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Ariadne opens her eyes to a city that is quiet and still. All the details from the tall high-rises to the bodega window displays are in place where they should be, but the harried men and women that should be populating the streets and buildings are conspicuously absent. Juxtaposed against her memories of bustling Paris and vibrant L.A., the silence of this city she built feels incongruous.
Her heart sinks. They had known it wouldn’t be this easy, but Ariadne had still been foolish enough to hope.
It won’t be like a usual dream down there, Cobb had told her. You’ll have to find him.
Ariadne crosses the street and approaches the doors of a sleek, modern-looking hotel. She’s not sure where to search, but this seems as good a place as any to start. The lobby, like the street outside, is quiet and empty. The lights are on behind the reception counter, but no uniformed employee stands behind the desk to greet Ariadne as she enters.
She walks across the lobby to the elevator, its doors open and waiting for her without any guests to call it to another floor. Her hand hovers indecisively over the buttons for a brief moment, before she selects the highest floor. The thirty seconds it takes for the elevator to travel to its destination are almost a relief. Inside the confines of the elevator, it's easier to pretend that there are others going about their lives outside its doors. But when the doors open on the forty-sixth floor, the illusion is broken. The hotel hallway is clean and brightly lit, but just as still as the lobby downstairs.
Ariadne slowly makes her way down the empty hallway, knocking on doors one by one and listening for any sounds inside. After the fifth door, she starts to feel foolish. Even before entering the lobby doors, she had sensed it — there is no one else here.
At the end of the hallway is a door leading to a rooftop patio. Ariadne pushes it open and steps outside, thinking that perhaps she may be able to see something, anything, in the city below from this new vantage point.
Standing on her toes and resting her hands on the guardrail, she leans forward to survey the city sprawled out beneath her. A glimmer of movement several blocks away catches her eye and she feels a swell of hope. She sees nothing for several drawn-out seconds — and then a gentle breeze sweeps through, rustling the leaves of a tree in the same spot where she had noticed the movement. Ariadne tamps down her disappointment and continues to sweep her gaze across the city.
Nothing. There’s nothing, not a single sign of life that she can perceive — she is utterly alone here. A rush of vertigo hits her and she shivers, pushing herself away from the railing. Although she knows it would have made her search more difficult, she wishes that she could have populated the city with her projections. This is her dream, her mind, but she feels too exposed standing alone on the rooftop.
Ariadne is turning to head back inside to the safety of the hotel when out of the corner of her eye, she catches sight of something strange. Feeling a growing sense of unease, she walks instead to the opposite railing to get a better look. There, in the distance, a thick fog is encroaching upon the edges of her city. She reflexively sticks her hand in her pocket to fumble for her totem, aware that it is a useless gesture inside her own dream, but needing to feel its familiar weight all the same.
Ariadne knows the fog is not her own doing. Every other element of the city — the sleek office buildings, the verdant trees planted along the sidewalk, even the thin wisps of clouds overhead — is exactly as she designed. This addition to the dreamscape at the outskirts of her city is the sign she’s been searching for, the evidence that someone else is sharing this dream with her, although she really would have preferred to stumble across some projections rather than this ominous fog. Ariadne watches the thin tendrils of mist stretching into the city and she shudders. There’s no avoiding it — she needs to get a closer look at the fog.
Now that her search has a focus, Ariadne moves with more surety. She emerges from the hotel and sets off down the street in the direction of the fog. From the hotel roof, the edge of the city hadn’t seemed so far, but now that she is down on the ground, the distance is further than she had expected.
When she is finally close enough to see it, she immediately wants to turn back around. Up close, she can see that it is less a fog and more a wall of opaque mist that bisects the street. It towers over her, covering the roofs of the buildings inside of it. The sky above is overcast, with low-hanging gray clouds that seem to blend right into the fog below.
Ariadne gathers her courage and walks up to the edge of the fog. She’s never seen anything like it before, not in the real world nor in dreams. Tentatively, she reaches a hand forward into the mist. Even though her hand is only a few inches beyond the surface, she cannot see even a shadow of it from the other side. Leaving her hand inside the mist, she feels around for the brick wall to her right so that she can at least use it to stay oriented while inside the fog.
There’s nothing there. Where the wall should have continued on into the fog, there’s just empty air. It is as if the fog has eaten away at her dream, disintegrated it into nothing. Ariadne gives a strangled shriek, yanking her arm out of the mist as if it were made of acid. She stares at her hand, heart racing, half-expecting it to dissolve before her eyes as well.
When a minute has passed and her hand feels no less corporeal than before, Ariadne’s heart rate slowly returns to normal. She raises her trembling hand back up to the mist and pushes it through again. She tries wiggling her fingers; they all still seem to be firmly connected to her body. Ariadne wraps her other hand around the comforting weight of the chess piece in her pocket, takes a deep breath, and steps forward into the fog.
Everything around her is dense, gray mist. She cannot see the sky overhead, nor the ground beneath her feet, though there must be something there since she is not falling through the swirling mist. She glances over her shoulder. Sure enough, she cannot see anything of the city that is mere inches behind her. She feels the panic rising again, afraid to take another step in any direction lest she lose her bearings and become trapped inside the fog. Standing on this side of the fog, her body is the only solid thing she can see. She glances down at her hands that are still shaking slightly, one hand still grasping her totem.
Her totem.
Ariadne’s eyes widen with the realization that her little metal chess piece — and her clothes, for that matter — has not been lost to the fog. But why? Why this, when everything else she has dreamed up has been destroyed here?
Ariadne unwinds her scarf from around her neck, a hypothesis forming in her head. She holds the fabric out in front of her, its deep green hue a stark contrast to the endless gray around it, and releases her grip to let it drop down. As soon as she lets go, the scarf seems to dissolve, its color and substance leaching out until it is part of the mist.
It’s just pure creation, Ariadne had said to Arthur, unable to stay away even after that first harrowing excursion into shared dreaming with Cobb. This fog, though, is the opposite of everything she loves about dreaming, rendering her creations undone.
It’s unnerving to see, but her mind is already turning this over. She doesn’t fully understand the mechanics of this strange fog, but this, at least, is something she can work with.
Taking a step backwards out of the fog, Ariadne immediately feels the relief of being back in the tangible world of her dreamscape. She retreats along the sidewalk until she reaches a street lamp halfway between the fog and the nearest intersection. In her own dream, without the presence of someone else’s projections, she doesn’t have to worry about minimizing changes to the dreamscape so she conjures up a large skein of thick red yarn. She ties one end around the street lamp, double-knotting the string and pulling it tight, and then walks back to the fog with the rest of the yarn.
Once again, Ariadne steps through the wall of mist, but this time when she looks back, a trail of bright red stands out against the mist, pointing the way back out to her. With her yarn as a safety line tethering her to the boundaries of her own subconscious, Ariadne begins walking deeper into the mist.
There’s no variation to it, no feature in the landscape that suddenly appears when she comes close enough, no anomaly in the swirling patterns that surround her. Without the sun, without even the ground to mark her progress, it’s hard to tell how long or how far she’s traveled.
She keeps walking.
An hour — or so she estimates — passes like this. The optimism Ariadne had felt when she tied her red string around the lamp post is slowly fading away, the sense of foreboding and wrongness creeping back in the farther into the mist she goes.
Never go into a job blind, Arthur had told her on their first post-inception job together, after Ariadne turned incredulous eyes upon the mountain of files on his desk.
