Done for yet another prompt on LiveJournal, because I only know one trick; you have to admit, I do it very, very well.

Five (stupid, comic, ridiculous, deadly serious but really irrelevant) pieces of advice someone else gave them about their relationship and one they took to heart.

Don't Take Advice from Anyone More Fucked Up Than You

i. the question

Ariadne has decided interfering coworkers are infinitely more insufferable than nosy classmates. It simply is not fair that Eames is practically paid to take chapter and verse out of small gestures and aborted glances. And it does not help that he finds her little drama to be hilarious. He is planted in her chair, feet on a scrapped model, 'helping'.
"Hypothetical for you, say there's a free-thinking bright modern young woman and she's been making cow-eyes at a certain bloke for three months and counting."
"Eames, no free-thinking bright young anything would make cow-eyes at you." Ariadne dabs glue onto a corner thoughtfully. "Although, the UK is a known hotspot for mad-cow disease. Does rapidly progressing dementia sound about right?"
Eames grandly ignores her.
"You should show up naked on his doorstep and be done with it. Just because Mr. Redacted wouldn't know a hot night of passion if it jumped into bed with him, you're going to sit around making cheap shots about the old country."
"I'm not sitting," she replies primly, clamping the freshly glued pieces together. She reaches for her rasp. "Also, I don't know what you're talking about."
She spends the next ten minutes rounding a piece of wood and pretending she can't hear him over the noise.

In the privacy of her own mind, Ariadne does have to wonder if, on the off off off off chance Eames is right, she should make the first move. First and a half really. A kiss isn't any less real if it's not real, is it? And a kiss is still worth more in the grand scheme of things than, say, coffee after work, right?
The worst that can happen is he knows where this is going, and she has no doubt he is that observant at least, and he says 'no' and their every interaction following is uncomfortable and awkward and punctuated with pitiful silence. Fuck"

"I have a theory," Eames announces, straddling the chair beside Arthur. The point man casts a glance at his jacket, wrinkling under Eames' arms, and goes back to his bank statements. "Don't you want to know what it is?"
Arthur slides a sheet over. "Twenty thousand Euro watch. Mistress or self-indulgence?"
Eames holds the paper, closes his eyes and waves his hand. "Purchased from a midget with a green hat when the moon was waxing gibbous. Clearly this man needed the fine craftsmanship of a Rolex to fix his temperamental TARDIS." He flicks the sheaf back and watches it fall ungracefully to the floor. "My theory, since you are so keen to hear it, is that you are an ass. Worse than that, it's like there's a huge chunk of stupid in your brain right where 'Ariadne' is."
"Fuck off, Mr. Eames."

Arthur stops by her desk on his way out. He looks surprised and not to find her at it.
"I knew you were smart. But I didn't think you could start building without knowing we had a job."
She hides her sketchbook in her lap and smiles slightly breathlessly. "Giant workspace I have a key to, no need to share tools or wall sockets, and Eames is easy to tune out." She doesn't mention the other reason she prefers to work here instead of the tiny cordoned space in the university's workshop. "I can get out if it's disturbing you-"
The dismay in her voice is almost tangible and Arthur hurries to fix it. "I don't mind at all. It's... good to have you here."
"You mean it's nice to have someone besides Eames-"
"I mean it's good to have you."
The sentence, complicated and simple and layered like a maze, twists in the space between them and she can feel hope and heat bubbling up her spine.
"Ariadne."
Having him say her name is totally worth all the shit that came with it during her formative years.
"I'm a little late to ask..."
Is it possible to suddenly realize you can't feel your lungs? Because she can't.
"May I take you to dinner sometime?"
Ariadne is both terribly grateful and kind of pissed Arthur has to use such specific language. It leaves her no room to question his intentions, acclimate herself to the possibility of him maybe liking her sort of the way she does him. She manages to say 'yes', and she easily packs worlds of meaning into the single word.

ii. the anticipation

Arthur doesn't know how Eames learned he and Ariadne have dinner arrangements, and he certainly doesn't know how it is any of Eames' damn business, but the fact remains that the thief is making a giant nuisance of himself.
Thoughts of dinner, of the date, naturally turn into thoughts of Ariadne. She called last night, to remind him she will finally be done with all her projects and presentations and they are still on for dinner, right? He can't help comparing that Ariadne, all eager nervous prattle, to the brilliant and bossy little architect who ran straight over Cobb's best laid plans with barely a swish of colored silk.
He has to pull himself back into work. The chemist will be here any minute and Arthur should have the comprehensive list of Caulder's meds already.

