Eames (dream_bigger) wrote in papillonlogs, @ 2010-11-22 21:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | ariadne (1), eames (1) |
WHO: Eames and Ariadne
WHAT: Reunion time!
WHEN: Just after this
WHERE: Outside the arrival room.
He quickly made his way towards the place where he’d first shown up, still marvelling at the fact that he could do anything quickly after so long. He kept an eye on the phone as he walked in case Ariadne got in touch while he was on his way, and absently wondered why he’d saw fit to recreate her projection. Perhaps he was just wishing for familiar faces in the midst of all the new projections, and she’d been one of the last people he’d met before tumbling down into Limbo. Had she been there when he’d fallen? He’d always thought as much, but over the past fifteen years or so, his memory had taken a drastic turn for the worst, and he really wasn’t sure about anything any more.
Wait. Not true. He was sure about one thing. He knew he was in Limbo. It was the one unforgettable fact, even more so than his identity, his own bloody name, but somehow, he’d lost the meaning of it along the way. He’d stopped deliberately changing things around him at around the same time as his memory started going. He hadn’t purposely built anywhere new, or Forged, or even just created small things like flowers or little wooden puzzles, and he had no real intention of doing so. Sure, things had changed around him, but he’d just ascribed it to the ever-changing nature of Limbo itself, and never once considered the fact that he might have been doing the changing without even thinking about it.
It explained why he hadn’t tried the simple test of “Can I still Forge?”, though. Although even if he did try, and it failed, he would blame “The Compounds”. The Compounds were what he blamed everything on. As far as he could remember, it was their fault he’d ended up in Limbo. He couldn’t remember the exact specifics of how he’d got there, not any more, but he knew the Compounds had a major part to play in things. All in all, until he found his totem, he was convinced he was in Limbo, and no amount of kicks or suicides would get him out because of the damned Compounds.
None of this flickered through his mind as he walked to the place where Ariadne was waiting for him, though. He paused as he passed a small coffee shop and picked up a tea for himself, a black coffee for Ariadne (because even though he’d forgotten her name, and where they’d met, he knew she took her coffee black and that she sometimes dunked her croissants in the coffee), and a few pastries for them to share, and then continued on his way.
Soon enough, he was approaching the place where he’d first arrived, and there was a lone figure pacing up and down and hugging herself. “Hello, my dear,” he said, loud enough for it to carry, “I’ve brought us a little something in case you’re hungry.”
If it were a dream, Ariadne would have been tempted to kill herself to get out. Find the tallest building she could and jump, or a blade to slit her wrists. But she didn't have her totem - more disorientation had followed when she'd realized that, and she'd almost retched on the floor of the room where she'd woken up - and she didn't want to end up like Mal, dying on the wrong level. For all that her life had become sick and strange, she still wanted to live.
Whatever this place was, though, it wasn't a dream. Even in someone else's dream she should have been able to manipulate it. That was one of the first tricks she'd learned in her lessons with Arthur - and the thought of her erstwhile teacher was like another stab, somehow fresher now that she knew Eames was here. Even if he hadn't sounded entirely sane in their textual conversation, he or someone like him was here and coming to get her, and for all that they'd only known each other for a few weeks she was still relieved that a familiar face would be there soon.
She turned at the sound of that smooth British accent and inhaled sharply. It was him, or it looked like him, and he was definitely not comatose. "Oh my god. Eames. It is you." Ariadne took a few halting steps towards him. And then, despite the fact that they only barely knew each other, and despite the food and drinks he was carrying, she threw her arms around his waist and buried her face in his shirt.
“Oh, my dear, my duck, what is this?” he asked as she practically plastered herself to him. He couldn’t really hug back with all the things in his hands, but there was a windowledge beside them so he shuffled them both over towards it and put everything down. After that, he wrapped his arms round her shoulders and hugged tight. “Of course it’s me,” he told her, rubbing circles on her back with one hand as she clung to him, and then added “ I brought you a coffee.”
Caffeine solved everything. Or tea did, at least. He still made no move to let go of her, not when he could feel his shirt getting a touch damp where her face was pressed tight against him. “Ariadne, darling, it’s alright. It’s okay, I promise.”
Having his arms wrap around her was entirely too comforting, and Ariadne made no effort to stop the tears that were slowly escaping from her eyes. She'd spent so long being scared and hiding from the consequences of her actions and the responsibility she felt she had. And now one of the victims of her cowardice was here and more or less fine and telling her that things would be fine. And using ridiculous pet names. It had to be Eames.
"You were lost. All of you. And it was my fault," she mumbled into his shirt. She was silent for a while after that, just drawing strength from his presence, before carefully pulling away. "God. Sorry about that. And about your shirt."
He didn’t let her pull away too far. He put one hand on her shoulder, and the other was gently wiping her tears from her cheeks, one at a time. “It’s just a shirt, Ariadne,” he told her, then brushed her hair back from her face and smiled down at her. He’d forgotten just how small she was. “I hardly think anything was your fault. And I told you, if the others were down here, I would have found them by now. I haven’t, and they can’t Forge so they couldn’t have disguised themselves to hide from me, so they aren’t here. So, you see, you don’t need to fret.”
Ariadne looked up at him, sure that her face was tearstained and red. More than anything else she wanted to believe him. But in the back of her mind Cobb's voice echoed, telling her that losing track of reality was the surest way to get lost. And if Eames had been lost in Limbo, would he be right about anything? "Why are you so sure we're in a dream?" she asked, ignoring the way her throat wanted to close on the words.
