(fic) Untitled Inception-Kink Thingy
Okay, I was trying to be all stealthy and stuff, but I wrote a thing for the inception_kink meme, and it turned into a big thing, and I think it's going to be something ridiculous like 20k words when I'm finally finished with it. Cry. Anyway, that's way too much to cram into a comment box, so I'm forced to de-anon and stick this sucker up on my journal for the whole world to see.
It's OK. It's not like I had any dignity left anyway.
So here's the first couple parts of a very poorly-written, slapdash fic in which Arthur is a girl and Eames knocks her up. (I KNOW, I KNOW, it's just SO unlike me to write something like this!) Also, there's no title, because I am not clever enough to come up with one. So there.
Ariadne figures it out first.
(Later, she likes to think that she was the first one to know because of some sort of woman’s intuition thing, or because the friendship between herself and Arthur had become so close that it was only natural that she would know before anyone else. Privately, she is forced to admit that she was probably the first to know only because she was the only person actually around Arthur at the time.)
***
After Inception, Cobb returns to his children and gives every appearance of having retired completely from the field.
Ariadne misses him in a way she doesn’t entirely understand; she didn’t know him all that long, all things considered, but he introduced her to a world that is greater, more wonderful that anything she could have ever imagined, and when she realizes that he won’t be sharing his dreams with her anymore, she feels a sharp, unexpected pang of loss.
Eames is gone, too; she doesn’t know where. He kissed her cheek in the airport and ducked into a cab, and sailed off to parts unknown.
Saito, of course, has returned to his world of power and privilege. Yusef sent her a postcard from Mombasa, with a promise to send her his new compounds to try out. But they all left, one by one, chasing cabs or planes around the globe until they’re completely gone from Ariadne’s life, almost as if they were never really there at all.
Ariadne watches the group splinter at the airport and begins to feel somewhat abandoned. Waiting for her luggage, she finds herself almost ready to settle down into a serious sulk over stupid jerks who waltzed into her life, showed her something incredible, and then waltzed back out like it was nothing.
She is almost angry, as she stands there in the airport and realizes that the team was splitting up and no one is even giving her so much as a backward glance. An absurdly large sum of money is waiting for her in her Paris bank account, yes, but that isn’t nearly enough. Not after everything that’s happened.
Then, just as she is pulling her suitcase off the luggage carousel, Arthur takes her arm, draws her aside, and asks her if she’d like company back to Paris. Arthur’s fingers curl around her wrist loosely, her fingernails unpainted, but buffed to a shine, and in that moment Ariadne feels so relieved that for a moment she actually feels dizzy.
***
If she’d had to pick just one member of the team to stay with her, Ariadne would have chosen Arthur in a heartbeat, and only half of it was due to the frank, almost giddy admiration she still felt in Arthur’s presence.
Arthur, with her trim Yves Saint Laurent suits and Jimmy Choo pumps. Arthur, her hair always carefully sleeked back, face tinted with just enough makeup to be tasteful, a hint of Chanel No 5 always clinging to her slender frame.
Arthur, no first name given. Not Ms. Arthur, either. Just Arthur.
The first time she’d met Arthur, Ariadne had studied the other woman, then looked down at her own worn jeans, her ragged cuticles, her hair that was always coming undone. She’d felt, with a rush of embarrassment, like a child, and it would have been absolutely unbearable, except for the fact that Arthur had never treated her like a child at all.
On the contrary, she always treated Ariadne like an equal, and Ariadne was secure enough to admit to herself that she had maybe developed a very, very small crush on Arthur during the time they’d spent in the warehouse together, exploring the dream-worlds that Ariadne created.
It wasn‘t a serious infatuation, nothing that left her pining away, but Ariadne was distinctly relieved when Arthur clasped her hand and drew her from the luggage carousel over to the departures gate.
On the plane ride back to Paris, Ariadne had to keep herself from clutching at Arthur’s hand in gratitude. She leaned back in the plush first-class seat and thought happily about returning to the warehouse, returning to the world of dreams.
***
Afterward, back in Paris, Ariadne has little difficulty settling into a new routine. She has her studies and her classes, and if they aren’t quite as compelling as they once were, she still enjoys them.
When she gets bored and starts longing for a purer form of creation, she calls Arthur, and Arthur shows her the plans for the job she is working on in Paris. Ariadne helps build the dreamscapes Arthur needs, and for her first few weeks back home, Ariadne is so happy that she doesn’t really notice that Arthur is looking a little pale these days, a little strained around the eyes.
She doesn’t notice anything, really, until she drops into the warehouse, late one night, to play around with some of the models.
Out at a bar with some classmates, happily buying rounds of drinks and paying for them with her new credit card, she suddenly thinks of a better version of the maze she’d been making for Arthur. It’s late, but she succumbs to the rush of inspiration and ducks out of the bar and takes a cab to the warehouse. Ariadne isn’t particularly surprised to see Arthur’s car parked on the street outside the warehouse doors.
But when she gets inside, she is very surprised to see that Arthur doesn’t seem to be working. Instead, she’s slumped over at her desk, face buried in her hands, fingers knotted in her disheveled hair.
Ariadne hovers behind her chair, uncertainly.
“…Arthur?”
Arthur’s head shoots up, and she whirls around and blinks at Ariadne. For a second, Arthur almost looks as if she doesn’t recognize Ariadne, but then her face clears. She reaches up a hand and smooths her hair awkwardly.
Ariadne is very much aware that she shouldn’t be staring (that was one of her mother’s favorite admonitions when she was a little girl: don’t stare, Ariadne, it’s rude!) but it’s impossible not to stare.
She can’t tell whether or not Arthur has been crying, but her eyes are red and her face it looking decidedly…blotchy, and that’s not a word Ariadne ever thought she’d associate with Arthur.
“Are you okay?” She reaches out to touch Arthur’s shoulder, and is relieved when Arthur doesn’t pull away.
“Yes. It’s…fine. What time is it?” Arthur fumbles for her watch and blinks at the time. “What are you doing here so late?”
Ariadne draws her hand back, and shrugs her shoulder in the direction of her workroom.
“Had a couple ideas, and I wanted to get them down on paper before I forgot.” She drops her purse and coat on one of the lawn chairs, and slides another glance in Arthur’s direction.
Arthur has smoothed her hair back into some semblance of order and is sitting straight in her chair. Her long fingers fiddle with a pen, and she’s staring at the papers in front of her like she’s trying to remember what she’s looking at.
It’s so bizarrely out of character that Ariadne is sure she cannot reasonably be expected to ignore it. She pauses, and then drifts back toward Arthur’s desk.
“You sure you’re okay? You look a little…” Ariadne tries to think of a nicer way to say ‘sloppy’. “…Out of it.”
Arthur clears her throat and rubs her hands together briskly. She very deliberately does not look in Ariadne’s direction. “I’m fine.”
She shuffles through the sheaf of papers on her desk, and pulls out one that describes one of the dreamscapes she wants, and Ariadne is quickly distracted.
***
After that, Ariadne might have forgotten the whole incident entirely…except she notices that Arthur is acting weird in other ways, too.
When they were working on the Fisher job, Arthur always drank black coffee, gallons of it. Now, she suddenly seems to have sworn off coffee completely. And when Ariadne brings in a tuna salad sandwich for lunch one afternoon, Arthur goes pale and leaves the warehouse entirely until she’s finished eating.
