prison of memories
Title: Prison of Memories
Author: kissoffools / wakeyourheart
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne, friendship. Arthur/Eames, one-sided.
Rating: R
Summary: At age eight, Arthur meets Ariadne. And even though he has no interest in girls, he thinks he may have just found his soulmate.
Disclaimer: Nolan created the characters - I'm just having some fun.
Notes: For inception_kink - the prompt was an Arthur/Ariadne friendship fic based off a quote from "Mysterious Skin". Word Count: 4,304. An AU in which Arthur and Ariadne grew up together. Keep in mind that I was working off a quote from "Mysterious Skin", so there's a bit of a darker tone to this. No prostitution, though.
"If I wasn't queer we would have ended up having sloppy teenage sex and getting pregnant, contributing more fucked-up unwanted kids to society. But instead, she became my soulmate."
- Neil McCormick, Mysterious Skin
At age six, Arthur realizes he’s gay.
Okay, so it isn’t as simple as that. He doesn’t know the word gay - hell, he’s still having a hard time pronouncing the word spaghetti - and he doesn’t know what that will mean for the rest of his life. But he knows that he’d rather look at the men in his mama’s Sears catalog than the women, that he prefers their smooth, solid lines to the women’s soft curves. His friend Yusuf - not really his friend, but when you’re six and your world extends the length of your residential street in Ann Arbor, Michigan, anyone your age will do - likes to open the pages to the underwear section and giggle at the ladies in their bathing suits. Arthur doesn’t tell Yusuf, but his eyes are always drawn to the men in their boxer shorts instead.
Even at six, Arthur knows there are some things you should keep to yourself.
That year, Arthur meets Barry Wintermeyer.
Barry stands three whole fingers taller than Arthur does, and they sit kiddie-corner from one another at the desks in Miss Laura’s classroom. Barry’s hair is a fiery orange and always sticks straight up, as if he was electrocuted as a baby, and sometimes the other kids in their class laugh and point because his hair makes his ears look big.
Arthur never does.
Arthur can’t verbalize what it is about Barry that makes him so interesting. Barry is skinny and when he runs around in gym class, he always trips on his shoelaces. Barry isn’t anybody’s best friend. But he loaned Arthur an eraser once, when Arthur wrote his b the wrong way in spelling, and he didn’t even point out that Arthur’s d was wrong, too. Arthur thought that was really nice.
Every time the recess bell rings, all of Arthur’s first grade class runs outside to play the kissing game.
Arthur doesn’t remember who started it; it might have been Colin Jenkins sometime after Halloween, when he wanted to marry Shawna Reynolds by the jungle gym and she wouldn’t let him, but it didn’t matter anymore. All Arthur knows is that when that bell rings, and the girls take off into the schoolyard, it is the boys’ jobs to chase them. If a girl trips over her shoelace or falls to the ground, a boy has to kiss her. It doesn’t matter that the boys don’t really want to kiss the girls, and the girls don’t really want to run and get themselves all muddy. This is the game they always play, and Arthur doesn’t want to stand and watch in the corner until they’re brought back inside.
So he always chases after Barry.
Not that anyone knows that’s what he’s doing. Arthur pretty much just gallops around the yard, trying to stay far enough away from any girls so that if one falls, there’s another boy much closer to pounce. There’s no keeping score, not really, and no one cares that Arthur’s never kissed one of the girls in their class. So Arthur runs around with the rest, all the while keeping an eye on Barry and keeping his lips to himself.
Until the day that Barry falls.
It’s his shoelaces, Arthur realizes as Barry wipes at his dirt-covered shorts. Barry is the child that every teacher wishes would buy velcro. But Barry doesn’t cry, doesn’t even flinch, and Arthur thinks that’s pretty cool. And before Arthur thinks his plan all the way through, he sinks to his knees next to Barry, right there in the middle of all their classmates, and plants a kiss on Barry’s cheek.
It takes less than a second for Arthur to realize that this was a bad idea.
“Ew!” Barry wails, both hands flying up to scrub angrily at his cheek. “Arthur’s gross! Arthur gave me cooties!”
“Ew!” the voices of his classmates echo.
Barry climbs to his feet and scampers away, running full-tilt towards Miranda Lancaster. “Cooties, I’m gonna give you cooties!” he taunts.
And Arthur stands, dusts off his knees, and walks out of the yard. He waits by the door for eight minutes until the recess bell rings to let them all back inside.
Barry Wintermeyer moves away at the end of the school year. Arthur never tells anyone this, but he knows it’s all his fault.
***
At age eight, Arthur meets Ariadne.
She transfers in from Mr. Lewis’ third grade class, and ends up sitting in the desk next to Arthur. He can see knobby knees and translucent skin sticking out from beneath her wool skirt, and she spends the whole afternoon drawing rain clouds in her notebook. She doesn’t chatter a mile a minute, not like the other girls in his class, and Arthur starts to think she’s not so bad.
Ariadne lives two blocks away from Arthur, and they walk home the same way from school. He hangs back a little, shy, and watches her maneuver through a bizarre little skipping dance all the way home. Years later, he asks her about that day and she tells him that she was squishing ants. Arthur thinks maybe they were destined to meet.
Arthur learns almost right away that Ariadne is good at math. She memorizes the nine times tables faster than anyone else in the class, and she doesn’t even have to use the hand trick that Mrs. Braeden teaches them. She’s multiplying by twelve when the rest of the class is still on tens. Arthur still struggles on the eights.
