dream a dream (and what you see will be)

mizzy2k

Bastian made many other wishes, and had many other amazing adventures - before he finally returned to the ordinary world. But that's... another story.

Apparently secrets aren't the only thing Dominic Cobb will attempt to extract.

Ariadne still considers herself a rookie to the whole dreamsharing business.

Everything is strange to her. Militarizing someone's subconscious. Setting up a heist in someone's brain to steal their deepest secrets. Recreating people's fantasies. Inception. It's all really bizarre.

So when Cobb comes up with something even a consummate extractor might think odd, Ariadne doesn't notice at first.

"There's a girl. Amelia. Nine years old," Cobb starts. "A few years she was diagnosed with NICCD - neonatal intrahepatic cholestasis caused by citrin deficiency-"

"Liver disease," Yusuf interrupts, before Eames' confused face settles into the more hostile expression he wears when Cobb gets polysyllabic on them.

"Yes. That." Cobb scratches his nose, like he always does when someone derails him. "It happens sometimes in adults that symptoms of citrullinemia... Yusuf?"

"A genetic disease that causes ammonia and toxins to build up in the blood," Yusuf says.

Ariadne smiles at him to let him know she's impressed. The smile he sends back is a little strained. Ariadne's smile softens, and she looks back at Cobb. One day she'll understand why Yusuf prefers making chemicals in the back of dirty warehouses and running a highly illegal dreamden, when he could so very easily be a high-paid doctor.

She files the mystery in the back of her head, and tries to think about what this mission could be about. Cobb's never started a briefing with a medical report before, but that doesn't mean it's anything weird in the dreamsharing world.

"It's so rare for NICCD sufferers to get the citrullinemia symptoms so quickly that... the parents missed it. Amelia fell into a coma two months ago." Cobb temples his fingers, leans back against the nearest table, and looks at them seriously. "The doctors realized immediately what was wrong with her and treated her."

"So what's the problem?" Arthur asks. Ariadne looks in his direction. He's frowning slightly, his pen and moleskin in his lap. She can see his neat handwriting, citrullinemia (sp?) and medical extraction? and coma heavily underlined.

That's Ariadne's first clue that there's something different about this job. She doesn't think she's ever seen Arthur underline things in his moleskin.

She settles in to listen to Cobb's answer, hyper alert now that there might be something strange going on.

"She didn't wake up," Cobb says.

"So... the doctors cocked something up?" Eames asks. He's leaning back in his lawn chair, looking for all the world like he might be on some sunny veranda in an exotic European location, not on a second-hand lawnchair in a grimy Californian warehouse. "Medical extraction. I'll be a nurse." He leers a little at Arthur. "You'd be my patient. Pain in the ass, right?"

"Don't be gauche," Arthur mutters.

"Would I?" Eames asks in an injured tone, throwing his best angelic look Arthur's way.

"Yes," Ariadne says, at the same time as Arthur does. Arthur's mouth twitches. It's the closest he comes during briefings to a grin, so Ariadne takes it as one and grins back.

"And the pain in the ass would be you, I'd imagine," Yusuf tells Eames. Arthur makes a choking sound and Eames looks delighted for a second.

"Mr. Cobb, the children are ganging up on me," Eames sing-songs.

Cobb sighs and shakes his head and ignores them. "I've checked and double checked the medical reports. Sent it to the usual sources. Nada. Amelia's clinically healthy. She should be waking up."

All levity in the room drops. Eames' face is a question mark. Ariadne's stomach flutters. There's the second sign this is not a regular dreamsharing job. Ariadne has to take her cues from the professionals. She folds her arms and waits to see what Cobb's about to say.

"So we're..." Eames sounds out his thoughts. "Extracting Amelia from herself?"

He sounds unsure of himself. Clue three: this is really not regular extractor stuff at all. It's one of Ariadne's best cues to deciphering the dreamsharing world: If Eames hasn't done something with a PASIV, it's either boring, so beyond ridiculously dangerous that even a gambler wouldn't touch it, or strangely out of the norm.

"We've done it before," Arthur says gently, into the silence. Eames looks at him, surprised. Arthur throws him a smug look for a moment. "We shouldn't need anything more than a dream-within-a-dream."

"Damn," Yusuf says, "I was looking forward to trying out a new compound."

"We may need one anyway," Cobb says. "Amelia's on a certain amount of medication. We need a compound that won't interfere with the medication she's on. I've got a meeting set up with the parents in an hour. I'll text you the list when I get it."

"I should still be able to start work, I know some of the major therapies, and what will be contraindicated," Yusuf says. "Arthur, there'll be some equipment I need, will you be able to work your magic?"

"It's called the Internet, Yusuf," Arthur says, getting to his feet and reaching over for the laptop, "and one day you will know its many mysteries for yourself."

"And when Arthur's installed you a robust antivirus on that decrepit machine you call a desktop, Yusuf," Eames says, "then I will link you to all the free porn."

Arthur stills and glances sideways at Eames. "Violence is wasted on you," Arthur informs him, after a pause, before continuing over to the set of tables Yusuf had already claimed as his own.

"Love," Eames says, sarcasm lacing the epithet, "it's always so charming to work alongside you."

"Your condescension, as always, is much appreciated, Eames, thank you," Arthur calls back, winking at Ariadne. Ariadne smothers her grin and edges a look at Eames, who looks torn between pitching a fit and laughing.

Cobb's pinning up some information on their board, some research about the illness along with a picture of Amelia. Ariadne moves over to look at it, feeling a little bit unsure. It's mostly because the architecture hasn't been discussed yet. Ariadne likes to be prepared on their jobs, usually because Cobb never estimates the time they'll have properly. Or he just enjoys putting them all under pressure because he's sadistic... or that's his management style.

If the latter, his management style is rubbish.

Ariadne hopes he's just trying to make her be a bit more forward, so tries the proactive approach. "So... do you have any ideas about the architecture or are you waiting to see Amelia in person?" she asks.

"I've already got the plans for this one," Cobb tells her. Ariadne freezes for a moment, feeling suddenly and terribly insecure. She swallows it back down. She really doesn't want to remind Cobb how young and inexperienced she is. She's replaceable, after all. Cobb doesn't seem to notice her moment of crestfallen angst, because he continues, "I thought you might like to come to the meeting with me."

"Seriously?"

Cobb looks pleased at her burst of disbelief. "A female voice might be a better approach."

"So you only want me for my voice," Ariadne says, mock-dolefully, "well, I've had worse pick-up lines."

Cobb, predictably, flusters at that. "I- we- you-"

"Relax, she's messing with you." They both look to see Arthur looking at them both, the internet dongle in his hand. Ariadne shoots him an apologetic look - it's her fault for leaving it in the laptop bag, not attached to the laptop. "He's right about the female interaction. Considering the sensitivity and type of the extraction, it needs an empathetic pitch. Two men might be too hostile."

Ariadne nods.

"Although," Arthur adds, leaning in, his hands behind his back, twining the cable of the dongle between his fingers, "I'd be a little paranoid that Cobb just wants someone who won't interrupt him when he's trying to be melodramatic."

"Hey," Cobb says.

"He does like to be melodramatic," Ariadne intones.

"I'm standing right here," Cobb mutters.

"He's adorable when he's being micromanaged," Ariadne muses to Arthur, like Cobb isn't actually there. Although it would be wasted if he wasn't.

"I don't micromanage," Arthur says, "I backseat extract."

Ariadne rolls her eyes. "Specificity, shmecificity."

Arthur gifts her one of his rare, small smiles, and then looks at Cobb, seriously. "Be empathetic," he says, "and stick to the point. Don't be too dramatic. This is a child, not a billion dollar secret."

"Yes, mother," Cobb says.

"Melodramatic," Arthur says to Ariadne in a fake conspiratorial tone before waving the dongle at them in a 'this is why I'm moving away now' gesture.

"I've never met with a client before," Ariadne says. A terrible thought strikes her. "Do I have to wear a suit? I don't own a suit. Well, I did own a suit once for my college interviews, but even then it wasn't exactly business friendly attire, I wore it down into the hotel level in the Fischer job but dreamed it as a skirt when it was really a skort, I-"

"Arthur babbled before his first client meeting too," Cobb says, looking down at her. "You'll be fine."

"Arthur babbled?" Ariadne says, because she can't help herself. "Wow. I guess you can't always know everything about everyone you work with."

It's a light-hearted observation. It doesn't explain why Cobb suddenly goes cold and withdrawn for a moment. Ariadne follows his gaze over to where Arthur's pushing in the dongle and connecting to the variable signal that plagues their warehouse.

"We'd best get a move on," Cobb says. He sounds a little distant, but he moves for the door before Ariadne can mention it. She takes another look over at Arthur, tapping away efficiently as Yusuf looks on in wonder, like what Arthur does is actually magic.

Then again, they walk around in people's dreams. Anything's possible.

Ariadne smiles to herself and follows Cobb out of the warehouse to the car.

Their client's sitting room is clean, if a little sparse. There's little hint of personality, and the walls and the furnishings are all magnolia. Even the light fitting is magnolia.

It's just too much bland for Ariadne.

Cobb's still explaining the procedure to Amelia's parents, but Ariadne's overwhelmed by the whole concept. She excuses herself and waits in the hallway, listening to Cobb's muffled voice, reassuring and charming as he explains the process to them.

Ariadne keeps her head down, and considers looking at the past half an hour again in the PASIV later, to see if she's as much a coward as she thinks she is for wandering out. Memories aren't as terrible for solo dreams as for shared ones, and Ariadne loves to be able to walk amongst them, relive the better ones, and expunge the negatives ones in belated catharsis. It's better than therapy.

Suddenly Ariadne realizes why they're even doing this job. It's something even a therapist can't do. The implications of dreamshare are staggering, which is probably why it's all so very illegal.

Cobb's persuasive voice is a low soundtrack in the background. It's nothing but guilt that leaves Ariadne stranded out here in the narrow hallway, twisting her hair around one finger, casting uneasy glances down the corridor to where Amelia lies in her coma.

Lost, the doctors have been saying, inside her own head.

Amelia's parents are old college friends of Mal's, and it wasn't as if the job was an impossible one - Arthur said they'd done this before. Ariadne's slightly appalled at herself for going along with Cobb for that reason alone. Last time he said that, they nearly all ended up as vegetables, lost in limbo.

Of course, that's the thought that brings it all home for Ariadne. She was a single bad decision away from ending up like Amelia.

It's morbid curiosity that leads Ariadne up the small hallway and away from Cobb's low, entreating tones. Their house is much like the one Ariadne grew up in; three bedrooms, magnolia paint on the walls, the whole place a blank canvas for imagination to take flight.

