He's ashamed. He pictures the astonishment on her round face the moment he wakes up every morning and hears the echo of her voice calling out to him long after he should be asleep. His dreams are muddled scenes with her that drift in and out of sequence and leave him feeling empty and unfulfilled in the waking world.
He shouldn't have been so stupid. He shouldn't have let her catch him. No—he shouldn't have let her leave a year ago, when it counted the most.
Another week goes by and he doesn't even feel it. Eames calls again. He has found an architect, and expects Arthur in Washington D.C. in a few days to train the new guy. Arthur feels the tug of his obligation to travel down there, to do his job, but it's not enough to make him leave New York. He can't stand the idea of leaving her in this city. She might be gone when he comes back, and he knows he would never look for her if she left, because she hadn't wanted him to find her in the first place.
On a particularly muggy Wednesday she doesn't walk past the subway station he sits at to watch her on her way to work. He tries to brush it off, and even retreats from his lookout bench with every intention to spend the entire day holed up in the hotel he's barely living in.
It doesn't work. By nightfall he's out there again, waiting to see if she'll pass by on her way home. When she doesn't he feels his chest constrict with an almost imperceptible, controlled kind of panic. Without thinking it through his feet are sweeping over the pavement, hailing a cab. It's a half hour drive and he can't stand the uselessness of just sitting in the back on the smelly upholstery. His heart is beating like he needs to run, like his arms and legs need to pump and his muscles need to rip with the supreme effort to find her.
It's irrational. He understands that, and even as he understands it, even as he clutches his totem and knows that he is in the waking world, he still panics.
When the cab finally pulls up to her apartment building he practically throws the cash at the driver and leaves before the man can count it and realize how much Arthur overpaid him.
There's a security guard in the front desk. "Excuse me," says the guard, and Arthur stops in his track, feeling his own stupidity seep in. Usually he is so suave, so contained, and in any other circumstances—surely in circumstances more dire than this—he might have been able to slip up the rickety stairs unnoticed.
"Well?" says the guard, when Arthur just stares at him.
"I'm looking for someone," he says breathlessly.
"What room?"
"I'm not sure."
The guard rolls his eyes, making a show of his irritation. "Do you have a name?"
"Ariadne," he says, and the feels weird on his tongue, like some sort of hidden secret he revealed to himself after not saying it for so long.
The guard laboriously pulls out a binder and flicks through it. "There's no Ariadne here."
For the first time in a long time Arthur is frustrated enough to want to hit something. He considers the trouble he'd go through for kicking a hole into the peeling walls of this dump and decides against it, feeling his bones quake in protest to his logic.
"I know she's here," he says defensively. He makes a break for the stairs.
"Don't make me call the cops," the man barks, finally getting up from the desk.
"You don't understand."
"No, I don't. And that's why you have to leave. Now."
The hardest part is waiting. He stands by the side of the building, rigid as a board, barely even moving. Two hours pass. It's a ridiculous notion that she would bother leaving the apartment this late, even assuming that she is actually inside, but he waits anyway, determining that he'll wait until morning if that's what it takes.
When a taxi pulls up next to the building he doesn't even look at it, his eyes focused on the front entrance as if she will magically appear there, drawn to him.
"What are you doing here?"
As quiet and raspy as it sounds, he recognizes her voice in an instant, and he near whips his head out of place in an effort to see her face. It feels like he's spent the past year stretching a rubber band too far and now that she's so close to him, mere feet away, the elastic has mercifully snapped back into place.
"Ariadne," he says stupidly. "Your eye."
She reaches a self-conscious hand up to the swelling bruise and he sees that her other arm is in a sling as well.
"What happened?" he asks, already blaming himself.
"I . . ." She's embarrassed. "I was sleepwalking last night. And I tripped."
He wants to touch her cheek and make it better. He wants to hold her until her eyes lose that wide, scared look and she stops holding her arms too close to her sides.
"Sleepwalking?" he repeats.
She starts to nod, then shakes her head instead, staring at him in bewilderment. "Arthur. What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you," he says honestly.
The hurt in her eyes is somewhat masked when she commits her entire face into a twisted scowl. "You ran away from me," she accuses.
He doesn't say anything for a moment. He doesn't know what he's doing. Coming up with an excuse? He's better than that, he knows, because there is no suitable excuse for his behavior, and trying to find one would only make her lose respect for him.
"I'm sorry. It caught me off guard, when you saw me in the window."
She sighs. He can see just a hint of her chest through the buttons of her coat and it looks almost concave. She seems like even more of a wisp of a person than he remembers her being, and he would call her fragile, but the way she looks ready to tear his eyes out makes him think the better of it.
"I wasn't talking about the coffee shop. I was talking about Los Angeles."
He balks, surprised by how much venom he hears in her voice. In mere moments she has rendered him speechless, and although he has imagined and quite literally dreamed of this confrontation for months now, he has never thought it would be like this.
She searches his face for a few moments. Waits for him to say something. Then he sees a slow and bitter acceptance cross her face, as she understands he has nothing to say. "Fine," she says. "Great. Good night, Arthur."
"Wait."
She's already halfway up the front steps, her back turned to him. "I'm sick of waiting."
He walks up the steps tentatively. It's almost frightening the way she won't turn around, the way she won't move. He remembers how Cobb would dream, how his vision of his children would always be obscured and out of reach, and he suddenly has to stifle the fear that this is the pivotal moment that will forever define him if he screws it up.
