Reality Can Bend (Sometimes into Impossible Shapes)

[civillove]

Title: Reality Can Bend (Sometimes into Impossible Shapes)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 6,743
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne (established relationship)
Summary:inception_kink prompt here. "I don't want to end up like her."
Disclaimer: I dont own anything (: oh and suprockstar , this turned out longer then I had planned but i hope that's alright and I really, really hope you enjoy this and that I did justice for your prompt (:
The thrill was intoxicating. There was no denying it. Building worlds of her own, things she could never even think of pulling off of a blue print and putting in the real world, something she never would have felt if she'd stayed a regular architecture student in college.

The actual sleep deprivation, well that's something every college student has to deal with. So if she was going to get that from staying up all night, coffee cup upon coffee cup, she might as well be doing something she loved. Something she lived for…gave up normal sleep and dreaming for.

She passed Arthur on one of the lawn chairs as she headed back to her desk. He was sleeping awkwardly on his side, amazingly not one crease in his suit or a hair out of place. He hadn't moved from the position in over an hour, the blanket she slid over his form unmoved. She smiled softly and shook her head, putting her attention back to the cardboard slices over top of her blue prints. He'd have one hell of a kink in the neck when he woke up.

It was late, one in the morning as she looked at the clock. Arthur had fallen asleep while looking over files in the lawn chair and Ariadne hadn't planned on waking him until she was finished with the cardboard cutout of the first dream layer she had been working on. Just a few more places to cut and glue and she was finished.

She didn't need the layout finished until Tuesday, which was in two days, but she liked to be punctual. And the sooner she finished, the sooner it could be given a test run by the team. That way, if there were any mistakes, she had time to re-map out the layer and fix it well before the extraction needed to take place.

After the Inception three months ago, she had slipped into a daily routine. She went back to college and held a simple…normal, run of the mill life until Arthur showed up on her doorstep with a job. A simple extraction. But by the time she was finished with that job, she was hooked all over again. That slow thrill of building something of her own curled deep in her belly and shot through her veins like rushes of adrenaline. She couldn't stay away and couldn't turn back to that normal life even if she tried.

So there she was, on job six, another daily routine sliding into the place of her old one. Just one more cardboard piece and one more stripe of glue before she went back to her apartment and got some shut eye. She was designing the level one as a strip club, because the mark was a dealer in the black market who just happened to be the manager of a strip joint. So naturally, that was the first level had to be; a comfortable, familiar place of employment. Which Eames was just enjoying entirely too much for her liking.

Ariadne sighed, running a hand through her hair. She slid the exacto-knife along the cardboard and jumped as she cut a part of her finger. She bit her lower lip and swore under her breath, bright red blood blossoming from the small cut on her index finger. Was she seriously so exhausted that she missed her finger being in the way of cutting out a piece of cardboard?

"Oh, careful love, you nicked yourself."

She looked to the right, seeing Eames leaning on the side of her desk. She had forgotten he was even here.

"I thought you left." She hated how strained her voice sounded, like it was bordering on tears. But goddamnit if she couldn't admit how much that cut hurt.

He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. Something told her he didn't want to plaster a fully fledged grin in fear that she would get the wrong idea and burst into tears. He took out a handkerchief from his suit pocket and leaned towards her.

"Lemme see." She shook her head and pulled away from him. The Forger sighed, un-amused but patient. "Oh please, I may not have delicate, girly hands like Arthur but I can be gentle."

Ariadne rolled her eyes and put her hand in Eames', feeling the calluses on his fingers against her knuckles. He turned her hand in his, examining the slice to her finger.

"Doesn't seem too deep…the hell were you doing? Trying to cut with the wrong side of the exacto-knife again Ariadne?" He teased, smiling as he took the first-aid kit out from under her desk and put it over top of her blue prints.

He pushed the handkerchief onto the cut to slow the bleeding and she bit her lip again, a small throbbing pain emanating from her finger. She glared at him. "No, it slipped."

Eames took out peroxide from the kit and opened the bottle, pulling the handkerchief away. He poured the liquid onto some cotton balls and looked down at her.

"This is going to sting."

She just nodded as he dabbed the cut. She winced and couldn't help as a small tear slid down her cheek. She pushed it away with her other hand and swallowed, waiting for him to put a bandage on it. He finished up with her cut and put the kit away.

He touched her chin, gently, in a brotherly way. "Chin up love, seen you take harder beatings then peroxide before."

