Fic: The Other Half, Part Two (Inception, R)
title: The Other Half, Part Two
author: ilovetakahana
pairings: Main pairing is Ariadne/Mal. Secondary pairing is Arthur/Eames. Mention of
previous Mal/Cobb.
warnings: And now here is Part Two of my Survivor!Mal AU. If you've missed Part One, it's HERE.
The setup: Dominick Cobb killed himself, leaving his widow Mallorie to pick up the pieces of her life. Luckily, Stuart Eames and Arthur Hardy are her best friends and her own private Stadtler and Waldorf, and luckily, she's about to meet Ariadne Mann. AU hijinks and lots of guns galore, lots of slash, and of course femslash!
Thanks once again to chn_breathmint for help with the guns and the action sequences, to photoclerk for being such a wonderful beta, and to the Twitter and LJ gangs for the comments and the never-ending encouragement and pompoms.
This one covers pretty much all the genre bases: drama, comedy, action. Healthy doses of snark and humor ahead, and characters changed to fit the new concept.
Watch out for all the cameos and mentions!
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.
summary: The Other Half, Part Two - Ariadne shows what she's made of and Mal lets the mask crack to reveal what lies beneath.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/.
“um. mal?”
“Yes, Ariadne?” And then Mal wrenched the steering wheel over to the right and Ariadne shrieked as she was thrown straight into her window, audible and loud thump in the cabin and she hung on for her life.
“Sorry, sorry,” she heard Mal say. In Ariadne’s opinion Mal did not sound repentant at all. She sounded, if anything, determined. Concentrating on something. Busy, preoccupied.
But then again, if it were Ariadne at the wheel and the mirrors showed a couple of ominously black - of course they had to be black, there was no point in being surprised - cars chasing them, all three cars running hellbent for leather as Paris began to fall away and fade into its suburbs, she might also be a little distracted.
“Hang on to something,” Mal called, and swung hard into a smaller lane.
“In all honesty, it’s a little too late for that,” Ariadne said, but only to herself, and only inside her head. Her teeth were clenched together and she felt every rut and crater in the road through them as they careened onward.
Those thumping sounds in the back were not helping her calm her nerves.
There was a dead body in the van with them, after all.
“Ah, finally,” she heard the other woman suddenly say - and with an almighty screech of protesting brakes Mal performed a U-turn, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand out her window. The hand that was holding her pistol.
Ariadne counted the shots - there were at least five - and heard the other woman swearing in extremely guttural French as she bounded out of the van, approached the other two cars. In fact, she only guessed that the language had been French; Mal had been nearly unintelligible with rage.
Both cars, Ariadne saw when she peeked out her window, had been totalled, crashing smack into each other when Mal had taken out the drivers and passengers.
All that in just half a dozen shots? Damn!
Ariadne half-fell out of the van, just in time to see Mal yank one more man out of one of the cars. The other woman’s face was fixed in a snarl, teeth bared as she, presumably, hissed questions and got answers.
When Mal put the muzzle of the pistol right between the other man’s eyes and fired, Ariadne whirled away, and threw up next to the van.
“All done,” Mal said as she came back, and Ariadne watched her tear off one blood-stained sleeve, the stains long since dried to a rusty brown, and offer it to her.
She thought she might hate Mal, because that had been an execution back there. It was impossible to mince words.
But it was an execution that meant Ariadne herself was still alive.
And that tangled her up.
There were so many thoughts flashing through her head.
Was Mal to be thanked? To be condemned? What did it all mean? Why was she in danger? Why were there people who wanted her dead or captured or worse?
And when she looked into the other woman’s eyes there was fear, there was pain. Mal looked wrecked and haunted and fighting for her very sanity. As if, instead of seeing the van and the destroyed cars and the various bad-guy corpses and Ariadne herself, she were seeing something familiar and much too painful.
Ariadne’s head was throbbing as she took the sleeve from Mal’s hand and turned away.
“No need to get back in the van - just get your things. We’ve arrived,” was all Mal said, though, and Ariadne was left watching as Mal disappeared into the back of the van, emerging a moment later with the now-battered, now-livid corpse of the former driver.
///
“Where are we?”
“Créteil,” was Mal’s very brief answer.
Sitting at the kitchen table and surrounded by a silver case and various battered bags, Ariadne watched her stand at the sink and scrub her bloody, ash-covered hands, watched her wring her dirty shirt out.
Mal was out of her shirt and her undershirt, was standing at the sink half-naked, in her jeans. Red bra a startling contrast against her pale skin, eyes blank and looking down at some unfathomable middle distance. Past the water. Past the soap suds. Past the floor at her feet.
They were frozen and silent for a long few moments, and then Mal visibly shook herself back to reality, hands shaking and slopping water before she blinked and there she was again, just the same woman who had offered Ariadne plums and her services as a bodyguard with the same soft steel voice, the same enormous sad eyes.
As if she hadn’t been someone else right now. Someone who was carrying an immensity of grief around on her shoulders. Someone who had been contemplating loss and death and far worse.
Ariadne could only catch her breath when Mal deliberately spread the shirt out on the kitchen counter to dry, and then looked over her shoulder, half-smirk not quite enough to cover for her haunted eyes. “This is my, well, I guess you’ll want to call it my little country house? Except we’ve not really left Paris, we’ve just moved into the suburbs. It used to belong to my grandmother. When she died, I inherited it from her.”
Ariadne nodded, not trusting herself to speak for the lump in her throat.
Mal went on, seemingly light-heartedly. “There are three bedrooms. For now we’ll stay together in the middle one, just in case we get any visitors of the Cobol persuasion. I don’t think we can stay here for long, though. We may have to get out of France completely. I’ll make plans for that - we’ll have to talk to Arthur and Eames at some point.”
Ariadne put her head in her hands. “Mal?”
“Yes?”
“Am I going to have to be on the run forever? Are Nash and Fischer and I as good as prisoners?”
When Mal sighed, gently, Ariadne looked up, dashed away a stray tear from her eye.
“I have no answer to that question.”
“I’m asking because you’re acting like you’re used to it.”
“Because I am used to it,” and she watched as Mal sat down across from her, finally. “You are hardly the first person...I’ve gone on the run with my father, Ariadne. With Arthur, when he was just starting out, and when I was teaching him. I once went on the run for an entire year with my - my husband. This, this has been my life for a few years now.
“It’s bothering you, or you wouldn’t have asked. This is also not the first time I’ve had to answer that question. Oh, it was worded differently every time it was asked. But it’s always the same question no matter who asks. And truth be told, it’s always the same answer anyway: it’s done when the job is done. Not before and not after. It ends with the job.”
“Shit,” was all Ariadne could say, and she did so feelingly.
///
They spent the first day in Créteil in complete silence.
Eventually coaxed away from the kitchen by Mal, Ariadne spent the rest of the day alone in the middle bedroom. They had found bedding and some flat pillows stored away in a hall closet, and she and Mal had attacked the dust bunnies vigorously - but that had been about all she could do before the idea of being on the run took over, again, and she withdrew into silence.
Mal had guided her back into the bedroom and given her a couple of bottles of water, pointed out where the toilet was, and left her alone.
