inception: days i had with(out) you
days i had with(out) you
Arthur/Ariadne. ~1500 words. What they've got lately isn't enough.
At first you can't tell that she's left you. She didn't keep anything personal in your apartment in New York City. You think you didn't leave anything with her either, but a week later she mails you the few back-up ties you had kept at her Parisian studio. They are neatly pressed and rolled into an inventive tangle in the box, like a tapestry spiraling out, kept in place by inventive tucks and folds of paper. They smell more like you and your drycleaner than they do like her.
She isn't the kind to lay claim through indirect means. She isn't the kind to take souvenirs either.
When you see her next, she still lets you open doors for her. When you and Cobb take her out for her birthday, she still chooses the seat closest to yours. When you linger afterwards, she still stays behind, her elbow brushing yours, the edge of her scarf in her teeth while she waits for you to catch up.
When you try to reconstruct the dream level for the next job with her, she still almost, almost, rests her head against your shoulder when she squints at something you point to in the distance. Without touching her, you lean in close, wanting to smell her hair again, wanting to find that strain of lemon and carnation that you always associate with her. When she's the only one sharing your dream, the smell is everywhere-- in the streets she paves, in the bridges she coaxes from the ground-- and it makes you want to crush her against your chest.
When she is gone, the smell is too. That's how you know. She's left you.
*
It's not that I don't think you love me, she tells you.
What is it, then? you ask her, palming her ribs, her thin almost boyish body, the surprising and sweet curves of her breasts.
I think you've already made up your mind to be alone, she says. She sighs when you, trying to distract her, stroke gently up the inside of her legs, your fingers disappearing inside her, slow and easy so as to hide your trembling. Arthur, she murmurs, and for the next few minutes you think that if you can only make her moan, if you can give her such pleasure, she won't leave you. You can be hers, and she can build you from the inside out, the way in dreams, sometimes, one builds a staircase from the middle step out.
*
So you play at being unaffected, and for a while it works. You do another job, and another, and the third finds you and her and Cobb and Eames together again. When the job is over and you're all flushed with success and money, Eames invites you and Ariadne out for a drink. She sits by you at the table, even touches your knee when she jokes. At first it feels like nothing has changed. You're still a gentleman for her, and Eames swings the whole spectrum of overly affectionate uncle to absent older brother, and she slides between the two of you, balanced, a perfect pivot. You all drink one too many, and Eames calls dibs on walking her back to her hotel, and you promise to bring her breakfast the next morning, in bed, if she'll give you the key. She kisses you, sloppily, goodnight.
You dream that night, the first time in years, of how you'll win her back. Flowers, a room full of carnations. You'll swoop down and kiss her on the forehead, promise her you'll change. You'll tell her that she's wrong. You don't want to be alone. You don't know how to even be alone, when you're with her.
Then the next morning finds Eames coming out of her hotel room, yawning. "Hullo," he says when he sees you frozen in the corridor, staring. "'s good timing, I was just about to leave," and winks.
*
“Eames is a terrible idea," you tell her hotly over two cups of coffee and a box of doughnuts. She's brushing her teeth in the bathroom, and you drop everything onto the hotel room table, throwing yourself helplessly onto a chair like an afterthought.
"He's not an idea," she snaps, pulling her hair back to wash her face. "He just passed out on the bed. We weren't having ideas. And anyway," she says, her voice raised over the sound of the running faucet, "my ideas or lack thereof are really no longer your business, Arthur."
There's powdered sugar scattered on the hotel stationary from where you handled the doughnut box a little too forcefully. You sweep it into a trashcan so you don't have to watch her scratch the back of her ankle with her toes, that tiny gesture you saw so many times in your apartment. "Ariadne," you say, but there's nothing else you want to add.
You know your faults. You jump too quickly to conclusions. You retreat too easily when faced with emotional complexities. You are too comfortable in your own habits, too reluctant to learn new ones. You are too eager to please, yet too reluctant to let someone in.
