In the Garden of the Commendatore 4/5
In the Garden of the Commendatore
by Starvinbohemian ~ Rated R ~ 31,000 words
Ariadne/Robert, implied Ariadne/Arthur, + Ensemble
Ariadne and Robert build a green skyscraper.
...In the Garden of the Commendatore...
Part IV
Continued from Part Three.
~*~
“Mr. Fischer, you need to tell us the name of this fine gentleman here, or we’re going to blow your friend’s brains out all over this nice wallpaper.”
Robert looks between Ariadne and the as yet unnamed projection without breaking his poker face. Eames has him in one of the leftover chairs and sat facing his own projection. Arthur still has his arm around her throat.
“I have no idea.”
Arthur’s arm tightens, and she squeaks in feigned alarm. Robert’s face barely changes, but she thinks she detects a faint twitch at the sound. The projection starts to sob.
“There’s no point in hurting her. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“No,” Eames says, “but you can drop the act before someone gets hurt.”
“Scream,” Arthur whispers into her ear. He grabs and pulls a handful of her hair. It does hurt a little, but she screams as if he’s pulled a patch out of her head.
Arthur feigns the movement of knocking her down, and Ariadne goes to her knees. The movement comes off sloppy due to Arthur trying to avoid actually hurting her, but Robert falls for it anyway.
“Stop it!” he yells.
“Happily,” Eames chirps. He leans casually against the wall as if he could do this all day. “Just tell us the man’s name, we’ll stop, and you can both go home.”
“Robert, please,” she whimpers. Part of her wishes he would tell them all to go to hell, but another louder part just wants this all to be over. Just give them a name, Robert, she urges, and we can wake up.
The projection frantically shakes his head, but Robert is staring into her eyes as if he can hear her thoughts. Discomfited, she drops her gaze.
“All right,” he murmurs.
She looks back up in surprise. Arthur’s hand tightens on her shoulder.
Eames’s voice becomes supple, like the deceptive softness of shadows, as he says, “Very good, Mr. Fischer. His name- that’s all we need. Give us a name, and you can go. Both of you.”
Robert looks pained as he trains his gaze on her and purposely avoids looking at the struggling projection. She tries to give him a reassuring smile, but it seems to have the opposite effect of what she intends. He pales.
“Mr. Fischer,” Arthur says warningly. The Glock digs deeper into her temple.
“Gerald Holden.”
Ariadne’s breath releases in a soft woosh.
But it’s too soon to celebrate.
It all happens too fast.
The door bursts open, and the projections are there.
Time and space shrink into a storm of bullets. Holes suddenly pepper the walls, and someone’s screaming. A vase explodes near her face, and Ariadne flattens to the floor and covers her head.
Eames flips one of the twin beds up to use as a shield, and he’s firing back at them. But the room isn’t very big, and they’re all too close to each other. If she were to lift her head even a little, she’d lose it.
Robert’s shouting something. The static is buzzing so loud in her ears that it takes her several seconds to realize that the shooting has stopped. Arthur’s there, tugging on her arm, trying to get her behind the bed frame, but she can’t move because there’s a gun in her face.
The gun blast explodes in her ear, and she chokes on a real scream.
But she doesn’t die. Or wake up.
Arthur’s hands fall away from her, and she hears him slump to the floor. She hears this happen, but doesn’t look because she can’t turn away from the image of Robert pointing a gun over her shoulder at Arthur’s still form.
All three of the projection bodyguards charge the mattress barricade and take out Eames in a hail of bullets.
Ariadne finds herself left crouching in the center of a room that is now filled with beloved corpses. Even Gerald Holden is dead, a pathetic casualty and still strapped to his chair. God.
“Are you all right?” Robert asks her. He starts to crouch down beside her, but he stills when one of the bodyguards points his gun at her. “What are you doing? She’s with me.”
The gun doesn’t waver. “Step back, Sir.”
“What? No! Didn’t you hear me? She’s with me!”
“Step back!” the projection roars.
“Don’t-”
Ariadne squeezes her eyes shut, but when the gun goes off, it’s Robert who cries out. He falls to his knees, and she belatedly realizes he must have thrown himself in front of her. The projection raises his arm again, but another gunshot comes from behind and takes him out.
There is only a split second window of time, and Ariadne grabs Robert’s fallen gun and takes out the remaining bodyguards in two swift movements. It’s kind of funny. In real life, she can’t shoot to save her life, but in the dream, she’s Annie Oakley.
Once they’re down, she sees her savior from the first bodyguard.
Eames.
Struggling to bend up at the waist, he drops his gun once he sees she’s all right and slumps back to the floor with a groan. “Hey,” he calls.
Robert is curled into a fetal position and clutching his arm. With an uncertain glance at him, she crawls passed Arthur’s body- don’t look, don’t look- and over to Eames. He looks so much worse close up. His shirt is a red bloody mess, and his face has gone clammy and blanched.
“You don’t look so good,” she says, attempting levity even though looking at his bloody chest makes her want to throw up.
“He can’t die here,” Eames gasps, and for a terrifying second, she thinks he’s going to tell her Robert will fall into limbo. “If he kicks before the timer runs out, there won’t be time… there won’t be time to…”
“Escape,” she finishes for him as understanding comes to her.
Arthur already has a head start on them, but it won’t do him any good if Robert dies before Eames and Ariadne can escape the dream. Robert could wake to find himself connected to the PASIV and surrounded by sleeping strangers. There won’t be a graceful way out of that, not even for someone as quick on their feet as Arthur.
She is loathed to do it, but she pulls Eames’s H&K pistol from his loose grip and gently rests it against his temple. “Should I? And then… myself?”
“No, you’re the dreamer.” He tries to grin at her, but the result is grotesque since his teeth are stained red from blood. “You go, and this whole place crumbles. And I’ll go the natural way any second now I suspect.”
He coughs. It’s a horrible, wet sound, but this is just a dream, just a dream, damn it!
“Just… just keep him alive as long as you can to stall and give us more time.”
There’s shouting coming from down the hall.
“Go.”
Ariadne’s up and tugging Robert to his feet. He cries out in pain, and she winces.
The wound is in his shoulder. She asks if he can walk through the pain, and he nods. She doesn’t really believe him since he’s wobbling unnaturally, but they have to get out of here. The shouting voices are getting closer.
“I know it hurts,” she says, “but you need to put your good arm around my shoulders and try to act casual, okay?”
She doesn’t look back at Eames as they leave the room.
There are more projections down the hall. She quickly angles Robert in the opposite direction. Their stares feel like hot pokers on her back.
“Stay cool,” she whispers as much to herself as to him. “We can do this.” She puts her arms around his waist and hopes to God that they look like a normal couple leaving their hotel suite. Or at least an inebriated couple that can’t quite manage walking straight.
“What the hell is going on?” he hisses back.
“They’re bad guys,” is her vague answer.
“That’s not what you were wearing before.”
Of all the things to notice now. “Look, there isn’t time to explain, okay? We have to get out of here.”
Just a few more steps and they’ll be out of the hallway and the sight of the projections. They can’t be paying them much mind since they haven’t started firing yet. That’s good. Her heart’s pounding like it wants to escape her chest, but it’s good. Almost there.
They turn the corner. Ariadne holds her breath, but she doesn’t hear them in pursuit. Victory.
They move faster. She has no idea where to go or what to do, so she just guides him back toward the ballroom. The dream has a whole cityscape designed, which means lots of places to hide, but going outside also means braving a sea of projections on the street.
She is busy trying to figure out how much time Arthur and Eames will need up above, when Robert says, “I don’t understand. Why did he want to shoot you? It doesn’t make any sense…”
She doesn’t have the focus to spare to make up some bullshit about why his fake bodyguard would turn on him. “I don’t know, Robert,” she mutters. “Just keep moving.”
They’ve escaped her labyrinth hallways- only slightly more complex than the real thing- and the impossible brightness of the ballroom lies just ahead.
But he stops.
Robert’s feet grind to a halt, and because she is pulled tight against his frame and wrapped around him, his abrupt stop jerks her back and almost pulls both of them off their balance.
Before she can ask, she sees the reason.
Robert’s gaze is transfixed by the view from the bay window, on a statue that somehow looks twice as large and imposing as it did before. No longer serene, the sea is churning angry tides that crash up against his marble legs and look so real she can smell the ocean spray.
