It's Not the Fall That Will Kill Us (It's the Landing)
Title: It’s Not the Fall That Will Kill Us (It’s the Landing)
Author: Classlicity
Fandom: Inception
Pairing/Characters: Ariadne/Arthur
Rating: PG-13 (for language)
Author’s notes: Thank you to solitudeinherk for the awesome manip (here) that inspired this story. Also many many thanks to sobota who was super quick to beta this, and has been my rock through a really rough time. Written for i_reversebang challenge.
Summary:
He slipped his business card, just a first name and a phone number on textured ivory card stock, discreetly into her carry-on as they deplaned, knowing she was smart enough to call if she was in danger.
--------
She called.
There wasn’t any danger.
“You know, at first I didn’t think you were the kind of person to be into this sort of thing,” Jen says, plopping herself on the bench across from Ariadne. Swiping one of her friend’s fries, she continues, “I mean, when I first met you, I thought you were one of those head-in-the-clouds types, not an adrenaline junkie like me.”
Their jumpsuits are crumpled on the empty spot on the bench next to Jen, High-Flying Skydiving School scrawled across the back.
Ariadne just shrugs, mouth too full of burger to respond, but that doesn’t stop her from swatting at Jen’s pilfering fingers. She swallows with an exaggerated gulp and grins at her friend. “I am a head-in-the-clouds kind of person. I just sometimes like to get pushed out of planes.”
--------
He slipped his business card, just a first name and a phone number on textured ivory card stock, discreetly into her carry-on as they deplaned, knowing she was smart enough to call if she was in danger.
--------
She called.
There wasn’t any danger.
--------
She likes to text him pictures. Mostly of her school projects in various states of assembly to get his opinion or coerce him into doing some of the structural math for her, since, as she puts it, ‘he’s way better at it.’
There are the joking pictures where she’s pantomiming hanging herself because the latest creation isn’t coming together, and the serious shots she takes of something she finds particularly vivid and beautiful and dreamlike, and one from when she had the craziest morning hair ever.
He should delete that one, he thinks.
--------
Ariadne had met Jen when they were both in their first graduate-level drafting course. Jen looked completely different, with short purple hair and her earlobes only slightly stretched. They shared a desk for four months, becoming the sort-of-friends that slipped away once their class was finished.
Jen loved bridges.
--------
His texts are to the point. Though he’s not above using the occasional acronym, she has never received a single emoticon. She double checks one night when she’s drunk on cheap rosé and coming down from an adrenaline high.
There are six of them crashed out in their hostel in Grenoble, and Ariadne loves the blissed-out feeling that’s left behind when her heart stops pounding. Because she’s the littlest, everyone tends to forget she’s twenty-three, not thirteen, so Ariadne gets away with a lot, like using Henri’s lap as a pillow when his normally jealous girlfriend is sitting only a foot away. Marguerite is smiling and obviously feeling it too; whether it is the spine-tingling-aliveness of throwing oneself off a bridge, or the more mundane affects of three-euro wine.
“Give me your phone,” Henri demands, snatching it out of her hands before she has a chance to say no. “I will send your boyfriend another picture, because he is too stupid to come see for himself.”
Ariadne bites him on the thigh, hard enough that Henri yelps. Laughing, he snaps a picture of her with her teeth bared. Marguerite joins her, doing her best impression of a lioness, and then Jen and Erik start howling like wolves, and it devolves into a cacophony of animal noises until someone in the common room comes and pounds on their door.
-------
“You’re kidding, right?” he asks when she finally confesses to her new hobby.
Three words and she knows exactly how deeply his brow is furrowed.
“Why would I lie about it?”
“Why would you do it in the first place? So many things can go wrong, and no one’s even paying you.”
“The exact opposite really,” she jokes, but it doesn’t take.
“Ariadne,” he says as a warning.
“Arthur,” she replies, voice as even as his.
-------
They don’t speak for two months.