Ariadne had not even been able to pick up a pencil, to lose herself in the reassuring whisper of graphite against paper. To create something beautiful or useful or both.
It wasn’t a lack of energy. It wasn’t the loss of the adrenaline rush. It wasn’t fear - at least, she wasn’t afraid of Cobol. There were people looking out for her, and Mal had mentioned others who were working to defend her, and Nash, and Fischer.
It was everything else that had finally caught up to her. There were some very scary realizations to be had in all of this: that Ariadne was talented. That her talents were very specific, very unique, and potentially either very helpful or very destructive. That there were people who were willing to teach her, to give her talents room and the exact space in which they could grow, and that there were people who saw her as nothing more than a resource that could be exploited.
No matter if all she wanted was to design beautiful things. No matter if she was determined to enjoy herself and equally determined to never hurt anyone while she was enjoying herself.
It wasn’t the world that she had been expecting.
And no amount of dreams, no amount of building beauty or sewing art would ever make it right again.
///
When the door creaked open Ariadne heard herself gasp, watched herself as though on a TV screen as she scrabbled for the edge of the bed and fell over it, preparing to hide under the frame again.
But the feet that walked into the room were shapely and small, the nails painted a chipped gray, visible even in the faint light.
“Ariadne,” she heard Mal say, and slowly, sheepishly, she rolled out and up and back to her feet.
But Mal wasn’t smiling mockingly at her.
The look in her eyes could only be gentle. Understanding.
“I’m sorry,” she heard Mal say quietly. “I’m - that really wasn’t the best thing to do. I should have knocked and I should have identified myself before coming in. I won’t forget next time, Ariadne.”
“O-okay,” Ariadne said. And then: “I wish I knew why I was so afraid. It’s not like I didn’t watch you take out the bad guys.”
“Fear,” Mal said, as though she knew what Ariadne had been thinking earlier. She was quiet and sagelike as she moved around the room, pushed the armchair in the corner closer to the lamp atop one of the bedside tables. “Cobol specializes in fear. Both here and in the dreamshare. There’s a reason why Eames and Arthur and I are actively trying to fuck them over, why Papa is fighting them with all of his considerable strength. We’re only lucky that people like Saito and his Proclus Global are on our side, at least for now. Cobol are merde, plain and simple. Their methods are worse than useless and their architects and extractors don’t deserve their names.”
“I’m sensing some strong feelings there,” Ariadne said.
She watched as Mal walked over and joined her on the bed. “Pillow, please,” and Ariadne handed her one from the pile behind and beneath her, and Mal assumed an intricate fold of leg, and she pulled the pillow close to her chest and looked out the curtained window, at the darkening sky. “Strong feelings. Yes. As good a place to start as any.
“I’m - I’m beginning to think that it was Cobol that killed my husband, Ariadne.”
Ariadne felt her eyes grow wide at that. “Um,” was all she could say, however, as she watched Mal fall back into the same blank stare that she had had at the sink, with the sodden shirt in her hands, and suddenly Ariadne remembered that the shirt had been just a hair too large for the other woman, had definitely been cut and styled for a man. A woman’s shirt had prettier tails or longer ones for tying in the front or in the back; a woman’s shirt had the buttons on the left-hand side; and then - “Oh my god. That shirt was your husband’s.”
“Penny for the smart lady,” Mal whispered.
“If you don’t want to talk about it now we can drop the subject,” Ariadne hurriedly said.
“Thank you, Ariadne. I am going to have to talk about it some time, and it might be with you - but thank you for understanding that I can’t do so now.”
Ariadne nodded frantically, even as she finally felt her brain run down from everything that had happened. “I don’t even care if you never talk about it with me. But, but, I hate seeing people sad, and then there’s you, and - ” And at that point she finally clapped her hands over her mouth.
Mal said nothing, and, still sitting at the foot of the bed, simply turned her back on Ariadne.
The last thing Ariadne heard before she went to sleep was Mal, whispering, and she was too tired to decipher the French, though it sounded eerily familiar.
“Dieu reunit ceux qui s’aiment.” [1]
///
On the sixth day, Ariadne looked up with a start from her seat at the kitchen table and realized that they had actually evolved a sort of routine together.
Mal slept for a few hours in the mornings, sometimes at the foot of Ariadne’s bed, sometimes on the floor next to the bed, and sometimes in a chair that had taken both of them to push into the middle bedroom.
No matter how Mal slept she always ended up in a sort of curled-up fetal variation, and she always slept on her left side, facing away from Ariadne.
Her right hand was, even in her sleep, closed lightly around one of the two guns in the house.
The first thing Ariadne did when she woke up was transfer her blankets to Mal. Sometimes this meant simply flipping the comforter over onto her, if she was sleeping at the foot of the bed; sometimes this meant pushing the blankets over the edge of the bed to fall onto her, if she was sleeping on the floor; and dragging the blankets toward the chair, if she was sleeping there.
Wash face, brush teeth - she was lucky she carried toiletries around with her, though she was running low on toothpaste - and then Ariadne would set up shop on the kitchen table. Cup of pencils and crayons on the left side, a stray pen or two pushed to far corners of the table, stack of sketchbooks sitting on the floor. The backpack she’d been carrying that night at the Sorbonne, slowly getting even more battered as she dragged it around after her from room to room of the house.
After the shock had worn off she was surprised that the ideas that she and Professor Miles had been testing on that last day in Paris had returned with a vengeance, and she could spend long hours sketching out, lightly at first and then darker and darker as she firmed up the ideas, levels built on impossible shapes. She did her best to remember her math and geometry classes, tried to remember everything she’d been taught on topology, cut out several Mobius strips. One morning found her deep in thought, straightedge out as she tried to construct a set of Penrose stairs.
At some point Mal would wake up and go out for a run; she often brought food back. Bread, cheese, fruits, milk. Sometimes there was a chocolate bar, and Ariadne always left Mal half.
Mal never ate until she was done with her morning exercises.
Ariadne watched, sometimes, heart in her mouth as Mal started out slowly, languidly, and then sped up until she was a whirling mess of limbs, and dancing away finally, slowing down to the original pace.
In the afternoons, Ariadne often spent a few minutes hooked up to the PASIV, with Mal watching over her and timing her off for the kick.
In the dreams she began to build the levels that Professor Miles had asked for, and more.
Mal joined her once, and when they woke up together in Miles’s classroom at the Sorbonne, Ariadne grinned, and took her hand, and said, “Come on.”
In here, Ariadne only had to look around her, and the landscape fell to pieces and rebuilt itself according to her wishes.
Now they were standing in a white, blank space, distant hum and roar of ocean surf. She watched as Mal looked down, wiggled her bare toes - and Ariadne called up the memory of a beach she’d read about in some of her books, put it together with what she knew of tropical shores, and then they were standing at the very edge between the water and the sand. Gray soft grains washed endlessly by the waves. Two visible moons hanging in the sky.
“Very good,” Mal laughed after a moment. “Never build from memories. Always distort. It’s going to be nearly impossible to accept a place like this as reality, not with two moons, and not when the moons are so large.”
