(no subject)
Oh my god, I can't believe I finished this scene after I don't even know how many weeks of staring at it. Apparently I do my best work when I'm sitting in class supposed to be taking notes, who knew?
Ariadne passes a quiet few weeks after she sees Arthur. She got back into town just at the end of the semester, but she had withdrawn from her one class halfway through the Fischer job, and so during finals week she drifts around campus, with little to do. Miles pulls some strings and gets her into a summer repeat of her dropped class, but that doesn’t start till June so she has an unexpected bounty of free time. Normally she’d be scrambling to find a summer job right about now, but that’s not exactly a necessity this year.
Instead Ariadne goes under every day for hours, exploring the limitations and possibilities of dream architecture without a hostile subconscious to keep her from playing. There’s a million worlds that she creates and destroys, things she’s seen only in movies and books, and things stitched together from her memories, half-remembered from childhood summers at her grandparent’s farm, her house in upstate New York with her parents, the LA suburbs with her aunt and uncle, the streets of Paris that she knows as well as her own two hands.
She sleeps in every morning, and has a late breakfast at her favorite café, tipping outrageously and earning clear favorite status from all the waitresses. She takes her sketchbook with her and works out increasingly elaborate designs to play with when she goes under in the afternoon, and gets to know the barista who flirted with Arthur so hard that he straight-up blushed, a twentysomething tattooed art student with an outrageous sense of humor named Martha. She browses through street markets and buys the freshest of ingredients, takes the time to cook for herself properly, the first time in months. She even gets some work done for her portfolio, though nothing serious, mostly idle sketches that she’ll turn into something later. Her mind is stuck in low gear, at the moment; she can’t seem to take anything seriously but the dreaming.
She also goes out, almost every evening. Contrary to what some people seem to think, she does in fact have a life outside of her work. She’s not a social butterfly by any means, but her department isn’t exactly huge and she knows just enough of everyone to show up at any of the usual parties and be greeted with a hug and a beer, which isn’t bad as these things go. Eames may like to tease her about her so-called monkish ways, but Eames seems like the sort of person who burns bridges behind him when he leaves, so she doesn’t think he has any room to talk.
So she drinks too much, does a whole lot of awkward dancing, catches up with her fellow degree-seeking sufferers and spouts off the now-familiar lie about a sudden internship position about a thousand times. She has an ill-advised fling with her ex before she remembers why she broke up with him and then spends another week going to increasingly ridiculous lengths trying to avoid him. Once he even tracks her to the café and she has to bribe Martha to let her hide behind the counter for twenty minutes.
It’s, you know, a life. It’s the kind of life she used to daydream about, actually, when she was stuck in the middle of the end-of-semester crunch and hating everything ever, silly and fun and relaxed. And she’s pretty sure that there’s something wrong with her, because by the time Jessy and Angela get back into town she’s about ready to climb the walls with boredom.
Angela shows up at her door in late May, a bottle of red wine in one hand and an enormous grin on her gorgeous face. “Life has been a desert without you, darling, how the hell have you been?” She gives Ariadne a smacking kiss on the cheek, shoves the bottle into her hands, and brushes past her. “I’m starving, what do you have in?”
Ariadne laughs, can’t quite help it. Angela is always just so exactly herself, a trait that Ariadne has always envied and tried to emulate. She’s missed her.
“Think I’ve got some Pop-Tarts, maybe,” she calls out, and follows her, just to catch the annoyed look Angela gives her when she opens the fridge and sees the shelves of real food. “Where’s your better half?”
“Parking the car,” Angela says, still looking irritated. “When are you going to find somewhere to live that doesn’t require circling the block five thousand times first? One could almost think that you don’t want visitors.”
“One would almost be right,” Ariadne shoots back, setting the wine bottle on the counter and starting to hunt through her cabinets for glasses. “Maybe because I have nosy friends that don’t even bother to call first.”
“Why would we? It’s not like you were going to be anywhere else.”
“I could have been,” Ariadne says, a little sharply, but Angela has her head in the fridge and doesn’t really hear.
Ariadne hears her front door swing open again and a moment later Jessy comes in, arms full of grocery bags, looking put-upon. “Next time you get to park,” she says to Angela, who emerges from the refrigerator with a handful of fresh vegetables and a container of hummus.
