[Fic] Secret Country
Title: Secret Country
Fandom: Inception
Characters: Ariadne, Arthur, Eames, Cobb, Saito, Yusuf, OFC, OMCs, eventual Arthur/Eames
Status: Unfinished, 1/?
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,137
Summary: Ariadne gets in over her head on a job with another team, and calls for help. Can the crew really survive a second inception job?
Warnings/Spoilers Cross-posted at inceptionfic , Violence, non-major character death, swearing, original characters (non-self inserts), slash (eventual). Oh, and Ariadne is paired with an OC, but it's not a focus. Spoilers for the movie.
Disclaimer: Inception is Nolan's, though I wish it was mine. Ooh, do I wish.
Author's Note: So, this is my first fic in years, and my first Inception fic period, but I love that this movie made me WANT to read and write fics, so here goes. Bear with me while I get my sea legs, and definitely don't mind me on the original characters. They're heavy in this chapter to set everything up, and then they'll mellow down throughout the rest. They have a purpose relating to plot, promise. ;) Thank you so much, psycocatgirl , for beta reading! <3
Secret Country
Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.
Cobb always said that, Arthur heard the words leave his mouth more times than he could count in the years they’d known each other, but somehow they still eluded him now when he truly needed to remember them. Choking on salt water and frantically trying to drag himself onto the sandy beach, he should have put more thought into where he was, how he’d gotten there and why, but he was so exhausted that once he was no longer in danger of drowning, he collapsed in a wet heap, only half-out of the surf.
==============================
If Ariadne were any typical kind of girl, she’d have dissolved into tears by now, and that was no joke. It was a testament to her will and her general toughness that she was still a functioning member of the group, and the problem at hand wasn’t even anything that was happening, but what wasn’t happening. It had been a bad idea to go off in search of other jobs without the people she’d risked her life and sanity with, but Cobb was right - once she’d taken to the dream world, she couldn’t just forget it; reality wasn’t enough for her, anymore. A new group wasn’t enough, either, because they weren’t the faces that Ariadne had grown to trust. There was no Cobb, with his sheer determination and quick-thinking, or Yusuf’s almost-shy smiles and nerdy jokes. Eames wasn’t here flirting and sassing the rest of the group as he pretended that he didn’t love what he did and that he was so needed, and no Arthur with his impeccable style and amazing gunmanship, not to mention the subtlety in everything he did. She even missed Saito, who had seemed so distant and unreachable when she first met him. She missed the variety that was her group, the versatility and the range of talent that they all brought to the table, and Jericho’s group only made that ache more severe. It was hard to watch this group that she had lent her skills to struggling with a situation that she knew the others never would have gotten into. Oh, and if they had? It would have been dealt with quickly and professionally, without the arguing. Well, except for Eames, he might not have always been professional, but he made an art out of being inappropriate.
“We failed! That means we get the fuck out of here, and hope to God that they don’t catch up with us!” Jericho shouted, tossing anything that belonged to him into his bag while he did. He was a decent extractor, with more skill at getting out of trouble and slithering through impossible to navigate traps than he seemed to have at first glance. Ariadne respected him for his skills, but wasn’t so confident in his leadership abilities. She couldn’t help comparing, and Cobb was the best. How do you work with the best, and then with others? It was painful. What helped was that he didn’t have a crazy dead wife haunting his dreams as a deadly projection while they worked, and he genuinely seemed to be attracted to Ariadne. It felt good to be wanted and liked that way, and so maybe she gave him a little leeway for his faults.
“Running isn’t going to get us anywhere, Jer! We’ve gotta talk to this guy, explain the situation, and either give him his money back or find another way to do the job!” Rowen shouted, his shaggy dark brown hair bouncing back into place with his gestures. It had been matted down when he woke up sweaty and screaming from the dream, just like the rest of them had in varying degrees. They had failed spectacularly.
“It’ll get us out of here alive, Rowen! I don’t know about you, but I’d like to live long enough to forget this ever happened!”
“That’s because you’re a fucking coward!” Ariadne flinched with the severity of Rowen’s words and the fury in his blue eyes, worried for an instant that he and Jericho were going to come to blows right there in the middle of the room, what with the way Jericho threw down his bag to face the other man. Jericho’s black hair was sticking up comically from where he’d been sleeping during the dream, despite being as short as it was, but there was nothing comical about the darkness of his expression. Ariadne opened her mouth, but no sound came out. What could she possibly even SAY? She glanced at Jason, wondering if he had any genius ideas, but he returned the look with equally wide blue eyes and an uncertain expression. She felt bad for him, looking like he’d been awake for days and hadn’t shaved for just as long, but they all looked tired, didn’t they? For as much sleeping as they did, none of it was restful.
