summer.
Title: Summer
Author: kissoffools / wakeyourheart
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Four seasons, a million moments, one lifetime.
Disclaimer: This is all Christopher Nolan. I'm just playing around.
Notes: For inception_kink - the prompt was "four seasons". Word Count: 2,140. A year in Arthur and Ariadne's lives, mapped out by seasons.
They meet in the springtime.
It’s not that Arthur doesn’t want another architect; he understands their need for someone precise, someone full of creativity, someone who can take this impossible idea and truly run with it. But Nash’s betrayal still stings. Never rely on anyone but yourself, Arthur’s father used to tell him, and it had even been a struggle learning to rely on Cobb. Arthur doesn’t want to have to learn to trust someone else, too.
Not to mention a student. He knows that a school is the best place to recruit someone in a pinch, but they have Eames. They have Yusuf. Both are capable, experienced dreamers who understand exactly what risks they’re going to run into. A student implies naiveté. A student is someone who’ll get you into an impossible mess, and then expect I’m sorry to make everything all right.
Arthur can’t remember being a student anymore.
He’s all right with the student Cobb chooses, though. Ariadne. She isn’t cocky, but she’s determined - Cobb tells him about the maze test she aced, the same one he himself was tested on years ago. And Arthur likes the way she doesn’t just follow blindly; she calls Cobb out on his shit and she always has to know the why. Arthur thinks that’s interesting. Promising.
When he looks at the level she’s designed for his dream, the way she outlines the walls of the maze with her finger, the way she murmurs, “Paradox” with a satisfied smile - it’s then that Arthur realizes he trusts her.
And it’s all downhill from there, really.
Arthur finds that he’s more protective of her than of anyone else on the team. He knows that’s a problem, that during a job, you can’t watch someone else’s back the whole time. Not if you want to watch your own. During every mission, he has to trust that the others can take care of themselves because he knows they trust him to do the same. And yet, the entire time he’s driving a taxicab under gunfire during Yusuf’s dream, his mind is in the other car, praying that Cobb is keeping her safe.
He knows he shouldn’t kiss her on the job. Arthur is nothing if not a professional in all aspects of his work, and he knows how to handle the eyes of staring projections. He knows how to create diversions and perform slight of hand, and he has complete confidence in his ability to get both of them out of this situation unharmed. He doesn’t kiss her to keep them safe from the projections.
He does it because he’s afraid he won’t ever get another chance.
Except that when the plane lands and he’s waiting for a town car, he spots her in line for a taxi. He smiles, and she smiles, and somehow - to this day, he can’t remember whether she asked or he offered - she ends up in line next to him. He even holds the door open for her and lets her slide onto the leather seat first.
And then he kisses her all the way to the hotel.
That summer, they fall in love.
Arthur doesn’t mean for this to happen, he truly doesn’t. He’s expecting their evening in Los Angeles to be of the one-night-stand variety - hands pawing at each other in an elevator, ties and jackets and scarves on the carpet the second the door clicks shut. He’s less reserved than usual, because he doesn’t think this is going to go past awkward exchanges in the morning and a handshake goodbye at the elevator. Except when he wakes up in the morning, Ariadne’s still asleep. And when he makes coffee in the stainless steel maker provided by the hotel, and the smell makes her stir, he offers her a cup. When she accepts it, she asks, “What was your major in college?”
And then, before Arthur knows it, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, they’re both still in their pyjamas, and he’s irrevocably, unexplainably happy.
They spend two weeks in Los Angeles. Ariadne has never visited - born and bred up north, she tells him - and Arthur’s time in the city in the past has only covered business-related locales. They see the Walk of Fame, the Kodak Theatre, the Grove, and Ariadne even convinces him to take a tour of celebrity homes in Beverly Hills. He grumbles the whole way, but she treats him to ice cream when all is said and done, and it’s butterscotch ripple and Arthur can practically feel his irritation dissipate. They do museums, and the opera, and even the beach on a sunny Tuesday in late June.
Ariadne’s swimsuit is a one-piece, and he notices her constantly smoothing a hand over her stomach.
“Stop it,” he finally says, pulling at her wrist.
“Stop what?” He hates it when she plays innocent.
“Judging yourself.” Arthur leans over and drops a peck on her nose. “I think you look amazing.”
