I've been looking forward to posting this chapter since I started this story...finally I can use the word penultimate! It's such a powerful, socerous word. Not like final or last, which are just limp and noodle-y.
Anyway, thank you for all the lovely reviews. You are awesome.
Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan
- Li
Matryoshka
A design principle that denotes a recognizable relationship of similar object within similar object
Chapter Twenty-Six
When Caligiuri opens the door, Ariadne steels herself for the worst: catheters, oxygen masks, heart monitors, the whole glamorous package, supplemented with a fair share of dried blood. Her contingency plans are all for worst case scenarios from textbook thrillers, so she's not at all prepared for the cloud of warm white that greets her.
Every last inch of the room is tiled, painted or draped in varying shades of white and faintly tinged pastel hues. Two medical gurneys lie parallel in the middle of the room. Antonelli – shoulder neatly bandaged – and Carla lie flat on their backs, dead to the world except for the liquid dripping steadily through the IVs suspended from the ceiling. When they enter, a middle-aged man in a lab coat embossed with Caligiuri's company logo is busy attaching both IV drips to a PASIV on a trolley at the foot of the gurneys. A strict looking armchair stands empty beside it.
"My secretary and laboratory supervisor," Caligiuri introduces with a careless gesture at the man, who nods tersely before returning to the jumble of tubes surrounding him. "This is just a small lab," he continues. "Very basic equipment but I think it's more than adequate for the job at hand, no?" He steps back, allowing Ariadne Arthur and Eames to move further into the room.
Arthur, sufficiently recovered from his former agitation, surveys the room with a critical eye. Ariadne knows without asking that he's looking for some flaw in the room that would make it impossible for her to complete the job. She supposes that she should feel gratitude for his obvious concern for her safety, but she can't help thinking that, after having been subjected to dreaming in the back of a tumbling van, this feels almost too safe.
"It's fine," Arthur admits reluctantly after a swift scan of the room. He checks his watch – more, Ariadne suspects, for the sake of having something to do than an actual need for the time. "If we start now, we should have this done in less than ten minutes. Then we can go our separate ways."
"Excellent." Caligiuri beckons to his secretary, who finishes connecting the last length of tubing before leaving through a door at the other end of the room that Ariadne had not noticed earlier. Caligiuri moves to the other side of the room himself and into a small, glass enclosure, where Ariadne assumes he can watch their every move without having to be in any danger himself. The expectant expression reminds her eerily of preschoolers at the circus. Nauseated, she hurries to join Arthur and Eames, already busy beside the gurneys.
"It's obvious that he doesn't make much use of his millions," Eames mutters darkly, tugging the PASIV open with a loud scraping noise that bounces off the laboratory's soundproof walls. "This has got to be the most ancient model I've ever seen and that includes all that second-hand junk we stole from Miles."
Arthur makes a noise at the back of his throat that could either be assent or a request to shut up. Although she's fully aware that this is only Eames' way of calming her down, Ariadne still feels a tug of worry.
"What happens with old models?" she asks tentatively.
"The dreams will be lower quality. Kind of like a cathode ray tube compared to an LED. No spontaneous trips to limbo, unfortunately."
She returns his brief grin with a dimmer one of her own. "Unfortunately."
Arthur stops fidgeting with the interconnecting tubes and holds the needle out to her. "Are you sure you still want to do this?"
Ariadne stares at the bright glint of the needlepoint, which seems much sharper and more lethal than she remembers. It figures. With the way her luck has been running lately, it would probably pierce right through Antonelli's drugged stupor and wake him up fully equipped with flailing gun and theatrics. She chews her suddenly dry lips.
"I think so."
His hand on the needle jerks ever so slightly. She's almost certain that he's going to take her words as a way out of all this, but at the last minute, he passes it to her, albeit with clear reluctance. Ariadne slides the needle under her own skin and tries to arrange her body more comfortably in the rigid armchair. She catches Arthur's eye as Eames' finger hovers over the PASIV's spongy yellow centre. Wanting to reassure him that everything will be alright, as he's done so many times for her, but with the seconds ticking down and her senses still a little numbed, she can do little more than offer him a wavering smile.
