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So there's this story.
Okay, honestly, I am working on Playing Cops and Robbers. But I started this story first (if just barely) and it doesn't have the complications or planning required to write casefile shit, it's just a lot of banter and sex and flirting and somewhere along the line it acquired substance. This story is... okay, you know how sometimes you feel like everything you're writing is just increasingly ridiculous remixes of yourself? This is one of those, and yet I love it. I read Really Good Mistakes, which convinced me that some casual Eames/Ariadne would be just awesome, and at the time I was working on a (still drastically unfinished, I'm sure you're shocked) Sherlock story in which Sherlock basically turned into a girl!John's sexless boyfriend while kind of accidentally seducing Lestrade, and this story happened. It's also pretty heavily inspired by Marriage á Trois, not gonna lie.
And I'm posting the rough draft now in pieces as I go, because this way I may have some hope of writing in a vaguely chronological order. Emphasis on rough draft, by the final I may go back and add in entirely new scenes when I suddenly decide that I absolutely have to have this deeply important metaphorical theme or whatever. Feel free to concrit, really at this point anything that would help me wrestle this bastard into some form of order would be helpful.
So there she is in the airport, not one hour after she and a bunch of crazy people have completed the world's first intentional successful inception (she's still reeling from the knowledge of what Dom did to his wife, unable to process that kind of power over a loved one's mind) and she's standing in line at the car rental booth and she's thinking about the sketchbook she has in the bag slung across her shoulders. Once upon a time it was full of realistic if whimsical buildings, and now it's all complex mazes and physics that don't actually work outside of somebody's head. How is she supposed to go back to designing things for real life, is what she's thinking. How can anyone expect one reality to be enough when there's uncharted impossibilities just a needleprick away?
And she's thinking about what Arthur told her, one late evening after they'd graduated from his Penrose steps to the basic structure she had planned for the first level, about how Dom said pretty much the same thing on the very first day. "One reality won't be enough for her anymore." Is she that predictable? Is she that much of a junkie? She can't help but think of Mal, savage and vengeful in the corridors of Dom's mind, and from Arthur's two whole words of explanation she knows that's probably not what Mal was actually like before she killed herself, but that was before she killed herself because she got lost in another reality. Is that what Ariadne wants for herself?
And while she's thinking these deep and weighty thoughts, and also wondering why the fucking Hertz people are taking two goddamn years to process the claim of the guy at the desk, she feels someone sliding into the space behind her and then there's a voice in her ear.
"So what are your plans for the city of sunshine, love?"
She's surprisingly unsurprised that Eames followed her. She turns around (and he's right in her personal space, but she knew that already, and they've all been in each other's heads so often that physical proximity seems essentially meaningless) and smiles up at him. “I think I’m just gonna find a cheap hotel and hole up for a few days till Saito’s check clears,” she admits.
Eames gives her a genuinely horrified look. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” he declares. “You’re officially an international criminal now! That sort of thing is beneath you.”
There’s a bit of an odd look from the guy in front of her, but this is LAX and declaring one’s criminal activities is barely a blip on the radar. “I thought about going to see my family, but they’d have all kinds of questions about what I’m doing out of school in the middle of the semester.” Plus, there’s a reason she went off to finish school on another continent. She’ll see them for Christmas like usual and that’ll be easier for all parties involved. “Safest just to skip any unplanned vacations home and avoid the whole mess entirely.”
Eames has his eyebrows raised like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. This is actually a very common expression for him. Eames seems to operate in a state of being perpetually disappointed that the rest of the world isn’t him. “So, what, you’re just going to go find a room and watch bad daytime telly?”
Ariadne runs a hand over her bag. “I was planning on working on my portfolio a little, actually. Figure I should do some work towards that degree I’m paying the big bucks for, seeing as how I just spent a month working with a bunch of crazy people.” He grins, lazily, in response. “My advisor would have been having fits if it hadn’t been Miles, and even he was starting to send a few pointed messages during the last week or so.”
“Terribly studious of you,” he drawls. “Why, you responsible types, I just can’t hardly stand you.”
Ariadne arches one eyebrow. “That, Mr. Eames, is a flat lie.”
“Really.” He rolls out the word on his tongue, looks at her speculatively. “How do you figure that?”
It’s not as if everyone doesn’t know the answer. “Arthur,” she says simply. “You don’t get more responsible than Arthur.”