“WHOA, hey, guys!” The only other female in the group, Rook, was on her feet and jumping between them, her lithe form looking nothing but delicate with the two larger guys about to come to blows around her. Jericho wasn’t very bulky, with a leaner build, but Rowen was athletic and looked it. He and Rook were close, and the only two in the group that consistently took up arms against the projections for this group, so Ariadne was surprised at Rook’s lack of a bias as she tried to split them up. There was no mistaking the way she let Rowen have her back, though. She had a gun tucked into a shoulder rig that was ridiculously close to Rowen, not Jericho. Rook trusted Rowen not to touch it. Did she trust Jericho that far? “Everyone’s pissed, we failed and that sucks, but standing around here yelling at each other doesn’t fix that. Why don’t we regroup somewhere a little less obvious in a few days and make sense of this, okay? Then, we can all cool down.”
Rook was often the peacemaker, so Ariadne wasn’t surprised at the self-admitted Gypsy girl’s sincere expression beneath the bright blue eye make-up that enhanced her dark eyes, but she was surprised that Rook was advocating a regroup at a later date instead of dealing with it all immediately. Apparently, so was Rowen.
“What? Why would we wait?” Rowen demanded, stepping back, but not less upset. “He’s gonna think we ran off with his money!”
“So we give it back now, and then get in touch with him again in a few days, after the initial impact blows over,” she offered.
“Hey, guys,” Jason offered, his voice quiet while still holding a sense of urgency to it. The others ignored him, but Ariadne glanced in his direction to find him staring out the window beside him.
“That’s impossible, we can’t just give it back!” Jericho snapped back.
“GUYS! COMPANY!” Jason shouted, rushing away from the window. He broke his otherwise hasty retreat to the bathroom just long enough to grab Ariadne’s upper arm and drag her along with him, the others left to their argument. He stopped her from seeing what was happening, which might have been a doing her a favor, as he shoved her into the bathroom and started trying to wrench open the little window cut in the wall of the shower. At the same time, gunshots were exploding from the room behind them, and she heard Jericho’s voice from right outside the bathroom door that Jason had shut on their way in. There was no sound out of Rook and Rowen, but there was too much gunfire for them to be doing anything other than returning fire, at first. There was shouting and screaming, but nothing that she recognized other than Jericho’s cursing, and she’d heard all of them scream at one point or another in the dreams. She wished she could see, if only so that she wouldn’t have to wait around in this panicked bubble of not-knowing, but she heard when Rowen was hit.
Unlike some of the people in their field, Ariadne still dreamed on her own, and Rowen’s agonized scream was going to be in her dreams for a very long time. Rook shouted his name in the same instant, then fell silent, and the sounds of gunfire from outside of the bathroom door suddenly exploded into being. Had Jericho not been shooting the whole time? Ariadne hadn’t noticed the difference until he suddenly started firing, and something inside of her ached for poor Rook and Rowen. Jason was muttering to himself and hissing as he fought again with the window that didn’t want to open, a vein in his temple standing out and a fine sheen of sweat forming over his skin.
“I’m trying, Ariadne, I just can’t get the damn thing open!” he grimaced, shooting her a look that was half panic and all apologetic. She could see the white of her face in the mirror over the sink, and she knew that he had to have heard Rowen’s voice above the bullets. Jericho was grabbing at the bathroom door, yanking it open to Ariadne’s shriek, and Jason abandoned the window in that instant to kick at the towel rack beside the shower he was standing in. It came off completely after only three kicks, and Jason had only caught it a glancing blow on that second one, clattering to the floor noisily before he snatched it up and glared at Jericho. Were there any bullets left in the gun he was holding? The way Jason put himself between the door and the other two, that flimsy towel rack in hand, it was obvious that he doubted it. She still yanked it out of Jericho’s hand, her own smaller fingers wrapping around it like it was just another part of her old group that she missed. Arthur taught her how to shoot, and now she felt foolish for not having a gun of her own. She should have never left her safety in the hands of others, people who weren’t Arthur, Cobb and Eames.