-------
That summer, Ariadne travels. She hops around the Mediterranean, starting with a week in Marseilles. A group of gangly teenage boys strut around on the beach as she sketches the nearby cliffs, swearing at each other in creative French. Finally, after one too many cries of “Foussard! Foussard!” the youngest begins climbing his way to the top. It’s not steep and he’s got the sure feet of a local, so his inelegant scrambling gets him there quickly.
Stripping off his shirt, he casts a quick glance down at his friends on the beach. The boy shouts something at them prompting whistles and cat calls. With a crazy Tarzan cry, he sprints towards the edge of the cliff and hurls himself feet-first into the sea.
A cheer goes up from the boys, and it becomes a mad dash to see who is jumping next.
Ariadne is fourth.
------
In Malta, she signs herself up for a tandem paragliding session. Her pilot’s a retired English engineer named John who made thirteen million pounds on a patent for a better axle shaft bearing that he sold to an auto-manufacturing conglomerate. He has two children who won’t leave him be about their inheritance, and a Pomeranian that his wife adores and he loathes. Ariadne hopes he’s not quite so talkative on their flight.
Other than the occasional “Steady on” or “that’s my girl” where John is clearly addressing his equipment, he’s silent, content to let the scenery speak for itself.
It feels a bit like a dream. Like it shouldn’t exist, and that it will slip away as soon as her feet hit the ground.
John expertly skims them along the beach below, and they land with a few quick steps to collapse their wing and bring it out of the wind.
“Just lovely, isn’t it?” he asks. His eyes skim across the water, and Ariadne tries to follow his gaze, finding nothing but the sun beginning to set. “Wish my Sophie would visit. She could bring the kids.”
As John begins the process of folding his gear up to put it in the attached backpack, Ariadne fishes her phone out of a zippered pocket in her suit. She snaps a shot of him hunched over, with the sunset of in the background.
This is John, she types. He’s lovely.
Her finger hesitates over the send button, but she presses it anyway.
-------
Several hours later, after she’s showered and changed for bed and has had more rum than is probably advisable, her phone buzzes on the night stand.
He’s a little old for you, don’t you think?
-------
Ariadne finally makes it to Greece by way of Italy, a plane ride she’d been avoiding her entire time in Europe. She feels like an intruder there, with her mythological name and Irish ancestry.
Jen meets up with her in Athens, and they spend their nights getting drunk and their days drawing statues older than their homeland. Jen’s hair is neon red and she has a new tattoo.
One Thursday evening, bottle of ouzo in hand, Jen makes a spectacular argument as to why Ariadne should get a minotaur breathing fire across her ribs, but then they both start laughing so hard they forget why it’s a good idea.
-------
Arthur doesn’t understand why he wakes up to a doodle of a man with a bull’s head in his inbox.
Ariadne nearly spits out her dolmas when she opens her phone to a close up of a raised eyebrow she would know anywhere.
-------
He calls her three weeks into the fall semester, and she’s so surprised she almost doesn’t answer. It’s awkward in a way that the conversations she initiates never are.
Always to the point, Arthur says, “I’m coming to town next week.”
“Oh? For business or pleasure?”
“I’ve got a job in Brussels on the fifteenth. So I thought I’d take the train from Paris.”
He pauses when there’s nothing but silence on the line. “If it’s not a good time, I can fly straight there.”
“No,” she stutters, “that would be great. Really great.”
By the time they hang up, her heart is pounding like she is two seconds away from opening her parachute.
-------
His flight gets in later than he would like, but he doesn’t bother complaining. The TSA is the TSA, and nothing he can do will change that. Once, on a flight from JFK to Naples, he wondered what it would have been like if he’d taken the offered job with Homeland Security after he was discharged. Within the first hour of the flight, he’d calculated, based on average speed of promotion (accelerated, of course, for exemplary work), standard career path, and congress’s proposed budget, that he would be making nearly twenty-four hundred and seventeen dollars less per hour.
