untitled Ariadne/Sherlock story.
Inception + BBC Sherlock. Ariadne/Sherlock. PG probably. 2000 words.
Notes: The idea for this came from a random pairing in that numbers meme thing. It is my new OTP. Thanks featherfish!
Sometimes Ariadne dreams of living in a house in the country, maybe by the sea. At least where she can hear it, the sea, the waves, that is, crashing and hushing on the shore. Rhythmically, but sometimes a little unsteadily, like breathing.
Ariadne’s dreams are strange now. She has too much control over them, so every night she enters a world where her ability to create and destroy only lets her know her unconscious mind’s exact desires. There is no metaphor.
She lives with Cobb in the house by the sea, though she calls him Dom in these dreams. Sometimes they walk along the beach, and they don’t have to hold hands because they know the other is so close. When she walks with the hems of her jeans rolled up and her feet in the water, the sand sucks and forms around her feet when the tide pulls out, when the sea breathes in.
These dreams are the only world in which Ariadne can have this. Her dream-self is the only one who can keep a husband. In her waking life she is too busy and too solitary. She tried dating a boy once, his name was Etienne and he waited for her at a café for an hour and a half before she remembered to meet him. She showed up at the date with graphite fingerprints and was not sorry. She told him she was a lesbian.
She lives in a flat in London, now, where she does not date English boys and works late at a prestigious architecture firm where she is much too young to have any right to work but which hired her because she is the best at what she does.
Every week or so, sometimes a few times in one week, sometimes not for a few weeks, she sees her friend. She feels weird calling him “her friend” because that makes it seem as though he is her only friend (which he kind of is? But she doesn’t want to admit that to herself for several reasons) and even then, they aren’t really friends. So to speak.
She will get a text some evenings, or late some nights, or sometimes in the afternoon, and once at 5 AM although she didn’t text back even though she was awake. The texts usually say something like “Meet me?” and she can hear the pleading tone behind the question he tries to pose casually.
She feels adult having this kind of relationship thing where it isn’t a Relationship but it is definitely a relationship. She delineates the boundary between Relationships and relationships as: in the former, you keep clothes at the other person’s flat. In the latter, you ride the Tube back to your place with sleep-flattened hair, self-conscious amidst the early-morning commuters.
He only ever texts. She asked him why, once, and he replied only, “It is far more elegant than all that fooling about with Hellos and How are yous,” and she was unsurprised and she understood completely. He only sometimes texts from his phone, but all his texts are followed by SH (as though anyone else would be texting her “Meet me?” at midnight on a Tuesday).
She met his roommate once. His name was John and he was astoundingly pleasant. She didn’t understand how he could live with someone as frustrating as Sherlock, but in another respect she was held before Sherlock by the same fascination that held John in place: sometimes they were planets revolving around him. His bright star or black hole. Depending on his mood.
Someone had told her once never to invite someone she didn’t know back to hers in case the person became a crazy stalker, but it seemed just as unsafe for her to go back to the home of someone she didn’t know. In any case, she always went back to his place, a charming flat on Baker St. which seemed kept up by someone who was definitely not Sherlock and probably not John, because it always seemed to smell somewhat pleasant and she couldn’t imagine either of them ever vacuuming.
The first couple of times they met at a bar or something, before they realized that neither needed the pretense that this was anything besides what it was. It was more comfortable this way, her coming over and them fucking and then falling asleep on opposite sides of his bed, which seemed unnecessarily huge, each curled away from the other, arms tucked in and ankles crossed.
Sometimes he texts and she doesn’t come over, she is too tired or too busy or thinking about Cobb or something, and he never seems to hold it against her the next time they see each other, even though there is something about the urgency of his touch sometimes that makes her curious. Or sad.
A year ago the age gap might have made her uncomfortable, but she feels jaded beyond her unlined face and the smooth backs of her hands. Sherlock never asks about the scar on her neck, and he never asks why she sometimes struggles into her clothes and bolts out of the flat when it’s still dark out. (Sometimes she can’t stand her unwavering mental image of Cobb’s eyes, wide open, pupils dilated, staring at nothing as they carried him out on the stretcher.) A couple of times she has caught him staring at her with a somewhat vacant squint which obviously said “What has happened to you?” but she is pretty sure she is the only person he can’t quite figure out. And perhaps that’s why he likes her, although she doesn’t really want to know. She wonders if he’d even really believe it if she told him.
