SERIES: Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient
STORY: Infinite
A story about whistle-blowers and war-mongerers. A story about pyrite and cubic zirconia, about Dolos and Carnus.
A story about doing a bad thing for good reasons and doing a good things for bad reasons. (Sometimes, they are all the same thing.)
Hullo all! It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Welcome to my series Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient. It's a bit sprawling, has a lot of non-linear narrative chucked in and an abundance of slightly reality-bending spy stuff in it, too. I've rated it M for some pretty nasty themes, including instances of torture and sexual violence, although neither are too graphic in this story.
There is an Arthur/Eames pairing, but it's such a slow burn that the flame is barely alight in this one. You'll see it more in future stories, particularly Arthur and Eames' viewpoints, which will come later in the series. There is also a tiny bit of Arthur/Ariadne, but it's quite obviously not endgame.
I would love to know what you think, so do leave a little review!
Many thanks,
ArwenJaneLilyLyra x
(Cross-posted from Archive of our Own under LittleRedCosette.)
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PART ONE
(the prisoner)
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(between the indigo, pearl's mother)
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At the forefront of her mind is this: a frown soft enough to let in the sunlight of a hidden smile, glass buildings and clean sidewalks and a voice sounding young for the first time.
At the forefront of her mind on a lyrical loop of regret he says, She was lovely.
As Ariadne looks down at Arthur's lax figure through the one-way glass panel, sees him hooked up to a PASIV by one line and a saline drip by the other, she wonders darkly what she'll tell people about him.
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It begins on a Sunday in April. Easter has come and gone, leaving Paris in cherry rose bloom.
The Tuileries Garden is alight with golden green, tourists flock down the Champs-Élysées in camera clicking herds and in a tiny café in Menilmontant, Ariadne Sommerson is being followed.
At least, she thinks she's being followed.
She sits at a cautious angle in her seat at a corner table, her eyes scanning the faded yellow walls and thin, weary faces blinking into their breakfasts as the April morning creeps towards noon.
Her coffee has gone cold and the croissant she ordered is missing two bites at most, choked down and pulled apart by anxious fingers into crumbs on her plate.
There's a man sitting near the door, wrapped in cool lines of blue and grey and purple, a gentle face and a newspaper folded in his lap.
Hand hidden in the centre pocket of her hoodie, Ariadne types a text with a stiff thumb,
Caught a tail. Come to palais cafe asap.
She presses Send with a violent jab and toys with her coffee cup in her free hand. The tight, ricocheting irritation in her chest which has been present for days grows as the man sitting across the room at the seat nearest the door lifts one leg to cross his ankle over his knee, flapping out his newspaper loudly.
Though it feels like an hour, it probably takes less than ten minutes for Jessie to arrive.
She lopes in with an easy grin for the waiter and an order of two coffees. As she slides into the seat opposite Ariadne, she snorts at her friend's meagre first attempt at breakfast.
"And just what do you think will happen now your heel-clutcher has seen me, too?" Jessie asks, her dark blue eyes glittering.
Her blonde hair is wet, pulled up in a bun with wisps falling about her round, clean face.
For as long as Ariadne has known her, Jessie Gordon has had the uncanny ability to always look like she's just woken up from a nap in faeryland. She's soft and warm and she looks like she belongs on a farm in rural France, carrying pails of milk and wearing muddy dungarees.
At least, Ariadne thinks so. Jessie heartily disagrees and has said as much on more than one occasion, chuckling with rolling, lemon-sharp disdain.
"I don't know ," Ariadne says, eyes flicking around the room for the umpteenth time.
The tables are mostly unoccupied. The few other patrons are engrossed in conversations and newspapers.
There's a deep, sooty smell of old wood permeating the cafe. The grumbling of the outside world feels distant, locked away despite the sunshine leaking like melted butter through the room.
"Which one is it?" Jessie asks. "Monsieur Charcuterie at the bar?"
Her smile is radiant. Ariadne huffs.
"Monsieur Cravat near the door," she corrects her neighbour.
"Ahh," Jessie nods, conspiratorial and gleeful.
Her cheeks are pink and she blinks a lot as the waiter approaches with their coffees.
"Mercy bucup! " she titters in her worst French accent.
For nearly four years they've been frequenting this cafe and every single time Jessie has without fail played the perfect tourist.
"Jess, I'm serious," Ariadne says.
"Aren't you always?" Jessie retorts, her smile dimming but never quite leaving her face. "Try to look like you're at least a tiny bit happy to see me, Saffron," she teases.
Ariadne pulls her lips into a grin. It's ill-fitting, almost painful.
"I am," she replies. "Thank you. Really."
Jessie just laughs and sips her coffee.
She's been covering Ariadne's back ever since the Canadian returned from LAX nearly three years ago, bringing with her a whole host of cloying, writhing nightmares.
It had been Jessie from the start, really, since their first year student roommate days, arguments over shampoo flavours and who ate the last of the bread. When Ariadne's plane had touched down in Paris, it had been Jessie holding a big placard at the Arrivals Gate, SAFFRON in capital letters.
She had been the cold, damp flannel on a feverish brow and the warm body cocooning her restive sleep and the sympathetically vague excuses to professors and friends.
She'd been the open ear that Ariadne's secrets had fallen into and she hadn't flinched once.
"You need a boyfriend," Jessie says after a while, picking at a mosquito bite on her calf.
The cafe, quiet as it is, still bubbles with life. Outside, Paris is the same shuffling, strolling contentment it always is at eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning.
Ariadne groans, shifting to lean her chin into a cupped palm, elbow heavy on the table.
"You can borrow mine, if you like," Jessie offers, not for the first time. "Lord knows he's been no use to me lately."
"I'll pass," Ariadne replies with a sour leer.