Ariadne trails her fingers lightly against the wall as she casually explores. She knows which room Amelia is in. Amelia. Even the name is ringing against the inside of her skull, a skip and a step away from her own name. Ariadne's always had a fanciful imagination. Her childhood home was as bland as this house, and Ariadne's mother let Ariadne choose the decorations for her own room, provided she did the decorating herself. So Ariadne did. She made over her room once a month, spending her allowance on paint and pens, imagining and re-imagining cities and dreamscapes, never realising that form of creation was nowhere near as pure as the PASIV would allow her in the not-so-distant future.

Amelia's just a girl, in a house like Ariadne grew up in, stuck in her own brain without even the experience of limbo beforehand to temper the terror of it. Ariadne sometimes has the plummeting feeling that experiencing limbo might be worth it. It only takes remembering the sunken, horrified expression Cobb gets when something reminds him of Mal to wipe that fancy away.

She's so focussed on the parallels of her life and Amelia's that by the time Ariadne gets to the doorway she and Cobb passed earlier, Ariadne is actually startled to see the young Amelia in bed. Amelia looks younger than nine years old, but her parents have no reason to lie; she has a fuzzy halo of blonde hair and a peaceful expression on her blank, pale face.

Ariadne's heart contracts at the sight of her, arranged like she might be in a coffin, with tubes forcing breath into her and machines counting her heartbeats, and immediately Ariadne just feels ashamed at thinking of her own relief at surviving in face of Amelia's suffering.

Ariadne has always hated being scared of anything, so she doesn't fall back; she goes into Amelia's room and sits down in one of the armchairs by Amelia's bed, and watches her breathe for a while with the aid of the machinery.

She wants to say something, because everyone knows comatose people should be talked to, just in case, but Ariadne has no idea what to say.

"Hi," she tries, "I'm Ariadne," but it doesn't feel like anywhere near enough. She casts around to see if Amelia has any interests. There are a lot of books, and one large hardcover is on the floor next to the bed. Ariadne bends and picks it up, smoothing her finger over the cover.

It's a first edition of The Neverending Story by Bastian Balthazar Bux. Ariadne can't help the smile that tugs her face. It was a huge hit when it came out, when Ariadne was small; a movie adaptation followed and Ariadne and all her friends went to see it ten times over. Most of her friends had a crush on Atreyu, but Ariadne liked small, brave Bastian the best. She empathised with him, wanting to escape into this fantasy tale rather than live real life.

"She loves that book."

Ariadne starts, and turns guiltily, her fingers clinging onto the edge of the book, not wanting to drop the treasured volume on top of being nosy and invasive. "I used to love it too," Ariadne says, smiling tentatively up at Amelia's mother, who's stood in the doorway, looking small and frail and so very sad. "I guess I was maybe more of a fan of the film, though."

"I'm glad you know of it."

Ariadne moves to get out of the chair.

"Oh, don't. Stay." Amelia's mother moves as if to put her hand on Ariadne's shoulder, but she pauses mid-way through the movement as if thinking better of it and looks at Ariadne awkwardly instead. "Read to her. She'd like that. I'm sure she gets tired of my silly old voice," Amelia's mother says, sinking onto the nearest stool to the door. She looks tired and her eyes stray over Amelia's body like it hurts to look at her. "Your boss says he's using the story as inspiration for Amelia's therapy. It sounds silly to someone like me."

"He didn't tell me that," Ariadne says, and flushes, because she shouldn't sound unprepared in front of a client. Amelia's mother smiles regardless. Maybe honesty is a comfort too. "Well, I can see how it would work. Turn Amelia's headspace into the fantasy world... and then open up a gate home. Get her to step through it."

It's clever. Ariadne looks at Amelia, and wonders how lost inside her head she actually is, and whether they'll be able to find her.

"You still sound doubtful."

Ariadne smiles, but it's tight and there's less comfort in it than she would like. "Well, it's not as easy as if Persephone was her favourite story. It would be easy to convince her that she's had her six months in Hades and it's time to come home for Spring."

"I don't particularly like the idea of Hades being anywhere in her head."

Ariadne falters. She was trying to be helpful. She'd always loved the story of Persephone; that love had overcome her reason. Cobb shouldn't have brought her. "If Cobb's finished, I should be going," Ariadne says.

"Your boss is passionate about his work."

"He is," Ariadne says, automatically, turning more fully in the chair to look at Amelia's mother, and if it keeps Amelia out of her line of vision, well, her mother doesn't have to know it's deliberate. "He's a father," she adds, not knowing what she's going to say but searching for the words regardless, "I think this type of work really strikes a chord. Like he's doing it in the hope that should he not be in this line of work, someone would do it for James or for Phillipa."

"And do you think you can do this for her?"

Ariadne looks back at Amelia, because looking at a torn and withered nine year old might make her sad, but it's suddenly better than looking at her mother, old before her time, worry scarring lines onto her face and tightening her jaw. "We're going to try our best."

There's a hesitant pat on her shoulder, and Ariadne looks up into the smiling face of Amelia's mother, and Ariadne smiles back, ignoring the moisture in her eyes, and then Cobb appears in the doorway and tells her it's time to go.

On the way to the car, he confirms they've been given the job. Ariadne's feeling a mixture of odd happiness and sadness. More relief than anything else. She rides that feeling. What they do is illegal, but if they can do good things like this, the definitely moral alongside the dubiously moral jobs, then maybe Ariadne will continue to be able to sleep at night.

She's feeling better about herself and the world than she has for a long time.

...and then she goes back to the warehouse and accidentally starts a fight.

The fight starts over a small thing—a cup of coffee.

Really it's about the lingering fear that Cobb's going to replace them all, or make one of them redundant, and Ariadne feels dreadful for starting it. And it's not a full-on fight—those, with their combined histories, involve at least one gun, and someone inevitably walks away with a black eye, and once it was Ariadne an hour before a huge exam and Miles was furious.

It's just one of their odd fights. There's been plenty of them over the year Ariadne's been working with this team of unique individuals. It normally starts with bickering and then really heavy silence until Eames makes an inappropriate and lewd joke, and then Arthur looks enraged and calls Eames terrible and makes a snit about civilised society, and Eames mutters about not even knowing what that is, present company included, and then Arthur breaks something and blames it on something else that isn't him and his inability to deal with emotions because they're something he can't control.

Cobb inevitably descends with his ever-increasing God complex (regaining his kids and performing inception to a positive end has been like a drug to Dominic Cobb) and Yusuf points out something perfectly reasonable which Ariadne shoots down because of how guilty she feels, and then everyone wanders around, sulking and feeling hurt, for hours, and the practice sessions don't go right at all.

And Ariadne hadn't meant to bring up the trigger point for most of their recent fights, except this job apparently doesn't need an architect—not if Cobb already has the plans—and she's addicted to the dreaming now. She can dream without the somnacin and the PASIV, but... her own dreams always seem a lot smaller now, and weirder. The idea of it all being snatched away from her as quickly as it was handed to her...

It had panicked her to the point of saying a month ago: "You could train me to take other roles in the dreamscape, couldn't you, Cobb?"

Cobb had this contemplative look, and said something about maybe taking some architecture jobs for himself now Mal wasn't going to be roaming the halls of their nightmares so often, and even though nothing's really happened—Ariadne hasn't been given much training in anything new—the idea was still out there. Prevalent. Gnawing under the surface. More firmly lodged than an incepted idea ever could be.

Until now. Because of - in a little while - the cup of coffee, which no one yet knows will be the impending incitement of such a terrible, horrible argument.

Cobb brings in a bunch of poster tubes from the trunk of his car. Ariadne's quietly amused at his confidence that Amelia's parents would let a bunch of law-breakers into their only child's head, but then she remembers how frail Amelia looks, and the amusement fizzles away into a pleasure that Cobb's confidence the job would go ahead was well placed.

Ariadne's excited despite the odd tension, and helps Cobb roll them out. As soon as the plans are all on the table Arthur comes over and looks at them, and his face goes ice cold.

"This isn't what you said," Arthur says, and his words are composed but his tone isn't; there's a strong tremble in his voice. Arthur's hands clench at the edges of the nearest table, like he's struggling to stay upright; Ariadne feels almost dizzy just looking at him, because Arthur's predictable and regimented and unchanging.

It's everyone else that changes—not Arthur.

Ariadne's moods are all over the place, especially with her unsettled periods (it's no small wonder Cobb never mentioned somnacin sometimes knocking her menstrual cycle aside—she supposes begrudgingly it's not something a man would even think to mention.)

Yusuf keeps jetting back to Mombasa for months at a time; when he comes back he's morose, the more he stays in California the happier he gets, but off he flies again, random and unpredictable.

Eames flits around from one job to the next. He doesn't change per se—although he shows up with a random assortment of injuries and on one occasion a slightly gappier smile—but Ariadne never knows now if they'll be working with or without him. When he's gone they get on with it, hire someone to be a thief; forging's not always necessary. When he's there, it's like he never left in the first place; he just slots in like a chameleon, riling up Arthur and flirting with everyone like it's his last day on Earth.

Cobb's confidence grows daily. Whereas once it was heartening, now Ariadne thinks his ego might one day explode.

No, Arthur's the one who stays rigid and strong throughout it all, and out of them all, he's the one Ariadne wishes to be like when she grows up. Eames still says Arthur doesn't have any imagination, like it's a bad thing, but Ariadne sometimes feels like she has too much. Like she's wasting her life by not using it in a way society would prefer. Ariadne doesn't know. She just knows she likes being with these people, and she likes dreaming, and it's going to take a lot to make her walk away now.

Because she can't help thinking something this amazing can't last forever.

Ariadne's fingers trace over the thick papers spread out before her. The plans have to be at least ten years old, and she can see coffee stains, and smudges of pink which she thinks might be sherbet, which is a little odd. There's also definitely areas where blood or ketchup were spilled on the plans, and she resists the urge to dip and sniff the paper, see if she can tell if it smells like tomato. There's place names scrawled on the map with incredibly neat, precise handwriting. The writing looks familiar. The name she can see nearest her, The Ivory Tower, sounds awfully familiar. But she's more interested in what's actually going on around her than some old plans.

Especially when Arthur's looking like he's possibly about to murder Cobb.

"I know this isn't quite what I said when I broke the mission," Cobb says, and his shoulders sag, but he looks at Arthur with a patient, level expression. "But the girl's lost, Arthur. I don't have a choice."

"You do. You do," Arthur says, incomprehensibly, but with such a note of actual panic in his voice that Eames shuts his mouth where he's lounging by a defunct water dispenser, obviously swallowing back a snarky comment or two. "I can't-" Arthur adds, like it's a big effort to do so.