“I didn’t think I was so unsure about this,” he murmured to himself, then shrugged. “Where else would we be? One doesn’t spontaneously leave Limbo, and there’s no point in trying to generate a kick to get out because of the bloody Compounds. Didn’t our great and glorious leader tell you as much?” he asked. He couldn’t remember much about their great and glorious leader; he knew how intense the man was along with a quite frankly overwhelming sense of sadness, and that he was an Architect who refused to build. Other than that, nothing.
“Besides, I have no idea how I got here, and no totem to check with. I lost it on the beach when I arrived here,” he further admitted, no more concerned with it than he was with the fact that the bakery had run out of custard doughnuts. Moving to put his arm across her shoulders, he moved her towards the windowledge where he’d put their food. “Now, I’ve brought you something to eat and drink. We can sit here and have our meal, or have it as we walk back to the flats. You can meet my flatmate, if you like. He’s quite odd, but I like him. I think this is his dream, actually.”
Ariadne squinted up at him. "There are a lot of places we could be other than a dream. What they said on the thing could be true and we could be somewhere else entirely in reality. But I don't think we're in Limbo. And Cobb never told me anything like that, I was only just starting to learn about how somnacin worked when I walked out." Another sob threatened to rise out of her throat, but she fought it back.
"On the beach? You didn't show up in the little room back there?" She allowed him to shift her across the sidewalk, picking up the squat cardboard cup of coffee. "I'm not hungry but we can go back to whereever it is you're staying." Part of her felt a little crestfallen that he had a roommate; he was familiar in a very strange situation, and she didn't really want to leave his side.
Cobb? Was that his name? It seemed to fit. Cobb and Arthur. Arthur and Cobb. Point Man and Extractor... “Cobb was an Extractor? Yes. Yes, he was. Wasn’t he? I thought he was a broken Architect.” Clever Ariadne, she could help him remember. And remembering things about his last team were far more important than pointless arguments about Limbo.
“What? Oh, no, I did. Little room, yes. I meant right at the start, when I first fell. This was all a beach to begin with. One huge empty beach. There were remnants of a city in the distance, but I stayed away at first, and built my own place. My totem got lost in the sand, and I never got it back. I think maybe it got washed out to sea, you know.” His voice was soft, and his eyes were slightly unfocused as he remembered those first panicked days in Limbo. Strange how they were so clear in his mind, and most everything else was a blur. “I built a house, but you would have laughed at it, pet. I say ‘house’, but it was more like a shack. Building was never my strong point. Still, practice made perfect, as they say.”
"He used to be an Architect, Arthur said, but he wouldn't build anymore. Not since Mal died." Her words sank into silence as they walked; if he'd been stuck in Limbo as long as the Cobbs had, would he feel the same way? She listened to his story with that same crawling feeling of unease. Was this what she had been responsible for? Who was to say that he wasn't right? Don't lose your grip on reality, don't create from memory.
That last bit was clearly meant for her, and she smiled at the pet name as much as the image he conjured up. "That would be like laughing at me because I can't Forge. What did you build?" Did it count as morbid curiosity if they were talking about creations?
“I built myself a city, of course. Bright lights, big city, all that. It was a bit rubbish at first, but that’s only to be expected, I suppose. I’m not a trained Architect, after all, but I got better.” He had, too. If Ariadne could have seen his creations, he hoped she would be... not impressed, that was too strong a word, but pleased. Yes. Pleased. “But enough about me, it’s a long and dull story. Tell me... tell me anything. Please.”
He reached for his tea and took a drink, then reached into the bag of pastries and brought out a maple and pecan plait. He tore it in half and offered her first pick, even though she had said she wasn’t hungry.
Ariadne took the piece of pastry and looked at it as if it was somehow unfamiliar to her instead of a perfectly ordinary piece of food. "I don't know what there is to tell you. It hasn't been that long since I saw you - in reality, anyway," she corrected herself. "I walked out, the rest of you continued with the job, it all went haywire somehow..." A gulp of coffee covered the tears that were threatening to start afresh. "Since then I've mostly been hiding in my apartment, honestly," she admitted.
“No, no no no, that’s, no,” he said, shaking his head as he denied what Ariadne was suggesting. “No. You were there, I’m sure of it. Well, as sure as I can be of anything,” and he laughed softly before looking over at her. “You’re meant to eat that. That much, I know.”
He smiled, then took a bite of his own half. It was very sweet, but it worked well with his tea, he found, and so it didn’t bother him all that much. “And why would a lovely young thing like yourself hide away? Or be building up for more tears? Hmm?” He spoke quietly, not looking up from his tea, even when he was finished.
"I wasn't, Eames," she said flatly. "And I was hiding because - I'm not stupid, I knew the risks going into it. Not strictly legal, Cobb said. So when Saito and Fischer both ended up in comas in the same first-class cabin, along with the rest of you? And they started talking about illegal dreamsharing in the news? I figured it was only a matter of time before someone came looking for me. For answers. Or... I don't know, something." She sipped at her coffee, and found the warmth bracing. The caffeine probably wouldn't help how shaky or edgy she felt, but at this point she didn't much care.
He finished his pastry, took another drink of tea to wash it down and finally looked round at her. Not for the first time, he cursed his hole-riddled memory and wished he could state something as fact and know it was true. Especially something that would help Ariadne to feel better. “You look like you need to sit down and relax for a while. Let’s go back to the flats, okay? You can come and see mine first, and we’ll do whatever you like. How does that sound? Okay?” He’d already picked up the pastries with the same hand that was holding his tea, so he was able to put his arm round Ariadne’s shoulders. He gave her a brief squeeze. “Come on, sweetheart. We’ll go home.”