FIC: (Inception) Thimblerig - Arthur (/Ariadne)

[cupiscent]

TITLE: Thimblerig
AUTHOR: Dee

PAIRING: Arthur (/Ariadne)
RATING: Adult (themes, language)
SUMMARY: "They've been in this life, side by side, mind by mind, for two years now, and Cobb still pretends like he thinks there's some way Arthur might not have seen how bad it's become. When Arthur does look at Ariadne - when he wonders if he's done the right thing - that's what he reminds himself of."
NOTES: Thanks to plasticity for being an architect, immlass for flagging the international aspect, and airgiodslv for falling in first and reading this during tech.

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way affiliated with Inception. I intend no infringement or disrespect.

=====

After the walkthrough, the two of them are doublechecking the technical specs, and on the end of a string of questions about projection latency and chemical stability, Cobb tosses in, same tone of voice, "So you have a thing for our new architect?"

The lead in Arthur's mechanical pencil snaps, shattering across the calculations in a spray of graphite. He lifts a hand to brush it all away; thinks better of it, and holds down a corner of the paper while he blows the detritus off. "Can we focus?" he suggests blandly, clicking a new lead into place.

"Well, I can."

There's the tiniest cousin of a smirk on Cobb's face when Arthur glances up, and despite how good it is to see anything like a smile on his face, Arthur still wants to punch him right in it. They were in the walkthrough, side by side, mind by mind, for ten minutes. He glanced at Ariadne once. They've been in this life, side by side, mind by mind, for two years now, and Cobb still pretends like he thinks there's some way Arthur might not have seen how bad it's become. When Arthur does look at Ariadne - when he wonders if he's done the right thing - that's what he reminds himself of.

And if Cobb thinks that's a thing, Arthur's not going to encourage him to look for anything else. He just lifts an eyebrow, gives his pencil one last pointed click, and says, "The credulity friction matrix." Meets Cobb's gaze until it drops back to the paperwork.

It's not that she shot him in the knee. He's been shot before, too many times to count and in far more painful places. It's that she was working with the subject. The extractor's projection, working with the subject. You could write a paper about this, if the journal editors wouldn't scoff. You could, if you weren't so busy being shot.

Something had to be done. Arthur told that to Miles, standing in the corridor outside Nash's door, watching Cobb's, phone to his ear. "Oh really?" Miles said, and honestly, Arthur hates the entire British isle and all its mild, hundred-proof sarcasm.

"If he could do it alone, he'd have done it by now." It was the first time Arthur had even admitted it to himself, and it tasted like bile and gunpowder residue.

Miles mulled it over. "Catalyst."

Arthur never actually studied under Mal's father, and there are some times when he regrets that. That had not been one of them. "Pardon?"

"Do you have room for an extra?" Miles asked.

And then Arthur got it. Ran a dozen variant scenarios in the time it took to set his bag down and switch the phone from one hand to the other. "Better if Dom does the recruiting himself. Something central but not necessarily active. Architect would be best."

"Don't you have one?"

"I'll sort it out." It's what he does, after all; sorts things out. He had his hand lifted to knock on Nash's door when he ended the call, but he never knocked. Instead, he thumbed in a new number, picked his bag up again, headed for the elevators.

Arthur doesn't believe in fate. Nor deja vu, the luck of the draw, the democratic process or ghosts.

He does believe in hauntings. He's not blind.

He also believes in practice making perfect, in the virtue of thorough planning, and in the half-life of the distance between should and did. That's what makes him so good at his job. He lives in the space after the plan goes wrong and before the job goes right. It's possible he left his good, steady, legal job in search of more delicate intricacy in fuck-ups to solve. Possible, but not the whole answer.

Too-precise planners come unstuck because it's just not possible for a plan to be perfect. You can't even guarantee a computer simulation will run identically on every single iteration, not if it has any complexity. Add in people, and uncertainty becomes the fifth dimension. Add in just one subconscious, and you're fucked. Preparation isn't about planning, it's about creating options, and the point man's job within the run is to keep as many of them as possible open.

