Fic: How to Disappear Completely, Part 2/2

[narceus]

"How am I going to learn to steal somebody's secrets if I can't practice?" Ariadne asks, and so Arthur makes the latest in his string of bad decisions, and lets his subconscious populate her dream.

"I don't want any of your big secrets, so warn me before I open it up," Ariadne says, and hefts a shovel over one shoulder. They're at the foot of a tall, grassy hill, surrounded by impenetrable-looking woods. Arthur follows Ariadne up the winding gravel path as much out of curiosity over what kind of vault she's built here.

"I haven't got any deep secrets involving hills and forests," Arthur tells her as they trudge upwards. His subconscious gave him combat boots instead of loafers. Arthur is fond of his subconscious. "How do you intend to trigger me?"

"Structurally," Ariadne pants. "It seems to me that, as much as the subject's subconscious reacts to things in the dream that the subject hasn't even consciously experienced yet, then even if I don't put you in mind of the particular information I'm looking for with conversation or environmental triggers, just the kind of safe or box might get your subconscious to leave the right information there."

"Clever," says Arthur, and means it. "Hard to do with any specificity, though. For instance, if you give the mark a bank vault, you'll probably get financial information, but which financial information--"

"That's why I wanted to see how much we could narrow it down. You might be able to steal information that the mark never had to even consciously think about at all."

"Not bad, Ariadne." She was made for this. Miles be damned. "Just one question, how am I going to warn you about whatever we're breaking into up here if I don't know what it is before you open it?"

"For now I just want to know if whatever's in the container stays the same after you see the container with your conscious mind," Ariadne says. "I can pick it up and shake it before I show it to you, right?"

Arthur smiles, wider than he would if she weren't in front of him on the steep trail. "Sure," he says. "I'm curious."

The top of the hill is as gently curved as the sides are steep. Directly in the middle is a huge, gnarled apple tree, perfect for climbing, with a tire swing dangling off one branch. It's an excellent vantage point for the surrounding area, so Arthur leans against the tree trunk to keep a wary eye out for stray projections.

"Good, just don't look this way until I say you can," Ariadne says. There's the crunch of the shovel sinking into loose, sandy soil. Arthur lets himself relax. There's only another hour or so left on the PASIV, dream-time, and if Ariadne can't dig her container up by then she'll learn a valuable lesson about hiding your safes too well for even you to find them. Somehow, he doubts it'll be a problem.

Indeed, it isn't much longer before the scrape-scrape of shovel on dirt is interrupted by the scrape-thunk of shovel hitting something solid. Metal, Arthur thinks, and wonders if his noticing that will throw off Ariadne's results. He keeps his eyes on the distant horizon, thin wisps of clouds skimming over the tops of endless trees, and waits patiently while she scuffles in the dirt.

"Okay," Ariadne says finally. "I don't know what's in here, but I know how much it weighs and what it sounds like. If you change it too much by looking at it, one of us will know." Arthur turns.

Ariadne's crouched down next to a deep hole, dirt streaked across her nose and wisps of hair coming loose around her face, sweaty-damp even from dream exertion and the heat of a sun that doesn't exist. There's a metal cylinder a little larger than a shoebox in her lap. When Arthur leans down to take it, she pats the grass next to her, and he finds himself sitting on the ground, back against the roots of the apple tree. Ariadne hands the box over.

It's not terribly heavy, for being made out of metal. It's labeled in big, bright letters that look like a child's crayon scrawl: 'TIME CAPSULE'. Lower, 'ARTHUR, AGE 20'. He raises an eyebrow at Ariadne.

"What, you never buried one of those when you were a kid?" she asks. "It was going to be age eight, but you never talk about your childhood. I thought it might be too private."

"Next time, think about changing the font to go with the different setting," Arthur says, and shakes the capsule next to his ear. Something soft and fabric shifts against the side, and then, quieter, he hears a small 'clink'. It's the obvious, then. He didn't have many dark secrets at twenty, just memories of what was true then that he never pulls out to look at now. "I know what's in here. Go ahead, see if it's changed." He hands it back.

Ariadne pauses with her hand on the lid to give him one more, long-considering look. "You sure it's okay if I open this?" she asks.

"You invaded Cobb's dreams without permission and bullied him into telling you every detail of his darkest secret," Arthur points out.