"I know," Cobb says, again, and Ariadne feels awkward, like she's wandered into the room and her parents are already two-thirds of the way through a fight she doesn't understand. "It's why I took Ariadne to the meeting today and not you. I'm thinking of taking Ariadne on point."

"Woah, there." Eames pushes himself forward, eyes fixed on Cobb's face. "I'm not Arthur's biggest fan in the world, but there's a reason I keep working with you, Cobb. And it's not you. It's the fact that for some reason you have the best point man dog tailing you around the world like a kicked puppy looking for scraps of compliments from its deranged master, and-"

"I can fight my own battles, Eames. I'm not a child." Arthur snaps the words out with his usual brisk, emotionless efficiency. He doesn't even turn to look at Eames' face, and he misses the wash of emotions that tighten on Eames' face in a brutal rainbow—hostility, ambivalence, concern, regret, acceptance. Ariadne doesn't miss them. She notices more than anyone thinks. It's why she's a good architect, and why she's secretly been thinking she would make a good point man- er, point woman.

It's never crossed her mind that Cobb might think so too, though, because Arthur's their point man. Eames has admitted it gruffly more than enough that Arthur's the best point man in the business, even despite his prevalent lack of imagination. Eames has told her a lot over the last few months, of the teams he's worked, the jobs he's been on, and while a lot of it has to be bullshit, enough of it must be true. Eames has worked with every point man in the business, even Yusuf has confirmed that, and if he says Arthur is the best—without a hint of condescension—then it's plain fact.

So why the hell is Cobb saying Ariadne should take point?

She's missing something. Huge. It's a sad fact that she contemplates how to extract the reason from Cobb before she considers just plain asking him when she gets a quiet moment, or maybe it's just sad that an extraction would hold a greater chance of succeeding than outright asking for the truth.

"I'm fine-" Ariadne says. "I can just sit this one out. Or, y'know. Tourist. Amelia's family trusts me. We don't know why she's not waking up. She's physically healthy. Anything could be causing her to mentally withdrawal. A female presence in the dream could be key."

"You're point on this mission, Ariadne." Cobb says, hard. "Don't make me say it again." He doesn't look at anyone in particular when he says, "If anyone has trouble with that, I've got time to replace you all. Arthur, start running Ariadne through her paces. You of all people know how much a task it is to hold something like this in one head."

It turns out to be a complete understatement.

The maps are insane. Ariadne thinks after ten minutes of Arthur explaining the system to her that her head is going to explode, because what kind of physical place shifts its locations around? The main piece of the dreamscape stays in the centre, like a hub, and depending on which direction the dreamers go, Ariadne has to compensate with the landscape. Arthur seems quite happy explaining it to her, and confident she'll be able to manage it. She tries not to be sour that he doesn't feel worried about his job; Arthur and Cobb have been working together forever. It's Ariadne that's the newbie.

She wishes she had Arthur's faith in her that it will fit in her head.

"This is ridiculously difficult," Ariadne grumbles, realising why Cobb had muttered an excuse that necessitated him not being in the warehouse. Even Yusuf looks dazed, and he's not the subject of the discussion.

And then this is where the cup of coffee comes in. Later, Ariadne will regret saying it, but when she thinks back, it was such an innocuous statement that no one would have known it would start such a storm of a squabble.

"I need caffeine," Ariadne says.

"Caffeine won't help," Arthur says, grimly. "It's a transient environment and you need to be naturally alert to keep up with the progression of the landscape, depending on where the Mark wants to go."

"Her name's Amelia," Ariadne says, because she can't think of any other English words that would make sense next to Arthur's technobabble. "She's not a Mark. She's a sick child in a coma that we're helping. We're not extracting confidential information."

"You're just outlining the procedure, Arthur, not embedding the landscape in her head yet," Yusuf kindly interjects, as he often does when coffee is mentioned; his chemistry genius extends to beverages, too. "A cup of coffee at this stage isn't out of the question."

"Fine," Arthur says. "We'll break for a damn coffee. And while your synapses are weakening, and the world falls apart because you can't hold it long enough, I hope Amelia is very happy."

His tone is exactly the same as if he was discussing something technical about the PASIV, or dreamscape engineering, but that's how Arthur snarks; quiet and patronising and so you walk away scratching your head and only realize an hour later that he'd insulted you.

"Now, pet, Ari's new at this. You might not want to give her such a hard time," Eames says, moving closer to the maps.

"You're a fountain of knowledge, Mr. Eames. Why don't you walk Ariadne through a shifting, quad-axial dreamscape with fluctuating regions?"

The thing is, Arthur's still talking as if it's a normal, actionable, perfectly reasonable suggestion. It's only Eames' reaction that clues Ariadne in to the fact that Arthur's not being perfectly civil. One day, Ariadne thinks, she'll be able to tell the difference between Arthur being a bitch and Arthur being Arthur. She doesn't know whether to rue that day or welcome it.

"I would. But I'm not insecure about my job being made redundant." Eames leans over the table, his fingers tapping over the edges of the paper like it's a piano.

"I'm not- That's not-" Arthur takes a breath to compose himself, and now Ariadne's worried, because this is twice in a day that Arthur's apparently been lost for words, and she feels uneasy again. Arthur's never lost for words, or at least a concrete reaction. "God, who even does that, extrapolates some weird subtext from a conversation without the proper weight of context-"

"English sometime this century would be a courtesy," Eames interrupts, the biggest shit-eating grin on his face.

"I'm not going to grunt in monosyllables when a few polysyllabic words say what I mean more succinctly-"

"The day you say what you really mean, pet, there'll be a bloody parade in the streets," Eames says.

"I'll skip the coffee," Ariadne interjects, actually stepping between them and smiling at Arthur with a wide, fixed, terrified smile. Arthur moves his glare from Eames' face to hers. His expression softens immediately, but Ariadne feels the heat of his antagonism with Eames like a physical blow. "I'll apologise in advance for the caffeine withdrawal over the next couple of days, too."

So there's the usual bickering, and then the really heavy silence settles around them all like a heavy, suffocating blanket. Ariadne opens her mouth to ask a question about the layout, and then—as usual—Eames can't leave things alone.

"Best to wait to apologise until after the job is done, love. Unless you enjoy your coffee with a side of sarcasm."

"That's a mature response," Arthur automatically snaps.

"What are these maps, anyway?" Eames doesn't rise to the argument, which is practically an apology from him, even though there's nothing that Ariadne can see to say sorry for. Arthur's just tetchy and on edge for some reason that Ariadne can't see. Eames pushes at one of the maps, and Arthur leans over to stop him pushing, and as a result one of the paper's rips.

Arthur's eyes narrow - and that's when Ariadne thinks maybe Arthur's got his stubborn blinders up again. It happens sometimes with Eames. The whole world and its dog could see the different between Eames pranking around and Eames being earnest, but sometimes Arthur takes Eames so seriously that Ariadne almost forgets Arthur's capable of levity (the "paradox in my pants" incident over Christmas will forever convince Ariadne of the existence of Arthur's sense of humor) and Ariadne wants the ground to swallow her up because this is going to be a shitstorm of an argument.

"Christ, Eames—did the age of these papers spark off just a little bit of realisation in your head that these might be irreplaceable? Or are you this cavalier with everything?"

The problem when Arthur takes Eames' jokes seriously is that Eames instantly reacts with the same intensity. Eames mirrors people automatically and sometimes that's gestures and sometimes that's moods. "And by cavalier I suppose you mean careless-" Eames starts, stepping in closer.

"Careless is one word for it," Arthur starts. "I could add to it. Idiotic. Moronic. Unthinking-"

Eames loses any attempt at composure, even though Arthur looks as though they could be discussing the weather. "Right, I'll-"

No one finds out what Eames is about to say, or, more likely, do. Ariadne hadn't noticed Cobb's return, but she should have expected it; he usually turned up to intervene at about this point in one of Arthur and Eames' arguments. It's like he has a sixth sense for it. Perhaps he's just training for James and Phillipa's inevitable, inescapable puberty.

"Are they bickering again?" Cobb says. Arthur looks at Cobb with a patient 'he started it' expression which is blatantly untrue in this case (as Arthur's the one who did the majority of her substantial induction into dreamsharing—and in the time she spent with him training there were no murderous projections or possibly lethal secrets like with Cobb's portion of the training—she tends to be loyal to him over any of the others, to a point. Arthur passed that point more than a good minute ago.)

"It's just a matter of personal dream approach," Yusuf says, helpfully. "A clash of preferred technique. I would lend to Arthur's expertise in this area as he's dreamed the world before."

Ariadne opens her mouth automatically, only for Cobb to actually clamp his hand around her mouth. She's so shocked she goes slack, and then shoots him the worst death glare she can muster, and he lets her go. "You'd only say something you'd regret," Cobb tells her, and Ariadne bristles, but he's right so she mimes zipping her mouth shut. "Kids, grab your coats. We're going out."

"Cobb," Arthur protests, "this is a huge task-"

"Which needs time and the appropriate attention. No one's in the right headspace. We need to de-stress."

"Cobb," Arthur says, and his voice sounds a lot more strained now.

Cobb sighs, and gives Arthur a mostly unreadable expression. Ariadne can see a little bit of sadness, and a little bit of self-loathing, and a jumble of something else which passes between them like a secret handshake that makes Arthur's expression tighter than normal. If Ariadne didn't know Arthur, she wouldn't have noticed he's more stressed, but she recognises now that despite his mouth being almost permanently pressed into a thin line, there's a downturn to the right side that betrays how tense he's feeling.

"Amelia's been in a vegetative state for two years now. An extra week or two won't hurt her," Cobb says eventually. "Us being tense and unhappy might."

Arthur sags minutely, until Eames grins speculatively at him and Arthur makes this huff under his breath which is pretty terrifying. Ariadne tries not to hurry for her coat.

Cobb's idea of team bonding and relaxing is to go to the beach. It's one of the reasons why Ariadne doesn't mind being out in San Jose and not in a quaint Paris apartment which had been her plan for life for as long as she can remember.

Dreaming with the PASIV, doing a job with her team, and easy access to the sea, it's more than worth the sacrifice.

There's some sort of carnival-stroke-market thing going on today, which Cobb navigates successfully to a ratty looking food vendor which produces some surprisingly excellent stuff. Ariadne goes for it and comes out with a hamburger which she thinks she would possibly kill for and a corn dog. Eames has one too and immediately makes a lewd penis reference which Ariadne thinks is directly responsible for Arthur coming away with nothing but a bottle of water.

