Fanfiction: Architecture of Chess (Complete)
Title: Architecture of Chess
Writer: Sporadic_Writer
Status of work: Complete
Characters and/or pairings: Ariadne-centric, Arthur, Cobb, Eames, Yusuf, Saito, OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings, kinks & contents: Sexist and homophobic remarks from an OC.
Summary: Ariadne's bishop has a long history.
A/N: I wrote this story to fill fruityshirts's prompt from here. The prompt: "Maybe this already exists and I just haven't found it, but I would love to see a story in which Ariadne plays chess. And possibly kicks everyone on the team's ass, much to their chagrin! XD I feel like there's a lot of backstory on Arthur and Eames' totems, and I'd love to see some for Ariadne's bishop!"
Update: fruityshirts graciously drew a beautiful illustration of a key scene in the story, and it can be found here, along with her poignant social commentary on women in chess.
“Women don't belong in chess.” An anonymous quote off the Internet, but unfortunately, not a rare belief.
Assholes like Bobby Fischer are everywhere.
Ariadne figured that out the first day she brought out her plastic travel chess set and asked the little boy across the seat to play with her. The little boy smiled and would have agreed, but his father interrupted and asked patronizingly if the game wasn't too boring for a little girl. Then Ariadne stomped on his foot, and her parents sent her in disgrace to their sleeping compartment on the train.
She spent the rest of the afternoon brooding over the unfairness: why wasn't the man punished for calling her stupid?
Chess always smelled like syrup to her. Her grandmother's old wooden chess set was made of a deep golden brown that retained its forest smell no matter how long ago the timber had been hewed from the original tree.
“This is the king,” her grandmother said, lifting out the tall cross-crowned figure. The old woman gave a conspiratorial smile, as she whispered, “He's rather useless without his wife.”
Ariadne giggled, and she held the little king in her small hands.
From the cross-grained box, her grandmother lifted out another tall figure, but one crowned with delicate little points that were sharper than they looked.
“Ouch.” Unwisely, Ariadne had reached out to caress the little pointed top and realized that the queen came with authentic protection.
“Guard your queen,” her grandmother chided. “She's the most powerful one there. Lose your queen and forfeit the game.”
“She's that important? You can't have a game without her?”
“Yes and no. If you lose your queen, forfeit the game as punishment for being so stupid.”
Undaunted by the vein of bitterness running under her grandmother's words, Ariadne boldly pulled the box of chess pieces over to her side of the table. She rummaged around and found one with an odd lip near the top.
“What's this, Granny? It has a peach on top!”
“That's not a peach, silly goose. It's the bishop's hat. The bishop can only move in a diagonal, like this and like this,” the old woman made the bishop hop from one colored square to another. The little girl giggled at the funny sight, so much like a rabbit's twitchy movements.
“I like this one best,” the little girl decided.
The grandmother widened her eyes in pretend shock. “Why, I haven't even introduced you to the rook or the knight or the faithful old pawn yet.”
“I know, but I like how it keeps going the same way. Daddy said only dummies stay on the same old path, but he left to marry his new girlfriend, so I think he's the real dummy.”
The grandmother leaned over to place a dry kiss on the little girl's forehead. “Then you're smarter than many adults. Because, guess what, the bishop always has a partner that will protect her.”
Ariadne played seven games with her grandmother on that golden chess set that smelled so sweet.
She had hopes that her grandmother would give it to her when she was a big girl. But the kitchen fire that took her grandmother away also took away everything else.
Ariadne thought about the little boy on the train-not often at all because her life was filled with so many interesting things to do and see, but she thought about him sometimes. She also thought about his chauvinist dad.
She thought about them both, as she grew older, and chess was no longer just chess. The youth chess tournaments were fun at first in the lower levels where the gender ratio was less askew, and the girls that played chess did so out of competitive spirit, and the boys only looked at a girl to see which piece her eyes seemed to favor.
Ariadne made friends with several like-minded girls, and they gave the boys a run for their money, and then everyone, no matter who lost and who won, would go out to eat ice cream.
On a Tuesday, when they were thirteen, Cara lost her first game.
Ariadne wanted to cry, and she bit her lip to hold back the recriminations that threatened to flow out. “It's okay; you'll do better next time. I'll help you practice,” she finally said when she could mock up some composure.
“What?” Cara asked distractedly, checking the gloss of her long hair in the bathroom mirror.
“I'll help you practice so that you can beat him next week,” Ariadne repeated.
