The Nameless Point
With Arthur busy in the dream, they needed someone trustworthy to take point in the real world. It was the most dangerous position and Arthur knew just who to call. Really, it was lucky she still had that flight attendant uniform. Arthur/Nameless A/A
…
The problem with dreams within dreams was that they required more than one point man. The Fischer Inception Job would take three, for two levels of the dream and then one for the real world point. It was because of Dominic Cobb and his preference for the impossible that distinctions like "real world point" or "dreaming point" even existed now; they didn't used to.
In the beginning, taking point meant not going into the dream at all, meant never losing one's ability to dream without a machine. What these days had to be specified as "real world point" was Arthur's specialty as well as his preference, but he never got to do it working with his best friend. Though he was still a point man, Dom Cobb had made him a dreamer, too—he liked to push the rules like that.
Dreams within dreams were hard to do, and Cobb had been quick to discover that the best point man in the business got that way by having an infallibly stable and organized mind, which happened to be just what was needed to make several-layered dreams possible. Thus was born the dreaming point man, who was not able to walk away from a friend in need, even if helping him be the best extractor in the business meant going under regularly and slowly losing his dreams at night.
Dom certainly has an affinity for the outrageous. Arthur thought when found himself arranging a job that required point in three different places with real world point being the most dangerous of them all, of course. Unlike in a dream, an enemy's bullet in the real world didn't mean waking up, it meant falling dead. Real dead.
With Yusuf agreeing to take point in the first level after being bribed with an increase in his share, and Arthur running point in the second as he always did these days, they were left in need of someone trustworthy to take the real world point.
Saito just wanted to bribe a flight attendant. The others thought it was the simplest way to go, too, since all she'd need to do was push a button when she was told to, and then lock the door to the first class cabin and not let anyone in for ten hours… but Arthur didn't like that idea.
For one thing, a flight attendant paid off to ignore such blatantly illegal activity could easily be paid off to betray them. COBAL Enterprises still had prices on his and Cobb's heads, and there were plenty of desperate criminals out there who were willing to kill six dreamers in their sleep for that kind of money… Sure, it was Saito's plane—his entire airline—but that didn't mean one lone COBAL assassin couldn't slip through the cracks of his security…
Therefore, Arthur felt that it was a reliable point man or bust. The others trusted his judgment and left it to him to find someone. Arthur knew just who to ask—never once considered anyone else for the job. Sure, he might have put off making the call until he absolutely couldn't anymore, but he pretended like that wasn't the case, and that was easy to do since he literally had hundreds of other details to take care of.
He made the call in private; it was strictly a business deal even though it was no one's business but his. Not that she was his private business anymore. Still, it would just be a lot easier to talk without Eames overhearing his end of the conversation. So, alone in his sparsely decorated, barely lived-in Paris apartment, he put his elbows on his knees as the line rang against his ear.
The number he'd dialed from memory was her personal cell, a number she scarcely gave out. She answered in German, so he knew she was busy.
"It's me," he said.
Things got quiet. Arthur drew a steady breath, remembered this was all for the job. He broke the silence. "I have a job for you."
"I already have work." She spoke in English now sounding a lot like herself again so he knew she'd slipped away from the poor soul she was double-dealing these days.
"I know, but I'm in a tight spot. We could really use you."
"Still working with the wife-murderer, I presume."
Arthur sighed, rose above that because now was not the time. "Listen, I just need a point man that's as good as me," she laughed here and so he said the rest with a smile, "I've taken care of everything else to do with the job, so this will be easy. You'll take real world point as we do a job. It's baby-sitting, really. We're flying first class in a 747. It'll be ten hours guarding six dreamers."
"Jesus," she breathed. Author supposed that it was a lot to take in. He was used to it by now but a job on a plane was risky because airline security was so intense, and few jobs were ten hours long involving six dreamers. She didn't ask questions, though, knew better than that.
He sighed letting his stress over it all show for half a second. "Yeah," he grunted and then gave her the figure that Saito had approved as payment. It had an impressive number of zeroes—she'd be a fool to turn it away.
But some people would argue she'd be a bigger fool coming anywhere near Arthur again.
"Well," she said, and he could hear it in her voice: she was impressed he was involved with people throwing around that kind of money. "I guess it's lucky I still have that flight attendant uniform."
He laughed, and was thankful he'd done this without Eames around; if the forger heard this laugh and saw this blush spreading down his neck, he'd never let Arthur hear the end of it.
"So you'll do it?" he asked, feeling a weight lift from his shoulders in relief.
