Look at me! I'm actually writing this story on time! (Bahaha… This was two weeks ago…)

And can I just say again how AWESOME all of you reviewers are? Or anyone who is reading my story? I already have over 100 alerts on this story and more than 10,000 hits. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE! (I use over punctuation to get my point across!) Let me give you a little background on this story so you can see why I am so surprised:

I was driving up to Virginia for holiday and me and my sister got to talking about Inception. I had read a few Inception fanfics and I thought they were terrific. A few of my fantasies were not coming true with these fic. None of them made Arthur out to be the way I pictured them but that wasn't imporant, blah blah blah. Minor details. Then my sister got it into her head that I was going to write a story for her and here we stand.

What started out as just a story for my little sister is now my most popular story…

And guess what: It's all thanks to y'all. C; Really, a writer would be nothing without her readers.

This chapter is a bit more serious. And, sadly, it does not feature too much Arthur/Ariadne.


Ties

Chapter Eleven

Wherein Ariadne has a heart-to-heart with several people


Rachel, it seemed, had become the biggest problem to any forward progress the team would make.

For one, she and Yusuf seemed to have come to heads at some point—probably about basketball—and were now sending dagger eyes each other's way at all times. It was almost oppressive to be in the same room as the two of them. Ariadne didn't know how it was at all possible. The two had known each other for a grand total of four days—that wasn't enough time to build a grudge. But at meal times—when Yusuf was invited to dinner—it was almost as if there were sparks of electric hatred flying over the table and Rachel and Yusuf were the two competing nodes. Even Ms. James's chicken cordon bleu could not distract the others at the table from the heat of hate that was emitting from the two.

And secondly, Rachel and Eames seemed to have become best friends. While this was pleasant at first, it caused some serious issues and more stress for Ariadne's over taxed brain. Eames was getting less work done that usual—at that was saying a lot. While he used to at least attempt to seem like he was doing work by browsing on the internet, he straight up did not do any work at all now. He said that they were "supposed to look like we're on vacation."

But they were doing a job, and it required some work on his part. He needed to be studying people, learning their ticks and their traits. But at this rate, the only person he would be able to imitate would be Rachel. That was the only person he was paying attention to in the entire house.

Which, in turn, brought other problems. Because, as Ariadne reminded him in private one day, they were still pretending to be engaged.

"Darling, darling. I think we both act mature enough that this shouldn't seem to bother you." He said with an easy grin when she brought it up.

"I don't think we could exactly call you 'mature.' That might be stretching the word a bit too thin. Plus, we don't need to give Arthur's family any reason to question our 'relationship.'" She used air-quotes around the word "relationship," because there was no relationship there. Only a friendship. And even that word was stretching it too much as Eames began to irk her more and more.

Eames let out a girlish giggle. "Dear me, Ariadne. I do believe that you are getting a bit jealous! Are you perhaps really in love with me?"

The way he was acting reminded Ariadne of a woman in a large dress and who took great pleasure in beating people with her overly large purse and walked with a dog hitched under one arm. And Ariadne felt like that dog, the air slowly being squeezed out of her as Eames continued his maniacal laughter. Really, she didn't see what was so funny about the situation.

"Eames, I could hardly be jealous. In fact, if it weren't for keeping up appearances, I would tell Rachel to take you off my hands. But since we are here to do a job, I will deal with you for a few days longer. Since I am doing you the favor of putting up with your idiotic nature, will you please do me the favor of acting like a near-thirty year old man and not like a seventeen year old diva?"

"Now now, there is no need to spoil my fun, pet—" With that, Ariadne had to walk out.

Because not only was Eames acting like an actress from the 1900s. He was starting to sound like one too.


She figured that there had to be some way to get back at Eames. In fact, the whole household was driving her around the bend. Ms. James, who had seemed so pleasant before, was starting to rub her the wrong way. Aridne pictured her feelings toward Ms. James like a giant cheese grater. At first, her feelings, the cheese, seemed to be working well with Ms. James, the cheese grater. But the more and more she interacted with her, the more Ariadne realized that she literally was being rubbed the wrong way. Instead of tiny curls of beautiful cheese falling to the plate, her feelings ended up as a smushed, gross mess.

