on the lam
It's been awhile, hasn't it? I wouldn't say I'm back, exactly, but here's a story.
.on the lam
in which a tea kettle explodes, yusuf keeps his wits about him in the face of unprecedented adversity (read: a bear), and ariadne tames a raven. written for this prompt.
r . 7412 words
1.
The tea kettle should’ve given it away.
Yusuf didn’t know if it was growing up in a household where the kettle was on on the regular or just being a chemist, but he did know how long it took for water to bowl. And he knew that a kettle of that volume on an electric rangetop shouldn’t have started hissing after a minute and a half, and Yusuf was about to say something, to remind Felipe that kettles needed to be filled, at least if anyone hoped to get enough hot water for the three of them out if it, when the kettle itself exploded.
After that, everything went to shit, which was maybe to expected. There was the kettle shrapnel, for one, but the explosion must have been some sort of signal because then there was a gunshot through the window, thunderclap loud and resulting in a bullet whizzing entirely too close to Yusuf’s ear, and Yusuf had a brief flashing thought about how he was supposed to have retired, already, he had said he was going to retire, and the retirement thing is like a waking dream where he imagines himself at home with his cats and his cozy little den of addicts, and then he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of motion that is Ariadne darting for the bathroom door. He mulls for a moment on the things he shouldn’t have allowed to draw him out of retirement, and then he bolts for the bathroom door, because there’s no way she’s going to the bathroom; even if Ariadne seemed like the sort to piss herself Yusuf had seen the large (inconvenient, incongruous) window in the shower, and the motel room has no back door--just the front door, by the window whose glass is now in shards on the floor and caught in the cheap, heavy curtains.
When Yusuf shoulders his way into the bathroom Ariadne already has the shower curtain wrapped around her fist, plastic hooks dangling. Her first attempt at breaking the window doesn’t take, but on the second she gets it, or at least starts, and then she sort of prods around in the window frame with her swaddled fist until it’s clear, and then Ariadne is hefting herself up and over and is gone.
Yusuf follows. He hopes Ariadne didn’t sell them, mostly because it would be a pity to have to take her out. Also because she might be a step ahead of him, if that’s the case, and considering the fact that she’s already physically, several steps ahead of him: in a few more paces she’ll be through the treeline. In the moment it makes about as much sense to follow her as to split off in the opposite direction, because, all things considered, Yusuf trusts Ariadne more than Felipe, because he trusts them both about as far as he could throw them, and he could throw Ariadne further.
It probably shouldn’t be as surprising as it is when Ariadne trips him a yard into the woods--Yusuf isn’t in the habit of running, especially not on soft, uneven ground, and he was off kilter even before the foot darted into his path.
“So,” she says. “You or Felipe?”
“I could ask you the same,” Yusuf mutters into a mouthful of moss. Ariadne’s knee is in his back, and then Ariadne’s knee is joined by what could be the muzzle of a gun, on the back of his head.
“You could,” she says. “But I’m the one with the gun.”
“And the brilliant cliche,” Yusuf says, and Ariadne presses her knee into his back a little more firmly.
“It wasn’t me,” he says. “And I could still ask you the same thing. I should’ve fucking retired.”
“You sure someone didn’t pay you a little extra to come out of retirement and sell us out?”
“We have more in common, you and I, than you and Felipe,” Yusuf says, trying to sound like someone a person would trust. Not that Ariadne shouldn’t trust him--but maybe she shouldn’t. “Unless there’s something I don’t know.”
The moss tastes like wet dirt, or dirty water, and Yusuf is sick of it. He could take Ariadne. He’s bigger, he figures, but he is also on the ground with moss in his face and a gun to the back of his head, and he was felled by the smaller person’s foot.
“So this is nice,” Yusuf says when Ariadne doesn’t respond, and then she pauses for a moment and pulls back, sitting on the ground next to Yusuf with a gentle thud. Yusuf sits up and spits out the moss. Ariadne watches him, her gaze steady.
“Fine fix we’re in,” she says.
“I’m still not entirely sure it wasn’t you,” Yusuf says.
“We have more in common, you and I--” she parrots back at him, though something in her voice makes it sound more true than it did when Yusuf said it. She sighs. “Fucking Felipe.”
“Were you?”
“Hell no,” she says, looking up at him sharply. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”
“I don’t,” Yusuf says flatly. It’s true; the things Yusuf knows about Ariadne he could count on his thumbs.
Ariadne doesn’t respond. She tilts her head to the side and furrows her brow like she hears something, far off, and then she’s on her feet again, reaching down to offer Yusuf a hand.
“We need to run,” she says. “Though you can wait here if you want to see what happens.”
And then she’s off. She’s not fast, exactly, but she’s more nimble on the uneven ground than Yusuf is, avoiding the soft spots like she has a sixth sense for them. It may just be that she’s lighter than he is--even when Yusuf tries to follow in her footsteps, it’s not quite right. He gets his foot stuck in a hole he suspects was made by a moose (they saw a moose on the drive up to the motel, standing by the side of the road with huge, blank eyes, and it was one of the more disturbing looking animals Yusuf has encountered), but he pulls it out and presses on, manages to at least keep Ariadne within sight, if not exactly--close. She might be slowing to wait for him, but at any rate they go like that for what seems like a distance, and by the time Ariadne stops at a pebbled lake shore Yusuf is panting.
“What,” he says.
“They were going to come,” she says. “After us. They were going to come after us.”
“I got that, actually. I meant what, about the lake,” Yusuf says. “And a sort of general what, as in what--the hell--are we doing.”
“Not getting shot?” Ariadne asks. “That was at the forefront of my mind. And by shot I mean probably tortured, by someone after Cobb’s secrets, or, you know, whatever.”
“Not Cobb’s secrets,” Yusuf says. “If they wanted something from Cobb they would’ve gone for Cobb.”
“Maybe they felt bad, about the kids?”
“If that’s the case, good on them,” Yusuf says. “Either way, here we are, and the question still stands.”
“The question?” Ariadne asks.
“What,” Yusuf says. “The question is: what are we doing?”
“And the answer still stands.”
“And what else are we doing, then?” Yusuf asks.
“Well this is a nice lake,” Ariadne says. It is nice, of sorts; too cool for mosquitoes, and the water is a flat, clear blue.
“Okay,” Yusuf says, trying to convey his distaste.
“It’s the sort of lake you might have a cabin on,” Ariadne continues.
“Oh,” Yusuf says. “Oh.”
“Yes,” she replies, nodding. “Yes.”
The lake is bigger than it had seemed at first, and the shoreline where they began opens up into a cove as they travel, and the woods along the shore are so thick as to be, at points, impassable. The water’s cold besides, and the whole endeavor is starting to seem beyond awful, especially when Ariadne begins to sing, loudly and tunelessly and endlessly.
Yusuf tells her, point blank, to shut up.
Ariadne ignores him, but Yusuf gets his own back when Ariadne gets tangled in a thicket. Not that Yusuf would claim any responsibility for Ariadne getting stuck in the dense snarl of branches, but mostly because there’s an inherent humor to her cussing and flailing.
She gives him the finger when she gets out, shirt torn jagged around the hem, with a wry twist of her lips that Yusuf can’t quite read.
“That’s cute,” Yusuf says.
“You’re cute,” Ariadne says. “Fuck off.”
“Fuck yourself,” Yusuf mutters.
“Fuck an egg,” Ariadne counters, hopping from one rock to the next.
“Fuck your mother,” Yusuf is not even sure where this conversation emerged from, but now that it’s begun he can’t seem to stop. It’s almost like they’re friends.
Camaraderie's bound to emerge from being stuck in the woods together. Isn’t that the moral of every movie about being lost in the woods? Except the ones where everyone dies. Yusuf prefers those ones, actually.
“Motherfucker,” Ariadne says, and she’s beginning to grin. She stands atop her rock and swings her arms up in the sky.
“Fuckerfucker,” Yusuf replies, then pauses.
“We have no food,” he says, and Ariadne frowns at him.
“It was going so well,” she says. “And then you had to bring up that.”
“You have a gun,” Yusuf says speculatively, and Ariadne shrugs.
“So what if I do?”
“Hunting,” Yusuf says.
“So you’re a good shot, then?” Ariadne asks. “Because I’m not, not really.”
“Moose are big,” Yusuf suggests.
“And you can kill one with a handgun and butcher it?” Ariadne replies. “Because I can’t.”
“You’re a downer,” Yusuf says. “Awful to have on a trip. I wouldn’t have invited you if I knew this was going to happen.”
Ariadne continues walking, but she pauses and turns back to look at him.
“Why were you here?” she asks. “I thought you retired.”
“So did I,” Yusuf says, like that explains anything. It’s his business, not hers; it is, additionally, not a conversation he feels like having. As if sensing this, Ariadne shrugs a little.
“Well, we’re shit at this, aren’t we?” she asks with a brightness even Yusuf can tell is false. “Maybe we’ll find a fully stocked cabin. Full of delicious canned meat.”
“Unlikely,” Yusuf says, though he’s more stuck on the image of canned meat than anything else.
“Now who’s the downer?” Ariadne asks, then answers her own question, flipping her fingers into guns and pointing back at Yusuf: “You.”
Yusuf doesn’t bother responding, and Ariadne apparently doesn’t expect any sort of response.
They continue like that, speaking intermittently, slipping along the pebbled shore and through patches of brush. Yusuf’s legs get sore around the knees, first, and it occurs to him that his shoes are shit, and eventually he’s tired enough that when Ariadne suggests drinking the lake water he acquiesces, even though the tannin puckers his mouth and giardia seems like a distinct possibility.