Cara laughed delightedly. “Oh, my God! Ariadne, who cares? Did you hear what he said to me after the game? He said that he almost let me win because I'm so cute. Can you believe that? Devin thinks that I'm cute. Hey, if I do really bad in the club rankings next week, do you think he'll tutor me?”
Bile rose up in Ariadne's throat, and she rushed through the hinged door of the nearest toilet to vomit. The chunks of hamburger from lunch and the ugly brown of Dr. Pepper swirled down the toilet. She leaned her forehead against the cool round porcelain and ignored her best friend's shrieks about the toilet being dirty.
Ariadne wanted to quit the club, but Cara aside, there were still girls who played to win, and there were still boys who didn't look at her and want to cage her into a square.
“Can I get a game?” the handsome blue-eyed young man asked her. Ariadne looked up from her urban studies textbook and held up a finger for quiet before slipping her bookmark (a simple strip of paper patterned with black and white squares) into place.
“Black or white?” she asked simply in return. He chose white, and with a confident grin, moved his knight with a clumsy grip. She took her black pawn and placed it with a gentle thud before her king.
When the boy lost and cussed her out, calling her a bitch and a dyke and a slew of other terms that she didn't bother to remember, she carefully collected the chess pieces, including the ones he'd tossed to the ground in anger. She slid the wooden cover into the roughly sanded box and then sedately went back to studying for her final exam.
Only later, when the boy had left, chased away by glares from various disapproving strangers, did she open the box and rub clean the pieces that were stained with mud or covered in debris from the leaf-ridden stones in the park. But still, her tears did not fall.
The old men, who also sat in the circular courtyard near the fountain, never seemed to pay her any particular notice. But this time, one man wearing a heavy wool scarf took his cane from his bench and limped slowly to her table.
“You looked nearly cool as ice back there,” he told her abruptly in a voice hoarse with the ravages of dust and time, and Ariadne thought briefly of her grandmother.
“Your throat bobbed a bit when you swallowed though,” he continued. “You want to be careful about a tell like that. In a practice game like this and in the real deal. Your opponent's going to want to see you sweat.”
“I'm not playing in tournaments,” Ariadne said tightly, nails digging into her palms to hold back the tears that continued to linger in the backs of her eyes.
“You don't want to show up more morons?” the old man asked with a wry smile before turning around and returning to his own seat.
Ariadne rubbed the black bishop against her sweater.
She did.
“Is he going to know you?” Arthur asked her the first time they met. She gave him a wary look, and she kept her right hand in her pocket, where her car keys were. They were sharp enough.
“What are you talking about?”
He held up a newspaper clipping from a year ago. “You're a chess champion in several tournaments in the Bay Area. Are you going to be recognizable? We can't have Fischer remembering any of us.”
Stalker, Ariadne thought, more than a little unnerved and remembering the cryptic warnings her mom used to give her about strange men and isolated places.
Dominic Cobb, her professor's son-in-law, laughed lowly and clapped a fond hand on the back of Arthur's neck, inadvertently raking up the collar of his dress shirt. “Arthur's our point man, and he does a background check on everyone just to make sure we have no surprises.”
Ariadne gave him a sideways look. The career counselors had mentioned that companies required background checks, but everything about this job placement reminded her of the gangster films that her film studies teacher liked so much.
“I haven't played chess competitively for a while,” she finally answered, shrugging. “I had to focus on finishing my M.Arch., so I quit last September, and there were plenty of good new players to take my place. I don't think even my old competitors would remember me.”
Arthur looked a bit dubious, but he exchanged a look with Cobb, and they began instead to discuss the terms of her contract.
He's a kind young man, a gentleman deep down, her grandmother would have noted with a hint of irony. He patiently helped Ariadne to understand dreamwork, and he exhibited a hint of softness on occasion.
When they discussed totems, he hunted for the right words, and upon the lack, resorted to pulling out his own sacred item to show her. But when she tried to touch it, the same way she reached out for the queen piece as a child, Arthur smiled ruefully, closing his fingers around it. “Nah, can't let you touch it. That would defeat the purpose. Only I can know the exact feel of this die.”
In her hotel room, later that day, as she melted the gold from the sole piece of jewelry, a small bracelet, that she had inherited from her mother, she thought about Arthur's words. While she poured the thin stream of molten gold into her lead container, she carefully maneuvered around to thicken the bottom of the bishop.
