A/N: A shout out to everyone who reviewed/faved my other Inception fanfic, "Wednesday": you are all awesome and I cannot thank you enough, but here's me trying. Not quite sure how to describe this, other than a conceptual patchwork; bits and pieces of their relationship stitched together with fluff, humour, angst and drama. There's a bit of everything in here; hope you like it.

Summary: Straight-line mazes are the easiest to figure out; circular mazes are much more difficult. But when it comes to her, he relishes the challenge. He was never the type to just settle for the easier path anyway. Arthur/Ariadne

Disclaimer: Inception and characters are the property of Christopher Nolan. We mere mortals can only dream and write fanfiction.

Unravel

Straight-line mazes are the easiest to figure out. The brain can find its way around angular edges because right angles are a human construct, their jutting harshness an inelegant fabrication, an unnatural contortion that the mind intuitively rebels against.

Nature paints in graceful arcs, in hyperbolas and parabolas and ellipses. It's why circular mazes are much more difficult; there are no hard defining corners, only an endlessness that bends and coils like an optical illusion that makes you go cross-eyed and dizzy if you stare at it for too long, reflecting the human mind's curves in on itself until the once-reassuring familiarity is warped beyond recognition. It's easier to find your way out of someone else's mind than your own.

Ariadne is definitely a circular maze, Arthur thinks. But when it comes to her, he relishes the challenge. He was never the type to just settle for the easier path anyway.

―

Eames, with his innate habit for observing the subtleties and nuances of people's mannerisms (useful as a forger, just plain annoying in everyday life) is the first to notice. The way the point man's eyes follow the architect across the room, the way his gaze seems to linger on her a moment longer than is absolutely necessary, the way he always manages to find some reason to talk to her purely out of pleasantry rather than out of a need to actually discuss anything with her. She, too, responds in kind, smiling a little more when she's with him than with the others, gripping the edge of her desk a little tighter when he stands behind her to look over her work, pulling her chair over to sit a little closer to him when they're dreaming.

"Well, well, well. Enjoying the view, are we?" Eames, voice dripping with condescension, has a tendency to show up unbidden whenever he observes this, the way he always does: never around when needed, but somehow present to slip in a snide remark at the most inconvenient of moments.

Arthur doesn't bother with a comeback, even though the forger is currently leading in their verbal duel and this line of questioning will give him enough ammunition for weeks. It's not because he can't think of anything to say, because he can: I have no idea what you're talking about, or maybe yes, I do happen to like looking out of the window, thank you very much, but what I would enjoy even more is the sight of you being thrown out of that window. It's right on the tip of his tongue but for once he doesn't bother rising to the taunt; his attention isn't really on Eames anyway.

―

Ariadne falls asleep at her desk sometimes, after pulling an all-nighter to finish off a set of blueprints or a cardboard scale model. Arthur tries to dissuade her from staying up in the first place, but she won't have any of it, waving him off whilst muttering something unintelligible under her breath, something about the muse being upon her. She pretends not to hear the inferred I'm worried about you in his voice, writing it off as a figment of her fatigued imagination or wishful thinking, a fanciful interpretation of his words. Or both, since they're the same thing, really.

So when she does pass out from exhaustion, sprawled over piles of her own work, he takes it upon himself to make sure she manages to get some decent rest before one of the others tries to wake her up. They all stopped dreaming long ago – him, Cobb, Eames, Yusuf – and it seems unfair to have to take that away from her so soon.

There are scraps of paper strewn chaotically over her desk, crude sketches jotted down in a flash of inspiration, all watermarked with cold coffee stains from where she's used her cup as a paperweight. Her handwriting is nearly illegible, but the clarity of her architectural vision is astounding, with places that could never exist in real life set down on paper with fluid, confident strokes, and he always pauses a moment to admire those drawings before picking up her cardigan – her vermilion red cardigan with the thread already starting to unravel at the fraying hems – and draping it across her shoulders. Then he gently pats her hand, giving her fingers a comforting squeeze.

It's his way of telling her what he doesn't yet have the words for.

―

His is the first name on her lips when she wakes up.

"Arthur?" Her voice is gentle, unlike Cobb's matter-of-fact enunciation or Eames's sarcastic, patronising drawl. There's a slight lilt in the way Ariadne says his name, slightly muffled with sleep, slightly hesitant, a hidden question. He hasn't quite figured out what that question is supposed to be, so he doesn't know what answer she's expecting.

"Hey," he says.

She sits bolt upright. "I fell asleep, didn't I? Why didn't you wake me up?"

There are streaks of charcoal and graphite smeared across her cheek from where she's slept with her face pressed against paper. She doesn't notice this, so he inadvertently reaches up and wipes the grey marks off, his thumb softly tracing circles across her skin. Now she does notice and immediately tenses under his touch.