It gets weirder. Ariadne doesn’t catch Arthur sitting by herself in a dark warehouse with her head in her hands again, but she can still tell that Arthur is distracted, preoccupied. Sometimes she seems downright upset about something, and it’s so unlike the Arthur Ariadne thought she knew.
But she still doesn’t figure it out until, one day, Arthur leans over to look at the models Ariadne’s been working on. Ariadne glances at Arthur’s chest, the flash of cleavage exposed by a small gap between buttons, and thinks her boobs have gotten bigger.
And then Ariadne gets it.
***
She’s sort of embarrassed, afterward, that she didn’t figure it out sooner. During her sophomore year, her roommate got pregnant halfway through the second semester, and it had been the same thing: swollen breasts, a sudden aversion to weird smells and familiar foods, a distracted air, an inexplicable sense of being preoccupied with something else.
It sort of obvious, now that Ariadne has thought of it, except that it’s so weird to think that Arthur might be pregnant.
Ariadne knows, logically, that it really shouldn’t be all that weird. Arthur is a very beautiful, frighteningly competent woman, and Ariadne privately suspect that if she were a man (or a less heterosexual woman) she would probably be madly in love with Arthur herself.
So, no, it’s not really surprising that Arthur would have a lover or two out there somewhere. But, somehow, Ariadne finds it really difficult to think of sex and Arthur in the same sentence.
***
So when it finally hits her, she’s a little shocked. And that’s probably why she doesn’t bring the issue up discreetly, and instead just stares openly at Arthur’s increased bustline and suddenly blurts out, “Are you pregnant?!”
Arthur stiffens immediately and jerks away.
Ariadne swears to herself and reaches out to grab Arthur’s arm before she can get very far.
“No, its- Arthur, I’m sorry. No, it’s none of my business, really.”
Her face is hot, and Ariadne is extremely glad that her mother is on the other side of the ocean. (Besides ‘don’t stare’, her mother’s second-favorite maxim was ‘think before you speak’. Ariadne had never been much good at following either one.)
Arthur shrinks away under her hand, but Ariadne pulls her back toward the desk resolutely.
“Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean to just…blurt it out like that. I just noticed, you know, your boobs and the coffee and the tuna, and you…”
Ariadne breaks off. Arthur is pale, and staring at her, but she isn’t trying to get away anymore, so Ariadne lets go and rubs her hands over her face.
“Yeah, I’m just. Going to shut up now, okay? Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything.”
It’s hard, it’s so hard to resist the urge to look at Arthur’s face, to see how she’s taking this, but Ariadne carefully fixes her gaze on the sketches in front of her and shuffles them around on the desk.
Slowly, Arthur shuffles back to the desk and sits on the small chair next to Ariadne’s.
“You know?” she asks quietly. Her voice sounds small, somehow, and Aridane darts a glance over at Arthur’s lap. Her hands are clutching the knees of her sleek, expensive skirt so tightly that her knuckles have gone white.
“Yeah, it. I mean, I just sort of, guessed?” Ariadne resists the urge to tug at her own clothing, in a sort of sympathetic anxiety.
“How.” Arthur breaks off, clears her throat. When she speaks again, her voice sounds stronger, steadier. “How long. I mean, when did you…”
She doesn’t finish her sentence, but Ariadne mentally fills in the gaps.
“Oh. Geez, I mean I sort of just figured it out now? You’re, um.” Ariadne pauses, and then figures, in for a penny, in for a pound. “Your boobs are bigger? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but yeah. Totally bigger.”
Arthur doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. She darts a glance down at her own chest, and her forehead creases slightly, like she’s trying to judge the change for herself.
She doesn’t look angry or anything. That’s a lot more than Ariadne was hoping for, because she’s pretty sure she’d be pissed if she were in Arthur’s shoes and someone just came out and said all that stuff to her.
But Arthur has a better handle on herself, apparently, because she just sits there.
Ariadne pushes herself back in her chair and lets herself look, really look, at Arthur. (It helps that Arthur is very carefully not looking back.) Ariadne hunches her shoulders and tries to think what to say.
“So, uh. You’re definitely…pregnant, then?”
Arthur’s jaw tightens and she looks out one of the warehouese’s many windows. She nods slightly.
“Ah. Congratulations?” Ariadne bites her lip and searches Arthur’s face desperately for some kind of clue how to respond to this. “Or…not?”
Arthur huffs out a sound that’s sort of like a laugh, but rougher and maybe a little more manic. She gives Ariadne a smile that’s all jagged edges.
“I don’t…actually know whether congratulations are due,” she says, slowly.
Ariadne picks at her cuticles and thinks.
There really isn’t a classy, subtle way to say, hey, I took my roommate to the clinic last year, I could help you make an appointment, or go with you, if you want?
There isn’t really a nice way to ask, so are you keeping the kid, or what?
Ariadne decides to skip that question and go onto the next one.
“Who…?”
She can’t quite bring herself to spell it out, but Arthur gets her drift right away, and gives her a small, but very decisive head-shake. The message is clear: we’re not talking about that.
Fair enough, Ariadne thinks. She picks at the scattered scraps of paper littering her desk and tries to steer the conversation back onto firmer ground.
“So, are you cool to work? By yourself, I mean? You’re not, you’re not gonna get shot or anything?” She gestures toward the PASIV, suddenly alarmed. “Wait, that stuff’s not gonna give your baby twelve fingers or something, is it?”
She flinches after she says it, and thinks she probably shouldn’t have called it your baby, in case Arthur is going to…well. In case Arthur would rather not think about it that way.
But Arthur cracks a smile, briefly flashing dimples that are so cute that Aridane thinks it’s really no surprised someone went and knocked her up.
“No, I’m,” Arthur coughs briefly, and wipes the inside of her wrist across her forehead. Some of the tension around her eyes has eased, and a faint smile lingers around her mouth. Ariadne privately congratulates herself for cheering Arthur up.
“I’m pretty sure it’ll be okay,” Arthur finishes. Ariadne smiles.
“Oh. Cool.”
Ariadne pushes herself back in her chair and fiddles with her scarf. This conversation has gone well, better than she’d expected, and she’s pretty sure that she should just quit while she’s ahead.
But somehow, she can’t keep herself from gesturing to Arthur’s stomach and asking, “So…how far along, do you think?”
Arthur licks her lips and hesitates slightly. “A couple months.”
It’s an oddly unspecific answer, particularly from Arthur, who seems to prize specificity above all else. Ariadne blinks, and something of her thoughts must show on her face, because Arthur sighs, and says, “Seven weeks.”
It’s totally not any of her business, but Ariadne can’t help but do the math. Seven weeks…seven weeks ago, they were all in the warehouse working.
Ariadne knows that doesn’t really mean anything, because Arthur had an apartment down the street and everything, so of course she could have had a boyfriend, or just hooked up with some guy she met in a bar somewhere or something, and none of them would have known about it.
Of course, the father doesn’t have to be anyone Ariadne knows, but she still entertains herself with a few brief fantasies of Arthur carrying Saito’s secret love-child. Or, no, maybe when Arthur stayed behind all those times to help Yusuf perfect the kick, they were secretly carrying on some torrid affair!
Ariadne is halfway through imagining what their baby would look like, when Arthur clears her throat and stands suddenly.
