Fic: dream a dream (and what you see will be) - mizzy2k - PART 3
dream a dream (and what you see will be)
mizzy2k
"Arthur was supposed to be temporary, but the dependency..." Cobb shrugs. "It's had side effects."
"To the tune of me being him almost permanently," Arthur says, shuddering a little and running a hand through his hair again, pulling his fingers back and looking at them dispiritedly. "Dom, my left brain identity is a stick-in-the-mud."
"The personality splintered down the middle of the brain," Yusuf says, like he's thinking out loud, "yes, yes I see where that might have happened."
Ariadne thinks about it. Thinking about something inconsequential is easier than thinking about the hate curling in her stomach. "So should we call you Bastian while you're here?"
Arthur actually winces. "Mal thought it would be better. She thought it would make adjusting to the forge easier if I ever had to let it go, like I have to now. But..." He looks at the computer screen blankly, and minimises the cover rather than closing it. "It's easier in Fantasia to differentiate. Mal started calling me Arthur in there, the closer I got to leaving. So Bastian is my Fantasia name, and Seb's my name. And Arthur is. well. Him."
"Using a name like a totem," Eames says. "She was a hell of a woman." He doesn't look at Cobb, but it's close enough to a 'sorry I nearly shot you', so Cobb nods stoically, taking the win.
"If Amelia's anywhere near as bad as me, we might have to use AURYN," Arthur says, twisting to look up at Cobb, a frown on his face.
"Or convince her she already has," Cobb says. "And she's forgotten some of the important things, the good things she's left behind."
"It's risky, and depends on how badly she's lost," Arthur says. "But if we use Level 1 to find her, Level 2 as Fantasia... and no sedative. We can't risk losing her in limbo. If she took Fantasia down to limbo we'd never find her."
"Agreed. AURYN will keep her safe, and in a lethal situation if we prioritise Ariadne, to keep the landscape, and Eames, who can forge into new characters as and when, then I'll take point in any dangerous situations," Cobb says.
"We should keep Falcor the luckdragon close," Ariadne suggests, excitedly. "Just in case."
"Oh my god, you're a Neverending Story geek too," Arthur says, with an exaggerated groan.
"I just can't believe we're lounging around seriously discussing Fantasia," Eames says. "I might as well just superglue my totem to the palm of my hand the number of times I keep checking it." He shakes his head a little. "So we do this job, you step through a door and we get Arthur back?"
He sounds a little unsure at the end, and all the mirth and incredulity Ariadne's been feeling settle in the base of her stomach. Or maybe it's the hamburger playing havoc again. Either way, Ariadne can feel her fingernails digging into her palms, because the answer suddenly means everything.
Arthur - or should that be Sebastian - Ariadne's having trouble knowing what to call him now.
Seb's face falls, and he looks so much like Arthur all of a sudden - downturned frown, anger in the eyes - that the answer suddenly becomes urgent on top of its importance.
Cobb shuffles and looks at Seb's face, but not into his eyes. "You'll have to become him again, Seb. The somnacin dependency-"
"Fucking hell, Dom - you've got the best chemist in the world. It's been fifteen years. Don't try and tell me there's no cure." Seb's chin juts mulishly. Arthur wouldn't be seen dead looking so stupid - it makes his face look almost ugly. Ariadne hadn't thought it possible. "If I have it my way, Arthur's gone. I won't let that personality smother me again. I won't."
Seb storms off over to the laptop, and although he pushes up the screen to continue watching his cartoon; Ariadne can tell he's not really watching it, because when it comes to an end he just lets the viewing window go blank and he doesn't click on anything else.
"It's funny he's said that," Eames says, almost conversationally.
"Hm?" Cobb says, glancing at Eames and then tensing, like he'd forgotten Eames had had a gun in his face ten minutes ago. Ariadne frowns and makes a mental note to discuss somnacin's effect on memory because seriously, if this is Cobb's brain unaffected by any external thing, then Cobb's nowhere near as decent as Ariadne had been assuming.
"Because if Arthur doesn't come back, you've just made the best enemy in the world." Eames pats Cobb on his shoulder, and storms off, slamming the warehouse door so loudly that the building shakes with it.
Ariadne doesn't know what to think at all.
She wraps her arms around herself and when she looks back, Cobb and Yusuf are steadfastly not talking about it, even though Yusuf keeps glancing at Cobb like there's something he wants to say. She wonders what Eames is thinking, because he's always thinking something. She can't wrap her head around the idea of what's happened to Arthur on her own, or Seb, or the fact that Seb's just dropped the concept of Arthur never coming back into all of their heads.
I don't want to die is what Arthur had said before walking through the door, and Ariadne had been so relieved to see him alive, but it wasn't physical death he meant at all. It was the death of his personality, and wasn't that just as much dying as being shot?
She needs air. She needs Eames. The universe is nice for once when she stumbles out of the warehouse and finds Eames leaning against the outer wall, smoking.
Ariadne thinks about going back inside for her coat. It's chilly out here. But stepping through that door had been bad enough once - she'd had the fleeting thought that maybe Arthur was still somehow in that threshold and she could catch him and stuff him back in his body. Her flights of fancy weren't diminishing with PASIV use. Maybe being able to have pure creation is like a drug that just keeps unlocking more and more, with no limits.
Eames doesn't smoke much, only when he's stressed, and Ariadne doesn't blame him. She almost wants to bum a cigarette from him, but it's a habit she doesn't want to pick up. The somnacin is one addictive habit too far.
She's angry, and confused, but she can feel the bristling energy just rolling off Eames. Going into the conversation angry will only feed into his anger, and they'll bounce off each other exponentially.
To keep the conversation vaguely rational, Ariadne's going to need to go in gently.
"I'm right in thinking this is odd and not a normal day at the dreamsharing office, right?"
It's usually a good angle, abusing her rookie status as an excuse to probe. It's a flimsy replacement for the real question ("How are you?"), couched in terms that are less likely to bring up Eames' automatic defences, but it's the best one Ariadne's got. She hasn't got long left to use the newbie angle, so she's glad she can get some use out of it still.
"It's like high school all over again, love." Eames exhales a cloud of smoke up into the air, clouding his face a little. When the smoke clears, his eyes are hooded, and his face is blank. It's like he's taking what he has left of Arthur and holding it in his own face. Forging a little of the Arthur they know to keep him safe.
"High school was irritating and confusing," Ariadne says. "It rarely blurred the philosophical line of life and death for me."
Eames grins; Ariadne's eyes briefly trace the uneven mountain range of his lower teeth. There's glee in his grin, but no warmth. Death mask, she thinks, involuntarily. He doesn't look down at her, but Ariadne's not expecting him to. She doesn't know where she would look if he did. "The American education system has its flaws compared to its superior British cousin."
"I forgot Britain was still in the Dark Ages and supported gladiatorial fights to the death," Ariadne says, mirroring his pose against the wall and looking out into the same skyline. "I'll make sure not to repeat my mistake."
Eames makes a small sound of amusement. Normally he'd grace her deadpan style of humor with a guffaw. His genuine amusement would be a delight to hear, but this isn't that sound. It's a million miles away from that sound and Ariadne knows exactly how it feels to only be able to manage a quarter of the positive emotion you want to feel.
She doesn't want to feel anything positive. Arthur isn't real. Ariadne's not entirely sure she'll ever feel anything positive again.
"My dad," Eames says, after an unexpectedly short pause. "When I was in comprehensive school - that's British for high school, darling."
"I'm American," Ariadne says, mock-haughtily. "Not a Philistine."
"You don't have the right coloring," Eames informs her. He's still not looking at her. This is probably one of his stories that's less fabrication than usual. Ariadne's getting better at noticing. Eames is a born storyteller, but that often means he embellishes the details. When he's telling a really rampant lie, he's all body and eye contact. He takes you by the elbows and looks deeply into your eyes and is so very, very earnest. But the times when he's telling stories where maybe, even if just for a minute, Eames actually got hurt - those are the times he can't make eye contact at all. Even like now, when he's joking with her.
"So what happened when you were a sophomore at your comprehensive school?" Ariadne asks, tongue firmly in cheek.
Eames does flash her a look at that. She catches a glimpse of raised eyebrows, a semi-quirk of a genuine smile, and she looks away so as to not make him be the one to move first.
"When I was a Sixth Former," Eames says, "my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's."
Ariadne tries to swallow her rapid exhale of breath, because she knows Eames doesn't appreciate anyone making a deal of anything that hurts him. He spares her a brief, thankful glance. "I'm-" she starts.
"If the next work in your sentence is sorry, I'm not beyond getting Cobb to swap you for a younger, prettier model. You're 24 now, Ariadne, don't you hear the biological clock ticking?"
Ariadne kicks him in the shins on the principal of it. She doesn't hold back. Eames winces and screws up his eyebrows, before shaking his head a little and extinguishing his cigarette against the wall. He toys with the butt for a while, smearing ash across his fingers.
"My childhood was better than being in a dreamden," Eames says, "Wasn't yours?"
"Absolutely," Ariadne says, reverently. "That's one of the things I can't wrap my head around."
"Along with the crazy Fantasia layout."
"Obviously."
"I guess... this is just like coming home from school. And seeing this man with my father's face, with no idea what he's ever done." Eames shakes himself a little. "A man who knew my name and nothing else. And I think-"
"What?"
Eames does look down at her then. His expression is still blank, unreadable. Ariadne tilts her face up to look at him, because she has to. Because her attention is the only thing she can offer. It feels like if she stretches out her fingers to try and touch him, he might melt between her fingers. "You don't want to listen to an old man ramble."
Ariadne rolls her eyes, making a show and dance of it. "I listen to Cobb," she says, because Eames doesn't listen to straight protests. Eames responds to between-the-lines better than on-the-nose.
"Touché."
"I try."
