A/N: Written for la_sikka's prompt at inception_kink on LJ, with apologies to Homer for seriously messing around with the story. Also, I know I went way overboard with the Greek mythology references (unsubtle symbolism is definitely unsubtle) but this is what happens when you leave me alone at two in the morning with a prompt like this. Hope it's acceptable…?
Summary: He is her Odysseus and she is the fixed point in the world that he returns to. Arthur/Ariadne
Disclaimer: I do not own Inception or the characters. Or the Odyssey for that matter.
Ithaca
His parents named him Arthur, but there are times when he thinks he should have been Odysseus instead. Reading the Greek classics as a boy, Arthur hadn't cared much for the exploits of the near-invincible Achilles or headstrong Ajax or honourable Hector, but Odysseus… Odysseus was a survivor, strength and cunning personified, worthy of his own Homeric epic.
A point man's line of work (aim, fire, lock, load, repeat; perfection not optional) doesn't exactly lend itself to spare moments for soul-searching introspection, but there is always that one moment during every job when Arthur is reminded of his own vulnerability. An instant when his life – in the dream, at least – is on the line and he stares death full in the face before his reflexes spur instinctively into action and he grapples one projection into an immobilising arm lock and smashes the man headfirst into another approaching security guard.
Over the years, he has battled more than his fair share of metaphorical Cyclopses and survived allegorical shipwrecks more times than he cares to keep track of. The thrill of extraction is just as intoxicating and destructive as any honeyed Siren song, and dreaming is a mistress no less mesmerising, no less beguiling than the enchantress Circe herself. But the worst of all of Odysseus' sufferings was caused by the sea-nymph Calypso, whom the hero could not thwart with either strength or cunning, because she didn't try to take his life; she tried to claim his heart instead.
Arthur had never given much thought to this triviality, but the Fates have a strange way of twisting the strings of destiny and so this is the very thought that crosses his mind on the day that he commits his one fatal mistake. It is the very thought that crosses his mind seconds before a stray bullet finds its mark right between his eyes. It is the thought that crosses his mind as the world dissolves to blinding white all around him and he finds himself trapped in his own personal version of Calypso's Ogygia:
Limbo.
―
She was born Ariadne, but she is really Daedalus and Ariadne both, the creator and the solver of labyrinths, the architect and the guide.
Arthur is more an Odysseus than a Theseus, this much she's figured out after three years. Wandering is in his nature, yet he is not without aim and somehow his travels lead him back to her front door every single time, unannounced but never unwelcome. There's no red thread tying them together, but the thought that he's there to be with her rather than because he doesn't have anywhere else to stay keeps her hopeful above all else.
During the periods of his absence, however, Ariadne is more of a Penelope than her namesake suggests. She thinks of the ever-patient Ithacan queen and of how she spun her web of deception, swearing to remarry only when she had finished weaving a mourning shroud for her father-in-law Laertes. While she toiled at her loom by day, she secretly unpicked all the threads apart again at night so that it could never be completed.
Ariadne also waits, but she does not pine and she will never be idle. Instead, she studies by day, painstakingly drawing up blueprints for real buildings with Professor Miles to guide her hand and the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright to play her muses. And like Penelope, she awakens at night and she unravels her own creations, unlearning the rules set down by physics. Under the cloak of darkness, she delves once more into that other world where she deliberately flies too close to the sun, praying each time that her pasted wings will stay on because it's the only way she can be near true inspiration anymore.
The scars on her wrists and the dark half-moons under her eyes don't go unnoticed, but she does nothing to cover them up, choosing to wear them defiantly as a proud shield of denial.
―
He spends seven years in Limbo, staring at the sea.
The beach evokes inevitable thoughts of Odysseus: Odysseus who refused Calypso's proposal of immortality, and who was held captive for seven years on her magical island of Ogygia, gazing across the waves every day with a heavy heart, trailing his hands through the tides that once caressed the distant shores of Ithaca. But Limbo is more seductive than Calypso's promises, and it would be so easy to drown here in the ocean of his subconscious and let the waters of Lethe – the river of forgetfulness – wash it all away. An eternal analgesic, immortality exchanged for the price of oblivion.
Time is no healer, he realises after a while; it's the source of the illness, an incurable amnesia of the soul. Everything blurs, hours and days bleeding into each other, fading into months then years until eventually the passage of time loses meaning altogether. There are no calendars, and all the clocks point to forever in this halfway land where pendulums do not sway. There were once yesterdays and todays and tomorrows but now they're one and the same; today will soon be yesterday, as will tomorrow another day after that. Just because Limbo has a name doesn't mean it actually occupies any definitive place in space or time; it's all in the mind, a nowhere and a nowhen, an endless blurring of yesterdays.
In another life, he was called Arthur, but such soubriquets are meaningless where there are no people to speak it. He builds himself a crude shelter (not a home), all straight planes and stark lines, but he avoids projections, because that would be too much like talking to himself and he refuses to let what little sanity he has left simply trickle away.
So he holds on (because giving in would mean giving up), clinging desperately to the memories because they are all that he has left. Yet even they evaporate quickly, like the tiny beads of condensation that hang briefly in the air when he exhales. It's almost as if his very psyche is escaping with every butterfly sigh that detaches itself like a reluctant kiss from his lips, except that he can't do anything to steal them back. Half-forgotten memories and half-remembered dreams echo like whispers in the dark, and in his most lucid moments he can faintly hear something about dice and bishops and spinning-tops and trains, a vague truth he only dimly recalls yet never quite forgets. The truth that somewhere, somewhen, far from here, there's still a Penelope waiting for him.