You keep thinking you're only good enough for second best, she had told you on the fourth date, lying lazily on your chest while you stroked her hair. Why is that?
Because I know you best me at everything, you'd told her then, joking, so she would kiss you, and she did.
Now you might tell her instead that it is easier to be right about failure than to be wrong about success. Now you might tell her, you are a mess of complications, a tangle of a man who is too proud and too much of a coward. Now you might tell her that you are scared of losing happiness, and maybe that is why she thinks you want to be alone.
*
Miles offers her a study abroad program in Vienna that she takes in a heartbeat. You don't find out until months later, from Cobb. "She didn't tell you?" he asks, combing Phillipa's hair into pigtails. "She's been there since August."
"We don't talk much," you tell him. When he gives you a shocked, curious look, you realize he doesn't know. "Since we stopped seeing each other."
What a strange term, seeing each other. You still see her all the time, in the self-possessed girls with their hair pulled back who walk the streets of Paris, in the unexpected smell of frangipani as you pass by a dried flower store, in the gingerbread that was always her favorite and would make her kisses taste of cinnamon and crystallized spice afterwards, in the steely bite of a chablis you drink one night with Cobb. The chablis tasted of her voice, the way it would turn cold when you patronized her with limitations, how it would mellow out, gold and honey, when you made her laugh.
You wonder if she sees you in anything.
*
One Saturday morning you go to the warehouse in Paris, pull up a reclining chair, and plug yourself in. You wake up in Jardin du Luxembourg, watching Ariadne recreate the Lotus Building, the one in Delhi, right behind a mockup of the Guggenheim Museum. You know that this is merely a projection of yours. If it really were her, she'd create something new. She'd build you the Kunsthausvien inside out, or Fallingwater coming out of a mountain face with glass structures instead of a waterfall, or the Louvre with an inversion that allowed it to contain Montreal Biosphere. She'd build you things you couldn't dream of. She'd build you dreams inside of dreams.
But you can only make do with your own imagination, with the approximation of her. The smell of lemon and carnations blows past you on a breeze, sick and sweet with its inaccuracies, with how those inaccuracies show the depths to which you miss her.
"Arthur," the dream Ariadne says, not turning around. You can't imagine her face, can't recreate the way her eyes would burn with exultation and frustration whenever she built. It was always too much and never enough with her in dreams. She wanted the dreams to be real. She wanted reality to be dreams. That paradox made her real in a way that you can't, so you'd rather your dream keep her facing forward, facing away from you, letting you stay in your little illusion a while longer.
"Come over here and help me," she beckons, coaxing another petal out of steel.
"I can't," you tell her.
She shrugs, says, "Suit yourself," and then laughs. For a minute, the sound is so real, because you've heard it so many times before, memorized it and tucked it away. But it fades away unnaturally, leaving a sour taste in your mouth.
You tell her, "I love you. "
"I know," she says simply, and doesn't say anything more.
You stay seated on the grass. In the distance you can hear sound of metal twisting under her--your--imagination. Then the wind moving through the trees, like your longing moving through you.
*
notes: (1) I'm sorry for the second person. (2) I'm sorry that this never goes anywhere. (3) Go easy on me (I can't help what I'm doing). OKAY I WILL STOP QUOTING KINGS OF CONVENIENCE LYRICS. For your reference, the title is obviously from the song "Days I Had With You", the summary is from "Stay Out of Trouble". (4) I actually have a whole list of fics entitled "some stories i will never finish writing", and to tell the truth, this is one of the stories. I don't know where it was supposed to be going, I don't know what I wanted to say, I don't know where the story came from, I don't know what it adds to anything except my terrible attempts to write an Ariadne that is not beholden to any of the men in her life, and also I wanted to stop writing Arthur/Eames because I am really bad at it. GOD WHATEVER GUYS I AM REALLY SORRY I AM SERIOUSLY TRYING MY BEST now back to my criminal law reading.
