Chapter Text
She flopped down on the bed and sighed. It has been exactly 57 minutes since the point man slipped her the note in the hotel lobby. The wait had been antagonizing slow since then. The decision to let Arthur come and talk to her had been pretty obvious. She wasn't ready to leave the team or what she had spent the last few months on. She couldn't just forget dream sharing, especially not knowing what happens with Cobb and Saito. No, no matter what Arthur and Eames told her to do she would never forget this.
Exactly 59 minutes from when Arthur handed her the note in the lobby there was a soft knock on her door. She bolted up from where she had been lying on the bed. She took a deep breath and slowly walked towards the door. She looked through the little peephole to make sure that it was Arthur. A sigh of relief fell from her lips when she saw that it was.
She unhooked the latch and opened the door to let him in. He quickly walked into the room and she shut and locked the door behind him.
"Well hello to you too" She told him, crossing her arms. From the look on his face she could tell that he was not in the mood to joke around, but neither was she. "What is this all about? I know you wouldn't break the rules unless it was really important."
"When you woke up from your nap on the plane what did you notice about Cobb and Saito?" He asked her, looking down at the briefcase he had placed on the desk and was in the process of emptying.
She thought back but it didn't take very long. The whole thing was at the forefront of her mind, the memory as fresh and detailed as the suit Arthur was wearing. "When I looked up they were both gone, none of their stuff was there either. It was almost like they had never been there in the first place. Why?"
"I was working on a way to get them off the plane on my computer and I looked up and they were both just gone." He sighed and ran his hands through his perfectly gelled back hair, "I looked down for just a few seconds and I looked up and they were both just gone. If anyone had come in to take them or tried moving them I would have noticed."
Ariadne walked to his side and placed her hand on his shoulder. "This isn't your fault Arthur. I was asleep and Eames was probably too drunk to notice anything and Yusuf probably didn't even care. You can't place this all on yourself," she told him in the most soothing tone she could muster under the circumstances because like Arthur, this disturbed her.
"What about Eames?" Why was the forger not here for this conversation because this is obviously important?
"He is going to be back tomorrow. I have a few ideas as who could be behind this. One of them involves a past employer of Cobb and I on a job we failed just before the inception. Eames is going to check it out." Arthur said, cold and calculating, voice empty of all emotions.
"So what do we do now?" Ariadne asked.
"Lay low for the rest of the day. Eames is already on another flight dealing with it. He should be back tomorrow afternoon." Arthur slumped down into the chair on front of the desk, "In the meantime we are going to work on self defense training just in case. Are you up for this?"
Ariadne didn't even have to think. "Count me in."
Deciding to stay and help wasn't really a hard decision at all. Arthur would chastise her for not thinking it through more but she wasn't ready to let this go.