fast tattoo
.fast tattoo
ariadne taps in morse code. arthur notices. written for this prompt.
pg13 . 4440 words
Ariadne’s father had been a drummer, and that was the only thing they had in common. He taught her how to play, actually. It had been their way of communicating. They’d go down to the basement and take turns--he’d started her with Ringo Starr, and then he’d moved her on to Stewart Copeland and Keith Moon and Ginger Baker. When Ariadne got older she shifted towards Karen Carpenter, and later Meg White, but mostly because they were chicks, and her father never quite understood that; but any of the greats from the ‘60s and ‘70s were fair game for him.
After her mom died they played drums more than they talked, or sat down together for meals, or whatever it was normal families did. Ariadne would drum after school, and when her dad came home she’d go upstairs and make dinner and he’d play for awhile. During dinner they’d drum on the table, playing a game her dad had made up for her when she was learning: progressively more complicated riffs that the other had to imitate and expound upon. No one ever won, but it was fun.
Then her dad brought home the book on morse code one night in midwinter, when it got dark early. They altered things slightly for their skill set; a dash became three tapped beats, while a dot was one tapped beat, with the usual one beat of silence between elements, three between letters, seven between words. It took them a little while to learn everything, and in the beginning they were painfully slow, but they had the rhythm and eventually it got so they’d bring their drum sticks to the table and have their conversations that way. They got to be fast, and it reached the point where they could talk aloud and tap out morse beneath their conversation, telling secrets in public, hiding in plain sight.
Somewhere in there, morse code became Ariadne’s language of truth.
She does not tell this story when she gives the eulogy at her father’s funeral, but she taps it while she talks, and if no one but her and Dad understand--well, isn’t that the point?
Afterwards when Ariadne is being hugged by people she hardly knows, she fingers her totem in her pocket and thinks that this makes her an orphan, but maybe she’s too old to identify as such. She thinks maybe she should stop dreaming while she can still dream in sleep (sometimes in taps, but that’s--well). Not because her father’s dead; he had no unfinished business in or with her, really, and she doubts he’ll show up among her projections. She loved him, to be sure, but when he died it made sense, and he tapped his last words to her.
--I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's the record.
It was a reference to his favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, and Ariadne had tapped back
--You may go gentle into that good night. I love you.
and that was that, that was all okay. But she knew he would like her to settle down, to live in one place and have children and teach them how to draw and play the drums and do whatever they would like most in the world to do, and being a criminal wasn’t exactly conducive to that. Inception gave her enough money to finish school, and now she’s inherited everything from her dad as well--she doesn’t need the money. She could get out.
Arthur calls a couple days later and offers her a job in New Zealand.
--
Arthur’s trying to ease back in, now that Cobb’s become a family man. An easy job befits Saito’s first extraction, anyway. Just because you’ve spent time in limbo doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing--in fact, limbo might make things worse, but what Saito wants, Saito gets. Eames has signed on as well, and because Yusuf has decided to stay in Mombasa, they wind up with Beatrice as their chemist. Arthur’s worked with her before, and she behaves like someone’s grandmother, but she’s damn good nonetheless.
Arthur calls Ariadne last. He’s not sure if he wants to take her on, for one thing, though Saito suggests her. She’s young. Good, maybe great, but young, and they don’t really need a great architect for this job, anyway. They could probably even use Nash, although he’d probably piss his pants if he had to work with Saito.
Arthur doesn’t pursue the second reason he doesn’t want to call Ariadne very far, because it makes him uncomfortable. It’s just something about her that’s--bright, he’ll say. Pure might be a better word, but it sounds so maudlin, like he’s trying to imply that he and Cobb (because it was mostly he and Cobb, if he’s honest with himself) somehow corrupted her. If she was that clean, she wouldn’t have come in the first place. If she were that pure, she wouldn’t have been so good.
Arthur calls her.
She says yes almost immediately, but doesn’t tell him much else. Which isn’t surprising, because Arthur isn’t one for small talk, but something in her tone makes him wonder what’s going on. He texts her the flight information within the hour, made up under the name of the fake passport Cobb gave her for her first job, and she meets them in Auckland two days later, bags under her eyes.
“Sorry,” she says, like there’s something to apologize for. “I can’t sleep on planes.”
They start discussing details in Arthur’s hotel in Auckland, Ariadne and Eames sitting cross-legged on the bed, Saito and Beatrice in stiff-backed desk chairs. Arthur stands and paces. When he tells them the mark isn’t militarized, Eames snorts and says, “Are you certain, darling?” Arthur can feel himself scowling.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “I’m certain.”
Ariadne taps a tattoo against her leg, fast and with a steady beat, but Arthur doesn’t pay it much mind.
The mark is a professor at the university in Dunedin, so after a couple days in Auckland they fly south to start the real work. They take separate flights, just to be safe, but he and Ariadne end up on layover in Christchurch together, browsing magazines and pretending not to know one another. She’s tapping again, quickly, and there’s a pattern to it that seems familiar but he doesn’t quite recognize. He wonders if it’s the drum line to a familiar song, though he’s never been much for popular music, and it doesn’t really sound like a drum line, anyway. He doesn’t ask her. He’ll figure it out eventually--he always does.