As they wander over the beach itself, Ariadne slipping off her shoes and socks long before they get to the sand and stashing them in her shoulder bag because she likes the feel of granite beneath her toes as much as she likes sand and the sea, Yusuf buys cotton candy for everyone.

Arthur's the only one to keep his in its plastic bag, and she watches it swing in his hand as they walk, distracted by the way the light glances from it. When she looks up, Eames is twisting his candy floss into ever-increasingly rude shapes, apparently for Arthur's benefit. Arthur only manages a fleeting smile when Eames shapes his candy into a cock and balls, unfortunately right in front of an appalled mother and her two seven-year old twin girls.

From Eames' example, and with her hamburger and corn dog settling into an uncomfortable rolling dog fight in the pit of her stomach, she leans against the metal railings separating the sand from the promenade, and starts creating a mini city with her candy floss. She sits cross legged on the sand, keeping her back to the railing, waiting for the queasiness to calm before she goes in the sea. She frowns as she pushes at her candy floss with her finger. Eames made it look so easy.

"Ever the architect," Cobb says, sitting down next to her. Yusuf is off paddling in the water already, but he has an iron constitution. Arthur, as ever, is hovering close to Cobb, and Eames casually joins in next to her, smiling in that knowing way he has that makes her feel like she's one of the crew, a sharp counterpoint to the way she's been feeling since Cobb announced the job.

That panic is still there, bubbling under the surface despite her new job role. Maybe especially with her job role, and the sinking feeling she's not going to manage the job anywhere near Arthur's standards.

She needs to change the direction of her thoughts before she ends up losing any more of her self esteem. The conversation reorients her and she shapes one of the candy towers into a pointed spire. "Not so much on this job, apparently."

"You'll get the hang of it," Cobb says comfortingly, rubbing his stomach absent-mindedly. The food had been too much for him too. Ariadne can't remember when she last ate before the hot vendor food, and maybe that's the problem they're all having, except for Arthur, who was smart enough to stick to water, who still has his candy floss bagged up at his side.

"Why did you pick me? In Paris," Ariadne says, out of nowhere. She didn't even realize the question had been bugging her until it's out of her mouth.

"Miles said you were his best student," Cobb says amicably with a shrug. He's squinting away from her, at the relatively busy beach for a Thursday afternoon, but maybe that's due to the market carnival thing. "I used to be his student, a long time ago. It's why I know he can pick out the best students, the ones with the aptitude for dreamsharing."

"Because he picked you," Ariadne says, and doesn't let his smugness go without an eye roll. "I meant... Why did he, why do you pick architect students for creating dream worlds?" Ariadne leans backwards, shading her eyes but glancing up at the sun regardless, squinting furiously. "Why not artists?" She glances to Eames to punctuate the thought, but Cobb responds.

"Artists do tend to have more imagination," Cobb allows, "but the few I've taken in... the world looks amazing, but the feel of it isn't there. The structure. Architects tend to dream up the same kind of beauty, but they remember to lay foundations in first. They put the basics in and build on them; they're not tempted to go backwards. It's a specialised kind of art that lends itself to dreamshare."

"Not that I'm trying to talk myself out of work—I'm just curious—but why not a writer, then? Some writers I've met are more visual than the artists I know. And they have to have structure in their work to fit plots in, beginnings, middles, ends..." Ariadne looks down from the sun, smiling oddly at the afterburn of flickering lights in her vision, thinking about trying to catch one but reigning the impulse in.

"Took one in once," Cobb says, with a shrug. "The world was delightful, dizzying, the most beautiful place I've ever been. Rich, full of life, full of imagination. We took the Mark down a level more and the second dream was as close to reality as you can get without using memories, and the Mark didn't believe it. Didn't really believe real life after that for a long time."

"More than that," Eames breaks in. Ariadne startles and then is embarrassed—she had almost forgotten he was there. That was one of his key talents. Chameleon. Slide into the background or into a key role, as much as required. Ariadne's glad Cobb doesn't want her to train as a forger, because it seems like it might be even harder work than training to be on point. "Too much imagination is a bad thing in our business."

"Too much?" Ariadne blinks, and it's not to dispel the after image of the sun dotting around the sky. "But you rib Arthur every day for not having any-"

Arthur bristles at the second-hand insult; Ariadne shoots him a look of apology. Eames grins, and obviously starts to think about how he can use other people to deliver his barbs and snide comments to Arthur. He looks delighted, and Arthur looks decidedly unimpressed.

"Dreamers with no imagination at all build from memory," Cobb says. "And that's the quickest route to the subconscious realising there's an intruder. The more real a dream, the quicker you feel if it's being messed with. But dreamers with too much imagination-"

Cobb looks across to Eames for support, obviously unable to find the right phrasing of it, and even Eames pushes his mouth into a line, searching for the right word.

"Some of them get lost," Arthur says, and Ariadne turns to him. Arthur's looking out to the sea. He's sitting cross legged in the sand like he's on a tiled floor not on sand, and his back is ruler straight, and seriously, Ariadne feels empathy—he must have back problems. Or, alternatively, a chance at never having a back problem at all. He turns his head to look at her, and his expression is impassive. "Sometimes the world they build is so wild you can't find the information to extract, it's impossible to differentiate the fact from the fiction."

"Like limbo-" Ariadne begins, but Cobb looks tired all of a sudden and she swallows the word back in.

"Or if you take a dreamer with too much imagination into a more realistic dream, like an extraction, sometimes their subconscious can't help it; the storyline of the dream diverts too much. Fears become monsters, daydreams become part of the dream, fantasies manifest and let the subject know too quickly they're being messed with, and-" Arthur turns to Cobb, one eyebrow raised, "remember the Ellison job?"

"Urgh," Cobb says, rubbing his chest automatically like a tic he can't get rid of; he frowns down at his hands like they are giant traitors. He faces Ariadne to explain, "The projections were all dressed up like X-Men."

"Cobb got speared out of the dream by Wolverine," Arthur says, "It was a mistake to take the client in."

"The guy wanted to be a superhero," Cobb says, "I had no idea my architect at the time was pissed off about the X-Men movie."

"The whole world was pissed off about the X-Men movie," Arthur points out. "They only kept in two of Whedon's lines. Two."

"It was tragic," Cobb says, in this flat dreary voice like he's heard this rant before.

"And one of them they let Halle Berry butcher," Arthur adds.

"Worst moment of her entire career," Eames says in an agreeable tone like he has no clue what they're going on about, but Ariadne has heard him make X-Men references before; it's disturbing how easily Eames keeps pretending to be someone else, even around them. She wonders absently who the real Eames is, and doubts she'll ever find out. The thought makes her sad, but not for herself. She hopes someone finds out who the real Eames is; someone else if it can't be Eames himself.

"And then sometimes, writers get lost." Ariadne thinks somehow it's part of Arthur's X-Men rant, but it's the sudden sombreness in his tone that's the clue; that, and his face has become cold, and distant, and even more like stone than his I'm on the job face. Arthur's tone is icy, but almost whimsical, like he's missing something that he can never have; Cobb's voice goes a bit like it when something reminds him of Mal.

"Sometimes they never want to come out of the world they've made. Even though it's a first level dream and not limbo. They know it's not real but it's better than facing the real world," and there's a real bitter, mocking tone to Arthur's voice now, almost like self loathing, and Ariadne's heart tumbles in her chest hard, and she moves forward instinctively—only to be stopped by Eames' arm, straight and hard across the planes of her shoulders.

Ariadne looks at him, hurt, a bitter word already halfway out of her throat, and Eames looks back patiently, no change of expression, but it's times like this when Eames seems wise beyond his years. It's his observation skills, the ones that make him an excellent forger, the skill none of them have to his degree, that sometimes manifest in an almost precognition—noticing something wrong before anyone else does, and Ariadne looks again at the scene to see what she has missed.

She catches it—the mirroring furrow between the eyes, matching on Arthur's and Cobb's faces. There's history here, an old argument. Arthur gets to his feet, coldness cutting across his face like a shadow, and Cobb follows him up smoothly, his expression hard like steel. Ariadne copies them by instinct; she stumbles, and Eames helps her up. He's tensed like he's ready to step in the middle. Like he can smell a fight in the air, here in the sunshine, on the sand, while the sea glitters like the largest sapphire in the world behind them; an incongruously pretty backdrop.

"I know what you're planning with this job," Arthur says, and it cuts directly through the almost jovial air they'd managed to create like a huge fucking cleaver, shattering it neatly. Arthur twists to face Cobb in one smooth movement, and apart from that tiny furrow, Arthur's face is carefully, carefully blank. "I know what you're asking."

"Nothing that can't be done," Cobb replies, his tone as light as Arthur's, but just as cutting regardless.

"Dom-" Arthur breathes, and that's when Ariadne inhales, clasping her hands to her mouth and earning a streak of candy on her cheek from the pink frothy sugar city she had forgotten she was holding, because Arthur never says Cobb's first name, never, it's always formality with Arthur, procedure, one hundred per cent of the time. Ariadne had to threaten Arthur with a spork for him to call her by her first name. Ariadne risks a look at Eames, to see if he is as uncomfortable as she is, but he just looks patient, like he knew this was about to happen.

"This girl is lost, Arthur. We're not extracting a petty commercial secret. We're extracting her personality. You know the scope of what we need." Cobb tilts his head, strong, and stares straight at Arthur. "We need Fantasia."

The word means something to Arthur, because he tenses even more, and Ariadne would have guessed that was an unlikely feat except it's happening before her; Arthur personifies tense at the best of times, and this is feeling awfully a long way away from the best of times.

Then she realizes that the world means something to her too, and she can't form words for a moment, because the concept is beautiful. Of course that's where she's heard the name Ivory Tower before...

"Wait a second." Eames manages to find his voice and uses it to barge in, even though he's interrupting the stare that Arthur is directing at Cobb, a stare that could probably level cities. Ariadne idly wonders then if anyone has done that in a dream, and the answer is swift: of course they have. "Fantasia. You're going to recreate the Neverending Story, in a dream." Eames whoops then, loud and unembarrassed, doing a funny half-spin on his heel before turning back to them, arms spread wide. "That's insane. And genius."

"So we're recreating the biggest kid's story in the world, after Harry Potter," Ariadne says, slowly digesting the idea, already feeling ten years younger already as the nostalgia of her youth catches up with her. "Isn't that like, recreating a memory? So it's dangerous."

"You've never physically been there, so you don't have memories or experiences." Cobb shrugs.

"I've been there, Cobb," Arthur snaps, Dom's surname fully back in place, Arthur's control obviously there as well. "I'm glad you have the option to forget about that, but I don't." Arthur steps forwards, and his eyes are flint-hard.

