[fic: inception]
myosotis
inception. arthur. arthur/ariadne. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter [tie a flower chain around your middle so you forget me not] ~5700 | r
“You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”
-Charles Dickens
The first time he sees her, it’s by the evergreen tree, the only tree in the whole city. He’s always thought of it a bit like a beating heart, its thick roots reaching out and touching every inch of the city, pumping blood into its cement veins.
He catches sight of her. A car whizzes by. She’s not there at first, but when the blue, shiny paint is gone there she is. She stands against the tree, long dark hair tangled and curly. From the distance between them, he cannot make out her face. But she pulls the hemlock from the lower branches and he thinks that she must be making some sort of daisy chain with it.
When he blinks, she’s gone. The watch on his wrist alerts him that he is now off his carefully monitored schedule. For the first time in his memory, Arthur shows up ten minutes late to work.
He has an office that overlooks the city. High glass bay windows. When he had first started, he had had a vague, incessant fear of heights. It’s long gone now. Arthur likes looking down at the white pavement and dark roads, hearing the busy hum of traffic. He likes watching the skyscrapers converge on one another, pointed tips nearly touching. He doesn’t find the press of the marble and steel and concrete buildings discomforting. He likes the closeness.
His secretary, Mallory, has in her slender hands the latest of his reports-stock exchanges, market values, bank drafts; a stack of white that flutters with her walk.
“It’s almost spring,” Mallory says lowly, placing her papers on his desk. His desk is, as always, smooth and perfect, a reflective surface that shows him his face, cool and impassive and aloof.
“Flowers don’t bloom here,” he points out, looking at his reflection. He wants to trace the lines of his jaw, the curves of his cheeks, the plains of his forehead. Once, he thinks, I must have recognized this face.
“That’s alright.” Mallory knows him so well. When she came to him-how long ago was it? A year? Two? Perhaps it was only yesterday, and he has forgotten-she said, sir I know what you want. You desire perfection and I can assure you, I am. He’d been intrigued (but never attracted) by her short, dark hair flaring out from her pale face, the slightly French tilt of her eyes, the way she spoke as if half-afraid of disturbing his silence.
“I never much cared for spring-April specifically,” she murmurs and Arthur realizes-it must be April. He had forgotten. “Don’t you think it’s cruel?”
“April? It’s a month. Months cannot be cruel-only people.”
“April can be abdominally cruel,” she claims. “Before April, the land is dead. April stirs life in those dull roots with its thick, heavy rain, breeds the flowers from the lifeless ground, forces it to breathe. If that is not cruelty, than what is?”
“But as I said, flowers do not grow here.”
“Yes.” Mallory’s smile blooms, teeth stretching over lips, and he thinks of an orthodontist’s palatal expander, cracking the jaw wider and wider until the muscles shatter under the pressure. “We should be very thankful for it.”
He turns from her. Below him is a stony jungle. The sun on the glass makes him think of broken pieces of jewelry, scattered carelessly about the floor. The city here is a dry stone with no water. And what roots could grow?
He thinks he sees her again, amongst the alleyways of the city on his way home. A flash of her dark hair disappearing around the corner. But the city shudders like old bones around him and she is nowhere to be seen, not in the alleys that reek of dead rats and bones.
Arthur is sure he imagines her, a friendly phantom that ghosts through his city, scuttling across the edges of it like murmur.
There is a fortune teller on the street that he sometimes crosses. She reminds him a bit of the old fortune machines-a quarter goes in and the guru’s eyes light and it reiterates a fortune with a voice that hums with mechanical gears, hands over a crystal ball or a set of tarot cards. Arthur remembers them from his youth, and remembers that he used to love them. Not for the fortune, but because his fingers had always itched to take it apart, see its metal heart and the wires and springs and frames that make up its veins and organs. Turn to those around him and say, see? It is not magic at all.
Arthur makes it a habit of avoiding this one. She is no mechanical genie for him to pick apart, dissect and find his answers. She is of flesh and blood, dark eyes and dark hair scraggily around her marked face.
“Ah, sir!” she cries and latches onto his arm before he can continue by. “A fortune! A fortune for you, I have.”
“I don’t have any money,” Arthur says, trying to yank his arm free. Her fingers are like claws, they dig into the dark sleeves of his suit jacket. Holds him tight, a cage.
“Look, look now would you?” she says, and pulls from the heavy fold of her pocket two cards. “Here, this is the Fool. And this, the Hanged Man. Do you know what they mean?”
Arthur thumbs the cards, can almost hear the jangle of the bells on the Fool’s hat. The Hanged Man’s upside down face is grotesque and enthralling. “No. I cannot say I do.”
“Od’ und leer das Meer,” the fortune teller says. “Fear death by water. You, above all, fear death by water. And here,” she dips a hand into another pocket, pulls out a leafy, flowery branch and slaps it onto the cards in his palm, “sleep beside some belladonna. It keeps the nightmares at bay.”
The old woman who sees the future leaves him there, crosses the street. And the city swallows her up.
Arthur dreams of death by water. Dreams of sinking into the dark, unreal ocean that crashes against the edges of his city. He dreams of sinking deeper and deeper into the dark, dark pit, dreams he cannot swim to the top.
He dreams of the woman, hands on his shoulders, pushing him down down down, her eyes dark and bright. They remind him of pearls.
They are standing in a Grecian temple. She takes his hands, tugs him forward. A woman-or a girl, or an old crone; she changes in instances, in heartbeats, she is everything and nothing-sits in a jar and seems to grow both tiny and huge, and fumes rise from the hole at her feet. Her eyes roll to the back of her head and he can see the whites of her eyes, and the little red veins that map her eyeballs.
“Sybil, what do you want?” the woman at his side asks.
She turns. Her hair is a palate of colors he cannot describe-blue and green and black and pink and orange, mixed together, sent shivering down the thin lengths of her bony arms-her eyes do not look at them. They are still rolled to the back of her head, he can see only the whites.
“I want to die,” the Sybil answers.
He can almost hear the addition, I have seen the future, and I wish to die. Fear death by water, my love. She will wreck this world.
The woman turns and kisses him. She tastes like the sea, and it feels like he is being drawn into her veins and her blood is all water. Her hands are around his neck, tightening (strangling), but it feels like he’s drowning. He shoves her off, and falls backward.
Arthur wakes in his bedroom, on the floor. He climbs to his feet and pulls the belladonna from its place at the edge of his headboard and throws it into the trash.
After his shower, he looks into the steamy mirror. Draws his fingers through the condensation, only vaguely aware of the shapes he creates-a woman who is small and large, young and old, trapped in a jar.