“Math is the same in Mrs. Braeden’s class and Mr. Lewis’,” Ariadne tells him one afternoon. He never realizes that he didn’t ask.
“What?”
“In Mr. Lewis’ class, we were learning how to spell words in French. Here you guys read English books. But both classes do multiplication.” She shrugs and bites at the end of her pencil. “For one period of the day, I know what I’m doing.”
Arthur only wishes he was that lucky.
One Thursday, the boys start asking the girls out. Arthur doesn’t quite get it - they don’t go anywhere, and they don’t hold hands. They don’t act anything like the way his mama does when she brings home a new friend and they hide out in her bedroom and pretend to be quiet. Mostly the boys each pick a girl and they give her a flower, and then they sit beside each other at recess, and all is forgotten once they go inside for seventh period. Arthur thinks it’s kind of stupid, because girls are kind of gross, but he’s learned his lesson. So at recess, he corners Ariadne by the basketball net.
Her eyebrows rise skeptically as she looks at the daisy in his hand. “What’s that for?”
“Will you be my girlfriend?” Arthur asks, and he leans forward before she can give him an answer. He smacks a kiss on her lips, just like he’s seen Kyle Riener do to Holly Saintfield. When he pulls back, he stares at her expectantly.
“You’re gross,” Ariadne says, wiping off her lips.
“You’re grosser,” he tells her. If that is kissing girls, he wants nothing to do with it.
“I don’t want to be your girlfriend.”
“Yeah, well, I changed my mind!”
He throws the daisy onto the asphalt as she runs back to her friends. He can see the girls giggling as she whispers to them, most definitely telling them the story of what’s just happened. Girls are stupid, he thinks to himself, trying hard not to pout.
When they get inside after recess, he’s planning to build a fence out of rulers to keep her on her side of the desk. Instead, Ariadne offers him one of her fruit snacks.
Arthur takes a grape one.
***
At age eleven, Ariadne finds a dirty magazine under Arthur’s mattress.
He doesn’t know what she was doing, looking under there. She claims that her pen rolled down behind the headboard when she was working on her history homework, but all Arthur knows is that he leaves the room for two minutes to go pee, and returns to find his mama’s copy of Playgirl wide open on his bed.
Ariadne lies on her stomach in front of it, and raises her eyes to meet his when he freezes in the doorway. “He’s hairy.” She points.
“Don’t look at that!” Arthur snaps, tugging it away from her. He tosses it into his closet and slams the door.
“Don’t be a jerk,” she mutters, sitting up on her knees. “Do you like the blond ones or the ones with brown hair?”
He can feel himself turning red. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ariadne pauses for a second to consider. “I like the blond ones.”
And it’s the fact that she makes it so not a big deal that leads Arthur to realize that it is. It’s a big deal because it’s the first time someone’s discovered his deepest secret, one he’s worked at for years to keep hidden… and she’s treating it as fact. She doesn’t question him, not once, and by the expression on her face, you’d think she was talking about the animals at the zoo.
Finally, Arthur admits, “I like the blond ones too.” His voice is barely a whisper.
When Ariadne takes off down the hall, he doesn’t expect her to return with a sewing needle.
“Hold out your hand,” she orders, and he stares at her in disbelief. “Give me your hand, moron!”
When he does as she asks, it happens fast - a quick jab, a hiss from her own lips, and then she’s pressing their thumbs together. Two pinpricks of blood, pressed together by two people, mingling and mixing into one completely new entity.
“There,” she says finally, pulling away and wiping her hand on a tissue. “Now we can never tattle on each other. You keep my secrets, and I keep yours.”
Arthur feels the prick of that needle for days afterwards, but not once does he remember it as painful.
***
At age fourteen, Ariadne starts dating Dominic Cobb.
It isn’t that Arthur doesn’t like the guy; it’s that he doesn’t even know the guy. Dominic - “Dom,” Ariadne always insists, “call him Dom,” - is a football player, a senior turning eighteen in the fall, and Arthur never even gets to meet the guy before he starts sticking his tongue down Ariadne’s throat. The first time Arthur ever even sees Dom is when he’s at Ariadne’s locker, one arm draped across the door like some sort of cocky Adonis, and it sort of pisses off Arthur on principle.
He doesn’t have any delusions that Ariadne belongs to him. But he doesn’t really want her to belong to anyone else, either.
Arthur sees them everywhere - in the cafeteria, out on the hill before school, in his Toyota on the way home. It doesn’t seem to matter that Dominic is three whole grades ahead of her and that they can’t possibly have anything in common. He lights up Ariadne’s face in a totally new way - Arthur notices this from his place on the sidelines. And it sucks, he thinks, knowing that someone as temporary as Dom can have this effect on her.
Arthur blows up at Ariadne when he catches her with Dom in the backseat of Dom’s car, her blouse unbuttoned to her navel and her skirt pushed up over her hips.
“What the hell is your problem?” she spits, chasing Arthur down the street as he storms off towards his own house. Her stockings are twisted.
“I thought we were going to hang out,” Arthur says, back still turned, fighting to keep his voice under control. “I didn’t expect to show up and find you fucking that jock.”
“We weren’t fucking!” she exclaims, and he can feel her blush even if he can’t see it. “We were making love.”
This makes Arthur turn around. The girl in front of him looks so small, so innocent - he’s seeing her on her first day in Mrs. Braeden’s class all over again. And that makes him want to double back and punch Dominic Cobb in the face for thinking she’d be ready for something like this.
Instead, he scoffs and turns back around. “Nobody makes love. Not these days.”