"Best step back, sweetheart," Eames murmurs into Ariadne's ear, but it's redundant—she doesn't have Eames' keen eyes or people skills, but she knows dangerous people when she sees them, and Arthur's radiating dangerous.

"And Mal promised me I would never have to go back," Arthur finishes, delivering what is supposed to be the final blow. Arthur tenses, like he's expecting Cobb to fight back, but Cobb just sags, and that makes it worse, like a thousand years in limbo have just crawled into his shoulders and onto his face and settled there.

"I've danced around the truth for your sake, Arthur. And I know you work yourself ragged to be the best point man in the world, but it stings me to watch you do that, when you could be the best architect out there as easy as breathing."

Ariadne fumbles in her bag lining for her totem, feeling uncertain and vulnerable. When she edges a look at Eames, she catches a glimpse of something in his hands that he quickly pockets and she feels less crazy.

Arthur looks like he wants to swear, or punch Cobb; instead, his reaction is pure Arthur. He stays still, tilts his chin, and if looks could kill, Cobb would be jelly on the pavement. He's cool, professional and bristling with how lethal he actually could be if pushed any farther. "You just crossed a line you shouldn't have, Cobb."

Cobb's voice is just as quiet when he says, obtusely, "Mal was the reason you weren't left there in the first place."

Arthur visibly flinches. "Low blow."

"She wouldn't hesitate doing the same for this girl."

"Lower blow," Arthur snaps, but the tension across his shoulders dissipates with his words. Cobb opens his mouth to say something else, and Arthur's eyes narrow immediately. "I'm armed. Call me by my real name and I swear I am not so precious about my impeccably clean police record that I'll refrain from shooting you in public."

Arthur moves his hands to the small rise in the line of his jacket that Ariadne hadn't even noticed, and Cobb holds his hands out like a surrender, his half-eaten cotton candy blowing in the wind. Arthur swallows, looks absolutely torn for a second, and then his face relaxes and he turns, heading back for the sea. Ariadne looks to Cobb for a cue, and follows when Cobb does.

"Call me when it's time to go back," Arthur says. "And you owe me candy," he adds, calling it backwards without looking, his voice thin. "Lots of candy."

"Strawberry sherbet and Tootsie Pops," Cobb says. "I remember."

"His real name-" Eames starts, sounding hugely curious and so much like himself in the middle of all this strangeness that Ariadne shoulder bumps him companionably, and Eames predictably steals the last of her cotton candy in retaliation.

Eames joins Yusuf in the water, ostensibly to escape Ariadne's wrath over the cotton candy, but really because he's been dying to join Yusuf in the sea since they got down onto the beach. Ariadne recognised at least the way his eyes traced Yusuf's path in the water. It was longing. It was what Ariadne had felt, that night after fleeing from her first day of dreaming. Furious at Cobb for shredding her face apart with glass fragments, but longing all the same for that sensation of pure creation. The longing eventually won out over the fury.

Longing usually did.

Ariadne's more sensible than Yusuf and Eames, or that's what she tells herself. She moves to stand by Arthur, on the damp sand, where the incoming tide laps over her toes. Arthur's removed his shoes too by the time she gets there; they join his candy floss to dangle from one hand. His pant legs are rolled up neatly, and he's wearing his socks like a pocket handkerchief poking out of his front jacket pocket.

It's a companionable silence, and Ariadne feels relieved that they can still have this even after Cobb and Arthur have fought. She feels relief and a quiet sort of happiness at this, her odd little found family.

And then Arthur makes this keening sound. Low in his throat, like he's been shot.

Eames and Yusuf don't notice at first, too busy still splashing around, but Ariadne does, and her heart clenches at his stricken expression. Arthur turns from her, looking out into the sea with an expression that hurts, and Ariadne nearly reaches out for him automatically without thinking, pulling her hand back when she remembers last second that Arthur isn't particularly touchy-feely.

She tries to follow Arthur's gaze, and he's staring at Eames. He swallows, and it's like he's having trouble scraping oxygen into his lungs, and he says, helplessly, "He doesn't even know what he's asking me to give up."

Ariadne can't help herself. She doesn't understand the moment—she only understands Arthur's in some sort of pain, and that's enough for her to want to act. She can't stop herself this time. Her hand reaches out, touches his elbow and he flinches, looking at her with wide, hollow eyes. And then he shakes himself, and his mouth sets into that thin, heavy line she's more familiar with.

"We should get back," Arthur says, his voice low and uncertain. He shoves his free hand in a pocket and starts to walk back, shoes still dangling from the other. Ariadne watches him go. She wasn't cold before but now she can feel it, down to her bones. The bright sunshine is a decoy to the actual temperature of the day.

"What did you say?" Eames demands, splashing towards her. His expression is set in shadow as he stares after Arthur, a frown on his face. Ariadne can see the frown, and she doesn't understand it for the longest time.

"I didn't say anything," Ariadne says. Arthur's heading for the embankment, and Eames is still frowning at him. Eames can see something she can't. She looks again, focussing. His shoes in his left hand dangle, swaying oddly. "He's less tense."

"He's absolutely pissed off, but you're right. He's looser. And look at his feet."

Ariadne looks, and tilts her head to the side, like a different angle might give her a better appreciation. She hadn't noticed anything different at all, but she does now. She wonders if it's Eames' talents, or if it's because Eames just watches Arthur more than she does. "He's walking toe to heel, not heel to toe."

"Like a dancer," Eames murmurs. Ariadne doesn't know if he realizes he's said that out loud. He shakes himself, and gives her a broad smile she doesn't believe. "Looks like it's time to get back to work."

"It is getting rather chilly," Yusuf says from behind them. Ariadne startles. She hadn't realized he'd been so close, but it makes sense. Something big enough to cause that much of an argument between Arthur and Cobb is something huge, something terribly secret, and they're so closed knit any secret is going to be a focal point of their lives.

They're not as relaxed as Ariadne had hoped they would be as they walk back to their headquarters, but they're also not as tense. She thinks of the emails she's been getting from her friends in corporate operations about their teambuilding exercises, which have mostly included building things from newspaper and abseiling and really odd buffet food. Ariadne much prefers Cobb's version, even though they're all quiet on the way back. Eames seems oddly entranced by how Arthur's walking, swapping between heel-to-toe and toe-to-heel at the oddest of moments.

She thinks maybe Arthur hurt his foot; he's stoic enough not to mention something like that.

The truth is much worse than that.

A few metres away from the front door of the warehouse, Arthur stops. His expression is blank, and he's staring at the door like it's the worst thing in the universe.

Ariadne slows and comes to a stop a few paces behind him. The others stop beside her. It happens a lot in people who work together—the hive mentality. One holds back and the rest do automatically.

Arthur's shoulders are tense, and he looks like he might never move again.

"Do you know they've done studies about memory?" Arthur says. Ariadne almost wishes she could see his face, but she's locked to the spot by her own fear. Arthur is reliable and dependent and doesn't act oddly, but this is out of character. For Arthur to break routine, it has to be something terrible. His voice is cold and flat, like during their briefings, when he's relaying clinical facts. "That feeling when you walk to the kitchen to do something, but by the time you get there you've forgotten what you're going for. We have that feeling when we're dreaming from the very beginning of the dream. Like there's something we've forgotten."

"We use that feeling," Cobb says, "to do our job."

"Did you know that studies say it's perfectly reasonable to go from one room to the next and forget the reason why you even made the move? It's because the brain compartmentalizes everything. Memory's not continuous. Our brains are more like computers. We have to put things in blocks. Doors, thresholds, they're a natural barrier. Our brain automatically uses the sensation of passing through a door to close the door on that block of memory."

"Trust you to research that," Eames says, already rolling his eyes, but he has his hands in his pockets. It's defensive body language. He's just on edge as the rest of them.

"Doors are just symbols. But then, so are totems. And they're sometimes the only thing keeping us grounded."

"We can do this later," Cobb says, edging a little closer, a small frown creasing his forehead like he's only just now figuring out something is wrong. Ariadne wants to slap him round the back of his head. It's a common impulse around him and Ariadne's well practised at holding it back in. She's had more than her fair share of revenge in the dream world. Once she "accidentally" dropkicked him down a well. Good times, she thinks, and feels instantly saddened; this moment feels the farthest from good times she's ever felt.

"The longer we wait the harder it is to make a clean break of it." Arthur squares his shoulders, like moving through the door into the warehouse is going to kill him, and Ariadne swallows hard, tasting acid. She doesn't like this day. She really doesn't like it. She wants to cry or crack apart the sky. She wants to dream up a world exactly like this moment just so she can destroy it. She wants Arthur to stay outside, and go back to the beach with them, or at least stay where he is, because if he moves, Ariadne feels like the world might end if he does. It's melodramatic and over the top, but that's the only way she can describe it.

Arthur steps forward, because wishing that something isn't real means squat in the real world. He pauses, and turns then, and his face is the most terrible thing that Ariadne's ever seen, because there's pain in it. And Arthur never shows emotion, never, and this is worse than being in pain herself-

"It's time for a parade," Arthur says, clear, concise, impossible; he looks at Eames helplessly for a moment, then turns to the door and says, in a much less composed voice, in a voice that's almost a whisper, "I don't want to die."

And then he pushes open the door and steps through.

The four of them stand there stupidly for a moment, just staring at the door as it swings shut behind him, and they're frozen. A sound tears loose from the back of Ariadne's throat and it hurts like it's grazing her tonsils. She looks at the others in nothing but disbelief, and her heart clenches in her chest for a moment; Cobb looks worried, Yusuf upset, and Eames... The expression on Eames' face...

Ariadne can't describe it. She feels it, though. It's like rage and fury and confusion blended into a cocktail of fire; it's enough to kick start her body into movement, and she's running with Eames to the door, blind with panic.

Eames gets there first. The door snaps back, slams into the wall of the warehouse like the sound of a gunshot, and Ariadne's imagination is awash with mindless terrors - fire washing through the warehouse and Arthur's body on the floor in a puddle of blood or maybe Arthur will have disappeared and there'll be no sign he ever existed-

All her fanciful fears dissipate in a second when she skids to a halt on seeing Arthur halfway across the warehouse, throwing his shoes into the corner. He turns on hearing them, and he smiles and waves.

Ariadne feels abruptly silly - a combination of silliness at thinking such odd disasters would await them in the warehouse and silliness at not adding insanity to her list.

And then Arthur starts taking his clothes off.

"Um," Cobb says, slightly awkwardly, "this is a shared space. You have co-workers. We like, um, being able to work without feeling awkward."

Arthur calmly drops his pants onto the chair he'd automatically draped his jacket over, and tilts his head as he peels off his waistcoat and starts on his shirt. "I'm uncomfortable, Dom. You can't expect me to work like this."