She smiled and he in turn smiled too, seeming pleased with himself that he got her mind off the cut.

"Yeah, I'm a regular masochist."

He chuckled and looked over her layout on her desk, picking up a cardboard square to examine.

"Happens to the best of us." He winked and she sat on her stool, watching him play with her design and examine her blueprint.

Masochist. The topic was laughable. She didn't understand how anyone could enjoy that kind of thing for pleasure. She could hardly stand paper cuts let alone real pain. Not that she ever encountered honest to God real pain in reality. She wasn't part of the extraction group that met up with gunshots on a dreamscape and in reality. Well…not yet anyways. If this was going to become just a part of her lifestyle, she was sure she'd encounter it one time or another.

Dream pain, however, she could understand. That real pain of projections tearing you apart, ripping, shooting, kicking, slicing, tearing into you. Stabbing you. She swallowed and her hand went to her stomach, touching the phantom scars of her first lesson in shared dreaming. It hadn't been real. Neither Mal nor the stab wound had been real. But it still felt real sometimes, and she wasn't going to deny the nightmares she had had after the event. Nightmares that still felt real after being woken up.

Eames had been speaking to her and she didn't even hear the beginning of his sentence. "What?"

He looked her over and noticed her hand on her stomach. "Feelin' queasy?"

She blushed, soft pinpricks of pink over her cheek bones. "No, no." She pulled her hand away and thought for a moment. Wondered. A raw, unformed idea.

"Did you…know Mal?"

He seemed confused by the question, not because he didn't know how to answer but because he wasn't quite sure where it had come from. In all honesty, she wasn't sure either. It just formed and popped out, like a beautiful five story high bridge right in the middle of downtown Paris in a dreamscape. She thought it, it happened.

"No," The Forger said after a few moments, putting down her design. "She was before I joined the team. I heard about her though," He smiled thoughtfully. "Beautiful and dangerous in her later years…my kind of woman."

Ariadne tried not to seem disappointed, she really tried, but if anyone, Eames could tell when someone was putting up a bluff. His totem was a poker chip for Christ's sake.

"Why do you ask?"

She looked at her design and slid the hot glue gun along the last cardboard cutout. "Just curious."

He was quiet. But not for long. "No…that's not a look of curiosity. You want to know something. What's bothering you, darling?"

She put down the glue gun and settled the last piece into place, she always felt like she was just finishing a complicated puzzle when she finished her designs for a layout. She lost sleep, gave up eating more times than Arthur liked and was entirely focused until the job was finished. Just like completing a hard puzzle.

Unfortunately, the small thrill that usually filled her system when she finished was in short supply. And she couldn't figure out why.

"Nothing."

"You trying to fool a forger?"

A small laugh escaped her and she stole a glance at Arthur to make sure she hadn't woken him. "No. I was just wondering…about Mal. You know what made her…" She trailed off, not sure how to continue.

"Past nine on the crazy clock?"

She hated speaking ill of the dead. Really hated it and she felt entirely disrespectful. She didn't know Mal, she barely knew Cobb before he left to be with his children. Should she just mind her own business? She couldn't quell the sea of curiosity, of mystery, of…something she couldn't quite grasp inside her. The undying need to just know.

Ariadne nodded, standing her design up on her desk. Eames beamed as he looked it over, following the maze of the outline with his eyes.

"Oh bloody brilliant, Ari."

She smiled proudly, the admiration making her stomach flip and her cheeks redden. "Thank you."

She waited a few moments before the question escaped her, "Was it because she loved her work?"

Ariadne didn't think it was that. Maybe it had nothing to do with the job. As far as she knew Cobb had loved his job, before everything that happened. Loved the thrill of architecture, just like her, pure creation between and under his hands. Or maybe it had everything to do with the job. Maybe loving the job so fiercely, immersing into something that wasn't real and straddling lines and brinks of reality with pure creation was okay. Just as long as you had something to tie you to reality. Something a totem--hard, heavy and reassuring--couldn't provide.

She could understand that after a while a totem wouldn't give reassurance. Perhaps all it came down to was a person. A strong, heavy pulse against cold, unsure fingers.

Eames shook his head. "No, I don't think that was it."