After that, she chases him into the waves, shouting when he picks her up and tosses her over his shoulder. Not once does he catch her hand at her belly.
“Why haven’t you taken another job?” she asks one day in early July, around a mouthful of soft pretzel in Manhattan.
He shrugs and slips his hand into hers, tugs her right up against his side. “Cobb’s with his family. I haven’t felt like working without him yet.”
“You don’t miss it?”
“Not even a little bit.”
She smiles up at him. “Yeah. Me neither.”
He even meets Ariadne’s parents. After Los Angeles and New York, and before Montreal and Washington, they stop off in Michigan. Ariadne’s a small-town girl, which doesn’t surprise Arthur in the least, and her parents own a quaint white clapboard home just outside of Ann Arbor. She hasn’t warned them of their arrival, and when they pull into the long driveway, two large dogs yap at them from the front porch.
Arthur has done the meet-the-parents bit exactly twice in his life before this, both many years ago, but not once has he been this jittery. Before they climb out of the car, Ariadne squeezes his hand. “They’ll love you,” she tells him. The words like I do hang unspoken between them and disappear with the latch of the car door.
And she’s right. Her mother Corrine dotes on him, compliments his suit and gives him an extra helping of meatloaf - the flowers he brought probably helped, he thinks. Her father, Jack, warms up to him nicely when Arthur manages to remember how to talk about college football, and they spend a half an hour in a spirited discussion before Ariadne’s mother brings out dessert. At the end of the evening, Jack’s handshake is firm and Corrine’s hug is welcoming.
“You come back soon, you hear?” she insists, pressing a recipe for scalloped potatoes into his hand.
“I will,” he promises, and he really wants to mean that.
They don’t watch their first sunset together until the middle of August. The wait isn’t intentional - he knows Ariadne’s love for beauty, for unexplainable miracles, and he’s planning to show her a sunset all summer long. It’s just that they get distracted with museums and benefits and dancing on a pier, and by the time they actually settle themselves on a hill to watch the sun go down, there’s a bit of a nip in the air.
Ariadne has to borrow his jacket to stop her shivering.
“I heard from Cobb,” he tells her in the silence. She’s leaning up against his chest, her small body moving with every rise and fall, and it isn’t until much later that he thinks he should have brought this up at a better time. He should have savoured this moment.
“And?” she murmurs, so softly he thinks she might be falling asleep.
“He wants to do another job,” he says, “something based out of Prague. He wants me there by September first. And you too, if you’ll join us.”
When she finally answers, the sun is so low in the sky that their skin is stained a deep red. “It’s over, isn’t it?” she says - a statement, not a question - and he doesn’t realize that she’s not referring to the image in front of her eyes.
“The sun will be up tomorrow morning, good as new,” he assures her, pressing a kiss to her hair. She squirms.
“If you say so,” she agrees. In another world, with another couple, Arthur realizes dimly that I love you would have fit quite nicely in this moment.
He doesn’t say it.
They break up in the fall.
It isn’t Cobb’s job that causes it, or the new environment, or Eames with his darlings and loves and you’d really look better in a shorter skirt, pet. It’s everything and nothing all together, a big jumble of reasons with no discernable starting point.
Arthur should have told her that he loved her when he had the chance.
She packs her things at the end of the Prague job, just as the wind picks up and the leaves begin falling from the trees in earnest. The air in the tiny flat they’ve shared for two months is stifling, and it has nothing to do with the temperature.
“Where are you going to go?”
A shrug. “I’ll figure that out once I’m gone.”
He follows her out the door, down the three flights of rickety stairs, and tries to trap her in the lobby. “Take me with you.” He wishes he could keep the pleading note out of his voice.
“Why?” she asks. She’s wearing a brown knit sweater, one with too-long sleeves that hang over her hands and practically drown her. “So you can hole yourself up and pore over files all day? So I can drive you crazy with my imagination and schemes?”
So I can keep myself together, he doesn’t say.
Ariadne shakes her head, and Arthur’s positive she’s blinking back tears. Then again, maybe those are his own. “We were summer,” she says. “It’s fall now.”
The clatter of the door behind her sounds like shattering.
