i'd do it all for you (1/2) [inception]
Title: i'd do it all for you (1/2)
Fandom: Inception
Summary: She's aware she might be falling for him. But that, she insists, is just a phase.
Pairing: Ariadne/Yusuf
Rating: R
Notes: Oh dear god. I don't know what this is.
Ariadne panics a little at first, staring at her bank account, trying to remember all the steps she went through the get all those extra "zeros" added at the end of her savings. She checks and double checks and calls her bank to make sure - they simply remind her that she was left a considerable sum by a deceased uncle. Saito, she remembers, covers all his bases.
The team splits for a while after that. Several postcards arrive the first few weeks she's back in Paris - along with a letter from Cobb in LA. No names are mentioned, nor places, but she knows. Arthur's in New Hampshire, visiting family; Eames is in Moscow, working a quick forgery; Cobb is back with his family. The one phone calls she receives from him in the month after the Fischer job tells her all she needs to know: he's happy. He's happy and that's what matters.
Yusuf, on the other hand, is outside her door.
This piece of news is a bit more than surprising.
"Mombasa just wasn't appealing anymore," he says over Korean takeout.
"Should I read that to mean you got busted?"
"You may read it however you wish." He tosses her a grin and devours the rest of his food, sipping on the cheap white wine she keeps in the fridge. "You live in Paris, have more money than you've ever dreamed of having in your bank account - and this is the best you can do?"
"And I suppose as a chemist you could tell me which kind of wine I should be drinking."
"I could. If you asked."
"I prefer Diet Coke, actually."
"Disgusting. And tasteless. It's a sad day when I'm the classiest person in the room." Ariadne laughs and chucks the cork at him, wondering why they spent so little time together while they were working. Of course, she has an answer to that, but it's just a moment hanging in the back of her head and she doesn't want to remember the things she saw inside Cobb's dreams - the monster that had become his wife and the prison he'd built for her. She must look miserable now, because Yusuf frowns and reaches forward, placing a large, warm hand on her shoulder.
"Are you alright?"
"Hmm? Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just tired, I think. You can crash here if you want - no. I insist," she says quickly as he begins to shake his head, holding his hands up in protest. "Please, Yusuf. Just stay."
He stays. After a while, the pullout couch seems a bit ridiculous, and Ariadne finally clears out the spare room that used to be occupied by another girl in the program before Ariadne came back from the Fischer job and found the place empty, with a note that detailed, excruciatingly, how the girl's life had fallen to pieces. If Saito wasn't taking care of her rent, Ariadne doesn't know how she'd afford the flat - but she can and so she makes a more permanent space for Yusuf in her life.
He protests, of course, but she rarely listens to him for very long.
"This is your room. Don't blow it up, okay?" At this, he laughs, tossing his head back and sending that rich, beautiful noise around her apartment. She loves his laugh, and she loves having him around. It feels like a constant warm light is in her life now, brightening every corner and scaring the shadows out. There was loneliness here before, but now there's Yusuf and his coffee and his expensive wines and his patched, yellow jacket that she's always picking up off the ground by the door and barking at him to hang up.
She is aware that she might be falling for him. But that, she insists to herself, is just a phase.
Ariadne should know better, really. Yusuf isn't hers by any means, and he's certainly not undatable. When he gets a girlfriend, she pretends that the woman doesn't exist. That she's simply a bit of air hanging between her room and his and that it will be easy enough to get by her in the morning. Yusuf doesn't know that anything is wrong and insists that they spend time together. Her name is Lucille. And Ariadne despises her.
She despises her because Lucille is a woman and makes Ariadne feel like a little girl. She despises her because she's sharp and can keep up with Yusuf's long winded talks on compounds and journals that he's reading and books published by his preferred scholars. Ariadne had suffered through those talks, only to tease him relentlessly when he was done. Lucille offers up a legitimate discussion - nothing like Ariadne's childish cork-tossing antics or desperate attempts to change the subject to the color of her kitchen wall and whether it should be orange or purple.
Lucille, though, adores Ariadne. And that just makes it all worse.
"Architecture is so fascinating to me," she says over one of their forced coffee dates. Ariadne smiles and nods, answering questions as well as she can without flipping the table over and running into moving traffic.
