(fic) A Long Slow Collision, part 7
Sep. 27th, 2010 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cicerWould've had this part up earlier, but. Um. Governor of Poker is stupidly addictive.
She can’t do up her pants.
Fuck, Arthur thinks, and stares at the fabric straining around her waist.
She struggles with the zipper for a full five minutes before she gives up and glares at the offending item of clothing. She really, really wants to pretend that the pants have somehow shrunk, but she knew there was no way her dry cleaner would have been so careless.
Arthur throws the pants on the floor and flings herself onto her bed.
It feels stupid and sort of melodramatic, but she can’t help it. She likes those pants.
They were expensive, too. And now they won’t fit for…well. Probably not for a long time.
Arthur grabs a pillow and smashes her face into it. It’s not fair, she thinks, and indulges in a brief moment of self-pity. Then she pries herself off the bed, fishes a skirt with a slightly more forgiving waistline out of her closet, and pulls it on.
She gives the crumpled pair of pants lying on the floor a dirty look.
It isn’t fair. She did read the pamphlets the doctor gave her, so she knows that the baby is only supposed to be the size of a lima bean at this point. A lima-bean-sized fetus should not be big enough to make her unable to fit into her favorite pants. It’s just not logical.
Arthur zips up the skirt and casts a jaded eye over the blouses hung up neatly in her closet. Unfortunately, it’s not only the pants that aren’t fitting; half her shirts won’t fit over her new and increased bustline. Ariadne wasn’t kidding; her boobs really had gotten bigger.
Arthur admits to herself that, under different circumstances, she might’ve like that. She was never particularly…well-endowed in that area.
Not that she was insecure about it, of course. She most definitely wasn’t the sort of woman who spent half her life cataloguing her perceived physical flaws. Still, it would have been sort of nice to have bigger boobs…if they hadn’t been so horribly sore all the time.
Staring balefully into the closet, Arthur finally selects a shirt and buttons it up.
She’s going to have to go clothes shopping sooner or later. She knows that, but she’s been putting it off.
It’s ironic. She’s pretty sure this is the first time in her life she’s ever dreading shopping. She likes clothes, and enjoys picking out new things.
But, unfortunately, Arthur is quite sure that she can’t go looking for maternity clothes at her usually couturiers. Much as she would like to think that she could find a nice Dior skirt or at least an Armani sweater, she’s pretty sure that’s not in the cards. She’s going to have to go into one of those horrible maternity shops.
There’s one a few blocks from her apartment. Arthur passes it on the way to the warehouse every day, but she has so far avoided going into it. She dreads what she’ll find.
The covers of Ariadne’s magazines are full of women crammed into deeply unflattering dresses, and if that’s the best that models and magazine editors can do, Arthur does not have high hopes for herself. She has already decided that she would rather fling herself into the Seine than wear anything remotely resembling a muumuu.
Plucking a pair of shoes out of her closet, Arthur regards her Manolo Blahniks sadly. Her feet haven’t started swelling yet, but she’s sure that’s on the way.
No decent shoes, no suits…Arthur thinks she’s beginning to understand why women in some cultures go into seclusion when they’re pregnant. Maybe she’ll lock herself in her apartment until she can fit into her old clothes again.
For now, at least, the shoes go on easily enough.
Arthur crams the pants that wouldn’t fit into the back of the wardrobe where she won’t have to look at them and heads briskly for the door. She checks her hair and makeup briefly in the mirror, snatches up her briefcase, and leaves.
She’s due to meet Geralds at the hotel in fifteen minutes. As she locks her apartment door behind her, Arthur quickly takes inventory.
Geralds is bringing the PASIV. There’s a gun in her jacket pocket, just in case things go wrong. She checked with the bartender last night; he has the sedative and knows what he’s supposed to do with it. So far so good, she thinks grimly, before mentally reviewing the three different escape plans she worked up.
The truth of the matter is, she was more confident in her abilities before inception. She knows it, and she hates that she’s lost faith in herself. But at the same time, she can’t seem to find a way to get over it. Even now, two months later, she can’t believe the mistake she made.
It was so stupid. She should’ve known that Fisher had been trained, should’ve been prepared for a militarized subconscious. It was an unforgivable oversight, and Arthur still feels sick when she thinks about.
She could have gotten all of them killed. Not that she knew that was a risk at the time, admittedly. Dom had neglected to share the details of the sedative. Still. If she’d done the research properly, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Saito wouldn’t have been shot, he and Dom wouldn’t have ended up in limbo, and everything would have gone much more smoothly.
In the end, things went as well as could be hoped, but Arthur knows better that to think that was due to any particular skill on her part.
She did all right. She managed to make the kick, even after they lost the gravity. She got Ariadne, Eames, and Fisher back from the third level. But that was cold comfort.
Things turned out all right in the end, it was true. They accomplished their objective. Almost three weeks after the job, Fisher had announced his intention to dissolve his father’s empire.