Ariadne smiled at the praise, and sat down on the sand to start drawing with her fingers. The sand collapsed in ruler-straight lines at her touch, a Penrose triangle melting into Penrose stairs into the familiar double-helical shape of DNA.
And with that, she looked up and out into the distance and she could see it in her mind, forming far away, a second landscape with her and Mal, twining around this one - the waves, the moons, the random writing she’d already laid down in the sand.
It took all of her concentration - but it only took a few moments.
Behind her, she heard Mal make an odd strangled noise, and say, “Merde!”
And she had to smile. That had been the exact reaction she had been looking for.
“Mal,” she said, “do something. Maybe wave at the other us. Or do one of your
exercise forms. Tell me if the projections of us react.”
A sharp intake of breath was all the answer she needed to hear.
“Mal?”
“Actually, they’re starting to come toward us,” Mal said. “Should we be worried?”
“No, because, wait,” and Ariadne thought back to how DNA worked, how it uncoiled to duplicate itself and then resumed its helical form, and she opened her eyes now and she laughed as the landscapes split apart and now the Mal and Ariadne on the second strand were torn away, to stand on a distant, separate, third strand. “There.”
“Ariadne,” she heard Mal say.
There was a note in that voice that she had never heard before, and she turned to look at the other woman as she brushed the sand away from her hands. “Yes?”
“This is - this is amazing. How did you do - all that?”
“Can’t tell you,” Ariadne said, jokingly. “Or I’d have to kill you.”
And then Mal laughed - truly laughed, a joyous note over the endless waves, and Ariadne started running on the sand, fast enough to launch herself into a series of somersaults and cartwheels on the shore.
///
That night, Ariadne watched with her heart in her throat as Mal carefully keyed a complex number sequence into her mobile phone, and then pressed the button for loudspeaker.
One ring, two, three, and then - “Mal?”
“Hello, Arthur,” Mal said. “Are you somewhere safe?”
“Hello, Mal,” a new voice said. “Eames here. We’re still safe as houses here in Barcelona, though that might change in the next few hours.”
Ariadne watched as Mal’s eyebrows swung sharply upwards. “It looks like Ariadne and I are the cavalry calling just in the nick of time, then. What’s going on out there, boys?”
“Nash has been attacked - again,” was the clipped response from Arthur. “But not to worry, he’s safe, he’s alive. Do you know Yusuf? He’s been with Nash all this time, protecting him from our old friends. They’re on the run right now, and we’ve asked them to come here, if they can, but we’re not taking any chances. We’ll probably have to meet them partway.”
Ariadne felt the idea come to her complete, unbidden, and she quickly scribbled out a note to Mal: We can help. We can counter Cobol. You just have to get me into the same room with Nash and you and the PASIV and the bad guys.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Mal said, and turned back to the phone. “Listen carefully, both of you. Ariadne and I can help you; we can send those Cobol dogs running home destroyed.”
“I’m listening,” Arthur said.
“We have to meet somewhere. We’re going to make them think that they’re going to snatch Nash and Ariadne and me - but what’s really going to happen is that we were just the bait, because you two, and Yusuf, are going to be doing the snatching. Then we’ll knock them all out and hook them up to the PASIV, perform a counter-extraction and do some serious damage to them. Our architects will lead the way.”
“Tricky,” Eames observed. “But, yes, very evil and very doable. Just tricky. Arthur, we’re going to have to pull in a few favors, get some transportation - and we’re going to be needing a few guns. Any preferences, Mal?”
Ariadne raised her eyebrows when Mal laughed, but she had to admit, it was a strange and funny question under the circumstances.
“If Arthur still has my shotgun, and if it’s in good working condition....”
“I only dinged it just the once, Mal, and that was because I’d never handled a shotgun before,” and Arthur actually chuckled, grimly amused.
“Not an excuse, not when you’re Arthur. First and best of my students.”
“That means nothing. Technically speaking, I was, and still am, your only student.”
“Not relevant. No one is better than you.”
“Except for you, Mal,” Eames interjected.
“Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr. Eames,” Mal said. After a moment her face and her voice turned serious once again. “Boys. Can we do this?”
“Yes,” Eames said, firmly, almost overshadowing Arthur’s comment of “Already working on it.”
“Merci, you two. See you soon. And keep safe.”
“You too, Mal. Ariadne,” Arthur said, and then there was just the beep of a disconnected line.
They sat there on their sides of the bed for a long time, looking at each other and at the moonlit night outside the windows.
And then, Mal heaved a deep sigh and said, “Are you ready? Because. Remember what I said. If you commit to this now, if you say you’re going to be part of the heart of this job, then you should remember.”
“It’s done when the job is done,” Ariadne said. And nodded, firmly. “I’m in. I’m putting this all together, aren’t I? The job’s going to hinge on how well I can do that trick I have in dreams. I’m in. Until it ends.”
///
Interlude
“It’s easier if we take a car,” Arthur said, looking down at the arsenal that he was putting together, on the floor of his Barcelona apartment.
“We’d be much more traceable, though. I say this is a job for a motorbike.” Eames walked in, then, long corkscrew of orange peel falling from his hands and his pocketknife. He quickly divided the fruit into segments and offered Arthur one.
Arthur chewed, spat out a seed, and cocked his head at the array of pistols, submachine guns, and shotgun on the drop cloth. “I suppose whoever’s not driving can carry all this shit on his back, provided I can wrap the whole bundle closely and safely. We’ll pack the magazines and the MP5Ks in the saddlebags. I am not going to risk any stupid accidental discharges just because we hit a fucking speed bump.”
“Splendid,” Eames said. “Now all we have to do is find something decent. Oh don’t look at me like that, I promise it’s going to look like a right proper speedster. I can find us something that’ll do the job.”
Arthur rolled his eyes but leaned up to kiss Eames anyway. “If all else fails I can wear a helmet with a very dark visor. And maybe white racing leathers. But I’d have to be driving.”
Eames laughed. “That’s the spirit, stig.”
Eames watched Arthur pack the guns away, carefully, meticulously, and thought of the early days, when he and Arthur were starting out together, and how he was so immersed in the idea of being the perfect point man. Sure, he’d often had a more methodical approach, as opposed to Mal’s more intuitively scattershot one - but they had been lucky, and the two ways of attacking the same idea had only benefited their respective teams.
Lucky them, of course.
After a moment, he thought back to the day’s telephone conversation with Mal, and he tapped Arthur on the shoulder and said, “So, about that little Architect.”
“Ariadne?”
“Yes. Opinions?”
“I really hope she knows what she’s doing, or else there is no plan, and we’re all going to have to drop off the face of the earth for a good long while if we don’t want to be, oh, dead.”
“You do know Mal’s good at that. Picking out competent folk, I mean. You, and Dominick, and now this Ariadne.”
“I suppose we’ll know soon enough why Cobol wants its dirty little paws on her.”
///
The morning after the phone call, Mal sat Ariadne down at the kitchen table and showed her how to use a gun.
“This, Ariadne, would be a Beretta Px4 Storm. This is my personal sidearm. I am going to teach you how to use it.”
Ariadne tilted her head curiously, but made no move to touch the gun. “Is it loaded?”
