nothin' gets done with dust in your gun (original) (raw)

.title: nothin' gets done with dust in your gun
fandom: Inception
summary: Arthur lead her through mazes she built. She would get lost in his paradoxes, but any sign of a trip and he built some impossible solid ground without missing a beat. So prepared for everything, he was. (He hadn’t been prepared for her, despite a thorough investigation of the architect student.)
characters/pairings: Ariadne, Arthur/Ariadne
rating: PG
note: enjoy. (:

;;

Dry days left her with reminders of normalcy, and it made her sick to her stomach. Particularly when a throw-away comment on behalf of Yusuf on days before extraction and inception sounded like a wistful reminiscence. What was so great before, before? Nothing. Some good fucks, but all mostly blurring into each other (special boys were for girls without very creative dreams). Fulfilling course requirements that had nothing to do with architecture (granted, she finished these first awhile back, but still, wasted time). Two close friends off in another country, little to no contact. A few local friends who’ve got their own focuses (studies, girls, money) going on. Lines, limits, lepers to creativity. At least in comparison to the possibilities and unrealities she was exposed. She would not go back.

The dreams would leave her one day, and she would claw at her naivety of normalcy. But she wouldn’t be left shivering in the cold air of her bitterness. The cold was the best. She could wrap herself in anything, dream or not dream, arms, gloves, jackets, lips, etc. Nothing traumatic. These days felt the most normal to her. Days infected with chemicals, research (fine-pressed suits), schematics. The cold pressing the thrown outs, together.

Spring was leaping toward her at an unusual pace. The lack of heat, however, sufficed to pull a question out of her mouth. “How about a forger? Cobbs never hired a regular?”

Arthur seemed disinterested from the first syllable, but skip some minutes (two, 34 seconds she counted, probably incorrectly), he shrugged. He turned from his work that he always managed to build a wall around lest it was pertinent to her duty or whoever else was on whatever particular job, and said succinctly, “Our longest contracted forger lasted seven months. Corporate espionage, on her behalf of course. Cobb found her out pretty quickly. I dealt with her.”

Ariadne’s mouth parted slightly. But she snapped it shut and raised her left eyebrow at him.

“Forgers can’t be trusted. They impersonate, show you what you want. It’s one thing for it to be a talent, another for it to be innate. More often than not, it’s the latter.”

“You kill her?” Ariadne asked not wasting a space of moment.

“That’s not what you really want to know.”

He was right. But a file with her name on its label couldn’t possibly say that, infer that.

Arthur lead her through mazes she built. She would get lost in

his

paradoxes, but any sign of a trip and he built some impossible solid ground without missing a beat. So prepared for everything, he was. (He hadn’t been prepared for her, despite a thorough investigation of the architect student.)

A world built by he and she would be spectacular.

And his fingers branded her skin, the word special slow-dancing/lightning-fast drowning in her mind. He chewed at her skin, power coursing over her nerves and he had her building 23-story tailor shops in her brain, and webs of collateral glasses pulsated her curiosity when his mouth caved into hers.

He spoke to her of predictability and mentality. No one was the same, but fear never differed. He didn’t like speaking about past jobs, though in another era she could have predicted that he enjoyed antique treasures. There was a vast difference to him, however. Details had power, but whole pictures distracted from new complications.

For these reasons, amongst others (anxious affection was never a refined taste of hers), she was disaffected by his choice to loosely knot his fingers in hers only when in bed. It was when he held her tightly and closely, be it in bed, in dreams, in a neglected warehouse, that she worried of the nightmares he no longer had but still crossed memories he wished not to resurface.

She later asked “what did you mean, ‘dealt with her’?”.

He was irritated by the question immediately. He acknowledged her, and her question too. He licked his lips, held her eyes with what she would call contempt but reading people was not her forte (she wanted to say at least she could read him, but clearly this was where ‘special’ faltered), and tilted his chin upward. She believed he was on the cusp of breathing it out, saying something, but he appeared to change his mind or it was never his intention to say a thing. He turned to the machines that took them to anywhere she built, and waited until she lay in the browned lawn chair where he would hook her up, and he would follow.

A ride of the overflowing summer sun made for tiresome night with poor sleep. Arthur could tell she was uneasy (the heat, anyone, friend, family, stranger, Ariadne, would deduct, but he knew her). The fan overhead her bed beat an irritating rhythm, thus he shut it off. It wasn’t helping, anyhow. Removing his vest, tie, shirt, belt, and pants (they never said much prior to or during their encounters, only they lay in whatever setting together, but she would speak sometimes of all the work he left at her hands with his attire, she was oh so impatient, and when it wasn’t frustrating, he couldn’t get enough of her nature). He crawled beside her, letting his body curve into her back. He took an arm around her, kissed the nape of her neck. He heard her moan, but it was of displeasure from the now-growing heat.