“Maybe we could catch fish,” Yusuf says, looking out across the water. The horizon in the east is rimmed by twilight, and the water, which was already dark, is darker now.
“We’ll save that for tomorrow,” Ariadne says, but her stomach growls. Yusuf looks at her.
“I have a fast metabolism,” Ariadne says. “I’ll be fine. We have nothing to fish with.”
“A stick?”
“Do you think they’re going to track us?” Ariadne has settled on a dry log by the shore, and she’s peering at the water like some sort of rescue will emerge there. A raven wheels overhead, cawing hollowly.
“What do you think they want?” Yusuf says. “Because if it’s us dead, maybe they’ll just leave us to it.”
Ariadne quirks a brow at him, but that actually seems to comfort her.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s find somewhere to sleep.”
So they do.
Yusuf doesn’t sleep well, because even the softest, driest patch of ground they find is hard and damp, and he can hear Ariadne shifting uncomfortably nearby, her breathing the uneven breathing of someone who is not asleep. Yusuf’s good at recognizing that, in his line of work. Even with the distraction of monitoring Ariadne’s sleep, the night is not good--Yusuf has always been good at suppressing dark imaginings, but the forest creaks and moans, and he’s unused to it. He imagines a moose stumbling upon them in the dark; worse yet, a bear.
They both wake early and lie still without speaking, until finally Yusuf finally shifts upright and says, “I know you’re awake.”
“I am,” Ariadne says. From where he’s sitting Yusuf can see that she’s lying flat on her back with her eyes open, looking at a ceiling of interlaced bare branches.
“Onward, then,” she says. “Onward and onward.”
The sun’s three-quarters of the way across the sky before Yusuf starts cursing Felipe in his head, one long string that’s only broken when Ariadne pauses and peers up the bank. There’s a thin track, not quite something, but it looks like it could be something.
“We should check,” Yusuf says, and Ariadne gives him a withering look.
“Of course we’re checking,” she says. “We get a lead, we’re following it. It’s not like we have anything else.”
The track slants upwards onto dry, crumbling ground, and then broadens into something that is probably legitimately something, and then crests into a clearing, and there, there is a cabin: squat and brown and awful looking, but with four walls and a roof, which is enough for Yusuf right now.
“Well,” Ariadne says. “This is a convenient plot device.”
2.
Yusuf claims that the lock is very easy to pick, and Ariadne just sort of hunches over on the doorstep and watches him. She has a blister on her left heel--she felt it developing, as they walked, but couldn’t think of anything to do but keep going.
And now they’re here.
“You think they’re tracking us?” she asks. “Also, what do we do when we get out?”
“Food first,” Yusuf says, twisting to look down at her and then elbowing the door open. “There better be some damned food in here.”
And there is: three cans of baked beans.
“Well,” Ariadne says. “It’s something.”
They split the first can cold, and it’s awful and sticks to the roof of Ariadne’s mouth and is also possibly the best thing she’s ever eaten. It tastes of relief, mostly, overwhelming any other flavors there might be, artificially preserved and ensconced in tin.
In addition to the three cans of beans, the cabin contains a woodstove on thin legs, a sagging cot piled with blankets, a table with a map shellacked onto its surface, and a fishing pole. The map appears to be more for looks than use, and neither of them can manage to pin it to their locations--the roads, the only landmarks they can name, don’t match. It is the fishing pole that holds actual significance.
“I’m choosing to believe that we’ve been left for dead,” Ariadne says.
“Sounds reasonable,” Yusuf says. He’s kneeling in front of the woodstove, inspecting it like he expects it to turn draconian at any moment. Considering the events of yesterday, it’s not an entirely unwarranted approach to metal appliances. “How do you think they access this place?”
The only trail is the one coming up from the shore--there’s nothing suggesting a road, or a driveway.
“Probably by boat. So we need to keep going,” Ariadne concludes. “Because I refuse to be left for dead.”
Yusuf twists around to look at her, leaning back. Something in his face suggests that he hears the steel in Ariadne’s voice, and will match it with his own, and it warms Ariadne more than anything has since they stumbled out of that shoddy motel room the morning before.
“But we’ll stay here the night,” Yusuf says. “Because I know you didn’t sleep last night.”
“And by turn, you didn’t, either,” Ariadne says. A beat passes in uncomfortable silence before Ariadne comes up with something else to say: “Why’d you agree to do this job?”
“This shit job?” Yusuf asks, tone dry. “This job which has imploded?”
“That’s the one.”
“Because I’m a shithead,” Yusuf says, in a tone that suggests this line of questioning should not be pursued. “And easily bought.”
There’s a box of matches and a deck of cards on a rickety shelf in the corner, and although it’s missing the queen of spades and the two of hearts, they manage a passable game of gin, over the course of which Ariadne loses the bed to Yusuf, and also two hundred dollars that she may never be reunited with. She’s grateful, at least, that they don’t play for the cans of beans, and also that Yusuf shows no intention of allowing her to win out of kindness or pity. It makes her feel like maybe they aren’t going to die.
The floor is hard and cold, but with an extra blanket folded beneath her it’s comfortable enough, and Ariadne sleeps fitfully, but more than the night prior, at least. Yusuf’s snoring in the bed, and they have a fire crackling in the stove. The flames play across the ceiling, and Ariadne blinks to freeze them in frames, the light here, and here, and here. It’s easier to think about the way the light moves than the way they’re moving, where they’re going, because the only thing she’s certain of is that they can’t go backwards.
Things look better in the morning. Yusuf kicks her out of a heavy sleep, and they actually take the time to heat a second can of beans. The second can of beans mostly serves to make Ariadne hungrier, but the fishing pole is a bit of hope.
“So we bait it with worms?” Yusuf says, and Ariadne squints back at him against the morning sun.
“You’ve never gone fishing?”
“I grew up in London,” Yusuf says. “Maybe we could’ve caught tin cans in the Thames, but it was more fun to smoke by the bridge.”
“Well I was a wholesome country lass, once,” Ariadne says, pressing forward along the shore. It doesn’t look any different than what they’d seen already, but there must be a stream or something, feeding the water body, and when they get there--“By which I mean I caught a sunfish at summer camp.”
“Then we’re better off than Felipe would’ve been,” Yusuf says. “Because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what a fish looks like if it hasn’t been filleted yet.”
“And I don’t know how to fillet a fish,” Ariadne says.
“That,” Yusuf says. “That I can do. I worked in kitchens once.”
“Then we’re a fine pair,” Ariadne says, and Yusuf doesn’t reply.
At lunch they catch a single, sad fish, and cobble together a fire to cook it.
“I’d like some tea,” Ariadne says, picking fish off the bone with her fingers. Yusuf spins a rib between two fingers and looks at her.
“I wouldn’t turn down a smoke,” he says. The raven that Ariadne had spied following them the day before is hopping along the shore, watching them with one canny eye. She throws the spine at it, then dips her fingers in the water and dabbles them clean.
“Don’t encourage it,” Yusuf says. “Rat with wings.”
“All birds are not a pigeons,” Ariadne says.
“There are different sorts of rats,” Yusuf counters.
The raven picks up the bone in its beak and fiddles with it, and Yusuf shakes his head.
“There was more meat on there,” he says.
“There was not,” Ariadne says. “And it’s going to eat the skins when we’re gone, anyway. Additionally: I caught the fish, and I can do with it as I please.”
“I cooked it,” Yusuf mutters, and then begins to stomp out the ashes of their fire, and Ariadne covers it over with rocks before they move on.
The odd thing about walking is that it begins to feel comfortable, even with the blister throbbing at her heel. Ariadne and Yusuf develop something that might be called a rapport, if one was so inclined--at the very least, they find things they can talk about and proceed to talk about them, ranging from video games to odd bits of childhood drama to industry gossip, centering mainly around the possibility that Saito is trying to lure Cobb back into dream sharing with promises of sexual favors, limbo notwithstanding. Ariadne doesn’t entirely trust Yusuf, but she trusts him enough, right now, to tell him the story about the time she was in middle school and swallowed a goldfish.
But she’ll tell that story to just about anyone.
They go up the hill into the woods to sleep the night, spreading out stolen blankets and cooking the third, final can of beans and two bony fish. It’s as close as they have to a feast, and Ariadne notices Yusuf turning a roving, and worrying, eye towards mushrooms.
“No,” she says.
“I know the hallucinogenics,” he says.
“I don’t think you do.”
She sleeps--well, she sleeps some, but she also knows Yusuf doesn’t go fetch any mushrooms in the night, so maybe she doesn’t sleep that well at all.
3.
Yusuf had no intention of picking mushrooms, but he likes the withering look Ariadne gives him when he suggests it again in the morning, over a breakfast of air and water. There’s dirt under her nails from digging for worms, and it’s streaked inconsistently across her face.
“You think anyone knows we’re gone?” she asks.
“No one expected me back this soon. Anyway, your damned raven knows we’re here,” Yusuf says, as the raven wheels closer. It’s a damnable bird. Yusuf’s pretty sure ravens carry some diseases--really terrible ones. Bird flu level shit.
“Do you think it realizes we have no food?” she asks. “If we were going to get a bird, better it were a hunter and not a scavenger.”
“You fed it,” Yusuf mutters, and Ariadne shoots him a withering look.
“Is this what we’re going to talk about, then?”
“Any alternative suggestions?” Yusuf asks.
