Broken
"What happens to the Wide-Eyed observer,
when the window between reality and unreality breaks,
and the glass begins to fly?"
Unknown
"Arthur," Cobb said sleepily. "What are you talking about?" It was late and a frantic call from the Point Man had jerked the Extractor from a dreamless sleep.
"I woke up, Ariadne was feeding the baby, she told me to stay away from her. She was talking about the dream she had. The one with Braker. Like it was a real thing. She thinks the children in it were real, and I let them drown. You should have seen the look in her eyes." Arthur hissed.
His face was a mess of worry. He stood in an empty hall in the hospital. Just outside his wife's room. His cell phone glued to his ear. After the frightening conversation with Ariadne, he refused to leave his daughter alone with her Mother. He alerted a nurse who had taken the baby to the nursery. Ariadne didn't seem to object and quickly feel back asleep.
Now, he wasn't sure what to do. What to even think. She had looked so crazed. Like she could have killed him. He had never seen that look on her face.
"Did you two have a fight?" Cobb asked.
"No, No Cobb your not listening." Arthur hissed feeling increasingly frustrated. "Something is wrong with her." Arthur looked down the hall at the nursery. "She was talking about the projections of those children like they were real. Like they had really drowned in the dream Morpheus pulled her into." His heart was beating fast over worry. Over fear for his wife.
Had she lost her grip on reality?
"What are you doing?" Came a voice. Arthur jumped and saw Ariadne in the doorway of her hospital room. She was standing half in and out of the shadows. She stepped into the light. Her face, unreadable. For and unexplainable moment, Arthur was afraid of her.
"I was... I was talking to Cobb." Arthur breathed as he hung up his cell phone.
"Where's Audrey?" She asked in a dead voice. Arthur felt his breathing come faster.
"She's... she's fine, the nurses are taking care of her." He said. She looked down the hall at the nursery. She held out her pale hand to him.
"Come to bed." She said softly. She was dressed in a white hospital gown. Her face was drawn and tired looking from the labor and delivery. Her dark hair, limp around her face. Her skin pale in the dark hall and room. She looked almost ghostly.
Arthur swallowed a hard lump in his throat as he took her hand. A hand that felt suddenly cold.
He followed her into the shadows of her hospital room.
He shut the door behind them.
She climbed back into her hospital bed and gave him room to climb in next to her.
He eased his lean frame around her small body. Spooning her. Cautiously, he wrapped his arms around her.
"I love you Ariadne." He whispered. "You know that right?"
"Of course I do." She said. Her voice sounding far away. "I love you to, Arthur."
Dawn came, as it always dose. No matter how bad the day before, how awful the night had been, the sun always rises in the morning.
The dawn seemed to have brought Ariadne back to normal. She seemed chipper as she packed her things to check out of the hospital. The staff had brought the baby back to her, and Audrey had been carefully placed in her car set by her Father. Arthur had been surprised when Ariadne had asked him to put the baby safely in her seat. It was as if the events of the night before had not happened.
Ariadne was the same as she ever was. Arthur sat in his chair watching her. Not attempting to hide the worried look on his face.
Ariadne was a dutiful mother. Always had been. She kept one eye on her sleeping baby as she packed. She glanced at her husband.
"What's wrong?" She asked him. He sat up straighter.
"Oh, nothing." He lied trying to look normal.
"What did you do?" She sighed looking annoyed with him.
"Nothing!" He said "Everything's fine."
"Why do you look so worried?" She asked.
"I'm just worried... about Eames driving my car." he said quickly. She smiled at him and gave a soft laugh.
"I'm sure it's fine." She told him.
"Ariadne?" He asked. She turned to him.
"Do you still dream?" He asked. "I mean without the PASIV?"
"No." She told him. Her face looking honest. "I think the last time I dreamed was before I was kidnapped. It was about Zombies. I had turned into a Zombie and was eating some poor guy's brains.*" She had finished packing and secured Audrey's blanket.
"I think the PASIV 4 took away my natural dreaming." She told him. "Why do you ask?"
"Just wondering." Arthur said with a worried smile.
Cobb was worried to. He had driven from the house alone to pick them up. He and Arthur talked for a long time in the hallway. The Point Man obviously scared.
"Cobb, it's like what happened with Mal." Arthur was saying. A real sense of panic spreading over him. Cobb tried to calm his friend down.
"You said it yourself, you were half sleep. She hasn't slept very well in days. Maybe she was just cranky." Cobb offered. Not wanting to believe the worst.
"No." Arthur shook his head. "I know what I heard." Cobb sighed.
"Let's call Yori then."
"I already did." Arthur told the Extractor.
Back at large country house again, Ariadne was perfectly fine. Sybil and Eames had been told about what had happened. The Architect thought that the extended family was just being attentive to her and the baby, really, they were afraid to leave her alone with the newborn.
The memory of what happened to Mal was written on Cobb's face. On the faces his motherless children.
"I think I can help." Sybil was telling them. Yori and Saito were in the air but still a few hours away from England. The Team was gathered in Arthur's study. Ariadne was with Audrey in the front parlor.
