(Inception/Narnia) Always Halfway to Somewhere Pt. 1 for xover_exchange
Title: Always Halfway to Somewhere
Author: hobbit_eyes
Fandoms: Inception/Narnia
Characters Ariadne, Arthur, Eames, Yusuf, Miles; Susan
Pairings: Slight Arthur/Ariadne
Rating: PG for one use of language, mild violence
Wordcount: ~16,000
Spoilers: All of Inception, up to ‘The Last Battle’ in Narnia.
Warnings: Occasional creepiness.
Disclaimer: Inception and Narnia belong to their respective creators
A/N: This story ran away with me slightly, sorry! Major thanks to aurilly for stepping in to beta this monster at the last minute while I skipped off to Ireland!
Summary: Ariadne’s professor, Dr Pevensie, is put in contact with the team via Miles for a very unusual job, relating to the loss of her family. When her projections are somewhat... different from what was expected, the job suddenly gets a lot more complicated, and Ariadne is forced to consider what is most important to her.
Always Halfway to Somewhere
Ariadne did not like the feeling of being in trouble. Being in trouble meant that she’d messed up somewhere. While performing an extraction, of course, this could be dangerous for everyone. But it seemed that standing outside her professor’s door, waiting to be shouted at, could instigate just the same levels of burny dread in the pit of her stomach. Her face felt hot, her fists were balled, and she was clenching her teeth, but she held her head high and knocked.
“Yes?”
Ariadne took a quiet breath and opened the door. “You wanted to see me, Dr Pevensie?”
Dr Pevensie was stood leaning over her desk, holding two separate piles of papers in each hand with another pile on the desk, evidently caught in the middle of her looking for or reorganizing something. When she saw Ariadne, though, she just placed the piles back on the desk neatly and sat down again, tucking her long brown hair behind her ears and smiling.
“Yes! Ariadne, come in. Sit down.”
Ariadne slid into the chair opposite Dr Pevensie’s desk. Like the rest of her study, her desk appeared to be an example of organized chaos - there was barely any surface visible, but all the stacks of papers and files and books were perfectly neat. Ariadne’s attention was caught by a small snowglobe in one corner, with what appeared to be a miniature forest inside.
“Now, Ariadne,” said Dr Pevensie. “I imagine you know why you’re here.”
Ariadne made herself look Dr Pevensie in the eye. “I know my grades haven’t been so good lately, I just - I’ve been really busy.”
“Yes. I’m aware that you were selected for that work placement with Mr Cobb and, given the scale of the opportunity which Miles informed me this was, I was prepared to your drop in performance at this time slide. But you have been back with us for several months now, yet have only shown minimal improvement. Ariadne...”
Ariadne took a deep breath, preparing for the worst.
“... is something bothering you?”
Ariadne blinked. “What?”
“You seem distracted.” Ariadne realized Dr Pevensie wasn’t angry, but concerned. That was even worse. “You have been since you returned. You used to be such a bright, engaged student, but now you seem to spend most of our tutorials with your mind somewhere else entirely. Your creativity remains as brilliant as it ever was - some of your latest designs have truly astonished me - but your knowledge of existing works is slipping. Then your last paper...”
“I got a B,” said Ariadne, more defensively than she intended.
“Yes, but your answers were so minimal. I know I’m always telling the others to be more concise, but I know you were capable of so much more in the time given. And the doodles in the margins... you have become a fan of the artwork of Escher?”
“Penrose, actually,” replied Ariadne before she could stop herself. Dr Pevensie smiled slightly, briefly, but as she turned another page, a frown deepened between her eyebrows.
“And then this... why have you written this, Ariadne?”
Ariadne looked at the page. Written at the bottom, in a careless scrawl, surrounded by infinite loops and folded-up streets, were the four words, ‘Waiting for a train’.
Ariadne shrugged. “I don’t even remember writing that,” she admitted.
“Hmm.” Dr Pevensie didn’t look entirely satisfied, but she sat back in her chair. “You’re a good student. A very good student. One day soon you’ll be an even better architect. I can see how you might be getting bored of your studies, especially after a work placement, and just want to get out to work - but if you’re planning on staying around, I’d like to see a little more effort on the essay front. Can you do that for me?”
Ariadne could tell there was no point in arguing, so she nodded. Dr Pevensie smiled. “Thank you. Have a good afternoon.”
With that, she returned to her papers. Ariadne quietly got to her feet and let herself out.
*~*~*
Even though it was raining, Ariadne found herself waiting outside the university a few minutes early. She held her folder of notes over her head to keep at least a little of the rain off and scanned the cars approaching. She wasn’t waiting too long before a familiar car with an even more familiar man at the wheel drove up next to her, and she ran to it with relief. Arthur couldn’t visit Paris often, but when he did, she was always glad of the convenience.
“So what did Dr Pevensie want?” asked Arthur as Ariadne slipped into the car next to him.
“Oh, just busting my ass over not doing so good in class lately.” Ariadne slid down in her seat and relaxed as Arthur pulled away from the kerb back into the steady stream of Parisian traffic, listening to the gentle pattering of rain against the window.
“Ouch. She didn’t give you a hard time, did she?”
“No, she was doing that thing of being more concerned than angry. I don’t think Dr Pevensie can get angry. Do British people get angry?”
Arthur grinned. “I don’t know. Eames certainly did.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t even drink tea any more, he doesn’t count.”
“I guess. How about Miles, does he ever get angry?”
“Nah, he’s always ‘just disappointed’.”
“I think you might have a theory there, then.” They stopped at some traffic lights and Arthur turned to look at her. “Hey, speaking of the potentially angry potentially English man, Eames just rang - he’s coming into town for a few days, so he and Miles wondered if we wanted to meet up for dinner tonight?”
“Sounds great!” smiled Ariadne. “I can’t stay out too late though, I should really get some work done.”
“Ah, what paper is it this time?”
“None, I just want to add some more to my portfolio.”
To her surprise, Arthur’s face darkened. He turned back to paying full attention to the traffic, which, sure, was a necessity in Paris, but a slight clench in his jaw betrayed this wasn’t just caution.
“What?”
“Are you going to use the machine again?”
“Oh god, you’re not still on that, are you?”
“If you use it too often-”
“- it’s the only way I’ll be able to dream, I know, but hey, I get more ideas this way. Dr Pevensie said herself, my creativity has never been better, and I think that’s the only reason she’s cool with my failing work in other areas. It’s worth it.”
“I thought you had good designs anyway.”
“Do you remember college, Arthur? Do you remember just how much work and pressure there is? This way, I get to experiment with a new design for what seems like hours when I in fact wake up with a ready-to-go design within 15 minutes. Otherwise it’s just me staring at a sketchpad for hours and hours on end, and god knows I’m behind in my work as it is.”
An awkward silence hung between them in the car. Ariadne sighed and looked down at her fingernails and their chipped nail polish. “I’ll stop when my final project’s in. That way I shouldn’t lose my normal dreams. Though why I can’t do without the dreams where I turn up to class naked...”
Arthur couldn’t stop a smile slipping out. “How come I never get to share THAT dream with you?”
Ariadne punched him on the arm, grinning. “Jerk!”
“Ow! Think of the British!”
“I am, I’ve gone for the Way of Eames.”
“He doesn’t resort to violence so quickly,” said Arthur, rubbing his arm. “He gets in a good dose of sarcasm first, at least."
*~*~*
“Arthur,” said Eames, slapping him on the back with a little more force than was surely necessary, “I must thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for choosing a restaurant so delightfully inaccessible to those with cars. Truly, the effort of finding one so distant from any car parks must have been magnificent. Bravo.”
“What?” frowned Arthur, wincing slightly as he took his coat off, “I thought you wanted to come here. Miles called me and told me he’d booked it.”
Eames shrugged. “Then I guess he’s the one with godawful taste. Hang on, is that him back there?” he added as he scanned the dining room. “With a lady? Hey, snaps to Miles.”
Ariadne followed his gaze curiously and felt a strange dropping in her stomach when she saw who was with him. “Oh god, that’s Dr Pevensie!”
“Dr Pevensie??” said Arthur, craning to look as well. “Why’s he brought her?”
“I don’t know! I mean, they’re kinda friends, I guess, but why he’d bring her tonight, I mean - how are we going to explain how we all know each other? The work placement? What if she asks what the nature of the work was? What if-”
“I guess we’ll go find out,” said Arthur, just briefly putting a reassuring hand on her arm before the three of them wended their way through the tables to the one in the corner.
Miles and Dr Pevensie had been engaged in conversation, but both looked up as they approached. “Ah! Here they are! Susan, you already know Ariadne, and these two are Arthur and Eames, two other past protégés of Mr Cobb. Everyone, this is Susan Pevensie.”
Ariadne smiled awkwardly at her professor, and Arthur looked from one to the other, but Eames smiled and thrust out a hand as the rest of them sat down. “Nice to meet you.”
Susan smiled as well. “And you! Is that a London accent I hear?”
“Indeed it is, but I haven’t been back there in years.”
“Ah, see, I can’t stay away. I grew up in London, Oxfordshire was about as far away as I could manage. I only transferred here a few years ago, it’s quite a change.”
“It was back in Oxfordshire I met Susan myself,” said Miles. “We were at the university together for a time.”
“So what brings you out with us this evening?” asked Arthur. “I mean, not that you’re not welcome of course, but Miles doesn’t often ask his friends out with us - are we celebrating something?”
Miles looked at Susan, who nodded. “Actually,” he said, “Dr Pevensie here has a job offer for us.”