He gets four steps away when she calls after him, “What, are you jealous? I thought you were a big old qu-”
He’s in front of her before she can finish the word, clasping a hand over her mouth. “God damn it, Ariadne, the whole world doesn’t have to know,” he hisses, and he waits to put down his hand until he’s sure she won’t keep yelling.
“I’m sorry you’re bitter and alone, but don’t take that out on me,” she finally replies, her tone biting.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like hell I don’t. I’m the only one who knows you at all.”
Arthur can see realization dawn on her, can see the way her eyes light up as if she’s cracked some major code. That’s the thing about Ariadne - she always understands, even when Arthur can’t find the words to explain.
“You know,” she says, and this time her tone is a little hesitant as she idly twists the hem of her skirt between her fingers, “Dom’s great, and he’s fun… but he’s nothing compared to the love of my life.”
One private smile and she’s heading back to the Toyota. Arthur watches her tug open the door, hears her laugh as Dominic pulls her inside. He turns and heads back towards his house; the last thing he wants is to watch him fuck her.
Arthur doesn’t believe in anything but fucking, not really - he doesn’t think anything else exists. He’s never found the proof, not in his own life. But if anyone deserves to make love, it’s Ariadne.
***
At age sixteen, Arthur falls for Eames.
Ariadne drags Arthur to a play - The Taming of the Shrew, she tells him, but it’s not like he can understand anything they’re saying anyway. Fuck Shakespeare. But her cousin Lauren is playing Katherina, and her mom got them all tickets. “And,” - he watches her huff around her bedroom - “I am absolutely not going through this torture alone.”
“Look at that jackass,” Arthur whispers to her from the safety of their back-orchestra seats. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in tights.”
“So you don’t plan on a career as a tranny?”
“Fuck you,” he hisses, punching her in the shoulder. He turns his attention back to the play, watching Ariadne’s cousin move across the stage. “I hate actors.”
Then the actor playing Gremio steps out onto the stage, and Arthur almost falls out of his seat.
Arthur scrabbles for the playbill the second the lights go up at intermission. The guy playing Gremio has a fair bit of work under his belt, mostly local theatre, and he goes to a high school across town. A senior - he’s one whole year older than Arthur. Arthur stares at the tiny black-and-white photo beside his bio. Fuck. His shoulder is tattooed.
Ariadne catches him staring halfway through the second act. “Close your mouth, you can’t suck his dick from here,” she says softly. The tips of Arthur’s ears blush pink.
After the play is over, Ariadne’s parents lead them down to the basement of the theatre. There’s a small reception set up, with cookies and cups of juice set out carefully on a white tablecloth, and Arthur would crack some joke about it to Ariadne if he wasn’t so busy scanning the crowd. Lauren finds them soon enough, and there are hugs and congratulations all around, and Arthur kind of wants to gag from the entire thing.
That is, until Lauren snags the sleeve of someone walking by.
“Eames! This is my family - my aunt and uncle, my cousin, and her friend,” Lauren says with a warm smile.
“Hello there,” Eames says warmly, and Arthur feels like he’s been kicked in the stomach. Eames’ accent isn’t an act solely for the play.
Eames is sweaty from his costume and enthusiastic from a successful performance, and Arthur can feel both those things when he shakes Eames’ hand. “Arthur,” he introduces himself, practically tripping over his tongue.
“Thanks for coming out to see the show,” says Eames.
“Wouldn’t miss it - I love theatre.” Arthur purposefully ignores Ariadne’s incredulous stare.
“Really?” Eames asks, one hand reaching up to scratch the back of his neck. His grey t-shirt rides up just a little bit, and shit, Arthur can see a patch of skin on his hip. “Do you act?”
“I’d like to,” Arthur lies, and he hears a snort of derision from his right. He makes a mental note to kick Ariadne later.
“Awesome.” Eames’ face breaks out into a wide grin, and he scrabbles for his wallet. “Here’s my card - email me your resume. Maybe I can keep an eye out for auditions for you.”
Eames is gone before Arthur can even say a proper thank-you, schmoozing with an older couple by the cookies. Arthur stares at the card in his hand. It’s a foreign combination of letters and numbers and symbols, and Arthur wouldn’t know what to do with it in his wildest dreams.
Ariadne elbows him in the side. “You’re a fucking moron. Should’ve just blown him in the bathroom stall when you had a chance.”
Arthur doesn’t look up from Eames’ number.
“Shut up.”
***
At age eighteen, Arthur graduates high school.
He isn’t very excited about it, if he’s being honest. Oh, he’s looking forward to being away from all the jocks and preps and various other assholes that he’s been forced to spend thirteen years of his life with, that’s for sure. But after high school comes college - or, if one has opted out of college like he has, after high school comes real life. And Arthur isn’t sure he’s ready for that yet.
Arthur goes to convocation like a good boy, wears the cap and gown and poses for pictures just like he’s supposed to. It’s more for his mama’s benefit than his own, though. “My son!” she exclaims, “The graduate!” He smells the menthol on her breath when she hugs him.
Arthur and Ariadne skip out on the post-ceremony parties. Instead, they climb a grassy knoll beside a farmer’s field.
The stars twinkle overhead, lights acting as guides to help lost souls home, and Arthur can’t help but think that he couldn’t find his way with those if he tried.
“So,” Ariadne says, a slow exhale somewhere above his head, “what next?”
“Fuck if I know,” he murmurs.
