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fae_boleynChapter Title: With All Your Good Intentions
Fandom: Inception
Summary: Inception's not an easy job, it takes months of careful planning. These are the planning stages. Also, genderbend, girl!Arthur and girl!Yusuf. Movie AU, begins when the movie does, but the primary focus is the pre-job months.
Pairings: past Mal/Cobb, girl!Arthur/Eames, Ariadne/girl!Yusuf (so, yes, het and femslash, no m/m in this one, I do apologize)
Author's Note: Small transitional chapter, the next one will, with any luck, be longer.
You disappear with all your good intentions
And all I am is all I could not mention...
See my head aches from all this thinkin'
Feels like a ship, God
God knows I'm sinkin'... – Flowers for a Ghost, Thriving Ivory
For two days it's just Ariadne and Anita, and in some ways it feels a lot like school, the two of them talking about dreams and diagrams over takeout, seguing into more personal stories now and then. But on the third morning, they're just discussing a hotel for the second level – whatever the research Anita is currently working on eventually turns up on Fischer, businessmen spend enough time in fancy hotels that it's not a stretch to use one – when Cobb comes in, followed by a Japanese man that Anita narrows her eyes at and...
Oh. The other newcomer is a woman, Indian, Ariadne thinks, though her grasp on guessing nationalities has never been the best. And she's... Right, Ariadne needs to get away from that train of thought because she's here to work, not ogle her coworker. It looks as though Anita's expecting another person, but the new woman is the last one to show up.
“Eames went right to Sydney to start working on his forgeries,” Cobb says, and Ariadne has no idea what he's talking about but Anita scowls.
“I wasn't asking,” she says evenly, before offering a hand to the Japanese man. “Mr. Saito. This is a surprise.”
“I have decided to accompany you on this job, to make sure you do as I ask,” explains this Mr. Saito. He must be the one who hired them. Anita glances at Cobb, but introduces herself quickly to the other woman, whose name is Yasirah, before pulling Cobb aside and into what looks like a heated argument. Saito seems unconcerned by whatever's going on there, taking out his Blackberry and walking outside, presumably to make a phone call.
Yasirah's unpacking the cases she'd brought in, taking out a chemistry set far more advanced looking than the ones Ariadne remembers from tenth grade, or even than godawful chem class she'd had to take her sophomore year of college. “That's... a lot of stuff,” Ariadne says, cursing herself a second later for sounding like an idiot.
Yasirah looks up, but to Ariadne's relief the older woman doesn't seem to think Ariadne's an idiot. “It is, but I'll use all of it, trust me. I'm going to guess that you're the architect, since I know Anita's Cobb's point woman. They're fairly well-known in our circles.”
“Yeah, I'm Ariadne. And they are? I'm new to this, so...”
“Your first job is going to be inception?” Yasirah shakes her head and Ariadne draws herself up.
“I folded Paris like a taco on my second visit to a dream,” she says sharply and then flushes when she realizes how much like a cocky kid she sounds. But Yasirah slants her a look and then grins wickedly, holding up her hands in a gesture of mock-defeat.
“I didn't mean anything by it, I promise. You must be good if they're using you for a job like this. And folding Paris? Very ambitious of you.” Yasirah leans against the worktable she's appropriated, giving Ariadne a searching look. Ariadne shrugs, not sure how else to respond.
“It was the first thing that came to mind.”
The other woman laughed outright. “If that's the first thing that comes to your mind in a dream, then I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”
~ ~ ~
Anita flops down on her hotel room bed, staring up at the ceiling and telling herself she's not going to call. There's no reason to call, it would be ridiculous. But then she's got her cell phone out and is scrolling through her contacts, as though her thoughts have no bearing on her actions at all. Three rings, and then, before the man she's calling can say a word, she says, “Cobb's a fucking idiot.”
“Well,” Eames says with wry amusement in his voice, “we both already knew that, Anita. You're calling me just for that?”
“Do you know about Saito?” Anita asks.
“Ah, yes, our tourist. If it helps, I did tell him there's no room for tourists on a job like this. Did you really tell Cobb inception can't be done?”
“Do you really think it can be?”
There's a low laugh on the other end of the line, and Anita sighs. “Of course it can. It'll be difficult, I'm sure, but it can't be harder than that job in Seville,” Eames tells her.
“You nearly got us killed in Seville because you had to play the daredevil!” Anita snaps, remembering that night. Granted, they'd both gotten away without a scratch, and once she no longer had to fire rounds from her Glock out her window, sitting in the passenger seat with Eames driving like a maniac had actually been... almost fun. But that doesn't invalidate her point.
“Now, now, it wasn't that bad. Surely better than Alexandria.”
Anita's jaw tightens. “Don't talk about Alexandria. Besides, all that was years ago.”