All the color has gone out of Robert’s face. “That’s… my father.”
Seeming to forget the pain of the bullet in his shoulder, he straightens, his face gone slack with awe. He pulls away from her and edges closer to the window. “I don’t understand,” he whispers.
“Robert,” she says miserably. They don’t have time for this.
With obvious reluctance, he turns away from his towering father and blinks bleary eyes at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “This… can’t be real.”
The pictures on the wall begin to shake.
“Am I dreaming?”
At once, the chatter from the ballroom falls silent and at least forty heads turn in their direction. She can almost hear the buzzing from the collective hive mind as it narrows in on them.
Time’s up.
Ariadne does the only thing she can do: she slaps him. Hard.
“Did that hurt?” she demands.
He stares at her incredulously and touches his pink cheek. To her relief, the awe in his eyes has been replaced with indignation. “Yes, damn it!”
“Then you can’t be dreaming, can you?” she says, and the lies just keep coming. “The pain is making you hallucinate.”
When his expression still registers skepticism, she adds (a bit desperately), “That is not your father." It wasn't so long ago that she had to make a similar assurance for Cobb. "It’s just a statue, okay? Okay, Robert?”
A sudden wave crashes against the window, hard enough to shake the glass, and Ariadne leaps back with a surprised cry.
Nonplussed, Robert looks at her curiously, but she’s staring passed him at the source of the aggressive wave.
When the second arm cracks and falls, the huge chunk of marble drops into the sea, and the resulting splash sends another wave at them that bursts against the window. The statue is coming apart at the seams, much like this dream.
Ariadne's lost count of how long it has been so far in relation to the real world, but decides she doesn’t care. She wants out of this dream yesterday.
Not bothering to wait for his agreement, she grabs his arm and tugs him forward. He cries out in remembered pain, and she takes that for a good sign. “Come on.”
He’s confused, but he follows her.
When they manage to get outside the hotel and onto the sidewalk without any projections coming after them, she makes the mistake of thinking they’ve done it, that they have made it out of harm’s way.
They haven’t.
She can hear the sound of massive marble cracking far off in the distance, but she ignores it, her focus completely on Robert and keeping him moving. All they have to do is survive a little longer.
But Robert has already begun to doubt the validity of the world around them, and she knows they have gone as far as they can- too soon, too soon- when the tall buildings lining the street give a great, shuddering groan.
Everything goes quiet and still as the dream seems to be holding its breath. Then, the earth shakes.
“Shit,” Robert gasps.
A tremor travels beneath their feet and sends Ariadne carting sideways. She has to grab onto a convenient trashcan to keep from falling over.
The shaking moves from the ground up so that the cars along the street begin to rattle, and she sees window dressings fall over in their displays.
Ariadne tugs Robert away from a lamppost with a merry lantern swaying dangerously above their heads.
Clutching his shoulder, Robert grimaces. “We should keep moving,” he says because he doesn’t understand yet that it is pointless.
Ariadne doesn’t move because she does. The world is disintegrating around them, and this is only the harbinger of worse things to come.
Even as she thinks it, that something worse arrives.
A stream of ice-cold water suddenly splashes onto her head.
Crying out, she jerks forward, unintentionally bumping into Robert to escape the stream, forcing him to catch her with a pained grunt.
When she glances up at him, the apology dies on her tongue.
His mouth has fallen agape as he stares over her head at something across the street. It is not with a little trepidation that she turns to see what he is looking at.
The scent of salt in the air turns out not to be just her imagination.
From every window, on every floor, in every building along the street, water pours from the sills. As if every single tenant has simultaneously left the faucets running so that their buildings are overflowing.
“What the hell?” Robert murmurs. He seems more transfixed by what he sees than afraid.
Turning, she sees that all the windows in all the buildings on either side of them are the same. Water gushes through the windows and over the ledges, flooding the sidewalks and the streets. One of the window displays fills up like a fish tank until the glass finally shatters from the rising pressure and more water floods into the street.
Because this is a dream, it takes little over a minute before they are standing ankle-deep in freezing water.
Eames and Arthur are never going to work with her again, she realizes. Why should they? No one wants an architect who keeps losing control of her own designs. Poor Cobb. Poor her.
As if summoned by her thoughts, the invisible hand of her coworkers appears in the dream.
She hears the kick before she sees it.
~*~
Non sperar, se non m'uccidi (I won’t let you go, unless you kill me)…
~*~
Ariadne knows a lot about dying.
Two years younger and with two years worth of excess naivety, she leaves the warehouse in Paris that first time, after dying twice in the course of what amounts to ten minutes in the real world.
Head full of mirror-born bridges, upside-down skylines, and shanks tearing into her abdomen, she wanders around the city for hours until the shaky feeling finally starts to wear off.
Cobb and Arthur might not be affected by simulated murder, maybe because they have done it so many times before, but Ariadne isn’t accustomed to dying.
Deciding to go back takes a bafflingly short amount of time. But before she actually follows the bread crumbs back to the warehouse, Ariadne adds some tools to her toolbox. She researches different methods of dying.
Understandably, it has to be simple and quick.
Hanging herself turns out to be tricky because she would only die right away if the angle were just right so that she’d snap her neck immediately on the drop. But hanging could also result in a slow, painful strangulation if the slightest calculation were off. Too risky.
Suicide by subway comes with a surprisingly high- apparently sixty-seven percent- survival rate due to several factors impervious to calculation, while jumping in front of a train has only a ten percent survival rate.
Thankfully for Cobb and Mal, they didn’t fall into that ten percent.
Trains seem like a good bet, but after the inception job, Ariadne knows she will never include trains in any of her designs. Ever.
Cobb and Arthur’s preferred method of suicide seems to be a quick shot to the head, but even that comes with risks, she discovers. People get shot all the time at point blank range in the face and still survive- usually due to sheer dumb luck.
She doesn’t comprehend the finer details of the thing but understands enough to know that it all comes down to missile velocity, the energy of the projectile, and tissue interaction. If the shot doesn’t kill her immediately, if she doesn’t get hit in just the right spot, then she could be forced to wait out the rest of the dream with severe brain damage, hemorrhages, disfigurement, and bone fragments embedded in her brain.
It’s not a pretty picture.
Oh, but drowning.
Without oxygen, the brain takes an average of six minutes to die. Maybe three minutes till you lose consciousness and then permanent brain damage sets in. Three minutes means one-hundred and eighty seconds of conscious drowning. One-hundred and eighty torturous, endless seconds might as well be a hundred and eighty years to a drowning person as you struggled (and failed) not to breathe.
Drowning is supposed to be one of the most horrible, painful ways to go.
Ariadne herself now has experience with dying due to flying projectiles and from being gutted like a fish by a peeved projection. She can’t exactly recommend either as preferred methods of death.
But they are both still preferred to drowning.
~*~
When the tsunami-sized wave crests over a skyscraper, consuming the steel behemoth in one hungry gulp, understanding comes to her in a flash.
It’s the kick.
But it is the last kick she would ever want to impose on Robert. Or herself.
With his back turned to their imminent deaths, Robert hasn’t noticed the wave yet because he’s so fascinated by the water pouring from the windows. He holds out his hand beneath one of the streams with child-like wonderment.
But it only takes the span of a second for the thunderous roar of the ocean’s arm as it punches down to earth to reach him.
Ariadne reaches up and catches his face in her hands before he can turn to look. Pressed in so close, his impossibly blue eyes fill her vision, and she forces herself to see only him and nothing else.
Robert mouths her name, but whatever else he says is lost to the bellow of the wave and its pitiless destruction.
She doesn’t have to look to know half their dream is already gone.
It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real!
Ariadne is gripping his face so hard it must be hurting him, but she’s so afraid her knees are shaking. She is also very sorry for what they are both about to experience.
Robert’s hands come up to her arms. She expects him to pull her hands away from his face, but he just rests them there on her wrists.
Both their gestures are too intimate, a poor fit for them, but they are about to die, and Robert is giving her a smile she’s never seen him wear before- for once more smile than smirk- and full of something undefinable as he gazes down at her. The effect of it all changes his entire face by softening his sharp lines.
The sight of it frightens her more than even the wave.
Projections are screaming as they get sucked down in the rapids’ wake. Less than a second until she and Robert join them, and her mind’s eye already sees him tossing and spinning through darkness as he slowly suffocates.
Because of her.