“I can’t parallel park to save my life and you know it,” Angela says cheerfully, dumping her find on the cutting board. “I’d probably hit some poor bastard and then where would we be? The insurance company is still having fits from last time.”
“Some days I wonder how she gets out of bed in the morning,” Jessy sighs, and then grabs Ariadne and gives her a hug. “It’s good to see you! I told the problem child that we should call first, but she was insistent that it be a surprise, sorry if we ruined your plans.”
“It’s fine, you two are much more interesting,” Ariadne says. She gives Jessy’s shoulders a squeeze and then lets go. “So here you are, back from the wilds of America! How was your trip? How many people did Angela have to punch?”
“Excuse me,” Angela drawls. “I resent the accusation that I am short-tempered and prone to violence.”
“Only because it’s true.”
“I didn’t punch anybody, thank you very much.” Angela scrounges some chips out of Ariadne’s cabinet and scowls at both of them. “That was one time, and he was drunk and groping me. It was the only way to discourage him.”
“The cutthroat world of high fashion, ladies and gentlemen. I feel educated already.”
“She may not have punched anyone, but she did threaten to cut the balls off of one of the other interns,” Jessy adds, with rolled eyes. “The poor man was asking me if I wanted to get a drink, very shyly I might add, when Ange descended upon him like the wrath of an avenging angel.”
“He was asking you out while I was right there. Since you didn’t see fit to inform anyone that you were taken, I had to do so.”
“I would have gotten there if you hadn’t jumped the gun!”
“You say that as if it hasn’t happened before.”
“People hit on you every time we walk out the front door, but do I fly off the handle? No. You just can’t keep a handle on your temper.”
The two of them settle in to glare at each other across the kitchen, and Ariadne bites her lip to hold back laughter. It’s good to know that some things don’t change.
Ariadne met Jessica Harper her first year in Paris. Jessy was in her department but a year older, and they bonded during a shared class and soon became fast friends. It was about a year later when Jessy met Angela Barnes, a statuesque and charismatic psychology grad student with lots of long dark hair and flashing dark eyes, and Angela immediately decided that she was in love. It made Ariadne think well of her, that such an absurdly attractive person could so ardently desire no-nonsense Jessy, who was more cute than pretty, short and lean with chopped-short blondeish hair and lots of freckles, and it took about six months but Jessy eventually gave in. Angela has been part of their lives ever since.
“Ladies, please,” Ariadne says finally, when the cold war doesn’t show any sign of lifting. “Why don’t we break open the wine, sit down in the living room, and get drunk like the classy broads we are while you tell me about your trip?”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Angela says, considering, and Jessy laughs and gives her girlfriend a quick peck on the cheek.
“Alright, trouble, you pour.”
~*~
A few hours later they are, indeed, drunk, piled together on the couch and giggling like schoolgirls over some anecdote Angela has just shared. The two of them were in New York for the last few months, Jessy for an internship at an architectural firm and Angela picking up some modeling work so that they could stay in town together. Now Jessy’s internship is done and they’re back in Paris, Angela to pick up a job with a sleep study group and Jessy to scrounge around looking for work. They’re full of stories and laughter and plans for the future, and Ariadne mostly sits back and listens with what she knows is uncharacteristic silence.
The two of them are probably the closest thing she has to family in this city. She loves her aunt and uncle, the twins and even Mary, but they’re in America and Ariadne can count the number of times she’s seen them since graduating high school without running out of fingers. There are reasons for that, some better than others, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that Ariadne’s just comfortable here, with this life, with these people. Jessy was her first and best friend in this city, and when Angela came along they ended up forming a weirdly codependent trio.
Sometimes Ariadne wonders: if the two of them hadn’t been out of town when Dom approached her, would she have taken the job? With her safety net, would the whirlpool of guilt and danger she encountered in Dom’s mind have seemed like too much to risk? She doesn’t know. She honestly doesn’t.
But she did take the job, and she went down, down, down into the very depths of Fischer’s mind, and she performed the miracle of Inception and she actually changed the destiny of another human being. It was this huge, astounding thing, and it changed her world as much or more as they changed Robert Fischer, and now she sits curled around her two best friends in the world and she’s realizing that she has absolutely no idea how to relate to them anymore.