They reconvene at a warehouse by the harbor, and everyone goes to work--Eames needs to tail the mark’s husband, and Ariadne’s designing a level that’s a cross between that bamboo structure that was atop the MoMA a few summers ago and something from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or at least that’s what Ariadne says, although she can’t remember if the scene she’s thinking of is from Crouching Tiger or Hero. When she talks about it she moves her arms around a lot, and talks about organic architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright and Fallingwater. Arthur thinks she may be putting too much thought into this, but she seems happy. Beatrice is doing--something--that she seems to have even more trouble explaining herself clearly than Ariadne. She’s been in the business a long time, and Arthur trusts her. Somewhat. He’ll call Yusuf, later, and ask him to explain some things. And Saito is on the phone with Cobb intermittently, and then he is meditating. Arthur wonders again why he took this job, but since Saito is matching the client’s price--well, there’s that.
He goes for a walk by the ocean, and oh God the accents here are ridiculous. It’s kind of a relief Eames is a good forger, even though Arthur wouldn’t tell him so to his face.
--
One week in, Ariadne asks Arthur to go under with her and test the first dream level, the bamboo one.
It’s hard to explain: there’s bamboo everyone, and it’s bound together into ladders, twisted into tunnels. Arthur grew up in Iowa (yes, he’s heard the jokes; don’t make them) and once in his life, when he was very young, he went to a maze made of bales of hay, piled atop each other to create three stories that could be crawled up and through and around. This is like that, only the bamboo sways lightly and sometimes opens up into little forest groves, and occasionally into larger forest groves with thick copses of bamboo, where Ariadne has somehow made fucking pandas.
“Ariadne,” Arthur says. “Pandas?”
“Well,” Ariadne blushes a little. “I thought they were cute.”
They are, but that’s not the point.
“How do they work?” Arthur asks. “You realize we don’t usually have animals in our dreams, unless the dreamer has some fucked up projections?” And Arthur has seen some fucked up projections.
“Oh,” Ariadne says, looking flustered. “They’re like non-playable characters, in video games? They’re sort of automated robots. So they’re properly part of the architecture--they just have activity loops they run through, and then repeat.”
Arthur watches one of the pandas, and looks at Ariadne sidelong. “You know you could get some serious business out of this, if you wanted. No one else is doing it.”
Ariadne shrugs, “Would it really help with an extraction? I just did it for fun.”
“It could help,” Arthur says, turning thoughtful. “If animals were a big part of the mark’s life, or we were working on, like, a Greenpeace activist or something. Some people trust animals, more than humans, and animals can’t be forged. It could help with an inception, actually.”
And then Ariadne is tapping again, and Arthur really needs to figure that out.
They wake up. Ariadne goes back to her models, where she’s working on the first level. Which is in a series of linked underwater caves, although Ariadne says she’s going to put an Escher waterfall in one of them, at the surface, if anyone ever gets up there. The mark likes to travel, been to China a few times, and on her most recent trip had gone diving in underwater caves in South America. So the levels make sense, but Arthur hadn’t expected Ariadne to latch unto the ideas so thoroughly. This is not the sort of thing an architect does on their first job. Hell, he’s seen architects fifty jobs in who are afraid to try anything but cities and buildings. Which are by no means easy, but they are far more conventional--they fall within the training most architecture students receive. Ariadne is working somewhere else entirely.
He wonders if she still dreams, what they’re like.
She’s putting an Escher waterfall in, ‘just for fun.’
She’s tapping again.
--
Arthur doesn’t dream when he sleeps, but sometimes when he’s asleep ideas come to him fully formed. That’s how he figures out what Ariadne’s tapping--he wakes up, one arm thrown over his pillow, and he knows. There’s no other way to explain it. It’s like sleep loosens up all the information that he’s stored in his brain, and the first thing he thinks is morse code. Ariadne. Morse code.
His architect is tapping out things in morse code. He doesn’t know what to do with this information, because she could be spying on the team or she could be just tapping, but who does that?
He waits for her to do it again. It takes nearly all day, but when he’s in the middle of a conversation with Eames he hears the beat coming from Ariadne and her models.
“So,” Eames is saying. “I think that I’m all set, I just need to talk to Ariadne a little about how I can work the husband into the first level.”
“Okay,” Arthur says, and Eames looks at him sort of blankly, and Arthur realizes this is because normally he’d have approximately twenty collections and clarifications, but he moves in Ariadne’s direction anyway, fully aware that Eames is watching him and will probably have twenty questions himself, when this is done.
She has a sketch pad open on her knees, and is tapping the tail of the eraser on the spiral. It’s only now that he recognizes the tapping as morse and is hearing it again, that Arthur fully realizes how fast Ariadne’s been doing this: it’s clear that three taps are a dash, but he can only translate one in every four of her letters before he loses track.
He’s rusty. And he still needs to explain himself to Eames.
“Ariadne,” he hisses. “Taps in morse.”
“Whatever you say, darling,” Eames replies easily. “Just don’t come to me when you realize stalking won’t get you in our dear architect’s pants.”
“I don’t,” Arthur hisses. “Want in Ariadne’s pants.”
“What?” Ariadne calls.
“Nothing,” they say simultaneously, and she twists around and looks at them skeptically.
“Arthur wants in your pants,” says Eames, and Arthur punches him in the shoulder.
“Well good thing I’m wearing a skirt, then,” says Ariadne, and goes back to her sketchpad.
