Current mood:	nervous
Current music:	unkle - the runaway
Entry tags:	fic, fic: inception

inception fic: sense memory
sense memory
inception; arthur/ariadne; nc-17; 6,530 words; time to wake up.

oh man, have I ever fallen for this fandom hard.  no huge spoilers for the movie, though it probably won't make a lot of sense if you haven't seen it already.




The streetlight sprouts from the ground like bamboo, black metal that unfolds until the lantern blooms like a lit flower.

"You're still building from memory," Arthur says.  She's constructing London this time, somewhere north of the National Gallery.  It's an exercise - she knows that none of the dreams will be set in London.  This is just one of Arthur's tests.  "Come on, Ariadne.  Memory construction is the mind being lazy."

"You build everything from memory," Ariadne snaps back, annoyed.  She's unused to criticism, especially criticism as sharp and candid as Arthur's usually is; she's always excelled at everything she's ever done, the critique of her teachers and professors tempered by their obvious admiration of her natural ability.  But Arthur's different: cool, unflappable, and clearly not impressed with her learning curve.  She's been working with Arthur for a few days now, and as much as she likes him, the process is thoroughly frustrating.  "Jesus. I'm building London, Arthur.  It's location specific - it's not like I'm building something new."

"You can build pieces from your memory," he says, resting his hip against one of the cars parked illegally on the road.  For a brief moment she considers arming the car with a car alarm, but decides against it.  The last thing she needs to do is draw attention to them; she can still remember the feeling of the knife sliding into her gut, something that feels far more real than it should.   "Why do you think I have you building something specific?  You need to learn how to break it apart, even if it's when you're building something you know, something that's real and recognizable - it can't be exactly the same as the real thing.  Piece it together.  Don't think of an entire landscape, think of the small details first: a mailbox, a streetlight, a sidewalk.  Pick focal points that makes the architecture believable and just fill in the rest, like colouring.  That way you won't be tempted to let your mind fall back on memory construction."

Ariadne takes a deep breath and a rainbow of graffiti bubbles up along a swath of brick wall, a garbage can pops up filled with fast food wrappers, empty coffee cups, and used syringes.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the pedestrians down the street turn their heads and look at her for a brief second before they turn back and continue on their way.

Arthur smirks, raising his arms over his head and stretching.  The fabric just below the collar of his shirt bunches in the dip of his shoulders, his vest shifting with the rest of his body.  Even in his dreams, Arthur wear suits.

"Try it again."





On Wednesday, Marie-Louise calls her while Arthur is sketching out a housing complex they used during a job in Budapest; it reminds her of the post-war council housing that the professor uses in his lessons as an example of unimaginative, but efficient design.  Her cell phone is set on vibrate, but it's quiet enough in the small warehouse that he can hear it go off in her jacket pocket.  His arm slides against the small of her back as he reaches around to pluck the buzzing phone from her jacket, depositing it in her upturned palm.

"Marilou?" he asks, peeking at the call display.

"Partner on a project," she explains, continuing when he shoots her a puzzled look. "For class?  Introduction to passive environmental systems."

His look morphs into something darker, and she suddenly feels like she's been caught out after curfew.  She knows she's younger than the other architects they've used in the past.  Arthur isn't particularly forthcoming with information, but she's been able to weasel out little details of the architects they've worked with, though he won't talk about the one on their last job at all, which makes her more than a little nervous.

She tosses the phone on the table, next to her cup of tea that has gone cold and Arthur's half-eaten roast beef sandwich, letting the call roll to voicemail.

"Who designed this?" Ariadne asks no one in particular, twisting the paper around and tapping her pencil against it.  She crosses out the parking lot that snakes between two of the buildings, circling poorly devised staircases.  "Too much open space.  Why didn't they just draw the projections a map?"

He laughs under his breath, rubbing at the light five o'clock shadow along the line of his jaw.  "I designed it."





Arthur glances down at his watch.  She can't remember the last time she wore a watch; between her cell phone and the ipod she habitually keeps stuffed in her pocket, she's already got enough gadgets that tell time.  The only person she knows other than Arthur who wears one is the professor, but it had been a gift from his wife or daughter, some sentimental rather than practical thing. 

"How much longer do we have?" Ariadne asks.  She's surprised how easy it is to lose track of time in the dream world; even as the dreamer, she finds it difficult measuring time.