She wavers for a second — she wants to be brave, wants to prove herself — before she gives in and turns around to face the red trail behind her. Amid the gray of her surroundings, the bright red shines like a beacon, an arrow pointing her towards safety. She’s not giving up, she promises herself fiercely. She’ll come back when she’s better armed with knowledge, after she’s consulted with Cobb on the nature of this strange mist.
Ariadne walks quickly, retracing her steps along the trail of yarn. The way back out seems to take less time now that she’s following a previously laid path, but even five minutes more in this bewildering emptiness feels far too long. When she finally emerges into her familiar cityscape again, Ariadne could weep at the sight of the cracked asphalt pavement, solid beneath her feet.
There’s something off, though, something different about this street than before. A chill runs down her spine when she realizes what it is. The lamp post, previously equally far from the fog as it was from the intersection, is now much closer to the fog. While she was inside the fog, it had been devouring even more of her dreamscape.
Dropping her yarn in a pile by the street lamp, Ariadne hurriedly retreats until she has several city blocks of distance in between her and the encroaching fog. She’s not sure how much time she has left on the clock, but suddenly, she can’t wake up from this dream fast enough. Unwilling to wait around for the somnacin dose to wear off, Ariadne keeps going until she is leaning out over a window ledge, far above the ground in another dreamed-up hotel, unsettled enough to create her own premature kick.
Ariadne climbs out on the ledge and stares down at the hard pavement below. Although she knows for certain that she is dreaming, she has never liked being kicked out of dreams through death, some part of her still traumatized by the very real danger of limbo from her first job in dreamshare.
She thinks of Mal and the brief moment of weightlessness she must have felt before plummeting down to the street below. She wonders if it had felt like flying.
---
After the Fischer job, it feels strange to return to school. After building impossible structures and pushing her creativity beyond the limits of the physical world, it seems anti-climatic to pick up her pencil again and sketch archways and windows for her graduate coursework.
One afternoon shortly after returning from L.A. and finished with her classes for the day, Ariadne finds herself outside Professor Miles’ office door. She’s not sure what compelled her to come here, but she’s been restless ever since she landed back in Paris. Ariadne feels changed — now that she’s had a taste of creating without limits in dreams, the real world seems too small.
Ariadne knocks on his door hesitantly.
“Come in,” says a voice inside. Ariadne opens the door and steps into the quaint office. “Ah, Ariadne,” Miles says, “back from the States?”
“Yeah, I flew back last week,” Ariadne replies.
“What can I do for you?” Miles asks.
Ariadne pauses, still unsure of why she came here. I don’t know what to do because architecture isn’t enough for me anymore seems like the wrong thing to tell him. Instead, she says, “I wanted to thank you for recommending me to Cobb.”
“Of course, you’re one of my best students,” Miles says, smiling kindly. “And you have a mind uniquely suited to the nature of his work,” he adds.
Ariadne perks up at this. “Where can I find more opportunities to do this kind of work?”
A troubled look crosses Miles’ face and he stands up, walking around his desk to close his office door. “You’re looking to take another job in dreamshare?” he asks, returning to sit behind his desk again.
She hadn’t been, but she doesn’t know why she didn’t think of it before now. Cobb, Arthur, Eames, Yusuf — all of them had worked jobs just like the Fischer job long before she had even heard the term “dreamsharing.”
“Yes, I’d like to,” Ariadne says.
Miles folds his hands together and looks at her with a serious expression. “I don’t want to know the details of your last job, but am I correct in saying that it was not strictly legal?”
Ariadne doesn’t think that’s quite fair, given that Professor Miles is the reason she was given that job. And besides, while dreamshare is not legal , per se, it’s also not explicitly illegal, not while the general public is kept unaware of its existence.
Miles frowns, taking her guilty silence for the answer it is. “As I said, Ariadne, you are one of my top students. You have a bright future ahead of you and plenty of opportunities right here, in the waking world.”
“It’s different, though,” Ariadne argues. “I can do so much more in dreams than I ever could here.”
“But they’re still just dreams,” Miles says with the wearied tone of a man who is repeating an argument he has made in the past to deaf ears. He sighs, gaze falling downwards to a framed photograph on his desk. “Don’t fall into the same trap as my daughter and son-in-law. Don’t throw away your life chasing something that isn’t real.”
Ariadne follows his gaze to the photograph on his desk of Mal and Cobb. Both of them are beaming at the camera, full of youth and vitality, forever immortalized on film.
“Do you blame him?” Ariadne blurts out before she can stop herself.
“What for?” Miles asks.
Ariadne hesitates. As far as she knows, Miles isn’t aware of what Cobb did to wake Mal up from limbo, the true cause of her madness. “For introducing Mal to dreamshare,” she says, a safer answer.
The elderly man looks surprised. “Dominick did not introduce my daughter to shared dreaming. I was the one who showed my daughter how to build dreams. She taught Dominick, in turn.” He smiles sadly at Ariadne. “You see, I know something about how addictive dreaming can be.”
“Oh,” Ariadne says, trying to reconcile this in her head. She pictures her mentor — bookish, proper, polite — and experiences a moment of cognitive dissonance when she tries to imagine him fighting projections in a dreamscape alongside Arthur or Eames. “I didn’t realize. Do— do you still dream?”
“No, not anymore. Not since my daughter died,” he says, old sorrow visible in his eyes as they drift again to the framed photograph.
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne says softly.
He looks back up at her, a resigned expression on his face. “I’ll let you know if I hear of any work opportunities, Ariadne. But I want you to remember not to let dreaming become a replacement for what you’re missing in the real world. We live up here, not down there.”
Ariadne remembers Cobb spending his evenings hooked up to the PASIV and his memories of Mal. She remembers him trying futilely, night after night, to see his children’s faces one more time, to stop Mal from jumping.
“Thank you, Professor,” she says. “I won’t forget.”
---
Ariadne opens her eyes and startles to find Cobb hovering over her anxiously.
“Oh, thank God,” Cobb says in relief, collapsing down into a chair next to her. The light outside the window is still bright; she doesn’t think more than two hours could have passed.
“What happened?” Ariadne asks warily, pulling the needle out of her wrist and pushing herself up into a sitting position. “Was I under for longer than expected?”
“Only a little. The timer ran out ten minutes ago. I would’ve given you a kick in another ten if you hadn’t woken up on your own,” Cobb says.
“Then what’s the matter?” she asks.
Cobb’s eyes flicker over to the monitor that is hooked up to the electrodes adhered across her forehead and temples. Ariadne follows his gaze and looks at the spiky wave on the screen that is meant to show her brain activity.
“Is something wrong with my brain?” she asks with growing concern. “I don’t know how to read this.”
“No, no, everything looks normal now” Cobb reassures. “It’s while you were under. For about an hour, your brain activity dropped significantly,” he continues, frowning.
Ariadne doesn’t like the sound of that. “What does that mean?”
“Well, it means that for an hour, your brain activity was similar to that of a coma patient,” Cobb says. They both look at Arthur, who hasn’t so much as twitched since they laid him on the sofa earlier that day. It’s disturbing — Ariadne has never seen him so still in all the time she’s known him. Arthur had always been in motion, fingers tapping or foot bouncing even at rest, and it feels wrong to see him like this.
“Well, shit,” Ariadne says finally.
“What did you see down there? Did you find Arthur?” Cobb asks hopefully.
“No, not yet,” Ariadne sighs. “But I found something, all right.”