Ariadne just shakes her head and gets to her feet to walk. Yusuf appreciates that about her; that she keeps walking. He’s not sure he would, independently. Last night there was blood staining his socks, and it’s not like he hasn’t noticed Ariadne favoring her left foot. He’s just not that guy, who asks about it.
“Why are you still in the industry?” Yusuf asks when the silence, broken only by the raven and the soft lapping of the water, gets to be too much. He’d been wondering, because it seems like Ariadne has potential for something else, and although they haven’t touched on real things yet, they may as well have.
“Because I want to be,” she shoots back. “Why are you?”
Yusuf feels an overwhelming, unexpected, surge of affection for Ariadne. Not everyone wants to be part of this, and even Yusuf has been trying to rein in his involvement--he’s not sure if Ariadne’s speaking out of bravery or naivete, but still, she’s speaking.
“What about you?” Ariadne asks, when Yusuf doesn’t respond. “Tit for tat, this for that.”
“Tit?” Yusuf echoes wryly, and Ariadne snorts.
“Tit’s what you already got, dumbass,” she continues. “An answer, and now I need tat.”
“I have a tattoo,” Yusuf says. “But I’d prefer you didn’t call it that.”
“Shut up, asshole,” Ariadne says, and then, after a few beats: “You do?”
“Would I lie to you?” Yusuf asks. He wants to add: “Especially when we might die, anyway?” but that’s been unspoken between them for good reason. If they don’t think about death it’s not there, dogging them like that raven.
“Probably,” Ariadne says. “But show it, then.”
“Rather not,” Yusuf says, which is true. He’s just grateful for having changed the subject. The tattoo is stupid, he got it when he was eighteen, but it’s less personal than the alternative, and, furthermore, he doesn’t think Ariadne will make him strip.
Ariadne stops and turns around.
“Strip,” she says.
“Fuck off,” he says. “It’s stupid.”
“Is it on your penis?” Ariadne asks, and when Yusuf recoils, she grins.
“Then show it.”
“It’s close,” Yusuf says.
“Close to what?” Ariadne asks, and Yusuf tries to somehow imply through exaggerated eye movement what he’s trying to say.
“It’s on my hip,” Yusuf says.
“Well good for you, then,” Ariadne says. “Point being?”
“I’m not showing you.”
“Suddenly modest, huh?”
“You didn’t show me your tit,” Yusuf says, and almost immediately wants to swallow that. It’s not that--Ariadne’s breasts are small, but probably nice--but they don’t need this. Yusuf may be a fuckhead, but even he knows they don’t need this. And he’s had sex before--it’s not like he’s trying to avoid dying a virgin, or anything.
“Okay,” she says.
“No,” Yusuf says. “No.”
“The right one’s bigger,” she says.
It occurs to Yusuf that he’s slipped into flirting--they both have, really--and this is Ariadne, who is also a criminal but probably too good for him, anyway. And they’re stuck in--well, they’re in the woods, and Yusuf doesn’t want to think about this too much deeper than that.
“Keep walking,” he says. “We’re supposed to be not dying.”
It’s the dying that does it, that word like switching from color to black and white, stark and foreign from the world they inhabited previously. Ariadne blinks, once, then twice, and turns around.
They don’t talk much until they hit the river. It’s lunch time, more or less, and Ariadne sets out to catch fish and gets them three, and fat ones.
“So do we follow it?” she asks. “Or do we keep going around the lake?”
“Water’s flowing out,” Yusuf says. “So it should go--”
“Yeah,” Ariadne says. “So we’ll be going downstream, to bigger things. And they build towns along rivers.”
There’s no development around the lake, as far as Yusuf can tell, so any route seems better than none.
“River it is, then,” Yusuf says. “And the fish are better here.”
“Looks that way,” Ariadne says, and then she peels off a clean piece of fish and tosses it to the bird.”
“You,” Yusuf says. “You’re ridiculous.”
“My mom used to tell me a story, when I was a kid,” she says. “Everything’s better if you share, if you’re asked.”
“You planning to give me the rest of that then? If I ask?”
“Shut up. You aren’t a fairy in disguise, and you already had a fish and a half.”
“You don’t think I’m a fairy in disguise? When we get back to civilization I’m having--” Yusuf says. “Something. Delicious. And a lot of it.”
“Like what?”
“Everything,” Yusuf says. “All the foods in the world. But probably no fish.”
“Some people would pay good money for this fish,” Ariadne says, gesturing emphatically at the river. “It’s from a clear mountain stream.”
“But not every day,” Yusuf says, then slaps the ground. “And not without salt or pepper. Let’s get going.”
They sleep that night along the river, in a patch of grass that’s coarse but more comfortable than the ground they’ve slept on thus far. When Yusuf gets up in the middle of the night to take a piss, he tries not to think too hard about the fact that he is now evaluating ground like he used to evaluate the beds in shitty motel rooms, like there’s a hierarchy of ground comfortableness. Which there is. But he shouldn’t have to know about it.
Yusuf’s mostly gotten over the noises in the woods, and they’re starting to sound to him like the hum of the fridge and electricity at home: pleasant, forgettable background noise. The stars are stretched out across the sky, and the moon is bright, and altogether it’s not all that bad, until the bear.
The bear is loud, is what it is at first, and its eyes flash, and it is at least as large as Yusuf is and all up in his face.
It’s probably larger than Yusuf is, if he’s honest, and he sees a gleam of what he suspects are teeth, and the bear must be--two meters? less?--away from him, which is too close.
He runs.
He screams. Ariadne’s name is ripped from his lungs like something inhuman, and then he’s saying things like “Fuck” and “Bear” nonsensically, and by the time he gets to Ariadne she’s sitting--standing--looking at him with wild eyes and hair.
“Bear,” he says, gasping a little.
“I don’t--” she says. “I don’t see one.”
There’s no sound, either; nothing barelling through the bush except Yusuf himself. The bear’s not there.
“There was one,” he says. “I was taking a piss, and there was--really close--”
“Right,” she says. “So are you going to go back to sleep?”
“Fuck no,” Yusuf says, unashamed, and Ariadne squints up at the sky like she expects to see some sign of sunrise.
“So you want to keep walking?”
Yusuf’s amazed she goes along with it. Maybe he shouldn’t be; Ariadne, it strikes him, is unique in being both even-handed and independent-headed, giving a shit about other people and also looking out for herself.
“You know,” Ariadne says. “It was probably more scared of you than you were of it.”
“Fuck off,” Yusuf says.
But maybe she’s not any of the things Yusuf thinks of her as. Maybe she’s lying, like he is--a little or a lot, but enough to get by without being touched. Either way, Yusuf has to admit that Ariadne’s grown on him like old mold, and he’s as surprised as anyone.
He should probably tell her, but lies are such a convenient buffer.
4.
The bear--Ariadne is skeptical about the bear, but the moon is bright and they can walk alright by its light. The fact that is still night, or early morning, somehow makes it easier to talk, and she finds herself spilling out things she wouldn’t share otherwise. Maybe it’s to ward off bears.
They walk through to dawn, and then they stop and Ariadne fishes, and then they have breakfast. There’s still a crescent of hunger around the edge of Ariadne, on the fringes of her body and her stomach, but the fish seems to be almost enough, close enough. It takes the edge off.
She hums a little while they eat, and throws a scrap to the raven who is there, close, practically at her elbow. He seems to find them easily enough.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “That they’d want us that bad. That they’d want us dead.”
“This job has never made sense,” Yusuf says, like that somehow helps. The raven is watching them, and Ariadne wishes she felt as canny as the raven looks. She still has her gun.
“Are you sure you don’t know anything?” she asks. Yusuf’s eyes are sleepy, heavy-lidded. He seems undisturbed by this question, and maybe there’s nothing to admit, but she’s been examining their situation from every angle and it doesn’t quite fit together, like a house whose walls have all the wrong measurements, or whose walls aren’t at right angles.
“Felipe promised me something I’m not sure he could give me,” Yusuf says, finally. “Certain freedoms.”
Ariadne looks at him, but weighing the statement only takes a moment.
“Fuck you,” she says. “They wanted you? This had nothing to do with me at all?”
“Well,” Yusuf says evenly. “It could. But probably no.”
She should probably be angrier than she is. She takes their third fish, throws it wholesale to the raven, kicks out the fire and keeps walking.
“That’s it?” Yusuf asks. He probably would have shot her or something. She still has the gun; she’s surprised Yusuf hasn’t stolen it.
She doesn’t care.
“That’s it,” she says. “Don’t talk to me.”
She decides that, in the event that they die, she’ll be more pissed with him, but she doesn’t really expect to die. Maybe she should.
“If we die,” she says. “If we start to starve or whatever, I’m shooting myself and then chucking the gun in the river so you can’t, and I hope the bird pecks out your eyeballs.”
“Okay,” says Yusuf. “Tit for tat.”
Ariadne laughs. She’s not sure if it sounds bitter, or sad; mostly she suspects Yusuf kept her around because he wasn’t sure he could do this on his own, and that’s a little sad and a little--flattering?--she’s not entirely sure. It felt like something, and their conversations felt like something, but now she understands why he never wanted to talk about the matter at hand, the job, why he took it, why he’s in dreamsharing at all. It’s something deeper and harsher than their idle conversation. She lets it slide off her, but that’s what she’s always been good at. She’s slippery like that.
“It wasn’t--” Yusuf says. “I wasn’t sure at first.”
“But you were sure pretty quick,” Ariadne says, and when he doesn’t reply she knows it’s true.
She lets that slide, too, and keeps walking.
The silence is heavy and in sharp contrast to the clear, early morning light. The raven is circling ahead of them, above a tattered hem of trees.
