AN: Hello! This is my third fic here. I used to write, but I took a long hiatus. Here I am again. And I'm glad to be back. This is also my second Arthur/Ariadne fic, and I hope you like it!
Lost & Found
It starts as the sun sets.
Ariadne fits the world into a maze, sculpting and hollowing out the curves and sharp turns of a labyrinth. When necessary, she improvises. She's always been good at that; that's why she's Professor Miles' best. Improvisation, and quality improvisation, is a rare skill.
But for a moment her vision slips, and the darkness seems even darker than usual. If that's even possible. It's solid now, and presses on her, unusually hostile.
She recoils briefly, bumping into Dom.
"Sorry," she mumbles, shifting her feet until her balance is righted again.
"Change the layout," he hisses in reply.
It's a lot harder to change something you can't see, but Ariadne tries anyway. She tries to remember what the turn that comes up looks like when under moonlight and other potential directions so that their mark will take wrong turns.
But she can't, because it's not her dream anymore, it belongs to the dark. She can't remember. Their feet pound the pavement, hers and Dom's – the others are stationed elsewhere. Yusuf is out there, their back-up. Eames and Arthur are ahead, prepared to take the mark on an ambush.
The ambush will only work if the mark is misdirected. He's keeping this secret in the front pocket of his coat, apparently his version of a strongbox.
"I can't." She skids, feet searching for solid ground and catching on the edges of a drain (how had she forgotten that? She'd freaking built it, for heaven's sake. And they called her an architect.)
"Focus!" Dom's hands grab Ariadne's shoulders they round a corner, guiding them physically. "What the hell, Ariadne?"
She turns indignantly, trying to face Dom and failing. "I can't see!" Her eyes trace the lines of Dom's arms he gestures at what faint source of light glows in her dulled vision.
"It's not pitch dark; we agreed we'd make the moon bright, remember? Of course you can see. Now hurry, the mark's almost at that turn."
Ariadne shakes her head miserably.
"It's just one change! A tiny change compared to what we asked of you last time. Just. Change. The. Direction. Turn the road downhill. Come on."
But it's not Dom Cobb's dream, and no matter how much he cajoles and rebukes, Ariadne can't picture it anymore. She doesn't even know where 'downhill' is. It's all black.
How do you have an architect who can't see?
Piaf starts to play. It's welcome, sometimes, when they're stuck too long and too deep and can't come out on their own. Then they need Yusuf's help from outside the dream for a kick. But this time they all hear it and they all hate it.
Failure should be out of the question for the team. They're made for each other, practically. Each falls into their own roles easily, not just as Architect and Extractor and Forger and all that, but also as a family. Dom is the naggy, over-excitable dad. Eames is probably the kooky uncle that is never invited for family events but shows up anyway. And Yusuf? He's unwavering, steady, the rock of things. Never a major player but a pillar all the same.
Arthur and Ariadne, on the other hand, are the young ones on the team. Arthur has been doing this for a lot longer than she has, but she isn't sure how both of them fit into their dysfunctional family dynamic.
She's not even sure it matters.
Not right now, certainly. Not when Dom is questioning her fervently: why-did-you-fail-this-time-you-never-fail and Ariadne never failed, she knew that, she wasn't wired for it. She could tolerate failure in others, maybe, but not her own.
Which is why she tells Dom, in the end, that she really doesn't know. She'll figure it out. She'll be fine. She leaves first, feeling their eyes trailing her as she gets up and walks to the door of the planning room, a set of blueprints under her arm, and notes Arthur has given her on their next job.
She doesn't tell them that her vision is a tunnel, that the edges of her sight are blurred and appear as smears of colour. She doesn't tell them that she's so, very afraid.
The second time is, if anything, worse. Ariadne has taken her precautions – she spends late nights (with all the lights on, blazing, in hopes that they can sear themselves into her mind) poring over the plans, committing them to memory, willing herself to be consumed by them – a walking, breathing labyrinth.
She knows the trashcan should be a metre from where she and Eames are standing. She points it out to him even though its evening and the edges are blurring. He walks over to it, the clean lines of his suit jacket smudged in her vision, and disposes of his wig.
"What happens to the things we throw away in dreams?" Ariadne wonders aloud.
Eames sits on a park bench and removes his right shoe, turning it in his hands thoughtfully. Ariadne joins him. She doesn't always expect answers from Eames – not straightforward ones, at any rate. If she wanted direct talk, she'd have asked Dom or Arthur.
But he answers anyway, dropping the shoe in and replacing it with a ratty old sandal. Homeless are common in Central Park; spread on the benches, in tattered blankets and scraps of clothing. Ariadne watches as he makes a quiet transformation.
