(no subject)
Title: -none-
Rating: R for suggestive situations and language
Pairing: Ariadne/Arthur
Word Count: 2359
Summary: The line between fantasy and reality is a fine one.
Author's note: enjoy? One can hope, anyway.
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The last thing he remembers is being in his car, driving home. Maybe someone slipped him something. Or maybe he's dreaming and he's in the middle of a job gone wrong.
Neither of those scenarios inspire much comfort.
Unfortunately, there's only one way to know for sure if he's awake or dreaming, but his hands are tied...literally, against the headboard of the bed he's on.
He's in a tastefully decorated, if not somewhat generically furnished by a ubiquitous Swedish chain room. The room is completely empty of any personal effects, making it difficult to figure out whose room it was. Still, the room was painted a light purple. One clue was better than none.
"Arthur?" a voice calls out, and he nearly faints in relief.
"Ariadne?" he asks. "Thank god. Where the hell am I?"
She appears in the room, and he knows he's not in any kind of immediate danger. Her movements are steady and calm and she makes no move to free him. "You doing all right?"
"Not bad, under the circumstances. Want to uncuff me?"
"I'm afraid that's not part of the plan." she smiles, stepping squarely into his field of vision. She's wearing a tight, long sleeved lace dress, hitting mid thigh.
He swallows thickly, hoping her get-up didn't inspire a visible physical reaction in him, because that would be inconvenient given his suspicion, one he voices immediately. "You turned on me."
She laughs. "Always thinking business, aren't you? Don't worry, Arthur. We're still on the same team. Just thought you'd enjoy this, given the way you've been looking at me lately."
There was only one other explanation for this. "Eames? You bastard."
She grins again, stepping out of her heels. "I'm not Eames, I swear to you. Although it'd be a favour to you either way." She stops for a second. "Why is it so hard to believe this might be actually happening?"
He looks longingly over at the EXPEDIT series desk (matching shelf unit sold separately), where his totem was sitting.
She follows his gaze. "Oh yeah, that." she says, resting her hands at the edge of the bed for a few seconds, as if contemplating her next move, before climbing on the bed, in a manner he could really only describe as seductively (and completely out of character), until she hovered over him. "Unfortunately, you're just going to have to go with your gut tonight."
"This is not-" Her lips hitting his was a shock, to say the least. The feeling of finally getting something he never knew he wanted (that bad) poured in quickly afterward, surprising him in its intensity,
He idly wondered how he intended to finish the sentence she had swallowed from him.
She's carefully maintaining distance between their bodies so their lips are the only place they met, which has the effect of diminishing returns on him. The longer she kissed him, the less satisfying just kissing became. She breaks off all contact immediately when he tries to arch his body up to meet her (which is exceedingly difficult, by the way, without any leverage).
"Ariadne," he says. "Give me my totem." She ignores him, and he tries again. "I need to know if this is real."
"Why?" she asks mischievously.
"I need to know if I can look you in the eye tomorrow."
"You're not in the position to make any demands. If you couldn't tell already."
"Why am I here?" he finally asks.
"I wanted to get some information out of you." she said, stroking his sides lightly with her nails.
He's still not entirely convinced he can trust her. "What do you want to know?"
"What you think about me." She smiles coyly and he has a sinking feeling that he won't like where this is going.
"You're a brilliant architect..." he starts to say, but she shakes her head.
"Maybe I need to be more specific. You keep staring at me, when you think I'm not looking. What's that about?" Her lips are centimetres away from his, and he can't help himself, he tries to kiss her, but she pulls away.
"Tell me," she says keeping her lips an inch away from him, as she moves down his body. He can almost feel her on him, her lips dragging a path, first along the curve of his shoulder, then moving down to his chest, and he groans.
"Isn't it obvious?"
"I want to hear you say it."
"I..." he hesitates. "...like being with you."
"Oh. So that's why we always try to sit next to each other. Or why you walk me home. Or why you just tried to kiss me."
"Ok, it's not just that." he admits.
"I didn't think so." she smiles, rearranging her hair so it’s all on her left shoulder, the waves brushing against his chest. They both hear the clink of the handcuffs hitting the headboard, for him, before he realizes how hard he's pulling against them. She looks up at the restraints smugly. "Someone's eager."
"Ariadne," he says, voice low, sounding much more threatening then he felt, "what the hell are you doing?" His wrists are sore from pulling so hard. He needs to touch her, to feel her against him, she's literally two inches away from him and refuses to oblige, wearing that sinfully sheer dress, and her hair so fucking soft.
"Come on, Arthur. This doesn't have to be as hard as you're making it." She sits up and slides her hands from his shoulders up to his hands so he can hold them, and he does so tightly. He knows what she's doing. Giving him the illusion of some control but without conceding anything.
"What do you want from me?" he asks desperately. He gets the feeling she's not entirely averse to leaving him there.
"No, Arthur." she grins, dipping her head to run her lips along his neck. "What do you want from me? Tell me."
He gives up. "You want to know? I think about you all the time. What you're doing, who you're with, where you are. Sometimes at night, I wonder if you're alone, and I torture myself with the possibility that you're not. You don't know how many times I've wanted to ask you out, ask you up to my place, ask you anything, really, whatever you'd say yes to, but can't risk it, because I don't know what I'd do if you said no. I fucking hate it when you flirt with Eames. Sitting on his desk, propping your feet on his lap, fixing his hair. You're not my type, but you honestly have me questioning whether maybe you ARE and I just got it all wrong with everyone before. I haven't been with anyone since I met you 9 months ago, and you're killing me. You drink from my coffee, you dance with me when we go out, and sometimes, I could swear you're looking at me the same way I do at you. What do I want from you? I want to know if I'm batshit insane or whether I'm on to something."
