InsaneJournal

Who: Lt. Danny Eames, (now aged 23), and Ms. Ariadne Wood, (still aged 7)
What: A reunion, of sorts, kind of?
When: Before this, 5th August 2011
Where: Arthur and Ariadne’s apartment
Status: Complete/Closed



Danny stretched out in bed, unwilling to open his eyes until the alarm actually went off, even though he knew he was awake before it. And then he frowned. He’d gone to sleep in a shitty little single bed with a lumpy mattress; there was a spring that dug into his hip constantly, and he had a permanent bruise from the little fucker. But he was waking up in a huge bed that was comfortable and not lumpy in the slightest, and this was wrong.

He opened his eyes quickly and pushed himself up onto his elbows and looked around as best he could, still somewhat bleary, and he hadn’t got a fucking clue where he was. The bed was huge, the room was unfamiliar and he could hear someone else in bed with him. Time to retreat and regroup, he thought, and carefully started to get out of bed. If he moved quietly enough, he could probably get out of the room at least without anyone noticing, and then he could find some clothes other than a slightly baggy tee-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts an-

“FUCK,” he yelped as he stood on something so painful it almost brought tears to his eyes. Looking down at the floor and squinting in the dull light, he couldn’t help but stare. It was an entire bloody minefield of bloody Lego bricks. “Where the fuck am I?” he muttered to himself as he lifted his sore foot up and pulled a blue four-by-two spots brick out of his heel.

Ariadne had been sleeping quite contentedly. When Daniel had come back from the other apartment he'd started sleeping in the biggest big bed with her again, since there was lots of room and they wouldn't kick each other but they could also stay up late and read books or talk or draw or build Lego castles if they wanted, since Arthur wasn't very good at making sure they went to bed right away. And it made her feel safer knowing Daniel was there and that she had a friend in a place she still considered very strange. And it was nice if she woke up in the middle of the night to have him there so she wouldn't get scared.

But now it was the middle of the night and it was dark and Daniel wasn't there and there was a strange man in her room - or the room she was thinking of as hers - and it was very, very scary. Ariadne sat up with the blanket pulled right up to her chin and frowned, trying to look as mean as she could.

"Who are you?" she said, trying not to let her voice be all shaky. "And where's Daniel? And if you don't leave I'm going to scream and Arthur will come and hurt you and why are you in my room?"

He jumped at the sound of the voice, and lost his balance, hitting the floor with a thud and a bitten-off swearword or six. “Oh, bloody hell,” he groaned, having landed on what felt like a small mountain of lego, and then sat up to try and see who was in the room with him. The light was fairly crap so he couldn’t really make out very much in the way of details, but there was a small girl in the room with him glaring at him as he peered over the top of the bed.

“Uh. Hello. I’m Daniel? Danny. And I just woke up here. I’m leaving now, I promise, but your lego is everywhere, sweetheart,” he said as he pushed himself up to his feet and started to back away towards the door. He stood on more lego as he went, but he forced himself to keep the reactions to winces instead of swearing. “I don’t kno-OW, turn that off, please!” The little girl apparently had a torch or something because she was currently blinding him with the damn thing, so he shut his eyes and started trying to find the door with his hands which really wasn’t a good idea. Stumbling backwards while practically blinded, standing on so much fucking lego in his bare feet, bloody hell. Not exactly his best wake-up call ever.

"You're not Daniel," Ariadne said, frowning even more. "Daniel is eight and almost nine and he has light hair and comes from London and he's not you and you're not supposed to be sleeping in my bed!" She was getting louder as she went along, because now that she was waking up she was not only scared but angry. "Where's Daniel?" She was starting to cry a little bit, even if he was scrambling towards the door and looked silly and not very scary at all with his eyes closed and making funny faces as he stepped on the lego bricks. "I want Arthur. Arthur!" For such a small girl, she had a remarkably loud voice when she wanted to use it.