"I don't really need to throw these away, per se," Eames says. He can just as easily dream them away, replace them in his mind with more appropriate attire as he's doing right now. A bright, garish, cheap sweater swallows his perfectly tailored shirt. "I just do it for the symbolism. Makes the transition easier."
He might not look it, but Ariadne has come to realise that Eames is a hopeless romantic. He's poetic. He delivers one-liners with a kind of practised style, loves clichés with a kind of obsession. It's perhaps appropriate given that he's such an actor.
"But they're not really gone. You can throw anything away in dreams. And when you wake up…" He pulls an old photo from the pocket of his trousers, the last item of clothing that needs changing. It's a photo of them, at the airport. After Fischer and Saito. After Mal.
It was a safety risk. If anyone ever found that photo, it would raise questions – what were these people doing in LAX together? And with Saito, too?
But, damn it all, don't they look happy?
Ariadne reaches for it involuntarily, but Eames drops it into the trashcan with a casual flick of his hand.
"… you find it again."
That's the danger of dreaming, she thinks. You can take it all lightly – lives and memories and feelings and time. They're in abundance; practically in excess in the dreamscape.
But they should be taken seriously, treated with delicacy. They deserve that reverence. So as Eames playfully pushes Ariadne off the bench to recline on the bench, she rummages blindly in the trashcan until her fingers stop touching fabric and find paper.
She puts it in her pocket, next to the bishop. It can be her other totem.
"See you," she tells Eames, and slips off into the dark. There are a few people walking around – mostly bits of the mark's subconscious. They're calm, strolling, taking in the sunset, which is good. It means the mark hasn't suspected anything.
She remembers what Dom told her in her first dream (not her first, but it might as well have been, that awakening to a whole world), when Dom had still been Cobb. Talking to those figments of someone's mind can reveal plenty about them. So she approaches one, a lone figure by the pond.
She has five minutes, she figures, before Arthur appears. Then her work starts. So she starts talking.
"Hi!"
The figure turns slightly, surprised, and she can make out a hard, masculine jawline against the light of a nearby streetlamp. The figure is lean, but spreads slightly to paunch lower on his body. He's wearing jeans and a t-shirt, she guesses from the shadow.
"Oh, hello!" He sounds self-deprecating, a little unused to talking to women. Ariadne decides that she rather likes this shadow, however unreal he is. He's friendlier than Mal, at least.
"Come here a lot?"
"Yeah, I – I do some jogging. My sister, she's always telling me I need to lose weight." He chuckles sheepishly, the sound rippling through him, curving his body a little.
She really, really likes him. But then she's reminded that she's supposed to be trying some snooping work. First things first: the mark doesn't care very much for his physical fitness. He's open, ready to talk about his family, a rare trait for a New Yorker. His relationship with them is strong. Might or might not have a sister or brother.
Meanwhile, Ariadne has no idea what he looks like, or what he's wearing. And she's found nothing useful, unless they're going to blackmail him into agreement using his sister, just like Robert Fischer's father. Perhaps she'd raise that at the next discussion sesion chaired by Arthur (probably not.)
"She must care about you a lot," Ariadne says, probingly. The jogger shifts on his feet – she can see his silhouette moving. Suddenly she has another thought: the mark isn't married. A married man would have taken less kindly to his sister's advice; in the first place, he would already have had the advice of a loving spouse. There's a high chance that the mark is single.
"Yeah, she does." Then he's closing off slightly, a bit unsure. New Yorkers don't often have proper, concerned conversations with each other. Ariadne presses forward anyway, because this might be the most fascinating conversation she's ever had in a dream.
"I'm Ariadne. What's your name?" she asks. Then she has to refrain from crying out as a hand grabs her arm, hard, from behind.
"What are you doing?" a familiar voice hisses. "You're not supposed to talk to him."
It's Arthur. Angry Arthur, which is never any fun. Unlike Eames, he's practical and plays by the rules. He's a realist to a fault.
"But it's just a shade, it's not really –"
"I'm Christopher," he says, and turns to face Ariadne. He smiles, about to stick out a hand to shake, when he realises there's a man behind her. Holding her arm. Threateningly. "Um… are you okay?"
A few passing shades look up, watching the scene. Ariadne's all too aware of the potential dangers of this situation. Because she's just spent five minutes talking to a mark. And she told him her name. Damn it.
In the half-light, and with his face to her, Ariadne can see it now. Christopher Wilkins, a philanthropist hiding the secrets of a corrupt relation in politics to protect him. Entirely well-meaning Christopher Wilkins, whose uncle might be traced as the cause of a terrorist bombing in England.