They lie on their backs, heads side by side and legs sprawled out in opposite directions. The grass scratches his calves and he does his best to ignore it. Ariadne pinches an unlit joint between her thumb and finger. She’s taken to carrying it around, always that same damn joint, and holding it when no one’s looking. She’ll never light it, and she won’t let Arthur smoke it either - her father’s a policeman. “He’d smell it in a heartbeat,” she says, “and then I’d never be allowed to see you again. I don’t want that.”
Arthur thinks she holds it because she likes holding the possibility of danger. He wonders if that’s why she hangs around with him, too.
“Are you still talking to Eames?”
Arthur shrugs, his jacket rustling the grass. “Every once in awhile. He hasn’t emailed me back in a month.”
“That sucks.” He notices that she doesn’t say “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well.” Arthur sighs. “That’s life.”
She’s silent for a second, and he knows even without looking that she’s rubbing at the scar on her wrist. One date, one night, gone in the morning. “I know.”
“Think we’ll ever get out of here?” Arthur has always been good at changing the subject.
“Out of Ann Arbor?” Ariadne asks, and he grunts the affirmative. “I sure as hell am. I’m not coming back after college. I’m going to get an apartment, a job, a whole new life. Somewhere a million miles away.”
He hears her roll over, and he follows suit. They lie on their bellies, heads propped up on arms, foreheads almost touching. Arthur likes the world best like this - quiet and still, the two of them against everyone else.
“And when I do,” Ariadne tells him, an impish smile on her lips, “I’m dragging you with me whether you like it or not. I’m not letting you waste away in this stupid town.”
Two months later, Ariadne hugs Arthur goodbye and gets on a plane headed for France. The next day, Arthur packs up his car.
He isn’t sure where he’s headed yet.
***
At age twenty-two, Arthur falls into dream extraction.
This isn’t the plan for his life. He doesn’t really have a plan for his life, and he knows that’s pathetic. He spends awhile as a drifter, traveling the country in his beat-up Camaro - the one good thing his dad’s ever done for him, he never thinks. He’s somewhere in New Orleans, looking worse for the wear, when he gets into a conversation with a stranger at a bar.
When he wakes up, his entire life has changed.
Arthur starts out by doing all his jobs alone. He researches, builds, diverts, extracts - he’s a one-man operation, because he’s never found anyone he can trust as well as himself. The thing is, when it comes to dream extraction, Arthur is good. He’s never been good before.
Sure, sometimes he makes mistakes. Sometimes the mark’s subconscious will catch onto him, will chase him down until he jolts awake, gasping from a gunshot wound. He teaches himself to build mazes, to design levels so complex that projections will lose themselves while he emerges victorious. Paradoxes.
Soon he finds himself making money. His clients are all rich, powerful businessmen with a taste for fine brandy and a loose hand on their wallets. These men dole out hundreds in a way Arthur will never understand. He can’t complain, though, because suddenly he’s eating in five-star restaurants, sleeping on thousand-thread-count hotel sheets, and wearing clothes by Gucci and Prada. It’s nothing he’s ever thought he’d need, and it soon becomes everything he loves.
Once Arthur thinks he sees Eames in a hotel bar in Manhattan - a flash of a smile and the dip of an accent, and Arthur is practically climbing over booths to check. Instead he finds a faceless Brit chatting up a brunette girl, one who’s all sharp elbows, and when he returns to his seat, he orders another whiskey. A double.
Sometimes Arthur gets homesick enough to consider going home. But then he remembers that home isn’t Ann Arbor; it’s a little girl who squashes ants on the sidewalk and calls him out on his bullshit.
He doesn’t even know if she’s still in Paris.
***
At age twenty-five, Arthur has to work his first job with a partner.
It’s a more complex assignment than he’s used to - a mark that’s dealt with subconscious security in the past. It requires a dream within a dream; it requires him to focus so much on the action that he doesn’t have the time to build properly.
At first, he’s worried that she won’t come. She’s moved back stateside again, and she lives with two friends somewhere in northern California. She’s studying architecture, she’s dating, she’s succeeding - she’s doing everything Arthur ever imagined she would do. And, as far as he can tell, she’s doing it brilliantly.
But he calls, and Ariadne packs up and flies to Paris.
Neither of them has ever put much stock in hugs - words work just as well as actions, they’ve always said. But she launches herself at him the moment he picks her up at the airport, and he realizes that’s all complete bullshit.
“I missed you,” she tells him on the drive to the hotel, and he doesn’t know how to say that he missed her, too. So instead he reaches across the seat and squeezes her hand.
She picks up dreaming rather easily, but Arthur isn’t surprised. Ariadne’s always been able to understand where his mind was going, often sooner than he himself could. Soon she’s building bridges, buildings, entire cities in the blink of an eye, and Arthur can barely keep up with her.
They wake from a dream, gasping. She’s laughing and he’s working to catch his breath.
“Sorry,” she says, and he doesn’t think he’s even seen such genuine happiness on her face. “Did I build and change that maze too fast for you?”
“You think?”
She laughs. “You know I’m smarter than you are. Why’d you even hire me?”
“Because I knew you’d be the best.”
Ariadne flushes at the compliment and pushes herself up off the hotel bed. Moving towards the suite’s kitchen, she fishes around in the refrigerator. “Do we have any cream for coffee?”
“I don’t think so,” Arthur replies. “I think we’re out.”
Arthur paws in his pocket for his totem almost on instinct. Ariadne almost never checks hers - he can’t decide if her faith is impressive or incredibly stupid. He rolls the dice across the bed, breathing a sigh of relief when it lands on five. She glances over her shoulder at him and smiles before busying herself with her coffee.
He hired her because he doesn’t know how to make a new life for himself without fitting her into it.
end.
