Disclaimer: I do not own Inception.

a/n: I, uhm...I'm so sorry. I was having too much fun for it to be legal, and I couldn't stop. It was like playing DDR. You're about to pass out, but you're so fascinated by the obnoxious music and the arrows spelling out your doom on the screen while you pound uselessly at a dance mat, and there's just so much joy inside you every time you step on the right arrow at the right second that stopping is an impossibility. Or, for a slightly less unusual metaphor, it was like doing heroin. Which I haven't done. Awesome.

Ariadne always found scenarios that ended—or…middled?—with her being intoxicated oddly fascinating, and this one was no exception.

In her vague, very fuzzy moments of lucidity, she made mental notes to remember tomorrow morning that she was in a bar, for some reason, and that Arthur was there with her, and that they were talking in poorly-accented, slurring French.

She wasn't sure, but she thought the conversation had something to do with snack foods and high school Biology.

Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point was the bizarreness of this situation, and the fact that Arthur's hair was messed up, because that was kind of fun and spontaneous or something. Though spontaneity doesn't really work as an explanation or justification for something when the truth of the matter is that Ariadne was the one who messed his hair up, and they'd been having an earlier conversation about why he never let his hair be messed up. There was something about an ex-girlfriend and a whole pile of high school drama that he really, really did not want to talk about or think about in there, though she had no clue what it had to do with anything the whole time, but whatever.

"No, no, you know what? You know what you're like?" She leaned forward, propping her elbow on the bar emphatically—and kind of painfully—and pointing at him, slurring now in English, his softer-than-usual eyes focused not-so-intently on hers, because dude, he was drucking funk, or funking druck, or fu—no, no, not the point. "You're like cat paws, man."

That threw Arthur for a curve. A long, very slow-to-react curve, considering the deepening layers of inebriation through which he was attempting to function.

"…what?"

"Cat paws. C'mon, Arthur, it makes a frocking stellar amount of sense. Think about it. Use your brainpan, point man," she said, grinning messily as she dropped her glass equally messily on the counter. The bartender glared at her, but she wasn't paying enough attention to notice or care. It wasn't like the glass had shattered or anything.

"I'm not…no, 'riadne, I'm really not gettin' anything. Are you insinueati—insinuarin—insinu—trying to say that I'm fuzzy or something?"

"Nnnwell, sure, okay, maybe, I dunno. Are you fuzzy?"

She reached out an unsteady hand to pat his cheek, decided that he was just kind of soft-skinned in the way that pretty men tended to be, and went on with her drunk-ass self.

"What I meant was that, like, you know how soft cat paws are when the cat's had its…pointy things—claws taken out? They're all soft an' fluffy and stuff, yeah? And when they walk, you can't hear them and stuff?"

"Cat paws." He looked stuck somewhere between amused and hopelessly befuddled.

"Cat paws."

Of course, her own logic ceased to make sense to her about ten seconds after the fact, mostly because the lull in the conversation allowed them both enough time to realize that they'd been making consistent, unbroken eye contact for far too long to still be in a state of not-making-out.

At least the procession into kissing was without fumbling—both of them were still coordinated enough to find the other's mouth, and they even managed not to poke out each other's eyes when they did the whole "Oh, this is so fun, I'm going to wrap my arms around you and/or caress your face passionately now" thing.

Consequently, they stopped drinking, choosing instead to devote their very important attention to one another. There was a lot of vague stuttering between kisses, and eventually Ariadne managed to articulate that retiring to her apartment—which happened to be the nearer of the two—was a good idea.

Of course, Arthur was very, very drunk, so…nothing happened when they got there. At least nothing that anyone wants to know about. Really, they just cuddled muzzily, floating in very similar states of not caring about their half-nakedness. Arthur had lost his pants and his left sock and shoe somewhere, and Ariadne's scarf, shirt, and bra were M.I.A.

Still, she was fascinated as she drifted off, at how the world spun when it wanted to do.

Just before she slipped into sleep, inhaling lungfuls of Arthur's cologne, her face pressed into his neck, she made an analogy that would haunt her the following morning as she tried to figure out what the Hell her subconscious was talking about:

Arthur was to cats as feet were to paws. Or something like that.