Work Text:
Ariadne liked to observe people, and the individuals working on the inception job were no exemption. She sometimes sketched little portraits of them while she waited for the glue on her model mazes to dry.
Yusuf caught her drawing him while he had been working on the sedative blend that Cobb had needed for three layers of dreams, and shuffled over to look.
"Is that me?" he asked, leaning over her little sketchbook.
"Uh, sorry?" she spluttered, startled out of her artist's reverie.
"No, this is wonderful! I have never been the subject of a portrait before," he said, beaming and absurdly pleased as though her hasty charcoal sketch deserved to hang in a museum next to the Van Goghs and Caillebottes.
She found a foil-wrapped chocolate truffle on her worktable the next day. She had unwrapped it and taken a bite out of it when Eames sauntered up to her desk and appropriated one of the creaky wooden chairs Arthur had procured for their warehouse HQ.
"Rumor has it that you put Yusuf in a very good humor yesterday," he said, nodding at the chocolate.
"It's just a doodle," she said, fighting the urge to smile as she wrapped the uneaten half of her truffle in the foil and stuck it in her pocket.
"May I?" Eames asked, extending a hand for her sketchbook.
"Go ahead." She gave it to him and continued on the cityscape she had been working on before she had left for her apartment in Kléber and homework the evening before. He flipped through the pages slowly, as though reading paper printed with tiny, dense text.
"This is some very good work, Ariadne," Eames said after he had spent a few minutes looking at her drawings. "Why are you an architect, again?"
"Because I don't want to work as a barista for the rest of my life," she said as she pulled the straight pins out of a Bristol board skyscraper that she had left to dry overnight.
"You don't have to work as a barista," he said, his smile wry. "There are some very lucrative possibilities for someone with your talent."
"Are you trying to corrupt me, Mr. Eames?" she asked, keeping her voice light and innocent. He had left her sketchbook open on the table before him, and she fought the urge to smile when she saw the page he had been looking at.
"I believe I am obligated to try," he said, his glance lingering on the portrait head she had drawn in pencil. "Anyone can draw a topographical study of another person's features, but you have the attitude, and that is sometimes harder."
She grinned, then, and took her sketchbook back, flipping through the rest of the studies. "But Arthur makes it so easy," she said at last, holding up the portrait she had done of him while he had been sitting at his desk reading.
"Indeed he does," Eames said with another one of his crooked smiles and a nod of approval.
Cobb had described Arthur as a point man; a term extractors used to refer to the individual responsible for intelligence and operational security. Arthur performed both aspects of his job with enough familiarity and ease to make Ariadne wonder about his background. She wasn't entirely sure of his age; he felt older than her own twenty-five, but that could have been as much a factor of dress and carriage as much as of actual chronological time.
The way he dressed was one of the reasons she liked drawing him, particularly in the little unguarded moments when his attention was focused entirely on his work. The other was a matter of convenience; Arthur was the one who was there most often, and who was also the least prone to fidgeting.
"I like this one the most, I think," Eames told her when she handed the sketchbook back to him. He pointed to a lightning study of Arthur sitting in his chair, one drawn in quick, gestural lines. His expression had been pensive while his horn-rimmed reading glasses slid down the bridge of his nose. "You captured his sitting posture perfectly."
"He likes to sit sidelong in a chair if he can help it," she said. "Rests his weight on the left side of his hip when he isn't tilting his chair back."
"Shrapnel from Afghanistan, I believe," Eames said, thoughtfully. "About four months before I actually met him for the first time, if my reckoning is correct."
"How long have you known him?" she asked, looking back up at Eames. He seemed the older of the two, but then Arthur possessed a deceptively youthful face. She suspected that he could pass for seventeen if he dressed right for it.
"One doesn't actually know a man like Arthur," Eames said after a few moments of thoughtful silence, "but to answer your question, about eight years."
Ariadne found a box on her desk the next day, full of HB pencils, the hardness she favored. The box had been placed over a note scrawled hastily on the back of a receipt from an art supplies store several streets away. For future portraits, the writing had said. It was signed with the initial E.