“And I can’t hardly stand him,” Eames says easily. This time Ariadne does roll her eyes.
“Is that what you wish we would think, or do you genuinely believe that we don’t know? You couldn’t be more obvious if you were pulling his pigtails.”
“Christ, there’s an image,” Eames winces. He rubs a hand over his jaw and Ariadne can almost hear the rasp of his stubble against his wide, calloused palms. “Can we agree that you have a point and leave it there?”
What Ariadne loves, more than anything, is finding things out and then making sure that she’s right. It’s what led her into the mess of Dom’s mind when she had no invitation or right, but it’s also how she managed to keep the job from going pear-shaped there at the end, so her guilt is minimal.
She can also be generous in victory. “Sure, let’s go with that. If you can manage not to make any cracks about what I do with my free time.”
“I think I can manage that,” Eames agrees quickly. A little too quickly, because he gets that look that says I’m thinking about trying something that will probably get me slapped, and then the follow-up look of no, this would be totally worth it anyway, and Ariadne braces herself.
“Your free time is your own, but I can’t bear the thought of you in some dingy little room with gunshots going off outside your window-“
She arches her eyebrow, a wordless really? LA is known for its crime statistic, but that’s pushing it and he knows it.
“-so at least allow me to offer my couch. I keep a flat in town for my business trips-“ this said with an ironic glance at the guy in front of them, who is blatantly eavesdropping at this point, “-and I’ve certainly got enough space for one undersized college student to bump around until payday. You’d be more than welcome,” he adds, cutting off her protest before she can do more than open her mouth.
There’s a sort of affected sleaze in his voice, covering up the genuine offer, and he sounds like he can’t decide whether to turn it into a come-on or not. The way he’s leaning even further into her space sort of gives away which he’d really prefer. Ariadne bites her lip to hide her smile.
“You’re really offering your couch?”
A pause. “Well, I have a couch,” he admits, and she laughs, abandoning the rental car line without a thought, lacing her arm through his.
“Take me home, Mr. Eames,” she tells him, and he smiles back, slow and dirty.
~*~
The next morning, Ariadne wakes before sunrise and hours sitting at the breakfast bar in his spacious kitchen, filling up page after page in her sketchbook with breathless, sweeping spires. She didn’t get to play as much as she would have liked on the Fischer job because of the necessity to keep all three levels so thoroughly grounded in reality, and after a night where she sleeps soundly and dreams, still, of the ground and sky coming together, she’s filled with a need to recreate that feeling in solid lines of ink. That was the first lesson she took from Miles, the thing that so frustrated her when he classmates refused to grasp it- creating a building isn’t, ultimately, about what goes into the construction. First and foremost, one thinks, how do I feel when I look at this, and Ariadne just spent about two months doing her best to attach her architecture to someone else’s emotions, so it feels good to create something for her.
She’s so caught up in what she’s doing that she doesn’t notice Eames padding into the kitchen until he’s fetched up against the counter next to her, a mug of coffee in one hand and the other sorting through some of the abandoned pieces of paper. She blinks at him, losing the plot for a moment as she gets distracted by the tattoos scrolling over his shoulders, and then smiles a little uncertainly when Eames looks up at her.
“I know you said you felt guilty about your portfolio, but I think this sort of scholarly devotion is a bit above and beyond the call,” Eames says after a moment, and she feels relief when she realizes that he isn’t going to comment on the work itself. Despite the really, truly amazing amount of sex they had last night, her sketches feel so much more intimate than all that, more intimate even than the hours and hours everyone (except for Dom) spent wandering around inside her head as she hammered in the details of each of the levels for them. These came from unaided dreams, and from what Dom told her there’s a finite number of those in her future.
“Yeah, I guess my body decided that I’d slept enough already yesterday.” She begins to gather up the papers into one messy pile with big sweeps of her hands, opening up her sketchbook to shove them all in. “Sorry I took over your counter. You’ve just got really great light in here.”
Eames smiles indulgently over the rim of his cup, and that’s when she realizes that she’s being kind of a spaz. “Normally the best thing this counter sees is the dubious results of my cooking. You are a vast improvement, I can assure you.”
“Oh, well, that’s good.” She finishes tidying up, compulsively, and then closes her sketchbook and makes a conscious decision to act like a fucking grown-up. “I can cook, actually- basic self-defense when I started college- and if you’re hungry I can manage some eggs or something.”
