Ariadne/Robert- Guilty By Design

[butterflys_fics]

Title: Guilty By Design
Author: butterflys_fics/blacksouledbutterfly
Rating: NC-17 (to be safe)
Pairing(s): Ariadne/Robert Fischer
Word Count: 5,071
Summary: After the inception guilt eats away at Ariadne. So, she decides to hunt down Robert Fischer and tell him the truth.
Warnings: Sexual content.
Notes: For this prompt at inception_kink.



"It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."- Oscar Wilde

She had never known, until now, just how paralyzing that guilt could be. And she had never known that guilt could be so all consuming. She had been well aware of what she was getting herself into when she signed on to work with Cobb and his team but what she hadn’t known, what she hadn’t expected was for the whole ordeal to cause her to feel the way that she does.

Stepping off of the plane and making her way through the airport guilt starts to swell in her stomach. She moves through the crowds to baggage claim and though she knows that she shouldn’t she watches him. She watches Robert Fischer making his way through the crowds to get his baggage; watches him pause as Cobb moves past him, look at him like maybe he knows him but can't place it. She watches him as he goes to meet the man there to pick him up and keeps watching him until he's out of her sight.

But just because he's out of her sight doesn’t mean that she's not thinking about him anymore. She goes to her hotel and she sits down and she thinks about what they just did, about the magnitude of what just happened. They had gone into this man's head, this man who had just lost his father, and had convinced him to rip apart his father's company, the empire that the dead man had spent his whole life building. And while she knows that they did it for a good reason, that they were trying to help Cobb to get back to his family that doesn’t mean that they had the right to actually manipulate someone like that and potentially ruin their lives. It was cruel and callous.

She doesn’t sleep that night, just lies awake and wonders if doing this will affect him in any other way. She wonders if having him decide to rip apart the empire will affect him in a way that isn't financial. It could change everything about him, change who he is, how he sees the world. The idea itself had seemed so simple at the time, had seemed so abstract. And it hadn’t even seemed so bad going into the dream but once it was all over, when they were coming in for a landing and she was looking at him it hit her exactly what they had done, that they had played with someone's life.

So sleep just doesn’t come for her. She spends the entire night thinking about the magnitude of what they had done and then gets on a plane back to Paris in the morning. But once she's there she can't sleep either. Instead she goes on her computer and looks up everything she can about Robert Fischer. She hadn’t gotten to know as much about him as she could have during the preparation for the job and she knows that. And that’s just because she wasn’t supposed to go into the dreams with them. She was just supposed to create the levels and be done with it. But she had gone in and now it's like he's haunting her.

She finds whatever she can online instead of calling anyone from the team. And she doesn’t think to call them because she doesn’t suppose that they'd actually understand. She could hope that they would but she doesn’t think that they are affected the same way that she is. They've been working in dreams for a long time. They may not have done inception before but they've done extraction. They lived in a world where goes into people's heads was common, it was normal.

Until now she hadn’t done anything like this before. Until this job she hadn’t been anything more than a student. She wanted to create things and Cobb had given her the chance to do that. But in doing that she had stepped over a line she doesn’t think that people really have the right to. The mind is a place that’s supposed to belong only to the person that owns the mind. Your thoughts, your secrets, your desires. They're all supposed to be safe and sacred.

But they had just destroyed the sanctity of the mind. They had broken into him and had poked around in his head. They had put an idea inside of him that wasn’t his, made him think that it was his and manipulated him. And looking through the internet articles about Fischer and his father and his company, looking at his face she knows what they did could be so, so damaging.

And that’s why guilt swells inside of her. It makes her feel anxious like maybe her skin is going to crawl right off of her body. It makes her feel nauseous, makes her feel like she has to pee. But she can't call any of the others and let them know how she's feeling. Because they just wouldn’t get it. And because she just hopes that she can get over it quickly. She doesn’t want her mind to be weighed down by this guilt. Because that’s the most surefire way for her to end up falling completely into darkness. And the last thing she wants is for this job to control her life like that. Her life has to be more than what she just did.

"You don’t sound like yourself."

It’s a month after the Fischer job and Arthur called her. After a couple of days of barely being able to sleep- first not sleeping at all and then sleeping for an hour or two before waking up and then having to fall right back asleep- she's finally able to sleep through the night. And you might think that she would be relieved but that would be too easy and relief is fickle.

