2 inception ficlets
blue green colors flashing, ariadne/arthur (inception), nc-17, ~2,000 words
i wrote this because of the incredibly talented nami86's drawing for forgerness's inception rarepair fest. you can find her drawing here (slightly nsfw). title from fleetwood mac's "silver springs."
Arthur has a place in Tokyo, an apartment in a huge skyscraper in the Sendagaya neighborhood. It's where they stay on the occasions when Arthur is called on for a task by Saito, or when Ariadne gets so sick of Paris that she wants to scream. Everything in Tokyo is bright and loud, of course, but Shibuya overflows with such noise and light, a sugar high of brightly-lit store windows and chattering crowds that make it incredibly easy to get lost. Ariadne always feels adrift when she's there, suspended in the air over a sweeping landscape of chrome and concrete, toppling her bishop over on the slick, glass coffee table.
She likes to sleep in, the way she can't in Paris. Paris is a city for the daylight, but Tokyo - Tokyo comes alive at night. She'll spend full days twisted up in the sheets, not always sleeping but just resting, twisted up with her head at the foot of the bed and her toes pressed against the headboard. Sometimes, Arthur will come back from wherever it is that he's been, smelling of smog and cigarettes and sugar, and he'll join her, sliding his legs under hers and tangling his fingers into her braid. They'll doze and wake up with the sunset, and they'll go to expensive restaurants and bars with rows and rows of glossy, multicolored liquors and walk home beneath the blur of the neon-bright night sky, holding hands and not talking, two points of quiet in a sea of noise.
On one Sunday afternoon, she wakes to sunlight shining harshly on her face. She's sweating beneath the thick blanket and a dull headache from the brightness of the room pounds dully behind her temples. Sweat-heavy and sloth-slow, she climbs out of bed and lies on the floor in the shade of the nightstand, her cheek pressed to the cool air floating up from the vent. This is where Arthur finds her, stripped of the over-sized t-shirt she sleeps in, her hair fluttering in the air conditioning, eyes closed serenely but very much awake.
She smiles when he palms her forehead. "I was hot," she says lamely, feeling dizzy beneath the contrast of his warmth and the floor's coolness.
She feels him rise without responding, and a few moments later, the curtains close and the room is thrown into relieving dimness.
"Mmm."
"Just like a kitten," he remarks, returning to her side. She hears him nudge his shoes off and the rustle of his suit jacket as he pulls it off.
"Meow," she murmurs, arching up into his hand, brushing her cheek gently.
There's a long pause, then his mouth against her collarbone, his teeth sliding scratchy-slick against the spot where the strap of her bra sits.
"You look like a dream," he mumbles and she shivers, reaching out to grab his neck, sliding her hands down his shoulders, pressing hard, her head spinning. His dress shirt feels like paper beneath her palms; the gel in his hair crinkles when she pulls her fingers through it.
"Maybe you should check," she whispers, compelled to keep her voice down, beneath the sounds of his clothes rustling against her skin, the shift of his knees on the floor as he swings one leg over hers, his breath blowing against her stomach.
He bites once sharply, at the hollow in her hipbone, the spot he always gravitates to. If Ariadne was the type of girl who got tattoos, she would get one right there, a die outlined in red ink, small enough to seem like a trick of the light or a rebellious scrap of fabric to those not looking closely enough.
He slides her backwards until her head hits the edge of the vent, the cool air blowing directly on her neck. He smirks slightly, a wicked twist of his mouth, and pulls his totem from his pocket, dropping it on her stomach. It hits her skin like a tiny punch.
"Looks real to me," he says. She arches her back until it rolls off, biting her lip as it rolls down instead of over, tumbling over her crotch to drop on the floor between them with a quiet clack of plastic.
Arthur traces the path it made with eyes, and then fingers, sliding down the lines of her muscles, down down and down until he finds her clit, pressing confidently, catching the small of her back with his other hand and pulling up. Ariadne reaches back and braces against the floor, most of her weight on her shoulders. Looking at his hand moving inside her underwear makes her feel like she's about to fall apart and float away.