The next two hours of the flight he spent figuring out who he would have to kill in order to finally force some efficiency upon the department, and honestly, thirty-seven bodies just aren’t worth the pay cut.
And it’s a moot point anyway, he thinks, pulling a non-descript black suitcase from the carousel, as he never even made it to the ‘honorable discharge’ part.
Except that his flight gets in later than he would like because the TSA had installed those ridiculous full body scanners, and some dumb tourist in LA had thrown a fit, and the ensuing scene had closed down three security lines for international flights, and everyone had gotten delayed, so he’d missed Ariadne’s text about dinner because he’d still been in the air.
-------
“So, do you still talk to the others?” she asks.
The café is softly lit, and probably more romantic than she meant it to be, but it was the first place she could think of when she received Arthur’s Just got in. Drinks?.
He runs a finger around the rim of his tumbler. It’s warm enough that condensation beads on the side of the glass, and Arthur’s particular enough to not enjoy having to wipe his fingers off after every swig.
“Depends,” he answers honestly. “I check up on Cobb every now and then to make sure he’s okay. Eames turns up on jobs once in awhile. Yusuf, rarely.”
A blush creeps up her neck despite her best efforts to appear nonchalant. Ariadne doesn’t really know what to do with the information, but it pleases her to be the only one of the old team he still talks to with regularity.
“What about you?” he asks, afraid of the silence that skirts the edge of their conversation.
“No, never.”
Humming in acknowledgement, Arthur takes a long drink of his gin and tonic. This was a bad idea. He’s tired and he’s not used to this blushing, quiet version of Ariadne; it makes his tongue heavy and his brain slow.
Ariadne stretches, ready to bury all thoughts of her ill-advised crush. Her foot brushes against the solid weight of Arthur’s suitcase.
“Did you,” she asks, eyes wide and glimmering with the hint of an idea, “bring it?”
He smiles with the corner of his mouth and raises a lordly eyebrow. “What do you think?”
All hesitation forgotten, Ariadne grabs his hand. “Can I show you something? I’ve been playing with it when I get bored in class.”
-------
Arthur’s hotel is close, and it’s only a few minutes before they’re checked in and Ariadne is poking around the small room in bare feet, trying to not seem overly eager while Arthur fishes innocuous looking parts from between his pressed shirts. He pops the more complex pieces from a secret compartment at the bottom of his suitcase.
He lays them out on the bed and begins the process of screwing it all together. Glancing over his shoulder, he catches Ariadne watching him like a hawk. “I know you have questions. You might as well ask.”
She crowds his personal space trying to get closer to watch, and Arthur finds he can’t mind when her small mouth breaks into a wide grin.
-------
It’s not quite Paris, but the air hums with the idealism of the city of lights. The buildings, though, have the sleeker, more modern edges of Singapore or Tokyo. It’s Ariadne’s dream, through and through.
She drags him through the streets, past patisseries and green grocers and tiny corner cafés like the one they were at that night. He tries to slow her down, stroll a bit and take in the sights and smells that she’s dreamed up, but Ariadne has a destination in mind and he’s finding it hard to untangle their fingers.
The moment he sees it, he stops dead in his tracks.
“That’s amazing, Ariadne.”
And it really is. It’s a double helix of an apartment building, but Ariadne has twined two different ribbons together so that it works in the third dimension. It’s all glinting glass with exposed girders that wrap around the tower as a single piece of metal that could never exist in reality. The sun begins to set on her city and Arthur knows that this is a gift.
When he can finally tear his eyes away, he looks over at her and she’s beaming. Not because of his praise, but because it’s perfect.
“Come on,” she tugs at his hand again, “we’re on the clock.”
He half expects to be taken on an elevator ride straight from a Roald Dahl story, but despite the beautiful décor, the inside is much like any high end apartment building he’d been in. It’s no surprise, but Ariadne punches the penthouse button.
She sticks her tongue out at him when he smirks at her. “What? It’s my dream.”
“That it is.”