"About five minutes," he answers, tugging at the cuffs of his shirt.  His cuff links are tiny gold apples, and he runs his thumb over one as she watches.  "You should always dream yourself wearing a watch."

"Dream myself wearing a watch?"

Arthur nods.  "It's harder to do than crafting the physical space - your subconscious tends to take over when you dream your physical self, including what you wear, but with practice, you could conceivably look however you want."  He scans her body with his eyes, finally resting them on her slim hips.  He doesn't even blink when shoots him a hard look, like he wants her to know exactly what he's looking at, thinking about.  "But we usually use forgers for that kind of work."

"Forgers?"

"Just like you manipulate the world of the dream, they can manipulate their form within it.  It's their specialty.  It's hard to find a skilled forger because of the amount of mental discipline and skill required.  That's what Cobb's doing in Mombasa."

"Finding us a forger?"  Cobb found her through the professor, and she figures that being an architect in the real world requires the same skills as being an architect in a dream, the buildings she's used to sketching on paper instead sketched in three dimension.  She's not sure what skill set lends itself to be a forger, though.  "How exactly does that work?"

"Well, he's one we've used before."  Arthur's look suddenly becomes distant, staring at the complex hedge maze she built behind the small, mundane house with yellow shutters.  He snaps out of it and shoots her a snide smile, full of derision, although she's pretty sure it's not for her.  "He's an acquired taste."

She smiles, ducking her head down until she's pretty sure he can't see her face.  She isn't quite sure what to make of Arthur; he has the methodical, calculating nature that she assumes is an asset in a point man, cool and unflappable, but he approaches everything with a clandestine warmth that she can feel in the worlds he creates, a humor he mutes beneath layers of perfectly tailored wool and cotton.

"So, the watch - how do you know that it will keep time properly, anyway?  I mean, if the boundaries of the real world can be broken in a dream, can't time change as well?"

In the distance she can hear the soft sound of footsteps running through the maze, Arthur's projections catching up with her as she alters the dream.

"The timeline can shift - past, present, future - but time measurement stays the same," he explains, as he wraps his hand around her elbow, leading her away from the maze and toward the house.  His palm is warm, and the feeling is odd in its complexity; Ariadne is unused to dreaming this vividly.  She can understand immediately how easy it would to lose herself in this world, in dreams that don't feel like dreams.  "The ratio of real time to dream time, dream within a dream time, is always steady."

He stops when they reach the door.  The door is locked, and Arthur eyes her suspiciously over his shoulder before he turns back toward her.  She wants to reach beside him and touch the brass knocker, a slightly warped horseshoe.  She wonders if her mind built it with all the flaws she remembers.

There's shouting in the distance now, some unintelligible mash of words.  It sounds like the hissing of a snake.

"What is this place?" Arthur asks sternly.

She wakes up.





There's a small corner store near her apartment, just across from the Saint-Sulpice metro stop and beside a cafe with a huge maroon awning that serves the best cr�me br�l�e she's ever tasted.  Ariadne contemplates stopping at the cafe for dinner, usually a Friday night ritual, but it's Thursday, and she had to give up her part-time job at the small architecture firm in the 3rd arrondissement in early spring, so money is tight.

Instead, she buys a can of leek and potato soup and a small baguette from the corner store.  The store owner remembers her and smiles when he passes over her change.

She has an odd feeling that she's being watched as she walks home.  She doubles back around the block, looking for familiar faces before she finally steps up to the door of her building and fishes out her keys.  In the apartment below her, she can hear her neighbour fighting with his girlfriend again, the sort of all out brawl that usually ends up meaning she has to sleep with her ipod on, the fight boiling over into sex that echoes through the entire building.

She eats by herself on her bed, bowl resting between her legs, re-reading an old French translation of All Quiet on the Western Front while her mind churns with landscapes and structures.





It's a cityscape this time, an anonymous row of highrises that stretch along a busy six lane street.  Cities like this - North American beasts of construction -  are Ariadne's least favourite to build; while their functionality and sharpness appeal to her, she's always preferred the subtle elegance of Renaissance architecture.  Cities like this seem too easy to reproduce - the mishmash of design principles and concepts, no natural flow - almost any formulation is believable to the mind.  Their minute details, though, offer enough of a challenge to make this an exercise worthy of her.

An elderly woman walking a little white dog bumps into her as she crosses the street with Arthur.  "Sorry dear," the woman says, patting Ariadne on the shoulder.