Ariadne frowns. There's something different about Arthur's tone, and not just his more casual use this time of Cobb's first name. She holds back cautiously, not wanting to blister into this situation that she doesn't understand.

Arthur pulls off his shirt as Cobb frowns at him, and Ariadne finds a blush creep up on her cheeks as she can't quite stop staring. Underneath his pristine clothing, Arthur's. Well. Fit. Then she stares for a different reason as Arthur picks up his water bottle and tips it over his head. He shakes his head a little, his normally pristine hair still slicked back. Ariadne had a boyfriend in college who used pomade like Arthur does; she supposes the one dose of water isn't quite enough to dispel it.

"The fuck is this stuff," Arthur mutters, and Ariadne fumbles for her totem again, because what?

"I don't know if we'll be able to concentrate if you walk around like that," Cobb eventually manages, as Arthur stands there nonplussed, standing in his blue-checked boxer shorts (well, Ariadne reflects, there's one question she wouldn't have asked about Arthur answered regardless) and socks like nothing's wrong. Like the whole team isn't staring at him and his sculpted abs.

Arthur looks at Cobb seriously for a moment, and then cracks an odd sort of smile. "What if I said I worked better like this?" Arthur steps out from behind the table, displaying the curve of his legs to great effect. He's acting like nothing's wrong, even though this is completely out of character.

"Ariadne and I have no complaints," Eames breaks in, with an exaggerated leer on his face. Arthur rolls his eyes at Eames, but looks back towards Cobb. Ariadne shoots an annoyed look on principle at Eames, but she can't bring herself to lie; she could sort of stare at Arthur's naked chest for a long time without getting bored. She's not going to be able to look at any businessman in a suit without wondering what's beneath now, dammit.

"Relax, Dom. You think I run all the way from my apartment every morning in a suit? I've got my jogging clothes in the back." Arthur tilts his head at the small area in the back where they all mostly drop their stuff during work, and turns to go.

Ariadne turns, because it would be completely unprofessional to watch him walk the length of the warehouse, even though his legs look as toned as his stomach, and she is only human. As she glances over at the others, Cobb is looking up at the ceiling, his expression slightly strained, Yusuf looks unaffected, and Eames isn't making any pretence at not watching Arthur walk away which is so ridiculously in character for him that Ariadne feels grounded despite Arthur's behaviour change.

She doesn't know what to think that Arthur's walking toe-to-heel the whole way. She's not Eames and she can't decipher people that easily.

She goes back to the maps but feels lost, and she doesn't even turn when Arthur taps her on the shoulder. He's wearing sweatpants and a loose t-shirt, and doesn't look too odd—they're probably designer work-out clothes knowing Arthur's pristine taste. "Things are a bit of a jumble at the moment... But one thing I do remember. An argument. I was too harsh," he says, and Ariadne looks at him and can't help but stare. She's confused and Arthur looks... different. He's obviously tried to wash his hair, and it still looks normal, all slicked back, except a few hairs are curling at the nape of his neck, against his forehead, and it softens his face a little. "I'm sorry."

"Are you apologizing?" Eames demands from across the room where he's helping Cobb and Yusuf with some particularly fragile looking equipment that Ariadne kinda remembers from Chemistry class, but she can't remember the name of half of the pieces. It doesn't look like he's helping much, more like he's distracting himself, and Ariadne doesn't blame him. It's easier to think about things rather than Arthur's weird mood shift. "Because you should. You're being odd."

"I'm not apologizing to you," Arthur shoots back, lifting an eyebrow in Eames' direction, but instead of the controlled, thin press of his mouth that usually accompanies a jibe in Eames' direction, there's a curve of a wicked smirk on his mouth instead.

"Wouldn't want to be too out of character," Eames mutters, as Yusuf slaps his hands away from meddling with one of Yusuf's thousand glass jars of strange liquids and compounds.

"Getting out of character is sort of the point," Arthur says, grabbing a chair and straddling it backwards, reaching for something under the tables. He emerges with a laptop, and shoves at the papers. Some of them casually fall on the floor and Arthur doesn't bat an eyelid, even though he was screaming bloody murder at Eames' 'cavalier' attitude to them earlier.

Arthur flips up the lid, and hums contentedly under his breath for a moment as it loads. Ariadne pulls up a chair to watch him as he pushes in a dongle to connect to the internet, and as the laptop's screen darkens for a moment in its loading process she sees Arthur's face freeze in the middle of his humming, like he's just realized he has been humming, and then there's an almost forced physical tension that flits across his face as he makes himself continue to hum until Google Chrome loads up and fills the screen.

"Can you pass me that candy floss?"

Ariadne blinks at the question, then reaches across the table, gingerly picking up Arthur's casually discarded bag of pastel colored candy and passing it to him. He rips it open and starts shoving handfuls into his mouth. Ariadne stares at him as he loads up YouTube, and starts watching cartoons.

"Um," Ariadne says, after a minute of Super Mario, "how is this supposed to help?"

"Arthur doesn't watch cartoons," Arthur says, "when else am I supposed to catch up. Have you seen this one?"

Ariadne stares. "Arthur?"

"Hmm-mm?" Arthur turns to look at her, looking slightly annoyed. He sighs and reaches out to slap at the space bar and the video stops playing. He grabs for another handful of candy floss. There's a clear look of realisation on his face. "You know, this is odd. I can remember arguing with you, but Arthur's just holding back a ton of stuff. It's rather annoying. You're Ariadne, right? It's difficult to keep track of names."

"I- what? Arthur, what-"

Arthur sighs, and slams the laptop lid down. "Dom, seriously, you're a shit. Who doesn't brief a team that they're working with a multiple?" Arthur shoves a hand in Ariadne's direction, and Ariadne looks at his hand like it's an alien object. "I'm Seb. Pleased to meet you."

Ariadne continues to stare at his hand, and then she shakes herself and automatically holds out her hand, because she's an idiot but she's not a rude idiot, and if multiple means what she thinks it means, well, it's hardly Arthur's fault. She shakes Arthur's - Seb's? - hand quickly, and brushes her hand on her pants.

She doesn't know what to call him in her head. Calling him something else would be like agreeing he's gone, and he's not. Arthur's sitting right in front of her.

"Oh, sorry about that, I get sugar everywhere," Arthur says, and his voice is different, the rhythm's all off, and he's a little shyer, a little friendlier in his tone, and Ariadne doesn't believe he's sorry at all.

"Excuse me a minute," Ariadne says. Arthur rolls his eyes and flips the laptop open again, jabbing at it. She hurries to her feet and over to where Cobb is standing, looking as frightened as he probably should be, considering how she's feeling. She pushes right into Cobb's personal space. "Do you want to explain this? What the hell's going on?"

Cobb looks sheepish. He puts a hand on the back of his neck, and looks up at the ceiling. Ariadne just gets angrier. They routinely go into each other's heads. Something like this is crazy. It's unfair.

It's completely odd and Ariadne can't wrap her head around it. Arthur's her constant and now it's like he isn't even there.

"Arthur," Cobb starts, and he brings his gaze down from the ceiling. It's more defiant now, like he's daring them to tell him he's done something wrong. "Arthur doesn't really exist."

"Excuse me?" Eames says, losing all pretence at being useful. His fingers break whatever piece of equipment he's holding. Yusuf's face falls, but Eames is being obvious enough about his current aura of hostility; Yusuf isn't going to brave setting him off any more. "What the hell do you mean Arthur's not real, he's right there. This is real life, Cobb. Your totem might be malfunctioning but ours are just fine, so if this is an attempt to be stupid, well, I never thought you had to work hard at that-"

"I'm sorry to blunt your ego like this, Eames, but Arthur's a forge." Cobb shrugs a little, and looks over to where Arthur's honest-to-goodness giggling at what's on the screen, still eating mouthfuls of the candy and he's loose, relaxing into the chair, tapping his fingers on the table, a wide grin stretching his face. "He used to be like Amelia, lost in a dream. Mal and I got him out, but we had to... make some adjustments."

"Arthur's a forge," Eames repeats, like he didn't hear Cobb, but Ariadne sees his fingers dig into his leg and it's disbelief more than anything.

Ariadne's numb, too numb to react, because this feels weird. Unreal. Except not even an extractor would use this dream scenario on a Mark, because it's so crazy. A sane brain would reject it, and the warehouse is stubbornly stable.

Ariadne might be frozen, but Eames doesn't stay frozen.

It's because Eames, like Cobb, errs on the melodramatic that Ariadne doesn't even feel surprise that Eames pulls his gun on Cobb.

The fact that she sits and calculates an escape strategy is probably just a sad reflection on the fact she's way too immersed in the criminal world now.

A criminal world where Arthur isn't real, and Ariadne's sorry, but what the fuck? It's going to take Ariadne's brain longer to wrap around that one than the whole Fantasia dreamscape.

Cobb swallows automatically, and then looks coolly at Eames, his 'facing down projections' expression. "All right," Cobb says, his tone smooth apart from the small hitch in his voice betraying the fact he believes Eames might shoot him, "I can understand that response-"

"Really," Eames says flatly. His eyes are dark. "Because I might not. Explain it to me."

Cobb flickers a look at Ariadne, who is the closest to Eames and stands a much better chance of disarming Eames. Eames' finger isn't on the trigger, but that doesn't mean much. Ariadne's been around them in too many dreams with firearms and undergone enough basic training to know it's just regular firearm safety.

She doesn't particularly feel inclined to rush to Cobb's rescue. Not until he stops being so crazy.

"You don't know what happened," Cobb says, "to necessitate-"

"Does anyone like it when he's polysyllabic?" Eames asks Ariadne, still keeping his gun trained on Cobb's chest.

Only aim at something you're willing to kill is pounding through Ariadne's head instead of anything else. Arthur's words from her last firearm training. Only aim at something you're willing to kill.

"Not enough dislike to shoot him over it," Ariadne says, shakily. Cobb exhales in obvious relief, as Eames nods at her and holsters his weapon. "But I might be willing to join in on the bodily harm if his explanation isn't good enough."

She tilts her head at Cobb. Defiantly. Daring him to have a problem with her anger.

"One of these days I'm going to get through a working day without you all offering to shoot me," Cobb mutters, sulkily.

"Maybe one of these days you'll not be a complete arsehole," Eames says.

There's a long, slow moment where no one says anything. Ariadne feels sick, and uncertain, but mostly sick to the stomach. She'd thought the world had rotated a hundred and eighty degrees when Cobb introduced her to dreamsharing, and had been sure that nothing else would be able to pull the rug from under her carefully constructed world so thoroughly again.

She was wrong.

