Chapter Text
Ariadne hadn't really thought about extraction work in months when Eames and Arthur both decided to show back up in her life. It was true that Saito had called her with a couple job offers, and equally true that there was nothing quite like shared dreaming, but she had refused both times due to school and scheduling conflicts. She had had a thesis to finish and now she had its defense to prepare, and she had already spent enough of her time (time that she had been supposed to spend on schoolwork) on the Fischer job.
She had just finished her Tuesday art history elective and had been thinking about a late lunch when she spotted someone waiting in the hallway outside her classroom.
"Hello, Ariadne," Arthur said, as he eased himself off the wall he had been leaning on and walked towards her, carrying a scratched black briefcase in his right hand. Something felt off despite the usual polish of his dress and demeanor, and he was wearing, rather incongruously, a battered leather jacket over a striped dress shirt. His usual carriage was blunted, his shoulders subtly, but uncharacteristically bowed.
"Arthur? What are you doing here?" She looked up at him and found his eyes smudged with dark circles and there was the faintest hint of stubble on his cheeks and chin. Ariadne could not imagine when she had seen Arthur this scruffy. He looked as though he had not slept in days.
"We'll talk about it on the way out," he said. "Let's go."
She watched him head down the stairs with his usual easy stride.
"You look like hell, Arthur," she said as they walked through the gates at 14 Rue Bonaparte. "Are you all right?"
"I'm just tired," he said. "Driving here was tedious."
"You braved Paris traffic?" She looked at him doubtfully, and then glanced across the street, where a local driver proved her point by darting rather skillfully into a gap in the traffic, cutting off two other individuals as he did so. Paris drivers scared her even more than Boston drivers did, and that took a lot of doing.
"I had to. We started in Katowice," he said as though it explained everything.
"You drove from Poland to get here? And who's 'we'?" she asked.
"Eames. I left him at your apartment."
"You didn't leave him waiting outside, did you? My landlady doesn't like loiterers."
"I'm sure he's found his way in by now."
"At least it's not like there's anything worth stealing in there."
"That's not what we're here for," Arthur said with a faint smile on his face.
Ariadne's usual route home started with a short walk from 14 Rue Bonaparte to the Metro station at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Today, Arthur took her home by a different route. They walked to the station at Solferino and changed lines on Falguière instead.
"What aren't you telling me about, Arthur?" she asked him quietly, as they stood in the end car of the train. She didn't quite like the way Arthur had crammed her into a corner of the car; she couldn't even look out the train windows like she normally did on the way to and from school. "You didn't make this detour for nothing."
He glanced around, his tired eyes still alert, and then let out a soft sigh. "Your life may be in danger," he said softly in a voice that was just above a whisper.
Ariadne fought to keep from shouting in the spike of anger that followed. "Does this have anything to do with the inception job?" she asked, resenting the tremor in her voice.
"Yes and no. Before Saito hired us we took a job for a South African client. Cobol Engineering. We failed, and for a while Cobb had a price on his head."
Ariadne realized belatedly that Arthur had been interposing himself physically between her and the other passengers in the car. "What did they want?" she asked, her hands icy cold from panic. She stuck her fists in the pockets of her jacket to hide the trembling.
"Plans that Saito kept in his head," Arthur said, with a bleak smile.
"Can't you get them from him?" Her fingers strayed to the doctored bishop she used as a totem, and she gripped it tightly, like a good-luck charm.
"He gave them to Cobb after the Fischer job, and that got rid of them for a time." Arthur looked around himself again, and then leaned wearily against the wall of the train car, still standing between her and everyone else. "Unfortunately I think they're after him again."
"Why would they do that?"
"They were bidding on an oil pipeline project; one that would have covered the entire east coast of the African continent. Their backing evaporated after Fischer dissolved Fischer-Morrow."
"If their problem is with Cobb, then why am I in danger? Wouldn't they go after him or his family instead?"
"Cobb may have retired, but he still has connections; as long as he remains in America, getting to him is going to be difficult. I think they want to burn him by killing us, or worse."
"Did they try to kill you, too?" she asked. He swallowed hard, but did not speak. She grabbed his arm after a minute of silence and squeezed with a little more force than was necessary. He was tense, the muscles of his arm taut under the sleeve of his leather jacket, and she could see the tension build in his jaw and neck. "Arthur."