Near the door, Monsieur Cravat folds his newspaper and asks the waiter for the bill.
"He offered to go down on me last night," Jessie continues, sounding thoroughly disgruntled. "Offered! Oh honey, I thought as a little treat tonight, I'd do the dishes, and then the hoovering, and then perhaps I'll eat your pussy?"
"Jessamine!" Ariadne snips, pulling her gaze from the man near the door to glare at her friend.
"Oral sex isn't a chore on the list, Ariadne!" Jessie announces, a decibel shy of loudly.
"I didn't ask you to come to distract me, Jess."
"He still has to ask if I did come at all," Jessie grumbles. "And of course you did. You know full well I'd be about as useful as tits on a turtle if you were actually being followed."
"I am being followed," Ariadne says sharply. "I asked you here because I didn't want to be stuck alone with him."
Jessie looks disbelieving as she sips her coffee.
Ariadne twists her lips and starts shredding her destroyed croissant even further.
"And I wanted a distraction."
"Hmm," Jessie smirks victoriously. "So?"
"So?" Ariadne sighs.
"What do you think about Max offering to go down on me?"
Ariadne shrugs.
"I think you should have said yes."
"How do you know I didn't?"
Finally, the smile Ariadne cracks feels a little more genuine.
"Because you wouldn't be complaining so much today if he had."
Jessie scrunches her nose and takes a handful of croissant from Ariadne's plate. She looks as if she's considering eating it, but instead she starts pulling it apart into her drained coffee cup.
"It would have been nice if he'd just done it. You'd think after two years he'd have the guts to get messy in the bushes without asking for permission first. The only prude in all of France and I have to get stuck with him. I swear to God, he's more English than me."
Ariadne watches over her friend's shoulder as the stranger with the gentle face and the grey neckerchief pays his bill with a crisp twenty euro note.
He stands abruptly, not waiting for change. His natural stoop hides most of his face as he bows out of the cafe.
A thick, Gordian knot of anxiety that's been tied around Ariadne's stomach loosens.
"Your tail gone?" Jessie asks coolly.
"Yup," Ariadne says. "Thanks."
"You can thank me with a daquiri. Tonight. No excuses."
Jessie waves over the waiter and asks for the bill with a clumsy la dishon, please , sounding something closer to Italian this time.
She preens at Ariadne's disapproving glower.
"It's been ages ," she says, holding the whine in her throat around the vowels. "I'm worried."
Guilt flares brief and electric in Ariadne's chest.
Her mouth twists around her apology.
Just the once, she returned to Paris a week earlier than expected, covered in bruises and shaking at the thought of going to sleep alone.
Jessie's hovering has only increased over time.
It was almost four months ago, now. She'd called Arthur two days later, but like the previous seven voice mails she'd left in the lead up to the job, her plea went unanswered.
The job was a clear bust and the extractor had emailed an apology before wiring three thousand Euros into her account.
She's turned down three jobs since.
"Building Beneath ," Jessie says, picking up the second year architecture textbook Ariadne brought with her to the cafe and perusing with a slight sneer. "What are you doing with a kiddie book like this?"
"It was the first one I picked up off my shelf."
Jess laughs, bemused.
"And you left your flat why, exactly?"
"Monsieur Cravat was sitting outside the building, Jess," Ariadne gripes. "He's been there before, too."
This time, Jessie doesn't respond.
Her eyes, sad emeralds in a face of freckled sunshine, crease at the edges with concern.
It's the same look she gave Ariadne four months ago as she rubbed aloe into her purpled skin and hummed Chopin under her breath. It's the look that says Stop louder than her lips will ever dare.
It's the look she gives when Ariadne mentions paradoxes and kicks and Limbo.
It's the look she used to give at the name Arthur, but Ariadne hasn't mentioned him since the last unreturned voicemail, four months ago.
He's become a ghost in her telephone. He's slipped out of her grasp like smoke and there's hollow fear in her chest to think of him.
They are sparing thoughts. They ooze blood and plasma and somnacin. They swell in her mind and throat like throbbing cobwebs.
"Thank you for coming," Ariadne says, meek and sincere.
There's a crease in Jessie's brow, still. Her hair is lightening as it dries, curling at her temples and nape into clouds of gold.
"I'm sorry I pulled you into all this."
Jessie raises her thick, caramel eyebrows.
"I walked into it."
She sounds almost affronted.
"Well, thanks."
Dropping the money for the coffees and croissant onto the table, Ariadne stands.
Jessie follows, still frowning.
She's taller than Ariadne, with limbs made for tennis and curves that she hides beneath shapeless dresses and jumpers.
It's only once they're out on the street, meandering up to their apartment block and casting furtive glances for followers that Jessie speaks again.
"I mean, I can't remember the last time I offered him a blowjob."
Ariadne grins, briefly grabbing her friend's fingers to squeeze them fondly.
"I know," she says consolingly.
Their laughter is loud in the Sunday softness of the daylight. It filters up into the sky and rumbles beneath the sparse traffic.
On the other side of the street, a man follows.
His eyes are quick and his stride is long. The tap-scrape of his gait is light against the stones of the pavement.
He watches the two women as they stop at the greengrocer's and the florist's and the butcher's, one by one by one. He watches them scurry into their apartment block, the heavy door shutting behind them with a quiet snick.
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I thought you were being paranoid, Jessie will say later as she cleans the vomit from Ariadne's face and holds her hands to stop the trembling.
So did I, Ariadne will reply.
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(gold, a sun, for the fools to cherish)
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Spring blossoms, full speed ahead towards a scorching summer. Jessie and Max cook dinner and bicker over garlic-tomato ratios. The world continues to fizzle and turn.