Eames, Arthur, Cobb at one point…and herself included loved the job. That's why they kept coming back wasn't it? Money wasn't always the reason, even though sometimes it was the answer they gave. Everyone had trouble admitting that this job did it for them; made them warm inside, sped up their pulse, opened their minds to incredible imagination. No one wanted to go so far as to say it…but Ariadne couldn't place why. She could see it in Arthur's eyes sometimes: the pride, the power. The thrill. She felt it too. So why? Was it too much like a curse on oneself to admit such a thing?

"I mean, true enough, she loved her work but I think it was limbo that screwed with her noggin. Messed up what was real and what wasn't." He paused, weighing something in his head. "And then, of course, there was Cobb."

That statement surprised her. "You blame him?"

He looked at her, his lips pursed. "Blame…isn't the right word." If he had another word in mind he wasn't sharing. "He gave her the idea though, didn't he?"

How did he know about that? How did he know that she knew? The way Cobb had spoken to her in limbo, the haunting shade of his wife-cold, metal sliding into her gut, piercing her organs-Mal's eyes like glass, cutting into him as he spoke. It made Ariadne feel like he had never told anyone that before, like she was the only one. She wasn't trying to make herself feel special, she was just assuming. Cobb seemed like a private man, the only reason he had been telling her all this was because she had maneuvered her way into is life through his dreamscape, subconscious, memories.

"Point man isn't the only one who can dig up information." Eames said slowly, she guessed it was from her confused expression.

Ariadne bit her tongue on a question; had he dug up things on her as well?

"So…you think it's a combination of things? Work, limbo, Cobb?"

He moved towards her, leaning his elbow and part of his body weight on her desk. She had seen this look in his eye before; he was intrigued. "Why so interested, pet?"

She shrugged, honestly not sure how to answer that. She wasn't sure of the answer herself. All she could decide on was that she was curious, even though she could feel it in her nerve endings that it was something much deeper than that. Something she didn't understand and she wasn't sure she wanted to.

Arthur stirred in the lawn chair, waking up and prompting Eames' attention from the architect. She felt relieved as his scrutinizing eyes left her.

"Well, now that sleeping beauty's awake I should get going." She just nodded at his statement, pretending to be caught up in her work. "Ta' love."

Knowing Eames, he'd pick up right where he left off the next time he saw her. She heard the warehouse door open and close five minutes later. Maybe then she'd have a resemblance of an answer to give him.

"What was he doing here so late?"

She felt Arthur's presence before she heard him, his voice streaked in sleep. She turned to look at him and she was amazed that he was exactly the way he looked three hours ago, not a hair out of place. Every time she slept for more than three hours straight she looked like a disheveled rag doll that had been played with one too many times when she woke up.

"Hello to you too, Arthur." She said wryly, but couldn't help the streak of playfulness that had woven itself in there.

He smiled softly, setting the blanket she had put over him on the edge of her workstation. He slid his one arm around her waist, gently pulling her until she was against his body.

Arthur placed a soft, warm, gentle kiss on her forehead, murmuring against her skin as he spoke.

"Good evening, Ariadne."

She smiled, butterflies exploding in her stomach and circulating through her veins as he pulled back.

"Eames was just waiting to see if I finished the design for the first level before he left."

Arthur nodded and she watched as the point man persona slid onto his face. His hands picked up her model and ran through it a few times. He noticed her sketches next to her blueprints. She watched his eyes look over the sketches and then back to the cardboard cut out a few times. Back and forth.

"This is good." She couldn't help but beam and he shook his head, a smile tugging his lips. It was something that Ariadne could see in his eyes more than his mouth. "We can test run it in a few days."

She took the model from him and set it down on her desk. "Take me home then?"

His eyes never lifted from the sketches on her desk, he moved to pick one up. The hotel for the second dream level, where Eames disguised as a stripper, would take the mark. She felt a small blush stain her cheeks. The sketch was unfinished and done in such a quick fashion. She had yet to finish it to map out the blueprint and then of course the cardboard cutout. But the way Arthur was holding it, with a smile that finally reached his mouth, made the blush disappear.

"Is it…I mean, I know it's not finished but…"

"No," He cut her off gently, looking up at her and then back at a sketch. "It's not that. It's just…it's uncanny." He glanced up at her confused expression and lowered the sketch. "You know Mal used to draw."

Ariadne couldn't stop her body tensing up and she just managed to keep it from Arthur, or at least she thought she did. "Oh?"

Had he heard Eames and her entire conversation? It was too odd to be a coincidence.