Eames raises an eyebrow at Arthur, and Saito gives him both an earful for unprofessionalism. But that evening when Arthur leaves the warehouse, Beatrice catches him by the elbow and whispers, “You know, I think she likes you.”
It is at this point that Arthur remembers Beatrice has a bit of a reputation as a yenta. He hopes she and Eames don’t talk. Ever.
Which is very, very unlikely.
Arthur goes to the university library that night to brush up on morse code. The library is a big glass and stone concoction, crawling with the sort of undergraduates Arthur usually goes out of his way to avoid. But he finds the book and lodges himself in a study room, glaring at anyone who comes in talking about “reservations” or saying “your time’s up, mate” or “don’t you see I’m signed up for this slot?” The problem is that he knows morse code already, so the book isn’t much help. Ariadne’s just too fast for him, which is ridiculous, because he’s the best point man there is and knows everything.
It’s not like anyone is fluent in morse code. It’s fucking morse code. It doesn’t even make sense that Ariadne knows it, because she’s barely over twenty and as far as Arthur knows has never worked in air traffic control or run an amateur radio. And it’s Arthur’s job to know these things.
Arthur turns the things he does know about Ariadne over in his head: twenty-four years old. Born and raised in Quebec. Fluent in English and French. Three semesters into an architecture degree program. Dead mother. That’s all; that’s all he has. It had seemed like enough--Cobb trusted her, and she was too green to have many secrets, she seemed too good to be a double agent.
Still, Arthur isn’t paid to trust people. He needs to learn to understand Ariadne’s morse code.
He shuts the book and goes home.
--
His solution is to jot down Ariadne’s dashes and dots in his moleskine, where he can translate later. So when she starts tapping at the next day’s group meeting, Arthur takes those down instead of the notes he’d intended to make, and figures the team won’t be any worse off for it.
This is what he gets: God, Eames, I don’t want to look at your chest hair. Could you just do up one more button? Please. Beatrice looks like I imagine Beatrice Potter. I wonder if she lives somewhere with a garden with rabbits. But if she had a garden, why is she here? Because it’s winter in England, you dumbass. Like it is stateside. Clearly, no carrots, so no need to be around.
It goes on like that for two pages, so she’s not a spy, or if she is she’s an extremely unhelpful one, prone to flights of fancy. It reads more like a one-sided conversation, a series of observations. Like their architect is actually thinking in morse code. Which seems relatively harmless, but bizarre.
Arthur thinks he knows considerably less about Ariadne than he thought. He remembers kissing her, because someone (okay: Mal) had played that one on him once and it seemed only right to pass it along. But now he wonders why he did it. Why kiss someone you barely know, in a dream?
The answer’s simple, like they usually are: because that’s what you do in dreams. You kiss people you barely know, and damn the consequences. There’s no risk, and you aren’t worried.
It’s been awhile since Arthur dreamed like that; he’d forgotten.
Arthur keeps working on Ariadne’s morse code, anyway. It’s almost a subconscious desire--once he’s figured out she’s doing, he can’t stop listening to it. He gets faster, too, and eventually he doesn’t need to jot her comments in his moleskine and he can just translate them in his head.
--Underwater level’s almost done, what a relief. I’ll bring Beatrice under with me to test it.
--Shouldn’t have gone out drinking with Eames and Beatrice last night, ugh.
(That one makes Arthur nervous.)
--Saito is like the Man personified. Dad would’ve hated him.
And then there’s a series of cliches, inserted if anything arises in conversation that makes them applicable, of which Ariadne seems to have an endless supply:
--I’m happy as a clam. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Nervous as a cat on a porch full of rocking chairs. A rolling stone gathers no moss. Raining cats and dogs. Barking up the wrong tree. Everything’s right as rain. Cat’s away, the mice will play. Solitary as a hog on ice.
(The last two are said in relation to Arthur. The first makes him nervous, the second makes him uncomfortable.)
He doesn’t have much time to worry about Ariadne’s nonsense, however entertaining, because the job is only two days out, and he needs to confer with Saito and make sure everyone knows their roles. Beatrice is dreaming the first level; the mark is dreaming the second. Eames will forge the mark’s husband in the first level, and hopefully when they get to the second level Saito will be able to find everything he needs to in a sunken treasure chest somewhere.
The architecture is still absurd, but otherwise it’s simple enough.
--
The first rule of any job is not to think it’s easy, which Arthur probably wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t been so fucking distracted by the architect’s morse code. But he was distracted, so it does happen.
The mark is going to a conference in Christchurch, so they get her while she’s alone in the hotel. So that’s easy. But once they get in the dream, it’s the pandas. Eames is supposed to talk to the mark, as her husband, about how he’s worried she’s keeping secrets from him, and then they’d move up to the second level. The thing is, she’s distracted by the pandas. They’re too cute. It should be a cakewalk.
Except there are pandas. The mark keeps sushing Eames to go over and pet them, because she’s afraid they’ll run away if he talks. Arthur should be running point, and dealing with this, and he can see Eames making frantic gestures at him, and Ariadne is fucking tapping.
Arthur is a skilled pointman. And he’s listening to his architect’s insipid thoughts in morse code instead of solving their problem It’s genuinely pathetic.
