[FIC] Stepping Sideways Into the Underground [3/3]
Title: Stepping Sideways Into the Underground
Author: toujourspret
Disclaimer: Clearly, I don't own Inception. This is a work of fiction written by a fan for fans. Any resemblance to people or situations fictional or otherwise is pure coincidence.
Rating: R
Characters: Ariadne-centric, ensemble cast
Summary: The team takes a case that's different from the usual case: extract the location of a serial killer's last victim. Ariadne finds herself inside the murderer's mind, lost in a twisted Wonderland where the only way out is in and the only way up is down. With the help of the team as various denizens of Wonderland and herself as Alice, Ariadne has to find the real Alice before the killer catches on. But is the killer really the only thing to worry about? In Wonderland, things are never quite what they seem.
Warnings: Very disturbing imagery, violence against children, offscreen mention of sexual abuse, character death (non-canon characters). IMPORTANT: Please be aware that certain aspects of this fic may be triggering, or cause emotional duress.
Author's Notes: See Part 1 for notes.
Link to Art: here
Chapters: Chapter 1 Chapter2 Chapter 3
Stepping Sideways Into the Underground [3/3]
Her eyes snap open, blurry with tears, and she stares at the ceiling, feeling the chemicals from the PASIV fade, the tide ebbing and leaving in its wake the harsh burn of reality. Ariadne feels her chest heaving for breath, feels the sting of panic already slipping from tense limbs. She props herself up on her elbows and looks around; Yusuf still looks dazed, and Cobb avoids her eyes as he coils the lines methodically. Arthur still looks puzzled, as if coherence is the wrong frame of mind. When Eames quirks a concerned eyebrow in her direction, she realizes she’s still attached to the machine and, with a brutally efficient tug, reaches down to yank the line from her arm. Hot blood wells at her wrist, and she can hear it spattering on the floor under the hum of the lights, the idle chatter of police officers milling nearby, the throbbing pound of her pulse in her temples. She doesn’t look at Lewis; she thinks she can feel his eyes on her.
“I didn’t get it,” she announces to the room as she shrugs on the sweater she’d draped over the back of the chair. “I failed.” She moves to the door, ignoring Cobb’s hand as he reaches for her. “Not right now,” she tells him, shoving brusquely into the hall, but there’s nowhere to go. Ariadne slumps against the cinderblock wall heavily, scrubbing at suddenly tired eyes with the back of her hand. She’s torn between going out to hide in the car in embarrassment and going back in to apologize when the door swings open.
“Are you through with the self-pity now?” Arthur asks, but his tone isn’t unkind and there’s a faint softness around his eyes. She nods shortly, ducking her head and patting her face with her scarf. “Everyone fucks one up now and then,” he tells her, and she laughs. “Don’t worry about it.”
“That whole thing was so fucked up,” she says. She doesn’t like the wobble she hears hiding behind the words or the way her throat feels sticky. “I,” she starts, then reconsiders. “He was waiting for me. He knew what was going on. I think,” she stops, then presses her fingers into her closed eyes. He waits patiently. “I think maybe Cobb tried to warn me? But it was so confusing. I didn’t-”
He nods patiently, but his grip on her elbow is firm. “Let’s go back inside now,” he says, and when he pulls the door open again, she peers past him. The police officers look strangely sheepish, ducking away from her eyes as she looks at them. The nurse is helping them strap the still unconscious Lewis into a wheelchair for transport. Ariadne shudders when her gaze lands on his face. He looks even more smug than before, if possible, and she pictures him wandering around in the Wonderland she’s left in his subconscious, sees him lumbering through the dark and twisted forest he’s corrupted, or worse-she sees him as Alice Seward, sees him pretending to be the little girl he’d murdered. She looks away. Arthur guides her with a hand at the small of her back, and she fights back the urge-instinct-to bolt again. Instead, she steps away, taking her seat and fiddling with her scarf until she hears the squeaking of the wheelchair leave the room. She looks up, then, and is surprised to see she’s the center of attention.
“What happened?” one of the police offers asks, his tone a bit awestruck. She looks at him, really looks, and decides meanly that he’d never be able to understand. She ignores him, turning to pin Cobb with a look.
“Did you know that was going to happen?” she demands.
He shakes his head slowly, jerkily, and she knows he’s lying. “I was aware of some of the risk. There’s not really a lot of information out there about lucid subjects yet-”
“It was an experiment?” she interrupts. Yusuf looks abashed, Arthur guilty. Eames pins Cobb with a searing look. “I can’t believe you. I thought,” she stops herself. Her hands clench on the armrests of the chair as she wills herself not to push away, not to get up and walk away from the team and the poison-sweet world of dream sharing altogether. She clears her throat. “I thought I could trust you.”
“Oh, pet,” Eames starts.
“You wouldn’t have been in any real danger,” Arthur says, overlapping.
“It was just a dream,” Yusuf reminds her gently.
“Fuck you all,” she says, and she’s surprised at the angry tears that threaten to fall. “You didn’t,” she chokes. “You weren’t-it wasn’t the same for you. For any of you. I-” and she stops herself again, stubborn and unwilling to admit in the light of day just how scared she was, how desperate she’d felt. She refuses to admit how close to forgetting she’d been.
“That’s fair,” Cobb says, and she remembers then that of all of them, he’d be the one to know how real a dream could feel, how potent and terrible fear and pain and forgetting could be. Regret surges into her mouth and she wants to apologize, but can’t. “Someone should have told you. I should have told you.”
A cough breaks the numb silence of the room. Ariadne jerks to look at the detective where he stands at the edge of the crowd. While they were arguing, he’s turned the white board around, revealing an intricate spider’s web of strings connecting photographs and dates, newspaper clippings and tiny bags marked EVIDENCE, until blue threads have tangled around the smiling face of Alice Seward and the question mark drawn next to her head. Ariadne shakes her head at the detective’s hopeful expression, flinching when he swears loudly and throws his pen across the room.
“What happened?” he snaps, and she can feel tension rising in the team.
“Look, Mr. Lightoller, you’ve got to understand that dreaming isn’t an exact science,” Arthur warns him. He’s rolled into a protective stance on the chair, elbows on his knees in a position that makes him look pedantic, as if explaining simple things to morons.
“I understand that the state of California has paid you people a hell of a lot of money to come in here and take a fucking nap,” Lightoller says.
“We can try it again,” Ariadne suggests, braver than she feels. She’s grateful when Cobb shakes his head.