Author: kissoffools / wakeyourheart
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne, friendship. Arthur/Eames, one-sided.
Rating: R
Summary: At age eight, Arthur meets Ariadne. And even though he has no interest in girls, he thinks he may have just found his soulmate.
Disclaimer: Nolan created the characters - I'm just having some fun.
Notes: For inception_kink - the prompt was an Arthur/Ariadne friendship fic based off a quote from "Mysterious Skin". Word Count: 4,304. An AU in which Arthur and Ariadne grew up together. Keep in mind that I was working off a quote from "Mysterious Skin", so there's a bit of a darker tone to this. No prostitution, though.
"If I wasn't queer we would have ended up having sloppy teenage sex and getting pregnant, contributing more fucked-up unwanted kids to society. But instead, she became my soulmate."
- Neil McCormick, Mysterious Skin
At age six, Arthur realizes he’s gay.
Okay, so it isn’t as simple as that. He doesn’t know the word gay - hell, he’s still having a hard time pronouncing the word spaghetti - and he doesn’t know what that will mean for the rest of his life. But he knows that he’d rather look at the men in his mama’s Sears catalog than the women, that he prefers their smooth, solid lines to the women’s soft curves. His friend Yusuf - not really his friend, but when you’re six and your world extends the length of your residential street in Ann Arbor, Michigan, anyone your age will do - likes to open the pages to the underwear section and giggle at the ladies in their bathing suits. Arthur doesn’t tell Yusuf, but his eyes are always drawn to the men in their boxer shorts instead.
Even at six, Arthur knows there are some things you should keep to yourself.
That year, Arthur meets Barry Wintermeyer.
Barry stands three whole fingers taller than Arthur does, and they sit kiddie-corner from one another at the desks in Miss Laura’s classroom. Barry’s hair is a fiery orange and always sticks straight up, as if he was electrocuted as a baby, and sometimes the other kids in their class laugh and point because his hair makes his ears look big.
Arthur never does.
Arthur can’t verbalize what it is about Barry that makes him so interesting. Barry is skinny and when he runs around in gym class, he always trips on his shoelaces. Barry isn’t anybody’s best friend. But he loaned Arthur an eraser once, when Arthur wrote his b the wrong way in spelling, and he didn’t even point out that Arthur’s d was wrong, too. Arthur thought that was really nice.
Every time the recess bell rings, all of Arthur’s first grade class runs outside to play the kissing game.
Arthur doesn’t remember who started it; it might have been Colin Jenkins sometime after Halloween, when he wanted to marry Shawna Reynolds by the jungle gym and she wouldn’t let him, but it didn’t matter anymore. All Arthur knows is that when that bell rings, and the girls take off into the schoolyard, it is the boys’ jobs to chase them. If a girl trips over her shoelace or falls to the ground, a boy has to kiss her. It doesn’t matter that the boys don’t really want to kiss the girls, and the girls don’t really want to run and get themselves all muddy. This is the game they always play, and Arthur doesn’t want to stand and watch in the corner until they’re brought back inside.
So he always chases after Barry.
Not that anyone knows that’s what he’s doing. Arthur pretty much just gallops around the yard, trying to stay far enough away from any girls so that if one falls, there’s another boy much closer to pounce. There’s no keeping score, not really, and no one cares that Arthur’s never kissed one of the girls in their class. So Arthur runs around with the rest, all the while keeping an eye on Barry and keeping his lips to himself.
Until the day that Barry falls.
It’s his shoelaces, Arthur realizes as Barry wipes at his dirt-covered shorts. Barry is the child that every teacher wishes would buy velcro. But Barry doesn’t cry, doesn’t even flinch, and Arthur thinks that’s pretty cool. And before Arthur thinks his plan all the way through, he sinks to his knees next to Barry, right there in the middle of all their classmates, and plants a kiss on Barry’s cheek.
It takes less than a second for Arthur to realize that this was a bad idea.
“Ew!” Barry wails, both hands flying up to scrub angrily at his cheek. “Arthur’s gross! Arthur gave me cooties!”
“Ew!” the voices of his classmates echo.
Barry climbs to his feet and scampers away, running full-tilt towards Miranda Lancaster. “Cooties, I’m gonna give you cooties!” he taunts.
And Arthur stands, dusts off his knees, and walks out of the yard. He waits by the door for eight minutes until the recess bell rings to let them all back inside.
Barry Wintermeyer moves away at the end of the school year. Arthur never tells anyone this, but he knows it’s all his fault.
***
At age eight, Arthur meets Ariadne.
She transfers in from Mr. Lewis’ third grade class, and ends up sitting in the desk next to Arthur. He can see knobby knees and translucent skin sticking out from beneath her wool skirt, and she spends the whole afternoon drawing rain clouds in her notebook. She doesn’t chatter a mile a minute, not like the other girls in his class, and Arthur starts to think she’s not so bad.
Ariadne lives two blocks away from Arthur, and they walk home the same way from school. He hangs back a little, shy, and watches her maneuver through a bizarre little skipping dance all the way home. Years later, he asks her about that day and she tells him that she was squishing ants. Arthur thinks maybe they were destined to meet.
Arthur learns almost right away that Ariadne is good at math. She memorizes the nine times tables faster than anyone else in the class, and she doesn’t even have to use the hand trick that Mrs. Braeden teaches them. She’s multiplying by twelve when the rest of the class is still on tens. Arthur still struggles on the eights.
“Math is the same in Mrs. Braeden’s class and Mr. Lewis’,” Ariadne tells him one afternoon. He never realizes that he didn’t ask.