Ariadne and Arthur glanced at each other in confusion, and Eames cleared his throat. “Uh, by job, you mean, for all of us?”
“Yes, I mean a dream manipulation job.”
Arthur and Eames turned to Miles, but Susan was looking at Ariadne and smiling. “Miles here has told me all about your extracurricular pursuits, Ariadne,” she said. “If you’d rather not do it yourself, I quite understand, but by the sounds of it, you are the best team out there.”
“Well,” said Eames, waving a hand to feign being flattered, but Arthur cut in,
“What kind of job?”
“A rather unusual one, I must admit,” said Susan, clasping her hands together on the table in front of her. “Miles tells me that your jobs usually entail the discovery of certain facts from within a person’s mind, ‘extraction’, or planting a new idea, ‘inception’. You needn’t worry, I won’t be going to the police with any of this,” she quickly assured, seeing the troubled frown on Eames’s face. “You see, the job I want you to carry out is on myself. I suppose it would be most like inception, but I don’t want you to plant a new idea - I want you to strengthen an idea that already exists in there.”
After a moment, Arthur managed to say, “That doesn’t sound like anything we’ve done before...”
“I will hardly be consulting the Trading Standards Agency for lack of good results, I understand if it cannot be done,” assured Susan. “But I am happy to pay simply for the attempt. You see, I lost my siblings in a train crash many years ago now.” Her tone of voice was utterly businesslike. “I’m getting old. Actually, I’ve gotten old. I am old. My mind is not what it once was. My memories - they’re not what they once were. They change, they play tricks, they elude me one day and are as vivid as the sunset the next - my memories are all I have left of them. I want you to go into my subconscious and fix them. Make them more stable. I need to remember them as they were before, when they were - when we were happy, young. Before I lost them. And... if you can... I’d like to believe that they’re just as happy and at peace wherever they are now.”
Miles put a hand on hers, and she stopped, looking very firmly at the tablecloth. “We have already discussed this earlier,” he said to the others, “and I will describe the job in more detail later. But I can assure you that it is almost certainly within your usual parameters, if a little unusual. All we need to know from you now is whether you are willing to take on the job?”
Ariadne, Arthur and Eames were silent. “You haven’t had your subconscious trained, have you?” asked Eames.
“I’m not even sure exactly what that means.”
“OK. Well, I’m in, then.” He turned to Arthur and Ariadne. “Guys?”
Arthur didn’t answer, but looked at Ariadne. She thought for a moment, then said, “Are you sure you don’t have any problems with me being involved with your subconscious? I might see some private stuff.”
“I doubt you’ll find any test answers in there. As long as you’re fine with it, I am as well.”
“Well... OK then, I guess.” Ariadne managed a smile, and Arthur nodded at Miles as well.
“Excellent!” said Miles brightly, picking up his menu. “Now, I can see the waiter shooting us looks across the room, so we’d better get to choosing our dinners. I hear the fish is excellent.”
Arthur began to ask Susan, “So, Dr Pevensie, how would -”
“Any more discussion can wait till afterwards,” interrupted Miles, pouring out more glasses of wine. “Until then, I recommend you enjoy your meals. You’re about to come into some money, after all.”
*~*~*
“How will this even work?” said Arthur. His face was uncharacteristically blank with confusion. “The whole point of inception is the target doesn’t know you’re planting an idea, that they think they are discovering the idea themselves. Otherwise it doesn’t take.”
“Yeah, how do you make someone believe something when they already want to believe it and are expecting it?” asked Ariadne.
They had enjoyed an extensive dinner with Dr Pevensie and then bid her goodnight before heading back to Miles’s townhouse for further discussion of the job. Miles, who had been handing them all glasses of brandy, sat down in his chair. “It’s simple. We plant an idea that she is not expecting.”
“One she hasn’t asked for? What, for shits and giggles?” said Eames.
“Ariadne is right - it is very difficult to make someone believe something which they already want to believe. There is a great difference between having a thought and believing it. If you cannot believe in an idea already, there is something stopping you, and until you address that, it will always be there as a corrosive doubt. Miss Pevensie wants to believe that her siblings are happy and at peace. An important thing for us to discover will be why she does not already believe this to be the case. Arthur, your primary job will be to investigate why this is the case. Eames, you will join him in his research to better understand them, it is very likely you will be called upon to impersonate one of them.”
“I’m not sure I can pull that off when I haven’t seen them in person,” said Eames.
“There are photos and diaries Miss Pevensie has provided me. I also took the liberty of acquiring the diaries and notes of a Professor Kirke in England, who housed them briefly during the Second World War, so you will be able to drop in facts otherwise not recorded, to make the charade more convincing. They should arrive within the next two days.”
“So we’re going to remove whatever’s making her not believe that?” said Ariadne.
“No. We are simply researching to better understand our customer. But we’re still going to plant an entirely different idea - the idea that she needs to let go and move on.”
“What?”
“The reason she needs to believe that they are happy is because she cannot let go of the past. If we can simply help her along with that second part, we can skip the first part entirely. She will be expecting us to perform the former, so the latter can still be carried out with relative ease.”
“But it’s not what she hired us for,” said Ariadne uneasily.
Miles turned to look at her. “Fischer didn’t hire you at all. This is a strange time to grow a moral conscience, Ariadne, you will be doing far greater favours for Miss Pevensie than you did for him.”
“But it’s different-”
“Because you know Dr Pevensie personally?”
“No! Because this isn’t just a business empire, these are her memories of her brothers and sister!” Arthur tentatively put a hand on her shoulder, but she barely noticed. “Fischer was a good businessman, he’ll make his own fortune, and now he has good memories of his father as well. Miss Pevensie might not even have that if we mess this up!”
“Have you ever lost anyone important, Ariadne?” His voice was not raised, his face passive, but a dead silence fell on the room as Miles looked directly at her. “You saw the dangers of dwelling in the past with Mr Cobb. For those of us who do not have the luxury of visiting our lost loved ones in dreams, it can be unbearable. It may sound heartless, but believe me when I say that if there is a means by which Miss Pevensie can finally let go, still remember but not linger with the dead, you will be doing her the greatest favour by assisting her.”
Ariadne’s face was flushed with embarrassment, but unease still festered within her. “If she’d wanted to move on,” she said firmly, “she could have hired us to do that.”
“And that would make our jobs so much harder. We must be grateful for small mercies. Remember, Ariadne, that what people want and what they need are not often the same thing.”
Ariadne had no more arguments, but she still wasn’t happy. When it became clear that she was done, Miles continued, back in his business-like tone, “Arthur, Eames, you must undertake the research. Yusuf is on a flight in to assist with the drugs, but this should not be too long a job, so you will not require much. I obviously cannot help much beyond this, so Arthur, you’ll be in charge.”
“Me?” said Arthur in surprise. “But I’ve never -”
“As I said, this is a simple job. I leave the planning to you, but I do recommend that you, Ariadne, spend your time getting better acquainted with Miss Pevensie’s surroundings, as they would probably be best used for the first dream level. Perhaps an exploratory dream-walk inside Miss Pevensie’s mind would also give you a better idea as to what to expect within.”
Arthur started scribbling notes on his pad, looking stressed.
“Perhaps I could go on one as well,” said Eames, “If there are any projections of her siblings, I could learn from their mannerisms.”
“Very good, but remember, they might not be exact representations but how she is remembering them idealistically. Remember to read all the information as well.”
“Wait - the first dream level as a place in the real world?” said Ariadne. “Cobb always said never to do that. He said you might forget what’s a dream and what’s real.”
Miles looked at her again for the first time. “Then you’d better have your totem on you.”
*~*~*
Eames and Ariadne arrived at Susan’s house the following evening, where they were let in by her housekeeper. She was already asleep, she told them, and they could go straight up. If she was confused by these instructions which had been left for her regarding any guests showing up at her employer’s doorstep, she didn’t show it.
They both climbed the stairs quietly. It had been agreed between Susan and Miles that the two of them would let themselves into her house one night when she was already asleep for an exploration of her natural dream state, with no advanced warning, so as to hopefully not alter it overly much in any way. Sure enough, when they silently opened her door, she was already asleep in her bed, one arm helpfully left bare out to the side. With a glance at each other, they opened the case containing the machine. As Eames carefully connected Susan and then himself to it, Ariadne felt an unexpected thrill of apprehension. Miles had warned her earlier that she might have an unusual subconscious - untrained, but different. He hadn’t explained further. But when Eames offered her a connecting cable as well, she took it and slid it into her arm, quickly slipping into the dream state.
Ariadne had found herself wondering that afternoon what she would find inside her professor’s head. Many dreams, in her experience, were walkthroughs of everyday life, and rather dull, but she’d vastly prefer that to something hideously embarrassing. She was professional, after all, but she’d rather be able to look Dr Pevensie in the eye after all this. It was a relief, and only a slight surprise, to open her eyes in a seemingly empty snowy forest - having read the preliminary files provided by Miles earlier that day, she’d learned of her upbringing in the English countryside. If her mind was dwelling on her deceased siblings lately, it made sense for her subconscious to be rooted in her childhood as well.
Trees surrounded them in all directions, snow hanging heavily on all the branches, and Susan was nowhere in sight. Something about it struck Ariadne as odd, though, but she couldn’t work it out. She looked to Eames, but he didn’t seem concerned about anything. He looked around and shrugged. “Pick a direction?” he suggested.
She peered through the trees around them. She noticed that in one direction, there seemed to be a definite path, and in all the others, the trees became less distinct, as though Susan’s memory failed her. “That seems like a start,” she said, and the two of them set off.