Ariadne’s dream apartment mimics the soft and sharp of her cityscape. The fading light streams in through the floor to ceiling windows. Arthur tugs at the knot of his tie, nearly forgetting himself. It would feel good to live here, be able to sink into the over-stuffed couch, eat dinner at the granite-topped island with the spectacular view.
“And this isn’t even the best part.”
“Then lead the way,” he says.
She takes him up a back stairwell, ramming her shoulder into the heavy fire door at the top to get it open. The rooftop has been transformed into a garden; a useful one, he notes, spotting basil and thyme and chervil in brightly colored pots.
He runs a hand through the basil, letting the scent, meticulously rendered as always, wash over him -the perfect notes of pepper and licorice and green.
When he looks up, Ariadne is standing at the ledge of the roof, staring off into space. She catches his eye, smiling wide.
“Are you ready?” she asks, beckoning him over.
He smiles back, crossing the terracotta patio to take her hand. “Ready for what?”
“The best part, of course,” Ariadne answers, stepping up on the low curb of the roof.
It puts them almost at the same height, so when she tugs on his fingers and pulls him to her she’s looking right into his eyes. He’s smiling, but he’s gone completely still, barely even breathing. She bites her bottom lip, anticipation sparking across her skin.
She leans forward an inch and their lips brush. Arthur raises a hand to her face, trying to hold her there, press closer, but she pushes him away.
Spreading her arms wide, Ariadne winks at him. “See you in a minute.”
“What are you doing?”
He reaches out to grab her but she’s already jumping, laughing. The wind rushing past is so loud that she can’t hear the gunshot, can’t hear anything but the pounding of blood in her ears.
-------
Gasping awake, Ariadne pulls the needle from her vein roughly. She scrambles over to Arthur’s side of the bed, not as careful as she should be, but she’s alive, so alive, and shivering with it. Everything is sharper, realer, than it was ten minutes ago.
Arthur’s already awake when she straddles him. Desperate to share the electricity thrumming in her veins, Ariadne buries her face in the crook of his neck, kissing and biting, hands squirming between them to tug at his buckle.
“What the fuck, Ariadne?” he barks, twisting his hips and rolling them over. He grabs her wrists and pins them over her head with a single hand. “What the fuck was that?”
His face is a mask, cold and dangerous, and she doesn’t want to answer his question. She blinks up at him, eyes impossibly wide. He grips her wrists tighter and tighter until she squeaks in pain. The sound breaks something in him.
“I can’t do this.” Arthur shoves himself off the bed, shaking his head. “Get out.”
He refuses to look at her, concentrating on the tiny bottle of vodka he pulls from the mini bar. The fucking cap sticks as he tries to wrench it open.
Ariadne watches him though, still hungry. “What is your fucking problem, Arthur? Who shoved that giant stick up your ass?”
His hand shakes as he carefully places three ice cubes in his glass. Vodka next, then soda, because there was no tonic. He takes a measured sip, finally turning to meet her eyes.
“You throw yourself off a building,” his voice is strained, “and you have the audacity to wonder why I’m upset?”
“I…” she looks like a fish with her mouth opening and closing while she tries to decide what to say. Arthur frowns at her, waiting.
“I just like waking up.”
Setting his glass down, Arthur pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs heavily. Ariadne slides off the bed, ashamed, looking for her shoes.
Arthur stays quiet until her hand is on the doorknob. “This is our fault,” he says.
She doesn’t say anything, can’t move, can’t do anything but swallow half-hearted apologies.
A card is pressed into her free hand. Thick and textured and she knows the printed number on it by heart.
“If you’re going to keep it up, you need help. Jorg is good. You should forget about it and graduate and be a happy, normal person, but if you won’t, you should call him.”
Nodding mutely, Ariadne slides the card into the pocket of her jeans.
“And don’t call me.”
-------
She collapses in the hallway just outside the door, sliding down the wall to sit on the coarse carpet. Knees to her chest, she sobs until she can’t feel her face anymore.