"Yeah, and I learned my lesson. Besides, I don't think what's in here is going to send me to Limbo if I'm not careful. I just...don't want to force you into anything you're not comfortable with."

Which is patently ridiculous, because he hasn't been on a job in three months and he's still living out of a hotel room in Paris, not sleeping with anybody but her. The last thing Arthur wants is to explain how much she's already pushed him. "Ariadne," he says. "Open the capsule."

She unscrews the cap and lets the contents slide out onto her lap, careful not to drop anything. There are only two things in there, a green hat with a patch sewn onto the front, and a pair of tags on a chain. Ariadne picks the tags up delicately, respectfully, curiously.

"You were in the army," she says, and he nods, feeling the lightness against his chest where those tags used to dangle all over again. She blinks, focusing on the name etched into the metal. "I thought Arthur was your--"

"It's the name I go by," Arthur says, wondering why he ever thought this was a good idea.

She picks up the beret next, running her fingers over the embroidered insignia. "From oppression, liberation?"

"De Oppresso Liber," Arthur says. "Motto of the US Army special forces. It probably shouldn't be in here, I didn't earn it until I was almost 21."

It's a symbol, this beret, conjured up by his brain from all the ideals of Corporal J. Arthur, old enough to serve two terms in the desert and too young to drink on base back home. It doesn't have the snag running up the side of the insignia like the one sitting over his dog tags on the highest shelf in his mother's closet, something she at least understands enough to be proud of.

"But it was important to you," Ariadne says, and doesn't ask any of the questions he knows are coming, later. She's closer to twenty than Arthur's twenty-eight. He wonders what he'd have thought of her back then, all her innocent idealism and sweeping dreams.

"It was, then," Arthur says. He takes the beret out of her lap and drops it back into the time capsule, leaving it to the past where it belongs.

"Not anymore?"

"I didn't say that," Arthur says, and stands up. There's dirt all over his jeans but he doesn't bother to brush himself off. "If we're done here, we should throw ourselves out and go somewhere more interesting."

"There should still be at least twenty minutes left on the PASIV," Ariadne says, but stands up anyway.

"I brought a gun."

"Of course," Ariadne says. "Okay, do me, then you."

He shoots her between the eyes from five feet away without a flinch, then re-holsters the pistol and bends down to pick his dog tags up from the dirt. He thinks he would have liked Ariadne when he was in the service, if he'd met her like she is now. Of course, when he was twenty Ariadne was wearing a pleated skirt and daydreaming through math class, and when he was in high school she was still in pigtails. Arthur isn't even thirty yet, but he feels old. His twenty-year-old self wouldn't recognize him, some days.

He opens his eyes with the lurch and thud of landing hard on a carpeted concrete floor. Ariadne's head peeks over the edge of the bed to look at him.

"You didn't wake up," she says. Arthur props himself up on his elbows, ignoring the new bruise on his hip.

"Thanks for the kick," he says, and crawls back up into bed.

"So, you were in the army before you met Cobb?" Ariadne asks, maybe a week later, propping herself up on one elbow to look at him curiously. If you count time spent asleep with the PASIV, nearly all of their conversations take place in bed these days.

"I met him while I was in," Arthur clarifies. "We started working together after I left." The bed at his hotel is more comfortable than the one in Ariadne's tiny dorm room, certainly far more spacious, and no risk of curious roommates, but Ariadne's room is soft and golden with afternoon sunlight. It makes the whole world seem syrupy-slow, dreamlike, though if this were Arthur's dream he'd have made the bed firmer.

"Why'd you leave?" she asks. "International globe-trotting mind criminal sounds way more glamorous than soldier in the army, but you had to have a reason."

"I didn't leave the army to become a criminal." Arthur's fingers trace idle patterns over the indentations left in her skin by the strap of her bra. "I left because the Army isn't the most comfortable place when you're better at your job than your superiors and aren't afraid to let them know it."

Ariadne raises her eyebrows at that, a wry, mocking grin on her face. "I can just imagine. So all right, how'd you go from that to working with Cobb?"

"It was the easiest way to get back into dreaming," he says. He doesn't even know, right now, if they're awake or not. He can't remember how long the sun's been at that same angle, sweet honey through the gaps in Ariadne's fluttering thin curtains. Right now, it doesn't seem to matter.

"Right--you said it was an army training technique."

"Once, but by my time they'd moved on. Nowadays the only people in the US military getting dream training are the ones expected to use it for intelligence gathering, and some of the recon marines."