As they walked, Eames said, “Which forest do you reckon this is? One from Oxfordshire?”
“I’m thinking one where she and her siblings went during the war. That’d probably make more of an impact. Or maybe a mixture of the two.”
“How old was she during the war again? Twelve, thirteen?” Eames shook his head. “She’s over 80 years old. If I can be as sharp as her when I’m her age, I’ll quit drinking now. Think it’s the British country air keeping her so well?”
“I don’t know,” said Ariadne. “Some people just age gracefully, I guess?”
“Yeah, but there’s Helen Mirren and then there’s full-on elixir of life. I don’t-”
“Shh.” Ariadne held out a hand to simultaneously stop and silence him. She’d just heard a voice up ahead, through the trees. At the same time, she’d realized what was bothering her about these woods. She couldn’t hear any animals, no tweeting or fluttering of birds or rustling of tiny mammals in the undergrowth. It was like the snow covering every twig and patch of grass had also muffled the entire world around them. The entire forest was unnaturally silent and still. Empty. This would be strange enough in a real forest, but in a dream forest, where the person’s projections should still be everywhere, it was very disconcerting.
She did not voice these concerns to Eames, but proceeded with him more quietly, until they came to the edge of a clearing. Their attention was caught first by a tall, iron lamppost - rather out of place, but Ariadne supposed she must have brought it in from somewhere else - but quickly moved to Susan, a girl who must be Susan, who had the same eyes as the older Susan they knew framed in a much younger face, with dark hair down past her shoulders. She was wearing a fur coat, and on the other side of the clearing were two boys and a girl who must be her siblings.
“Come on Susan!” they were saying, “We’re going to the palace!”
“I can’t,” the girl replied, looking saddened but resigned, “I can’t take my fur coat out of the wardrobe. It wouldn’t be polite.”
“But there’ll be chess pieces made of gold!” the eldest boy said, “They’ll last for thousands of years! Just leave the coat!”
“But it’s part of me. I’ll freeze without it.”
“Aslan is warm. He’ll look after you,” said the little girl.
“No. He’s the one who’s left us here in the snow in the first place.”
Eames was shaking his head. “Goddamn unshaped dreams. What the hell are they talking about?”
“Just be glad they’re not all naked,” pointed out Ariadne. “Maybe you could get closer as a bird or something - Eames, what is it?”
He had turned away from the clearing and was looking out into the forest around them. “Do you hear that?”
Ariadne listened hard, and soon heard it as well - a strange sound, coming closer, like two pieces of slightly rough material being pulled over each other quickly, with the pounding of hooves. It sounded very familiar, and she finally placed it as the sound of a sled of some kind approaching. But no sooner had she made this conclusion than another sound joined it, the baleful blare of a steam train releasing steam. She met Eames’s gaze and his expression mirrored her own confusion.
In the clearing, Susan had clearly heard it as well, because she became agitated. “Peter, Edmund, Lucy! You’ve got to get out of here! It’s coming!”
“What is?” Lucy laughed, “Aslan protects us from everything. Nothing can hurt us here.”
“No, you have to move! You have to come back to the real world, they can’t get you there.”
“But then we won’t be kings and queens,” said Peter slowly, disappointedly.
“But it’ll be real! Please, come back with me, you can’t stay here forever, you’re too old-”
Ariadne was trying to watch and listen to the approaching sounds as well. There was definitely the sound of a sled on ice, of the pounding hooves of whatever was drawing it, but also the steady chugging of train wheels, the occasional blare of released steam - both a sled and a train? How did that make sense? But in the clearing, the children were stepping away from Susan.
“You’ve grown up,” said Lucy accusingly.
“I had to,” replied Susan.
“We didn’t,” said Peter, “We never did.”
With one last blare of steam, the source of the noise burst into the clearing. For a second, Ariadne got an impression of the train she had heard, but she blinked and it was definitely a sled - a beautiful, white sled, drawn by reindeer. Steering a sled was what appeared to be a dwarf, and a tall, dark, beautiful woman was sat in the back. Ariadne and Eames could only watch, silently.
“Hello Sons of Adam and Daughter of Eve,” she said to Lucy, Peter and Edmund. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes,” the three of them chorused, and they eagerly clambered aboard the sled. As they did so, and the woman threw her long fur cloak around all of them to keep them war, she turned her imperious head to Susan.
“Hello Susan,” she said, “No room for you, I’m afraid. You’re far too big to fit in here. Unless you would like my seat?”
Susan was shaking her head and backing away. “No. You can’t take them.”
“They’ve taken themselves. I shall simply deliver them to their final destination. They’re so eager to see Aslan, you see? Now, are you sure you don’t want my seat?”
“No. I don’t.”
The woman smiled maliciously, and held out a wand. “You’re almost there. You don’t even need one of these, do you?”
Susan said nothing, lips pressed together, so far backed away she was almost enveloped in a thick bush. The woman nodded at the dwarf, who cracked the reins and send the sled sliding off again into the woods, and Susan could only watch as her siblings were carried away from her. Ariadne was just turning to Eames to stare at him in amazement when a sudden, horrible noise devastated the silence of the woods - the screeching of brakes, the screaming twisting of metal, crashes, shatterings, all so loud and so vivid that Ariadne’s heart felt it would explode from the sheer intensity of the clamour of what she knew must be the sound of a train crashing horrifically.
Susan had covered her eyes and ears at the sound and, as Ariadne and Eames watched, her hair turned to grey and her body aged before them, and she grew to the old lady they already knew. The forest around them was silent once again, aside from the faint rustling of the trees.
*~*~*
The next morning, Susan woke up to find Ariadne sat next to her bed with a cup of tea. “Eames made it,” she promised, handing it to her. “He said you never lose the knack.”
Susan took it from her slowly, still not entirely awake. “So I presume you went into my dreams last night?” Ariadne nodded. “Hm. I didn’t see you. Was it enlightening?”
“That’s one word for it.”
With a little effort, Susan pulled herself to sit upright and leaned back against her pillows. Ariadne had to remember that, despite her mental acuity and seeming sharpness, this woman was supposedly in her eighties. “What did you see?”
Ariadne considered where to start. “There was a dark-haired woman in a sleigh, in the forest in winter... do you have any idea how those elements might have come together? Like, a story you read, or someone you knew, or...”
She trailed off when she noticed Susan was smiling into her tea. “Ah,” said the older woman. “So, you saw Jadis.” Ariadne waited, and after a sip of the tea and a nod of approval, Susan began to explain.
“When my siblings and I were young, we were sent to the country as evacuees, as you know. It was... dreadfully dull. We passed the time the usual way, with games, with books - but my sister Lucy, well, her imagination was always beyond all of ours. She invented this whole world in the back of a wardrobe. Narnia was its name. It was full of magic and talking animals and adventure and wonder. It was so compelling that, well, we all joined in, played her games. It felt almost real sometimes. Even Edmund got drawn in, and he was so difficult back then, he had barely talked to us since our father went off to fight.
“I imagine that was the main appeal. In Lucy’s games, we weren’t just kids, lost from London in a world at war - we were kings and queens, wise and good and strong, and we saved the land from the darkness that was consuming it. Now, one of the main ‘baddies’ in this world was Jadis, the White Witch, the woman who had made it eternally winter. We defeated her in the end, of course,” she added as an aside, with a smile tainted by a hint of self-deprecation. “But she was quite imposing, I can tell you. I suppose I’m not too surprised to learn she is in my dreams.”
“She took your siblings off in her sleigh,” said Ariadne. “They wanted you to go with them...”
Susan looked down at the cup of tea in her lap. “I tired of the game long before they did,” she said quietly. “It made the jump back to London with us. Peter stopped playing when he did his exams, and I, well, I grew up, but Edmund and Lucy kept playing. They even got our cousin Eustace involved, can you believe that? He was a real brat before then, improved no end by all accounts... but then Peter went back to playing with them as well, they kept talking about it as if it were real. They spent all their days dreaming about this fantasy world where they had supposedly achieved so much. Lucy almost drowned one time,” she said abruptly, looking back at Ariadne. “At the Kirke house. She almost drowned in the river, because in Narnia she could swim, so she thought she could in real life.”
Ariadne didn’t know how to respond, and Susan sighed and looked away again. “Professor Kirke encouraged them, god knows why. They’d have little meet-ups about it... it was on their way to one of those that they were killed in the train.” There was no pain or regret in her voice. She might have been telling Ariadne about the construction of a particularly notable skyscraper. “Not just them - my parents were meeting them as well. I had to identify all the bodies. I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle - Eustace’s parents, who, of course, had just lost their son as well. I think part of them blamed my siblings... they sent me off to university, I went happily enough. We weren’t a family. Mine were gone.”
Ariadne swallowed. Suddenly she wished they were discussing this in a formal meeting rather than in the more intimate setting of at her bedside. She felt that she should say something comforting but knew that, after seventy years, there was nothing she could say. Instead she chose to remain professional and said, “I can see why you want to remember the good times, then. We’ll do what we can to help.”
Susan suddenly turned and grabbed Ariadne’s hand. Her eyes betrayed a greater depth of emotion than she had let show during her explanation. “Ariadne - there’s more. There’s more I want you to do for me. Can you help me? Please?”
“Uh - OK, I can get the others together for a meeting, and -”
“No. I can’t talk about this in front of all of them. I couldn’t even tell Miles. I can barely say it once.” She took a deep breath, but when her gaze met Ariadne’s again, it was steady. “I want you to make me believe that Narnia was real.”