No time for regrets now, not with the door being flung open and Jason following it with an aggressive shout and swing of that towel rack that was uncharacteristic for the oftentimes shy, quirky chemist. Ariadne flinched at the solid sound of impact and a body hitting the floor before another gunshot rang out, and Jason backed himself right through the doorway again, grabbing at the handle and bringing it right along with him. That didn’t help their situation all that much, since the next time the door opened, the men on the other side were a lot more prepared for a crazy twenty-something year old with a towel rack, but Jason still launched himself at them and Ariadne heard the connection with flesh again before someone fired and Jason howled in pain. He hit the floor on his knees in front of the door, the rack bouncing out of his grasp, and this time Ariadne was up.
“Don’t!” she screamed, jerking Jericho’s gun up in her sweaty palms and aiming for the man with his own firearm on Jason. “I swear, I’ll shoot if you touch him.”
She heard Jericho shift behind her as the men near Jason moved, letting someone else through. This man was dressed in a tailored navy suit, probably fresh from the campaign trail to be present for this gory little event, and he twisted his lips at Ariadne in what was likely supposed to be a smile. “That thing loaded, little girl? If you shoot, you better have enough bullets for all of us,” Renaldi warned her, watching her for an instant before his deep-set eyes twitched over to Jericho behind her.
“Shoot him.”
Ariadne had that cold, heavy feeling settle in her gut as she pulled the trigger to kill the man before her and the only shot that rang out was the one that left the gun leveled at Jason’s head. She was staring him in the eyes, those hazel eyes that she’d never really paid attention to and never really appreciated, but were actually quite beautiful, and she could see the fear and the resolve in them beneath the surface. He knew he was going to die even before Renaldi gave the order, but that knowledge didn’t make the reality any less horrifying. Ariadne had seen people die in dreams and didn’t falter over it, but she wanted to dig the bishop out of her pocket to prove to herself that this was a dream and that Jason hadn’t just died. She knew that her totem would tell her that this was real, but that desperate hope lingered.
Jericho’s arms wrapped around her middle as she tried to hurl herself at Jason’s fallen body, the empty gun clattering to the floor a distant sound in her ears beneath the rushing blood and the ringing from the gunshot in such a small space. Suddenly, she was glad that Jason had spared her the sight of the others dying, the thought of watching the light in Rowen and Rook’s eyes go out just sickening, but she knew they hadn’t deserved to go alone like that.
“This enough to make my point? I want this job done, and I want it done right, or the rest of you are all dead. I’m not playing around next time,” Renaldi informed them, all traces of that smile gone as he pointed at them, focusing specifically on Ariadne. She and Jericho stayed where they were until the rest of the motel room had been silent for nearly ten minutes, and then she lurched out of his arms to collect her things.
She nearly jumped through the room when one of the bodies on the floor turned, groaning and trying to sit up with a veil of straight, dark hair obscuring her face, and Ariadne didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the realization that Rook was still alive. She couldn’t even find it in herself to move until the group’s point man pushed herself into a sitting position and shoved her hair out of her bloodied face. The mixture of the blood and bright blue eye make-up was startling on the girl’s face, but Rook seemed relatively unharmed as she took in her surroundings, including Rowen’s still form beside her. Ariadne didn’t have to have witnessed the fight to know that Rook saw him go down and tried to cover for him; it had happened in dreams before, but with a much higher survival rate. Rowen wasn’t going to wake up with phantom pains after this one, and that knowledge crossed Rook’s face in a dark shadow at about the same time Ariadne thought it. Jericho came out of the bathroom in that moment of silence between the two women, and he instantly grabbed up his duffel bag to finish what he’d been doing before the attack with a renewed fervor.
“Good to see you’re still with us, Rook. We need a new forger and chemist if we stand any chance at doing this job, and we need to get the hell out of here before the police show up,” he said quickly, his eyes darting around like he expected one of the bodies to sit up and attack him. Rook looked at him like he was insane.
“Chemist? Jason?” she asked, glancing to Ariadne, whose eyes teared up once more.
“Oh, God,” Rook murmured, dipping her head and running her fingers over Rowen’s hair. It was lacking in blood, the fatal bullet looking as though it had taken him in the chest, and his face shouldn’t have looked that peaceful after being gunned down, his eyes closed. Not like Jason, whose eyes Ariadne closed for him before they left.