“I don’t tell people things,” Yusuf says. “If it’s not their business.”
“It kind of was,” Ariadne says without looking at him. “My business. It kind of was my business. And I’m not angry with you, but I don’t really want to talk with you right now.”
“That sounds like you’re angry with me,” Yusuf says. “Tit for tat, right? I’ll show you my tattoo.”
“I don’t really care anymore,” Ariadne says. “Let’s keep going.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Yusuf says.
“Is it on your ass?” Ariadne asks, because she can’t not ask.
“No. What do you take me for? Also, I already told you where it is.”
“Don’t care,” Ariadne says, curt and quick. She doesn’t. She didn’t trust Yusuf, entirely, but it’s frustrating to have him prove her more right than she ever expected.
Yusuf’s quiet. He’s quiet for longer than Ariadne expects him to be. He’s quiet all the way through to their next meal, and after Ariadne catches the first fish he looks at her kind of balefully, like he’s not sure if she’s going to catch another.
“I didn’t expect this from you,” she says as she baits the next hook.
“What?” Yusuf asks. “Lying?”
“No,” she says, casting her line. “Being pathetic about it.”
Yusuf sits down beside her, a little uneven on his feet. She wonders if he has blisters, too--he probably does, but that’s something they don’t talk about. Maybe they should: maybe the things they don’t talk about matter.
“How are your feet?” she asks, when a few moments pass and Yusuf doesn’t say anything.
“Same as yours,” he says.
“Right,” she says. “There’s more we haven’t talked about than we have.”
She can feel Yusuf looking at her, now. His eyes are dark and heavily lashed: she knows what they look like. She doesn’t look at him.
“So,” she says. “Are we going to talk about them, or are we going to not? Because I could go either way, now. But if we aren’t going to talk, we’re not, and if we are, we are. Does that make sense to you?”
“I got the tattoo when I was eighteen,” Yusuf says. “It’s the chemical symbol for epinephrine--adrenaline. I thought I was cooler than I was.”
“Didn’t we all,” Ariadne says. “But that’s not exactly what I wanted.”
There’s a tug on the line, and as Ariadne pulls it in, Yusuf cracks his knuckles, gets to his feet and sets about starting a fire. If Yusuf’s not talking she figures she won’t, either, but she flips the two fish into the fire. She gives the tail and the skin to the raven, and Yusuf frowns a little and keeps silent.
If there’s something to say, he’ll say it. They have nothing but time.
Ariadne hums as they walk, tuneless as ever. There’s something comforting about the fact that, while not much is out, there’s no longer much that’s hidden, either. They’re just there: the pair of them, walking. Even if Ariadne’s foot winces whenever it hits the ground.
She wonders what will happen, if Yusuf talks. If it means anything. She doesn’t typically imbue things with excess weight, but she has time on her hands, and space in her head.
“I knew I shouldn’t trust you,” she says. “But part of me thought it didn’t matter, out here.”
“Out here,” Yusuf echoes.
“You know what I mean,” she says, and they fall silent again. Both of them do. Out here, things were different than they were anywhere else, looser. Ariadne tried to keep herself a little prickly on jobs, to stay safe.
The river takes a sharp turn and dissolves into riffles. Ariadne wishes she knew more about rivers, though she doubts there’s any signs that can be read by someone looking for a road, or any sign of civilization, really. She wonders where they put in the boat to get to the cabin on the lake, and if she might be some sort of idiot for not thinking to stay on the lake, look for a place to put boats in. A dock.
She wonders why Yusuf trusts her. It wasn’t something she had thought of before, but usually people who aren’t trustworthy aren’t so trusting themselves. Yusuf had allowed himself to loosen, too. He had to.
5.
Yusuf decides to tell Ariadne when they break for dinner, because that’s what makes sense in his head. It’s not such a secret, now that Ariadne knows it was his fault--the reasons don’t matter much. But if that’s what she wants--
He might as well. He likes Ariadne. She’s--something.
And then they start hearing road noises, the rumble and flow of something that just sounds like water, at first. Yusuf doesn’t say anything, and he suspects Ariadne is doing the same.
And then, suddenly, it’s real: the road noise shakes away from the sound of water, rolling and flowing, and becomes something distinct. It is, without a doubt, a semi-truck, and not far off.
“Fuck,” Ariadne says, but there’s an undertone of brightness to the word. And then she hugs him. It’s sudden, surprising, and knocks the wind out of Yusuf, and then she steps back, and keeps walking.
“I just wanted more,” he says.
“Money?” Ariadne asks.
“Freedom,” he says. “Felipe says he could get me back into--some areas of the world I’ve haven’t been back to in awhile.”
“Right,” Ariadne says. “So a new passport?”
“I was going to open up a new den,” Yusuf says. “Mombasa is--good--but other locations could be better. I needed certain business permits.”
“We’ve been wandering around in the woods so you could get a business permit,” Ariadne says flatly, and Yusuf can see how she might not get it.
“Can’t you just operate one illegally?”
“That’s what I’m doing right now,” Yusuf says. “And I’m getting old.”
“Okay,” Ariadne replies, but by then they’re so close to the road that there’s nothing else to talk about, but the road, and what it might mean to be back in civilization. Which they are, or nearly. A truck piled high with logs hurtles past, and they walk in the direct it’s headed: south, where more towns are more likely, and away from the river.
Ariadne thrusts out her thumb, and eventually, sooner than Yusuf expected, they’re picked up. Ariadne talks for them, to the man who’s picked them: he squints at them a little, like he’s trying to figure something out. Ariadne, bright and entirely foreign to the person Yusuf knew in the woods, makes up some flaky story about going for a hike, and the guy who’s driving spends most of the drive staring at her sidelong, like he’s trying to figure out if she and Yusuf are dating or if he can hit on Ariadne, despite the fact that there’s dirt on her face and she smells a little rank. They both do, though, but apparently Yusuf isn’t as attractive.
Maybe if he were younger.
Ariadne doesn’t respond to their driver’s advances, just chatters away nonsensically, probably so that the holes in her story will be less apparent. Yusuf is reminded, again, that she’s kind of good at this and watching Ariadne slip into a character is bizarrely engaging. It makes the person he knew in the woods seem more real, not less: her nonsensical stories and terrible singing seem like someone existing like they would if no one was there, but this is obviously a carefully calibrated act.
They reach a town, eventually; it’s of medium size but there’s a place that rents cars, and they’re dropped there. Ariadne waves jauntily at their host and ignores his advances.
“Thanks for helping, there,” she says when they’re on the sidewalk.
“It looked like you had it handled,” Yusuf says.
“That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have used help.”
“Right,” Yusuf says.
“Right,” Ariadne repeats.
And then they rent a car, and they drive.
“Where’d you want a permit for?” Ariadne asks, when they get to McDonald’s a order more cheeseburgers than they probably should.
“London,” Yusuf says. “It’s sort of--there’s a coalition, in dreamsharing. I needed something from them. They don’t like me.”
“Right,” she says.
“Probably, less, now,” Yusuf says. “Because I imagine Felipe fucked everything up.”
“Good on him,” Ariadne says, and Yusuf looks at her sharply, over his half eaten burger. It kind of stabs him--just a little. Just for a moment.
Because it’s an act, like the one in the car, with the guy who picked them up and flirted with Ariadne despite the fact that she smelled rank. It’s not Ariadne, actually.
“Stop it,” Yusuf says, and Ariadne twists to stare at him for a moment, eyes blank, before turning back towards the road.
“Stop what?” she says, as two lanes of highway blur past in front of them.
“Faking,” Yusuf says. “Lying. I lie. You tell the truth.”
“Well maybe we’ve swapped, now,” Ariadne says. “If you did tell me the truth. Maybe that’s what happens.”
“That doesn’t even--” Yusuf says. “Tit for tat.”
“Tit for tat,” Ariadne echoes. She sounds tired, which is maybe not surprising. “We should get a hotel.”
So they do; it’s a slumping building by the side of the highway with a sort of half-assed log cabin theme, and there’s only one room free, with one bed. Yusuf didn’t expect that, but Ariadne just sort of shrugs and takes it, hands over her credit card and mutters something about losing at gin. Inside it’s plain and rustic, with a single bed that sags in the middle and has a coarse bedspread.
It looks wonderful. Ariadne exhales a sigh and sits down, letting the bedsprings creak beneath her. It suddenly occurs to Yusuf that she’s a small person--small in stature, almost delicate. He’d forgotten. She had, after all, gotten him on his knees with a gun to his head--she had, after all, fed them for most of the past few days.
“You know,” she says, leaning back and cracking her back. “I think my raven is following us.”
“Does the rat have a name?” he asks, because it seems appropriate, and it’s easier than saying something else--talking about the raven seems like slipping backwards, to themselves in the woods, when they were other people and Ariadne, at least, was more honest.
Yusuf was, too, except for about that one thing.
“No,” she says. “But if it keeps following, I might. I might name it.”
“Yeah?” Yusuf asks.
“I’m just saying,” she says, fiddling with the hem of her shirt, which is still the one she tore in the thicket that first day. “We weren’t together for very long, but I don’t think we can leave it behind.”
It’s not quite what Yusuf expected, but before he can react Ariadne is already peeling off her shirt, in one smooth movement. Underneath she’s small, pale and freckled. Underneath that, though, there’s something like steel.
“Tit for tat,” she says. “The right one’s bigger.”
“They're both perfect,” Yusuf says, which is probably the most embarrassing thing he has ever said, but it doesn't matter because when he peels off his own shirt, Ariadne smiles.
