forget the tragedy the day had resulted in. Arthur discovers, rather sloppily, that raspberry vodka is his drink of choice; Eames discovers, also rather sloppily, that raspberry vodka is not his drink of choice.
“Hail the less than victorious dead,” Arthur hiccups, at least ten shots in. Eames gestures with his empty left hand in a small, sad salute, and Yusuf just downs his shot in recognition.
“Hail,” Eames repeats.
There is a moment of silence. “We should say something,” Eames suggests.
Arthur pours himself another drink, but Eames’s words seem to sober him. “Yes,” the point man agrees. “Your spelling might not be great, but you do have a way with words, Eames. I am nominating you to say-to say, things.”
“Seconded,” Yusuf adds under his breath.
“Well, if you lovely lads insist,” Eames says, attempting to bring himself to his feet, then reconsidering his sitting position after wobbling around a bit. Finally, he finds himself cross-legged between the chemist and the point man, with Cobb out cold on the bed behind him.
“I’ll start with our tourist, who was bloody brave when it counted,” Eames begins. “Even with a bullet lodged in his chest, he kept going. And I’m pretty sure he launched a grenade toward the end, tough little bastard. And I think… I think if he’d have woken up, he would have made the call to fix Cobb’s record, either way.”
“Tha’s-tha’s speculation,” Arthur drawls, but Yusuf raises his glass, effectively silencing Arthur.
“It’s the truth,” the chemist replies. “Saito is-was… that kind of man.” Arthur finally nods his head and raises his glass high.
“To Saito,” Eames says in salute. They all drink. A moment passes.
“Now… to the girl who spun the best webs,” Eames murmurs just loud enough to be heard over the sound of Cobb’s breathing. Arthur’s breath hitches. “May you live in our dreams forever.”
Arthur clutches at his glass tightly, eyes wide.
“Ariadne,” is what Yusuf responds with.
“I kissed her,” is what Arthur says.
Yusuf and Eames spin toward Arthur with looks of shock plastered on their faces. The humor of the moment almost drowns out the grief. “In the dream, on level two. The projections were looking at us.”
“Of course they were going to be looking at you, we were bloody doing the Mr. Charles gambit,” Eames growls. “You right git. Taking advantage of her, that is.”
“I know,” Arthur admits simply, and Eames realizes he has pressed the issue too casually.
“Cherish it,” Eames tells Arthur, who looks at the forger with an odd expression on his face. “Lucky bastard.” The point man nods and takes a sip of his drink.
Cobb rustles in his sleep, and what is left of the team decides to call it a night.
When Cobb wakes up, he doesn’t comment on how the suite smells like alcohol or how Yusuf, Eames, and Arthur all seem rather sensitive to light and moving objects. He figures the hangover will teach them all a better lesson than he ever could, a lesson he had learned years ago: that dulling the pain doesn’t make it go away… that there is no such thing as burying the hatchet. It is a lesson that Cobb learned the hard way when Mal jumped, and was yet again reminded of when Ariadne chose to stay behind in limbo, forcing Cobb to return to reality.
Cobb doesn’t tell them about his plan until they have been on the road for about an hour.
“I’m going to get them back,” Cobb says to the rest of the team.
Arthur nearly swerves off the road.
On her first day in limbo, Ariadne buries her friends.
The moment Dom is killed (the moment she kills him), the dream stops falling apart, because it no longer belongs to him. It is her place now: her prison. Most of the buildings are beginning to morph into places that Ariadne remembers from her past: the church from her hometown, the visual arts center at her place of undergraduate study, the university square in Paris where she had learned how to sketch properly.
For a while, she sits at the table where the Cobbs had discussed Mal’s unreality. Ariadne slowly comes to the realization that her task was more than a little beyond her own capabilities. Find Saito, in this grand landscape? And not only to find him, but to convince him that this world, this place that seems so damn real, that had tricked the experienced Dom Cobb for fifty years, that had convinced Mal Cobb so completely that she had killed herself to get back to it… convince Saito that this place wasn’t real? Ariadne drags her hands down her face, steeling herself, gathering her courage. She doubts she can complete the mission, but she hasn’t got a choice: she’s got to.
She drags Dom’s body to Mal’s side, and they both lie peacefully next to one another. Ariadne thinks that in some potential future timeline, one where the shit hit the fan even more brutally than it had in the world she had known and loved, this was the possibility that Mal had been longing for. A wave of nausea hits Ariadne in the pit of her stomach and she clutches at her throat, willing herself not to throw up. Looking at his corpse is harder than she had originally imagined.