"Well, your subconscious seems to be in a good mood today," Ariadne says, shifting closer to Arthur as she builds a park between two skyscrapers, plotting a path for them between the trees.  A handful of people appear out of nothingness, filling the green space.  A young couple walks toward her and Arthur on the path, their fingers intertwined. 

"A romantic, are we?" Ariadne jokes, watching the girl lean up to kiss the boy, running a hand through his hair.  When Arthur doesn't respond, she turns to him, and the look on his face makes her feel like she's ten seconds away from another knife in her gut.

"Are you ok?" she asks, her voice wavering between hard and concerned.  He nods sharply, but doesn't stop tracking the couple until they turn, following one of the forks in the path that disappears behind a building.

Arthur's projections feel different than Cobb's, which seems like a bizarre distinction to make given they all seem to be almost entirely anonymous.  The way they interact with her dream is distinct, though; Arthur's projections feel calm, like a stream of water running over her, while Cobb's had felt angry and irritated from the start, like a nest of hornets that been kicked.  She wonders if the projections really are bits of Arthur, if the forms they choose to take and the roles they choose to fill are representative of something.  Arthur has only brought her into his dreams a couple of times, and as far as she can tell, the projections of her subconscious don't mean anything to her conscious mind.

"Arthur-" she starts, reaching up to touch his shoulder.  The tenseness she finds there is disconcerting, and it reflects itself in the projections around them, several of them stopping to stare at her, their fingers clenched into fists by their sides. 

He looks down at her.

"Time to wake up."






The restaurant is half-full with patrons.  She's never been to it before - it's in the east side of Paris, the 12th arrondissement, in a little conclave that she's never bothered investigating.  Arthur chose it, said he knew a little place that served good curry, led her through the maze of Paris with an ease that made her wonder if he'd ever spent time living in the city.  It's the first time they've met outside of the warehouse, and it strikes her as odd that she knows so much of what goes on inside Arthur's head while she knows almost nothing about him.  She doesn't know where he was born or even how old he is, but she knows what his subconscious feels like when he's in pain, how his mind creates and destroys.

They get a table near the kitchen; Arthur shoves a pack of sugar under one of the short legs and loosens his tie, shrugging his jacket back onto his chair.  Their waitress is a woman who speaks French with a thick Indian accent and brings them two glasses of water before Ariadne orders for the both of them.  Arthur's French is dubious at best. 

By the time their food arrives, the small shoptalk has faded into a prickly silence.

"Who was that?" Ariadne asks as she digs into her plate of jadoh.  The spiciness burns her tongue; she loves it.

"Who?"

"The girl in the park."

Arthur lets the tines of his fork drag on his plate; they make a sharp, angry noise. "No one."

"Why don't I believe you?"

Arthur drops his fork, leaning back into his chair and away from the table.  He takes a deep breath, his eyes darting to the loud kitchen beside them. "Listen, they'll be a lot you'll see in our minds - a lot I'll see in your mind.  That doesn't mean you have a right to know," he says.  The words aren't unkind or harsh, just a recitation of facts.  "We can't always control what shows up in a dream."

Ariadne smiles awkwardly.  She feels like she's just been caught snooping through his things, invading his privacy, even though he's the one who offered it up.  Always too curious for her own good.  "Sorry."

"No, I understand," he says, sitting up straight again.  He brushes off his vest before taking a sip of water. "You never know when someones baggage is going to stab you in the stomach... or shoot you in the leg."

"She shot you in the leg?"

"Kneecap."

They smile at each other like it's a joke, because there's no other way to treat it, because thinking of what Cobb turned his wife into in his head is too sad to think about seriously, and Ariadne hadn't even known her.  It had frightened her to see the necrosis of a memory like that, what the mind can do with pain and sadness.

"Anyway, it was good work in there.  The more comfortable the mind is, the more the subconscious relaxes, and that's usually when the target's guard goes down and their subconscious starts to fill the dream with information.  Secrets."

"Hence Miss No One."  She mentally scolds herself as soon as the words leave her mouth.

Arthur just follows a shrug with a nod.  The tension between them bleeds out, replaced by a quiet semi-comfort.  She wants to trust Arthur, but she never quite feels like she's on solid footing with him, like at any moment she's going to say or do something wrong.  But there are moments where she feels like she's seeing Arthur and not the unflappable projection of himself he likes to pass off, and it grounds her a bit.