"Well. It's that philosophical line of life and death, isn't it?" Eames' mouth presses into a line. Pure Arthur. "What are you supposed to prefer - the monster that loves you, or a stranger who doesn't hurt you but doesn't even know you to like you?"
"I don't think there's any supposing about it," Ariadne says, slowly, but she feels dizzy. She feels like she's on the verge of figuring something out, something which might hurt to figure out. The ground feels less solid beneath her feet. It's all fancy. The sky and the ground are static and it's Ariadne that's wavering inside her own mind. "You have to feel what you feel."
"Feelings," Eames says, with conviction. "Bollocks to that concept. Let's go get drunk on firewhiskey and catch us some luckdragons."
His whimsy is infectious and Ariadne smiles because she wants to, powering through the guilt with it the best she can.
"Are you coming in?"
The energy of smiling through Eames' faked bravado (and it's faked, because not even Eames is that whimsical; whimsy is only for grad students and Cobb when he's drunk and morose, in the world according to Eames) makes her miss how quickly Eames has moved from the wall and around her.
She wrinkles her nose a little. "I might stay out in the cold a while longer."
Eames nods, like he understands. He throws her a loose salute instead of saying anything more, and bows his head to duck through the door. Like he's scared of hitting his head against the frame, even though it's a clear foot above his head when he's standing in heels - it happens, because it's Eames; he has to practice his female walking because it's not every day he has to walk naturally in five inch high shoes, so it happens occasionally, and always to everyone's mirth. Eames is good natured when he's the butt of a joke.
Ariadne has to stay outside to swallow and swallow for a while, gulping down air and trying to stop herself from throwing up, because Eames' words are an uneasy accompaniment to her thoughts, and she is sure she's missing something.
What's better, Eames had basically asked, a monster who loves you or a stranger who can't hurt you because they don't remember how.
Her heart contracts and Ariadne can't help but clasp her own throat with her hands hard enough to hurt, deep enough for her to feel her heartbeat pulsing against the press of her fingertips. She wants to cry at the idea of it, because this, this is something she clearly should have seen. Something maybe she didn't want to see. Arthur and Eames have always bickered at each other, have done as long as she's known them, surely if they were involved there would be more than hurtful exchanges and smug contests to outdo each other?
The monster who loves you, Ariadne thinks, and it's not her heartache to feel, but she feels it regardless. She wasn't listening to their conversations in the past with an unbiased ear. She was listening as a girl who didn't want to grow up, who wanted this fairytale life of stealing ideas and imagining impossibilities into being to never change. Deciphering exchanges into a form that could mean this new life changing - of course it would never be a priority.
But now she has an inkling of what has been going on, their words mean something else. Each insult becomes a checkpoint, an endearment disguised in a cloud. I hate you - which anyone else would read between the lines of their words - means something else entirely.
Something which makes the concept of Arthur being gone forever even more unbearable.
The monster who loves you, Ariadne thinks, and her heart splits clean in two.
#
It takes four full and long days for Ariadne to get the concept of the maps in her head.
Every day is a day too long. She makes Cobb and Yusuf stay in the warehouse at all times she's there with Seb, because she's uncomfortable and because asking Eames to be her bodyguard is one hit too hard.
Yusuf thankfully takes on the job of looking after Seb out of 'office hours', taking him shopping for clothes more in his comfort zone after he deliberately wrecks Arthur's pristine jogging clothes, and putting him up in a hotel and catering to his every whim. It's overly zealous. Ariadne remembers the look of guilt on Yusuf's face when Seb talked about his dreamden experience, and tries not to think about what he might have done that would elicit this sort of diligent compensation.
She tries not to think about how appalled Arthur will be when he realizes what Seb's been making him wear, because it makes her want to smile and Ariadne thinks she needs to be angry. She always works best when she's angry and Arthur deserves her best.
Eames spends most of the four days out of the way, consistently drunk, and answering their texts with one word replies. Ariadne covers for him, mumbling about him researching Amelia's life. Cobb accepts it much too quickly for him to believe the excuse.
He can't stay away forever, and his breath is clear when he comes in on the fifth day.
Ariadne isn't surprised. Eames isn't the kind of person to give anyone up without a fight.
As they set the PASIV up for the trial run, Seb's eyes linger too much on the small vials of somnacin for Ariadne's calm. She quickly and quietly shuts Seb down when he tries to flirt with her.
It's not the first time. Over the last few days he hasn't exactly been subtle. Ariadne's been slowly, cautiously trying to get to know Seb. To her horror, she's found herself smiling a few times at his clumsy jokes, and on a few occasions nodding along with his ideas.
She could like Seb, if he wasn't stealing Arthur away from them. She misses Arthur fiercely, much more than she'd thought she ever would. By necessity, then, Seb is the person wrongly inhabiting Arthur's face and Arthur's body, and Seb is the one who has stolen Arthur away from them.
Cobb is an idiot, but Seb is the enemy.
She's trying very hard not to think about how really, isn't it sort of the other way around? And why does Arthur deserve to live more than Seb?
No, that's not how she's going to think. She shuts down Seb's flirting because apparently Seb is a hundred and eighty degrees different from Arthur and that means he's flirty and it also somehow means he's straight. Ariadne couldn't respond to it either way, because even if she likes the Seb personality, how would it morally work? It would be like using Arthur without his consent.
Besides, she could never do that to Eames, now she knows there's honor to defend on that count.
Seb takes Ariadne shooting him down with a lopsided grin that looks all wrong on Arthur's solemn face and, unfortunately, he's pretty loud about it. Ariadne pretends not to see how tense Eames' face is the whole time.
Cobb's one hundred percent oblivious to the whole exchange, of course. He nudges her when she's untangling the wires. "Amazing, isn't it? That Seb is totally different to Arthur in every way but his face?"
Ariadne watches the tension ratchet up in Eames' shoulders, and she narrows her eyes. "Amazing isn't the word I'd choose," she says, not bothering to keep her voice low.
Cobb frowns. "Maybe not a complete 180 - he seems to like you in both personalities. Some things cross."
"Some things definitely don't," Seb mutters, looking at Eames for the first time since Eames had come back in. Ariadne stares at him in surprise, and Seb looks at her. There's a cruel edge to his smile that no one else is looking to see. "Pretty but not my type, if you get my drift."
Cobb looks amused at that, like he thinks he's talking about Ariadne. "Somebody's been shot down," he says with a grin. "We should get this party started."
"Party," Eames mutters. "More like a bloody spectacle."
Cobb squints across at Eames. "I thought you'd be happier with this formation. Arthur doesn't even like you. Seb's on the opposite side of the spectrum and he has imagination. The chances are higher that Seb would actually like you."
Maybe it's Seb, smirking unpleasantly from the other side of the PASIV. Or maybe it's Cobb sounding so genuine about his cluelessness. Or maybe it's the way that Cobb is right - except not in the way he thinks he is.
Seb is one hundred and eighty degrees different from Arthur, and it's clear to Ariadne right in this moment - Seb hates Eames.
There should actually be comfort in that somewhere, Ariadne thinks, although she will never say it.
Eames is bristling like someone's threatened to bodily harm one of the team, and he straightens from where he's pulling up one of the lawn chairs and looks across at Cobb, coolly and with hate clearly on his face. "Sometimes, Cobb, you're a real son of a bitch."
"Uh," Cobb says, helpfully. He looks between his team like Ariadne looked at the PASIV the first time - like there was knowledge to be had, something new and amazing to learn, but it was an eternity beyond her grasp. "Seb, you remember now - let Bastian take control in the dream. We need Fantasia, not Resident Evil."
Seb rolls his eyes. "I know, I know. Let warm fuzzy boy take over or me, Arthur and Bastian all die of brain rot. I've read the manual, dude."
"We're just creating Fantasia in level one this time. In the job itself it'll be on level 2. So please, all of you remember to call him Bastian from the off. If we call him Seb-"
"Him," Seb sniffs, "Am I the cat's illegitimate bastard nephew? I have a name. And seeing as I don't get to hang around much, I'd like not to be a him. And if I'm letting Bastian run around, you'd better as hell give me some dreaming time as me."
"On the job you'll have level one to yourself. I already promised you that a thousand times," Cobb says.
"Excuse me for not believing your promises on face value-" Seb starts.
"Let's just do this rehearsal run, okay?" Ariadne says, quickly. She's always the one making the peace. She almost wonders how this team worked without her; Arthur told her the other week that while they did, their successful heist percentage had increased a little. Not enough to conclusively prove Ariadne's a lucky charm or considerable asset, but enough to intimate that this may be the case.
At the time, Ariadne had been almost offended at Arthur's earnest statistics.
Now she'd do almost anything to get them back.
Eames is scowling so hard, the scowl a particular brand of his own this time, that Ariadne thinks he'll be scowling in the dream.
She has to make it a quick assumption so her mind doesn't linger on it, because her mind has to be full of the twisting nature of Fantasia geography. Seb's been teaching her, and it's almost insane - except for the logic of it. It's like a choose your own adventure; limited permutations considering which route they decide to go. It's smart. If they let Amelia take the lead, she'll believe the dream so much better than if forced into a path.
Entering the real world has to be her free choice.
They appear in the middle of the Grassy Sea. Ariadne makes a noise of surprise that she's managed to get it as spot on in the dream as it is in her head, and the colors grow brighter as she twists around in the sea of long, waving grass. She can see the glinting spires of the Ivory Tower far off in the distance, and Horok far in the distance in another direction, light sparking off its thousand windows, and the forests, and Ariadne thinks that might even be the Wandering Mountain to the North, just for a moment, but then it's gone.
The skies are blue, bluer than even in San Jose, and the clouds seem higher even than the sky, wispy like when Ariadne's painting and runs out of paint on her brush, leaving the oddest streaks of color on the page. There's a gentle breeze, but it's nothing too cold, and she can hear nothing but a pleased hum from Seb.