He likes to arrange her like this, holding her hips still, in the air, on his lap, in his hands. He'll hold her there for as long as he feels like, her knees bracketing his waist, working into her with fingers or cock or tongue. He likes to watch her face, will whisper filth into her thighs until she comes, shaking and sweating and yelling. Once he pushed her onto his desk in the New York apartment and traced words onto her skin with his tongue and made her guess them, and for every one she got wrong he drew it out a little longer, pulling away at just the last second, pinning her knees to the wood surface so she couldn't kick him.
That’s what Ariadne loves most about sex with Arthur, the way he makes it okay for her to do whatever. To be wanton or shameless, to lie on the floor in her underwear and arch her back and moan as loud as she wants to. She could ask him to do anything, and he’d just raise an eyebrow and smile with the corners of his mouth and do his best, which even on his worst day, is significantly better than most people’s best.
Ariadne tilts her head back, shivering at the wash of cool air sliding down her back, eyes slamming shut as Arthur presses one, two, three fingers inside her, breathing through her teeth. She hears his breath and his shirt rustling, and he crooks his fingers and makes her cry out, unnaturally loud in the bubble of silence.
"There you are," he says, reaching up to rub her sternum between her breasts, the tips of his fingers catching the base of her throat. "Don't be so quiet, mon chaton."
Another surge of his fingers and Ariadne inhales with the motion, moving upwards to grab his arm. "Clothes," she says and her voice is raspy, soaked in want. "Clothes, I want to - you, Arthur, fuck me."
"There was a sentence in there somewhere," he replies smugly, so Ariadne reaches up and pinches him vindictively. He pulls away, laughing. "Take it easy."
"You take it easy," she says on a huff, taking the opportunity to strip off her bra. Her nipples harden immediately in the cool air; she rubs them lazily and watches him undress, smiling at every new spot of skin that's revealed, blessing every inch silently.
Naked, Arthur is a different person - wilder, sillier, louder, even. He smiles more, laughs more easily, teases her and has a wicked, evil smirk that would put Eames's to shame. She likes the undressing the best, likes to watch the world fall away from his shoulders, and sometimes she'll do it herself, unbuttoning and unzipping so slowly until he's hard and desperate by the time she's done.
This time Arthur just pulls it all off quickly, tossing it aside with a recklessness that is absent during working hours. His eyes are on her breasts, her nipples, twisted between her fingers, and he spreads out on top of her, wedging his hips between her thighs and pressing his mouth to her chest hungrily. Ariadne lets her hands fall away and pushes up into his teeth, bracing her hands on the floor so she can grind upwards with her hips, feel the sweet drag of his cock between her legs. She throbs all over, flushing hot and cold between him and the goddamn vent, her hair dampening with sweat and sticking unevenly to her skin, drying too fast whenever the air blows over a new spot.
"Arthur," she whispers, and he moves up to lick her throat, rubbing his cheek against hers. His stubble burns, just this side of too much. "Arthur, Arthur, Arthur."
"If you can still pronounce my name," he says into her ear, pulling her underwear down with two fingers, "we're really not there yet."
Her reply stalls on the first powerful push of his hips, sending her fingers scrabbling for purchase against the floor. She breathes through the little, instinctive prick of panic, the rush of too much, too full, and he waits, breathing softly against her cheek. She has an absurd moment of unreality for half a second; nothing could be this much, this visceral, this overwhelming, right? The distant music of the city beats in her ears and Arthur's murmuring endearments in French; she couldn't dream up anything better if she tried.
She takes a deep breath, gets him moving with a nudge to the side of his face and hooks her ankles together in the small of his back; this is real, alright.
Ariadne registers a sharp pain, something between her ass and the floor, and realizes it's the sharp edges of Arthur's die. She laughs out loud, the sound devolving into a moan at a sharp snap of his hips, the wet sound of their skin slapping together.
"What," he says, grinding against her again, pushing her into the floor. The die digs painfully into her skin and Ariadne hisses.
"Nuh," she says intelligently. Arthur pauses, pressed all the way inside her, and laughs, almost frantically. Ariadne joins him. "Nothing," she says, swallowing. Arthur responds with another wave of his hips, tilting his head down to kiss one cheekbone delicately. "Nothing, oh, keep going. Keep doing that, that's good."