With sleep comes dream and also nightmares. And while Robert Fischer isn't keeping her awake at night anymore that doesn’t mean that he's left her mind. He comes to her in almost every dream. His face fills her head, haunts her like a ghost of some kind. He comes to her in all sorts of reasons, in all sorts of ways. But one dream comes more often than any other.

She's sitting alone at a bar. She's sitting alone with a drink in front of her but there's no bartender, no other patrons. It's like the rest of the world had completely fallen away, vanished. It feels like she's the last person on the face of the earth. And then the door opens and it moves like its all been slowed down.

She turns from where she's sitting at the bar, her arm resting against the bar itself to help push her body. Light pours into it, comes through the door while no light comes through the windows. Sudden day when it's all night otherwise. And Robert Fischer walks into the bar, wearing the same exact clothes she had seen him in during their plane trip.

He moves across the floor like he's on autopilot, takes a seat at the bar next to her. Her heart pounds in her chest, almost feels lodged in her throat at the same time. And at first she just watches him. She just looks at his profile, takes in the contours of his face, how clear his eyes look from that angle, like there's no color to them at all.

And then he turns slowly to look at her and his eyes meet hers and there's something there, something inside of them that tells her that he's there but he isn't. There's something inside of him that’s completely and totally damaged, broken, like a piece of him is gone, a part of him has been destroyed. And it makes her choke up, makes her breath catch in her throat. And then she wakes up panting for breath.

"Ariadne?"

"Yeah?" She knows she got lost for a second there and knows that getting lost will just make Arthur suspicious. And maybe it will even make him worry. And if he worries then he might show up there and try to find out what's going on with her. And she doesn’t want him there. She doesn’t want to have to explain all of this to him. It really shouldn’t be an issue for the others. It should be a problem for her and her alone.

"You were gone there for a bit."

"Just have a lot on my mind."

"Really? School getting to you?"

"Something like that." But school is the least of her concerns right now. School isn't that difficult for her right now. The only thing that makes it difficult is being haunted in her dreams by Fischer. It's distracting and no matter what she does she can't seem to concentrate after she's awoken from a dream he's in, like he's controlling her entire life. He's controlling her entire life and she doesn’t even know him, not really. They've never met officially at least. And hell, he wouldn’t know who she was if she ever bumped into him. And in all honesty she only way she can think to get this to stop is to find Fischer.

And to clear her conscience.

It takes nearly four months to track him down. She does it in between doing her schoolwork and that’s just because she doesn’t want to fail out fail out of school. If her grades start to fall then her mother is going to start calling her up worrying. She's going to start asking her what's going on with her, what made her suddenly start to let her grades fall. Because she's always been a good student, ever since she was a kid.

But it took four months to track Robert Fischer down without using any of the guys she worked with. If she used Arthur then she would be able to get the information a lot easier. But she doesn’t want Arthur to know what's going on because she knows that he'll just try to talk her out of what got into her head.

But she finally finds out he's going to be in New York for a business meeting so that’s when she starts putting her plan into action. She tells her professors that she has to go home for a family emergency, lets them know she'll get her work done and turned in as soon as she possibly can. And then she buys a plane ticket, uses some of the money that she got paid for the inception though it almost feels like blood money.

And it's three days before the business meeting that she finally gets on a plane and heads into New York to meet him face to face.

Officially this time.

It wasn’t as hard to find out what hotel he's staying in as she thought it would be. She thought that sort of information would be more safely guarded but a few less than legal keystrokes later and she had been able to find out what hotel he's staying at. So she gets herself a room in the same hotel even though its not exactly what you would call cheap- its not even close to cheap and she knows that by the time this is all done most of the money she made during the extraction will probably be gone but if it helps to ease her mind its worth it.

She's been sitting in the bar for hours- three to be exact- waiting for any sign of Fischer coming back. The hotel bar itself is pretty empty which she supposes should be unusual but she also supposes that there's a very, very good chance that they all go out to restaurants and clubs when they're there. When you have money you can afford to almost anything you want.