At the top of the mirror it is written, but he does not notice.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
“Rats, every last one of them,” says Ean, who has convinced Arthur to go out for drinks. He doesn’t truly care much for this coworker. He is too loud, too vivacious but this morning he could not find the fortune teller though he looked.
Has the city eaten her whole? he had wondered, feeling ridiculous immediately. Cities are not living creatures. Not Venus flytraps. Cities cannot devour.
But Ean had said, friend of mine, do you want to go out for a drink? And Arthur had said yes.
“The lot of them, rats,” Ean goes on. “Look at ‘em, scrambling about. No better than rats in the alleys. Don’t you think, Arthur?”
Arthur makes a noncommittal sound and drinks more of his bourdon. Always had a taste for bourdon, he thinks. Mom used to make fun of me. Always wanted bigger and better things, she’d say, but never could turn down a glass of cheap bourdon.
“I mean just think of it,” Ean says, taking a swig from his beer bottle. His hands are tight around the neck. “What do those people do? I mean, really? They crawl about, scavenge the trash, kill each other over the smallest things. And for what? They are insignificant. They serve no purpose. They can’t pull themselves out of the gutter, they just create more filth to live. Rats in an unreal city, you know?”
Arthur is barely listening to him. His eyes are drawn instinctively across the room. The bar they’re in is hazy from cigarette smoke. Her hair is not an exceptional color. It is brown, but it reminds him of living fire, burning bright. He imagines it spread out, like fiery points, burning hot until the moment it’s extinguished.
“I’m not much for small women, but I wouldn’t mind that one,” Ean mutters besides him. “But she’s got eyes only for you. Better go get her, boy-o.” He nudges Arthur from his seat with his hip. He stumbles forward, inexplicably drawn.
He crosses to her, unable to stop. She’s wearing a simple black dress, and it’s dark like the universe and the secrets of it may be kept there. If he unravels them, he will have all the answers he’s desired.
“Arthur,” she says when he reaches her. Her hand reaches out and grips his. She is so small, he thinks, so small I might break her if I breathe too hard. She shudders as if the connection is too much for her. “Don’t kick me out.”
“What?” he asks, his voice far away. Like he’s underwater-fear death by water, the fortune teller had told him, but he has forgotten that dream now; in the face of her. The Woman. The only Woman.
“Do you-”
He kisses her, and swallows her words. She settles against him. He can’t distinguish her smell, it’s smothered by the scent of the bar, cheap wood and cheaper tobacco and watered down alcohol. But her mouth tastes sweet, like a twisting labyrinth, constantly changing and immutable. His tongue feels heavy and like wormwood in his mouth. He trades it for hers.
They are in the small bathroom of the bar. The hinges of the stall rattles from where he pushes her against them. He lifts her tighter against him, hands underneath her pale, thin thighs. He is so hot and heavy, and she is small and tight. And then his cock is inside her and she gasps and squirms and moves against him like they’ve done this a thousand different times, a thousand different ways.
“Arthur,” she pants, legs tight around his hips, nails digging half-moons into his shoulders, dark hair wet and tangled around her sweaty forehead. “Please. Please, Arthur. Don’t.”
He bites down into her collarbone, tastes the sweet salt of her skin. “Who,” he breathes into her skin, like she is a canvas and he the painter. He has a desire to press himself so tightly against her, in her, that he is irreversibly a piece of her and when she leaves, wherever she goes, he must go to. “Who are you? Who?”
Arthur moves so furiously in her, pumping harder and faster and deeper. She latches onto him as if to never let him go. His fingers stroke her belly, her naval, he reaches between them. Her head falls backwards, rattles the plastic walls of the stall again, and he swallows her scream with his mouth, holds her tightly against him as he comes. Oh Jesus, it’s life-altering. This orgasm.
“Who-” he starts again, lost in a whirlpool that cycles the same thought over and over again. Who are you? I must know you. I need to know you.
He doesn’t remember her leaving, but she’s gone and he’s left alone in the bathroom to clean up. Arthur stares at himself in the mirror, barely recognizing this man who stares back. This man with wild, tussled hair and uneven buttons on his vest and a glinting, dangerous look in his dark eyes.
Across from him, there is a cracked mirror. He knows it’s from someone’s fist, he can sense the anger in the jagged edges of the broken mirror. But there is red lipstick scrawled across the ends, so it looks like a jigsaw puzzle. The handwriting is not neat, as if the writer had too much going on in their mind to worry about the dips and curves of their letters. But he knows what it says all the same.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Ean is a sloshed mess by the time Arthur makes his way back to him. He hauls the man out of the bar. Ean refuses to pay for a taxi, he lives nearby.
“Two blocks or so. Not so far, in this city,” he claims from his slouched position against Arthur’s shoulder. His head swings limp as he moans. “Gotta sleep this off. Damn scotch.”
Halfway, Ean manages to push himself free of his intoxicated state to ask, “So you and the bird? You get any?”
“That’s none of your business,” he says, a bit tightly. Arthur, in the office, is cheerily referred to as don’t-invite-to-parties-Arthur. He never has any fun. He hovers at the corner, feeling like an interloper, watching them all with something akin to disgust.
Ean takes a breath, tests it. “So you got some then?” He leans his head onto Arthur’s shoulder again. “Good on ya. You don’t have nearly as much fun as you should have here, you know? Boy-o, you gotta let loose. How long has it been?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“’Course you don’t!” Ean laughs, like the world is a joke and he’s the only one in on it. “Sometimes, Arthur, I wonder about you. Man’s got to wonder about you. Of all the places, of all the cities-”
Arthur leaves Ean on the steps of his apartment. Ean shoos him off with a flick of his wrist, resting his head on the cool cement.
As Arthur hikes the five blocks to his apartment, he thinks he can hear Ean quietly singing, “To Carthage then I came burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest…”
burning
In his dreams, he holds the jar in his hands. The Sybil, from within the glass walls, the glass prison, presses her gnarled hands against the sides.
“Fear death by water,” she says, “Od’ und leer das Meer.”
Arthur throws up in the wastebasket.
He searches for her in the corners and in the shadows and feels foolish for it. And still he does. He makes sure to pass by the tree in the center of the city at least once a day. But the girl never comes. Arthur isn’t sure if he’s relieved or disappointed that the tree is always empty, just a big, massive thing with heavy branches that seem to exist in counterbalance to the stone city that grows around it.
There is no water here, Arthur thinks on his second pass. Upon what does it feed, this tree?
“You never go on vacation,” he notes to Mallory.
She shrugs a careless, slender shoulder, tilts her head as if to understand him, her dark hair flapping around her face like wings. “And where would I go?”
“There are places,” he says, defensively. “Outside the city. The ocean.”