They had so much at stake here, and she's just ruined everything. She should've known, should've guessed from his profile, but in the darkness it was impossible to see anything.
"I'm fine," she says quickly. "This is – this is Arthur." And she curses herself again, into oblivion if possible, because shit why can't she come up with a fake name for once?
"He's my boyfriend." That was one lie that came easily, at least. "He's, um, a little possessive."
Arthur nods stiffly, his hand still holding Ariadne's upper arm tight. His fingers can fit almost all the way around her slim muscle. "I don't much like her talking to strangers," he says gruffly.
"Right! I – I meant no harm, really –"
Then Christopher must be feeling afraid, because the watching shades start making their way over, and Ariadne senses trouble brewing. Why can't an extraction ever go smoothly?
"It's okay! Arthur's always like this. You know what it's getting late, we should go. Nice meeting you, Christopher!"
She tugs Arthur's arm and hurries down a slope, out of sight of Christopher (and the approaching shades). Now they have to change their plans somewhat – Eames, posing as a homeless man who will win Christopher's trust and gain access to his home, will have to get up and make his way over to the mark instead of having Arthur guide him over.
Now the risks are even higher than before.
Arthur pulls his arm away the second Christopher out of their line of vision, and faces Ariadne. He looks positively sinister in moonlight. Looming. Ariadne wishes so badly that she could see colours the way she used to, because she remembers that Arthur has the sort of face that glows in dim lighting, it reflects off the angles of his face in that particular way.
"Is there a problem, Ariadne?"
He doesn't say it like a warning. He says it like a question, coolly, neutral.
She says no but her head nods yes.
"Because this is really fucking everything up," he says, still monotonous, but the use of a profanity is an indication. Arthur doesn't swear often.
"I'm sorry." He thinks an apology isn't enough. She knows that. He knows she knows that. So he waits for her to continue. "It's been getting worse lately. I mean, at first I couldn't see well in poor lighting. I thought maybe my eyes were tired."
Ariadne has to look at him directly, because corner-of-her-eye peeking doesn't work out anymore, and it makes her self-conscious. Nervous. Because she knows Arthur's eyes can pick out plenty of things about her, plenty of faults. He's just too much of a gentleman to say so.
"Now I can't see out from the sides of my vision, it's just…" she gestures in the general direction of the patch of blindness. "It's just black."
"Why didn't you say so before?" But his eyes aren't judging her this time, aren't picking out those details about her that make her flawed. People think Ariadne is pretty, beautiful, even. But she believes Arthur sees all the ugly. Just by looking. This time, though, he's just looking into her eyes and oh my it's frightening, his eyes look completely black, there are no whites, there isn't anything in there, and he's not blinking.
Ariadne is blinking far more than usual. "I thought it would get better." Which is a half-lie. Arthur knows that too. They both know Ariadne prefers to be independent, strong, proud, not a burden as a woman on an otherwise all-male team. Not that she hasn't proven her worth to be there. It just gets to her sometimes, that people think women are weaker. She doesn't ever want to have to prove that belief right.
In the next moment her hands are in his, clasped, surrounded by warm, dry skin. She feels impossibly tiny.
"It does get better when you dream," he says. "You can make yourself see perfectly in your dreams."
Logically, Ariadne should be able to. Dreams are what dreamers make of them, after all. But it's difficult, it involves forgetting what it's like to not-see and remembering what it's like to see completely. She can't do it. And she can't stop feeling like a failure since that first mistake.
"I can't," she says miserably. She remembers telling that to Dom, too. But people seem to insist that she can do things.
"Sure you can," Arthur says lightly. "You remember what I look like."
Ariadne nods. She does. She remembers his face because she's sketched it, all the dips and curves, unexpectedly soft lines on an angular face. She closes her eyes and it's all there, for retrieval. Memories of those days when her vision had been flawless (and so had she.)
"Open your eyes."
She does, and the vision remains, the vision of Arthur's face only it's real and not her imagination anymore. She knows because she reaches up and touches it, because she sees this time that his eyes are brown, liquid, beautiful. She knows she can see because as she leans in to kiss Arthur on the lips she can see Eames out of the corner of her eye, watching them and trying not to look surprised as he shuffles near to the mark.
And she knows because Arthur's hands drop hers and move to her shoulders, holding her away gently but firmly. She knows because it's exactly what she would expect of him, because he's exactly the way she remembers him.
"It worked," he says, smiling.
Ariadne is thankful that he doesn't make it more awkward than it has to be. "Yeah. Thanks."
And she supposes the opposite to what Eames' said is also true – she can lose something in reality, and find it here.