Jessy, who is the tiniest and thus the most drunk, spends five minutes peeling the label off the wine bottle and then utterly fails to throw it into the trashcan. “Ugh,” she pronounces, and makes vague flailing motions to indicate her intention to get up and fix it. Angela, exercising a rare bout of prudence, grabs the back of her shirt to keep her still. “Damn it.”
“Hand-eye coordination, the first to go,” Ariadne pronounces. Jessy’s flailing has knocked her loose and now she snuggles into the opposite corner of the couch, stretching out her legs until her toes bump up against Angela’s thigh. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it later.”
“You’re so tidy,” Jessy says sadly, and Angela snorts because no, Ariadne really is not but this is a long-running argument. Jessy is a neat freak. Angela grew up with maids. Their ongoing “compromise” on that particular subject often resembles outright domestic warfare.
“She has to be, flat this size,” Angela says dismissively. Ariadne rolls her eyes. “Don’t give me that look! Why you still live in this hellhole I do not understand.”
Ariadne loves her to pieces, but sometimes Angela is just so relentlessly upper-class. “Some day, I am going to get it through your head what it means to live on a budget, Ange.”
Angela gives her an amused look. “Darling. That’s what trust funds are for.”
“Yeah, okay,” Ariadne concedes, laughing. It suddenly occurs to her why she was so quick to like Eames: he reminds her very much of Ange, the same semi-mocking endearments and profanity and Britishness. They’re not really that much alike, Ariadne reflects- for one thing, Angela inhabits her body with a sense of permanence that only comes from feeling both resentment and gratitude for its value, and Eames has based his life on shedding the permanent markers inked onto his skin- but the cheerful irreverence and charm and hidden darkness is very much the same. No wonder Ariadne was so ready to be charmed.
And then, because she’s thinking of Eames and not really paying attention to the present, she says absently, “And anyway, I’m thinking of looking for a new place sometime soon.”
She’s immediately horrified at herself. First of all, because she shouldn’t have the kind of money that would allow her to look for something nicer and they know it perfectly well, and second of all, because no she hadn’t. She’d lived here since she started school in this city, and even after getting Saito’s payout she hadn’t been thinking about using it to find new housing. Until this exact moment, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she could.
Even Jessy, drunk as she is, doesn’t let that one slide by and immediately sits up. “Ari!” she exclaims. “Since when? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s just an idle thing,” Ariadne deflects, wondering if there is any way she’s going to be able to talk herself out of this. She shouldn’t have had so much wine tonight; she knows what she’s like when she gets drunk. Loose lips sink ships and all that, and while she trusts Jessy and Ange about as much as she’s ever trusted anybody, she has no intention of telling either of them what she’s been doing with her life recently. “You know, just an idea I’ve been tossing around.”
But Angela hasn’t had as much as either of them, and she’s looking at Ariadne slow and steady. “How are you going to afford it?”
She knows, Ariadne thinks with a spike of panic, and then immediately gets a hold of herself. Of course Angela doesn’t know, how could she? She’s not expressing suspicion, dummy, just concern. Friendly concern, the kind that friends do.
“I kind of… got an inheritance,” Ariadne says, spinning fiction wildly. Why, oh why didn’t she think about this ahead of time? Her carefully nonchalant story about her internship had been planned way beforehand, why not this? It didn’t even occur to her that she’d need it. “It turns out that my father had a cousin that I never knew about- some kind of scandal, I think she married down? Anyway, I think Dad was the only one that ever kept in contact with her, so when she passed away she left a little something to me. I’m not like a millionaire or anything, but I’ve got a little spare change going for a while. I can afford a new place.”
I don’t even want a new place, she thinks, annoyed with herself. How the hell does she get herself into these situations?
“That’s really great, Ari,” Angela says, and she wraps one hand around Ariadne’s ankle, smiles at her warmly. Curled half over her lap, Jessy beams at her. “Let us know if you need any help looking for real estate.”
“I’m not even sure I want-“ Ariadne says. Angela gives her a steady look. “-yeah, I’ll do that,” Ariadne revises. “Definitely.”
“Good,” Jessy says with a grin. “You need us, little sister, we’re here for you.”