No, her brain interjects, from Bastian. This is home to him.
"There's nothing here," Eames says, and Ariadne turns to him with a frown. He's the only one who hasn't altered the residual self-image of the clothes they were wearing in the waking world, and he looks out of place, in the world, in amongst them.
Cobb and she are dressed similar, in soft brown leather clothes that wouldn't look out of place in Pocahontas; Ariadne's been affected by Arthur always mimicking Cobb's clothes when they dream. It's just embedded in her subconscious that a Point Person mimics the lead Extractor.
Yusuf's not there. He's going to be staying in Level 1 of the dream when they do the real job, or at least, that's his excuse. He's been hanging out with Seb steadfastly, keeping an eye on him on behalf of the whole team, taking the lion's share of babysitting duty. Maybe it's his form of grieving Arthur - looking after what remains - which makes Ariadne all kinds of sad at the thought, because he's not gone, he isn't. There's nothing else she can do but try not to think about it.
Seb - Bastian - is in some version of what Bastian wears in the second movie - a loose hoodie and some jeans. He doesn't look out of place, but maybe Ariadne's automatically coloring the landscape so he fits in, or his subconscious is doing that because Fantasia is his world. She really needs to remember to call him Bastian when here. It's best to stick to Mal's rules. Much more likely for us to get Arthur back, Ariadne thinks, and automatically thinks of Eames.
Eames, who is still wearing an ill fitting suit, a pink shirt and white loafers, in the middle of the most fantastical place they've ever dreamed up. He is still frowning, but it's less. He sounds much less angry too, when he speaks. "It's much quieter than I ever imagined Fantasia to be."
There's nothing so much as a hint on his face, but Ariadne deciphers the small dig in Bastian's direction (even as she's getting dizzy at how easy it is to think of him with a different name) and quietly agrees with him, because the landscape is her only job and he's right. They're nearly waist deep in bristling, soft grass and there's nothing. No creatures, no bugs, none of the Purple Buffalo that fill Atreyu's homeland and so should be somewhere in sight because they're in the middle of where Atreyu is from in the book.
"Duh," Bastian says, and he's definitely Bastian now. Where Seb's jittery, Bastian is calm; this is his world, and his comfort in it is horrifyingly clear. He's relaxed, like the idea of tension has never even occurred to him. This is someone 100% comfortable with his surroundings, someone who feels entirely safe.
Someone who is the furthest away from being Arthur is possible.
Someone who still has Arthur's face.
Ariadne's stomach clenches. "Please explain it to the rest of us who aren't blessed with your particular range of experiences?"
Bastian looks a little apologetic.
"Careful, love," Eames says, "you're starting to sound like a real Point Man."
"Point Person," Ariadne snaps, annoyed. "So?" She's harsher than she means to be, because Eames is right, and that was Arthur's brand of condescension, and maybe that's what happens in the dreamsharing world. Because it's not like there's some manual to follow, what with it being so completely illegal and most of the times borderline-immoral, so people have to do it by learning on the job or shadowing others. Dreamsharing leaves you brain-deep in the people you work with, and so learning from them, it's probably inevitable some of their tics get passed on along with the knowledge. Maybe the same tics have been passed down from extractor to extractor.
Ariadne's in love with the idea of it, all of a sudden. She can picture it. Three hundred years in the future, and dreamshares are still running under the radar (because going into people's heads, that'll never be happily accepted, there's too many boundaries that can be crossed, too many morals that are shady enough in reality that could be compromised in a heartbeat; dreams are the last safe territory some people have, and no one would want their privacy routinely invaded so intimately) and a Point Person with Arthur's frown is holding a gun to a crowd of projections, and an Extractor with Cobb's squint is staring at someone in disbelief, and a Forger with Eames' swagger is sashaying across the floor.
Eames gives her his usual soft, pitying look - like he knows she's off in LaLa land. Like maybe that's the trait she'll be passing on to those architects in the future.
Ariadne's practiced enough in dreamshare by now that her flights of fancy don't affect the rigidity of the dreamworld. Still, if they want to move around Fantasia she's still going to have to focus. She thinks through the major regions of Fantasia in her head again, and keeps throwing the same challenging look at Eames.
He just grins at her, his trademark shit-eating grin, and glances at Bastian with his most practised expression of disdain.
"Fantasia doesn't exist anywhere but my head," Bastian says, looking away from them. "And it's not the location. We could have made this look like anything we wanted."
"Now you say," Ariadne says, thinking of the hours she's spent cramming this landscape into her head.
Bastian gives her a look which Ariadne might describe as fondness, except it looks so wrong on Arthur's face that she has to fight the urge to flinch; Arthur doesn't show fondness. His emotion is expressed in the small moments of approval, the lack of condescension; so much of Arthur's life is made up of the spaces, of things he doesn't say.
It stands to reason that Seb and Bastian both have no problem showing their emotion. And yet again Ariadne hurts at how easily it is to think of Arthur as all these different people so easily.
"We need the landscape for Amelia's sake," Bastian says, rolling his eyes and not making any secret of his distaste for having to explain all of this. Arthur, on the other hand, likes it when people ask him to explain stuff they're not getting the hang of. At the very least he's pleased (although he never shows it) if you ask him once. Five questions later about the same thing and he's planning how to create a paradox in the real world with your body parts.
"Why does Amelia need it if she's never been here?"
"Fantasia has become part of the world's identity. There are so many people in the world who know now what Fantasia is 'supposed' to look like." There are heavy air quotes in Bastian's tone. "The films, the books, the comics - they all depict Fantasia as the way it was for the Atreyu storyline. It doesn't matter that Fantasia is made up of limitless wishes and it can look however you want it to. No one will ever know the thousand permutations of Fantasia I walked. I picked this one for the book because it had the moral twist, the identity dilemma the publishers were looking for. But what was identical in each version of Fantasia was the characters. They were my friends. And they were what Fantasia was to me. And they're what I need to wish into this world to make it Fantasia."
Bastian reaches beneath his hoodie and pulls out an object on a chain. Ariadne feels an odd thrill, a tingle in her palms. She knows that object even before her brain identifies what it is, and she understands the reason for the landscape to mimic the film's landscape now - her recognition of AURYN is immediate, undeniable. If it didn't look like it did in the film, her subconscious wouldn't expect it and the dream would fall apart.
"Close your eyes," Bastian says. "All of you. Right now."
No one does. Ariadne looks sheepish when Bastian turns his peeved look in her direction.
"This is how it works," Bastian says. "I could wish up a gun and shoot you all out of here. Then I'd never have to leave."
"And you'd never be back, ever," Cobb says, and his voice is so hard that Ariadne starts in surprise. "I'd make sure of it, Bastian. I can take you so deep in a dream, so far into your own nightmares that you'd choose to be Arthur again so fast your head would spin. And I would ensure Arthur never let go of his control ever again. Even if it meant goddamned shooting him to do it."
"You'd do that to your friend?"
"We all would," Eames says, and the unevenness of his voice is nothing compared to the deadly seriousness of his eyes, boring into Bastian's face like he doesn't even care it's Arthur's face too. "For Arthur. So watch where you step, fantasy boy."
Bastian narrows his eyes, and his fingers clench around AURYN involuntarily.
Ariadne can't help but think, oh, that's what Eames' anger towards Arthur would be like if he didn't... The thought is too raw to finish, and she swallows back the tears that well in her eyes. Even in a dream, those emotional reactions can feel so real.
"C'mon," Cobb says, reluctantly. "We don't have too long scheduled down here. Best to close your eyes." He takes the lead, screwing up his eyes and he looks so ridiculous that Ariadne can't help the snort of laughter the comes out. He snaps one eye open to glare balefully at her, and Ariadne looks contrite and makes a song and dance of shutting her eyes.
The rest must follow suit, because a few moments later Bastian says, "You can open your eyes now."
Ariadne does. She's sort of expecting the world to fall away from her, because she always used to mix up The Neverending Story with Labyrinth, because her friends would watch those two films together, and Arthur loves paradoxes, and the Escher sequence of Labyrinth is more the fantasy world she can picture him in - but the world is intact when she opens her eyes and she breathes an audible sigh of relief. She freezes, because normally she'd be mocked to high heaven, but the others are distracted and Ariadne can't blame them.
Because as soon as she lifts her head to the landscape around them, all concrete thought is lost.
Ariadne actually has to pinch herself to keep her brain locked fully on the complicated layout, because she could so easily lose herself in this moment. Fantasia is beyond expectation, beyond even her imagination. It's so easy to believe in this moment that Bastian's just a boy with Arthur's face, because this is a thousand times more than Ariadne would have ever guessed was lurking in that brain of his; she suddenly understands how Arthur fits in that brain alongside everything else. Because if this is Bastian's imagination at full play, it's enough imagination for a whole person to fit quite comfortably.
The detail is breathtaking, exquisite. Later, Ariadne will lie in bed and remember what it felt like to trail her hand through the rough fronds of the Grassy Sea and feel the small creatures nose at her fingers, and she'll remember the cry of the Purple Buffalo speeding across the plains, and the laugh of the Tiny that wandered up to greet them.
For now it washes over her like a jumble of sound and brilliance and light, and she wants to laugh at it all and she wants to lie on her back in the grass and just stare at how alive this world is, and she can understand for one horrifying moment what it must have been like for Arthur to be stuck here, to feel like it was almost forever, to feel like it didn't matter if it was...
And then to trust Dom and Mal, and to be brought into the real world, squinting and frail, and to realize the world was dark and grey and it hurt. And yet Arthur was so committed to the idea of reality, surely that couldn't be just him, it had to be a spark buried deep in the whole of who Seb and Bastian and Arthur were.