Arthur can’t stay in their apartment alone, not when it smells like her shampoo and he finds one lonely lost sock tucked underneath the radiator. He goes out for a walk, jacket tugged tight around him, and stops only to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store.
“Lovely day, isn’t it?” the shopkeeper says with a bright smile as he hands Arthur his change. Arthur wonders if his scowl is invisible to everyone.
He shoves the packet deep into his pocket. “I hate the fall.”
They spend the winter apart.
Arthur works a few jobs, all with Cobb. All extractions, all fairly simple - one or two levels that do not require sedation or a chemist. They call Eames in to work just once, and they have him forge into the daughter of a wealthy celebrity and encourage her mother to include her agent in her will. Sometimes it feels like old times - the only person Arthur trusts is Cobb. The only person Arthur needs to trust is Cobb.
They hire a new architect. Her name is Samantha, and Arthur dislikes her immediately.
Arthur spends all of December and all of January in a foul mood. He bites peoples’ heads off, he’s short and curt, and he destroys the hell out of every projection that crosses his path. This continues into February and just seems to get worse by March, and every time Cobb tries to broach the subject, Arthur cuts him off.
“I’m just focusing on the job,” Arthur says.
He has no idea where Ariadne is.
In the spring, they reunite in Paris.
He doesn’t know how she finds him. He thinks it might be the work of Cobb, or maybe even Saito, but he’s in front of the warehouse, staring up and suffering from a bout of nausea, when he hears a cough behind him.
He’d know that cough anywhere.
“I never took you for someone this sentimental,” Ariadne remarks as he turns around.
Arthur shrugs. “I guess I have some surprises in me yet.” He likes the look that wakens in her eyes.
“Can you believe this was a year ago?” she asks.
“What are you doing here?” is his answer.
“Cobb,” she says simply. That’s all he needs to know.
There are a hundred questions on the tip of his tongue. Where did you go? What have you been doing? Was it nice? Do you miss me like I miss you? But instead, he asks, “Want to get a cup of coffee?”
She’s wearing that damn yellow scarf again, just in time for summer.
“Yeah,” Ariadne agrees with a smile - the first one he’s seen since September.
Arthur holds her hand all the way there.
end.
Author: kissoffools / wakeyourheart
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Four seasons, a million moments, one lifetime.
Disclaimer: This is all Christopher Nolan. I'm just playing around.
Notes: For inception_kink - the prompt was "four seasons". Word Count: 2,140. A year in Arthur and Ariadne's lives, mapped out by seasons.
They meet in the springtime.
It’s not that Arthur doesn’t want another architect; he understands their need for someone precise, someone full of creativity, someone who can take this impossible idea and truly run with it. But Nash’s betrayal still stings. Never rely on anyone but yourself, Arthur’s father used to tell him, and it had even been a struggle learning to rely on Cobb. Arthur doesn’t want to have to learn to trust someone else, too.
Not to mention a student. He knows that a school is the best place to recruit someone in a pinch, but they have Eames. They have Yusuf. Both are capable, experienced dreamers who understand exactly what risks they’re going to run into. A student implies naiveté. A student is someone who’ll get you into an impossible mess, and then expect I’m sorry to make everything all right.
Arthur can’t remember being a student anymore.
He’s all right with the student Cobb chooses, though. Ariadne. She isn’t cocky, but she’s determined - Cobb tells him about the maze test she aced, the same one he himself was tested on years ago. And Arthur likes the way she doesn’t just follow blindly; she calls Cobb out on his shit and she always has to know the why. Arthur thinks that’s interesting. Promising.
When he looks at the level she’s designed for his dream, the way she outlines the walls of the maze with her finger, the way she murmurs, “Paradox” with a satisfied smile - it’s then that Arthur realizes he trusts her.
And it’s all downhill from there, really.
Arthur finds that he’s more protective of her than of anyone else on the team. He knows that’s a problem, that during a job, you can’t watch someone else’s back the whole time. Not if you want to watch your own. During every mission, he has to trust that the others can take care of themselves because he knows they trust him to do the same. And yet, the entire time he’s driving a taxicab under gunfire during Yusuf’s dream, his mind is in the other car, praying that Cobb is keeping her safe.