“I need to go finish some recon.” She glances at the papers and half-formed models on the desk. “You’re good here?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure, go.” Ariadne reaches out blindly to grab one of the models and waves it at Arthur. “Just gonna finish this one up, and them I’m heading home.” She smiles at Arthur and tries to look like she wasn’t just making up perverse Harlequin romance plots featuring various members of their team.
Arthur smiles back, faintly. She lifts a hand in a brief wave, gathers her coat, and leaves.
Ariadne waits ten minutes, until she’s absolutely sure Arthur isn’t coming back. The she pulls out her cell phone, scrolls quickly through the contacts list until she finds Cobb’s number, and hits send.
As the phone rings, Ariadne reasons to herself that she’s not technically breaking any confidence. It isn’t like Arthur told her not to tell anyone.
Of course, Arthur probably thought that went without saying, but whatever. Cobb is like Arthur’s big brother, of course he’ll want to know.
And Ariadne was never very good at keeping secrets.
In retrospect, Arthur thinks that it took her entirely too long to figure out that she’s pregnant.
It’s her job to know things, to have all the information, and part of that job involves knowing her own body. She needs to know her limitations, needs to know what she is and is not capable of, and so when she realizes that her period is several weeks late, she is extremely annoyed with herself for not noticing sooner.
Then the panic sets in.
She spends a good fifteen minutes frantically flipping through her calendar, matching up dates, trying to figure out how many weeks late she is (three), whether she’s absolutely sure that she hasn’t made some sort of mistake with the dates (she hasn’t), and whether the approximate time she would have been ovulating coincides with that night in the hotel, just before Inception (it does).
Despite increasingly frenzied attempts, she fails to uncover any evidence that would suggest that the cause for her missed period is anything other than what she suspects. Finally, Arthur gives up, sets the calendar down, and sits on her couch for a full ten minutes, without moving.
Then she gets up, puts her paperwork in order, and goes to finish doing reconnaissance. She is a professional, she reminds herself sternly, as she locks her apartment door and heads down the stairs to the street below. Professionals do not let their personal issues get in the way of their work.
It’s almost a relief to have something to do, something to distract herself with. Unfortunately, the job isn’t demanding enough to be entirely diverting. It’s a fairly straightforward case; a wealthy businessman wants to know if his corporate partner is planning to throw him under the bus and force him out of the company.
Arthur is fairly sure that this is the sort of case that could be solved easily enough with a private detective, without all the drama and expense of dream-sharing, but the client says he wants to be sure, and Arthur isn’t complaining. It’s an easy paycheck.
The mark spends every Thursday evening with his mistress at a downtown hotel. He arrives at seven o’clock; the mistress turns up a half an hour later. Ariadne is nearly finished with the dreamscape, a replica of the corporate boardroom where the mark discusses future business plans with his associates.
The client supplied his own extractor, a man by the name of Geralds. Arthur is to be the dreamer.
She doesn’t need to review the plan, but she drives to the hotel and does so anyway. She paces the path between the bar downstairs and the mark’s reserved hotel room.
The bartender has been paid to drop a light sedative into the scotch the mark always orders at the bar, before heading up to his room. Arthur figures she has thirty minutes to slip in and out before the mistress arrives. More than enough time.
Arthur walks the perimeter of the hotel, checks the exits, plans three different escape routes.
After that, there is nothing more to do.
She hovers in the lobby for several minutes, half-hoping for sudden gunfire, a phone call, anything to provide a distraction, a reason to put off what she knows she needs to do. Finally, she gives up stalling and drives to the pharmacy two streets over.
***
There is an alarmingly large selection of pregnancy test. Arthur studies each once carefully. She reads the directions on the backs, compares prices, and generally stands in front of the display for so long that the cashier begins to stare.
Arthur very studiously ignores her. She picks two tests: a digital kind, and a kind that shows the result with bright pink lines.
The cashier rings the tests up silently. Arthur keeps her gaze fixed on her wallet, her credit cards. She suspects that if she does happen to look up, she will find the cashier looking at her with mild scorn.
It seems like the cashier must know that no woman who was hoping to be pregnant would hang around the display for so long, looking shifty. Surely the cashier has figured out that Arthur wasn’t planning on this at all. Arthur feels like the truth must be written all over her face.
She pays, and takes the nondescript brown paper bag the cashier hands her. The cashier passes her a copy of the receipt; Arthur stuffs it in the trash can outside the store.
On the drive back to her apartment, she lectures herself. How many times has she raised a condescending eyebrow when she heard of a woman who forgot to take her pill, forgot the condom? Arthur had always scorned that kind of recklessness, that lack of preparation, confident that it would never happen to her. She’d never be that stupid.
Except, apparently she was that stupid.
For a while, Arthur entertains the idea of blaming Eames. It’s mostly his fault, after all. She’s slept with him four times now, and she didn’t plan on any of them. Each time, she’d just happened to find herself alone with him, and he’d just happen to look at her, in that way that he had. A way that suggested that he didn’t need to do anything so crass as undress her with his eyes, because he already knew perfectly well what she looked like naked. It was deeply irritating, and also intensely arousing.
He’d look at her, and then he’d say something. It didn’t matter what: something flirtatious, some blatant come-on, something obscene. It didn’t matter what he said, because whatever it was, it was softened by the way he looked at her afterward, as if to say, Isn’t this ridiculous? I can’t believe you let me get away with this.
And from there, it only took one word, a casual darling, or hand grazing her thigh, and the next thing she knew she was tangled in the sheets of an unfamiliar hotel bed, or pressed up against a bathroom stall, her skirt hiked up around her hips, panties on the floor.
It was ridiculous, and she couldn’t believe she let him get away with it. It was incredibly stupid to get involved with anyone you were working with. Arthur had seen it go wrong too many times before, with Cobb, and with others.
It wasn’t safe to allow someone access to your body when you were also allowing them access to your mind. It was too much; you ended up giving away too much of yourself, and when you gave away too much, it was easy to lose everything.
***
Arthur parks in the underground garage and walks up the three flights of stairs to her apartment. She takes off her coat, her shoes, and then locks herself in the bathroom with the little paper bag. Tearing open the boxes, she lines up the tests (four in all) on the sink and carefully unfolds the two sets of directions. She reads each one three times, in English and in French, and after that there’s really nothing to do but take the damn things, so she does.
The tests make a tidy row between her toothbrush and foundation bottle. Arthur watches the second hand on her watch tick, slowly.
Three minutes.
She sits on the edge of the bathtub, pulls her legs up, and tries not to think.
It doesn’t really work. She was never very good at not-thinking about things.
Two minutes.
She takes the pins out of her hair, unravels the neat French twist she made that morning. Runs her fingers through the strands, works out the tangles. Fastens her hair back again.
One minute.
For a moment, a tiny bubble of panic rises in her throat, a stray thought: what will I do if…? She shoves in back down, ruthlessly.
Thirty seconds.
There is a small run in her stocking. Arthur picks at it, and tries to remember where she left the clear nail polish.
Ten seconds.
She watches the second hand gradually migrate to the twelve, stands up, and forces herself to look at the line of tests.
She wants to be surprised. She really does. But when she sees the results, she isn’t surprised at all.
The first test: two pink lines.
The second: another set of lines.
The third: one word, flashing dark against the gray digital display. PREGNANT.
The fourth: A repeat of the third.