“Tell me,” Cobb says.
Ariadne tells him about the appearance of the mysterious fog at the edges of her dreamscape. Cobb frowns, the furrow between his brows deepening as she recounts how it slowly ate away at the outskirts of her dreamed city.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” she asks.
Cobb is silent for a few moments, deep in thought, before he stands, grabbing a pen and a notepad off the table next to him. He jots down a few scribbled sentences as he paces in front of the couch where Arthur lies.
“How long were you inside the fog?” Cobb asks.
“I’m not sure, but I think an hour or so? It was hard to keep track of time in there,” Ariadne answers. As she says this, the realization comes to her. “You said my brain activity dropped for about an hour. Do you think it was while I was in the fog?”
“Yes,” Cobb says, tapping his pen against the notepad. “I believe the fog may be how Arthur’s coma manifests in the dreamscape, and it spread to you while you were in contact with it.”
Ariadne frowns, thinking this over. “But that doesn’t make sense. Time is slowed down in dreams. An hour down there in the fog should've only been half an hour up here, with this mix.”
“You’re right, but we don’t know how perceived time works in a coma,” Cobb replies.
“So, what, Arthur is somewhere in this fog, then?” She can’t imagine what that would be like for him, to be trapped in hazy fog for weeks on end. A new fear strikes Ariadne. “Or is he even there at all for me to find? Is the fog what’s left of his mind?”
Cobb sighs, looking troubled. “You asked if I had seen anything like this before, and the answer is no, I haven’t. I think there’s a strong chance Arthur is in there somewhere, though, whether he’s in the fog or in his own dreamscape. It’s a good sign that you were able to go in and out of the fog and still wake up.” He leans against the table, eyes narrowed in thought. “If we can find Arthur and lead him out of the fog and into a stable dreamscape,” he says slowly.
“Then we can wake him up with a kick,” Ariadne says, finishing his thought.
---
Arthur calls a few weeks later as Ariadne is returning to her studio apartment after class.
“I heard you’re looking for work,” he says without preamble when she picks up, straight to the point as usual.
“Arthur? Oh— hello,” she says, fumbling with her keys and trying to awkwardly keep her phone pressed to her ear with her shoulder. “Yes I am,” she says eagerly. “How did you hear?” She steps into her apartment and kicks off her shoes in the entryway before walking across the room and flopping onto her couch.
“I have my sources,” Arthur says dryly.
Ariadne snorts. “Did Professor Miles talk to you?”
“Yes, in fact, he did,” Arthur says. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be scared off after that mess of a job, but I had a feeling you’d be back.” Ariadne hadn’t been sure either, in the immediate aftermath of the Fischer job. It wasn’t until she was back in the studio, drawing perfectly possible staircases, that she realized she wanted more.
“What’s the job?” Ariadne asks, pulling a notebook and pencil out of her bag.
“A simple, one-level extraction. The mark is an average citizen who just happened to stumble upon a valuable piece of information, so the danger up here should be minimal.”
“So after pulling off inception, this should be a piece of cake, right?” Ariadne jokes.
Arthur’s easy laugh displays a marked departure from the tense, burned out man Ariadne had known on the Fischer job. “I hope you’re not expecting all dreamshare jobs to be as exciting as inception.”
“No, that’s perfectly fine with me,” Ariadne says hastily. “I really just want a chance to build again. Will it be the same team as before?”
“Just me and Eames, and you, if you’re in. Eames is extracting and the job is simple enough not to need a chemist on-site,” Arthur says. “We can do all the planning in Paris, just like before. Are you in?”
“Count me in,” Ariadne says without hesitation.
---
The fog is no less dense when she returns the next afternoon, but Ariadne imagines that it seems a little less ominous than before. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that this is Arthur’s mind — and Arthur knows twenty different ways to incapacitate a foe, but Ariadne knows that he would never purposefully harm her. Before, entering the swirling gray mist felt like walking into the mouth of a sinister creature waiting for her to accidentally let go of her tether so that it could swallow her down; now, walking through the nothingness feels no different than swimming in open water — treacherous, yes, but only in the uncaring, unfeeling way that nature is.
I’m in a coma right now, Ariadne thinks wildly. It’s still hard to wrap her head around it, even though Cobb’s theory makes sense. For hours, she’s been wandering around down here while her brain slows to a near-complete standstill up above. It’s strange to think about — she would’ve thought that it would feel different somehow.
All at once, between one step and the next, the fog vanishes. Ariadne halts in surprise and whirls around — the wall of fog is inches from her face, the red string she holds ending abruptly mid-air where the fog begins. She laughs in disbelief and in relief — somehow, she has made it to the other side of the fog.
Ariadne pauses for a moment to take in her new surroundings. She has emerged in the middle of a city, standing on a neatly paved sidewalk not too unlike the one she had just left hours before. For a moment, she fears that she has somehow walked in a giant circle within the fog and reemerged right where she came from — but no, the architecture here looks more varied and eclectic than in the city she constructed. And now that she has gotten over her initial disorientation, she can hear the rhythmic cacophony — the roar of car engines, the percussive pounding of a jackhammer, a siren wailing faintly in the distance — of a city come to life.
She reaches in her pocket to touch her totem and feels that the weight is different now; the dream she is in is no longer her own.
Still not daring to let go of her string, Ariadne walks towards the sounds, eager to see another sign of life after hours alone. A few streets down, she starts seeing projections going about their lives. As she passes the entrance to a convenience store, a woman pushing a stroller exits and smiles politely at Ariadne when she pauses to let the woman pass by. Halfway down the block, Ariadne sees a dark-haired man in a well-tailored suit at the next intersection crossing to the other side of the street and she immediately quickens her pace. Her heart pounds as she approaches the crosswalk, not daring to get her hopes up, but the signal changes just as she steps into the intersection and she hastily steps back onto the sidewalk to avoid being run over by a gray sedan. The driver honks at her as he drives past, giving her a rude look.
Ariadne grits her teeth in irritation as possibly-Arthur walks further away from her while she waits for a break in the cars so she can dart across the street after him. Finally, the intersection is clear and Ariadne dashes across just as she sees the man turn the corner at the end of the block. She runs down the street in pursuit, rounds the corner, and promptly collides with a man walking in the opposite direction.
“Sorry,” she says automatically, not even sparing him a glance as she tries to sidestep him before she loses possibly-Arthur again.
“Careful there, love, you’re going to hurt someone running around like a madwoman.” At the familiar voice, one she hasn’t heard in months, Ariadne looks up sharply into the man’s face.
“Eames?” she says in shock, thoughts of finding Arthur momentarily forgotten.
“Good to see you too,” Eames says, smiling lightly at her. “Have you missed me?”
Ariadne pushes down her surprise and confusion, and doesn’t let herself think before she throws her arms around him in a fierce embrace. Though Eames had never been the hugging type, she feels him squeeze her back gently after only a moment’s hesitation.
---
After a few more successful jobs, Ariadne has come to the realization that she, Arthur, and Eames have become a team, of sorts. Sometimes there’s an extra member or two, but the three of them have worked every job together since the Fischer job and it’s surprising how easy it is to fall into rhythm with them.
With the next job coming up in less than a week — a two-level extraction, with Ariadne serving as one of the dreamers for the first time — Ariadne hovers over the architectural model on her work table, anxious to commit the layout of her dream level to memory. Eames, on the other hand, has perfected his forge days ago, and Arthur has uncharacteristically agreed to take a break from hacking into the mark’s bank records to practice hand-to-hand combat with him.