“It wouldn’t work. It would give Lewis the chance to militarize, to understand what cooperative dreaming feels like and be ready for us,” Cobb says, and Ariadne’s skin crawls at the thought of Lewis being better equipped.
“Maybe something happened in the dream that can help,” Yusuf suggests. Ariadne nods, turning back to Lightoller. He groans softly, gesturing for her to begin.
“Well, for starters, you’re missing two girls,” she says, and from the surprised looks on the officer’s faces, she can tell she’s got them hooked.
It takes her three hours to tell the story, and when she’s done, the knot of tears is back in her throat. She describes the sickening crack of Lewis’s skull and talks in a muted tone about the banyan tree, the way its slender roots had tangled their way through the dream world until she’d realized there was nowhere to go.
“And then?” Lightoller asks. She shrugs.
“Then the music started and I woke up,” Ariadne says simply, pointing to the tape player resting on the PASIV’s shiny case. Through the headphones, she can still hear tinny music, distant and far away.
Lightoller frowns to himself, turning away thoughtfully. When he turns back, a manic sort of hope has begun creeping across his face. “You think he buried her. You really think that?” he asks. She nods silently, a flash of dirt-smudged teeth flickering across her mind’s eye. “Do you think-” he cuts himself off, crossing his arms and pacing in front of the board. “Would you recognize that tree if you saw it again? The one from your dream?”
She shivers, tugging her sweater tighter across her shoulders. “Yeah,” she tells him. “I’d remember it. I don’t know how important it could be, but I’d remember that tree.”
“Good,” he says.
::
Somehow, the cottage is even more terrifying in real life. It’s fallen into disrepair, yes, but nothing like the dream, and yet it looms ominously over the car. Ariadne’s limbs refuse to let her get out. Her nails are white against the plush leather of the car’s seats, and it’s only when Lightoller’s irritation draws a protective snip of displeasure from Cobb that she manages to force her legs through the open door. The leaves crack in a familiar way under her feet, and even though he hasn’t been here since his arrest over a year ago, the whole area is so tangibly Lewis that her skin crawls. She pushes away from the car with faked confidence, and she only allows herself the barest of glances over her shoulder, half expecting to see Alice there. She can feel the girl’s eyes between her shoulder blades.
There’s a small garden that wasn’t there in the dream, daylilies and marigolds spilling raucously over a tiny picket fence holding them back from the worn path. They’ve gone wild, and Ariadne thinks of the garden of live flowers and frowns, imagining them feral and mean. There is a worn stone caterpillar nestled between the stalks. Ariadne glances at Yusuf, but he’s looking away.
“We’ll start inside,” Lightoller says, and she nods dumbly. He slices through the police tape cleanly with a knife, the sound of metal on plastic grating and sharp in the unearthly bubble of silence surrounding the cottage.
Inside, the cottage is subtly different from the dream. The furniture is arranged differently, a painting changed here or there. She drags her finger along the dust smearing one of the movie posters in the hall and is surprised to see that underneath the grime it’s not Alice at all, but Gone With the Wind. The big mirror in the parlor is gone, in its place a deadly dull landscape of a pastoral scene. The chair is there, turned away to face the television set that now intrudes upon the room, hulking in the corner as if to say it’s always been there. Ariadne touches the remote on the armrest and it’s real, slightly chilled plastic firm and present. Lightoller gives her an odd look, and she’s not sure if it’s frustration at her odd behavior or irritation that she can’t seem to stop touching things, so she tugs her hand back reluctantly and follows when he leads them into the hall.
She drags her feet as Lightoller opens the heavy wooden door at the end of the hall and the others get their first glance at the Alice room. When she finally enters, she’s struck by the disparity: things she’d assumed were fantasy-the flickering lamps lighting wall sconces with antiquated eeriness, the enormous bookshelves full of different editions of Carroll’s works-are real, and things she’d taken for granted-the rounded reading chair, the enormous lithograph of Carroll’s Alice covering half the wall-are different, wrong somehow for the inelegance they add to the room. Most striking is the chair, that chair where the girls were bound and killed. In the dream, she’d taken its soft calfskin leather for rote, assumed that its teak and brass tacks were a very definite part of the real Alice room. Outside of the dream, the chair is sad, a lonely little kitchen chair stranded in the wrong room and used for wrong purposes. There are inelegant scars on the wood where handcuffs were dragged against its legs and arms, where lab technicians have taken hunks of its flesh to test and tag and file away for evidence. Ariadne’s fingers flutter over the edge of its tall back before she realizes, jerking away as if scalded.
“This isn’t right,” she says, scanning the room with her eyes. The lithograph, so unsettling and wrong in the dream, has become a framed press of flowers. The floors are no longer smooth and glossy but scratched and marred where hundreds of trampling feet have trod them, where nosy pry bars have lifted them to plunder the dank secrets below. If she thinks about it, even the wallpaper is wrong, cheery yellow stripes of floral damask to the brooding mahogany swirls before. She spies the record player and lifts the arm to see what Lewis left playing. A jolt like electricity grabs her as she recognizes the name on the plate. Epiphany waits on the back of her tongue, and it’s important to touch the hourglass suddenly, but it’s gone. She doesn’t mention aloud how much this scares her.
“There’s nothing in here,” Lightoller says. “Let’s go outside.”
Ariadne follows behind, part of her stuck in the Alice room with her thoughts. The back yard is unremarkable, flat and bland but for a small, pink plastic tea table left moldering at the bottom of the garden where a sandy creek cuts across the property. She doesn’t notice the water until she’s stepped in it, and it flushes into her shoes, cold and muddy. There’s nothing familiar about this place, but everything’s the same. She recognizes the willow from Wonderland where it dangles its leaves into the trickling creek, and on a whim, she turns, leaving the team and the police and the rational world behind, striking out in the direction she knows is right.
It shouldn’t be here. It’s improbable, impossible; it shouldn’t be here, but it is, and she stares up at the banyan with something like cotton, something like blood in her mouth. “This is the tree,” she murmurs, stuck in sloshy shoes at the base of the beastly tree. When Lightoller jogs up, mouth set in a disapproving line, she simply says, “Dig here,” and walks away to crouch against the trunk of another tree. Her sweater isn’t enough to stop the shivers this time as she wiggles her toes against her wet socks and wonders if she’ll ever be warm again. Lightoller’s men are rushing back and forth with shovels, and the others look torn between watching in interest and consoling her. Cobb goes, finally, rolling up his shirtsleeves to help dig, and Arthur follows, standing back to preserve the crisp white of his own shirtsleeves. Eames is staring morosely off into the distance, and Yusuf smiles apologetically as he leaves her to pitch in, hauling dirt out of the rapidly deepening hole to sort through makeshift pans.