Luckily for all of them, Eames is a good forger, and he somehow uses the pandas to his advantage; Arthur doesn’t follow their conversation completely, as it seems to be the sort of thing that only makes sense in dreams, or to someone who has been stalking the mark for a month and a half. Then Eames and the mark go to sleep next to a panda, so at least that part was easy. Damn panda-sexuals. But at least when they move up the next level Arthur is pretty sure they have the information they need, to open the chest.
If they can find it.
Saito is supposed to find it, of course, but the title of the extractor encompasses more than that, because the extractor should be planning the whole job. In some ways Arthur and Eames had been walking Saito through the process of being an extractor, with Cobb consulting via phone.
The point is, they split up. Eames stays with the mark, still as her husband. Beatrice goes with Saito. Arthur is left with Ariadne. He’d really prefer not to be with Ariadne. Who is tapping.
--I’d really prefer not to be with Arthur.
Okay, then. Arthur shouldn’t be bothered by this, but he kind of is. Only then they have their oxygen tanks on, and they’re swimming. Ariadne knows the caves better than he does, so Arthur follows her. He’s constantly surprised at how small she is, but this is the first time he’s seen her so close to nude, and it kind of shocks him. She swims well, though, maybe because this is a dream and maybe because she’s trying to shake him.
Not that he’d let her. They don’t need to be in pairs, strictly speaking, because the kick will come wherever they are and they all have guns, in case. But there are projections swimming around, and if they get close to the chest the projections may get violent. So, better safe.
They get to a junction, and Ariadne jerks her head to the left, which seems to Arthur to lead further to the center of the caves. He scans the floor of the caves, but doesn’t see anything like a chest; some rubble, maybe, and a few fish Ariadne has rigged up like the pandas. Only uglier.
They end up in a vast cavern, and Ariadne swims up to the surface, looking smug when he breaks the water and can see properly.
There’s no waterwheel, but otherwise it’s a perfect Escher waterfall.
“Were you even looking for the chest?” are the first words out of Arthur’s mouth, even though he wants to be astounded, he should be astounded. It’s just--it’s way better than Penrose steps. It’s also totally superfluous, like the pandas that almost botched the job.
Ariadne looks unrepentant, “It might’ve been this way.” She hoists herself out of the water, squirming, and walks over to where the waterfall meets the pool, where a stream splits off and starts to flow up.
“Actually, it might still be this way. Come here,” she says, and Arthur clambers out of the water and follows her, because he’s not sure what else to do.
She goes into the waterfall, stepping into the stream. She disappears.
Arthur follows her, and of course Ariadne put a fucking cave behind the waterfall, which M. C. Escher couldn’t even make work, and there’s a chest in it. Ariadne kneels down and unlatches it, and Arthur has to wonder if she knew it’d work out this way all along. She probably did. Ariadne is starting to scare him more than anyone else on the team, because it seems like there are so many things about her he’s missed.
She may also be beginning to turn him on more than anyone else on the team (which, okay, isn’t much of a competition). For the exact same reason.
“So,” says Ariadne. “It’s done.”
And Arthur says he supposes it is.
Ariadne taps something idly, with her fingernails.
--But we don’t need to wake up quite yet.
Then:
--I really should’ve thought through making a level that put Arthur shirtless.
Arthur can’t help himself. He crouches down, and picks up a rock. His beat is a bit slower than Ariadne’s, but he thinks he’s got it.
--Why?
Ariadne looks--Arthur isn’t sure what Ariadne looks like. She looks shocked. She looks like she’s going to cry. She looks like she understood exactly what he said. Or tapped.
She sits down across from him and picks up a rock, tapping it rapidly.
--Because you tricked me into kissing you on inception and sometimes I’m a still stupid little girl and think that meant something. Because you called and I said I’d do this job even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Then she pauses, and looks at him directly.
--Because when you’re in nothing but swim trunks I can’t believe you normally wear something on the order of thirteen articles of clothing. And because I think the Escher waterfall turned you on at least a little bit. And I kind of knew it would.
And suddenly it’s like Arthur can dream again, because damn the consequences. He is on Ariadne, and he is kissing her, and it isn’t chaste. And Ariadne’s kissing back, hard, and her small body is pressed against his. She pushes him backwards through the waterfall, and he lets her. And then they are plunging into the pool behind them and--
That’s the kick. They’re awake, and Ariadne is blinking at him blearily.
She is not blinking in morse code.
Arthur exhales. They have the information they need. The job is done. He rolls over on his side and kisses Ariadne again, before he can think about it, because if he does this outside the dream that makes it real.
She smiles against his lips and brings her hands up to the back of his head. She taps a finger on the nape of his neck.
--We need to give them a kick.
But they wait a little longer. But then Eames and Saito and Beatrice are awake, too, and their eyes are bleary and Arthur realizes that now they all have to pack up the PASIV and get out of the room, but--his lips are still on Ariadne's. Her hands are in his hair, which should annoy him but doesn’t.
They pull apart, and Beatrice looks gleeful, Saito knowing. Eames is stifling laughter. Arthur is blushing, he can feel it, but Ariadne isn’t, and that makes him blush more.
When they’re in the hallway, Eames lets his laughter loose.
“Finally met your match, Arthur? Someone to pull the stick out of your arse?”
Arthur doesn’t say anything. Instead he grabs Ariadne’s hand and taps
--Yes into her palm.