Ariadne just about kept her mouth from falling open, but she couldn’t keep the blind shock and confusion from her face. “What?”
“I believed it when I was young. I want to believe it again. That’s a simpler inception, isn’t it? Reinstate the notion that my childhood fantasy world was real. Or at least the hope it was... just, please, find some way to make me believe in it again. To let me hope for it again. Then I can hope... I can hope that they’re somewhere good. That their obsession was all worthwhile. That it all came out well in the end.”
Ariadne gently sat back, trying to subtly extract her hand from Susan’s grip, but her fingers were clasped tightly in their fervour. “Uh... Dr Pevensie... I’m not sure we can...”
“Do you know what it’s like to lose faith in something you loved? In something that made you so happy?” Susan let go of Ariadne’s hand and looked away from her again. She gathered her bedsheets in her hands and twisted them absent-mindedly, such that Ariadne wasn’t sure she knew she was doing it. “Losing my family changed me as a person. That served me fine through life - I could look after myself, I made my own way, I was happy. But I’m old, now, Ariadne. I’m older than you can comprehend. I want to go back to being free. I want to be free of my ghosts. I want the hope that there is something else, and that I haven’t lived my life in an unmagical world. It’s not too late.”
Ariadne was frozen in her seat. She had never, ever heard someone speak the way Susan just had, and there was nothing she could think to say. She didn’t think there was anything she could say. Quietly, she rose from her seat, and said, “I’ll talk to the others.”
“Thank you.” Susan did not look at her again. Ariadne quietly got to her feet and let herself out.
*~*~*
“Why the hell didn’t Miles tell us about this?”
Yusuf had arrived that morning, and their briefing of him was confused for all the unexpected new information they had received. Eames had remained uncharacteristically quiet - Ariadne wondered if he was as affected by what he had seen in the dream as she was - and Arthur was desperately scribbling things in a pad and crossing them out again with a kind of diligent fury, struggling to construct some kind of idea of how to do this. Yusuf was looking at them all one by one, the most taken aback of them all.
“We are supposed to carry out inception, on someone who is expecting it, of an idea she is asking for - and this inception is the restoration of faith?” He shook his head. “Faith is impossible.”
“It’s hardly faith,” said Ariadne. As unnerving as she’d found it when Susan had proposed it, she couldn’t help but defend her. “It’s just allowing herself to hope that her fantasy world as a kid was real. It’s the hope her family are happy wherever they are.”
Yusuf spread his hands wide. “Sounds like faith to me. And you should not go messing with people’s faiths. Wars happen over faith. People go insane over faith. They kill for it.”
“But she wants us to,” said Eames.
“Which is the only reason I’m not out the door already. If it wasn’t Miles asking...”
Yusuf lapsed into silence, and they all sat quietly while Arthur continued to scribble. Finally he sighed and leaned back, rubbing his eyes.
“OK,” he began. “She needs to believe that the fantasy world is real again. Or at least hope it is. The easiest way to do this would seem to be creating a first-level dream world exactly like ours, and have her find her way back there - the back of a wardrobe, you said was where it started? The smoother we can make the transition, the better. She’s aware people are going to be performing inception on her, so if she becomes aware, we’ll have to adapt, and we’ll have to give good messages rather than outright lies which she’ll see through in the morning. Even if she figures out it was an inception, hopefully it’ll help her see things more clearly.”
“So it’s more - dream therapy?” said Eames.
“I guess, yeah. The diaries from Professor Kirke’s estate arrived earlier, Eames, you and Ariadne will have to look closely through them to build this world convincingly. Hopefully, if she thinks it’s real, she’ll fill it with her own projections. Yusuf, we’re going to help read them as well, maybe get some ideas...”
For the next few hours, the four of them sat and read through all the notes, both of Kirke’s and Susan’s. Ariadne found a sheaf of sketches tucked into a folder and flicked through them, and was amazed at the sheer level of detail and imagination: there was Susan with all her family in regal clothing; beautiful palaces and scenes of natural beauty; magical creatures like dryads and centaurs and some she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before; beautifully crafted objects, in particular what appeared to be a hunting horn, which always seemed to crop up in the outfits Susan was wearing.
She pointed it out to the others. “This seems pretty significant. That’s probably going to be a detail we’re going to have to put in there.”
“Kirke’s diaries keep talking about someone called Aslan,” said Arthur, shuffling through same pages, “He seems pretty important too, like a king or a lord or a god or something. He could be someone for Eames to pose as. You seen any drawings of him?”
Everyone searched silently for a few seconds until Yusuf started laughing. He held up a sketch. “Guys. I think Aslan’s a LION.”
Eames’s mouth fell open. “I am NOT being a lion.”
“But it looks like she’d listen to him.”
“Ix-nay on the Ion-Lay! Not happening! I had to be cat once in an extraction we did on this old lady in a coma so the family could see where she’d put her will - NEVER AGAIN.”
“OK, OK, we’ll find someone else.” Yusuf flipped through another pages and barely suppressed a smirk. “How about a beaver?”
As Eames grabbed a heavy folder of notes and ran around the table at Yusuf, who himself leaped out of his chair and ran around in the opposite direction, initiating a chase game round and round the table, Arthur threw down his pen and said to Ariadne, “You know, I think that’s our cue for a lunchbreak.”
*~*~*
“I’ve thought of something I don’t like about this,” said Ariadne.
“Something else?” Arthur couldn’t help smile.
“Something worse.”
The two of them were in a cafe. Yusuf was taking Eames out to a bar for an apologetic pint, but neither of the two of them had fancied it, so they were down the road at Arthur’s favourite delicatessen, where they always went when he visited. It was small, but had a great atmosphere and was always warm.
Arthur grabbed their pastries and drinks from the server and the two of them sat down at a table in the window. “OK. What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about what Susan said. About this other fantasy world. Which you can go to and it takes no time whatsoever and she and her siblings had full power over. Sounds like a lower dream level, right? So, we can do this for her, and she’ll have her happy little imaginary world where they’re happy. But... she wants to think her siblings got there by dying. That they got somewhere better by dying. That’s not happy little imaginary worlds any more, Arthur. That’s not a lower dream level, that’s a higher one, a more real better reality. That’s... if we do this wrong, she could end up like Mal.”
Arthur’s face darkened. “You’re right. If we do this too well...”
“... she might think all she has to do to be with them again is kill herself.” Ariadne hesitated. “Do you think we should go through with this? Do you think we should tell Miles?”
Arthur rested his hands in his hands and considered it silently. “No,” he said finally. “No, we can handle this. We’ll just have to be... very careful.”
“But -”
“She doesn’t need the belief, right? She just needs the hope. So we can leave a shadow of a doubt. Remind her that this might be a dream... I mean, when the job’s done, she’s always going to be wondering what of her feelings came from us anyway. She’ll never be that convinced of it, I don’t think.”
Ariadne stared. “But that’s even more horrible. Not knowing which of your beliefs are your own?”
“She wouldn’t have asked for it if Miles hadn’t explained everything to her. And remember, she should believe them so strongly it’s like someone’s just revealed them to her rather than just stuck them in her. She’ll be fine.”
“We hope,” said Ariadne flatly. “But we can’t know because no-one’s ever done this before.”
Arthur sighed. “No. We can’t. But we can be as certain and as careful as possible... and if we pull this off, who knows? This could be a legit career. Just think of how popular therapy is, taking dream therapy public could do great things. It could help so many people.”
“Until advertising companies or someone gets hold of it.” She tried to concentrate on her tea, but the words came tumbling out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Arthur, have you ever considered what’s going to happen when this technology goes mainstream? Rather than just underground in backstreet dream dens or in high-flyer fraud and theft... When anyone and everyone can enter and share each other’s dreams and ideas, but also invade them and change them. What happens when people can’t trust their minds and realities as their own any more? What do we become?”
She was finally voicing thoughts which had been eating away at her for a long time, and hearing them out loud somehow made them more terrifyingly real, albeit in the strange environment of the sunlit cafe with normal people walking by on the street just outside. But her voice remained as steady as Susan’s had when she described the loss of her family. As horrible as these things could be, they were the reality they lived in and not worth crying over.
However, Arthur must have seen something of her true feelings in her face, because he stood up, pulled her to her feet, and hugged her. His arms were surprisingly strong, and Ariadne distantly remembered Cobb telling her one time about how, while fighting in dreams was happening in your subconscious, it helped to train in real life so that, in fights with hostile projections, you believed you could win. Doubt, he’d told her, was as dangerous as the ‘Mr Charles’ manoeuvre in attracting the projections’ attention.
“We’ll be careful,” Arthur said in her ear. “We won’t screw up. We’ll make it that we’re only giving good, positive messages, which, if she does take them to heart, can only be taken in a good way. Stuff we’d tell her in real life if she’d listen to us. And we’ll keep an eye on her afterwards, OK? And if, a big if, it looks like something’s not right, we’ll fix it. We’ll always fix it.”
Her face was buried in his shoulder. He smelled of washing detergent, a particularly nice washing detergent which she almost tempted to ask the name of. It was comforting, and he was comforting, but she still had to ask, “What’s going to happen?”
“Whatever does happen, we’ll manage.” He stepped away from her and smiled. “Besides, we’ll have a head-start on everyone else. Can’t imagine what anyone would find if they tried to get in my head.”
Ariadne laughed. “Oh, I bet I know what’s in there.”
“Oh yeah? Enlighten me.”
“Simple. A giant 5-dimensional bouncy castle filled with piranhas.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It’s the security layout I’m designing for you. The piranhas are trained in the art of ju-jitsu.”