Now he's backed in a corner - Cobb's put him there; his own willful fingers-crossed-and-hoping disregard of the festering problem has put him there - and it's hard not to view Ariadne as the only card he has left to play. But she opens up a whole new suite of options. And she comes back. She has her first, good, fatal glimpse of the problem, and she comes back.

Arthur thinks perhaps he can solve this for the first time in...

For the first time.

He should keep silent, should never let her know he knew why Miles had sent her in, so that Cobb could never pick it out of her mind, infer it from her subconscious. But in the distance between should and did, he says, "Pure creation, huh? You don't have to run the line with me, though it's probably best to stay in the habit."

She looks at him for a moment like she just doesn't understand, and he thinks if he has to be more specific, this actually isn't going to work at all. He's figured out six exit strategies by the time her mouth twists into a smirk and she says, "So did you ask Miles to call me in?"

Not Professor, he notices that, just like he notices the way her weight shifts, her posture softens, and that's all it takes for her to look as old as he knows she is. There's a cant to her hips and a challenge in the eyebrow she lifts, and Arthur finds himself saying, "Not you precisely."

He has no idea what he was expecting, but even then, he knew it hadn't been her. Ariadne. If that's her real name, he'll eat his tie. But when he asks, she just grins, sudden and knowing and bright, and says, "What, you don't believe in mythical symbolism?"

He doesn't, actually. Put it on the list.

Eames says, "You have a thing for the new architect," fifteen minutes after he arrives, beating Cobb by weeks and surprising no one, especially Arthur. In the time before that, he's mentioned Arthur's haircut, Saito's taste in suits, Cobb's need for both a haircut and a suit to save him from sartorial squalor, the fact that he's impersonated a former Spice Girl since they last met, and something arcane about cricket, so Arthur doesn't even bother looking up from the screen until there's a longer pause, and then Eames adds, "Good lord, you do."

When Arthur looks across, Eames is tilted way back on his chair, one foot up on the edge of the desk, so he can see into the space where Ariadne's frowning at something in the midst of her modelling mess. Arthur wonders if he'll have an email tonight with another dozen questions. She picked it up fast in their drilling, but it's obvious she wasn't an architecture student. When he pointed that out, she smirked at him, sharp as a knife and lazy as a cat, and suggested he wasn't just a pretty face.

Eames is smirking at him now, and nothing good has ever come of that expression on that face. "No," Arthur says, trying to cut him off, and knowing it won't work.

"Two days," Eames says. And then blessedly, uncharacteristically, shuts up. Except for that smirk, which continues to speak volumes of bad news.

Arthur taps at the laptop keyboard, and then says, against his better judgment, "Two days what?"

"Two days," Eames says, leaping in like he was waiting for the capitulation. "And I could be her."

Arthur laughs out loud, and Ariadne turns to frown at them instead, looking a little lost but a lot determined. Looking young. "No," he tells Eames again, "you really couldn't."

But really, the problem with Eames is that the only thing he hates more than equanimity in others is secrets.

"We can't do this while he's on the job with us," Arthur states. It's past midnight, and they're halfway across the city drinking amaro (her choice) in a basement cafe where the only other patrons are two old men shouting at each other in Italian over a chess board. Arthur's still keeping an eye on the door.

"A smug Brit," Ariadne says, around the strip of orange peel that she's been chewing on. Her fingertips are still shiny with liquor from when she fished it out of her drink; now she takes it out of her mouth and uses it to tick off items on the fingers of her other hand. "Not when the job's so complicated, not when anyone else is around. What's next? Do you actually want to do this?"

"Of course I do." Arthur doesn't even bother with putting any heat in his response, it's such a stupid question.

She sets her chin on the heel of her hand, dangling the orange peel between her fingers now. A vision of nonchalance, except for the focus of her eyes on him; Arthur's interviewed for military positions and felt less observed than he feels right now. "He won't be any good to his kids if he takes her home to them. What was she like, anyway?"