"In Singapore," he said at last, the words hissing softly in his throat. "They laid quite the trap for me, but I got out."
"What about me?" she asked. She had started to shake a little by then and she wasn't sure if she envied or resented Arthur's own relative calm. "I'm just a grad student. When I accepted Cobb's offer I didn't plan to get involved in stuff like this."
He kept his face cool and composed, but she read a flicker of emotion behind his eyes that could have been rage. "They won't try to make a move on you now that I'm here, and if they try it's going to be very difficult for them to get out of it alive."
They got off the train at Kléber and walked to her third-floor studio apartment. It consisted of twelve square meters of floor space and sloping walls, built into the garret of a converted prewar house. She had started to reach into a pocket for her keys, but Arthur stepped in front of her and rapped sharply on the door, twice. She heard a soft shuffle, and then the bolt worked. Eames was standing shirtless in her doorway with a towel around his neck. She caught a hint of strong soap and cologne, and his wet hair stood up in short, spiky tufts. In another context she would have started mentally back-tracking through the events of the day to figure if she had been dreaming or not; she suspected strongly that a shirtless Eames had that effect on almost anything with a pulse. After the bombshell Arthur had dropped on her earlier, however it just annoyed and frustrated her to see how comfortable Eames was while she had a price on her head.
"Do you mind, Eames?" Arthur asked, tartly, as he ushered her into the door and shut it behind him. "I asked you to keep an eye on her apartment, not to move in."
"We were stuck in a car with malfunctioning air-conditioning for two days and I didn't want to offend her with my manly stench," he said, reaching up to dry his hair with the towel. His tattoos writhed in the movement of his chest and shoulders, but she was not in any mood to appreciate the sight right now. Instead she sat down in one of the two chairs placed at the fold-down dinette table that was all she had room for in her studio and fixed them both with her best impression of her mother's Stare of Death. "Excuse me. You can continue the Eames and Arthur Show after you've answered my questions."
Arthur tipped his head to the side. "Ask away."
"How did they connect me to you?" she asked. "I can see how they know you're Cobb's partner in the extraction business, and how Eames connects into this, but what made them think, 'Hey, this architecture grad student was in on whatever made Fischer change his mind?'"
"I tried pretty hard to make sure we had solid operational security for this job," Arthur said. "They're probably working off a copy of the passenger manifest from the flight to LA, which places us all in the same first-class cabin as Fischer. I don't know how much they know about what you did, but considering the way they work they might just consider your death acceptable collateral damage as long as it screws with Cobb."
"You don't just get a copy of something like that, right? Aren't the flight authorities supposed to be secure?"
Arthur shook his head at that. "Enough money can get you anywhere, and you should know that." She thought about Saito buying an entire airline, and nodded in response.
"Not to mention that there are other ways of getting reliable intelligence on a passenger list," Eames said, his expression darkening. "The lead flight attendant – she's dead. The authorities in Perth pulled her mangled body out of a wrecked car, but I got hold of the autopsy report and there are some injuries that the coroner couldn't account for."
"They tortured her for the information, and then killed her," Ariadne whispered. Her hands were like knots of ice in her lap. "Cobb's fine, right? What about the others? Yusuf and Saito?
"Yusuf's had to leave Kenya for his own safety. Eames managed to touch base with him in Amsterdam; he's fine. They wouldn't try to mess physically with Saito, but he can hold his own even if they did." Arthur pulled up the other chair in her apartment and sat down beside her, his briefcase on the floor beside his ankle.
"I guess you two are pretty used to being on the run while your lives are in danger, but I'm pretty pissed-off," she said, her voice shaking with a volatile blend of rage and terror. She stood up and began to pace out of a physical urge to move that was so strong it hurt. "Neither you nor Cobb were entirely honest about the consequences when you offered me this job," she said, jabbing a finger in Arthur's direction.
Eames gave her a look, cool and appraising, as he sat down on the edge of her bed. "I know you're upset, love," he said, "but we're not going to let anything happen to you."
"I – Okay," she said, slumping a little as she sat back down in her chair. "So what happens now? I have a bunch of angry people after my life, and you two bodyguard me?"
"In a nutshell, yes," Eames said. "One of us is going to be with you 24 hours a day."