Reality had to be better than Fantasia somehow, somehow, and that's the only thought that reins her attention back to the others.
She's desperate then to see Fantasia through their eyes, and she's giddy as she looks at them, thrilling to see the wonder reflected on their faces. Cobb's smiling softly, like Fantasia's an old friend. Bastian looks so very relaxed, loose around the shoulders, but smug; it's like he's finally getting to show off his home that he loves so very much to the people that mean the most to him, and in this moment it doesn't matter that it's supposed to only exist in dreams, because it's real to him and isn't that where all the moral implications of dreamsharing run into stony ground?
Eames has his poker face on, and Ariadne wants to nudge him, to wake him up to the brilliance, but she doesn't have to - she catches Bastian clenching AURYN again, and he winks at her, and closes his eyes, and Ariadne looks up in the sky, feeling it in the pull of her gut that something amazing is about to happen.
It does. Ariadne yells, purest joy, because she can't help it, it's brilliant, it's beyond amazing - because there's Falcor the luckdragon and he is everything that the book described and more, and he's more real than that puppet in the movie, and he's glorious, flying above them, low enough that Ariadne thinks she could lift her hand up and tangle her fingers in his snowy white fur. Falcor swoops past them, and the luckdragon is laughing, a deep belly laugh that's contagious, and when Ariadne looks across to Eames, desperate to find someone like her, a fan of the book, to connect to, he has tears in his eyes that Ariadne just smiles at, her throat suddenly aching with feeling, because Falcor is the embodiment of all her childhood dreams and wishes, and he's real, he's real, and Ariadne thinks about the kinds of dreams people would want to immerse themselves in for thirty years, and this has to be one of them, if you didn't have people in the real world to miss.
Ariadne's too locked to the real world - she's been craving her mama's lasagne since the first visit to Amelia's house, and she has plans with her friends in Paris after this job is done - but if she didn't... Mal was wrong, Ariadne thinks, for perhaps the hundredth time, it's not just a totem you need to fix yourself to the real world, or a name - it's people, and you have to have something to return for. She knows now the instant she doesn't have either is the instant she has to walk away from dreaming forever.
The ache of that thought isn't enough to dissuade the infectious joy and delight from seeing Falcor. Ariadne's bristling with it, full to the brim with it. She has no doubt in this moment that Amelia will be more than saved when they bring her here. She's not alone in her glee. The others are smiling, and Ariadne reflects the smile right on back.
"Are all the characters in the book here, or do you have to wish them here too?" Ariadne says, and maybe she's yelling, but she's fighting for control of the landscape against the insistent pull of her own joy, and controlling her volume is one ask too far.
"I wish them all in at once," Bastian says, and his voice is full of her excitement too. "I can't help it. You could go anywhere in Fantasia and find any of them. They'll be there. Engywook and Urgl, Morla, Pyornkrachzark. The Childlike Empress is in the Ivory Tower, and Xayide in Horok over there; Ygramul you'd find in the land of the Dead Mountains, fly too high and you can meet all four of the wind giants. You'd even find Gmork if you strayed too far into the Swamp of Sadness. They're as much a part of Fantasia as I am."
"And Atreyu?"
"Some of the characters were the other players in the dreamden," Bastian says, and he sounds a little sad at that.
It might be Ariadne's imagination, but Fantasia loses a little of its color. Perhaps the sun has gone behind one of those paint-streak clouds.
"So Atreyu was another player," Ariadne says.
"No," Bastian says, and flickers a mischievous look in Cobb's direction.
"Did Cobb pretend to be Atreyu?" Ariadne can't help but be a little appalled, because she spent hours listening to her friends regale her with florid descriptions of themselves cavorting off with Atreyu on Artax into the sunset.
"Cobb as Atreyu," Eames interrupts, even though Ariadne hadn't thought he was paying attention, "that's an image I could have lived without."
"Hey," Cobb protests, without heat. "I didn't look too bad in a lambskin waistcoat at that age-" Then he realizes what he's saying, and clamps his mouth shut, but it's too late to take it back.
Ariadne's shriek of laughter isn't one that she can put down to the mirth of Fantasia; the look on Cobb's face is immortal, and Ariadne hopes one day someone will invent a camera that will work from the dream into the real world, because there's been some classic Facebook material from Cobb over the last twelve months that Ariadne has had regrets over being unable to save.
"We've only got twenty more minutes dreamside here," Ariadne says, in lieu of an apology. "Can we try moving?"
Cobb nods, throwing her one last disgruntled look before picking a direction at random like Ariadne had asked him to before they went down. They won't know which direction Amelia will choose, so Ariadne has to be prepared for whimsical choices as well as straightforward ones.
They're going to have to practice this several times, Ariadne thinks, as they enter an area of woodland. A little further into this wood is a monastery with floating stone pillars; Ariadne remembers Eames digging Arthur's lack of imagination with a rueful shake of her head.
He technically had imagination the size of a thousand planets. It just so happened that he was inhabiting that imagination. Seb had tried to explain it, that it took all his energy and imagination being Arthur to survive the dreams that there was little left over for Arthur to use - and that's why it was safe for Arthur to go into the dreamworld. It left him reliable and dependable - perfect for a Point Person.
Repeated exposure to the somnacin, to the dreamworld, to the emphasis that Seb could not be anyone but Arthur in the dream... that's what had led to the more definite split.
Ariadne has to push those thoughts out of her head again, because she can't contemplate an ending to this story that could work out well for any of them, and while she never wants to think about losing Arthur forever, it's impossible, it's horrendous, it's sad that Seb and Bastian have to be boxed away for him to live. Yet again, one of Mal's actions was leaving repercussions that rippled like afterquakes through their lives.
Cobb takes the lead, changing direction randomly, and they press so deep into the woodland that the trees become a roof over them, and light filters down through the gaps in stripes, illuminating spilling dust motes in the gaps. Ariadne's always had a good sense of direction, and she adjusts mentally for each degree turn.
If the Ivory Tower is North, then they're currently heading West. The trees are still silent, so they haven't wandered into Singing Tree Country. Ariadne mentally runs through the map and adjusts for this course. Travelling directly through the woodlands in a Westerly direction should lead them directly to the Silver Mountains. She's happily rewarded with a glimpse of the Glass Tower of Eribo when the trees thin for a while, a thin beautiful spire in the distance where the inhabitants captured starlight.
No matter how much Cobb twists and turns in the time they have left, they're going to end up at the Silver Mountains. With that able to fit into the back of her mind, her brain's free to think of other things. Ariadne tries to think about Arthur when he was Bastian, maybe when he was the same age of Amelia, coming up with all of this.
Her math isn't as strong as it could be (although, always better than Eames' woeful relationship with numbers) but if Bastian was kept in a level 1 dreamscape (just a dream, not a level 2 dream-within-a-dream - Arthur came up with the terminology when dreams-within-a-dream-within-a-dream threatened more likely) then...
One hour in a dream was five minutes in real life. Even if Bastian had only been kept for a year in a dreamden... That was an extra two decades.
If someone had introduced him to the concept of a dream-within-a-dream...
Ariadne shudders. No wonder Arthur sometimes seems like an old man, she thinks, and nearly stumbles.
She catches herself, although not quick enough to avoid Eames noticing and smirking at her over his shoulder. This part of the woodland is pretty wild underfoot, and Ariadne feels embarrassed, because as the dreamer she's the one to blame for filling the area with that sort of detail. It had made sense, topside, cramming the layout into her head - the nearest Fantasia inhabitants in this part of the woodland were the ones who lived in Salamander, and they spent all their time on their flaming streets, not scurrying out into the woods for the fear of setting the trees alight.
In her position as Point Person, Ariadne has enough focus to catch herself when she stumbles, but Bastian's gaze is on the sky as he walks, careless of his steps. Ariadne's been trying not to look at him much, because it's so weird to have Arthur with that look of unfettered joy on his face walking along, but as she glances in his direction, Bastian's foot connects with a twisting tree root and he's stumbling forwards much too quickly for Ariadne to help him.
Thankfully, Eames is close enough - and he automatically hurtles forward, twisting on his heels and crouching to catch Bastian before he faceplants into a particularly unpleasant looking tree. Eames' hands are on Bastian's elbows, and Eames' back is scraping the tree, and Bastian stumbles into him, momentum carrying him solidly into Eames' chest.
Eames looks down at Arthur's face, pressed so suddenly and awkwardly near his, and his expression is blank. Ariadne swallows, and it hurts, because Eames is schooling his emotions more tightly than she's ever seen him, and this has to be painful for him, to have Arthur so close and so far away.
Except, Bastian's voice is deeper than it has been when he says, "Eames," and then again, "Eames?" and Ariadne's heart is in her mouth, it's the only way she can describe it, because it's Arthur, oh, somehow, it's Arthur, and he's come back to them and they can stop this farce. And Eames has realized too, because his eyebrows are furrowed, and his face had been entirely blank.
Eames' eyes are scraping Arthur's face like he's been missing - not just his personality, but his whole body gone too. Eames is looking at Arthur like he hasn't seen him for a week, even though his face has been right there the whole time. Arthur - because it is Arthur, it is - makes that sound again in the back of his throat, the one he made when he was saying that Cobb didn't know what Arthur was giving up, and Ariadne knows what it means now, because it was Eames Arthur was giving up, is giving up, and Ariadne glances up to see if Cobb has realized.
Cobb turns around a moment later to see why they're not following him, and his eyes flicker to Arthur and Eames, and over to Ariadne, then back to Arthur and Eames for a moment. Arthur and Eames are almost frozen; Eames' hands tight on Arthur's elbows, their eyes locked on each other.
The trees around them that had been rustling gently in the wind start to quieten; a silence settles on the whole, frozen tableau as Bastian's subconscious can't populate the dream any more. His imagination is busy with something else.