Well, Arthur thinks dimly. That’s that.
Then she turns around and is abruptly sick in the toilet.
When she’s finished dry-heaving, she sits on the bathroom floor for a while, clutching the rim of the toilet, nauseous, sweaty all over and feeling utterly disgusting.
Oh, fuck, she thinks. It’s the only word the registers in the her mind, and it ping-pongs around her brain several time.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
She was so stupid.
***
She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had sex without a condom; the night in the hotel with Eames may very well have been the first. It was still a stupid thing to do, beyond stupid, and she didn’t even have the excuse of being drunk.
Yes, she’d meant to go get a drink that night, after locking up the warehouse, but then, as she left, Eames had sidled up to her with some pretense about sharing a cab, and…well. His hotel was on the way to her apartment.
She’d balked, and he’d laughed, fingers skimming her hip as he pressed her into the taxi. Come on, love. Just a quick ride. He’d actually winked at her, the filthy bastard, as if she wouldn’t have caught the innuendo on her own.
And after that, she should have shoved him aside, hailed her own cab, gotten the fuck out of there. But she was tired, and he licked his lips, and she found herself thinking that it had been a long time since she’d had sex, longer still since she’d had good sex. It would be a of a lot easier to stop off at the hotel with Eames than scrounge around in some dive bar, looking for a partner for the night. It would more efficient, really.
Arthur liked things that saved time.
She got in the cab.
The Paris streets passed outside the cab windows passed in a blur of light. Eames rested his hand lightly on her knee, not grasping or fondling, just resting. His fingertips were rough and warm and caught on her stockings, and by then Arthur had a pretty good idea of where the night was going to go, and decided she might as well enjoy it.
In the hotel elevator, she shoved her hands inside his jacket, grabbed at his sides, and fucked her tongue into his mouth. He laughed, breathy and startled, and cupped her ass.
The hotel room was dark, and Eames didn’t bother to turn on the lights. Arthur tripped over something, kicked off her high heels; Eames shoved her up against the wall and thrust against her. It was hot and filthy and rushed and good, and then his hands were under her shirt and then her shirt was off, and then they were on the bed, and…
It just hadn’t seemed worth spoiling to moment to go digging around for a condom.
He talked to her while he fucked her, a stream of nonsense: yeah, darling, that’s it, god, your legs, look at you, so wet, what do you want, hm? tell me.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and swore at him to go faster, dammit, fuck. He laughed and mouthed at her neck.
In the morning, she picked her clothing off the floor while he slept, sprawled out face-down on the bed. She dressed hurriedly in the bathroom and left.
When she saw him again, at the warehouse that afternoon (after she’d gone back to her apartment, showered, put on a freshly pressed suit, and generally done everything she could to erase all evidence of the previous night) she buried herself in research and avoided his gaze.
Later, she happened to look up for just a second, and he caught her eye and sent her another exaggerated wink. She wanted to glare at him, or flip him off, but there was something else in his expression, a strange of softness that made her swallow and look away.
***
When she’s fairly sure she’d done vomiting, Arthur crawls into the shower and rinses off the cold sweat under the hot spray. She doesn’t particularly need to wash her hair, but she does anyway.
After, she towels off and digs a pair of worn sweatpants out of her dresser. She wears them exclusively when she’s on her period; now, she swallows the irony and puts them on, along with a white t-shirt.
Her breasts ache. She notices it when she pulls the shirt over her chest. They’ve been aching off and on for several days. She had put it out of her mind, before, thinking vaguely that it must be PMS. Arthur studies her chest in the mirror, cups her breast briefly, then drops her hands down to her sides.
She finds it incredibly unpleasant to look in the mirror now, to imagine her breasts swelling up, her belly rounding out. She stares at the mirror anyway, masochistically, for several minutes. Then she turns away and gathers up the dirty clothes.
Running a hand briskly through her damp hair, she hangs up the wet towel, sweeps the pregnancy tests into the garbage, and takes a container of leftover sesame chicken out of the refrigerator.
There’s a bottle of wine chilling on the bottom rack. Arthur stares at it for several minutes and thinks of pouring a large glass, drinking it down, then pouring another.
Then she shuts the refrigerator door and sits in front of the television. She turns on the news, mutes it, and eats the cold chicken straight from the container.
***
In the morning, she makes a cup of coffee, stares at it, and then calls her gynecologist.
When Arthur expresses an urgent need to see the doctor as soon as possible, the receptionist hums thoughtfully. On the other end of the line, Arthur can hear the receptionist tapping away at a keyboard. She clutches her half-cooled mug of coffee and waits.
They have an opening this morning, the receptionist says. Their 9:30 has canceled. Would she like the appointment? Can she be there in thirty minutes?
Arthur thinks about saying no, no thank you, never mind. I’ve changed my mind; I don’t want this to be real. She chews her lip.
But then she remembers that she didn’t get to wear she is today by pretending that problems don’t exist. She got when she is by figuring them out, attacking them, solving them. So she says yes, dresses hurriedly, and drives to the doctor’s office.
The office is absolutely appalling. Arthur can’t believe she hasn’t noticed it before. There are entirely too many heavily pregnant women in the room. Across the room, there is a low table full of parenting magazines and pictures of smiling infants are scattered across the walls.
Arthur thinks, for one paranoid moment, that they are staring at her. She fixes her gaze on the clipboard full of forms in front of her and fills them out meticulously. The forms, at least, she can deal with. She’s good with forms; they’re reassuringly straightforward. But the forms are finished all too quickly, and then there is a nurse calling her name, escorting her down the hall.
Inside the exam room, the nurse takes her blood pressure and weighs her. Arthur forces her throat to unstick and explains calmly about the four positive pregnancy tests.
The nurse smiles, says that the doctor will want to do a blood test to confirm, but that she’s never heard of anyone having four false positives.
Arthur nods; she hadn’t really expected anything else.
She changes into the horrible paper gown the nurse hands her, then watches the nurse draw blood. The nurse remarks in surprise that she is very calm. Most people don’t like to watch when I draw their blood, she says.
There is no possible way for Arthur to explain that she is very used to sticking needles into her veins, so she says nothing.
She is asked for a urine sample. The nurse collects it. Then Arthur has the pleasure of waiting for the doctor in the cold exam room. On the back of the door, there is a diagram of a fetus curled inside a womb. It makes Arthur want to throw up again.
The doctor comes. Arthur used to like him, but today she decides that she hates him, because the first thing he does is palpate her breasts, and she nearly takes his head off. It’s so painful that she actually shoves his hands away, reflexively.
She doesn’t even have a chance to be embarrassed about it, because he just laughs, pats her shoulder, and says that it’s very common for women to have sensitive breasts during pregnancy. He seems to be trying to make her feel better, and Arthur thinks she wants to slap him.
He tells her what she already knew, that yes, she is definitely pregnant, and he would estimate that she’s a little more than four weeks along. Arthur nods calmly, and tries to pretend that she isn’t coming apart inside.
The doctor says he wants to perform an internal exam, as he euphemistically calls it. Arthur puts her feet in the stirrups, closes her eyes, and thinks of mazes and paradoxes and her plans for her next job.
When he’s done, the doctor pats her shoulder again and hands her a plastic bag full of pamphlets and little bottles of prenatal vitamins. He directs her to the receptionist to make an appointment for the next month. He congratulates her.