"Three-"
"See you when I wake up."
"Two-"
Arthur slides his fingers between hers. "I'll be waiting."
"One."
"Miss? Excuse me, miss, are you ready to order?"
Ariadne blinks up at the black and white waiter – her subconscious – standing patiently at her elbow, pen posed over writing pad, then back down at the glossy menu in front of her. Under the glare of the Mediterranean sun, the fancy font hidden behind smooth laminate is only visible if she squints.
"Um…An iced coffee."
Her waiter scribbles down the corresponding number. "Anything to eat with that?"
A particularly blinding ray of light from over her shoulder glares off her menu. She cranes her head around automatically and almost immediately twists back around, heart racing. The waiter taps a foot impatiently.
"No thanks, that's all."
Displeased, her waiter huffs and puffs her way to the next table. Ariadne takes the opportunity to slide further down in her chair and shake her hair out until her entire left profile is nothing but a mass of brown curls. For good measure, she pulls a textbook out of her backpack –inadvertently brushing her fingers against the barrel of Arthur's gun – and props it up against the sugar bowl. From slightly behind her, she hears the waiter's reedy voice.
"Are you ready to order?"
A cough. "An espresso and two éclairs. Carla?"
"Just a cappuccino, thanks."
After the waiter leaves, there's a rustle of elastic winding over hair – bright red – followed by the kind of sigh that signals the beginning of a well used lecture.
"Papa, you know what the doctor said about your blood sugar. One éclair is more than enough for you."
"They're for us to share, one each. That's not going against the doctor's orders, so don't bother going to report me."
"You know I hate éclairs."
Antonelli's chuckle is quiet and gravelly, reminiscent of a heavy smoker. "It slipped my mind. Must be the dementia flaring up again."
Ariadne chances a quick glance at the pair on her left. Carla, glamorous even in a simple flowered summer dress accessorised with two deep slashes between her eyes to match the frown on her lips, is hunched over the table, hands clasped together. Her father, on the other hand, stretches across his chair in a lazy yet dignified loll, one arm slung over the back of his chair, the other lying on the clean tablecloth. His shoulder, Ariadne notices, is clean and whole. As she watches, Carla reaches one hand across the table to touch her father's.
"Don't talk like that. I'm sure we'll find something."
Antonelli laughs again, but this time there is no light humour, just bitterness. "Your optimism never fails to amaze me, Carla, but even you can't believe that there's anything left to find. I own the pharmaceutical industry. If there was anything, I would be the first to know."
"Medicine isn't the answer to everything. There's always therapy-"
"I don't believe in all that psychology nonsense. If I want to lie on a leather couch all day, I'll do it free of charge in the comfort of my own home."
"You believe in extraction," Carla accuses. Ariadne stops flipping pages in her book and strains to hear above the café's crowded din.
"That's science," Antonelli replies. "Somnacin – we sell that. Not legally, of course, but the best business usually lies on that side. There are algorithms for its use, measurements and calculations we can use."
"Michel says-"
Antonelli holds up a hand to silence his daughter. "What have I said about mentioning his name?"
Carla grinds her teeth together quite audibly. "You're being childish, Papa. What are you going to do when I marry him?"
"I'm going to be the model father-in-law," Antonelli replies pleasantly. "But until then, he's just another one of my daughter's many male acquaintances, and I'll abuse him however I want to."
At this point, Ariadne's waiter reappears with her coffee. She dumps the frosted glass unceremoniously on the table and glides over to Carla and Antonelli. They thank her quietly before returning to their conversation.
"You don't trust him," Carla says bluntly.
Her father takes a sip of his drink. "I didn't get to where I am today by trusting people."