Just because it's true doesn't mean he has to like it - to like the idea of trying to pull this off as well as inception, under the scrutiny of the smug Brit. Just because he doesn't like it doesn't mean he won't work towards it with everything he has available. "I told you," he says, lifting his glass, "she was lovely."

The amaro is sharp and warming and the same colour as her eyes. He's expecting a remonstrance for being unhelpful, but instead she says, "Were you in love with her too?"

Arthur doesn't choke, or drop the glass, or splutter or object or prevaricate. He notices her noticing that, as he pauses, takes another sip, sets the glass down again. "No," he says. Then after a pause, he adds, "I was in love with her first, but I was seventeen, and she was too busy having screaming arguments with this arrogant blond bastard to notice."

Her smile's faint but not soft. She's winding the orange peel absent-mindedly around her fingers, not looking at anything but Arthur. "Are you in love with him?"

"No," he says, meeting her gaze, spanning his fingers over his glass.

She doesn't hesitate. "Were you?"

He does hesitate. He taps a finger against the rim of his glass, and within it the ice settles, sending out tiny ripples. He gives her a half-smile, and she smiles back, dropping the orange peel into the ashtray. "Don't worry about Eames," she says. "He'll be too distracted to really figure it out."

"It's not him I'm worried about," Arthur grumbles, but she's licking stickiness off her fingers, eyes bright, one eyebrow cocking up, and he switches tack. "You're going to distract him?"

She shrugs. "He'll distract himself. I think it'll be more you than me." She glances towards the bar. "I feel like a whisky, something single malt and almost as old as me. You want one?"

"You do not want to be dreaming hungover," Arthur warns, but downs the rest of his amaro.

Ariadne just laughs; the waiter's drawn like a magnet.

Cobb corners him in his own way, which means there's no cornering at all, just Cobb showing up at Arthur's worktable in the middle of the warehouse space. As long as Arthur's known him, Cobb's been paranoid enough to think about how to ensure sensitive conversations aren't overheard, and intelligent enough to know that walls aren't the protection they may feel like; the more serious the topic, the more visibility he wants. He hates being hemmed in. But no one can see in every direction at once, and nothing creates suspicion like trying to. You need someone you trust implicitly to watch the other half of the compass.

Dom leans casually against Arthur's workspace, hands in his pockets, and the tiniest shift of Arthur's weight, a tilt of his head, lets him cover the rest of the space. Over in her nook, Ariadne's looking their way, but Arthur's under no illusions that it's him she's staring at so fixedly.

"Eames," Dom says quietly.

Arthur snorts, still scribbling his calculations so this conversation looks as casual as it can. "A little late to ask if I think we can trust him, isn't it?" In any case, it's a meaningless question; Arthur mightn't like Eames, and knows that in this quarter especially there really is no honour amongst thieves, but he also knows from startling experience that Eames has some sort of strange us and them mentality. Trusting him is as obvious as checking your pockets after he brushes past.

"Can we trust him to pull this off?" Dom asks, and Arthur sets down his pencil to think about that, reaching for his coffee cup instead.

Beside him, Dom shifts, turning around, so Arthur does likewise, turning to lean against the table as Dom reaches for the sheets of calculations. Facing this way, Arthur's range takes in Saito and Eames facing off across a playing board, Eames circling three white stones in his hand. Can they trust him to get this done? It isn't a question of skill. Eames is, actually, as good as anyone else out there, and better than most. And willingness isn't an issue either. Fundamentally, Eames is an adventurer, and a gambler. He'll have a go if he thinks the odds are in his favour, or he can change them to be so. Having a stab at something is rather his modus operandi. And that, right there, is where he and Arthur differ fundamentally.

Arthur's totem is a loaded die, after all. He may recognise its necessity, but that doesn't mean he likes uncertainty.