He rubbed his nose into her shoulder, wrapped his legs around hers, and that aroused her from her dissatisfying sleep. She nearly jumped, but he held her tight, which only seemed to scare her more.

“Everything alright?” she said mumbling. Her eyes were red from the lack of sleep. It looked like she’d only been able to sneak in some five or ten minutes and he awoke her, but she could make up for it later.

“I romanced her,” he said, his eyes focusing on hers, “had her at odds with her boss over me. I got the information I needed from her. I didn’t know what to do with her when we got what we needed, and Cobbs didn’t want to send her back, knowing they’d kill her. He wasn’t a big fan of hers, but still. But she found out before we figured something out. She pulled herself together, negotiated something with our former employer, and we never heard from her again.”

(Telling her things about the past was not partially irksome in the least, he found. But this was probably just a one-time thing.)

“Was she just a job?” she asked, the question unintentionally coming out in a squeak.

“Yes,” he said, not blinking. But she seemed unsure. He placed his hand on her cheek, pulled her to his face, kissed her with the same fire he always managed to burn her with.

She braced herself on him, climbed over him, heard a resounding echo of “yes” without him having to verbalize it, and okay, she didn’t need to hear something twice to understand it.

“You never been in love, have you? That’s why you lack imagination,” Eames said with a cock-eyed smile.

“Love’s something us point-men read about under marital status and cross ex-lovers turned enemies,” Arthur said.

Ariadne read about love in required literature, experienced it once before even, but it was a great time only until time ran out and she moved on. Hearing Arthur say it drew no argument from her. Nonetheless, Eames pointed his gaze at her and asked, more pointedly than at Arthur, “and you, love? How’s life been to you in that department?”

Her mouth suddenly went dry, her brain fell silent. She should have shrugged, something. But it was only when she saw Arthur looking at her with the faint read of curiosity in a sideways glance that she clicked back into place. “Once,” she answered nonchalant, “I don’t miss it.”

“Ended badly, got it,” he mused in a low but audible whisper. He shrugged his questions and the architect and point man’s answers before and after Ariadne’s amendment of “it didn’t I just…don’t miss it.”

She turned her head to Arthur who was already back to his own work, and she could hear Mal’s crisp voice lauding “one half of a whole”. She snapped that terrible case of a nightmare and returned to building tangible things, like schematics to another’s dream.

Going into Arthur’s dreams to get ideas, build, expand were preferable above all else. And he allowed her access without question, despite her own barrage of new questioning that arose with each dawn. He often times smirked at her when her eyes contracted at the sights in his dreams, observed her with dead silence at each new question, answered the ones he knew concisely (he didn’t like answering to things he didn’t precisely know, although he would make “educated” guesses when he felt she could use the amusement).

Leaves broke beneath the toes of her sneakers as she walked toward the warehouse, and accompanying footsteps did the same. Her nose was pale, paler than the fog surrounding them, and he chuckled at her disarray of the cold that she so thoroughly enjoyed.

“I don’t feel like work today,” she admitted, and he smiled to himself.

He took her hand, though she hardly felt it through their respective glove-covered hands.

“There’s an apartment complex for lease ten miles west of here. You got your supplies?”

She furrowed her brows at him, but replied “yes”, obviously,” her large leather bound briefcase tucked into her side.

“It could use some work,” he said, and he whistled for a cab before she had time to ask a question. He could hear them in the slightly warmer space of the apartment complex that could flourish at her hands.

“If you don’t like the place,” he said, locking his eyes with hers, “we’ll find you another. It won’t be the same as dream-building, but you can work with anything. And, it’ll be just ours.”

It sounded so serenely romantic, which struck her as odd, but it didn’t have her emptying the contents of her stomach either.

Not noticing when the cab had stopped for them, she felt herself fall into a seat, and heard her door shut close. Arthur directed himself to the other door, and sat inches from her. She leveraged herself on her knuckles after the shock shrunk into itself, though her knees still felt what she guessed was weakness, and she leant over to him, pressing a softly faint kiss on his cheek. He tilted his head at her with a smug smile and a shine of light in his eye.

They both moved once over, where they sat touching thigh to thigh, and their hands found each other through threaded hands.

There was, of course, the question of it all being a dream. But fingering totems and all, it got tiresome, dull after awhile. So they trusted each other with the question. And if they got lost, stumbled into gardens with yards of centuries of “us, us, us forever”, they pulled out the gun and shot whoever was laced most into the lullaby, and that was that.

.