"When is it?" she lisped and he imagined she'd uncapped a sharpie pen and held the cap between her teeth as she balanced a pad of paper on her knee and held the phone with a shoulder. She could have been a doctor with the penmanship she was most likely scrawling across the paper.
"That remains to be seen," he answered with delicacy. "But it's soon."
"Right," she knew there were a number of things that the date of an extraction job relied on. Once again, she knew better than to ask which one of them this one was.
"I'll wait for your call." The line went dead before he could say another word.
Strictly business. Right.
…
"So have you got someone yet, darling?" Eames asked the next day when it was brought up.
"Yes," Arthur answered without looking up from his notebook. He was balancing on the back legs of his chair while he wrote, as he tended to do when deep in thought. His simple answer was enough for everyone else but Eames, who let a few beats pass waiting for Arthur to elaborate. When he didn't, the Englishman huffed, "Well who is he?"
"Don't worry about it," Arthur answered evasively, drawing a chuckle from Ariadne. Cobb grinned and Eames laughed, "Oh, come on, you know I want more than that."
"Lucky for me, it's not my place to fill your wants, Mr. Eames." Arthur replied coolly. "We have a point man that will be there when the button needs to be pushed, what more assurance do you want?"
"I'm just curious," Eames said with a wicked grin.
"What do you want?" Arthur laughed, "His height, skin-tone, relationship status? Sorry, Eames, but I don't think this one will satisfy your battle-scars fetish."
Eames winked at him, "I have plenty of other fetishes for him to fill, love."
"That's enough," Cobb cut in as Ariadne laughed out right. Dom's fifty years in Limbo were showing as he met Eames' eye. He was like a school teacher reprimanding a misbehaving student. "We're here to work."
Arthur chuckled at the sight of his enemy cut down to size and then Dom turned on him, "Stop provoking him."
Arthur's chair landed on all fours and the point man gave his best friend a dark look. "He's the one trying to get a mental image—I was trying to keep us on topic!"
"Excellent work you did on that, love, really," Eames said. Arthur shot him a dangerous look and bit his tongue rather than answer. His control satisfied Cobb who put them all back on topic. Arthur looked to Ariadne for support, which she gave with a sympathetic smile pasted over her repressed chortles.
She patted his knee, hand lingering absently and he forgot to take notes for a few moments after that.
…
On the day of the job, they boarded the plan, each privately saying their own prayers that the impossible be suddenly possible. Cobb stopped in his tracks upon seeing the first class flight attendant. Directly behind him in line, Arthur couldn't help but smile as he took in the sight of her.
She looked lethal despite the uniform and its friendly smile; but maybe that was only because Arthur knew there was no one else who'd mastered more ways to kill a man than she had. She was also beautiful, maybe even more so than ever. They'd gone their separate ways a while ago, but keeping up with Cobb meant Arthur hadn't had the time it required to properly get over her.
She gave the operation's brooding leader a wicked smile when he stopped walking at the sight of her, "Welcome aboard."
"Hi," Cobb said. He fidgeted with his carry on and then turned to glare at Arthur. The younger man gave him a steady look back, for the job it said. Drawing a deep breath, Cobb turned back to her and offered a kind greeting and then found his seat.
"Oh, hello," Eames purred behind Arthur as he took in the sight of her and gave her a charming smile. "No battle scars on you, I hear." He held out a hand, "I don't believe we've met."
"We haven't," she answered, with a professional flight-attendant motion for him to continue into the cabin, "And we won't. You don't need to know my name."
Behind the forger, Ariadne swallowed her laugh, but only barely. Then she gave a start when she found herself in the woman's gaze. "Um, hi," the little architect said lamely and then she instinctively hurried to claim her seat.
From over at his seat, Arthur gave the best-looking piece of his past a wink as he pulled off his coat before sitting down. Cobb shot him another dirty look for hiring her of all people—he held grudges against anyone who asked him if he really killed his wife—but now was not the time to go into it. Cobb took his seat and the passport that Eames discreetly slipped to him.
Even with an eye on the job which was happening right now, Arthur found it hard to look at anything else but the rogue CIA assassin who was playing her part perfectly, serving Fischer the water he asked for…
She was wearing the uniform of this airline, (not at all the one she'd mentioned still having earlier.) Honestly, she needn't play the part of the flight attendant, could have easily played just another passenger on the plane, but she preferred to. The real flight attendant that had been scheduled to work this flight would had been unavoidably detained—nothing lethal, just probably not pleasant, either, and this one slipped in through the cracks of the rescheduling process. She was a genius at arranging things like that, had actually taught Arthur a few things.
He thought of those lessons mixed in with random memories of her. These memories used to feature in his dreams a lot, but dreams scarcely came to him on their own anymore. He was staring at her as he considered the fact that she could very well be the last woman he ever dreamed of… That was rather depressing.