"It's a challenge," Arthur says, lifting his coffee cup to mask the movement of his mouth. "Something that hasn't been done before. He'll want to be a part of that." Arthur suspects Eames will deliver above and beyond, hare-brained and daredevil and outrageous, just to be able to tell the story nonchalantly in bars from Tashkent to Buenos Aires. "If we keep it a challenge, keep him fully engaged, he'll break all the laws of physics to see it done."

"I thought that was your area," Dom comments.

Arthur lifts an eyebrow in nothing like affront, glances sidelong for a moment to meet Cobb's gaze. "I do not break, I obey strictly, precisely and to the letter."

"I need you to make it happen," Dom's saying as Arthur turns back to cover his half of their surrounds, under the guise of checking on the contents of his coffee cup. "If I start messing with him or playing keepaway, he's liable to get ruffled, or at least act it, but you--"

"Have been known to prod at him," Arthur supplies, and sighs, and sets down his coffee cup. Taunt him. Distract him. Don't kill him out of sheer annoyance. "Sure."

"Arthur." Dom doesn't continue until Arthur turns to look at him again. "This has to work. I can't afford for it not to."

Arthur looks Cobb in the eyes, where intensity burns like a fever, framed by shadows like bruises, and thinks that that goes for both of them. What he says is, "I know."

He watches Ariadne chipping away at the edges of Cobb, sees it every time she asks a question with wide-eyed innocence, or points at her models. Which he's told her are ridiculous, this isn't a design review, but she said, "No, no, I want all the trappings, the solid physical reminders of what he's denying himself."

Sometimes it's so obvious he's worried Eames really will notice it. Arthur can't be the only one who's slept with a psych major, and in some respects Eames's eye for detail is even finer than his own. And he can count; Ariadne's keeping a file extra to the ones she has for every environment she's creating, and if Dom would rather walk through fire than open any of them, he's not even close to the nosiest bastard in this warehouse.

"Please tell me," Arthur says quietly, leaning over her shoulder to touch the pointed tip of a skyscraper, "that you keep a close eye on that file."

"Jesus," she huffs, smacks his wrist. "You are all so fucking paranoid." She sticks a thumb in the file - it's not as thick as the one Arthur has on Fischer, but he still doesn't know how she's had the time - and before he can object, heaves it open. A page flutters, onionskin crinkled with her writing.

Which is a jumbled mess of French and Cyrillic. Arthur's open mouth closes again.

She lets it fall shut, plain manila cover. "Are you ready for what's in there?" she asks, turning a little more towards Arthur now.

They both know she doesn't mean the file. But how can he even answer that when he has no idea what could be holding Cobb hostage inside his own head? Except that isn't quite true, is it? Not when he can still see with perfect clarity Mal turning her chocolate gaze and her ladylike pistol on him.

Instead he says, "If you're this interested - this good" and he taps on the folder, "at dream-related psychiatry, why aren't you with the CIA?"

She lifts her eyebrows, and her smile's a little mocking. "Americans lack vision." He's still cross-analysing her accent with other options when she adds, as quiet and casual as this whole conversation has been, "I was engaged in the area. Briefly. The establishment and I have an ongoing difference of opinion. I'm more or less persona non grata." She tilts her head and pins him with her gaze. "Now you answer my question."

Fair is, he supposes, fair. "I don't care." No, wait; he shakes his head before she can do more than lift a skeptical eyebrow. "It doesn't matter. I don't need to know. It's his head."

She gives a little huff of scoffing laughter. "You're in a strange position to be developing a conscience about the boundaries of thought ownership."

"And you're supposed to be here to analyse Cobb, not me," Arthur points out, but with no heat. She has a point. It doesn't apply - this is different - but she does have a point. There's a tilt to her head and a curl to one corner of her mouth that's both very distracting and entirely not the character she's been playing in this warehouse. "Can you fix him?" he demands, for the first time.

Her eyes flicker to something behind him, and her posture shifts ever so slightly, easing out of the challenging stance she'd had. "I'm working on it," she says, looking back down to her drawings and models.