"You're good, you know," he says without meeting her eyes, and she watches carefully as he pokes at his food, dissecting it more than consuming it.  "You're probably the best architect I've ever seen, and I've seen more than a few."

Ariadne can't fight the smile that tugs at her mouth.  Her cheeks begin to warm, and she tries desperately to push down the rising blush.  She feels exactly fourteen years old.

"What?" he asks, pausing before he eats another forkful of his curry.

"Nothing," she answers.  He reaches for his small cup of masala tea.  His fingers are long and slender, and Ariadne appreciates their design.  It's funny how much of Arthur is reflected in the dreamscapes he creates, how much his body reminds her of the lines and designs he chooses.  "It just- it sure didn't seem like you felt that way."

"Most architects spend months learning the dreamscape.  You've picked it up in less than two weeks."  He sips his tea carefully, watching the families and couples seated at the tables around them, his eyes shifting around the cramped restaurant. "Just had to keep you motivated.  I know your type.  The more I seemed unimpressed, the harder you'd work to impress me."

"Asshole," she huffs incredulously. 

He runs his tongue over his teeth, clearly amused with himself.  Their waitress wanders over to refill their water glasses before disappearing back into the fray of the kitchen.  "So, you're only in your second year?"

"Yeah.  But I've got enough credits to graduate next year.  I'm just taking the one course over the summer."

"Introduction to passive environmental systems."

"Yeah," she laughs lightly, impressed that he remembers.  "It's all about how to design with natural light, gravity, and sound.  Basically how to build something that complements the power and limitations of natural forces, and achieves a balance with its surroundings."  She pauses for a moment.  "I think that's why I like dreambuilding so much.  There's so much in the real world that constricts creation.  In a dream, there's nothing I can't build, no rule I can't bend."

He smiles at her, a wide, pure smile that she's never seen on him before.  It sends a warm rush through her body.  "So what you're telling me is that you're a control freak."

"Shut up."

"See?"

"Just wait until you get into my next dream, buddy.  Clowns.  Spiders.  Mimes.  The works."

His face suddenly goes serious, his mouth drawn into a flat line.  He leans over the table a bit, until she can smell the sweet hint of his cologne.  "How do you know we're not in a dream right now, Ariadne?"

"If this was my dream," she says, leaning closer to him so she can steal the last piece of chapati off his plate before she shifts back again, "we'd be eating thai."





He walks her home, even though she says she's fine making her way back to her apartment by herself.  He offers to call a taxi, but she declines, instead leading him down the narrow street still wet from the short rain shower that had started while they were having dinner.

The metro is filled with the usual clutter of commuters and tourists, teenagers in tacky leather jackets and businesswomen with smudged make-up and tired eyes.  His thigh brushes up against hers on the 4th line, cramped together on the tiny seats that stretch down the metro cars, and she feels the same warmth pool in her gut as when he smiled at her over dinner, a giddy heat that makes her feel twitchy, every nerve in her body firing.  He mentions something about the New York City subway that gets lost in the din of the car, floating between the other conversations and the noise of the air slicing around them in the tunnel.

It's only when they reach her stop, when he follows her out of the packed car and up the stairs into the cool, evening air, that she realizes she spent the entire ride watching for his projections, looking for the telltale signs that they were on to her.

He steps into the doorway of her building before she does, leaning up against the callbox on the wall.  Like he's been here before.

"It was you," Ariadne says sharply, pausing before she leans away from him, trying to move back.  Suddenly aware of Arthur's hand closing around hers, she tries to tug it free, but he spreads his fingers between hers and tightens his grip.  He pulls her closer, until she's in the doorway with him, hidden from the rest of the street.   "You followed me home the other night, didn't you?"

"Yes."  The distance between them disappears until she's flush up against him, the hand still laced with his tugged behind his back. "Sorry, I needed to know where you lived." 

He doesn't look apologetic in the slightest. 

"You could have asked me," she says, even though she knows, instinctively and bone deep, that it had nothing to do with needing to know where she lived.  It's something far more complicated than that; she doesn't think trust comes easily for Arthur.  Part of that deep-sown mistrust is what makes him such a thorough, talented point man.  She's watched him over the past few weeks, listened to him detail the breakdown of his research on Fischer, the way he checks and re-checks, methodical in his precision, like the person he trusts the least is himself.

It starts to rain again, just a light drizzle that makes a soft, wet noise as it hits the road, the small cars that line the street endlessly, parallel parked inches from each other's bumpers.  A couple of people on the sidewalk scuttle from view, seeking their own shelter from the rain.