All things considered, she thinks she’s doing a great job of tuning out the curses and grunts coming from Arthur and Eames sparring behind her in this too-small space, right up until a rolling chair flies across the room into her table, jostling the foam replica of a museum sitting on top.
“Hey, watch it!” she exclaims, steadying the model before it can fall to the ground. “If you guys are going to do this indoors, can you at least not be launching chairs in my direction?”
“Sorry, Ariadne.” Arthur grins at her from where he’s picking himself up off the edge of the mat, looking no worse for the wear from having just been thrown into a chair.
Eames flashes her an unrepentant grin. “Why don’t you come join the fun?”
Ariadne raises her eyebrows. “Uh, no thanks. I’d rather not go to the hospital for a concussion today.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t let you get hurt,” Arthur says reassuringly.
“You should learn how to defend yourself, if you’re planning to stay in this line of work,” Eames adds more seriously.
Ariadne chews her lip, looking down at her foam model. “I was actually just about to go under to practice building the level again. I want to make sure everything’s nailed down before next week.”
“We could all go under into your museum level and kill two birds with one stone,” Eames suggests. “You can practice your build and also learn how to fight without worrying about getting injured.”
“That’s not a bad idea, actually,” Arthur says thoughtfully. Ariadne sees Eames roll his eyes and she hides a grin.
“All right,” Ariadne agrees. She could use an outlet for her pre-job nerves, anyway.
Arthur brings out the PASIV and they lay down side-by-side on the mat, inserting their own lines. When Ariadne and Eames each give Arthur a nod to signify that they’re ready, he pushes down the button in the middle of the machine, sending them down into Ariadne’s dream.
Ariadne opens her eyes to find herself in a wide-open room, its walls lined with glass cases with little white placards next to each of them. On one end of the room is the entrance to the next gallery, which Ariadne knows will connect to several more galleries before leading back to this one in a recursive loop.
Arthur stands next to her, observing the details of the room. “Ariadne, you need to have a little more faith in yourself. This is perfect. You’ve nailed down the feel of this place.” Ariadne smiles, feeling better at the reassurance.
Eames walks up to them. “Shall we?” he asks.
Ariadne conjures up a large, padded mat into the center of the room. She steps onto it, bouncing on her toes. “Okay, yeah, I’m ready,” she says.
“All right,” Arthur says, standing off to the side of the mat. “First, I want you to try tackling Eames.”
Ariadne looks doubtfully at Eames, who is standing across from her looking like he could knock her across the room with one hand. “Don’t you think you should teach me some basics first?”
“Just try,” Arthur encourages.
“Okay,” Ariadne says, still skeptical. She squares her shoulders and then lunges at Eames, turning her shoulder into his chest and wrapping her arms around his middle as she tries to push him backwards. Eames doesn’t even stumble and Ariadne drops her arms, embarrassed.
“Takes more than that to take me down, love,” Eames says with a grin. Ariadne glares at him. “Although you do have rather sharp shoulders.”
“Okay, do you know why you couldn’t bring Eames down?” Arthur asks.
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because he’s got fifty pounds on me,” she replies sarcastically.
“Exactly,” Arthur says. “You’re small — you’ll never be able to bring down someone his size with just brute force.” He smiles. “That’s why you need to fight dirty.”
Fighting dirty is an understatement. Arthur has her biting, scratching, and clawing her way to small victories where she can get them. Eames, for his part, doesn’t take this lying down. She can tell he’s going easy on her, but she’s still thrown into the mat more times than she would like.
Arthur is patient and a great teacher, truly, but after an hour of this Ariadne is feeling more tired and sore than she’s ever been in the waking world. “Okay, I know this is a dream, but I think I need to sit down,” Ariadne says, wobbling over to the side of the mat and collapsing to the floor.
Arthur nods in approval. “Good work. With a little practice, you’ll be able to hold your own in a fight.”
“It’s your turn now, Arthur,” Eames says, rolling his shoulders with a glint in his eye. “I need to pay you back for all the times you told Ariadne to kick at my groin.”
Arthur smirks at him. “You can try.” He rolls up his sleeves and steps onto the mat, lowering himself into a fighting stance.
Arthur and Eames grapple with each other for a while, each of them only on the ground for a split second before rolling back to their feet whenever they’re knocked down. They seem evenly matched — Eames has the strength advantage, but Arthur is scrappier and lighter on his feet, twisting out of Eames’ holds before he can pin him down. Ariadne watches with wide eyes, truly understanding for the first time just how dangerous these men she works with are. The realization should be frightening, but oddly enough, she feels safer, knowing they’re on her team.
Finally, Arthur manages to get his arms around Eames in a chokehold, and Ariadne thinks Arthur is going to win this round. However, in a move that Ariadne can’t quite grasp the physics of, Eames pitches forward, throwing Arthur over his back onto the floor and pinning him down in the same movement. Arthur struggles ineffectively for a brief moment but Eames only tightens his hold on his wrists.
“Ready to tap out, darling?” Eames asks smugly.
Arthur sighs, laying his head down against the mat, and taps his right hand against the floor. “All right, now let me up.”
Eames doesn’t move. “Actually, I think I like you where you are,” he says, smirking. Arthur’s ears go red and a blush begins to spread across his cheekbones even as he scowls at him.
Ariadne coughs awkwardly, refusing to be a third wheel in her own dream. “Um, hello. I’m still here.”
Eames looks at her with a grin and rolls off of Arthur to lay beside him. “Ah, Ariadne, give us a hand?” he says, holding a hand out towards her.
Ariadne snorts but still extends a hand to help him up. However, Eames gives her hand a sharp tug and she yelps as she falls. She ends up sprawled between them on the mat, glaring at Eames indignantly. “What was that for?”
“You looked a little left out up there,” Eames offers, leaning up on one elbow. “Couldn’t have that now, could we? The three of us, we’re a team.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Ariadne says, but she can’t help but laugh. She sits up, looking down at Arthur to her right and Eames to her left, smiling fondly. Yes, somehow, the three of them have become a team.
---
“So what brings you here?” Eames asks, after she finally lets go of him.
Ariadne’s eyes widen and she curses under her breath, knowing the man in the suit is long gone by now. But she realizes it doesn’t matter — Eames may be a projection, but he’s not just any projection. “I’m looking for Arthur,” she says. “Do you know where I can find him?”
“Arthur?” Eames looks bemused. “Well, in that case you can just come along with me then,” he says, gesturing with a tilt of his chin in the direction he was headed in before Ariadne collided with him. “He’ll be glad to see you.”
Ariadne falls into step beside Eames, still awkwardly trailing her string behind her, as he leads the way down streets that look vaguely familiar. As they pass by a small cafe, Ariadne recognizes with a start the blue awning overhead and the brightly painted yellow chairs where she and a friend had sat and drank foamy lattes one sunny afternoon, and she suddenly realizes that it’s not just some kind of backwards déjà vu that she’s experiencing.
“Eames, are we in London?” she asks, studying the buildings around her with narrowed eyes. Up ahead is another restaurant that Ariadne recognizes, where she had tried blood pudding for the first time. A tall, brunette woman stands outside, perusing the menu.
“Where else would we be?” Eames says, shooting her an amused sideways glance.