“You brought it up, darling.”
“And you don't know how to... Look, never mind. So, any idea how much time you'll need to spend in Sydney?”
“Missing me, then, are you?” Eames is teasing but there's an edge to his voice, and considering the terms on which they'd last parted, Anita can't entirely blame him. “Getting a grip on Browning should take a few weeks, a month at the most. Is it true Cobb's hired a green architect for this? Why isn't he building it?”
Anita closes her eyes. “Why do you think? He's not building anymore, and while he won't admit to it, I think it's that projection of Mal he's got wandering around in there.”
“She went after you again.” It's not a question, and Anita knows a denial isn't going to be worth her time to make.
“Kneecap. Look, it's a problem, but we should be able to handle it. Push comes to shove, we shoot her – or Cobb. We shoot Cobb anyway if he complains about it.”
“You've finally gotten sick of him, haven't you?”
“I want this to go smoothly,” Anita says, neatly evading the question. “As for Ariadne, the 'green' architect you mentioned, Cobb promised Miles that she won't be going with us on the actual job. Admittedly, Cobb's track record with that kind of promise sucks, but it's something.”
They talk a little longer, little details about the job, before they hang up and Anita tosses the phone onto her nightstand, covering her face with her hands. Damn it, he had to go and bring up Alexandria. She can still remember Alexandria, Eames' blood on her hands, and...
She still can't believe that Eames kissed her, when he had a bullet wound in his side. Except it had been just like him. “Figured it was worth a shot in case I die, love.” She still remembers three days in that chair by his bed, waiting for him to wake up. And then the two of them being split up right after, only to meet again on different terms for Project Morpheus.
But why did he have to remind her of that, when she's spent the past five years pretending Alexandria never happened?
~ ~ ~
“Yasirah, can I speak with you for a minute?”
Yasirah looks up from her work to raise an eyebrow at Cobb, who looks distinctly uncomfortable. Well, now, what is this all about?
She can't help but notice that they're the only ones around. Anita left about an hour ago, something about needing to run some errands, and Ariadne offered to do the latest coffee run five minutes ago. Saito is outside speaking to someone or other. Her eyes narrow suspiciously. “What do you want, Cobb?”
“This sedative... You know what will happen if someone dies in the dream.” It's not a question, and suddenly Yasirah remembers a night in a bar in Mombasa, coming across a completely wasted Eames, the man muttering semi-coherently about “that crazy bastard” and “what the fuck is she doing?”, with the former likely referring to Cobb and the latter to Anita. There's got to be a reason why Eames, for as long as she's known him, has been leery of working with Cobb. She hadn't seen it before, and had thought that if Eames had overcome his misgivings everything was fine, but now... How does Cobb know?
“You fall into Limbo,” she tells him. They'd found that out in the early days of her dream-den's operation, and now, some people came to her looking for it as a more pleasant alternative to regular suicide. “My question is, how do you know that?”
“I knew about the sedation because my wife and I did it. We were in Limbo.”
Holy shit. Yasirah had not expected that. “I see. But you managed to escape with your sanity.” Well, a functional level of sanity at least, she qualified silently. “Why are you speaking to me about this if you already know what the effects are going to be?”
“Because I'm not telling anyone else, and I need you to keep your mouth shut too.”
“What? You can't be serious. You actually want to take other people down into someone's mind and not tell them that it could be fatal? Eames mentioned you were a nutter, but he didn't say you were this much of a bastard.”
“There's no point to telling them. All that would do is make them turn down the job, and I need them to do this job with me.”
Yasirah frowns. “Why? What is so important about this job that you absolutely must do it, whatever the cost?”
“If we succeed, Saito pulls some strings, and I get to go home to my kids. I haven't seen them since my wife, their mother, died two years ago, and I need to get back to them. This job is how I get there.”
It's a persuasive argument. Yasirah will admit that. But she's still not sure about this. It's a huge risk, and she can't imagine the wrath of either Anita or Eames will be pleasant to face should they find out about this. Ariadne's would be less dangerous but equally unpleasant, she imagines, except that the younger woman already said she wasn't supposed to go with them for the actual job.
She stays silent, and Cobb glares at her. “All right, fine, you need a better reason? You do this for me, you can have my share of the payoff as well as your own. I've got enough money put away, I don't need it. Just keep this a secret for me.”
Well, that clinches it. The money is tempting, obviously, but by itself Yasirah doesn't think it'd be enough to convince her. It does, however, make it clear that Cobb is desperate. He'd be perfectly willing to fire her and hire someone less competent, she can see that, if it means he gets the silence he's demanding. And that would make this more dangerous for everyone concerned.
So she agrees to say nothing. Besides, as long as the subject's not militarized, there shouldn't be any real danger anyway, should there?