"Tsk. You know if his doctor has to change his HIV regimen, and he will, I'm going to have to reformulate the whole damn thing."
"I know that, I made sure our employer knows that, and your bank account will know it too once the job is done." Arthur feels his phone buzz in his pocket. Across the room, the phone on Eames' desk starts crooning If I Was From Paris. "What about the Efavirenz? Common side effects include 'vivid dreams'." His brow knits as the phone 'ooh la la's on, muffled only slightly by wads of paper, its owner nowhere in sight. "What is that going to do?"
Anya huffs. "God knows. With all the other crap in his system, bringing him into a shared dream might do nothing or it might make all of you polka fucking dotted pigs. I'm going to throw that thing into the toilet." She tromps over to Eames' phone. Arthur takes the opportunity to check his. "Who the fuck names their child Ariadne?"
Arthur is next to her in a heartbeat. A piercing glance confirms the English Asshole has cloned his phone.
"This is our architect?" Anya pauses to examine the look on his face. "Word of advice. Don't mix business with pleasure. I did that once. Had to drug the guy in the end. Also spiked his Tylenol with laxatives, but that was just me being a bitch."
He thanks her stiffly for her consideration and goes outside to call his... to call Ariadne back. On the way, he drops Eames' clone in a mug of day old coffee.
Oh good, you haven't trashed this number yet. I was afraid you'd fled the country.
"Don't be. I doubt anyone will care if I kill an Englishman here. How was your presentation?"
Umm... Decent I guess, considering Chevalier is unhealthily attached to Deconstructivism. At least it's all over. This restaurant had better have dessert. I deserve it.

She was only half kidding about fleeing the country. There's a job, so it's not like he can switch workshops, cut up his cards and drop his phone in the river. Of course, there's no saying he won't do as much after tonight. God damn it.
She sees tangerine-tinged salvation exiting the library.
"Cassie! I need a dress for a date."

"You shouldn't buy a new outfit for a first date."
"So I should smell like turpentine?" Ariadne shuffles through a rack looking for something... elegant.
"Seriously, it's not like you have announce to the guy you bought something new just for tonight. Doing so has been known to turn on the male-stupid-under-unexpected-pressure. And if it doesn't work out, you never want to wear the dress again and it just sits in your closet reminding you of all the Cup Noodles you had to eat to afford-"
"Cassie, I like you, I respect you sometimes and I understood you the first time you went off about an Ancient Greek Princess Club, but please shut up." She pulls out something deep blue and holds it against her chest. "How's this?"
"Not bad." The blonde tugs on the front. "Shame you haven't the tits for it."
Ariadne makes a face. "I'm starting to get why no one paid any attention to what Cassandra said."
"You realize Ariadne was abandoned on an island while she was sleeping, right?"
"Not paying any attention."

iii. the ensuing date

When she got off of the plane in L.A. all she had were details; the feel of a couch branding art deco into her ass; the splash of mutable mahogany at his throat; a lingering gaze and the knowledge that you could have sense memories of things that never really happened. She has replayed every second over in her mind, often to the detriment of her homework and occasionally her lunch. So when she answers the polite knock at her door and sees Arthur is wearing the tangible version of The Tie, the one that looked so nice with The Suit and would have looked so much better on The Floor, it can't be helped that she goes a little weak at the knees. A little swooning isn't enough to prevent her from hearing his sharp intake of breath, courtesy of the soft red so-glad-Mom-didn't-co-sign-the-credit-card dress she spent three hours searching for.

She spends the car ride in a happy haze, two simple thoughts circling in her carefully coiffed head. Date. On date. With Arthur! She is lucky Arthur is a gentleman who opens doors for his female companions date! because neither of the thoughts floating through her mind know what to make of the car's locking mechanism.