There was something about Ms. James that Ariadne couldn't put her finger on. For all the love she showed Arthur, there seemed to be something… off about it. It had started with the Shampoo in the shower and the towels on the rack the first day there. They hadn't been new or replaced, like a mother would do when her son came home. It was almost like she hadn't expected Arthur to actually come home. Or that she didn't want him there.

Or that she didn't want him there long.

Ariadne couldn't figure it out. But all she knew was that the longer Arthur stayed, the louder and louder Ms. James became.

In fact, the noise level reached such peak the day after Arthur and Ariadne had spilled their feelings, that Ariadne found herself excusing herself back out to the woodshop to work on her model.

The summer Virginia air was surprisingly cool, after the heat of Paris's summer streets. It was a refreshing sort of air, and a cool breeze seemed to carry off a bit of Ariadne's stress and anger. It certainly did wonders for her abnormally red face. Ms. James had been speaking with such a loud volume to Arthur about his plans for his future that Ariadne had become a bit antsy and breathless. Not one for loudness, she had excused herself to the back. When the door snapped shut, Ariadne wondered for a minute if Mr. James had installed sound proof doors. Because Ariadne could see Ms. James inside one the couch next to Arthur, but she could not hear even a hum of their conversation.

Then she decided that it didn't matter because she needed to get away from all of that anyway.

The trek up to the workshop was calming and Ariadne could already hear her heart rate lowering.

Silently, she took up her tools and began working. For nearly a half hour she worked, tools in hand, nearly an extension of her fingers. Thirty minutes in and she had already nearly finished the lower floor of the house. She was working with the speed of a shark and with the tenacity of a bloodhound.

She almost didn't notice, in fact, when the bottom half of the Dutch-door opened up and Mr. James tiptoed in. She looked up from her work—bottle of glue in one hand and the piece of wood she was trying to attach in the other.

"Oh, I'm sorry dear," he said, starting to back track out of the door. But Ariadne stopped him.

"No, no! Come in!" She said, waving him onward with the glue bottle. "I could actually use your help."

There was a flash of eagerness on his face before it was replaced by his usual slightly smiling lips. He snapped the door shut and nearly pranced over to the work table.

"I didn't want to interrupt you." He explained, drawing a tall stool over to the high work table.

"No. You weren't interrupting me. Like I said, I could use your help." She gestured to the starting of the house before her. "I'm an architect in training. But I've spent so much time drawing buildings that I have hardly ever gotten around to actually building models of the buildings."

She then grinned a little bit. "I heard from Arthur that you're pretty handy with a saw. I could use your help."

He laughed a little. "I used to be handy with a saw." He held up his hands and Ariadne saw his swollen joints. She was surprised she hadn't noticed them before. With knots as big as kidney beans protruding from his fingers, Ariadne was surprised he was even able to pick up a spoon.

"Well, I should say that you still have an eye for taste," Ariadne countered. "If you could teach me the ins and outs of finer detail, that would be excellent. I'm growing up in a world that thrives on sleek lines and a lot of boxes. And that's about it."

Mr. James laughed and Ariadne couldn't help but join in. His light laughter was as infectious as the plague.

For the next few hours, the two spent their time building the house. Aridne did most of the fine work, but under the guiding light of Mr. James, she was able to make greater strides toward finally finishing it. He offered her many time-saving hints that she hadn't thought of before. He also knew the inside of his house better than she knew the inside of her own house. This was hardly surprising—he had lived in his house for nearly thirty years—and it turned out to be a great resource for her. He pointed out things that she would have never noticed and probably would have aroused his attention in the dream world had she forgotten them.

They were nowhere near finished with the house when they started talking about things not at all related to architecture. It was actually rather sudden, the change in topics.

"I'd like to thank you for being a friend to my son." Mr. James said as he handed her a piece of plywood.

Ariadne, who was still contemplating a thought he had just had about table saws, looked at him quickly.

"I'm sorry?" She said, taken aback by the sudden change in topic.

Mr. James flushed a bit. For a politician, he sure didn't seem to like talking to people. "I just wanted to thank you for being such a good friend to my step-son."

"Oh, no problem!" Ariadne rubbed the back of her head, embarrassed. She had no idea why she was so embarrassed so suddenly, but she was. She also suddenly wished that she had not rubbed the back of her head. The glue from building the model had stuck in her hair and when she pulled her hand away from her head, she felt giant chunks of hair departing from their home port.