“No, it’s not. And that’s a good question, as it introduces the rules of gun safety. Have you ever been around guns before?”
“Not me,” Ariadne said. “My father. He had a couple of hunting pieces stashed away at my grandfather’s house; he was a very good shot.”
Mal nodded. “All right, then. Gun safety. Rule Number One: All guns are always loaded.”
Ariadne watched her hands move over the gun, sure and unhurried. “Watch carefully; I’m unloading the gun. Here is the magazine, those are the rounds in the magazine. Here,” and Mal held up a single cartridge, “is the round that was chambered before I started this lesson with you. This is a 9x19 mm Parabellum round, or 9 mm Para for short. As you can see from the shape, I’m partial to hollow point rounds.”
Ariadne took the round from her and examined it carefully. “This is the type that expands or something?”
“Correct. The shape of the tip allows it to expand on impact; this decreases the penetration. More importantly, it means that there is far more tissue disruption.”
Ariadne nodded, and carefully set the bullet back down on the table.
“Now. Gun safety, Rule Number Two: Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. In layman’s terms: Do not point this gun at something unless you intend to kill that something.
“Rule Number Three: Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target. This is what you’ll hear other people refer to as trigger discipline.
“And, Rule Number Four: Be sure of your target and what is beyond it. Essentially, when you shoot, make sure that the person or object you’re shooting at will actually stop the bullet, and prevent it from traveling onward and causing unwanted collateral damage.”
“Hence the hollow points,” Ariadne said, suddenly understanding.
“Hence the hollow points. High marks for a first lesson.”
Ariadne watched, deeply interested, as Mal put the gun back together, then racked the slide - and safetied the gun. “Do I get an actual firing lesson at any point?”
Mal looked at her, right in the eyes, and then grinned.
Ariadne raised her eyebrows.
“Actual? Not yet. But I’m thinking it might be easier on you if we try to do this in dreamspace, first, where we can actually control every possible condition. I’ll put a shooting range together for you, and we’ll train there, before I actually turn this gun over to you.”
That made Ariadne smile back. “I can do that.”
///
“And it turns out you’re a natural shot in the dreams.”
Ariadne smiled, and lined up her Mare’s Leg for another blast, which tore the center cleanly out of her paper target. “My father would have been amused.”
Mal waved her hand and the target repaired itself. “He would at that. Now. Change to, hmm, let’s have you decide on your sidearm. I’d suggest something compact, to give you the element of surprise. How about this,” and she thought for a moment and a gun appeared on the table next to her.
Ariadne put the Mare’s Leg down, willed it to disappear, and picked up the pistol.
“This is pretty neat.”
“Smith & Wesson’s M&P, the compact version,” Mal said, nodding in approval as Ariadne handled it carefully. “Chambered for 9 mm, of course, unless you want something else.”
“Nope.” Ariadne thought up a magazine full of jacketed hollow points, loaded the gun, and spun to face the target once again, put all her bullets into the center ring.
“Excellent! You’re really a natural at this, and the gun looks like it’s been built for you.”
“Can I keep it?”
“In the dreams, of course. In real life - we’ll practice, and then we’ll talk about it. Fair?”
“Fair.” But before Ariadne could unload the pistol, Mal held out a hand; she stopped, and put the gun down on the table and raised her empty hands.
“Relax, Ariadne. I’m just thinking about how you can carry this gun concealed. You’re not one to use purses and such, not even in real life.”
“I had a backpack, didn’t I?”
Mal grinned. “Right. So you’re going to have to carry this on your person, and you have a few options, depending on how we’re dressed in the dreams.” Suddenly her shirt and jeans shredded away and she was standing there in a tuxedo.
Oh, all right, Ariadne’s mind supplied once it had finished gibbering, not really a tuxedo. No waistcoat, no cummerbund, no bow tie. Lace cuffs poking out of the jacket, and stiletto heels, for god’s sake.
Imperfect tuxedo or not, Mal made it look good.
When Mal laughed at her, Ariadne couldn’t find it in her heart to be offended - but she did snap back to reality when Mal said, “Now, pay attention.”
“I’m here,” she said. Not all of me yet, but here, she thought.
“You’d better be; there will be a quiz at the end. Now. Holsters for concealed carry. Yes, I realize that this is dreamspace, and you can manifest a compact pistol as easily as you can, say, warp the landscape into some godsforsaken shape, but we are also here to instill some good habits in you, and part of that is knowing how to correctly carry a concealed firearm on your person.”
Ariadne watched as Mal waved her hand, and a thick, sturdy leather belt appeared at her waist, together with the type of holster that she’d seen on policemen back at home. “I’m guessing that’s a standard holster, but it’s not concealed.”
“Correct. This is a belt holster, and it’s for people who can carry their guns openly. For people like us, and especially for me, something like this,” and Mal shifted her stance, one hand raising the hems of her jacket a little, “would probably be a better choice.” Now the holster was riding the inside of her waistband, and when she dropped her suit jacket back down and stood casually, arms folded across her chest, it was as the holster, and the gun she’d made appear in it, didn’t exist.
“Wow,” Ariadne breathed.
Mal smiled, a secret little quirk of her mouth, and kept going. “The other option is this.” The belt vanished, and she carefully took off the jacket and turned around. She talked with her back to Ariadne, one finger pointing to the area near her shoulderblade. “Shoulder holster, viewed from the back. Only works with a jacket, as you might guess from the position, and the awkward thing about it is, you’d have to carry it on the opposite side from your gun hand. Pity you’re not ambidextrous.”
“You’re not, either,” Ariadne said.
“Well-spotted. No, I’m not. Eames is, though.” Mal put the jacket back on, and turned back to face Ariadne. “You see it’s almost impossible to notice the holster at this point, although it must be noted that I am cheating because this jacket is now a little too large for me. For people like Arthur, who does like his suits, this might be a problem, but since I taught him seven different ways to subdue a person and five ways to break someone’s neck he might not need a gun.”
Ariadne giggled, a little nervously. “What am I getting myself into, running around with people who might as well be deadly weapons in their own right?”
But the laugh died away as she saw how Mal sobered at that, as Mal dropped into a chair without really breaking stride, the legs and seat forming as she fell backward. “That was the last conversation I’d had with my husband, you know, in the dreams, before...well, before.”
Ariadne looked away from the naked pain on Mal’s face. Dream or no dream, no one was supposed to look like that. The world was not supposed to make anyone look like that, and she’d been seeing that look far too often of late. “Do you want to talk about it? Here?”
“No. Not here.” Mal’s face firmed, a little, though the haunted shadow remained in her eyes. “Let’s wake up, and pack, and get going. I’ll tell you everything.”
Ariadne got up, then, and slammed a new magazine into her pistol, and brought it up in one smooth motion to point at Mal’s forehead. “May I wake you up?”
“By all means,” Mal said, softly, smilingly. And she closed her eyes and folded her hands in her lap.
Bang.
Ariadne stared for a long moment at the spot where Mal had been, and shut her eyes tight against the steel bands squeezing around her heart, so many conflicts and desires.
[end part two]
[to be continued]
Note:
[1] - "God reunites those who love each other" - the last line of the Edith Piaf song "Hymne à l'amour".