-------
She doesn’t call.
-------
He really should delete that picture.
Author: Classlicity
Fandom: Inception
Pairing/Characters: Ariadne/Arthur
Rating: PG-13 (for language)
Author’s notes: Thank you to solitudeinherk for the awesome manip (here) that inspired this story. Also many many thanks to sobota who was super quick to beta this, and has been my rock through a really rough time. Written for i_reversebang challenge.
Summary:
He slipped his business card, just a first name and a phone number on textured ivory card stock, discreetly into her carry-on as they deplaned, knowing she was smart enough to call if she was in danger.
--------
She called.
There wasn’t any danger.
“You know, at first I didn’t think you were the kind of person to be into this sort of thing,” Jen says, plopping herself on the bench across from Ariadne. Swiping one of her friend’s fries, she continues, “I mean, when I first met you, I thought you were one of those head-in-the-clouds types, not an adrenaline junkie like me.”
Their jumpsuits are crumpled on the empty spot on the bench next to Jen, High-Flying Skydiving School scrawled across the back.
Ariadne just shrugs, mouth too full of burger to respond, but that doesn’t stop her from swatting at Jen’s pilfering fingers. She swallows with an exaggerated gulp and grins at her friend. “I am a head-in-the-clouds kind of person. I just sometimes like to get pushed out of planes.”
--------
He slipped his business card, just a first name and a phone number on textured ivory card stock, discreetly into her carry-on as they deplaned, knowing she was smart enough to call if she was in danger.
--------
She called.
There wasn’t any danger.
--------
She likes to text him pictures. Mostly of her school projects in various states of assembly to get his opinion or coerce him into doing some of the structural math for her, since, as she puts it, ‘he’s way better at it.’
There are the joking pictures where she’s pantomiming hanging herself because the latest creation isn’t coming together, and the serious shots she takes of something she finds particularly vivid and beautiful and dreamlike, and one from when she had the craziest morning hair ever.
He should delete that one, he thinks.
--------
Ariadne had met Jen when they were both in their first graduate-level drafting course. Jen looked completely different, with short purple hair and her earlobes only slightly stretched. They shared a desk for four months, becoming the sort-of-friends that slipped away once their class was finished.
Jen loved bridges.
--------
His texts are to the point. Though he’s not above using the occasional acronym, she has never received a single emoticon. She double checks one night when she’s drunk on cheap rosé and coming down from an adrenaline high.
There are six of them crashed out in their hostel in Grenoble, and Ariadne loves the blissed-out feeling that’s left behind when her heart stops pounding. Because she’s the littlest, everyone tends to forget she’s twenty-three, not thirteen, so Ariadne gets away with a lot, like using Henri’s lap as a pillow when his normally jealous girlfriend is sitting only a foot away. Marguerite is smiling and obviously feeling it too; whether it is the spine-tingling-aliveness of throwing oneself off a bridge, or the more mundane affects of three-euro wine.
“Give me your phone,” Henri demands, snatching it out of her hands before she has a chance to say no. “I will send your boyfriend another picture, because he is too stupid to come see for himself.”
Ariadne bites him on the thigh, hard enough that Henri yelps. Laughing, he snaps a picture of her with her teeth bared. Marguerite joins her, doing her best impression of a lioness, and then Jen and Erik start howling like wolves, and it devolves into a cacophony of animal noises until someone in the common room comes and pounds on their door.
-------
“You’re kidding, right?” he asks when she finally confesses to her new hobby.
Three words and she knows exactly how deeply his brow is furrowed.
“Why would I lie about it?”
“Why would you do it in the first place? So many things can go wrong, and no one’s even paying you.”
“The exact opposite really,” she jokes, but it doesn’t take.
“Ariadne,” he says as a warning.
“Arthur,” she replies, voice as even as his.
-------
They don’t speak for two months.