Everything narrows down to two points, like two opposite sides of a spectrum, the die and her clit, throbbing in tempo to Arthur's thrusts. Then he pauses for a second to reach down between them and starts to rub and stroke, and that's when everything jumps up an octave, her breath coming in sharp panting bursts and incoherent sounds clawing their way out of her throat. She slams her eyes shut so hard she sees little bursts of white behind her eyelids, and when she comes, they turn into stars.
Arthur's not far behind her, biting the meat of her shoulder and squeezing her waist in a painful grip. The flood of warmth between her legs makes her shiver violently, gasping for breath on the cold floor, the A/C still blowing unforgivably against her neck and the die a sharp, uncomfortable pain.
He collapses on top of her, breathing heavily and mumbling something too soft for her to make out. She laughs weakly and shoves at his shoulder until he rolls away, enough so that she can reach behind her and dig the die out, tossing it away carelessly.
"Jesus," he mutters, shifting next to her, his bangs brushing her shoulder. "I'm getting too old to do shit like this."
Ariadne giggles, floating high on adrenaline and endorphins. "Ah, but you'll always be young at heart."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence." His voice is sardonic but muffled, buried in her hair, and Ariadne laughs again, happy to be with him, to be here, to be simply alive.
"We'll do it on the bed next," she whispers, spider-walking her fingers down his side, grinning in satisfaction as he shivers. She can feel the goose bumps on his skin. "I've still got plans for you, Mr. Arthur."
"Kiss me first," he demands.
She blesses his smile and complies.
let's ignore the whole 'don't touch each other's totems' thing and pretend that between lovers it's a-OK. Uh, yeeeeah.
it's like fate, or something, pre-ariadne/arthur (inception), pg, 810 words
for this prompt at inception_kink: They've met before. Arthur was the cranky waiter at the restaurant where freshmen in high school Ariadne was eating at during prom night with her 'hawtie' senior date.
He doesn't remember her. That much is obvious; she'd searched and searched his face for weeks when they first met, hungry for any glimmer of recognition and came up empty. And really, why would he? A couple hours, years and years ago, they were different people living in a different world, one conversation, there's no reason for it to have stuck to the sides of his memory like it did to hers.
There's really no reason for her to remember, either, but she does. Every girl remembers her prom night.
She'd worn a green dress that her aunt bought for her, borrowed high heels and her mother's makeup, desperate to impress Nico Jackson, the Nico Jackson, who played Orpheus in the Spring production of Eurydice and had big, broad hands that knocked her knees out whenever they made their way across her waist. Nico Jackson who ditched her at the restaurant with the check while she was in the restroom giving herself a pep talk and she'd known deep down in her bones that it was because she'd made it abundantly clear to him that her waist was as far down as his big, broad hands were going to get that night.
She barely remembers Nico (Nico, really, his real name was Nick, for pete's sake) but she remembers Arthur, who'd smiled at her when he brought her her iced tea, who didn't mind when she accidentally knocked it over with her nervous hands, who came over and sat down in the abandoned seat across from her as she sat there, blinking and trying desperately not to cry.
He's a stupid kid who does stupid kid things, he'd told her, setting a chocolate muffin by her arm carefully, and he'd sounded so assured and confident that she'd just believed him. You're so much bigger than that. You'll see. And he'd comped her meal and called her a cab and that was that, only it wasn't, because fifteen-year-old girls like Ariadne don't just forget about it when beautiful men tell them that they're meant for bigger things.
She wonders about how he got from that Arthur to this Arthur, who can disassemble a pistol with his eyes closed and helps her build worlds, strolling through her mind effortlessly. That Arthur didn't seem like the type who knew four different forms of karate or how to hack a social security number in five minutes. That Arthur had curly hair and a wonderful smile, obviously hated his job with incredible passion and made her laugh with his sarcastic courtesy and subtle, vicious commentary on Nico's rented suit.
