[fic]

[apiphile]

PREV

At the train station she finds a missed call from Reilly.

"Anything?" she asks, the minute the woman picks up. "Prior & Wells? Innovations? Other employees?"

"It's been a bit sparse," Reilly says cautiously. "Prior went missing, Well's in a hospice. I found Yusuf Iqbal but he says he's talked to you already -"

"Yes," Ariadne says, impatiently. A train passes in the other direction, and the slipstream wrenches her clothes back and forth. "Go on."

"- and I've got a death certificate for Mark Chapel from fifteen years ago," Reilly says, "other than that they've been good at kicking a lot of dust over things. There was an innovations patent but it's been removed and the guy I spoke to at the patents office says it's not in the system any more either."

"Of course," Ariadne says, as her throat closes briefly at the words death certificate.

"I got one name, some guy called Fuhr, Albrecht Fuhr. I have his number, he's working in Moscow." The hopefulness in Reilly's voice is aggravating. She clearly wants a pat on the head or at the very least an explanation, and Ariadne's in no mood for either.

"Send me that, then." Ariadne watches a gull pecking excitedly at something on the platform. She leans closer, and a grey feather stirs in the lump - the last remains of a pigeon. "Thanks."

The next train to arrive is hers, heading back to London, and as she steps into the wound that opens in its side, Ariadne can't help feeling an echo of Mal, speaking furious remembered words in the basement of Dom's mind all those years ago.

But it doesn't matter where it's going. Because you'll be together.

"Fuck," Ariadne says under her breath, leaning against the luggage rack. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

The departure lounge at Heathrow is becoming more familiar to Ariadne than her bedroom, and she struggles to care that this is so, hunched up in the First Class waiting lounge with a small bag at her feet and her phone in her hands, waiting for her to dial.

There are a lot of Doyles in prison in the UK. It took a while, her laptop in front of her and her shoes on the headboard of an anonymous hotel bed, to find the appropriate news story. Stacy Doyle, a minor, and an unidentified young white male in a baseball cap and loose-fitting t-shirt had broken into a shop in South London, where Stacy resided at the time, and tried to steal the contents of the safe.

Although she knew she shouldn't have, Ariadne had snorted to herself in fleeting amusement at the parallel. Stealing the contents of a safe.

The shop's owner, Kahil Sevinç, had surprised them, and in what Stacy described in court as a moment of panic, one or the other of them - Stacy said she couldn't remember whether it had been her or her boyfriend - shoved Sevinç into the sheet glass window extremely hard.

Ariadne had buried her face in her arms for a minute at this; the rest of what she could glean was as she'd expected from Antonia's bitter remarks. Chris Denham fled, Stacy Doyle - already pregnant, though she didn't know it at the time - was caught. Attempts to find Denham were fruitless -

"Of course they were," Ariadne had said to the empty hotel room. "Oh, Eames."

- Not exactly helped by "Chris Denham" being an alias used by four different people, none of them him. Sevinç held on in hospital for the better part of a week but eventually died of a clot in the brain which the doctors believed was caused by the impact of both window and glass-covered pavement.

Now, in the airport lounge, Ariadne taps her finger beside the spot on her phone screen which functions as a call button, the private number of Albrecht Fuhr waiting for her to connect. She's not any more certain now, after another abrupt night's sleep (from which she woke looking for her totem, the jump-cut of dreamless unconsciousness panicking her as neatly as unreal perspectives or repeating faces), whether to assume guilt on Eames's part or not.

It was a long time ago. There's a very good chance - she knows it from a thousand tells in the intervening time, from the broken-line scars on his body which he told her so many interlocking lies about, from a sinking feeling in her body - that whatever happened with poor Kahil Sevinç, Eames has killed someone since.

She stows the thought away for future consideration, and hits call.

"Uh?" says Fuhr, when he picks up.

"Mr Fuhr," Ariadne says, leaning back on the lounge seat; it is comfortable, designed not to be felt on the weary bodies of wealthy travellers. There is no need to make herself hurt for this conversation. "Do you have a minute to clear a few things up for me, about someone you used to work with?"