For absolutely no reason, Ariadne feels her throat ache with something that seems almost like grief. “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
tbc.
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Ariadne passes a quiet few weeks after she sees Arthur. She got back into town just at the end of the semester, but she had withdrawn from her one class halfway through the Fischer job, and so during finals week she drifts around campus, with little to do. Miles pulls some strings and gets her into a summer repeat of her dropped class, but that doesn’t start till June so she has an unexpected bounty of free time. Normally she’d be scrambling to find a summer job right about now, but that’s not exactly a necessity this year.
Instead Ariadne goes under every day for hours, exploring the limitations and possibilities of dream architecture without a hostile subconscious to keep her from playing. There’s a million worlds that she creates and destroys, things she’s seen only in movies and books, and things stitched together from her memories, half-remembered from childhood summers at her grandparent’s farm, her house in upstate New York with her parents, the LA suburbs with her aunt and uncle, the streets of Paris that she knows as well as her own two hands.
She sleeps in every morning, and has a late breakfast at her favorite café, tipping outrageously and earning clear favorite status from all the waitresses. She takes her sketchbook with her and works out increasingly elaborate designs to play with when she goes under in the afternoon, and gets to know the barista who flirted with Arthur so hard that he straight-up blushed, a twentysomething tattooed art student with an outrageous sense of humor named Martha. She browses through street markets and buys the freshest of ingredients, takes the time to cook for herself properly, the first time in months. She even gets some work done for her portfolio, though nothing serious, mostly idle sketches that she’ll turn into something later. Her mind is stuck in low gear, at the moment; she can’t seem to take anything seriously but the dreaming.
She also goes out, almost every evening. Contrary to what some people seem to think, she does in fact have a life outside of her work. She’s not a social butterfly by any means, but her department isn’t exactly huge and she knows just enough of everyone to show up at any of the usual parties and be greeted with a hug and a beer, which isn’t bad as these things go. Eames may like to tease her about her so-called monkish ways, but Eames seems like the sort of person who burns bridges behind him when he leaves, so she doesn’t think he has any room to talk.
So she drinks too much, does a whole lot of awkward dancing, catches up with her fellow degree-seeking sufferers and spouts off the now-familiar lie about a sudden internship position about a thousand times. She has an ill-advised fling with her ex before she remembers why she broke up with him and then spends another week going to increasingly ridiculous lengths trying to avoid him. Once he even tracks her to the café and she has to bribe Martha to let her hide behind the counter for twenty minutes.
It’s, you know, a life. It’s the kind of life she used to daydream about, actually, when she was stuck in the middle of the end-of-semester crunch and hating everything ever, silly and fun and relaxed. And she’s pretty sure that there’s something wrong with her, because by the time Jessy and Angela get back into town she’s about ready to climb the walls with boredom.
Angela shows up at her door in late May, a bottle of red wine in one hand and an enormous grin on her gorgeous face. “Life has been a desert without you, darling, how the hell have you been?” She gives Ariadne a smacking kiss on the cheek, shoves the bottle into her hands, and brushes past her. “I’m starving, what do you have in?”
Ariadne laughs, can’t quite help it. Angela is always just so exactly herself, a trait that Ariadne has always envied and tried to emulate. She’s missed her.
“Think I’ve got some Pop-Tarts, maybe,” she calls out, and follows her, just to catch the annoyed look Angela gives her when she opens the fridge and sees the shelves of real food. “Where’s your better half?”
“Parking the car,” Angela says, still looking irritated. “When are you going to find somewhere to live that doesn’t require circling the block five thousand times first? One could almost think that you don’t want visitors.”
“One would almost be right,” Ariadne shoots back, setting the wine bottle on the counter and starting to hunt through her cabinets for glasses. “Maybe because I have nosy friends that don’t even bother to call first.”
“Why would we? It’s not like you were going to be anywhere else.”
“I could have been,” Ariadne says, a little sharply, but Angela has her head in the fridge and doesn’t really hear.
Ariadne hears her front door swing open again and a moment later Jessy comes in, arms full of grocery bags, looking put-upon. “Next time you get to park,” she says to Angela, who emerges from the refrigerator with a handful of fresh vegetables and a container of hummus.