Arthur/Ariadne. ~1500 words. What they've got lately isn't enough.
At first you can't tell that she's left you. She didn't keep anything personal in your apartment in New York City. You think you didn't leave anything with her either, but a week later she mails you the few back-up ties you had kept at her Parisian studio. They are neatly pressed and rolled into an inventive tangle in the box, like a tapestry spiraling out, kept in place by inventive tucks and folds of paper. They smell more like you and your drycleaner than they do like her.
She isn't the kind to lay claim through indirect means. She isn't the kind to take souvenirs either.
When you see her next, she still lets you open doors for her. When you and Cobb take her out for her birthday, she still chooses the seat closest to yours. When you linger afterwards, she still stays behind, her elbow brushing yours, the edge of her scarf in her teeth while she waits for you to catch up.
When you try to reconstruct the dream level for the next job with her, she still almost, almost, rests her head against your shoulder when she squints at something you point to in the distance. Without touching her, you lean in close, wanting to smell her hair again, wanting to find that strain of lemon and carnation that you always associate with her. When she's the only one sharing your dream, the smell is everywhere-- in the streets she paves, in the bridges she coaxes from the ground-- and it makes you want to crush her against your chest.
When she is gone, the smell is too. That's how you know. She's left you.
*
It's not that I don't think you love me, she tells you.
What is it, then? you ask her, palming her ribs, her thin almost boyish body, the surprising and sweet curves of her breasts.
I think you've already made up your mind to be alone, she says. She sighs when you, trying to distract her, stroke gently up the inside of her legs, your fingers disappearing inside her, slow and easy so as to hide your trembling. Arthur, she murmurs, and for the next few minutes you think that if you can only make her moan, if you can give her such pleasure, she won't leave you. You can be hers, and she can build you from the inside out, the way in dreams, sometimes, one builds a staircase from the middle step out.
*
So you play at being unaffected, and for a while it works. You do another job, and another, and the third finds you and her and Cobb and Eames together again. When the job is over and you're all flushed with success and money, Eames invites you and Ariadne out for a drink. She sits by you at the table, even touches your knee when she jokes. At first it feels like nothing has changed. You're still a gentleman for her, and Eames swings the whole spectrum of overly affectionate uncle to absent older brother, and she slides between the two of you, balanced, a perfect pivot. You all drink one too many, and Eames calls dibs on walking her back to her hotel, and you promise to bring her breakfast the next morning, in bed, if she'll give you the key. She kisses you, sloppily, goodnight.
You dream that night, the first time in years, of how you'll win her back. Flowers, a room full of carnations. You'll swoop down and kiss her on the forehead, promise her you'll change. You'll tell her that she's wrong. You don't want to be alone. You don't know how to even be alone, when you're with her.
Then the next morning finds Eames coming out of her hotel room, yawning. "Hullo," he says when he sees you frozen in the corridor, staring. "'s good timing, I was just about to leave," and winks.
*
“Eames is a terrible idea," you tell her hotly over two cups of coffee and a box of doughnuts. She's brushing her teeth in the bathroom, and you drop everything onto the hotel room table, throwing yourself helplessly onto a chair like an afterthought.
"He's not an idea," she snaps, pulling her hair back to wash her face. "He just passed out on the bed. We weren't having ideas. And anyway," she says, her voice raised over the sound of the running faucet, "my ideas or lack thereof are really no longer your business, Arthur."
There's powdered sugar scattered on the hotel stationary from where you handled the doughnut box a little too forcefully. You sweep it into a trashcan so you don't have to watch her scratch the back of her ankle with her toes, that tiny gesture you saw so many times in your apartment. "Ariadne," you say, but there's nothing else you want to add.
You know your faults. You jump too quickly to conclusions. You retreat too easily when faced with emotional complexities. You are too comfortable in your own habits, too reluctant to learn new ones. You are too eager to please, yet too reluctant to let someone in.
