A/N: I don't even. This … thing infected my brain and I needed to get it written down and I know that there's probably a gazillion stories like this out there, but I never claimed to be the most original. So there.
I hope you like it anyway.
(Also, rated for a reason.)
.
.
.
"Tell me what you're gonna do when you grow up, little Picasso."
"I'm gonna build you a palace."
Ariadne cannot remember a time in which she did not experiment with shapes, styles and colors. Crayons on her mother's kitchen wall was a wealth of joyous moments to her, both gratefully received and generously offered. For her mother it was a heavy migraine and paying for new wall paint with money they couldn't realistically afford. The results of forcing geometrical figures together until they felt right peppered her writing pads and left her math teacher fairly unimpressed and under the assumption that she suffered from a rather intense form of ADD. Spending what little money she earned working in a lousy diner on canvases and paint and brushes seemed the most sensible thing to do, even when she finally noticed that none of her peers seemed to have such a single-minded focus on anything.
But her mother called her her 'little Picasso' and although Pablo Picasso had less to do with her artistic progress than, say, Michelangelo, or Jørn Utzon, Ariadne was secretly pleased.
She knew her passion long before most of her classmates even only spared a thought to what they were going to do after graduation, and it made her a bit of an outcast. Friendship, or rather the lack of it, wasn't something that bothered Ariadne, at least not until her mother pointed out that there's more to life than structural loads and the smell of paint thinner.
So, making an effort, Ariadne participated in scholar activities, received slightly better grades for it and made a few somewhat-friends. The time needed to do all that, however, was not subtracted from her hours spent drawing, but from those that should have been spent sleeping.
In essence, her adolescence was a blur of lack of sleep, of mediocre performance on anything not relating to her passion, and acquaintances that shifted between being utterly amused or completely weirded out by her focus.
It all changed drastically upon entering college, mainly because now there were people around her who wanted this just as much as she did, and it fueled her impetus exponentially. And now that everything else fell away she didn't need to sacrifice her physical needs in order to maintain a relatively normal life.
Friends were found easily, and she had fun going out with them, enjoyed being part of something other than a family unit consisting of her mother and herself. Still she worked her butt off, continued cramming her head with knowledge and designing all kinds of buildings until she fell asleep on her desk.
She felt she deserved it when she got that scholarship for Paris, where, for all intents and purposes, she kept to this sort of lifestyle.
So all these years she's been pushing forward, at times almost violently so.
And now she's stuck.
And it drives her insane.
"Your designs are, without a doubt, very unique, very imaginative. But you need to be careful not to disregard practicality entirely, Miss...?"
"Ariadne, Professor Miles, just Ariadne."
She's been in creative holes before, has felt the utter absence of inspiration like a gunshot wound. So she'd spent some days, sometimes weeks, pulling her hair, biting her nails – and one day, all of a sudden she'd be back on track again, coming out of her crisis all the better for it.
But this, this is different, is worse. As far as metaphors go, this is a wall too high to climb, too thick to penetrate. No way around it, forcing Ariadne to stay where she is, because she can't go back where she came from, either.
Finding a reason is as simple as it is useless: Her journey to Limbo seems an appropriate catalyst for her situation, even if temporally removed from the actual incident by a few weeks. But knowing it doesn't automatically lead to an adjuvant solution.
And still there are lectures to attend if she wants to graduate sometime. The fact that she feels stressed out the moment she sees an empty canvas does absolutely nothing to alleviate her feeling of being completely out of her element, separated from what her life was like before Cobb dropped in.
For assignments she uses old concept drawings of hers that had been discarded for a reason, and it doesn't even take two weeks before her professors catch on to her affliction.
Naturally, Miles is the only one who has the faintest idea as to what is actually going on with her, and he corners her after she fails one of his assignments rather abysmally. He is obviously worried and seems to feel half-guilty for having been the one to push her into the job – but she is quick to placate him; she wouldn't have wanted to miss this opportunity for the world and if this, obviously fleeting, form of creative block is the price she has to pay for having experienced something like that she's more than willing to do so.
She's telling the truth and he can see that, so he lets her go and fight her demons on her own.
"Have you ever thought of being something else than an architect?"
"Like what?"
"Dunno, hun. Like the poster child for the Titless Women Association or something."
"...Very funny, Claire."
She tries forcing her muse to come back. She grabs her sketch book, an assortment of pens and pencils, and starts wandering the streets of Paris, a watchful eye on every house she passes, on the way the sunlight hits a tree, on how the Eiffel Tower looks from a distance. Sits down in a park and watches children chase each other around. Goes as far as to climb a tree in order to change her perspective.