Somewhere during that monologue she had undone his handcuffs because he finds his arms dropping loosely to his sides, and it only takes him a split second to have them in her hair.
He can't breathe.
She, on the other hand, does not seem the least bit surprised by any of his revelations. "How come you've never told me any of this?"
"Because I know you know." He didn't, until this very moment, but it makes perfect sense that she would. He had been subtle, but how he felt would still be plainly evident if she had been paying attention. The words hang between them as she considers them, and he realizes this is the first time he's had the upper hand the entire night.
She finishes his thought before he can clarify. "And if I knew but never did anything about it, you could only conclude that your feelings were unreciprocated."
"Are they?" he asks, still not daring to breathe.
"Come on. You don't need me to tell you that."
She shoots him in the head before he can respond.
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He wakes up, sweaty and aroused.
His initial instincts had been correct. He had been dreaming. And not even PASIV induced, he thought to himself as he looked around his empty bedroom. That Ariadne had been nothing more than a projection from his fevered subconscious. Which meant he still wanted her, she still didn't know, and subsequently, he was still fucked. He flops back onto the bed, muscles aching and tight.
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"Feeling better?" Ariadne trills from across the room when he comes in.
"What?" he asks.
"Add 'short term memory loss' to the side effects list." she calls to Yusif. "You volunteered to try a new dream inducing caplet he came up with. I had to watch you for a couple hours last night to make sure you wouldn't chew your lip off.
"How did I get home?"
"Like you always do. You drove." Seeing his baffled expression, she smiles. "He suggested you try it out at home to minimize stress."
"You were at my house." he confirms haltingly.
"Yes. You really don't remember anything, do you?"
"I...I could have sworn you were in my dream, but I woke up and no one was there."
"Another side effect of the pill is that you may continue sleeping even after the dream is over. That would explain why Ariadne was able to leave without your knowledge. However, you shouldn't have been dreaming at all. It contains a compound to induce more vivid dreams, but it shouldn't kick in unless you're on the PASIV. Last night's test was for stability only. I must have gotten the ratios wrong." Yusif mutters to himself and putters off to tinker with his chem set.
It takes him a second to fit the pieces together before he turns around to look at Ariadne. She's sitting on his desk, feet propped up on his chair, calmly drinking the coffee he had just brought in.
"It was you." he says.
"What?" she asks, holding his gaze evenly.
"You were in my dream. You weren't a projection."
"I don't know what you're talking about." He can't tell if she's lying, but she's certainly not acting like she had something to hide. He keeps pressing.
"You held me hostage in your room."
"I did?"
"Yes. I was handcuffed to the headboard."
She takes another sip. "Sounds fun."
"Don't do this to me. Not after everything I told you."
"Which was...?"
He groans. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe Yusif had gotten the compound wrong. Maybe Ariadne had just been over at his house for a few hours to monitor him, and slipped out while he was dreaming. Maybe she had just been a figment of his imagination, due to stress, and tension...and want.
"Come on, Arthur. This doesn't have to be as hard as you're making it." Her voice breaks suddenly through his haze.
She had used THAT voice, the voice she had used last night, deep, husky, and calming. She's grinning widely, with a tinge of sheepishness seeping into her expression.
"How did you manage that?" He is apparently all business, because the first question he asks is one he couldn't give a shit about.
"I waited till everyone left to take the PASIV. It wasn't hard. I'll tell Yusif later that his ratios were correct." she says, casting a worried look at the door he had left from.
"Fuck Yusif. We need to finish the conversation we were having last night."
"Do we? I already found out everything I needed to know."
"No, it's my turn this time." He plants his arms on either side of her, preventing her escape from his desk. He can tell he's making her slightly uneasy, because she's having a harder time maintaining her gaze. "Now you know how I feel about you. I want to know how you feel about me."
"Isn't it obvious?" she sasses him.
He leans forward, and is more than slightly gratified when he sees her eyes flutter shut at his proximity to her. "Yes," he says, still hoping, because he could have got it wrong, "but I want to hear you say it."
"Come on. You don't need me to tell you that."
They're at a stalemate, he thinks, and he's completely fine with it if he has to stay in this position for days, because he has to know, bullshit aside, exactly what's going on here. He's never been this close to her for this long and he can think of worse places to be than all up in her personal space anyway.
But then she cracks, or maybe it was part of her plan from the beginning, and she puts his coffee down, so she can loop her arms loosely around his neck, weighing him down so their faces are only a breath apart. "You already know." she says, enunciating her words clearly. "What are you waiting for?"
He breaks, pushing up against her and kissing her. And it's so much better than the dream, with dulled senses and dampened sensations. She's warm, and delicious, her hair slightly rougher than he imagined, but still so good, and he has to loosen his grip on her to check his totem when she wraps her legs around his waist.
"I'm usually much better at making the first move, I swear." he mumbles against her lips.
"Yeah, and when would we see it? Five years from now?"
"I deserved that." he says happily, high from the feeling of being so close to her. "But it would have been good. I would have asked you out, told you to dress up, and brought you to a dive."
"Mmmm. The one on 65th?" she asks hopefully.
"Yeah. We'd get shitfaced and I'd bring you home, and then who knows."
"That was your grand plan? That sounds terrible." she laughs, and she suddenly turns serious. "But there's still time."
"Tonight then?"
She grins. "At 8. I'll wear a dress. Get back to work."