There’s something wrong, but she can’t place it until she sees Eames’s hand moving, flicking rapidly over his poker chip like it’s a worry stone, like it’s an idol, like it’s a-she snatches at her pocket, suddenly desperate. Like it’s a totem, she realizes, and hers is nowhere to be found. A soft cough breaks through her distraction and she looks up to find a young officer standing over her, hand outstretched.
“You dropped this, I think,” he says, and when he rolls his palm over and uncurls his fingers, she stops cold. Her bishop gleams in his palm.
“Th-thanks,” she says, reaching out for it. He pulls his hand away, lifting the bishop to catch the fading sunlight of the day. If they don’t find Alice soon, it will be too late.
“What is it?” he asks, still peering at it in fascination.
“It’s a tool of the trade. It’s very important to me,” she tells him, forcing a smile onto her face. “I’d like to have it back now, please.”
“If it’s so important, you should be more careful with it,” he says. “Ariadne.”
She hears a click, hears a click like the safety of a gun, hears very faintly that someone has started the record in the cottage, hears-
-Non, Je ne regrette rien-
-and she tries very, very hard to remember the car ride to the cottage. They’d gotten into the car at the station. She’d buckled her seatbelt; Eames and Arthur had bickered over something inconsequential. The car had left the lot, got onto the highway, driven for a long time. Had they taken the road south? North? When had the cactuses turned to deciduous trees? She can’t remember. She realizes she can’t remember beyond Lightoller saying they needed-no. She can’t remember anything between thinking, He’s going to need us to go to Lewis’s house and the crunch of dead leaves under the car’s tires. Her mouth stretches into a forced smile as she holds her hand out, palm up, and waits for him to place it in her hand. Cool metal chills her skin for a moment before she tips her palm, spilling the bishop onto the stone at her feet.
It falls in slow motion, tipping end over end in time with the beating of her heart. By the time it hits the granite paving stone between them, it is spinning, whirling faster and faster until it crashes against the stone with a ringing sound and dips, whirling on its rim in circles. It’s wrong. A wave of déjà vu sweeps over her. She smiles at Lewis; he smiles back crooked teeth through the young officer’s chapped lips and charming scruffiness.
“You’re a smart girl,” he says, and behind him, the projections that look like her team members are staring at her.
“Thank you,” she says, and she’s proud that her voice doesn’t wobble. Edith Piaf sings in the background as the sunlight turns fire-colored through the leaves and the tips of the trees that reach up in supplication.
“You still haven’t found her,” he says, and she nods. “You want me to tell you?”
“Please,” Ariadne asks. “Don’t you think I’ve earned it?”
“Oh, very nearly. It’s a nice trick, that music,” he tells her, and for a moment they’re silent, listening to the swell of the orchestra as Edith sings. “But I can’t let you have her. She’s mine.”
“She doesn’t deserve to be hidden away, waiting to be found. You’re never coming back here in real life,” Ariadne tells him. Lewis’s smile falls between them.
“That’s what you think,” he says shortly. The young police man’s face flickers, his mouth shifting into Lewis’s thick-lipped scowl and back to the young man’s smooth features. “You’ll never find her, and I’ll never tell. She’ll still be here when I get out.”
“Don’t you get it?” Ariadne snaps, voice raising to a frenzied pitch. “You’re never getting out! When we wake up, when we really wake up? They’re going to lock your crazy ass up for murder!” Her voice dips, deadly and slow, “And you. You are never getting out.”
Lewis’s façade cracks. “I am not crazy!” he snarls back, and when he rears back, Ariadne remembers the officer’s gun. He levels it at her, face twisted in a way that she half-remembers. Behind him, the projections are growing uneasy, shuffling into a ragged line like a house of cards. Lewis bares his teeth, and Ariadne flinches at the explosion of powder, twisting left to dodge and charging into the dusky woods.
There’s only one place to go, only ever been one place to go: the center of the labyrinth. And the center isn’t below ground, not beneath the tree, not in the Alice room. Ariadne closes her eyes and thinks hard, trying to follow the flimsy thread of dream through the labyrinth. Her hands clench around air as she stops and remembers. And then she knows.
The dream’s layout is Wonderland, always Wonderland, dilated and stretched, but even through the red paint she can see the white rose petals beneath. Her eyes pick up on a smooth stone from the path she’d followed into the forest. She passes the twirling, snapping flowers until-there it is before her, just as she’d imagined. She hadn’t bothered looking back the first time through, but now she wonders how she’d missed it.
The rabbit hole is slight, just a dip in the low mound of a hill between two yew trees. The yew is a symbol of eternal life, she remembers as she takes in the tattered, weather-worn bow looped through the lower branches. Alice Seward’s hair ribbon is frayed, waving in the breeze, tangled with the thick, ropy branches. It explains a lot, the way the thick trunk resembles the banyan’s loping roots. Yews are sacred, holy, protected. Yews are hollow. She raises a hand, pleased that it’s only slightly shaking, and knocks firmly.
“You can’t get in that way,” Alice says behind her, and when Ariadne turns around, she knows it’s really her. The bark of the tree is dry, dead. Ariadne pushes against it and it creaks under the strain, cracking with thick, meaty snaps. She peers between the splinters, and for the first time, she sees Alice.
The girl is desiccated, dried out and bloodless but somehow whole, crouched on the ground with her arms wrapped around herself. Filthy bruises mar her skin; she has been posed. Ariadne pulls at the wood until she has pried open a hole big enough to reach in. Alice’s cheek is cold and smooth, chilled by the winter air. Her lashes flutter and Ariadne jumps back, sprawling on the ground with her heart juddering in her chest.
A cold hand traces along the side of her face and she screams, skittering away from the projection of Alice where she stands, watching Ariadne. “Thank you,” Alice says, and Ariadne bites back the ridiculous urge to say, It’s cool. She coughs, instead.
“I-it was nothing,” she says, unable to focus her eyes on the girl as she stands before her. Alice’s smile is sideways and wry, and she tugs on the orange sweatshirt the corpse-and now she-is wearing. “I,” Ariadne starts, but she doesn’t know where she’s going and stops.