On to Part Three
author: ilovetakahana
pairings: Main pairing is Ariadne/Mal. Secondary pairing is Arthur/Eames. Mention of
previous Mal/Cobb.
warnings: And now here is Part Two of my Survivor!Mal AU. If you've missed Part One, it's HERE.
The setup: Dominick Cobb killed himself, leaving his widow Mallorie to pick up the pieces of her life. Luckily, Stuart Eames and Arthur Hardy are her best friends and her own private Stadtler and Waldorf, and luckily, she's about to meet Ariadne Mann. AU hijinks and lots of guns galore, lots of slash, and of course femslash!
Thanks once again to chn_breathmint for help with the guns and the action sequences, to photoclerk for being such a wonderful beta, and to the Twitter and LJ gangs for the comments and the never-ending encouragement and pompoms.
This one covers pretty much all the genre bases: drama, comedy, action. Healthy doses of snark and humor ahead, and characters changed to fit the new concept.
Watch out for all the cameos and mentions!
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.
summary: The Other Half, Part Two - Ariadne shows what she's made of and Mal lets the mask crack to reveal what lies beneath.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/.
“um. mal?”
“Yes, Ariadne?” And then Mal wrenched the steering wheel over to the right and Ariadne shrieked as she was thrown straight into her window, audible and loud thump in the cabin and she hung on for her life.
“Sorry, sorry,” she heard Mal say. In Ariadne’s opinion Mal did not sound repentant at all. She sounded, if anything, determined. Concentrating on something. Busy, preoccupied.
But then again, if it were Ariadne at the wheel and the mirrors showed a couple of ominously black - of course they had to be black, there was no point in being surprised - cars chasing them, all three cars running hellbent for leather as Paris began to fall away and fade into its suburbs, she might also be a little distracted.
“Hang on to something,” Mal called, and swung hard into a smaller lane.
“In all honesty, it’s a little too late for that,” Ariadne said, but only to herself, and only inside her head. Her teeth were clenched together and she felt every rut and crater in the road through them as they careened onward.
Those thumping sounds in the back were not helping her calm her nerves.
There was a dead body in the van with them, after all.
“Ah, finally,” she heard the other woman suddenly say - and with an almighty screech of protesting brakes Mal performed a U-turn, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand out her window. The hand that was holding her pistol.
Ariadne counted the shots - there were at least five - and heard the other woman swearing in extremely guttural French as she bounded out of the van, approached the other two cars. In fact, she only guessed that the language had been French; Mal had been nearly unintelligible with rage.
Both cars, Ariadne saw when she peeked out her window, had been totalled, crashing smack into each other when Mal had taken out the drivers and passengers.
All that in just half a dozen shots? Damn!
Ariadne half-fell out of the van, just in time to see Mal yank one more man out of one of the cars. The other woman’s face was fixed in a snarl, teeth bared as she, presumably, hissed questions and got answers.
When Mal put the muzzle of the pistol right between the other man’s eyes and fired, Ariadne whirled away, and threw up next to the van.
“All done,” Mal said as she came back, and Ariadne watched her tear off one blood-stained sleeve, the stains long since dried to a rusty brown, and offer it to her.
She thought she might hate Mal, because that had been an execution back there. It was impossible to mince words.
But it was an execution that meant Ariadne herself was still alive.
And that tangled her up.
There were so many thoughts flashing through her head.
Was Mal to be thanked? To be condemned? What did it all mean? Why was she in danger? Why were there people who wanted her dead or captured or worse?
And when she looked into the other woman’s eyes there was fear, there was pain. Mal looked wrecked and haunted and fighting for her very sanity. As if, instead of seeing the van and the destroyed cars and the various bad-guy corpses and Ariadne herself, she were seeing something familiar and much too painful.
Ariadne’s head was throbbing as she took the sleeve from Mal’s hand and turned away.
“No need to get back in the van - just get your things. We’ve arrived,” was all Mal said, though, and Ariadne was left watching as Mal disappeared into the back of the van, emerging a moment later with the now-battered, now-livid corpse of the former driver.
///
“Where are we?”
“Créteil,” was Mal’s very brief answer.
Sitting at the kitchen table and surrounded by a silver case and various battered bags, Ariadne watched her stand at the sink and scrub her bloody, ash-covered hands, watched her wring her dirty shirt out.
Mal was out of her shirt and her undershirt, was standing at the sink half-naked, in her jeans. Red bra a startling contrast against her pale skin, eyes blank and looking down at some unfathomable middle distance. Past the water. Past the soap suds. Past the floor at her feet.
They were frozen and silent for a long few moments, and then Mal visibly shook herself back to reality, hands shaking and slopping water before she blinked and there she was again, just the same woman who had offered Ariadne plums and her services as a bodyguard with the same soft steel voice, the same enormous sad eyes.
As if she hadn’t been someone else right now. Someone who was carrying an immensity of grief around on her shoulders. Someone who had been contemplating loss and death and far worse.
Ariadne could only catch her breath when Mal deliberately spread the shirt out on the kitchen counter to dry, and then looked over her shoulder, half-smirk not quite enough to cover for her haunted eyes. “This is my, well, I guess you’ll want to call it my little country house? Except we’ve not really left Paris, we’ve just moved into the suburbs. It used to belong to my grandmother. When she died, I inherited it from her.”
Ariadne nodded, not trusting herself to speak for the lump in her throat.
Mal went on, seemingly light-heartedly. “There are three bedrooms. For now we’ll stay together in the middle one, just in case we get any visitors of the Cobol persuasion. I don’t think we can stay here for long, though. We may have to get out of France completely. I’ll make plans for that - we’ll have to talk to Arthur and Eames at some point.”
Ariadne put her head in her hands. “Mal?”
“Yes?”
“Am I going to have to be on the run forever? Are Nash and Fischer and I as good as prisoners?”
When Mal sighed, gently, Ariadne looked up, dashed away a stray tear from her eye.
“I have no answer to that question.”
“I’m asking because you’re acting like you’re used to it.”
“Because I am used to it,” and she watched as Mal sat down across from her, finally. “You are hardly the first person...I’ve gone on the run with my father, Ariadne. With Arthur, when he was just starting out, and when I was teaching him. I once went on the run for an entire year with my - my husband. This, this has been my life for a few years now.
“It’s bothering you, or you wouldn’t have asked. This is also not the first time I’ve had to answer that question. Oh, it was worded differently every time it was asked. But it’s always the same question no matter who asks. And truth be told, it’s always the same answer anyway: it’s done when the job is done. Not before and not after. It ends with the job.”
“Shit,” was all Ariadne could say, and she did so feelingly.
///
They spent the first day in Créteil in complete silence.
Eventually coaxed away from the kitchen by Mal, Ariadne spent the rest of the day alone in the middle bedroom. They had found bedding and some flat pillows stored away in a hall closet, and she and Mal had attacked the dust bunnies vigorously - but that had been about all she could do before the idea of being on the run took over, again, and she withdrew into silence.
Mal had guided her back into the bedroom and given her a couple of bottles of water, pointed out where the toilet was, and left her alone.