Ariadne still remembers the first lesson Cobb taught her. Never recreate places from your memory, Cobb had said, after spending half a century in limbo with Mal doing just that. As if hearing her thoughts, the brown-haired woman turns towards them as they pass by and Ariadne glimpses Mal’s face with a shock of recognition. She tenses, feeling the ghost of the startling pain of Mal’s knife plunging into her gut, the other part of that first lesson she still hasn’t forgotten.
She stops in her tracks and does a double-take, but the woman has turned away and entered the restaurant. Ariadne stares after her for a moment, before she decides she must have been imagining it, with Mal already on her mind. She quickens her pace to catch up with Eames, anxious not to be left behind.
They arrive at a row of red brick apartments within a quiet neighborhood that feels removed from the bustle of the city. A young woman walking a black labrador passes them on the sidewalk as Eames leads Ariadne towards an apartment near the end of the block. He unlocks and opens the door, motioning Ariadne through with an “after you” gesture.
Ariadne finds herself in a brightly lit entryway and she looks around herself curiously. Against the wall next to her is a plain black table with several pieces of mail and a small bowl holding a set of keys on top. Hanging on the wall above the table is a series of three portraits of a man’s face at different angles, his features abstract and blurred with smooth, sweeping brush strokes.
Behind her, she hears Eames enter as well. He closes the door and takes off his shoes, tucking them underneath the table next to several other pairs of shoes.
“Where are we?” she asks, toeing off her shoes as well and placing them next to Eames’.
“My flat, of course.” Eames tosses his keys into the small bowl where they clang against the other set already in the bowl. “Darling?” he calls down the hallway.
“In here,” comes Arthur’s voice from a room on the right.
Ariadne follows Eames into his living room, where Arthur lounges sideways on the couch in jeans and a dark blue sweater, gaze directed downwards at the laptop in his lap. Although he is focused on whatever is on his screen, he looks more casual and relaxed than Ariadne has ever seen him before.
“You have a visitor,” Eames tells him. Arthur looks up at that and his face breaks out into a warm smile upon seeing Ariadne.
“Ariadne!” Arthur exclaims, immediately closing his laptop and setting it aside in order to stand up and hug her.
Ariadne hugs him back tightly. “It’s so good to see you,” she chokes out, overcome with relief at finally finding Arthur, inside his dream. Arthur feels solid and real, and for the first time since she started this endeavor, she feels like everything might be okay. It was Arthur who first taught her to dream — that disastrous first dream with Cobb notwithstanding — and she hadn’t realized how lost she felt without his steady presence. Ariadne forces herself to let go, fighting the urge to immediately drag him back through the fog and into the waking world before he disappears again.
“I just saw you last week,” Arthur says with a laugh. “Not that it isn’t good to see you now.” Ariadne feels her smile fade a little. Dom had warned about this, that it was likely that Arthur would be confused after all this time, that he may not realize he’s dreaming.
Ariadne opens her mouth to try to gently break the news, but Eames steps forward at the same time, placing his hand on Arthur’s arm.
“I’ll just go and start dinner,” Eames says. He leans in towards Arthur, giving him a peck on the cheek, and Arthur smiles fondly after Eames as he leaves the room. Ariadne watches this exchange with concern, forced to consider for the first time that, perhaps, Eames’ presence in Arthur’s dream is not a good thing after all.
Arthur directs his gaze back at her. “Is something wrong?” he asks, noticing her strained expression.
“No, nothing,” Ariadne says, forcing herself to smile again. She decides that she’ll ease him into it, gently nudge him towards the truth. “I actually came here to ask you what you know about comas.” She winces internally, wondering if that was too blunt.
“Comas?” Arthur just looks bemused, the topic not triggering any spark of recognition in his eyes.
“Yes,” Ariadne fumbles along, “Cobb and I are researching how dreamshare technology might help coma patients.”
“Ah, you and Cobb,” Arthur says with a knowing look.
“Yeah, we— hang on, why are you looking at me like that?” Ariadne asks, sidetracked.
Arthur laughs. “Don’t think I didn’t notice all the time you spent pining after Cobb during the Fischer job.”
“God, Arthur, Cobb is like ten years older than me!” Ariadne splutters in indignation.
Arthur raises an eyebrow. “And?”
“Okay, yeah, maybe I was trying to impress him at first while we were all working together in the warehouse,” Ariadne admits, a blush rising as she tries to figure out how this conversation has become so derailed. “But that was before his dead wife tried to get us all trapped in limbo.”
Arthurs smile flickers slightly at the mention of limbo and Ariadne realizes that at least some part of him must be aware of their situation.
“Arthur,” Ariadne says hesitantly, taking a chance, “you know you’re dreaming, right?”
The smile drops completely from Arthur’s face as if it had never been there. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says stiffly.
“You’re in a coma, up in the real world,” Ariadne presses on. “You’ve been in one for almost a month and Cobb and I have been trying to wake you up.” She tries to choose her next words carefully. “Don’t you remember, Eames—”
“That’s enough,” says a low, angry voice from the doorway behind her. Ariadne spins around to see that Eames has come back into the room standing framed in the doorway with his arms crossed.
The expression on Eames’ face freezes the words in her throat and the rest of her sentence slips away from her.
Ariadne tries to address Eames. “You’re not—”
“I said that’s enough. You should go,” Eames says with finality, the friendly affection with which he normally regards her is completely absent from his face. Ariadne is forcefully reminded that the man in front of her is — was — a professional criminal.
“Arthur?” Ariadne asks nervously, looking back at him. Arthur says nothing in response, just watches her with a shuttered expression. “Please, Arthur, you need to wake up. Listen to me—”
She sees Eames advancing towards her out of the corner of her eye and she stifles a gasp, a bright flash of fear passing through her — what happens if she dies within someone else’s coma? — but Eames merely takes hold of her elbow and guides her out of the room and down the hallway with a gentle but unyielding grip.
On the front doorstep, Ariadne turns around to face Eames before he can close the door in her face. “Eames,” she pleads. Eames shakes his head and closes the door, with Ariadne and her red string on the other side.
Immediately, a wind starts blowing down the street, gentle at first and then gaining force until Ariadne is stumbling along the sidewalk, pushed in the direction of the wind. Blown and buffeted by the wind back the way she came from until the fog is in sight again, Ariadne recognizes that she is being ejected from this dream. She tries to fight it, but the wind forces her back until the world disappears into nothing once again.
---
Ariadne jerks awake, ripping the needle out of her arm. “I found him,” she gasps, adrenaline racing through her veins, looking around the room for Cobb. She swings her legs over the edge of the cot and lurches into a standing position, stumbling slightly until Cobb hurries over to her side and pushes her back down into a chair.
“Arthur? You found him?” Cobb asks.
“Yes, he’s in London. Well, not London, but a dream-London, with Eames. Past the fog,” Ariadne says, the words tumbling out of her in an echo of her frantic rush to escape the dream.
“Slow down,” Cobb says, his hands pressing down on her shoulders, grounding her. “You got through the fog? What’s this about London and Eames?”
Ariadne takes a few deep breaths and closes her eyes, both to try and calm her racing heart as well as to better remember the details of the dream in her mind, before they can be overwritten by the sharp clarity of reality. “I found Arthur. I got through to the other side of the fog, and Arthur was there. He’s dreaming of London, right now.”
“Great, that’s great,” Cobb says. “Were you able to talk to him?”
“Yes. I told him he was dreaming, but he didn’t believe me.” Ariadne opens her eyes to look at Cobb, watching his expression. “And he has a projection of Eames down there.”