"He's never been the… friendly sort. I guess you could say that he's stand-offish. I trait he got from growing up with me, no doubt." A brief smile flashed across Mr. James' face. "I'm glad that he's been able to find such good friends as you and Eames."

Ariadne nearly had to snort at the fact that Mr. James thought Arthur and Eames were friends. But then again, the two of them were better actors that most gave them credit for. "Oh, think nothing of it. You did a good job raising Arthur. He's grown up to be a fine young man."

The way she said that made her seem like she was about seventy-six, but Mr. James didn't notice. In fact, he seemed a bit reassured by her last statement.

"Oh, well thank you for saying as much. I've always hoped that I was a good father figure for Arthur. I was always afraid that he wouldn't like me…"

"Because you aren't his real dad?" Ariadne asked, wondering how in the world Mr. James could think he was a bad father figure.

Mr. James seemed to consider for a few seconds and appeared to be teetering between two options. In the end, he shrugged. "Yes, I suppose."

"Well, I can tell you, Arthur has told me a bit about you. And from the way he's spoken of you, you wouldn't even think that you weren't his real father. I think he genuinely thinks of you as his father. If you're afraid of him going off to find his real father or trying to replace you, your fears are happily unfounded." Ariadne felt that her speech had used the word "father" a few too many times, but Mr. James seemed appeased.

"Yes…. Arthur is the loyal type." He nodded.

The two sat in silence for a few seconds. They did nothing, just pondered. The glue stayed on the table, and nothing was glued onto the model.

"Why won't you adopt him, Mr. James?" Ariadne asked when she was unable to control her question for any longer.

"Huh?" Mr. James started. He had obviously been involved in his own thoughts and had not heard what Ariadne had just blurted out.

"Why… won't you adopt him, Mr. James?" Ariadne asked again, this time more slowly and with more enunciation. It would do her no good to slur her words.

"Why won't I adopt Arthur?" He asked, reiterating her last statement and employing one of the strategies of communication: a skill that Ariadne lacked.

"Yes sir." She didn't know what else to say.

He sighed, and leaned back in his chair. In his doing so, Ariadne discovered that the chairs had backs that facilitated leaning back and decided that she would at one point see how far the springs in the chair would let her catapult things. He rubbed a gnarled hand across his face and gathered his thoughts.

"Let's just say that I have personal reasons for not wanting to adopt Arthur…" He said in a manner that closed that passage of discussion, but invited her to continue questioning him.

"What was Arthur's real father like?" Ariadne asked. She figured that she may as well get all of her questions out of the way before Mr. James decided that it was no fun to play questioner-and-the-questioned.

In her mind, Ariadne had tried to picture just what kind of person Arthur's real father could have been. She had given up on any sort of tortured past for Arthur—she had met his family. But that didn't mean that she could give up on him having a good for nothing father or maybe a father who tragically died, leaving a young Ms. James destitute with a small child. Ariadne knew the ideas were over romanticized, but she couldn't help but feel that Arthur's past deserved a little more drama than a father and mother who just couldn't get along. Which, she decided, was dramatic enough. Just not the kind of war-novel-esque ending she was looking for.

"Well… I don't know exactly what to say about Arthur's real dad. Arthur doesn't know much more than I do, and if he hasn't shared anything with you, I don't know that he'll want me sharing it with you." Mr. James looked slightly uncomfortable.

Ariadne was about to protest and say that it was only because she had never asked Arthur about his father had she had never learned anything. But she figured that this would give her negitive brownie points—after all, it was kind of going around Arthur's back to ask his step-father about Arthur's father. So she made up her mind to ask Arthur that night.


"What are you looking at?"

Arthur's head had popped up over the edge of the top bunk and he was looking at her with a disconcerting look on his face. Noticing such a face in such close proximity made her uncomfortable, he smirked and scooted his face closer to her. Ariadne groaned, already halfway asleep—or in a sugar coma because of Mrs. James' banana pudding—she wasn't sure. With floppy hands, she reached out at random and attempted to push his face away. It was a scary face. And she wanted sleep. That's all she knew. But with her face nose deep into her down pillow, her depth perception wasn't at its most stellar, and so any attempts to push his face away just resulted in her hands making an excellent buffeting motion in the air.

"Arthur, you appear to be made of air," she said into her pillow, when her forth sweep of the air around her bed made no contact with his annoyingly close face.