Saito got what he wanted. Dom went back to his kids. And all their bank accounts were considerably fatter. But it wasn’t enough to put Arthur’s mind at ease. Not nearly enough.
She hails a cab and gives the driver directions to the hotel. On the way, she fidgets with her briefcase, and finally slumps against the window and stares at the street that passes by.
The Paris sky is gray and dim. It’s about half an hour till sunset, and it looks like rain. Arthur shrugs deeper into her jacket and fingers the gun in her pocket.
It was a terrible mistake, and she still catches her breath when she thinks about it. And she thinks about it fairly often.
She knows it does no good to stew over what could have happened. She knows that. Dom used to tell her sometimes that she spent too much time lingering over old regrets.
That was back when Mal was still alive, when Dom was still carefree, before he’d been consumed by regrets of his own. After that, they’d never talked about guilt or regret again.
Still. Sometimes, she can’t stop thinking about it. Her pregnancy makes it worse. That was a mistake, too, another stupid oversight, the result of another bout of carelessness.
Arthur feels a slight twinge of guilt when she thinks that way. It seems unkind, somehow. The thing inside her is a child, though she can’t quite wrap her head around that yet. Still, it’s going to be a person, and it’s not fair to think of its existence as a mistake. She doesn’t know much about children, but she’s sure that not good parenting.
The cab hits a puddle and sends a wash of water onto the sidewalk. Arthur draws her gloves out of her pocket and puts them on carefully.
She studies the street signs. Three more kilometers to the hotel. She licks her lips and waits for the hotel façade to come into view.
She isn’t supposed to think of the baby as a mistake. She knows that. If she think about it that way, she’ll be a bad mother.
And she wants to be a good mother, she really does. This wasn’t planned, not even a close, but it’s happened, and she desperately wants to not fuck it up. But she doesn’t feel very confident in her abilities these days, and her lack of experience with children is starting to close in on her and make her feel vaguely claustrophobic. She doesn’t want to think about how little she really knows about kids, but she can’t help it.
Arthur remembers that Mal always said she was good with children. But then, Mal never said an unkind word to anyone in her life. And Mal was always complimenting Arthur, ascribing to her all sort of admirable qualities that Arthur was not entirely sure she actually possessed.
Mal said she was good with children, good with James and Phillipa at least. But Arthur isn’t fooling herself; she knows perfectly well that there’s a big difference between being a good babysitter and being a good parent.
And there’s a big difference between being a good mother and a good single mother. Mal had Dom around to help out, to support her, to be there for the kids. Arthur doesn’t have that.
Outside the cab, it starts to rain, and Arthur realizes that she’s forgotten her umbrella. She swears quietly, and notices the driver glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. She ducks her head and squints up at the darkening sky
After a moment’s thought, she checks her cell phone to see if Geralds has left her a message. He’s at the hotel, keeping an eye on the mark until she arrives. If the mark had cancelled his meeting with his mistress because of the weather, he surely would have called her.
But there’s no message. Apparently, the job is still on.
Tucking her phone carefully into her briefcase, Arthur sits back. The driver whistles an unfamiliar tune and makes a sharp left turn. Arthur mentally maps out the drive. They’re two kilometers away from the hotel, now.
Unbidden, Eames’ face pops into her mind and she ruthlessly shoves it back, crams all thoughts of Eames into a mental box and locks it up tight.
She’s tried so hard not to think about Eames in the days since the pregnancy tests came up positive. Deep down, she harbors the secret belief that if she just doesn’t think about it, she won’t have to deal with the situation, at least for a while.
It’s an imperfect solution and she knows it. They work in the same business, run in the same circles. They’re bound to cross paths sooner or later, and she knows that eventually she’s going to have to tell him about the baby. It’s not even a question of ethics, it’s a question of practicality. She’s going to have to tell him, because he’s going to find out anyway.
Arthur has very carefully refused to even think about how he might take the news. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. She’s perfectly prepared to do this one her own. She can handle it.
She doesn’t know if she can handle it well, but that’s not the point. She’ll manage, and she doesn’t need him. She doesn’t need anybody.
But…
Even though she doesn’t want to think about what he might think, how he might respond, it still sort of bothers her that she really doesn’t know what to expect. She thinks she should know him well enough to at least hazard a guess, but she can’t. Apparently she doesn’t know him that well after all, she thinks, somewhat bitterly.
He probably won’t want to be involved. He never struck her as the sort of person who likes to be tied down, so Arthur suspect that when he finds out, he’ll probably bolt.
And that’s fine. It is. She isn’t expecting anything more.
But then, every now and then Eames shows a bewildering, unexpected streak of loyalty. It’s entirely unpredictable and it pops up at the oddest of times.