Caught up in her own mind, she doesn't realize Arthur is leaning down to kiss her until his nose brushes against hers.  She only has enough time to suck in a sliver of a startled breath before he opens his mouth over hers, kissing her.  She lets loose a soft noise from the back of her throat when his tongue slips into her mouth, her eyebrows above her closed eyes pulling up in surprise, and she suddenly feels him let go of the hand he had trapped behind his back, curling both of them around her hips instead.

When she reaches up and wraps a small hand around his tie gently, her shirt shifts, and Arthur's fingers, still tangled over her hips, slide home over warm skin.  The tips of them snug into the waistband of her jeans, and she shivers into the kiss, putting just enough pressure on his tie to make him bend into her more, her breasts brushing against his chest.

"You should have told me you thought you were being followed," Arthur says after he breaks the kiss, brushing his mouth over her cheekbone before pulling away.  He licks his lips as his hands drop from her hips, his dull nails dragging across her skin as they fall.

He walks away into the rain, back toward the metro, his hands shoved into his pockets.





Their practice on Friday goes horribly wrong. 

She doesn't sleep well the night before, the unexpected heatwave in Paris making the air in her fourth floor apartment stifling without air conditioning.  It's been almost three weeks of mazes, minutes that stretch into hours that stretch into days in the dream world, and when she does sleep, she dreams of nothing but penrose stairs and paradoxes.  Her mind is exhausted, constantly cycling through concepts: stairs, ceilings, walls, skylights, arches.  She closes her eyes and sees only mazes, bleeding far into the distance.

She's unprepared, and she can feel the difference instantly when she brings Arthur into her dream; his subconscious is immediately on edge.  It feels electrified around her, humming dangerously.

"Ariadne," Arthur warns, clearly able to sense something wrong as well.  They're in a city, anonymous and cold; all the street lights turn green, but none of the cars move.  A bike messenger resting against a mailbox looks at her and smiles, but it's a mutilated thing, a flash of teeth that looks more like a threat than anything else.

As soon as she starts building additions to the maze to protect them, the projections swarm, a young girl with freckles swathed across her face reaching her hand into Ariadne's hair and pulling as a balding older man wraps his thick fingers around Ariadne's throat.

"Arthur!" she screams before the pressure on her neck cuts off the sound.  Even though logically she knows that she's in a dream, that when she finally passes out, when the projections rip her to shreds, she'll wake up, untouched, in the warehouse, dreams feel real, along with the pain in them, and her body's natural survival instinct kicks in.  In her panic, she lashes out with her hands, her nails leaving marks in the face of the man choking her.  She can see Arthur out of the corner of her eye, fighting off the projections, pulling at the layers of them surrounding her.  She closes her eyes and wills herself to wake up, imagines dropping off the edge of a building, imagines hitting the cold surface of a lake, but when she opens them again, she sees nothing but the sweaty, angry face of one of Arthur's projections.

She feels it before it starts, the curl of creation in her gut, a force that singes its way through her body until it explodes into her skull.  The projections around her shred as the space shifts, tearing and evaporating.  The walls shift up instantaneously, wallpapered with little sparrows diving through white space. 

She's on her knees, one hand gripping at the familiar rug under her, the other wrapped around her neck; she can still feel the pressure of the projection's hands on her throat, and she rubs at the skin, trying to erase the memory.  She coughs roughly, choking out the last of her panic.

Arthur's hanging onto a bookcase she remembers vividly, steadying himself, his eyes wide with shock.  His fingertips brush against a copy of Black Beauty.

"Baby?" she hears a familiar voice coo, and she can't help it, she can't help but look up at them.  They're standing in the door, the woman in a yellow dress and the man in jeans and a button up shirt.  They look exactly the way she remembers, and sound she lets loose makes her own blood chill.

Arthur's projections reach the door, throwing the couple out of the way as they scramble toward her.  This group looks different than the last - younger, like the small clans of hipster teenagers on the metro when Arthur had taken her home that one night - but the look in their eyes is the same: empty, soulless.  Angry.

She looks up at Arthur, helpless, as he pulls a gun out from the back of his pants and shoots her in the head.





