Disclaimer: I do not own Inception.
a/n: I had a little Arthur/Ariadne muse for the first time in a while, so this happened. I'm sorry it's short-that's just where the ending happened, and it felt right. For the record, this is an implied established relationship fic. I don't know if that came across at all, but it's what I was thinking of when I wrote it, so... yay! Oh, and the title is French for "dawn".
Ariadne jerked awake before she hit the floor, twisting as she fell, landing with a clatter of limbs and a groan. She sat up, raking a hand through her hair as she glared at her bed with its tangled sheets. Her elbow hurt where she had banged it against the bed frame, and she knew there would be a bruise on her knee from the floor, rug or not, but more than that, she hated the fact that it hadn't just been a fall. It had been a kick.
She missed the days when falling out of bed in the midst of some subconscious jerk of limbs, a poorly choreographed roll, was just falling out of bed. Now it was that jerk of falling, the tug in her stomach as she tried to put herself back into equilibrium with gravity. Now it was waking up.
She glanced at the clock as she shifted back onto her bed, sighing at the blue numbers. Five forty-three. Three hours until class, and she knew herself well. Ariadne never fell back asleep—once she woke up, she was awake for the day, and that was how it worked.
There were clothes scattered around the room, scarves and khakis and sweaters tangled in bunches on the chair in the corner, the top of her dresser, the foot of her bed. The sheets and quilt were falling off the side of the bed, having been pulled down as she fell. The light filtering in between the curtains threw things into quiet relief and shadow, the yellow of the streetlamps touching things with indifferent fingers. It was a lonely thing to look at, she mused, toeing the edge of her quilt.
"May as well make use of it," she said, levering herself to her feet and padding into the bathroom, stepping carefully as Leo wound between around her ankles, fur brushing her bare legs.
"Stop it," she said, pushing him away with her foot as she fumbled for the shower knobs. He meowed at her, and she relented just before stepping into the steaming water, ended up crossing her apartment in nothing but an old tank top.
"Dumb cat," she mumbled in his direction, stroking his back as he crunched at the food in his bowl. And then she was back to the bathroom, hair wet and streaming down her back as she stared at the tiles in front of her. She wondered where Arthur was, if he was pacing a hallway in Belgium, boarding a plane in Dubai, drinking black tea in a San Francisco café. She hadn't the faintest clue which one was closest, but she smiled a bit as she noted that he would be wearing a three-piece suit wherever he was.