There’ll be a job that’s gone south, and Arthur will be expecting him to save his own skin, but instead he’ll stick with the team and make sure everyone gets out okay. Or he’ll take yet another job with Dom, even when he knows how reckless, how downright dangerous Dom’s become.
Every time he does that, shows some scrap of loyalty to others, it startles her. She doesn’t quite know what to make of it.
It could be a sort of thrill-seeking, risk-taking behavior, a willful decision to put himself in harm’s way. But Arthur suspects it’s something more.
Every now and then, Eames inexplicably decides to be responsible. She doesn’t know why, but sometimes, that’s what he does. And given that, Arthur really has no idea how he’ll respond to this. A child is the ultimate responsibility. A pregnant ex-lover is the ultimate responsibility.
The problem, of course, is that Arthur doesn’t want to be anybody’s responsibility. In fact, the idea is entirely repugnant to her. She never wanted to be dependent upon or indebted to anybody.
But she has a feeling that what she wants probably isn’t going to matter all that much anymore. Not in the long run, anyway.
The cab draws up to the hotel. Arthur forces all thought of Eames and the baby back into her mental box and seals it up tight.
Dom always put his secrets in a safe, and so did Mal, but Arthur puts hers in a wooden trunk. She pictures her secrets nearly filling it up, and imagines the lid snapping shut, the lock clicking into place.
She can’t think about this now. She has a job to do.
So she locks her mental box, pays the driver, gathers her briefcase, and hurries through the rain into the hotel.
***
Twenty five minutes later, she’s back on the sidewalk trying to hail another cab.
The job, mercifully, went off without a hitch.
Arthur left the mark is in his room, sleeping off the sedative. Geralds left five minutes before she did, through the back exit, taking the information the client wanted.
Everything went smoothly, as smoothly as anyone could’ve hoped for, but Arthur still feels tense, keyed-up. She always does after a job, no matter whether it went well or not.
A taxi pulls up at the cub and Arthur ducks inside. The rain has turned into a deluge during her brief stint inside the hotel, and her hair is soaked from the five seconds it took to dart from the awning outside the hotel into the cab.
Inside the taxi, Arthur wrings out her hair with a handkerchief. She is unpleasantly reminded of the of the Fisher job; the heavy rain and the stale inside of the taxi are frighteningly reminiscent of the first level. She half expects a train to come plowing through the streets, or for a battalion of projections to appear out of nowhere.
Arthur swallows hard and stuff the wet handkerchief into her pocket, alongside the gun she hadn’t needed to use after all. She shuts her eyes for the rest of the ride.
Within minutes, the taxi deposits her at the front door of her apartment building. Arthur climbs the stairs to her apartment slowly.
She can’t help but think about how she’ll manage the stairs in six or seven months, when she’s heavily pregnant. Her attempts at keeping her mind on the job are fraying now that its over.
That’s that, she thinks dimly. Job’s done, and it would be too dangerous to look for another one right now. She doesn’t need the money anyway. There’s nothing left to think about but herself and her future. And the baby.
She unlocks the door to her apartment and drops her briefcase and wet coat at the entryway, not bothering to put them away. Her cell phone beeps; it’s a text from Geralds.
Transaction complete.
In other words, he’s taken the information to the client, and the payment has been received. It’s over.
Arthur deletes the text.
For a moment, she stands in the middle of her apartment, feeling suddenly adrift.
What to do now, she wonders? Since she got into the extraction business, she’s never gone more than a month or two without a job, and rarely even that. And even then, the hiatus between jobs wasn’t her choice; she was out of work simply because there were no jobs to be had.
She’s never taken a vacation voluntarily, she realizes. She doesn’t even know what to do. What do people do when they’re not working, not looking for work? What do people do when they’re not planning for the next job, or doing research, or making connections with potential clients? What is there to do?
Ariadne’s pregnancy magazines and baby catalogues sit in a thick stack on the coffee table. Arthur stares at them. Then she drops onto the couch and pulls the stack towards herself.
She’s wet, dripping all over the couch, and her heels are squelching unpleasantly every time she moves her feet. She ignores all that and flips through the catalogues.
Ariadne’s selections are highlighted in blue. There are a lot of things marked.
Here’s something to do, she thinks suddenly. Baby things. She’ll need them. She hadn’t wanted to think about it before, but now…now it could be a job.
There’s a lot to do. There are prices to compare, safety standards to research. She’ll need to baby-proof the apartment, she realizes, and looks around the room.
The coffee table has sharp edges, and the cords for the television and lamps snake from the appliances into the wall. The electrical outlets are exposed, and the cords for the window blinds hang nearly to the floor.
Yes, Arthur thinks slowly, and lowers the catalogue onto her lap. There’s a lot to take care of.
She’s still wet, so she showers and changes hurriedly before returning to the couch. There’s a pad of paper in the kitchen drawer, and she pulls it out along with her laptop.
She lines up her things on the coffee table and pores over the catalogues.