He hastily drops his hand. "Sorry, you've got pencil marks there," he offers by way of explanation, realising that he could easily have pointed it out to her and she could have wiped it off herself. Except now, thanks to him, it's smudged even more so that it looks like she's sporting an asymmetrical moustache drawn clumsily in a child's unsteady hand. "Sorry," he says again, unable to resist a grin.

She grabs a tissue and cleans off the rest, using the reflective surface of her phone as a makeshift mirror. Her cheeks are flushed pink but it doesn't disguise her only half-embarrassed smile. "Don't be."

―

What Eames doesn't notice straightaway, probably because he's too busy tallying up the latest score (Devilishly Handsome Forger: 17, Sanctimonious Stick-in-the-Mud: 2), is how the interaction between his two teammates slowly changes.

What Eames doesn't notice, probably because he and Yusuf are otherwise engaged in clandestine betting ("ten euro says Arthur makes the first move"/"twenty on Ariadne"), is how the looks exchanged between the point man and the architect evolve until they're no longer surreptitious glimpses hazarded shyly from halfway across the room, but meaningful moments of mutual eye contact accompanied by secretive, knowing smiles.

And what Eames doesn't notice, since this only happens after he leaves, is how one night Arthur and Ariadne stay on a little while longer alone in the workshop, stealing much more than just hidden glances and chaste kisses this time.

―

Arthur plays chess because it helps him think, helps him focus. He doesn't just crave the adrenaline rush that winning provides, although the satisfaction of trumping the competition (especially Eames, who is laughably pathetic) is never unwelcome. Mainly, though, it serves as a necessary diversion, an abstraction that transcends both the real world and the realm of the dream, an occupation to take his mind off the faceless corporations that hire him and the faceless projections that ruthlessly hunt him down.

But it's different for Ariadne. She plays chess for the same reason she does everything else: because it's an act of creation. Composing variations on a sixty-four-square grid, tempting the opponent with an opening here or a sacrificed pawn there, luring them into a dead end and waiting for the pieces to fall slowly into place for checkmate. For her, it's like designing a maze; the blueprints are laid out beforehand, each detail meticulously planned to ensnare a weaker adversary, one who is unable to see beyond the path directly ahead of them and thus unable to find the way out. Like designing a maze, except you have to seal the exits as you go.

He often wonders why she chose the bishop. When he asks, she shrugs and says it's her favourite. He personally would have gone for a rook or queen but he supposes there's some apposite symbolism in the fact that she prefers a piece that plays in powerful sweeping diagonals across a rigid frame of squares. Always bending the world to her will, always moving in unexpected ways.

―

They have arguments sometimes that drag on for days at a stretch, when they can't even bear to be in the same room together and they're both too stubborn to be the first to back off. Mostly they bicker about trivial matters – his total incompetence at cooking or her inability to sew a button on straight – but occasionally there are important issues too, usually when one of them gets seriously hurt. Even Yusuf picks up on the unmistakable tension in the workshop on those days.

But then there'll be a turning point, a point when they forget about what initiated the argument in the first place, and then there'll be a truce, a gesture of reconciliation. He'll bake her a lopsided cake with an apology written on top in loopy icing letters and they'll spend hours laughing and cleaning up the flour and egg-splattered mess in her kitchen and then hours afterwards making up.

Or they'll be walking in the rain on a day when they've both forgotten to arm themselves with an umbrella against the unpredictable Parisian weather (normally they're prepared but they were too angry that morning to think straight) so he takes off his jacket and wraps it around her petite, shivering body. It doesn't help since they're already soaked to the skin and his best suit is ruined beyond saving, but then he'll say something along the lines of how he can always get a new Ermenegildo Zegna three-piece but he doesn't want a replacement girlfriend. It's unbelievably cheesy and yet – coming from Arthur – somehow also incredibly heartfelt, so Ariadne, hardly the sentimental type, hugs him right then and there in the middle of the street whilst passing cars honk and slosh rainwater at them, but it doesn't matter; once they're back home, drenched or not, they'll have no more need for clothes anyway.

The next day, they're barely able to keep their eyes and hands off each other and it takes a particularly acerbic comment on Eames's part ("Bloody hell, what is this, a new game we're playing? Would either of you care to teach me? Preferably Ariadne, but I don't discriminate") to separate them with a guilty look. Arthur, never one for euphemisms, responds by telling the Englishman in no uncertain terms to shove off and do something anatomically impossible to himself, but it doesn't wipe the uncharacteristically ridiculous smiles from their faces and they continue grinning inanely at one another for the whole of the rest of the afternoon.