She bites her lip against the stinging in her eyes. Never again.
The soft pant of his breath falls against her mouth, and their breathing mingles as they exhale together into the short space between them. For one brief, precious moment, all other sounds fade away, and he really is the only other thing in the world.
“Don’t look,” she whispers even though he can’t hear her.
Later, she will have to blame the blurred logic of the dream and her own desperation in the moment for what she does next.
She closes the distance and kisses him.
The wave hits.
~*~
Ariadne wakes, gasping and flailing. She’s screaming, but no sound seems to leave her lips.
A hand snaps out of the ether and catches her thrashing arm.
Brown eyes meet blue, and they breathe together. In, out.
Robert opens his mouth to say something, maybe her name, and Arthur brings the bronze horse paperweight down on his head.
His grip falls from her arm, and Robert’s eyes slide closed again.
Ariadne stares at him for several more seconds as the fog slowly clears and her heart rate returns to normal. As the reality of the dream and the reality of here and now coalesce together, she realizes they survived the kick.
And Arthur probably just killed Robert with a paperweight.
There is nothing wrong with her throat, not really, but she still feels the ghost pain of strained muscles as she rasps, “What the hell did you do?”
Arthur holds out a hand to help her up. “Taking care of a problem.”
She bats his hand away and laboriously struggles to her feet. “This isn’t a dream, Arthur. You can’t just bash his brains in and walk away!”
Arthur and Eames share another ambiguous glance, and Ariadne does not want to know.
“We couldn’t have him waking up with us here,” Eames reminds her. “As soon as things went bad, this was the only option.”
“He could be really hurt,” she insists. Robert isn’t bleeding or anything, but there is already a brutal-looking bruise forming on his forehead. She checks his pulse just to be sure.
“We could be really hurt.”
“Well?” Arthur asks her, starting to look a little worried.
She glares at him, but says grudgingly, “He’s alive, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t caused permanent damage!”
Arthur reaches out to touch her arm, but his hand feels cold and she jerks away at the memory of frozen water filling her throat and lungs and the world going dark.
His hand falls back to his side.
Eames looks between them and sighs. Irreverent as always, he waves the tension in the room away as if it were a cloud of undesired perfume. “Well, that didn’t exactly go smoothly, but I’m happy to say mission accomplished, nonetheless. Our employers will be happy.”
She doesn’t immediately understand what he’s talking about, because the fact that Robert gave up the name of his plant at Varis Energy is the last thing on her mind at the moment.
Robert is so still. Guilt makes her tone sharper than she intends. “Congrats.”
“That means we’re done,” Arthur adds quietly.
He’s right. The job is finished.
Before they go, Eames lightly touches her head and says in an unintentional imitation of Cobb, “You did a good job, Ariadne.”
She gives them ten torturous minutes, and then she calls 911.
~*~
Ah taci, ingiusto core (Ah, be quiet unjust heart)…
~*~
Robert only has a mild concussion.
Ariadne accompanies him to the hospital and has to explain to both Robert as well as the doctors how he must have fallen and hit his head on his own desk. The doctors tell him he has post-traumatic amnesia since he can’t remember the events leading up to the fall. Confusion is typical.
She only leaves him for the time it takes to be disappointed in her hopes for a cup of coffee from a still-open cafeteria- they closed hours ago- but he’s gone by the time she returns to his room.
Like a fool, she stands in the center of his room and performs a full circle as if she’ll be able to locate him this way.
She has just come around to face the door again when a flustered nurse rushes into the room and tells her Robert refused to stay for observation or listen to the doctor’s advice.
“People with concussions need to be watched,” the nurse whines at her, as if Ariadne were the one in need of convincing.
Her frustration, coupled with worry and guilt, compels her into a cab before she can think too hard about it.
Robert’s penthouse lies at the top of a luxurious art deco building on the Upper East Side. The building, ominous in its height at this late hour, has a doorman who glares suspiciously at her through sleep-deprived eyes as he calls up to Robert’s apartment for the okay to let her go up.
Standing under harsh angles that spread and intersect in a rhythmic design that reminds her of a spiderweb, Ariadne can’t help but think Robert lives in a geometric prison.
The doorman gets the okay and up she goes, floor after floor.
He has left the door open for her, and a familiar-sounding mournful melody carries down the hall to greet her. If this weren’t enough to concern her, then what she actually sees when she peeks her head through the door does the trick.
“Ariadne,” he announces. “I had the strangest dream.”
She doesn’t know what disturbs her more- the fact that Robert’s brandishing a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels at her or the fact that he’s wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants like… well, like a normal person.
Eyeing him cautiously, she comes further into the room and sets her purse down on a high-backed chair. She glances around with a frown.
Robert’s apartment, anchored by dark furniture and sharp-lined tables and cabinets, is a study in unwelcoming interior design, garnished as it is with expensive-looking vases and sculptures and the overall impression of old money. Melancholy eyes stare out at her from two baroque portrait paintings and contribute to what can only be called a very depressing living space.
Fearing that any wrong move could result in breaking something or being sliced by a sharp edge, Ariadne cautiously navigates around his possessions to where he stands.
“I said I had the strangest dream,” he repeats when she doesn’t ask him to elaborate.
“I heard you,” she mutters. “I was just busy wondering how you arrived at the conclusion that drinking while concussed was a good idea.”
Robert makes a dismissive gesture at her, but Ariadne takes the opportunity to grab the bottle out of his loose grip. “What were you thinking?”
“Why do you think you can talk to me that way?” he asks sullenly, slouching down onto a leather couch.
She would take him more seriously if he weren’t pouting like a child. “You have a concussion.”
“And the whole world is going to know that I tripped and knocked myself out on my own desk,” he says angrily. “Thanks to you.”
She turns an incredulous gaze on him. “I was supposed to let you lie there, unconscious and concussed? Really?”
“Those nurses aren’t going to keep their mouths shut about this. My critics are going to get an early Christmas present this year.” He shakes his head in disgust. “Father would be furious. He’d murder me, and he’d be right to do it.”
It is probably her overwhelming disgust at such a flagrant display of self-pity that makes her snap at him as she does. “Is that why you’re listening to this?” She’s no expert on classical music, but even she recognizes Mozart’s unfinished requiem. Between the sad music and the sad décor, it’s a miracle he hasn’t jumped off the roof yet.
She angrily stomps over to his music system and fiddles around in search of the off button. “Damn it, Robert, let the Mozart thing go! That opera probably isn’t even about Mozart’s father! You’re just projecting!”
His mouth falls open and closed, and Ariadne feels her face grow hot. “This isn’t Don Giovanni,” he says finally.
“I know that, but I think you’re missing my point.” She finds the off button, and the room falls silent.
Robert shakes his head, but he doesn’t seem angry so much as confused. “You act like you’re… Who do you think you are?”
She eyes him warily. “I’m someone who doesn’t like the idea of you leaving a hospital against doctor’s orders and not even pretending to take care of yourself.”
“Why do you care?”
He sounds so suspicious that Ariadne softens immediately. “Do I need a reason?” she asks, coming nearer. “Can’t I just be concerned?”
“Everyone has an angle,” he says bitterly.
She wishes that weren’t true. She hesitates and then asks, “Do you really believe I have an angle?”
Robert stares up at her, and his eyes, though bright, are sharper than the whiskey should have allowed. His silence costs Ariadne her nerve, and she turns away from him. “I’m going to get you some water-”
He catches her arm. “Ask me what my dream was about.”
She swallows nervously. “What was it about?”
His pause runs so long she doesn’t think he is going to tell her after all, but then he says, “I was drowning.”
She lets out a breath…
“You were there.”
… and promptly sucks it back in.
His fingers are digging into her arm, and she can’t look away from him even though her instinct tells her she should be running for the door. “You’re always there.”
“I… am?” she says, her throat turned to dust.
“Yes.”
Robert uses his hold on her to pull himself to his feet, and then he’s hovering over her. They’re standing close enough to share breath, and Ariadne suddenly smells sea air again. The quiet of the room lingers around them like something fragile and sacred. Her heart starts to pound.
Robert gently touches her hair, her face. “Always there,” he murmurs. “You’re here, you’re at work, you’re everywhere. I’ve never… I talk to you all the time in my head… I can’t help it.”
It’s such an intimate confession- and coming from a man who sounds lost rather than fervent- that she doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s too much. He’s giving her something here, something that doesn’t belong to her, because he’s drunk and confused, and she doesn’t want it.