Ariadne had not even been able to pick up a pencil, to lose herself in the reassuring whisper of graphite against paper. To create something beautiful or useful or both.
It wasn’t a lack of energy. It wasn’t the loss of the adrenaline rush. It wasn’t fear - at least, she wasn’t afraid of Cobol. There were people looking out for her, and Mal had mentioned others who were working to defend her, and Nash, and Fischer.
It was everything else that had finally caught up to her. There were some very scary realizations to be had in all of this: that Ariadne was talented. That her talents were very specific, very unique, and potentially either very helpful or very destructive. That there were people who were willing to teach her, to give her talents room and the exact space in which they could grow, and that there were people who saw her as nothing more than a resource that could be exploited.
No matter if all she wanted was to design beautiful things. No matter if she was determined to enjoy herself and equally determined to never hurt anyone while she was enjoying herself.
It wasn’t the world that she had been expecting.
And no amount of dreams, no amount of building beauty or sewing art would ever make it right again.
///
When the door creaked open Ariadne heard herself gasp, watched herself as though on a TV screen as she scrabbled for the edge of the bed and fell over it, preparing to hide under the frame again.
But the feet that walked into the room were shapely and small, the nails painted a chipped gray, visible even in the faint light.
“Ariadne,” she heard Mal say, and slowly, sheepishly, she rolled out and up and back to her feet.
But Mal wasn’t smiling mockingly at her.
The look in her eyes could only be gentle. Understanding.
“I’m sorry,” she heard Mal say quietly. “I’m - that really wasn’t the best thing to do. I should have knocked and I should have identified myself before coming in. I won’t forget next time, Ariadne.”
“O-okay,” Ariadne said. And then: “I wish I knew why I was so afraid. It’s not like I didn’t watch you take out the bad guys.”
“Fear,” Mal said, as though she knew what Ariadne had been thinking earlier. She was quiet and sagelike as she moved around the room, pushed the armchair in the corner closer to the lamp atop one of the bedside tables. “Cobol specializes in fear. Both here and in the dreamshare. There’s a reason why Eames and Arthur and I are actively trying to fuck them over, why Papa is fighting them with all of his considerable strength. We’re only lucky that people like Saito and his Proclus Global are on our side, at least for now. Cobol are merde, plain and simple. Their methods are worse than useless and their architects and extractors don’t deserve their names.”
“I’m sensing some strong feelings there,” Ariadne said.
She watched as Mal walked over and joined her on the bed. “Pillow, please,” and Ariadne handed her one from the pile behind and beneath her, and Mal assumed an intricate fold of leg, and she pulled the pillow close to her chest and looked out the curtained window, at the darkening sky. “Strong feelings. Yes. As good a place to start as any.
“I’m - I’m beginning to think that it was Cobol that killed my husband, Ariadne.”
Ariadne felt her eyes grow wide at that. “Um,” was all she could say, however, as she watched Mal fall back into the same blank stare that she had had at the sink, with the sodden shirt in her hands, and suddenly Ariadne remembered that the shirt had been just a hair too large for the other woman, had definitely been cut and styled for a man. A woman’s shirt had prettier tails or longer ones for tying in the front or in the back; a woman’s shirt had the buttons on the left-hand side; and then - “Oh my god. That shirt was your husband’s.”
“Penny for the smart lady,” Mal whispered.
“If you don’t want to talk about it now we can drop the subject,” Ariadne hurriedly said.
“Thank you, Ariadne. I am going to have to talk about it some time, and it might be with you - but thank you for understanding that I can’t do so now.”
Ariadne nodded frantically, even as she finally felt her brain run down from everything that had happened. “I don’t even care if you never talk about it with me. But, but, I hate seeing people sad, and then there’s you, and - ” And at that point she finally clapped her hands over her mouth.
Mal said nothing, and, still sitting at the foot of the bed, simply turned her back on Ariadne.
The last thing Ariadne heard before she went to sleep was Mal, whispering, and she was too tired to decipher the French, though it sounded eerily familiar.
“Dieu reunit ceux qui s’aiment.” [1]
///
On the sixth day, Ariadne looked up with a start from her seat at the kitchen table and realized that they had actually evolved a sort of routine together.
Mal slept for a few hours in the mornings, sometimes at the foot of Ariadne’s bed, sometimes on the floor next to the bed, and sometimes in a chair that had taken both of them to push into the middle bedroom.
No matter how Mal slept she always ended up in a sort of curled-up fetal variation, and she always slept on her left side, facing away from Ariadne.
Her right hand was, even in her sleep, closed lightly around one of the two guns in the house.
The first thing Ariadne did when she woke up was transfer her blankets to Mal. Sometimes this meant simply flipping the comforter over onto her, if she was sleeping at the foot of the bed; sometimes this meant pushing the blankets over the edge of the bed to fall onto her, if she was sleeping on the floor; and dragging the blankets toward the chair, if she was sleeping there.
Wash face, brush teeth - she was lucky she carried toiletries around with her, though she was running low on toothpaste - and then Ariadne would set up shop on the kitchen table. Cup of pencils and crayons on the left side, a stray pen or two pushed to far corners of the table, stack of sketchbooks sitting on the floor. The backpack she’d been carrying that night at the Sorbonne, slowly getting even more battered as she dragged it around after her from room to room of the house.
After the shock had worn off she was surprised that the ideas that she and Professor Miles had been testing on that last day in Paris had returned with a vengeance, and she could spend long hours sketching out, lightly at first and then darker and darker as she firmed up the ideas, levels built on impossible shapes. She did her best to remember her math and geometry classes, tried to remember everything she’d been taught on topology, cut out several Mobius strips. One morning found her deep in thought, straightedge out as she tried to construct a set of Penrose stairs.
At some point Mal would wake up and go out for a run; she often brought food back. Bread, cheese, fruits, milk. Sometimes there was a chocolate bar, and Ariadne always left Mal half.
Mal never ate until she was done with her morning exercises.
Ariadne watched, sometimes, heart in her mouth as Mal started out slowly, languidly, and then sped up until she was a whirling mess of limbs, and dancing away finally, slowing down to the original pace.
In the afternoons, Ariadne often spent a few minutes hooked up to the PASIV, with Mal watching over her and timing her off for the kick.
In the dreams she began to build the levels that Professor Miles had asked for, and more.
Mal joined her once, and when they woke up together in Miles’s classroom at the Sorbonne, Ariadne grinned, and took her hand, and said, “Come on.”
In here, Ariadne only had to look around her, and the landscape fell to pieces and rebuilt itself according to her wishes.
Now they were standing in a white, blank space, distant hum and roar of ocean surf. She watched as Mal looked down, wiggled her bare toes - and Ariadne called up the memory of a beach she’d read about in some of her books, put it together with what she knew of tropical shores, and then they were standing at the very edge between the water and the sand. Gray soft grains washed endlessly by the waves. Two visible moons hanging in the sky.
“Very good,” Mal laughed after a moment. “Never build from memories. Always distort. It’s going to be nearly impossible to accept a place like this as reality, not with two moons, and not when the moons are so large.”