He nodded. "She would draw the buildings for Cobb, she was never good at setting them up in a dream but she was…breathtakingly creative. She'd sit and draw for hours." He set her sketch down. "This one reminds me of one she did for a job."

If she hadn't felt cold, icy, shivers run down her spine, maybe just maybe, Ariadne would have felt a streak of jealousy over the awe the point man held for Cobb's wife.

Arthur saw the brief tense change in her posture, saw a small shiver run over her frame and frowned, sliding off his suit jacket. She looked up at him as he placed the material over her form, waiting for her to slide her arms through. She did so and was enveloped in the warmth his body had left in the fabric, his scent; mint, cotton, summer breeze, things just purely Arthur, engraved into the suit. Buried under the stitching.

"Thank you." She mentioned very softly.

Arthur ran a hand through her hair, resting his palm on the back of her neck. He could tell something was off, something more than a chill running through the warehouse and making her cold. But he couldn't put his finger on it. He wasn't used to picking through unsaid emotions and figuring out what was wrong. Lines, structure, bank accounts, high school records, social security numbers and addresses. These kinds of things he could do. Do with his eyes closed and in his sleep.

These things with Ariadne-she smelled of lavender and coffee grounds, warmth that made something curl up in his belly-were all new to him. It'd take some time and he hoped she could understand that.

"Want me to take you home?" He asked quietly.

She looked up at him and nodded softly, offering a small smile. "I'm sorry, I'm just exhausted."

He held out his hand and she took it as they walked back to the car. Arthur knew that wasn't the reason but he nodded, not wanting to push her.

He drove her to her apartment and parked outside of the building. "I can walk you up but I can't come in tonight." He turned the heat off in the car. "I have to research a stripper for Eames."

Ariadne raised her eyebrows at the way it sounded and Arthur chuckled, a dark crimson blush blotching his cheeks and the back of his neck. "Uhm…"

Now she laughed and Arthur was relieved that the tension in the car since they left the warehouse had dissipated a little. "I get what you mean."

She seemed like she was sliding back into herself, that whatever issue she had had was forgotten with his embarrassment.

He sighed. "The mark has the same girl, every night, bring him drinks. It's the perfect way to get Eames in there as the stripper in the dream to take him to the hotel."

She shook her head and put her one hand up, the other opening the passenger door. "I don't need the details, have fun stripper searching."

Arthur took her hand that she was holding up and stopped her from getting out of the car; he leaned over and kissed her lips softly. So softly that it felt like the tip of a feather sliding against her lips.

"I'll pick you up in the morning."

She shook her head. "I'll just meet you at the pancake hall."

He grimaced. "Not that place again. I've had enough of pancakes with too much butter and powdered sugar smiles overtop of them."

She giggled and he smiled at the sound. "Well too bad, I love that place. So expect to go to it at least three times a week."

She got out and closed the door and he watched her get inside safely before pulling the car away. The smile didn't leave his lips until he got home.

O0o0o0o0o0o0o

Something was definitely wrong. She hardly said good morning when they met at the pancake hall and she barely touched her food during the whole meal. And Ariadne loved this place. Loved it. She had told him one breakfast that it reminded her of a place her and her mother always used to go when she was little, the pancakes had the same smiles on them. And she always ended up smiling when she got her pancakes. The smiley pancake making her face brighten in ways Arthur didn't really understand. It was just a pancake. But he found that not seeing her smile over the circular, flat cake actually bothered him.

Arthur knew all these things about her. Why she wanted to be an architect-because her father had been one. What high school she went to-Morton High School. Her favorite coffee place in Paris-Ladurée. That her grandmother had Alzheimer's-which Arthur never told her he knew. He figured she'd talk to him if she needed to. All his point man research and he couldn't figure out why she was so upset that she wasn't speaking to him or smiling at her goddamn pancake. It was infuriating, irritating and worrying all at once.

He was trying to get her to open up, kept giving her chances to tell him but she wasn't budging. She got to the warehouse, thanked him for breakfast with a feather light kiss on his cheek and went to her workstation. She thanked him for a breakfast she didn't even eat. She had three sips of coffee and a bite of her pancakes. That was it.

Arthur stood there in the same spot, in the doorway of the warehouse, for at least five minutes before he got his legs to move to close the door and go to his desk. He sat on the stool and tried to put his worrying into something productive. Like the mark and research and everything that didn't include Ariadne and what her problem was.