Working together when they're in the middle of one of their fights or right after they've made up is never easy, and Arthur, for all his stoic professionalism, has his breaking point. Then again, though, he's not the type to opt for the easy way out. Theirs is no ordinary relationship and the alternative, quitting the job altogether, is too unthinkable so neither of them ever mentions that possibility; the unspoken accord is that dreaming is too much a part of their lives, too much a part of their lives together, for them to leave unscathed now.

They simply try not to notice how, with each passing day, their subconscious projections start looking unmistakably more and more like each other.

―

They play chess in, of all places, a restaurant. It's one of her favourite eateries, a tiny bistro squeezed in between a newsagent's and a grocery store, the kind of homely place straight out of an old film, with tables nestled snugly along brick walls and wavering candlelight flickering liquid gold against the vivid red-and-white chequered tablecloths. They're waiting for their orders to arrive and he notices that she starts fidgeting with her totem, toying with the bronze figurine as if she doesn't know what else to do with her hands, absentmindedly drawing diagonals across the patterned squares as if she were moving the bishop around on a real chessboard.

"Challenge you to a game," he says.

She looks up in surprise. "What, now?"

"Sure, why not?"

"Arthur, we're in a restaurant." She stares at him incredulously. "We don't have a chess set."

"No, but I thought we could make one."

She raises a sceptical eyebrow.

"Look," he explains, "we've already got a chessboard" – the chequered tablecloth is indeed a perfect eight by eight – "so all we need is a little improvisation…" He looks around and is suddenly struck by an idea. Rushing to each of the empty tables, he gathers up as many condiment containers as he can find, which he then brings back to her. "…Voilà."

He hands her salt shakers to use as pawns, keeping the pepper shakers for himself as they divide up the other items between them. She places her bronze piece in its proper position on the grid and he takes out his own totem to use as king, flanked by a ketchup bottle and a vial of vinegar to complete the miniature army.

"Improvisation," she agrees, impressed.

They play in amiable silence; he rolls up his sleeves and loosens his tie and she tugs pensively at her scarf, both making their moves with the cautious yet poised, calculated assuredness that comes only with years of experience. Piece after piece is captured until at last Ariadne seizes an opening, a rare breach in Arthur's usually solid defence, and triumphantly slides her totem into place, the bishop and an olive-oil-bottle knight cornering the exposed red die.

"Checkmate," she says quietly.

He knocks over all the remaining chess pieces as he leans across the table to kiss her, bringing his hand up to cup her cheek and intertwining his fingers into her hair to deepen the kiss. Around them, bottles shatter with the discordant clank of glass on wood and the air is swathed in a salty, peppery maelstrom, although of course they don't notice any of it. When they break apart for air, he runs his fingers through her dark tresses, shaking leftover salt and pepper out of the chocolate-brown locks as she laughs and leans forward again.

But as he kisses her once more, he notices the way her fingers still firmly clench her totem and out of his peripheral vision he glimpses a flash of metal as it hits the table. It leaves a bittersweet taste in his mouth, honey laced with toxin, swallowed with poison, and he knows that from now on, there is also a hidden question in his own eyes – one that he's not sure he wants to know the answer to.

―

One of the perks of the extraction business is its international nature and so they pass most of their time on planes and trains, motion-blurred hours spent trawling from one continent to another or hopping between major European cities. Their anniversaries are never spent in the same place; their one-month date was in Paris and their sixth-month in Barcelona, their first anniversary was spent in Prague and the following in London. He doesn't mind the travelling, she gets to appreciate the architecture, and truth be told the reminiscence of Cobb's anniversary-suite nightmare surfaces much too regularly for their liking that ultimately they're rather thankful they don't have a fixed palace of memories like that.

On the evening of their third anniversary, however, he senses that the change is in her. It's clear from the moment she takes his arm and he escorts her to their reserved table in the restaurant that something is bothering her. He's noticed it for weeks, silently observed her uncharacteristically distracted demeanour at work, observed the shadow of doubt eclipsing her eyes before her soft chestnut lashes fan down across her cheeks, observed how she pulls too quickly away from his kisses.

Still, he waits until afterwards, when they've retreated back into their own private space, before he brings the subject up.

"What's wrong?" he says gently, pleading more with his eyes, more with the tender yet hesitant brush of his lips along her jaw, than with words.

So, finally, she tells him. She tells him how she's afraid that Cobb and Mal's footprints are sunk so deep into the fabric of the dreamscape that they're pulling in everyone else whose lives are woven in together with the doomed couple's, pulling them all in like quicksand. She tells him how she's afraid of loving him too much, afraid that they too are fated to replay the same farcical display, locked in an endless cycle of tragic re-enactments. And she tells him how she's afraid that, in building her own maze, she's sealed off the most important path of all and left herself no way out.