“It’s not real,” she tells herself. “Don’t do this right now.”
That’s when she decides to bury them both.
It’s a bit of an ordeal getting them both into the elevator (not the one she had taken to go floor to floor in Cobb’s dream-levels, but the actual elevator of the building they-well, really it was just Ariadne-were at the precipice of). A line of red trails underneath Cobb’s body from the gunshot she had so readily delivered. Ariadne thinks about the task ahead of her and suddenly wishes he were there with her, in the thick of it. As unstable as he had seemed throughout the process of inception, Ariadne had somehow subconsciously tied him to her own reality: how could she ever dream up the fantasies that he had inspired? To dream, to build: it was pure creation. And so she had tied him to everything she knew as real and true.
Seeing him dead was killing her resolve, so he had to disappear. A grave was the most reasonable.
She digs for what feels like days. She has no shovel, so she claws at the sandy earth with her hands until they turn bloody. First comes the pain, then her hands turn numb, and then a second wave of pain hits her and she is forced to resort to pushing away the soil with her feet. It is a less precise art, but she manages a grave deep enough for one body.
Mal goes first.
Ariadne clasps the dead woman’s face in her hands, cupping her cheeks.
“They told me you were lovely,” she tells the corpse. “The real you: I believe you were exactly the kind of woman that a man like Cobb deserves. But this perversion of you… was just a parasite. You almost killed him.” A sudden fury boils within her, and Ariadne finds herself pushing the body unceremoniously into the grave. It falls, and Ariadne hears a sickening crunch of bones snapping.
Her hands are too warped to dig another grave, so she pushes the dirt over Mal with cupped palms and decides on digging Cobb’s grave when she wakes up.
She falls asleep curled up by the grave, wishing it could have been different.
When she wakes up, Cobb’s body is gone, and her hands have been bandaged.
For a few moments, there is only the panic of his loss: this grave-digging was going to be her closure, the way that she could begin anew in this bizarre, physics-less world of the dream, of limbo itself. Severing her ties with him would give her the edge she needed to survive.
But there was no Cobb to be seen. Mal’s grave was the same, save that a mysterious hand had placed a small cross made of twigs at its head. Ariadne shudders.
“I didn’t put that there,” she whispers. She looks at her bandaged hands and feels oddly violated. Suddenly, Ariadne finds that she is choking on her own tongue, her heart beating sporadically. The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and she is truly afraid.
The unspoken words Then who did? plague her for the next three months.
“We just drove hundreds of miles away from the people who want to lock you up forever and throw away the key, Cobb,” Eames says slowly, as if talking to a child. “We are currently driving away from the men who wish to put you on death row. And you, you want to turn around and walk right into their arms.”
Eames’s neck hurts from twisting it to face Cobb, who sits calmly in the back seat next to Yusuf. The forger’s face is red with frustration at trying to get the former extractor to listen to reason.
“That wasn’t exactly the plan I had in mind,” Cobb growls back. He looks beseechingly at the rest of the team. “Come on, we owe it to Saito and Ariadne to try and rescue them. They would do the same for one of us.”
“Ariadne did do the same for one of us,” Yusuf says softly, but the sound of his words are drowned out by the tornado of anger and frustration that is Eames.
“You cannot be serious! You CANNOT be serious. Arthur,” Eames says, turning to the point man, whose face is devoid of emotion, “do something. Talk some sense into him. Them,” he adds, shooting Yusuf an evil glare, as if the chemist was encouraging a bad habit, such as thumb sucking or sleeping with the lights on.
“This could very well mean the end of all our careers,” Arthur finally says. The point man has a look in his eye that Cobb recognizes. Cobb can feel the hum of anticipation buzz within him, waiting for what he knew was coming.
“Thank you,” Eames says with a sigh of relief when Arthur does not continue… but Cobb knows better.
“That being said,” Arthur interrupts, “I’m in.” He allows a quick glance over his shoulder before flicking his turning signal. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing, Cobb.”
Cobb nods curtly. “If you don’t want in, get out now.”
No one moves. No one says a single word in response.
It’s when Arthur makes the U-turn and begins the long drive back that Cobb knows he’s won.