“I have to make a phone call,” she told the other two quietly, turning to place her chess piece on the table they’d done so much of their planning on, tipping it and staring at it when it did exactly as it was supposed to. Rook had cleaned her face up before she’d vacated the motel room, a quick splash of soap and water to make her pass in public like a normal person, but there was an angry, swelling cut over one of her high cheekbones. She took hold of Ariadne’s arm with her left hand, her right on a gun she’d taken from one of the fallen attackers tucked into her knee-length coat. Her own backpack was on her shoulders and a messenger bag hung between them at her left side, holding the necessary equipment for their trade and Jason’s work. They would salvage as much as they could until they got another chemist, but Ariadne had no intention of drawing some other poor soul that she didn’t know and didn’t trust into this mess. She needed help.
==============================
Arthur, believe it or not, was sitting in a chair staring at the sun setting over the ocean when his phone rang. Had it been anyone else, he might not have bothered answering it, being on ‘vacation’, as he was. Still, he’d never been known to take a proper vacation before, and it was Ariadne. He always answered her calls.
“Hello?”
“Arthur, I need your help. Where are you?” she asked, her voice trembling over the line, and he sat up a little straighter. Suddenly, he felt foolish even being there on the beach when Ariadne was so obviously in trouble.
“I can be wherever you need me as soon as possible. What’s happened?”
“I…I kept taking jobs, couldn’t just leave it all, you know? This one went bad, Arthur, half of the team is dead and the rest of us will be if we don’t finish. We can’t do it,” she explained desperately, her obviously hard-won control beginning to break at the admission. Knowing the strong-willed, spunky girl that she was, this was disturbing for Arthur to hear and made him all the more determined to help.
“What kind of job is it? What do you need?”
“Inception.”
“Christ. Ariadne, why would you accept that?” he hissed, unable to believe that she’d have even dared, knowing what they’d gone through once before.
“It wasn’t my choice. Jericho, he thought we could do it because I knew how we did ours, but it didn’t work. They’re going to kill us, Arthur. They already…Rowen and Jason, they’re gone.”
“Alright, calm down. Send me your address, I’ll give you a rendezvous point. Keep your head down until I get there,” he instructed, his free hand going to the bridge of his nose for a moment before he was up and headed inside. He had a lot to do in a short period of time.
Fandom: Inception
Characters: Ariadne, Arthur, Eames, Cobb, Saito, Yusuf, OFC, OMCs, eventual Arthur/Eames
Status: Unfinished, 1/?
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,137
Summary: Ariadne gets in over her head on a job with another team, and calls for help. Can the crew really survive a second inception job?
Warnings/Spoilers Cross-posted at inceptionfic , Violence, non-major character death, swearing, original characters (non-self inserts), slash (eventual). Oh, and Ariadne is paired with an OC, but it's not a focus. Spoilers for the movie.
Disclaimer: Inception is Nolan's, though I wish it was mine. Ooh, do I wish.
Author's Note: So, this is my first fic in years, and my first Inception fic period, but I love that this movie made me WANT to read and write fics, so here goes. Bear with me while I get my sea legs, and definitely don't mind me on the original characters. They're heavy in this chapter to set everything up, and then they'll mellow down throughout the rest. They have a purpose relating to plot, promise. ;) Thank you so much, psycocatgirl , for beta reading! <3
Secret Country
Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.
Cobb always said that, Arthur heard the words leave his mouth more times than he could count in the years they’d known each other, but somehow they still eluded him now when he truly needed to remember them. Choking on salt water and frantically trying to drag himself onto the sandy beach, he should have put more thought into where he was, how he’d gotten there and why, but he was so exhausted that once he was no longer in danger of drowning, he collapsed in a wet heap, only half-out of the surf.
==============================
If Ariadne were any typical kind of girl, she’d have dissolved into tears by now, and that was no joke. It was a testament to her will and her general toughness that she was still a functioning member of the group, and the problem at hand wasn’t even anything that was happening, but what wasn’t happening. It had been a bad idea to go off in search of other jobs without the people she’d risked her life and sanity with, but Cobb was right - once she’d taken to the dream world, she couldn’t just forget it; reality wasn’t enough for her, anymore. A new group wasn’t enough, either, because they weren’t the faces that Ariadne had grown to trust. There was no Cobb, with his sheer determination and quick-thinking, or Yusuf’s almost-shy smiles and nerdy jokes. Eames wasn’t here flirting and sassing the rest of the group as he pretended that he didn’t love what he did and that he was so needed, and no Arthur with his impeccable style and amazing gunmanship, not to mention the subtlety in everything he did. She even missed Saito, who had seemed so distant and unreachable when she first met him. She missed the variety that was her group, the versatility and the range of talent that they all brought to the table, and Jericho’s group only made that ache more severe. It was hard to watch this group that she had lent her skills to struggling with a situation that she knew the others never would have gotten into. Oh, and if they had? It would have been dealt with quickly and professionally, without the arguing. Well, except for Eames, he might not have always been professional, but he made an art out of being inappropriate.