“Don’t worry,” Ariadne says. “I’ll take good care of him.”
ariadne taps in morse code. arthur notices. written for this prompt.
pg13 . 4440 words
Ariadne’s father had been a drummer, and that was the only thing they had in common. He taught her how to play, actually. It had been their way of communicating. They’d go down to the basement and take turns--he’d started her with Ringo Starr, and then he’d moved her on to Stewart Copeland and Keith Moon and Ginger Baker. When Ariadne got older she shifted towards Karen Carpenter, and later Meg White, but mostly because they were chicks, and her father never quite understood that; but any of the greats from the ‘60s and ‘70s were fair game for him.
After her mom died they played drums more than they talked, or sat down together for meals, or whatever it was normal families did. Ariadne would drum after school, and when her dad came home she’d go upstairs and make dinner and he’d play for awhile. During dinner they’d drum on the table, playing a game her dad had made up for her when she was learning: progressively more complicated riffs that the other had to imitate and expound upon. No one ever won, but it was fun.
Then her dad brought home the book on morse code one night in midwinter, when it got dark early. They altered things slightly for their skill set; a dash became three tapped beats, while a dot was one tapped beat, with the usual one beat of silence between elements, three between letters, seven between words. It took them a little while to learn everything, and in the beginning they were painfully slow, but they had the rhythm and eventually it got so they’d bring their drum sticks to the table and have their conversations that way. They got to be fast, and it reached the point where they could talk aloud and tap out morse beneath their conversation, telling secrets in public, hiding in plain sight.
Somewhere in there, morse code became Ariadne’s language of truth.
She does not tell this story when she gives the eulogy at her father’s funeral, but she taps it while she talks, and if no one but her and Dad understand--well, isn’t that the point?
Afterwards when Ariadne is being hugged by people she hardly knows, she fingers her totem in her pocket and thinks that this makes her an orphan, but maybe she’s too old to identify as such. She thinks maybe she should stop dreaming while she can still dream in sleep (sometimes in taps, but that’s--well). Not because her father’s dead; he had no unfinished business in or with her, really, and she doubts he’ll show up among her projections. She loved him, to be sure, but when he died it made sense, and he tapped his last words to her.
--I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's the record.
It was a reference to his favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, and Ariadne had tapped back
--You may go gentle into that good night. I love you.
and that was that, that was all okay. But she knew he would like her to settle down, to live in one place and have children and teach them how to draw and play the drums and do whatever they would like most in the world to do, and being a criminal wasn’t exactly conducive to that. Inception gave her enough money to finish school, and now she’s inherited everything from her dad as well--she doesn’t need the money. She could get out.
Arthur calls a couple days later and offers her a job in New Zealand.
--
Arthur’s trying to ease back in, now that Cobb’s become a family man. An easy job befits Saito’s first extraction, anyway. Just because you’ve spent time in limbo doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing--in fact, limbo might make things worse, but what Saito wants, Saito gets. Eames has signed on as well, and because Yusuf has decided to stay in Mombasa, they wind up with Beatrice as their chemist. Arthur’s worked with her before, and she behaves like someone’s grandmother, but she’s damn good nonetheless.
Arthur calls Ariadne last. He’s not sure if he wants to take her on, for one thing, though Saito suggests her. She’s young. Good, maybe great, but young, and they don’t really need a great architect for this job, anyway. They could probably even use Nash, although he’d probably piss his pants if he had to work with Saito.
Arthur doesn’t pursue the second reason he doesn’t want to call Ariadne very far, because it makes him uncomfortable. It’s just something about her that’s--bright, he’ll say. Pure might be a better word, but it sounds so maudlin, like he’s trying to imply that he and Cobb (because it was mostly he and Cobb, if he’s honest with himself) somehow corrupted her. If she was that clean, she wouldn’t have come in the first place. If she were that pure, she wouldn’t have been so good.
Arthur calls her.
She says yes almost immediately, but doesn’t tell him much else. Which isn’t surprising, because Arthur isn’t one for small talk, but something in her tone makes him wonder what’s going on. He texts her the flight information within the hour, made up under the name of the fake passport Cobb gave her for her first job, and she meets them in Auckland two days later, bags under her eyes.
“Sorry,” she says, like there’s something to apologize for. “I can’t sleep on planes.”
They start discussing details in Arthur’s hotel in Auckland, Ariadne and Eames sitting cross-legged on the bed, Saito and Beatrice in stiff-backed desk chairs. Arthur stands and paces. When he tells them the mark isn’t militarized, Eames snorts and says, “Are you certain, darling?” Arthur can feel himself scowling.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “I’m certain.”
Ariadne taps a tattoo against her leg, fast and with a steady beat, but Arthur doesn’t pay it much mind.
The mark is a professor at the university in Dunedin, so after a couple days in Auckland they fly south to start the real work. They take separate flights, just to be safe, but he and Ariadne end up on layover in Christchurch together, browsing magazines and pretending not to know one another. She’s tapping again, quickly, and there’s a pattern to it that seems familiar but he doesn’t quite recognize. He wonders if it’s the drum line to a familiar song, though he’s never been much for popular music, and it doesn’t really sound like a drum line, anyway. He doesn’t ask her. He’ll figure it out eventually--he always does.