Ariadne has already marked the things she likes. Arthur studies her choices carefully, and begins to make a list.
Crib. Changing table. Rocking chair.
God, she thinks. Where’s she going to put all this?
Arthur looks up from the catalogues suddenly and stares around the apartment. She has a small spare bedroom that she mostly uses as an office. She supposes that will have to be the nursery. After all, it’s not like she’s going to need the office anytime soon, if she’s not going to be working.
She hesitates at that thought, and goes back to the list.
Baby monitors. Bedding for the crib. Baby clothing…
She’ll let Ariadne pick that out, she decides quickly. The idea of sifting through pastel terrycloth onesies is a little too much for her.
Diapers, bottles…
She’ll have to decide is she wants to breastfeed or do formula, and she’ll have to decide between disposible diapers and cloth, and oh God what the fuck is she doing.
Arthur drops the pad of paper on the floor and bends forward, pushing her hands into her hair.
She can’t do this. Why did she think she could do this? This is, this is not okay, this is a baby, a person, and she’s going to have to take care of it, by herself, and it’s going to be completely dependent on her, and she can’t work anymore, and what the fuck is she going to do with a baby?
She doesn’t know anything about babies. She knows about guns and dream-building and computer hacking. She knows about fraud and crime and all kinds of illegal things, and what is she going to do about that? What’s she going to do when the kid is old enough to say, Mommy, what kind of work do you do? How is she going to explain?
Why did she think she could do this?
She wants to cry, but she doesn’t because that would make things worse. She wants to throw up, she wants to scream and smash everything in her apartment, but she doesn’t because that would be pointless. That wouldn’t help anything.
Instead, she digs the heels of her hands into her eyes until she sees stars and tries to breathe.
She doesn’t know why she decided she was going to do this. It wasn’t a logical decision, and even now she’s thinking that it would really, really be a good idea to just….
To just be done with it. Call the doctor, tell him she changed her mind, she wants an abortion. She could do it.
But the idea makes her sick, and she doesn’t quite know why. Every time she tries to seriously consider it, tries to walk herself through the process, she slams face first into a giant mental block. She can’t. She doesn’t want to be pregnant, but she doesn’t want to have an abortion either, so there she is.
She’s fucked, she thinks grimly.
There is no way this is going to be okay.
She thinks of her phone, still tucked away in her soggy briefcase. She could call someone, pour all this out and ask for a shoulder to cry on. The idea horrifies her; she’s never done that in her life. But she could. She could call somebody and just say, I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do here, because I’m so lost.
But she doesn’t know who she would even call.
Ariadne wouldn’t be any help. She’d want to be helpful of course, but Arthur doesn’t think Ariadne quite gets it. She’s excited about the baby because it isn’t hers, it’s Arthur’s, and Ariadne gets to play the doting aunt.
Which is fine, really, Arthur kind of appreciates that, because at least this way she isn’t completely alone. But Ariadne doesn’t have any perspective on the issue, and can’t understand what Arthur’s feeling right now. She’d probably just be sad and disappointed that Arthur isn’t happy. So Ariadne is out.
She can’t call Dom, because…because they don’t talk about things like this, they don’t ask for emotional support. After Mal died, they learned to be there for each other without talking about anything, without calling each other out too much on their respective emotional baggage.
It worked for them, sort of. And maybe there’s a better way to do it, but it’s too late to change things between them now, especially since Dom is finally, finally home. She can’t ask him for anything now.
There’s another option, of course. It’s staring her right in the face, and Arthur stares back at it for the first time.
She could call Eames. She could call him and just say, look, tell me what to do about this, please. What should I do? What should we do?
Except there isn’t any we, not really, and Arthur’s afraid to ask those questions, because she doesn’t know if she’ll like the answers. If she doesn’t call Eames, then she doesn’t have to hear him tell her that he doesn’t want to be involved, that he doesn’t want to see her ever again, and that he thinks she should have the abortion.
It’s cowardly, and she’s disgusted with herself for it, but she can’t make the call. She can’t bring herself to ask, to give him the opportunity to reject her.
She fishes the phone out of her briefcase and stares at it anyway.
It would be easily. All she’d have to do is press two little buttons. She even has him on speed-dial, embarrassingly enough.
Arthur finds Eames’ name her contact list and stares at it. Her thumb hovers over the ‘send’ button.
She thinks about it. She thinks about being brave, or at least dignified, and calling him up and telling it to him straight. She could listen whatever it is he has to stay; she could stop wondering about it, dreading it. And if he tells her he doesn’t want to see her ever again, well, at least it would be over then. Unpleasant, but quick, like ripping off a band-aid.
The phone is cool and heavy in her hand. Arthur shuts her eyes. Then she snaps the phone shut and shoves in between the couch cushions.
She can’t do it, and she hates herself for it.
Onto the next part...