Arthur looks over his shoulder. Eames is handing a coffee to Yusuf, a tray of them in his other hand, but even in the middle of whatever ribald jokes they're exchanging, he glances over. Arthur sighs, and steps away from Ariadne, not too fast, just fast enough. She gets her caramel latte with flowery language that she apparently doesn't notice in the midst of some tricky problem; Arthur gets his double-espresso macchiato with a pointed lift of eyebrows that he just as pointedly ignores.

The knock at the door turns out to be Ariadne.

Arthur's surprised, and his greeting sounds it, even as he steps back to let her in. He's talked to her every night - emails or phone calls or both - but they agreed the less extracurricular face-to-face time the better, and that's not even covering the risk of her coming here. "Is something wrong?" Shit, if Eames has figured it out - or Cobb...

"No," she says, but she's loitering near the door as he closes it, glancing around the room like she's uneasy. It's weird and disconcerting. He says her name, lays a hand on her shoulder, is frowning at her as she turns to look up at him, her eyes wide and warm and clear as a spring day.

She steps in and kisses him.

Arthur doesn't think about it. Doesn't have to. His hand slips naturally down her back to ease her closer as he kisses her back for one stretched, singing moment.

Then she breaks it, not stepping back but turning her head, catching her bottom lip between her teeth before she says, "I thought - huh." And she gives a little abortive giggle, her eyes still huge and shining and bright as she looks back up.

Arthur starts laughing. He leans back on the doorframe and laughs harder than he has in a long time, as she says, "What?" and then, "Arthur," and then, "Fuck," in a way that's almost right for him to pull her back in again, but not really, not quite.

By the time he's got his mirth under control, it's Eames eyeing him somewhat sulkily from where he's sat himself on the back of the sofa. "Well," Arthur says, straightening his stance and his tie. "Are we under for long?"

Eames shrugs a shoulder. "Half an hour."

Arthur lifts an eyebrow, but doesn't comment. Trust him. Distract him. Whatever. "Shall we do some actual work, then?"

"You are unnatural," Eames declares, but he steps forward, and they do.

If Ariadne was a quick learner, Saito's an unsettling sponge. He's simply been there, always somewhere on the fringes of one of the discussions taking place in the warehouse. Occasionally asking quiet, subtle questions, more often heavily involved with a device slipped out of his breast pocket. Arthur suspects that device has the same resemblance to his own smart phone as the PASIV has to a fifth of vodka. He also suspects that regardless of how engrossed Saito has seemed in teleworking, he's absorbed enough information to go into the extraction business himself.

Arthur might have thought that was why Saito insisted on tagging along. Might have. But he knows better.

Tonight, when Arthur comes back to the warehouse for some drawings he is going to need after all, Saito is still there, controlling the world from his pocket device, sitting at the table that still bears the completed game board. Arthur knows just enough about go to notice the strong black groups, the conspicuous gaps, and how comprehensively white has been beaten.

When he glances up, Saito has been watching him looking over the board. "Do you play?" he inquires evenly.

Arthur nods at the massacre with a deprecating smile. "I couldn't do any better."

"Maybe not now," Saito allows.

Arthur actually feels flattered, which is pretty ridiculous. "Are you waiting on something?" he asks, not really to cover it up.

Saito tilts one hand at the wrist to point towards another corner of the space. "Protecting my investment," he notes, as calmly as ever.

Arthur tilts a little, but already knows he'll see Cobb's battered shoes on supine feet. He's glad, actually, that for once there's someone watching over. Arthur's never been allowed. Never. But Saito's always been magnificently deaf to the word "no", since the first moment Arthur called him up to make a deal and found himself saddled with slightly more than he'd anticipated.

He's turning away, the well, goodnight on his lips when Saito adds, "Your investment is with him."

His mind flashes through a hundred possibilities of Ariadne being under with Cobb, but the glance back is unhesitating. Saito is watching him steadily, tucking his phone back into his breast pocket. "I told you," Arthur says evenly, "this will not interfere with your job."

"That was the arrangement," Saito says, as though agreeing. "You have never asked me," he continues, "about the fate of Mr Nash."