“Oh, then that makes perfect sense.”
On to Part 2
Author: hobbit_eyes
Fandoms: Inception/Narnia
Characters Ariadne, Arthur, Eames, Yusuf, Miles; Susan
Pairings: Slight Arthur/Ariadne
Rating: PG for one use of language, mild violence
Wordcount: ~16,000
Spoilers: All of Inception, up to ‘The Last Battle’ in Narnia.
Warnings: Occasional creepiness.
Disclaimer: Inception and Narnia belong to their respective creators
A/N: This story ran away with me slightly, sorry! Major thanks to aurilly for stepping in to beta this monster at the last minute while I skipped off to Ireland!
Summary: Ariadne’s professor, Dr Pevensie, is put in contact with the team via Miles for a very unusual job, relating to the loss of her family. When her projections are somewhat... different from what was expected, the job suddenly gets a lot more complicated, and Ariadne is forced to consider what is most important to her.
Always Halfway to Somewhere
Ariadne did not like the feeling of being in trouble. Being in trouble meant that she’d messed up somewhere. While performing an extraction, of course, this could be dangerous for everyone. But it seemed that standing outside her professor’s door, waiting to be shouted at, could instigate just the same levels of burny dread in the pit of her stomach. Her face felt hot, her fists were balled, and she was clenching her teeth, but she held her head high and knocked.
“Yes?”
Ariadne took a quiet breath and opened the door. “You wanted to see me, Dr Pevensie?”
Dr Pevensie was stood leaning over her desk, holding two separate piles of papers in each hand with another pile on the desk, evidently caught in the middle of her looking for or reorganizing something. When she saw Ariadne, though, she just placed the piles back on the desk neatly and sat down again, tucking her long brown hair behind her ears and smiling.
“Yes! Ariadne, come in. Sit down.”
Ariadne slid into the chair opposite Dr Pevensie’s desk. Like the rest of her study, her desk appeared to be an example of organized chaos - there was barely any surface visible, but all the stacks of papers and files and books were perfectly neat. Ariadne’s attention was caught by a small snowglobe in one corner, with what appeared to be a miniature forest inside.
“Now, Ariadne,” said Dr Pevensie. “I imagine you know why you’re here.”
Ariadne made herself look Dr Pevensie in the eye. “I know my grades haven’t been so good lately, I just - I’ve been really busy.”
“Yes. I’m aware that you were selected for that work placement with Mr Cobb and, given the scale of the opportunity which Miles informed me this was, I was prepared to your drop in performance at this time slide. But you have been back with us for several months now, yet have only shown minimal improvement. Ariadne...”
Ariadne took a deep breath, preparing for the worst.
“... is something bothering you?”
Ariadne blinked. “What?”
“You seem distracted.” Ariadne realized Dr Pevensie wasn’t angry, but concerned. That was even worse. “You have been since you returned. You used to be such a bright, engaged student, but now you seem to spend most of our tutorials with your mind somewhere else entirely. Your creativity remains as brilliant as it ever was - some of your latest designs have truly astonished me - but your knowledge of existing works is slipping. Then your last paper...”
“I got a B,” said Ariadne, more defensively than she intended.
“Yes, but your answers were so minimal. I know I’m always telling the others to be more concise, but I know you were capable of so much more in the time given. And the doodles in the margins... you have become a fan of the artwork of Escher?”
“Penrose, actually,” replied Ariadne before she could stop herself. Dr Pevensie smiled slightly, briefly, but as she turned another page, a frown deepened between her eyebrows.
“And then this... why have you written this, Ariadne?”
Ariadne looked at the page. Written at the bottom, in a careless scrawl, surrounded by infinite loops and folded-up streets, were the four words, ‘Waiting for a train’.
Ariadne shrugged. “I don’t even remember writing that,” she admitted.
“Hmm.” Dr Pevensie didn’t look entirely satisfied, but she sat back in her chair. “You’re a good student. A very good student. One day soon you’ll be an even better architect. I can see how you might be getting bored of your studies, especially after a work placement, and just want to get out to work - but if you’re planning on staying around, I’d like to see a little more effort on the essay front. Can you do that for me?”
Ariadne could tell there was no point in arguing, so she nodded. Dr Pevensie smiled. “Thank you. Have a good afternoon.”
With that, she returned to her papers. Ariadne quietly got to her feet and let herself out.
*~*~*
Even though it was raining, Ariadne found herself waiting outside the university a few minutes early. She held her folder of notes over her head to keep at least a little of the rain off and scanned the cars approaching. She wasn’t waiting too long before a familiar car with an even more familiar man at the wheel drove up next to her, and she ran to it with relief. Arthur couldn’t visit Paris often, but when he did, she was always glad of the convenience.
“So what did Dr Pevensie want?” asked Arthur as Ariadne slipped into the car next to him.
“Oh, just busting my ass over not doing so good in class lately.” Ariadne slid down in her seat and relaxed as Arthur pulled away from the kerb back into the steady stream of Parisian traffic, listening to the gentle pattering of rain against the window.
“Ouch. She didn’t give you a hard time, did she?”
“No, she was doing that thing of being more concerned than angry. I don’t think Dr Pevensie can get angry. Do British people get angry?”
Arthur grinned. “I don’t know. Eames certainly did.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t even drink tea any more, he doesn’t count.”
“I guess. How about Miles, does he ever get angry?”
“Nah, he’s always ‘just disappointed’.”
“I think you might have a theory there, then.” They stopped at some traffic lights and Arthur turned to look at her. “Hey, speaking of the potentially angry potentially English man, Eames just rang - he’s coming into town for a few days, so he and Miles wondered if we wanted to meet up for dinner tonight?”
“Sounds great!” smiled Ariadne. “I can’t stay out too late though, I should really get some work done.”
“Ah, what paper is it this time?”
“None, I just want to add some more to my portfolio.”
To her surprise, Arthur’s face darkened. He turned back to paying full attention to the traffic, which, sure, was a necessity in Paris, but a slight clench in his jaw betrayed this wasn’t just caution.
“What?”
“Are you going to use the machine again?”
“Oh god, you’re not still on that, are you?”
“If you use it too often-”
“- it’s the only way I’ll be able to dream, I know, but hey, I get more ideas this way. Dr Pevensie said herself, my creativity has never been better, and I think that’s the only reason she’s cool with my failing work in other areas. It’s worth it.”
“I thought you had good designs anyway.”
“Do you remember college, Arthur? Do you remember just how much work and pressure there is? This way, I get to experiment with a new design for what seems like hours when I in fact wake up with a ready-to-go design within 15 minutes. Otherwise it’s just me staring at a sketchpad for hours and hours on end, and god knows I’m behind in my work as it is.”
An awkward silence hung between them in the car. Ariadne sighed and looked down at her fingernails and their chipped nail polish. “I’ll stop when my final project’s in. That way I shouldn’t lose my normal dreams. Though why I can’t do without the dreams where I turn up to class naked...”
Arthur couldn’t stop a smile slipping out. “How come I never get to share THAT dream with you?”
Ariadne punched him on the arm, grinning. “Jerk!”
“Ow! Think of the British!”
“I am, I’ve gone for the Way of Eames.”
“He doesn’t resort to violence so quickly,” said Arthur, rubbing his arm. “He gets in a good dose of sarcasm first, at least."
*~*~*
“Arthur,” said Eames, slapping him on the back with a little more force than was surely necessary, “I must thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for choosing a restaurant so delightfully inaccessible to those with cars. Truly, the effort of finding one so distant from any car parks must have been magnificent. Bravo.”
“What?” frowned Arthur, wincing slightly as he took his coat off, “I thought you wanted to come here. Miles called me and told me he’d booked it.”
Eames shrugged. “Then I guess he’s the one with godawful taste. Hang on, is that him back there?” he added as he scanned the dining room. “With a lady? Hey, snaps to Miles.”
Ariadne followed his gaze curiously and felt a strange dropping in her stomach when she saw who was with him. “Oh god, that’s Dr Pevensie!”
“Dr Pevensie??” said Arthur, craning to look as well. “Why’s he brought her?”
“I don’t know! I mean, they’re kinda friends, I guess, but why he’d bring her tonight, I mean - how are we going to explain how we all know each other? The work placement? What if she asks what the nature of the work was? What if-”
“I guess we’ll go find out,” said Arthur, just briefly putting a reassuring hand on her arm before the three of them wended their way through the tables to the one in the corner.
Miles and Dr Pevensie had been engaged in conversation, but both looked up as they approached. “Ah! Here they are! Susan, you already know Ariadne, and these two are Arthur and Eames, two other past protégés of Mr Cobb. Everyone, this is Susan Pevensie.”
Ariadne smiled awkwardly at her professor, and Arthur looked from one to the other, but Eames smiled and thrust out a hand as the rest of them sat down. “Nice to meet you.”
Susan smiled as well. “And you! Is that a London accent I hear?”
“Indeed it is, but I haven’t been back there in years.”
“Ah, see, I can’t stay away. I grew up in London, Oxfordshire was about as far away as I could manage. I only transferred here a few years ago, it’s quite a change.”
“It was back in Oxfordshire I met Susan myself,” said Miles. “We were at the university together for a time.”
“So what brings you out with us this evening?” asked Arthur. “I mean, not that you’re not welcome of course, but Miles doesn’t often ask his friends out with us - are we celebrating something?”
Miles looked at Susan, who nodded. “Actually,” he said, “Dr Pevensie here has a job offer for us.”
Ariadne and Arthur glanced at each other in confusion, and Eames cleared his throat. “Uh, by job, you mean, for all of us?”