Six days after the cafe and the undrunk coffee, Ariadne answers the phone as she lounges on the sofa, halfway through a marathon of films she should probably stop watching, now that she knows them by heart.
It's Yusuf, sounding breezy and faltering, though she won't realise that until later, untilafter .
She answers the phone and Yusuf crows in delight, like he's surprised she picked up.
(She'll wonder later if she wasn't supposed to, though by then it will be too late.)
"I heard about this job and thought instantly of you," he says proudly, all cheer and confidence.
Ariadne grins nervously into the phone.
"I'm sort of on a break right now, Yusuf," she says in a gentle apology.
Yusuf scoffs. The sound crackles through the ten thousand miles that separate them.
"Dreams wait for nobody, Miss Ariadne," he reminds her with a flourish of extra r rolls.
Buried into the mountain of cushions bedecking her sofa, Ariadne wriggles into a comfier position and yawns.
"There will always be dreams," she retorts.
"But Ariadne!" Yusuf cries, sounding close to despair. "A labyrinth of suburbia followed by a theme park! Tell me you've never wanted to build your own scary funhouse."
"I've never wanted to build my own scary funhouse," Ariadne says, grinning.
"You're lying," Yusuf grumbles.
"Yes, I am," Ariadne confesses. "But I'm taking a break. Everyone wants to build their own scary funhouse, Yusuf. Ask someone else."
"Nobody will build a scary funhouse like you, though," he says with a dry laugh.
Nestled in her sofa with the TV muted and dusk spilling into the room through her window, Ariadne frowns.
"Whose is the job?" she asks.
The prickling in her spine that she thought was cold air from the window has spread out towards her extremities.
On the muted television screen, a silent Ava Gardner gesticulates wildly, glistening like starlight.
"It's Eames'," Yusuf says. The breezy tone to his voice sounds all of a sudden a great deal cooler. There's a thin layer of ice coating his words, making them feel fragile. "He needs you in Copenhagen by the twenty-sixth."
The sharp needle hidden in Yusuf's words almost misses Ariadne completely.
She stutters on several questions before the realisation strikes her.
"Copenhagen?" she says instead.
Ava Gardner has given up her tirade. Ariadne watches her trembling frame and feels the fizz of confused anger inside her own belly.
"Bright and early on the twenty-sixth," Yusuf confirms.
A memory emerges from the ink of Ariadne's mind, a hissing, spitting wildcat of an Englishman, half drunk as he barrels into a warehouse sporting a black eye and no luggage.
Fucking Danish cunts and their fucking Danish by-laws. What exactly have the Danes ever given us, huh? I'll show them extradited. I'll extradite them all the way to Kingdom Come. The twats. I don't even like Carlsberg. Piss in a barrel.
"Sounds good," Ariadne says. "I'll think about it."
She tries to mask the tremor in her voice with a yawn, but Yusuf's reply is stilted.
"Grand," he says. "I'll tell him you'll call, yes?"
"Mm," she replies, her breath quick and cold in her chest. "Yeah. Good."
"Everyone loves the funhouses," Yusuf says, pointed and flippant. "Use his Spanish number. Take care."
"You too, Yusuf," Ariadne says.
The call ends. Her throat is painfully dry.
The dark is descending quickly by now, sunset smouldering along the western skyline. Ariadne tumbles off the sofa and reaches out of her window to pull the shutters closed.
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She tells herself she misunderstood.
She tells herself that just because Eames complained about the Danes and extradition and colourful sailor swears in the same sentence, doesn't mean he's actually unable to return to the country.
Doesn't mean he's lying about the job.
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Doesn't mean Yusuf's lying about the job.
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(Someone's lying about a job.)
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There's another phone call. A shorter one. Two hours after Yusuf's.
Two hours of thinking about what could possibly make Arthur stop returning her calls after over two and a half years of clean jobs and smooth runs. Two hours of thinking about how if anyone could figure out who's lying about the job in Copenhagen, it would be Arthur.
This time, Ariadne types the number, feeling queasy with nerves.
Cobb answers with a light, confident voice.
A father's voice, full to the brim with mirth.
"This is Dom," he says in that fatherly voice, fresh and wide as the ocean that separates them.
Fuzzy in the background, a thinner voice yelling Daddy you're not looking!
"Cobb," she says, can't mask the tremors of guilt and need that hang through the line between them. "It's, it's Ariadne. I'm looking for Arthur. I think something's wrong."
The far away voice continues, a stream of yelps and demands that sound like cartwheels and trampolines.
Daddy did you see you aren't watching Daddy watch me look at me look Daddy watch I'm doing it now Daddy watch Daddy watch me!
And then, Dom speaks again.
"Sorry?"
The word punches a hole in Ariadne's chest, a light lilt of confusion colouring his voice, the impersonal cadence of a stranger.
"It's Ariadne, I've been trying to talk to -"
"Sorry," Cobb says again, harder this time. "I think you've got a wrong number."
"Cobb!"
He ends the call.
Ariadne can see it in her mind's eye. Dom, throwing down the phone like a rodent, returning to the sunshine glow of his children, watching them dance barefoot in the grass, competing and clowning for his adoring attention.
Ariadne feels her own phone slide out of her hand to the floor with a dull carpeted thump.
For the first time since Arthur failed to return her call months ago, the breathless nausea of panic starts clambering up her throat, sticky fingers in her oesophagus, clamping her tongue with talons.
There are so many reasons why Cobb might have ended a call like that.
Inappropriate company, inappropriate time. Tapped phone, bugged house.
Any number of reasons that might suggest he'll call back with a grunted apology and news of Arthur lying low in Kazakhstan.
But Ariadne feels the raw scrape of fear against her insides all the same. She returns to her couch before her rubbery knees can buckle completely, snatches the phone up from the floor and sinks into the cushions.