She had valued devotion ever since she was a little girl whose world was shattered by an unfaithful father. She wasn't about to discount a sturdy nature now.
“You're not pretentious,” Eames, the forger, told her one day, currently not preoccupied with pestering Arthur and tugging on the man's metaphorical pigtails.
Ariadne tugged on the flowered silk scarf wrapped around her throat. She had bought it on sale, but it still wasn't cheap.
“That's not pretension; that's fashion,” he said dismissively, noting her fidget. He nodded towards the golden bishop that hung on a black cord threaded through the loop of her brown wool jeggings. “You play. I do too.”
“You want a game?” Ariadne asked, and a small part of her that had been subsumed by the curves and lines of architecture began to resurface in recognition.
Eames grinned, a surprisingly boyish expression on a man who looked like he spent his nights skulking around the backrooms of casinos. Having learned that he was a forger (in reality as much as in dreams), Ariadne wondered how much she could trust what she was seeing. The long fingers, callused and a little dry, moved nimbly and knowledgeably as he helped to unfold the board and arrange the black and white pieces.
When Ariadne offered him the choice, he suggested that they make it fair and use a die. Ariadne ended up winning white, and she took her pawn and placed it two steps ahead. Eames bit his lip thoughtfully before taking his own pawn and moving it two steps forward so that they were one square away from a diagonal.
They both smiled.
“Oh,” Yusuf said a few days later. “You play chess.”
“She beat the pants off me,” Eames said good-naturedly before flicking his eyes towards Arthur to see if the point man had noticed his emphasis on pants.
Yusuf laughed and settled into a nearby lounge chair. “I was going to ask for a game, but I learned from this one.” He jerked a shoulder in Eames's direction. “If he's no good, then I should look for a better teacher first.”
“That doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be a big competition. We can just play for fun,” Ariadne said encouragingly, and she brought out again the old travel chess set that hadn't seen so much use in years.
Yusuf took the first move with gusto, and she met his pawn with her pawn, and their foot soldiers slowly advanced towards each other before engaging in several evasive maneuvers that ended in a slow decrease on both sides.
Despite not being particularly strong, Yusuf possessed an unusual playing style that Ariadne found very engaging. He would choose a pawn when she would have chosen a knight; he used his rooks less often than most amateur players would; and he pulled off castling on the queen's side rather early.
He made her laugh, and it was an oddly gentle, peaceful game despite the violent symbolism inherent in the playing. When she won, he shook her hand good-naturedly.
Ariadne would have liked to ask Yusuf for more games, but as the deadline for their project grew closer, time for rest and play grew less and less.
Saito always seemed like a shadowy figure to her even though the man spent most of his time tapping away on his Blackberry and murmuring softly in various languages on the phone. He seemed like the epitome of a regular businessman, and the strong light of the midday sun didn't melt him but gave him the usual healthy glow that graced all living things.
After a generous lunch catered by a local restaurant, the loyalties of which had no doubt been bought by Saito, Ariadne spent the afternoon hours walking around the warehouse and organizing her materials and otherwise deriving some exercise from her work.
When she finally felt less bothered by her full stomach, she sat down on the small living room set that had just appeared one day, and she took out her totem to admire the elegant shape and the comforting weight in her hand.
“Would you honor me with a game?” Saito asked, his shadow falling over her, as he sat in the other armchair, his ever-present phone for once in his pocket.
“White or black?” Ariadne asked, letting her golden bishop fall back under the neckline of her blouse.
If Ariadne based her predictions of the men's chess approaches on their personalities, then she would have guessed that Saito would prefer an aggressive game. She wasn't wrong.
As they developed their game past the opening, he pinpointed the potential weakness in her center and attacked the pawn she still kept there-a strategy she confronted with her beloved bishop to c5.
They were in the thick of their game, having each lost a few pawns and several more important pieces, when Arthur received the call, and Cobb came to gather them all to finalize their plans for immediately following on Fischer's heels. Ariadne sat back, frustrated in her interrupted attempt to capture the white bishop that would have paved her path to victory.
She thought that a lesser man would have forgotten their game, but even as he rose from his seat, eyes intent on his goal, Saito looked down and gauged their game thoughtfully. She sensed no artifice in his words when he apologized courteously, “I'm afraid I'm must leave to make arrangements. I believe you are winning, but I would like to finish our game later if possible.”
When she came back to the warehouse the day after Arthur's lesson on totems, she had lifted her golden bishop to Arthur's sightline, but when he held his hand out for it, a smile lurking in the corners of his mouth, she had refused to let it go.