“We failed! That means we get the fuck out of here, and hope to God that they don’t catch up with us!” Jericho shouted, tossing anything that belonged to him into his bag while he did. He was a decent extractor, with more skill at getting out of trouble and slithering through impossible to navigate traps than he seemed to have at first glance. Ariadne respected him for his skills, but wasn’t so confident in his leadership abilities. She couldn’t help comparing, and Cobb was the best. How do you work with the best, and then with others? It was painful. What helped was that he didn’t have a crazy dead wife haunting his dreams as a deadly projection while they worked, and he genuinely seemed to be attracted to Ariadne. It felt good to be wanted and liked that way, and so maybe she gave him a little leeway for his faults.
“Running isn’t going to get us anywhere, Jer! We’ve gotta talk to this guy, explain the situation, and either give him his money back or find another way to do the job!” Rowen shouted, his shaggy dark brown hair bouncing back into place with his gestures. It had been matted down when he woke up sweaty and screaming from the dream, just like the rest of them had in varying degrees. They had failed spectacularly.
“It’ll get us out of here alive, Rowen! I don’t know about you, but I’d like to live long enough to forget this ever happened!”
“That’s because you’re a fucking coward!” Ariadne flinched with the severity of Rowen’s words and the fury in his blue eyes, worried for an instant that he and Jericho were going to come to blows right there in the middle of the room, what with the way Jericho threw down his bag to face the other man. Jericho’s black hair was sticking up comically from where he’d been sleeping during the dream, despite being as short as it was, but there was nothing comical about the darkness of his expression. Ariadne opened her mouth, but no sound came out. What could she possibly even SAY? She glanced at Jason, wondering if he had any genius ideas, but he returned the look with equally wide blue eyes and an uncertain expression. She felt bad for him, looking like he’d been awake for days and hadn’t shaved for just as long, but they all looked tired, didn’t they? For as much sleeping as they did, none of it was restful.
“WHOA, hey, guys!” The only other female in the group, Rook, was on her feet and jumping between them, her lithe form looking nothing but delicate with the two larger guys about to come to blows around her. Jericho wasn’t very bulky, with a leaner build, but Rowen was athletic and looked it. He and Rook were close, and the only two in the group that consistently took up arms against the projections for this group, so Ariadne was surprised at Rook’s lack of a bias as she tried to split them up. There was no mistaking the way she let Rowen have her back, though. She had a gun tucked into a shoulder rig that was ridiculously close to Rowen, not Jericho. Rook trusted Rowen not to touch it. Did she trust Jericho that far? “Everyone’s pissed, we failed and that sucks, but standing around here yelling at each other doesn’t fix that. Why don’t we regroup somewhere a little less obvious in a few days and make sense of this, okay? Then, we can all cool down.”
Rook was often the peacemaker, so Ariadne wasn’t surprised at the self-admitted Gypsy girl’s sincere expression beneath the bright blue eye make-up that enhanced her dark eyes, but she was surprised that Rook was advocating a regroup at a later date instead of dealing with it all immediately. Apparently, so was Rowen.
“What? Why would we wait?” Rowen demanded, stepping back, but not less upset. “He’s gonna think we ran off with his money!”
“So we give it back now, and then get in touch with him again in a few days, after the initial impact blows over,” she offered.
“Hey, guys,” Jason offered, his voice quiet while still holding a sense of urgency to it. The others ignored him, but Ariadne glanced in his direction to find him staring out the window beside him.
“That’s impossible, we can’t just give it back!” Jericho snapped back.