Cobb swears softly, immediately understanding the implications of this as she had known he would. Mal’s shade no longer haunts him, but the memory of how close she came to ruining him is still fresh. Mal, beautiful and destructive, but only because some deep, desperate part of Cobb wished her to be.
“There’s something else,” Ariadne says, remembering her other piece of bad news with a wince. “I think the fog is starting to move faster.”
---
This time, Ariadne takes no chances and tethers her string to the opposite end of the city from the fog. The way through the fog feels quicker this time, familiarity making the journey go faster. When she steps out on the other side in gloomy London, she wastes no time and heads directly to the apartment that Arthur and Eames share in this dream.
Although she is expecting more hostility from Arthur’s projections, after being unceremoniously ejected from his dream the last time, the men and women she passes on the street pay her no attention. Ariadne allows for some cautious optimism; perhaps the message she previously delivered has managed to penetrate into his subconscious after all.
The street where Arthur and Eames live looks the same as the last time — peaceful, tranquil, and a painfully realistic snapshot of what could have been. Ariadne walks up to their door, the words she rehearsed ready on her lips, and knocks twice.
Even though she’s expecting it this time, it still feels like a gut-punch to see Eames here again. He looks just how she remembers him, a doppelgänger, an echo frozen in time, composed of love and grief. For Arthur, seeing Mal for the first time in Cobb’s dreams must have felt the same.
“You’re back,” Eames says mildly, leaning against the doorframe.
“I need to talk to Arthur,” Ariadne says, trying her best to look conciliatory, lest he toss her out into the fog again.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
“Why not?” Ariadne demands.
“He’s not home right now,” Eames says.
Ariadne grits her teeth. “Where can I find him?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that either. Anything you want to tell him, you can tell me.” Eames says, crossing his arms and drawing himself up to his full height.
Ariadne knows Eames, and this imposing man directing a cool frown down at her is not him. Just like it wasn’t Mal who stabbed her in the stomach or attacked her with a broken wine glass, she knows she’s not arguing with Eames. She’s arguing with a part of Arthur that is grieving and in denial. However, this shade wears Eames’ face and talks with his voice, and it’s easy to forget.
“You’re not real,” Ariadne says, meeting his eyes.
His lip curls up in a snarl. “But I’m real enough to hurt you down here.”
“Would you?” Ariadne asks him. “Just because I’m trying to tell you something you don’t want to hear?”
Eames looks away. “Maybe not. But I can’t help you.” He moves to shut the door but Ariadne sticks her hand out, stopping it from closing.
“Eames, please,” Ariadne begs. “Let him go.”
Eames looks at her, the anger gone from his face and replaced with sadness now. “I don’t think you understand, love. He doesn’t want to be let go. He’s happy here. Isn’t that enough?”
The door closes with finality and Ariadne is left standing outside as a light misting rain begins to fall. She slowly turns around and drops to sit on the doorstep, resigning herself to waiting for Arthur to return home.
---
The thing is, Eames shouldn’t have died that night. Ariadne is only twenty-five, too young to give death more than a passing thought, a concern for a distant future. But still, in their line of work, living life like a series of high-stakes bets, Ariadne has always thought that if death were to come for them, it would be in a flurry of gunfire and action — revenge from a past mark, perhaps, or a heist gone wrong, a bullet taken for a friend.
It’s none of those things, in the end.
It happened on a Tuesday. Ariadne can still picture it perfectly in her mind, the last time they were all together. Somehow, the day had faded quickly into the evening, with Ariadne busy sketching out a military base in her notebook, Arthur buried in stacks of the mark’s credit card transaction history, and Eames watching grainy surveillance videos of the mark’s sister. Upon noticing the late hour, Eames offered to fetch takeout for dinner.
Be back soon, darling, Eames had said to Arthur with a wink as he departed with their orders. Try not to miss me too much.
Arthur had just rolled his eyes irritably, not looking up from his papers as he waved Eames off with a casual motion of his hand, but Ariadne still caught the small smile tugging the corners of his lips up.
And then Eames hadn’t come back.
For the first few hours, Ariadne and Arthur waited in the warehouse, Arthur compulsively checking his phone every five minutes, and Ariadne running over the path Eames would have taken to the restaurant and back in her mind. At a quarter to midnight, Arthur eventually sent Ariadne back to her hotel, promising her that he would call her with any updates.
At three in the morning, the call came in from Arthur. A hit-and-run, Arthur had said, his voice sounding choked with grief even through the tinny audio of her cheap mobile phone. He’s dead? Ariadne responded in shock. She hears a strangled gasp of pain through the phone. He’s— he’s dead, Arthur had echoed, sounding lost.
The next time she saw Arthur was at the funeral. Standing next to him as Eames was lowered into the ground, Ariadne couldn’t stop fidgeting with her totem, because this couldn’t be real. And yet, her totem betrayed her, the weight and shape of it exactly as she had created, proving that this wasn’t something she could wake up from.
According to the police report, Eames had been struck and killed by a drunk driver, who in turn crashed into a tree and died two miles down the road. For the next few weeks, Arthur had obsessively pored over the report, convinced that it wasn’t an accident, that it was a hit on Eames from someone he had cheated in the past. He was searching for the who, someone he could punish for taking Eames away from him, but Ariadne thought he was really looking for the why.
But sometimes, death doesn’t have a reason. Sometimes, it’s just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, staring down the blinding twin beams of oncoming headlights.
And then, only three months later, Arthur took a hit to the head in the middle of a job. Ariadne had thought he was fine — he only stayed down for a few minutes, before he was back on his feet and fighting again. After they dispatched the last of their assailants, they made their hasty exit and left for separate safehouses with promises to check in with each other in the morning. It wasn’t until the next day, after Arthur left her calls unanswered, that Ariadne realized how wrong she was. Ariadne hadn’t stayed in contact with Cobb after the Fischer job, but when she found Arthur unresponsive in his safehouse, she found herself dialing his number in a panic.
She’s already lost Eames; she refuses to lose Arthur as well.
---
The persistent light rain that has been dampening Ariadne’s hair and clothes suddenly ceases as a shadow stops on the sidewalk in front of her. Ariadne scrambles up, a greeting on her lips that quickly dies away as she realizes that the dark-haired figure holding an umbrella over her is not Arthur.
“Hello, Ariadne.”
Mal observes her with pursed lips, looking effortlessly elegant and imposing in a dark trench coat tied at the waist even as rain drips around her down the sides of her umbrella. Even standing on the raised step, Ariadne still has to tilt her head to look up at Mal. Ariadne takes a step back, her hands rising reflexively to fend off a remembered knife. Mal tuts and steps forward with her, keeping her under the protection of the umbrella.
“Don’t be foolish,” Mal says. “Come, walk with me.”
Ariadne glances down the street uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, but I’m waiting for someone.”
Mal huffs impatiently. “Arthur will not return here with you waiting outside his door. If you want to help him, you will come with me.”
Despite her misgivings, she is cognizant of the fact that sitting on Arthur’s doorstep until she is kicked out of the dream again is likely an exercise in futility. Ariadne swallows down her reservations and steps down into the street next to Mal. Together, they walk down the sidewalk, Mal leading the way.
“I saw you the last time I was here,” Ariadne says. “Outside a restaurant. Why didn’t you say anything to me then?”
“You were with Eames. He doesn’t like having me around,” she says.
“Why not?” Ariadne asks, her apprehension returning. “Have you hurt Arthur?”