“You should go now,” Alice tells her, and Ariadne nods shakily, climbing to her feet to brush the dead leaves from her jeans. She’s walking away, wondering how she’ll find her way back to the cottage, when the thought occurs to her.
“Alice?” she asks, and Alice steps out from behind a tree ahead of her onto the path.
“Who,” Ariadne asks, biting her lip as she decides whether to ask or not. “Cobb mentioned…who was the Queen? Cobb said I should keep an eye out for her, like she was dangerous or something, and I just wanted to know,” she says, words pouring out of her nervously at the cat smile forming on Alice’s face. “Who was he talking about?”
Alice’s smile is sharp. “Me, of course. Alice is the queen of Wonderland. It’s all about me; it always has been.”
And Ariadne is tired of running, so when Alice raises the gun she smiles and takes the bullet, and she hopes when she opens her eyes again she’s somewhere else.
::
She opens her eyes and the fluorescent lights give her a blinding headache, or make her more aware of one that’s formed just behind her eyes. She feels nauseated for a moment, and when she can finally see one of everything instead of two, she registers the concerned faces around her.
“You missed the kick,” Arthur tells her as he removes her line and turns it neatly around his elbow. “So we gave you another one. You missed it, too.”
“She wouldn’t let me leave until I found her,” Ariadne murmurs softly. Cobb’s expression turns sharp.
“You found her?” he asks, and she nods, tentatively. The officers rush, then, surrounding her with notepads and hushed, excited faces. She describes the grave, the ribbon marker and the yew trees, and when Lightoller starts barking orders and the officers pour out of the room, she’s surprised by how little she cares if the girl is there when they find the place. She knows the place will be there, too, just as she knows that the Alice in the dream hadn’t been hers or Lewis’s. Her stomach flips; she glances over at the empty spot where Lewis had been strapped to his bed.
“Did they take him out when I missed the kick?” she asks, pointing to the empty bed. Cobb peers at it thoughtfully, as if unsure what to say.
“Ariadne,” he finally manages, then stops. “Ariadne,” he tries again.
“I,” Eames says, flustered. “Lewis died, love. Some sort of reaction to the somnacin.”
Ariadne’s skin goes cold. “That’s not possible. He was in the dream with me. We were there for less than a day; that’s, what, twelve minutes? He couldn’t have died in twelve minutes,” she says.
“You were under for three quarters of an hour,” Arthur tells her, and she stares at him. “The rest of us came up at twenty five minutes. Lewis flatlined at thirty. You were by yourself for the last fifteen.”
Bile burbles in her stomach. “No, I wasn’t. That’s a day in dream time, and I wasn’t alone for a whole day in dream time. I wasn’t even there a whole day.”
Arthur narrows his eyes. “Ariadne, this case was timed perfectly. You were the only person who didn’t come up according to plan. We thought you’d fallen into limbo.”
And Ariadne’s mouth goes numb at this thought. “Is that-” she turns to Cobb with imploring eyes. “Is that what happened to Lewis? Is he in limbo now?”
“Lewis is dead, Ariadne,” Arthur tells her. She shoots him a dirty look and goes back to Cobb.
“Is he there? Trapped in limbo?” she demands. Cobb shrugs helplessly.
“I don’t know, Ariadne. I-limbo isn’t a real place, you know. It’s a construct of the mind. If you went to limbo with Lewis, then yes, he’d be in limbo for you, but he wouldn’t be there for me, or for anyone else. He would just be a projection. You can’t trap someone’s soul inside the PASIV,” he says, and his bitter tone says he’s tried. Mal, she thinks, then shakes the idea away.
“Lewis was in the dream after you guys woke up. I know he was. I saw him. He chased me!” she insists.
“I don’t doubt he did,” Eames says, wincing at the memory. “Projections can tell when things are going wrong outside the dream. I was working this one case with an extractor named Jones; we were traced back to headquarters, we had a rat, something, and somehow Jones was shot outside of the dream. It was horrific. He lingered for hours in the dream, and we didn’t notice until all of a sudden the dream started to collapse-it was like it started to rot from the inside out. The projections went mad; they gutted my architect like a fish.”
“That’s not what happened,” Ariadne grinds out through gritted teeth, and he the smile he gives her is more patronizing than placating.
“Well, whatever happened, it’s over now,” Yusuf suggests. She bites back a sharp retort and settles for tugging on her sweater. There are a few officers left behind, grumbling to each other as they fold the chairs. The dead girls stare up at her from the folder Eames is holding; he flicks through the pages idly before closing the folder and handing it to Arthur. Arthur tucks it away, and Ariadne realizes: they’re leaving. Yusuf has tugged his coat on, adjusting the sleeves, and Eames is on his way out the door.
“Not to say that this wasn’t a lovely way to spend the afternoon,” Eames says, waving jauntily as he heads out, and suddenly he’s gone. She can hear the click of his boots on the concrete in the hall, listens as the heavy metal door at the end of the hall grates open and closed again. She holds these sounds to herself, proof that Eames is real. Yusuf gives her a halfhearted smile and ducks out, himself.
“I’d better get going, too,” Arthur says briskly, punctuating this statement with the click of the clasps on his briefcase. Buttoned up in his coat with the big black case resting against his leg, he could pass for a lawyer. The PASIV is inside. He has three warrants out for his arrest. He smiles at her with a short salute and he’s gone.
“Are you going to be okay?” Cobb asks her, and she nods. She doesn’t trust herself to speak, but shakes her head a little and nods again.
“Each of these cases is like a dream, itself. They leave me wondering what’s real and what’s not. But this one was more like a nightmare,” she manages. Her smile is weak.
“You mustn’t forget that you’re not dreaming, Ariadne,” he tells her seriously, pressing an impulsive and fatherly kiss to her forehead. “You can’t ever forget that you’re not dreaming, because you lose control when you forget that.” She nods and he stands there, watching her with an inscrutable expression on his face.
“You’d better go,” she tells him. She’s proud that her voice only wobbles a little. “James and Phillipa will be wondering where you are.” He nods slowly, and she listens to his ponderous footsteps going all the way down the hall before she steps out of the room. He’s gone.
And when, a week later, she is watching on the news as police describe the stroke of luck they’d had in finding Alice Seward’s body, she pushes her bishop over to watch it roll along the counter. It tips slowly, then faster and faster until the sound of metal ringing on marble fills her ears.