The light flickers in from the window shades, falling unbidden on Ariadne’s closed eyes. She flicks a wrist at the shade and it snaps shut, enclosing her in darkness once again. She pulls the covers up over her head, but it’s no use: she has always had trouble going back to sleep after being awakened. She stumbles out of bed, reaching blindly for a toothbrush, which she promptly shoves into her mouth, vigorously brushing it against her teeth. She pulls the t-shirt she had been wearing as makeshift pajamas over her head and shimmies out of her panties, letting both articles of clothing fall to the floor. She then walks to the door of the shower, opens it and steps inside, her bare skin prickly in the early morning cold. She turns the handle of the shower and instantly hot water gushes out. She lets the water hit her cheek for a long minute before turning her head sideways and finally inhaling a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
It’s the normalcy of limbo that surprises Ariadne. Now aware how similar this place is to the real world, Ariadne knows how easy it could be to confuse the two. She feels a bizarre, unwanted connection with Mal-a woman who had not been strong enough, who had allowed limbo to get the better of her-and it makes the pit of her stomach sink, as though her body physically knows something that her brain had yet to recognize. Time has no meaning here-Ariadne realizes that she has a mission, but there is little point in rushing herself. She has stopped counting the days since Cobb’s body had disappeared-had it been a week, or a month?
She turns off the water and lets the glass around her defog slowly before exiting the stall. She wraps a white towel around her body, letting her wet hair drip down her back freely. A window stands at the end of the long bathroom, exposing the rest of the world-a sky clear as day, a horizon in the distance that seems to hug the curvature of the Earth-and Ariadne momentarily finds herself captivated.
It’s when she’s looking out that same window that she first feels it: it’s a strange, ominous feeling that makes her shudder. At first, she thinks she’s imagining things. But she gets the same feeling at that window each morning when she steps out of that shower: that dark feeling that someone was watching her. She knew her worries were absurd; knew that the only other person, only other real person down below in this man-made, self-imposed hell was Saito, and if he was watching her, wasn’t that a good thing? Didn’t she want to find him in the first place?
When she finally discovers the complex on the hill, a fortress that was too clean-cut, too smooth for her tastes-basically, a place not her own in a world sprung from her imagination-she knows that she has to get inside. She’s not sure why exactly, she can’t put words to the feeling that she has every time she takes a step closer to what is pretty much a castle blighting the landscape around it-
Suddenly, she sees something in her periphery: for a moment she thinks she sees a man, tall, blond, smirking at her like a cat that’s just swallowed a mouse. For a second, she thinks she knows him.
She decides that turning around is a better idea, and she lies in bed for hours on end until the nervous, creeping anxiety dissipates from her gut.
When it happens again (the flash of flesh beside her on the climb up the hill toward the tower), she grits her teeth and bores through the nearly overwhelming panic that radiates through her being. She pushes onward, falling to hands and knees against the rocky crag. It’s when she thinks that someone’s caught her ankle in a vice grip that she lets out a scream (a broken one at that, because she’s refrained from using her vocal chords for so long) and lets the forces masquerading as gravity pull her down the rock face and back onto the beach where she had begun her ascent. She whips her head around sharply, sweat dripping down the back of her neck, goose-bumps rising on the skin of her arms and legs, searching desperately for the perpetrator-but there’s no one there.
The third time she attempts the climb, she reaches the top. Then she is promptly knocked unconscious by a couple of Japanese soldiers carrying machine guns.
When Ariadne wakes up, she’s sitting at a long table in a mirrored room. A familiar face stares back at her from across the table: a long streak of white dances cruelly around the man’s brow, lightning-shaped and blinding.
“Saito,” Ariadne breathes.
“So you know my name,” the man says archly. “Clever girl. Tell me yours, and tell me why you were trespassing on company property. My property, to be precise.”
“Saito, it’s Ariadne,” she cries out plaintively. “I work for you. I’m here to-“
“Here to what, Miss Ariadne?” Saito interrupts. “Steal from me? Many men and women have attempted that in the past… they have also failed.”
“I don’t want anything of yours,” Ariadne says, head spinning. “I’m here for you.”
“Oh, kidnapping? That is rich,” Saito says, a wry smile appearing on his lined visage.
“This place isn’t real, Saito,” Ariadne finally blurts out. Saito barks out a laugh, waves a hand, and a guard appears behind her with a silver knife.
“Not real? Tell me, child, does this feel real enough to you?” Saito hisses. The guard grabs her by the wrist and cuts a small but deep incision across her wrist. Ariadne hisses, recoiling her arm into her body. Blood erupts from the wound, and the pain from it is indeed heady.
“Pain,” Ariadne breathes, repeating the words of a dear friend, “is in the mind.”
“You are delusional,” Saito concludes. “Get out of my house. This place isn’t real, girl? What gives you the right to say that this place isn’t real?” Ariadne is dragged bodily from the room. “You yourself don’t fully buy what you’re trying to fool me into believing! You think I would not notice your hesitation?”