She knows only that he is a “consulting detective,” although she has only a vague understanding of what that means, but she can tell if a case of his has gone well or badly by how he handles himself, how he touches her. She is able to step outside of herself well enough to know that she always acts the same. She does not know which is better and which is worse.
* * *
It was a Thursday and she had had her monthly phone conversation with her parents; strange that something so devoid of emotion could leave her feeling so hollow. It was 7:48 PM and she took off her jeans and her scarf and crawled into bed.
She was awoken by the little text message alert jingle of her phone, which she had left next to her because she didn’t know where else to put it, whether she wanted it right next to her or across the room or in the Thames. It said this:
Busy?
SH
And she squinted at it in the dark for a moment before tossing it back down and curling more tightly into a little ball.
A few moments later her phone jingled again. “Meet me?” it said, as usual. She peered at it from her blanket cocoon. An absurd and childish wish for a stuffed animal to hug flashed through her mind, taking her aback and then making her self-conscious even though nobody knew that it had happened. She decided to call in sick to work the next day. Her eyes felt too wide and too dry.
“Where do you live?” The next message asked. She couldn’t help a little twinge of guilt; he must be in bad shape.
And she texts him her address and goes to the bathroom to brush her hair.
She is eating a sandwich and halfheartedly reading an issue of the Times that is several days old when the buzzer rings. She lets him in and goes back to her sandwich.
He is a little winded from the stairs up to her apartment and he enters in a swirl of cigarette-smoke; she can tell he walked here and chainsmoked the entire way. There is something manic about his attitude.
“What happened?” Is all she asks. She is still sitting at her little table, she hadn’t bothered to put her jeans back on and she is cross-legged with her wool winter socks sort of scrunched around her ankles.
“It’s just a case. It was a case. It’s over now. It’s.” He sort of flails one pale hand in the air. She kind of likes the wave of cigarette smell that washes over her when he takes off his coat and hangs it on the back of a chair. He sits down across from her; his eyes are wide and there are little bruised circles under them. His lips are chapped. “I didn’t catch him in time. I failed.”
And she understands: someone died. This is no way to do what he does. He cannot take personal responsibility for the solution -- or lack thereof -- of each case, she is pretty sure that is how police officers go mad. She brushes crumbs off of her hands and levels her most serious gaze at him.
“As though you’re responsible for what anyone else does?”
“No, of course not. I’m responsible for being better than they are.”
“Then what are the police for?” She ventures, but immediately realizes this is the wrong question.
“The police? The police are useless men in little uniforms who bumble about pretending that they keep any semblance of order by adhering to an ignorant and completely pigheaded way of thinking. Or rather, not thinking at fucking all.” The pale insides of his wrists are exposed when his frantic gestures push his shirtsleeves back a little bit.
“It doesn’t lie only on your shoulders, though.”
“It does, though! No one else seems to be capable of doing what I do.”
“Taking it personally like this won’t take back what happened.”
He laughs, awkwardly, a little huff of breath that seems caught like a cough in his throat, and he rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands.
“Go to sleep,” Ariadne says.
“I can’t,” Sherlock responds immediately.
“Go to sleep.” She gets up and takes him by the arm and guides him with one hand at the small of his back to her bed. She puts the plate that the sandwich was on in the kitchen and she goes to brush her teeth. He is sitting cross-legged on the bed when she gets back, elbows propped on his knees, head in his hands. “Go on, then,” she says. He looks up at her as though he doesn’t understand.
“Here, take this stuff off, get into bed.” She feels like everyone’s mother sometimes.
He doesn’t actually undress, but he lays down on the bed and she curls up next to him, not touching but close enough to smell the tobacco and exhaustion he exudes. He interlocks his fingers and rests his hands on his chest, and she looks over and watches them rise and fall with every breath.
His stomach is convex between his ribcage and his hipbones and she decides to take him to her favorite diner tomorrow morning because his body will give out if he does not eat something soon. He is asleep, she realizes.
She wakes up later and it is dark in the room except for the faint light from the street that comes in through the window. She is disoriented because she knows she is in her bed in her apartment but she is curled up in someone’s arms. There are lips pressed against her forehead and her head is pillowed on his arm. He is wearing jeans but the ankle of one leg has been pushed up and, there, their skin is touching. She feels the rhythm of his heart where her hand rests on his back, she feels the rhythm of his breath on her forehead.