"Like how Arthur walked me home from school. What were you going to do if someone had taken a shot at me then?" she asked, looking from Eames to Arthur, and back again. Arthur picked the briefcase up off the floor and popped its latches with the faintest hint of a smile on his face. Strapped into it was a submachine gun, and Ariadne realized belatedly that the briefcase had a trigger built into its grip.
"I call her Pandora," he said, brushing a bit of lint off the receiver with a fingertip.
"Isn't that a bit much?" she asked, looking at the briefcase doubtfully.
"Silly Ariadne," Eames said with a slow grin. "There is no such thing as overkill, only how you employ it."
"As the Boy Scouts say, 'Be Prepared'," Arthur said as he shut the briefcase.
"Were you a Boy Scout, then, Arthur?" Eames asked. The tone of his voice lent the question a somewhat salacious import.
"Eagle Scout. Not that my father would have let me be anything less." The way Arthur bit off the sentence invited no further comment. She glanced at Eames and half-expected him to supply a witty comeback but he only looked at her with his cool gray gaze and gave a shrug and a tiny shake of his head.
"You're not going to be here forever, are you?" She barely had enough room for herself in this studio apartment, and she wasn't sure how she was going to deal with Eames and Arthur living with her in this space.
"We're going to be shadowing you long enough for you to learn to take care of yourself."
"I hope that isn't going to take up too much of my time, because I have a thesis to defend and electives to finish."
"Fortunately for you," Eames said as he got up and reached down towards the luggage piled beside her bed, "dream-training takes a fraction of the time real-world training does." He drew a PASIV unit out of a slipcase with a flourish.
"I can have each session take no more than fifteen minutes, real-time," Arthur said as he shrugged off his leather jacket and rolled up the left sleeve of his shirt. "Shall we?"
"Have you ever handled a firearm before?" Arthur asked her, as she looked around the space she was standing in. They were standing in an indoor shooting range made out of dreary concrete and cinderblock. Paper targets were clipped to rails hanging from the ceiling overhead. There was a faintly oily, chemical tinge to the air that she assumed was gun oil or something like that, and above it all was the roar of a ventilation fan, somewhere.
"I shot Mal in Limbo, but I don't think that counts," she said. Arthur handed her a pair of shooting glasses, and she put them on.
"You know, Dom never told me about that," he said thoughtfully, "but no, it wouldn't count. Sometimes you can change the rules in a dream to make your shots go where you expect them to go. That won't work here. I've imposed rules on this particular place so we'll have to work on more than just wishful thinking."
"What's all this ear protection for?" she asked as he handed her both a pair of earplugs and a pair of earmuffs.
"Shooting indoors can get as loud as 140 decibels; it won't permanently deafen you since you're actually dreaming, but it still hurts, and that's not the point of this lesson." He put on his own pair of shooting glasses and ear protectors after she finished putting hers on, and then took her to one of the stations, where he picked up a handgun in both his hands but did not give it to her. "Gun safety rules. First one. Assume all guns are always loaded." He pulled back on the slide of the little handgun and showed it to her. "This one here's a Beretta 1934, and as you can see it's unloaded and there isn't a round in the chamber."
She looked and nodded, and Arthur then held up an empty magazine in one hand and a fistful of rounds in the other. "This is the magazine. It holds the cartridges and feeds them into the chamber after every shot. This one holds seven rounds of .380 ACP." His fingers worked smoothly as he fed each cartridge into the magazine he was holding. He fed the magazine into the well in the pistol grip, and then put it into her hand, his warm, steady fingers folding hers around the grip. "Second gun safety rule: Keep your finger off the trigger until and unless you're ready to shoot." The little pistol was surprisingly dense in her hands. A bloom of condensation marked the outlines of her fingertips in the cool metal.
"Like this?" she said, looking down at the gun she was now holding in both hands, her left hand bracing her right. Arthur nodded, and he guided her hands up until she raised it and pointed it downrange at the paper target.
"Not bad, which brings us to rules three and four. Don't ever point your gun at anything you're not willing to kill or destroy." he said. He shifted and stood behind her, looking over her shoulder, his own chest close enough to her back that she could feel the warmth of his body through his clothes. A spicy, peppery hint of juniper and frankincense travelled upwards on his body heat; he was always warm enough to feel feverish, even in dreams. She imagined that he possessed the metabolism of a ferret. "Always make sure what your target is," he told her, "and what is behind it. In this setup the wall behind us is packed, bermed earth. Shots will lodge in it safely. Out in the open things aren't always so certain, and even in a room a bullet can go through drywall to kill the person in the apartment next door."