He knows he shouldn’t kiss her on the job. Arthur is nothing if not a professional in all aspects of his work, and he knows how to handle the eyes of staring projections. He knows how to create diversions and perform slight of hand, and he has complete confidence in his ability to get both of them out of this situation unharmed. He doesn’t kiss her to keep them safe from the projections.
He does it because he’s afraid he won’t ever get another chance.
Except that when the plane lands and he’s waiting for a town car, he spots her in line for a taxi. He smiles, and she smiles, and somehow - to this day, he can’t remember whether she asked or he offered - she ends up in line next to him. He even holds the door open for her and lets her slide onto the leather seat first.
And then he kisses her all the way to the hotel.
That summer, they fall in love.
Arthur doesn’t mean for this to happen, he truly doesn’t. He’s expecting their evening in Los Angeles to be of the one-night-stand variety - hands pawing at each other in an elevator, ties and jackets and scarves on the carpet the second the door clicks shut. He’s less reserved than usual, because he doesn’t think this is going to go past awkward exchanges in the morning and a handshake goodbye at the elevator. Except when he wakes up in the morning, Ariadne’s still asleep. And when he makes coffee in the stainless steel maker provided by the hotel, and the smell makes her stir, he offers her a cup. When she accepts it, she asks, “What was your major in college?”
And then, before Arthur knows it, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, they’re both still in their pyjamas, and he’s irrevocably, unexplainably happy.
They spend two weeks in Los Angeles. Ariadne has never visited - born and bred up north, she tells him - and Arthur’s time in the city in the past has only covered business-related locales. They see the Walk of Fame, the Kodak Theatre, the Grove, and Ariadne even convinces him to take a tour of celebrity homes in Beverly Hills. He grumbles the whole way, but she treats him to ice cream when all is said and done, and it’s butterscotch ripple and Arthur can practically feel his irritation dissipate. They do museums, and the opera, and even the beach on a sunny Tuesday in late June.
Ariadne’s swimsuit is a one-piece, and he notices her constantly smoothing a hand over her stomach.
“Stop it,” he finally says, pulling at her wrist.
“Stop what?” He hates it when she plays innocent.
“Judging yourself.” Arthur leans over and drops a peck on her nose. “I think you look amazing.”
After that, she chases him into the waves, shouting when he picks her up and tosses her over his shoulder. Not once does he catch her hand at her belly.
“Why haven’t you taken another job?” she asks one day in early July, around a mouthful of soft pretzel in Manhattan.
He shrugs and slips his hand into hers, tugs her right up against his side. “Cobb’s with his family. I haven’t felt like working without him yet.”
“You don’t miss it?”
“Not even a little bit.”
She smiles up at him. “Yeah. Me neither.”
He even meets Ariadne’s parents. After Los Angeles and New York, and before Montreal and Washington, they stop off in Michigan. Ariadne’s a small-town girl, which doesn’t surprise Arthur in the least, and her parents own a quaint white clapboard home just outside of Ann Arbor. She hasn’t warned them of their arrival, and when they pull into the long driveway, two large dogs yap at them from the front porch.
Arthur has done the meet-the-parents bit exactly twice in his life before this, both many years ago, but not once has he been this jittery. Before they climb out of the car, Ariadne squeezes his hand. “They’ll love you,” she tells him. The words like I do hang unspoken between them and disappear with the latch of the car door.
And she’s right. Her mother Corrine dotes on him, compliments his suit and gives him an extra helping of meatloaf - the flowers he brought probably helped, he thinks. Her father, Jack, warms up to him nicely when Arthur manages to remember how to talk about college football, and they spend a half an hour in a spirited discussion before Ariadne’s mother brings out dessert. At the end of the evening, Jack’s handshake is firm and Corrine’s hug is welcoming.
“You come back soon, you hear?” she insists, pressing a recipe for scalloped potatoes into his hand.
“I will,” he promises, and he really wants to mean that.
They don’t watch their first sunset together until the middle of August. The wait isn’t intentional - he knows Ariadne’s love for beauty, for unexplainable miracles, and he’s planning to show her a sunset all summer long. It’s just that they get distracted with museums and benefits and dancing on a pier, and by the time they actually settle themselves on a hill to watch the sun go down, there’s a bit of a nip in the air.
Ariadne has to borrow his jacket to stop her shivering.