"Really? Why not?"

If this is a dream, then he'll be able to slide his hand up from her ribs and under the pillow, curl it around the butt of a loaded pistol where he'd never dare put it in real life. A moment later the barrel is resting lightly against Ariadne's temple. She blinks.

"Did you want to wake up?" she asks. "It's a little abrupt, and I didn't have anything else going on tonight, but--"

"No," Arthur says, and tucks the gun back under the pillow, carefully, dream gun or not. "They stopped using the shared dreaming as a training exercise because of that."

"Because when you die, you wake up? Isn't that the point?"

"Because no matter how much you trust me, Ariadne, I just had a loaded gun to your head and you didn't even flinch," he says. "You're so used to death as an escape that it doesn't scare you any more."

"Well, I know this isn't real," she says.

"It's not about what you know, it's about your reflexes. That split second of fear where most people just freeze. A soldier, a good one, uses that moment to react to the danger and save his own life. But if you're so used to getting shot in the face that you don't even have the reflex any more--"

"Then you don't react," Ariadne finishes. "Are you saying that the soldiers they trained in the dreams were getting killed because they weren't afraid to die?"

"Something like that," Arthur says. "Soldiers with no fear of death can be incredibly effective at carrying out a mission, but they also tend to have pretty high mortality rates."

"That's terrible," she says. Then, "Wait, what about us? How do you--"

"You get some of the conditioning back after you get shot a few times by real weapons," Arthur says dryly. "Or shot and not killed often enough. It never quite brings back that instinctive fear of death, but fear of pain can be useful enough."

"Great," says Ariadne, looking like she thinks it's anything but. Arthur slides his hand back over her rib cage, stroking gently.

"Bothered?" he asks. "If you get out now, it'll never be a problem. If you want to keep going in the illegal extraction business, the best I can assure you is that you'll probably be painfully wounded enough times on jobs gone wrong before you start coming to the attention of angry people with real guns."

"No, why would I be bothered by that?" she asks, dry as Sahara. "I just...never thought I was the kind of person who would ever be comfortable around guns. What's next, fearlessness in the face of high explosives?"

"If you like," says Arthur. "I was going to offer to train you in hand-to-hand, first."

"All right, I was kidding," says Ariadne.

"I wasn't," says Arthur. He hadn't been planning on it before the words left his mouth, but it's a good idea. Ariadne won't always have a gun to hand, and the ability to throw a good punch is sometimes worth any amount of fancy weaponry. "You should learn that in the real world, though. The reflex memory carries over either way, but your body in a dream can do things it won't in reality. You risk running into a situation where your brain will try to send a signal to move in a way your muscles can't keep up with."

"Maybe," she says. "I'll think about it."

"Do," he says.

Ariadne's friends make Arthur uncomfortable. He expected this--he's still fairly sure that he and Ariadne have nothing in common beyond the dreaming, and he was ready for the half-dozen artistically-inclined fellow students she spends her free time to be about as different from Arthur's experience of the world as it's possible to get.

He didn't expect them to remind him of himself at twenty-four, after the military but before Cobb's meltdown put him back on the clock 24/7. Even when he spent time with the college crowd, Arthur hung out with the hard scientists, the grad students doing research internships at the think tank where Cobb and Mal worked, the ones who believed in straight lines and hard proof. Architects are all about the most attractive way to get from Point A to Point B, however long it takes. Arthur's known enough of them to say so. He never expected that he and Ariadne's friends would get along.

Eva is painfully shy until you piss her off or get a few drinks in her, and then she's like a tiny dark-haired whirlwind, quick with words and brilliant at argument in three languages. Arthur goads her into a five-minute rant about misappropriation of cultural artifacts in Russian just to hear her talk. Guillermo is Italian; he lives down the hall from Ariadne in the foreign student housing. He flirts outrageously with all of the girls but only has eyes for the boys. Elizabeth is tall and flamingly red-headed and hugely Scottish, and she can quote both Shakespeare and Doctor Who extensively from memory.

Ariadne slips in with them easily, all of them almost painfully young to look at, tossing their heads back in laughter without ever checking their exits or keeping an eye on the crowd. Arthur crosses his legs and tries to look relaxed. The weight of his ankle holster presses against his leg like a reminder. He has a clear eye line to three of the bar's exits.