Arthur had her stand with her feet slightly apart, wider than her shoulders, with her weight resting mostly on the balls of her feet, and then showed her how to line up the sight blades with the center of the target. "You'll want to squeeze down on the trigger instead of jerking back with your finger," he said. "That way your shots will stay accurate because you're not cocking the barrel upwards." She rested her finger lightly on the trigger, and then pulled back when he nodded. The shot was louder than she had expected even through the ear protection, and the recoil stung, just a little, in her hands.
"Again," Arthur said, and she fired shots at the target until she had squeezed off all seven shots and the little pistol rested slide-locked in her hands. She put the empty gun down on the counter at the shooting station and worked the tingle out of her fingers as he pushed down on a button. The paper target came towards them on the rail it had hung from, and Ariadne had to fight a spike of self-consciousness as it came closer to her.
"Five out of seven," she said, feeling a flush rise in her face. Only one of her shots had landed in the central ring of the target's man-silhouette, and she was starting to feel rather incompetent.
"That one's pretty good," he said, transfixing one of the holes with a pen he had pulled out of a pocket. "You would probably have gotten his liver, maybe even nicked his descending aorta if you were lucky. I did worse than you when I first learned to shoot."
"How'd you get good then?" she asked as she watched him pop the spent magazine from the Beretta and reload it from a box of cartridges he had pulled out of a shelf beneath the shooting station.
"Lots of drills and range time courtesy of the US Air Force, and I started admitting that I didn't know everything about everything." He replaced the paper target in the hanger with a fresh one.
"You don't know everything?" she asked with mock horror, and he smiled as he handed the Beretta back to her. She took it with more confidence this time and settled into the modern isosceles stance he had taught her to adopt.
"Let's try this again," he said, sending the target back downrange with a press of a button.
Ariadne estimated that she had been shooting at targets for nearly two subjective hours when she woke up in her own apartment. She opened her eyes and stared straight up at the sloped ceiling right above her narrow little bed for a few minutes before she got up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her foot struck something soft and she heard a muffled curse from Arthur, who had been lying on the hardwood floor beside her bed.
"Sorry," she said, tucking her feet up while he sat up and pulled the needles from his wrist.
Eames had put on a t-shirt while she had been dreaming and was sitting in one of the two chairs in the room, reading one of the Hellblazer trade paperbacks she had kept in her bookshelf. "How was it?" he asked, marking his page with a slip of paper that looked like a printed-out sales receipt.
"It was okay, I think," she said as she freed herself from the IV and its tether. "At least I know what not to do now."
"It was better than okay," Arthur said as he reeled the IV lines back into the PASIV. "You actually probably would be a fairly good shot with more range time."
"So talented, our Ariadne," Eames said with a gentle smile. "Are you two hungry at all? I was thinking of getting some take-away for dinner."
"Actually, yeah," she said. "I haven't eaten since breakfast today."
"You seem to be feeling better," said Arthur. "Unless you're one of those people who can still eat while pissed-off."
"I'm not done with that yet, okay?" she said. She wobbled a little with a dizzy head rush as she climbed out of her bed. "If I get out of this alive I'm going to fly to LA to scream at Cobb in person."
"You'll live," Eames said, his smirk confident and infuriating, "I'll go with you if you want someone to hold him down while you kick him in the bollocks."
"Language, Eames," Arthur said, mildly.
Arthur sent Eames out for takeout while he worked on securing Ariadne's apartment.
"What I'd love to know," he said as he installed an alarm in her front door, "Is how you managed to afford an apartment in 16e on a grad student's stipend."
"My mother knows Mme Arnaud from way back," she said half-absently as she frowned at her word processor. "She let me have this room for cheap because it's the crappiest one in the building. Five-hundred and fifty Euros a month doesn't get me central air or heating, but I have an electric space heater and the other guy on this floor has to pay twelve hundred Euros for his space." She was now sitting at her dinette table, tapping away at the keyboard of her new MacBook, the one indulgence she had allowed herself from her share of the inception take. She was frustrated and nervous enough that she found it hard to work, but she also doubted that her instructors would accept the potential of death or kidnap as an excuse for late homework, and she had a paper due in three days.