.on the lam
in which a tea kettle explodes, yusuf keeps his wits about him in the face of unprecedented adversity (read: a bear), and ariadne tames a raven. written for this prompt.
r . 7412 words
1.
The tea kettle should’ve given it away.
Yusuf didn’t know if it was growing up in a household where the kettle was on on the regular or just being a chemist, but he did know how long it took for water to bowl. And he knew that a kettle of that volume on an electric rangetop shouldn’t have started hissing after a minute and a half, and Yusuf was about to say something, to remind Felipe that kettles needed to be filled, at least if anyone hoped to get enough hot water for the three of them out if it, when the kettle itself exploded.
After that, everything went to shit, which was maybe to expected. There was the kettle shrapnel, for one, but the explosion must have been some sort of signal because then there was a gunshot through the window, thunderclap loud and resulting in a bullet whizzing entirely too close to Yusuf’s ear, and Yusuf had a brief flashing thought about how he was supposed to have retired, already, he had said he was going to retire, and the retirement thing is like a waking dream where he imagines himself at home with his cats and his cozy little den of addicts, and then he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of motion that is Ariadne darting for the bathroom door. He mulls for a moment on the things he shouldn’t have allowed to draw him out of retirement, and then he bolts for the bathroom door, because there’s no way she’s going to the bathroom; even if Ariadne seemed like the sort to piss herself Yusuf had seen the large (inconvenient, incongruous) window in the shower, and the motel room has no back door--just the front door, by the window whose glass is now in shards on the floor and caught in the cheap, heavy curtains.
When Yusuf shoulders his way into the bathroom Ariadne already has the shower curtain wrapped around her fist, plastic hooks dangling. Her first attempt at breaking the window doesn’t take, but on the second she gets it, or at least starts, and then she sort of prods around in the window frame with her swaddled fist until it’s clear, and then Ariadne is hefting herself up and over and is gone.
Yusuf follows. He hopes Ariadne didn’t sell them, mostly because it would be a pity to have to take her out. Also because she might be a step ahead of him, if that’s the case, and considering the fact that she’s already physically, several steps ahead of him: in a few more paces she’ll be through the treeline. In the moment it makes about as much sense to follow her as to split off in the opposite direction, because, all things considered, Yusuf trusts Ariadne more than Felipe, because he trusts them both about as far as he could throw them, and he could throw Ariadne further.
It probably shouldn’t be as surprising as it is when Ariadne trips him a yard into the woods--Yusuf isn’t in the habit of running, especially not on soft, uneven ground, and he was off kilter even before the foot darted into his path.
“So,” she says. “You or Felipe?”
“I could ask you the same,” Yusuf mutters into a mouthful of moss. Ariadne’s knee is in his back, and then Ariadne’s knee is joined by what could be the muzzle of a gun, on the back of his head.
“You could,” she says. “But I’m the one with the gun.”
“And the brilliant cliche,” Yusuf says, and Ariadne presses her knee into his back a little more firmly.
“It wasn’t me,” he says. “And I could still ask you the same thing. I should’ve fucking retired.”
“You sure someone didn’t pay you a little extra to come out of retirement and sell us out?”
“We have more in common, you and I, than you and Felipe,” Yusuf says, trying to sound like someone a person would trust. Not that Ariadne shouldn’t trust him--but maybe she shouldn’t. “Unless there’s something I don’t know.”
The moss tastes like wet dirt, or dirty water, and Yusuf is sick of it. He could take Ariadne. He’s bigger, he figures, but he is also on the ground with moss in his face and a gun to the back of his head, and he was felled by the smaller person’s foot.
“So this is nice,” Yusuf says when Ariadne doesn’t respond, and then she pauses for a moment and pulls back, sitting on the ground next to Yusuf with a gentle thud. Yusuf sits up and spits out the moss. Ariadne watches him, her gaze steady.
“Fine fix we’re in,” she says.
“I’m still not entirely sure it wasn’t you,” Yusuf says.
“We have more in common, you and I--” she parrots back at him, though something in her voice makes it sound more true than it did when Yusuf said it. She sighs. “Fucking Felipe.”
“Were you?”
“Hell no,” she says, looking up at him sharply. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”
“I don’t,” Yusuf says flatly. It’s true; the things Yusuf knows about Ariadne he could count on his thumbs.
Ariadne doesn’t respond. She tilts her head to the side and furrows her brow like she hears something, far off, and then she’s on her feet again, reaching down to offer Yusuf a hand.
“We need to run,” she says. “Though you can wait here if you want to see what happens.”
And then she’s off. She’s not fast, exactly, but she’s more nimble on the uneven ground than Yusuf is, avoiding the soft spots like she has a sixth sense for them. It may just be that she’s lighter than he is--even when Yusuf tries to follow in her footsteps, it’s not quite right. He gets his foot stuck in a hole he suspects was made by a moose (they saw a moose on the drive up to the motel, standing by the side of the road with huge, blank eyes, and it was one of the more disturbing looking animals Yusuf has encountered), but he pulls it out and presses on, manages to at least keep Ariadne within sight, if not exactly--close. She might be slowing to wait for him, but at any rate they go like that for what seems like a distance, and by the time Ariadne stops at a pebbled lake shore Yusuf is panting.
“What,” he says.
“They were going to come,” she says. “After us. They were going to come after us.”
“I got that, actually. I meant what, about the lake,” Yusuf says. “And a sort of general what, as in what--the hell--are we doing.”
“Not getting shot?” Ariadne asks. “That was at the forefront of my mind. And by shot I mean probably tortured, by someone after Cobb’s secrets, or, you know, whatever.”
“Not Cobb’s secrets,” Yusuf says. “If they wanted something from Cobb they would’ve gone for Cobb.”
“Maybe they felt bad, about the kids?”
“If that’s the case, good on them,” Yusuf says. “Either way, here we are, and the question still stands.”
“The question?” Ariadne asks.
“What,” Yusuf says. “The question is: what are we doing?”
“And the answer still stands.”
“And what else are we doing, then?” Yusuf asks.
“Well this is a nice lake,” Ariadne says. It is nice, of sorts; too cool for mosquitoes, and the water is a flat, clear blue.
“Okay,” Yusuf says, trying to convey his distaste.
“It’s the sort of lake you might have a cabin on,” Ariadne continues.
“Oh,” Yusuf says. “Oh.”
“Yes,” she replies, nodding. “Yes.”
The lake is bigger than it had seemed at first, and the shoreline where they began opens up into a cove as they travel, and the woods along the shore are so thick as to be, at points, impassable. The water’s cold besides, and the whole endeavor is starting to seem beyond awful, especially when Ariadne begins to sing, loudly and tunelessly and endlessly.
Yusuf tells her, point blank, to shut up.
Ariadne ignores him, but Yusuf gets his own back when Ariadne gets tangled in a thicket. Not that Yusuf would claim any responsibility for Ariadne getting stuck in the dense snarl of branches, but mostly because there’s an inherent humor to her cussing and flailing.
She gives him the finger when she gets out, shirt torn jagged around the hem, with a wry twist of her lips that Yusuf can’t quite read.
“That’s cute,” Yusuf says.
“You’re cute,” Ariadne says. “Fuck off.”
“Fuck yourself,” Yusuf mutters.
“Fuck an egg,” Ariadne counters, hopping from one rock to the next.
“Fuck your mother,” Yusuf is not even sure where this conversation emerged from, but now that it’s begun he can’t seem to stop. It’s almost like they’re friends.
Camaraderie's bound to emerge from being stuck in the woods together. Isn’t that the moral of every movie about being lost in the woods? Except the ones where everyone dies. Yusuf prefers those ones, actually.
“Motherfucker,” Ariadne says, and she’s beginning to grin. She stands atop her rock and swings her arms up in the sky.
“Fuckerfucker,” Yusuf replies, then pauses.
“We have no food,” he says, and Ariadne frowns at him.
“It was going so well,” she says. “And then you had to bring up that.”
“You have a gun,” Yusuf says speculatively, and Ariadne shrugs.
“So what if I do?”
“Hunting,” Yusuf says.
“So you’re a good shot, then?” Ariadne asks. “Because I’m not, not really.”
“Moose are big,” Yusuf suggests.
“And you can kill one with a handgun and butcher it?” Ariadne replies. “Because I can’t.”
“You’re a downer,” Yusuf says. “Awful to have on a trip. I wouldn’t have invited you if I knew this was going to happen.”
Ariadne continues walking, but she pauses and turns back to look at him.
“Why were you here?” she asks. “I thought you retired.”
“So did I,” Yusuf says, like that explains anything. It’s his business, not hers; it is, additionally, not a conversation he feels like having. As if sensing this, Ariadne shrugs a little.
“Well, we’re shit at this, aren’t we?” she asks with a brightness even Yusuf can tell is false. “Maybe we’ll find a fully stocked cabin. Full of delicious canned meat.”
“Unlikely,” Yusuf says, though he’s more stuck on the image of canned meat than anything else.
“Now who’s the downer?” Ariadne asks, then answers her own question, flipping her fingers into guns and pointing back at Yusuf: “You.”
Yusuf doesn’t bother responding, and Ariadne apparently doesn’t expect any sort of response.
They continue like that, speaking intermittently, slipping along the pebbled shore and through patches of brush. Yusuf’s legs get sore around the knees, first, and it occurs to him that his shoes are shit, and eventually he’s tired enough that when Ariadne suggests drinking the lake water he acquiesces, even though the tannin puckers his mouth and giardia seems like a distinct possibility.