He had successfully spent five minutes going over different plans for mazes, paradoxes and other possibilities in his head before he saw movement near Ariadne's desk out of the corner of his eye.

Eames was there again, cheap suit and all, leaning far too close to her for his liking. His smirk was wiped from his face as she said something to him and something Arthur had never seen on the forger's face before appeared there a moment later: concern. Genuine concern. What was so awful that she could tell Eames and not him?

Arthur looked back at his work on his desk. Maybe he was just over compensating. Over paranoid, over something. He glanced back up, curiosity peaking him in ways that made him squirm, and Eames had his hand on her back, rubbing for a millisecond and then stepping away to his desk. Something boiled in his stomach, shooting through his veins. Anger, then jealously, then anger all over again.

Arthur turned back to his desk and was determined to not look up at her for the rest of the day. If she was going to be this way then he'd let her.

But as the morning turned into afternoon, the anger slipped and worry replaced his nagging feelings all over again. He researched the mark and wrote down things of high importance, things that needed to be mentioned in the dream for the extraction to work, and tried not to feel foolish for feeling so angry over something as stupid as Eames getting on his nerves.

He noticed that the forger and she had bonded over the months after the inception. Which he was just fine with. Eames had told him, upon numerous occasions, that he didn't see the architect more than a little sister.

Arthur had never had a steady relationship before. Maybe just once or twice in high school and around college. But nothing that held up to anything memorable in his mind or heart. With the dream sharing job, he found it impossible to be with someone. He'd have to explain the details of his job somehow. Not to mention, if they had stuck around after the dream talk, which was unlikely within itself, they could get hurt. On more than one occasion people of high power and deep pockets had come after them to put a price on their head. Cobol Engineering was just a fine example of that. He found it impossible, improbable and unsafe to keep a relationship while he still held this job.

Ariadne was different. She was their architect, his architect. And she had gone through three levels of shared dreaming and limbo on her first job. She was something he had never experienced before; something bright, brilliant, creative and most of all strong. Strong spirited, strong willed and incredibly curious and stubborn.

The relationship between him and her was different, very new, very frightening-which is something he'd never admit to her. All his lines, straight and reassuring, were erased when she was with him. Lines replaced by pastel colored paints and shading. Straight lines turned askew. He didn't think he'd let anyone become so close to him; attached. Cobb and Mal were perfect examples of love gone wrong in their line of work. Maybe the two didn't mix. He looked up at Ariadne, working away with her cardboard pieces for the second level; it seemed too late to change anything now. He surprised himself because he didn't want to change anything. For the first time it just wasn't about the job.

Even though it went against his better judgment, he wouldn't push her. He'd let her come to him if she needed to. He wasn't the type of person to nag her until she gave into it. She seemed upset enough and the last thing he wanted to do was to make it worse.

Unfortunately she never came to him. Not about what was upsetting her at least. She went to his desk once or twice, borrowing another pencil, asking him if there was any information she should work into her design, if the level of maze was complicated enough. Work related things. Arthur tried his hardest not to be offended by the fact that she wasn't opening up. He knew Ariadne was the type of person to bottle things up. She did that when she was angry. But when she was sad, he knew she kept things rather close to the chest. Suffer in private, where no one could see her tears, kind of thing. He respected and understood that. But it still didn't nag him any less. It was like he had found one lone puzzle piece and he wasn't sure what puzzle it belonged to. The not knowing was driving him mad. It was the point man in him, this much he knew. Always needing to know every little detail, because knowing made the job easier and it had a higher success rate. But what he had to remember was that Ariadne wasn't a job. She was a person.

Hours flew by quickly, afternoon faded into night with pink skies and purplish clouds. Arthur was buried under work. He caught wind that the mark might have had security put in against extractors and for the last two hours he was trying to dig up history on him to find out if that was fact or fiction. He barely heard Ariadne's meek footsteps approach him.

He looked up at her and ran a hand through his slicked back locks.

"I know you're really busy," she said to him, "so I think I'm going to have Eames drive me home."

He bit his lip, which was something he's never really done before, as he looked at the Forger waiting for her by the warehouse doors. "I can stop and take you home."

She shook her head, the old Ariadne slipping back into place for a second as she rolled her eyes. "And then come all the way back here just to finish? I'm not going to make you do that."

"But you're going to make Eames drive you?" Anger slipped. Just for a second.

She swallowed, shaking her head and he could tell she really wanted to avoid confrontation.