"This isn't one of your business partners. This is my fiancé you're talking about."
"All the less reason to trust him." Antonelli surveys the plate of éclairs thoughtfully. "You know, these are so small that I don't think they'll affect my blood sugar at all. Are you sure don't want one?"
Carla ignores his question. "Why won't you tell me the reason you set those extractors on him?"
Antonelli pokes one of the éclairs with a tiny dessert fork. Cream, white and airy, spills and oozes from its chocolaty heart, reminding Ariadne of why she's here. She presses her leg against the front pocket of her bag to feel the contours of the weapon hidden there.
"I did tell you," Antonelli mumbles from around a mouthful of éclair.
Carla flushes a deep, angry pink. "I don't want some story about keeping me safe that a seven year old could see through. I want the truth."
"That is the truth. I wanted to make sure he would take good care of you once I'm gone."
"Stop saying that!"
A deadly silence falls over the café, the sidewalk and the square on the other side of the street. The projections, every one of them, turn to stare at Carla. Ariadne isn't sure if it's her subconscious sensing hostility or her conscious mind finally linking the pieces together, but it's of no importance because Antonelli is staring at her with a look of dawning comprehension.
And he's dying.
Carla is on her feet, shaking, both hands curled into fists, shouting obscenities, one step away from flying at her. Only Antonelli's restraining grasp keeps her back.
And she's in love. So desperately in love.
"You!"
And Ariadne is so sick she can barely see straight, but still she pulls the gun out of her bag and points it, wavering, at the air between father and daughter. Antonelli stands up and steps around the table with his eyes fixed on her, only her, coming ever closer until she can see that his eyes are exactly the same as his daughter's.
"Are you going to shoot me again?" he spits in her face.
She backs away on unsteady feet and stumbles against her chair. He sneers at her retreat.
"You don't have the guts. You think I couldn't see the first time? You could have killed me then and saved yourself all this hassle. But you're a coward."
Ariadne tightens her grip around the smooth metal and steadies her aim as best as she can. It's a point blank shot to his heart. If she fires now, everything will be over and she can go back, back to reality and to Arthur. "You don't know me."
"But I do know you. Look around you. Look at the projections. Your projections because they certainly aren't mine. Look at their faces. Do they look like the subconscious of someone who would kill a helpless old man?"
Despite her best efforts, she can't help but to listen and to look. He's right. Her own projections are motionless, useless, her doom and her salvation. Her arms shake. From exhaustion, she tells herself, but the gleam in Antonelli's eyes says otherwise. He shakes back his sleeve and makes a big show of checking the gold watch strapped to his wrist.
"How much time do you have left? Fifty minutes? You'd better make up your mind soon."
"Get back, or I swear I'll shoot."
Antonelli almost smiles. "Well then, you'd be doing us all a favour, wouldn't you? I have to admit, I'm getting tired of all this waiting around. I suppose it's just my bad luck that Caligiuri didn't send someone more experienced. I would have preferred your friend, Arthur – his efficiency is astonishing. He would have made me an excellent secretary."
Sheer confusion drops Ariadne's aim an inch. She forces it back up, but not before Antonelli notices it.
"Have I stunned you?" he taunts. "My apologies."
"What are you talking about? How do you know about Caligiuri?" Ariadne straightens her aim and voice, but it's clear that he's not fooled by her act. He chuckles and shakes his head.
"Trade secret.
Just behind him, Carla moves forward.
"Papa-"
Antonelli stops his daughter midsentence. "Carla, stay out of this," he warns, and for the first time, there is more than contempt in his voice. There is thick, animal fear.
His daughter.
His Carla.
His everything.
It takes Ariadne only a fraction of a second to switch her aim from father to daughter, but the transformation that the former undergoes speaks silent words that would take her years to describe, and even longer to forget. Pain, anger, terror, love. Still, she keeps the gun trained above Carla's heart.