"Mais oui, we have to go see them, Elizabeth, come on," Chloé says. "Ariadne, you're in, non?" Arthur's only accompanied Ariadne's friends to the bars a few times, but Chloé is always trying to coax the rest of them to some concert by a band Arthur's sure he wouldn't know even if he were French.

She reminds him, breathtakingly, of Jenny, Jenny who he dated for almost six months before she found herself another boyfriend while he was on a job and didn't bother to mention it until three weeks after he got back. Jenny knew every obscure indie band in LA and dragged him to see half of them. She hated the war without remotely understanding what it meant, and Arthur loved her, loved in her the innocence that was never going to need to know what it felt like to kill. Chloé sits down the table between Elizabeth and Jerome and dismisses everything she doesn't like with a flick of her hand, from American celebrities to international conflict, and if Arthur lets his vision blur a little it's 2007 all over again.

Arthur doesn't let his vision blur. He holds his beer loosely with his non-dominant hand, keeps an eye on the exits, and pretends he has something to contribute to the conversation.

"If I get done my project for Professor Gerald by Friday afternoon, I can make it," says Ariadne. "I think I might be up all Friday night to get it emailed in on time, though."

"Please, how much are you procrastinating, lovely girl?" Guillermo asks. "We all know you work twice as fast as the rest of us."

"But her designs are twelve times as mad, so it balances out a bit, doesn't it?" Elizabeth says. "Oh, no offense, Ariadne, you've just gone a bit modern art this year."

"I like trying new things," Arthur picks up on the edge of discomfort in Ariadne's tone, but he's not sure if anybody else at the table does. "Hey, even if I can't make it, maybe Arthur could go." She taps her toe against the back of his calf, lightly, affectionate. "Unless you have something better to do on a Friday night."

Arthur is pretty sure he outgrew cramped venues and music of questionable taste when he left his life behind to help save Cobb's. He almost wishes it were a tempting offer. Ariadne's friends eye him like the awkward interloper he is. He'd much rather go back to discussing Shakespeare or politics.

"I'm going to be out of town," he lies. "American Thanksgiving."

"Is that this week?" Chloé demands, and then leans over Elizabeth to swat Ariadne on the shoulder. "You never said."

"I'm Canadian. We had Thanksgiving last month."

"Tell me, what can possibly excuse such a poorly-matched meal?" Jerome asks. "It's bizarre. You have your meat and your gravy all mixed up with your sweets, cranberry jelly on your potatoes, it is the oddest thing I've ever heard."

"Tradition," Arthur says shortly. He can't help remembering how much Mal hated cranberry sauce. Chloé swats Jerome on the side of the head in turn.

"Crètin," she says. "It's cultural. You can't ask Americans why they do all the bizarre things they do, they're Americans. There's no explaining it."

On Friday night, Ariadne knocks on Arthur's door just as he's in the process of pouring himself another glass of wine to go with the pulpy paperback he got at the used bookstore last week. He sets it down without bothering with a bookmark.

"I thought you were supposed to be at a concert," Arthur says at the door.

"I thought you were going home for the holidays," Ariadne counters. Arthur doesn't answer, just closes the door behind her. Cobb would have had him, if Arthur had come, but LA isn't much like home any more.

"I need to build," says Ariadne. "I can't get this project straight, I'm going to fail unless I figure out what I'm doing. Can I use the PASIV?"

"What were you going to do if I really was back in the States?" Arthur is already moving towards the bedroom, kicking off his shoes as he goes. An evening of watching Ariadne build is more interesting than an evening alone with a book. Particularly this book.

"Cry," says Ariadne. "I didn't think you would be, though. I'm starting to be able to tell when you're lying."

"Remind me never to lie, then," Arthur says, and flips open the case. "Ready?"

"Ten minutes," Ariadne says. "Then I'll need to get some of it down on the computer." She drops her laptop case next to the bed and lays down, still in her coat. "Shall we?"

Ariadne spends the rest of the night in and out of dreams in ten-minute intervals that grow to hours. Arthur brings his book into the bedroom and reads in chunks while Ariadne pokes frantically on her computer, drawing and measuring and rotating things before determinedly reaching for the PASIV again. He's not about to let her go down by herself, not with as much change as she's wreaking on each little universe.

She finishes at four AM, after six hours of work that translate to nearly a full day, giddy with the adrenaline of success and deprivation of any sleep worthy of the name. Arthur flops back against his pillow with a little more drama than he would allow himself, if it weren't four in the morning.