“GUYS! COMPANY!” Jason shouted, rushing away from the window. He broke his otherwise hasty retreat to the bathroom just long enough to grab Ariadne’s upper arm and drag her along with him, the others left to their argument. He stopped her from seeing what was happening, which might have been a doing her a favor, as he shoved her into the bathroom and started trying to wrench open the little window cut in the wall of the shower. At the same time, gunshots were exploding from the room behind them, and she heard Jericho’s voice from right outside the bathroom door that Jason had shut on their way in. There was no sound out of Rook and Rowen, but there was too much gunfire for them to be doing anything other than returning fire, at first. There was shouting and screaming, but nothing that she recognized other than Jericho’s cursing, and she’d heard all of them scream at one point or another in the dreams. She wished she could see, if only so that she wouldn’t have to wait around in this panicked bubble of not-knowing, but she heard when Rowen was hit.
Unlike some of the people in their field, Ariadne still dreamed on her own, and Rowen’s agonized scream was going to be in her dreams for a very long time. Rook shouted his name in the same instant, then fell silent, and the sounds of gunfire from outside of the bathroom door suddenly exploded into being. Had Jericho not been shooting the whole time? Ariadne hadn’t noticed the difference until he suddenly started firing, and something inside of her ached for poor Rook and Rowen. Jason was muttering to himself and hissing as he fought again with the window that didn’t want to open, a vein in his temple standing out and a fine sheen of sweat forming over his skin.
“I’m trying, Ariadne, I just can’t get the damn thing open!” he grimaced, shooting her a look that was half panic and all apologetic. She could see the white of her face in the mirror over the sink, and she knew that he had to have heard Rowen’s voice above the bullets. Jericho was grabbing at the bathroom door, yanking it open to Ariadne’s shriek, and Jason abandoned the window in that instant to kick at the towel rack beside the shower he was standing in. It came off completely after only three kicks, and Jason had only caught it a glancing blow on that second one, clattering to the floor noisily before he snatched it up and glared at Jericho. Were there any bullets left in the gun he was holding? The way Jason put himself between the door and the other two, that flimsy towel rack in hand, it was obvious that he doubted it. She still yanked it out of Jericho’s hand, her own smaller fingers wrapping around it like it was just another part of her old group that she missed. Arthur taught her how to shoot, and now she felt foolish for not having a gun of her own. She should have never left her safety in the hands of others, people who weren’t Arthur, Cobb and Eames.
No time for regrets now, not with the door being flung open and Jason following it with an aggressive shout and swing of that towel rack that was uncharacteristic for the oftentimes shy, quirky chemist. Ariadne flinched at the solid sound of impact and a body hitting the floor before another gunshot rang out, and Jason backed himself right through the doorway again, grabbing at the handle and bringing it right along with him. That didn’t help their situation all that much, since the next time the door opened, the men on the other side were a lot more prepared for a crazy twenty-something year old with a towel rack, but Jason still launched himself at them and Ariadne heard the connection with flesh again before someone fired and Jason howled in pain. He hit the floor on his knees in front of the door, the rack bouncing out of his grasp, and this time Ariadne was up.
“Don’t!” she screamed, jerking Jericho’s gun up in her sweaty palms and aiming for the man with his own firearm on Jason. “I swear, I’ll shoot if you touch him.”
She heard Jericho shift behind her as the men near Jason moved, letting someone else through. This man was dressed in a tailored navy suit, probably fresh from the campaign trail to be present for this gory little event, and he twisted his lips at Ariadne in what was likely supposed to be a smile. “That thing loaded, little girl? If you shoot, you better have enough bullets for all of us,” Renaldi warned her, watching her for an instant before his deep-set eyes twitched over to Jericho behind her.
“Shoot him.”
Ariadne had that cold, heavy feeling settle in her gut as she pulled the trigger to kill the man before her and the only shot that rang out was the one that left the gun leveled at Jason’s head. She was staring him in the eyes, those hazel eyes that she’d never really paid attention to and never really appreciated, but were actually quite beautiful, and she could see the fear and the resolve in them beneath the surface. He knew he was going to die even before Renaldi gave the order, but that knowledge didn’t make the reality any less horrifying. Ariadne had seen people die in dreams and didn’t falter over it, but she wanted to dig the bishop out of her pocket to prove to herself that this was a dream and that Jason hadn’t just died. She knew that her totem would tell her that this was real, but that desperate hope lingered.
Jericho’s arms wrapped around her middle as she tried to hurl herself at Jason’s fallen body, the empty gun clattering to the floor a distant sound in her ears beneath the rushing blood and the ringing from the gunshot in such a small space. Suddenly, she was glad that Jason had spared her the sight of the others dying, the thought of watching the light in Rowen and Rook’s eyes go out just sickening, but she knew they hadn’t deserved to go alone like that.