Someone else.
On to part 4
Masterpost
mizzy2k
"Arthur was supposed to be temporary, but the dependency..." Cobb shrugs. "It's had side effects."
"To the tune of me being him almost permanently," Arthur says, shuddering a little and running a hand through his hair again, pulling his fingers back and looking at them dispiritedly. "Dom, my left brain identity is a stick-in-the-mud."
"The personality splintered down the middle of the brain," Yusuf says, like he's thinking out loud, "yes, yes I see where that might have happened."
Ariadne thinks about it. Thinking about something inconsequential is easier than thinking about the hate curling in her stomach. "So should we call you Bastian while you're here?"
Arthur actually winces. "Mal thought it would be better. She thought it would make adjusting to the forge easier if I ever had to let it go, like I have to now. But..." He looks at the computer screen blankly, and minimises the cover rather than closing it. "It's easier in Fantasia to differentiate. Mal started calling me Arthur in there, the closer I got to leaving. So Bastian is my Fantasia name, and Seb's my name. And Arthur is. well. Him."
"Using a name like a totem," Eames says. "She was a hell of a woman." He doesn't look at Cobb, but it's close enough to a 'sorry I nearly shot you', so Cobb nods stoically, taking the win.
"If Amelia's anywhere near as bad as me, we might have to use AURYN," Arthur says, twisting to look up at Cobb, a frown on his face.
"Or convince her she already has," Cobb says. "And she's forgotten some of the important things, the good things she's left behind."
"It's risky, and depends on how badly she's lost," Arthur says. "But if we use Level 1 to find her, Level 2 as Fantasia... and no sedative. We can't risk losing her in limbo. If she took Fantasia down to limbo we'd never find her."
"Agreed. AURYN will keep her safe, and in a lethal situation if we prioritise Ariadne, to keep the landscape, and Eames, who can forge into new characters as and when, then I'll take point in any dangerous situations," Cobb says.
"We should keep Falcor the luckdragon close," Ariadne suggests, excitedly. "Just in case."
"Oh my god, you're a Neverending Story geek too," Arthur says, with an exaggerated groan.
"I just can't believe we're lounging around seriously discussing Fantasia," Eames says. "I might as well just superglue my totem to the palm of my hand the number of times I keep checking it." He shakes his head a little. "So we do this job, you step through a door and we get Arthur back?"
He sounds a little unsure at the end, and all the mirth and incredulity Ariadne's been feeling settle in the base of her stomach. Or maybe it's the hamburger playing havoc again. Either way, Ariadne can feel her fingernails digging into her palms, because the answer suddenly means everything.
Arthur - or should that be Sebastian - Ariadne's having trouble knowing what to call him now.
Seb's face falls, and he looks so much like Arthur all of a sudden - downturned frown, anger in the eyes - that the answer suddenly becomes urgent on top of its importance.
Cobb shuffles and looks at Seb's face, but not into his eyes. "You'll have to become him again, Seb. The somnacin dependency-"
"Fucking hell, Dom - you've got the best chemist in the world. It's been fifteen years. Don't try and tell me there's no cure." Seb's chin juts mulishly. Arthur wouldn't be seen dead looking so stupid - it makes his face look almost ugly. Ariadne hadn't thought it possible. "If I have it my way, Arthur's gone. I won't let that personality smother me again. I won't."
Seb storms off over to the laptop, and although he pushes up the screen to continue watching his cartoon; Ariadne can tell he's not really watching it, because when it comes to an end he just lets the viewing window go blank and he doesn't click on anything else.
"It's funny he's said that," Eames says, almost conversationally.
"Hm?" Cobb says, glancing at Eames and then tensing, like he'd forgotten Eames had had a gun in his face ten minutes ago. Ariadne frowns and makes a mental note to discuss somnacin's effect on memory because seriously, if this is Cobb's brain unaffected by any external thing, then Cobb's nowhere near as decent as Ariadne had been assuming.
"Because if Arthur doesn't come back, you've just made the best enemy in the world." Eames pats Cobb on his shoulder, and storms off, slamming the warehouse door so loudly that the building shakes with it.
Ariadne doesn't know what to think at all.
She wraps her arms around herself and when she looks back, Cobb and Yusuf are steadfastly not talking about it, even though Yusuf keeps glancing at Cobb like there's something he wants to say. She wonders what Eames is thinking, because he's always thinking something. She can't wrap her head around the idea of what's happened to Arthur on her own, or Seb, or the fact that Seb's just dropped the concept of Arthur never coming back into all of their heads.
I don't want to die is what Arthur had said before walking through the door, and Ariadne had been so relieved to see him alive, but it wasn't physical death he meant at all. It was the death of his personality, and wasn't that just as much dying as being shot?
She needs air. She needs Eames. The universe is nice for once when she stumbles out of the warehouse and finds Eames leaning against the outer wall, smoking.
Ariadne thinks about going back inside for her coat. It's chilly out here. But stepping through that door had been bad enough once - she'd had the fleeting thought that maybe Arthur was still somehow in that threshold and she could catch him and stuff him back in his body. Her flights of fancy weren't diminishing with PASIV use. Maybe being able to have pure creation is like a drug that just keeps unlocking more and more, with no limits.
Eames doesn't smoke much, only when he's stressed, and Ariadne doesn't blame him. She almost wants to bum a cigarette from him, but it's a habit she doesn't want to pick up. The somnacin is one addictive habit too far.
She's angry, and confused, but she can feel the bristling energy just rolling off Eames. Going into the conversation angry will only feed into his anger, and they'll bounce off each other exponentially.
To keep the conversation vaguely rational, Ariadne's going to need to go in gently.
"I'm right in thinking this is odd and not a normal day at the dreamsharing office, right?"
It's usually a good angle, abusing her rookie status as an excuse to probe. It's a flimsy replacement for the real question ("How are you?"), couched in terms that are less likely to bring up Eames' automatic defences, but it's the best one Ariadne's got. She hasn't got long left to use the newbie angle, so she's glad she can get some use out of it still.
"It's like high school all over again, love." Eames exhales a cloud of smoke up into the air, clouding his face a little. When the smoke clears, his eyes are hooded, and his face is blank. It's like he's taking what he has left of Arthur and holding it in his own face. Forging a little of the Arthur they know to keep him safe.
"High school was irritating and confusing," Ariadne says. "It rarely blurred the philosophical line of life and death for me."
Eames grins; Ariadne's eyes briefly trace the uneven mountain range of his lower teeth. There's glee in his grin, but no warmth. Death mask, she thinks, involuntarily. He doesn't look down at her, but Ariadne's not expecting him to. She doesn't know where she would look if he did. "The American education system has its flaws compared to its superior British cousin."
"I forgot Britain was still in the Dark Ages and supported gladiatorial fights to the death," Ariadne says, mirroring his pose against the wall and looking out into the same skyline. "I'll make sure not to repeat my mistake."
Eames makes a small sound of amusement. Normally he'd grace her deadpan style of humor with a guffaw. His genuine amusement would be a delight to hear, but this isn't that sound. It's a million miles away from that sound and Ariadne knows exactly how it feels to only be able to manage a quarter of the positive emotion you want to feel.
She doesn't want to feel anything positive. Arthur isn't real. Ariadne's not entirely sure she'll ever feel anything positive again.
"My dad," Eames says, after an unexpectedly short pause. "When I was in comprehensive school - that's British for high school, darling."
"I'm American," Ariadne says, mock-haughtily. "Not a Philistine."
"You don't have the right coloring," Eames informs her. He's still not looking at her. This is probably one of his stories that's less fabrication than usual. Ariadne's getting better at noticing. Eames is a born storyteller, but that often means he embellishes the details. When he's telling a really rampant lie, he's all body and eye contact. He takes you by the elbows and looks deeply into your eyes and is so very, very earnest. But the times when he's telling stories where maybe, even if just for a minute, Eames actually got hurt - those are the times he can't make eye contact at all. Even like now, when he's joking with her.
"So what happened when you were a sophomore at your comprehensive school?" Ariadne asks, tongue firmly in cheek.
Eames does flash her a look at that. She catches a glimpse of raised eyebrows, a semi-quirk of a genuine smile, and she looks away so as to not make him be the one to move first.
"When I was a Sixth Former," Eames says, "my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's."
Ariadne tries to swallow her rapid exhale of breath, because she knows Eames doesn't appreciate anyone making a deal of anything that hurts him. He spares her a brief, thankful glance. "I'm-" she starts.
"If the next work in your sentence is sorry, I'm not beyond getting Cobb to swap you for a younger, prettier model. You're 24 now, Ariadne, don't you hear the biological clock ticking?"
Ariadne kicks him in the shins on the principal of it. She doesn't hold back. Eames winces and screws up his eyebrows, before shaking his head a little and extinguishing his cigarette against the wall. He toys with the butt for a while, smearing ash across his fingers.
"My childhood was better than being in a dreamden," Eames says, "Wasn't yours?"
"Absolutely," Ariadne says, reverently. "That's one of the things I can't wrap my head around."
"Along with the crazy Fantasia layout."
"Obviously."
"I guess... this is just like coming home from school. And seeing this man with my father's face, with no idea what he's ever done." Eames shakes himself a little. "A man who knew my name and nothing else. And I think-"
"What?"
Eames does look down at her then. His expression is still blank, unreadable. Ariadne tilts her face up to look at him, because she has to. Because her attention is the only thing she can offer. It feels like if she stretches out her fingers to try and touch him, he might melt between her fingers. "You don't want to listen to an old man ramble."
Ariadne rolls her eyes, making a show and dance of it. "I listen to Cobb," she says, because Eames doesn't listen to straight protests. Eames responds to between-the-lines better than on-the-nose.
"Touché."
"I try."