All over a fucking chemist. She hates herself. She really does.
"Yusuf tells me you're quite the artist as well."
"I'm not great."
"Oh, come now. I spotted some of your sketches in his room."
"Yusuf has some of my sketches?" Ariadne's head snaps up. She has no idea why or how he got them, but she's suddenly very self-conscious. God knows she's drawn him a thousand times. She drew everyone on the team when she went home at night - Arthur loosening his tie, Eames flipping his poker chip into the air, Cobb pacing in front of the white board, Saito with his fingers steepled, observing his investment -
and Yusuf, hunched over his table, eyes narrowed in concentration. Yusuf, tossing Arthur about. Yusuf, giddy with excitement over his sedative.
"He does, yes. They're quite lovely, too." Ariadne nods, giving her a polite thank-you, staring into her coffee.
- - -
She knocks on his door late that night, after Lucille has left and everything in her room has been organized and reorganized a thousand times.
"You have some of my sketches," she says, crossing her arms over her chest. Yusuf cringes and nods, shrugging his shoulders. "I didn't give them to you."
"They were in the trash."
"That should have been a hint to you on where they were headed."
"Ariadne, these are beautiful." He leans to his left and takes them from his bookshelf, flipping through them like it's a habit, like he does it all the time. She knows which ones they are - leftovers from a day spent skipping her Tuesday class and instead wasting the whole morning at the coffee shop she'd just come back from, sketching the vendors across the street and the American tourists who spent a whole hour obsessing over a map of the city before she finished shading them and went over to help
"I didn't give them to you," she says, staring firmly at her feet. Yusuf raises and eyebrow and stands up, striding toward her and holding the papers out. There's a look on his face she doesn't want to ever see again - a mix of frustration and a bit of anger and resignation. She knows she's just acting up, but she takes the drawings from his hand and stalks out. The door shuts quietly behind her. After a while, the light goes off and she is awake and alone. The drawings mock her from the bathroom wastebasket, so she picks them up and stuffs them in the bottom of one of her vanity drawers.
Glancing in the mirror, she sees a girl she doesn't like. A girl on the verge of tears -
all because of a stupid boy.
In the morning, she makes eggs, tea, and toast.
"You're cooking." Yusuf is leaning against the counter, startling her, smirking just a bit.
"I am, yeah."
"I almost checked my totem." He settles into one of the kitchen chairs, preparing his tea and pulling the paper from the sugar bowl. "Damn. Still can't read French."
"Learning a foreign language by osmosis rarely works." Ariadne sets a plate of food in front of him and then begins to work on her own, peppering her eggs until they're nearly black and slathering her toast in butter. Yusuf makes a face and calmly eats his food plain. "I like to taste my food."
"Right. Black pepper is one of my favorite things to have in the morning, too."
The banter feels right and she's happy again, but it's obvious that he's being reserved around her and she doesn't like it. Three knocks sound on the door and when Yusuf comes back from answering, Lucille is there, arms loaded with containers of strawberries.
"They were a steal," she says, grinning madly. "The vendor was furious because half were smashed so he just wanted to get rid of them and go home. I know all sorts of things we can make with these. My mother has an old, old strawberry tart recipe and there's of course an angel foodcake I picked up on my way over here and strawberry moose. Oh we'll freeze these and it'll be lovely. Ari, dear, do you want to help me?" Ariadne swallows her peppered eggs thickly and stares at her lap.
"I...I'm allergic to strawberries."
"Oh." Lucille looks from Ariadne to Yusuf, then back at the massive crate she's just carried in. "Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't know." Yusuf clears his throat, then takes another sip of his tea. It's stupid, really, this awkward moment. And she knows that he thinks she's making it up. She knows that he knows that she hates his girlfriend. And it's something she might do, probably. Especially after the night before.
"I have class all day. So you can cook here while I'm gone. I get back at four..."
"No, no, I'll-"
"Really. It's fine." Ariadne grabs her bag from its spot in the corner and takes her plate to the sink. "Really," she says once more, giving Lucille the most genuine smile she can muster without breathing too deep around the fruit. Yusuf watches her walk out, but she doesn't look back or say goodbye. In the elevator, Ariadne closes her eyes and tries to force the look of his obvious disbelief from her mind.