When Arthur left his hotel, it was after he had evaluated his choice in attire for the hundredth time and realized he was going to be late. He made it all the way into the driver's seat of his car when he caught a glimpse of the white shirt reflected in the window and the voice in his head, sounding disturbingly like the lovechild of the man at Armani and that one girl from college, piped up again. It informed him that brown was for informal events, which this certainly was not, and that this was going to be remembered, not as 'a romantic gesture', but 'unimaginative and more than a little creepy' which was hardly the tone you want to set for the first date, stud.
Any misgivings he has about his choice in formalwear being misread are dispelled soon after the amuse-bouche arrives. Ariadne sneaks little peeks while pretending to listen to the waiter and the asymmetric hint of smile is the happiest reassurance he's received in a long while, with a single exception.

Now that she is face-to-flesh with the details, she has a passing panic attack about forgetting her totem in her coat, which Arthur, being the gentleman he was, had removed for her and handed to the coat-check-lady. She is quite sure she could have dreamed something this perfect for a first date and that possibility terrifies her with its intensity and sharpness and pinstripe.
"Ariadne?"
A shiver runs up her spine and settles low in her stomach and proves once and for all that not only does she have paradoxical architecture on the brain, she has it in the rest of her as well.
"Arthur?" she says, with that word-layering trick she is getting so good at. Nuance, like labyrinths, is an art she has been working very hard on for the last few months.
"You okay?" Arthur does not say she looks like she's seen a ghost that then slapped her across the face (stabbed her in the stomach) and he is somewhat concerned because he really wants this evening to go well and therefore be justified in asking her to a second, third, fourth and nth.
No, Arthur manages to convey all that in a darkly warm look that curls her toes and pinks her cheeks and sends a thrill rocketing around her ribcage. She is quite sure she could not have dreamed that and it frees her brain from the screaming fit it has been having about whether bowls actually come that small and if so did her ignorance of this fact mean not-asleep.
Ariadne smiles luminously at her date date! and replies, "More than okay." She shoots her brain one last reminder to shut up or grow up and samples a little ball of crab pâté. "I was just thinking you look very nice."
"Ah." He takes a sip of water, like the thought forming behind his lips is sucking all the moisture from his throat. "I've been trying to find some way to compliment you since you opened that door, but nothing for polite company has come to mind."
Ariadne blushes the color of the rosé being poured. The waiter is too well-trained to react but Ariadne is sure the gleam in his eye has nothing to do with the mood lighting.

iv. leap of conviction

I know who you are.
The knife slides into her so easily; she can feel the viscera as it tears and every second is interminable.
How could you understand?
She wakes, plaid sheets sticking to her legs and blurry lights engraved in her eyeballs. She runs the bath before stripping her bed and shuffling into the kitchenette to stuff the linens in the washing machine. She sits in her tub and lets the water lick at her ankles.
"She's not real," she reminds herself.
How do you know that?
Ariadne's shudder has nothing to do with the temperamental nature of the water heater. She catches sight of her rubber duck. The little painted face clearly expresses its disapproval with her.
"It won't be like that with him," she defends. She ignores the little doubts niggling in her ribcage. The duck is not impressed.
She turns the spigot with her toes and thinks of Arthur, cool crisp refined Arthur. Nothing like Cobb, who fell in love and fell and fell. She wonders if maybe she's a bit envious.
The duck glares so she sets it in the water, like that will appease it.
Instead it bobs slightly as she lets go, as if heaving a great big sigh.
"So I'm a little childish," she sniffs, forgetting for the moment who she is addressing. "I can handle this." She leans back with an imperious toss of her hair, fully expecting the duck will have no further arguments.
Her triumph ripples through the water and sends the duck into an furious tirade. The duck doesn't believe her in the least because good girls, raised with loving mothers and steadfast fathers and higher education and women's rights and all their faculties, do not ihandle/i these sorts of things.
The architect thinks again of the point man, but this time she thinks also of the job: the running; the hiding; the fighting when those fail; the shady characters; the compromised morals; and the dangerously illegal activities. She allows that maybe she is overestimating her abilities.
The duck nods smugly. Ariadne is a smart girl who knows her limits.
She climbs out of her bath. She puts her duck back on its ledge. She pulls the bung out of the drain and wraps herself in a towel. She scrounges up some sheets for her bed. She goes to sleep and wakes up a minute before her alarm goes off.
She dresses without any particular fuss, but dabs a little perfume on her neck. She goes to Starbucks and pays for a coffee and a chocolate croissant. She only eats half before it's time to go to the airport. She takes a cab and her fingers drum a reverie into the leather.
There's barely any standing room in the arrivals area. She is positioned near an older couple with a giant pink teddy bear lounging between them. She needs to find another word for 'distance' while she waits.
An arm slips around her waist, a sharp nose blunts itself in her scarf and a warm voice thrills through her cells in a way that would scandalize that older couple and their teddy bear.
Any and all thoughts of limits and knowing them and being different people and maybe we should be realistic fly straight out of her head; the only thing left is an idea.
Ariadne is a girl in love with a man who knows how to cheat reality.