They reconvene at a warehouse by the harbor, and everyone goes to work--Eames needs to tail the mark’s husband, and Ariadne’s designing a level that’s a cross between that bamboo structure that was atop the MoMA a few summers ago and something from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or at least that’s what Ariadne says, although she can’t remember if the scene she’s thinking of is from Crouching Tiger or Hero. When she talks about it she moves her arms around a lot, and talks about organic architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright and Fallingwater. Arthur thinks she may be putting too much thought into this, but she seems happy. Beatrice is doing--something--that she seems to have even more trouble explaining herself clearly than Ariadne. She’s been in the business a long time, and Arthur trusts her. Somewhat. He’ll call Yusuf, later, and ask him to explain some things. And Saito is on the phone with Cobb intermittently, and then he is meditating. Arthur wonders again why he took this job, but since Saito is matching the client’s price--well, there’s that.
He goes for a walk by the ocean, and oh God the accents here are ridiculous. It’s kind of a relief Eames is a good forger, even though Arthur wouldn’t tell him so to his face.
--
One week in, Ariadne asks Arthur to go under with her and test the first dream level, the bamboo one.
It’s hard to explain: there’s bamboo everyone, and it’s bound together into ladders, twisted into tunnels. Arthur grew up in Iowa (yes, he’s heard the jokes; don’t make them) and once in his life, when he was very young, he went to a maze made of bales of hay, piled atop each other to create three stories that could be crawled up and through and around. This is like that, only the bamboo sways lightly and sometimes opens up into little forest groves, and occasionally into larger forest groves with thick copses of bamboo, where Ariadne has somehow made fucking pandas.
“Ariadne,” Arthur says. “Pandas?”
“Well,” Ariadne blushes a little. “I thought they were cute.”
They are, but that’s not the point.
“How do they work?” Arthur asks. “You realize we don’t usually have animals in our dreams, unless the dreamer has some fucked up projections?” And Arthur has seen some fucked up projections.
“Oh,” Ariadne says, looking flustered. “They’re like non-playable characters, in video games? They’re sort of automated robots. So they’re properly part of the architecture--they just have activity loops they run through, and then repeat.”
Arthur watches one of the pandas, and looks at Ariadne sidelong. “You know you could get some serious business out of this, if you wanted. No one else is doing it.”
Ariadne shrugs, “Would it really help with an extraction? I just did it for fun.”
“It could help,” Arthur says, turning thoughtful. “If animals were a big part of the mark’s life, or we were working on, like, a Greenpeace activist or something. Some people trust animals, more than humans, and animals can’t be forged. It could help with an inception, actually.”
And then Ariadne is tapping again, and Arthur really needs to figure that out.
They wake up. Ariadne goes back to her models, where she’s working on the first level. Which is in a series of linked underwater caves, although Ariadne says she’s going to put an Escher waterfall in one of them, at the surface, if anyone ever gets up there. The mark likes to travel, been to China a few times, and on her most recent trip had gone diving in underwater caves in South America. So the levels make sense, but Arthur hadn’t expected Ariadne to latch unto the ideas so thoroughly. This is not the sort of thing an architect does on their first job. Hell, he’s seen architects fifty jobs in who are afraid to try anything but cities and buildings. Which are by no means easy, but they are far more conventional--they fall within the training most architecture students receive. Ariadne is working somewhere else entirely.
He wonders if she still dreams, what they’re like.
She’s putting an Escher waterfall in, ‘just for fun.’
She’s tapping again.
--
Arthur doesn’t dream when he sleeps, but sometimes when he’s asleep ideas come to him fully formed. That’s how he figures out what Ariadne’s tapping--he wakes up, one arm thrown over his pillow, and he knows. There’s no other way to explain it. It’s like sleep loosens up all the information that he’s stored in his brain, and the first thing he thinks is morse code. Ariadne. Morse code.
His architect is tapping out things in morse code. He doesn’t know what to do with this information, because she could be spying on the team or she could be just tapping, but who does that?
He waits for her to do it again. It takes nearly all day, but when he’s in the middle of a conversation with Eames he hears the beat coming from Ariadne and her models.
“So,” Eames is saying. “I think that I’m all set, I just need to talk to Ariadne a little about how I can work the husband into the first level.”
“Okay,” Arthur says, and Eames looks at him sort of blankly, and Arthur realizes this is because normally he’d have approximately twenty collections and clarifications, but he moves in Ariadne’s direction anyway, fully aware that Eames is watching him and will probably have twenty questions himself, when this is done.
She has a sketch pad open on her knees, and is tapping the tail of the eraser on the spiral. It’s only now that he recognizes the tapping as morse and is hearing it again, that Arthur fully realizes how fast Ariadne’s been doing this: it’s clear that three taps are a dash, but he can only translate one in every four of her letters before he loses track.
He’s rusty. And he still needs to explain himself to Eames.
“Ariadne,” he hisses. “Taps in morse.”
“Whatever you say, darling,” Eames replies easily. “Just don’t come to me when you realize stalking won’t get you in our dear architect’s pants.”
“I don’t,” Arthur hisses. “Want in Ariadne’s pants.”
“What?” Ariadne calls.
“Nothing,” they say simultaneously, and she twists around and looks at them skeptically.
“Arthur wants in your pants,” says Eames, and Arthur punches him in the shoulder.
“Well good thing I’m wearing a skirt, then,” says Ariadne, and goes back to her sketchpad.