“The ocean? Horrible place, that. I would never go.” Mallory doesn’t hesitate with her words, they are spoken with a certainty that shocks him, that seems to steady his decaying world. “You have a meeting with the board at four, sir.”
When she is gone, he doesn’t look out the window. Instead, he sits at his desk and looks into the reflection there. He’s not old, is he? He feels ancient, but he can see that he is not old. This face is a young face. It shows the callow of youth.
He wishes vaguely that it were old. The old seem to understand more, and Arthur desperately wants to understand.
In his pocket rests old, worn tarot cards. The Hanged Man. And the Fool.
The Fool.
In the pack on his back, he carries all his worldly possession. Here is his life, his future. It weights him heavily, he is hunched over. But he continues on, as if he knows not how to stop. He cannot comprehend greater things. Instead, he must accept in blind faith what is and what he has. To reach beyond would be his destruction.
The Fool means newness. A time where time has restarted, returned once more to the beginning.
The lock on his door turns. Arthur lays still in his bed, in the dark, watching the gold knob twist. He cannot tell if this is a nightmare, if this is a dream. His heart pounds so loudly in his ears.
The Woman steps in, so dark she nearly blends in. She doesn’t hesitate, and reaches him in a second. His room is always neat and kept, but she moves across it as if she knows where everything goes. Here is the couch, and here is the door to the kitchen, and here. Here is Arthur.
She presses her mouth to his. He cannot distinguish her smell. She feels mechanical. Something is off, like something whispering at the back of his mind this is not her. But Arthur does not know who she is so it is not conceivable that he can distinguish a wrongness about her. But she feels synthetic and unreal, he knows it from where she lies against him.
“No,” she says when he pushes a hand under her shirt. She grips his wrist. “No. I can’t. Listen to me, Arthur.”
His breath shutters out. Panic. But when he moves to kiss her again, she pulls away. From the pocket of her jeans she pulls out a flower chain. It is not the hemlock he saw her pluck from the evergreen tree. They are red like blood and small and curved outward. A dense spike, a thick, heavy cluster of red drops of blood, flowers beautiful in their bulbous shape.
She lays the flower chain over his heart, presses it down into his flesh. “I’ve tried so hard,” she says softly, brokenly. “So hard. Arthur, come with me.”
“Where?” he demands, his fingers closing over hers, over the flowers.
“To the ocean.”
His heart hammers and his fingers release hers, nearly shoving her away. “No,” he breathes, the small world of his apartment seems to creak and moan as if expelling a disease.
When he opens his eyes, she is gone and he drowns helplessly in regret. To the ocean, but he cannot go. Fear death by water, above all things. He picks at the flower chain still resting on his chest. It is still warm from where she has touched.
Hyacinthus. Rebirth.
Mallory hums as she works, her short, cropped hair so silky and smooth. Her fingers so competent and slender. Pale. For some reason, he’s taken to imagining her dangling over the side of their office building, staring down at the merciless concrete below. Arthur, sometimes, imagines what her body would look like falling, what it would look like on the pavement after a twelve-storey drop.
“Something on your mind?” Mallory asks, lifting her head, eyes crinkling at the corners.
“No,” he croaks out.
She nods and goes back to humming, her voice slightly soft and warm. It sends a shiver down his spine. “Od’ und leer das Meer…”
“What?” He spins his head toward her, there is a roar in his ears. “What did you say?”
“It’s an old song,” Mallory explains with a small, sad smile. “My mother, now long dead, used to sing it to me. She was French, you know. It was her favorite thing to sing, always over and over again, by my bed. You don’t like it?”
“No,” he manages weakly. “Could you sing something else?”
“Of course.” Mallory turns out of his office, and Arthur wonders absently if he’s offended her and perhaps he should be a bit more worried if he has. But his heart pounds too painfully in his chest for him to worry about that.
“Non, rein de rein,” Mallory sings outside his office, voice so soft and sure. “Non, je ne regrette rein.”
Arthur wants desperately to run, to flee, but in this city with its bleached cement and sharp, harsh sun there is no escape.
He dreams of cities collapsing inward, twisting as if made of water. Towers falling, toppling down and over, into the cement that has turned into black water. Here in his mind he sees the curves of his city, but he also sees Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London. All falling down into the violent, unfeeling ground.
It is all unreal.
The city is dry, and its bones are dry. Arthur knows this because he knows that dry bones will do no harm. They will rattle and creak but they cannot touch, they are little better than dust.
When he awakens in the morning, a brown fog is brought in by a gust. And with it, comes the rain. It is April, in this city.
Ean asks him about the garden. “I’m growing one,” he explains. “It’s raining now. When it rains like this, you better plant your gardens because when it’s gone it’ll all wither up and dry. Arthur, how do you grow your garden?”
“I don’t have garden.” His apartment is a barren, Spartan thing in a Spartan city. He remembers his dream of falling, crumbling buildings but the city around them now is immaculate and untouched, undestroyed.
“Of course, you do. Arthur, you’re the only one with a garden. It has been growing for so long.” Ean swings an arm around his shoulder, leans toward him as if they are conspirators. “But I know your secret.”
He thinks of the Woman and her indistinguishable smell, the feel of her hips against his, the breath of his name across his cheek. Their sweaty, sticky skin fused together. Come with me, to the ocean.
“It’s corpses, isn’t it?” Ean guesses. “You’ve planted your garden with corpses. Have they begun to sprout yet? Will it bloom this year? There’s been no frost disturb it’s bed.”
“Goodbye, Ean,” Arthur says, and walks away from him.
The door to his office opens, but it is not Mallory who steps through. It is she. The Woman. Arthur hisses out a shocked breath. He’d never imagined she’d come here, break this sanctuary. Come where they are so high above everything else.
“I was surprised to see her,” the Woman says. “What do you call her?”
It takes him a moment. His heart twists and tightens, as if it understands the countenance of her face but he himself cannot comprehend.
“Mallory.” The words are ripped from him.
“Mallory,” she repeats the words, tests them on her tongue. She crosses to him. “You’re impossible to break, Arthur.”
He wants to ask her what she means. He wants to ask her who she is, what she is. There are a million questions in his head, and if he asks them he will crack this riddle. Instead, his hands fist in her hair and he jerks her against him, unable to stand this distance between them. He is a starved man, a dying man, and she is food and water and life.
Arthur turns her over the side of his desk, her hips dangling. She moans and pants where he touches, as if she cannot help herself. He kisses the curvature of her spine, curses when he cannot pin down the exact smell of her. It feels like he should, like he should know what she smells like. He grips her hips, enters in fast, heavy strokes. His fingers clutch the desk just above her head, hers dig into the skin of his wrist.