She only wanted to build with him.
“Why can’t I get you out of my head?” he asks plaintively, as if she holds all the answers. The cruel irony is that she does.
Because I’ve made you mine, she thinks sadly.
“Sometimes," he whispers, "in the dreams, you save me.”
She sees the kiss coming and recognizes her last opportunity to avoid this. Frozen and feeling more than a little lost herself, she doesn’t.
When Robert’s lips touch hers, she can suddenly hear the wave again and feel the earth moving beneath her feet. She tastes the ocean on his tongue.
The desperate way Robert grips her face and kisses her confirms all her fears about this mission. She worried about the consequences of spending so much time in Robert’s mind, and here they are.
Robert’s fingers cut into her cheeks, her neck. He’s touching her as if he’s trying to make sure she is real. Ariadne feels so dizzy and that’s really the only reason she grips his shirt, which is warm from his flushed skin. He’s warm everywhere, and what surprises her most is the heat that rises up in her to meet him where he touches, as if summoned by him.
She suddenly realizes he’s murmuring something between frantic kisses, something that sounds suspiciously like, “Save me, Ariadne.”
She hasn’t kissed him back, not really, but this has her shoving him away, halting her passive non-resistance.
Not looking at him, she ducks around Robert, standing so still and quiet now, and takes the bottle of Jack Daniels into the kitchen. The bottle makes a clinking noise when she drops it into the sink.
Gripping the counter with clenched fingers, Ariadne stares hard at the tile, at anything so she won’t have to think about the colossal mistake she’s just made. But it’s pointless because her self-loathing won’t let her off that easy. Not this time.
After everything she has already done to him, she could still do this? She hadn’t sunk low enough? Robert is a man who exists outside of dreams and with real, human feelings. Feelings that she suspects aren’t even entirely his own anymore.
The reminder makes her feel sick enough to throw up all over his expensive carpet.
“Ariadne?”
She doesn’t turn around when she says, “I’m sorry.” She can’t look at him, even though her body is still singing from the touch and taste of him.
Taste? God, she can taste the Jack Daniels in her mouth. How did she ever mistake that for the ocean? Stupid, stupid girl.
“Why?” he asks warily.
Hopefully, he will never know all the reasons. “Because that was a mistake. It… it shouldn’t have happened, and it can’t ever happen again. Ever.”
She finally braves a glance at him and sees that Robert looks stricken. He goes to say something, but she cuts him off. “It shouldn’t have happened,” she repeats for emphasis.
His face hardens.
The only thing she wants right now is to leave, but Robert is blocking her way. She edges around him, careful not to touch any part of him. “I’m… I’m going now. Okay?”
He doesn’t say anything.
Ariadne grabs her purse and runs.
~*~
turn thee, ere heav'n hath doom'd thee (there's time yet for repentance)…
~*~
The next day at work, Robert pretends to lean over her shoulder so as to look at her computer screen. He whispers so only she can hear, “Ariadne, please-”
“No,” she says immediately.
He straightens and glares down at her.
“Here are the blueprints you wanted, Mr. Fischer,” she says in a louder voice.
Robert snatches them from her, and Ariadne hopes whoever happens to be watching will mistake his animosity for one of his typical moods.
“Thank you,” he says in a clipped tone.
And that’s that.
The next day, Robert doesn’t look her in the eye. Actually, he doesn’t acknowledge her at all. He comes in late, strides passed her, barking into his phone, and then closes himself up in his office. Every so often, they can hear him talking agitatedly to people on the phone. When he wants to talk about the building plans, he calls Harriet in.
Overnight, Ariadne becomes invisible.
“He’s in a mood,” Harriet mutters after coming out of his office. The few people who go in there come out looking vaguely traumatized.
She gives Ariadne a shrewd look. “Then again, so are you. Everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” Ariadne says in a purposely light tone. For a touch of realism, she adds, “Just tired maybe.”
“Better get used to that,” Harriet says, completely devoid of sympathy. “It never gets any easier.”
“So I’ve been told,” she mutters, glancing up again at Robert’s door as his office secretary comes out. She looks near tears.
Ariadne knows it is cowardly to think better you than me, but she’s never claimed to be a good person.
She dreaded coming in to work after… after the incident and had no idea what she was going to say to him. Now that he has taken the choice out of her hands, it’s hard not to be grateful. Until they can get back to where they were before, she’s fine with playing Invisible Girl.
Nonetheless, she also doesn’t fool herself into thinking this mutual avoidance can last. She knows they will have to face each other eventually and talk this out like adults because this awkward tension can’t go on forever.
Or so she thinks. It turns out that she vastly underestimates Robert’s penchant for passive-aggressive behavior.
For almost a week, he only speaks to her when absolutely necessary and, more often than not, he goes through Harriet instead. It shouldn’t be strange for him to take his ideas to Harriet. She is Ariadne’s superior and technically head of this project.
But a childish voice whispers in her ear that this is her skyscraper. Robert should be coming to her with any changes or alterations he wants to make. This was part of their deal: intern only in name.
The funny thing- which is not really funny at all- she discovers after a full week of this treatment turns out to be that she actually kind of… She wouldn’t say misses him because that would be ridiculous and an exaggeration. They aren’t friends, and despite a single near miss, they aren’t anything more than that either. No, misses isn’t the right word.
But she has gotten used to certain things, like talking to him every day, occasionally sharing lunch and awkward small talk, and (most importantly) building a dream with him. Ariadne’s enthusiasm for this project is entirely her own, but without that ambitious livewire sparking between them, coming in to work every day is considerably less exciting. His enthusiasm feeds hers, and she likes to think that goes both ways.
When Robert suddenly leaves for a week-long business trip back to Australia, it is both relieving and frustrating because his absence means putting off reconciliation for even longer.
The first day of his trip, Harriet looks surprised to see her coming in to work. “What are you doing here?”
“I… work here?”
“I thought Robert was taking you to Australia.”
Ariadne stares at her in confusion. “Why would he do that?”
Harriet shrugs. “He mentioned ages ago that he was thinking of taking you with him. Something about introducing you to members of the Australian branch and giving you a feel for another office.”
“He… never mentioned it.”
“Oh. Then he must have changed his mind.”
“I guess he did.”
It means nothing to Harriet either way, but Ariadne feels as if she’s been punched in the gut. Robert was going to take her to Australia, but he didn’t.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why he changed his mind.
Then, Ariadne starts to get angry. Personal awkwardness aside, going with him could have been a great opportunity to make business contacts and gain experience. Leaving her behind was petty and beneath him and in doing so, he took this beyond the personal and into the professional.
Make that very angry.
The facts are these: Robert kissed her. He kissed her. He should be the one to feel embarrassed, and he shouldn’t be punishing her. There are laws against sexual harassment in the work place for a reason.
Her anger builds and builds throughout the course of the week until Robert finally comes back. He has barely settled back into his office when she barges in on him.
“How was your trip?”
He looks up in surprise at her sudden appearance. “It was fine,” he says after an uncomfortable pause. “Productive.”
“Why didn’t you take me?” she demands.
Robert barely pauses in unpacking his briefcase, but she sees the hesitation in his movements even if he isn’t looking at her. “I never said I was taking you.”
“You told Harriet you were,” she says even though that isn’t specifically true.
“Harriet spoke out of turn,” he says icily.
“Why didn’t you take me?” she repeats because she wants to hear him actually say it.
Robert’s hands still over his papers, and he rests them gently on his desk. He lifts his eyes slowly to hers, and his voice is deceptively soft.
“Because I didn’t need you.”
~*~
For once, she doesn’t stay late.
There are about a thousand things she could be working on, but the idea of staying in an empty, too-quiet building while Robert hides from her inside his office sounds less than appealing.
The car is waiting for her outside.
She doesn’t notice at first, even starts to walk passed it, but she comes to a quick stop when Peter Browning pokes his head out of the window.
“Hello, Ariadne.”
He doesn’t bother to ask if she remembers him or not, and it’s maybe this that puts her immediately on edge even more so than the fact that he seems to already know her name.
Still, her tone is amiable when she says, “Hello, Mr. Browning. Something I can help you with?”
Then, he says the words she has been dreading hearing for months.
“You and I need to talk.”
~*~
Continue to Part V.