“This enough to make my point? I want this job done, and I want it done right, or the rest of you are all dead. I’m not playing around next time,” Renaldi informed them, all traces of that smile gone as he pointed at them, focusing specifically on Ariadne. She and Jericho stayed where they were until the rest of the motel room had been silent for nearly ten minutes, and then she lurched out of his arms to collect her things.
She nearly jumped through the room when one of the bodies on the floor turned, groaning and trying to sit up with a veil of straight, dark hair obscuring her face, and Ariadne didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the realization that Rook was still alive. She couldn’t even find it in herself to move until the group’s point man pushed herself into a sitting position and shoved her hair out of her bloodied face. The mixture of the blood and bright blue eye make-up was startling on the girl’s face, but Rook seemed relatively unharmed as she took in her surroundings, including Rowen’s still form beside her. Ariadne didn’t have to have witnessed the fight to know that Rook saw him go down and tried to cover for him; it had happened in dreams before, but with a much higher survival rate. Rowen wasn’t going to wake up with phantom pains after this one, and that knowledge crossed Rook’s face in a dark shadow at about the same time Ariadne thought it. Jericho came out of the bathroom in that moment of silence between the two women, and he instantly grabbed up his duffel bag to finish what he’d been doing before the attack with a renewed fervor.
“Good to see you’re still with us, Rook. We need a new forger and chemist if we stand any chance at doing this job, and we need to get the hell out of here before the police show up,” he said quickly, his eyes darting around like he expected one of the bodies to sit up and attack him. Rook looked at him like he was insane.
“Chemist? Jason?” she asked, glancing to Ariadne, whose eyes teared up once more.
“Oh, God,” Rook murmured, dipping her head and running her fingers over Rowen’s hair. It was lacking in blood, the fatal bullet looking as though it had taken him in the chest, and his face shouldn’t have looked that peaceful after being gunned down, his eyes closed. Not like Jason, whose eyes Ariadne closed for him before they left.
“I have to make a phone call,” she told the other two quietly, turning to place her chess piece on the table they’d done so much of their planning on, tipping it and staring at it when it did exactly as it was supposed to. Rook had cleaned her face up before she’d vacated the motel room, a quick splash of soap and water to make her pass in public like a normal person, but there was an angry, swelling cut over one of her high cheekbones. She took hold of Ariadne’s arm with her left hand, her right on a gun she’d taken from one of the fallen attackers tucked into her knee-length coat. Her own backpack was on her shoulders and a messenger bag hung between them at her left side, holding the necessary equipment for their trade and Jason’s work. They would salvage as much as they could until they got another chemist, but Ariadne had no intention of drawing some other poor soul that she didn’t know and didn’t trust into this mess. She needed help.
==============================
Arthur, believe it or not, was sitting in a chair staring at the sun setting over the ocean when his phone rang. Had it been anyone else, he might not have bothered answering it, being on ‘vacation’, as he was. Still, he’d never been known to take a proper vacation before, and it was Ariadne. He always answered her calls.
“Hello?”
“Arthur, I need your help. Where are you?” she asked, her voice trembling over the line, and he sat up a little straighter. Suddenly, he felt foolish even being there on the beach when Ariadne was so obviously in trouble.
“I can be wherever you need me as soon as possible. What’s happened?”
“I…I kept taking jobs, couldn’t just leave it all, you know? This one went bad, Arthur, half of the team is dead and the rest of us will be if we don’t finish. We can’t do it,” she explained desperately, her obviously hard-won control beginning to break at the admission. Knowing the strong-willed, spunky girl that she was, this was disturbing for Arthur to hear and made him all the more determined to help.
“What kind of job is it? What do you need?”
“Inception.”
“Christ. Ariadne, why would you accept that?” he hissed, unable to believe that she’d have even dared, knowing what they’d gone through once before.
“It wasn’t my choice. Jericho, he thought we could do it because I knew how we did ours, but it didn’t work. They’re going to kill us, Arthur. They already…Rowen and Jason, they’re gone.”
“Alright, calm down. Send me your address, I’ll give you a rendezvous point. Keep your head down until I get there,” he instructed, his free hand going to the bridge of his nose for a moment before he was up and headed inside. He had a lot to do in a short period of time.