"Well. It's that philosophical line of life and death, isn't it?" Eames' mouth presses into a line. Pure Arthur. "What are you supposed to prefer - the monster that loves you, or a stranger who doesn't hurt you but doesn't even know you to like you?"
"I don't think there's any supposing about it," Ariadne says, slowly, but she feels dizzy. She feels like she's on the verge of figuring something out, something which might hurt to figure out. The ground feels less solid beneath her feet. It's all fancy. The sky and the ground are static and it's Ariadne that's wavering inside her own mind. "You have to feel what you feel."
"Feelings," Eames says, with conviction. "Bollocks to that concept. Let's go get drunk on firewhiskey and catch us some luckdragons."
His whimsy is infectious and Ariadne smiles because she wants to, powering through the guilt with it the best she can.
"Are you coming in?"
The energy of smiling through Eames' faked bravado (and it's faked, because not even Eames is that whimsical; whimsy is only for grad students and Cobb when he's drunk and morose, in the world according to Eames) makes her miss how quickly Eames has moved from the wall and around her.
She wrinkles her nose a little. "I might stay out in the cold a while longer."
Eames nods, like he understands. He throws her a loose salute instead of saying anything more, and bows his head to duck through the door. Like he's scared of hitting his head against the frame, even though it's a clear foot above his head when he's standing in heels - it happens, because it's Eames; he has to practice his female walking because it's not every day he has to walk naturally in five inch high shoes, so it happens occasionally, and always to everyone's mirth. Eames is good natured when he's the butt of a joke.
Ariadne has to stay outside to swallow and swallow for a while, gulping down air and trying to stop herself from throwing up, because Eames' words are an uneasy accompaniment to her thoughts, and she is sure she's missing something.
What's better, Eames had basically asked, a monster who loves you or a stranger who can't hurt you because they don't remember how.
Her heart contracts and Ariadne can't help but clasp her own throat with her hands hard enough to hurt, deep enough for her to feel her heartbeat pulsing against the press of her fingertips. She wants to cry at the idea of it, because this, this is something she clearly should have seen. Something maybe she didn't want to see. Arthur and Eames have always bickered at each other, have done as long as she's known them, surely if they were involved there would be more than hurtful exchanges and smug contests to outdo each other?
The monster who loves you, Ariadne thinks, and it's not her heartache to feel, but she feels it regardless. She wasn't listening to their conversations in the past with an unbiased ear. She was listening as a girl who didn't want to grow up, who wanted this fairytale life of stealing ideas and imagining impossibilities into being to never change. Deciphering exchanges into a form that could mean this new life changing - of course it would never be a priority.
But now she has an inkling of what has been going on, their words mean something else. Each insult becomes a checkpoint, an endearment disguised in a cloud. I hate you - which anyone else would read between the lines of their words - means something else entirely.
Something which makes the concept of Arthur being gone forever even more unbearable.
The monster who loves you, Ariadne thinks, and her heart splits clean in two.
#
It takes four full and long days for Ariadne to get the concept of the maps in her head.
Every day is a day too long. She makes Cobb and Yusuf stay in the warehouse at all times she's there with Seb, because she's uncomfortable and because asking Eames to be her bodyguard is one hit too hard.
Yusuf thankfully takes on the job of looking after Seb out of 'office hours', taking him shopping for clothes more in his comfort zone after he deliberately wrecks Arthur's pristine jogging clothes, and putting him up in a hotel and catering to his every whim. It's overly zealous. Ariadne remembers the look of guilt on Yusuf's face when Seb talked about his dreamden experience, and tries not to think about what he might have done that would elicit this sort of diligent compensation.
She tries not to think about how appalled Arthur will be when he realizes what Seb's been making him wear, because it makes her want to smile and Ariadne thinks she needs to be angry. She always works best when she's angry and Arthur deserves her best.
Eames spends most of the four days out of the way, consistently drunk, and answering their texts with one word replies. Ariadne covers for him, mumbling about him researching Amelia's life. Cobb accepts it much too quickly for him to believe the excuse.
He can't stay away forever, and his breath is clear when he comes in on the fifth day.
Ariadne isn't surprised. Eames isn't the kind of person to give anyone up without a fight.
As they set the PASIV up for the trial run, Seb's eyes linger too much on the small vials of somnacin for Ariadne's calm. She quickly and quietly shuts Seb down when he tries to flirt with her.
It's not the first time. Over the last few days he hasn't exactly been subtle. Ariadne's been slowly, cautiously trying to get to know Seb. To her horror, she's found herself smiling a few times at his clumsy jokes, and on a few occasions nodding along with his ideas.
She could like Seb, if he wasn't stealing Arthur away from them. She misses Arthur fiercely, much more than she'd thought she ever would. By necessity, then, Seb is the person wrongly inhabiting Arthur's face and Arthur's body, and Seb is the one who has stolen Arthur away from them.
Cobb is an idiot, but Seb is the enemy.
She's trying very hard not to think about how really, isn't it sort of the other way around? And why does Arthur deserve to live more than Seb?
No, that's not how she's going to think. She shuts down Seb's flirting because apparently Seb is a hundred and eighty degrees different from Arthur and that means he's flirty and it also somehow means he's straight. Ariadne couldn't respond to it either way, because even if she likes the Seb personality, how would it morally work? It would be like using Arthur without his consent.
Besides, she could never do that to Eames, now she knows there's honor to defend on that count.
Seb takes Ariadne shooting him down with a lopsided grin that looks all wrong on Arthur's solemn face and, unfortunately, he's pretty loud about it. Ariadne pretends not to see how tense Eames' face is the whole time.
Cobb's one hundred percent oblivious to the whole exchange, of course. He nudges her when she's untangling the wires. "Amazing, isn't it? That Seb is totally different to Arthur in every way but his face?"
Ariadne watches the tension ratchet up in Eames' shoulders, and she narrows her eyes. "Amazing isn't the word I'd choose," she says, not bothering to keep her voice low.
Cobb frowns. "Maybe not a complete 180 - he seems to like you in both personalities. Some things cross."
"Some things definitely don't," Seb mutters, looking at Eames for the first time since Eames had come back in. Ariadne stares at him in surprise, and Seb looks at her. There's a cruel edge to his smile that no one else is looking to see. "Pretty but not my type, if you get my drift."
Cobb looks amused at that, like he thinks he's talking about Ariadne. "Somebody's been shot down," he says with a grin. "We should get this party started."
"Party," Eames mutters. "More like a bloody spectacle."
Cobb squints across at Eames. "I thought you'd be happier with this formation. Arthur doesn't even like you. Seb's on the opposite side of the spectrum and he has imagination. The chances are higher that Seb would actually like you."
Maybe it's Seb, smirking unpleasantly from the other side of the PASIV. Or maybe it's Cobb sounding so genuine about his cluelessness. Or maybe it's the way that Cobb is right - except not in the way he thinks he is.
Seb is one hundred and eighty degrees different from Arthur, and it's clear to Ariadne right in this moment - Seb hates Eames.
There should actually be comfort in that somewhere, Ariadne thinks, although she will never say it.
Eames is bristling like someone's threatened to bodily harm one of the team, and he straightens from where he's pulling up one of the lawn chairs and looks across at Cobb, coolly and with hate clearly on his face. "Sometimes, Cobb, you're a real son of a bitch."
"Uh," Cobb says, helpfully. He looks between his team like Ariadne looked at the PASIV the first time - like there was knowledge to be had, something new and amazing to learn, but it was an eternity beyond her grasp. "Seb, you remember now - let Bastian take control in the dream. We need Fantasia, not Resident Evil."
Seb rolls his eyes. "I know, I know. Let warm fuzzy boy take over or me, Arthur and Bastian all die of brain rot. I've read the manual, dude."
"We're just creating Fantasia in level one this time. In the job itself it'll be on level 2. So please, all of you remember to call him Bastian from the off. If we call him Seb-"
"Him," Seb sniffs, "Am I the cat's illegitimate bastard nephew? I have a name. And seeing as I don't get to hang around much, I'd like not to be a him. And if I'm letting Bastian run around, you'd better as hell give me some dreaming time as me."
"On the job you'll have level one to yourself. I already promised you that a thousand times," Cobb says.
"Excuse me for not believing your promises on face value-" Seb starts.
"Let's just do this rehearsal run, okay?" Ariadne says, quickly. She's always the one making the peace. She almost wonders how this team worked without her; Arthur told her the other week that while they did, their successful heist percentage had increased a little. Not enough to conclusively prove Ariadne's a lucky charm or considerable asset, but enough to intimate that this may be the case.
At the time, Ariadne had been almost offended at Arthur's earnest statistics.
Now she'd do almost anything to get them back.
Eames is scowling so hard, the scowl a particular brand of his own this time, that Ariadne thinks he'll be scowling in the dream.
She has to make it a quick assumption so her mind doesn't linger on it, because her mind has to be full of the twisting nature of Fantasia geography. Seb's been teaching her, and it's almost insane - except for the logic of it. It's like a choose your own adventure; limited permutations considering which route they decide to go. It's smart. If they let Amelia take the lead, she'll believe the dream so much better than if forced into a path.
Entering the real world has to be her free choice.
They appear in the middle of the Grassy Sea. Ariadne makes a noise of surprise that she's managed to get it as spot on in the dream as it is in her head, and the colors grow brighter as she twists around in the sea of long, waving grass. She can see the glinting spires of the Ivory Tower far off in the distance, and Horok far in the distance in another direction, light sparking off its thousand windows, and the forests, and Ariadne thinks that might even be the Wandering Mountain to the North, just for a moment, but then it's gone.
The skies are blue, bluer than even in San Jose, and the clouds seem higher even than the sky, wispy like when Ariadne's painting and runs out of paint on her brush, leaving the oddest streaks of color on the page. There's a gentle breeze, but it's nothing too cold, and she can hear nothing but a pleased hum from Seb.