Arthur shows up at her door with a bottle of liquor in his hand.  She didn't ring him up, so she's not quite sure how he managed to sneak past the locked door downstairs, and frankly, she doesn't care.  For a moment she thinks about dismissing him with the line of platitudes she has brewing in her brain, about how she's fine, about how she'll get some sleep and be better than new in the morning.  Instead, she steps aside and lets him in.

She's still embarrassed about what happened this afternoon.  She'd cried when she had woken up, the sort of unbridled crying she hadn't let loose in years, and Arthur, thankfully, had let her be instead of comforting her, like he knew it was something she had to work out for herself.

She had taken off before he returned from the small office in the back, her tangled lead discarded on the floor.

He unscrews the top of the bottle and goes searching for glasses in the cupboards of her small kitchen as she closes her front door.  He laughs gently as he pulls out two of her Snoopy glasses, a christening gift from one of her Parisian friends for her apartment.  She looks at her apartment critically now that she sees Arthur in it; even though she's been living in the same place for almost two years, the space looks bare.  The walls are covered in sketches, drawings of buildings inked on cafe menus and napkins, structures inked on pages ripped out from her sketching book, but the only real pieces of furniture are her bed and the bookcase she bartered for ten euros at the huge flea market on the outskirts of Paris.  There isn't much room for anything else - space is at a premium in the city and her apartment is pretty tiny - but she can't help but feel like a transient in the eyes of others.

He hands her one of the glasses.  She hates whiskey, but she drinks it anyway, appreciative of the burn it makes as it slides down her throat.  She coughs a bit, then hands her glass back over to Arthur, watching as he pours her more.

"You okay?" he finally asks, moving to sit beside her on her bed.  She notices for the first time that he's not in one of his trademark suits, instead clad in what looks a thin shirt with a leather jacket over it.  She's suddenly filled with the urge to sneak her hands inside of it, touch her fingers to the soft material over his chest.

Instead, Ariadne shakes her head and takes another drink.  Blowing out a heavy breath, she speaks.  "What happened?  What... was that?"

"You shifted."

"Shifted?"

"The dreamer completely breaks down and rebuilds the dream in a second - usually into a place where the dreamer's mind feels safe.  I've only seen one person do it before today.  It requires..." he rests his elbows on his knees and looks straight at her as he finishes, "an incredible amount of power."

Suddenly realizing how little she knows about the dreamscape, her mind floods with a thousand questions, mingled in with the anger she feels at herself for not bothering to ask these questions before she climbed into something so unknown.  She doesn't understand where her impulsiveness is coming from; she's always been the girl to ask every question, to map out every decision, account for every possibility.

One question bubbles to the surface.

"Who?" she asks.

"Cobb."  He polishes off the rest of his drink, tipping his head back so his throat is a straight line, working down the alcohol.  Ariadne waits for him to finish, to offer some sort of explanation, but he doesn't.  His secrets are buried deep.

"Who were they?" he asks, filling the awkward silence as he tips the neck of the bottle into her glass before filling up his own again.  She's starting to feel the faintest edge of the alcohol, a warm sedation that settles her frazzled nerves.  "In the dream.  Who were they?"

Her mouth feels too dry to answer, throat swollen with pain she thought she had pushed down years ago, dulled with time.  "My parents."

Arthur's eyes narrow.  "That house with the yellow shutters..."

She remembers the perfect, sunny colour of them.  The horseshoe knocker with the dented curve on the front door.  The horrible sound it used to make when it slammed against the door.

"It burned down when I was ten."  Her mind hadn't aged the projections of her parents a day, still the same way she remembered them back when she was a little girl.  She used to think about it a lot as she was growing up, what her parents would have looked like on her thirteenth birthday, what they would have looked like when she graduated from high school.

She knows she doesn't have to put it together for Arthur, that his mind has already drifted into the logical conclusion.

"I loved that house," Ariadne says, her finger running over the rim of her glass.  "There was this crawlspace beneath the stairs that my father built into a playroom for me with those little glow-in-the-dark stars all over it.  It was tiny, but I used to sneak down at night and sleep in it."

He takes the glasses from their hands and sets it down on the small nightstand beside her bed, on top of the battered copy of All Quiet on the Western Front.

"You have to be careful," he says, letting his hand drift over her knee.  "This is why people get lost in dreams.  Trust me, I understand the temptation to build from memory, to recreate the things you've lost."  There's a sadness there that lets her know instantly that he's telling the truth.  She wonders about the things he's lost, the people stuck in his subconscious.  "But it's not real.  It's not the same."