Arthur had been kneeling barefoot on her bed while he worked on the window when she heard him make a small sound of surprise, one answered by a small mew. She couldn't help smiling as she turned in her chair to see him glancing suspiciously at the big orange cat that had just climbed in through her window.
"Is this your cat?" he asked, as the cat jumped off the bed and walked towards Ariadne.
"Nope," she said as she picked it up in her arms. That was enough to start it purring loudly. "This is my landlady's cat. He visits all the apartments from time to time. I think he thinks he's the custodian of the building."
"Wonderful," he muttered. "Look. Can you keep this window shut for the time being? It's a security risk. Someone armed with a decent rifle would have a shot at you from any of the buildings across the street."
"I don't have central air, remember? I'll roast in here with the window shut. I can keep the curtains drawn but – you're not allergic to cats, are you?" she asked, watching him carefully as the cat purred in her arms and butted its head against her chin.
"I'll live," he said bleakly.
Eames came back with pad thai and foam cups of Thai iced tea, strong and sweet. "Are you using those bloody glass bottles as security again?" he asked Arthur when Ariadne let him in.
"I like having some kind of backup like this," Arthur said after Eames had shut the door. He had demonstrated the trick to Ariadne earlier. He had put an empty, upturned Snapple bottle by the front door and it had tipped over with a hollow clunk when she had opened the door to let the cat out. Apparently this trick didn't work quite as well with other bottle shapes. Beer bottles tipped too easily; jam jars not often enough. He had already installed a door alarm that whined shrilly if the door was opened before it was disarmed, but electronic security could easily be circumvented with the right tools and skill set.
"One day I'm going to step on one of those and break my neck," Eames said, nudging the offending bottle aside with the toe of his sneaker.
"Maybe you should pay more attention to what's going on under your feet," Arthur said as he took the takeout boxes from Eames and carried them to the dinette table. Ariadne scrambled to collect her notebook and put it away before someone spilled something on it.
"I hope you guys realize that there's only two places at the dinner table," she said as she put her Mac to sleep and left it on top of her bed.
"I can sit on the floor," Eames said. He took one of the cartons of noodles and a cup of tea and sat cross-legged by her bed.
"You're not going to both live here with me, right?" she asked. Arthur handed Eames a pair of disposable chopsticks, and then sat down opposite her at the table.
"What?" Arthur said, his chopsticks freezing halfway to his mouth as he thought about her question. "No, we're going to be trading shifts."
"Delightful as you are, Ariadne love," Eames said through a mouthful of noodles, "we need downtime too."
"Good, because there isn't enough room in this apartment for the both of you."
"Agreed," Arthur said, and she could only stare over her pad thai at the utter gall.
"The next time you decide to trawl universities for an architect maybe you could pick someone with a larger apartment," she said, rather tartly.
"Point taken. I guess I should have paid attention to that when I did the background check." Arthur went back to eating his dinner, rolling the fried noodles in neat bundles around his chopsticks before he ate them. The ends of the chopsticks were mismatched, as though he had trouble splitting them neatly, but then, so did she.
"Does that mean there's going to be a new entry in the checklist you have whenever you assemble a team? 'Number thirty-four, make sure architect has flat larger than twenty square meters?'" Eames asked. He had finished his pad thai and was now working on his cup of iced tea.
"Not exactly like that," Arthur said after he had swallowed his mouthful of noodles. Ariadne had never seen him talk with his mouth full in the time she had worked with him.
"I'm almost afraid to ask what you know about my background," she said, before she picked up a shrimp from her cartoon of noodles and ate it.
"Nothing a future employer of yours wouldn't have been able to look up. Education verification, credit check, identity and address verification."
"You didn't check my criminal history?" she asked. She knew extraction wasn't exactly legal, but she thought that Arthur would have at least checked to see how amenable she was to bribery.
"That's because you didn't have one that showed up on records, anyway." Eames said with a slow grin. "And don't look at me like that, Ariadne. It's only natural that I would do a little research into anyone I was expected to work with."
Ariadne sighed then and ate another mouthful of noodles while she wondered about the practicality of paying cash for everything from now on.