-------
That summer, Ariadne travels. She hops around the Mediterranean, starting with a week in Marseilles. A group of gangly teenage boys strut around on the beach as she sketches the nearby cliffs, swearing at each other in creative French. Finally, after one too many cries of “Foussard! Foussard!” the youngest begins climbing his way to the top. It’s not steep and he’s got the sure feet of a local, so his inelegant scrambling gets him there quickly.
Stripping off his shirt, he casts a quick glance down at his friends on the beach. The boy shouts something at them prompting whistles and cat calls. With a crazy Tarzan cry, he sprints towards the edge of the cliff and hurls himself feet-first into the sea.
A cheer goes up from the boys, and it becomes a mad dash to see who is jumping next.
Ariadne is fourth.
------
In Malta, she signs herself up for a tandem paragliding session. Her pilot’s a retired English engineer named John who made thirteen million pounds on a patent for a better axle shaft bearing that he sold to an auto-manufacturing conglomerate. He has two children who won’t leave him be about their inheritance, and a Pomeranian that his wife adores and he loathes. Ariadne hopes he’s not quite so talkative on their flight.
Other than the occasional “Steady on” or “that’s my girl” where John is clearly addressing his equipment, he’s silent, content to let the scenery speak for itself.
It feels a bit like a dream. Like it shouldn’t exist, and that it will slip away as soon as her feet hit the ground.
John expertly skims them along the beach below, and they land with a few quick steps to collapse their wing and bring it out of the wind.
“Just lovely, isn’t it?” he asks. His eyes skim across the water, and Ariadne tries to follow his gaze, finding nothing but the sun beginning to set. “Wish my Sophie would visit. She could bring the kids.”
As John begins the process of folding his gear up to put it in the attached backpack, Ariadne fishes her phone out of a zippered pocket in her suit. She snaps a shot of him hunched over, with the sunset of in the background.
This is John, she types. He’s lovely.
Her finger hesitates over the send button, but she presses it anyway.
-------
Several hours later, after she’s showered and changed for bed and has had more rum than is probably advisable, her phone buzzes on the night stand.
He’s a little old for you, don’t you think?
-------
Ariadne finally makes it to Greece by way of Italy, a plane ride she’d been avoiding her entire time in Europe. She feels like an intruder there, with her mythological name and Irish ancestry.
Jen meets up with her in Athens, and they spend their nights getting drunk and their days drawing statues older than their homeland. Jen’s hair is neon red and she has a new tattoo.
One Thursday evening, bottle of ouzo in hand, Jen makes a spectacular argument as to why Ariadne should get a minotaur breathing fire across her ribs, but then they both start laughing so hard they forget why it’s a good idea.
-------
Arthur doesn’t understand why he wakes up to a doodle of a man with a bull’s head in his inbox.
Ariadne nearly spits out her dolmas when she opens her phone to a close up of a raised eyebrow she would know anywhere.
-------
He calls her three weeks into the fall semester, and she’s so surprised she almost doesn’t answer. It’s awkward in a way that the conversations she initiates never are.
Always to the point, Arthur says, “I’m coming to town next week.”
“Oh? For business or pleasure?”
“I’ve got a job in Brussels on the fifteenth. So I thought I’d take the train from Paris.”
He pauses when there’s nothing but silence on the line. “If it’s not a good time, I can fly straight there.”
“No,” she stutters, “that would be great. Really great.”
By the time they hang up, her heart is pounding like she is two seconds away from opening her parachute.
-------
His flight gets in later than he would like, but he doesn’t bother complaining. The TSA is the TSA, and nothing he can do will change that. Once, on a flight from JFK to Naples, he wondered what it would have been like if he’d taken the offered job with Homeland Security after he was discharged. Within the first hour of the flight, he’d calculated, based on average speed of promotion (accelerated, of course, for exemplary work), standard career path, and congress’s proposed budget, that he would be making nearly twenty-four hundred and seventeen dollars less per hour.
The next two hours of the flight he spent figuring out who he would have to kill in order to finally force some efficiency upon the department, and honestly, thirty-seven bodies just aren’t worth the pay cut.