He spends exactly seven years, two months and twenty-five days in Limbo before the extractor he was working with finally shows up, carrying a 9mm semi-automatic pistol that has two rounds left in it. On his 2643rd day as a hostage of his own mind, he is finally released and the kick is less painful than he anticipates because even as he's falling, winged Hermes is pulling him back up to reality. Seven years, two months and twenty-five days, and Calypso finally sets Odysseus free.
―
He buys a copy of the Odyssey at the airport, leafing through the printed pages with a newfound fascination, relearning the crisp, flimsy texture of paper and the million other minutiae that his subconscious mind couldn't recreate accurately. The passages are all familiar to him even though it's the first time he's read it in years (he doesn't forget to add the seven spent in Limbo) and he lingers a little while longer on his favourite stanzas.
Unsurprisingly, it's the reunion scene that captures his attention the most: the part where Penelope orders the servants to bring forth the marriage bed as a final test and Odysseus immediately demands to know who moved the bed since he carved its corner-post from the trunk of a living olive tree and built their nuptial chamber around it. It's at that moment that Penelope realises beyond all doubt that her husband has returned at last because he was the only other person in the world who knew about the olive tree.
A secret is a shared totem of trust, he notes, and he can't resist casting the die for the third time in as many minutes. He rereads the same lines over and over until the tiny black letters grow hazy and start to smudge across the paper, but he doesn't dare fall asleep – not before he sees (sees, hears, feels) Ariadne again. He doesn't trust himself as much as he would like to anymore and he can't, won't, risk losing, not now that he's this close. He will not be Orpheus, he tells himself, because she is not Eurydice.
It's already past midnight when the plane touches down at Charles de Gaulle, past one o'clock when he makes it back to the apartment at last. He lets himself in with the key he's kept next to the totem in his pocket these past few months (years), and is surprised to find Ariadne still awake. She's hunched over her cluttered desk, poring over a model for a dream maze, and in the yellow glow of the lamp, with her tousled hair tumbling in loose mahogany waves over stress-tensed shoulders, she is more beautiful than he remembers.
"Ariadne—"
The rest of his sentence gets cut off when she throws herself at him and knocks the breath from his lungs.
"Arthur," she murmurs into the fabric of his suit. Her voice is muffled by wool, but it's been a lifetime since he's heard the sound of her voice and the way the two syllables of his name slide like quicksilver from her tongue. To him, it feels like she's giving his name back to him, rechristening him into this world again.
"You waited," he manages in a hoarse whisper, still feeling lethargic from years of silence. But it is emotion, not eloquence, that matters now.
"Of course," she murmurs softly, a little confused at his seemingly odd choice of words. Seven years in Limbo is all of a few hours in reality and even with the time for the job he's only been away for a month at most – she doesn't know this yet, though, so for what it's worth he takes the sentiment at face value.
I missed you so much, he tries to say, but the words feel inadequate and they choke up in his throat so he decides to bypass speech altogether; actions mean more to him anyway. Cupping her face with his hands, he carefully traces the delicate contours of her nose, her mouth, her eyelids and her jaw, sculpting the outlines of her features with his fingertips; exploring, discovering and rediscovering her inch by inch. She wraps her arms around him, cheek resting at the spot just above his heart and he wonders, fleetingly, if she can sense how much harder it is for it to beat with the added weight of seven years. But then he presses his lips into the arch of her neck and she responds in kind and he doesn't need to say any more as she drags him from the cold hallway and into the warmth of the bedroom beyond.
There will be time for talking later, he thinks as they undress each other with kisses, kisses he's been saving up for the better part of a decade. There will be time for talking on the other side of sunrise. In the morning, they'll share breakfast in her tiny kitchen, scrambled eggs on toast eaten with mismatched cutlery, hot coffee served out of chipped souvenir mugs (the Eiffel Tower is hers, the Louvre his), a leaning tower of dishes stacked in the sink the way they always have been. Then they'll exchange stories, her voice quivering when she declares she wants to work with him after graduation (to be closer to her dreams and closer to him), his gaze unable to level with hers when he tells her about his seven-year eternity. Twin perils in disguise, Scylla rearing its monstrous head and Charybdis threatening to drag them in deeper and deeper. Such secrets, once spilled, are like bloodstains, and one way or another they'll have to learn to close the wounds. Perhaps time will help; in Limbo, time is an incurable amnesia of the soul, but here in reality, it is an anaesthetic too.
Right now, though, they are alone together in the quietest hour of the night and no words can intrude into the perfect gossamer veil of silence that's draped over their tangled bodies. Although he resents the fact that Limbo has stolen seven years from him, it's made the reunion that much more poignant, and as he observes her gently slumbering form – the way the dim light embraces her skin, the way that shadows hug the curves of her hips and breasts – he's thankful that reality has a thousand shades of grey to remind him that beauty lies not in perfection but in perfect imperfections. Right now, he is completely satisfied with the knowledge that when he wakes up again, she will still be here with him and, most important of all, she will still be real.
He is Arthur and she is Ariadne (he muses as he finally allows himself to drift off to sleep), but he is also her Odysseus and she is his Ithaca, his Penelope. Though he may wander and stray, he will never be lost because, like a compass finding north, she is the fixed point in the world that he returns to in the end, and neither Siren nor Circe nor Calypso can ever keep him away.
A/N: Reviews would be nice, and while you're here why not check out my other Inception fanfics as well? Cheers.