The confession drags his heart through the pit of his stomach, confirming the dread that had seeded itself in his subconscious since the beginning. But they've come too far to go back now; he's peeled away the manifold layers of her façade so that he's left staring at the dark beauty of her bare soul, and this far down, this deep within the unravelled labyrinth of her mind, there's only one thing that he can think of to say, only one thing that sounds right anymore amidst this twisted perversity of pain and fear: "I'll hold your hand."

―

There's something oddly soothing about the steady, rhythmic tapping of heavy raindrops on the floor of the rooftop they're standing on. He can't remember how he got there, but she's with him, and the city is spread out literally below their feet. Despite the downpour that shrouds everything in a gauzy curtain, despite the mist obscuring everything but the faintest outlines from view, he knows instantly it's not a place that he recognises, not a place he's ever been, at least not in real life. Identical, nondescript skyscrapers soaring up from the slate-grey soil of a generic concrete jungle, a complex yet formulaic crisscrossing lattice of road networks, rows of streetlamps winking like strings of fairy-lights across his rain-hazed vision… this indistinct cityscape could be anywhere. Right now, though, it's nowhere.

It's impossible to ignore the irony of the situation because he remembers, they both remember, exactly how Mal died. But Arthur tries to put that thought out of his mind as he inches closer to the edge, Ariadne's hand held tightly in his. She steps up first onto the short ledge that runs all the way around the rooftop, treading carefully so as not to slip on the slick wet surface, and tugs at his hand for him to follow. Her fingers feel clammy, slightly damp in his grasp, and he's pretty sure it's not due to the sluice of icy rainwater trickling down their linked arms. Beside him, she looks small and afraid; a kite ensnared by the strings of her own dreams, a prisoner lost and trapped and entangled in her own labyrinth.

"Will we survive?" she whispers, the wind all but snatching her voice away. He realises that she's not just asking about the fall.

"Depends." He can faintly hear the noise of traffic drifting up from the busy street down below – far below, tens of storeys below. From here, the distant rushing sound of water flowing through drainpipes and the drunken sloshing of puddles on tarmac both have their own strangely sedative appeal. Falling could almost be easy, he thinks; too easy. Then again, so would sleeping and he's never been the type to simply settle for the easier path.

"Ariadne…" He closes his eyes. "How much do you trust me?"

―

His is the first name on her lips when she wakes up, doubled over and clutching her stomach, suppressing the urge to scream.

"Arthur?" Her voice falters, breath coming out in ragged gasps; her eyes are wide with fear and dart frantically from side to side as she blinks rapidly, pupils contracting to compensate for the sudden burst of light that assaults her eyes.

He's already at her side, already pulling the intravenous tube out from her trembling wrist. He gently rubs over the tiny puncture marks that have become a semi-permanent tattoo etched onto her skin, feeling her pulse beating erratically under the pressure of his thumb. "Hey, it's alright," he says, the familiar words rolling off his tongue out of pure habit, but he always means it with her and even more so today. "I'm here, you're OK. Look at me, Ariadne. Please."

She gulps and takes a deep breath to steady herself and nods, her eyes meeting his. "Arthur." She repeats his name, slower, as a statement this time. Yet there is still an unanswered question implied and he responds by taking out his own totem while she too fumbles in her pocket for the familiar weight kept there. She draws it out with shaking fingers and they watch as the die and the chess piece are balanced in midair for a long second, breathing simultaneous sighs of relief when they finally tip over.

He reaches for her but she finds him first; this time, there's no trace of doubt in her eyes and he sees only sincerity in their warm depths before they close. Her lips crash down on his and she doesn't pull away this time but allows herself to fall completely into him, urgently, desperately, passionately.

"We survived," he says when they break apart a few minutes later, his hands still gently tracing circles on her cheeks. He's not just talking about the fall. "We will survive, no matter how many times it takes."

She smiles then and takes his hands in hers, leaving her fingers tightly threaded with his in an undoable knot, returning the comforting squeeze that he gives her with one of her own. Because they both know that the reassuring grasp of a hand pulling you back to reality is a better way to wake up than the abrupt jolt of a kick, and falling is easier when someone's there to catch you on the other side. A simple gesture and yet to him it speaks volumes; no more unanswered questions, only answers right now, and this is answer enough for him.

It's her way of telling him what they don't need words for.

A/N: Thanks for stopping by. Please leave a review if you're in the mood; feedback is always welcome. Also, be sure to check out my other Inception fanfics, "Ithaca", "Wednesday" and the multichapter "Marriage Proposals for Dummies"! Cheers.