“Yes, I mean a dream manipulation job.”
Arthur and Eames turned to Miles, but Susan was looking at Ariadne and smiling. “Miles here has told me all about your extracurricular pursuits, Ariadne,” she said. “If you’d rather not do it yourself, I quite understand, but by the sounds of it, you are the best team out there.”
“Well,” said Eames, waving a hand to feign being flattered, but Arthur cut in,
“What kind of job?”
“A rather unusual one, I must admit,” said Susan, clasping her hands together on the table in front of her. “Miles tells me that your jobs usually entail the discovery of certain facts from within a person’s mind, ‘extraction’, or planting a new idea, ‘inception’. You needn’t worry, I won’t be going to the police with any of this,” she quickly assured, seeing the troubled frown on Eames’s face. “You see, the job I want you to carry out is on myself. I suppose it would be most like inception, but I don’t want you to plant a new idea - I want you to strengthen an idea that already exists in there.”
After a moment, Arthur managed to say, “That doesn’t sound like anything we’ve done before...”
“I will hardly be consulting the Trading Standards Agency for lack of good results, I understand if it cannot be done,” assured Susan. “But I am happy to pay simply for the attempt. You see, I lost my siblings in a train crash many years ago now.” Her tone of voice was utterly businesslike. “I’m getting old. Actually, I’ve gotten old. I am old. My mind is not what it once was. My memories - they’re not what they once were. They change, they play tricks, they elude me one day and are as vivid as the sunset the next - my memories are all I have left of them. I want you to go into my subconscious and fix them. Make them more stable. I need to remember them as they were before, when they were - when we were happy, young. Before I lost them. And... if you can... I’d like to believe that they’re just as happy and at peace wherever they are now.”
Miles put a hand on hers, and she stopped, looking very firmly at the tablecloth. “We have already discussed this earlier,” he said to the others, “and I will describe the job in more detail later. But I can assure you that it is almost certainly within your usual parameters, if a little unusual. All we need to know from you now is whether you are willing to take on the job?”
Ariadne, Arthur and Eames were silent. “You haven’t had your subconscious trained, have you?” asked Eames.
“I’m not even sure exactly what that means.”
“OK. Well, I’m in, then.” He turned to Arthur and Ariadne. “Guys?”
Arthur didn’t answer, but looked at Ariadne. She thought for a moment, then said, “Are you sure you don’t have any problems with me being involved with your subconscious? I might see some private stuff.”
“I doubt you’ll find any test answers in there. As long as you’re fine with it, I am as well.”
“Well... OK then, I guess.” Ariadne managed a smile, and Arthur nodded at Miles as well.
“Excellent!” said Miles brightly, picking up his menu. “Now, I can see the waiter shooting us looks across the room, so we’d better get to choosing our dinners. I hear the fish is excellent.”
Arthur began to ask Susan, “So, Dr Pevensie, how would -”
“Any more discussion can wait till afterwards,” interrupted Miles, pouring out more glasses of wine. “Until then, I recommend you enjoy your meals. You’re about to come into some money, after all.”
*~*~*
“How will this even work?” said Arthur. His face was uncharacteristically blank with confusion. “The whole point of inception is the target doesn’t know you’re planting an idea, that they think they are discovering the idea themselves. Otherwise it doesn’t take.”
“Yeah, how do you make someone believe something when they already want to believe it and are expecting it?” asked Ariadne.
They had enjoyed an extensive dinner with Dr Pevensie and then bid her goodnight before heading back to Miles’s townhouse for further discussion of the job. Miles, who had been handing them all glasses of brandy, sat down in his chair. “It’s simple. We plant an idea that she is not expecting.”
“One she hasn’t asked for? What, for shits and giggles?” said Eames.
“Ariadne is right - it is very difficult to make someone believe something which they already want to believe. There is a great difference between having a thought and believing it. If you cannot believe in an idea already, there is something stopping you, and until you address that, it will always be there as a corrosive doubt. Miss Pevensie wants to believe that her siblings are happy and at peace. An important thing for us to discover will be why she does not already believe this to be the case. Arthur, your primary job will be to investigate why this is the case. Eames, you will join him in his research to better understand them, it is very likely you will be called upon to impersonate one of them.”
“I’m not sure I can pull that off when I haven’t seen them in person,” said Eames.
“There are photos and diaries Miss Pevensie has provided me. I also took the liberty of acquiring the diaries and notes of a Professor Kirke in England, who housed them briefly during the Second World War, so you will be able to drop in facts otherwise not recorded, to make the charade more convincing. They should arrive within the next two days.”
“So we’re going to remove whatever’s making her not believe that?” said Ariadne.
“No. We are simply researching to better understand our customer. But we’re still going to plant an entirely different idea - the idea that she needs to let go and move on.”
“What?”
“The reason she needs to believe that they are happy is because she cannot let go of the past. If we can simply help her along with that second part, we can skip the first part entirely. She will be expecting us to perform the former, so the latter can still be carried out with relative ease.”
“But it’s not what she hired us for,” said Ariadne uneasily.
Miles turned to look at her. “Fischer didn’t hire you at all. This is a strange time to grow a moral conscience, Ariadne, you will be doing far greater favours for Miss Pevensie than you did for him.”
“But it’s different-”
“Because you know Dr Pevensie personally?”
“No! Because this isn’t just a business empire, these are her memories of her brothers and sister!” Arthur tentatively put a hand on her shoulder, but she barely noticed. “Fischer was a good businessman, he’ll make his own fortune, and now he has good memories of his father as well. Miss Pevensie might not even have that if we mess this up!”
“Have you ever lost anyone important, Ariadne?” His voice was not raised, his face passive, but a dead silence fell on the room as Miles looked directly at her. “You saw the dangers of dwelling in the past with Mr Cobb. For those of us who do not have the luxury of visiting our lost loved ones in dreams, it can be unbearable. It may sound heartless, but believe me when I say that if there is a means by which Miss Pevensie can finally let go, still remember but not linger with the dead, you will be doing her the greatest favour by assisting her.”
Ariadne’s face was flushed with embarrassment, but unease still festered within her. “If she’d wanted to move on,” she said firmly, “she could have hired us to do that.”
“And that would make our jobs so much harder. We must be grateful for small mercies. Remember, Ariadne, that what people want and what they need are not often the same thing.”
Ariadne had no more arguments, but she still wasn’t happy. When it became clear that she was done, Miles continued, back in his business-like tone, “Arthur, Eames, you must undertake the research. Yusuf is on a flight in to assist with the drugs, but this should not be too long a job, so you will not require much. I obviously cannot help much beyond this, so Arthur, you’ll be in charge.”
“Me?” said Arthur in surprise. “But I’ve never -”
“As I said, this is a simple job. I leave the planning to you, but I do recommend that you, Ariadne, spend your time getting better acquainted with Miss Pevensie’s surroundings, as they would probably be best used for the first dream level. Perhaps an exploratory dream-walk inside Miss Pevensie’s mind would also give you a better idea as to what to expect within.”
Arthur started scribbling notes on his pad, looking stressed.
“Perhaps I could go on one as well,” said Eames, “If there are any projections of her siblings, I could learn from their mannerisms.”
“Very good, but remember, they might not be exact representations but how she is remembering them idealistically. Remember to read all the information as well.”
“Wait - the first dream level as a place in the real world?” said Ariadne. “Cobb always said never to do that. He said you might forget what’s a dream and what’s real.”
Miles looked at her again for the first time. “Then you’d better have your totem on you.”
*~*~*
Eames and Ariadne arrived at Susan’s house the following evening, where they were let in by her housekeeper. She was already asleep, she told them, and they could go straight up. If she was confused by these instructions which had been left for her regarding any guests showing up at her employer’s doorstep, she didn’t show it.
They both climbed the stairs quietly. It had been agreed between Susan and Miles that the two of them would let themselves into her house one night when she was already asleep for an exploration of her natural dream state, with no advanced warning, so as to hopefully not alter it overly much in any way. Sure enough, when they silently opened her door, she was already asleep in her bed, one arm helpfully left bare out to the side. With a glance at each other, they opened the case containing the machine. As Eames carefully connected Susan and then himself to it, Ariadne felt an unexpected thrill of apprehension. Miles had warned her earlier that she might have an unusual subconscious - untrained, but different. He hadn’t explained further. But when Eames offered her a connecting cable as well, she took it and slid it into her arm, quickly slipping into the dream state.
Ariadne had found herself wondering that afternoon what she would find inside her professor’s head. Many dreams, in her experience, were walkthroughs of everyday life, and rather dull, but she’d vastly prefer that to something hideously embarrassing. She was professional, after all, but she’d rather be able to look Dr Pevensie in the eye after all this. It was a relief, and only a slight surprise, to open her eyes in a seemingly empty snowy forest - having read the preliminary files provided by Miles earlier that day, she’d learned of her upbringing in the English countryside. If her mind was dwelling on her deceased siblings lately, it made sense for her subconscious to be rooted in her childhood as well.
Trees surrounded them in all directions, snow hanging heavily on all the branches, and Susan was nowhere in sight. Something about it struck Ariadne as odd, though, but she couldn’t work it out. She looked to Eames, but he didn’t seem concerned about anything. He looked around and shrugged. “Pick a direction?” he suggested.
She peered through the trees around them. She noticed that in one direction, there seemed to be a definite path, and in all the others, the trees became less distinct, as though Susan’s memory failed her. “That seems like a start,” she said, and the two of them set off.