Moving mechanically, Arthur fills out the rest of the paperwork and books the appointment.
Then she goes home, lies on her bed, and spends the next three hours trying very hard not to cry.
Onto the next part...
It's OK. It's not like I had any dignity left anyway.
So here's the first couple parts of a very poorly-written, slapdash fic in which Arthur is a girl and Eames knocks her up. (I KNOW, I KNOW, it's just SO unlike me to write something like this!) Also, there's no title, because I am not clever enough to come up with one. So there.
Ariadne figures it out first.
(Later, she likes to think that she was the first one to know because of some sort of woman’s intuition thing, or because the friendship between herself and Arthur had become so close that it was only natural that she would know before anyone else. Privately, she is forced to admit that she was probably the first to know only because she was the only person actually around Arthur at the time.)
***
After Inception, Cobb returns to his children and gives every appearance of having retired completely from the field.
Ariadne misses him in a way she doesn’t entirely understand; she didn’t know him all that long, all things considered, but he introduced her to a world that is greater, more wonderful that anything she could have ever imagined, and when she realizes that he won’t be sharing his dreams with her anymore, she feels a sharp, unexpected pang of loss.
Eames is gone, too; she doesn’t know where. He kissed her cheek in the airport and ducked into a cab, and sailed off to parts unknown.
Saito, of course, has returned to his world of power and privilege. Yusef sent her a postcard from Mombasa, with a promise to send her his new compounds to try out. But they all left, one by one, chasing cabs or planes around the globe until they’re completely gone from Ariadne’s life, almost as if they were never really there at all.
Ariadne watches the group splinter at the airport and begins to feel somewhat abandoned. Waiting for her luggage, she finds herself almost ready to settle down into a serious sulk over stupid jerks who waltzed into her life, showed her something incredible, and then waltzed back out like it was nothing.
She is almost angry, as she stands there in the airport and realizes that the team was splitting up and no one is even giving her so much as a backward glance. An absurdly large sum of money is waiting for her in her Paris bank account, yes, but that isn’t nearly enough. Not after everything that’s happened.
Then, just as she is pulling her suitcase off the luggage carousel, Arthur takes her arm, draws her aside, and asks her if she’d like company back to Paris. Arthur’s fingers curl around her wrist loosely, her fingernails unpainted, but buffed to a shine, and in that moment Ariadne feels so relieved that for a moment she actually feels dizzy.
***
If she’d had to pick just one member of the team to stay with her, Ariadne would have chosen Arthur in a heartbeat, and only half of it was due to the frank, almost giddy admiration she still felt in Arthur’s presence.
Arthur, with her trim Yves Saint Laurent suits and Jimmy Choo pumps. Arthur, her hair always carefully sleeked back, face tinted with just enough makeup to be tasteful, a hint of Chanel No 5 always clinging to her slender frame.
Arthur, no first name given. Not Ms. Arthur, either. Just Arthur.
The first time she’d met Arthur, Ariadne had studied the other woman, then looked down at her own worn jeans, her ragged cuticles, her hair that was always coming undone. She’d felt, with a rush of embarrassment, like a child, and it would have been absolutely unbearable, except for the fact that Arthur had never treated her like a child at all.
On the contrary, she always treated Ariadne like an equal, and Ariadne was secure enough to admit to herself that she had maybe developed a very, very small crush on Arthur during the time they’d spent in the warehouse together, exploring the dream-worlds that Ariadne created.
It wasn‘t a serious infatuation, nothing that left her pining away, but Ariadne was distinctly relieved when Arthur clasped her hand and drew her from the luggage carousel over to the departures gate.
On the plane ride back to Paris, Ariadne had to keep herself from clutching at Arthur’s hand in gratitude. She leaned back in the plush first-class seat and thought happily about returning to the warehouse, returning to the world of dreams.
***
Afterward, back in Paris, Ariadne has little difficulty settling into a new routine. She has her studies and her classes, and if they aren’t quite as compelling as they once were, she still enjoys them.
When she gets bored and starts longing for a purer form of creation, she calls Arthur, and Arthur shows her the plans for the job she is working on in Paris. Ariadne helps build the dreamscapes Arthur needs, and for her first few weeks back home, Ariadne is so happy that she doesn’t really notice that Arthur is looking a little pale these days, a little strained around the eyes.
She doesn’t notice anything, really, until she drops into the warehouse, late one night, to play around with some of the models.
Out at a bar with some classmates, happily buying rounds of drinks and paying for them with her new credit card, she suddenly thinks of a better version of the maze she’d been making for Arthur. It’s late, but she succumbs to the rush of inspiration and ducks out of the bar and takes a cab to the warehouse. Ariadne isn’t particularly surprised to see Arthur’s car parked on the street outside the warehouse doors.
But when she gets inside, she is very surprised to see that Arthur doesn’t seem to be working. Instead, she’s slumped over at her desk, face buried in her hands, fingers knotted in her disheveled hair.
Ariadne hovers behind her chair, uncertainly.
“…Arthur?”
Arthur’s head shoots up, and she whirls around and blinks at Ariadne. For a second, Arthur almost looks as if she doesn’t recognize Ariadne, but then her face clears. She reaches up a hand and smooths her hair awkwardly.
Ariadne is very much aware that she shouldn’t be staring (that was one of her mother’s favorite admonitions when she was a little girl: don’t stare, Ariadne, it’s rude!) but it’s impossible not to stare.
She can’t tell whether or not Arthur has been crying, but her eyes are red and her face it looking decidedly…blotchy, and that’s not a word Ariadne ever thought she’d associate with Arthur.
“Are you okay?” She reaches out to touch Arthur’s shoulder, and is relieved when Arthur doesn’t pull away.
“Yes. It’s…fine. What time is it?” Arthur fumbles for her watch and blinks at the time. “What are you doing here so late?”
Ariadne draws her hand back, and shrugs her shoulder in the direction of her workroom.
“Had a couple ideas, and I wanted to get them down on paper before I forgot.” She drops her purse and coat on one of the lawn chairs, and slides another glance in Arthur’s direction.
Arthur has smoothed her hair back into some semblance of order and is sitting straight in her chair. Her long fingers fiddle with a pen, and she’s staring at the papers in front of her like she’s trying to remember what she’s looking at.
It’s so bizarrely out of character that Ariadne is sure she cannot reasonably be expected to ignore it. She pauses, and then drifts back toward Arthur’s desk.
“You sure you’re okay? You look a little…” Ariadne tries to think of a nicer way to say ‘sloppy’. “…Out of it.”
Arthur clears her throat and rubs her hands together briskly. She very deliberately does not look in Ariadne’s direction. “I’m fine.”
She shuffles through the sheaf of papers on her desk, and pulls out one that describes one of the dreamscapes she wants, and Ariadne is quickly distracted.
***
After that, Ariadne might have forgotten the whole incident entirely…except she notices that Arthur is acting weird in other ways, too.
When they were working on the Fisher job, Arthur always drank black coffee, gallons of it. Now, she suddenly seems to have sworn off coffee completely. And when Ariadne brings in a tuna salad sandwich for lunch one afternoon, Arthur goes pale and leaves the warehouse entirely until she’s finished eating.
It gets weirder. Ariadne doesn’t catch Arthur sitting by herself in a dark warehouse with her head in her hands again, but she can still tell that Arthur is distracted, preoccupied. Sometimes she seems downright upset about something, and it’s so unlike the Arthur Ariadne thought she knew.