The second time I drop a tidal wave on my fic heroine! Last time, I promise.
by Starvinbohemian ~ Rated R ~ 31,000 words
Ariadne/Robert, implied Ariadne/Arthur, + Ensemble
Ariadne and Robert build a green skyscraper.
...In the Garden of the Commendatore...
Part IV
Continued from Part Three.
~*~
“Mr. Fischer, you need to tell us the name of this fine gentleman here, or we’re going to blow your friend’s brains out all over this nice wallpaper.”
Robert looks between Ariadne and the as yet unnamed projection without breaking his poker face. Eames has him in one of the leftover chairs and sat facing his own projection. Arthur still has his arm around her throat.
“I have no idea.”
Arthur’s arm tightens, and she squeaks in feigned alarm. Robert’s face barely changes, but she thinks she detects a faint twitch at the sound. The projection starts to sob.
“There’s no point in hurting her. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“No,” Eames says, “but you can drop the act before someone gets hurt.”
“Scream,” Arthur whispers into her ear. He grabs and pulls a handful of her hair. It does hurt a little, but she screams as if he’s pulled a patch out of her head.
Arthur feigns the movement of knocking her down, and Ariadne goes to her knees. The movement comes off sloppy due to Arthur trying to avoid actually hurting her, but Robert falls for it anyway.
“Stop it!” he yells.
“Happily,” Eames chirps. He leans casually against the wall as if he could do this all day. “Just tell us the man’s name, we’ll stop, and you can both go home.”
“Robert, please,” she whimpers. Part of her wishes he would tell them all to go to hell, but another louder part just wants this all to be over. Just give them a name, Robert, she urges, and we can wake up.
The projection frantically shakes his head, but Robert is staring into her eyes as if he can hear her thoughts. Discomfited, she drops her gaze.
“All right,” he murmurs.
She looks back up in surprise. Arthur’s hand tightens on her shoulder.
Eames’s voice becomes supple, like the deceptive softness of shadows, as he says, “Very good, Mr. Fischer. His name- that’s all we need. Give us a name, and you can go. Both of you.”
Robert looks pained as he trains his gaze on her and purposely avoids looking at the struggling projection. She tries to give him a reassuring smile, but it seems to have the opposite effect of what she intends. He pales.
“Mr. Fischer,” Arthur says warningly. The Glock digs deeper into her temple.
“Gerald Holden.”
Ariadne’s breath releases in a soft woosh.
But it’s too soon to celebrate.
It all happens too fast.
The door bursts open, and the projections are there.
Time and space shrink into a storm of bullets. Holes suddenly pepper the walls, and someone’s screaming. A vase explodes near her face, and Ariadne flattens to the floor and covers her head.
Eames flips one of the twin beds up to use as a shield, and he’s firing back at them. But the room isn’t very big, and they’re all too close to each other. If she were to lift her head even a little, she’d lose it.
Robert’s shouting something. The static is buzzing so loud in her ears that it takes her several seconds to realize that the shooting has stopped. Arthur’s there, tugging on her arm, trying to get her behind the bed frame, but she can’t move because there’s a gun in her face.
The gun blast explodes in her ear, and she chokes on a real scream.
But she doesn’t die. Or wake up.
Arthur’s hands fall away from her, and she hears him slump to the floor. She hears this happen, but doesn’t look because she can’t turn away from the image of Robert pointing a gun over her shoulder at Arthur’s still form.
All three of the projection bodyguards charge the mattress barricade and take out Eames in a hail of bullets.
Ariadne finds herself left crouching in the center of a room that is now filled with beloved corpses. Even Gerald Holden is dead, a pathetic casualty and still strapped to his chair. God.
“Are you all right?” Robert asks her. He starts to crouch down beside her, but he stills when one of the bodyguards points his gun at her. “What are you doing? She’s with me.”
The gun doesn’t waver. “Step back, Sir.”
“What? No! Didn’t you hear me? She’s with me!”
“Step back!” the projection roars.
“Don’t-”
Ariadne squeezes her eyes shut, but when the gun goes off, it’s Robert who cries out. He falls to his knees, and she belatedly realizes he must have thrown himself in front of her. The projection raises his arm again, but another gunshot comes from behind and takes him out.
There is only a split second window of time, and Ariadne grabs Robert’s fallen gun and takes out the remaining bodyguards in two swift movements. It’s kind of funny. In real life, she can’t shoot to save her life, but in the dream, she’s Annie Oakley.
Once they’re down, she sees her savior from the first bodyguard.
Eames.
Struggling to bend up at the waist, he drops his gun once he sees she’s all right and slumps back to the floor with a groan. “Hey,” he calls.
Robert is curled into a fetal position and clutching his arm. With an uncertain glance at him, she crawls passed Arthur’s body- don’t look, don’t look- and over to Eames. He looks so much worse close up. His shirt is a red bloody mess, and his face has gone clammy and blanched.
“You don’t look so good,” she says, attempting levity even though looking at his bloody chest makes her want to throw up.
“He can’t die here,” Eames gasps, and for a terrifying second, she thinks he’s going to tell her Robert will fall into limbo. “If he kicks before the timer runs out, there won’t be time… there won’t be time to…”
“Escape,” she finishes for him as understanding comes to her.
Arthur already has a head start on them, but it won’t do him any good if Robert dies before Eames and Ariadne can escape the dream. Robert could wake to find himself connected to the PASIV and surrounded by sleeping strangers. There won’t be a graceful way out of that, not even for someone as quick on their feet as Arthur.
She is loathed to do it, but she pulls Eames’s H&K pistol from his loose grip and gently rests it against his temple. “Should I? And then… myself?”
“No, you’re the dreamer.” He tries to grin at her, but the result is grotesque since his teeth are stained red from blood. “You go, and this whole place crumbles. And I’ll go the natural way any second now I suspect.”
He coughs. It’s a horrible, wet sound, but this is just a dream, just a dream, damn it!
“Just… just keep him alive as long as you can to stall and give us more time.”
There’s shouting coming from down the hall.
“Go.”
Ariadne’s up and tugging Robert to his feet. He cries out in pain, and she winces.
The wound is in his shoulder. She asks if he can walk through the pain, and he nods. She doesn’t really believe him since he’s wobbling unnaturally, but they have to get out of here. The shouting voices are getting closer.
“I know it hurts,” she says, “but you need to put your good arm around my shoulders and try to act casual, okay?”
She doesn’t look back at Eames as they leave the room.
There are more projections down the hall. She quickly angles Robert in the opposite direction. Their stares feel like hot pokers on her back.
“Stay cool,” she whispers as much to herself as to him. “We can do this.” She puts her arms around his waist and hopes to God that they look like a normal couple leaving their hotel suite. Or at least an inebriated couple that can’t quite manage walking straight.
“What the hell is going on?” he hisses back.
“They’re bad guys,” is her vague answer.
“That’s not what you were wearing before.”
Of all the things to notice now. “Look, there isn’t time to explain, okay? We have to get out of here.”
Just a few more steps and they’ll be out of the hallway and the sight of the projections. They can’t be paying them much mind since they haven’t started firing yet. That’s good. Her heart’s pounding like it wants to escape her chest, but it’s good. Almost there.
They turn the corner. Ariadne holds her breath, but she doesn’t hear them in pursuit. Victory.
They move faster. She has no idea where to go or what to do, so she just guides him back toward the ballroom. The dream has a whole cityscape designed, which means lots of places to hide, but going outside also means braving a sea of projections on the street.
She is busy trying to figure out how much time Arthur and Eames will need up above, when Robert says, “I don’t understand. Why did he want to shoot you? It doesn’t make any sense…”
She doesn’t have the focus to spare to make up some bullshit about why his fake bodyguard would turn on him. “I don’t know, Robert,” she mutters. “Just keep moving.”
They’ve escaped her labyrinth hallways- only slightly more complex than the real thing- and the impossible brightness of the ballroom lies just ahead.
But he stops.
Robert’s feet grind to a halt, and because she is pulled tight against his frame and wrapped around him, his abrupt stop jerks her back and almost pulls both of them off their balance.
Before she can ask, she sees the reason.
Robert’s gaze is transfixed by the view from the bay window, on a statue that somehow looks twice as large and imposing as it did before. No longer serene, the sea is churning angry tides that crash up against his marble legs and look so real she can smell the ocean spray.
All the color has gone out of Robert’s face. “That’s… my father.”