“I heard from Cobb,” he tells her in the silence. She’s leaning up against his chest, her small body moving with every rise and fall, and it isn’t until much later that he thinks he should have brought this up at a better time. He should have savoured this moment.
“And?” she murmurs, so softly he thinks she might be falling asleep.
“He wants to do another job,” he says, “something based out of Prague. He wants me there by September first. And you too, if you’ll join us.”
When she finally answers, the sun is so low in the sky that their skin is stained a deep red. “It’s over, isn’t it?” she says - a statement, not a question - and he doesn’t realize that she’s not referring to the image in front of her eyes.
“The sun will be up tomorrow morning, good as new,” he assures her, pressing a kiss to her hair. She squirms.
“If you say so,” she agrees. In another world, with another couple, Arthur realizes dimly that I love you would have fit quite nicely in this moment.
He doesn’t say it.
They break up in the fall.
It isn’t Cobb’s job that causes it, or the new environment, or Eames with his darlings and loves and you’d really look better in a shorter skirt, pet. It’s everything and nothing all together, a big jumble of reasons with no discernable starting point.
Arthur should have told her that he loved her when he had the chance.
She packs her things at the end of the Prague job, just as the wind picks up and the leaves begin falling from the trees in earnest. The air in the tiny flat they’ve shared for two months is stifling, and it has nothing to do with the temperature.
“Where are you going to go?”
A shrug. “I’ll figure that out once I’m gone.”
He follows her out the door, down the three flights of rickety stairs, and tries to trap her in the lobby. “Take me with you.” He wishes he could keep the pleading note out of his voice.
“Why?” she asks. She’s wearing a brown knit sweater, one with too-long sleeves that hang over her hands and practically drown her. “So you can hole yourself up and pore over files all day? So I can drive you crazy with my imagination and schemes?”
So I can keep myself together, he doesn’t say.
Ariadne shakes her head, and Arthur’s positive she’s blinking back tears. Then again, maybe those are his own. “We were summer,” she says. “It’s fall now.”
The clatter of the door behind her sounds like shattering.
Arthur can’t stay in their apartment alone, not when it smells like her shampoo and he finds one lonely lost sock tucked underneath the radiator. He goes out for a walk, jacket tugged tight around him, and stops only to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store.
“Lovely day, isn’t it?” the shopkeeper says with a bright smile as he hands Arthur his change. Arthur wonders if his scowl is invisible to everyone.
He shoves the packet deep into his pocket. “I hate the fall.”
They spend the winter apart.
Arthur works a few jobs, all with Cobb. All extractions, all fairly simple - one or two levels that do not require sedation or a chemist. They call Eames in to work just once, and they have him forge into the daughter of a wealthy celebrity and encourage her mother to include her agent in her will. Sometimes it feels like old times - the only person Arthur trusts is Cobb. The only person Arthur needs to trust is Cobb.
They hire a new architect. Her name is Samantha, and Arthur dislikes her immediately.
Arthur spends all of December and all of January in a foul mood. He bites peoples’ heads off, he’s short and curt, and he destroys the hell out of every projection that crosses his path. This continues into February and just seems to get worse by March, and every time Cobb tries to broach the subject, Arthur cuts him off.
“I’m just focusing on the job,” Arthur says.
He has no idea where Ariadne is.
In the spring, they reunite in Paris.
He doesn’t know how she finds him. He thinks it might be the work of Cobb, or maybe even Saito, but he’s in front of the warehouse, staring up and suffering from a bout of nausea, when he hears a cough behind him.
He’d know that cough anywhere.
“I never took you for someone this sentimental,” Ariadne remarks as he turns around.
Arthur shrugs. “I guess I have some surprises in me yet.” He likes the look that wakens in her eyes.
“Can you believe this was a year ago?” she asks.
“What are you doing here?” is his answer.
“Cobb,” she says simply. That’s all he needs to know.
There are a hundred questions on the tip of his tongue. Where did you go? What have you been doing? Was it nice? Do you miss me like I miss you? But instead, he asks, “Want to get a cup of coffee?”
She’s wearing that damn yellow scarf again, just in time for summer.
“Yeah,” Ariadne agrees with a smile - the first one he’s seen since September.
Arthur holds her hand all the way there.
end.