It's late, really late and she's getting ready to leave the bar and go up to her hotel room when she sees Fischer coming into the bar. So she stops and she waits and waits and waits, watches him sitting down and having a few drinks. It's like some disturbingly brighter version of her dream, no desolation outside and no rain pelting down but not touching him before he can enter. But its so much like her dream anyway that it makes her breath hitch, makes her feel anxious, nervous, like she needs to throw up or pee. She's not sure which but she doesn’t do either. She just waits, and waits and waits.

She waits until he slides out of his seat and makes his way out of the bar. And she waits a couple of beats longer than that so that it doesn’t look like she's following him even if that’s exactly what she's doing. and then she slides out of her seat herself, throws money down on the table to pay for what she ordered, follows him out into the hall, takes a different elevator than he does but stops at his floor, stays as far behind him as she can while making sure that she keeps a close eye on him, not wanting him to be able to step into his room before she can talk to him. So she just watches him moving down the hall in his expensive tailored suit and his shiny shoes, moving like a man without a care in the world. (The emptiness in his eyes in her dream flash through her memory unbidden and unwanted.)

She stops him just as his hand closes on the doorknob, puts her hand on his wrist, her tiny fingers encircling it. "Mr. Fischer." Her voice sounds so much stronger than she feels, so much more sure of herself.

He turns his head slightly to look at her, pale blue eyes skipping across her face and for a moment she swears she sees something akin to recognition in them but she doesn’t wait to find out, doesn’t want to know what he could possibly say if he does recognize her.

"We need to talk."

He's pacing. He's pacing back and forth across the floor in front of the bed while she sits on it, sits far enough back from the edge that the toes of her shoes barely brush across the rug as she kicks her feet back and forth slightly, an inch forward, an inch back. She hadn’t expected things to go well when she told him what happened, what they had done. She expected anger or at least disbelief. But he's been pacing for the last ten minutes without so much as a single word. And it's really beginning to scare her.

The composure that he had on his face the entire time she had explained the whole mess to him was gone now, the corners of his mouth turned down in almost a frown, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. His hand shakes at his side, taps against his outer thigh in some sort of a rhythm she can't place. Or maybe it's just a nervous tick and not a rhythm at all, just something he's doing without realizing it.

"No," he finally says after a moment, shakes his head. "No, that’s not possible. You can take information out of people's heads but you can't put things in there."

"I assure you- you can and we did."

"That’s not possible."

"I'm afraid just telling yourself that over and over again won't make it true."

"Stop it." He stops at the little desk in the room, rests his hand on the edge of it, grips it so white his knuckles blanch to paper white. "You're insane," he finally says as though he just discovered the meaning of life, the answer to every question in the universe. "You're insane and somehow you got it into your head to come tell me this."

In that moment she knows he truly believes that, thinks that she's making it up. Or that’s what he wants to believe. Because fiction can be so much easier than reality. And the reality of it is that they violated him in the worst way possible. They played around in his head and made him do something he never would have thought of on his own. And so her chest feels tight while he watches him go over to the mini-fridge, open it up, take out a bottle of water that probably costs ten times as much as one the same size would at the local market. He pours come into one of the glasses on top of the fridge, takes a sip and walks towards the desk again, leans his hip against it and nods to himself like that explains everything.

"You recognize me," she rationalizes.

"From the airplane," he immediately replies. "Yes, I recognize you in passing. From the plane I took when I was going to bury my father. If that's what you think passes for proof then…"

"You wanted to know why no one could dream up a beach."

He pauses with the glass halfway to his mouth, turns his head slightly to look at her. "Excuse me?"

"There was snow everywhere," she continues. "And you had to get to the antechamber, had to find the answers you were looking for. There was an avalanche and you asked why no one could dream up a beach." She shrugs once, slowly. "Saito told me later on. I was with…someone else at the time." Her eyes jump up to meet his. "Do you remember?"

"No, that’s was-"

"A dream. Yes. And you almost made it to the antechamber and you were shot. And in an instant you were in this place, this city by the sea. And then I pushed you off of the porch and you were back outside of the antechamber. Yes, it was a dream. But it wasn’t your dream. Not really. I created that world. We brought you into it."