“No, nothing like that. I am not the same twisted ghost you met in my husband’s dreams. I am just as Arthur remembers me, a dear friend,” Mal says, glancing sideways at her. “Interesting how that happens, no?”
Ariadne hadn’t known Mal in life, but Arthur had always talked fondly of her. She was lovely, Arthur had said.
“The problem is that it’s not as easy for Arthur to forget I’m dead,” Mal continues. “You see, I remind him of reality.”
“And Eames wants Arthur to believe this world is real.”
Mal sighs. “He wants Arthur to be happy.”
“Then why are you helping me?” Ariadne asks. “Don’t you want Arthur to be happy too?”
Mal shrugs. “Yes, but I know better. He thinks he can be happy here, but it will never be real, no matter how much he wishes so.”
Ariadne hesitates. “What if I gave him some more time here? To let him say goodbye?”
Mal shakes her head. “A man dying of thirst will not find relief from a mirage. All he can do is die faster, crawling after the illusion of water he will never reach. Do you understand? It is not a kindness to let him remain here, even for a little while longer.”
“How can I convince him of that?” Ariadne asks.
“He already knows this, deep down, because I know this. How else would I have found you?” Mal says. “And now, you must remind him.”
They arrive at a park, a large grassy island in the middle of the city. On a bench along a cobblestone path, Arthur sits reading a book. He looks up as they approach him, his expression wary when he sees who it is.
“Hello, Arthur.” Ariadne tries to give him a reassuring smile.
“I know why you’re here,” Arthur says, not smiling back. He closes his book and stands up to face them. “You might as well save your breath, because you’re wrong.”
“About what?” Ariadne asks. “That you’re dreaming right now?”
“No. That this isn’t real,” Arthur says.
Ariadne lets out a breath. “So you realize this is a dream?” Ariadne says. Arthur’s eyes flit over to Mal almost involuntarily; Ariadne sees this only because she is watching Arthur’s face carefully. “Then you know this can’t be real.”
“Dreaming doesn’t mean anything. You’re in my dream too, are you real?” Ariadne doesn’t know how to respond. “This has to be real,” Arthur continues, his hands clenching around his book convulsively, “because if it’s not, then— then—”
Then Eames is truly gone and Arthur alone is keeping himself here. When Orpheus crossed the river Styx into the underworld and stood against Hades himself, did he ever fear that Eurydice might wish to stay? Perhaps not, but down here, Eurydice and Hades are one and the same.
“I’m sorry, Arthur,” Ariadne says. “But Eames is dead.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Arthur says, a hard note in his voice like ice over a lake in the dead of winter. He looks up at someone over Ariadne’s shoulder. “Tell her she’s wrong.” Ariadne stiffens as Eames walks past her and stands beside Arthur, a protective hand on his shoulder, but he remains silent.
“He cannot tell you what you want to hear,” Mal tells Arthur, ignoring the dark look Eames sends her, “because you cannot lie to yourself.”
“Don’t listen to her. It doesn’t matter,” Eames says to Arthur urgently. “This doesn’t have to change anything. I’m still here. All the things we wanted to do, all those places we wanted to see — Greece, Rio de Janeiro, that giant goddamn ball of twine in the middle of nowhere you told me about — we can still do that. Just stay here with me and we can build our lives together.”
Ariadne can tell from the expression on Arthur’s face that he wants to believe this more than anything and it kills her that she can’t let him have this. “Arthur,” she says gently. Arthur looks at her, grief, hope, and denial battling across his face. “You can’t build a life on a foundation that isn’t real.” She turns to Eames. “I know you want him to be happy. But can’t you see this is killing him?”
“You saw what my husband did to himself. You know this isn’t how happiness feels,” Mal says.
“There’s nothing left for me up there,” Arthur says.
“That’s not true, and you know it,” Ariadne says sharply. “I know he’s not your favorite person right now, but Cobb cares about you and he’s up there right now next to you, waiting for you to wake up. And what about James and Phillipa? They ask about you, you know. Cobb keeps them out of the room you’re in, but they know that there’s something wrong with their Uncle Arthur.”
“You promised me,” Mal interjects, “when we named you godfather, you promised me you would be there for them.”
“And what about me?” Ariadne asks, unable to keep all the hurt from her voice. “I care about you too. I know… I know I didn’t lose Eames the way you did, but I still lost a friend. I don’t want to lose you too.”
Eames stays strangely silent, even as Arthur begins to look more conflicted.
“Please, Arthur,” Ariadne says. “Just because Eames died doesn’t mean you can’t live. Eames wouldn’t want you to be holding on to his ghost. He would want you to live.”
“I don’t care what he would want,” Arthur snaps. “It doesn’t matter what he would want because he’s gone.” Eames drops his hand from Arthur’s shoulder and Arthur looks horrified as he realizes what he just said. “No,” Arthur whispers, staring pleadingly at Eames.
Eames just smiles sadly back at him. “I’m sorry, darling.”
“No, I— I can’t do this without you,” Arthur says, his voice breaking. “Tell me not to go. Tell me to stay, that we’ll be happy here, together.”
“All I want is for you to be happy, darling,” Eames says with an odd expression on his face.
“Please, Arthur,” Ariadne says again. “Come back with me.”
“Fine,” Arthur chokes out, tearing his gaze away from Eames’ and slumping in on himself, all the fight that came from denial gone and replaced with a resigned grief.
---
Ariadne walks into the warehouse, holding two cups of tea from the cafe down the street. She sets one of them down on Arthur’s desk, where Arthur stands with his head bowed, a pile of unopened files in front of him.
“How are you doing?” she asks him tentatively.
Arthur straightens up and looks at her. To anyone else, he probably looks as professional and collected as he always does, clean-shaven and dressed in a button-down and slacks. Ariadne, though, can see the cracks in his demeanor, the extra tension in his shoulders and the way he carries himself as if each day is just another ordeal to be endured.
“It doesn’t feel right to be doing this without him,” Arthur says finally. This is their first job without Eames since the accident, the first time in three years that their team is missing a member. Arthur hasn’t yet hired anyone else to perform the extraction, and Ariadne is unwilling to bring up the topic.
“I know. I wish he was here too,” Ariadne says.
“I miss him so goddamn much, Ariadne,” Arthur says, his mouth twisting. “Every day when I wake up, I forget that he’s gone at first. And those first few moments, everything is fine.” He gives a short, bitter laugh. “And then I remember, and I tell myself it’s just a bad dream, that Eames will be right there next to me when I open my eyes. But he’s not, and every time it fucking kills me.”
“Oh, Arthur,” Ariadne says, wanting to reach out to hug him, but unsure if it would be welcome.
He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, he has his expression carefully under control again. “I’m sorry,” he says, grimacing. “Don’t worry, I can still do this job.”
Ariadne frowns. “Hey,” she says. “We’re not just two people who work together. You’re my friend and I don’t give a damn about the job if you’re hurting.” She sets her cup down on his desk as well, stepping forward to give him the hug she should have earlier. “I’m here for you.”
---
Ariadne follows the red string back into the mist, this time not alone, for what she hopes is the last time. Arthur walks beside her with several loops of red yarn around his hand and strict instructions not to let go.
They walk in tense silence — Arthur, newly grieving, the pain of Eames’ loss fresh once again, and Ariadne unsure what to say, when she is the one who brought his grief back.
“I missed you,” Ariadne says when she is unable to bear the silence any longer, looking over at Arthur.