His hand fell to his side, and he smiled openly.
He had said nothing more about it for the rest of their time preparing so thoroughly for Inception. Then once on the plane, while they waited for takeoff, Ariadne found herself drumming her fingers nervously on the armrest of her seat. She forced them to still.
Arthur peered around from his seat right behind hers. He balanced a magnetic checkers board on her lunch tray. “Poor man's chess?” he asked.
She suppressed the nervous giggles that threatened to rise up.
“Red or black?” she asked, pushing a stray plastic disk back onto its metal square.
Arthur shrugged. “Doesn't really matter, does it?”
“Guess not,” she agreed lightly before seizing the familiar black and making her move.
Their pieces playfully munched away at each other like voracious open-mouthed Pac-Man figures.
Cobb was the last to ask. Not for a game, but for a reason. They stood together on the half-demolished floor, little pieces of which continued to strip away in the mild wind. Ariadne toed the dry wall that lay crumbled at her feet and wondered if she could fall.
Cobb stared at where his wife used to stand. His eyes were bleak, and his stillness told of a man still in shock. Waiting, Ariadne found herself absently fiddling with the bishop that hung from her neck.
“What made you choose the bishop?” Cobb asked, rolling his totem between his palms, as he continued to look into the distance.
“What would you have chosen?” Ariadne asked in response. “The knight?”
Cobb was silent. “Recently, I feel like I would have chosen the pawn,” he said finally in faint self-deprecation, and Ariadne could understand the charm that had garnered Cobb his wife, Arthur's loyalty, and even her own presence now.
After the plane landed, as she watched Cobb close his eyes in relief upon the airport security allowing him passage, she remembered a cardinal rule that her grandmother had impressed on her young mind: a pawn can cross the board, enduring various travails, and return as an entirely new piece.
She watched Cobb's back disappear into the crowd, and she pulled her own luggage behind her in the manner of a regular college girl, following Arthur's final instructions and paying the others no mind as they too gathered their luggage and followed their own paths to various gates.
As promised, she didn't look back.
Returning to the university to study under her professor's watchful eyes seemed rather anti-climatic, and she worried that she would stagnate in her classes and projects tied to the waking world. She gave her professor a truncated version of events and attended to the few course requirements left for her degree. Miles remained her thesis advisor, but their earlier genuine closeness was now rife with secrets untold and knowledge unforeseen. She missed him: while he hadn't been exactly like a father to her, he had most definitely been like a fond uncle. But she couldn't regret what she had gained.
She began playing chess again. She had always known the university had a chess club, but she hadn't felt comfortable joining the meetings, not when she had noted that the club comprised roughly 90% men.
Not long after Inception, she attended the next meeting, bringing her battered old travel chess set, and she sat down in front of the club president, who'd insisted that he gauge her skills to better match her with the players on her level.
She beat him. At the looks of surprise all around, Ariadne smiled to herself and thought of a familiar hand holding up an old newspaper clipping.
“You're really good,” one of the female club members said, long black hair swinging, as she leaned past the others to evaluate the endgame.
Pursing her lips at the final move with the queen, the young woman looked genuinely impressed for a moment before her smile fell into a challenging smirk. She held out a hand for Ariadne to shake. “I'm good too. My name's Liane. Let's play a game.”
Ariadne made a place for herself at the club, and she began to consider playing in tournaments again. But her mind no longer swirled with just chess pieces and bits of related strategy that coalesced to form a tale of win or loss. Sometimes when she walked along the boulevard to her classes, her gaze would be drawn irresistibly to the various buildings that sat along the way. She would caress a nearby wall to feel the stone that had been used in the foundation, and she would pause and look a structure from top to bottom until she was satisfied she knew the process of its construction.
After a lazy afternoon spent half-listening to a lecture on spatial composition, she returned to her apartment and fell on her bed for a much-needed nap.
She dreamed of winding staircases that had no beginning, no ending, in their isolation; she dreamed of skyscrapers that bent like trees with the weight of their occupants; she dreamed of hollow chess pieces shaped into thrilling towers.
She walked through bridges that curled with silver leafy patterns beneath her feet; she jumped to the sea from balconies that encompassed houses; and she explored glass-walled tunnels that warped like particularly viscous soap bubbles.
When she woke, she relinquished the more fanciful and whimsical ideas, but the daring, ambitious ones she kept close to her heart-along with the golden bishop.