Fischer just watches her for a moment, his eyes skipping across her face. He thinks about that dream, about the group of people all dressed in white, the tiny little woman going off with the man that had called himself Mr. Charles. He thinks about seeing that tiny little woman where she said she had been, on the porch outside of an apartment, stuck in a place that shouldn’t exist in reality- a house in an apartment building. He can picture it all so very clearly that it's like it's happening all over again. But it never happened. He knows it never happened. It was a dream. It was all just a dream. And yet…

"Ariadne." Her name slips past his lips unbidden, like a hand reached down inside of him and yanked it out- the name he had heard them call her, a name he wouldn’t have known because she hadn’t given him her first name. Just her last.

"Yes."

She watches as the recognition and the realization crosses over his face, fills his eyes, makes them shiny like he wants to cry but there are no tears. Only the sharpness of a person that knows the truth now, knows what was done to him. And he curses under his breath, curses a word she can't hear and slams his hand with the glass down on the desk.

The glass shatters on impact, his hand coming down on the broken shards before he can stop the momentum. A piece tears through his flesh, through muscle and he reels backwards, bumps his legs against the mini-fridge. He curls his hand into a fist, blood already starting to seep out of the room. And she's off of the bed, moving towards him to check on his hand an instant later, moving on pure instinct. But he turns his gaze up and meets her eyes, his own burning.

"Get out."

He doesn’t say another word to her, just disappears into the bathroom and closes the door behind him. And she stands there in his hotel room, listens to the water start to run, her heart pounding in her chest. But she knows she can't leave, knows she can't walk away until she knows he's alright. So she doesn’t leave. Not yet. Instead she moves over to the desk, carefully picks up the shards of the broken glass and deposits them in the waste bin, mops up the water with tissues and waits and waits and waits.

She waits until long after she hears the shower turn on, listens to it running and running and running for what feels like an eternity, her heartbeat pounding in her ears like a drum. She waits until she really starts to worry and then she makes her way over to the door, knocks on it, check the doorknob and finds it unlocked.

She opens the door, feels the steam pouring out of it. "Mr. Fischer?" But he doesn’t answer her. And she waits and waits for any sign of him hearing her before she looks inside, the bathroom, looks at the mirror all steamed up, the glass doors of the shower equally as steamed up. There's a bloody towel resting on the sink. "Robert?" But he still doesn’t answer her and worry makes her heart beat faster, makes her move over to the door of the shower even though she knows she shouldn’t, makes her slide it open.

The first thing she sees is the pale skin of his back, reddened by the heat of the water, his shoulders shaking like he's cold though she knows he can't be, not with the heat pouring out of that shower. And she reaches out her hand to put it on his shoulder to try to get his attention. Once her hand makes contact with his skin he turns, reaches out and grabs her wrist, pulls her into the shower before she can do anything but squeak in surprise and he presses her against the wall of the shower, water soaking through her shirt. His eyes are red as is his face.

"You invaded my mind," he whispers out.

"I know."

"You made me rip apart everything my father created. You manipulated me."

"I know."

"The first thing I ever did for myself…and it wasn’t my idea."

"I know."

He releases her wrist, lets out this breathless, saddened laugh that’s almost a sob and her heart aches. His eyes go away from her, his gaze going out into the bathroom, his face haunted. Reaching up she puts one hand on the side of his face and he flinches away from her, anger and something close to fear crossing his face.

She puts her other hand on the other side of his face, turns his face back towards her. "I'm sorry," she whispers out to him, meaning that maybe more than she's meant anything else in a long time. "We did it for a good reason. And it doesn’t make it right but it explains it."

"My father never wanted me to be my own person," he realizes.

"I don’t know," she admits. "I don’t know what your father wanted. But that doesn’t matter. You did it. Why does it matter if that’s what he wanted? You're building something for yourself. You're proving you don’t need his legacy."

He lets out this strangled sob and bows his head and she's not sure when she decides to do it but she arches herself off of the wall, tilts his face up with her hands and presses her mouth against his, tries to soothe him the best she can. And then it's like a floodgate opening and his mouth is pressing against hers, desperate and sad and needy- in need of comfort, of validation, of something and nothing all at once. Just needy in general.

His hands go to her waist, slip beneath the wet fabric of her shirt, touch against her skin and she feels like she can't breathe, the steam and the kiss overloading her senses. His fingers dip beneath the waistband of her skirt run along her skin and she releases his face, reaches down and unzips the zipper at the side, lets her skirt fall into a pile on the shower floor and then his fingers slide into her panties, his finger finding the part between her legs, the slick digits moving over her easily.