Arthur loved shared-dreaming, it was fascinating, but if there was one thing he hated about it, it was the dreamless side-effects of it. He happened to believe that dreaming was a vital part of living. He'd never told anyone that, though, or that he was losing the ability and it was a personal tragedy for him.
The faux flight attendant caught him staring and threatened him thoroughly enough with a single look. He focused on other things after that and reminded himself that he'd had his chance with her and blown it. Truthfully, he didn't want a second chance. Not with her, anyway.
They were too much alike in a lot of ways and that was one of the reasons things had gone so wrong between them. The sad romantic sap way deep down inside of him, however, couldn't help but dwell on the memory of what it'd been like to wake up every morning in love, and he wanted that back.
It wasn't until Arthur was looking for other things to focus on that he noticed he'd had an audience to his guileless staring; Robert Fischer had noticed and had just glanced over to the woman and back at him with his eyebrows up as if to admonish him for his poor discretion.
Taking it immediately in stride, Arthur played the part, sending his eyebrows low and puckering his lips in a low silent whistle of appreciation. Fischer wasn't interested in joining a pig in his goggling and drank more of his sedative-laced water…
Chuckling because Arthur so rarely got to play parts in the real world anymore, always deceiving sleeping subjects and their projections instead which wasn't half as much fun, he pulled out his notebook. He was going to make himself casually busy with his scribbling until Fischer dropped off to sleep and the real work could begin, but as he pulled the band from around the cover, he noticed that his audience had been a billionaire as well as an architect.
Ariadne had seen all of it, evidently, and was now discreetly giving him a look from behind her book with one eyebrow cocked and an amused tilt in the corner of her mouth. He blushed lightly—for some reason he was embarrassed she'd seen him play that role. He winked at her to make up for the weakness of the blush.
She turned pink and looked away, and for some reason it was hard for him to kill his smile.
…
Arthur woke first when the timer went out. He always woke first. He looked around at the point woman, ex love of his life, pretend flight attendant. She looked back. He sighed heavily and jumped his eyebrows—no, it didn't go well. The others woke and as Eames packed up the PASIV and checked Fischer's pulse, Arthur checked Cobb's and then Saito's and then there was nothing else he could do except wait and see…
He hated waiting. The cabin seemed eerily quiet with nothing to distract them from Cobb and Saito's sleeping forms. After Fischer woke, Arthur knew he wasn't alone in finding it hard not to stare at him, as if some kind of evidence might show on his face that the idea had taken. Arthur thought it had better have taken, because all of that couldn't have been for nothing.
Though, if Saito didn't wake up it didn't matter what Fischer did because Cobb still wasn't going to see his kids again. Arthur wasn't sure what he'd do if his best friend never woke up, so when Cobb's eyes finally fluttered and opened Arthur was so happy he smiled freely and couldn't look at him for too long without saying something that would give them away to Fischer.
When the plane landed, he fell behind until he was the last passenger.
"I have to admit," she said, "I'm curious about what the hell you were up to down there for two of you to end up in Limbo."
"It was four, actually," he answered. She gave a start and he held up a hand. They were not going to discuss it. Her blue eyes burned with intrigue as they swept him up and down. She frowned, "I'm happy to see you're doing well."
"Well?" he echoed, "No, this was pure desperation." He laughed, "If you think this is me doing well, I must have really been a mess last time you saw me."
"I think we both were," she admitted. All he could do to that was nod.
"Thanks," he said. "It must have been boring for you up here, but it took a load off my mind knowing that you were on point."
She grinned, "Hey, call me any time you have that kind of money for work this easy."
He drew in a deep breath and nodded, headed out because he'd already lingered far too long.
"See you around," he said.
"Actually," she said and he stopped, looked back. She shrugged and said in a rush. "You won't. I'm retiring, starting a family."
His jaw dropped. She nodded, beamed with happiness no longer repressed.
"Wow," he breathed then his manners caught up to him. "Congratulations."
"You, too," she said.
He frowned, "What do you mean?"
She grinned wickedly, "She's cute. You two look good together."
Ariadne sprang straight to mind, the kiss he'd stolen from her and he didn't hide his smile. "I don't know what you're talking about."
She winked and with a seductive charm she couldn't control if she tried, closed the first class curtain, severing them suddenly and completely. Her usual dramatic exit. If he opened the curtain she wouldn't be there, as impossible as it was. Arthur laughed, and left the plane in the traditional method.