It's true, and here and now, Arthur follows it with more truth. "I don't care about Nash."

Saito inclines his head. "You have been with Cobb for some time now."

He and Cobb cover more time and far more prepositions than Arthur is ever going to explain, even to a man whose perspicacity has been rivalled only by his discretion. "And hopefully some time to come," he says lightly. "Good night."

The knock at the door turns out to be Ariadne, but she has a thick folder wedged under her arm and she's tapping away at her phone when Arthur opens the door. Is still tapping when she glances up at him staring at her and says, "What, did I do the secret knock wrong? Is there a password? Do you not let girls in your clubhouse?"

It's been long enough for Arthur to step backwards through everything he's done since leaving the warehouse, including the fact that he called her. He walks away from the door, letting her kick it shut behind her, and mutes the television news. The steadily coalescing file on Fischer is spread all over the couch; Arthur's almost starting to feel like he knows the guy, but you can still never predict someone else's subconscious (exhibit A: his partner). Most days he has enough trouble with his own anyway.

The pertinent point - the reason he's called her over - is still up on the laptop screen, but the details don't matter, so he closes it. When he sweeps the rest into a pile (sometimes, in this process, randomising can be as useful as organising) and dumps it on top of the laptop, Ariadne takes up the cleared space with herself and her own file. It's got thicker in the past little while as well. "What's up?" she demands.

"Fischer's subconscious is militarised," Arthur says. And then, to her blank look, he explains, "He's had training to recognise and resist dream extraction."

She frowns, obviously running through how this operates upon every aspect of her information and planning; Arthur recognises it on her face like he's looking in a mirror. "Does this mean the job's off? We're practically on go."

Ordinarily, maybe yes; then again, Cobb has often had a strong resemblance to a bull given a red rag of challenge...

Arthur blinks at the snap of Ariadne's fingers. "Out loud," she says, exasperated and goading. "This shit might be important."

He gives her a look, but obliges, laying out his mental process, explaining what the training actually means, how that impacts on a normal extraction, the couple of times that he and Cobb have actually tried it regardless. (Like he said: he's been shot, and in more painful places.) "But this job..."

"Means too much," she provides, when he trails off. "It has to happen, and it needs to happen soon. He's wound too tight."

Arthur shakes his head. "This changes everything. We'll need to rework the plan entirely, lay the approaches differently and build in more failsafes--"

"Have you told him yet?" she interrupts, and he's barely shaken his head when she's continuing, "Don't."

He stares at her for a moment, but she doesn't seem inclined to add any more. "I don't think you understand what this means."

"I don't think you understand what this means." She shifts forward on the couch, as intense as he's seen her. "He is wound tight, he's very close to a moment where he has to choose to confront or bury forever. We can't afford to wait. And if he knows Fischer's militarised, he'll never take me down as well."

"Of course he fucking won't." They've had this conversation before, but Arthur's somewhat used to people for whom eight times isn't enough to convince. "A run like this - even before this revelation - is no place for a novice; don't even bring up Saito again." He's already had to bite his tongue against telling her that that's her fault as well. It isn't, really. It's his fault. All of it.

Her turn to shake her head, but it's not denial, more like he just doesn't get it. "I told you, he's close to that moment. But unless he gets there, burying is the default. I need to be there. I need to go down with him, as deep as he'll let me, to make sure he gets there, hopefully facing the right way. The rest is up to him, but I have to get him there." She fixes him with her gaze. "I've already talked him into it, I'm not going to let you fuck it all up."

"You've what?" But Arthur can't say he's entirely surprised; Miles picked brilliantly in Ariadne, or maybe she's just that good. Either way, Cobb's been a complete sucker for her from the first moment. "No. No. Never mind that we'll probably only get one shot at this and it has to work first time. If it fails, and there's a good chance it will, even if we go in with all the information--" This was inception after all, he can still barely believe it. "--then we will be on the run from the moment we open our eyes. I don't care how non grata you think your persona is, that's a whole different ball game, and I'm not throwing you into that."