No, her brain interjects, from Bastian. This is home to him.
"There's nothing here," Eames says, and Ariadne turns to him with a frown. He's the only one who hasn't altered the residual self-image of the clothes they were wearing in the waking world, and he looks out of place, in the world, in amongst them.
Cobb and she are dressed similar, in soft brown leather clothes that wouldn't look out of place in Pocahontas; Ariadne's been affected by Arthur always mimicking Cobb's clothes when they dream. It's just embedded in her subconscious that a Point Person mimics the lead Extractor.
Yusuf's not there. He's going to be staying in Level 1 of the dream when they do the real job, or at least, that's his excuse. He's been hanging out with Seb steadfastly, keeping an eye on him on behalf of the whole team, taking the lion's share of babysitting duty. Maybe it's his form of grieving Arthur - looking after what remains - which makes Ariadne all kinds of sad at the thought, because he's not gone, he isn't. There's nothing else she can do but try not to think about it.
Seb - Bastian - is in some version of what Bastian wears in the second movie - a loose hoodie and some jeans. He doesn't look out of place, but maybe Ariadne's automatically coloring the landscape so he fits in, or his subconscious is doing that because Fantasia is his world. She really needs to remember to call him Bastian when here. It's best to stick to Mal's rules. Much more likely for us to get Arthur back, Ariadne thinks, and automatically thinks of Eames.
Eames, who is still wearing an ill fitting suit, a pink shirt and white loafers, in the middle of the most fantastical place they've ever dreamed up. He is still frowning, but it's less. He sounds much less angry too, when he speaks. "It's much quieter than I ever imagined Fantasia to be."
There's nothing so much as a hint on his face, but Ariadne deciphers the small dig in Bastian's direction (even as she's getting dizzy at how easy it is to think of him with a different name) and quietly agrees with him, because the landscape is her only job and he's right. They're nearly waist deep in bristling, soft grass and there's nothing. No creatures, no bugs, none of the Purple Buffalo that fill Atreyu's homeland and so should be somewhere in sight because they're in the middle of where Atreyu is from in the book.
"Duh," Bastian says, and he's definitely Bastian now. Where Seb's jittery, Bastian is calm; this is his world, and his comfort in it is horrifyingly clear. He's relaxed, like the idea of tension has never even occurred to him. This is someone 100% comfortable with his surroundings, someone who feels entirely safe.
Someone who is the furthest away from being Arthur is possible.
Someone who still has Arthur's face.
Ariadne's stomach clenches. "Please explain it to the rest of us who aren't blessed with your particular range of experiences?"
Bastian looks a little apologetic.
"Careful, love," Eames says, "you're starting to sound like a real Point Man."
"Point Person," Ariadne snaps, annoyed. "So?" She's harsher than she means to be, because Eames is right, and that was Arthur's brand of condescension, and maybe that's what happens in the dreamsharing world. Because it's not like there's some manual to follow, what with it being so completely illegal and most of the times borderline-immoral, so people have to do it by learning on the job or shadowing others. Dreamsharing leaves you brain-deep in the people you work with, and so learning from them, it's probably inevitable some of their tics get passed on along with the knowledge. Maybe the same tics have been passed down from extractor to extractor.
Ariadne's in love with the idea of it, all of a sudden. She can picture it. Three hundred years in the future, and dreamshares are still running under the radar (because going into people's heads, that'll never be happily accepted, there's too many boundaries that can be crossed, too many morals that are shady enough in reality that could be compromised in a heartbeat; dreams are the last safe territory some people have, and no one would want their privacy routinely invaded so intimately) and a Point Person with Arthur's frown is holding a gun to a crowd of projections, and an Extractor with Cobb's squint is staring at someone in disbelief, and a Forger with Eames' swagger is sashaying across the floor.
Eames gives her his usual soft, pitying look - like he knows she's off in LaLa land. Like maybe that's the trait she'll be passing on to those architects in the future.
Ariadne's practiced enough in dreamshare by now that her flights of fancy don't affect the rigidity of the dreamworld. Still, if they want to move around Fantasia she's still going to have to focus. She thinks through the major regions of Fantasia in her head again, and keeps throwing the same challenging look at Eames.
He just grins at her, his trademark shit-eating grin, and glances at Bastian with his most practised expression of disdain.
"Fantasia doesn't exist anywhere but my head," Bastian says, looking away from them. "And it's not the location. We could have made this look like anything we wanted."
"Now you say," Ariadne says, thinking of the hours she's spent cramming this landscape into her head.
Bastian gives her a look which Ariadne might describe as fondness, except it looks so wrong on Arthur's face that she has to fight the urge to flinch; Arthur doesn't show fondness. His emotion is expressed in the small moments of approval, the lack of condescension; so much of Arthur's life is made up of the spaces, of things he doesn't say.
It stands to reason that Seb and Bastian both have no problem showing their emotion. And yet again Ariadne hurts at how easily it is to think of Arthur as all these different people so easily.
"We need the landscape for Amelia's sake," Bastian says, rolling his eyes and not making any secret of his distaste for having to explain all of this. Arthur, on the other hand, likes it when people ask him to explain stuff they're not getting the hang of. At the very least he's pleased (although he never shows it) if you ask him once. Five questions later about the same thing and he's planning how to create a paradox in the real world with your body parts.
"Why does Amelia need it if she's never been here?"
"Fantasia has become part of the world's identity. There are so many people in the world who know now what Fantasia is 'supposed' to look like." There are heavy air quotes in Bastian's tone. "The films, the books, the comics - they all depict Fantasia as the way it was for the Atreyu storyline. It doesn't matter that Fantasia is made up of limitless wishes and it can look however you want it to. No one will ever know the thousand permutations of Fantasia I walked. I picked this one for the book because it had the moral twist, the identity dilemma the publishers were looking for. But what was identical in each version of Fantasia was the characters. They were my friends. And they were what Fantasia was to me. And they're what I need to wish into this world to make it Fantasia."
Bastian reaches beneath his hoodie and pulls out an object on a chain. Ariadne feels an odd thrill, a tingle in her palms. She knows that object even before her brain identifies what it is, and she understands the reason for the landscape to mimic the film's landscape now - her recognition of AURYN is immediate, undeniable. If it didn't look like it did in the film, her subconscious wouldn't expect it and the dream would fall apart.
"Close your eyes," Bastian says. "All of you. Right now."
No one does. Ariadne looks sheepish when Bastian turns his peeved look in her direction.
"This is how it works," Bastian says. "I could wish up a gun and shoot you all out of here. Then I'd never have to leave."
"And you'd never be back, ever," Cobb says, and his voice is so hard that Ariadne starts in surprise. "I'd make sure of it, Bastian. I can take you so deep in a dream, so far into your own nightmares that you'd choose to be Arthur again so fast your head would spin. And I would ensure Arthur never let go of his control ever again. Even if it meant goddamned shooting him to do it."
"You'd do that to your friend?"
"We all would," Eames says, and the unevenness of his voice is nothing compared to the deadly seriousness of his eyes, boring into Bastian's face like he doesn't even care it's Arthur's face too. "For Arthur. So watch where you step, fantasy boy."
Bastian narrows his eyes, and his fingers clench around AURYN involuntarily.
Ariadne can't help but think, oh, that's what Eames' anger towards Arthur would be like if he didn't... The thought is too raw to finish, and she swallows back the tears that well in her eyes. Even in a dream, those emotional reactions can feel so real.
"C'mon," Cobb says, reluctantly. "We don't have too long scheduled down here. Best to close your eyes." He takes the lead, screwing up his eyes and he looks so ridiculous that Ariadne can't help the snort of laughter the comes out. He snaps one eye open to glare balefully at her, and Ariadne looks contrite and makes a song and dance of shutting her eyes.
The rest must follow suit, because a few moments later Bastian says, "You can open your eyes now."
Ariadne does. She's sort of expecting the world to fall away from her, because she always used to mix up The Neverending Story with Labyrinth, because her friends would watch those two films together, and Arthur loves paradoxes, and the Escher sequence of Labyrinth is more the fantasy world she can picture him in - but the world is intact when she opens her eyes and she breathes an audible sigh of relief. She freezes, because normally she'd be mocked to high heaven, but the others are distracted and Ariadne can't blame them.
Because as soon as she lifts her head to the landscape around them, all concrete thought is lost.
Ariadne actually has to pinch herself to keep her brain locked fully on the complicated layout, because she could so easily lose herself in this moment. Fantasia is beyond expectation, beyond even her imagination. It's so easy to believe in this moment that Bastian's just a boy with Arthur's face, because this is a thousand times more than Ariadne would have ever guessed was lurking in that brain of his; she suddenly understands how Arthur fits in that brain alongside everything else. Because if this is Bastian's imagination at full play, it's enough imagination for a whole person to fit quite comfortably.
The detail is breathtaking, exquisite. Later, Ariadne will lie in bed and remember what it felt like to trail her hand through the rough fronds of the Grassy Sea and feel the small creatures nose at her fingers, and she'll remember the cry of the Purple Buffalo speeding across the plains, and the laugh of the Tiny that wandered up to greet them.
For now it washes over her like a jumble of sound and brilliance and light, and she wants to laugh at it all and she wants to lie on her back in the grass and just stare at how alive this world is, and she can understand for one horrifying moment what it must have been like for Arthur to be stuck here, to feel like it was almost forever, to feel like it didn't matter if it was...
And then to trust Dom and Mal, and to be brought into the real world, squinting and frail, and to realize the world was dark and grey and it hurt. And yet Arthur was so committed to the idea of reality, surely that couldn't be just him, it had to be a spark buried deep in the whole of who Seb and Bastian and Arthur were.
Reality had to be better than Fantasia somehow, somehow, and that's the only thought that reins her attention back to the others.