She wants to ask, but he's a different man now, with clearly drawn lines and boundaries that she's too polite to cross. It's like an obstacle course, negotiating around them, digging to uncover little bits of who he is, buried deep beneath expensive linen and wool. But Ariadne loves challenges, puzzles, mazes, it's sort of her job to negotiate the ins and outs of stairs and gardens, wide, glass balconies and swooping arches. Sometimes when she's building she can see the curve of Arthur's cheekbone in a ribbed vault ceiling or the sharp, clean line of his shoulders in a karamon gate.
(She can reach out and touch his arm, or his hand, and she swears she feels granite marble. This is why she never draws him; if she started, she could never stop.)
It doesn't matter much, anyway. Maybe she'll tell him one day, maybe she won't. Probably she won't; it's not his memory, it's hers, and sharing it, even with Arthur, feels like a betrayal of the young-Ariadne's trust. The parts of her that still live in her heart, shut and locked away, but breathe steadily nonetheless. He doesn't ever have to know what he did for her or how many times she'd thought of him since that night, whether in the angsty mire of her teenage years or later, in unfamiliar cities oceans away from home. How tightly she'd clutched those words to her breast when she felt scared or ugly or young or foolish. Those words aren't for him, they're for her.
Life is funny, she knows, because who'd have thought that she'd be introduced to her life's work by her waiter, the bit player in her high school cliche? Who really, could picture Ariadne, of all people, plain and blunt and sorely stubborn, to be the one with the all the infinite power of thought at her fingertips? Well. Not Nico Jackson, that's for sure.
I like your name, Arthur insisted once, over drinks after a successful job, cutting through Ariadne's scathing diatribe on the various mispronunciations their client had butchered it with. It's unique. Powerful. I've always liked it.
She'd watched him look away, as if he'd revealed too much, and smiled to herself. Yeah, she'd replied. Just like me.
I realized after posting that the play I reference here, Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, was actually written in 2003, and Ariadne's high school probably would not have done a production of it (not to mention she was probably eighteen or so in 2003). Mostly because it is not a high school kind of play; it's mostly produced by university theatre departments and professional theatre companies. But it is an amazing play so let's just suspend belief again. Go see it, by the way. Bring tissues.
i wrote this because of the incredibly talented nami86's drawing for forgerness's inception rarepair fest. you can find her drawing here (slightly nsfw). title from fleetwood mac's "silver springs."
Arthur has a place in Tokyo, an apartment in a huge skyscraper in the Sendagaya neighborhood. It's where they stay on the occasions when Arthur is called on for a task by Saito, or when Ariadne gets so sick of Paris that she wants to scream. Everything in Tokyo is bright and loud, of course, but Shibuya overflows with such noise and light, a sugar high of brightly-lit store windows and chattering crowds that make it incredibly easy to get lost. Ariadne always feels adrift when she's there, suspended in the air over a sweeping landscape of chrome and concrete, toppling her bishop over on the slick, glass coffee table.
She likes to sleep in, the way she can't in Paris. Paris is a city for the daylight, but Tokyo - Tokyo comes alive at night. She'll spend full days twisted up in the sheets, not always sleeping but just resting, twisted up with her head at the foot of the bed and her toes pressed against the headboard. Sometimes, Arthur will come back from wherever it is that he's been, smelling of smog and cigarettes and sugar, and he'll join her, sliding his legs under hers and tangling his fingers into her braid. They'll doze and wake up with the sunset, and they'll go to expensive restaurants and bars with rows and rows of glossy, multicolored liquors and walk home beneath the blur of the neon-bright night sky, holding hands and not talking, two points of quiet in a sea of noise.
On one Sunday afternoon, she wakes to sunlight shining harshly on her face. She's sweating beneath the thick blanket and a dull headache from the brightness of the room pounds dully behind her temples. Sweat-heavy and sloth-slow, she climbs out of bed and lies on the floor in the shade of the nightstand, her cheek pressed to the cool air floating up from the vent. This is where Arthur finds her, stripped of the over-sized t-shirt she sleeps in, her hair fluttering in the air conditioning, eyes closed serenely but very much awake.
She smiles when he palms her forehead. "I was hot," she says lamely, feeling dizzy beneath the contrast of his warmth and the floor's coolness.