She curls her feet beneath her, lays her head back to gulp the grey air and waits for Cobb to call her back.
.
.
The first time Arthur doesn't pick up the phone, Ariadne assumes he's busy.
When a week passes by without a return call, she tries again.
(She tries and she tries and she tries.)
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That night, after the phone calls that shouldn't have been answered, when the picture text comes as the clock kisses four AM, she doesn't bother trying to call.
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It happens like this.
.
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She wakes up at four in the morning, the pitch of night, clouds cloaking the stars. She forgot to shut the curtains and the shutters are still flung wide. Outside Paris sleeps, hesitant.
The television is on, flicking white and blue and red, silent. Adverts, maybe. She can barely see for the glare of the screen in the dark, wincing in her eyes.
In her hand, her phone, silent too, the battery drained to almost nothing.
No missed calls.
But there's a text.
The number isn't one she recognises.
1 MB Picture Message, it says.
Download.
Delete.
She clicks the first option, the bloody lump of her heart in her throat, pulsing and pinching. Her breath rattles in her chest, brittle, toxic.
The picture loads slowly.
Splice by splice, a dusty floor is revealed, grey and dark and splashed with something shiny, wet. Red.
The pool of blood leaking around Yusuf's head is not a crude mockery of a halo. He doesn't look like he's sleeping.
One arm is bent and splayed backwards like an unfolded wing of a crippled bird. His shirt is torn, soaked with blood and sweat.
His face, puffed purple and split.
He looks like he's in pain.
A sharp, terrified bellowing echoes out of Ariadne. She slaps a hand over her mouth hard enough to cut her lip on her teeth. Guttural fear clamours and claws and she mentally corrects herself as hot, stinging tears drip fast down her face.
He looks like he died in pain.
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.
(She doesn't know it, yet. That coincidences, they are so very, very real. That Occam's Razor is a bedtime story.)
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She answers the phone when it rings, even as the battery light blinks in warning on her cell.
"Yes?"
"You're a difficult woman to reach, Ariadne. "
For some reason, she's startled by the rolling accent that might be Dutch. A man's, light and disgracefully reasonable sounding.
"You've been sitting outside my apartment long enough," she says and, bolstered by the lack of tremor in her voice, continues. "What do you want with me?"
The man's laughter is cool and pleasant.
Ariadne rubs the tears from her cheeks with hard fingers, tries to keep hold of the measured breaths she's counting in her head like waves on a beach, trying to burn through the image of Yusuf's shattered skull cracked open against the ground.
"Unfortunately, Ariadne, I have better things to do than sit outside your apartment all day watching you play third wheel to Cinderella and Prince Charming. "
Ariadne's lungs clamp shut.
Jessie's grinning face bleeds into her thoughts, her blonde hair stained red, her wide mouth and her snubbed nose and her green eyes.
"Don't you fucking dare," she chokes.
Terror is biting her lips, her bones.
Against her will, Ariadne feels her body folding into herself, aching and yearning and desperately afraid.
"Ariadne, " the man warns, a distinct growl tickling his words. "Listen to me carefully. You're already in a lot of trouble but I am here to get you out of it. There's something I need you to do for me and you are going to do it. It's in everybody's best interests that you do as you're told. Do you understand me?"
She tries to answer. She tries to speak but her mind is shutting down, heavy clouds putting a stopper in every thought beyond Jessie Yusuf Max Jessie Max Yusuf Jessie Yusuf Yusuf Jessie-
Her knees throb as she scrambles off the couch, tries to drag air in and sound out but it won't come, won't go, nothing works. The phone tumbles out of her grasp and her throat is burning.
There's a voice yelling her name, too loud to be the man on the phone and hands, a hand in her hair, a hand on her knee, pulling and yanking and rage bursting the vessels in her heart. Cobb's voice echoing Sorry? over and over and Ariadne feels the abyss looming before it claims her.
She leaps into it gladly.
The blissful empty swallows her whole.
.
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It doesn't take long after that.
Screaming she feels but can't hear. Half an hour she doesn't remember, Jessie and Max breaking in as she yells down the whole apartment block.
Jessie cleaning her up after she vomits mid-retelling of the day's events, apologises for her disbelief, begs her to call for help.
Max bellowing at her in rapid French for endangering them in her shit, demanding she call the police before he does it for her.
That's when the car arrives, electric, no engine whir to warn them. It glides silently over the cobbles, sits in wait outside the apartment block. The streets are mostly empty, because dawn is still only a whispered promise.
Ariadne zips up a packed weekend bag, marches past Jessie's wet face and bony fingers.
Max holds her back, bare shoulders against his chest, his forearms braced across her torso. He nods at Ariadne over his girlfriend's shoulder and her heart aches in her shoes.
She gets in the car with an abstract, hopeful fear, sits trembling with mortal rage at this man's doughy smile.
.
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The drive is long.
.
.
There's a plane, a sleeping pill choked down with lukewarm water. A gun in an unclipped holster .
.
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I am Michel. I'll be escorting you to HQ immediately. Have you eaten?
Don't you fucking talk to me.
Manners are everything, Miss Sommerson, for a person in such a position as yours right now .
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(faltering in the hollow, cavernous)
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The flight might be long, it might be short.
Either way, she wakes up sweating and allows herself to be dragged across a sunlit compound into a building made of concrete and despair. She sits in the chair they push her into, drinks the still water they open for her.
It's an interrogation room, the kind someone has almost certainly died in ten years ago and the people that frequent it now tell themselves they're better than those that came before them.
It takes a few minutes to recognise Arthur when they thrust the photograph under her nose.