v. scrumtrulescence

"Seriously, you've been dating him how long?" Cassie twists the chain around her neck like maybe it will give her some insight into Ariadne's utter contortions of logic.
"Long enough." Ariadne tapes down another moving box and makes a mental note to buy more tape. "I thought you were here to help."
"I am helping. I am straight up telling you not to do this for your own good and probably his. You can't just move in with a thirty-something year old, delicious though he is, five months after he asks you out!"
Ariadne can't tell her that five months is more than eternity with a needle in your arm because Cassandra would take it entirely the wrong way and probably call the police. Ariadne is confident Arthur is not currently wanted by Interpol, but she's not about to test the theory.
Ariadne also can't tell her that she's not moving in with the man because that would imply a house or apartment somewhere, a static state of existence one linear interval away from The Next Step.

Cassandra wouldn't understand that linear is highly overrated and the next step is down and in and a little over, a bit sharp, slightly minty, second scar to the right, half asleep, two thirds awake and a small infinity short of forever. Cassandra wouldn't understand. Her father would dismiss it as some female foolishness. Her mother would think she understood, because daughters become women become mothers and rocket science has nothing on young women when it comes to incomprehensibility.
Maybe her mother might understand, but Ariadne doesn't want her to. Ariadne doesn't fully understand it herself because she doesn't need to.
It doesn't bother her that Arthur is a man who would need a plottable series of events leading up to all this and actual sensical words for it. The words or lack thereof do nothing to change how they are together.

Dom doesn't exactly disapprove, but he's not clapping him on the back either. That's the difference between them. Arthur doesn't believe a piece of paper and the exchange of rings can make this more real than having Ariadne in his dreams and out of them. But Cobb only sees paranoia and a lack of commitment.
Arthur tried to explain that this wasn't a 'trial run', that much as he loved Ariadne, yes the operative was loved and not liked, lusted for, admired or whatever else was in the thesaurus, he really did not have any intention of proposing. Arthur tried to explain that it wasn't having his name on file or flying out to Podunk, US of A to inform the girl's parents he was taking their baby that was holding him back. Arthur tried to explain that he wasn't holding back at all and that even if Ariadne was a little older, a little less gung ho about creating entire worlds and a little more involved with real life, he still wouldn't be asking for her hand in marriage because he knows the two of them do not need it.
Arthur tried to explain all this once twice and a few more times than that, and he's tired of shoving the horse's face in the river.
Arthur gives in to bad form. "Sorry Dom, gotta go, incoming call."