“A lovely offer, but if I’d left anything in the fridge it probably would have evolved into an entirely new society by now. And I didn’t exactly have time to order some groceries last night.”
She blushes, a little, because she never did manage to get over that reflex- but she also smirks back at him, because she’s not entirely the young ingénue they always seemed to think, and last night was pretty fantastic. “I did wear you out, that’s true.”
Eames gets a soft, delighted look, the same one that she saw for the first time when he realized that the level she built for him was going to involve snowmobiles, the one he gets when she does something both unexpected and welcome. She’s aware that Eames and Yusuf thought of her as Cobb and Arthur’s pet (much less what Dom and Arthur themselves seemed to think) but even knowing why she was underestimated doesn’t keep her from enjoying it.
“And apparently I didn’t manage to return the favor, which hurts my pride in terrible, terrible ways.”
“It’s just because I’m young and spry. I’m sure you remember what that’s like.”
“You are not as funny as you think you are,” Eames tells her flatly, but his lips are twitching, so she knows he’s wrong.
“Yes I am,” she says cheekily. He sighs and nudges closer to her along the counter.
“Perhaps, but you do have other talents.”
“Subtle,” she accuses, and Eames nudges over again, and opportunist’s smile on his face, till his arm is lying against hers, his bicep bleeding heat through her thin t-shirt.
“I am known for my subtlety,” he says solemnly. She leans into him despite the fact that she doesn’t want to reward his brazenness.
“That is not even a little bit true,” she admonishes, but then she leans up and captures his lower lip between her teeth, so she doesn’t think he’s really listening.
~*~
She doesn’t emerge from his apartment for three days. Then the transfer from Saito comes through, and Ariadne throws the handful of things she’d bothered to unpack back into her bag, gives Eames a kiss on the cheek, and beats feet back to LAX, still wearing his oversized, ugly-as-fuck paisley dress shirt. She just smiles at the disdainful look of the taxi driver that picks her up at Charles de Gaulle, and runs her fingers over the bishop in her pocket, over and over again, as they drive through the rain-soaked streets of Paris and she looks up at the skyline and thinks, I could do that one better.
I promise there is actual Arthur in the next bit.
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comments)
Okay, honestly, I am working on Playing Cops and Robbers. But I started this story first (if just barely) and it doesn't have the complications or planning required to write casefile shit, it's just a lot of banter and sex and flirting and somewhere along the line it acquired substance. This story is... okay, you know how sometimes you feel like everything you're writing is just increasingly ridiculous remixes of yourself? This is one of those, and yet I love it. I read Really Good Mistakes, which convinced me that some casual Eames/Ariadne would be just awesome, and at the time I was working on a (still drastically unfinished, I'm sure you're shocked) Sherlock story in which Sherlock basically turned into a girl!John's sexless boyfriend while kind of accidentally seducing Lestrade, and this story happened. It's also pretty heavily inspired by Marriage á Trois, not gonna lie.
And I'm posting the rough draft now in pieces as I go, because this way I may have some hope of writing in a vaguely chronological order. Emphasis on rough draft, by the final I may go back and add in entirely new scenes when I suddenly decide that I absolutely have to have this deeply important metaphorical theme or whatever. Feel free to concrit, really at this point anything that would help me wrestle this bastard into some form of order would be helpful.
So there she is in the airport, not one hour after she and a bunch of crazy people have completed the world's first intentional successful inception (she's still reeling from the knowledge of what Dom did to his wife, unable to process that kind of power over a loved one's mind) and she's standing in line at the car rental booth and she's thinking about the sketchbook she has in the bag slung across her shoulders. Once upon a time it was full of realistic if whimsical buildings, and now it's all complex mazes and physics that don't actually work outside of somebody's head. How is she supposed to go back to designing things for real life, is what she's thinking. How can anyone expect one reality to be enough when there's uncharted impossibilities just a needleprick away?
And she's thinking about what Arthur told her, one late evening after they'd graduated from his Penrose steps to the basic structure she had planned for the first level, about how Dom said pretty much the same thing on the very first day. "One reality won't be enough for her anymore." Is she that predictable? Is she that much of a junkie? She can't help but think of Mal, savage and vengeful in the corridors of Dom's mind, and from Arthur's two whole words of explanation she knows that's probably not what Mal was actually like before she killed herself, but that was before she killed herself because she got lost in another reality. Is that what Ariadne wants for herself?