"Take off your pants and come to bed, you're staying here tonight," he says. "Unless you have class, we're sleeping until noon."

Ariadne is always neat about her belongings at Arthur's. She sleeps in her clothes as often as not, rolling over after an hour with the PASIV into real sleep without bothering to change. When she does strip down for bed, she always makes a tidy pile of folded clothing, jeans, then shirt, then socks. She takes her bra off last, facing the wall away from Arthur like any modesty is left them at this point. Arthur's seen her naked a hundred times in dreams, but this isn't something they do in the real world. He turns away under the polite pretense of turning off the lamp as she slips under the covers.

"I'm not even tired," Ariadne says. "I'm still too wound up."

"You will be." She's warm all up his left side, down to almost nothing but skin where he slipped into a t-shirt and pyjama pants a few hours ago. Arthur's hand brushes up against her thigh, tentative, almost accidental. She shifts into it.

"We could..." Ariadne starts, rolling up on her side into the middle of the bed. Arthur lets his hand trail up her thigh and lightly across her stomach, come to rest cupping the curve of her hip. He can barely make out her face in the light from the street lamps behind the curtains.

"I don't even have anything," Arthur says. Dream sex has never gotten anyone pregnant, after all.

"There's other things we can do," says Ariadne, and closes in for the kiss, sliding one leg forward, pressing, firm, demanding. Arthur curves his free hand behind her head to pull her closer.

Real sex is messier than dream sex, but the worn, languid feeling it leaves lasts longer. Arthur wakes up with the sun high in the sky, Ariadne nestled against him, her hair spreading out across his chest and, now that he's awake, tickling enormously. He's already making plans to go home for Christmas.

Arthur is back in Paris for the new year. That's after three days spent on the northern coast of Australia, baking away the cold of an Iowa Christmas and snorkeling in the most dangerous waters on the planet.

The only perspective home-for-the-holidays has given him is a resurgence of that old aching need to never set foot in Jesup, Iowa again. Arthur hasn't felt this stuck since he was sixteen. He slept on the sofa in the living room on his uncle's farm, trudged out in the snow to help feed the horses in the morning, and tried to switch with some grace between fake obtuseness and condescending sarcasm in the face of his cousins' curious sneers about his life. His mom kept going quiet whenever he walked into a room, quiet and sad and older than he ever remembers her.

It's the first Christmas Arthur's made it home for in two years. He remembers it being easier, when he knew the next flight out could take him back to an apartment in still-sunny LA, Mal with bottles of champagne, Dom grilling a New Year's steak dinner, and nobody asking any awkward questions. Home was easier to take when he had a better one to go back to.

Well, now he has a blandly luxurious hotel suite entirely decorated in shades of silver and gray, a New Year's Eve spent alone with Edith Piaf and the most expensive bottle of champagne he could find, and Ariadne. For whatever that's worth. It's not much to build a life on, but it's a start.

"To not jumping off a fucking building," Arthur toasts the lights of Paris over the rail of his balcony, and then gulps Dom Pérignon straight from the bottle.

Somewhere, a clock strikes eleven. Arthur suspects that he is well on his way to drunk, which is ridiculous, drunk on half a bottle of champagne, but maybe it was the three martinis he'd had instead of dinner, or the fifth of vodka he'd brought home afterwards.

Ariadne is either in Toronto, or out at some ridiculously decked-out nightclub with Elizabeth the Scottish Amazon, and Guillermo who's charming with the ladies, and Chloé who is just like Jenny. Ariadne is living. The idea aches with a heaviness like taking a cannonball straight to the gut, but Arthur would like to believe that he's too drunk to figure out why.

He fumbles his cell phone out of his pocket left-handed, takes another swig out of the bottle clutched in his right. She only takes two buttons to call.

The phone rings once, twice, a terrible idea buzzing in his ear. "Arthur?" Ariadne answers. She sounds out of breath. There's a crowd behind her, but muffled, like she's stepped out into a bathroom or an alleyway to take the call.

"Don't do this any more," he says. "Don't come back here."

"Arthur, what...are you drunk?" she asks.

"I used to have a life," Arthur tells the phone. "I had a Chloé--a Jenny. She left me while I was living in a shack on the Norwegian border in the middle of winter. Brad couldn't handle the guns."