He pulls her hips flush against his, stroking inside her. He has dreamt of doing this in countless ways with her. Fucking her slowly, and fast, and hard and gentle. In a small, unimpressive apartment. In rich, dark hotel rooms. On grey, cement floors with light filtered through dirty windows; lawn chairs squeaking, desk legs trembling.
It’s too much. He slams into her so hard, the whole desk jerks forward across the floor. She trembles beneath him, begging him-Arthur please, yes, please, I can’t stand it-and it’s like he’s trying to prove something, trying to force something inside him. He’s angry at himself, in his thrusts there is rage.
He comes, holding her hips tightly against his. She screams into the wood, limbs shaking against his. She bites down on his hand, and he scraps his teeth against the back of her collarbone.
Then she is gone, and he grips the empty spaces where she has been. She takes all the air with her, and he cannot breathe in her absence.
Her voice lingers. “Arthur, I’ll wait for you at the ocean. Come with me.”
Their sweat leaves marks on his desk, and the surface is no longer reflective. His fingers move angrily across it, but not to wipe it away. Instead he writes.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
He runs and runs. Mallory calls after him, but he does not listen. He runs out of the building and into the blinding light of the city, he runs to the heart of it. To the tree.
The Hanged Man.
It is suspension. It is not life. It is not death. Upside down, the world is seen with a different sort of clarity, but with the knowledge nothing can be done. It is impossible to move. Here, it is timeless.
And beneath the tree of the Hanged Man, always sits the Fool.
“You’ve come,” observes the old man, who sits beneath the tree.
“Who are you?”
“You know me,” the old man says. “But you did not dare give me a name.”
The city is so hot and dry. The rain did not last long. It swept through quickly and powerfully, but was forced out. Arthur strips his off his suit jacket, rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. It does not help. The heat comes from inside him.
“I know the sea well,” the man says. “Far better than you. I died there, close to it. Twice. You choose to make me old. The lie is easier than the truth.”
Arthur kneels beside him, brain pounding, like it wants to pour out his ears. “I know you,” he says, with a certainty that shocks him. “I know you.”
“Not this me, but yes. Once. A lifetime ago. And then you choose to forget-better to pretend it’s real than to wail at the bars of a cage, correct Arthur? You were never good with cages, but you always appreciated facades.”
Down this far, in this city. He thought it better to forget. Impossible as it was to escape, he thought he’d at least pretend at happiness. Better than going quietly insane. Better than turning bitter and hollow over missing her.
“Consider me, Arthur,” the old man says, and his face changes. His is young, even if his eyes are old. Twice he died, he said. He cannot die this time-he is not real, here. His hair is blonde, his eyes are blue, his face is something like home. Arthur knows him. “Once I was like you.”
The city rattles around him, loudly, like loose bones in a corpse being violently shaken. A building falls sideways, and lays on the callous ground.
Arthur picks himself up, and runs.
The man calls out, “Do you remember? We used to call her Mal.”
In his apartment, someone has been. They’ve left a loaded die on his bed. When he picks it up, it feels wrong, feels so wrong, and it shocks him. It’s a punch to the gut.
It is wrong. This is wrong.
On the wall above his bed, painted out in blood-red lipstick, someone has written meet me at the ocean.
Outside his window, the skyscrapers and buildings curl into one another, brilliant bright shards of glass shattering and raining down onto the city like dust. The steel frames and solid mortar hit the ground and scatter like raindrops.
Arthur follows the railway tracks to the ocean that has awaited him for an eternity. Hurry up please, it’s time.
Od’ und leer das Meer.
Desolate and empty, the sea.
The Woman waits him there, water circles her ankles, crashing against the high walls of his city, tearing it down at long last. The water has been fighting this war for a long time, he thinks.
“Your city is like Sparta,” the Woman accuses. “Anytime we got close, you’d kick us out. You’ve got defensive mechanisms like I’ve never seen.”
“Comes with the job,” he answers with a loftiness he does not feel so close to the water. Fear death by water, the fortune teller said. It is the only thing that can reach you here.
“But I’m stubborn. You didn’t count on that.” She holds out a hand for him. “We’ve gotten so close before, Arthur. I have a million and one times. Damn you, how’d you know orgasm was a kick?”
He doesn’t answer. He kicks off his black, shiny shoes and steps out toward her. His body shudders where the water touches him, terror and rage mixing into a potent chemical. He grips her hands to keep himself steady. She smiles at him, her lips red like the lipstick she uses to write on his walls, write on his body.
She is no longer the Woman. “Ariadne.” His fingers are tight on her hands, his knuckles white.
She smiles brilliantly and he draws her into his arms, mouth fastened hungrily over hers. He had forgotten. No, he had chosen to forget. He trapped so far down, he had not thought she could, should, would come. He thought it was better to let himself have this city, this life. Better than sitting at the ocean waiting for a ship that would never come.
He grips her face tightly, she moans against him, and they step further out into the sea.
“Let’s go,” she says breathlessly. “Let’s go. Let’s go.”
Arthur turns one last time, he looks at the city he built from the recesses of his mind. His stone cage of mourning. The fragments of the life he lived crash against the ruins of the city. In the distance, he sees rain clouds moving in.
“I want to wake up,” he says.
Ariadne closes her arms around him, and they drop into the ocean. It opens and cradles them. Ariadne’s arms are like chains around him, dragging him deeper and deeper. Fear death by water. She will wreck your city.
The water is black, thick and heavy. Like oil and tar. He sinks deeper and deeper, and holds Ariadne to remind himself. The loaded die that felt wrong sits in his pocket, a weighing stone.
He opens his eyes for the first time.
Ariadne sleeps against him. The warehouse they are in is familiar, though he cannot place the particulars of it just yet. It will come in time. From what he remembers of Cobb, it will come in time.
When Ariadne stirs he closes his arms around her shoulders so she awakes against him. Her dark eyes smile bright into his. She points to his side, and he sees that against the PASIV is his die. The feel of it, its rightness, is like the last lock freeing his heart.
Ariadne strips her shirt, and her jeans and then takes off his clothes and climbs onto him. Kisses him and draws him into her. It hadn’t felt so real in the dream. He had not been able to place the right texture of her skin, the smell of her sweat and sweet, sweet arousal. The die clutched in his hand drops to the floor with a little ping so he can grip her hips and move with her.
“La mer a bercè mon cœur pour la vie,” Ariadne whispers, tongue soothing the last burns that linger on his skin. He presses his mouth against the curve under her breast and at last remembers her smell.
Myosotis. Forget me not.