As they walked, Eames said, “Which forest do you reckon this is? One from Oxfordshire?”
“I’m thinking one where she and her siblings went during the war. That’d probably make more of an impact. Or maybe a mixture of the two.”
“How old was she during the war again? Twelve, thirteen?” Eames shook his head. “She’s over 80 years old. If I can be as sharp as her when I’m her age, I’ll quit drinking now. Think it’s the British country air keeping her so well?”
“I don’t know,” said Ariadne. “Some people just age gracefully, I guess?”
“Yeah, but there’s Helen Mirren and then there’s full-on elixir of life. I don’t-”
“Shh.” Ariadne held out a hand to simultaneously stop and silence him. She’d just heard a voice up ahead, through the trees. At the same time, she’d realized what was bothering her about these woods. She couldn’t hear any animals, no tweeting or fluttering of birds or rustling of tiny mammals in the undergrowth. It was like the snow covering every twig and patch of grass had also muffled the entire world around them. The entire forest was unnaturally silent and still. Empty. This would be strange enough in a real forest, but in a dream forest, where the person’s projections should still be everywhere, it was very disconcerting.
She did not voice these concerns to Eames, but proceeded with him more quietly, until they came to the edge of a clearing. Their attention was caught first by a tall, iron lamppost - rather out of place, but Ariadne supposed she must have brought it in from somewhere else - but quickly moved to Susan, a girl who must be Susan, who had the same eyes as the older Susan they knew framed in a much younger face, with dark hair down past her shoulders. She was wearing a fur coat, and on the other side of the clearing were two boys and a girl who must be her siblings.
“Come on Susan!” they were saying, “We’re going to the palace!”
“I can’t,” the girl replied, looking saddened but resigned, “I can’t take my fur coat out of the wardrobe. It wouldn’t be polite.”
“But there’ll be chess pieces made of gold!” the eldest boy said, “They’ll last for thousands of years! Just leave the coat!”
“But it’s part of me. I’ll freeze without it.”
“Aslan is warm. He’ll look after you,” said the little girl.
“No. He’s the one who’s left us here in the snow in the first place.”
Eames was shaking his head. “Goddamn unshaped dreams. What the hell are they talking about?”
“Just be glad they’re not all naked,” pointed out Ariadne. “Maybe you could get closer as a bird or something - Eames, what is it?”
He had turned away from the clearing and was looking out into the forest around them. “Do you hear that?”
Ariadne listened hard, and soon heard it as well - a strange sound, coming closer, like two pieces of slightly rough material being pulled over each other quickly, with the pounding of hooves. It sounded very familiar, and she finally placed it as the sound of a sled of some kind approaching. But no sooner had she made this conclusion than another sound joined it, the baleful blare of a steam train releasing steam. She met Eames’s gaze and his expression mirrored her own confusion.
In the clearing, Susan had clearly heard it as well, because she became agitated. “Peter, Edmund, Lucy! You’ve got to get out of here! It’s coming!”
“What is?” Lucy laughed, “Aslan protects us from everything. Nothing can hurt us here.”
“No, you have to move! You have to come back to the real world, they can’t get you there.”
“But then we won’t be kings and queens,” said Peter slowly, disappointedly.
“But it’ll be real! Please, come back with me, you can’t stay here forever, you’re too old-”
Ariadne was trying to watch and listen to the approaching sounds as well. There was definitely the sound of a sled on ice, of the pounding hooves of whatever was drawing it, but also the steady chugging of train wheels, the occasional blare of released steam - both a sled and a train? How did that make sense? But in the clearing, the children were stepping away from Susan.
“You’ve grown up,” said Lucy accusingly.
“I had to,” replied Susan.
“We didn’t,” said Peter, “We never did.”
With one last blare of steam, the source of the noise burst into the clearing. For a second, Ariadne got an impression of the train she had heard, but she blinked and it was definitely a sled - a beautiful, white sled, drawn by reindeer. Steering a sled was what appeared to be a dwarf, and a tall, dark, beautiful woman was sat in the back. Ariadne and Eames could only watch, silently.
“Hello Sons of Adam and Daughter of Eve,” she said to Lucy, Peter and Edmund. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes,” the three of them chorused, and they eagerly clambered aboard the sled. As they did so, and the woman threw her long fur cloak around all of them to keep them war, she turned her imperious head to Susan.
“Hello Susan,” she said, “No room for you, I’m afraid. You’re far too big to fit in here. Unless you would like my seat?”
Susan was shaking her head and backing away. “No. You can’t take them.”
“They’ve taken themselves. I shall simply deliver them to their final destination. They’re so eager to see Aslan, you see? Now, are you sure you don’t want my seat?”
“No. I don’t.”
The woman smiled maliciously, and held out a wand. “You’re almost there. You don’t even need one of these, do you?”
Susan said nothing, lips pressed together, so far backed away she was almost enveloped in a thick bush. The woman nodded at the dwarf, who cracked the reins and send the sled sliding off again into the woods, and Susan could only watch as her siblings were carried away from her. Ariadne was just turning to Eames to stare at him in amazement when a sudden, horrible noise devastated the silence of the woods - the screeching of brakes, the screaming twisting of metal, crashes, shatterings, all so loud and so vivid that Ariadne’s heart felt it would explode from the sheer intensity of the clamour of what she knew must be the sound of a train crashing horrifically.
Susan had covered her eyes and ears at the sound and, as Ariadne and Eames watched, her hair turned to grey and her body aged before them, and she grew to the old lady they already knew. The forest around them was silent once again, aside from the faint rustling of the trees.
*~*~*
The next morning, Susan woke up to find Ariadne sat next to her bed with a cup of tea. “Eames made it,” she promised, handing it to her. “He said you never lose the knack.”
Susan took it from her slowly, still not entirely awake. “So I presume you went into my dreams last night?” Ariadne nodded. “Hm. I didn’t see you. Was it enlightening?”
“That’s one word for it.”
With a little effort, Susan pulled herself to sit upright and leaned back against her pillows. Ariadne had to remember that, despite her mental acuity and seeming sharpness, this woman was supposedly in her eighties. “What did you see?”
Ariadne considered where to start. “There was a dark-haired woman in a sleigh, in the forest in winter... do you have any idea how those elements might have come together? Like, a story you read, or someone you knew, or...”
She trailed off when she noticed Susan was smiling into her tea. “Ah,” said the older woman. “So, you saw Jadis.” Ariadne waited, and after a sip of the tea and a nod of approval, Susan began to explain.
“When my siblings and I were young, we were sent to the country as evacuees, as you know. It was... dreadfully dull. We passed the time the usual way, with games, with books - but my sister Lucy, well, her imagination was always beyond all of ours. She invented this whole world in the back of a wardrobe. Narnia was its name. It was full of magic and talking animals and adventure and wonder. It was so compelling that, well, we all joined in, played her games. It felt almost real sometimes. Even Edmund got drawn in, and he was so difficult back then, he had barely talked to us since our father went off to fight.
“I imagine that was the main appeal. In Lucy’s games, we weren’t just kids, lost from London in a world at war - we were kings and queens, wise and good and strong, and we saved the land from the darkness that was consuming it. Now, one of the main ‘baddies’ in this world was Jadis, the White Witch, the woman who had made it eternally winter. We defeated her in the end, of course,” she added as an aside, with a smile tainted by a hint of self-deprecation. “But she was quite imposing, I can tell you. I suppose I’m not too surprised to learn she is in my dreams.”
“She took your siblings off in her sleigh,” said Ariadne. “They wanted you to go with them...”
Susan looked down at the cup of tea in her lap. “I tired of the game long before they did,” she said quietly. “It made the jump back to London with us. Peter stopped playing when he did his exams, and I, well, I grew up, but Edmund and Lucy kept playing. They even got our cousin Eustace involved, can you believe that? He was a real brat before then, improved no end by all accounts... but then Peter went back to playing with them as well, they kept talking about it as if it were real. They spent all their days dreaming about this fantasy world where they had supposedly achieved so much. Lucy almost drowned one time,” she said abruptly, looking back at Ariadne. “At the Kirke house. She almost drowned in the river, because in Narnia she could swim, so she thought she could in real life.”
Ariadne didn’t know how to respond, and Susan sighed and looked away again. “Professor Kirke encouraged them, god knows why. They’d have little meet-ups about it... it was on their way to one of those that they were killed in the train.” There was no pain or regret in her voice. She might have been telling Ariadne about the construction of a particularly notable skyscraper. “Not just them - my parents were meeting them as well. I had to identify all the bodies. I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle - Eustace’s parents, who, of course, had just lost their son as well. I think part of them blamed my siblings... they sent me off to university, I went happily enough. We weren’t a family. Mine were gone.”
Ariadne swallowed. Suddenly she wished they were discussing this in a formal meeting rather than in the more intimate setting of at her bedside. She felt that she should say something comforting but knew that, after seventy years, there was nothing she could say. Instead she chose to remain professional and said, “I can see why you want to remember the good times, then. We’ll do what we can to help.”
Susan suddenly turned and grabbed Ariadne’s hand. Her eyes betrayed a greater depth of emotion than she had let show during her explanation. “Ariadne - there’s more. There’s more I want you to do for me. Can you help me? Please?”
“Uh - OK, I can get the others together for a meeting, and -”
“No. I can’t talk about this in front of all of them. I couldn’t even tell Miles. I can barely say it once.” She took a deep breath, but when her gaze met Ariadne’s again, it was steady. “I want you to make me believe that Narnia was real.”
Ariadne just about kept her mouth from falling open, but she couldn’t keep the blind shock and confusion from her face. “What?”