Ariadne does not move, and goes back to sleep.
Notes: The idea for this came from a random pairing in that numbers meme thing. It is my new OTP. Thanks featherfish!
Sometimes Ariadne dreams of living in a house in the country, maybe by the sea. At least where she can hear it, the sea, the waves, that is, crashing and hushing on the shore. Rhythmically, but sometimes a little unsteadily, like breathing.
Ariadne’s dreams are strange now. She has too much control over them, so every night she enters a world where her ability to create and destroy only lets her know her unconscious mind’s exact desires. There is no metaphor.
She lives with Cobb in the house by the sea, though she calls him Dom in these dreams. Sometimes they walk along the beach, and they don’t have to hold hands because they know the other is so close. When she walks with the hems of her jeans rolled up and her feet in the water, the sand sucks and forms around her feet when the tide pulls out, when the sea breathes in.
These dreams are the only world in which Ariadne can have this. Her dream-self is the only one who can keep a husband. In her waking life she is too busy and too solitary. She tried dating a boy once, his name was Etienne and he waited for her at a café for an hour and a half before she remembered to meet him. She showed up at the date with graphite fingerprints and was not sorry. She told him she was a lesbian.
She lives in a flat in London, now, where she does not date English boys and works late at a prestigious architecture firm where she is much too young to have any right to work but which hired her because she is the best at what she does.
Every week or so, sometimes a few times in one week, sometimes not for a few weeks, she sees her friend. She feels weird calling him “her friend” because that makes it seem as though he is her only friend (which he kind of is? But she doesn’t want to admit that to herself for several reasons) and even then, they aren’t really friends. So to speak.
She will get a text some evenings, or late some nights, or sometimes in the afternoon, and once at 5 AM although she didn’t text back even though she was awake. The texts usually say something like “Meet me?” and she can hear the pleading tone behind the question he tries to pose casually.
She feels adult having this kind of relationship thing where it isn’t a Relationship but it is definitely a relationship. She delineates the boundary between Relationships and relationships as: in the former, you keep clothes at the other person’s flat. In the latter, you ride the Tube back to your place with sleep-flattened hair, self-conscious amidst the early-morning commuters.
He only ever texts. She asked him why, once, and he replied only, “It is far more elegant than all that fooling about with Hellos and How are yous,” and she was unsurprised and she understood completely. He only sometimes texts from his phone, but all his texts are followed by SH (as though anyone else would be texting her “Meet me?” at midnight on a Tuesday).
She met his roommate once. His name was John and he was astoundingly pleasant. She didn’t understand how he could live with someone as frustrating as Sherlock, but in another respect she was held before Sherlock by the same fascination that held John in place: sometimes they were planets revolving around him. His bright star or black hole. Depending on his mood.
Someone had told her once never to invite someone she didn’t know back to hers in case the person became a crazy stalker, but it seemed just as unsafe for her to go back to the home of someone she didn’t know. In any case, she always went back to his place, a charming flat on Baker St. which seemed kept up by someone who was definitely not Sherlock and probably not John, because it always seemed to smell somewhat pleasant and she couldn’t imagine either of them ever vacuuming.
The first couple of times they met at a bar or something, before they realized that neither needed the pretense that this was anything besides what it was. It was more comfortable this way, her coming over and them fucking and then falling asleep on opposite sides of his bed, which seemed unnecessarily huge, each curled away from the other, arms tucked in and ankles crossed.
Sometimes he texts and she doesn’t come over, she is too tired or too busy or thinking about Cobb or something, and he never seems to hold it against her the next time they see each other, even though there is something about the urgency of his touch sometimes that makes her curious. Or sad.
A year ago the age gap might have made her uncomfortable, but she feels jaded beyond her unlined face and the smooth backs of her hands. Sherlock never asks about the scar on her neck, and he never asks why she sometimes struggles into her clothes and bolts out of the flat when it’s still dark out. (Sometimes she can’t stand her unwavering mental image of Cobb’s eyes, wide open, pupils dilated, staring at nothing as they carried him out on the stretcher.) A couple of times she has caught him staring at her with a somewhat vacant squint which obviously said “What has happened to you?” but she is pretty sure she is the only person he can’t quite figure out. And perhaps that’s why he likes her, although she doesn’t really want to know. She wonders if he’d even really believe it if she told him.