Writer: Sporadic_Writer
Status of work: Complete
Characters and/or pairings: Ariadne-centric, Arthur, Cobb, Eames, Yusuf, Saito, OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings, kinks & contents: Sexist and homophobic remarks from an OC.
Summary: Ariadne's bishop has a long history.
A/N: I wrote this story to fill fruityshirts's prompt from here. The prompt: "Maybe this already exists and I just haven't found it, but I would love to see a story in which Ariadne plays chess. And possibly kicks everyone on the team's ass, much to their chagrin! XD I feel like there's a lot of backstory on Arthur and Eames' totems, and I'd love to see some for Ariadne's bishop!"
Update: fruityshirts graciously drew a beautiful illustration of a key scene in the story, and it can be found here, along with her poignant social commentary on women in chess.
“Women don't belong in chess.” An anonymous quote off the Internet, but unfortunately, not a rare belief.
Assholes like Bobby Fischer are everywhere.
Ariadne figured that out the first day she brought out her plastic travel chess set and asked the little boy across the seat to play with her. The little boy smiled and would have agreed, but his father interrupted and asked patronizingly if the game wasn't too boring for a little girl. Then Ariadne stomped on his foot, and her parents sent her in disgrace to their sleeping compartment on the train.
She spent the rest of the afternoon brooding over the unfairness: why wasn't the man punished for calling her stupid?
Chess always smelled like syrup to her. Her grandmother's old wooden chess set was made of a deep golden brown that retained its forest smell no matter how long ago the timber had been hewed from the original tree.
“This is the king,” her grandmother said, lifting out the tall cross-crowned figure. The old woman gave a conspiratorial smile, as she whispered, “He's rather useless without his wife.”
Ariadne giggled, and she held the little king in her small hands.
From the cross-grained box, her grandmother lifted out another tall figure, but one crowned with delicate little points that were sharper than they looked.
“Ouch.” Unwisely, Ariadne had reached out to caress the little pointed top and realized that the queen came with authentic protection.
“Guard your queen,” her grandmother chided. “She's the most powerful one there. Lose your queen and forfeit the game.”
“She's that important? You can't have a game without her?”
“Yes and no. If you lose your queen, forfeit the game as punishment for being so stupid.”
Undaunted by the vein of bitterness running under her grandmother's words, Ariadne boldly pulled the box of chess pieces over to her side of the table. She rummaged around and found one with an odd lip near the top.
“What's this, Granny? It has a peach on top!”
“That's not a peach, silly goose. It's the bishop's hat. The bishop can only move in a diagonal, like this and like this,” the old woman made the bishop hop from one colored square to another. The little girl giggled at the funny sight, so much like a rabbit's twitchy movements.
“I like this one best,” the little girl decided.
The grandmother widened her eyes in pretend shock. “Why, I haven't even introduced you to the rook or the knight or the faithful old pawn yet.”
“I know, but I like how it keeps going the same way. Daddy said only dummies stay on the same old path, but he left to marry his new girlfriend, so I think he's the real dummy.”
The grandmother leaned over to place a dry kiss on the little girl's forehead. “Then you're smarter than many adults. Because, guess what, the bishop always has a partner that will protect her.”
Ariadne played seven games with her grandmother on that golden chess set that smelled so sweet.
She had hopes that her grandmother would give it to her when she was a big girl. But the kitchen fire that took her grandmother away also took away everything else.
Ariadne thought about the little boy on the train-not often at all because her life was filled with so many interesting things to do and see, but she thought about him sometimes. She also thought about his chauvinist dad.
She thought about them both, as she grew older, and chess was no longer just chess. The youth chess tournaments were fun at first in the lower levels where the gender ratio was less askew, and the girls that played chess did so out of competitive spirit, and the boys only looked at a girl to see which piece her eyes seemed to favor.
Ariadne made friends with several like-minded girls, and they gave the boys a run for their money, and then everyone, no matter who lost and who won, would go out to eat ice cream.
On a Tuesday, when they were thirteen, Cara lost her first game.
Ariadne wanted to cry, and she bit her lip to hold back the recriminations that threatened to flow out. “It's okay; you'll do better next time. I'll help you practice,” she finally said when she could mock up some composure.
“What?” Cara asked distractedly, checking the gloss of her long hair in the bathroom mirror.
“I'll help you practice so that you can beat him next week,” Ariadne repeated.