Author: toujourspret
Disclaimer: Clearly, I don't own Inception. This is a work of fiction written by a fan for fans. Any resemblance to people or situations fictional or otherwise is pure coincidence.
Rating: R
Characters: Ariadne-centric, ensemble cast
Summary: The team takes a case that's different from the usual case: extract the location of a serial killer's last victim. Ariadne finds herself inside the murderer's mind, lost in a twisted Wonderland where the only way out is in and the only way up is down. With the help of the team as various denizens of Wonderland and herself as Alice, Ariadne has to find the real Alice before the killer catches on. But is the killer really the only thing to worry about? In Wonderland, things are never quite what they seem.
Warnings: Very disturbing imagery, violence against children, offscreen mention of sexual abuse, character death (non-canon characters). IMPORTANT: Please be aware that certain aspects of this fic may be triggering, or cause emotional duress.
Author's Notes: See Part 1 for notes.
Link to Art: here
Chapters: Chapter 1 Chapter2 Chapter 3
Stepping Sideways Into the Underground [3/3]
Her eyes snap open, blurry with tears, and she stares at the ceiling, feeling the chemicals from the PASIV fade, the tide ebbing and leaving in its wake the harsh burn of reality. Ariadne feels her chest heaving for breath, feels the sting of panic already slipping from tense limbs. She props herself up on her elbows and looks around; Yusuf still looks dazed, and Cobb avoids her eyes as he coils the lines methodically. Arthur still looks puzzled, as if coherence is the wrong frame of mind. When Eames quirks a concerned eyebrow in her direction, she realizes she’s still attached to the machine and, with a brutally efficient tug, reaches down to yank the line from her arm. Hot blood wells at her wrist, and she can hear it spattering on the floor under the hum of the lights, the idle chatter of police officers milling nearby, the throbbing pound of her pulse in her temples. She doesn’t look at Lewis; she thinks she can feel his eyes on her.
“I didn’t get it,” she announces to the room as she shrugs on the sweater she’d draped over the back of the chair. “I failed.” She moves to the door, ignoring Cobb’s hand as he reaches for her. “Not right now,” she tells him, shoving brusquely into the hall, but there’s nowhere to go. Ariadne slumps against the cinderblock wall heavily, scrubbing at suddenly tired eyes with the back of her hand. She’s torn between going out to hide in the car in embarrassment and going back in to apologize when the door swings open.
“Are you through with the self-pity now?” Arthur asks, but his tone isn’t unkind and there’s a faint softness around his eyes. She nods shortly, ducking her head and patting her face with her scarf. “Everyone fucks one up now and then,” he tells her, and she laughs. “Don’t worry about it.”
“That whole thing was so fucked up,” she says. She doesn’t like the wobble she hears hiding behind the words or the way her throat feels sticky. “I,” she starts, then reconsiders. “He was waiting for me. He knew what was going on. I think,” she stops, then presses her fingers into her closed eyes. He waits patiently. “I think maybe Cobb tried to warn me? But it was so confusing. I didn’t-”
He nods patiently, but his grip on her elbow is firm. “Let’s go back inside now,” he says, and when he pulls the door open again, she peers past him. The police officers look strangely sheepish, ducking away from her eyes as she looks at them. The nurse is helping them strap the still unconscious Lewis into a wheelchair for transport. Ariadne shudders when her gaze lands on his face. He looks even more smug than before, if possible, and she pictures him wandering around in the Wonderland she’s left in his subconscious, sees him lumbering through the dark and twisted forest he’s corrupted, or worse-she sees him as Alice Seward, sees him pretending to be the little girl he’d murdered. She looks away. Arthur guides her with a hand at the small of her back, and she fights back the urge-instinct-to bolt again. Instead, she steps away, taking her seat and fiddling with her scarf until she hears the squeaking of the wheelchair leave the room. She looks up, then, and is surprised to see she’s the center of attention.
“What happened?” one of the police offers asks, his tone a bit awestruck. She looks at him, really looks, and decides meanly that he’d never be able to understand. She ignores him, turning to pin Cobb with a look.
“Did you know that was going to happen?” she demands.
He shakes his head slowly, jerkily, and she knows he’s lying. “I was aware of some of the risk. There’s not really a lot of information out there about lucid subjects yet-”
“It was an experiment?” she interrupts. Yusuf looks abashed, Arthur guilty. Eames pins Cobb with a searing look. “I can’t believe you. I thought,” she stops herself. Her hands clench on the armrests of the chair as she wills herself not to push away, not to get up and walk away from the team and the poison-sweet world of dream sharing altogether. She clears her throat. “I thought I could trust you.”
“Oh, pet,” Eames starts.
“You wouldn’t have been in any real danger,” Arthur says, overlapping.
“It was just a dream,” Yusuf reminds her gently.
“Fuck you all,” she says, and she’s surprised at the angry tears that threaten to fall. “You didn’t,” she chokes. “You weren’t-it wasn’t the same for you. For any of you. I-” and she stops herself again, stubborn and unwilling to admit in the light of day just how scared she was, how desperate she’d felt. She refuses to admit how close to forgetting she’d been.
“That’s fair,” Cobb says, and she remembers then that of all of them, he’d be the one to know how real a dream could feel, how potent and terrible fear and pain and forgetting could be. Regret surges into her mouth and she wants to apologize, but can’t. “Someone should have told you. I should have told you.”
A cough breaks the numb silence of the room. Ariadne jerks to look at the detective where he stands at the edge of the crowd. While they were arguing, he’s turned the white board around, revealing an intricate spider’s web of strings connecting photographs and dates, newspaper clippings and tiny bags marked EVIDENCE, until blue threads have tangled around the smiling face of Alice Seward and the question mark drawn next to her head. Ariadne shakes her head at the detective’s hopeful expression, flinching when he swears loudly and throws his pen across the room.
“What happened?” he snaps, and she can feel tension rising in the team.
“Look, Mr. Lightoller, you’ve got to understand that dreaming isn’t an exact science,” Arthur warns him. He’s rolled into a protective stance on the chair, elbows on his knees in a position that makes him look pedantic, as if explaining simple things to morons.
“I understand that the state of California has paid you people a hell of a lot of money to come in here and take a fucking nap,” Lightoller says.
“We can try it again,” Ariadne suggests, braver than she feels. She’s grateful when Cobb shakes his head.