Seeming to forget the pain of the bullet in his shoulder, he straightens, his face gone slack with awe. He pulls away from her and edges closer to the window. “I don’t understand,” he whispers.
“Robert,” she says miserably. They don’t have time for this.
With obvious reluctance, he turns away from his towering father and blinks bleary eyes at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “This… can’t be real.”
The pictures on the wall begin to shake.
“Am I dreaming?”
At once, the chatter from the ballroom falls silent and at least forty heads turn in their direction. She can almost hear the buzzing from the collective hive mind as it narrows in on them.
Time’s up.
Ariadne does the only thing she can do: she slaps him. Hard.
“Did that hurt?” she demands.
He stares at her incredulously and touches his pink cheek. To her relief, the awe in his eyes has been replaced with indignation. “Yes, damn it!”
“Then you can’t be dreaming, can you?” she says, and the lies just keep coming. “The pain is making you hallucinate.”
When his expression still registers skepticism, she adds (a bit desperately), “That is not your father." It wasn't so long ago that she had to make a similar assurance for Cobb. "It’s just a statue, okay? Okay, Robert?”
A sudden wave crashes against the window, hard enough to shake the glass, and Ariadne leaps back with a surprised cry.
Nonplussed, Robert looks at her curiously, but she’s staring passed him at the source of the aggressive wave.
When the second arm cracks and falls, the huge chunk of marble drops into the sea, and the resulting splash sends another wave at them that bursts against the window. The statue is coming apart at the seams, much like this dream.
Ariadne's lost count of how long it has been so far in relation to the real world, but decides she doesn’t care. She wants out of this dream yesterday.
Not bothering to wait for his agreement, she grabs his arm and tugs him forward. He cries out in remembered pain, and she takes that for a good sign. “Come on.”
He’s confused, but he follows her.
When they manage to get outside the hotel and onto the sidewalk without any projections coming after them, she makes the mistake of thinking they’ve done it, that they have made it out of harm’s way.
They haven’t.
She can hear the sound of massive marble cracking far off in the distance, but she ignores it, her focus completely on Robert and keeping him moving. All they have to do is survive a little longer.
But Robert has already begun to doubt the validity of the world around them, and she knows they have gone as far as they can- too soon, too soon- when the tall buildings lining the street give a great, shuddering groan.
Everything goes quiet and still as the dream seems to be holding its breath. Then, the earth shakes.
“Shit,” Robert gasps.
A tremor travels beneath their feet and sends Ariadne carting sideways. She has to grab onto a convenient trashcan to keep from falling over.
The shaking moves from the ground up so that the cars along the street begin to rattle, and she sees window dressings fall over in their displays.
Ariadne tugs Robert away from a lamppost with a merry lantern swaying dangerously above their heads.
Clutching his shoulder, Robert grimaces. “We should keep moving,” he says because he doesn’t understand yet that it is pointless.
Ariadne doesn’t move because she does. The world is disintegrating around them, and this is only the harbinger of worse things to come.
Even as she thinks it, that something worse arrives.
A stream of ice-cold water suddenly splashes onto her head.
Crying out, she jerks forward, unintentionally bumping into Robert to escape the stream, forcing him to catch her with a pained grunt.
When she glances up at him, the apology dies on her tongue.
His mouth has fallen agape as he stares over her head at something across the street. It is not with a little trepidation that she turns to see what he is looking at.
The scent of salt in the air turns out not to be just her imagination.
From every window, on every floor, in every building along the street, water pours from the sills. As if every single tenant has simultaneously left the faucets running so that their buildings are overflowing.
“What the hell?” Robert murmurs. He seems more transfixed by what he sees than afraid.
Turning, she sees that all the windows in all the buildings on either side of them are the same. Water gushes through the windows and over the ledges, flooding the sidewalks and the streets. One of the window displays fills up like a fish tank until the glass finally shatters from the rising pressure and more water floods into the street.
Because this is a dream, it takes little over a minute before they are standing ankle-deep in freezing water.
Eames and Arthur are never going to work with her again, she realizes. Why should they? No one wants an architect who keeps losing control of her own designs. Poor Cobb. Poor her.
As if summoned by her thoughts, the invisible hand of her coworkers appears in the dream.
She hears the kick before she sees it.
~*~
Non sperar, se non m'uccidi (I won’t let you go, unless you kill me)…
~*~
Ariadne knows a lot about dying.
Two years younger and with two years worth of excess naivety, she leaves the warehouse in Paris that first time, after dying twice in the course of what amounts to ten minutes in the real world.
Head full of mirror-born bridges, upside-down skylines, and shanks tearing into her abdomen, she wanders around the city for hours until the shaky feeling finally starts to wear off.
Cobb and Arthur might not be affected by simulated murder, maybe because they have done it so many times before, but Ariadne isn’t accustomed to dying.
Deciding to go back takes a bafflingly short amount of time. But before she actually follows the bread crumbs back to the warehouse, Ariadne adds some tools to her toolbox. She researches different methods of dying.
Understandably, it has to be simple and quick.
Hanging herself turns out to be tricky because she would only die right away if the angle were just right so that she’d snap her neck immediately on the drop. But hanging could also result in a slow, painful strangulation if the slightest calculation were off. Too risky.
Suicide by subway comes with a surprisingly high- apparently sixty-seven percent- survival rate due to several factors impervious to calculation, while jumping in front of a train has only a ten percent survival rate.
Thankfully for Cobb and Mal, they didn’t fall into that ten percent.
Trains seem like a good bet, but after the inception job, Ariadne knows she will never include trains in any of her designs. Ever.
Cobb and Arthur’s preferred method of suicide seems to be a quick shot to the head, but even that comes with risks, she discovers. People get shot all the time at point blank range in the face and still survive- usually due to sheer dumb luck.
She doesn’t comprehend the finer details of the thing but understands enough to know that it all comes down to missile velocity, the energy of the projectile, and tissue interaction. If the shot doesn’t kill her immediately, if she doesn’t get hit in just the right spot, then she could be forced to wait out the rest of the dream with severe brain damage, hemorrhages, disfigurement, and bone fragments embedded in her brain.
It’s not a pretty picture.
Oh, but drowning.
Without oxygen, the brain takes an average of six minutes to die. Maybe three minutes till you lose consciousness and then permanent brain damage sets in. Three minutes means one-hundred and eighty seconds of conscious drowning. One-hundred and eighty torturous, endless seconds might as well be a hundred and eighty years to a drowning person as you struggled (and failed) not to breathe.
Drowning is supposed to be one of the most horrible, painful ways to go.
Ariadne herself now has experience with dying due to flying projectiles and from being gutted like a fish by a peeved projection. She can’t exactly recommend either as preferred methods of death.
But they are both still preferred to drowning.
~*~
When the tsunami-sized wave crests over a skyscraper, consuming the steel behemoth in one hungry gulp, understanding comes to her in a flash.
It’s the kick.
But it is the last kick she would ever want to impose on Robert. Or herself.
With his back turned to their imminent deaths, Robert hasn’t noticed the wave yet because he’s so fascinated by the water pouring from the windows. He holds out his hand beneath one of the streams with child-like wonderment.
But it only takes the span of a second for the thunderous roar of the ocean’s arm as it punches down to earth to reach him.
Ariadne reaches up and catches his face in her hands before he can turn to look. Pressed in so close, his impossibly blue eyes fill her vision, and she forces herself to see only him and nothing else.
Robert mouths her name, but whatever else he says is lost to the bellow of the wave and its pitiless destruction.
She doesn’t have to look to know half their dream is already gone.
It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real!
Ariadne is gripping his face so hard it must be hurting him, but she’s so afraid her knees are shaking. She is also very sorry for what they are both about to experience.
Robert’s hands come up to her arms. She expects him to pull her hands away from his face, but he just rests them there on her wrists.
Both their gestures are too intimate, a poor fit for them, but they are about to die, and Robert is giving her a smile she’s never seen him wear before- for once more smile than smirk- and full of something undefinable as he gazes down at her. The effect of it all changes his entire face by softening his sharp lines.
The sight of it frightens her more than even the wave.
Projections are screaming as they get sucked down in the rapids’ wake. Less than a second until she and Robert join them, and her mind’s eye already sees him tossing and spinning through darkness as he slowly suffocates.
Because of her.
She bites her lip against the stinging in her eyes. Never again.