“What?”
“In Mr. Lewis’ class, we were learning how to spell words in French. Here you guys read English books. But both classes do multiplication.” She shrugs and bites at the end of her pencil. “For one period of the day, I know what I’m doing.”
Arthur only wishes he was that lucky.
One Thursday, the boys start asking the girls out. Arthur doesn’t quite get it - they don’t go anywhere, and they don’t hold hands. They don’t act anything like the way his mama does when she brings home a new friend and they hide out in her bedroom and pretend to be quiet. Mostly the boys each pick a girl and they give her a flower, and then they sit beside each other at recess, and all is forgotten once they go inside for seventh period. Arthur thinks it’s kind of stupid, because girls are kind of gross, but he’s learned his lesson. So at recess, he corners Ariadne by the basketball net.
Her eyebrows rise skeptically as she looks at the daisy in his hand. “What’s that for?”
“Will you be my girlfriend?” Arthur asks, and he leans forward before she can give him an answer. He smacks a kiss on her lips, just like he’s seen Kyle Riener do to Holly Saintfield. When he pulls back, he stares at her expectantly.
“You’re gross,” Ariadne says, wiping off her lips.
“You’re grosser,” he tells her. If that is kissing girls, he wants nothing to do with it.
“I don’t want to be your girlfriend.”
“Yeah, well, I changed my mind!”
He throws the daisy onto the asphalt as she runs back to her friends. He can see the girls giggling as she whispers to them, most definitely telling them the story of what’s just happened. Girls are stupid, he thinks to himself, trying hard not to pout.
When they get inside after recess, he’s planning to build a fence out of rulers to keep her on her side of the desk. Instead, Ariadne offers him one of her fruit snacks.
Arthur takes a grape one.
***
At age eleven, Ariadne finds a dirty magazine under Arthur’s mattress.
He doesn’t know what she was doing, looking under there. She claims that her pen rolled down behind the headboard when she was working on her history homework, but all Arthur knows is that he leaves the room for two minutes to go pee, and returns to find his mama’s copy of Playgirl wide open on his bed.
Ariadne lies on her stomach in front of it, and raises her eyes to meet his when he freezes in the doorway. “He’s hairy.” She points.
“Don’t look at that!” Arthur snaps, tugging it away from her. He tosses it into his closet and slams the door.
“Don’t be a jerk,” she mutters, sitting up on her knees. “Do you like the blond ones or the ones with brown hair?”
He can feel himself turning red. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ariadne pauses for a second to consider. “I like the blond ones.”
And it’s the fact that she makes it so not a big deal that leads Arthur to realize that it is. It’s a big deal because it’s the first time someone’s discovered his deepest secret, one he’s worked at for years to keep hidden… and she’s treating it as fact. She doesn’t question him, not once, and by the expression on her face, you’d think she was talking about the animals at the zoo.
Finally, Arthur admits, “I like the blond ones too.” His voice is barely a whisper.
When Ariadne takes off down the hall, he doesn’t expect her to return with a sewing needle.
“Hold out your hand,” she orders, and he stares at her in disbelief. “Give me your hand, moron!”
When he does as she asks, it happens fast - a quick jab, a hiss from her own lips, and then she’s pressing their thumbs together. Two pinpricks of blood, pressed together by two people, mingling and mixing into one completely new entity.
“There,” she says finally, pulling away and wiping her hand on a tissue. “Now we can never tattle on each other. You keep my secrets, and I keep yours.”
Arthur feels the prick of that needle for days afterwards, but not once does he remember it as painful.
***
At age fourteen, Ariadne starts dating Dominic Cobb.
It isn’t that Arthur doesn’t like the guy; it’s that he doesn’t even know the guy. Dominic - “Dom,” Ariadne always insists, “call him Dom,” - is a football player, a senior turning eighteen in the fall, and Arthur never even gets to meet the guy before he starts sticking his tongue down Ariadne’s throat. The first time Arthur ever even sees Dom is when he’s at Ariadne’s locker, one arm draped across the door like some sort of cocky Adonis, and it sort of pisses off Arthur on principle.
He doesn’t have any delusions that Ariadne belongs to him. But he doesn’t really want her to belong to anyone else, either.
Arthur sees them everywhere - in the cafeteria, out on the hill before school, in his Toyota on the way home. It doesn’t seem to matter that Dominic is three whole grades ahead of her and that they can’t possibly have anything in common. He lights up Ariadne’s face in a totally new way - Arthur notices this from his place on the sidelines. And it sucks, he thinks, knowing that someone as temporary as Dom can have this effect on her.
Arthur blows up at Ariadne when he catches her with Dom in the backseat of Dom’s car, her blouse unbuttoned to her navel and her skirt pushed up over her hips.
“What the hell is your problem?” she spits, chasing Arthur down the street as he storms off towards his own house. Her stockings are twisted.
“I thought we were going to hang out,” Arthur says, back still turned, fighting to keep his voice under control. “I didn’t expect to show up and find you fucking that jock.”
“We weren’t fucking!” she exclaims, and he can feel her blush even if he can’t see it. “We were making love.”
This makes Arthur turn around. The girl in front of him looks so small, so innocent - he’s seeing her on her first day in Mrs. Braeden’s class all over again. And that makes him want to double back and punch Dominic Cobb in the face for thinking she’d be ready for something like this.
Instead, he scoffs and turns back around. “Nobody makes love. Not these days.”