"That does depend on who you are," Fuhr says. He sounds sleepy. There is no reason that Ariadne can tell why he should be, but his voice is thick and drowsy as a summer bumblebee, and it makes her feel tired too. "If you're Interpol, for example -"

"My name is Ariadne Shaw," Ariadne says, quickly, "I'm an architect. You can look me up if you want to." She reaches around for the bottle of water she could have sworn she bought not twenty minutes earlier. "You used to work for Prior & Wells, am I right? In Tangier?"

There's a sharp silence. "If I did, what would you ask me?"

"Nothing to compromise yourself," Ariadne says, trying to reassure but impatient already. "I just need to ask some questions about someone you used to work with. In relation to ... in relation to shared dreaming."

"Oh," Fuhr says. There's another silence broken by some rustling and a loud cough. "Right. That. Who are you chasing?"

"I'm not chasing anyone," Ariadne tucks her feet under herself. "He's dead," and every time she says it she becomes a little more certain that it's the truth, and every time she says it the heat in her eyeballs and the desolation in her heart becomes a little harder to deny, to push away.

"Oh, you mean Mark?" Fuhr coughs again, sounding surprised. "He's been dead for years. What's dredged him up, then?"

"No," Ariadne says, "he hasn’t."

"That," Fuhr says heavily, "figures. Just like him. You know Mark isn't his real name?"

"I know," Ariadne says, "he's had a lot."

"Eh, no kidding," Fuhr coughs again. "He went through three when I knew him. But you know, you said Tangier, I figured you knew him as Mark. No?" He still sounds drowsy, but Ariadne thinks she can detect falsehood in it.

"No. I knew him later. Sooner," Ariadne presses her free hand to her face. "More recently."

"What do you need to know?"

"What are you willing to tell me?" Ariadne sighs, as the phone nearly slips from her grasp. She feels clumsy and dumb and, in spite of the several hours of merciful unconsciousness last night, bone-tired.

"Who are you, to him?" Fuhr says. She hears something like a lighter flaring; a suck of breath, a long, slow exhalation, and a lot more coughing.

"I hope someone he loved," Ariadne says, and the past tense clutches at her throat again until she could kick at it, scream at it. Loves, she says to herself, with a firmness and certainty she never bothered with while Eames was still around to antagonise her. Someone he loves. "I've spent the last ten years mostly living with him. Does that satisfy you? Does it change your story?"

"Alright, alright," Fuhr says, "I just wanted to make sure you weren't …" but he doesn't finish the thought, just sucks down more smoke and coughs up more wet-sounding air. Ariadne is glad she's not in the room with him. "Mark Chapel was Kevin Holmes when I met him, and I ran in to an old girlfriend of his who said she'd known him as Philip Dreyfus. I say when I met him; I met him at university - Sheffield - and he dropped out half-way through the first year. Reading law, but he fuck-he hated. Hated it."

There is an announcement, and several of the businessmen and women sharing the lounge get to their feet. Ariadne doesn't even check the time. There are hours before her flight.

"I don't think," Fuhr says, in a confidential voice smeared with sleep and cigarettes, "that he dropped out because he was bored but because it turned out his qualifications were, well." There is a smile in his voice. "You know Mark. They turned out to not be worth the paper they were printed on. I don't think he even finished school."

Ariadne finds she is smiling, too, then. Smoke and mirrors and forged papers. How very him; and as abruptly as the smile begins it's snapped and tugged from her face. He won't be swapping his handwriting for anyone else's again.

"So, Mark - Kevin, as he was when I knew him first - fucked off out of Sheffield. I ran into that old girlfriend of his who'd seen him when he was at Leeds. Studying Philosophy. Dropped out in the first year, same deal. I figured he was trying to outrun his own bullshit then and I don't think he ever stopped."

"No, Ariadne says, "he just took a break from running for a while."