The soft pant of his breath falls against her mouth, and their breathing mingles as they exhale together into the short space between them. For one brief, precious moment, all other sounds fade away, and he really is the only other thing in the world.
“Don’t look,” she whispers even though he can’t hear her.
Later, she will have to blame the blurred logic of the dream and her own desperation in the moment for what she does next.
She closes the distance and kisses him.
The wave hits.
~*~
Ariadne wakes, gasping and flailing. She’s screaming, but no sound seems to leave her lips.
A hand snaps out of the ether and catches her thrashing arm.
Brown eyes meet blue, and they breathe together. In, out.
Robert opens his mouth to say something, maybe her name, and Arthur brings the bronze horse paperweight down on his head.
His grip falls from her arm, and Robert’s eyes slide closed again.
Ariadne stares at him for several more seconds as the fog slowly clears and her heart rate returns to normal. As the reality of the dream and the reality of here and now coalesce together, she realizes they survived the kick.
And Arthur probably just killed Robert with a paperweight.
There is nothing wrong with her throat, not really, but she still feels the ghost pain of strained muscles as she rasps, “What the hell did you do?”
Arthur holds out a hand to help her up. “Taking care of a problem.”
She bats his hand away and laboriously struggles to her feet. “This isn’t a dream, Arthur. You can’t just bash his brains in and walk away!”
Arthur and Eames share another ambiguous glance, and Ariadne does not want to know.
“We couldn’t have him waking up with us here,” Eames reminds her. “As soon as things went bad, this was the only option.”
“He could be really hurt,” she insists. Robert isn’t bleeding or anything, but there is already a brutal-looking bruise forming on his forehead. She checks his pulse just to be sure.
“We could be really hurt.”
“Well?” Arthur asks her, starting to look a little worried.
She glares at him, but says grudgingly, “He’s alive, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t caused permanent damage!”
Arthur reaches out to touch her arm, but his hand feels cold and she jerks away at the memory of frozen water filling her throat and lungs and the world going dark.
His hand falls back to his side.
Eames looks between them and sighs. Irreverent as always, he waves the tension in the room away as if it were a cloud of undesired perfume. “Well, that didn’t exactly go smoothly, but I’m happy to say mission accomplished, nonetheless. Our employers will be happy.”
She doesn’t immediately understand what he’s talking about, because the fact that Robert gave up the name of his plant at Varis Energy is the last thing on her mind at the moment.
Robert is so still. Guilt makes her tone sharper than she intends. “Congrats.”
“That means we’re done,” Arthur adds quietly.
He’s right. The job is finished.
Before they go, Eames lightly touches her head and says in an unintentional imitation of Cobb, “You did a good job, Ariadne.”
She gives them ten torturous minutes, and then she calls 911.
~*~
Ah taci, ingiusto core (Ah, be quiet unjust heart)…
~*~
Robert only has a mild concussion.
Ariadne accompanies him to the hospital and has to explain to both Robert as well as the doctors how he must have fallen and hit his head on his own desk. The doctors tell him he has post-traumatic amnesia since he can’t remember the events leading up to the fall. Confusion is typical.
She only leaves him for the time it takes to be disappointed in her hopes for a cup of coffee from a still-open cafeteria- they closed hours ago- but he’s gone by the time she returns to his room.
Like a fool, she stands in the center of his room and performs a full circle as if she’ll be able to locate him this way.
She has just come around to face the door again when a flustered nurse rushes into the room and tells her Robert refused to stay for observation or listen to the doctor’s advice.
“People with concussions need to be watched,” the nurse whines at her, as if Ariadne were the one in need of convincing.
Her frustration, coupled with worry and guilt, compels her into a cab before she can think too hard about it.
Robert’s penthouse lies at the top of a luxurious art deco building on the Upper East Side. The building, ominous in its height at this late hour, has a doorman who glares suspiciously at her through sleep-deprived eyes as he calls up to Robert’s apartment for the okay to let her go up.
Standing under harsh angles that spread and intersect in a rhythmic design that reminds her of a spiderweb, Ariadne can’t help but think Robert lives in a geometric prison.
The doorman gets the okay and up she goes, floor after floor.
He has left the door open for her, and a familiar-sounding mournful melody carries down the hall to greet her. If this weren’t enough to concern her, then what she actually sees when she peeks her head through the door does the trick.
“Ariadne,” he announces. “I had the strangest dream.”
She doesn’t know what disturbs her more- the fact that Robert’s brandishing a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels at her or the fact that he’s wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants like… well, like a normal person.
Eyeing him cautiously, she comes further into the room and sets her purse down on a high-backed chair. She glances around with a frown.
Robert’s apartment, anchored by dark furniture and sharp-lined tables and cabinets, is a study in unwelcoming interior design, garnished as it is with expensive-looking vases and sculptures and the overall impression of old money. Melancholy eyes stare out at her from two baroque portrait paintings and contribute to what can only be called a very depressing living space.
Fearing that any wrong move could result in breaking something or being sliced by a sharp edge, Ariadne cautiously navigates around his possessions to where he stands.
“I said I had the strangest dream,” he repeats when she doesn’t ask him to elaborate.
“I heard you,” she mutters. “I was just busy wondering how you arrived at the conclusion that drinking while concussed was a good idea.”
Robert makes a dismissive gesture at her, but Ariadne takes the opportunity to grab the bottle out of his loose grip. “What were you thinking?”
“Why do you think you can talk to me that way?” he asks sullenly, slouching down onto a leather couch.
She would take him more seriously if he weren’t pouting like a child. “You have a concussion.”
“And the whole world is going to know that I tripped and knocked myself out on my own desk,” he says angrily. “Thanks to you.”
She turns an incredulous gaze on him. “I was supposed to let you lie there, unconscious and concussed? Really?”
“Those nurses aren’t going to keep their mouths shut about this. My critics are going to get an early Christmas present this year.” He shakes his head in disgust. “Father would be furious. He’d murder me, and he’d be right to do it.”
It is probably her overwhelming disgust at such a flagrant display of self-pity that makes her snap at him as she does. “Is that why you’re listening to this?” She’s no expert on classical music, but even she recognizes Mozart’s unfinished requiem. Between the sad music and the sad décor, it’s a miracle he hasn’t jumped off the roof yet.
She angrily stomps over to his music system and fiddles around in search of the off button. “Damn it, Robert, let the Mozart thing go! That opera probably isn’t even about Mozart’s father! You’re just projecting!”
His mouth falls open and closed, and Ariadne feels her face grow hot. “This isn’t Don Giovanni,” he says finally.
“I know that, but I think you’re missing my point.” She finds the off button, and the room falls silent.
Robert shakes his head, but he doesn’t seem angry so much as confused. “You act like you’re… Who do you think you are?”
She eyes him warily. “I’m someone who doesn’t like the idea of you leaving a hospital against doctor’s orders and not even pretending to take care of yourself.”
“Why do you care?”
He sounds so suspicious that Ariadne softens immediately. “Do I need a reason?” she asks, coming nearer. “Can’t I just be concerned?”
“Everyone has an angle,” he says bitterly.
She wishes that weren’t true. She hesitates and then asks, “Do you really believe I have an angle?”
Robert stares up at her, and his eyes, though bright, are sharper than the whiskey should have allowed. His silence costs Ariadne her nerve, and she turns away from him. “I’m going to get you some water-”
He catches her arm. “Ask me what my dream was about.”
She swallows nervously. “What was it about?”
His pause runs so long she doesn’t think he is going to tell her after all, but then he says, “I was drowning.”
She lets out a breath…
“You were there.”
… and promptly sucks it back in.
His fingers are digging into her arm, and she can’t look away from him even though her instinct tells her she should be running for the door. “You’re always there.”
“I… am?” she says, her throat turned to dust.
“Yes.”
Robert uses his hold on her to pull himself to his feet, and then he’s hovering over her. They’re standing close enough to share breath, and Ariadne suddenly smells sea air again. The quiet of the room lingers around them like something fragile and sacred. Her heart starts to pound.
Robert gently touches her hair, her face. “Always there,” he murmurs. “You’re here, you’re at work, you’re everywhere. I’ve never… I talk to you all the time in my head… I can’t help it.”
It’s such an intimate confession- and coming from a man who sounds lost rather than fervent- that she doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s too much. He’s giving her something here, something that doesn’t belong to her, because he’s drunk and confused, and she doesn’t want it.