The Team was out of hearing range of the Architect, but still keeping an eye on her and the baby, dressed in pink. Phillipa was watching the two boys outside. Cerberus was with them for good measure.
"Circe taught me all her little tricks before she died." The Control was saying as the Point Man peered nervously out the door at Ariadne. She was walking the floor with their daughter. She seemed happy.
"You can help by telling us exactly what Morpheus did to her. That whole drowning thing was his fault." Arthur barked at her. "Bring him here."
"I can bring him here, but he can't do anything." Sybil told the Team. They looked at her waiting for her to explain. "It's a one time only deal. He can pull people into a dream only once, and only if they have been in Limbo. That's why he never took you or Yori." She explained nodding to the Point Man.
"Our girl seems fine now." Eames said to Arthur. "She's affectionate to you. Normal. Not talking about the dream." The Forger sighed. "Are you sure you heard right?" he asked him.
"I know what I heard Mr. Eames." Arthur said coldly.
"With everything that she has gone though over the past few years, its possible that she has started to confuse the dream with reality." Sybil said
"We can't afford to just ignore this." Cobb said gravely. "I ignored these same signs with Mal, look what happened."
"She's just a shade." Sybil said in a hushed whisper.
A large helicopter, one capable of long distance travel, landed on the large country estate. Cerberus was barking madly as Yori and Saito dismounted. Their four year old son Shin in tow with his nanny following closely behind. Saito, ever the attentive friend since Cobb brought him back from Limbo, wasted no time in coming to the Team's aide.
"She is so lovey." Yori said holding Audrey. The Team was crowded in the large parlor. A large parlor, that suddenly seemed small when crowded with warm bodies. The baby's proud parents beamed as their friends gushed over their daughter.
Shin and Alexander chased one another around the room. Arthur's son indifferent to becoming a big brother. The house, if it was a living thing, was warm and happy with so much life bursting at it's seems. The friends talked and visited, ate a nice dinner, and put the children to bed. Shin sharing Alexander's room contentedly. Fast becoming the friends their parents hoped they would be.
Yori and Sybil were in Audrey's, now perfectly lavender, room.
"She's already so long." Yori exclaimed as she changed the baby. Ariadne laughed.
"I hope she's tall like Arthur." The Architect said with a smile. "It's rotten being so short."
"How is Mr. Nolan?" Yori asked Sybil. The Control shrugged.
"Fine, I went to see him last month in New York." Sybil told them.
"Anything happen worth mentioning?" Ariadne teased. Sybil rolled her large brown eyes.
"No." Sybil said, her voice irritated. "Percy thinks we should wait until we get married before having sex."
"What?" Ariadne laughed. Sybil nodded.
"I told him he was reading to much 'Twilight' and he got mad at me." The Control complained. Yori and Ariadne burst out in laughter.
"Sybil, maybe he just really loves you." Yori offered.
"I know he dose. All the more reason for him to put out." Sybil said in an irritated tone. "Ariadne and I went to the lingerie shop in Paris "la Dame du Gout*", got this really sexy nightie for me and I never even got the chance to have him rip it off." Sybil complained. Ariadne nodded.
"It was really nice." She told the Doctor. "It's where Arthur buys all the lingerie for me."
"Perhaps Saito and I should make a detour to Paris then." Yori offered. "I think after seeing your little princess here, I want one of my own." Yori lovingly held Audrey in her capable arms.
"What does Saito think about having another baby?" Ariadne asked. Her face beaming at the joy of shared motherhood. Yori considered her husband for a moment.
"Men, rarely have a say in such matters." The Doctor told her. Ariadne suppressed a giggle. At that moment, they both knew such a thing was universal and deeply true.
Sybil had been ignoring the women and their constant talk of babies.
"You know Eames said that celibacy is a very unnatural state for any living creature." She said. Her thoughts still on her time with Nolan. "It's not healthy to abstain from sex."
"Eames would say that." Ariadne countered.
Upstairs, the women giggled and laughed over their secretive girl talk. Downstairs, the men talked of more serious things.
"We can drug her easily enough." Eames was saying. "Yori brought a portable MRI. We can use it to determine if she really is dreaming without the PASIV. Decide where to go from there."
"She's nursing the baby." Arthur told them. "She can't take anything or else Audrey gets it in a few hours."
"You can bottle feed the baby for a few days. Just tell Ariadne that you want to be apart of the bonding. She'll think it's sweet." Cobb told him. The Point Man gave his friend a doubtful look. The Extractor shrugged. "Mal always thought it was sweet."
Plans were made. That very night, they would invade the Architect's dreams.
*La Dame du Gout, French, "The Lady's Taste". Not an actual shop in Paris.
* Zombie Dream, was the last dream I remember having.
~Thank you all so much for your wonderful reviews. I am so glad you love my stories and characters as much as I did creating them. I deeply appreciate all you have experienced on the journey with them. Your kind reviews mean the world to me. I hope to keep filling this world I've made for them, even if only a handful of people read it.~