But she still doesn’t figure it out until, one day, Arthur leans over to look at the models Ariadne’s been working on. Ariadne glances at Arthur’s chest, the flash of cleavage exposed by a small gap between buttons, and thinks her boobs have gotten bigger.
And then Ariadne gets it.
***
She’s sort of embarrassed, afterward, that she didn’t figure it out sooner. During her sophomore year, her roommate got pregnant halfway through the second semester, and it had been the same thing: swollen breasts, a sudden aversion to weird smells and familiar foods, a distracted air, an inexplicable sense of being preoccupied with something else.
It sort of obvious, now that Ariadne has thought of it, except that it’s so weird to think that Arthur might be pregnant.
Ariadne knows, logically, that it really shouldn’t be all that weird. Arthur is a very beautiful, frighteningly competent woman, and Ariadne privately suspect that if she were a man (or a less heterosexual woman) she would probably be madly in love with Arthur herself.
So, no, it’s not really surprising that Arthur would have a lover or two out there somewhere. But, somehow, Ariadne finds it really difficult to think of sex and Arthur in the same sentence.
***
So when it finally hits her, she’s a little shocked. And that’s probably why she doesn’t bring the issue up discreetly, and instead just stares openly at Arthur’s increased bustline and suddenly blurts out, “Are you pregnant?!”
Arthur stiffens immediately and jerks away.
Ariadne swears to herself and reaches out to grab Arthur’s arm before she can get very far.
“No, its- Arthur, I’m sorry. No, it’s none of my business, really.”
Her face is hot, and Ariadne is extremely glad that her mother is on the other side of the ocean. (Besides ‘don’t stare’, her mother’s second-favorite maxim was ‘think before you speak’. Ariadne had never been much good at following either one.)
Arthur shrinks away under her hand, but Ariadne pulls her back toward the desk resolutely.
“Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean to just…blurt it out like that. I just noticed, you know, your boobs and the coffee and the tuna, and you…”
Ariadne breaks off. Arthur is pale, and staring at her, but she isn’t trying to get away anymore, so Ariadne lets go and rubs her hands over her face.
“Yeah, I’m just. Going to shut up now, okay? Let’s just pretend I didn’t say anything.”
It’s hard, it’s so hard to resist the urge to look at Arthur’s face, to see how she’s taking this, but Ariadne carefully fixes her gaze on the sketches in front of her and shuffles them around on the desk.
Slowly, Arthur shuffles back to the desk and sits on the small chair next to Ariadne’s.
“You know?” she asks quietly. Her voice sounds small, somehow, and Aridane darts a glance over at Arthur’s lap. Her hands are clutching the knees of her sleek, expensive skirt so tightly that her knuckles have gone white.
“Yeah, it. I mean, I just sort of, guessed?” Ariadne resists the urge to tug at her own clothing, in a sort of sympathetic anxiety.
“How.” Arthur breaks off, clears her throat. When she speaks again, her voice sounds stronger, steadier. “How long. I mean, when did you…”
She doesn’t finish her sentence, but Ariadne mentally fills in the gaps.
“Oh. Geez, I mean I sort of just figured it out now? You’re, um.” Ariadne pauses, and then figures, in for a penny, in for a pound. “Your boobs are bigger? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but yeah. Totally bigger.”
Arthur doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. She darts a glance down at her own chest, and her forehead creases slightly, like she’s trying to judge the change for herself.
She doesn’t look angry or anything. That’s a lot more than Ariadne was hoping for, because she’s pretty sure she’d be pissed if she were in Arthur’s shoes and someone just came out and said all that stuff to her.
But Arthur has a better handle on herself, apparently, because she just sits there.
Ariadne pushes herself back in her chair and lets herself look, really look, at Arthur. (It helps that Arthur is very carefully not looking back.) Ariadne hunches her shoulders and tries to think what to say.
“So, uh. You’re definitely…pregnant, then?”
Arthur’s jaw tightens and she looks out one of the warehouese’s many windows. She nods slightly.
“Ah. Congratulations?” Ariadne bites her lip and searches Arthur’s face desperately for some kind of clue how to respond to this. “Or…not?”
Arthur huffs out a sound that’s sort of like a laugh, but rougher and maybe a little more manic. She gives Ariadne a smile that’s all jagged edges.
“I don’t…actually know whether congratulations are due,” she says, slowly.
Ariadne picks at her cuticles and thinks.
There really isn’t a classy, subtle way to say, hey, I took my roommate to the clinic last year, I could help you make an appointment, or go with you, if you want?
There isn’t really a nice way to ask, so are you keeping the kid, or what?
Ariadne decides to skip that question and go onto the next one.
“Who…?”
She can’t quite bring herself to spell it out, but Arthur gets her drift right away, and gives her a small, but very decisive head-shake. The message is clear: we’re not talking about that.
Fair enough, Ariadne thinks. She picks at the scattered scraps of paper littering her desk and tries to steer the conversation back onto firmer ground.
“So, are you cool to work? By yourself, I mean? You’re not, you’re not gonna get shot or anything?” She gestures toward the PASIV, suddenly alarmed. “Wait, that stuff’s not gonna give your baby twelve fingers or something, is it?”
She flinches after she says it, and thinks she probably shouldn’t have called it your baby, in case Arthur is going to…well. In case Arthur would rather not think about it that way.
But Arthur cracks a smile, briefly flashing dimples that are so cute that Aridane thinks it’s really no surprised someone went and knocked her up.
“No, I’m,” Arthur coughs briefly, and wipes the inside of her wrist across her forehead. Some of the tension around her eyes has eased, and a faint smile lingers around her mouth. Ariadne privately congratulates herself for cheering Arthur up.
“I’m pretty sure it’ll be okay,” Arthur finishes. Ariadne smiles.
“Oh. Cool.”
Ariadne pushes herself back in her chair and fiddles with her scarf. This conversation has gone well, better than she’d expected, and she’s pretty sure that she should just quit while she’s ahead.
But somehow, she can’t keep herself from gesturing to Arthur’s stomach and asking, “So…how far along, do you think?”
Arthur licks her lips and hesitates slightly. “A couple months.”
It’s an oddly unspecific answer, particularly from Arthur, who seems to prize specificity above all else. Ariadne blinks, and something of her thoughts must show on her face, because Arthur sighs, and says, “Seven weeks.”
It’s totally not any of her business, but Ariadne can’t help but do the math. Seven weeks…seven weeks ago, they were all in the warehouse working.
Ariadne knows that doesn’t really mean anything, because Arthur had an apartment down the street and everything, so of course she could have had a boyfriend, or just hooked up with some guy she met in a bar somewhere or something, and none of them would have known about it.
Of course, the father doesn’t have to be anyone Ariadne knows, but she still entertains herself with a few brief fantasies of Arthur carrying Saito’s secret love-child. Or, no, maybe when Arthur stayed behind all those times to help Yusuf perfect the kick, they were secretly carrying on some torrid affair!
Ariadne is halfway through imagining what their baby would look like, when Arthur clears her throat and stands suddenly.
“I need to go finish some recon.” She glances at the papers and half-formed models on the desk. “You’re good here?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure, go.” Ariadne reaches out blindly to grab one of the models and waves it at Arthur. “Just gonna finish this one up, and them I’m heading home.” She smiles at Arthur and tries to look like she wasn’t just making up perverse Harlequin romance plots featuring various members of their team.