But things which inspired her before stir nothing inside her now, nothing at all. And, feeling herself slip, Ariadne plans to barricade herself inside her apartment, to draw relentlessly until something comes out. Her friends, apparently anticipating this move, put their intervention into effect long before Ariadne can even think of asking Claire to give back the spare key to her apartment.
So they await her, force her to dress up, then drag her out into the Parisian night life. It takes an hour or two – but Ariadne finally complies with her friends' good intentions and lets herself have some fun for a change.
Fun, however, remains a relative term, and even if the dancing exhausts her physically and the alcohol she downs like water helps her forget for a few hours – the hangover she wakes to the next morning makes her feel all the worse for it.
"Don't you think you're taking this a little too far, Ariadne? The world isn't going to end just because you are in a slump."
"That's not it. I just … I don't really know this person I've become in the past few weeks ... All I know is that I can't stand her at all."
Unexpectedly, things get even worse.
A pencil breaks in her hand and she takes it as a Sign, even though she never believed in things like that before. But now something as mundane as her physical strength versus a thin piece of wood makes her certain that the world as a whole is laughing at her. And she knows she is being overly dramatic about all of this, but she feels so out of touch with herself that she can't even seem to think straight anymore.
So she starts raiding her apartment, throws out every empty canvas she finds, utterly destroys all her sketch blocks, banishes all her utensils into a box she's going to throw out the moment she can be certain her neighbors aren't looking.
And somehow, she doesn't even care about the money she's wasting.
Her mother is half-frantic when she calls and it brings Ariadne to the brink of hysteria as well – because this isn't what she wants her mother to know her as: an artist trapped by her own incompetence.
So for the duration of their phone conversation Ariadne gets her act together and tells her what is going on; finding herself in a creative crisis she can't seem to find a way out of. Her clinical explanation calms both of them down enough so that they can actually have a normal talk about this, and her mother, having been right there when Ariadne hadn't known anything else but her passion, has at least some words of wisdom to give.
The fact that they are of no use whatsoever can be completely chalked up to Ariadne omitting some rather vital parts of her most recent past.
"M-my name is -"
"I know who you are."
More than a week into this ridiculous display of misery Mal starts showing up in her dreams – or rather Cobb's projection of her, and it drives Ariadne further into her corner, making her avoid sleeping altogether, nursing one cup of coffee after the other.
And, god, she knows that she's letting this get out of hand, and that she isn't this kind of person – this weak, juvenile excuse of a human being who'd like nothing more than to punch her stupid reflection in the face. All that is keeping her from that particular extreme is the fact that she doesn't want to have to pick the shards out of the skin of her hand afterwards.
She is chronically tired, utterly frustrated and the urge to scream has manifested as a lump in her throat and a knot in her stomach.
It's on a warm Wednesday that she finally snaps.
Grabbing the box of utensils that still sits uselessly next to her apartment door, she pulls it over into her living room and takes out every single can of paint, regardless of the color. Meticulously she peels of every lid and lets the open cans sit on the low coffee table in front of her.
Now that she can actually take stock of it she can see that, without all her painting stuff, her apartment seems rather empty and somehow, this fact alone infuriates her enough that she grabs a can and throws its content at the opposite wall. The result is a blue splatter which stretches the entire wall, with spots on both adjacent ones and the ceiling, as well as droplets on the wooden floor. And, for good measure, she takes another can and repeats the process.
It's not exactly liberating, but it feels like something, and that is enough for her at the moment as she looks at the red paint overlapping and mixing with the blue.
The knock on her door is as sudden as it is unwelcome.
Swallowing a growl she puts the empty can down on a shelf which, upon further inspection, took some of the paint as well, and moves over to answer the door.
And well, this certainly is a surprise.
"Arthur", she says and it sounds like a question, because while she long since lost trust in her own accountability she is actually pretty sure that this person standing in front of her right now is him.
He nods and the way he regards her makes her think that she probably looks the way she feels, maybe worse. But she can't even seem to muster the emotional energy to feel self-conscious. She is, however, torn between doing the polite thing or slamming the door in his face, for a second.
In the end, her good upbringing wins out and with a stiff smile she invites him, uncomfortably aware what her apartment looks like right now. She watches him take in the mess, his eyes sweeping over what little furniture she possesses, lingering on the stains of color that cover her walls and floor before they come to rest on her face again. And, goddamnitall, he couldn't have chosen a worse time to show up.