His hair is long, curling in cowlicks around his ears. He's gone from slim to underfed and he's wearing tight jeans with a dark pink polo cutting too close to his throat. But it's more than that.
Associating with terrorists, they threaten, her own private sentencing.
That's when they pull out the photograph of Arthur.
The word jars as she stares down at the traffic cam photograph of her friend, her mentor and thinks not you, you are good.
Twenty-four hours ago, criminal was a bitter pill to choke down.
Now terrorist? Arthur?
"The prisoner is in our custody," the woman interrogating her says. "You are going to extract the names and locations of his associates."
Ariadne's mouth opens.
"Not your petty dream thieves," the woman sighs, exasperated. "The war-mongering, secret-spilling treasonous animals he sold his own government research to."
Ariadne just looks down at the photograph again, at Arthur's soft, crumpled face.
He was a good man, she thinks she'll say, when they ask about him. He was good.
.
.
Good men, of course, are still capable of great evil.
Sometimes, they lie, they steal, they extract.
(They incept.)
Good men can still drop those that seek to harm them screaming into Limbo, one by one by one.
.
.
"All of them?" Ariadne asks, staring through the glass wall of the viewing platform.
"We got most of them out," the woman, whose name is Grace Rigby, sniffs haughtily. Her blonde-grey plait knotted tight down her spine, her cheeks softer than her eyes.
"Intact?" Ariadne scoffs. She looks down at Arthur's limp body sprawled in the cot below.
Grace Rigby, who talks like a soldier and wears pencil skirt suits and has a thick purple scar on her left forearm, doesn't reply.
.
.
Cobb arrives the next morning.
Ariadne hasn't slept more than twenty minutes at a time. It's been two days since an electric car pulled up outside her apartment.
Two days since somebody texted her a picture of Yusuf's bloody corpse.
(What are you talking about? Grace Rigby says impatiently at his name. Brushes away the accusation like dust in the air. She is untouched by callous blows.)
Cobb arrives looking like he hasn't slept for a year, looking almost as bad as he did the day he stepped onto a plane in Sydney not knowing what his fate would be when they touched down on the other side.
He offers Ariadne a weary smile that doesn't even reach both sides of his mouth, let alone his eyes.
Cobb knows why he's here. Ariadne can see it in the apologetic tilt of his head towards her.
That's when the file comes out.
It's an innocuously beige manila folder, fat but not overflowing. A digital copy on a hard drive, too.
"This is everything we have on Carnus," Grace Rigby says coolly, dropping the file on the table.
"Like, Dolos and Carnus?" Cobb asks, hesitant.
"Of course," Grace Rigby replies.
Ariadne's eyebrows rise in polite curiosity.
Cobb laughs, and then Cobb throws up.
.
.
Why did you lie on the phone?
I thought they'd leave you out of it.
Why are you lying to me now?
I don't really know.
.
.
Here is everything Ariadne knows about Dolos and Carnus before opening Grace Rigby's folder:
They are pseudonyms of people Grace Rigby does not like.
.
.
Here is everything Cobb knows about Dolos and Carnus before opening Grace Rigby's folder:
They are war-mongering whistle-blowers who exposed a lot of dream secrets to the world.
.
.
"They think Arthur was Carnus," Cobb says, holding the folder in both hands like it's a bloody knife waiting for fingerprints.
"And if they're right?" Ariadne prompts; as if there's still a chance they're wrong.
Cobb looks at her, his crystal gaze sharp despite the rings around his eyes. There's betrayal's devastation in his frown.
"Then he's been lying to me since the beginning."
.
.
Here is everything Ariadne knows about Arthur before opening the folder:
He is thirty years old.
He wears a lot of primary colours.
He drinks a lot of coffee.
He works harder than anyone she has ever met.
He is mildly allergic to peppermint.
He admires paradoxes and he despises fuck ups.
He was trained in dreamshare by the Cobbs.
He has a viciously sharp memory and very little sense of humour.
His dreams are clean and full of neat lines.
He prefers ex-Soviet cities above all others.
He speaks four languages.
.
.
Here is everything Ariadne knows about Arthur that is actually true:
He wears a lot of primary colours.
He works harder than anyone she has ever met.
He admires paradoxes and he despises fuck ups.
He has a viciously sharp memory and very little sense of humour.
.
.
Inside Grace Rigby's file are three possible candidates of Carnus' true identity.
Carnus742G is an Englishman called Owen Perry, deceased.
Carnus928C is an Australian woman called Tess Farley, deceased, in custody, deceased.
Carnus361F is an American man called Jeremy Howard, deceased, in custody.
Arthur's face scowls up at them from Jeremy's file, baby-cheeked aged sixteen. Underneath Carnus361F it reads Dreamer184G2.
The evidence is substantial and vague.
A lot of hopefuls and coincidences and assumptions, overwhelming.
"Do you think it's true?" Ariadne asks Cobb.
The scars of disappointment are deep in his expression.
"I think so," he says wretchedly.
.
.
He's been lying to me, too, Ariadne thinks, feels bad because Arthur's never exactly promised her anything.
She thinks that maybe Cobb isn't just upset on his own behalf. Because if Arthur lied to Cobb then he lied to Mal, too.
She was lovely, he had said, like he thought a great deal of her.
But he still lied to her face about his own name. He still pretended to learn from her all the things that it turns out the military had taught him first.
.
.
And there's this.
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.
Don't trust Eames.
You trust him.
Yes, but if he sells me out to the Somalian government for a tidy profit I am confident I'll be able to get out of it.
Are you joking?
A week of sleep deprivation and waterboarding isn't a joke, Ariadne .
.
.
But then Eames had arrived and Arthur had said things like you'll take care of that, won't you Eames? and it was hard to remember not to trust him when Arthur kept putting eighty percent of the job's success on Eames' shoulders like he knew he could pull it off.