“I can’t parallel park to save my life and you know it,” Angela says cheerfully, dumping her find on the cutting board. “I’d probably hit some poor bastard and then where would we be? The insurance company is still having fits from last time.”
“Some days I wonder how she gets out of bed in the morning,” Jessy sighs, and then grabs Ariadne and gives her a hug. “It’s good to see you! I told the problem child that we should call first, but she was insistent that it be a surprise, sorry if we ruined your plans.”
“It’s fine, you two are much more interesting,” Ariadne says. She gives Jessy’s shoulders a squeeze and then lets go. “So here you are, back from the wilds of America! How was your trip? How many people did Angela have to punch?”
“Excuse me,” Angela drawls. “I resent the accusation that I am short-tempered and prone to violence.”
“Only because it’s true.”
“I didn’t punch anybody, thank you very much.” Angela scrounges some chips out of Ariadne’s cabinet and scowls at both of them. “That was one time, and he was drunk and groping me. It was the only way to discourage him.”
“The cutthroat world of high fashion, ladies and gentlemen. I feel educated already.”
“She may not have punched anyone, but she did threaten to cut the balls off of one of the other interns,” Jessy adds, with rolled eyes. “The poor man was asking me if I wanted to get a drink, very shyly I might add, when Ange descended upon him like the wrath of an avenging angel.”
“He was asking you out while I was right there. Since you didn’t see fit to inform anyone that you were taken, I had to do so.”
“I would have gotten there if you hadn’t jumped the gun!”
“You say that as if it hasn’t happened before.”
“People hit on you every time we walk out the front door, but do I fly off the handle? No. You just can’t keep a handle on your temper.”
The two of them settle in to glare at each other across the kitchen, and Ariadne bites her lip to hold back laughter. It’s good to know that some things don’t change.
Ariadne met Jessica Harper her first year in Paris. Jessy was in her department but a year older, and they bonded during a shared class and soon became fast friends. It was about a year later when Jessy met Angela Barnes, a statuesque and charismatic psychology grad student with lots of long dark hair and flashing dark eyes, and Angela immediately decided that she was in love. It made Ariadne think well of her, that such an absurdly attractive person could so ardently desire no-nonsense Jessy, who was more cute than pretty, short and lean with chopped-short blondeish hair and lots of freckles, and it took about six months but Jessy eventually gave in. Angela has been part of their lives ever since.
“Ladies, please,” Ariadne says finally, when the cold war doesn’t show any sign of lifting. “Why don’t we break open the wine, sit down in the living room, and get drunk like the classy broads we are while you tell me about your trip?”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Angela says, considering, and Jessy laughs and gives her girlfriend a quick peck on the cheek.
“Alright, trouble, you pour.”
~*~
A few hours later they are, indeed, drunk, piled together on the couch and giggling like schoolgirls over some anecdote Angela has just shared. The two of them were in New York for the last few months, Jessy for an internship at an architectural firm and Angela picking up some modeling work so that they could stay in town together. Now Jessy’s internship is done and they’re back in Paris, Angela to pick up a job with a sleep study group and Jessy to scrounge around looking for work. They’re full of stories and laughter and plans for the future, and Ariadne mostly sits back and listens with what she knows is uncharacteristic silence.
The two of them are probably the closest thing she has to family in this city. She loves her aunt and uncle, the twins and even Mary, but they’re in America and Ariadne can count the number of times she’s seen them since graduating high school without running out of fingers. There are reasons for that, some better than others, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that Ariadne’s just comfortable here, with this life, with these people. Jessy was her first and best friend in this city, and when Angela came along they ended up forming a weirdly codependent trio.
Sometimes Ariadne wonders: if the two of them hadn’t been out of town when Dom approached her, would she have taken the job? With her safety net, would the whirlpool of guilt and danger she encountered in Dom’s mind have seemed like too much to risk? She doesn’t know. She honestly doesn’t.
But she did take the job, and she went down, down, down into the very depths of Fischer’s mind, and she performed the miracle of Inception and she actually changed the destiny of another human being. It was this huge, astounding thing, and it changed her world as much or more as they changed Robert Fischer, and now she sits curled around her two best friends in the world and she’s realizing that she has absolutely no idea how to relate to them anymore.