Who the fuck was Arthur? Christ almighty, what was this place? “Will you shush, sweetheart, please?” He had finally found the wall, and then he found the lightswitch and then he could see the room properly. The sprawling piles of lego (did this girl own every lego brick in existence or something?) and the crayons and markers and pencils that were dumped off the side of the bed and a sketchpad lying open on the floor by his feet, full of what looked like Thundercats and Transformers and dinosaurs and basically everything he liked as a child, and then “...hey, that’s my signature... when I was younger,” he said with a frown and ducked down to look closer. And to remove the lego bricks from his feet.

When he stood up again, he was flicking through the pages, only his frown was a lot different than before. He recognised a lot of the drawings, he remembered sitting down at a table with a puppy that wasn’t his and a dark-haired girl who asked all the questions and drawing picture after picture as the two of them talked about all sorts of things, and then he looked back at the girl with wide eyes. “...You’re Ariadne, aren’t you.”

Ariadne turned off the flashlight when the man turned on the light, but she still clutched the heavy object to her chest. Just in case. And when he started moving she held it even tighter. Maybe she could hit him on the head and make him fall down if he came closer. Where was Arthur? Why hadn't he come running in? And then Danny was looking at the drawings Daniel had done and it was wrong, it was weird, he shouldn't have been looking at them, and she pulled the covers all the way up to her chin again. She let go of the covers to wipe at her nose and scrub her eyes. "How do you know my name?" she asked. Because he really, really shouldn't.

“I remember you,” he told her, trying to dig through his memories to see what else he could dredge up about her. “We tried to make toast and... and chocolate? on the first day that we met, and... is Escher the dog’s name? It ate my toast right off the plate. And... ugh, I can’t remember... and, and I drew...” he paused as he flicked through the sketchpad until he found the page he was looking for. “I drew this because that’s a coffee stain on the page, isn’t it? And it looked a bit like a monster... or something,” and he turned the page round to show her. “I’m Daniel. I’m older, I’m fifteen years older, but I’m still me,” he said, willing her to believe him. He still couldn’t quite remember who Arthur was, but he didn’t fancy getting hit by him, and if he didn’t convince Ariadne that he was who he was, she’d start yelling again and then he’d be fucked.

This wasn't helping Ariadne be any less confused. But now Danny was looking so much less sure, and he wasn't flailing around and he wasn't using bad words or telling her what to do, and she was a little less scared. She leaned over to look at the page he was showing, then back at the strange man. "How can you be older? People don't just grow big in the middle of the night." If nothing else, she was sufficiently distracted that she wasn't going to start screaming again. "And someone could've told you that." Not that it was likely. But she was dubious about this whole thing. "I don't believe you."

He blinked when she didn’t believe him, then ducked his head and rubbed at the back of his neck as he thought. “Christ, this is like trying to remember those dreams,” he muttered, then looked up at her again. “I had my own place. Uh, it’s close, it’s... across the hallway, full of paintings, and you snuck out with dinner every night, and look, we drew this together,” and he held up a coloured-in drawing of a dark-haired man in a suit dozing on a couch while a dog slept beside him with its head in his lap, then turned it back so that he could look at it again. “Is that a beagle? Is that Escher? I don’t remember the man, but we drew this. I don’t know how I’m older, though. Oh, wow, that’s Tygra...” he trailed off as he started flicking through the sketchpad again.

"That's Escher. And that's Arthur." Ariadne pointed. "We just did that before we went to bed." And Daniel wouldn't have told a stranger or a kidnapper what he was drawing if they took him away. And she'd seen people go from grown-ups to kids and from kids to old people on the network. And, she realized as Danny looked up at her again, he had the same eyes as Daniel. Maybe it really was him. "You're weird," she announced finally, flopping over on her side but still watching him. Also she was still sleepy.

“You think so, huh?” he replied with a smile, which broadened into a grin when he noticed that every time she blinked, it took longer for her to open her eyes. Every time. “You should go back to sleep, sweetheart. I’ll go out and find the kitchen and get some tea or something, and then when you wake up, I’ll make breakfast for you. How’s that sound? And yes, I know how to do that now.” He stood away from the wall and put the sketchbook down on the nearest bit of furniture, a chest of drawers, moving slowly and quietly because Ariadne was falling asleep as he watched and he didn’t want to risk waking her. Then he started to clear a path to the door for himself, shoving lego bricks out of his way with his foot.