As always, thanks much for the comments. ♥ I don't have time to reply to each one, but I promise, I read them (and reread them x5) and squeal giddily every time.
She can’t do up her pants.
Fuck, Arthur thinks, and stares at the fabric straining around her waist.
She struggles with the zipper for a full five minutes before she gives up and glares at the offending item of clothing. She really, really wants to pretend that the pants have somehow shrunk, but she knew there was no way her dry cleaner would have been so careless.
Arthur throws the pants on the floor and flings herself onto her bed.
It feels stupid and sort of melodramatic, but she can’t help it. She likes those pants.
They were expensive, too. And now they won’t fit for…well. Probably not for a long time.
Arthur grabs a pillow and smashes her face into it. It’s not fair, she thinks, and indulges in a brief moment of self-pity. Then she pries herself off the bed, fishes a skirt with a slightly more forgiving waistline out of her closet, and pulls it on.
She gives the crumpled pair of pants lying on the floor a dirty look.
It isn’t fair. She did read the pamphlets the doctor gave her, so she knows that the baby is only supposed to be the size of a lima bean at this point. A lima-bean-sized fetus should not be big enough to make her unable to fit into her favorite pants. It’s just not logical.
Arthur zips up the skirt and casts a jaded eye over the blouses hung up neatly in her closet. Unfortunately, it’s not only the pants that aren’t fitting; half her shirts won’t fit over her new and increased bustline. Ariadne wasn’t kidding; her boobs really had gotten bigger.
Arthur admits to herself that, under different circumstances, she might’ve like that. She was never particularly…well-endowed in that area.
Not that she was insecure about it, of course. She most definitely wasn’t the sort of woman who spent half her life cataloguing her perceived physical flaws. Still, it would have been sort of nice to have bigger boobs…if they hadn’t been so horribly sore all the time.
Staring balefully into the closet, Arthur finally selects a shirt and buttons it up.
She’s going to have to go clothes shopping sooner or later. She knows that, but she’s been putting it off.
It’s ironic. She’s pretty sure this is the first time in her life she’s ever dreading shopping. She likes clothes, and enjoys picking out new things.
But, unfortunately, Arthur is quite sure that she can’t go looking for maternity clothes at her usually couturiers. Much as she would like to think that she could find a nice Dior skirt or at least an Armani sweater, she’s pretty sure that’s not in the cards. She’s going to have to go into one of those horrible maternity shops.
There’s one a few blocks from her apartment. Arthur passes it on the way to the warehouse every day, but she has so far avoided going into it. She dreads what she’ll find.
The covers of Ariadne’s magazines are full of women crammed into deeply unflattering dresses, and if that’s the best that models and magazine editors can do, Arthur does not have high hopes for herself. She has already decided that she would rather fling herself into the Seine than wear anything remotely resembling a muumuu.
Plucking a pair of shoes out of her closet, Arthur regards her Manolo Blahniks sadly. Her feet haven’t started swelling yet, but she’s sure that’s on the way.
No decent shoes, no suits…Arthur thinks she’s beginning to understand why women in some cultures go into seclusion when they’re pregnant. Maybe she’ll lock herself in her apartment until she can fit into her old clothes again.
For now, at least, the shoes go on easily enough.
Arthur crams the pants that wouldn’t fit into the back of the wardrobe where she won’t have to look at them and heads briskly for the door. She checks her hair and makeup briefly in the mirror, snatches up her briefcase, and leaves.
She’s due to meet Geralds at the hotel in fifteen minutes. As she locks her apartment door behind her, Arthur quickly takes inventory.
Geralds is bringing the PASIV. There’s a gun in her jacket pocket, just in case things go wrong. She checked with the bartender last night; he has the sedative and knows what he’s supposed to do with it. So far so good, she thinks grimly, before mentally reviewing the three different escape plans she worked up.
The truth of the matter is, she was more confident in her abilities before inception. She knows it, and she hates that she’s lost faith in herself. But at the same time, she can’t seem to find a way to get over it. Even now, two months later, she can’t believe the mistake she made.
It was so stupid. She should’ve known that Fisher had been trained, should’ve been prepared for a militarized subconscious. It was an unforgivable oversight, and Arthur still feels sick when she thinks about.
She could have gotten all of them killed. Not that she knew that was a risk at the time, admittedly. Dom had neglected to share the details of the sedative. Still. If she’d done the research properly, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Saito wouldn’t have been shot, he and Dom wouldn’t have ended up in limbo, and everything would have gone much more smoothly.
In the end, things went as well as could be hoped, but Arthur knows better that to think that was due to any particular skill on her part.
She did all right. She managed to make the kick, even after they lost the gravity. She got Ariadne, Eames, and Fisher back from the third level. But that was cold comfort.
Things turned out all right in the end, it was true. They accomplished their objective. Almost three weeks after the job, Fisher had announced his intention to dissolve his father’s empire.