"Tell me."
Antonelli holds up both hands, palms outward, the universal sign for a momentary truce. "Carla has nothing to do with this. It was all my doing."
"So tell me about it," Ariadne replies, doing her best to emulate a mixture of Arthur's serious confidence and Eames' nonchalance. It comes out rather flat, but she knows as certainly as the sun rises in the east that in this bubble of time, Antonelli is beyond caring for little details in her voice. His daughter is his noose and her lifeline. She would be a fool not to grab it and cling on with everything she has, or so she tells herself when Antonelli tries to step in front of his daughter. But before Ariadne can push him back or adjust her aim, Carla steps nimbly around her father and back into the line of fire. Her simple, almost effortless step looks far braver than Ariadne has ever felt.
"Tell her Papa. Tell me why I'm here."
"Carla-"
"Please." It's a plea now, more urgent than Ariadne can muster in all her desperation. Somehow, without any of them even realizing it, everything has shifted. Old cracks have healed and new ones have broken in the short space of seconds so that nothing is recognizable anymore. And this impasse that they've reached, this dream of the real world, has become so much more than the means to an end.
"Tell me the truth about Michel."
Antonelli's throat bobs visibly as he swallows. "You don't need to hear it," he starts. His voice, already gravelly to begin with, cracks static over the words. Ariadne takes a slow step closer to Carla and his flinch perfectly matches her own. She could kill them both now and wait safely for her hour to run out or she could keep prying at lies and secrets that mean nothing to her beyond fulfilling her morbid need to know.
She grits her teeth together. What a laughable set of choices. "Tell me everything or I'll tell her the truth about the Frechette job."
Antonelli pales chalk white and colours in rapid succession. "You don't have any idea what you're talking about," he snaps angrily at both and neither women.
"Then you tell me, Papa," Carla says quietly.
For a moment, Ariadne almost wonders if he's going to let Carla go for the sake of his own reputation, but then, with a great deal of effort clear in the sharp lines of his face, he half turns to his daughter.
"Do you remember when you were five and you insisted that I tell you a story every night before you went to bed?"
Carla frowns. "What does that have to do with this?"
"Everything," Antonelli replies softly. "I remember one night I had to work. It happened sometimes and usually I could bribe you with candy or a new toy. But that night you wouldn't stop crying and running after me until I had to lock you in your room. I should have known then."
The blood drains from Ariadne's face as she realizes what is coming next. Lately, her mind has been so full of the bitter revelations and disappoints of someone else's life that she would give anything to look away, but she can't without lowering her aim. The best she can do is to avert her eyes and stare intently at the flowered pattern of Carla's dress.
"It was New Year's Eve. I had to drive all the way from Florence to Paris in the snow, and then all the way back before anyone realized what had happened." He stops and looks down at his hands and patent leather shoes, at the warm red bricks on the ground and the faint traces of some long forgotten stain, anywhere but at his daughter.
Carla's breathing is quick and shallow. "What happened?"
"I orphaned Mi-"Antonelli's voice dies in a soft, strangling sound. "Your fiancé."
Ariadne stares harder at the large, yellow sunflowers, fluttering lightly in the breeze, struggling not to listen. Still, curiosity gets the better of her, as it always has and always will.
"I don't understand," Carla says slowly, and her voice sounds as if it's coming from much further away than the two metres that separates them. "Why?"
Antonelli laughs, a forced and hollow sound that grates against Ariadne's ears. "You know why. I wanted something and they were in the way."
"So you just killed them?" The flower in Ariadne's vision trembles and she looks up involuntarily at Carla's face. Her skin is as pale as her father's, with the exception of two twin spots of angry red spreading out slowly but steadily from her cheeks. A spark of some unnamed emotion flashes in her eyes.
"If I'd known then that you'd want to marry him," Antonelli murmurs, "it would have been different."