She managed two more portraits that day: one was a thumbnail-size sketch of Saito in ballpoint pen in the margins of her notes, sketched idly while Arthur had briefed them on some of his findings. The second was a rather more elaborate sketch of Arthur, a little closer to an actual study, and she had sat down and finished the linework while Arthur had had a late lunch of Chinese takeout.
"He never, ever manages to snap his chopsticks correctly," Eames said, making her jump. He had come up behind her and had been watching her work on the values of light and shadow while Arthur had snuck out for a quick break.
"Neither can I," she said. She took her kneaded eraser and lifted the stray line from her drawing, and then lightened the shading on the slope of Arthur's shoulders for good measure. He had been sitting close enough to a window that the light had played rather well over the bones of his face.
"There is a trick to that, but it's a simple one. You simply have to exert equal pressure on both sides when you pull them apart," Eames said as he sat down in one of the chairs at her desk.
"I saw Arthur bumming a smoke off of you just now, just before he went outside," she said, taking mental note of his advice as she put her sketchbook down. She knew that Eames smoked but somehow could not disapprove of the habit where he was concerned; his mouth seemed to be made for sinning.
"Oh, he never carries cigarettes or a lighter. He hasn't for years, now." Eames picked up her sketchbook for a closer look at the drawing.
"Then what is he doing smoking your cigarettes?" She poked experimentally at the drying glue of her paper cityscape with a single finger and then spread glue on the base of another skyscraper with a tiny metal spatula.
"Denial. You see, Ariadne, he thinks he actually managed to quit," he said, handing her the box of straight pins as she pressed the building in place.
"Well, what are you doing enabling him if he's trying to quit?" she asked, rubbing drying PVA glue off her fingertips before she left unsightly marks on the rest of the maze.
"Probably because they're the only kind of fag I'll ever catch him sucking on," he had said with a wicked smile as he drew out a cigarette for himself and tapped it out on the pack.
"Eames," Ariadne had said, amused, if a little scandalized.
"You can't blame a bloke for trying," he said before he stood up and walked out of the warehouse, presumably to join Arthur on his smoke break.
Saito caught her drawing him two days later, and he had gamely remained half-reclining in one of the lawn chairs until she had finished her sketch.
"You are very talented, Miss Ariadne. Is this your hobby?" he had asked while he leafed backwards through her sketchbook, starting with her most recent portrait of him.
"One of them," she had said with a faint blush. She didn't know why Saito's approval had mattered so much to her, but she always felt that he was the kind of man who was stingy, at best, with his praise.
"And the others would be?"
"I like hiking and reading and I collect ball-jointed dolls, but I don't have time for that right now."
"Have you ever been to Tenshi-no-Sato?" Saito asked, surprising her.
"I've never actually been there. I've only managed to make the second Dolpa in New York."
"I should invite you to my estate in Kyoto after this is over. You can make an appointment for a visit then." He had left her with a polite nod, then, and she found herself grinning at the thought of a visit to the most exclusive doll shop in the world.
Saito was the last person she had expected to be able to discuss dolls with her, but she guessed it made sense in hindsight. She wondered later if he had any children, more specifically a daughter whose interest in dolls had acquainted him with the subject.
She was still grinning when Eames returned from an errand with a tray full of coffee cups in one hand and a pastry box in the other.
"You look as though you've managed to catch Arthur naked in that sketchbook of yours," he said as she collected a cup of coffee and a slice of almond tart from him.
"He has his shirt sleeves rolled up today, if that's what you mean," she said. Stray flakes of pastry fell from the tart when she took a bite and she pushed her maze models away before any crumbs landed in the still-drying glue.
Arthur was sitting at his desk across the room, eating his own slice of tart. She noticed that he preferred to chew with the left side of his mouth, and that he had somehow contrived to catch falling crumbs of pastry by folding a paper napkin around the almond tart.