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This fic pretty much is The Waste Land. I wouldn't suggest reading it unless you’re into modernist poetry or crazy (me). But it's there if you want to look at all the many many lines that inspired this fic.
inception. arthur. arthur/ariadne. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter [tie a flower chain around your middle so you forget me not] ~5700 | r
“You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”
-Charles Dickens
The first time he sees her, it’s by the evergreen tree, the only tree in the whole city. He’s always thought of it a bit like a beating heart, its thick roots reaching out and touching every inch of the city, pumping blood into its cement veins.
He catches sight of her. A car whizzes by. She’s not there at first, but when the blue, shiny paint is gone there she is. She stands against the tree, long dark hair tangled and curly. From the distance between them, he cannot make out her face. But she pulls the hemlock from the lower branches and he thinks that she must be making some sort of daisy chain with it.
When he blinks, she’s gone. The watch on his wrist alerts him that he is now off his carefully monitored schedule. For the first time in his memory, Arthur shows up ten minutes late to work.
He has an office that overlooks the city. High glass bay windows. When he had first started, he had had a vague, incessant fear of heights. It’s long gone now. Arthur likes looking down at the white pavement and dark roads, hearing the busy hum of traffic. He likes watching the skyscrapers converge on one another, pointed tips nearly touching. He doesn’t find the press of the marble and steel and concrete buildings discomforting. He likes the closeness.
His secretary, Mallory, has in her slender hands the latest of his reports-stock exchanges, market values, bank drafts; a stack of white that flutters with her walk.
“It’s almost spring,” Mallory says lowly, placing her papers on his desk. His desk is, as always, smooth and perfect, a reflective surface that shows him his face, cool and impassive and aloof.
“Flowers don’t bloom here,” he points out, looking at his reflection. He wants to trace the lines of his jaw, the curves of his cheeks, the plains of his forehead. Once, he thinks, I must have recognized this face.
“That’s alright.” Mallory knows him so well. When she came to him-how long ago was it? A year? Two? Perhaps it was only yesterday, and he has forgotten-she said, sir I know what you want. You desire perfection and I can assure you, I am. He’d been intrigued (but never attracted) by her short, dark hair flaring out from her pale face, the slightly French tilt of her eyes, the way she spoke as if half-afraid of disturbing his silence.
“I never much cared for spring-April specifically,” she murmurs and Arthur realizes-it must be April. He had forgotten. “Don’t you think it’s cruel?”
“April? It’s a month. Months cannot be cruel-only people.”
“April can be abdominally cruel,” she claims. “Before April, the land is dead. April stirs life in those dull roots with its thick, heavy rain, breeds the flowers from the lifeless ground, forces it to breathe. If that is not cruelty, than what is?”
“But as I said, flowers do not grow here.”
“Yes.” Mallory’s smile blooms, teeth stretching over lips, and he thinks of an orthodontist’s palatal expander, cracking the jaw wider and wider until the muscles shatter under the pressure. “We should be very thankful for it.”
He turns from her. Below him is a stony jungle. The sun on the glass makes him think of broken pieces of jewelry, scattered carelessly about the floor. The city here is a dry stone with no water. And what roots could grow?
He thinks he sees her again, amongst the alleyways of the city on his way home. A flash of her dark hair disappearing around the corner. But the city shudders like old bones around him and she is nowhere to be seen, not in the alleys that reek of dead rats and bones.
Arthur is sure he imagines her, a friendly phantom that ghosts through his city, scuttling across the edges of it like murmur.
There is a fortune teller on the street that he sometimes crosses. She reminds him a bit of the old fortune machines-a quarter goes in and the guru’s eyes light and it reiterates a fortune with a voice that hums with mechanical gears, hands over a crystal ball or a set of tarot cards. Arthur remembers them from his youth, and remembers that he used to love them. Not for the fortune, but because his fingers had always itched to take it apart, see its metal heart and the wires and springs and frames that make up its veins and organs. Turn to those around him and say, see? It is not magic at all.
Arthur makes it a habit of avoiding this one. She is no mechanical genie for him to pick apart, dissect and find his answers. She is of flesh and blood, dark eyes and dark hair scraggily around her marked face.
“Ah, sir!” she cries and latches onto his arm before he can continue by. “A fortune! A fortune for you, I have.”
“I don’t have any money,” Arthur says, trying to yank his arm free. Her fingers are like claws, they dig into the dark sleeves of his suit jacket. Holds him tight, a cage.
“Look, look now would you?” she says, and pulls from the heavy fold of her pocket two cards. “Here, this is the Fool. And this, the Hanged Man. Do you know what they mean?”
Arthur thumbs the cards, can almost hear the jangle of the bells on the Fool’s hat. The Hanged Man’s upside down face is grotesque and enthralling. “No. I cannot say I do.”
“Od’ und leer das Meer,” the fortune teller says. “Fear death by water. You, above all, fear death by water. And here,” she dips a hand into another pocket, pulls out a leafy, flowery branch and slaps it onto the cards in his palm, “sleep beside some belladonna. It keeps the nightmares at bay.”
The old woman who sees the future leaves him there, crosses the street. And the city swallows her up.
Arthur dreams of death by water. Dreams of sinking into the dark, unreal ocean that crashes against the edges of his city. He dreams of sinking deeper and deeper into the dark, dark pit, dreams he cannot swim to the top.
He dreams of the woman, hands on his shoulders, pushing him down down down, her eyes dark and bright. They remind him of pearls.
They are standing in a Grecian temple. She takes his hands, tugs him forward. A woman-or a girl, or an old crone; she changes in instances, in heartbeats, she is everything and nothing-sits in a jar and seems to grow both tiny and huge, and fumes rise from the hole at her feet. Her eyes roll to the back of her head and he can see the whites of her eyes, and the little red veins that map her eyeballs.
“Sybil, what do you want?” the woman at his side asks.
She turns. Her hair is a palate of colors he cannot describe-blue and green and black and pink and orange, mixed together, sent shivering down the thin lengths of her bony arms-her eyes do not look at them. They are still rolled to the back of her head, he can see only the whites.
“I want to die,” the Sybil answers.
He can almost hear the addition, I have seen the future, and I wish to die. Fear death by water, my love. She will wreck this world.
The woman turns and kisses him. She tastes like the sea, and it feels like he is being drawn into her veins and her blood is all water. Her hands are around his neck, tightening (strangling), but it feels like he’s drowning. He shoves her off, and falls backward.
Arthur wakes in his bedroom, on the floor. He climbs to his feet and pulls the belladonna from its place at the edge of his headboard and throws it into the trash.
After his shower, he looks into the steamy mirror. Draws his fingers through the condensation, only vaguely aware of the shapes he creates-a woman who is small and large, young and old, trapped in a jar.