She only wanted to build with him.
“Why can’t I get you out of my head?” he asks plaintively, as if she holds all the answers. The cruel irony is that she does.
Because I’ve made you mine, she thinks sadly.
“Sometimes," he whispers, "in the dreams, you save me.”
She sees the kiss coming and recognizes her last opportunity to avoid this. Frozen and feeling more than a little lost herself, she doesn’t.
When Robert’s lips touch hers, she can suddenly hear the wave again and feel the earth moving beneath her feet. She tastes the ocean on his tongue.
The desperate way Robert grips her face and kisses her confirms all her fears about this mission. She worried about the consequences of spending so much time in Robert’s mind, and here they are.
Robert’s fingers cut into her cheeks, her neck. He’s touching her as if he’s trying to make sure she is real. Ariadne feels so dizzy and that’s really the only reason she grips his shirt, which is warm from his flushed skin. He’s warm everywhere, and what surprises her most is the heat that rises up in her to meet him where he touches, as if summoned by him.
She suddenly realizes he’s murmuring something between frantic kisses, something that sounds suspiciously like, “Save me, Ariadne.”
She hasn’t kissed him back, not really, but this has her shoving him away, halting her passive non-resistance.
Not looking at him, she ducks around Robert, standing so still and quiet now, and takes the bottle of Jack Daniels into the kitchen. The bottle makes a clinking noise when she drops it into the sink.
Gripping the counter with clenched fingers, Ariadne stares hard at the tile, at anything so she won’t have to think about the colossal mistake she’s just made. But it’s pointless because her self-loathing won’t let her off that easy. Not this time.
After everything she has already done to him, she could still do this? She hadn’t sunk low enough? Robert is a man who exists outside of dreams and with real, human feelings. Feelings that she suspects aren’t even entirely his own anymore.
The reminder makes her feel sick enough to throw up all over his expensive carpet.
“Ariadne?”
She doesn’t turn around when she says, “I’m sorry.” She can’t look at him, even though her body is still singing from the touch and taste of him.
Taste? God, she can taste the Jack Daniels in her mouth. How did she ever mistake that for the ocean? Stupid, stupid girl.
“Why?” he asks warily.
Hopefully, he will never know all the reasons. “Because that was a mistake. It… it shouldn’t have happened, and it can’t ever happen again. Ever.”
She finally braves a glance at him and sees that Robert looks stricken. He goes to say something, but she cuts him off. “It shouldn’t have happened,” she repeats for emphasis.
His face hardens.
The only thing she wants right now is to leave, but Robert is blocking her way. She edges around him, careful not to touch any part of him. “I’m… I’m going now. Okay?”
He doesn’t say anything.
Ariadne grabs her purse and runs.
~*~
turn thee, ere heav'n hath doom'd thee (there's time yet for repentance)…
~*~
The next day at work, Robert pretends to lean over her shoulder so as to look at her computer screen. He whispers so only she can hear, “Ariadne, please-”
“No,” she says immediately.
He straightens and glares down at her.
“Here are the blueprints you wanted, Mr. Fischer,” she says in a louder voice.
Robert snatches them from her, and Ariadne hopes whoever happens to be watching will mistake his animosity for one of his typical moods.
“Thank you,” he says in a clipped tone.
And that’s that.
The next day, Robert doesn’t look her in the eye. Actually, he doesn’t acknowledge her at all. He comes in late, strides passed her, barking into his phone, and then closes himself up in his office. Every so often, they can hear him talking agitatedly to people on the phone. When he wants to talk about the building plans, he calls Harriet in.
Overnight, Ariadne becomes invisible.
“He’s in a mood,” Harriet mutters after coming out of his office. The few people who go in there come out looking vaguely traumatized.
She gives Ariadne a shrewd look. “Then again, so are you. Everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” Ariadne says in a purposely light tone. For a touch of realism, she adds, “Just tired maybe.”
“Better get used to that,” Harriet says, completely devoid of sympathy. “It never gets any easier.”
“So I’ve been told,” she mutters, glancing up again at Robert’s door as his office secretary comes out. She looks near tears.
Ariadne knows it is cowardly to think better you than me, but she’s never claimed to be a good person.
She dreaded coming in to work after… after the incident and had no idea what she was going to say to him. Now that he has taken the choice out of her hands, it’s hard not to be grateful. Until they can get back to where they were before, she’s fine with playing Invisible Girl.
Nonetheless, she also doesn’t fool herself into thinking this mutual avoidance can last. She knows they will have to face each other eventually and talk this out like adults because this awkward tension can’t go on forever.
Or so she thinks. It turns out that she vastly underestimates Robert’s penchant for passive-aggressive behavior.
For almost a week, he only speaks to her when absolutely necessary and, more often than not, he goes through Harriet instead. It shouldn’t be strange for him to take his ideas to Harriet. She is Ariadne’s superior and technically head of this project.
But a childish voice whispers in her ear that this is her skyscraper. Robert should be coming to her with any changes or alterations he wants to make. This was part of their deal: intern only in name.
The funny thing- which is not really funny at all- she discovers after a full week of this treatment turns out to be that she actually kind of… She wouldn’t say misses him because that would be ridiculous and an exaggeration. They aren’t friends, and despite a single near miss, they aren’t anything more than that either. No, misses isn’t the right word.
But she has gotten used to certain things, like talking to him every day, occasionally sharing lunch and awkward small talk, and (most importantly) building a dream with him. Ariadne’s enthusiasm for this project is entirely her own, but without that ambitious livewire sparking between them, coming in to work every day is considerably less exciting. His enthusiasm feeds hers, and she likes to think that goes both ways.
When Robert suddenly leaves for a week-long business trip back to Australia, it is both relieving and frustrating because his absence means putting off reconciliation for even longer.
The first day of his trip, Harriet looks surprised to see her coming in to work. “What are you doing here?”
“I… work here?”
“I thought Robert was taking you to Australia.”
Ariadne stares at her in confusion. “Why would he do that?”
Harriet shrugs. “He mentioned ages ago that he was thinking of taking you with him. Something about introducing you to members of the Australian branch and giving you a feel for another office.”
“He… never mentioned it.”
“Oh. Then he must have changed his mind.”
“I guess he did.”
It means nothing to Harriet either way, but Ariadne feels as if she’s been punched in the gut. Robert was going to take her to Australia, but he didn’t.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why he changed his mind.
Then, Ariadne starts to get angry. Personal awkwardness aside, going with him could have been a great opportunity to make business contacts and gain experience. Leaving her behind was petty and beneath him and in doing so, he took this beyond the personal and into the professional.
Make that very angry.
The facts are these: Robert kissed her. He kissed her. He should be the one to feel embarrassed, and he shouldn’t be punishing her. There are laws against sexual harassment in the work place for a reason.
Her anger builds and builds throughout the course of the week until Robert finally comes back. He has barely settled back into his office when she barges in on him.
“How was your trip?”
He looks up in surprise at her sudden appearance. “It was fine,” he says after an uncomfortable pause. “Productive.”
“Why didn’t you take me?” she demands.
Robert barely pauses in unpacking his briefcase, but she sees the hesitation in his movements even if he isn’t looking at her. “I never said I was taking you.”
“You told Harriet you were,” she says even though that isn’t specifically true.
“Harriet spoke out of turn,” he says icily.
“Why didn’t you take me?” she repeats because she wants to hear him actually say it.
Robert’s hands still over his papers, and he rests them gently on his desk. He lifts his eyes slowly to hers, and his voice is deceptively soft.
“Because I didn’t need you.”
~*~
For once, she doesn’t stay late.
There are about a thousand things she could be working on, but the idea of staying in an empty, too-quiet building while Robert hides from her inside his office sounds less than appealing.
The car is waiting for her outside.
She doesn’t notice at first, even starts to walk passed it, but she comes to a quick stop when Peter Browning pokes his head out of the window.
“Hello, Ariadne.”
He doesn’t bother to ask if she remembers him or not, and it’s maybe this that puts her immediately on edge even more so than the fact that he seems to already know her name.
Still, her tone is amiable when she says, “Hello, Mr. Browning. Something I can help you with?”
Then, he says the words she has been dreading hearing for months.
“You and I need to talk.”
~*~
Continue to Part V.
The second time I drop a tidal wave on my fic heroine! Last time, I promise.