She feels him rise without responding, and a few moments later, the curtains close and the room is thrown into relieving dimness.
"Mmm."
"Just like a kitten," he remarks, returning to her side. She hears him nudge his shoes off and the rustle of his suit jacket as he pulls it off.
"Meow," she murmurs, arching up into his hand, brushing her cheek gently.
There's a long pause, then his mouth against her collarbone, his teeth sliding scratchy-slick against the spot where the strap of her bra sits.
"You look like a dream," he mumbles and she shivers, reaching out to grab his neck, sliding her hands down his shoulders, pressing hard, her head spinning. His dress shirt feels like paper beneath her palms; the gel in his hair crinkles when she pulls her fingers through it.
"Maybe you should check," she whispers, compelled to keep her voice down, beneath the sounds of his clothes rustling against her skin, the shift of his knees on the floor as he swings one leg over hers, his breath blowing against her stomach.
He bites once sharply, at the hollow in her hipbone, the spot he always gravitates to. If Ariadne was the type of girl who got tattoos, she would get one right there, a die outlined in red ink, small enough to seem like a trick of the light or a rebellious scrap of fabric to those not looking closely enough.
He slides her backwards until her head hits the edge of the vent, the cool air blowing directly on her neck. He smirks slightly, a wicked twist of his mouth, and pulls his totem from his pocket, dropping it on her stomach. It hits her skin like a tiny punch.
"Looks real to me," he says. She arches her back until it rolls off, biting her lip as it rolls down instead of over, tumbling over her crotch to drop on the floor between them with a quiet clack of plastic.
Arthur traces the path it made with eyes, and then fingers, sliding down the lines of her muscles, down down and down until he finds her clit, pressing confidently, catching the small of her back with his other hand and pulling up. Ariadne reaches back and braces against the floor, most of her weight on her shoulders. Looking at his hand moving inside her underwear makes her feel like she's about to fall apart and float away.
He likes to arrange her like this, holding her hips still, in the air, on his lap, in his hands. He'll hold her there for as long as he feels like, her knees bracketing his waist, working into her with fingers or cock or tongue. He likes to watch her face, will whisper filth into her thighs until she comes, shaking and sweating and yelling. Once he pushed her onto his desk in the New York apartment and traced words onto her skin with his tongue and made her guess them, and for every one she got wrong he drew it out a little longer, pulling away at just the last second, pinning her knees to the wood surface so she couldn't kick him.
That’s what Ariadne loves most about sex with Arthur, the way he makes it okay for her to do whatever. To be wanton or shameless, to lie on the floor in her underwear and arch her back and moan as loud as she wants to. She could ask him to do anything, and he’d just raise an eyebrow and smile with the corners of his mouth and do his best, which even on his worst day, is significantly better than most people’s best.
Ariadne tilts her head back, shivering at the wash of cool air sliding down her back, eyes slamming shut as Arthur presses one, two, three fingers inside her, breathing through her teeth. She hears his breath and his shirt rustling, and he crooks his fingers and makes her cry out, unnaturally loud in the bubble of silence.
"There you are," he says, reaching up to rub her sternum between her breasts, the tips of his fingers catching the base of her throat. "Don't be so quiet, mon chaton."
Another surge of his fingers and Ariadne inhales with the motion, moving upwards to grab his arm. "Clothes," she says and her voice is raspy, soaked in want. "Clothes, I want to - you, Arthur, fuck me."
"There was a sentence in there somewhere," he replies smugly, so Ariadne reaches up and pinches him vindictively. He pulls away, laughing. "Take it easy."
"You take it easy," she says on a huff, taking the opportunity to strip off her bra. Her nipples harden immediately in the cool air; she rubs them lazily and watches him undress, smiling at every new spot of skin that's revealed, blessing every inch silently.
Naked, Arthur is a different person - wilder, sillier, louder, even. He smiles more, laughs more easily, teases her and has a wicked, evil smirk that would put Eames's to shame. She likes the undressing the best, likes to watch the world fall away from his shoulders, and sometimes she'll do it herself, unbuttoning and unzipping so slowly until he's hard and desperate by the time she's done.