She's desperate then to see Fantasia through their eyes, and she's giddy as she looks at them, thrilling to see the wonder reflected on their faces. Cobb's smiling softly, like Fantasia's an old friend. Bastian looks so very relaxed, loose around the shoulders, but smug; it's like he's finally getting to show off his home that he loves so very much to the people that mean the most to him, and in this moment it doesn't matter that it's supposed to only exist in dreams, because it's real to him and isn't that where all the moral implications of dreamsharing run into stony ground?
Eames has his poker face on, and Ariadne wants to nudge him, to wake him up to the brilliance, but she doesn't have to - she catches Bastian clenching AURYN again, and he winks at her, and closes his eyes, and Ariadne looks up in the sky, feeling it in the pull of her gut that something amazing is about to happen.
It does. Ariadne yells, purest joy, because she can't help it, it's brilliant, it's beyond amazing - because there's Falcor the luckdragon and he is everything that the book described and more, and he's more real than that puppet in the movie, and he's glorious, flying above them, low enough that Ariadne thinks she could lift her hand up and tangle her fingers in his snowy white fur. Falcor swoops past them, and the luckdragon is laughing, a deep belly laugh that's contagious, and when Ariadne looks across to Eames, desperate to find someone like her, a fan of the book, to connect to, he has tears in his eyes that Ariadne just smiles at, her throat suddenly aching with feeling, because Falcor is the embodiment of all her childhood dreams and wishes, and he's real, he's real, and Ariadne thinks about the kinds of dreams people would want to immerse themselves in for thirty years, and this has to be one of them, if you didn't have people in the real world to miss.
Ariadne's too locked to the real world - she's been craving her mama's lasagne since the first visit to Amelia's house, and she has plans with her friends in Paris after this job is done - but if she didn't... Mal was wrong, Ariadne thinks, for perhaps the hundredth time, it's not just a totem you need to fix yourself to the real world, or a name - it's people, and you have to have something to return for. She knows now the instant she doesn't have either is the instant she has to walk away from dreaming forever.
The ache of that thought isn't enough to dissuade the infectious joy and delight from seeing Falcor. Ariadne's bristling with it, full to the brim with it. She has no doubt in this moment that Amelia will be more than saved when they bring her here. She's not alone in her glee. The others are smiling, and Ariadne reflects the smile right on back.
"Are all the characters in the book here, or do you have to wish them here too?" Ariadne says, and maybe she's yelling, but she's fighting for control of the landscape against the insistent pull of her own joy, and controlling her volume is one ask too far.
"I wish them all in at once," Bastian says, and his voice is full of her excitement too. "I can't help it. You could go anywhere in Fantasia and find any of them. They'll be there. Engywook and Urgl, Morla, Pyornkrachzark. The Childlike Empress is in the Ivory Tower, and Xayide in Horok over there; Ygramul you'd find in the land of the Dead Mountains, fly too high and you can meet all four of the wind giants. You'd even find Gmork if you strayed too far into the Swamp of Sadness. They're as much a part of Fantasia as I am."
"And Atreyu?"
"Some of the characters were the other players in the dreamden," Bastian says, and he sounds a little sad at that.
It might be Ariadne's imagination, but Fantasia loses a little of its color. Perhaps the sun has gone behind one of those paint-streak clouds.
"So Atreyu was another player," Ariadne says.
"No," Bastian says, and flickers a mischievous look in Cobb's direction.
"Did Cobb pretend to be Atreyu?" Ariadne can't help but be a little appalled, because she spent hours listening to her friends regale her with florid descriptions of themselves cavorting off with Atreyu on Artax into the sunset.
"Cobb as Atreyu," Eames interrupts, even though Ariadne hadn't thought he was paying attention, "that's an image I could have lived without."
"Hey," Cobb protests, without heat. "I didn't look too bad in a lambskin waistcoat at that age-" Then he realizes what he's saying, and clamps his mouth shut, but it's too late to take it back.
Ariadne's shriek of laughter isn't one that she can put down to the mirth of Fantasia; the look on Cobb's face is immortal, and Ariadne hopes one day someone will invent a camera that will work from the dream into the real world, because there's been some classic Facebook material from Cobb over the last twelve months that Ariadne has had regrets over being unable to save.
"We've only got twenty more minutes dreamside here," Ariadne says, in lieu of an apology. "Can we try moving?"
Cobb nods, throwing her one last disgruntled look before picking a direction at random like Ariadne had asked him to before they went down. They won't know which direction Amelia will choose, so Ariadne has to be prepared for whimsical choices as well as straightforward ones.
They're going to have to practice this several times, Ariadne thinks, as they enter an area of woodland. A little further into this wood is a monastery with floating stone pillars; Ariadne remembers Eames digging Arthur's lack of imagination with a rueful shake of her head.
He technically had imagination the size of a thousand planets. It just so happened that he was inhabiting that imagination. Seb had tried to explain it, that it took all his energy and imagination being Arthur to survive the dreams that there was little left over for Arthur to use - and that's why it was safe for Arthur to go into the dreamworld. It left him reliable and dependable - perfect for a Point Person.
Repeated exposure to the somnacin, to the dreamworld, to the emphasis that Seb could not be anyone but Arthur in the dream... that's what had led to the more definite split.
Ariadne has to push those thoughts out of her head again, because she can't contemplate an ending to this story that could work out well for any of them, and while she never wants to think about losing Arthur forever, it's impossible, it's horrendous, it's sad that Seb and Bastian have to be boxed away for him to live. Yet again, one of Mal's actions was leaving repercussions that rippled like afterquakes through their lives.
Cobb takes the lead, changing direction randomly, and they press so deep into the woodland that the trees become a roof over them, and light filters down through the gaps in stripes, illuminating spilling dust motes in the gaps. Ariadne's always had a good sense of direction, and she adjusts mentally for each degree turn.
If the Ivory Tower is North, then they're currently heading West. The trees are still silent, so they haven't wandered into Singing Tree Country. Ariadne mentally runs through the map and adjusts for this course. Travelling directly through the woodlands in a Westerly direction should lead them directly to the Silver Mountains. She's happily rewarded with a glimpse of the Glass Tower of Eribo when the trees thin for a while, a thin beautiful spire in the distance where the inhabitants captured starlight.
No matter how much Cobb twists and turns in the time they have left, they're going to end up at the Silver Mountains. With that able to fit into the back of her mind, her brain's free to think of other things. Ariadne tries to think about Arthur when he was Bastian, maybe when he was the same age of Amelia, coming up with all of this.
Her math isn't as strong as it could be (although, always better than Eames' woeful relationship with numbers) but if Bastian was kept in a level 1 dreamscape (just a dream, not a level 2 dream-within-a-dream - Arthur came up with the terminology when dreams-within-a-dream-within-a-dream threatened more likely) then...
One hour in a dream was five minutes in real life. Even if Bastian had only been kept for a year in a dreamden... That was an extra two decades.
If someone had introduced him to the concept of a dream-within-a-dream...
Ariadne shudders. No wonder Arthur sometimes seems like an old man, she thinks, and nearly stumbles.
She catches herself, although not quick enough to avoid Eames noticing and smirking at her over his shoulder. This part of the woodland is pretty wild underfoot, and Ariadne feels embarrassed, because as the dreamer she's the one to blame for filling the area with that sort of detail. It had made sense, topside, cramming the layout into her head - the nearest Fantasia inhabitants in this part of the woodland were the ones who lived in Salamander, and they spent all their time on their flaming streets, not scurrying out into the woods for the fear of setting the trees alight.
In her position as Point Person, Ariadne has enough focus to catch herself when she stumbles, but Bastian's gaze is on the sky as he walks, careless of his steps. Ariadne's been trying not to look at him much, because it's so weird to have Arthur with that look of unfettered joy on his face walking along, but as she glances in his direction, Bastian's foot connects with a twisting tree root and he's stumbling forwards much too quickly for Ariadne to help him.
Thankfully, Eames is close enough - and he automatically hurtles forward, twisting on his heels and crouching to catch Bastian before he faceplants into a particularly unpleasant looking tree. Eames' hands are on Bastian's elbows, and Eames' back is scraping the tree, and Bastian stumbles into him, momentum carrying him solidly into Eames' chest.
Eames looks down at Arthur's face, pressed so suddenly and awkwardly near his, and his expression is blank. Ariadne swallows, and it hurts, because Eames is schooling his emotions more tightly than she's ever seen him, and this has to be painful for him, to have Arthur so close and so far away.
Except, Bastian's voice is deeper than it has been when he says, "Eames," and then again, "Eames?" and Ariadne's heart is in her mouth, it's the only way she can describe it, because it's Arthur, oh, somehow, it's Arthur, and he's come back to them and they can stop this farce. And Eames has realized too, because his eyebrows are furrowed, and his face had been entirely blank.
Eames' eyes are scraping Arthur's face like he's been missing - not just his personality, but his whole body gone too. Eames is looking at Arthur like he hasn't seen him for a week, even though his face has been right there the whole time. Arthur - because it is Arthur, it is - makes that sound again in the back of his throat, the one he made when he was saying that Cobb didn't know what Arthur was giving up, and Ariadne knows what it means now, because it was Eames Arthur was giving up, is giving up, and Ariadne glances up to see if Cobb has realized.
Cobb turns around a moment later to see why they're not following him, and his eyes flicker to Arthur and Eames, and over to Ariadne, then back to Arthur and Eames for a moment. Arthur and Eames are almost frozen; Eames' hands tight on Arthur's elbows, their eyes locked on each other.
The trees around them that had been rustling gently in the wind start to quieten; a silence settles on the whole, frozen tableau as Bastian's subconscious can't populate the dream any more. His imagination is busy with something else.
Someone else.
On to part 4
Masterpost