⥼ convocation ⥽⥼ inception, 1070 words ⥽
Click to viewThere is the distinct sound of water on glass -- that hollow thumping sound that comes with rain on windows, the washing of cars, with shower doors left closed on empty showers. It takes Ariadne a moment to realize that she's awake and then a moment longer to realize she's staring at the ceiling -- white wash and spackle at the corners, used to hide what she's known all along are weak points in the sagging old building's poor excuse for structural integrity. And no, she's not dreaming, it's morning and it's Paris and like any respectable Parisian morning in March it's raining, unapologetic in its enthusiasm (again, quite French).
There's a gold bishop sitting atop a stack of books on her nightstand and she reaches to try to push it over with a finger. It resists. Half satisfied, she then turns it 180 degrees and tries again, this time toppling it over without a fight. Awake, then; she yawns into one hand and then blindly feels for her phone with the other.
According to her mobile and the wonders of modern technology, it's raining in California too, but it's almost midnight on that side of the globe compared to her eight am here in Paris. Ariadne wonders if that means Cobb is sleeping, if his children are having nightmares -- a girl and boy, Philippa and James, whom she'd only ever seen from the back like strangers, like ghosts. Cobb's ghosts. Mal's children. (No, the Shade's children.) She wonders, now that he's back home, if he feels safely shelved in that house she'd seen rebuilt in his dreams, with its warmly-stained woodwork and welcoming back porch. She'd pushed Robert Fischer off of that porch with both hands after shooting the image of Cobb's wife through with a gun that didn't actually exist. Which Ariadne gets, makes it sound just as complicated and messed-up as the situation actually was. But, then again, catharsis always is.
Ariadne also wonders if that's what Cobb would call what happened to him four levels deep -- catharsis. Fischer's proof that catharsis doesn't have to be self-generated, but their ruse had been carefully constructed so as to fully obscure its own sleight of hand. There's nothing subtle about a bullet from a gun, but that's what Ariadne had to work with, and she's good with improvisation (for the most part). She'd shoved resolution on Cobb just like she'd shoved Fischer back up into the third level, without much finesse and with a quite literal 'bang', but now she can't help but second guess the method even though the motivations were crystal clear and twice as sharp.
It's like Arthur's analogy, she figures. The one with the elephants. You tell Cobb: 'don't think about Mal, don't think about Mal'. What's the first thing he's going to think about?
Mal.
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The number she has in her phone for COBB, DOM doesn't work anymore. Neither does the number marked ?, ARTHUR but the one for Eames still rings. Twelve times, in fact, before the voicemail picks up, the message recorded by what sounds to be an old woman telling Ariadne to do something in some slavic language. Most people would be derailed by this sort of thing but Ariadne guesses that this is just Eames' way of being Bondsian and elusive and that very specific brand of off-putting that just so happens to be charming at the same time. So she leaves a message (two, actually -- one in English and one in Russian, clumsily translated by the Internet) and then she does something she's never been very good at. She waits.
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Suffice it to say, Ariadne's never been one to hesitate when it comes to burning bridges. Granted, throughout her life she's had very little practice in doing so, but that's more due to a lack of bridges in the first place as opposed to a lack of trying. She supposes that makes her a little maladjusted, a little bloodless, but to her it just reads as common sense. One doesn't foster hindrance, one changes it and turns it into a benefit (or, at the very least, a break even); and if that doesn't work, then maybe it's better to part ways. Not just for her but for whomever else is involved. A clean break, a washed slate. Tabula rasa, etc etc.
She considers whether or not that's what this goosechase of hers is (a misnomer in terms since 'chase' implies flight and all this waiting for Eames to get back to her was quite the opposite); she had attempted to burn Cobb's bridge to Mal and, in proving successful (again, subject to debate), had been burned in turn. Like the way one excises malignant flesh to keep a cancer from spreading, had Cobb cut all ties with the dream? Had he returned home and shut the door on Eames, on Arthur, as well -- quarantining himself from the temptations the PASIV presented, not unlike an alcoholic destroying the key to the drinks cupboard?
These are the things that Ariadne mulls over in the back of her brain at night as she stares up at that same white washed ceiling she wakes to every morning, watching headlamps from the streets below move across it in abstract patterns or light and dark. She'd never had any illusions about what sort of world she was entering, about what kind of 'job placement' she'd found herself in. The criminal world doesn't embrace people, she's learned (it picks at the destitute and the disillusioned and the desperate like a scavenger, it compels in the inspired yet unscrupulous like gravity), but there is no expectation of longevity, of trust, of bonds that cannot be unmade at a moment's notice. She knows all this and accepts it, but that doesn't mean the pill cannot be bitter on its way down.
She waits a day for a return call. Then a week. Another message, this time in stilted Ukranian, gets left for Eames on his mysterious-cum-frustrating answering service. Ariadne fills her time with preparations for graduation, buying herself a power suit that she hopes she'll never have to wear, drawing buildings that would never exist in the real world but that she could make happen if she just had a PASIV, a dose of somnacin, and five minutes on the clock.
Two weeks. Then her phone rings.
She doesn't check the number, she just answers.