You keep thinking you're only good enough for second best, she had told you on the fourth date, lying lazily on your chest while you stroked her hair. Why is that?
Because I know you best me at everything, you'd told her then, joking, so she would kiss you, and she did.
Now you might tell her instead that it is easier to be right about failure than to be wrong about success. Now you might tell her, you are a mess of complications, a tangle of a man who is too proud and too much of a coward. Now you might tell her that you are scared of losing happiness, and maybe that is why she thinks you want to be alone.
*
Miles offers her a study abroad program in Vienna that she takes in a heartbeat. You don't find out until months later, from Cobb. "She didn't tell you?" he asks, combing Phillipa's hair into pigtails. "She's been there since August."
"We don't talk much," you tell him. When he gives you a shocked, curious look, you realize he doesn't know. "Since we stopped seeing each other."
What a strange term, seeing each other. You still see her all the time, in the self-possessed girls with their hair pulled back who walk the streets of Paris, in the unexpected smell of frangipani as you pass by a dried flower store, in the gingerbread that was always her favorite and would make her kisses taste of cinnamon and crystallized spice afterwards, in the steely bite of a chablis you drink one night with Cobb. The chablis tasted of her voice, the way it would turn cold when you patronized her with limitations, how it would mellow out, gold and honey, when you made her laugh.
You wonder if she sees you in anything.
*
One Saturday morning you go to the warehouse in Paris, pull up a reclining chair, and plug yourself in. You wake up in Jardin du Luxembourg, watching Ariadne recreate the Lotus Building, the one in Delhi, right behind a mockup of the Guggenheim Museum. You know that this is merely a projection of yours. If it really were her, she'd create something new. She'd build you the Kunsthausvien inside out, or Fallingwater coming out of a mountain face with glass structures instead of a waterfall, or the Louvre with an inversion that allowed it to contain Montreal Biosphere. She'd build you things you couldn't dream of. She'd build you dreams inside of dreams.
But you can only make do with your own imagination, with the approximation of her. The smell of lemon and carnations blows past you on a breeze, sick and sweet with its inaccuracies, with how those inaccuracies show the depths to which you miss her.
"Arthur," the dream Ariadne says, not turning around. You can't imagine her face, can't recreate the way her eyes would burn with exultation and frustration whenever she built. It was always too much and never enough with her in dreams. She wanted the dreams to be real. She wanted reality to be dreams. That paradox made her real in a way that you can't, so you'd rather your dream keep her facing forward, facing away from you, letting you stay in your little illusion a while longer.
"Come over here and help me," she beckons, coaxing another petal out of steel.
"I can't," you tell her.
She shrugs, says, "Suit yourself," and then laughs. For a minute, the sound is so real, because you've heard it so many times before, memorized it and tucked it away. But it fades away unnaturally, leaving a sour taste in your mouth.
You tell her, "I love you. "
"I know," she says simply, and doesn't say anything more.
You stay seated on the grass. In the distance you can hear sound of metal twisting under her--your--imagination. Then the wind moving through the trees, like your longing moving through you.
*
Click to viewnotes: (1) I'm sorry for the second person. (2) I'm sorry that this never goes anywhere. (3) Go easy on me (I can't help what I'm doing). OKAY I WILL STOP QUOTING KINGS OF CONVENIENCE LYRICS. For your reference, the title is obviously from the song "Days I Had With You", the summary is from "Stay Out of Trouble". (4) I actually have a whole list of fics entitled "some stories i will never finish writing", and to tell the truth, this is one of the stories. I don't know where it was supposed to be going, I don't know what I wanted to say, I don't know where the story came from, I don't know what it adds to anything except my terrible attempts to write an Ariadne that is not beholden to any of the men in her life, and also I wanted to stop writing Arthur/Eames because I am really bad at it. GOD WHATEVER GUYS I AM REALLY SORRY I AM SERIOUSLY TRYING MY BEST now back to my criminal law reading.