She knows only that he is a “consulting detective,” although she has only a vague understanding of what that means, but she can tell if a case of his has gone well or badly by how he handles himself, how he touches her. She is able to step outside of herself well enough to know that she always acts the same. She does not know which is better and which is worse.
* * *
It was a Thursday and she had had her monthly phone conversation with her parents; strange that something so devoid of emotion could leave her feeling so hollow. It was 7:48 PM and she took off her jeans and her scarf and crawled into bed.
She was awoken by the little text message alert jingle of her phone, which she had left next to her because she didn’t know where else to put it, whether she wanted it right next to her or across the room or in the Thames. It said this:
Busy?
SH
And she squinted at it in the dark for a moment before tossing it back down and curling more tightly into a little ball.
A few moments later her phone jingled again. “Meet me?” it said, as usual. She peered at it from her blanket cocoon. An absurd and childish wish for a stuffed animal to hug flashed through her mind, taking her aback and then making her self-conscious even though nobody knew that it had happened. She decided to call in sick to work the next day. Her eyes felt too wide and too dry.
“Where do you live?” The next message asked. She couldn’t help a little twinge of guilt; he must be in bad shape.
And she texts him her address and goes to the bathroom to brush her hair.
She is eating a sandwich and halfheartedly reading an issue of the Times that is several days old when the buzzer rings. She lets him in and goes back to her sandwich.
He is a little winded from the stairs up to her apartment and he enters in a swirl of cigarette-smoke; she can tell he walked here and chainsmoked the entire way. There is something manic about his attitude.
“What happened?” Is all she asks. She is still sitting at her little table, she hadn’t bothered to put her jeans back on and she is cross-legged with her wool winter socks sort of scrunched around her ankles.
“It’s just a case. It was a case. It’s over now. It’s.” He sort of flails one pale hand in the air. She kind of likes the wave of cigarette smell that washes over her when he takes off his coat and hangs it on the back of a chair. He sits down across from her; his eyes are wide and there are little bruised circles under them. His lips are chapped. “I didn’t catch him in time. I failed.”
And she understands: someone died. This is no way to do what he does. He cannot take personal responsibility for the solution -- or lack thereof -- of each case, she is pretty sure that is how police officers go mad. She brushes crumbs off of her hands and levels her most serious gaze at him.
“As though you’re responsible for what anyone else does?”
“No, of course not. I’m responsible for being better than they are.”
“Then what are the police for?” She ventures, but immediately realizes this is the wrong question.
“The police? The police are useless men in little uniforms who bumble about pretending that they keep any semblance of order by adhering to an ignorant and completely pigheaded way of thinking. Or rather, not thinking at fucking all.” The pale insides of his wrists are exposed when his frantic gestures push his shirtsleeves back a little bit.
“It doesn’t lie only on your shoulders, though.”
“It does, though! No one else seems to be capable of doing what I do.”
“Taking it personally like this won’t take back what happened.”
He laughs, awkwardly, a little huff of breath that seems caught like a cough in his throat, and he rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands.
“Go to sleep,” Ariadne says.
“I can’t,” Sherlock responds immediately.
“Go to sleep.” She gets up and takes him by the arm and guides him with one hand at the small of his back to her bed. She puts the plate that the sandwich was on in the kitchen and she goes to brush her teeth. He is sitting cross-legged on the bed when she gets back, elbows propped on his knees, head in his hands. “Go on, then,” she says. He looks up at her as though he doesn’t understand.
“Here, take this stuff off, get into bed.” She feels like everyone’s mother sometimes.
He doesn’t actually undress, but he lays down on the bed and she curls up next to him, not touching but close enough to smell the tobacco and exhaustion he exudes. He interlocks his fingers and rests his hands on his chest, and she looks over and watches them rise and fall with every breath.
His stomach is convex between his ribcage and his hipbones and she decides to take him to her favorite diner tomorrow morning because his body will give out if he does not eat something soon. He is asleep, she realizes.
She wakes up later and it is dark in the room except for the faint light from the street that comes in through the window. She is disoriented because she knows she is in her bed in her apartment but she is curled up in someone’s arms. There are lips pressed against her forehead and her head is pillowed on his arm. He is wearing jeans but the ankle of one leg has been pushed up and, there, their skin is touching. She feels the rhythm of his heart where her hand rests on his back, she feels the rhythm of his breath on her forehead.
Ariadne does not move, and goes back to sleep.