“Wait!” Ariadne pleads. “Let me explain!”
“I am no imbecile, girl; do not treat me as one,” Saito says with finality. When his guards throw her out the door, Ariadne is left nursing a wounded arm and clutching a deflated sense of conviction.
The walk home is long, full of uncertainty and doubt. Had she imagined the whole operation? Had she dreamed up these fantastic men who had whisked her off and taken her on daring adventures of questionable legality?
Where did reality end and dreams begin? The line that she had drawn in the sand between the two worlds has somehow been erased. By who, she does not know.
What she does know is that someone is watching her (even on her journey home she can feel his eyes bearing into the back of her neck, but she dares not turn around and face him, not yet). What she does know is that soon, she’s going to meet him.
And indeed, that’s the realization that sends shivers down her spine.
The drive back to LA is punctuated by sighs and grumblings coming from Eames, clearly stemmed from his winter of discontent. He has elected to switch seats with Yusuf in order to more thoroughly drill into Cobb’s head exactly how horrible an idea it is to go back for Ariadne and Saito.
“We are all going to die in the process, Cobb; does that not matter to you?” Eames asks, practically begging him to reconsider.
“How many times do I have to tell you: we are not leaving them behind,” Cobb shoots back, aggravated. “This is a volunteer only job, anyway. I’m perfectly content to go in alone.” The expectant look on Cobb’s face, however, says otherwise. Cobb knows there is no way to do this without the rest of his team. Convincing them would be the easy part.
When they finally find shelter for the night, the arguing gets even more emphatic. Eames, hissing curses, follows Cobb into his room with Yusuf and Arthur on their tails.
“You don’t know what you’re going to find in there,” Eames says, fists clenched as if bracing for impact. Arthur closes the door behind him with a soft click, the only person left who seems to consider secrecy an important value in their scheming. “You don’t know what she’ll be like. She might not want to leave. She might not even have the capacity to want things anymore, Dom. You have my deepest sympathies, but there must be a small, tiny part of your brain that realizes when it’s dancing with the impossible. You are walking into the unknown here with no plan, no strategy-”
Yusuf puts an arm out toward Eames’s shoulder to stop him, but it is too late: Dom’s rage, fused with his unending guilt, has at last reared its ugly head. Eames has tickled the sleeping dragon and would have to face the consequences.
“You’re asking for a plan?” Dom hisses at Eames.
Eames looks indignant. “Yeah!” he responds, voice growing louder. “I don’t think that’s too much too ask for.”
“It doesn’t matter if I have a plan or not! I’m going in, I’m finding her, and I’m bringing her back!” Cobb says, arms gesturing aggressively.
“We all want her back, Dom, but if you go in practically blind you are just plain asking to-” Eames bites back, but Cobb cuts him off, pressing Eames up against the wall of the motel room. At this sudden movement, Arthur is on his feet as well. Eames’s eyes dart toward the point man, then back at the extractor, who has his arm pressed up against Eames’s Adam’s apple.
“Asking for what?” he growls in the forger’s face.
“Asking,” Eames spits back, “to get lost in limbo. Again. And bloody hell, Cobb, it’s like you enjoy pressing me up against things,” Eames says suggestively. The pressure of Cobb’s arm against Eames’s neck recedes slightly as Eames continues: “Don’t you recall how that little diversion ended? It’s almost like you want to go back there, like this world just isn’t enough fun for you anymore, is it-”
In a moment, Eames is on the floor. It takes a shocked Arthur exactly four seconds to connect Cobb’s bloody fist with Eames’s darkened mouth; when he does realize what has happened, his gun is out, pointed at the wall between the two. He points the gun at neither of them, but at the same time, he is really pointing the gun at both of them. Cobb looks especially shocked, as if he had never imagined Arthur could pull a gun on him in the real world. Eames looks shocked as well, but more surprised at Arthur’s defense of him against Cobb than at the gun resting in the point man’s palm.
“You’re not yourself right now. Sit,” Arthur commands, looking at Cobb. Cobb glares back, looks down at his bloodied hand, and then turns his back on Eames. He sits.
“We are all on the same team here,” Arthur says, allowing a novel weariness to creep into his voice. He places the gun carefully back into the waistband of his belt. “We all want her back.”
“Them,” Yusuf adds softly. Cobb turns to him swiftly.
“What?” Cobb growls sharply in confusion.
“Them,” Yusuf repeats. “We all want them back. Ariadne and Saito.”
Cobb’s back stiffens. “Yeah,” Cobb agrees after a moment. “Yeah. That’s what we meant.”