Cara laughed delightedly. “Oh, my God! Ariadne, who cares? Did you hear what he said to me after the game? He said that he almost let me win because I'm so cute. Can you believe that? Devin thinks that I'm cute. Hey, if I do really bad in the club rankings next week, do you think he'll tutor me?”
Bile rose up in Ariadne's throat, and she rushed through the hinged door of the nearest toilet to vomit. The chunks of hamburger from lunch and the ugly brown of Dr. Pepper swirled down the toilet. She leaned her forehead against the cool round porcelain and ignored her best friend's shrieks about the toilet being dirty.
Ariadne wanted to quit the club, but Cara aside, there were still girls who played to win, and there were still boys who didn't look at her and want to cage her into a square.
“Can I get a game?” the handsome blue-eyed young man asked her. Ariadne looked up from her urban studies textbook and held up a finger for quiet before slipping her bookmark (a simple strip of paper patterned with black and white squares) into place.
“Black or white?” she asked simply in return. He chose white, and with a confident grin, moved his knight with a clumsy grip. She took her black pawn and placed it with a gentle thud before her king.
When the boy lost and cussed her out, calling her a bitch and a dyke and a slew of other terms that she didn't bother to remember, she carefully collected the chess pieces, including the ones he'd tossed to the ground in anger. She slid the wooden cover into the roughly sanded box and then sedately went back to studying for her final exam.
Only later, when the boy had left, chased away by glares from various disapproving strangers, did she open the box and rub clean the pieces that were stained with mud or covered in debris from the leaf-ridden stones in the park. But still, her tears did not fall.
The old men, who also sat in the circular courtyard near the fountain, never seemed to pay her any particular notice. But this time, one man wearing a heavy wool scarf took his cane from his bench and limped slowly to her table.
“You looked nearly cool as ice back there,” he told her abruptly in a voice hoarse with the ravages of dust and time, and Ariadne thought briefly of her grandmother.
“Your throat bobbed a bit when you swallowed though,” he continued. “You want to be careful about a tell like that. In a practice game like this and in the real deal. Your opponent's going to want to see you sweat.”
“I'm not playing in tournaments,” Ariadne said tightly, nails digging into her palms to hold back the tears that continued to linger in the backs of her eyes.
“You don't want to show up more morons?” the old man asked with a wry smile before turning around and returning to his own seat.
Ariadne rubbed the black bishop against her sweater.
She did.
“Is he going to know you?” Arthur asked her the first time they met. She gave him a wary look, and she kept her right hand in her pocket, where her car keys were. They were sharp enough.
“What are you talking about?”
He held up a newspaper clipping from a year ago. “You're a chess champion in several tournaments in the Bay Area. Are you going to be recognizable? We can't have Fischer remembering any of us.”
Stalker, Ariadne thought, more than a little unnerved and remembering the cryptic warnings her mom used to give her about strange men and isolated places.
Dominic Cobb, her professor's son-in-law, laughed lowly and clapped a fond hand on the back of Arthur's neck, inadvertently raking up the collar of his dress shirt. “Arthur's our point man, and he does a background check on everyone just to make sure we have no surprises.”
Ariadne gave him a sideways look. The career counselors had mentioned that companies required background checks, but everything about this job placement reminded her of the gangster films that her film studies teacher liked so much.
“I haven't played chess competitively for a while,” she finally answered, shrugging. “I had to focus on finishing my M.Arch., so I quit last September, and there were plenty of good new players to take my place. I don't think even my old competitors would remember me.”
Arthur looked a bit dubious, but he exchanged a look with Cobb, and they began instead to discuss the terms of her contract.
He's a kind young man, a gentleman deep down, her grandmother would have noted with a hint of irony. He patiently helped Ariadne to understand dreamwork, and he exhibited a hint of softness on occasion.
When they discussed totems, he hunted for the right words, and upon the lack, resorted to pulling out his own sacred item to show her. But when she tried to touch it, the same way she reached out for the queen piece as a child, Arthur smiled ruefully, closing his fingers around it. “Nah, can't let you touch it. That would defeat the purpose. Only I can know the exact feel of this die.”
In her hotel room, later that day, as she melted the gold from the sole piece of jewelry, a small bracelet, that she had inherited from her mother, she thought about Arthur's words. While she poured the thin stream of molten gold into her lead container, she carefully maneuvered around to thicken the bottom of the bishop.
She had valued devotion ever since she was a little girl whose world was shattered by an unfaithful father. She wasn't about to discount a sturdy nature now.