Saito got what he wanted. Dom went back to his kids. And all their bank accounts were considerably fatter. But it wasn’t enough to put Arthur’s mind at ease. Not nearly enough.
She hails a cab and gives the driver directions to the hotel. On the way, she fidgets with her briefcase, and finally slumps against the window and stares at the street that passes by.
The Paris sky is gray and dim. It’s about half an hour till sunset, and it looks like rain. Arthur shrugs deeper into her jacket and fingers the gun in her pocket.
It was a terrible mistake, and she still catches her breath when she thinks about it. And she thinks about it fairly often.
She knows it does no good to stew over what could have happened. She knows that. Dom used to tell her sometimes that she spent too much time lingering over old regrets.
That was back when Mal was still alive, when Dom was still carefree, before he’d been consumed by regrets of his own. After that, they’d never talked about guilt or regret again.
Still. Sometimes, she can’t stop thinking about it. Her pregnancy makes it worse. That was a mistake, too, another stupid oversight, the result of another bout of carelessness.
Arthur feels a slight twinge of guilt when she thinks that way. It seems unkind, somehow. The thing inside her is a child, though she can’t quite wrap her head around that yet. Still, it’s going to be a person, and it’s not fair to think of its existence as a mistake. She doesn’t know much about children, but she’s sure that not good parenting.
The cab hits a puddle and sends a wash of water onto the sidewalk. Arthur draws her gloves out of her pocket and puts them on carefully.
She studies the street signs. Three more kilometers to the hotel. She licks her lips and waits for the hotel façade to come into view.
She isn’t supposed to think of the baby as a mistake. She knows that. If she think about it that way, she’ll be a bad mother.
And she wants to be a good mother, she really does. This wasn’t planned, not even a close, but it’s happened, and she desperately wants to not fuck it up. But she doesn’t feel very confident in her abilities these days, and her lack of experience with children is starting to close in on her and make her feel vaguely claustrophobic. She doesn’t want to think about how little she really knows about kids, but she can’t help it.
Arthur remembers that Mal always said she was good with children. But then, Mal never said an unkind word to anyone in her life. And Mal was always complimenting Arthur, ascribing to her all sort of admirable qualities that Arthur was not entirely sure she actually possessed.
Mal said she was good with children, good with James and Phillipa at least. But Arthur isn’t fooling herself; she knows perfectly well that there’s a big difference between being a good babysitter and being a good parent.
And there’s a big difference between being a good mother and a good single mother. Mal had Dom around to help out, to support her, to be there for the kids. Arthur doesn’t have that.
Outside the cab, it starts to rain, and Arthur realizes that she’s forgotten her umbrella. She swears quietly, and notices the driver glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. She ducks her head and squints up at the darkening sky
After a moment’s thought, she checks her cell phone to see if Geralds has left her a message. He’s at the hotel, keeping an eye on the mark until she arrives. If the mark had cancelled his meeting with his mistress because of the weather, he surely would have called her.
But there’s no message. Apparently, the job is still on.
Tucking her phone carefully into her briefcase, Arthur sits back. The driver whistles an unfamiliar tune and makes a sharp left turn. Arthur mentally maps out the drive. They’re two kilometers away from the hotel, now.
Unbidden, Eames’ face pops into her mind and she ruthlessly shoves it back, crams all thoughts of Eames into a mental box and locks it up tight.
She’s tried so hard not to think about Eames in the days since the pregnancy tests came up positive. Deep down, she harbors the secret belief that if she just doesn’t think about it, she won’t have to deal with the situation, at least for a while.
It’s an imperfect solution and she knows it. They work in the same business, run in the same circles. They’re bound to cross paths sooner or later, and she knows that eventually she’s going to have to tell him about the baby. It’s not even a question of ethics, it’s a question of practicality. She’s going to have to tell him, because he’s going to find out anyway.
Arthur has very carefully refused to even think about how he might take the news. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. She’s perfectly prepared to do this one her own. She can handle it.
She doesn’t know if she can handle it well, but that’s not the point. She’ll manage, and she doesn’t need him. She doesn’t need anybody.
But…
Even though she doesn’t want to think about what he might think, how he might respond, it still sort of bothers her that she really doesn’t know what to expect. She thinks she should know him well enough to at least hazard a guess, but she can’t. Apparently she doesn’t know him that well after all, she thinks, somewhat bitterly.
He probably won’t want to be involved. He never struck her as the sort of person who likes to be tied down, so Arthur suspect that when he finds out, he’ll probably bolt.
And that’s fine. It is. She isn’t expecting anything more.
But then, every now and then Eames shows a bewildering, unexpected streak of loyalty. It’s entirely unpredictable and it pops up at the oddest of times.
There’ll be a job that’s gone south, and Arthur will be expecting him to save his own skin, but instead he’ll stick with the team and make sure everyone gets out okay. Or he’ll take yet another job with Dom, even when he knows how reckless, how downright dangerous Dom’s become.