From lower along the bed, she heard him laugh, and she realized with a sheepish smile that she had been beating at empty space. Arthur was super sneaky, she decided. Then she decided that her pillow smelled good and it was time for her to go to bed. With a contented sigh, she breathed in the smelly-smellyness of her pillow—

-and realized that she had just used the phrase "smelly-smellyness."

Yes, there was something wrong with her.

It had to be the banana pudding.

Sleep would not come—there had been far too many vanilla wafers in the banana pudding. And judging by the fact that Arthur's sleep pattern had become that of an Olympic gymnast going through his paces, Ariadne suspected that he, too, had had too many servings of banana pudding and its evil vanilla wafers.

"Is it your goal in life to torture me?" Ariadne asked, feeling herself starting to get sea sick when Arthur rolled over for the forty-second time. The rolling resulted in a sea-like swaying of the bed that was doing nothing for her now sugar-induced imagination.

"Well, it wasn't at first," he said as he rolled over—time number forty-three. "But now that you mention it, it doesn't sound like a bad occupation."

Ariadne refused to laugh. "Oh, haha. I suppose you think that it is funny to roll around and to creepily look at me while I am obviously suffering."

To prove a point, Arthur took trip number forty-four across his mattress.

"You devil." She said as she heard the southern dinner sloshing around in her stomach. She wasn't sure to whom she was talking—her achy stomach, her confused brain, or to the unfair man who was rolling around just to torture her. "You're all devils." She condensed them all into one.

"Well, I just wanted to check something," Arthur said by way of explanation.

Ariadne, who was still trying to figure out when her stomach had started hurting, was confused as to what he was talking about.

"What are you talking about?" She asked with the most eloquent language she possessed.

"I wanted to check something." Arthur said. Ariadne growled.

"You've already told me that. What in the world are you talking about?"

"That's why I was looking at you. I wanted to make sure that you were real."

Ariadne could hear the crickets outside.

"Of course I'm real…. Why wouldn't I be?" She poked herself to make sure she was real. She was.

"Well, we do work in a field that deals a lot with the unreal. I just had to make sure that you were real. You're so… unreal that I couldn't tell if you were real or not."

Ariadne stopped poking herself when she realized that Arthur was being sweet and not teasing her. She felt that continuing to poke herself would be slightly making light of a sweet moment in their new relationship.

"Well, I am real. And even if this was one giant dream, you wouldn't have to worry about what would happen when you woke up. Because I'd still like you the same way I do now."

"That, and I know this isn't a dream, so I don't have to worry about it." Arthur laughed.

"How do you know that this isn't a dream?" Ariadne asked, wiggling her eyebrows to the ceiling.

"Because no one in my imagination would go around poking themselves for no apparent reason."

From above, Ariadne wondered how in the world Arthur knew that she had been poking herself. Then she looked over and saw that the bathroom door was open. From inside, the mirror glinted. He had been using the mirror.

Arthur, the resourceful.

And suddenly, even through the haze of her banana pudding stupor, Ariadne remembered that she was on a mission.

"Arthur, can I ask you a question?"

"Only if I can ask you one too…"

That was invitation enough.

"Can you tell me about your real father?"


Again, sorry for the late update.

And can I say? This chapter was not written for the benefit of you, my readers.

Yes, yes, this was a secondary motivation. But my primary motivation for writing the chapter you have just read is this: in the face of studying for Anatomy—or any class, but Anatomy especially—anything sounds more enticing. In the course of this Sunday, I have cleaned my room, spent innumerable hours on my favorite blog, paced up and down my hallway, deleted 1000 songs from my iTunes, arranged my clothes in shirt-type order, followed by color-order, taken a personality/job test, listened to my entire iPod from B to T, gone to church, talked to people I don't even like, pondered the oxford comma, and done more loads of laundry than I ever have done in my entire life.

I am never more productive than when faced with the task of studying.

And now that I reach the end of this chapter, I am faced with the problem that, after I put in another load of laundry, I will have nothing else to do but study.

And tomorrow, on my test, I will be telling myself I was stupid for not studying sooner.

But right now I'm thinking: Who cares about what basophiles do?

But now I'm also thinking: "Well shoot-dang. I have nothing else left to do…"

Sooo… FIFA 11 anyone? C;

(Oh, and pee ess: I tried to upload this yesterday. But unfortunately, fanfiction was having issues I could not overcome, even with my super super powers….)