And it’s a moot point anyway, he thinks, pulling a non-descript black suitcase from the carousel, as he never even made it to the ‘honorable discharge’ part.
Except that his flight gets in later than he would like because the TSA had installed those ridiculous full body scanners, and some dumb tourist in LA had thrown a fit, and the ensuing scene had closed down three security lines for international flights, and everyone had gotten delayed, so he’d missed Ariadne’s text about dinner because he’d still been in the air.
-------
“So, do you still talk to the others?” she asks.
The café is softly lit, and probably more romantic than she meant it to be, but it was the first place she could think of when she received Arthur’s Just got in. Drinks?.
He runs a finger around the rim of his tumbler. It’s warm enough that condensation beads on the side of the glass, and Arthur’s particular enough to not enjoy having to wipe his fingers off after every swig.
“Depends,” he answers honestly. “I check up on Cobb every now and then to make sure he’s okay. Eames turns up on jobs once in awhile. Yusuf, rarely.”
A blush creeps up her neck despite her best efforts to appear nonchalant. Ariadne doesn’t really know what to do with the information, but it pleases her to be the only one of the old team he still talks to with regularity.
“What about you?” he asks, afraid of the silence that skirts the edge of their conversation.
“No, never.”
Humming in acknowledgement, Arthur takes a long drink of his gin and tonic. This was a bad idea. He’s tired and he’s not used to this blushing, quiet version of Ariadne; it makes his tongue heavy and his brain slow.
Ariadne stretches, ready to bury all thoughts of her ill-advised crush. Her foot brushes against the solid weight of Arthur’s suitcase.
“Did you,” she asks, eyes wide and glimmering with the hint of an idea, “bring it?”
He smiles with the corner of his mouth and raises a lordly eyebrow. “What do you think?”
All hesitation forgotten, Ariadne grabs his hand. “Can I show you something? I’ve been playing with it when I get bored in class.”
-------
Arthur’s hotel is close, and it’s only a few minutes before they’re checked in and Ariadne is poking around the small room in bare feet, trying to not seem overly eager while Arthur fishes innocuous looking parts from between his pressed shirts. He pops the more complex pieces from a secret compartment at the bottom of his suitcase.
He lays them out on the bed and begins the process of screwing it all together. Glancing over his shoulder, he catches Ariadne watching him like a hawk. “I know you have questions. You might as well ask.”
She crowds his personal space trying to get closer to watch, and Arthur finds he can’t mind when her small mouth breaks into a wide grin.
-------
It’s not quite Paris, but the air hums with the idealism of the city of lights. The buildings, though, have the sleeker, more modern edges of Singapore or Tokyo. It’s Ariadne’s dream, through and through.
She drags him through the streets, past patisseries and green grocers and tiny corner cafés like the one they were at that night. He tries to slow her down, stroll a bit and take in the sights and smells that she’s dreamed up, but Ariadne has a destination in mind and he’s finding it hard to untangle their fingers.
The moment he sees it, he stops dead in his tracks.
“That’s amazing, Ariadne.”
And it really is. It’s a double helix of an apartment building, but Ariadne has twined two different ribbons together so that it works in the third dimension. It’s all glinting glass with exposed girders that wrap around the tower as a single piece of metal that could never exist in reality. The sun begins to set on her city and Arthur knows that this is a gift.
When he can finally tear his eyes away, he looks over at her and she’s beaming. Not because of his praise, but because it’s perfect.
“Come on,” she tugs at his hand again, “we’re on the clock.”
He half expects to be taken on an elevator ride straight from a Roald Dahl story, but despite the beautiful décor, the inside is much like any high end apartment building he’d been in. It’s no surprise, but Ariadne punches the penthouse button.
She sticks her tongue out at him when he smirks at her. “What? It’s my dream.”
“That it is.”
