Disclaimer: I don't own Inception.


Dreaming In Color

It's a year after the Fischer job the next time he sees her. There she is, on a street corner in the middle of New York, plain as day. It's enough to make him brush the pocket of his pants with his hand, enough to make him need the security of his totem to make sure she isn't a dream. But he knows he wouldn't dream of her this way.

She's a mess. It's dark and it's raining and she's halfheartedly dangling an arm out for a cab, and even from here he sees her lips thinning in frustrating the way they did when she was poring over her models last year. But nothing else about her seems recognizable. She has traded in those jeans that sagged too low and left too much of her torso bare (merely an observation) and that silly scarf she wore for a pencil skirt, a severe-looking collared blouse, and stilettos she can barely wobble on. She looks like a little girl trying to play dress-up. It's pathetic, but it endears her.

Like a magnet he is drawn to her, already crossing the street before he can make a conscious decision to move. The closer her gets the more uneasy he feels. Something is wrong. She carries herself like a bruise, holds her limbs too tightly against herself, and casts her eyes downward. It's certainly no way to hail a cab, let alone live.

Already he's imagining how he'll approach her. He'll reach the corner and sidle up next to her easily, and in her distraction it might take her a few moments to realize he's sheltering her with his umbrella. Then, perplexed, she'll look up and catch his eye. A beat will pass as her brown eyes lock on his. He'll smirk at her, and maybe she'll feel at ease for just a moment, seeing that he is in control of the situation even though she is a disaster. For that moment he will be the rock in her stormy seas, and once that moment has sunk in he'll say something short, something witty, something perfect, and she'll smile like she used to.

By the time he reaches the corner she's already spilling into a taxi, completely and hopelessly unaware of his pursuit. He stands on the sidewalk, feeling stupid, and as the cab drives away he catches a glimpse of her through the window—watches as her shoulders sink, her chin wobbles, and a fat tear rolls down her cheek.

He sees her face long after she leaves his sight.


It doesn't take long to track her down. She's interning with a prestigious architecture firm in the city, not too far from the street corner where he saw her, and living in a pit a good hour away. It's evident that he has too much time on her hands when he starts memorizing her routine: she's out the door by seven in the morning and doesn't leave the building until eight at night, barely managing to scrape in excuses for meals from convenience store across the street.

He's stalking her. His next assignment doesn't start for a month because, yet again, they need another architect. They lose them easily, but none were as big a loss as Ariadne.

Several times he has struck up the nerve to approach her again, but every time something stops him. The curve of her neck tilted toward the ground, the way he caught her heaving the world's weariest sigh, the knot of her eyebrows as she stared out the window of a coffee shop and ignored the tea cup and the gridded pad and pencil in front of her. She's sad. Lonely, even. He wants to fix her but he knows that after what happened he doesn't have the right.

After a week of revolving around her he tells himself to quit. He has three weeks until the assignment so he fills his days running through central park, writing anonymous pieces on his theories on the subconscious, and dreaming.

He dreams now. He never used to, not even as a child, before he could ever have fathomed what his subconscious was capable of. But ever since the Fischer job he has not only dreamed, but dreamed in bright, vivid colors—dreamed every night—dreamed of her.

It's two weeks after he runs into her that he fears he is blurring the line between dreams and reality because he goes to her apartment, knocks on the door, and kisses her, and the kiss lasts and lasts and every part of him is unfathomably and irrevocably devoted to feeling the heat of her against him before he wakes up, his heart pounding miserably in his chest, mocking him.

His totem becomes an obsession. He is ashamed by how quickly he succumbs to his own desires, even if it is only dreaming, and he is ashamed for having them in the first place. Constantly he is checking his pockets for the totem's familiar weight, because he guiltily thinks to himself that it's okay if it's not real. It's okay to shut the door and pin her to the wall and skim a hand up her skirt as long as it isn't really happening, as long as he isn't actually going to her apartment and doing it to the actual object of his obsession, as long as it's only pretend.


He's running in Central Park when he feels his cell phone vibrating in his pocket.

"Eames," says Arthur.

"How did you know it was me?"

"Details are my specialty." Arthur slows his pace to a walk and smirks. "And you forgot to block the caller ID this time."

"Cute. I've been trying to get in touch with you for weeks. Where are you?"

"Around."

"Around what? An encyclopedia of cheeky ambiguities?"

Arthur kicks at a stray rock in his path. "What do you need, Eames?"

"The architect we signed on for the next job—"

He feels his heart thud one solitary beat, because he knows the gist of what Eames is going to say and in his traitorous mind immediately flashes to Ariadne.

"He's not going to work out."

"Should I bother asking?" Arthur sits down on one of the public benches. Not too far off is a woman feeding the pigeons and a day school of screaming kids running around on the grass. He watches them absentmindedly, trying to ignore the impulse pumping through his veins and collecting in his fists. He wants to tell Eames he found her. He wants to tell him he'll get Ariadne and that everything will work out for the best.

He can't.

Eames sighs. "I don't think I can find somebody else in time for you to brief them."

"Try."

Eames hangs up then, because he knows Arthur has nothing left to say on the matter. Arthur stands up from the bench and tucks the phone back into his pocket, feeling the weighted die between the pads of his fingers before continuing his run.


The more he tries to avoid her the closer to her he gets. He lies to himself and says he's watching out for her, that it's a big city with trouble lurking in every corner, but at her age he knows she is perfectly capable of handling herself.

It's a Sunday when she catches him. There's a tiny little dive by her apartment that serves coffee after clubbing hours and she always sits there on weekend mornings and drinks it (one cream and one sugar packet, the brown one) with her sketchpad and an enormous folder of paperwork he assumes is related to her internship. On these mornings she looks like Ariadne again, and wears her hair loose and her jeans saggy and ties that ridiculous scarf around her neck.

He feels greedy and almost like a thief, watching her through the windows, stealing the privacy she has no idea he has compromised. So when she finally looks up and makes eye contact with him, he figures he deserves it for being so selfish and assuming he has the right to pry after what he did last year.

It feels like slow motion. He would say it felt like a dream, but by now he has trouble disassociating the feeling of dreaming from the feeling of living. He watches helplessly as her eyes wander inevitably in his direction, and he can't move, there's no place to go and no way to obscure the fact that he is blatantly staring at her through the grimy glass.

Her face immediately burns a bright red hue and her mouth drops opens with some sort of lost intention. In her shock she almost lets the pad slide to the floor but she grabs it just in time, breaking eye contact with him for just a split second.

He takes that moment to run. It's stupid and childish and impulsive, but he runs away, looking ridiculous as he sprints along the dirty street in his three piece suit and loafers.

"Arthur!"

He hears her call his name and it feels like the wind has been knocked out of him. For a moment it feels like he'll never breathe again, but he keeps running. There is some sort of panic swelling in his chest that he's never felt before, not even during the worst and most hopeless extractions, and all he can think to do is get as far away as he can.

"Please, Arthur, wait!"

The words just barely reach his ears. She's an entire block away, but he doesn't dare look back to confirm. He doesn't stop until he knows there is nobody in sight, until he is certain she has lost his trail, until he is certain that he, the man who can find anybody, has lost her.


Next chapter to come sooooon :)