“Maybe we could catch fish,” Yusuf says, looking out across the water. The horizon in the east is rimmed by twilight, and the water, which was already dark, is darker now.
“We’ll save that for tomorrow,” Ariadne says, but her stomach growls. Yusuf looks at her.
“I have a fast metabolism,” Ariadne says. “I’ll be fine. We have nothing to fish with.”
“A stick?”
“Do you think they’re going to track us?” Ariadne has settled on a dry log by the shore, and she’s peering at the water like some sort of rescue will emerge there. A raven wheels overhead, cawing hollowly.
“What do you think they want?” Yusuf says. “Because if it’s us dead, maybe they’ll just leave us to it.”
Ariadne quirks a brow at him, but that actually seems to comfort her.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s find somewhere to sleep.”
So they do.
Yusuf doesn’t sleep well, because even the softest, driest patch of ground they find is hard and damp, and he can hear Ariadne shifting uncomfortably nearby, her breathing the uneven breathing of someone who is not asleep. Yusuf’s good at recognizing that, in his line of work. Even with the distraction of monitoring Ariadne’s sleep, the night is not good--Yusuf has always been good at suppressing dark imaginings, but the forest creaks and moans, and he’s unused to it. He imagines a moose stumbling upon them in the dark; worse yet, a bear.
They both wake early and lie still without speaking, until finally Yusuf finally shifts upright and says, “I know you’re awake.”
“I am,” Ariadne says. From where he’s sitting Yusuf can see that she’s lying flat on her back with her eyes open, looking at a ceiling of interlaced bare branches.
“Onward, then,” she says. “Onward and onward.”
The sun’s three-quarters of the way across the sky before Yusuf starts cursing Felipe in his head, one long string that’s only broken when Ariadne pauses and peers up the bank. There’s a thin track, not quite something, but it looks like it could be something.
“We should check,” Yusuf says, and Ariadne gives him a withering look.
“Of course we’re checking,” she says. “We get a lead, we’re following it. It’s not like we have anything else.”
The track slants upwards onto dry, crumbling ground, and then broadens into something that is probably legitimately something, and then crests into a clearing, and there, there is a cabin: squat and brown and awful looking, but with four walls and a roof, which is enough for Yusuf right now.
“Well,” Ariadne says. “This is a convenient plot device.”
2.
Yusuf claims that the lock is very easy to pick, and Ariadne just sort of hunches over on the doorstep and watches him. She has a blister on her left heel--she felt it developing, as they walked, but couldn’t think of anything to do but keep going.
And now they’re here.
“You think they’re tracking us?” she asks. “Also, what do we do when we get out?”
“Food first,” Yusuf says, twisting to look down at her and then elbowing the door open. “There better be some damned food in here.”
And there is: three cans of baked beans.
“Well,” Ariadne says. “It’s something.”
They split the first can cold, and it’s awful and sticks to the roof of Ariadne’s mouth and is also possibly the best thing she’s ever eaten. It tastes of relief, mostly, overwhelming any other flavors there might be, artificially preserved and ensconced in tin.
In addition to the three cans of beans, the cabin contains a woodstove on thin legs, a sagging cot piled with blankets, a table with a map shellacked onto its surface, and a fishing pole. The map appears to be more for looks than use, and neither of them can manage to pin it to their locations--the roads, the only landmarks they can name, don’t match. It is the fishing pole that holds actual significance.
“I’m choosing to believe that we’ve been left for dead,” Ariadne says.
“Sounds reasonable,” Yusuf says. He’s kneeling in front of the woodstove, inspecting it like he expects it to turn draconian at any moment. Considering the events of yesterday, it’s not an entirely unwarranted approach to metal appliances. “How do you think they access this place?”
The only trail is the one coming up from the shore--there’s nothing suggesting a road, or a driveway.
“Probably by boat. So we need to keep going,” Ariadne concludes. “Because I refuse to be left for dead.”
Yusuf twists around to look at her, leaning back. Something in his face suggests that he hears the steel in Ariadne’s voice, and will match it with his own, and it warms Ariadne more than anything has since they stumbled out of that shoddy motel room the morning before.
“But we’ll stay here the night,” Yusuf says. “Because I know you didn’t sleep last night.”
“And by turn, you didn’t, either,” Ariadne says. A beat passes in uncomfortable silence before Ariadne comes up with something else to say: “Why’d you agree to do this job?”
“This shit job?” Yusuf asks, tone dry. “This job which has imploded?”
“That’s the one.”
“Because I’m a shithead,” Yusuf says, in a tone that suggests this line of questioning should not be pursued. “And easily bought.”
There’s a box of matches and a deck of cards on a rickety shelf in the corner, and although it’s missing the queen of spades and the two of hearts, they manage a passable game of gin, over the course of which Ariadne loses the bed to Yusuf, and also two hundred dollars that she may never be reunited with. She’s grateful, at least, that they don’t play for the cans of beans, and also that Yusuf shows no intention of allowing her to win out of kindness or pity. It makes her feel like maybe they aren’t going to die.
The floor is hard and cold, but with an extra blanket folded beneath her it’s comfortable enough, and Ariadne sleeps fitfully, but more than the night prior, at least. Yusuf’s snoring in the bed, and they have a fire crackling in the stove. The flames play across the ceiling, and Ariadne blinks to freeze them in frames, the light here, and here, and here. It’s easier to think about the way the light moves than the way they’re moving, where they’re going, because the only thing she’s certain of is that they can’t go backwards.
Things look better in the morning. Yusuf kicks her out of a heavy sleep, and they actually take the time to heat a second can of beans. The second can of beans mostly serves to make Ariadne hungrier, but the fishing pole is a bit of hope.
“So we bait it with worms?” Yusuf says, and Ariadne squints back at him against the morning sun.
“You’ve never gone fishing?”
“I grew up in London,” Yusuf says. “Maybe we could’ve caught tin cans in the Thames, but it was more fun to smoke by the bridge.”
“Well I was a wholesome country lass, once,” Ariadne says, pressing forward along the shore. It doesn’t look any different than what they’d seen already, but there must be a stream or something, feeding the water body, and when they get there--“By which I mean I caught a sunfish at summer camp.”
“Then we’re better off than Felipe would’ve been,” Yusuf says. “Because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what a fish looks like if it hasn’t been filleted yet.”
“And I don’t know how to fillet a fish,” Ariadne says.
“That,” Yusuf says. “That I can do. I worked in kitchens once.”
“Then we’re a fine pair,” Ariadne says, and Yusuf doesn’t reply.
At lunch they catch a single, sad fish, and cobble together a fire to cook it.
“I’d like some tea,” Ariadne says, picking fish off the bone with her fingers. Yusuf spins a rib between two fingers and looks at her.
“I wouldn’t turn down a smoke,” he says. The raven that Ariadne had spied following them the day before is hopping along the shore, watching them with one canny eye. She throws the spine at it, then dips her fingers in the water and dabbles them clean.
“Don’t encourage it,” Yusuf says. “Rat with wings.”
“All birds are not a pigeons,” Ariadne says.
“There are different sorts of rats,” Yusuf counters.
The raven picks up the bone in its beak and fiddles with it, and Yusuf shakes his head.
“There was more meat on there,” he says.
“There was not,” Ariadne says. “And it’s going to eat the skins when we’re gone, anyway. Additionally: I caught the fish, and I can do with it as I please.”
“I cooked it,” Yusuf mutters, and then begins to stomp out the ashes of their fire, and Ariadne covers it over with rocks before they move on.
The odd thing about walking is that it begins to feel comfortable, even with the blister throbbing at her heel. Ariadne and Yusuf develop something that might be called a rapport, if one was so inclined--at the very least, they find things they can talk about and proceed to talk about them, ranging from video games to odd bits of childhood drama to industry gossip, centering mainly around the possibility that Saito is trying to lure Cobb back into dream sharing with promises of sexual favors, limbo notwithstanding. Ariadne doesn’t entirely trust Yusuf, but she trusts him enough, right now, to tell him the story about the time she was in middle school and swallowed a goldfish.
But she’ll tell that story to just about anyone.
They go up the hill into the woods to sleep the night, spreading out stolen blankets and cooking the third, final can of beans and two bony fish. It’s as close as they have to a feast, and Ariadne notices Yusuf turning a roving, and worrying, eye towards mushrooms.
“No,” she says.
“I know the hallucinogenics,” he says.
“I don’t think you do.”
She sleeps--well, she sleeps some, but she also knows Yusuf doesn’t go fetch any mushrooms in the night, so maybe she doesn’t sleep that well at all.
3.
Yusuf had no intention of picking mushrooms, but he likes the withering look Ariadne gives him when he suggests it again in the morning, over a breakfast of air and water. There’s dirt under her nails from digging for worms, and it’s streaked inconsistently across her face.
“You think anyone knows we’re gone?” she asks.
“No one expected me back this soon. Anyway, your damned raven knows we’re here,” Yusuf says, as the raven wheels closer. It’s a damnable bird. Yusuf’s pretty sure ravens carry some diseases--really terrible ones. Bird flu level shit.
“Do you think it realizes we have no food?” she asks. “If we were going to get a bird, better it were a hunter and not a scavenger.”
“You fed it,” Yusuf mutters, and Ariadne shoots him a withering look.
“Is this what we’re going to talk about, then?”
“Any alternative suggestions?” Yusuf asks.
Ariadne just shakes her head and gets to her feet to walk. Yusuf appreciates that about her; that she keeps walking. He’s not sure he would, independently. Last night there was blood staining his socks, and it’s not like he hasn’t noticed Ariadne favoring her left foot. He’s just not that guy, who asks about it.