The idea of Arthur, stable Arthur, not being real.

He's been her foundation of the dreamsharing world, and without that, without Arthur-

Ariadne still can't think about it. It's too much to process. Especially with Arthur sitting over on the other side of the warehouse, the bright colors of his cartoon flickering over his face.

Arthur's face.

Arthur.

She knows him. He's her friend. He's a forge. Before, when she shook Arthur's hand, it was an automatic thing. A vague track in the back of her head reminded her that Multiple Personality Disorder was a medical condition and no one's fault, and sometimes, as with other conditions like it, people got ashamed and didn't like to talk about it. But this is something else entirely. This is messed up.

No, this isn't going to settle in her brain properly any time soon at all.

"Mal and I had no choice," Cobb says levelly. "When we found Sebastian - Arthur," he clarifies, "he was sick. He's essentially the same, just with some... adjustments to be able to function effectively in the dreamscape without losing control."

"Essentially the same," Eames repeats, and doesn't soften his angry expression. "Christ, Cobb, you're a fucking knob. At least tell me you have a fucking clue why I nearly orphaned Jimmy and little Phillipa."

"I'm..." Cobb's eyes linger for a moment on the rise in Eames' jacket where he's stashed his gun back in its holster. "I'm aware."

He's clearly got no idea that Eames is still an inch from shooting him in the face.

Ariadne's a thousand miles past being unimpressed with the situation, and is not in the mood to inform Cobb of the probable impending violence to his person.

"Start from the beginning," Eames suggests, with the tone of a person that uses a suggestion as an invitation to impending violence if the words aren't to their satisfaction.

"Mal was a thief," Cobb says, "but she dabbled in forgery. Not to the depth as you, Eames. But enough."

Ariadne's hands clench uneasily in the jersey fabric of the top she's wearing, stretching it needlessly, a random tic from her high school days. She's never been a comfortable social creature, and it feels like she's standing on the edge of a cliff, like any moment the whole floor might crack and break beneath them. Her imagination is immense, it always has been, but there's no way she can imagine this conversation working without Eames pushing into Cobb's personal space, without blood being spilled before the end of the day.

Until Arthur gets up from the laptop, and heads over to them, his hands in the sweatpants pockets and a shy expression on his face that Ariadne's never seen from him before. "When they found me," Arthur says, and his voice is low and clear, like a bell, and warmer somehow. A friendlier tone. A less business-like tone, "and I insisted on dreamsharing with them, we created Arthur."

The tension leaves Cobb's body a little, like he's much more relieved now Arthur's standing there. Like Eames is less likely to try to knock his block off with Arthur in the way.

Ariadne glances across at Eames, and Eames sinks against the nearest table. Cobb's right.

"It was Mal's idea," Arthur explains. "A personality I could forge as it were, so I could safely dream without bringing Fantasia into an extraction." He looks at Ariadne, and fails a little at meeting her gaze.

"Bringing Fantasia in?" Ariadne still can't make her voice be steady. She thinks she must sound delirious. She wonders if she has a fever, and then hates herself for even thinking selfishly, because Arthur doesn't exist and Arthur's right there and Cobb didn't think it was a big deal and wow, Ariadne's really got an amazing track record of crushing on all the worst guys possible.

If Ariadne's crush on Cobb hadn't died on its own after a few months of him squinting and getting squashed by imaginary structures, it would have died today. Crashed and burned.

"I was like Amelia," Arthur says, and looks down. He swallows, hard, and then looks at Ariadne right in the eyes. "I was... lost."

We've done this before, Arthur said. Ariadne swallows, starting to understand.

Arthur shrugs sadly at her, and crosses to sit on the table Cobb's leaning against. "My mom couldn't cope- she tried, she tried her best- but she always messed with the wrong guys. So she put me somewhere where she didn't have to bother with me."

"They put you into a dreamden."

Yusuf's voice is gentle for the left-field conclusion. Ariadne looks at him. She's not the only one. It's a huge leap in logic. Yusuf's face creases, and he swallows, looking at Arthur. Arthur looks at him almost thankfully, like he hadn't really wanted to say it.

"Okay," Eames says, and his voice is completely unsteady, like he's worried he's lost his mind, "I may be shooting more idiots than just Cobb today."

Yusuf's voice might have been gentle, but his face is telling a different story.

"How did you come to that conclusion?" Cobb asks, bravely ignoring Eames.

Yusuf looks down, picks up something from the table and puts it back down, and then looks at Cobb directly, his head tilted. "It's something I was researching, back when I lived in Dubai and my work was more... legal. About the long-term effects of somnacin on children."

Ariadne stares at Yusuf, and thinks about the legal application of dreamsharing that Arthur has told her about - the Government using it for simulated wars, with soldiers stabbing and killing each other and testing what level of pain people could withstand. That had been terrible enough in itself. Testing it on children...

Not just one child. Children plural. Ariadne had just been unhappy about Arthur until now, and now her queasiness multiplies as she thinks about all the children in Amelia and Arthur's position, and all the things the PASIV allows people to do.

Sometimes Ariadne is uncomfortable with their illegal use of the PASIV, dropping into people's subconscious, messing with their heads in the most intimate and invasive way possible. But compared to all the things she's now imagining the Government doing with the technology, their work seems mild. Inconsequential.

It's no wonder Yusuf seems happier in his backstreet shop creating chemicals, and strictly monitoring his own dreamden.

"I hated my work," Yusuf says. "But my Government had reports of these children being put into dreamdens. They were cheaper than childminding services and kept the children out of the way while the parents went to work. It was much like how ten years ago some parents would just shove their children in front of the TV. Most of the serious cases of somnacin addiction we discovered happened to these children. No matter how much we tried, nothing would help. The victims had to keep dreaming or suffer very painful side effects. Or death. I lost my job trying to help them because mostly, the Government were using the kids as guinea pigs. They didn't care about survival rates, just results." Yusuf shifts a little under their gaze. "In my own dreamden, I'm more careful at my application of somnacin, and I never take a child under more than once. My compound counters the long-term effects to the best of my ability. When the dreamers choose to leave the shared dream I provide them with, they do not need somnacin."

"If I don't get a somnacin dose, my brain starts to eat itself," Arthur explains. "Charming, right? The PASIV is the safest way to ensure that a survivable level of the compound stays in my blood stream."

"That's terrible," Ariadne breathes. "And not just the somnacin dependency. And it's all terrible, and Cobb - I'm still pissed at you, that's not going to change any time soon, mister. But... Seriously, a dreamden?"

The idea of it hurts. Ariadne's always felt a bit queasy at the concept of parents who just shoved their kids in front of TVs, letting Disney movies and cartoons be virtual babysitters, and she's always had to swallow uncomfortably when adverts on TV for childrens' charities come up, talking about abandoned children. The idea of putting your own child into dreamshare... It's like some weird, mishmash horrible hybrid of the most monstrous things you could do to a kid in one concept.

The breadth of what was possible in the dream world collides sharply with the hundred visceral images she has of Arthur in her head; him shooting at projections with brutal efficiency, him getting sliced apart in different ways, and burned, and in one extraction which went particularly wrong, getting impaled on a signpost. Was he stoic as part of his personality? Or had he just spent years - potentially lifetimes - in a shared dream where worse things happened?

Or was anything as bad as finally waking up and finding out the real world was hard and horrible and the furthest from Fantasia as one could possibly be. A world where your mother didn't love you enough to stop the horror, and a world where people were harsh and you couldn't imagine new friends when things got bad. A world where because of what had been done to you, you had to submerge yourself in a new personality?

Everything's too raw. She owes it to Arthur to know, to open her eyes to it all, because world change can't happen without knowledge and Ariadne never dreams small. She has Robin Hood-style delusions of grandeur, using the PASIV for the elusive 'good'; Cobb'd never go for it, but he's got to retire eventually. Sooner rather than later if Eames has anything to do with it from his current expression. Ariadne's good at looking at the big picture. But she's getting to be as good at looking at the small details, too, and right now asking about it would be too much.

"It wasn't too bad a childhood." Arthur shrugs. It's not the response Ariadne was imagining; it's much better, but it doesn't salve the ache in her chest. "There are worse places to grow up."

Ariadne struggles to say something which isn't a mangled sound of pain. She works her mouth and says something, because her childhood was sunshine and rainbows in comparison and the conflicts with her parents suddenly taste like nothing but love, so she hasn't any real excuse but selfishness, and Ariadne hates being selfish. "And then?"

Arthur shrugs. "I was there too long. The authorities got involved and couldn't wake me up—the drugs were too strong. One of the cops knew of the Cobbs, and I met Mal for the first time when she was pretending to be Dame Eyola, making me strong enough to make the right wish to come home. So I got out of there, and readjusted. Wrote a book about it to get it out of my brain, to accept it was a dream, and then when I started to dream, Mal helped me create a forgery so we would be safe in the dreamscape. She and Dom always were on the experimental edges of dreamsharing."

Ariadne's mouth feels dry, because she remembers asking Who would want to be stuck in a dream for 10 years? and Yusuf had patiently responded, It depends on the dream.

"Wait, wait, wait, Dame Eyola, and you wrote a book-" Eames actually sits down hard on the table, making it wobble. It looks like the shock of whatever he's just eureka'd himself into has at least softened a little of his violence-to-Cobb bender. "Shitting fuck no." He looks at Arthur, wide-eyed and almost reverent.

"Shitting fuck yes," Arthur says, with a straight face that wavers a moment later and breaks out into another smile. "Fan of the book, ain'tcha?"

Eames looks appalled. "It was my favorite book at uni. Bloody fucking Arthur, you're Bastian Bux?"

Arthur hurries over, yanks the laptop out of the power lead and taps something into Google, bringing up a cover of the book The Neverending Story. Ariadne smiles at it automatically. It's identical to the copy Amelia has.

This scan of the cover includes the whole dust jacket, including a pixelated picture of the author. Ariadne thinks of the times she's seen that photo in her own copy, back in storage at her mom and dad's house, and she feels a rush of shame. How had she never realized it was Arthur? It's distinctive, the crease of his eyes, the pink curve of a rare smile, the slope of his chin. Eames moves closer and she can tell he's seen it too.

"There were always rumors on the dreamsharing grapevine that it was written by someone who had lived it in the PASIV," Eames says, shaking his head. "Christ, fuck." The color drains from his face. "The number of times you've let me dig your lack of imagination."

"On the contrary, I've appreciated it," Arthur says. "It's a comfort to know one of the best forgers in the community is taken in by it."

"So I'm a moose," Eames says, but he's shaking his head and not looking too mad.