Every time he does that, shows some scrap of loyalty to others, it startles her. She doesn’t quite know what to make of it.
It could be a sort of thrill-seeking, risk-taking behavior, a willful decision to put himself in harm’s way. But Arthur suspects it’s something more.
Every now and then, Eames inexplicably decides to be responsible. She doesn’t know why, but sometimes, that’s what he does. And given that, Arthur really has no idea how he’ll respond to this. A child is the ultimate responsibility. A pregnant ex-lover is the ultimate responsibility.
The problem, of course, is that Arthur doesn’t want to be anybody’s responsibility. In fact, the idea is entirely repugnant to her. She never wanted to be dependent upon or indebted to anybody.
But she has a feeling that what she wants probably isn’t going to matter all that much anymore. Not in the long run, anyway.
The cab draws up to the hotel. Arthur forces all thought of Eames and the baby back into her mental box and seals it up tight.
Dom always put his secrets in a safe, and so did Mal, but Arthur puts hers in a wooden trunk. She pictures her secrets nearly filling it up, and imagines the lid snapping shut, the lock clicking into place.
She can’t think about this now. She has a job to do.
So she locks her mental box, pays the driver, gathers her briefcase, and hurries through the rain into the hotel.
***
Twenty five minutes later, she’s back on the sidewalk trying to hail another cab.
The job, mercifully, went off without a hitch.
Arthur left the mark is in his room, sleeping off the sedative. Geralds left five minutes before she did, through the back exit, taking the information the client wanted.
Everything went smoothly, as smoothly as anyone could’ve hoped for, but Arthur still feels tense, keyed-up. She always does after a job, no matter whether it went well or not.
A taxi pulls up at the cub and Arthur ducks inside. The rain has turned into a deluge during her brief stint inside the hotel, and her hair is soaked from the five seconds it took to dart from the awning outside the hotel into the cab.
Inside the taxi, Arthur wrings out her hair with a handkerchief. She is unpleasantly reminded of the of the Fisher job; the heavy rain and the stale inside of the taxi are frighteningly reminiscent of the first level. She half expects a train to come plowing through the streets, or for a battalion of projections to appear out of nowhere.
Arthur swallows hard and stuff the wet handkerchief into her pocket, alongside the gun she hadn’t needed to use after all. She shuts her eyes for the rest of the ride.
Within minutes, the taxi deposits her at the front door of her apartment building. Arthur climbs the stairs to her apartment slowly.
She can’t help but think about how she’ll manage the stairs in six or seven months, when she’s heavily pregnant. Her attempts at keeping her mind on the job are fraying now that its over.
That’s that, she thinks dimly. Job’s done, and it would be too dangerous to look for another one right now. She doesn’t need the money anyway. There’s nothing left to think about but herself and her future. And the baby.
She unlocks the door to her apartment and drops her briefcase and wet coat at the entryway, not bothering to put them away. Her cell phone beeps; it’s a text from Geralds.
Transaction complete.
In other words, he’s taken the information to the client, and the payment has been received. It’s over.
Arthur deletes the text.
For a moment, she stands in the middle of her apartment, feeling suddenly adrift.
What to do now, she wonders? Since she got into the extraction business, she’s never gone more than a month or two without a job, and rarely even that. And even then, the hiatus between jobs wasn’t her choice; she was out of work simply because there were no jobs to be had.
She’s never taken a vacation voluntarily, she realizes. She doesn’t even know what to do. What do people do when they’re not working, not looking for work? What do people do when they’re not planning for the next job, or doing research, or making connections with potential clients? What is there to do?
Ariadne’s pregnancy magazines and baby catalogues sit in a thick stack on the coffee table. Arthur stares at them. Then she drops onto the couch and pulls the stack towards herself.
She’s wet, dripping all over the couch, and her heels are squelching unpleasantly every time she moves her feet. She ignores all that and flips through the catalogues.
Ariadne’s selections are highlighted in blue. There are a lot of things marked.
Here’s something to do, she thinks suddenly. Baby things. She’ll need them. She hadn’t wanted to think about it before, but now…now it could be a job.
There’s a lot to do. There are prices to compare, safety standards to research. She’ll need to baby-proof the apartment, she realizes, and looks around the room.
The coffee table has sharp edges, and the cords for the television and lamps snake from the appliances into the wall. The electrical outlets are exposed, and the cords for the window blinds hang nearly to the floor.
Yes, Arthur thinks slowly, and lowers the catalogue onto her lap. There’s a lot to take care of.
She’s still wet, so she showers and changes hurriedly before returning to the couch. There’s a pad of paper in the kitchen drawer, and she pulls it out along with her laptop.
She lines up her things on the coffee table and pores over the catalogues.
Ariadne has already marked the things she likes. Arthur studies her choices carefully, and begins to make a list.