He gets four steps away when she calls after him, “What, are you jealous? I thought you were a big old qu-”
He’s in front of her before she can finish the word, clasping a hand over her mouth. “God damn it, Ariadne, the whole world doesn’t have to know,” he hisses, and he waits to put down his hand until he’s sure she won’t keep yelling.
“I’m sorry you’re bitter and alone, but don’t take that out on me,” she finally replies, her tone biting.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like hell I don’t. I’m the only one who knows you at all.”
Arthur can see realization dawn on her, can see the way her eyes light up as if she’s cracked some major code. That’s the thing about Ariadne - she always understands, even when Arthur can’t find the words to explain.
“You know,” she says, and this time her tone is a little hesitant as she idly twists the hem of her skirt between her fingers, “Dom’s great, and he’s fun… but he’s nothing compared to the love of my life.”
One private smile and she’s heading back to the Toyota. Arthur watches her tug open the door, hears her laugh as Dominic pulls her inside. He turns and heads back towards his house; the last thing he wants is to watch him fuck her.
Arthur doesn’t believe in anything but fucking, not really - he doesn’t think anything else exists. He’s never found the proof, not in his own life. But if anyone deserves to make love, it’s Ariadne.
***
At age sixteen, Arthur falls for Eames.
Ariadne drags Arthur to a play - The Taming of the Shrew, she tells him, but it’s not like he can understand anything they’re saying anyway. Fuck Shakespeare. But her cousin Lauren is playing Katherina, and her mom got them all tickets. “And,” - he watches her huff around her bedroom - “I am absolutely not going through this torture alone.”
“Look at that jackass,” Arthur whispers to her from the safety of their back-orchestra seats. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in tights.”
“So you don’t plan on a career as a tranny?”
“Fuck you,” he hisses, punching her in the shoulder. He turns his attention back to the play, watching Ariadne’s cousin move across the stage. “I hate actors.”
Then the actor playing Gremio steps out onto the stage, and Arthur almost falls out of his seat.
Arthur scrabbles for the playbill the second the lights go up at intermission. The guy playing Gremio has a fair bit of work under his belt, mostly local theatre, and he goes to a high school across town. A senior - he’s one whole year older than Arthur. Arthur stares at the tiny black-and-white photo beside his bio. Fuck. His shoulder is tattooed.
Ariadne catches him staring halfway through the second act. “Close your mouth, you can’t suck his dick from here,” she says softly. The tips of Arthur’s ears blush pink.
After the play is over, Ariadne’s parents lead them down to the basement of the theatre. There’s a small reception set up, with cookies and cups of juice set out carefully on a white tablecloth, and Arthur would crack some joke about it to Ariadne if he wasn’t so busy scanning the crowd. Lauren finds them soon enough, and there are hugs and congratulations all around, and Arthur kind of wants to gag from the entire thing.
That is, until Lauren snags the sleeve of someone walking by.
“Eames! This is my family - my aunt and uncle, my cousin, and her friend,” Lauren says with a warm smile.
“Hello there,” Eames says warmly, and Arthur feels like he’s been kicked in the stomach. Eames’ accent isn’t an act solely for the play.
Eames is sweaty from his costume and enthusiastic from a successful performance, and Arthur can feel both those things when he shakes Eames’ hand. “Arthur,” he introduces himself, practically tripping over his tongue.
“Thanks for coming out to see the show,” says Eames.
“Wouldn’t miss it - I love theatre.” Arthur purposefully ignores Ariadne’s incredulous stare.
“Really?” Eames asks, one hand reaching up to scratch the back of his neck. His grey t-shirt rides up just a little bit, and shit, Arthur can see a patch of skin on his hip. “Do you act?”
“I’d like to,” Arthur lies, and he hears a snort of derision from his right. He makes a mental note to kick Ariadne later.
“Awesome.” Eames’ face breaks out into a wide grin, and he scrabbles for his wallet. “Here’s my card - email me your resume. Maybe I can keep an eye out for auditions for you.”
Eames is gone before Arthur can even say a proper thank-you, schmoozing with an older couple by the cookies. Arthur stares at the card in his hand. It’s a foreign combination of letters and numbers and symbols, and Arthur wouldn’t know what to do with it in his wildest dreams.
Ariadne elbows him in the side. “You’re a fucking moron. Should’ve just blown him in the bathroom stall when you had a chance.”
Arthur doesn’t look up from Eames’ number.
“Shut up.”
***
At age eighteen, Arthur graduates high school.
He isn’t very excited about it, if he’s being honest. Oh, he’s looking forward to being away from all the jocks and preps and various other assholes that he’s been forced to spend thirteen years of his life with, that’s for sure. But after high school comes college - or, if one has opted out of college like he has, after high school comes real life. And Arthur isn’t sure he’s ready for that yet.
Arthur goes to convocation like a good boy, wears the cap and gown and poses for pictures just like he’s supposed to. It’s more for his mama’s benefit than his own, though. “My son!” she exclaims, “The graduate!” He smells the menthol on her breath when she hugs him.
Arthur and Ariadne skip out on the post-ceremony parties. Instead, they climb a grassy knoll beside a farmer’s field.
The stars twinkle overhead, lights acting as guides to help lost souls home, and Arthur can’t help but think that he couldn’t find his way with those if he tried.
“So,” Ariadne says, a slow exhale somewhere above his head, “what next?”
“Fuck if I know,” he murmurs.