"Pretty long break now," Fuhr says, and coughs again. "So anyway, he vanished for a bit, came up as Mark Chapel. Out of nowhere, too. He was wearing a suit and a grin the size of the Channel. The grin fitted better than the suit did, of course. Asked if I wanted to come with him to work on some weird new technology, said he owed me. Which -" Fuhr coughs at length and says with a strange upward lilt, "- he did. Still does. Four hundred English pounds, though that's more like eight hundred now…"

"I can pay that back for you, if you want," Ariadne says quietly.

"Waste of time, I'm nearly as bad with it as he was. Profligate bastard." Fuhr sighs. "I suppose you know what technology it was. He said he'd stolen it from the US military, which, you know Mark. I thought it was bullshit. He was laughing all the time. Said he stole it from them for Prior & Wells but most of all for himself. Some company that made it, first. Not the actual-actual military. But you know, one of their companies."

"And it wasn't bullshit at all," Ariadne says, rubbing her wrist. "Was it?"

"Nope. Turns out that's exactly what they had him do. Dunno what he did - and I wish I could tell you, it must be a hell of a story - between dropping out of Sheffield and showing up to drag me to Tangier, but god. It must have been something."

Ariadne acknowledges that it probably was. It's Eames. It was him. It would have been something.

Fuhr says thoughtfully, "He was a good friend." There's another silence, something being turned over or moved out of the way. "I was fuck-I was drunk for a week, you know. When he di-when I thought he'd died. I just heard about it through the grapevine, but …" He says, as she's been sure he will, "Are you sure he's dead?"

"Yes," Ariadne says, her body as cold as if it's been encased in ice. "Yes, I am very sure."

"Do you want to know anything about the actual dreaming?" Fuhr asks, sounding nervous, "Because I signed a lot of stuff about not telling anyone -"

"I already know about that," she assures him. "You've been very helpful. I'll leave you in peace now."

"Hey, uh, what was your -"

"Ariadne," Ariadne says, abandoning her usual clipped 'Ms. Shaw'.

"Ariadne," Fuhr says, his voice scratchy with smoke, "I'm sorry."

She hangs up, and flops into the lounge chair. It's going to be a long way to Washington; she hopes like hell that she has enough sleeping pills left not to have to deal with the flight.

The flight proves a little too long; Ariadne sleeps through it, wakes disoriented and temporarily confused as to why she's on a plane at all, her fingers crawling to the reassurance of the chess piece in her pocket, but she catches up with herself. In the baggage claim she feels something rise within her like vomit, as inexorable and undeniably physical, and as if retching she finds she barely has time to run to the bathrooms.

With the door to a cubicle slammed behind her Ariadne slaps a hand over her mouth and folds at the waist as if some invisible fist has punched her in the guts; it feels that way, too, as if she has been suddenly winded. The sounds of the bathroom, the cut-off and suddenly reintroduced blasts of noise from the baggage claim as the main door swings open and shut wash over and through her unheeded, and Ariadne turns her hand sideways until she can clench her teeth over her knuckles.

At first this keeps the sound in, if not the tears. At first Ariadne simply slumps against the door and cries.

Rather than fading away the sobs escalate, shaking her shoulders, shaking her bones. Ariadne bangs the back of her head against the door and shudders around the hand in her mouth, choking on air, choking on tears.

She becomes aware of a thin, broken whine leaking out from around her knuckles, but she can't bring herself to care. Her t-shirt is sodden with tears, the back of her hand smeared with saliva and snot, and her chest hurts as if someone has pummelled it. Ariadne's ribs are tearing apart, her heart bursting, her spine falling away in splinters; she feels as if she is dying, taken to pieces with each fresh heave, but only a few feet away women are washing their hands and scolding their children. She is not dying.

As the main door opens and closes again, Ariadne tries to steady herself. There will be time for this later.

But her body won't listen. There will be no more putting off grief, not now.

For time she can't measure and doesn't care to, Ariadne is prisoner to the sadness that she has been so diligently excluding from her mind. The cubicle contains her, shields her from anyone's concern, but it can't stop ugly gasps and gurgles from her throat from echoing around the bathroom.