"No," She said softly. "He offered."

Arthur just nodded, afraid to add anything because he didn't want that anger to slip from him again. That nagging, irritated, confused and worried anger.

Ariadne swallowed again, not sure what to say to silence. So she turned to walk towards Eames. Arthur gently took her arm and tugged her back to him; she turned around as he did. He kissed her cheek and he saw she closed her eyes as he kissed.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

She nodded and went towards the door and left, the echoing of the warehouse door closing hurt his ears.

O0o0o0o0o

Eames pulled up to her apartment. "You should really just tell him what's wrong, love."

She sighed, getting out of the car. "Goodnight, Eames."

She didn't wait for his reply before shutting the door.

O0o0o0o0o00

It was three in the morning when Arthur walked into his apartment. He finally finished with what he had wanted to get done with the mark today. He set his case full of files on his couch and his suit jacket on the back of it, setting it gently on top of a blanket resting there.

He sighed, running a tired hand over his face as he made his way to his bedroom. So the mark had security. That made everything more difficult of course. It seemed like every job he had after the inception had people whose subconscious had security. He had a headache just thinking about the hoops he had to go through to get that kind of information. Like all the work he had done the entire day.

Arthur went into the bathroom and changed out of his clothes, slipping on cotton pajama bottoms and a plain white tee shirt. He had no room to complain however, and he wasn't going to. Point man was all about information and precision. The work was the same all the time; same work, different mark. It was just harder to find when it had to deal with subconscious security because that kind of work was supposed to be hidden, secretive, something that isn't found with a simple background check.

He was just about to crawl into bed, sheets drawn down and his pillows looking so inviting, when a knock sounded on his front door. If he would have been in bed maybe he would have ignored it but since he was up he slowly went to the door and opened it.

And there Ariadne was.

She was shivering, that's the first thing he noticed. The next was that she was in her pajamas; black sweatpants and t-shirt with Monet's Water Lilies covering the front. Her hair was strewn about, odd curls sitting in off places. Her cheeks were pink from rubbing away tears, eyes red and swollen. Her lower lip was red and the skin had been broken a few times from her teeth scraping against it, a nervous habit he guessed and she couldn't keep her hands still. One moment they were in her hair and then next wrapping around her body like a shield, the next rubbing her arms because she was cold and the next doing something else to keep them busy.

And he hadn't thought once that she still didn't look just as beautiful as she did other days.

"Can I come in?"

He shook his head because he didn't even think she needed to ask. He stepped aside and let her walk in. He watched her go straight into his bedroom as he closed the front door, locking it back up.

Arthur walked to his bedroom and watched her sit on the right side of the bed, sliding her shoes off and pulling her legs up onto the bed. She sat Indian style and curled her hair around her ears.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" He asked, soft, gentle, reassuring.

He climbed onto the bed and sat in front of her, letting his legs rest over the side of the bed, his body angled to her. Tried to look open, inviting, and warm. Something so she could open up. Trust him.

"My grandmother has Alzheimer's, you know?" She looked up at him and switched positions, bringing her knees up to her chest.

He nodded softly, letting her continue. Yes, he did know. He knew other things too. When she got it, how long she'd been in the nursing home after she got it, what medications and trials she was taking. He knew a lot. But he really didn't think this was the time to admit that he knew some personal things about her life that she didn't tell him about yet. Not unless he wanted her to get up and leave and never tell him what was wrong.

"She had…early signs when she was forty, my mom said." She swallowed thickly. Arthur breathed, listened. "Dementia, the forgetting, the…" She shook her head; bit her lower lip so hard. "The loss of reality, not knowing what was real and what wasn't…it kept getting worse and worse."

Her lip wobbled and she looked up at him again, his heart broke for her, it really did. Seeing her like this was too much.

"My dad called the other day. He said my mom was having trouble r-remembering things." Her voice quavered. "He said she forgot how to unlock the front door."

Her lip wobbled again, harder this time, and her eyes filled with tears, they poured down her cheeks with such intensity and rapid succession.

Arthur cupped her cheek, ran a strong and steady thumb across her cheekbone, wiping away a tear track. Didn't matter. The tears kept falling and undid his work.

She leaned towards him and he pulled his hand back from her face as she rested it on his shoulder, the sobs breaking loose as she did so. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her to him, pulling her so close to him that she nearly sat on his lap, rocked her gently like waves lapping the sand of a beach.