Arthur smiles back, faintly. She lifts a hand in a brief wave, gathers her coat, and leaves.
Ariadne waits ten minutes, until she’s absolutely sure Arthur isn’t coming back. The she pulls out her cell phone, scrolls quickly through the contacts list until she finds Cobb’s number, and hits send.
As the phone rings, Ariadne reasons to herself that she’s not technically breaking any confidence. It isn’t like Arthur told her not to tell anyone.
Of course, Arthur probably thought that went without saying, but whatever. Cobb is like Arthur’s big brother, of course he’ll want to know.
And Ariadne was never very good at keeping secrets.
In retrospect, Arthur thinks that it took her entirely too long to figure out that she’s pregnant.
It’s her job to know things, to have all the information, and part of that job involves knowing her own body. She needs to know her limitations, needs to know what she is and is not capable of, and so when she realizes that her period is several weeks late, she is extremely annoyed with herself for not noticing sooner.
Then the panic sets in.
She spends a good fifteen minutes frantically flipping through her calendar, matching up dates, trying to figure out how many weeks late she is (three), whether she’s absolutely sure that she hasn’t made some sort of mistake with the dates (she hasn’t), and whether the approximate time she would have been ovulating coincides with that night in the hotel, just before Inception (it does).
Despite increasingly frenzied attempts, she fails to uncover any evidence that would suggest that the cause for her missed period is anything other than what she suspects. Finally, Arthur gives up, sets the calendar down, and sits on her couch for a full ten minutes, without moving.
Then she gets up, puts her paperwork in order, and goes to finish doing reconnaissance. She is a professional, she reminds herself sternly, as she locks her apartment door and heads down the stairs to the street below. Professionals do not let their personal issues get in the way of their work.
It’s almost a relief to have something to do, something to distract herself with. Unfortunately, the job isn’t demanding enough to be entirely diverting. It’s a fairly straightforward case; a wealthy businessman wants to know if his corporate partner is planning to throw him under the bus and force him out of the company.
Arthur is fairly sure that this is the sort of case that could be solved easily enough with a private detective, without all the drama and expense of dream-sharing, but the client says he wants to be sure, and Arthur isn’t complaining. It’s an easy paycheck.
The mark spends every Thursday evening with his mistress at a downtown hotel. He arrives at seven o’clock; the mistress turns up a half an hour later. Ariadne is nearly finished with the dreamscape, a replica of the corporate boardroom where the mark discusses future business plans with his associates.
The client supplied his own extractor, a man by the name of Geralds. Arthur is to be the dreamer.
She doesn’t need to review the plan, but she drives to the hotel and does so anyway. She paces the path between the bar downstairs and the mark’s reserved hotel room.
The bartender has been paid to drop a light sedative into the scotch the mark always orders at the bar, before heading up to his room. Arthur figures she has thirty minutes to slip in and out before the mistress arrives. More than enough time.
Arthur walks the perimeter of the hotel, checks the exits, plans three different escape routes.
After that, there is nothing more to do.
She hovers in the lobby for several minutes, half-hoping for sudden gunfire, a phone call, anything to provide a distraction, a reason to put off what she knows she needs to do. Finally, she gives up stalling and drives to the pharmacy two streets over.
***
There is an alarmingly large selection of pregnancy test. Arthur studies each once carefully. She reads the directions on the backs, compares prices, and generally stands in front of the display for so long that the cashier begins to stare.
Arthur very studiously ignores her. She picks two tests: a digital kind, and a kind that shows the result with bright pink lines.
The cashier rings the tests up silently. Arthur keeps her gaze fixed on her wallet, her credit cards. She suspects that if she does happen to look up, she will find the cashier looking at her with mild scorn.
It seems like the cashier must know that no woman who was hoping to be pregnant would hang around the display for so long, looking shifty. Surely the cashier has figured out that Arthur wasn’t planning on this at all. Arthur feels like the truth must be written all over her face.
She pays, and takes the nondescript brown paper bag the cashier hands her. The cashier passes her a copy of the receipt; Arthur stuffs it in the trash can outside the store.
On the drive back to her apartment, she lectures herself. How many times has she raised a condescending eyebrow when she heard of a woman who forgot to take her pill, forgot the condom? Arthur had always scorned that kind of recklessness, that lack of preparation, confident that it would never happen to her. She’d never be that stupid.
Except, apparently she was that stupid.
For a while, Arthur entertains the idea of blaming Eames. It’s mostly his fault, after all. She’s slept with him four times now, and she didn’t plan on any of them. Each time, she’d just happened to find herself alone with him, and he’d just happen to look at her, in that way that he had. A way that suggested that he didn’t need to do anything so crass as undress her with his eyes, because he already knew perfectly well what she looked like naked. It was deeply irritating, and also intensely arousing.
He’d look at her, and then he’d say something. It didn’t matter what: something flirtatious, some blatant come-on, something obscene. It didn’t matter what he said, because whatever it was, it was softened by the way he looked at her afterward, as if to say, Isn’t this ridiculous? I can’t believe you let me get away with this.
And from there, it only took one word, a casual darling, or hand grazing her thigh, and the next thing she knew she was tangled in the sheets of an unfamiliar hotel bed, or pressed up against a bathroom stall, her skirt hiked up around her hips, panties on the floor.
It was ridiculous, and she couldn’t believe she let him get away with it. It was incredibly stupid to get involved with anyone you were working with. Arthur had seen it go wrong too many times before, with Cobb, and with others.
It wasn’t safe to allow someone access to your body when you were also allowing them access to your mind. It was too much; you ended up giving away too much of yourself, and when you gave away too much, it was easy to lose everything.
***
Arthur parks in the underground garage and walks up the three flights of stairs to her apartment. She takes off her coat, her shoes, and then locks herself in the bathroom with the little paper bag. Tearing open the boxes, she lines up the tests (four in all) on the sink and carefully unfolds the two sets of directions. She reads each one three times, in English and in French, and after that there’s really nothing to do but take the damn things, so she does.
The tests make a tidy row between her toothbrush and foundation bottle. Arthur watches the second hand on her watch tick, slowly.
Three minutes.
She sits on the edge of the bathtub, pulls her legs up, and tries not to think.
It doesn’t really work. She was never very good at not-thinking about things.
Two minutes.
She takes the pins out of her hair, unravels the neat French twist she made that morning. Runs her fingers through the strands, works out the tangles. Fastens her hair back again.
One minute.
For a moment, a tiny bubble of panic rises in her throat, a stray thought: what will I do if…? She shoves in back down, ruthlessly.
Thirty seconds.
There is a small run in her stocking. Arthur picks at it, and tries to remember where she left the clear nail polish.
Ten seconds.
She watches the second hand gradually migrate to the twelve, stands up, and forces herself to look at the line of tests.
She wants to be surprised. She really does. But when she sees the results, she isn’t surprised at all.
The first test: two pink lines.
The second: another set of lines.
The third: one word, flashing dark against the gray digital display. PREGNANT.
The fourth: A repeat of the third.
Well, Arthur thinks dimly. That’s that.
Then she turns around and is abruptly sick in the toilet.