And while she's thinking these deep and weighty thoughts, and also wondering why the fucking Hertz people are taking two goddamn years to process the claim of the guy at the desk, she feels someone sliding into the space behind her and then there's a voice in her ear.
"So what are your plans for the city of sunshine, love?"
She's surprisingly unsurprised that Eames followed her. She turns around (and he's right in her personal space, but she knew that already, and they've all been in each other's heads so often that physical proximity seems essentially meaningless) and smiles up at him. “I think I’m just gonna find a cheap hotel and hole up for a few days till Saito’s check clears,” she admits.
Eames gives her a genuinely horrified look. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” he declares. “You’re officially an international criminal now! That sort of thing is beneath you.”
There’s a bit of an odd look from the guy in front of her, but this is LAX and declaring one’s criminal activities is barely a blip on the radar. “I thought about going to see my family, but they’d have all kinds of questions about what I’m doing out of school in the middle of the semester.” Plus, there’s a reason she went off to finish school on another continent. She’ll see them for Christmas like usual and that’ll be easier for all parties involved. “Safest just to skip any unplanned vacations home and avoid the whole mess entirely.”
Eames has his eyebrows raised like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. This is actually a very common expression for him. Eames seems to operate in a state of being perpetually disappointed that the rest of the world isn’t him. “So, what, you’re just going to go find a room and watch bad daytime telly?”
Ariadne runs a hand over her bag. “I was planning on working on my portfolio a little, actually. Figure I should do some work towards that degree I’m paying the big bucks for, seeing as how I just spent a month working with a bunch of crazy people.” He grins, lazily, in response. “My advisor would have been having fits if it hadn’t been Miles, and even he was starting to send a few pointed messages during the last week or so.”
“Terribly studious of you,” he drawls. “Why, you responsible types, I just can’t hardly stand you.”
Ariadne arches one eyebrow. “That, Mr. Eames, is a flat lie.”
“Really.” He rolls out the word on his tongue, looks at her speculatively. “How do you figure that?”
It’s not as if everyone doesn’t know the answer. “Arthur,” she says simply. “You don’t get more responsible than Arthur.”
“And I can’t hardly stand him,” Eames says easily. This time Ariadne does roll her eyes.
“Is that what you wish we would think, or do you genuinely believe that we don’t know? You couldn’t be more obvious if you were pulling his pigtails.”
“Christ, there’s an image,” Eames winces. He rubs a hand over his jaw and Ariadne can almost hear the rasp of his stubble against his wide, calloused palms. “Can we agree that you have a point and leave it there?”
What Ariadne loves, more than anything, is finding things out and then making sure that she’s right. It’s what led her into the mess of Dom’s mind when she had no invitation or right, but it’s also how she managed to keep the job from going pear-shaped there at the end, so her guilt is minimal.
She can also be generous in victory. “Sure, let’s go with that. If you can manage not to make any cracks about what I do with my free time.”
“I think I can manage that,” Eames agrees quickly. A little too quickly, because he gets that look that says I’m thinking about trying something that will probably get me slapped, and then the follow-up look of no, this would be totally worth it anyway, and Ariadne braces herself.
“Your free time is your own, but I can’t bear the thought of you in some dingy little room with gunshots going off outside your window-“
She arches her eyebrow, a wordless really? LA is known for its crime statistic, but that’s pushing it and he knows it.
“-so at least allow me to offer my couch. I keep a flat in town for my business trips-“ this said with an ironic glance at the guy in front of them, who is blatantly eavesdropping at this point, “-and I’ve certainly got enough space for one undersized college student to bump around until payday. You’d be more than welcome,” he adds, cutting off her protest before she can do more than open her mouth.
There’s a sort of affected sleaze in his voice, covering up the genuine offer, and he sounds like he can’t decide whether to turn it into a come-on or not. The way he’s leaning even further into her space sort of gives away which he’d really prefer. Ariadne bites her lip to hide her smile.
“You’re really offering your couch?”
A pause. “Well, I have a couch,” he admits, and she laughs, abandoning the rental car line without a thought, lacing her arm through his.
“Take me home, Mr. Eames,” she tells him, and he smiles back, slow and dirty.