“It wouldn’t work. It would give Lewis the chance to militarize, to understand what cooperative dreaming feels like and be ready for us,” Cobb says, and Ariadne’s skin crawls at the thought of Lewis being better equipped.
“Maybe something happened in the dream that can help,” Yusuf suggests. Ariadne nods, turning back to Lightoller. He groans softly, gesturing for her to begin.
“Well, for starters, you’re missing two girls,” she says, and from the surprised looks on the officer’s faces, she can tell she’s got them hooked.
It takes her three hours to tell the story, and when she’s done, the knot of tears is back in her throat. She describes the sickening crack of Lewis’s skull and talks in a muted tone about the banyan tree, the way its slender roots had tangled their way through the dream world until she’d realized there was nowhere to go.
“And then?” Lightoller asks. She shrugs.
“Then the music started and I woke up,” Ariadne says simply, pointing to the tape player resting on the PASIV’s shiny case. Through the headphones, she can still hear tinny music, distant and far away.
Lightoller frowns to himself, turning away thoughtfully. When he turns back, a manic sort of hope has begun creeping across his face. “You think he buried her. You really think that?” he asks. She nods silently, a flash of dirt-smudged teeth flickering across her mind’s eye. “Do you think-” he cuts himself off, crossing his arms and pacing in front of the board. “Would you recognize that tree if you saw it again? The one from your dream?”
She shivers, tugging her sweater tighter across her shoulders. “Yeah,” she tells him. “I’d remember it. I don’t know how important it could be, but I’d remember that tree.”
“Good,” he says.
::
Somehow, the cottage is even more terrifying in real life. It’s fallen into disrepair, yes, but nothing like the dream, and yet it looms ominously over the car. Ariadne’s limbs refuse to let her get out. Her nails are white against the plush leather of the car’s seats, and it’s only when Lightoller’s irritation draws a protective snip of displeasure from Cobb that she manages to force her legs through the open door. The leaves crack in a familiar way under her feet, and even though he hasn’t been here since his arrest over a year ago, the whole area is so tangibly Lewis that her skin crawls. She pushes away from the car with faked confidence, and she only allows herself the barest of glances over her shoulder, half expecting to see Alice there. She can feel the girl’s eyes between her shoulder blades.
There’s a small garden that wasn’t there in the dream, daylilies and marigolds spilling raucously over a tiny picket fence holding them back from the worn path. They’ve gone wild, and Ariadne thinks of the garden of live flowers and frowns, imagining them feral and mean. There is a worn stone caterpillar nestled between the stalks. Ariadne glances at Yusuf, but he’s looking away.
“We’ll start inside,” Lightoller says, and she nods dumbly. He slices through the police tape cleanly with a knife, the sound of metal on plastic grating and sharp in the unearthly bubble of silence surrounding the cottage.
Inside, the cottage is subtly different from the dream. The furniture is arranged differently, a painting changed here or there. She drags her finger along the dust smearing one of the movie posters in the hall and is surprised to see that underneath the grime it’s not Alice at all, but Gone With the Wind. The big mirror in the parlor is gone, in its place a deadly dull landscape of a pastoral scene. The chair is there, turned away to face the television set that now intrudes upon the room, hulking in the corner as if to say it’s always been there. Ariadne touches the remote on the armrest and it’s real, slightly chilled plastic firm and present. Lightoller gives her an odd look, and she’s not sure if it’s frustration at her odd behavior or irritation that she can’t seem to stop touching things, so she tugs her hand back reluctantly and follows when he leads them into the hall.
She drags her feet as Lightoller opens the heavy wooden door at the end of the hall and the others get their first glance at the Alice room. When she finally enters, she’s struck by the disparity: things she’d assumed were fantasy-the flickering lamps lighting wall sconces with antiquated eeriness, the enormous bookshelves full of different editions of Carroll’s works-are real, and things she’d taken for granted-the rounded reading chair, the enormous lithograph of Carroll’s Alice covering half the wall-are different, wrong somehow for the inelegance they add to the room. Most striking is the chair, that chair where the girls were bound and killed. In the dream, she’d taken its soft calfskin leather for rote, assumed that its teak and brass tacks were a very definite part of the real Alice room. Outside of the dream, the chair is sad, a lonely little kitchen chair stranded in the wrong room and used for wrong purposes. There are inelegant scars on the wood where handcuffs were dragged against its legs and arms, where lab technicians have taken hunks of its flesh to test and tag and file away for evidence. Ariadne’s fingers flutter over the edge of its tall back before she realizes, jerking away as if scalded.
“This isn’t right,” she says, scanning the room with her eyes. The lithograph, so unsettling and wrong in the dream, has become a framed press of flowers. The floors are no longer smooth and glossy but scratched and marred where hundreds of trampling feet have trod them, where nosy pry bars have lifted them to plunder the dank secrets below. If she thinks about it, even the wallpaper is wrong, cheery yellow stripes of floral damask to the brooding mahogany swirls before. She spies the record player and lifts the arm to see what Lewis left playing. A jolt like electricity grabs her as she recognizes the name on the plate. Epiphany waits on the back of her tongue, and it’s important to touch the hourglass suddenly, but it’s gone. She doesn’t mention aloud how much this scares her.
“There’s nothing in here,” Lightoller says. “Let’s go outside.”
Ariadne follows behind, part of her stuck in the Alice room with her thoughts. The back yard is unremarkable, flat and bland but for a small, pink plastic tea table left moldering at the bottom of the garden where a sandy creek cuts across the property. She doesn’t notice the water until she’s stepped in it, and it flushes into her shoes, cold and muddy. There’s nothing familiar about this place, but everything’s the same. She recognizes the willow from Wonderland where it dangles its leaves into the trickling creek, and on a whim, she turns, leaving the team and the police and the rational world behind, striking out in the direction she knows is right.
It shouldn’t be here. It’s improbable, impossible; it shouldn’t be here, but it is, and she stares up at the banyan with something like cotton, something like blood in her mouth. “This is the tree,” she murmurs, stuck in sloshy shoes at the base of the beastly tree. When Lightoller jogs up, mouth set in a disapproving line, she simply says, “Dig here,” and walks away to crouch against the trunk of another tree. Her sweater isn’t enough to stop the shivers this time as she wiggles her toes against her wet socks and wonders if she’ll ever be warm again. Lightoller’s men are rushing back and forth with shovels, and the others look torn between watching in interest and consoling her. Cobb goes, finally, rolling up his shirtsleeves to help dig, and Arthur follows, standing back to preserve the crisp white of his own shirtsleeves. Eames is staring morosely off into the distance, and Yusuf smiles apologetically as he leaves her to pitch in, hauling dirt out of the rapidly deepening hole to sort through makeshift pans.