“I believed it when I was young. I want to believe it again. That’s a simpler inception, isn’t it? Reinstate the notion that my childhood fantasy world was real. Or at least the hope it was... just, please, find some way to make me believe in it again. To let me hope for it again. Then I can hope... I can hope that they’re somewhere good. That their obsession was all worthwhile. That it all came out well in the end.”
Ariadne gently sat back, trying to subtly extract her hand from Susan’s grip, but her fingers were clasped tightly in their fervour. “Uh... Dr Pevensie... I’m not sure we can...”
“Do you know what it’s like to lose faith in something you loved? In something that made you so happy?” Susan let go of Ariadne’s hand and looked away from her again. She gathered her bedsheets in her hands and twisted them absent-mindedly, such that Ariadne wasn’t sure she knew she was doing it. “Losing my family changed me as a person. That served me fine through life - I could look after myself, I made my own way, I was happy. But I’m old, now, Ariadne. I’m older than you can comprehend. I want to go back to being free. I want to be free of my ghosts. I want the hope that there is something else, and that I haven’t lived my life in an unmagical world. It’s not too late.”
Ariadne was frozen in her seat. She had never, ever heard someone speak the way Susan just had, and there was nothing she could think to say. She didn’t think there was anything she could say. Quietly, she rose from her seat, and said, “I’ll talk to the others.”
“Thank you.” Susan did not look at her again. Ariadne quietly got to her feet and let herself out.
*~*~*
“Why the hell didn’t Miles tell us about this?”
Yusuf had arrived that morning, and their briefing of him was confused for all the unexpected new information they had received. Eames had remained uncharacteristically quiet - Ariadne wondered if he was as affected by what he had seen in the dream as she was - and Arthur was desperately scribbling things in a pad and crossing them out again with a kind of diligent fury, struggling to construct some kind of idea of how to do this. Yusuf was looking at them all one by one, the most taken aback of them all.
“We are supposed to carry out inception, on someone who is expecting it, of an idea she is asking for - and this inception is the restoration of faith?” He shook his head. “Faith is impossible.”
“It’s hardly faith,” said Ariadne. As unnerving as she’d found it when Susan had proposed it, she couldn’t help but defend her. “It’s just allowing herself to hope that her fantasy world as a kid was real. It’s the hope her family are happy wherever they are.”
Yusuf spread his hands wide. “Sounds like faith to me. And you should not go messing with people’s faiths. Wars happen over faith. People go insane over faith. They kill for it.”
“But she wants us to,” said Eames.
“Which is the only reason I’m not out the door already. If it wasn’t Miles asking...”
Yusuf lapsed into silence, and they all sat quietly while Arthur continued to scribble. Finally he sighed and leaned back, rubbing his eyes.
“OK,” he began. “She needs to believe that the fantasy world is real again. Or at least hope it is. The easiest way to do this would seem to be creating a first-level dream world exactly like ours, and have her find her way back there - the back of a wardrobe, you said was where it started? The smoother we can make the transition, the better. She’s aware people are going to be performing inception on her, so if she becomes aware, we’ll have to adapt, and we’ll have to give good messages rather than outright lies which she’ll see through in the morning. Even if she figures out it was an inception, hopefully it’ll help her see things more clearly.”
“So it’s more - dream therapy?” said Eames.
“I guess, yeah. The diaries from Professor Kirke’s estate arrived earlier, Eames, you and Ariadne will have to look closely through them to build this world convincingly. Hopefully, if she thinks it’s real, she’ll fill it with her own projections. Yusuf, we’re going to help read them as well, maybe get some ideas...”
For the next few hours, the four of them sat and read through all the notes, both of Kirke’s and Susan’s. Ariadne found a sheaf of sketches tucked into a folder and flicked through them, and was amazed at the sheer level of detail and imagination: there was Susan with all her family in regal clothing; beautiful palaces and scenes of natural beauty; magical creatures like dryads and centaurs and some she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before; beautifully crafted objects, in particular what appeared to be a hunting horn, which always seemed to crop up in the outfits Susan was wearing.
She pointed it out to the others. “This seems pretty significant. That’s probably going to be a detail we’re going to have to put in there.”
“Kirke’s diaries keep talking about someone called Aslan,” said Arthur, shuffling through same pages, “He seems pretty important too, like a king or a lord or a god or something. He could be someone for Eames to pose as. You seen any drawings of him?”
Everyone searched silently for a few seconds until Yusuf started laughing. He held up a sketch. “Guys. I think Aslan’s a LION.”
Eames’s mouth fell open. “I am NOT being a lion.”
“But it looks like she’d listen to him.”
“Ix-nay on the Ion-Lay! Not happening! I had to be cat once in an extraction we did on this old lady in a coma so the family could see where she’d put her will - NEVER AGAIN.”
“OK, OK, we’ll find someone else.” Yusuf flipped through another pages and barely suppressed a smirk. “How about a beaver?”
As Eames grabbed a heavy folder of notes and ran around the table at Yusuf, who himself leaped out of his chair and ran around in the opposite direction, initiating a chase game round and round the table, Arthur threw down his pen and said to Ariadne, “You know, I think that’s our cue for a lunchbreak.”
*~*~*
“I’ve thought of something I don’t like about this,” said Ariadne.
“Something else?” Arthur couldn’t help smile.
“Something worse.”
The two of them were in a cafe. Yusuf was taking Eames out to a bar for an apologetic pint, but neither of the two of them had fancied it, so they were down the road at Arthur’s favourite delicatessen, where they always went when he visited. It was small, but had a great atmosphere and was always warm.
Arthur grabbed their pastries and drinks from the server and the two of them sat down at a table in the window. “OK. What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about what Susan said. About this other fantasy world. Which you can go to and it takes no time whatsoever and she and her siblings had full power over. Sounds like a lower dream level, right? So, we can do this for her, and she’ll have her happy little imaginary world where they’re happy. But... she wants to think her siblings got there by dying. That they got somewhere better by dying. That’s not happy little imaginary worlds any more, Arthur. That’s not a lower dream level, that’s a higher one, a more real better reality. That’s... if we do this wrong, she could end up like Mal.”
Arthur’s face darkened. “You’re right. If we do this too well...”
“... she might think all she has to do to be with them again is kill herself.” Ariadne hesitated. “Do you think we should go through with this? Do you think we should tell Miles?”
Arthur rested his hands in his hands and considered it silently. “No,” he said finally. “No, we can handle this. We’ll just have to be... very careful.”
“But -”
“She doesn’t need the belief, right? She just needs the hope. So we can leave a shadow of a doubt. Remind her that this might be a dream... I mean, when the job’s done, she’s always going to be wondering what of her feelings came from us anyway. She’ll never be that convinced of it, I don’t think.”
Ariadne stared. “But that’s even more horrible. Not knowing which of your beliefs are your own?”
“She wouldn’t have asked for it if Miles hadn’t explained everything to her. And remember, she should believe them so strongly it’s like someone’s just revealed them to her rather than just stuck them in her. She’ll be fine.”
“We hope,” said Ariadne flatly. “But we can’t know because no-one’s ever done this before.”
Arthur sighed. “No. We can’t. But we can be as certain and as careful as possible... and if we pull this off, who knows? This could be a legit career. Just think of how popular therapy is, taking dream therapy public could do great things. It could help so many people.”
“Until advertising companies or someone gets hold of it.” She tried to concentrate on her tea, but the words came tumbling out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Arthur, have you ever considered what’s going to happen when this technology goes mainstream? Rather than just underground in backstreet dream dens or in high-flyer fraud and theft... When anyone and everyone can enter and share each other’s dreams and ideas, but also invade them and change them. What happens when people can’t trust their minds and realities as their own any more? What do we become?”
She was finally voicing thoughts which had been eating away at her for a long time, and hearing them out loud somehow made them more terrifyingly real, albeit in the strange environment of the sunlit cafe with normal people walking by on the street just outside. But her voice remained as steady as Susan’s had when she described the loss of her family. As horrible as these things could be, they were the reality they lived in and not worth crying over.
However, Arthur must have seen something of her true feelings in her face, because he stood up, pulled her to her feet, and hugged her. His arms were surprisingly strong, and Ariadne distantly remembered Cobb telling her one time about how, while fighting in dreams was happening in your subconscious, it helped to train in real life so that, in fights with hostile projections, you believed you could win. Doubt, he’d told her, was as dangerous as the ‘Mr Charles’ manoeuvre in attracting the projections’ attention.
“We’ll be careful,” Arthur said in her ear. “We won’t screw up. We’ll make it that we’re only giving good, positive messages, which, if she does take them to heart, can only be taken in a good way. Stuff we’d tell her in real life if she’d listen to us. And we’ll keep an eye on her afterwards, OK? And if, a big if, it looks like something’s not right, we’ll fix it. We’ll always fix it.”
Her face was buried in his shoulder. He smelled of washing detergent, a particularly nice washing detergent which she almost tempted to ask the name of. It was comforting, and he was comforting, but she still had to ask, “What’s going to happen?”
“Whatever does happen, we’ll manage.” He stepped away from her and smiled. “Besides, we’ll have a head-start on everyone else. Can’t imagine what anyone would find if they tried to get in my head.”
Ariadne laughed. “Oh, I bet I know what’s in there.”
“Oh yeah? Enlighten me.”
“Simple. A giant 5-dimensional bouncy castle filled with piranhas.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It’s the security layout I’m designing for you. The piranhas are trained in the art of ju-jitsu.”
“Oh, then that makes perfect sense.”
On to Part 2