(Like he trusted him to pull it off.)
.
.
Nonetheless, Copenhagen rests heavily on Ariadne's mind.
She doesn't dare mention it to Cobb as they pore over files and mind-map Jeremy Howard's fall from grace. Not when they're in a compound full of earwigs.
After a few days, though, they dig down into the PASIV to trial run their hands at a military base and Ariadne seizes her chance.
"Yusuf's dead," she says, expecting at least a token of surprise.
What she gets is a grimace and a bowed head.
"How do you know?"
"They texted me a photo," she replies hotly, expecting a shade of horror at least.
Once again she's disappointed because Cobb, he just looks pleased.
"I was on the phone with him when they got him," he says.
Ariadne feels the bottom of her stomach clench and flip inside her.
"Jesus," she says, and then, emboldened by the ghastly truth, "Do you think Eames has something to do with this?"
"Eames?" Cobb scoffs. "I don't think so. He's a notorious crook, but he actively avoids the military. And he's had a crush on Arthur for years."
Ariadne smiles at that. She wonders if Cobb knows about Somalia and the waterboarding.
"Eames plays his own game," Cobb adds. "But this isn't his style. He's no puppet-master."
It's hard to believe him, though, when he won't look Ariadne in the eye as he says it.
They dream together for six hours underneath, wake up cranky and frustrated, like infants from an ill-timed nap, because all her knowledge of the military comes from films and all of his is out of date.
(At five and a half hours they finally admit to themselves that military camps are the last way for two civilians to trick an ex-soldier.)
Topside again, the file mocks them some more and Grace Rigby watches impatiently through the CCTV camera in the corner of the room.
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I think you should call for help, Jessie had said. Anyone. The police. The DGSE. Your dad. My dad. Just somebody. I have a few relatives at Sandhurst. Or, Max knows someone who goes out with someone whose sister is friends with a guy in the Mafia. At least, they think it's the Mafia. It could just be a really dodgy bloke.
But Ariadne had refused, stubbornly digging her heels against the possibility she might actually be out of her depth this time.
You friend, Arthur? Jessie spat, eventually. He's a criminal.
Now it's too easy to imagine looking Jessie in her ocean deep eyes, saying, My friend, Arthur? He's a terrorist, actually.
.
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Your friend, Arthur.
The man who taught you paradoxes in Paris and bought you hazelnut ice cream in Los Angeles and fucked you in a hotel in Mumbai because you asked.
Arthur, he is destroying other people's minds to protect himself. To protect a legacy he forged without permission.
.
.
(while lighthouses, they shine)
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.
Ariadne-Joanne, her father named her, for a Greek grandmother who never knew of her and a mother who never laid eyes on her.
Ari-Jo, her friends used to call her in sing-sing voices.
And then there was Casey, who teased her Joanne, with a voice made of cotton and corn. Who fell in love with her with little warning, only to leave with even less.
She lost the Joanne, then. It broke her father's heart to hide her mother's half, but she stopped sharing it. Kept it secret, like her heart.
Ariadne Sommerson, she says now. It rolls better anyway, the four-three trip off the tongue.
Sometimes she resents it, those syllables Casey stole, along with her confidence and her love. He turned himself into her world, then he turned her world inside out. Exposed the vulnerable flesh beneath the hard shell of her wasted affection.
Casey, who kissed her mouth with a strong tongue and made promises that seemed reasonable at the time but were in fact too much for him to live up to. He stole her name that she had never loved more than when he whispered it.
She fled to Paris in a final bid for freedom.
Found solace and mending in architecture, which had been a dream but became a life.
(Only to become dreams again, quite literally.)
Ariadne Sommerson, builder of worlds and survivor of Limbo.
The crème de la crème of dreamshare's architects.
(Or so Arthur said, seven months after LA, over Caesar salad and chardonnay in Lyon.)
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Do you know what it is to be a lover? Mallorie Cobb had asked. To be half of a whole?
I thought so, Ariadne had whispered inside her mouth, behind closed lips. But I was only half.
Truth be told, she's not entirely sure she ever wants to find out.
.
.
Ariadne was in Paris during the Montreuil riots
Ariadne was in Paris during the pension reform strikes.
Ariadne marched in Paris for everything she could, the way her father had told her she was more than welcome to once she no longer lived under his roof, thank you very much, though his grumbling had never stopped her.
She tied a purple bandana around her head and waved placards and stamped through the streets, a reticent Jessamine Gordon in tow.
We are part of something really important, she told Jessie, who looked ready to bolt in the opposite direction to the riot police at any minute. Didn't you ever protest back home?
My grandfather was a Cabinet Minister for Thatcher, Jessie had replied, looking ashamed. I have a cousin who voted for Tony Blair. She hasn't been invited to Christmas since.
Ariadne's not sure what this means exactly, but Jessie looks like she's about to be struck down from above at any moment for associating with a march and Ariadne thinks, what a shame, that fear of the consequences might inhibit one's politics so radically.
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"What exactly did Dolos and Carnus do?" Ariadne asks on Day Two.
They've slept (barely) and showered (excessively) and eaten (choked down buttered bread). Cobb is slumped in his chair, pulling apart a paper-clipped bundle of Jeremy Howard's school reports.
(Uncommunicative, sullen, antisocial. Highly intelligent and diligently hard-working.)
"They sent a lot of emails," Cobb says. "They told a lot of people about what the government and military black ops were up to. They extracted code operations from a low ranking General. They traded with some terrorist cells and they shipped about six government PASIV devices across the globe."
"Why?" she asks.
Cobb looks up, finally. There's a war in his expression between admiration and despair.