Eames raises an eyebrow at Arthur, and Saito gives him both an earful for unprofessionalism. But that evening when Arthur leaves the warehouse, Beatrice catches him by the elbow and whispers, “You know, I think she likes you.”
It is at this point that Arthur remembers Beatrice has a bit of a reputation as a yenta. He hopes she and Eames don’t talk. Ever.
Which is very, very unlikely.
Arthur goes to the university library that night to brush up on morse code. The library is a big glass and stone concoction, crawling with the sort of undergraduates Arthur usually goes out of his way to avoid. But he finds the book and lodges himself in a study room, glaring at anyone who comes in talking about “reservations” or saying “your time’s up, mate” or “don’t you see I’m signed up for this slot?” The problem is that he knows morse code already, so the book isn’t much help. Ariadne’s just too fast for him, which is ridiculous, because he’s the best point man there is and knows everything.
It’s not like anyone is fluent in morse code. It’s fucking morse code. It doesn’t even make sense that Ariadne knows it, because she’s barely over twenty and as far as Arthur knows has never worked in air traffic control or run an amateur radio. And it’s Arthur’s job to know these things.
Arthur turns the things he does know about Ariadne over in his head: twenty-four years old. Born and raised in Quebec. Fluent in English and French. Three semesters into an architecture degree program. Dead mother. That’s all; that’s all he has. It had seemed like enough--Cobb trusted her, and she was too green to have many secrets, she seemed too good to be a double agent.
Still, Arthur isn’t paid to trust people. He needs to learn to understand Ariadne’s morse code.
He shuts the book and goes home.
--
His solution is to jot down Ariadne’s dashes and dots in his moleskine, where he can translate later. So when she starts tapping at the next day’s group meeting, Arthur takes those down instead of the notes he’d intended to make, and figures the team won’t be any worse off for it.
This is what he gets: God, Eames, I don’t want to look at your chest hair. Could you just do up one more button? Please. Beatrice looks like I imagine Beatrice Potter. I wonder if she lives somewhere with a garden with rabbits. But if she had a garden, why is she here? Because it’s winter in England, you dumbass. Like it is stateside. Clearly, no carrots, so no need to be around.
It goes on like that for two pages, so she’s not a spy, or if she is she’s an extremely unhelpful one, prone to flights of fancy. It reads more like a one-sided conversation, a series of observations. Like their architect is actually thinking in morse code. Which seems relatively harmless, but bizarre.
Arthur thinks he knows considerably less about Ariadne than he thought. He remembers kissing her, because someone (okay: Mal) had played that one on him once and it seemed only right to pass it along. But now he wonders why he did it. Why kiss someone you barely know, in a dream?
The answer’s simple, like they usually are: because that’s what you do in dreams. You kiss people you barely know, and damn the consequences. There’s no risk, and you aren’t worried.
It’s been awhile since Arthur dreamed like that; he’d forgotten.
Arthur keeps working on Ariadne’s morse code, anyway. It’s almost a subconscious desire--once he’s figured out she’s doing, he can’t stop listening to it. He gets faster, too, and eventually he doesn’t need to jot her comments in his moleskine and he can just translate them in his head.
--Underwater level’s almost done, what a relief. I’ll bring Beatrice under with me to test it.
--Shouldn’t have gone out drinking with Eames and Beatrice last night, ugh.
(That one makes Arthur nervous.)
--Saito is like the Man personified. Dad would’ve hated him.
And then there’s a series of cliches, inserted if anything arises in conversation that makes them applicable, of which Ariadne seems to have an endless supply:
--I’m happy as a clam. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Nervous as a cat on a porch full of rocking chairs. A rolling stone gathers no moss. Raining cats and dogs. Barking up the wrong tree. Everything’s right as rain. Cat’s away, the mice will play. Solitary as a hog on ice.
(The last two are said in relation to Arthur. The first makes him nervous, the second makes him uncomfortable.)
He doesn’t have much time to worry about Ariadne’s nonsense, however entertaining, because the job is only two days out, and he needs to confer with Saito and make sure everyone knows their roles. Beatrice is dreaming the first level; the mark is dreaming the second. Eames will forge the mark’s husband in the first level, and hopefully when they get to the second level Saito will be able to find everything he needs to in a sunken treasure chest somewhere.
The architecture is still absurd, but otherwise it’s simple enough.
--
The first rule of any job is not to think it’s easy, which Arthur probably wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t been so fucking distracted by the architect’s morse code. But he was distracted, so it does happen.
The mark is going to a conference in Christchurch, so they get her while she’s alone in the hotel. So that’s easy. But once they get in the dream, it’s the pandas. Eames is supposed to talk to the mark, as her husband, about how he’s worried she’s keeping secrets from him, and then they’d move up to the second level. The thing is, she’s distracted by the pandas. They’re too cute. It should be a cakewalk.
Except there are pandas. The mark keeps sushing Eames to go over and pet them, because she’s afraid they’ll run away if he talks. Arthur should be running point, and dealing with this, and he can see Eames making frantic gestures at him, and Ariadne is fucking tapping.
Arthur is a skilled pointman. And he’s listening to his architect’s insipid thoughts in morse code instead of solving their problem It’s genuinely pathetic.