It's a sad day when he thinks she's lying.
The strawberry incident is never mentioned again. As Lucille becomes a permanent fixture in her life, Ariadne waits for the day when Yusuf will pack up and move out. But that day doesn't come. Instead, Lucille spends an increasingly large amount of time lounging in the living room and cooking huge amounts of food and sending it along with Ariadne to class every morning. It's making her sick.
So she buys a kitten.
Yusuf contemplates the creature with a scrutinizing gaze.
"I'm something of a cat expert," he says, prodding the kitten with one finger.
"Stop. You're frightening her." Ariadne scoops her new pet up in her arms and relishes in the soft, soothing purrs that emanate from her tiny body.
"She's a bit small."
"She's perfect. Don't be jealous."
"Jealous? It's a cat, Ariadne." Yusuf shakes his head and goes back into his room, muttering something she can't hear. The cat isn't there to make anyone jealous, really. It's just that she feels a little lonely and she's wanted a cat for ages and doesn't see why anything should stop her anymore. She names it Persephone, because naming it something else would make it look like she was avoiding her mythological heritage, but calls her Perce. Yusuf approves.
And the way he says the kitten's name and then looks back to her and nods melts her down right there in the kitchen.
It's stupid, she thinks, to let herself be so completely hung up on someone.
Everything falls apart the week before Ariadne's finals. She's stressed as fuck and Yusuf knows enough from his grad school days to stay well out of her way. He speaks to her only a handful of times, usually to stop her from breaking something or dropping out all together. He talks her through a couple of near-panic attacks and makes her a cup of tea and sends her to bed. In the morning, she's stress cooking an enormous omelet which is burnt and totally inedible, but she smothers it with pepper and ketchup anyway and tries to eat it.
"Ariadne."
"What?" she asks venomously, giving up on the charred mess and throwing everything, plate included, into the garbage. She's close to tears, body trembling and hands unable to hold onto anything. Yusuf takes a step closer and puts his own hands firmly on her upper arms, steadying her.
"It's going to be okay." He pulls her close to him and she clings to his shirt, taking in his soapy, chemical smell.
"What am I going to do?"
"You're going to take your exams and -"
"No, Yusuf. I mean...what am I going to do? I don't have any internships, I don't have a job, I don't have anything." I don't even have you, she almost says, shutting her eyes tight and letting herself cry against him. Yusuf shushes her and just holds her for a while. When she pulls back, he's just looking at her, like he's never really seen her very well before.
Without thinking, Ariadne kisses him.
She's not sure what she's expecting - maybe for him to quietly pull away, get angry, freeze.
She doesn't expect him to kiss her back. And she certainly doesn't expect him to do it with such fervor. But he does, pushing her against the kitchen cabinets, his fingers cuffed by her hair, pulling and pushing and trying to get closer than they already are. Ariadne's fingers trip over one another while she tries to undo the clasps of his belt, violently tugging at his shirt. His mouth is hot against her ear, whispering her name over and over, how he wants her, he wants her so badly, so badly it hurts, how it's hurt for months now.
She opens her mouth wider, her tongue feeling heavy behind her own lips. Yusuf pulls her jeans down, leaving a hot, red mark on the tops of her thighs, but Ariadne blinks through the sting, gasping when he slips a finger inside of her, then two.
"Fuck," she bites out. "Yusuf." He silences her with another hard kiss, pushing her into the corner of the kitchen and forcing her legs around his waist. For a moment, their eyes lock. Ariadne nods and he fits his hips tight between her thighs, pushing into her and taking the wind from her chest. It is all very desperate and quick, but she’s never wanted anything more. Her breath is leaving her body in harsh, staccato gasps as she leans back, her mouth wet and close to his ear. There are going to be bruises all over her body tomorrow, but she doesn't care. Already her thighs are quivering and aching, but he keeps going until, finally, he comes with a low groan, panting and holding himself inside of her for a moment.
Finally, his breathing calms and he pulls away from her, averting his eyes as she rights herself, doing the same and fixing his trousers.
"Yusuf-"
"I...I need to finish a few things," he says quietly. "I..." His eyes catch hers and travel down her face. He places a hand on her cheek and gives her a sad smile. "Sometimes, you are too lovely for your own good."