"Why, you would have killed him too?" Carla demands ruthlessly. Antonelli recoils like he's been slapped, but she seems unable to stop the questions tumbling out one after the other. "Is that why you hired all those extractors? To finish off the job?"
Antonelli runs a hand over his face. "I've told you so many times, Carla, but you always refuse to believe me. It was to keep you safe. I was terrified that he knew, that he remembered me from that night, and that he was only marrying you to get back at me. I didn't want to have to bury my own daughter, so I hired all those extractors to find out if he knew. To find out if he was planning some kind of revenge. I had to be certain he would take care of you after I die."
He turns suddenly to Ariadne, who takes a reflexive step back at the abrupt change. "There, you know now. My big secret." He spreads his hands wide and for the first time since she's met him, she notices that they are vibrating visibly. "The founder of the world's largest pharmaceutical company, and there's no medicine in the world that could cure me," he mutters bitterly.
A wave of pity, however undeserved or misplaced it may be, crashes over Ariadne and leaves her stinging from the salinity. Even Carla's furious expression of disgust softens ever so slightly so that the words pouring from between her lips lose some of their edge. Some but not all.
"You deserve it."
Her father's face tightens in pain. "I don't want to live forever" he murmurs to the void between them. "All I want is to die with some dignity."
"And Michel's parents?" Carla asks. Her voice trembles under the presence of a dozen pent up emotions threatening to spill over into the dream. "Didn't they deserve some dignity too?"
A beat while Antonelli struggles to defend an answer that he clearly no longer believes. "It was quick. They wouldn't have felt any pain."
"Speed doesn't equate dignity," Carla laughs derisively. Against the dark outlines of her eyes, Ariadne can plainly see pools of unshed tears gathering ever deeper. The glamorous heir, mascot for the perfect life, is minutes – seconds – from snapping.
Antonelli flushes under her mockery. "You think I don't regret what I did? I would give anything to turn back time and make everything right. But who's to say that it will fix anything? Your fiancé's entire life has been shaped by his parent's death-"
"Don't you dare-"
"If they'd never died-"
"You don't know anything-"
"Would you still be in love?"
Carla catches her breath and steals Ariadne's with it. The twin spots on her cheeks flare out over the entirety of her face, her body, her hair, a flaming, bleeding cocoon of fear and heartbreak masked in anger. "Michel is a hundred times the man you'll ever be," she spits out coldly. "Don't flatter yourself into thinking you've ever had any control over him. He barely even remembers his parents."
"That's not true."
Ariadne is as surprised as anyone to hear her own voice in the echoing silence of the suspended city around them. The words claw her throat raw on their way up, the very reason that she'd had to run from Antonelli in the first place.
"When we were in his mind, there was a part of him that remembered. He's kept it trapped in his subconscious, but it's there."
"Does he-"
Her gaze flickers to Antonelli. "He doesn't know who it was."
That one simple sentence knocks down every last one of his carefully erected barricades. His body falls limp as a punctured balloon and he sinks, shaking madly, into a chair.
"Thank God," he murmurs into his hands. "When you didn't show up after the extraction, I thought-"
He breaks off into a long, shuddering breath laced with the undercurrents of a sob that sends tremors rippling across his shoulders. Unable to bear watching any longer, Ariadne turns away before her heart can amass enough ammunition to overpower her mind and lower the gun still trained on Carla. What she needs are facts; logic and reasoning that will override her emotional autopilot and maybe, just maybe, bring some sense back into this thing.
"So now you know about the Frechette job," she says, speaking to Antonelli with her eyes fixed on his daughter. "Tell me about Caligiuri."
He doesn't look up from his hands. "I've known Luke Caligiuri for over twenty years," he tells her with the same monotony as a recitation of the periodic table might incur. "When he invited Carla and I to his estate just a day after you failed to deliver on the job, I guessed that he might be after an extraction himself. So I played along."