Ariadne smiled at the praise, and sat down on the sand to start drawing with her fingers. The sand collapsed in ruler-straight lines at her touch, a Penrose triangle melting into Penrose stairs into the familiar double-helical shape of DNA.
And with that, she looked up and out into the distance and she could see it in her mind, forming far away, a second landscape with her and Mal, twining around this one - the waves, the moons, the random writing she’d already laid down in the sand.
It took all of her concentration - but it only took a few moments.
Behind her, she heard Mal make an odd strangled noise, and say, “Merde!”
And she had to smile. That had been the exact reaction she had been looking for.
“Mal,” she said, “do something. Maybe wave at the other us. Or do one of your
exercise forms. Tell me if the projections of us react.”
A sharp intake of breath was all the answer she needed to hear.
“Mal?”
“Actually, they’re starting to come toward us,” Mal said. “Should we be worried?”
“No, because, wait,” and Ariadne thought back to how DNA worked, how it uncoiled to duplicate itself and then resumed its helical form, and she opened her eyes now and she laughed as the landscapes split apart and now the Mal and Ariadne on the second strand were torn away, to stand on a distant, separate, third strand. “There.”
“Ariadne,” she heard Mal say.
There was a note in that voice that she had never heard before, and she turned to look at the other woman as she brushed the sand away from her hands. “Yes?”
“This is - this is amazing. How did you do - all that?”
“Can’t tell you,” Ariadne said, jokingly. “Or I’d have to kill you.”
And then Mal laughed - truly laughed, a joyous note over the endless waves, and Ariadne started running on the sand, fast enough to launch herself into a series of somersaults and cartwheels on the shore.
///
That night, Ariadne watched with her heart in her throat as Mal carefully keyed a complex number sequence into her mobile phone, and then pressed the button for loudspeaker.
One ring, two, three, and then - “Mal?”
“Hello, Arthur,” Mal said. “Are you somewhere safe?”
“Hello, Mal,” a new voice said. “Eames here. We’re still safe as houses here in Barcelona, though that might change in the next few hours.”
Ariadne watched as Mal’s eyebrows swung sharply upwards. “It looks like Ariadne and I are the cavalry calling just in the nick of time, then. What’s going on out there, boys?”
“Nash has been attacked - again,” was the clipped response from Arthur. “But not to worry, he’s safe, he’s alive. Do you know Yusuf? He’s been with Nash all this time, protecting him from our old friends. They’re on the run right now, and we’ve asked them to come here, if they can, but we’re not taking any chances. We’ll probably have to meet them partway.”
Ariadne felt the idea come to her complete, unbidden, and she quickly scribbled out a note to Mal: We can help. We can counter Cobol. You just have to get me into the same room with Nash and you and the PASIV and the bad guys.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Mal said, and turned back to the phone. “Listen carefully, both of you. Ariadne and I can help you; we can send those Cobol dogs running home destroyed.”
“I’m listening,” Arthur said.
“We have to meet somewhere. We’re going to make them think that they’re going to snatch Nash and Ariadne and me - but what’s really going to happen is that we were just the bait, because you two, and Yusuf, are going to be doing the snatching. Then we’ll knock them all out and hook them up to the PASIV, perform a counter-extraction and do some serious damage to them. Our architects will lead the way.”
“Tricky,” Eames observed. “But, yes, very evil and very doable. Just tricky. Arthur, we’re going to have to pull in a few favors, get some transportation - and we’re going to be needing a few guns. Any preferences, Mal?”
Ariadne raised her eyebrows when Mal laughed, but she had to admit, it was a strange and funny question under the circumstances.
“If Arthur still has my shotgun, and if it’s in good working condition....”
“I only dinged it just the once, Mal, and that was because I’d never handled a shotgun before,” and Arthur actually chuckled, grimly amused.
“Not an excuse, not when you’re Arthur. First and best of my students.”
“That means nothing. Technically speaking, I was, and still am, your only student.”
“Not relevant. No one is better than you.”
“Except for you, Mal,” Eames interjected.
“Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr. Eames,” Mal said. After a moment her face and her voice turned serious once again. “Boys. Can we do this?”
“Yes,” Eames said, firmly, almost overshadowing Arthur’s comment of “Already working on it.”
“Merci, you two. See you soon. And keep safe.”
“You too, Mal. Ariadne,” Arthur said, and then there was just the beep of a disconnected line.
They sat there on their sides of the bed for a long time, looking at each other and at the moonlit night outside the windows.
And then, Mal heaved a deep sigh and said, “Are you ready? Because. Remember what I said. If you commit to this now, if you say you’re going to be part of the heart of this job, then you should remember.”
“It’s done when the job is done,” Ariadne said. And nodded, firmly. “I’m in. I’m putting this all together, aren’t I? The job’s going to hinge on how well I can do that trick I have in dreams. I’m in. Until it ends.”
///
Interlude
“It’s easier if we take a car,” Arthur said, looking down at the arsenal that he was putting together, on the floor of his Barcelona apartment.
“We’d be much more traceable, though. I say this is a job for a motorbike.” Eames walked in, then, long corkscrew of orange peel falling from his hands and his pocketknife. He quickly divided the fruit into segments and offered Arthur one.
Arthur chewed, spat out a seed, and cocked his head at the array of pistols, submachine guns, and shotgun on the drop cloth. “I suppose whoever’s not driving can carry all this shit on his back, provided I can wrap the whole bundle closely and safely. We’ll pack the magazines and the MP5Ks in the saddlebags. I am not going to risk any stupid accidental discharges just because we hit a fucking speed bump.”
“Splendid,” Eames said. “Now all we have to do is find something decent. Oh don’t look at me like that, I promise it’s going to look like a right proper speedster. I can find us something that’ll do the job.”
Arthur rolled his eyes but leaned up to kiss Eames anyway. “If all else fails I can wear a helmet with a very dark visor. And maybe white racing leathers. But I’d have to be driving.”
Eames laughed. “That’s the spirit, stig.”
Eames watched Arthur pack the guns away, carefully, meticulously, and thought of the early days, when he and Arthur were starting out together, and how he was so immersed in the idea of being the perfect point man. Sure, he’d often had a more methodical approach, as opposed to Mal’s more intuitively scattershot one - but they had been lucky, and the two ways of attacking the same idea had only benefited their respective teams.
Lucky them, of course.
After a moment, he thought back to the day’s telephone conversation with Mal, and he tapped Arthur on the shoulder and said, “So, about that little Architect.”
“Ariadne?”
“Yes. Opinions?”
“I really hope she knows what she’s doing, or else there is no plan, and we’re all going to have to drop off the face of the earth for a good long while if we don’t want to be, oh, dead.”
“You do know Mal’s good at that. Picking out competent folk, I mean. You, and Dominick, and now this Ariadne.”
“I suppose we’ll know soon enough why Cobol wants its dirty little paws on her.”
///
The morning after the phone call, Mal sat Ariadne down at the kitchen table and showed her how to use a gun.
“This, Ariadne, would be a Beretta Px4 Storm. This is my personal sidearm. I am going to teach you how to use it.”
Ariadne tilted her head curiously, but made no move to touch the gun. “Is it loaded?”
“No, it’s not. And that’s a good question, as it introduces the rules of gun safety. Have you ever been around guns before?”