"The government didn't start with soldiers using the PASIV," he says. "They perfected lucid dreaming over years of tests. They experimented on –"
The door swings open fast. Grace Rigby enters wearing an innocent expression, two lackeys follow behind with plates of sandwiches and bottles of water.
Cobb looks her square in the eye and smiles with grim defiance.
"They experimented on kids."
Ariadne looks across at Grace Rigby, thinks about Jeremy Howard's file, Dreamer184G2 , sixteen years old and studying college level economics and engineering. Grace Rigby looks apathetic at best, unperturbed by the accusation.
"Every test subject was a vetted volunteer," she says dismissively. "How long before you can take the prisoner under?"
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You're Ariadne, Phillipa Cobb said, the one and only time they met. Like the spider.
Almost, Ariadne had laughed. That was Arachne.
What did Ariadne do?
She saved Jason from the Minotaur's Labyrinth.
Phillipa cocked her head, curious.
Did she kill the Minotaur?
Ariadne shook her head sadly.
No, she just helped him escape the Labyrinth.
She thinks maybe she could have killed the Minotaur, though, if she had been that Ariadne.
But she's not.
She's this one. The one locked in a compound in what she thinks is Southern France. Yet her prison guard's an Anglo-American woman who barks like a plaited Navy Seal and writes notes by hand like a Renaissance Duchess and Ariadne is starting to feel like she could be anywhere.
There's a big gap missing from her timeline between getting into that electric car and getting out of the plane.
Her totem itches in the lining of her pocket and she's starting to think she's forgotten the true weight of it.
.
.
It's your totem. It's the most important thing you will hold in your hand. This is more important than your wedding ring.
I'm not married.
I can tell, love.
That's rude.
No, it's really not.
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.
It seems pointlessly cruel to ask Cobb if he's checked his totem, to show any fear of losing reality when he's barely recovered from his wife's violent disconnect.
She holds off until Day Four, when they're waiting to be told if they're allowed to see the ones that failed to break into Arthur's mind first.
"When did you last check your totem?" she whispers.
Cobb's entire frame seems to tighten beside her. They're sitting side by side in hardback chairs outside an office marked RIGBY.
"This morning," he says under his breath. "Why?"
Ariadne can't bring herself to reply.
"Are you having doubts?"
He sounds furious. Reins it into a snort like a bridled horse.
"This is real," he snaps. "We're awake, goddamnit."
"I'm sorry," she says.
"I know," she says.
"I'm just scared," she says.
.
.
("I don't want this to be real," she doesn't say.)
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Grace Rigby calls them inside.
"You can talk to McPherson," she says looking disgruntled.
She sends them away, her pen twitching against a letter in front of her, all swirls and torn lines.
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.
McPherson arrives early evening on Day Five.
She's got dark hair and dark eyes and a hundred thousand freckles on her face and hands.
She looks drawn and wilted, like her bones shrank without the rest of her body's permission. She wears soft grey trousers and a black blouse open at her throat, revealing deep scratches in her clavicle.
Her fingernails, Ariadne notes, are cut down to the wick, thick red lines of bruises in their rims.
"There were three of us," she says.
Her accent isn't strong. Edinburgh, Ariadne thinks, if she remembers Jessie's British dialect lessons well enough.
"We built his safe-house in Melbourne, the one we found before we'd caught up with him."
She doesn't sound afraid, though her fingers flinch towards her throat more than once. Her lips wrap bitterly around her words.
"He played along, but he knew. He knew the whole time. One minute he's making coffee and talking to Savage like he's an old school friend. There's music playing and it's raining outside. Savage took one sip of that coffee and went down like a pigeon shot out of the sky."
The words fall out of her lips like the creeping tales of the wolf in the night, softly spoken threats and ill-fated promises.
"I don't know how he got us down," she says, as defensive as if they were another inquisition, like the one she's no doubt been suffering since escaping the claws of a man pumped with sedative and trapped in his own mind. "We were two levels deep but he got us down to a third. I shot myself out of the dream, woke up still in Melbourne. Couldn't find Corrino. Savage, he was just, gone. I was so afraid of dropping to Limbo. I ran.
"He hunted me down like – I don't know. It was a horror film. The city flooded. Like he was trying to smoke me out or something. Flood me out. I ended up stranded on a rooftop with one of his projections. A woman with red hair and – shite."
She breaks off to gulp down air. Her eyes are pink.
"They got Corrino out of Limbo, apparently. Savage is still a vegetable."
She looks up from her bruised fingers. She looks up at those that are to go where she dreads to dream of.
"He's an animal," she spits, slicing cleanly through her anger, into the toxic rage beneath. "He needs to be put down."
.
.
McPherson isn't much help beyond that.
She scratches her blunt fingernails and screams at them to put the beast and all his victims out of their misery; to shoot him in the head.
.
.
They don't ask for another interview.
.
.
Holier-than-thou Grace Rigby just hmms, looking as determinedly unsurprised as she can.
(She doesn't hide the disappointment as well as she clearly means to, though.)
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My imagination works perfectly fine, thank you very much! Arthur had shouted across the Paris warehouse, while Yusuf and Cobb were running tests in another room.
Ariadne had looked down at her blueprints awkwardly while Eames laughed and replied in a soft cat's purr, Your sense of humour still needs work, though.
.
.
Too soon, they go under.
Standing on a viewing platform above, waiting for the signal, she thinks about what she'll say when people ask about Arthur the Point Man.
He was good, she wants to be able to say.
More accurately, though: I wish he was good. I think he was good. (It was hard to tell.)
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.
"I think we should let him fill the blanks," Cobb says, against every lesson he ever drilled into Ariadne's head.
"You think what now?" she scoffs around a mouthful of tuna mayo sandwich.
"We give him the dream and let his subconscious fill it. All of it. Not just, you know, the bank and the safe and the projections."