Fandom: Inception
Summary: She's aware she might be falling for him. But that, she insists, is just a phase.
Pairing: Ariadne/Yusuf
Rating: R
Notes: Oh dear god. I don't know what this is.
Ariadne panics a little at first, staring at her bank account, trying to remember all the steps she went through the get all those extra "zeros" added at the end of her savings. She checks and double checks and calls her bank to make sure - they simply remind her that she was left a considerable sum by a deceased uncle. Saito, she remembers, covers all his bases.
The team splits for a while after that. Several postcards arrive the first few weeks she's back in Paris - along with a letter from Cobb in LA. No names are mentioned, nor places, but she knows. Arthur's in New Hampshire, visiting family; Eames is in Moscow, working a quick forgery; Cobb is back with his family. The one phone calls she receives from him in the month after the Fischer job tells her all she needs to know: he's happy. He's happy and that's what matters.
Yusuf, on the other hand, is outside her door.
This piece of news is a bit more than surprising.
"Mombasa just wasn't appealing anymore," he says over Korean takeout.
"Should I read that to mean you got busted?"
"You may read it however you wish." He tosses her a grin and devours the rest of his food, sipping on the cheap white wine she keeps in the fridge. "You live in Paris, have more money than you've ever dreamed of having in your bank account - and this is the best you can do?"
"And I suppose as a chemist you could tell me which kind of wine I should be drinking."
"I could. If you asked."
"I prefer Diet Coke, actually."
"Disgusting. And tasteless. It's a sad day when I'm the classiest person in the room." Ariadne laughs and chucks the cork at him, wondering why they spent so little time together while they were working. Of course, she has an answer to that, but it's just a moment hanging in the back of her head and she doesn't want to remember the things she saw inside Cobb's dreams - the monster that had become his wife and the prison he'd built for her. She must look miserable now, because Yusuf frowns and reaches forward, placing a large, warm hand on her shoulder.
"Are you alright?"
"Hmm? Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just tired, I think. You can crash here if you want - no. I insist," she says quickly as he begins to shake his head, holding his hands up in protest. "Please, Yusuf. Just stay."
He stays. After a while, the pullout couch seems a bit ridiculous, and Ariadne finally clears out the spare room that used to be occupied by another girl in the program before Ariadne came back from the Fischer job and found the place empty, with a note that detailed, excruciatingly, how the girl's life had fallen to pieces. If Saito wasn't taking care of her rent, Ariadne doesn't know how she'd afford the flat - but she can and so she makes a more permanent space for Yusuf in her life.
He protests, of course, but she rarely listens to him for very long.
"This is your room. Don't blow it up, okay?" At this, he laughs, tossing his head back and sending that rich, beautiful noise around her apartment. She loves his laugh, and she loves having him around. It feels like a constant warm light is in her life now, brightening every corner and scaring the shadows out. There was loneliness here before, but now there's Yusuf and his coffee and his expensive wines and his patched, yellow jacket that she's always picking up off the ground by the door and barking at him to hang up.
She is aware that she might be falling for him. But that, she insists to herself, is just a phase.
Ariadne should know better, really. Yusuf isn't hers by any means, and he's certainly not undatable. When he gets a girlfriend, she pretends that the woman doesn't exist. That she's simply a bit of air hanging between her room and his and that it will be easy enough to get by her in the morning. Yusuf doesn't know that anything is wrong and insists that they spend time together. Her name is Lucille. And Ariadne despises her.
She despises her because Lucille is a woman and makes Ariadne feel like a little girl. She despises her because she's sharp and can keep up with Yusuf's long winded talks on compounds and journals that he's reading and books published by his preferred scholars. Ariadne had suffered through those talks, only to tease him relentlessly when he was done. Lucille offers up a legitimate discussion - nothing like Ariadne's childish cork-tossing antics or desperate attempts to change the subject to the color of her kitchen wall and whether it should be orange or purple.
Lucille, though, adores Ariadne. And that just makes it all worse.
"Architecture is so fascinating to me," she says over one of their forced coffee dates. Ariadne smiles and nods, answering questions as well as she can without flipping the table over and running into moving traffic.
All over a fucking chemist. She hates herself. She really does.