~*~
The next morning, Ariadne wakes before sunrise and hours sitting at the breakfast bar in his spacious kitchen, filling up page after page in her sketchbook with breathless, sweeping spires. She didn’t get to play as much as she would have liked on the Fischer job because of the necessity to keep all three levels so thoroughly grounded in reality, and after a night where she sleeps soundly and dreams, still, of the ground and sky coming together, she’s filled with a need to recreate that feeling in solid lines of ink. That was the first lesson she took from Miles, the thing that so frustrated her when he classmates refused to grasp it- creating a building isn’t, ultimately, about what goes into the construction. First and foremost, one thinks, how do I feel when I look at this, and Ariadne just spent about two months doing her best to attach her architecture to someone else’s emotions, so it feels good to create something for her.
She’s so caught up in what she’s doing that she doesn’t notice Eames padding into the kitchen until he’s fetched up against the counter next to her, a mug of coffee in one hand and the other sorting through some of the abandoned pieces of paper. She blinks at him, losing the plot for a moment as she gets distracted by the tattoos scrolling over his shoulders, and then smiles a little uncertainly when Eames looks up at her.
“I know you said you felt guilty about your portfolio, but I think this sort of scholarly devotion is a bit above and beyond the call,” Eames says after a moment, and she feels relief when she realizes that he isn’t going to comment on the work itself. Despite the really, truly amazing amount of sex they had last night, her sketches feel so much more intimate than all that, more intimate even than the hours and hours everyone (except for Dom) spent wandering around inside her head as she hammered in the details of each of the levels for them. These came from unaided dreams, and from what Dom told her there’s a finite number of those in her future.
“Yeah, I guess my body decided that I’d slept enough already yesterday.” She begins to gather up the papers into one messy pile with big sweeps of her hands, opening up her sketchbook to shove them all in. “Sorry I took over your counter. You’ve just got really great light in here.”
Eames smiles indulgently over the rim of his cup, and that’s when she realizes that she’s being kind of a spaz. “Normally the best thing this counter sees is the dubious results of my cooking. You are a vast improvement, I can assure you.”
“Oh, well, that’s good.” She finishes tidying up, compulsively, and then closes her sketchbook and makes a conscious decision to act like a fucking grown-up. “I can cook, actually- basic self-defense when I started college- and if you’re hungry I can manage some eggs or something.”
“A lovely offer, but if I’d left anything in the fridge it probably would have evolved into an entirely new society by now. And I didn’t exactly have time to order some groceries last night.”
She blushes, a little, because she never did manage to get over that reflex- but she also smirks back at him, because she’s not entirely the young ingénue they always seemed to think, and last night was pretty fantastic. “I did wear you out, that’s true.”
Eames gets a soft, delighted look, the same one that she saw for the first time when he realized that the level she built for him was going to involve snowmobiles, the one he gets when she does something both unexpected and welcome. She’s aware that Eames and Yusuf thought of her as Cobb and Arthur’s pet (much less what Dom and Arthur themselves seemed to think) but even knowing why she was underestimated doesn’t keep her from enjoying it.
“And apparently I didn’t manage to return the favor, which hurts my pride in terrible, terrible ways.”
“It’s just because I’m young and spry. I’m sure you remember what that’s like.”
“You are not as funny as you think you are,” Eames tells her flatly, but his lips are twitching, so she knows he’s wrong.
“Yes I am,” she says cheekily. He sighs and nudges closer to her along the counter.
“Perhaps, but you do have other talents.”
“Subtle,” she accuses, and Eames nudges over again, and opportunist’s smile on his face, till his arm is lying against hers, his bicep bleeding heat through her thin t-shirt.
“I am known for my subtlety,” he says solemnly. She leans into him despite the fact that she doesn’t want to reward his brazenness.
“That is not even a little bit true,” she admonishes, but then she leans up and captures his lower lip between her teeth, so she doesn’t think he’s really listening.
~*~
She doesn’t emerge from his apartment for three days. Then the transfer from Saito comes through, and Ariadne throws the handful of things she’d bothered to unpack back into her bag, gives Eames a kiss on the cheek, and beats feet back to LAX, still wearing his oversized, ugly-as-fuck paisley dress shirt. She just smiles at the disdainful look of the taxi driver that picks her up at Charles de Gaulle, and runs her fingers over the bishop in her pocket, over and over again, as they drive through the rain-soaked streets of Paris and she looks up at the skyline and thinks, I could do that one better.
I promise there is actual Arthur in the next bit.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth (
comments)