"You played-"
"I've worked both with and against him," Antonelli ploughs on in the same tone of quiet indifference. "He's an excellent businessman but he's afraid of getting his hands dirty. I hoped – I prayed – that once he learned I'd killed the Frechettes, he would use my dreams to get rid of me."
"You knew?" Carla's long fingers curl themselves viciously around empty air. "You knew that all this was going to happen, and you still came?"
"I hoped," he corrects.
"Why?"
Antonelli slowly raises his head from his hands to looks at his daughter. "Don't you see?" he murmurs, more to himself than to her. "This"– he waves an arm at the frozen world around them – "This is the cure I've been looking for. Dreams, limbo, whatever you want to call it. Look at me. I'm healthy. I've only got three months left up there, three months of hospitals and tests and painkillers. But down here…who knows?"
"And what about me?" Carla whispers. In the dim silence, her fragile voice reminds Ariadne of a child, of gangly, wild-eyed Jean, stumbling in the maze of Frechette's subconscious, desperate for freedom and an acknowledgement of the truth. And she wonders how they, Carla and Frechette, could ever have helped themselves from falling in love.
The warm glow of hope in Antonelli's eyes fades to darkness. "I never meant for you to be involved. If I'd known…"
"You would have done the same," Carla finishes bitterly. In her dry eyes, Ariadne can read the familiar lights and shadows of a frugal hope resigned to disappointment. "It was always about you, always. Everything that you've done, everything that you're doing now. So don't pretend that this would have been any different if you'd known."
"Carla-"
A sudden dissonant burst of music erupts from the sky, cutting him off. For a moment, Ariadne stands frozen in place, so unexpected is the alarm that she forgets what it even means.
Rien de rien.
But even if she does not remember, Antonelli seems to understand, and in that fraction of a second, he stands up with the abrupt jerkiness of an automaton in desperate need of oiling.
"Please…"
Je ne regrette rien.
She could stop all this right now. Just a twitch of her trigger finger is all any of them need. She could be safe.
Ni le bien qu'on ma fait.
Antonelli could be well. Caligiuri could be happy. Carla-
She would be lost. Might be lost. There would always be that spark of hope and undying optimism that she would break through the water to the surface.
Ni le mal.
Antonelli is half pleading, half reasoning with the knot of stubbornness buried deep in Ariadne that refuses to shoot. She barely hears the mumbled words of desperation streaming from his lips. Bile rises up the back of her throat. Time is ticking towards them until the kick arrives. Until the dream shatters. Until reality comes flooding back. Until the only things left to her are ripped from her fingertips.
Dreams.
Creation.
Arthur.
That's all it really comes down to, in the end, with only brick walls and armoured tanks facing her. She's heartless and selfish and cruel and a million other guilty pinpricks but what she wants, she always finds a way to get, and she has never wanted anything more in her life.
Tout ça m'est bien égal.
She will never be quite certain as to when and how it happens. One moment Carla is on her feet and breathing and the next she's on the ground, drowning in a pool of shining scarlet and Antonelli is there beside her, uselessly stemming her blood with his hands.
"Carla...Wake up…Carla…"
When he realizes how futile it is, he looks up at Ariadne with a dull, glowing hatred that blazes against her skin.
"She had nothing to do with this. Nothing. You could have let her go. She doesn't deserve-"
His words break and Ariadne almost regrets it. Then she remembers Caligiuri watching safely from behind a shield of bulletproof glass, waiting for a reason to pull his own trigger. Arthur and Eames, dangling up in the air, waiting for her to wake up. Waiting for Carla and Antonelli to die.
Avec mes souvenirs, j'ai allumé le feu.
Through an oddly muted haze, she hears her own forcedly detached voice.
"If you love her so much, bring her back."