Since his words aren't enough he grabs her hand, the one that isn't in the sling. He curls her fingers into his and is struck with the familiarity of it, remembering holding this same small, cold hand just a year before and then letting it go.
When she doesn't pull her hand away from him he walks up the stairs until he's level with her again. She turns her cheek, unwilling to let him see her face.
"Let me stay the night," he says gently.
Her shoulders tighten, indignant. "How stupid do you think I am?"
"It's not like that," he says. His face is hot with embarrassment. "I just want to make sure you're okay."
"I'm fine." Her voice is like steel. She pries her hand out of his, and maybe he's just imagining it, but she exerts some small pressure and lingers before she lets go.
"Well, if you won't let me in for your own sake, do it for mine. I don't want you to be alone tonight."
She bites at her lower lip to keep it from trembling visibly. He knows exactly what she's thinking about, and lowers his voice, partially in shame and partially to assure her. "I know it's asking more than I deserve."
It's starting to drizzle, but neither of them moves.
"The couch smells bad," she finally says. "And I don't have any spare pillows."
He supposes this isn't the ideal time to remind her that he's done a good portion of sleeping in a lawn chair. He smiles just slightly in relief and it feels like his face is cracking open, so he stops before she can catch him. By the time she turns to face him there is mascara dripping down her face from the rain and his face is stoic as a wall.
The guard glares at him on their way up, but doesn't try to stop them. Ariadne silently leads him up to her apartment, which is tiny and barely furnished, save for the bed and the threadbare couch. In the tiny kitchen is a coffee strainer full of soggy, used coffee grounds and an open box of crackers. On the counter are stacks of papers and layout plans. Her clothes are all laid out on the floor of the bedroom instead of hanging in the closet, as if she never meant to stay for as long as she has.
Staring at the disorganized, near empty apartment he can't help but remember the hotel in Los Angeles. Her clothes tucked neatly into her closet, her one pair of sneakers lined up by the bed, looking almost dainty next to his loafers. This mess, it isn't like her.
"Here."
She hands him a blanket. It's ragged, but it's clean, and he would just as soon not have a blanket if it means he can stay here with her. He strips down to his undershirt and boxers and makes a show of getting ready to sleep, but he knows that he won't. For the most part she ignores him, brushing her teeth and combing her hair and barely even throwing off her shoes before flopping back on her bed and burying her head in the pillow.
The door to her room is still open, so he has almost a clear view of her. The kitchen light is still on and he wonders if it bothers her. He shifts awkwardly before asking. "Should I turn off the light?"
"Mmmf," she says, her voice muffled.
Dutifully he gets up and shuts off the light. "Good night," he says, and by that time she either chooses not to reply or has already fallen asleep.
He lets about fifteen minutes pass before he hears light snoring. He almost smirks at the memory of her snoring in the warehouse on her very first day with Cobb. How she looked like a perfect porcelain doll on that filthy lawn chair, and how her chest rose and fell in small bursts, and how every so often her the angelic sound of her breath would hitch in a tiny, inelegant snore.
Once he's sure she's asleep he starts rifling through the files and paperwork scrambled on her kitchen counter. At first it's all blueprints and layouts of office buildings and chain restaurants and malls, courtesy of her internship. It's nice, it's professional, and it's very well done, but it isn't inspired. It isn't Ariadne. What he sees in these pages is a promising architect who wears her hair in a severe bun and wears heels as tall and intimidating as the towers she builds.
What he looks for is the girl who wore scarves in the summertime and scuffed up sneakers in fancy hotels, and didn't imagine things that could be contained on a simple blueprint or even in a three dimensional model.
He doesn't find her in the pages. Not even one hint of her, not after hours of poring through a year's worth of notes and scribbles and figures.
Something glints at him from the sink. He is about to ignore it, assuming it's silverware, but its gold color is distinct enough to make him double-take. He walks over slowly, not quite believing it.
It's Ariadne's totem. The chess piece. Laying abandoned in the sink.
He's about to reach out and touch it, but thinks better of it, drawing back as if the air around it scalds him. He knows better than to touch somebody else's totem. But he's never been good with boundaries and when it comes to Ariadne.
"Arthur?"
He is so astonished by her discarded totem that he doesn't even notice her footsteps padding into the kitchen. For a man whose life revolves around details, he sure has missed the important ones in the past few hours.
"You're up," he says, ever the observant one.
"Where is everybody?"
"Where . . ." He stares at her. "Where's who?"
She's looking at him without quite looking at him. Her eyes are sort of glazed over, her eyelids only half open. There's something stilted in her walk when she steps over to him, and that's when he realizes it.
"Oh," he says. "You're sleepwalking."
"We should probably leave," she says back.
He nods. "Come on, then," he says, keeping his voice low. "Let's go back."
As gently as he can, he grips his hands on her shoulders and starts to guide her out of the kitchen.
"This is the wrong way," she says. But she reaches out and grabs one of his hands and holds it tight, letting him lead her.
"It's a different way. It's okay."
They're in her bedroom doorway when she stops. "Where's Cobb?"
His chest constricts and he almost forgets to keep her moving. He takes a deep breath and nudges her ever so slightly, compelling her to move toward the bed. "I don't know," he tells her honestly.
"Are we dreaming?"
He chuckles at the awe in her voice. "Just a little."