Crib. Changing table. Rocking chair.
God, she thinks. Where’s she going to put all this?
Arthur looks up from the catalogues suddenly and stares around the apartment. She has a small spare bedroom that she mostly uses as an office. She supposes that will have to be the nursery. After all, it’s not like she’s going to need the office anytime soon, if she’s not going to be working.
She hesitates at that thought, and goes back to the list.
Baby monitors. Bedding for the crib. Baby clothing…
She’ll let Ariadne pick that out, she decides quickly. The idea of sifting through pastel terrycloth onesies is a little too much for her.
Diapers, bottles…
She’ll have to decide is she wants to breastfeed or do formula, and she’ll have to decide between disposible diapers and cloth, and oh God what the fuck is she doing.
Arthur drops the pad of paper on the floor and bends forward, pushing her hands into her hair.
She can’t do this. Why did she think she could do this? This is, this is not okay, this is a baby, a person, and she’s going to have to take care of it, by herself, and it’s going to be completely dependent on her, and she can’t work anymore, and what the fuck is she going to do with a baby?
She doesn’t know anything about babies. She knows about guns and dream-building and computer hacking. She knows about fraud and crime and all kinds of illegal things, and what is she going to do about that? What’s she going to do when the kid is old enough to say, Mommy, what kind of work do you do? How is she going to explain?
Why did she think she could do this?
She wants to cry, but she doesn’t because that would make things worse. She wants to throw up, she wants to scream and smash everything in her apartment, but she doesn’t because that would be pointless. That wouldn’t help anything.
Instead, she digs the heels of her hands into her eyes until she sees stars and tries to breathe.
She doesn’t know why she decided she was going to do this. It wasn’t a logical decision, and even now she’s thinking that it would really, really be a good idea to just….
To just be done with it. Call the doctor, tell him she changed her mind, she wants an abortion. She could do it.
But the idea makes her sick, and she doesn’t quite know why. Every time she tries to seriously consider it, tries to walk herself through the process, she slams face first into a giant mental block. She can’t. She doesn’t want to be pregnant, but she doesn’t want to have an abortion either, so there she is.
She’s fucked, she thinks grimly.
There is no way this is going to be okay.
She thinks of her phone, still tucked away in her soggy briefcase. She could call someone, pour all this out and ask for a shoulder to cry on. The idea horrifies her; she’s never done that in her life. But she could. She could call somebody and just say, I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do here, because I’m so lost.
But she doesn’t know who she would even call.
Ariadne wouldn’t be any help. She’d want to be helpful of course, but Arthur doesn’t think Ariadne quite gets it. She’s excited about the baby because it isn’t hers, it’s Arthur’s, and Ariadne gets to play the doting aunt.
Which is fine, really, Arthur kind of appreciates that, because at least this way she isn’t completely alone. But Ariadne doesn’t have any perspective on the issue, and can’t understand what Arthur’s feeling right now. She’d probably just be sad and disappointed that Arthur isn’t happy. So Ariadne is out.
She can’t call Dom, because…because they don’t talk about things like this, they don’t ask for emotional support. After Mal died, they learned to be there for each other without talking about anything, without calling each other out too much on their respective emotional baggage.
It worked for them, sort of. And maybe there’s a better way to do it, but it’s too late to change things between them now, especially since Dom is finally, finally home. She can’t ask him for anything now.
There’s another option, of course. It’s staring her right in the face, and Arthur stares back at it for the first time.
She could call Eames. She could call him and just say, look, tell me what to do about this, please. What should I do? What should we do?
Except there isn’t any we, not really, and Arthur’s afraid to ask those questions, because she doesn’t know if she’ll like the answers. If she doesn’t call Eames, then she doesn’t have to hear him tell her that he doesn’t want to be involved, that he doesn’t want to see her ever again, and that he thinks she should have the abortion.
It’s cowardly, and she’s disgusted with herself for it, but she can’t make the call. She can’t bring herself to ask, to give him the opportunity to reject her.
She fishes the phone out of her briefcase and stares at it anyway.
It would be easily. All she’d have to do is press two little buttons. She even has him on speed-dial, embarrassingly enough.
Arthur finds Eames’ name her contact list and stares at it. Her thumb hovers over the ‘send’ button.
She thinks about it. She thinks about being brave, or at least dignified, and calling him up and telling it to him straight. She could listen whatever it is he has to stay; she could stop wondering about it, dreading it. And if he tells her he doesn’t want to see her ever again, well, at least it would be over then. Unpleasant, but quick, like ripping off a band-aid.
The phone is cool and heavy in her hand. Arthur shuts her eyes. Then she snaps the phone shut and shoves in between the couch cushions.
She can’t do it, and she hates herself for it.
Onto the next part...
As always, thanks much for the comments. ♥ I don't have time to reply to each one, but I promise, I read them (and reread them x5) and squeal giddily every time.