They lie on their backs, heads side by side and legs sprawled out in opposite directions. The grass scratches his calves and he does his best to ignore it. Ariadne pinches an unlit joint between her thumb and finger. She’s taken to carrying it around, always that same damn joint, and holding it when no one’s looking. She’ll never light it, and she won’t let Arthur smoke it either - her father’s a policeman. “He’d smell it in a heartbeat,” she says, “and then I’d never be allowed to see you again. I don’t want that.”
Arthur thinks she holds it because she likes holding the possibility of danger. He wonders if that’s why she hangs around with him, too.
“Are you still talking to Eames?”
Arthur shrugs, his jacket rustling the grass. “Every once in awhile. He hasn’t emailed me back in a month.”
“That sucks.” He notices that she doesn’t say “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well.” Arthur sighs. “That’s life.”
She’s silent for a second, and he knows even without looking that she’s rubbing at the scar on her wrist. One date, one night, gone in the morning. “I know.”
“Think we’ll ever get out of here?” Arthur has always been good at changing the subject.
“Out of Ann Arbor?” Ariadne asks, and he grunts the affirmative. “I sure as hell am. I’m not coming back after college. I’m going to get an apartment, a job, a whole new life. Somewhere a million miles away.”
He hears her roll over, and he follows suit. They lie on their bellies, heads propped up on arms, foreheads almost touching. Arthur likes the world best like this - quiet and still, the two of them against everyone else.
“And when I do,” Ariadne tells him, an impish smile on her lips, “I’m dragging you with me whether you like it or not. I’m not letting you waste away in this stupid town.”
Two months later, Ariadne hugs Arthur goodbye and gets on a plane headed for France. The next day, Arthur packs up his car.
He isn’t sure where he’s headed yet.
***
At age twenty-two, Arthur falls into dream extraction.
This isn’t the plan for his life. He doesn’t really have a plan for his life, and he knows that’s pathetic. He spends awhile as a drifter, traveling the country in his beat-up Camaro - the one good thing his dad’s ever done for him, he never thinks. He’s somewhere in New Orleans, looking worse for the wear, when he gets into a conversation with a stranger at a bar.
When he wakes up, his entire life has changed.
Arthur starts out by doing all his jobs alone. He researches, builds, diverts, extracts - he’s a one-man operation, because he’s never found anyone he can trust as well as himself. The thing is, when it comes to dream extraction, Arthur is good. He’s never been good before.
Sure, sometimes he makes mistakes. Sometimes the mark’s subconscious will catch onto him, will chase him down until he jolts awake, gasping from a gunshot wound. He teaches himself to build mazes, to design levels so complex that projections will lose themselves while he emerges victorious. Paradoxes.
Soon he finds himself making money. His clients are all rich, powerful businessmen with a taste for fine brandy and a loose hand on their wallets. These men dole out hundreds in a way Arthur will never understand. He can’t complain, though, because suddenly he’s eating in five-star restaurants, sleeping on thousand-thread-count hotel sheets, and wearing clothes by Gucci and Prada. It’s nothing he’s ever thought he’d need, and it soon becomes everything he loves.
Once Arthur thinks he sees Eames in a hotel bar in Manhattan - a flash of a smile and the dip of an accent, and Arthur is practically climbing over booths to check. Instead he finds a faceless Brit chatting up a brunette girl, one who’s all sharp elbows, and when he returns to his seat, he orders another whiskey. A double.
Sometimes Arthur gets homesick enough to consider going home. But then he remembers that home isn’t Ann Arbor; it’s a little girl who squashes ants on the sidewalk and calls him out on his bullshit.
He doesn’t even know if she’s still in Paris.
***
At age twenty-five, Arthur has to work his first job with a partner.
It’s a more complex assignment than he’s used to - a mark that’s dealt with subconscious security in the past. It requires a dream within a dream; it requires him to focus so much on the action that he doesn’t have the time to build properly.
At first, he’s worried that she won’t come. She’s moved back stateside again, and she lives with two friends somewhere in northern California. She’s studying architecture, she’s dating, she’s succeeding - she’s doing everything Arthur ever imagined she would do. And, as far as he can tell, she’s doing it brilliantly.
But he calls, and Ariadne packs up and flies to Paris.
Neither of them has ever put much stock in hugs - words work just as well as actions, they’ve always said. But she launches herself at him the moment he picks her up at the airport, and he realizes that’s all complete bullshit.
“I missed you,” she tells him on the drive to the hotel, and he doesn’t know how to say that he missed her, too. So instead he reaches across the seat and squeezes her hand.
She picks up dreaming rather easily, but Arthur isn’t surprised. Ariadne’s always been able to understand where his mind was going, often sooner than he himself could. Soon she’s building bridges, buildings, entire cities in the blink of an eye, and Arthur can barely keep up with her.
They wake from a dream, gasping. She’s laughing and he’s working to catch his breath.
“Sorry,” she says, and he doesn’t think he’s even seen such genuine happiness on her face. “Did I build and change that maze too fast for you?”
“You think?”
She laughs. “You know I’m smarter than you are. Why’d you even hire me?”
“Because I knew you’d be the best.”
Ariadne flushes at the compliment and pushes herself up off the hotel bed. Moving towards the suite’s kitchen, she fishes around in the refrigerator. “Do we have any cream for coffee?”
“I don’t think so,” Arthur replies. “I think we’re out.”
Arthur paws in his pocket for his totem almost on instinct. Ariadne almost never checks hers - he can’t decide if her faith is impressive or incredibly stupid. He rolls the dice across the bed, breathing a sigh of relief when it lands on five. She glances over her shoulder at him and smiles before busying herself with her coffee.
He hired her because he doesn’t know how to make a new life for himself without fitting her into it.
end.