“You're not pretentious,” Eames, the forger, told her one day, currently not preoccupied with pestering Arthur and tugging on the man's metaphorical pigtails.
Ariadne tugged on the flowered silk scarf wrapped around her throat. She had bought it on sale, but it still wasn't cheap.
“That's not pretension; that's fashion,” he said dismissively, noting her fidget. He nodded towards the golden bishop that hung on a black cord threaded through the loop of her brown wool jeggings. “You play. I do too.”
“You want a game?” Ariadne asked, and a small part of her that had been subsumed by the curves and lines of architecture began to resurface in recognition.
Eames grinned, a surprisingly boyish expression on a man who looked like he spent his nights skulking around the backrooms of casinos. Having learned that he was a forger (in reality as much as in dreams), Ariadne wondered how much she could trust what she was seeing. The long fingers, callused and a little dry, moved nimbly and knowledgeably as he helped to unfold the board and arrange the black and white pieces.
When Ariadne offered him the choice, he suggested that they make it fair and use a die. Ariadne ended up winning white, and she took her pawn and placed it two steps ahead. Eames bit his lip thoughtfully before taking his own pawn and moving it two steps forward so that they were one square away from a diagonal.
They both smiled.
“Oh,” Yusuf said a few days later. “You play chess.”
“She beat the pants off me,” Eames said good-naturedly before flicking his eyes towards Arthur to see if the point man had noticed his emphasis on pants.
Yusuf laughed and settled into a nearby lounge chair. “I was going to ask for a game, but I learned from this one.” He jerked a shoulder in Eames's direction. “If he's no good, then I should look for a better teacher first.”
“That doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be a big competition. We can just play for fun,” Ariadne said encouragingly, and she brought out again the old travel chess set that hadn't seen so much use in years.
Yusuf took the first move with gusto, and she met his pawn with her pawn, and their foot soldiers slowly advanced towards each other before engaging in several evasive maneuvers that ended in a slow decrease on both sides.
Despite not being particularly strong, Yusuf possessed an unusual playing style that Ariadne found very engaging. He would choose a pawn when she would have chosen a knight; he used his rooks less often than most amateur players would; and he pulled off castling on the queen's side rather early.
He made her laugh, and it was an oddly gentle, peaceful game despite the violent symbolism inherent in the playing. When she won, he shook her hand good-naturedly.
Ariadne would have liked to ask Yusuf for more games, but as the deadline for their project grew closer, time for rest and play grew less and less.
Saito always seemed like a shadowy figure to her even though the man spent most of his time tapping away on his Blackberry and murmuring softly in various languages on the phone. He seemed like the epitome of a regular businessman, and the strong light of the midday sun didn't melt him but gave him the usual healthy glow that graced all living things.
After a generous lunch catered by a local restaurant, the loyalties of which had no doubt been bought by Saito, Ariadne spent the afternoon hours walking around the warehouse and organizing her materials and otherwise deriving some exercise from her work.
When she finally felt less bothered by her full stomach, she sat down on the small living room set that had just appeared one day, and she took out her totem to admire the elegant shape and the comforting weight in her hand.
“Would you honor me with a game?” Saito asked, his shadow falling over her, as he sat in the other armchair, his ever-present phone for once in his pocket.
“White or black?” Ariadne asked, letting her golden bishop fall back under the neckline of her blouse.
If Ariadne based her predictions of the men's chess approaches on their personalities, then she would have guessed that Saito would prefer an aggressive game. She wasn't wrong.
As they developed their game past the opening, he pinpointed the potential weakness in her center and attacked the pawn she still kept there-a strategy she confronted with her beloved bishop to c5.
They were in the thick of their game, having each lost a few pawns and several more important pieces, when Arthur received the call, and Cobb came to gather them all to finalize their plans for immediately following on Fischer's heels. Ariadne sat back, frustrated in her interrupted attempt to capture the white bishop that would have paved her path to victory.
She thought that a lesser man would have forgotten their game, but even as he rose from his seat, eyes intent on his goal, Saito looked down and gauged their game thoughtfully. She sensed no artifice in his words when he apologized courteously, “I'm afraid I'm must leave to make arrangements. I believe you are winning, but I would like to finish our game later if possible.”
When she came back to the warehouse the day after Arthur's lesson on totems, she had lifted her golden bishop to Arthur's sightline, but when he held his hand out for it, a smile lurking in the corners of his mouth, she had refused to let it go.