Jessy, who is the tiniest and thus the most drunk, spends five minutes peeling the label off the wine bottle and then utterly fails to throw it into the trashcan. “Ugh,” she pronounces, and makes vague flailing motions to indicate her intention to get up and fix it. Angela, exercising a rare bout of prudence, grabs the back of her shirt to keep her still. “Damn it.”
“Hand-eye coordination, the first to go,” Ariadne pronounces. Jessy’s flailing has knocked her loose and now she snuggles into the opposite corner of the couch, stretching out her legs until her toes bump up against Angela’s thigh. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it later.”
“You’re so tidy,” Jessy says sadly, and Angela snorts because no, Ariadne really is not but this is a long-running argument. Jessy is a neat freak. Angela grew up with maids. Their ongoing “compromise” on that particular subject often resembles outright domestic warfare.
“She has to be, flat this size,” Angela says dismissively. Ariadne rolls her eyes. “Don’t give me that look! Why you still live in this hellhole I do not understand.”
Ariadne loves her to pieces, but sometimes Angela is just so relentlessly upper-class. “Some day, I am going to get it through your head what it means to live on a budget, Ange.”
Angela gives her an amused look. “Darling. That’s what trust funds are for.”
“Yeah, okay,” Ariadne concedes, laughing. It suddenly occurs to her why she was so quick to like Eames: he reminds her very much of Ange, the same semi-mocking endearments and profanity and Britishness. They’re not really that much alike, Ariadne reflects- for one thing, Angela inhabits her body with a sense of permanence that only comes from feeling both resentment and gratitude for its value, and Eames has based his life on shedding the permanent markers inked onto his skin- but the cheerful irreverence and charm and hidden darkness is very much the same. No wonder Ariadne was so ready to be charmed.
And then, because she’s thinking of Eames and not really paying attention to the present, she says absently, “And anyway, I’m thinking of looking for a new place sometime soon.”
She’s immediately horrified at herself. First of all, because she shouldn’t have the kind of money that would allow her to look for something nicer and they know it perfectly well, and second of all, because no she hadn’t. She’d lived here since she started school in this city, and even after getting Saito’s payout she hadn’t been thinking about using it to find new housing. Until this exact moment, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she could.
Even Jessy, drunk as she is, doesn’t let that one slide by and immediately sits up. “Ari!” she exclaims. “Since when? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s just an idle thing,” Ariadne deflects, wondering if there is any way she’s going to be able to talk herself out of this. She shouldn’t have had so much wine tonight; she knows what she’s like when she gets drunk. Loose lips sink ships and all that, and while she trusts Jessy and Ange about as much as she’s ever trusted anybody, she has no intention of telling either of them what she’s been doing with her life recently. “You know, just an idea I’ve been tossing around.”
But Angela hasn’t had as much as either of them, and she’s looking at Ariadne slow and steady. “How are you going to afford it?”
She knows, Ariadne thinks with a spike of panic, and then immediately gets a hold of herself. Of course Angela doesn’t know, how could she? She’s not expressing suspicion, dummy, just concern. Friendly concern, the kind that friends do.
“I kind of… got an inheritance,” Ariadne says, spinning fiction wildly. Why, oh why didn’t she think about this ahead of time? Her carefully nonchalant story about her internship had been planned way beforehand, why not this? It didn’t even occur to her that she’d need it. “It turns out that my father had a cousin that I never knew about- some kind of scandal, I think she married down? Anyway, I think Dad was the only one that ever kept in contact with her, so when she passed away she left a little something to me. I’m not like a millionaire or anything, but I’ve got a little spare change going for a while. I can afford a new place.”
I don’t even want a new place, she thinks, annoyed with herself. How the hell does she get herself into these situations?
“That’s really great, Ari,” Angela says, and she wraps one hand around Ariadne’s ankle, smiles at her warmly. Curled half over her lap, Jessy beams at her. “Let us know if you need any help looking for real estate.”
“I’m not even sure I want-“ Ariadne says. Angela gives her a steady look. “-yeah, I’ll do that,” Ariadne revises. “Definitely.”
“Good,” Jessy says with a grin. “You need us, little sister, we’re here for you.”
For absolutely no reason, Ariadne feels her throat ache with something that seems almost like grief. “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
tbc.
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