At the top of the mirror it is written, but he does not notice.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
“Rats, every last one of them,” says Ean, who has convinced Arthur to go out for drinks. He doesn’t truly care much for this coworker. He is too loud, too vivacious but this morning he could not find the fortune teller though he looked.
Has the city eaten her whole? he had wondered, feeling ridiculous immediately. Cities are not living creatures. Not Venus flytraps. Cities cannot devour.
But Ean had said, friend of mine, do you want to go out for a drink? And Arthur had said yes.
“The lot of them, rats,” Ean goes on. “Look at ‘em, scrambling about. No better than rats in the alleys. Don’t you think, Arthur?”
Arthur makes a noncommittal sound and drinks more of his bourdon. Always had a taste for bourdon, he thinks. Mom used to make fun of me. Always wanted bigger and better things, she’d say, but never could turn down a glass of cheap bourdon.
“I mean just think of it,” Ean says, taking a swig from his beer bottle. His hands are tight around the neck. “What do those people do? I mean, really? They crawl about, scavenge the trash, kill each other over the smallest things. And for what? They are insignificant. They serve no purpose. They can’t pull themselves out of the gutter, they just create more filth to live. Rats in an unreal city, you know?”
Arthur is barely listening to him. His eyes are drawn instinctively across the room. The bar they’re in is hazy from cigarette smoke. Her hair is not an exceptional color. It is brown, but it reminds him of living fire, burning bright. He imagines it spread out, like fiery points, burning hot until the moment it’s extinguished.
“I’m not much for small women, but I wouldn’t mind that one,” Ean mutters besides him. “But she’s got eyes only for you. Better go get her, boy-o.” He nudges Arthur from his seat with his hip. He stumbles forward, inexplicably drawn.
He crosses to her, unable to stop. She’s wearing a simple black dress, and it’s dark like the universe and the secrets of it may be kept there. If he unravels them, he will have all the answers he’s desired.
“Arthur,” she says when he reaches her. Her hand reaches out and grips his. She is so small, he thinks, so small I might break her if I breathe too hard. She shudders as if the connection is too much for her. “Don’t kick me out.”
“What?” he asks, his voice far away. Like he’s underwater-fear death by water, the fortune teller had told him, but he has forgotten that dream now; in the face of her. The Woman. The only Woman.
“Do you-”
He kisses her, and swallows her words. She settles against him. He can’t distinguish her smell, it’s smothered by the scent of the bar, cheap wood and cheaper tobacco and watered down alcohol. But her mouth tastes sweet, like a twisting labyrinth, constantly changing and immutable. His tongue feels heavy and like wormwood in his mouth. He trades it for hers.
They are in the small bathroom of the bar. The hinges of the stall rattles from where he pushes her against them. He lifts her tighter against him, hands underneath her pale, thin thighs. He is so hot and heavy, and she is small and tight. And then his cock is inside her and she gasps and squirms and moves against him like they’ve done this a thousand different times, a thousand different ways.
“Arthur,” she pants, legs tight around his hips, nails digging half-moons into his shoulders, dark hair wet and tangled around her sweaty forehead. “Please. Please, Arthur. Don’t.”
He bites down into her collarbone, tastes the sweet salt of her skin. “Who,” he breathes into her skin, like she is a canvas and he the painter. He has a desire to press himself so tightly against her, in her, that he is irreversibly a piece of her and when she leaves, wherever she goes, he must go to. “Who are you? Who?”
Arthur moves so furiously in her, pumping harder and faster and deeper. She latches onto him as if to never let him go. His fingers stroke her belly, her naval, he reaches between them. Her head falls backwards, rattles the plastic walls of the stall again, and he swallows her scream with his mouth, holds her tightly against him as he comes. Oh Jesus, it’s life-altering. This orgasm.
“Who-” he starts again, lost in a whirlpool that cycles the same thought over and over again. Who are you? I must know you. I need to know you.
He doesn’t remember her leaving, but she’s gone and he’s left alone in the bathroom to clean up. Arthur stares at himself in the mirror, barely recognizing this man who stares back. This man with wild, tussled hair and uneven buttons on his vest and a glinting, dangerous look in his dark eyes.
Across from him, there is a cracked mirror. He knows it’s from someone’s fist, he can sense the anger in the jagged edges of the broken mirror. But there is red lipstick scrawled across the ends, so it looks like a jigsaw puzzle. The handwriting is not neat, as if the writer had too much going on in their mind to worry about the dips and curves of their letters. But he knows what it says all the same.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Ean is a sloshed mess by the time Arthur makes his way back to him. He hauls the man out of the bar. Ean refuses to pay for a taxi, he lives nearby.
“Two blocks or so. Not so far, in this city,” he claims from his slouched position against Arthur’s shoulder. His head swings limp as he moans. “Gotta sleep this off. Damn scotch.”
Halfway, Ean manages to push himself free of his intoxicated state to ask, “So you and the bird? You get any?”
“That’s none of your business,” he says, a bit tightly. Arthur, in the office, is cheerily referred to as don’t-invite-to-parties-Arthur. He never has any fun. He hovers at the corner, feeling like an interloper, watching them all with something akin to disgust.
Ean takes a breath, tests it. “So you got some then?” He leans his head onto Arthur’s shoulder again. “Good on ya. You don’t have nearly as much fun as you should have here, you know? Boy-o, you gotta let loose. How long has it been?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“’Course you don’t!” Ean laughs, like the world is a joke and he’s the only one in on it. “Sometimes, Arthur, I wonder about you. Man’s got to wonder about you. Of all the places, of all the cities-”
Arthur leaves Ean on the steps of his apartment. Ean shoos him off with a flick of his wrist, resting his head on the cool cement.
As Arthur hikes the five blocks to his apartment, he thinks he can hear Ean quietly singing, “To Carthage then I came burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest…”
burning
In his dreams, he holds the jar in his hands. The Sybil, from within the glass walls, the glass prison, presses her gnarled hands against the sides.
“Fear death by water,” she says, “Od’ und leer das Meer.”
Arthur throws up in the wastebasket.
He searches for her in the corners and in the shadows and feels foolish for it. And still he does. He makes sure to pass by the tree in the center of the city at least once a day. But the girl never comes. Arthur isn’t sure if he’s relieved or disappointed that the tree is always empty, just a big, massive thing with heavy branches that seem to exist in counterbalance to the stone city that grows around it.
There is no water here, Arthur thinks on his second pass. Upon what does it feed, this tree?
“You never go on vacation,” he notes to Mallory.
She shrugs a careless, slender shoulder, tilts her head as if to understand him, her dark hair flapping around her face like wings. “And where would I go?”
“There are places,” he says, defensively. “Outside the city. The ocean.”