He's stood up at some point, but she doesn't look at all daunted, chin tilted up politely towards him. "How kind," she says, sardonically but lightly. "But I know exactly how to disappear, and if you'd like proof, go ahead and tell Cobb about Fischer's training. And then you can go back to not dealing with this by yourself."

He stares at her, and she smiles back, sweet and fake as saccharine. "Fuck," Arthur states, and stalks away to the window, his back to her, the view invisible behind how hard he's thinking.

However many possibilities he runs, and tweaks, and re-runs, and stacks in batches, it only boils down to one thing: he has to tell Cobb. That's his job. That's what he does. It's why he's here. Keeping it back would be like betrayal.

Except he's already betrayed Cobb. He's been betraying him every time he didn't bring it up. Every time he let it slide. Every time he let a paltry excuse settle between them. He's been betraying Cobb for nearly two years.

Why did he call Miles - call for Ariadne - in the first place? Not because Mal shot him. Because Dom did. Because he threw himself flat, threw away every advantage and every bargaining element he had, to free Arthur from a prison of pain. An illusion, but a prison nonetheless; one from which he was powerless to escape on his own.

Arthur called because doing his job isn't enough.

He turns his head away from the window. "Fine," he says. "Have it your way."

She doesn't say it's for the best or come over to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder. He hears her stand, the soft weight of her tread going towards the door. He turns to watch her, and so he catches the glance she turns over her shoulder, serious and quiet and maybe - in the moment before the door swings closed behind her - just a little sympathetic.

She also didn't say there's a reason you told me before you told Cobb, and she had that file under her arm. Arthur thinks it's not all on Cobb.

He thinks she's known all this time just what she was asking.

He treats it like any other job: all bets off, the world fallen away, nothing but that space between should and did, even if it's defined by a dozen different plans.

It works.

It all works.

He will buy Eames his drinks in that bar somewhere between Tashkent and Buenos Aires. He'll learn to play go properly. He will never, ever tell Cobb what he has done; he'll just file it in amongst all the other secrets that pad the space between them.

He stands on the footpath outside LAX, the transit crowd fizzing around him, and breathes the filthy air.

"So," she says, next to him, and when he turns to look she's grinning lazily, propping her sunglasses on the top of her head. "I've already been well paid, but you can thank me."

He doesn't. He says, "Are you going to tell me your actual name?"

She thinks about it, that tilt to her head and smile on her lips. "Do I need to?"

She doesn't, actually. He still knows people in the establishment. Quite a few of them. Even if she had worked with NATO and not the CIA, the community isn't that big, not really. He's asked some questions. He's got some answers. "You want to shut us down," he says now. "We've just given you evidence for more papers on how dream intervention should be banned in all forms."

"Oh, I'm going to shut you down." There's not the slightest hint of surprise on her face; in fact, her smile broadens. "And would you really fight it? Can you really say, after all this, that what you're doing is healthy? For the minds of the participants, never mind the subject."

She's standing quite close, hip canted, challenge in every line of her, even her sunny smile. He can't take his eyes off her. "If you name names," he says, quiet and casual, "I will find you."

"Are you talking me into, or out of it?" she asks, mouth curling.

And he leans forward and kisses her. That place in the middle of her back fits the curve of his hand just as well as it did when it wasn't her, and the press of her against him is just as perfect, but she kisses direct as confrontation, her mouth open and her fingers creeping up his neck, into his hair, holding him steady as the kiss stretches and her weight digs Arthur's totem into his hip.

She bites his bottom lip, and the sensation's still lingering as she steps back, two steps, out of reach. Not a word, just that grin, as she drops her sunglasses down onto her nose, picks up her bag, and walks away.

When he turns around, Eames is standing just outside the automatic doors, squinting thoughtfully after her. "So she is your type after all. I was wondering, old boy." He offers a sunny, outrageous smile of his own. "Double or nothing?"

Arthur just starts laughing.