She's not sure who does what after that, who makes it go further. She doesn’t even know who slid her panties down her legs or who unbuttoned her shirt only that it ended up on the shower floor with her shirt. And then she's pressed more firmly against the wall and her feet are off of the floor, her legs around his waist and he's inside of her. it forces all of the oxygen out of her lungs and she closes her eyes, tilts her head back in the shower and then she opens her eyes again, looks at his face, meets his eyes and lets him take whatever comfort he can out of her body, makes little moaning sounds in the back of her throat as he thrusts in and out of her, the sound of the water hitting his back, hitting the floor filling her ears; the sounds of slick skin hitting slick skin, the small grunting sounds that crawl up his throat. She focus on that, on the warm feeling between her legs, presses her fingers against the back of his neck, presses the other hand against his back, digs her nails into his skin.

She thinks about the van, about swimming to the surface of the water and the gasping breath she had taken when she reached the surface and even though it was a dream it felt real. And it feels like that now, this foggy world that doesn’t seem real. Only this time it is and its not emerging from water that makes her gasp for breath. It’s the colliding of their bodies, it’s the breathy way that his name slips past her lips, the guilt swelling around inside of her, mingling with the tightness he's causing with each thrust of his hips. And when she feels like she can't take it anymore, that she's wound up so tight she might snap she comes undone all at once, his name rolling off of her tongue and echoing off the bathroom tiles.

He's gone in the morning when she wakes up.

She's not surprised.

And she's not disappointed.

She's sitting on her couch when she hears a knock at her door. She's been back in Paris for nearly two months by now. After that night she hadn’t had a nightmare about Robert Fischer again. She hadn’t heard from him, hadn’t heard any news of him wanting to do something about the inception either which she supposes is a small blessing. Or really a large one because she's sure that he could find a way to charge them with something if he wanted to. Money can do amazing things.

She puts her teacup down, clicks off the television set. Arthur had shown up a week after she got back, worried about how strange she had sounded on the phone. He hadn’t called first, just showed up knocking and the second she answered he door he had asked her if she was alright, before she could even say hello, before she could even register surprise over his being there.

And since then any time he or Eames is in Paris for a job they stop in to say hello, drink tea in her apartment, ask her how she's doing in finishing up school. They're not completely social visits, not completely business either. Arthur had stopped by just a week ago to ask her to work with him on a new job. She had said she'd think about it but she's not sure she can bring herself to do it unless he can promise it won't be ruining someone. She couldn’t take the guilt this time.

But she's so used to them stopping by now that she doesn’t even think it strange that someone's just knocking at her door, doesn’t think to call out and ask who it is. She just pads over to the door in her slippers, flings it open to see who it is. And she stops, her heart in her throat.

"You're not that difficult to find." There's something almost like amusement in Robert Fischer's voice as he looks down at the tiny woman standing there in her bright pink fuzzy slippers and her oversized pajamas.

"I…" She closes her mouth with a snap because she's not sure what to say to that except that she doesn’t try to hide anyway but that just sounds too rude even in her own head. "What are you doing here?"

"Right now? Waiting in the hall to see if you're going to let me in."

"Oh. Right." Finding him outside of her door had startled her so much she hadn’t even thought about that but as soon as he mentions it she steps back from the door, lets him in, watches as he steps into her apartment and looks around at her cheap furniture, at the notebooks strewn across the coffee table.

Closing the door behind him she clears her throat, crosses her arms over her middle. "I meant what are you doing at my apartment?"

"I know what you meant." He turns to look at her, crosses his arms over his chest in his expensive blue suit. "Why did you come tell me what you did?"

"I…I felt guilty…I thought you should know."

"I see." But he sounds skeptical and she can't blame him. And yet his face remains calm, impassive.

"Is…is that why you came here?"

"No, not entirely."

"Oh…then why are you here?"

The edge of Robert's mouth twitches, almost a smile but not quite. "How about you make me some of that tea you're drinking and then we'll talk?"

Her eyes flicker over to the teacup on her table and then back to his face and despite herself- despite the anxiousness and the wonder- she smiles, quick and fleeting and nods her head just once. "Alright," she hears herself say as she pushes off of the door and makes her way towards her kitchen. "I'll make you some tea."

And she could swear as she moves toward the kitchen she sees him smile.

And this time it looks real.