This time Arthur just pulls it all off quickly, tossing it aside with a recklessness that is absent during working hours. His eyes are on her breasts, her nipples, twisted between her fingers, and he spreads out on top of her, wedging his hips between her thighs and pressing his mouth to her chest hungrily. Ariadne lets her hands fall away and pushes up into his teeth, bracing her hands on the floor so she can grind upwards with her hips, feel the sweet drag of his cock between her legs. She throbs all over, flushing hot and cold between him and the goddamn vent, her hair dampening with sweat and sticking unevenly to her skin, drying too fast whenever the air blows over a new spot.
"Arthur," she whispers, and he moves up to lick her throat, rubbing his cheek against hers. His stubble burns, just this side of too much. "Arthur, Arthur, Arthur."
"If you can still pronounce my name," he says into her ear, pulling her underwear down with two fingers, "we're really not there yet."
Her reply stalls on the first powerful push of his hips, sending her fingers scrabbling for purchase against the floor. She breathes through the little, instinctive prick of panic, the rush of too much, too full, and he waits, breathing softly against her cheek. She has an absurd moment of unreality for half a second; nothing could be this much, this visceral, this overwhelming, right? The distant music of the city beats in her ears and Arthur's murmuring endearments in French; she couldn't dream up anything better if she tried.
She takes a deep breath, gets him moving with a nudge to the side of his face and hooks her ankles together in the small of his back; this is real, alright.
Ariadne registers a sharp pain, something between her ass and the floor, and realizes it's the sharp edges of Arthur's die. She laughs out loud, the sound devolving into a moan at a sharp snap of his hips, the wet sound of their skin slapping together.
"What," he says, grinding against her again, pushing her into the floor. The die digs painfully into her skin and Ariadne hisses.
"Nuh," she says intelligently. Arthur pauses, pressed all the way inside her, and laughs, almost frantically. Ariadne joins him. "Nothing," she says, swallowing. Arthur responds with another wave of his hips, tilting his head down to kiss one cheekbone delicately. "Nothing, oh, keep going. Keep doing that, that's good."
Everything narrows down to two points, like two opposite sides of a spectrum, the die and her clit, throbbing in tempo to Arthur's thrusts. Then he pauses for a second to reach down between them and starts to rub and stroke, and that's when everything jumps up an octave, her breath coming in sharp panting bursts and incoherent sounds clawing their way out of her throat. She slams her eyes shut so hard she sees little bursts of white behind her eyelids, and when she comes, they turn into stars.
Arthur's not far behind her, biting the meat of her shoulder and squeezing her waist in a painful grip. The flood of warmth between her legs makes her shiver violently, gasping for breath on the cold floor, the A/C still blowing unforgivably against her neck and the die a sharp, uncomfortable pain.
He collapses on top of her, breathing heavily and mumbling something too soft for her to make out. She laughs weakly and shoves at his shoulder until he rolls away, enough so that she can reach behind her and dig the die out, tossing it away carelessly.
"Jesus," he mutters, shifting next to her, his bangs brushing her shoulder. "I'm getting too old to do shit like this."
Ariadne giggles, floating high on adrenaline and endorphins. "Ah, but you'll always be young at heart."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence." His voice is sardonic but muffled, buried in her hair, and Ariadne laughs again, happy to be with him, to be here, to be simply alive.
"We'll do it on the bed next," she whispers, spider-walking her fingers down his side, grinning in satisfaction as he shivers. She can feel the goose bumps on his skin. "I've still got plans for you, Mr. Arthur."
"Kiss me first," he demands.
She blesses his smile and complies.
let's ignore the whole 'don't touch each other's totems' thing and pretend that between lovers it's a-OK. Uh, yeeeeah.
it's like fate, or something, pre-ariadne/arthur (inception), pg, 810 words
for this prompt at inception_kink: They've met before. Arthur was the cranky waiter at the restaurant where freshmen in high school Ariadne was eating at during prom night with her 'hawtie' senior date.