His hand fell to his side, and he smiled openly.
He had said nothing more about it for the rest of their time preparing so thoroughly for Inception. Then once on the plane, while they waited for takeoff, Ariadne found herself drumming her fingers nervously on the armrest of her seat. She forced them to still.
Arthur peered around from his seat right behind hers. He balanced a magnetic checkers board on her lunch tray. “Poor man's chess?” he asked.
She suppressed the nervous giggles that threatened to rise up.
“Red or black?” she asked, pushing a stray plastic disk back onto its metal square.
Arthur shrugged. “Doesn't really matter, does it?”
“Guess not,” she agreed lightly before seizing the familiar black and making her move.
Their pieces playfully munched away at each other like voracious open-mouthed Pac-Man figures.
Cobb was the last to ask. Not for a game, but for a reason. They stood together on the half-demolished floor, little pieces of which continued to strip away in the mild wind. Ariadne toed the dry wall that lay crumbled at her feet and wondered if she could fall.
Cobb stared at where his wife used to stand. His eyes were bleak, and his stillness told of a man still in shock. Waiting, Ariadne found herself absently fiddling with the bishop that hung from her neck.
“What made you choose the bishop?” Cobb asked, rolling his totem between his palms, as he continued to look into the distance.
“What would you have chosen?” Ariadne asked in response. “The knight?”
Cobb was silent. “Recently, I feel like I would have chosen the pawn,” he said finally in faint self-deprecation, and Ariadne could understand the charm that had garnered Cobb his wife, Arthur's loyalty, and even her own presence now.
After the plane landed, as she watched Cobb close his eyes in relief upon the airport security allowing him passage, she remembered a cardinal rule that her grandmother had impressed on her young mind: a pawn can cross the board, enduring various travails, and return as an entirely new piece.
She watched Cobb's back disappear into the crowd, and she pulled her own luggage behind her in the manner of a regular college girl, following Arthur's final instructions and paying the others no mind as they too gathered their luggage and followed their own paths to various gates.
As promised, she didn't look back.
Returning to the university to study under her professor's watchful eyes seemed rather anti-climatic, and she worried that she would stagnate in her classes and projects tied to the waking world. She gave her professor a truncated version of events and attended to the few course requirements left for her degree. Miles remained her thesis advisor, but their earlier genuine closeness was now rife with secrets untold and knowledge unforeseen. She missed him: while he hadn't been exactly like a father to her, he had most definitely been like a fond uncle. But she couldn't regret what she had gained.
She began playing chess again. She had always known the university had a chess club, but she hadn't felt comfortable joining the meetings, not when she had noted that the club comprised roughly 90% men.
Not long after Inception, she attended the next meeting, bringing her battered old travel chess set, and she sat down in front of the club president, who'd insisted that he gauge her skills to better match her with the players on her level.
She beat him. At the looks of surprise all around, Ariadne smiled to herself and thought of a familiar hand holding up an old newspaper clipping.
“You're really good,” one of the female club members said, long black hair swinging, as she leaned past the others to evaluate the endgame.
Pursing her lips at the final move with the queen, the young woman looked genuinely impressed for a moment before her smile fell into a challenging smirk. She held out a hand for Ariadne to shake. “I'm good too. My name's Liane. Let's play a game.”
Ariadne made a place for herself at the club, and she began to consider playing in tournaments again. But her mind no longer swirled with just chess pieces and bits of related strategy that coalesced to form a tale of win or loss. Sometimes when she walked along the boulevard to her classes, her gaze would be drawn irresistibly to the various buildings that sat along the way. She would caress a nearby wall to feel the stone that had been used in the foundation, and she would pause and look a structure from top to bottom until she was satisfied she knew the process of its construction.
After a lazy afternoon spent half-listening to a lecture on spatial composition, she returned to her apartment and fell on her bed for a much-needed nap.
She dreamed of winding staircases that had no beginning, no ending, in their isolation; she dreamed of skyscrapers that bent like trees with the weight of their occupants; she dreamed of hollow chess pieces shaped into thrilling towers.
She walked through bridges that curled with silver leafy patterns beneath her feet; she jumped to the sea from balconies that encompassed houses; and she explored glass-walled tunnels that warped like particularly viscous soap bubbles.
When she woke, she relinquished the more fanciful and whimsical ideas, but the daring, ambitious ones she kept close to her heart-along with the golden bishop.