Maybe he's just worn out. Ariadne empathises. Ariadne feels... calmer now. Because Arthur might be smiling now, and wearing clothes she's never pictured him in—loose sweatpants, functional t-shirt, his hair drying in curls at the nape of his neck—and he's not who she thought he was at all, but... He's still the same, too, in an odd way. That means there's hope, that this isn't the world shaken up forever. They had Arthur before and they will again. Ariadne can breathe.

"The cutest moose in the forest," Arthur says solemnly.

Eames wrinkles his nose. "It was easier to tell your sarcasm in the forge," he mutters, his voice sounding exactly like the time Ariadne tricked him into a discussion about Twilight and he talked for ten minutes about how to make skin sparkle in the sunlight before realising he'd spent ten minutes earnestly talking about sparkling vampires.

"Arthur was supposed to be temporary, but the dependency..." Cobb shrugs. "It's had side effects."

"To the tune of me being him almost permanently," Arthur says, shuddering a little and running a hand through his hair again, pulling his fingers back and looking at them dispiritedly. "Dom, my left brain identity is a stick-in-the-mud."

"The personality splintered down the middle of the brain," Yusuf says, like he's thinking out loud, "yes, yes I see where that might have happened."

Ariadne thinks about it. Thinking about something inconsequential is easier than thinking about the hate curling in her stomach. "So should we call you Bastian while you're here?"

Arthur actually winces. "Mal thought it would be better. She thought it would make adjusting to the forge easier if I ever had to let it go, like I have to now. But..." He looks at the computer screen blankly, and minimises the cover rather than closing it. "It's easier in Fantasia to differentiate. Mal started calling me Arthur in there, the closer I got to leaving. So Bastian is my Fantasia name, and Seb's my name. And Arthur is. well. Him."

"Using a name like a totem," Eames says. "She was a hell of a woman." He doesn't look at Cobb, but it's close enough to a 'sorry I nearly shot you', so Cobb nods stoically, taking the win.

"If Amelia's anywhere near as bad as me, we might have to use AURYN," Arthur says, twisting to look up at Cobb, a frown on his face.

"Or convince her she already has," Cobb says. "And she's forgotten some of the important things, the good things she's left behind."

"It's risky, and depends on how badly she's lost," Arthur says. "But if we use Level 1 to find her, Level 2 as Fantasia... and no sedative. We can't risk losing her in limbo. If she took Fantasia down to limbo we'd never find her."

"Agreed. AURYN will keep her safe, and in a lethal situation if we prioritise Ariadne, to keep the landscape, and Eames, who can forge into new characters as and when, then I'll take point in any dangerous situations," Cobb says.

"We should keep Falcor the luckdragon close," Ariadne suggests, excitedly. "Just in case."

"Oh my god, you're a Neverending Story geek too," Arthur says, with an exaggerated groan.

"I just can't believe we're lounging around seriously discussing Fantasia," Eames says. "I might as well just superglue my totem to the palm of my hand the number of times I keep checking it." He shakes his head a little. "So we do this job, you step through a door and we get Arthur back?"

He sounds a little unsure at the end, and all the mirth and incredulity Ariadne's been feeling settle in the base of her stomach. Or maybe it's the hamburger playing havoc again. Either way, Ariadne can feel her fingernails digging into her palms, because the answer suddenly means everything.

Arthur - or should that be Sebastian - Ariadne's having trouble knowing what to call him now.

Seb's face falls, and he looks so much like Arthur all of a sudden - downturned frown, anger in the eyes - that the answer suddenly becomes urgent on top of its importance.

Cobb shuffles and looks at Seb's face, but not into his eyes. "You'll have to become him again, Seb. The somnacin dependency-"

"Fucking hell, Dom - you've got the best chemist in the world. It's been fifteen years. Don't try and tell me there's no cure." Seb's chin juts mulishly. Arthur wouldn't be seen dead looking so stupid - it makes his face look almost ugly. Ariadne hadn't thought it possible. "If I have it my way, Arthur's gone. I won't let that personality smother me again. I won't."

Seb storms off over to the laptop, and although he pushes up the screen to continue watching his cartoon; Ariadne can tell he's not really watching it, because when it comes to an end he just lets the viewing window go blank and he doesn't click on anything else.

"It's funny he's said that," Eames says, almost conversationally.

"Hm?" Cobb says, glancing at Eames and then tensing, like he'd forgotten Eames had had a gun in his face ten minutes ago. Ariadne frowns and makes a mental note to discuss somnacin's effect on memory because seriously, if this is Cobb's brain unaffected by any external thing, then Cobb's nowhere near as decent as Ariadne had been assuming.

"Because if Arthur doesn't come back, you've just made the best enemy in the world." Eames pats Cobb on his shoulder, and storms off, slamming the warehouse door so loudly that the building shakes with it.

Ariadne doesn't know what to think at all.

She wraps her arms around herself and when she looks back, Cobb and Yusuf are steadfastly not talking about it, even though Yusuf keeps glancing at Cobb like there's something he wants to say. She wonders what Eames is thinking, because he's always thinking something. She can't wrap her head around the idea of what's happened to Arthur on her own, or Seb, or the fact that Seb's just dropped the concept of Arthur never coming back into all of their heads.

I don't want to die is what Arthur had said before walking through the door, and Ariadne had been so relieved to see him alive, but it wasn't physical death he meant at all. It was the death of his personality, and wasn't that just as much dying as being shot?

She needs air. She needs Eames. The universe is nice for once when she stumbles out of the warehouse and finds Eames leaning against the outer wall, smoking.

Ariadne thinks about going back inside for her coat. It's chilly out here. But stepping through that door had been bad enough once - she'd had the fleeting thought that maybe Arthur was still somehow in that threshold and she could catch him and stuff him back in his body. Her flights of fancy weren't diminishing with PASIV use. Maybe being able to have pure creation is like a drug that just keeps unlocking more and more, with no limits.

Eames doesn't smoke much, only when he's stressed, and Ariadne doesn't blame him. She almost wants to bum a cigarette from him, but it's a habit she doesn't want to pick up. The somnacin is one addictive habit too far.

She's angry, and confused, but she can feel the bristling energy just rolling off Eames. Going into the conversation angry will only feed into his anger, and they'll bounce off each other exponentially.

To keep the conversation vaguely rational, Ariadne's going to need to go in gently.

"I'm right in thinking this is odd and not a normal day at the dreamsharing office, right?"

It's usually a good angle, abusing her rookie status as an excuse to probe. It's a flimsy replacement for the real question ("How are you?"), couched in terms that are less likely to bring up Eames' automatic defences, but it's the best one Ariadne's got. She hasn't got long left to use the newbie angle, so she's glad she can get some use out of it still.

"It's like high school all over again, love." Eames exhales a cloud of smoke up into the air, clouding his face a little. When the smoke clears, his eyes are hooded, and his face is blank. It's like he's taking what he has left of Arthur and holding it in his own face. Forging a little of the Arthur they know to keep him safe.

"High school was irritating and confusing," Ariadne says. "It rarely blurred the philosophical line of life and death for me."

Eames grins; Ariadne's eyes briefly trace the uneven mountain range of his lower teeth. There's glee in his grin, but no warmth. Death mask, she thinks, involuntarily. He doesn't look down at her, but Ariadne's not expecting him to. She doesn't know where she would look if he did. "The American education system has its flaws compared to its superior British cousin."

"I forgot Britain was still in the Dark Ages and supported gladiatorial fights to the death," Ariadne says, mirroring his pose against the wall and looking out into the same skyline. "I'll make sure not to repeat my mistake."

Eames makes a small sound of amusement. Normally he'd grace her deadpan style of humor with a guffaw. His genuine amusement would be a delight to hear, but this isn't that sound. It's a million miles away from that sound and Ariadne knows exactly how it feels to only be able to manage a quarter of the positive emotion you want to feel.

She doesn't want to feel anything positive. Arthur isn't real. Ariadne's not entirely sure she'll ever feel anything positive again.

"My dad," Eames says, after an unexpectedly short pause. "When I was in comprehensive school - that's British for high school, darling."

"I'm American," Ariadne says, mock-haughtily. "Not a Philistine."

"You don't have the right coloring," Eames informs her. He's still not looking at her. This is probably one of his stories that's less fabrication than usual. Ariadne's getting better at noticing. Eames is a born storyteller, but that often means he embellishes the details. When he's telling a really rampant lie, he's all body and eye contact. He takes you by the elbows and looks deeply into your eyes and is so very, very earnest. But the times when he's telling stories where maybe, even if just for a minute, Eames actually got hurt - those are the times he can't make eye contact at all. Even like now, when he's joking with her.

"So what happened when you were a sophomore at your comprehensive school?" Ariadne asks, tongue firmly in cheek.

Eames does flash her a look at that. She catches a glimpse of raised eyebrows, a semi-quirk of a genuine smile, and she looks away so as to not make him be the one to move first.

"When I was a Sixth Former," Eames says, "my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's."

Ariadne tries to swallow her rapid exhale of breath, because she knows Eames doesn't appreciate anyone making a deal of anything that hurts him. He spares her a brief, thankful glance. "I'm-" she starts.

"If the next work in your sentence is sorry, I'm not beyond getting Cobb to swap you for a younger, prettier model. You're 24 now, Ariadne, don't you hear the biological clock ticking?"

Ariadne kicks him in the shins on the principle of it. She doesn't hold back. Eames winces and screws up his eyebrows, before shaking his head a little and extinguishing his cigarette against the wall. He toys with the butt for a while, smearing ash across his fingers.

"My childhood was better than being in a dreamden," Eames says, "Wasn't yours?"

"Absolutely," Ariadne says, reverently. "That's one of the things I can't wrap my head around."

"Along with the crazy Fantasia layout."

"Obviously."

"I guess... this is just like coming home from school. And seeing this man with my father's face, with no idea what he's ever done." Eames shakes himself a little. "A man who knew my name and nothing else. And I think-"

"What?"

Eames does look down at her then. His expression is still blank, unreadable. Ariadne tilts her face up to look at him, because she has to. Because her attention is the only thing she can offer. It feels like if she stretches out her fingers to try and touch him, he might melt between her fingers. "You don't want to listen to an old man ramble."

Ariadne rolls her eyes, making a show and dance of it. "I listen to Cobb," she says, because Eames doesn't listen to straight protests. Eames responds to between-the-lines better than on-the-nose.

"Touché."

"I try."

"Well. It's that philosophical line of life and death, isn't it?" Eames' mouth presses into a line. Pure Arthur. "What are you supposed to prefer - the monster that loves you, or a stranger who doesn't hurt you but doesn't even know you to like you?"

"I don't think there's any supposing about it," Ariadne says, slowly, but she feels dizzy. She feel