She thinks about Mal and wonders if her parents would suffer the same fate as projections, if her mother's hands or her father's voice would eventually turn cruel, if they'd be warped by her pain and longing.

So she asks.  Maybe she has a right to know, maybe she doesn't - but she wants to know either way.  "Who was the girl in the park, Arthur?"

He reaches up, his thumb pulling across her cheek before he leans in and kisses her.





Ariadne's fingers run over his sides, finally bare, and his skin is warm and sweaty over her without the armour of his suits and ties.  Arthur watches her with dark eyes as she touches him, explores, dipping her fingertips into the lands and grooves of his body, a quick swipe of her thumb across his nipple.  He doesn't say anything, just lets the ragged sound of his breath fill her apartment as her fingers trip across his ribs and skin drags against skin.

He retaliates with a hand between her legs, no preamble before he sinks two fingers into her.  He's watching her again; she thinks it might be a thing for him, because when she tips her head and looks back at him, he leans down to kiss her with too much tongue and too much teeth, overwhelming when it goes deep and he lets his thumb ride right over her clit.  She comes for the first time like that, with his tongue in her mouth and his fingers filling her.

She only has enough time to reach up and grab for the headboard before he's inside of her again, the thick drag of his cock this time, stretching her with a dull burn.  He tucks his head against the line of her throat, dragging the side of his face along her neck as he fucks her.  The hand not wrapped around the cheap wood of the headboard comes to rest along the exposed line of his jaw, cradling it before her hand slips lower, over his shoulder and down his back, feeling the strength of the muscles there working.

Arthur hooks an arm under her knee and hauls it up, changing the angle into something that makes her gasp, struggle to fill her overworked lungs.





She wakes up.

The first thing she registers is the dim red light from her alarm clock, 4:12 glowing into the dark of her room.  The next thing she notices is that she's alone, her body spread out across the bed.  She's in a t-shirt and panties, normal bed attire, but she feels a slight ache between her legs.  There are no glasses on her nightstand, and she can see the deadbolt on her door is locked.

She runs a thumb along her wrist, searching for the the telltale nicks from the leads, but the only ones she finds have already begun to heal over, the remnants of the last day's training sessions with Arthur. 

She tries to remember what she was doing before Arthur knocked on her door, but she can't remember a thing.





The warehouse is warm, even this early in the morning.  Arthur's already working by the time she wanders in around 6:30, his lanky frame bent over the papers spread out across his workstation, twisting his cell phone in his hand.  It smells like fresh cut grass mixed with coffee inside the airy room, lit by the early morning sun.

"Ariadne," he says with a guarded smile, and she's suddenly filled with a hard, unrelenting doubt.  She's too embarrassed to ask, feels like she's losing her goddamned mind, so she just smiles back.

"Hey," she says as he closes the distance between them, hands in his pockets.  He's wearing a three piece suit, but his jacket is draped over the back of his chair.  His tie is royal blue, and she wants to wrap it around her fist and pull just to see what he would do.

His hand slides into the slightly cupped space at the small of her back, flattening against her spine, heavy.  Squaring his shoulders with hers, he yawns, his eyes thick with sleep.

"Sorry," he says lazily, "I didn't want wake you up.  Cobb ran into some trouble in Mombasa with our previous employers and I had to run some interference here.  He'll be back in Paris in a couple days.  The forger is off to Sydney for some reconnaissance work."

"Oh," she breathes, a quick flood of relief washing over her.

One eyebrow rises, a whisper of a smile on his face.  "Thought it was a dream?"

She shakes her head, not sure if she's lying or not, and he looks at her with blatant scepticism.  She thinks back to the ache between her legs, the ghost of it still lingering like Mal's knife in her side.

"It's okay," he says, darting in to brush his mouth against her cheek.  He turns back to his work, then to the silver briefcase.  "It's normal.  After a while, it's tough to tell the difference."

It isn't reassuring in the slightest.  She feels a chill roll up her spine, through her limbs.

"Wait," she says as he pulls the leads from the machine, setting the clock inside. "How the hell did you lock my door?"





When they wake from the dream - a military compound this time, set at the base of a mountain range - Arthur goes down on her in the lawn chair.  Her lead is still in her wrist when she comes, the line of it tangled over his shoulder.  She rests her hands on his head, fingers brushing over his gelled hair as he watches her come down.

She sees him roll his die after, on her small worktable, when he thinks she isn't looking.  She doesn't see what number lands up.