In some other life that was less than a month ago, Eames followed her into the women's toilet in a train station in Geneva, sniggering at some joke she can no longer remember. He made a huge deal of checking all the other stalls in the most James-Bond fashion imaginable, holding up an imaginary gun, and she'd laughed and shaken her head and led him into the cubicle by the belt, her fingers squashed by his stomach against the leather.

Ariadne's throat is the width of a needle and her eyes sting. Her thighs ache from half-standing, half-leaning, braced between the door and the wall of the cubicle. She is not in Geneva any more, and Eames is not making ridiculous remarks about clockwork men and trying to kneel on the floor without his knees making that horrible grinding noise, because Eames is dead, and he is never going to kneel on the floor in front of her again.

Arthur's apartment is everything Ariadne has always expected it to be. In Georgetown, taking up what feels like an entire level of an apartment building, it looks almost identical to the levels he recreated from her designs. The building itself is an unassuming example of 1920s deco, hardly worth anyone's attention although sturdy enough; Arthur's apartment is a sea of pale coffee carpets and bare, dark floors; lacquered wood and walls with geometrically-spaced photographs of what look like fighter jets, which give her a little start when she notices them.

He looks older, of course, and that throws her for a minute too. Arthur had been frozen in her mind as the same sleek, well-oiled human machine ("The Alien from Newark", Eames says in her memory, and she winces), in his fastidiously-chosen wardrobe and his carefully-monitored emotions.

Now he is grey at the temples and in streaks through his hair, and makes no attempt to hide it; he can't be any older than Eames. The lines in his face have not deepened, and although he's not wearing a tie with his impeccable dark gray sweater-vest and shirt, Ariadne's mind rushes to supply one anyway.

Arthur greets her with a kiss on each cheek, which feels excruciatingly awkward. His demeanour is at least friendly, and perhaps it's the remnants of ancient guilt that makes her think there's any coldness between them at all. Ariadne perches on the edge of a sofa designed more for style than comfort, and waits.

After a moment it becomes clear that he's waiting for her, and she clears her throat. "How have you, have you been?"

The look he gives her would be pitying if it came from anyone else. From Arthur it just looks as if he's trying to remember how to be affable. "Working."

"That's good," Ariadne says, staring at her own fingernails for a moment. They're bitten, and she doesn't recall chewing her nails at all in the last week or so. "I didn't know you were still, Dom hasn't really mentioned."

"Well you could have talked to me," Arthur says, but it's not as snippy as she's been imagining it would be. "Protection training, and interrogation. I doubt you'd have the stomach for the latter but the former pays very well. You should give it a try."

"I build," Ariadne says. There is a mew from out of her line of sight, and she sits up, confused. "When did you get a -"

The cat trots in with its tail straight up in the air; it looks smaller than the average, wrinkled, and with a strangely-shaped head, the ears too large and the face too small. It takes her a minute of alarmed scrutiny to realise that the cat has no fur, and that this is why it looks like a stretched rat.

"This is Diane," Arthur says, with surprising softness. "She's named after my grandmother." He reaches down and picks up the cat, which goes limp in his arms and starts purring as if there is nowhere else in the world it would rather be.

Ariadne regards the cat and hopes that her revulsion doesn't show on her face. It shouldn't. She has had years of dealing with things she'd rather she didn't have to see, and she's been taught by the best - Ariadne sighs and looks out of the window. From this height all she can see are the waving tops of sycamore trees, buds reaching for the sky.

"Ariadne?" Arthur says, "You came to ask me about him, didn't you?"

"I did," Ariadne says, watching the trees rattling their twigs together.

"Ask, then."

She can't turn her head to look at him. She tells herself it's the cat, that ugly awful cat with the piebald skin, and his look of affection which she's only ever really seen directed to the memory of Mal and, when he wasn't looking, at Dom. She tells herself the twigs are hypnotic, and that Arthur's apartment is stiflingly minimalist, and that she doesn't want to stare at the wretched animal when she's attempting the delicate business of prising information from Arthur with the splinters of her heart resting in her stomach.