"Yusuf tells me you're quite the artist as well."
"I'm not great."
"Oh, come now. I spotted some of your sketches in his room."
"Yusuf has some of my sketches?" Ariadne's head snaps up. She has no idea why or how he got them, but she's suddenly very self-conscious. God knows she's drawn him a thousand times. She drew everyone on the team when she went home at night - Arthur loosening his tie, Eames flipping his poker chip into the air, Cobb pacing in front of the white board, Saito with his fingers steepled, observing his investment -
and Yusuf, hunched over his table, eyes narrowed in concentration. Yusuf, tossing Arthur about. Yusuf, giddy with excitement over his sedative.
"He does, yes. They're quite lovely, too." Ariadne nods, giving her a polite thank-you, staring into her coffee.
- - -
She knocks on his door late that night, after Lucille has left and everything in her room has been organized and reorganized a thousand times.
"You have some of my sketches," she says, crossing her arms over her chest. Yusuf cringes and nods, shrugging his shoulders. "I didn't give them to you."
"They were in the trash."
"That should have been a hint to you on where they were headed."
"Ariadne, these are beautiful." He leans to his left and takes them from his bookshelf, flipping through them like it's a habit, like he does it all the time. She knows which ones they are - leftovers from a day spent skipping her Tuesday class and instead wasting the whole morning at the coffee shop she'd just come back from, sketching the vendors across the street and the American tourists who spent a whole hour obsessing over a map of the city before she finished shading them and went over to help
"I didn't give them to you," she says, staring firmly at her feet. Yusuf raises and eyebrow and stands up, striding toward her and holding the papers out. There's a look on his face she doesn't want to ever see again - a mix of frustration and a bit of anger and resignation. She knows she's just acting up, but she takes the drawings from his hand and stalks out. The door shuts quietly behind her. After a while, the light goes off and she is awake and alone. The drawings mock her from the bathroom wastebasket, so she picks them up and stuffs them in the bottom of one of her vanity drawers.
Glancing in the mirror, she sees a girl she doesn't like. A girl on the verge of tears -
all because of a stupid boy.
In the morning, she makes eggs, tea, and toast.
"You're cooking." Yusuf is leaning against the counter, startling her, smirking just a bit.
"I am, yeah."
"I almost checked my totem." He settles into one of the kitchen chairs, preparing his tea and pulling the paper from the sugar bowl. "Damn. Still can't read French."
"Learning a foreign language by osmosis rarely works." Ariadne sets a plate of food in front of him and then begins to work on her own, peppering her eggs until they're nearly black and slathering her toast in butter. Yusuf makes a face and calmly eats his food plain. "I like to taste my food."
"Right. Black pepper is one of my favorite things to have in the morning, too."
The banter feels right and she's happy again, but it's obvious that he's being reserved around her and she doesn't like it. Three knocks sound on the door and when Yusuf comes back from answering, Lucille is there, arms loaded with containers of strawberries.
"They were a steal," she says, grinning madly. "The vendor was furious because half were smashed so he just wanted to get rid of them and go home. I know all sorts of things we can make with these. My mother has an old, old strawberry tart recipe and there's of course an angel foodcake I picked up on my way over here and strawberry moose. Oh we'll freeze these and it'll be lovely. Ari, dear, do you want to help me?" Ariadne swallows her peppered eggs thickly and stares at her lap.
"I...I'm allergic to strawberries."
"Oh." Lucille looks from Ariadne to Yusuf, then back at the massive crate she's just carried in. "Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't know." Yusuf clears his throat, then takes another sip of his tea. It's stupid, really, this awkward moment. And she knows that he thinks she's making it up. She knows that he knows that she hates his girlfriend. And it's something she might do, probably. Especially after the night before.
"I have class all day. So you can cook here while I'm gone. I get back at four..."
"No, no, I'll-"
"Really. It's fine." Ariadne grabs her bag from its spot in the corner and takes her plate to the sink. "Really," she says once more, giving Lucille the most genuine smile she can muster without breathing too deep around the fruit. Yusuf watches her walk out, but she doesn't look back or say goodbye. In the elevator, Ariadne closes her eyes and tries to force the look of his obvious disbelief from her mind.