He hangs up knowing it is transparent and pathetic as excuses go, but he also knows it would not have been worth another minute of the Dominick Cobb lecture series The Institution of Marriage (not the other kind) and You to call his cell from the hotel phone just to lend a little credence to a pathetically transparent excuse.
The phone vibrates in his hand. A glance at the jumble of numbers leads to a smile. Still wouldn't have been worth Items #53: too old for this laissez faire attitude and #54 too young to be so cynical about the sanctity of vows taken.
"I wish you had called ten minutes ago."
I wish it would rain tutti frutti jelly beans but that's how it goes.
There's a silence on the other end of the line that says Ariadne wants to know something but is still deciding whether to ask about it or what he's wearing.
"So Thursday, given what customs in Charles de Gaulle is like, I should be at your door at noon. We'll put your stuff in the warehouse and catch our flight to Hong Kong. Four days it'll be just us and the city; then we make contact with our extractor and the client."
Four days? I was told you were a workaholic.
"You should have been informed that I know how to prioritize a schedule as well."
I might have been paying attention to something else at the time. Even through the phone he can hear the naughty grin in her voice.

&. thaumazein

She is dreaming, she is quite sure. Chess pieces do not really give lectures to Classical Studies majors. Probably. As if in direct response to her thought (surely proof that this is a dream, right?) the Red King and White Queen begin to recite Plato's Theaetetus.
"How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?"
"I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond;-and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing."
"You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both."
Ariadne is distracted by the realization that she isn't a Classical Studies major, and when that thought completes itself, the chessmen are singing.

"How do I know he loves me?
How do I know he's mine?"
She hears something about yellow flowers when the sky is grey, and then the world is falling into bits and pancakes.
"Harry, wake up." "That's how you know!"
"Mmmph."
"Harry, I am going to leave your niece here, singing her adorable button nose off, if you don't get your butt up right now." "That's how you know he loves you."
"Nnnegh." There's a bouncing at the foot of the bed, presumably because no child can sing sitting still. Ariadne tells June she should at least try.
"And while my precious baby serenades you, I will be eating breakfast with the sizzling hot dish you call your boyfriend and telling him about all the times I babysat you." "Don't treat her like a mind eater."
"Don't forget the time I glued you to the La-Z-Boy, because that one never gets old." Ariadne burrows under the comforter.
"Good morning, Lena." Arthur smiles at the lump of girlfriend over the towel around his neck.
Lena, despite her earlier threat, doesn't spare a second glance at Arthur-after-a-morning-jog-and-shower. If Ariadne could note the phenomenon she might remember her cousin has willpower in excess and a history of hanging her upside down by the ankles.
"Good morning Arthur. Hold this." Lena hands him her daughter, who is humming as loud as she can, having forgotten the rest of the lyrics.
She gets into position, yanks the covers off the bed and then starts clawing her prey while June sings the Tickle Monster song.

Arthur is looking at the pictures on the walls. Everyone else is deep in a game of Taboo so he is a little surprised to feel someone watching him.
"You really like her, don't you?" Eloise gestures with her glass of wine and maternal pride.
"I do." It's been a year since he last heard a dissertation on the joys of holy matrimony, but he's not keen on another.
"You look like you have a question." She smiles knowingly.
Arthur plays along. "Why Ariadne?"
"Because her daddy said I couldn't name her Melpomene." She sips her wine. "That's not what you want to ask."
He should have known Ariadne's mother would be sharp but he shakes his head.
"I know what you want for her, but we're not like other people."
"Bullshit." She sets her glass on the sideboard and fixes him with her best professor-stare. "Not like other people my ass. You get rid of that idea right now and I'll let you off on the question. Until next time at least."
She picks up her wine and goes back into the family room to ask who wants ice cream.

Disclaimer time! There's a pile of things I don't own or profit from. Inception for one, Dr. Who, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Nissin Cup Noodles (aka one of the basic food groups)... uh... I'm pretty sure there's a reference to Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and probably more I made unconsciously.
Oh and there's a chunk of Plato stuck in there, but that was clearly labeled. Scrumtrulescent is courtesy of Will Ferrell of SNL fame. Look it up. While you're at it, you may check out thaumazein and Melpomene, because ancient Greek is awesome.
The song is naturally 'That's How You Know' from Enchanted. I'm sure there's more in there, because that's a lot of words and I doubt I could fill all of it with completely original content.

I feel like I should mention this, in case anyone wants to whine. I seriously dislike ff. net's formatting monsters and I would personally shove them in a blender given half a chance.