Author's Notes: Still haven't seen the movie, but still fascinated by these two characters and the sort of love story they could have. I'm bored and recovering after surgery, so this is just a taste of what's to come, and I promise I will reply to all your reviews for skyscraper as soon as I am able. I wrote this the other day and I just remembered it and wanted to put it up. I promise, as soon as I get better, I will work on this...thanks again for all the feedback!
disclaimer - Ariadne and Arthur don't belong to me, they belong to Christopher Nolan.
William Earnest Henley's Invictus makes a brief cameo in the summary, and the beautiful poem belongs to him. I don't take credit for his words or his genius. :)
Plot Summary: Ariadne doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know how to draw blueprints anymore, or how to work the elevator in her apartment or how to drive a car. She doesn't know who the man is either, the man at the cafe, but she has a feeling that she's known him before.
Labyrinth
by Harlequin Sequins
Chapter One: Prologue.
She had blueprints, a sort of map that choreographed the many twists and turns the path of her day was going to take. They were always there, in the fabric of her brain, and so she never needed to worry about getting lost. Only in the labyrinth of sleep, in her dreams, did she have to worry about that.
There was no need for surprises, at least not yet, and she craved normalcy in that strange way that a man would crave freedom after spending a lifetime in prison. It was as if she knew what had happened to her, in the fuzzy part of her brain that felt like, at one time, it had stopped working and had rebooted, wiped out all memory of who she was, what she did for a living, what kind of things she liked to do other than wander the city streets, fascinated by the metal giants that surrounded her.
All she could remember was that she liked structure. She liked order and reason and did not forget those, unlike everything else which had fallen prey to the void.
She desired a schedule like everyone else in the world, something to follow the shadow of time by and outline its course along the morning sky. It was somewhat neurotic, wanting to control every aspect of the day at hand, but the doctor who had seen her, right after she'd woken up in a cold, white room with monitors blinking and beeping like traffic lights around her, said this would be normal.
He called it a phase of transition. What she was transitioning into, he had left that up to her. Some things couldn't be explained and a loss of memory without any sign of concussion, not even a blow to the head, was something that left doctors both baffled and frustrated. And seeing as she was okay, by their standards, they let her go, free as a bird, but only as free as the cage of ignorance allowed her to be.
Before long, she found pieces of herself again. Hours and hours of being fascinated by buildings left her small hints, like breadcrumbs, to follow back to school, where perhaps she could relearn everything she might have already known, but had forgotten.
She had no money to her name, nothing to pay for her education, but a trip to the café down the street, which was always a part of her daily routine, earned her a steady apron job. Life was becoming something like reality again, no longer a dream in which she stood alone, knowing nothing about herself, the world around her…not even her past.
But the dreams still haunted her. Dreams that would tear her out of the seams of sleep but leave her empty as a ghost the moment she woke.
In the dreams, there was a face. Someone familiar, but she couldn't remember. The man at the café, who stole into her dreams, into the afternoon, golden-lit pages of her life, and was gone without another word. Without an explanation as to why she missed him when he was gone.