So she isn't sure if it's her instincts or the slowly creeping desperation that comes with her brand of crazy that makes her push him against the closed door and kiss him like it's the only lifeline available to her. His surprise shows in the way his body stiffens, but Ariadne ignores his discomfort and takes what she wants.
It's a minor triumph when he succumbs.
She is the tiniest bit caught off guard though, when his hands come up to frame her face and he returns her vigor to an equal degree. Groaning, she grabs the lapels of his suit jacket to draw him even closer, because she knows this kind of hunger and she knows how to satiate it.
She lets her hands travel underneath his jacket, lets them register the fabric of his vest before they reach for his shoulders in order to push the jacket off. He complies, letting the garment drop to the floor before his arms come up to wrap around her body.
Dimly she is aware that this is not one of her more brilliant ideas, that, if she doesn't take a minute to just breathe and think this through, there's a high chance she is going to regret this later on. That she is using Arthur in a way that should make her be ashamed of herself.
She also knows that she needs this, and to a certain degree, needs it to be with him – what that little detail may mean she is not ready to figure out yet.
And although she usually isn't this inconsiderate she qualifies that, when it comes down to it, this is all about herself, and that Arthur is a big boy and can speak up if he feels uncomfortable with what they are doing.
And because he doesn't she feels vindicated to continue.
She is nearly ecstatic to find that he is willing to let her dominate him, even if his motivation remains a mystery to her, at least for the moment. And for the moment, she doesn't question, doesn't even doubt, just coaxes him into doing what she wants him to do.
His muscles flex under her hands' passage and she's getting impatient, almost shoves him towards her couch which, luckily enough, is still in immaculate condition – although she can't honestly say she would have cared if it hadn't been. He sits, pulls her down on his lap so that the height difference between them is annulled.
His hands are hot where they've slipped under her shirt and onto her skin, and she thinks that if she looked now she might find angry red blotches. But the way he kisses her like he's never done anything else preoccupies her mind, her body, and she wants nothing more than to feel the texture of his skin under her hands.
Separated from any coherency her brain is capable of at the moment her fingers open the buttons of his vest, loosen his tie, continue with his shirt. Breaking contact for a second she lets him pull her shirt over her head. Her jeans present more of an obstacle, but once she's successfully wriggled out of them she feels part of her mind shut down, feels her world shrink down to what she needs right now, and how much of it he can provide.
She doesn't let them be leisurely about this, nestles with his belt and pants until she can finally – finally – sink herself onto him, setting a pace he only needs a moment to match up to. His mouth travels down her throat and she thinks she hears him mutter her name, but can't be sure about it since the next second his fingers seek and find her clit.
When she comes it's with a guttural grunt, and an apology trapped in her throat.
"Do you know what it is to be a lover? To be half of a whole?"
She isn't expecting her detour into the realm of carnal pleasure to make much of a difference in regards to her state of being, so she isn't really disappointed when days pass and she finds it doesn't. It is, however, a good thing that Arthur deems it appropriate to keep coming back, she thinks, even if her forcefulness shifted a landslide between them.
He explains to her over dinner that Cobb heard from Miles about her, and that when Cobb told him he used it as an excuse to seek her out, but that he would have shown up here someday, anyway.
He tells her over breakfast that they all struggled after their first few jobs, some worse than she did – but that this particular job really shouldn't have been the one to introduce her to the business, that too much went wrong and too much was at stake. That she came of her own free will and was determined to see it through to the end constitutes as an adequate attestation to the strength of her character. Her answer to that is a snort, but she takes the compliment for what it is, anyway.
She likes to think that even while they were working on the Fischer-job she got to know this person sitting opposite her now better than anyone else would have done in her position, that since he is such a private person he wouldn't open up to just anybody like that. Alleviates her gnawing qualms about their relationship or whatever it is that keeps him by her side by telling herself that she did get to know him before she slept with him, that she trusted him with her mind, with her life even, before she even thought of him in that capacity.
So even if this isn't a story about romance, or about all-blinding passion, it is one about trust, about consistency – and she thinks that this, more than anything else, is all she really needs.
And as they keep falling into bed together, Ariadne relearns to relinquish, enjoys it when he takes control – because she knows he is good at it. Likes the way he lets her satisfy her curiosity, the way he only quirks an eyebrow when he catches her staring again.
If she were paying the least bit of attention she would notice that her hands keep painting entire cities onto his skin.