Luckily for all of them, Eames is a good forger, and he somehow uses the pandas to his advantage; Arthur doesn’t follow their conversation completely, as it seems to be the sort of thing that only makes sense in dreams, or to someone who has been stalking the mark for a month and a half. Then Eames and the mark go to sleep next to a panda, so at least that part was easy. Damn panda-sexuals. But at least when they move up the next level Arthur is pretty sure they have the information they need, to open the chest.
If they can find it.
Saito is supposed to find it, of course, but the title of the extractor encompasses more than that, because the extractor should be planning the whole job. In some ways Arthur and Eames had been walking Saito through the process of being an extractor, with Cobb consulting via phone.
The point is, they split up. Eames stays with the mark, still as her husband. Beatrice goes with Saito. Arthur is left with Ariadne. He’d really prefer not to be with Ariadne. Who is tapping.
--I’d really prefer not to be with Arthur.
Okay, then. Arthur shouldn’t be bothered by this, but he kind of is. Only then they have their oxygen tanks on, and they’re swimming. Ariadne knows the caves better than he does, so Arthur follows her. He’s constantly surprised at how small she is, but this is the first time he’s seen her so close to nude, and it kind of shocks him. She swims well, though, maybe because this is a dream and maybe because she’s trying to shake him.
Not that he’d let her. They don’t need to be in pairs, strictly speaking, because the kick will come wherever they are and they all have guns, in case. But there are projections swimming around, and if they get close to the chest the projections may get violent. So, better safe.
They get to a junction, and Ariadne jerks her head to the left, which seems to Arthur to lead further to the center of the caves. He scans the floor of the caves, but doesn’t see anything like a chest; some rubble, maybe, and a few fish Ariadne has rigged up like the pandas. Only uglier.
They end up in a vast cavern, and Ariadne swims up to the surface, looking smug when he breaks the water and can see properly.
There’s no waterwheel, but otherwise it’s a perfect Escher waterfall.
“Were you even looking for the chest?” are the first words out of Arthur’s mouth, even though he wants to be astounded, he should be astounded. It’s just--it’s way better than Penrose steps. It’s also totally superfluous, like the pandas that almost botched the job.
Ariadne looks unrepentant, “It might’ve been this way.” She hoists herself out of the water, squirming, and walks over to where the waterfall meets the pool, where a stream splits off and starts to flow up.
“Actually, it might still be this way. Come here,” she says, and Arthur clambers out of the water and follows her, because he’s not sure what else to do.
She goes into the waterfall, stepping into the stream. She disappears.
Arthur follows her, and of course Ariadne put a fucking cave behind the waterfall, which M. C. Escher couldn’t even make work, and there’s a chest in it. Ariadne kneels down and unlatches it, and Arthur has to wonder if she knew it’d work out this way all along. She probably did. Ariadne is starting to scare him more than anyone else on the team, because it seems like there are so many things about her he’s missed.
She may also be beginning to turn him on more than anyone else on the team (which, okay, isn’t much of a competition). For the exact same reason.
“So,” says Ariadne. “It’s done.”
And Arthur says he supposes it is.
Ariadne taps something idly, with her fingernails.
--But we don’t need to wake up quite yet.
Then:
--I really should’ve thought through making a level that put Arthur shirtless.
Arthur can’t help himself. He crouches down, and picks up a rock. His beat is a bit slower than Ariadne’s, but he thinks he’s got it.
--Why?
Ariadne looks--Arthur isn’t sure what Ariadne looks like. She looks shocked. She looks like she’s going to cry. She looks like she understood exactly what he said. Or tapped.
She sits down across from him and picks up a rock, tapping it rapidly.
--Because you tricked me into kissing you on inception and sometimes I’m a still stupid little girl and think that meant something. Because you called and I said I’d do this job even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Then she pauses, and looks at him directly.
--Because when you’re in nothing but swim trunks I can’t believe you normally wear something on the order of thirteen articles of clothing. And because I think the Escher waterfall turned you on at least a little bit. And I kind of knew it would.
And suddenly it’s like Arthur can dream again, because damn the consequences. He is on Ariadne, and he is kissing her, and it isn’t chaste. And Ariadne’s kissing back, hard, and her small body is pressed against his. She pushes him backwards through the waterfall, and he lets her. And then they are plunging into the pool behind them and--
That’s the kick. They’re awake, and Ariadne is blinking at him blearily.
She is not blinking in morse code.
Arthur exhales. They have the information they need. The job is done. He rolls over on his side and kisses Ariadne again, before he can think about it, because if he does this outside the dream that makes it real.
She smiles against his lips and brings her hands up to the back of his head. She taps a finger on the nape of his neck.
--We need to give them a kick.
But they wait a little longer. But then Eames and Saito and Beatrice are awake, too, and their eyes are bleary and Arthur realizes that now they all have to pack up the PASIV and get out of the room, but--his lips are still on Ariadne's. Her hands are in his hair, which should annoy him but doesn’t.
They pull apart, and Beatrice looks gleeful, Saito knowing. Eames is stifling laughter. Arthur is blushing, he can feel it, but Ariadne isn’t, and that makes him blush more.
When they’re in the hallway, Eames lets his laughter loose.
“Finally met your match, Arthur? Someone to pull the stick out of your arse?”
Arthur doesn’t say anything. Instead he grabs Ariadne’s hand and taps
--Yes into her palm.
“Don’t worry,” Ariadne says. “I’ll take good care of him.”