There’s something wrong, but she can’t place it until she sees Eames’s hand moving, flicking rapidly over his poker chip like it’s a worry stone, like it’s an idol, like it’s a-she snatches at her pocket, suddenly desperate. Like it’s a totem, she realizes, and hers is nowhere to be found. A soft cough breaks through her distraction and she looks up to find a young officer standing over her, hand outstretched.
“You dropped this, I think,” he says, and when he rolls his palm over and uncurls his fingers, she stops cold. Her bishop gleams in his palm.
“Th-thanks,” she says, reaching out for it. He pulls his hand away, lifting the bishop to catch the fading sunlight of the day. If they don’t find Alice soon, it will be too late.
“What is it?” he asks, still peering at it in fascination.
“It’s a tool of the trade. It’s very important to me,” she tells him, forcing a smile onto her face. “I’d like to have it back now, please.”
“If it’s so important, you should be more careful with it,” he says. “Ariadne.”
She hears a click, hears a click like the safety of a gun, hears very faintly that someone has started the record in the cottage, hears-
-Non, Je ne regrette rien-
-and she tries very, very hard to remember the car ride to the cottage. They’d gotten into the car at the station. She’d buckled her seatbelt; Eames and Arthur had bickered over something inconsequential. The car had left the lot, got onto the highway, driven for a long time. Had they taken the road south? North? When had the cactuses turned to deciduous trees? She can’t remember. She realizes she can’t remember beyond Lightoller saying they needed-no. She can’t remember anything between thinking, He’s going to need us to go to Lewis’s house and the crunch of dead leaves under the car’s tires. Her mouth stretches into a forced smile as she holds her hand out, palm up, and waits for him to place it in her hand. Cool metal chills her skin for a moment before she tips her palm, spilling the bishop onto the stone at her feet.
It falls in slow motion, tipping end over end in time with the beating of her heart. By the time it hits the granite paving stone between them, it is spinning, whirling faster and faster until it crashes against the stone with a ringing sound and dips, whirling on its rim in circles. It’s wrong. A wave of déjà vu sweeps over her. She smiles at Lewis; he smiles back crooked teeth through the young officer’s chapped lips and charming scruffiness.
“You’re a smart girl,” he says, and behind him, the projections that look like her team members are staring at her.
“Thank you,” she says, and she’s proud that her voice doesn’t wobble. Edith Piaf sings in the background as the sunlight turns fire-colored through the leaves and the tips of the trees that reach up in supplication.
“You still haven’t found her,” he says, and she nods. “You want me to tell you?”
“Please,” Ariadne asks. “Don’t you think I’ve earned it?”
“Oh, very nearly. It’s a nice trick, that music,” he tells her, and for a moment they’re silent, listening to the swell of the orchestra as Edith sings. “But I can’t let you have her. She’s mine.”
“She doesn’t deserve to be hidden away, waiting to be found. You’re never coming back here in real life,” Ariadne tells him. Lewis’s smile falls between them.
“That’s what you think,” he says shortly. The young police man’s face flickers, his mouth shifting into Lewis’s thick-lipped scowl and back to the young man’s smooth features. “You’ll never find her, and I’ll never tell. She’ll still be here when I get out.”
“Don’t you get it?” Ariadne snaps, voice raising to a frenzied pitch. “You’re never getting out! When we wake up, when we really wake up? They’re going to lock your crazy ass up for murder!” Her voice dips, deadly and slow, “And you. You are never getting out.”
Lewis’s façade cracks. “I am not crazy!” he snarls back, and when he rears back, Ariadne remembers the officer’s gun. He levels it at her, face twisted in a way that she half-remembers. Behind him, the projections are growing uneasy, shuffling into a ragged line like a house of cards. Lewis bares his teeth, and Ariadne flinches at the explosion of powder, twisting left to dodge and charging into the dusky woods.
There’s only one place to go, only ever been one place to go: the center of the labyrinth. And the center isn’t below ground, not beneath the tree, not in the Alice room. Ariadne closes her eyes and thinks hard, trying to follow the flimsy thread of dream through the labyrinth. Her hands clench around air as she stops and remembers. And then she knows.
The dream’s layout is Wonderland, always Wonderland, dilated and stretched, but even through the red paint she can see the white rose petals beneath. Her eyes pick up on a smooth stone from the path she’d followed into the forest. She passes the twirling, snapping flowers until-there it is before her, just as she’d imagined. She hadn’t bothered looking back the first time through, but now she wonders how she’d missed it.
The rabbit hole is slight, just a dip in the low mound of a hill between two yew trees. The yew is a symbol of eternal life, she remembers as she takes in the tattered, weather-worn bow looped through the lower branches. Alice Seward’s hair ribbon is frayed, waving in the breeze, tangled with the thick, ropy branches. It explains a lot, the way the thick trunk resembles the banyan’s loping roots. Yews are sacred, holy, protected. Yews are hollow. She raises a hand, pleased that it’s only slightly shaking, and knocks firmly.
“You can’t get in that way,” Alice says behind her, and when Ariadne turns around, she knows it’s really her. The bark of the tree is dry, dead. Ariadne pushes against it and it creaks under the strain, cracking with thick, meaty snaps. She peers between the splinters, and for the first time, she sees Alice.
The girl is desiccated, dried out and bloodless but somehow whole, crouched on the ground with her arms wrapped around herself. Filthy bruises mar her skin; she has been posed. Ariadne pulls at the wood until she has pried open a hole big enough to reach in. Alice’s cheek is cold and smooth, chilled by the winter air. Her lashes flutter and Ariadne jumps back, sprawling on the ground with her heart juddering in her chest.
A cold hand traces along the side of her face and she screams, skittering away from the projection of Alice where she stands, watching Ariadne. “Thank you,” Alice says, and Ariadne bites back the ridiculous urge to say, It’s cool. She coughs, instead.
“I-it was nothing,” she says, unable to focus her eyes on the girl as she stands before her. Alice’s smile is sideways and wry, and she tugs on the orange sweatshirt the corpse-and now she-is wearing. “I,” Ariadne starts, but she doesn’t know where she’s going and stops.