Arthur buried his lips in his hair. He tied himself to her then-a real, flesh and blood, beating, pulsing totem-, making sure she knew he was there. That he was real, that she had him. He didn't stop rocking her until she stopped crying.

O0o0o0o0o0

The tears were long gone and dried up on her face but the ache in Ariadne's chest, the one that had been there for two days, wouldn't go away. She didn't pull her face back from Arthur's shoulder and he didn't force her to move. He just rocked her gently, occasionally stopping to rub circles into her back as she sniffled.

She shouldn't have kept this in as long as she had. She knew she bottled things up but…sobbing into Arthur was something she hadn't planned. Hadn't even thought of doing. She was going to tell him, perhaps over the phone or when she saw him at the warehouse the next day. Not like this. Wasn't supposed to be like this. She had more self control, some dignity. She was stronger than this…but then again, everyone had their weak moments right? This could be one of hers. One of the few she managed to let herself have.

What she shouldn't have done was ignore Arthur to the point that she had him snapping at her. She saw that anger in his eyes earlier tonight, when she told him Eames was taking her home. Eames. God, Eames. Who would have thought she would have mentioned anything to him. Weak moment, another one. Tell a stranger instead of someone close to you what's really bothering you. She had seen that tactic on doctor shows millions of times but never found it viable. That is, until she did it herself. Which was an accident. It just came out because she had been bottling. Something she wasn't going to do again.

"I'm sorry." She croaked and cleared her throat.

His hand stopped moving on her back and she felt his head look down at her. He gently pushed her up off his shoulder and he cupped her face again, hands on both sides of her cheeks. He placed a small kiss on her hairline and smoothed her hair back.

"You have nothing to be sorry for." Arthur said softly.

She shrugged, noticing the tear stains on the shoulder of his shirt.

"Your shirt for one…"

He looked down at his shoulder and laughed softly, a sound that made her stomach flip into impossible knots.

"Don't even worry about it."

She wasn't sorry for the shirt. Not really. She was sorry for ignoring him, for taking comfort in Eames and not him, for showing up at his doorstep a disheveled mess and then for sobbing on him. It seemed easier to apologize for the shirt instead.

He took the blanket off the foot of his bed and wrapped her up in it. She watched him and couldn't fight a yawn as it escaped her. She was emotionally exhausted.

"It's starting…in my mom. The dementia is the first sign."

"You don't know that for sure."

"Don't I?" She asked as he started to rub her arms through the fabric. "She couldn't remember a simple learned task. She remembered after a few minutes but…that's how it all starts. Simple tasks are lost."

Simple tasks, people, names, places, what goes where, what was that object that cooked things, what's my name, did that actually happen or did was it made up? What is reality and what isn't?

"I…actually get it now. How Cobb felt in Limbo with Mal." She swallowed thickly, looking down at her lap. Arthur's hands had moved onto her lap to take her hands into his. "How he…could lose his grip on reality, like she had. She was so lost. Confused. He could have stayed with her, you know?"

Arthur nodded. "Yeah, I know."

What was really frightening to Ariadne was that she could inherit the disease, like her grandmother had, like her mom was starting to show signs of. That she could lose grip on reality…and not even be involved in shared dreaming.

"I'm scared, Arthur." She admitted, so soft that he barely heard her. "I don't want to end up like her."

But not even Ariadne could distinguish who she meant in that one simple sentence. Maybe it was just her mom, the disease working into her mind like a simple idea-one simple, idea that could change everything-growing in there like a cancer, a time bomb. Or like Mal, wrapping herself up in levels upon levels of shared dreaming-beaches upon beaches of subconscious waves licking her legs, building things she never would have dreamed of building-being lost in something that was real…or unreal. A totem becoming useless to keep track of reality. Or maybe both, all at once, crashing into her.

Arthur wasn't sure either, didn't want to make the connection out loud. "You won't."

His voice was so certain, assertive, that she almost believed him.

"I won't let you." He cupped her face again, warm palms burning into her cheeks. "I'll be your totem. I'll reassure you of reality every day if I have to."

She swallowed and leaned forward, resting her forehead against his, noses grazing, and lips touching when either of them spoke. He kissed her softly, lips moving against hers in a soft, fluid motion, like silk flowing in the wind.

She often wondered if he would be enough. But then again, he was there reassuring her every other day that he was.

No, she concluded, she wouldn't end up like either of them.