"Arthur."

He sighs, and when she looks back he's absently stroking the cat behind the ears.

"Dom told you we ran an extraction on him, when we hired him?" Arthur says, his voice distant.

"No, I figured that out for myself," she says, too intimidated by the spotlessness of the sofa to pull her leg up under her, and too uncomfortable with both her feet on the floor to feel welcome. "Why did you hire him in the first place? Dom didn't tell me."

The cat makes a chirping noise that Ariadne wasn't previously aware cats could make, and stretches in Arthur's arms. She strokes her forearms, transfixed by how ugly and alien it is. It no doubt feels warm and light in his hands, a hot bundle of gently-squirming life. She feels bile in the back of her throat.

"We were looking for a second thief," Arthur says, "for a large operation on behalf of a trading company. Two subjects, simultaneously. I didn't think we could handle it. Dom was sure that we could, but he listened to me."

The cat squirms, and Ariadne looks quickly at her feet.

"There weren't a lot of people in the business at the time. Almost everyone I knew who knew anything about shared dreaming still worked for the military, and Dom only knew Miles and … Mal. Who had already passed away."

His delicacy is so rigid that Ariadne is exasperated on Dom's behalf. Passed away is not a suitable alternative for jumped out of a window, it is not a fitting euphemism for fell to his knees in a shopping centre, dead before he hit the floor. Ariadne struggles as if the horrible cat in Arthur's arms is rolling around in her chest instead, but she doesn't correct him.

"There are always rumours, though. We kept hearing about someone called Mark Chapel."

"Ah," Ariadne says.

"I assume Yusuf has already told you," Arthur continues, in the same distant voice, digging through his own long-filed memories. "However, there were two rumours circulating; one that Chapel had invented something called forging which would change the face of our work and which no one else had been able to master with any great success, and the other -" Arthur pauses, apparently examining the wall above her head. She's sure she knows what he's going to say next, and yet when it comes about she still feels a cold frisson. "- The other that he was dead. No one could say how. Eventually we started looking for people who might have worked with him…"

Ariadne nods, but the story is already piecing itself together in her head. So very him. So very Eames to be so slippery, so smug about his casual deceptions.

"… We came across a man calling himself Matthew Eames," Arthur says, and the familiar name, at last, twists a knife in Ariadne's chest. "Who said that he would be able to demonstrate Chapel's work for us, if we paid him what sounded like an unsupportable amount of money." Arthur sighs. "Happily the trading company were willing to put down more funds."

"And you took him on," Ariadne prompts, when the gap between his words indicates that he's not about to start talking again.

"It was months," Arthur hisses, disgusted. The cat leans away from him, enormous ears back and large eyes open even wider. "Months before we worked it out."

Ariadne looks at the floor to hide a smile. It obviously still rankles with him after all this time, all these years. But she can't help finding it funny, in a melancholy sort of way. Eames doing his best to contain his amusement at having duped his new partners so thoroughly.

Then she realises that those months Arthur is so incised by were probably months in which they were sleeping together. Months in which Arthur was painfully, clutchingly, controllingly infatuated with Eames, while Eames cheerfully went about his bullshit without a second thought for what he was doing to Arthur's hard-earned inner balance.

"Ah," Ariadne says, not meeting his eyes. "Did you ever find out anything about -" she searches for the words, and can only settle lamely on, "- Who else he'd been?"

"Not much," Arthur says, putting the cat down at last. To Ariadne's great relief, the animal flicks its horrible whip-like tail once or twice and wanders off to rub its strange, scrawny body against the edge of a low glass table, rather than completing its journey to investigate her. "I know one or two things. Mostly I just found out about the kind of person he was when I knew him."

Ariadne winces internally, and awaits his judgement.

"Which was …" Arthur sighs, and puts his hands in his pockets. Ariadne wonders if he is checking his totem as compulsively as she checks hers, or if he is simply more comfortable that way. "… Careless. Evasive."