"You mean you want to insert us directly into his uninhibited subconscious," Ariadne corrects, not quite laughing, because it's not quite a joke.
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I can't do this.
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.
This is fucking amoral.
.
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What if they're wrong?
.
.
What if they're right?
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.
What happens after we do it?
.
.
What happens after we fail?
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.
What happens to us after?
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.
(What happens to him ?)
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.
(outside, under oath, as Perseids reign)
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"How did you meet Arthur?" Ariadne asks.
She doesn't bother pussyfooting. It's hard to pretend to be coy with a man whose mind she broke into like a thief in the night. (Like a thief in the elevator shaft.)
"He came to Mal and I when we were researchers. He'd graduated in Biochemistry and was interested in applying his thesis research to lucid dreaming. He got into the off road stuff before us. Before me."
They're sitting at a table near the window. Their pencils are broken and their papers are full.
"He got in with people like Taylor Mason and Bella Neita," Cobb continues, regretful, fully aware he's retelling a history of deceit. "Mal and I did some softball jobs before everything happened. I'd been working on extraction theory for years."
Ariadne reaches over, plucks the pencil stub out of Cobb's fingers.
"How did you find out about Dolos and Carnus?" she presses.
Through the window, they watch a car pull up. Two men in grey crisp suits step out, greeted by a third. They shake hands, self-congratulatory and charming. Above them, the clouds shine white.
"We all heard about them," Cobb says, eyes clumped like a seal. "All the government-funded researchers. One day it was hush hush. Then the next, a bunch of alerts and phone calls redirected from the goddamn Pentagon saying there'd been a security breach."
He laughs across the table, picks up another pencil to twirl it like a spinning top in his hands.
He's aging every day in here. He's mourning a friend that never really existed and he's scrambling for answers he doesn't want.
"All those conspiracies about the government spies? Newspapers saying the US had gone Cold War on us all. People up in arms about the CIA going too far, spies everywhere. People like to protest things they don't understand."
(We're part of something really important, she hears herself insist.)
"That was them?"
Cobb shrugs, wobbling his hand in a half and half motion.
"That was a ripple effect of what they started. They told the researchers and the middle men what the government was up to. How they figured out lucid dreams. How they were using them to forcibly extract intel from prisoners. It trickled down to journalists screaming about governments spying on their people through computer software. Which, to be fair, is mostly true by now.
"The PASIVs and experiments didn't exactly reach the tabloids, else everyone would know about it."
According to the ugly file that sits between them at the table, Arthur is thirty-two years old.
It's only a lie of two years.
But two years holds a lot of time in its hands.
A lot of real clocks and a lifetime of dreams.
.
.
How did you guys meet Eames?
He was an art forger and a fence in Sydney. He was conning a mark Arthur and I were working on. Mal was pregnant with James at the time. He almost lost us the extraction. Ended up buying his way into the job. Arthur was so mad he wouldn't even look at him the whole time.
.
.
Before they go under, Grace Rigby reminds them.
"I want names and I want locations. I want Dolos. You hear me?"
.
.
Cobb has a pep talk of his own prepared.
"Any history between us and him doesn't matter right now. To him, we're the enemy. Understand? We're invading his mind. He is going to hunt us down like McPherson and her team and all the others they sent down. Understand? Whatever you see, whatever you hear, remember that he has successfully conned every single person he's ever met for years. Understand?"
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.
Before they go under, Ariadne thinks about all the questions she forgot to ask.
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.
"I think in a past life I helped build the Taj Mahal."
Arthur raises one eyebrow.
The sweat on his face is cooling; the blush in his chest fading.
"You should be so lucky," he replies as he kicks the last corner of the sheet off the bed.
Ariadne turns her head, looks at his profile from across the pillows and pulls a lock of her own hair out from where it's caught in her necklace chain.
"Shit," she groans, rising onto one arm and tugging at the knot.
"Come here," Arthur says with feathered impatience.
He leans over on his elbows, the length of his front tucked along her side. He fiddles at the knot of hair with delicate, determined fingers. Close up, she can see the bare trace of five o'clock shadow over his jaw, dipping into his chin.
His tongue, she realises, presses into his lower lip when he concentrates.
She watches his expression shift and twist, relaxing as her hair comes free. Before he can move away she surges upwards to kiss the corner of his mouth.
He accepts it with a barely-there return, stays up on one arm to look down at her.
"Thank you," she says.
(Blurts it out, ashamed.)
Arthur almost smiles, then. She sees it in the bunch of his cheeks as he tilts his head.
"You shouldn't thank me."
"I asked you," she points out, can't quite hold his unabashed stare. The liquid courage has long been sweated out of her.
Arthur lies down naked the way he stands up suited: sure and unafraid.
"I wouldn't have done it if I didn't want to," he says.
That she can believe. Ariadne has the distinct impression Arthur's never done anything he didn't want to do.
"Do you even like women?" she asks.
Arthur does smile, then.
It isn't a warm smile, but he doesn't look upset at the question.
"Do you even like men?" he counters, to which she has no definitive reply.
He kisses her. He licks a silent, wet confession out of her mouth.
She doesn't ask again.
She doesn't need to.
(Neither does he.)
.
.
When it happens, slipping down into Arthur's head feels a lot like that kiss.
Guilty, intimate, apologetic; boldly regretful.
.
.
She lies down in a cot next to the motionless Arthur. His hair's too long but he's clean shaven. Ariadne wonders vaguely who's in charge of keeping him from looking like he's been tied down and drugged up for a month. For longer.
Cobb lies on her other side, his face turned away from both of them.
She closes her eyes when she spots Grace Rigby watching, feels the pinprick of the needle and thinks forgive me.
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