When she’s finished dry-heaving, she sits on the bathroom floor for a while, clutching the rim of the toilet, nauseous, sweaty all over and feeling utterly disgusting.
Oh, fuck, she thinks. It’s the only word the registers in the her mind, and it ping-pongs around her brain several time.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
She was so stupid.
***
She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had sex without a condom; the night in the hotel with Eames may very well have been the first. It was still a stupid thing to do, beyond stupid, and she didn’t even have the excuse of being drunk.
Yes, she’d meant to go get a drink that night, after locking up the warehouse, but then, as she left, Eames had sidled up to her with some pretense about sharing a cab, and…well. His hotel was on the way to her apartment.
She’d balked, and he’d laughed, fingers skimming her hip as he pressed her into the taxi. Come on, love. Just a quick ride. He’d actually winked at her, the filthy bastard, as if she wouldn’t have caught the innuendo on her own.
And after that, she should have shoved him aside, hailed her own cab, gotten the fuck out of there. But she was tired, and he licked his lips, and she found herself thinking that it had been a long time since she’d had sex, longer still since she’d had good sex. It would be a of a lot easier to stop off at the hotel with Eames than scrounge around in some dive bar, looking for a partner for the night. It would more efficient, really.
Arthur liked things that saved time.
She got in the cab.
The Paris streets passed outside the cab windows passed in a blur of light. Eames rested his hand lightly on her knee, not grasping or fondling, just resting. His fingertips were rough and warm and caught on her stockings, and by then Arthur had a pretty good idea of where the night was going to go, and decided she might as well enjoy it.
In the hotel elevator, she shoved her hands inside his jacket, grabbed at his sides, and fucked her tongue into his mouth. He laughed, breathy and startled, and cupped her ass.
The hotel room was dark, and Eames didn’t bother to turn on the lights. Arthur tripped over something, kicked off her high heels; Eames shoved her up against the wall and thrust against her. It was hot and filthy and rushed and good, and then his hands were under her shirt and then her shirt was off, and then they were on the bed, and…
It just hadn’t seemed worth spoiling to moment to go digging around for a condom.
He talked to her while he fucked her, a stream of nonsense: yeah, darling, that’s it, god, your legs, look at you, so wet, what do you want, hm? tell me.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and swore at him to go faster, dammit, fuck. He laughed and mouthed at her neck.
In the morning, she picked her clothing off the floor while he slept, sprawled out face-down on the bed. She dressed hurriedly in the bathroom and left.
When she saw him again, at the warehouse that afternoon (after she’d gone back to her apartment, showered, put on a freshly pressed suit, and generally done everything she could to erase all evidence of the previous night) she buried herself in research and avoided his gaze.
Later, she happened to look up for just a second, and he caught her eye and sent her another exaggerated wink. She wanted to glare at him, or flip him off, but there was something else in his expression, a strange of softness that made her swallow and look away.
***
When she’s fairly sure she’d done vomiting, Arthur crawls into the shower and rinses off the cold sweat under the hot spray. She doesn’t particularly need to wash her hair, but she does anyway.
After, she towels off and digs a pair of worn sweatpants out of her dresser. She wears them exclusively when she’s on her period; now, she swallows the irony and puts them on, along with a white t-shirt.
Her breasts ache. She notices it when she pulls the shirt over her chest. They’ve been aching off and on for several days. She had put it out of her mind, before, thinking vaguely that it must be PMS. Arthur studies her chest in the mirror, cups her breast briefly, then drops her hands down to her sides.
She finds it incredibly unpleasant to look in the mirror now, to imagine her breasts swelling up, her belly rounding out. She stares at the mirror anyway, masochistically, for several minutes. Then she turns away and gathers up the dirty clothes.
Running a hand briskly through her damp hair, she hangs up the wet towel, sweeps the pregnancy tests into the garbage, and takes a container of leftover sesame chicken out of the refrigerator.
There’s a bottle of wine chilling on the bottom rack. Arthur stares at it for several minutes and thinks of pouring a large glass, drinking it down, then pouring another.
Then she shuts the refrigerator door and sits in front of the television. She turns on the news, mutes it, and eats the cold chicken straight from the container.
***
In the morning, she makes a cup of coffee, stares at it, and then calls her gynecologist.
When Arthur expresses an urgent need to see the doctor as soon as possible, the receptionist hums thoughtfully. On the other end of the line, Arthur can hear the receptionist tapping away at a keyboard. She clutches her half-cooled mug of coffee and waits.
They have an opening this morning, the receptionist says. Their 9:30 has canceled. Would she like the appointment? Can she be there in thirty minutes?
Arthur thinks about saying no, no thank you, never mind. I’ve changed my mind; I don’t want this to be real. She chews her lip.
But then she remembers that she didn’t get to wear she is today by pretending that problems don’t exist. She got when she is by figuring them out, attacking them, solving them. So she says yes, dresses hurriedly, and drives to the doctor’s office.
The office is absolutely appalling. Arthur can’t believe she hasn’t noticed it before. There are entirely too many heavily pregnant women in the room. Across the room, there is a low table full of parenting magazines and pictures of smiling infants are scattered across the walls.
Arthur thinks, for one paranoid moment, that they are staring at her. She fixes her gaze on the clipboard full of forms in front of her and fills them out meticulously. The forms, at least, she can deal with. She’s good with forms; they’re reassuringly straightforward. But the forms are finished all too quickly, and then there is a nurse calling her name, escorting her down the hall.
Inside the exam room, the nurse takes her blood pressure and weighs her. Arthur forces her throat to unstick and explains calmly about the four positive pregnancy tests.
The nurse smiles, says that the doctor will want to do a blood test to confirm, but that she’s never heard of anyone having four false positives.
Arthur nods; she hadn’t really expected anything else.
She changes into the horrible paper gown the nurse hands her, then watches the nurse draw blood. The nurse remarks in surprise that she is very calm. Most people don’t like to watch when I draw their blood, she says.
There is no possible way for Arthur to explain that she is very used to sticking needles into her veins, so she says nothing.
She is asked for a urine sample. The nurse collects it. Then Arthur has the pleasure of waiting for the doctor in the cold exam room. On the back of the door, there is a diagram of a fetus curled inside a womb. It makes Arthur want to throw up again.
The doctor comes. Arthur used to like him, but today she decides that she hates him, because the first thing he does is palpate her breasts, and she nearly takes his head off. It’s so painful that she actually shoves his hands away, reflexively.
She doesn’t even have a chance to be embarrassed about it, because he just laughs, pats her shoulder, and says that it’s very common for women to have sensitive breasts during pregnancy. He seems to be trying to make her feel better, and Arthur thinks she wants to slap him.
He tells her what she already knew, that yes, she is definitely pregnant, and he would estimate that she’s a little more than four weeks along. Arthur nods calmly, and tries to pretend that she isn’t coming apart inside.
The doctor says he wants to perform an internal exam, as he euphemistically calls it. Arthur puts her feet in the stirrups, closes her eyes, and thinks of mazes and paradoxes and her plans for her next job.
When he’s done, the doctor pats her shoulder again and hands her a plastic bag full of pamphlets and little bottles of prenatal vitamins. He directs her to the receptionist to make an appointment for the next month. He congratulates her.
Moving mechanically, Arthur fills out the rest of the paperwork and books the appointment.
Then she goes home, lies on her bed, and spends the next three hours trying very hard not to cry.
Onto the next part...