She nods again. Some things don't change.

"I know he killed," Arthur says, abrupt and without any delicacy at all. He does not use another noun; the word killed dangles in space like a noose. Not "someone", not "a man", not "a woman", not even - God forbid - "a kid". Just the verb, as if the verb itself is enough.

Ariadne bites the inside of her mouth for a moment, watching Arthur's impenetrable stillness. This is why Eames always called him the Alien, the Robot, with inflection ranging from the briefly affectionate to the unpleasantly derisive; Arthur does not fidget. Arthur does not shift his weight or twitch or toy with things. Arthur was hard for Eames to get down, because he has no easy identifying features of behaviour beyond this glassy stillness, and the near-inhuman grace with which he moves.

Seeing Arthur through Eames's eyes is easier now she's had a decade of his side of the story; Arthur would have fascinated and eventually frustrated him, presenting a challenge, a labyrinth at the centre of which there is no minotaur for a reward.

"I - when?" Ariadne breaks off the I know. Perhaps it's not the same person.

"Not sure." Arthur watches her face intently for a moment that is too long to be remotely comfortable. "Somewhere between Prior & Wells going under, and joining Dom and I. It's why Chapel had to go. He wouldn't say who, or how, but he did tell me that much; Mark Chapel had killed someone, and thus Mark Chapel had to die."

Ariadne shivers. Arthur's apartment is exactly the right temperature to give no justification for this, and the hairs on her arms rise anyway.

"For all either of us knows," Arthur says in a voice which is plainly intended to be kind, "he was protecting himself."

"What happened after the job?" Ariadne says quickly, jerking the conversation away from the shadows and the inevitable straws that Arthur seems to think she wants to clutch at. She's not sure she wants so badly to speculate on what neither of them can know.

"He went," Arthur says, flatly. "He left shortly after we got paid. A few messages from time-to-time, and then he vanished. He turned up in Mombasa later."

Ariadne nods him on, but Arthur has stalled again. "How did you -"

"I am very good," Arthur says without inflection, "at finding people."

"And after the Fischer job?"

In the silence that follows she thinks she can hear his mind discarding half-formed sentences. The wind must be picking up outside, as the trees dance and click and sway, and the ugly cat shoots out of the room in the face of nothing at all. Ariadne begins to count, internally, and she's reached fourteen before Arthur opens his mouth, his forehead furrowing, and says, "That was a mistake."

She doesn't answer him.

"I'm sorry he's gone," Arthur says, and although he doesn't sound it she believes him. Arthur drowns every expression in the deep pools within him and very little escapes through his face and voice. He opens his mouth to say something else, and closes it again, words unsaid. Ariadne is almost certain what he intended to say was I loved him once, and she holds her breath until she's sure he's not going to let it out into the air between them.

"… What did you say about interrogation?" Ariadne blurts, dragging the conversation once again away from what feels like the edge of a cliff. Outside a few specks of rain dash themselves against the window pane.

"What?" Arthur stirs himself as if he's waking up, and focuses on her like she's only just appeared on his sofa. "There are a number of suspects who prove harder to get information from than conventional and non-harmful methods of interrogation allow," he says, as rehearsed as a press officer, "and I have been training agents in how to extract from them. The evidence isn't admissible in court, but it usually leads us to some which is."

"Agents," Ariadne repeats, surprised in spite of herself. "You're working for the FBI?"

"With," Arthur corrects. "With."

More rain hits the windows, loud in the quiet of Arthur's apartment; Ariadne can see nothing that looks even a little like a stereo speaker, and wonders if he ever listens to music at all. There is no television, either.

"Why?"

Arthur gives her a look which she doesn't like in the slightest, and turns to watch the raindrops assaulting his windows. "Because I'm not a thief," he says, with the same compressed anger as before.

She leans away from him without intending to.

"And because I don't build," he says, inflectionless again. "I have something else for you."