As planned, the team pretended not to know each other in the airport. Strangers bustled between them, drawing them apart, but they couldn't help catching each other's eyes through the crowd to share triumphant smiles. Arthur wished he could really speak to them.
Standing off to the side, Saito was still on the phone. He'd started making calls to everyone in his family from the moment he woke up. At the luggage trolley station, the no-nonsense business man didn't so much as skip a beat in his rapid Japanese as he gave Arthur a polite—a grateful—nod of acknowledgement before turning away with watery eyes. What little of the language Arthur knew told him that Saito was trying to play it cool though he was hearing the voice of his little brother again after nearly a hundred years in Limbo.
Eames was lingering suspiciously close to Robert. Arthur smirked at him. Eames put on an innocent expression that failed to convince the point man. Standing in line at claims, Robert was checking his phone. Arthur allowed himself to look at him meaningfully before giving the forger a wink. The billionaire was Eames' type exactly, and it wouldn't be the first time the Englishman used his charm to squeeze one more night of fun out of their mark before disappearing forever.
Cobb seemed to be in a daze, staring around at the thrumming-with-life airport but not at all in the suspicious way he'd taken to doing after Mal died. It lightened a weight in Arthur's heart to see his friend so happy and at home. He wanted to give him a pat on the back, to give congratulations. Whatever had happened in Limbo must have been just what the doctor ordered; Mal wasn't haunting him anymore.
Next to Yusuf at the luggage belt, Arthur heard him grumbling that he needed a drink and had to bite his tongue to keep down a light hearted jab about the free Champaign. He'd been pissed before, ready to give the chemist a piece of his mind, but the elation of triumph degraded it all back down to harmless teasing.
As Arthur headed for the car rental, he passed a few flight attendants heading in for their shifts and his thoughts turned back to the woman who'd built him up and broke him down and most recently told him she was retiring, getting married, having a baby. It was a surprise, of course, but it wasn't as horrible to hear as one would think. He supposed it was partly to do with his having no intentions of having such a life any time soon. But mostly, he was certain, it was because he'd moved on.
Thoughts now turned to a gray dress suit, stiletto heels and pinned up hair, a sweet kiss followed by a blush and shining eyes. She was tiny and nosey and new to the world—not at all his usual type—but she was smart, beautiful, and creative.
She's cute. You two look good together.
He had yet to see her in the crowd—she was so short she'd have been easily swamped in it. He didn't let himself turn and crane around in search for her. Maybe he'd see her again someday. He would certainly think of her if he ever needed an architect and Miles would know how to find her. He found himself wondering how long it would be before he had another job with an unassigned architect.
The hot air of LA wrapped around him like a towel fresh out of the dryer. A moment later, Ariadne fell into step beside him, treating him no differently than the other bodies around her. He masked his surprise and headed for a waiting cab. A moment later, she was crossing in front of him. She brushed him as she went and then she was stealing the cab he'd been heading for.
"Thanks!" he called to her drily as she packed her luggage in. She tossed him a smile, rosy with a blush, and then the cab was pulling away. He watched it go and then called a cab of his own.
She didn't leave his head the whole way to his hotel room. Getting dressed for bed, he found he could smell her, faintly on his vest from where she'd brushed him. Her perfume had been invading his sense of smell months on end, so he knew it well. It was something French and far too expensive for a college student to wear.
He found something in the little watch pocket, something other than his totem, a piece of yellow paper folded into as small a square possible. He unfolded it and found bold sharpie lines on a legal pad sheet, recognized Ariadne's work.
It was a sketch of the Seattle Needle, signed by her but dated two weeks from now.
She must have put it in his pocket when she brushed past him. Arthur smiled; she was cunning.
The risk of passing notes this way was extremely minimal, but the fact that she did it brought a rush like she'd risked their lives. It was wholly unexpected from the young architect. He wondered where she'd learned it, what else she knew how to do, what else she was willing to learn how to do.
He crumpled it smiling so hugely that his dimples hurt as he finished getting into his pajamas. She wanted him to find her in Seattle. He would. This excited him. It'd been a while since any of his plans had centered on a woman in ways not at all related to crime.
He got into bed and as the lights went out there came the usual dread. The night stretched out before him with absolutely no promise. His dreams were few and far between, tattered and foggy. The last proper dream he'd had on his own had been of a woman soon to be someone else's wife.
It broke his heart, not because he'd lost her, but because he'd lost it, his chance to dream of a woman that was his. He'd known the risks, but had gone under with the compounds regularly anyway. For a friend. For that, he couldn't be sorry and if given a chance to do it differently, he wouldn't. Still, though, he wished he could dream again. Just once.
He fell asleep wanting to dream. And he did.
Of Ariadne.
…
Fin