A/N: If I could, I would say that I planted the idea for Inception in Nolan's mind, but I just can't take credit for his sort of genius. All of the below belong to him.
He is lines and angles, she is curves and shapes without corners. Even his touch is all of degrees - ninety between his forefinger and thumb, zero between his hand and hers - and it is jarring to her senses.
After LAX, they part ways with that single subtle look; he passes her and cuts forty-five degrees out into the street, as she meanders through the hallways of places she has never been in waving paths, imagining what the clinical tile under her feet could become if she were asleep.
He handed her a single card as he left (the corner had pressed its shape into her palm), and she laughs to see that the "a" of his name is exactly as she would have predicted it, with its severe peak and evenly spaced feet. But she tucks it into her purse and she plunges into American daylight with the same voracity for discovery that she sunk into a dreamscape.
She has earned two degrees by the time she hears his voice again (although that's not saying much, because she only had only four more courses to finish them both at the time that they met), and she blinks stupidly at her phone before she can respond. And even as she absorbs his words, she is fumbling in her pocket for the bishop, listening to it thud comfortingly into the wood of her desk, again - and again - and again.
It is a corporate espionage job, of the variety that she had once determined never to take part in, but there is something in her that is screaming for the creator's rush, to see a world spring up around her, a world of her own making.
The bishop collides with the polished oak of her desk. Smack.
And she says, "I'll do it."
She is not lacking in money (her cut in the Fischer job saw to it that her degree was, in effect, unnecessary, at least when it comes to her own net value), so she's gaining nothing from this job in that respect. Miles would kill her if he knew that she had gone gallivanting off to work an illicit extraction less than four months after her graduation. Her own boredom seemed merely a symptom, and she played with her totem with an obsessive tendency worthy of Cobb himself.
Her dreams are infrequent, but those that come are vivid, and she wakes to hear the smack of the chess piece against her bedside table, again - and again - and again. Once she dreams herself into Mal's world, into the dementia that wonders what is real and what as false, and in a moment of strange clarity she sees Arthur and begs him to wake her up, but when she feels the kick of reality, it is of her own doing, and there is that bishop on the table - again.
The job comes not a moment too soon, and she does not anticipate the strange kick that washes over her like cold water when she saw the sharp lines of that grey three-piece suit in an Italian airport, nor the fact that it does not subside when he touches her elbow, layers of cloth between them though there are.
After the job, they are sitting in a cafe, and they are the only two left in the same country (and possibly continent), and they stand out from the crowd with knifelike sharpness. They are drawing more looks here from reality (and it is reality, so said a red die and a golden bishop) than they had from an unsuspecting subconscious.
She thinks it must be exhaustion or caffeine or a combination of both when she wishes that reality could be distracted at least more easily than a subconscious, and she says that it's too bad that they know a kiss won't work.
The sharp lines of his shoulders curve, just for a moment, just enough to startle her (that kick, the waking-into-waking feeling again) as he says, in his smooth, measured way, that perhaps it worked better in reality. And when it didn't work quite as well, at least not precisely, it was not simply "worth a shot" - it was worth another shot.
The bishop smacked solidly against the table as they make that second attempt, but by the time it rolls into silence, he does not think to roll his die, and the arcs and angles of Ariadne and Arthur build worlds of their own to inhabit.
-fin-