The "something else" is a brown envelope not very different from the one she'd kept her recorder in on the way to Madrid; the recorder has outlived its usefulness, as the fog slowly clears from her mind, and Ariadne finds that even when she doesn't want to, she can remember what people are saying to her again.

"Saito sent it," Arthur says, passing it to her.

"Did you tell him I was coming to see you?" she asks, taking the envelope

"Saito?" Arthur shakes his head. "Probably sent a copy to all of us. You know him."

"Any idea what -"

"You could just open it," Arthur says, with infuriating logic. "But I believe Saito feels he should contribute to your …" he stops, and says, "Dom said they wouldn't find out much about him without an autopsy, and I guess he also said that to Saito. I know he did."

Ariadne peels back the envelope flap and stops with her hand inside the paper. "These had better not be photographs."

"He's not a monster."

Ariadne closes her fingers the contents of the envelope and slides it out into her hand. The papers slither onto her lap and something heavy and small falls onto the floor. She has an inkling what that is, but it's the papers that interest her. The first page is type-written, and she reads it aloud without stuttering or choking.

"Ariadne, I have done my best to trace what I can of our friend, and enclose the results of my search for your use, along with something which I believe belongs to you. Selly Oak hospital will release Eames to you whenever you wish. My deepest condolences go with you, and please do not hesitate to contact me if you are ever in need."

The other two sheets of paper are high-quality photocopies of X-rays. One is labelled "Eames, M [?]" with a date less than a week ago beside it. It appears to be an X-ray of his knees. The other is labelled "Chapel, M", with a date a good fourteen years ago. It also appears to be an X-ray of his knees, but in this there are dark lines through his knee caps and floating fragments and white where there should be no white.

She winces and shows Arthur.

"Oh," Arthur says. "That looks like a hammer."

Ariadne decides she doesn't want to know how he can tell that. Presumably from the way the kneecaps are broken, the angle of the force, something forensic that she has no intention of ever asking about. Just the word, hammer, so bald and unaffected, in connection with the black-and-white images, makes her want to close her eyes and cover her mouth with her hand.

Eames and his awful clicking, grinding knees. Eames struggling to kneel on the carpet of her apartment and keeping a running commentary on how imperfect joints would be the death of romance. Eames and his bad knees, and his bad heart.

Arthur turns the X-ray over. "This took some finding. I believe it helped to know a few of the names I might be looking for; Mark Chapel was admitted to Great Western Hospital in Swindon with two badly broken knees, which he refused to give any account for. He was operated upon and did not remain for the entire recommended period of convalescence. Two days after he left a man came looking for him, claiming to be affiliated with the police but refusing to show any identification."

"His knees," Ariadne says, giving in to the urge to cover her mouth with her hand. "Jesus."

"They never did work all that well," Arthur says, and she can't tell if he doesn't care or if he's just buried his response in the same place that he sank his affection for Eames in the first place. "Was there anything else in there?"

Ariadne bends to fiddle with her trainer laces, palming the worn, warped, scratched and dented black poker chip as she does so. "No," she says, standing up. "I think that's everything."

At last she takes him to the bell tower of Notre Dame. There are no suitable landmarks, no much-beloved place for him to strew himself through, and all Ariadne knows is that she refuses to be the kind of woman who keeps an urn in her home and ends up talking to it as she gets older and more lonely. Better to let go, the way she told Dom she would.

The wind is too cold among the stone peaks of the cathedral, and it bites at her ears, turns them red as the tip of her nose, as she removes the lid and upends Eames into the square below. It catches the ash as it falls, whipping dark grey into light grey into dissipation, scattering Eames into the naked trees, the sluggish river, the clouds and the pigeons, into her hair, into the stones.

Ariadne can't promise that she'll forget him as entirely as he would have no doubt liked, but she knows she won't let him fester in her mind, memories turning septic with sorrow at what could have been and never had the chance to be. And that will have to be good enough.

She puts the urn back into her bag, her hands in her pockets, and descends from the bell tower.

//FIN//

Comment, please. It's polite.