“You should go now,” Alice tells her, and Ariadne nods shakily, climbing to her feet to brush the dead leaves from her jeans. She’s walking away, wondering how she’ll find her way back to the cottage, when the thought occurs to her.
“Alice?” she asks, and Alice steps out from behind a tree ahead of her onto the path.
“Who,” Ariadne asks, biting her lip as she decides whether to ask or not. “Cobb mentioned…who was the Queen? Cobb said I should keep an eye out for her, like she was dangerous or something, and I just wanted to know,” she says, words pouring out of her nervously at the cat smile forming on Alice’s face. “Who was he talking about?”
Alice’s smile is sharp. “Me, of course. Alice is the queen of Wonderland. It’s all about me; it always has been.”
And Ariadne is tired of running, so when Alice raises the gun she smiles and takes the bullet, and she hopes when she opens her eyes again she’s somewhere else.
::
She opens her eyes and the fluorescent lights give her a blinding headache, or make her more aware of one that’s formed just behind her eyes. She feels nauseated for a moment, and when she can finally see one of everything instead of two, she registers the concerned faces around her.
“You missed the kick,” Arthur tells her as he removes her line and turns it neatly around his elbow. “So we gave you another one. You missed it, too.”
“She wouldn’t let me leave until I found her,” Ariadne murmurs softly. Cobb’s expression turns sharp.
“You found her?” he asks, and she nods, tentatively. The officers rush, then, surrounding her with notepads and hushed, excited faces. She describes the grave, the ribbon marker and the yew trees, and when Lightoller starts barking orders and the officers pour out of the room, she’s surprised by how little she cares if the girl is there when they find the place. She knows the place will be there, too, just as she knows that the Alice in the dream hadn’t been hers or Lewis’s. Her stomach flips; she glances over at the empty spot where Lewis had been strapped to his bed.
“Did they take him out when I missed the kick?” she asks, pointing to the empty bed. Cobb peers at it thoughtfully, as if unsure what to say.
“Ariadne,” he finally manages, then stops. “Ariadne,” he tries again.
“I,” Eames says, flustered. “Lewis died, love. Some sort of reaction to the somnacin.”
Ariadne’s skin goes cold. “That’s not possible. He was in the dream with me. We were there for less than a day; that’s, what, twelve minutes? He couldn’t have died in twelve minutes,” she says.
“You were under for three quarters of an hour,” Arthur tells her, and she stares at him. “The rest of us came up at twenty five minutes. Lewis flatlined at thirty. You were by yourself for the last fifteen.”
Bile burbles in her stomach. “No, I wasn’t. That’s a day in dream time, and I wasn’t alone for a whole day in dream time. I wasn’t even there a whole day.”
Arthur narrows his eyes. “Ariadne, this case was timed perfectly. You were the only person who didn’t come up according to plan. We thought you’d fallen into limbo.”
And Ariadne’s mouth goes numb at this thought. “Is that-” she turns to Cobb with imploring eyes. “Is that what happened to Lewis? Is he in limbo now?”
“Lewis is dead, Ariadne,” Arthur tells her. She shoots him a dirty look and goes back to Cobb.
“Is he there? Trapped in limbo?” she demands. Cobb shrugs helplessly.
“I don’t know, Ariadne. I-limbo isn’t a real place, you know. It’s a construct of the mind. If you went to limbo with Lewis, then yes, he’d be in limbo for you, but he wouldn’t be there for me, or for anyone else. He would just be a projection. You can’t trap someone’s soul inside the PASIV,” he says, and his bitter tone says he’s tried. Mal, she thinks, then shakes the idea away.
“Lewis was in the dream after you guys woke up. I know he was. I saw him. He chased me!” she insists.
“I don’t doubt he did,” Eames says, wincing at the memory. “Projections can tell when things are going wrong outside the dream. I was working this one case with an extractor named Jones; we were traced back to headquarters, we had a rat, something, and somehow Jones was shot outside of the dream. It was horrific. He lingered for hours in the dream, and we didn’t notice until all of a sudden the dream started to collapse-it was like it started to rot from the inside out. The projections went mad; they gutted my architect like a fish.”
“That’s not what happened,” Ariadne grinds out through gritted teeth, and he the smile he gives her is more patronizing than placating.
“Well, whatever happened, it’s over now,” Yusuf suggests. She bites back a sharp retort and settles for tugging on her sweater. There are a few officers left behind, grumbling to each other as they fold the chairs. The dead girls stare up at her from the folder Eames is holding; he flicks through the pages idly before closing the folder and handing it to Arthur. Arthur tucks it away, and Ariadne realizes: they’re leaving. Yusuf has tugged his coat on, adjusting the sleeves, and Eames is on his way out the door.
“Not to say that this wasn’t a lovely way to spend the afternoon,” Eames says, waving jauntily as he heads out, and suddenly he’s gone. She can hear the click of his boots on the concrete in the hall, listens as the heavy metal door at the end of the hall grates open and closed again. She holds these sounds to herself, proof that Eames is real. Yusuf gives her a halfhearted smile and ducks out, himself.
“I’d better get going, too,” Arthur says briskly, punctuating this statement with the click of the clasps on his briefcase. Buttoned up in his coat with the big black case resting against his leg, he could pass for a lawyer. The PASIV is inside. He has three warrants out for his arrest. He smiles at her with a short salute and he’s gone.
“Are you going to be okay?” Cobb asks her, and she nods. She doesn’t trust herself to speak, but shakes her head a little and nods again.
“Each of these cases is like a dream, itself. They leave me wondering what’s real and what’s not. But this one was more like a nightmare,” she manages. Her smile is weak.
“You mustn’t forget that you’re not dreaming, Ariadne,” he tells her seriously, pressing an impulsive and fatherly kiss to her forehead. “You can’t ever forget that you’re not dreaming, because you lose control when you forget that.” She nods and he stands there, watching her with an inscrutable expression on his face.
“You’d better go,” she tells him. She’s proud that her voice only wobbles a little. “James and Phillipa will be wondering where you are.” He nods slowly, and she listens to his ponderous footsteps going all the way down the hall before she steps out of the room. He’s gone.
And when, a week later, she is watching on the news as police describe the stroke of luck they’d had in finding Alice Seward’s body, she pushes her bishop over to watch it roll along the counter. It tips slowly, then faster and faster until the sound of metal ringing on marble fills her ears.