It's a sad day when he thinks she's lying.
The strawberry incident is never mentioned again. As Lucille becomes a permanent fixture in her life, Ariadne waits for the day when Yusuf will pack up and move out. But that day doesn't come. Instead, Lucille spends an increasingly large amount of time lounging in the living room and cooking huge amounts of food and sending it along with Ariadne to class every morning. It's making her sick.
So she buys a kitten.
Yusuf contemplates the creature with a scrutinizing gaze.
"I'm something of a cat expert," he says, prodding the kitten with one finger.
"Stop. You're frightening her." Ariadne scoops her new pet up in her arms and relishes in the soft, soothing purrs that emanate from her tiny body.
"She's a bit small."
"She's perfect. Don't be jealous."
"Jealous? It's a cat, Ariadne." Yusuf shakes his head and goes back into his room, muttering something she can't hear. The cat isn't there to make anyone jealous, really. It's just that she feels a little lonely and she's wanted a cat for ages and doesn't see why anything should stop her anymore. She names it Persephone, because naming it something else would make it look like she was avoiding her mythological heritage, but calls her Perce. Yusuf approves.
And the way he says the kitten's name and then looks back to her and nods melts her down right there in the kitchen.
It's stupid, she thinks, to let herself be so completely hung up on someone.
Everything falls apart the week before Ariadne's finals. She's stressed as fuck and Yusuf knows enough from his grad school days to stay well out of her way. He speaks to her only a handful of times, usually to stop her from breaking something or dropping out all together. He talks her through a couple of near-panic attacks and makes her a cup of tea and sends her to bed. In the morning, she's stress cooking an enormous omelet which is burnt and totally inedible, but she smothers it with pepper and ketchup anyway and tries to eat it.
"Ariadne."
"What?" she asks venomously, giving up on the charred mess and throwing everything, plate included, into the garbage. She's close to tears, body trembling and hands unable to hold onto anything. Yusuf takes a step closer and puts his own hands firmly on her upper arms, steadying her.
"It's going to be okay." He pulls her close to him and she clings to his shirt, taking in his soapy, chemical smell.
"What am I going to do?"
"You're going to take your exams and -"
"No, Yusuf. I mean...what am I going to do? I don't have any internships, I don't have a job, I don't have anything." I don't even have you, she almost says, shutting her eyes tight and letting herself cry against him. Yusuf shushes her and just holds her for a while. When she pulls back, he's just looking at her, like he's never really seen her very well before.
Without thinking, Ariadne kisses him.
She's not sure what she's expecting - maybe for him to quietly pull away, get angry, freeze.
She doesn't expect him to kiss her back. And she certainly doesn't expect him to do it with such fervor. But he does, pushing her against the kitchen cabinets, his fingers cuffed by her hair, pulling and pushing and trying to get closer than they already are. Ariadne's fingers trip over one another while she tries to undo the clasps of his belt, violently tugging at his shirt. His mouth is hot against her ear, whispering her name over and over, how he wants her, he wants her so badly, so badly it hurts, how it's hurt for months now.
She opens her mouth wider, her tongue feeling heavy behind her own lips. Yusuf pulls her jeans down, leaving a hot, red mark on the tops of her thighs, but Ariadne blinks through the sting, gasping when he slips a finger inside of her, then two.
"Fuck," she bites out. "Yusuf." He silences her with another hard kiss, pushing her into the corner of the kitchen and forcing her legs around his waist. For a moment, their eyes lock. Ariadne nods and he fits his hips tight between her thighs, pushing into her and taking the wind from her chest. It is all very desperate and quick, but she’s never wanted anything more. Her breath is leaving her body in harsh, staccato gasps as she leans back, her mouth wet and close to his ear. There are going to be bruises all over her body tomorrow, but she doesn't care. Already her thighs are quivering and aching, but he keeps going until, finally, he comes with a low groan, panting and holding himself inside of her for a moment.
Finally, his breathing calms and he pulls away from her, averting his eyes as she rights herself, doing the same and fixing his trousers.
"Yusuf-"
"I...I need to finish a few things," he says quietly. "I..." His eyes catch hers and travel down her face. He places a hand on her cheek and gives her a sad smile. "Sometimes, you are too lovely for your own good."