Ariadne’s words hang unanswered, suspended in the mist for a long moment. “I didn’t have to miss you,” Arthur says eventually, gazing ahead into the distance. “You were down there too. You lived in a small apartment across town and you came over for dinner and board games with us every Sunday.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “You would always accuse Eames of cheating.”
Ariadne’s breath catches. “That sounds lovely.”
“It was. It felt so normal and… and right, that it was easy to forget it wasn’t real,” he says. He stops in his tracks and turns to look at her, finally, his eyes accusatory. “Why did you have to remind me? I could have forgotten, eventually.”
“I don’t think you could have. You might have fooled yourself for a while, but there’d always be something missing. Because memories can’t replace the real thing.”
Arthur clenches his fists, his knuckles white underneath the vivid red of the string, before the tension drains out of him, his shoulders slumping. “It would have been enough. It would be better than feeling like this.”
“You feel like this because you loved him, Arthur. Love and grief — they’re the same thing, really. It’ll get better. I promise,” Ariadne says, reaching out to grasp his hand hesitantly. “And Eames loved you too. He’d want you to keep on living.”
“How? I don’t know how to do this without him,” Arthur says, looking lost.
Ariadne squeezes his hand. “The same way the rest of us do. One day at a time.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“You won’t have to do it alone,” Ariadne says. “You have people who care about you. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.” Arthur squeezes her hand back. “I know.”
“Good.”
Arthur gives her a small smile, and the silence feels easier now as they continue onwards.
They’ve been walking long enough that Ariadne thinks they must be nearly back to her own dreamscape when the unchanging landscape is broken by a tall, narrow shape. Ariadne frowns at this anomaly, heading towards it to investigate. As she gets closer, she recognizes it as the lamp post to which she had tethered her string — and sure enough, a loop of red encircles the metal post.
“Oh no,” Ariadne says, her face paling.
“What happened?” Arthur asks. “What is this?”
“This was supposed to be the tether to my dreamscape.” She looks frantically at Arthur. “This means that the fog has overtaken the point where I tied the string inside my dream. This is bad. This is really bad. We need to get out of here now, before the fog overtakes my dream completely. We have to be close — if we keep going in the same direction I think we’ll make it.” She lets go of her red string, useless now. When Arthur does the same, both the string and the metal post immediately flicker out of existence, the blue glow of the string’s afterimage still lingering.
Arthur frowns. “What happens if the fog takes over your dream?”
“I’m not sure.” Ariadne wrings her hands anxiously. “But if I had to guess, it means that I’ll be trapped in a coma too. And someone else — Cobb, probably — would have to come down to pull both of us out.”
“I won’t let that happen. Not because of me.” Arthur takes her hand and pulls her into a run. With every step, Ariadne’s anxiety swirls higher, a refrain of too late running through her head.
But only a few minutes later — Ariadne was right, they had been close — they stumble out of the fog and into Ariadne’s city. Ariadne only has a brief moment of relief from arriving back to relative safety, before she realizes how precarious their position is.
There’s about three square blocks of buildings left untouched, but the fog encroaches steadily upon them — not just from behind Ariadne and Arthur, where they have just come from, but also from the sides now, the fog curling around this last island of buildings, waiting to consume them too. The sky above is overcast and grey, as if the fog has taken hold there as well.
“What now?” Arthur asks.
“We need to get up somewhere high, where we can kick ourselves out.” Ariadne scans the remaining buildings around them for something both tall enough and far enough from the edges of the fog. She points to a nondescript concrete parking structure a block away. “That one,” she says, already starting to run in its direction.
Just before they reach the intersection, she hears Arthur swear behind her. She turns around to see Arthur sprawled on the ground, having tripped over an uneven crack in the sidewalk, and Ariadne curses her subconscious for adding this nod to realism. She jogs the few steps back to Arthur as he pushes himself back up. He hisses in pain as he tries to put weight on his right foot, nearly stumbling back down before Ariadne catches his elbow and steadies him.
“Shit,” Arthur says through gritted teeth. “I think I’ve sprained my fucking ankle.”
Ariadne glances nervously at the fog behind them. “Come on, I’ll help you.” She slings his left arm over her shoulder, supporting him as they continue to the parking garage as quickly as they can.
They reach the entrance to the parking garage and Ariadne looks back again at the fog. In the time it has taken them to hobble the short distance to the garage, the fog has advanced almost to the nearest street corner, as if it senses their urgency.
“I’m slowing you down,” Arthur says, grimacing. “Go on without me, before you get trapped here.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Ariadne says, glaring at him. His concern for her is real, she knows, but in his expression she can also see a wistful longing when he looks back at the mist. “I’m not leaving you here. We’re going to make it — both of us.”
She shoulders open the door to the stairwell and helps Arthur limp up, their progress painfully slow. By the time they reach the landing at the top of the stairwell, wisps of white mist, still mostly translucent, are snaking their way up the staircase, rising inexorably towards them. Ariadne throws open the door to the rooftop level with hands shaking from adrenaline and crosses over to the edge of the building with Arthur.
She clambers up on top of the low wall surrounding the perimeter of the garage. She turns to help Arthur up as well, but he is facing away from her, looking back at the door they came from where tendrils of mist are now reaching out towards them.
“Come on,” she says, forcing her voice to stay calm. “Let’s go.”
Arthur doesn’t move, doesn’t react to her voice, and Ariadne feels foreboding creep into her veins.
“Arthur,” she says louder, more insistently. “We need to go now.”
“Wait,” Arthur says, his voice strange. In the doorway, she can now see a figure of a man silhouetted in the mist. The man steps out onto the rooftop and she can see that it’s Eames, looking just as they’d left him back in Arthur’s dream. Ariadne sucks in a breath and wildly considers the feasibility of grabbing Arthur and throwing him over the edge of the roof, if she took him by surprise.
Arthur glances back at her as if he knows what she’s thinking. “Just wait one moment. Please.” He limps towards Eames, away from their escape. Ariadne almost shouts after him in panic, but then he stops, meeting Eames halfway.
“Eames,” Arthur begins, taking his hands into each of his. He swallows heavily. “I love you. And I miss you so much. But—” his voice breaks. “But I need to go now.”
“I know,” Eames says. “It’s okay.”
Arthur’s expression crumples and Eames pulls him into a tight embrace.
“We could have had a life together,” Arthur says, his voice muffled into Eames’ neck.
“We had our time. That’s luckier than many can say,” Eames says softly. He pulls back slightly to rest his forehead against Arthur’s, looking into his eyes. “But it’s time for you to wake up now, okay? It’s time to lay me to rest.”
“I know,” Arthur says, his voice shaking with emotion. He raises one hand to Eames’ cheek, staring into his face for a long moment like he’s trying to memorize his features. “Okay.”
Eames presses one last kiss to Arthur’s lips before releasing him. “Farewell, darling.”
“Goodbye,” Arthur says, tears in his eyes. Eames smiles sadly and nudges Arthur gently back towards Ariadne.
Arthur makes his way back towards Ariadne as Eames silently watches. She squeezes his hand as he climbs onto the low wall to sit next to her.
“Ready?” she asks.
Arthur looks back at Eames one last time, before turning to face Ariadne. He takes a deep breath. “I’m ready,” he says.
Holding on to each other, they push off the edge of the building, letting gravity pull them down, down and out. Up above, as Ariadne falls, a hint of sun peeks out from behind the clouds.