He doesn't remember her. That much is obvious; she'd searched and searched his face for weeks when they first met, hungry for any glimmer of recognition and came up empty. And really, why would he? A couple hours, years and years ago, they were different people living in a different world, one conversation, there's no reason for it to have stuck to the sides of his memory like it did to hers.
There's really no reason for her to remember, either, but she does. Every girl remembers her prom night.
She'd worn a green dress that her aunt bought for her, borrowed high heels and her mother's makeup, desperate to impress Nico Jackson, the Nico Jackson, who played Orpheus in the Spring production of Eurydice and had big, broad hands that knocked her knees out whenever they made their way across her waist. Nico Jackson who ditched her at the restaurant with the check while she was in the restroom giving herself a pep talk and she'd known deep down in her bones that it was because she'd made it abundantly clear to him that her waist was as far down as his big, broad hands were going to get that night.
She barely remembers Nico (Nico, really, his real name was Nick, for pete's sake) but she remembers Arthur, who'd smiled at her when he brought her her iced tea, who didn't mind when she accidentally knocked it over with her nervous hands, who came over and sat down in the abandoned seat across from her as she sat there, blinking and trying desperately not to cry.
He's a stupid kid who does stupid kid things, he'd told her, setting a chocolate muffin by her arm carefully, and he'd sounded so assured and confident that she'd just believed him. You're so much bigger than that. You'll see. And he'd comped her meal and called her a cab and that was that, only it wasn't, because fifteen-year-old girls like Ariadne don't just forget about it when beautiful men tell them that they're meant for bigger things.
She wonders about how he got from that Arthur to this Arthur, who can disassemble a pistol with his eyes closed and helps her build worlds, strolling through her mind effortlessly. That Arthur didn't seem like the type who knew four different forms of karate or how to hack a social security number in five minutes. That Arthur had curly hair and a wonderful smile, obviously hated his job with incredible passion and made her laugh with his sarcastic courtesy and subtle, vicious commentary on Nico's rented suit.
She wants to ask, but he's a different man now, with clearly drawn lines and boundaries that she's too polite to cross. It's like an obstacle course, negotiating around them, digging to uncover little bits of who he is, buried deep beneath expensive linen and wool. But Ariadne loves challenges, puzzles, mazes, it's sort of her job to negotiate the ins and outs of stairs and gardens, wide, glass balconies and swooping arches. Sometimes when she's building she can see the curve of Arthur's cheekbone in a ribbed vault ceiling or the sharp, clean line of his shoulders in a karamon gate.
(She can reach out and touch his arm, or his hand, and she swears she feels granite marble. This is why she never draws him; if she started, she could never stop.)
It doesn't matter much, anyway. Maybe she'll tell him one day, maybe she won't. Probably she won't; it's not his memory, it's hers, and sharing it, even with Arthur, feels like a betrayal of the young-Ariadne's trust. The parts of her that still live in her heart, shut and locked away, but breathe steadily nonetheless. He doesn't ever have to know what he did for her or how many times she'd thought of him since that night, whether in the angsty mire of her teenage years or later, in unfamiliar cities oceans away from home. How tightly she'd clutched those words to her breast when she felt scared or ugly or young or foolish. Those words aren't for him, they're for her.
Life is funny, she knows, because who'd have thought that she'd be introduced to her life's work by her waiter, the bit player in her high school cliche? Who really, could picture Ariadne, of all people, plain and blunt and sorely stubborn, to be the one with the all the infinite power of thought at her fingertips? Well. Not Nico Jackson, that's for sure.
I like your name, Arthur insisted once, over drinks after a successful job, cutting through Ariadne's scathing diatribe on the various mispronunciations their client had butchered it with. It's unique. Powerful. I've always liked it.
She'd watched him look away, as if he'd revealed too much, and smiled to herself. Yeah, she'd replied. Just like me.
I realized after posting that the play I reference here, Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, was actually written in 2003, and Ariadne's high school probably would not have done a production of it (not to mention she was probably eighteen or so in 2003). Mostly because it is not a high school kind of play; it's mostly produced by university theatre departments and professional theatre companies. But it is an amazing play so let's just suspend belief again. Go see it, by the way. Bring tissues.