InsaneJournal

Who: Ariadne and Eames
When: Late afternoon, today
Where: One of the parks
What: Enforced honesty: kind of not as funny as everybody thought.
Rating: PG-13
Status: Closed/incomplete


Whereever this was, it felt right. But it also felt weird. It looked like fall, and it felt like fall, but the city still wasn't anywhere she'd ever heard of. And someplace this big would have been common enough knowledge. It would have known about the outside world and been connected. But it simply wasn't.

And the buildings looked normal enough, but they didn't look... organic. There were different styles, to be sure, and they were jumbled together, but they didn't have the feel of a city that had developed over years and years. More like they'd been shuffled and laid out like a deck of cards. In some ways it reminded her of a subdivision, cookie-cutter houses laid out in artificial lanes with carefully manicured yards. Or like a theme park. The illusion of nature, delicately arranged in artifice.

Sometimes Ariadne wondered if it wasn't a really elaborate dream, if they weren't all trapped in Limbo together. If Cobb and Mal had managed to live there for what felt like decades - well, this would have been the blink of an eye, wouldn't it? But she probably wouldn't have dreamed that she needed a dull retail job or that she had to put food on the table. It simply would have been there if she needed it, right?

The bag of groceries thumped dully against the side of her leg as she took the long walk home, and she saw a familiar set of broad shoulders hunched over a sketchbook on a bench. There was someone she could talk to about things. And he would be brutally honest, of that she was certain.

"What'cha doin'?" She plopped down next to Eames on the bench without fanfare. Good afternoon, sir, hope you didn't want privacy.