“Not me,” Ariadne said. “My father. He had a couple of hunting pieces stashed away at my grandfather’s house; he was a very good shot.”
Mal nodded. “All right, then. Gun safety. Rule Number One: All guns are always loaded.”
Ariadne watched her hands move over the gun, sure and unhurried. “Watch carefully; I’m unloading the gun. Here is the magazine, those are the rounds in the magazine. Here,” and Mal held up a single cartridge, “is the round that was chambered before I started this lesson with you. This is a 9x19 mm Parabellum round, or 9 mm Para for short. As you can see from the shape, I’m partial to hollow point rounds.”
Ariadne took the round from her and examined it carefully. “This is the type that expands or something?”
“Correct. The shape of the tip allows it to expand on impact; this decreases the penetration. More importantly, it means that there is far more tissue disruption.”
Ariadne nodded, and carefully set the bullet back down on the table.
“Now. Gun safety, Rule Number Two: Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. In layman’s terms: Do not point this gun at something unless you intend to kill that something.
“Rule Number Three: Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target. This is what you’ll hear other people refer to as trigger discipline.
“And, Rule Number Four: Be sure of your target and what is beyond it. Essentially, when you shoot, make sure that the person or object you’re shooting at will actually stop the bullet, and prevent it from traveling onward and causing unwanted collateral damage.”
“Hence the hollow points,” Ariadne said, suddenly understanding.
“Hence the hollow points. High marks for a first lesson.”
Ariadne watched, deeply interested, as Mal put the gun back together, then racked the slide - and safetied the gun. “Do I get an actual firing lesson at any point?”
Mal looked at her, right in the eyes, and then grinned.
Ariadne raised her eyebrows.
“Actual? Not yet. But I’m thinking it might be easier on you if we try to do this in dreamspace, first, where we can actually control every possible condition. I’ll put a shooting range together for you, and we’ll train there, before I actually turn this gun over to you.”
That made Ariadne smile back. “I can do that.”
///
“And it turns out you’re a natural shot in the dreams.”
Ariadne smiled, and lined up her Mare’s Leg for another blast, which tore the center cleanly out of her paper target. “My father would have been amused.”
Mal waved her hand and the target repaired itself. “He would at that. Now. Change to, hmm, let’s have you decide on your sidearm. I’d suggest something compact, to give you the element of surprise. How about this,” and she thought for a moment and a gun appeared on the table next to her.
Ariadne put the Mare’s Leg down, willed it to disappear, and picked up the pistol.
“This is pretty neat.”
“Smith & Wesson’s M&P, the compact version,” Mal said, nodding in approval as Ariadne handled it carefully. “Chambered for 9 mm, of course, unless you want something else.”
“Nope.” Ariadne thought up a magazine full of jacketed hollow points, loaded the gun, and spun to face the target once again, put all her bullets into the center ring.
“Excellent! You’re really a natural at this, and the gun looks like it’s been built for you.”
“Can I keep it?”
“In the dreams, of course. In real life - we’ll practice, and then we’ll talk about it. Fair?”
“Fair.” But before Ariadne could unload the pistol, Mal held out a hand; she stopped, and put the gun down on the table and raised her empty hands.
“Relax, Ariadne. I’m just thinking about how you can carry this gun concealed. You’re not one to use purses and such, not even in real life.”
“I had a backpack, didn’t I?”
Mal grinned. “Right. So you’re going to have to carry this on your person, and you have a few options, depending on how we’re dressed in the dreams.” Suddenly her shirt and jeans shredded away and she was standing there in a tuxedo.
Oh, all right, Ariadne’s mind supplied once it had finished gibbering, not really a tuxedo. No waistcoat, no cummerbund, no bow tie. Lace cuffs poking out of the jacket, and stiletto heels, for god’s sake.
Imperfect tuxedo or not, Mal made it look good.
When Mal laughed at her, Ariadne couldn’t find it in her heart to be offended - but she did snap back to reality when Mal said, “Now, pay attention.”
“I’m here,” she said. Not all of me yet, but here, she thought.
“You’d better be; there will be a quiz at the end. Now. Holsters for concealed carry. Yes, I realize that this is dreamspace, and you can manifest a compact pistol as easily as you can, say, warp the landscape into some godsforsaken shape, but we are also here to instill some good habits in you, and part of that is knowing how to correctly carry a concealed firearm on your person.”
Ariadne watched as Mal waved her hand, and a thick, sturdy leather belt appeared at her waist, together with the type of holster that she’d seen on policemen back at home. “I’m guessing that’s a standard holster, but it’s not concealed.”
“Correct. This is a belt holster, and it’s for people who can carry their guns openly. For people like us, and especially for me, something like this,” and Mal shifted her stance, one hand raising the hems of her jacket a little, “would probably be a better choice.” Now the holster was riding the inside of her waistband, and when she dropped her suit jacket back down and stood casually, arms folded across her chest, it was as the holster, and the gun she’d made appear in it, didn’t exist.
“Wow,” Ariadne breathed.
Mal smiled, a secret little quirk of her mouth, and kept going. “The other option is this.” The belt vanished, and she carefully took off the jacket and turned around. She talked with her back to Ariadne, one finger pointing to the area near her shoulderblade. “Shoulder holster, viewed from the back. Only works with a jacket, as you might guess from the position, and the awkward thing about it is, you’d have to carry it on the opposite side from your gun hand. Pity you’re not ambidextrous.”
“You’re not, either,” Ariadne said.
“Well-spotted. No, I’m not. Eames is, though.” Mal put the jacket back on, and turned back to face Ariadne. “You see it’s almost impossible to notice the holster at this point, although it must be noted that I am cheating because this jacket is now a little too large for me. For people like Arthur, who does like his suits, this might be a problem, but since I taught him seven different ways to subdue a person and five ways to break someone’s neck he might not need a gun.”
Ariadne giggled, a little nervously. “What am I getting myself into, running around with people who might as well be deadly weapons in their own right?”
But the laugh died away as she saw how Mal sobered at that, as Mal dropped into a chair without really breaking stride, the legs and seat forming as she fell backward. “That was the last conversation I’d had with my husband, you know, in the dreams, before...well, before.”
Ariadne looked away from the naked pain on Mal’s face. Dream or no dream, no one was supposed to look like that. The world was not supposed to make anyone look like that, and she’d been seeing that look far too often of late. “Do you want to talk about it? Here?”
“No. Not here.” Mal’s face firmed, a little, though the haunted shadow remained in her eyes. “Let’s wake up, and pack, and get going. I’ll tell you everything.”
Ariadne got up, then, and slammed a new magazine into her pistol, and brought it up in one smooth motion to point at Mal’s forehead. “May I wake you up?”
“By all means,” Mal said, softly, smilingly. And she closed her eyes and folded her hands in her lap.
Bang.
Ariadne stared for a long moment at the spot where Mal had been, and shut her eyes tight against the steel bands squeezing around her heart, so many conflicts and desires.
[end part two]
[to be continued]
Note:
[1] - "God reunites those who love each other" - the last line of the Edith Piaf song "Hymne à l'amour".
On to Part Three