"Who's Brad?" Ariadne asks. Come to think of it, he never mentioned any of that. He never mentioned a lot of things.

"It was worth it," he says. "Cobb needed me. The point man always protects his team leader."

"Arthur, I'm coming over there," Ariadne says, which is the opposite of the point, which is exactly what he wants, exactly what he doesn't want to want.

"I came to him, Ariadne," Arthur stresses. "I needed him. You don't need me. You don't need the dreams, and you don't need me, and I'm telling you, you do not want to do this."

There are muffled noises on the other end, instead of a response. "Il faut que je vais--oui, oui, à demain, à demain--" the sound of the crowd louder, then quieter again. "I can make my own decisions about what I want to do," Ariadne says. Arthur groaned and leans back against the side of the building.

"You don't have the information to decide that," he says. "By the time you do it'll be too late. You don't want to be me."

"What, completely drunk all by myself before it's even midnight on New Year's Eve?" Ariadne asks. "No, I don't want to be you. I'm still coming."

"Don't," says Arthur. "Don't, don't ever come by here again..."

"Don't be stupid. Somebody has to make sure you don't drink so much you drown in your own vomit," she tells him. "Look, I'm going down into the metro, I'm going to lose signal now. Don't give yourself alcohol poisoning before I get there."

Then there's nothing but a dial tone ringing in Arthur's ear. He pulls the cell phone away and stares at it for a moment, contemplating the fall from the eleventh-story balcony. All he'd have to do is drop it, scatter all those phone numbers from the extractors, the chemists, the architects, six years of infiltrating the community of dream extraction specialists, and be done with it.

He puts it back into his pocket. Arthur isn't that dramatic, and he doesn't have enough else left in his life to waste what he's got.

Time goes hazy for a bit, but the other half of the champagne is gone by the time he hears the knock on the door to his suite, sharp and perfunctory. Arthur pushes himself to his feet--apparently at some point he'd sunk down against the wall of the building, and his ass is cold from sitting on bare concrete. At least he's wearing shoes. He doesn't bother to check the peephole before he opens the door. Tonight, for one night only, if somebody's sent armed assassins after him, he honestly couldn't care enough to put up a fight.

"Jesus, you're a wreck," Ariadne says, and pushes him back into the hotel room. "Give me that bottle. At least you got yourself trashed on the good stuff."

"I think it was the vodka, actually," Arthur says, letting her steer him backwards towards the lounge. The floor wobbles under his feet. "I should sit."

"You should drink a gallon of water and go to bed, Arthur." Ariadne pushes him, and everything wobbles, until he finds himself tottering backwards into sitting on the couch. "What were you even thinking?"

Ariadne drops her coat over the back of the couch, like always. She looks fantastic underneath, red top and short skirt and just a little sparkly. She looks beautiful. She looks young.

"You shouldn't let this ruin you, Ariadne," Arthur says. "Dreaming is addictive. It'll never let you go. You'll do anything to keep going in. You get involved in extraction and then you're fleeing countries, getting put on government watchlists, shooting people in the real world. You'll give up your life to it."

"Well, then, maybe it's an addiction I already have," says Ariadne. "Look, just because I'm apparently the only friend you have who you can call when you're trashed and alone in the middle of the night doesn't mean I need you to take care of me. I'm here because I want to be."

"I'm sorry," Arthur says.

"I know." Ariadne is rummaging through the cupboards in his little kitchenette, looking for glasses. She finds a pitcher, finally, and fills the whole thing up with water. "Drink this," she says, and shoves it at him. "I can't believe I have to treat you like my college roommate."

"I'd be fine," Arthur tells her, but drinks the water anyway.

"If you were fine, you wouldn't have called me." Arthur moves to set the pitcher down, half full, but Ariadne's glare stops him. He gulps more. "Damnit, Arthur, what are you even doing to yourself?"

"I'll let you know when I figure it out." Arthur groans and leans back against the sofa. He's already starting to see the creeping edges of sobriety. He'd really rather not, tonight. "Keep your life, Ariadne."

"I'll keep the life I want when I find it," she says. She takes the pitcher out of his hands and sets it down gently on the coffee table, then hauls him up to his feet by his wrists. "Come on."

"And what's that?" Arthur asks, following her without resistance. He's got nowhere else to be.

"I'll let you know when I figure it out," Ariadne parrots. "Come on," she says. "Let's go to sleep."