“The ocean? Horrible place, that. I would never go.” Mallory doesn’t hesitate with her words, they are spoken with a certainty that shocks him, that seems to steady his decaying world. “You have a meeting with the board at four, sir.”
When she is gone, he doesn’t look out the window. Instead, he sits at his desk and looks into the reflection there. He’s not old, is he? He feels ancient, but he can see that he is not old. This face is a young face. It shows the callow of youth.
He wishes vaguely that it were old. The old seem to understand more, and Arthur desperately wants to understand.
In his pocket rests old, worn tarot cards. The Hanged Man. And the Fool.
The Fool.
In the pack on his back, he carries all his worldly possession. Here is his life, his future. It weights him heavily, he is hunched over. But he continues on, as if he knows not how to stop. He cannot comprehend greater things. Instead, he must accept in blind faith what is and what he has. To reach beyond would be his destruction.
The Fool means newness. A time where time has restarted, returned once more to the beginning.
The lock on his door turns. Arthur lays still in his bed, in the dark, watching the gold knob twist. He cannot tell if this is a nightmare, if this is a dream. His heart pounds so loudly in his ears.
The Woman steps in, so dark she nearly blends in. She doesn’t hesitate, and reaches him in a second. His room is always neat and kept, but she moves across it as if she knows where everything goes. Here is the couch, and here is the door to the kitchen, and here. Here is Arthur.
She presses her mouth to his. He cannot distinguish her smell. She feels mechanical. Something is off, like something whispering at the back of his mind this is not her. But Arthur does not know who she is so it is not conceivable that he can distinguish a wrongness about her. But she feels synthetic and unreal, he knows it from where she lies against him.
“No,” she says when he pushes a hand under her shirt. She grips his wrist. “No. I can’t. Listen to me, Arthur.”
His breath shutters out. Panic. But when he moves to kiss her again, she pulls away. From the pocket of her jeans she pulls out a flower chain. It is not the hemlock he saw her pluck from the evergreen tree. They are red like blood and small and curved outward. A dense spike, a thick, heavy cluster of red drops of blood, flowers beautiful in their bulbous shape.
She lays the flower chain over his heart, presses it down into his flesh. “I’ve tried so hard,” she says softly, brokenly. “So hard. Arthur, come with me.”
“Where?” he demands, his fingers closing over hers, over the flowers.
“To the ocean.”
His heart hammers and his fingers release hers, nearly shoving her away. “No,” he breathes, the small world of his apartment seems to creak and moan as if expelling a disease.
When he opens his eyes, she is gone and he drowns helplessly in regret. To the ocean, but he cannot go. Fear death by water, above all things. He picks at the flower chain still resting on his chest. It is still warm from where she has touched.
Hyacinthus. Rebirth.
Mallory hums as she works, her short, cropped hair so silky and smooth. Her fingers so competent and slender. Pale. For some reason, he’s taken to imagining her dangling over the side of their office building, staring down at the merciless concrete below. Arthur, sometimes, imagines what her body would look like falling, what it would look like on the pavement after a twelve-storey drop.
“Something on your mind?” Mallory asks, lifting her head, eyes crinkling at the corners.
“No,” he croaks out.
She nods and goes back to humming, her voice slightly soft and warm. It sends a shiver down his spine. “Od’ und leer das Meer…”
“What?” He spins his head toward her, there is a roar in his ears. “What did you say?”
“It’s an old song,” Mallory explains with a small, sad smile. “My mother, now long dead, used to sing it to me. She was French, you know. It was her favorite thing to sing, always over and over again, by my bed. You don’t like it?”
“No,” he manages weakly. “Could you sing something else?”
“Of course.” Mallory turns out of his office, and Arthur wonders absently if he’s offended her and perhaps he should be a bit more worried if he has. But his heart pounds too painfully in his chest for him to worry about that.
“Non, rein de rein,” Mallory sings outside his office, voice so soft and sure. “Non, je ne regrette rein.”
Arthur wants desperately to run, to flee, but in this city with its bleached cement and sharp, harsh sun there is no escape.
He dreams of cities collapsing inward, twisting as if made of water. Towers falling, toppling down and over, into the cement that has turned into black water. Here in his mind he sees the curves of his city, but he also sees Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London. All falling down into the violent, unfeeling ground.
It is all unreal.
The city is dry, and its bones are dry. Arthur knows this because he knows that dry bones will do no harm. They will rattle and creak but they cannot touch, they are little better than dust.
When he awakens in the morning, a brown fog is brought in by a gust. And with it, comes the rain. It is April, in this city.
Ean asks him about the garden. “I’m growing one,” he explains. “It’s raining now. When it rains like this, you better plant your gardens because when it’s gone it’ll all wither up and dry. Arthur, how do you grow your garden?”
“I don’t have garden.” His apartment is a barren, Spartan thing in a Spartan city. He remembers his dream of falling, crumbling buildings but the city around them now is immaculate and untouched, undestroyed.
“Of course, you do. Arthur, you’re the only one with a garden. It has been growing for so long.” Ean swings an arm around his shoulder, leans toward him as if they are conspirators. “But I know your secret.”
He thinks of the Woman and her indistinguishable smell, the feel of her hips against his, the breath of his name across his cheek. Their sweaty, sticky skin fused together. Come with me, to the ocean.
“It’s corpses, isn’t it?” Ean guesses. “You’ve planted your garden with corpses. Have they begun to sprout yet? Will it bloom this year? There’s been no frost disturb it’s bed.”
“Goodbye, Ean,” Arthur says, and walks away from him.
The door to his office opens, but it is not Mallory who steps through. It is she. The Woman. Arthur hisses out a shocked breath. He’d never imagined she’d come here, break this sanctuary. Come where they are so high above everything else.
“I was surprised to see her,” the Woman says. “What do you call her?”
It takes him a moment. His heart twists and tightens, as if it understands the countenance of her face but he himself cannot comprehend.
“Mallory.” The words are ripped from him.
“Mallory,” she repeats the words, tests them on her tongue. She crosses to him. “You’re impossible to break, Arthur.”
He wants to ask her what she means. He wants to ask her who she is, what she is. There are a million questions in his head, and if he asks them he will crack this riddle. Instead, his hands fist in her hair and he jerks her against him, unable to stand this distance between them. He is a starved man, a dying man, and she is food and water and life.
Arthur turns her over the side of his desk, her hips dangling. She moans and pants where he touches, as if she cannot help herself. He kisses the curvature of her spine, curses when he cannot pin down the exact smell of her. It feels like he should, like he should know what she smells like. He grips her hips, enters in fast, heavy strokes. His fingers clutch the desk just above her head, hers dig into the skin of his wrist.