Ariadne’s dream apartment mimics the soft and sharp of her cityscape. The fading light streams in through the floor to ceiling windows. Arthur tugs at the knot of his tie, nearly forgetting himself. It would feel good to live here, be able to sink into the over-stuffed couch, eat dinner at the granite-topped island with the spectacular view.
“And this isn’t even the best part.”
“Then lead the way,” he says.
She takes him up a back stairwell, ramming her shoulder into the heavy fire door at the top to get it open. The rooftop has been transformed into a garden; a useful one, he notes, spotting basil and thyme and chervil in brightly colored pots.
He runs a hand through the basil, letting the scent, meticulously rendered as always, wash over him -the perfect notes of pepper and licorice and green.
When he looks up, Ariadne is standing at the ledge of the roof, staring off into space. She catches his eye, smiling wide.
“Are you ready?” she asks, beckoning him over.
He smiles back, crossing the terracotta patio to take her hand. “Ready for what?”
“The best part, of course,” Ariadne answers, stepping up on the low curb of the roof.
It puts them almost at the same height, so when she tugs on his fingers and pulls him to her she’s looking right into his eyes. He’s smiling, but he’s gone completely still, barely even breathing. She bites her bottom lip, anticipation sparking across her skin.
She leans forward an inch and their lips brush. Arthur raises a hand to her face, trying to hold her there, press closer, but she pushes him away.
Spreading her arms wide, Ariadne winks at him. “See you in a minute.”
“What are you doing?”
He reaches out to grab her but she’s already jumping, laughing. The wind rushing past is so loud that she can’t hear the gunshot, can’t hear anything but the pounding of blood in her ears.
-------
Gasping awake, Ariadne pulls the needle from her vein roughly. She scrambles over to Arthur’s side of the bed, not as careful as she should be, but she’s alive, so alive, and shivering with it. Everything is sharper, realer, than it was ten minutes ago.
Arthur’s already awake when she straddles him. Desperate to share the electricity thrumming in her veins, Ariadne buries her face in the crook of his neck, kissing and biting, hands squirming between them to tug at his buckle.
“What the fuck, Ariadne?” he barks, twisting his hips and rolling them over. He grabs her wrists and pins them over her head with a single hand. “What the fuck was that?”
His face is a mask, cold and dangerous, and she doesn’t want to answer his question. She blinks up at him, eyes impossibly wide. He grips her wrists tighter and tighter until she squeaks in pain. The sound breaks something in him.
“I can’t do this.” Arthur shoves himself off the bed, shaking his head. “Get out.”
He refuses to look at her, concentrating on the tiny bottle of vodka he pulls from the mini bar. The fucking cap sticks as he tries to wrench it open.
Ariadne watches him though, still hungry. “What is your fucking problem, Arthur? Who shoved that giant stick up your ass?”
His hand shakes as he carefully places three ice cubes in his glass. Vodka next, then soda, because there was no tonic. He takes a measured sip, finally turning to meet her eyes.
“You throw yourself off a building,” his voice is strained, “and you have the audacity to wonder why I’m upset?”
“I…” she looks like a fish with her mouth opening and closing while she tries to decide what to say. Arthur frowns at her, waiting.
“I just like waking up.”
Setting his glass down, Arthur pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs heavily. Ariadne slides off the bed, ashamed, looking for her shoes.
Arthur stays quiet until her hand is on the doorknob. “This is our fault,” he says.
She doesn’t say anything, can’t move, can’t do anything but swallow half-hearted apologies.
A card is pressed into her free hand. Thick and textured and she knows the printed number on it by heart.
“If you’re going to keep it up, you need help. Jorg is good. You should forget about it and graduate and be a happy, normal person, but if you won’t, you should call him.”
Nodding mutely, Ariadne slides the card into the pocket of her jeans.
“And don’t call me.”
-------
She collapses in the hallway just outside the door, sliding down the wall to sit on the coarse carpet. Knees to her chest, she sobs until she can’t feel her face anymore.
-------
She doesn’t call.
-------
He really should delete that picture.