Eames left her flat shortly after dinner, leaving Arthur behind to guard her through the night.
"I don't want you to take this the wrong way," she told him as she threw the takeout containers in the trash, "But I don't think there's enough room in my bed for the both of us, and I'm just talking about you. I don't think Eames could fit in it even if I wasn't here."
Arthur's smile was lopsided as put the Snapple bottle back beside the door. "I'll take the floor," he said before he knelt down by the luggage Eames had left behind on the floor near her bed. The items consisted of an overnight bag, the PASIV device and a lumpy cylinder that he soon unfolded into a sleeping bag.
"Is that okay?" she asked, wondering for a moment how old Arthur actually was. She didn't ask. Instead she gnawed at a hangnail and watched the lines on his face smooth themselves out as the smile faded. He could have been anywhere from an old 17 to a youthful 37, but he tended to carry himself as though he rested on the older end of the spectrum.
"I've slept in worse places," he said. His back was to her and she could see the grip of a pistol sticking out of a holster inside the waistband of his trousers. She wondered how many guns he had hidden on his person for that short trip back from the university.
"With or without sedatives?" she asked at last when she collected her MacBook and sat back down at the dinette table.
"Without." He pulled a paperback from his overnight bag and sat, crosslegged, on the floor beside her bed to read, his fingers leafing delicately through the pages of The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
It was nearly ten by the time Ariadne had finished the first draft of her paper. She was staring blearily at her citations page when Arthur marked his page and put his book down. She watched him root through his overnight bag for a towel, a change of clothing and a toiletries bag.
"I was thinking of making a cup of tea or something," she said as he stopped by the dinette table to look at her work. "Do you want one?"
"How late are you going to stay up working on this?" he asked, concern flickering across his face.
"As late as it takes," she said, rubbing at her eyes.
Arthur only crooked an eyebrow in her direction as he vanished into her bathroom. The shut door and the hiss of water pouring out of the shower jet did not entirely stifle the sound of his voice, and she went back to organizing her citations while he serenaded her with what sounded like an ironic rendition of Poker Face. She couldn't help smiling to herself as she put her MacBook away and put the kettle on for some chamomile tea.
"I didn't think you liked Lady GaGa," Ariadne said when Arthur stepped out of her bathroom. She watched the tips of his ears flush just slightly as he carried his clothes back out to the overnight bag. He had changed into a t-shirt and a pair of loose, drawstringed flannel pajama pants, and his wet hair hung heavily over his eyes.
"She's not something I normally listen to," he said as he laid his guns out (one, two, three) on the floor by the sleeping bag.
"But you listen to her enough to sing along in the shower," she teased, as she poured a cup of tea and pulled out a packet of shortbread fingers from the cabinet. She hesitated for a moment, and then poured another cup of tea for Arthur.
"Only because I was stuck in a car with Eames for two days." He sat down on the other chair and took the cup of tea, but shook his head when she offered him some shortbread. "No thanks," he said, "I already brushed my teeth."
"Eames likes Lady GaGa?" This was unexpected but not impossible; the image of Eames listening to The Fame Monster wasn't as cognitively dissonant as Arthur singing Poker Face, or God forbid, Bad Romance.
"And The Smiths, and Queen, and Franz Ferdinand. At least, that's what he was listening to when we drove here." Arthur sighed softly in exhaustion after he had drained half the cup and she watched his spine relax slightly as he sank back into the chair, which creaked softly under him. "I'm probably going to lie down after I'm done with this," he said, his face framed with wisps of steam drifting up from the cup of herbal tea.
"I might work on this for a bit more," Ariadne said, gesturing at her laptop. "Is it okay if I keep the lights on?"
"That's okay," he said, before he drained his cup.
Ariadne finally stopped work somewhere close to midnight and staggered to bed after a short, hot shower. Arthur was still half-awake in his sleeping bag, his Michael Chabon novel held inches from his nose as he flipped through the pages. He was close enough to falling asleep that the book threatened to slip from his fingers and hit him in the face more than once. He blinked sleepily as she climbed into her bed.
"Goodnight," she told him as she turned the lights out and pulled the sheets over herself.
"Mm. 'Night," he murmured drowsily as he put the book down and rolled over with a soft rustle.