“Why are you still in the industry?” Yusuf asks when the silence, broken only by the raven and the soft lapping of the water, gets to be too much. He’d been wondering, because it seems like Ariadne has potential for something else, and although they haven’t touched on real things yet, they may as well have.
“Because I want to be,” she shoots back. “Why are you?”
Yusuf feels an overwhelming, unexpected, surge of affection for Ariadne. Not everyone wants to be part of this, and even Yusuf has been trying to rein in his involvement--he’s not sure if Ariadne’s speaking out of bravery or naivete, but still, she’s speaking.
“What about you?” Ariadne asks, when Yusuf doesn’t respond. “Tit for tat, this for that.”
“Tit?” Yusuf echoes wryly, and Ariadne snorts.
“Tit’s what you already got, dumbass,” she continues. “An answer, and now I need tat.”
“I have a tattoo,” Yusuf says. “But I’d prefer you didn’t call it that.”
“Shut up, asshole,” Ariadne says, and then, after a few beats: “You do?”
“Would I lie to you?” Yusuf asks. He wants to add: “Especially when we might die, anyway?” but that’s been unspoken between them for good reason. If they don’t think about death it’s not there, dogging them like that raven.
“Probably,” Ariadne says. “But show it, then.”
“Rather not,” Yusuf says, which is true. He’s just grateful for having changed the subject. The tattoo is stupid, he got it when he was eighteen, but it’s less personal than the alternative, and, furthermore, he doesn’t think Ariadne will make him strip.
Ariadne stops and turns around.
“Strip,” she says.
“Fuck off,” he says. “It’s stupid.”
“Is it on your penis?” Ariadne asks, and when Yusuf recoils, she grins.
“Then show it.”
“It’s close,” Yusuf says.
“Close to what?” Ariadne asks, and Yusuf tries to somehow imply through exaggerated eye movement what he’s trying to say.
“It’s on my hip,” Yusuf says.
“Well good for you, then,” Ariadne says. “Point being?”
“I’m not showing you.”
“Suddenly modest, huh?”
“You didn’t show me your tit,” Yusuf says, and almost immediately wants to swallow that. It’s not that--Ariadne’s breasts are small, but probably nice--but they don’t need this. Yusuf may be a fuckhead, but even he knows they don’t need this. And he’s had sex before--it’s not like he’s trying to avoid dying a virgin, or anything.
“Okay,” she says.
“No,” Yusuf says. “No.”
“The right one’s bigger,” she says.
It occurs to Yusuf that he’s slipped into flirting--they both have, really--and this is Ariadne, who is also a criminal but probably too good for him, anyway. And they’re stuck in--well, they’re in the woods, and Yusuf doesn’t want to think about this too much deeper than that.
“Keep walking,” he says. “We’re supposed to be not dying.”
It’s the dying that does it, that word like switching from color to black and white, stark and foreign from the world they inhabited previously. Ariadne blinks, once, then twice, and turns around.
They don’t talk much until they hit the river. It’s lunch time, more or less, and Ariadne sets out to catch fish and gets them three, and fat ones.
“So do we follow it?” she asks. “Or do we keep going around the lake?”
“Water’s flowing out,” Yusuf says. “So it should go--”
“Yeah,” Ariadne says. “So we’ll be going downstream, to bigger things. And they build towns along rivers.”
There’s no development around the lake, as far as Yusuf can tell, so any route seems better than none.
“River it is, then,” Yusuf says. “And the fish are better here.”
“Looks that way,” Ariadne says, and then she peels off a clean piece of fish and tosses it to the bird.”
“You,” Yusuf says. “You’re ridiculous.”
“My mom used to tell me a story, when I was a kid,” she says. “Everything’s better if you share, if you’re asked.”
“You planning to give me the rest of that then? If I ask?”
“Shut up. You aren’t a fairy in disguise, and you already had a fish and a half.”
“You don’t think I’m a fairy in disguise? When we get back to civilization I’m having--” Yusuf says. “Something. Delicious. And a lot of it.”
“Like what?”
“Everything,” Yusuf says. “All the foods in the world. But probably no fish.”
“Some people would pay good money for this fish,” Ariadne says, gesturing emphatically at the river. “It’s from a clear mountain stream.”
“But not every day,” Yusuf says, then slaps the ground. “And not without salt or pepper. Let’s get going.”
They sleep that night along the river, in a patch of grass that’s coarse but more comfortable than the ground they’ve slept on thus far. When Yusuf gets up in the middle of the night to take a piss, he tries not to think too hard about the fact that he is now evaluating ground like he used to evaluate the beds in shitty motel rooms, like there’s a hierarchy of ground comfortableness. Which there is. But he shouldn’t have to know about it.
Yusuf’s mostly gotten over the noises in the woods, and they’re starting to sound to him like the hum of the fridge and electricity at home: pleasant, forgettable background noise. The stars are stretched out across the sky, and the moon is bright, and altogether it’s not all that bad, until the bear.
The bear is loud, is what it is at first, and its eyes flash, and it is at least as large as Yusuf is and all up in his face.
It’s probably larger than Yusuf is, if he’s honest, and he sees a gleam of what he suspects are teeth, and the bear must be--two meters? less?--away from him, which is too close.
He runs.
He screams. Ariadne’s name is ripped from his lungs like something inhuman, and then he’s saying things like “Fuck” and “Bear” nonsensically, and by the time he gets to Ariadne she’s sitting--standing--looking at him with wild eyes and hair.
“Bear,” he says, gasping a little.
“I don’t--” she says. “I don’t see one.”
There’s no sound, either; nothing barelling through the bush except Yusuf himself. The bear’s not there.
“There was one,” he says. “I was taking a piss, and there was--really close--”
“Right,” she says. “So are you going to go back to sleep?”
“Fuck no,” Yusuf says, unashamed, and Ariadne squints up at the sky like she expects to see some sign of sunrise.
“So you want to keep walking?”
Yusuf’s amazed she goes along with it. Maybe he shouldn’t be; Ariadne, it strikes him, is unique in being both even-handed and independent-headed, giving a shit about other people and also looking out for herself.
“You know,” Ariadne says. “It was probably more scared of you than you were of it.”
“Fuck off,” Yusuf says.
But maybe she’s not any of the things Yusuf thinks of her as. Maybe she’s lying, like he is--a little or a lot, but enough to get by without being touched. Either way, Yusuf has to admit that Ariadne’s grown on him like old mold, and he’s as surprised as anyone.
He should probably tell her, but lies are such a convenient buffer.
4.
The bear--Ariadne is skeptical about the bear, but the moon is bright and they can walk alright by its light. The fact that is still night, or early morning, somehow makes it easier to talk, and she finds herself spilling out things she wouldn’t share otherwise. Maybe it’s to ward off bears.
They walk through to dawn, and then they stop and Ariadne fishes, and then they have breakfast. There’s still a crescent of hunger around the edge of Ariadne, on the fringes of her body and her stomach, but the fish seems to be almost enough, close enough. It takes the edge off.
She hums a little while they eat, and throws a scrap to the raven who is there, close, practically at her elbow. He seems to find them easily enough.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “That they’d want us that bad. That they’d want us dead.”
“This job has never made sense,” Yusuf says, like that somehow helps. The raven is watching them, and Ariadne wishes she felt as canny as the raven looks. She still has her gun.
“Are you sure you don’t know anything?” she asks. Yusuf’s eyes are sleepy, heavy-lidded. He seems undisturbed by this question, and maybe there’s nothing to admit, but she’s been examining their situation from every angle and it doesn’t quite fit together, like a house whose walls have all the wrong measurements, or whose walls aren’t at right angles.
“Felipe promised me something I’m not sure he could give me,” Yusuf says, finally. “Certain freedoms.”
Ariadne looks at him, but weighing the statement only takes a moment.
“Fuck you,” she says. “They wanted you? This had nothing to do with me at all?”
“Well,” Yusuf says evenly. “It could. But probably no.”
She should probably be angrier than she is. She takes their third fish, throws it wholesale to the raven, kicks out the fire and keeps walking.
“That’s it?” Yusuf asks. He probably would have shot her or something. She still has the gun; she’s surprised Yusuf hasn’t stolen it.
She doesn’t care.
“That’s it,” she says. “Don’t talk to me.”
She decides that, in the event that they die, she’ll be more pissed with him, but she doesn’t really expect to die. Maybe she should.
“If we die,” she says. “If we start to starve or whatever, I’m shooting myself and then chucking the gun in the river so you can’t, and I hope the bird pecks out your eyeballs.”
“Okay,” says Yusuf. “Tit for tat.”
Ariadne laughs. She’s not sure if it sounds bitter, or sad; mostly she suspects Yusuf kept her around because he wasn’t sure he could do this on his own, and that’s a little sad and a little--flattering?--she’s not entirely sure. It felt like something, and their conversations felt like something, but now she understands why he never wanted to talk about the matter at hand, the job, why he took it, why he’s in dreamsharing at all. It’s something deeper and harsher than their idle conversation. She lets it slide off her, but that’s what she’s always been good at. She’s slippery like that.
“It wasn’t--” Yusuf says. “I wasn’t sure at first.”
“But you were sure pretty quick,” Ariadne says, and when he doesn’t reply she knows it’s true.
She lets that slide, too, and keeps walking.
The silence is heavy and in sharp contrast to the clear, early morning light. The raven is circling ahead of them, above a tattered hem of trees.