The wrench of reality beckoning to her synchronizes perfectly with the recoil of the streamlined lead bullet. Momentum sends Ariadne reeling through the onion layers of her subconscious and she struggles forward in her chair, nearly ripping the catheter from her wrist. Arthur's hands are already there to steady her, warm and solid against her shaking body. Ariadne sees his questioning gaze flicker from her to Antonelli and Carla, sleeping peacefully. She turns her head so he won't see the tears, but he understands her silence better than she does herself. Wordlessly, he pulls her into his chest.
For that one breathless moment of dizzying oblivion, they are complete.
It's hard to be complete when you're bound for opposite sides of the world.
She finds this out only after her flight begins to board. Ariadne checks her pockets one last time to make sure she has everything: passport, boarding pass and enough change for a taxi home from the airport. When she turns to ask Arthur some trivial question about their flight, the words die on her lips. He's still sitting motionless on the hard, plastic seat, his briefcase and jacket lying neatly on the chair beside him. The way he looks at her with an apologetic firmness makes her feel like a small child. She cannot help the accusation in her voice, and when Arthur flinches, she receives a kind of morbid satisfaction from it that, at the same time, leaves her ashamed.
"You're not coming."
"I'm not," Arthur replies quietly. Two chairs down, Eames shifts in his seat with rather more noise than necessary.
Ariadne bites back the retort on the tip of her tongue. The last thing she needs – or wants – is to cause a scene in the middle of the airport. She has been expecting this moment to come, but there was always that small glimmering hope that it would not have to come down to this. Arthur's uncharacteristic desperation over the past few days, his careless disregard for all the work boundaries they'd established and then broken down; they are all clear to her now. They were more than a gesture of comfort or trust, but a goodbye, and if she had been any smarter, she would have held onto him beyond the semidarkness trapped behind all those locked doors. Now that they are in the light of the sun, there really is nothing more to say.
She swallows, throat dry and scratchy. "Where are you going?"
"San Fernando."
"And then…"
He says nothing. Ariadne scuffs her shoe against the well polished floor, leaving a blackened smudge behind. Eames grunts something about the washroom and sidles away in a flurry of mumbled incoherency. She pretends to be interested by the pattern of the tiles and studies it without seeing anything at all.
Arthur clears his throat and holds out his hand. There's a plain business card between his index and middle finger, a number dashed across its back in his neat handwriting. "In case you need me," he murmurs.
She takes the card gingerly, doing her best to ignore the crackle of sparks when their fingertips collide. On the front of the card is the name and number of a consultant at Le moineau. She shoves it deep into her pocket with her bishop and wishes they could go back to the wedding boutique and do it all again, and maybe this time, they would get it right.
They both know that no matter how much she needs him – she will always need him – she won't call.
"This is how the job works. We can't stay together after an extraction, ever. It's too dangerous."
He does not mention Cobb, or Mal, or even Eames. Ariadne doesn't ask. She won't give him the pleasure of telling her, yet again, how different they are.
"Three months," he continues. "I'll come find you after three months, no matter where you are, and we'll figure something out then. I promise."
She can't help asking. "How do I know?"
Arthur closes his fingers tightly around her wrist. Her right one, just above the almost invisible scar that tethers her to reality. Ariadne closes her eyes and engrains the memory of his hand in her skin so that even when he's gone, she'll still have the touch of his calluses and scars on her arm.
"Just trust me."
She pulls away roughly before he can say more, terrified that she will. Above them, the P.A. buzzes on and reminds passengers to Paris, France that their flight is now boarding.
"Ariadne."
"I have to go," she says steadily, like it's the easiest thing in the world.
"Ariadne, I-"
"Please don't say it."
She does not need to hear that he is sorry – again – that he regrets this – whatever this was – that he loves her – because she most definitely does not love him – or anything else that he might feel inclined to tell her. What she needs is to leave, and quickly, before all her forced stoicism abandons her. In her rush to get away, she almost forgets her jacket lying on top of Arthur's suitcase. He hands it to her and she takes it without thanking him.
How can she, when she knows that he's holding back so much more?