"If you really want to torture Arthur," Eames told her as he sat down beside her with his own half-eaten slice of pastry, "ask him an important question while he's eating. It's as though his brain has to prioritize answering correctly before he swallows, but his manners won't allow him to talk with his mouth full."
"You seem to think a lot about torturing Arthur," she said slyly. As she sipped her coffee, she watched as Eames threw a sidelong glance at Arthur.
"Professional curiosity," Eames said, turning back to her. The tip of his tongue darted out to catch a fragment of almond stuck to his lower lip. "He's supposed to be a SERE graduate, and they're supposed to be fairly proficient at resisting torture."
"I don't think prisoners of war are ever tortured with impertinent behavior aimed in their direction, Eames." Ariadne finished her almond tart in two hasty bites and brushed the crumbs off her face and worktable before she pulled out her sketchbook again and handed it to Eames.
"Well, we can blame my soft heart for that," he said as he leafed idly through her sketchbook.
Back across the room Arthur had finished his almond tart. He brushed himself down with quick, easy movements and then put his glasses on in preparation for another long session of reading. Eames made a slightly disappointed sound as Ariadne snatched her sketchbook out of his hands and plucked one of her pencils off the worktable.
"Go get his attention," she told Eames, shooing him away from her desk. "Go on, go talk to him so I can draw you both together."
Eames raised an eyebrow at that, but he did not protest. He collected his cup of tea and then crossed the warehouse floor to harass Arthur at his desk. Ariadne grinned quietly to herself and took a large bite out of Eames' unfinished almond tart before she started to draw.
Ariadne had always possessed a gift for observation and in this moment it became clear to her what Eames was doing with all that teasing, and she knew then why she had never had to worry about Eames flirting inappropriately with her, the way he did with Arthur. Eames likes me, and Arthur likes me, but I think Eames wants Arthur to love him, she thought as she put down the gestural lines of their poses. Eames had his head turned towards Arthur in a tilt that made her think of a flower turning towards the sun. He usually acted as though he cared about nothing, but in this little moment Arthur was the center of his world. She tried to capture the line of his chin and the look of frustrated patience in Arthur's face, working quickly with her pencil in case Arthur decided to shoo Eames away. Fortunately the almond tart had put Arthur in a decent mood, and they sat talking to each other for ten minutes before Eames finally came back to her table.
"I could have sworn there was more tart here when I left to talk to Arthur," Eames grumbled when he found the handful of crumbs left over from his almond tart.
"Architect's prerogative," Ariadne said, before she fished out her kneaded eraser and lightened the construction lines on her drawing. He leaned over her table to study it, upside-down, and then looked up at her, his gray eyes more naked than she had ever seen them in their short acquaintance.
"You know." That was all he said as he hooked his foot around the leg of a chair and pulled it towards him.
"Yeah. I guess I do now. I thought you just liked being an ass at first, but it's more than that, isn't it?"
He shook his head and sat down facing her, chin resting in the palm of his hand as she continued to work, shading the picture with delicate cross-hatching and stippling.
"Do you want a copy of the drawing when I'm done?" she asked as she switched to a softer graphite pencil for Arthur's dark hair and the shadows pooling under his desk.
Eames shook his head, a tiny movement, and she stopped and looked up from her drawing, at his bluntly handsome face and the sharp angle of his nose.
"This is ridiculous," he said, "I'm thinking of Charlotte Brontë now, of all things," he said.
"I didn't think you read Victorian chicklit," she said, with a smile as she pictured Eames reading a copy of Wuthering Heights. "Are you talking about the bit in Jane Eyre where Jane offers St. John a portrait of Rosamond?"
"Exactly that, except I'm not going to ask you to marry me so we can go to India together."
"You should tell him," she said.
Eames looked down at the drawing again, a sad smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Perhaps I will," he said, before he got up and went to talk to Yusuf.
Defiantly, Ariadne tore the drawing out of her sketchbook and left it at Eames' desk before she left that evening.
She found a tiny nosegay of violets at her desk the next morning, bound with a scrap of silk ribbon, resting on top of a folded card. It read, Thanks for the drawing. E.