“I don’t tell people things,” Yusuf says. “If it’s not their business.”
“It kind of was,” Ariadne says without looking at him. “My business. It kind of was my business. And I’m not angry with you, but I don’t really want to talk with you right now.”
“That sounds like you’re angry with me,” Yusuf says. “Tit for tat, right? I’ll show you my tattoo.”
“I don’t really care anymore,” Ariadne says. “Let’s keep going.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Yusuf says.
“Is it on your ass?” Ariadne asks, because she can’t not ask.
“No. What do you take me for? Also, I already told you where it is.”
“Don’t care,” Ariadne says, curt and quick. She doesn’t. She didn’t trust Yusuf, entirely, but it’s frustrating to have him prove her more right than she ever expected.
Yusuf’s quiet. He’s quiet for longer than Ariadne expects him to be. He’s quiet all the way through to their next meal, and after Ariadne catches the first fish he looks at her kind of balefully, like he’s not sure if she’s going to catch another.
“I didn’t expect this from you,” she says as she baits the next hook.
“What?” Yusuf asks. “Lying?”
“No,” she says, casting her line. “Being pathetic about it.”
Yusuf sits down beside her, a little uneven on his feet. She wonders if he has blisters, too--he probably does, but that’s something they don’t talk about. Maybe they should: maybe the things they don’t talk about matter.
“How are your feet?” she asks, when a few moments pass and Yusuf doesn’t say anything.
“Same as yours,” he says.
“Right,” she says. “There’s more we haven’t talked about than we have.”
She can feel Yusuf looking at her, now. His eyes are dark and heavily lashed: she knows what they look like. She doesn’t look at him.
“So,” she says. “Are we going to talk about them, or are we going to not? Because I could go either way, now. But if we aren’t going to talk, we’re not, and if we are, we are. Does that make sense to you?”
“I got the tattoo when I was eighteen,” Yusuf says. “It’s the chemical symbol for epinephrine--adrenaline. I thought I was cooler than I was.”
“Didn’t we all,” Ariadne says. “But that’s not exactly what I wanted.”
There’s a tug on the line, and as Ariadne pulls it in, Yusuf cracks his knuckles, gets to his feet and sets about starting a fire. If Yusuf’s not talking she figures she won’t, either, but she flips the two fish into the fire. She gives the tail and the skin to the raven, and Yusuf frowns a little and keeps silent.
If there’s something to say, he’ll say it. They have nothing but time.
Ariadne hums as they walk, tuneless as ever. There’s something comforting about the fact that, while not much is out, there’s no longer much that’s hidden, either. They’re just there: the pair of them, walking. Even if Ariadne’s foot winces whenever it hits the ground.
She wonders what will happen, if Yusuf talks. If it means anything. She doesn’t typically imbue things with excess weight, but she has time on her hands, and space in her head.
“I knew I shouldn’t trust you,” she says. “But part of me thought it didn’t matter, out here.”
“Out here,” Yusuf echoes.
“You know what I mean,” she says, and they fall silent again. Both of them do. Out here, things were different than they were anywhere else, looser. Ariadne tried to keep herself a little prickly on jobs, to stay safe.
The river takes a sharp turn and dissolves into riffles. Ariadne wishes she knew more about rivers, though she doubts there’s any signs that can be read by someone looking for a road, or any sign of civilization, really. She wonders where they put in the boat to get to the cabin on the lake, and if she might be some sort of idiot for not thinking to stay on the lake, look for a place to put boats in. A dock.
She wonders why Yusuf trusts her. It wasn’t something she had thought of before, but usually people who aren’t trustworthy aren’t so trusting themselves. Yusuf had allowed himself to loosen, too. He had to.
5.
Yusuf decides to tell Ariadne when they break for dinner, because that’s what makes sense in his head. It’s not such a secret, now that Ariadne knows it was his fault--the reasons don’t matter much. But if that’s what she wants--
He might as well. He likes Ariadne. She’s--something.
And then they start hearing road noises, the rumble and flow of something that just sounds like water, at first. Yusuf doesn’t say anything, and he suspects Ariadne is doing the same.
And then, suddenly, it’s real: the road noise shakes away from the sound of water, rolling and flowing, and becomes something distinct. It is, without a doubt, a semi-truck, and not far off.
“Fuck,” Ariadne says, but there’s an undertone of brightness to the word. And then she hugs him. It’s sudden, surprising, and knocks the wind out of Yusuf, and then she steps back, and keeps walking.
“I just wanted more,” he says.
“Money?” Ariadne asks.
“Freedom,” he says. “Felipe says he could get me back into--some areas of the world I’ve haven’t been back to in awhile.”
“Right,” Ariadne says. “So a new passport?”
“I was going to open up a new den,” Yusuf says. “Mombasa is--good--but other locations could be better. I needed certain business permits.”
“We’ve been wandering around in the woods so you could get a business permit,” Ariadne says flatly, and Yusuf can see how she might not get it.
“Can’t you just operate one illegally?”
“That’s what I’m doing right now,” Yusuf says. “And I’m getting old.”
“Okay,” Ariadne replies, but by then they’re so close to the road that there’s nothing else to talk about, but the road, and what it might mean to be back in civilization. Which they are, or nearly. A truck piled high with logs hurtles past, and they walk in the direct it’s headed: south, where more towns are more likely, and away from the river.
Ariadne thrusts out her thumb, and eventually, sooner than Yusuf expected, they’re picked up. Ariadne talks for them, to the man who’s picked them: he squints at them a little, like he’s trying to figure something out. Ariadne, bright and entirely foreign to the person Yusuf knew in the woods, makes up some flaky story about going for a hike, and the guy who’s driving spends most of the drive staring at her sidelong, like he’s trying to figure out if she and Yusuf are dating or if he can hit on Ariadne, despite the fact that there’s dirt on her face and she smells a little rank. They both do, though, but apparently Yusuf isn’t as attractive.
Maybe if he were younger.
Ariadne doesn’t respond to their driver’s advances, just chatters away nonsensically, probably so that the holes in her story will be less apparent. Yusuf is reminded, again, that she’s kind of good at this and watching Ariadne slip into a character is bizarrely engaging. It makes the person he knew in the woods seem more real, not less: her nonsensical stories and terrible singing seem like someone existing like they would if no one was there, but this is obviously a carefully calibrated act.
They reach a town, eventually; it’s of medium size but there’s a place that rents cars, and they’re dropped there. Ariadne waves jauntily at their host and ignores his advances.
“Thanks for helping, there,” she says when they’re on the sidewalk.
“It looked like you had it handled,” Yusuf says.
“That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have used help.”
“Right,” Yusuf says.
“Right,” Ariadne repeats.
And then they rent a car, and they drive.
“Where’d you want a permit for?” Ariadne asks, when they get to McDonald’s a order more cheeseburgers than they probably should.
“London,” Yusuf says. “It’s sort of--there’s a coalition, in dreamsharing. I needed something from them. They don’t like me.”
“Right,” she says.
“Probably, less, now,” Yusuf says. “Because I imagine Felipe fucked everything up.”
“Good on him,” Ariadne says, and Yusuf looks at her sharply, over his half eaten burger. It kind of stabs him--just a little. Just for a moment.
Because it’s an act, like the one in the car, with the guy who picked them up and flirted with Ariadne despite the fact that she smelled rank. It’s not Ariadne, actually.
“Stop it,” Yusuf says, and Ariadne twists to stare at him for a moment, eyes blank, before turning back towards the road.
“Stop what?” she says, as two lanes of highway blur past in front of them.
“Faking,” Yusuf says. “Lying. I lie. You tell the truth.”
“Well maybe we’ve swapped, now,” Ariadne says. “If you did tell me the truth. Maybe that’s what happens.”
“That doesn’t even--” Yusuf says. “Tit for tat.”
“Tit for tat,” Ariadne echoes. She sounds tired, which is maybe not surprising. “We should get a hotel.”
So they do; it’s a slumping building by the side of the highway with a sort of half-assed log cabin theme, and there’s only one room free, with one bed. Yusuf didn’t expect that, but Ariadne just sort of shrugs and takes it, hands over her credit card and mutters something about losing at gin. Inside it’s plain and rustic, with a single bed that sags in the middle and has a coarse bedspread.
It looks wonderful. Ariadne exhales a sigh and sits down, letting the bedsprings creak beneath her. It suddenly occurs to Yusuf that she’s a small person--small in stature, almost delicate. He’d forgotten. She had, after all, gotten him on his knees with a gun to his head--she had, after all, fed them for most of the past few days.
“You know,” she says, leaning back and cracking her back. “I think my raven is following us.”
“Does the rat have a name?” he asks, because it seems appropriate, and it’s easier than saying something else--talking about the raven seems like slipping backwards, to themselves in the woods, when they were other people and Ariadne, at least, was more honest.
Yusuf was, too, except for about that one thing.
“No,” she says. “But if it keeps following, I might. I might name it.”
“Yeah?” Yusuf asks.
“I’m just saying,” she says, fiddling with the hem of her shirt, which is still the one she tore in the thicket that first day. “We weren’t together for very long, but I don’t think we can leave it behind.”
It’s not quite what Yusuf expected, but before he can react Ariadne is already peeling off her shirt, in one smooth movement. Underneath she’s small, pale and freckled. Underneath that, though, there’s something like steel.
“Tit for tat,” she says. “The right one’s bigger.”
“They're both perfect,” Yusuf says, which is probably the most embarrassing thing he has ever said, but it doesn't matter because when he peels off his own shirt, Ariadne smiles.