He pulls her hips flush against his, stroking inside her. He has dreamt of doing this in countless ways with her. Fucking her slowly, and fast, and hard and gentle. In a small, unimpressive apartment. In rich, dark hotel rooms. On grey, cement floors with light filtered through dirty windows; lawn chairs squeaking, desk legs trembling.
It’s too much. He slams into her so hard, the whole desk jerks forward across the floor. She trembles beneath him, begging him-Arthur please, yes, please, I can’t stand it-and it’s like he’s trying to prove something, trying to force something inside him. He’s angry at himself, in his thrusts there is rage.
He comes, holding her hips tightly against his. She screams into the wood, limbs shaking against his. She bites down on his hand, and he scraps his teeth against the back of her collarbone.
Then she is gone, and he grips the empty spaces where she has been. She takes all the air with her, and he cannot breathe in her absence.
Her voice lingers. “Arthur, I’ll wait for you at the ocean. Come with me.”
Their sweat leaves marks on his desk, and the surface is no longer reflective. His fingers move angrily across it, but not to wipe it away. Instead he writes.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
He runs and runs. Mallory calls after him, but he does not listen. He runs out of the building and into the blinding light of the city, he runs to the heart of it. To the tree.
The Hanged Man.
It is suspension. It is not life. It is not death. Upside down, the world is seen with a different sort of clarity, but with the knowledge nothing can be done. It is impossible to move. Here, it is timeless.
And beneath the tree of the Hanged Man, always sits the Fool.
“You’ve come,” observes the old man, who sits beneath the tree.
“Who are you?”
“You know me,” the old man says. “But you did not dare give me a name.”
The city is so hot and dry. The rain did not last long. It swept through quickly and powerfully, but was forced out. Arthur strips his off his suit jacket, rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. It does not help. The heat comes from inside him.
“I know the sea well,” the man says. “Far better than you. I died there, close to it. Twice. You choose to make me old. The lie is easier than the truth.”
Arthur kneels beside him, brain pounding, like it wants to pour out his ears. “I know you,” he says, with a certainty that shocks him. “I know you.”
“Not this me, but yes. Once. A lifetime ago. And then you choose to forget-better to pretend it’s real than to wail at the bars of a cage, correct Arthur? You were never good with cages, but you always appreciated facades.”
Down this far, in this city. He thought it better to forget. Impossible as it was to escape, he thought he’d at least pretend at happiness. Better than going quietly insane. Better than turning bitter and hollow over missing her.
“Consider me, Arthur,” the old man says, and his face changes. His is young, even if his eyes are old. Twice he died, he said. He cannot die this time-he is not real, here. His hair is blonde, his eyes are blue, his face is something like home. Arthur knows him. “Once I was like you.”
The city rattles around him, loudly, like loose bones in a corpse being violently shaken. A building falls sideways, and lays on the callous ground.
Arthur picks himself up, and runs.
The man calls out, “Do you remember? We used to call her Mal.”
In his apartment, someone has been. They’ve left a loaded die on his bed. When he picks it up, it feels wrong, feels so wrong, and it shocks him. It’s a punch to the gut.
It is wrong. This is wrong.
On the wall above his bed, painted out in blood-red lipstick, someone has written meet me at the ocean.
Outside his window, the skyscrapers and buildings curl into one another, brilliant bright shards of glass shattering and raining down onto the city like dust. The steel frames and solid mortar hit the ground and scatter like raindrops.
Arthur follows the railway tracks to the ocean that has awaited him for an eternity. Hurry up please, it’s time.
Od’ und leer das Meer.
Desolate and empty, the sea.
The Woman waits him there, water circles her ankles, crashing against the high walls of his city, tearing it down at long last. The water has been fighting this war for a long time, he thinks.
“Your city is like Sparta,” the Woman accuses. “Anytime we got close, you’d kick us out. You’ve got defensive mechanisms like I’ve never seen.”
“Comes with the job,” he answers with a loftiness he does not feel so close to the water. Fear death by water, the fortune teller said. It is the only thing that can reach you here.
“But I’m stubborn. You didn’t count on that.” She holds out a hand for him. “We’ve gotten so close before, Arthur. I have a million and one times. Damn you, how’d you know orgasm was a kick?”
He doesn’t answer. He kicks off his black, shiny shoes and steps out toward her. His body shudders where the water touches him, terror and rage mixing into a potent chemical. He grips her hands to keep himself steady. She smiles at him, her lips red like the lipstick she uses to write on his walls, write on his body.
She is no longer the Woman. “Ariadne.” His fingers are tight on her hands, his knuckles white.
She smiles brilliantly and he draws her into his arms, mouth fastened hungrily over hers. He had forgotten. No, he had chosen to forget. He trapped so far down, he had not thought she could, should, would come. He thought it was better to let himself have this city, this life. Better than sitting at the ocean waiting for a ship that would never come.
He grips her face tightly, she moans against him, and they step further out into the sea.
“Let’s go,” she says breathlessly. “Let’s go. Let’s go.”
Arthur turns one last time, he looks at the city he built from the recesses of his mind. His stone cage of mourning. The fragments of the life he lived crash against the ruins of the city. In the distance, he sees rain clouds moving in.
“I want to wake up,” he says.
Ariadne closes her arms around him, and they drop into the ocean. It opens and cradles them. Ariadne’s arms are like chains around him, dragging him deeper and deeper. Fear death by water. She will wreck your city.
The water is black, thick and heavy. Like oil and tar. He sinks deeper and deeper, and holds Ariadne to remind himself. The loaded die that felt wrong sits in his pocket, a weighing stone.
He opens his eyes for the first time.
Ariadne sleeps against him. The warehouse they are in is familiar, though he cannot place the particulars of it just yet. It will come in time. From what he remembers of Cobb, it will come in time.
When Ariadne stirs he closes his arms around her shoulders so she awakes against him. Her dark eyes smile bright into his. She points to his side, and he sees that against the PASIV is his die. The feel of it, its rightness, is like the last lock freeing his heart.
Ariadne strips her shirt, and her jeans and then takes off his clothes and climbs onto him. Kisses him and draws him into her. It hadn’t felt so real in the dream. He had not been able to place the right texture of her skin, the smell of her sweat and sweet, sweet arousal. The die clutched in his hand drops to the floor with a little ping so he can grip her hips and move with her.
“La mer a bercè mon cœur pour la vie,” Ariadne whispers, tongue soothing the last burns that linger on his skin. He presses his mouth against the curve under her breast and at last remembers her smell.
Myosotis. Forget me not.
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This fic pretty much is The Waste Land. I wouldn't suggest reading it unless you’re into modernist poetry or crazy (me). But it's there if you want to look at all the many many lines that inspired this fic.