(fic) A Long Slow Collision part 9
Oct. 3rd, 2010 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cicerTa-da!
Arthur lies on her couch, staring numbly at the television.
She’s half-watching some sitcom, but it’s not really holding her attention. She can only follow about a third of the plot. She’s fluent in French, but several of the pop cultural references are flying over her head.
From what she can glean, the plot is pretty stupid anyway, so it’s probably not much of loss. She throws an arm across her face and sighs.
She’s feeling intensely sorry for herself today, and she doesn’t like it. Self-pity is indulgent and stupid, and she doesn’t want to succumb to it, but she can help it. She feels pathetic, particularly since she’s discovered that she can no longer go more than four hours without needing to take a nap.
She feels useless, and fat, and disgusting. She can’t fit into most of her clothes, so she’s reduced to wearing sweatpants and pajamas until she works up the energy to go shopping.
Yesterday, out of sheer desperation and a fervent desire to avoid actually putting foot in a maternity shop, she went online and ordered some new, bigger skirts and pants. But they won’t be delivered for a few days, and in the meantime, Arthur has decided that she would prefer to hide in her apartment and gorge herself on cookies and Italian takeaway, rather than try to scrounge together a decent outfit.
She plucks another cookie from the package lying on the coffee table and eats it slowly.
It doesn’t really help her feel better. In fact, she has discovered that binging like this mostly just makes her feel fatter and more repulsive. But since there’s no one around to see her, Arthur has decided that she does not care.
Ariadne keeps telephoning, trying to persuade Arthur to go somewhere with her, presumably to do some sort of shopping for baby-related things, but Arthur keeps putting her off. She’s not quite ready to leave the apartment and announce her pregnancy to the world at large by stepping into a maternity shop.
But she did finish the list of baby things to buy.
It didn’t take quite as long as she’d hoped; if she had to suck it up and actually buy baby things, Arthur had hoped that the whole process would at least provide several days’ worth of work. But she was good at collecting information, comparing prices, and making lists. It was what she did. And so Arthur found that she had compiled a fairly complete list in under thirty-six hours.
She emailed it to Ariadne so that she could do the actual purchasing. Arthur had decided that was for the best. For one thing, it prevented her from having to do spend several hours comparing colors of crib bumpers, an experience she dearly wished to avoid. It also had the added benefit of distracting Ariadne, so she wouldn’t start asking Arthur whether she ought to sign up for Lamaze classes yet.
Arthur fully expects that Ariadne will embellish the list; it ended up being a fairly bare-bones, practical collection of the absolute necessities. Crib. Baby monitor. Changing table. The basics.
Ariadne would, no doubt, pick out the stuffed animals and things like that. Arthur thought about that for a while, then decided she was fine with it. After all, she had never liked stuffed animals or dolls, even when she was a child herself. She wouldn’t even know what to pick out. It was better that Ariadne chose those things.
Arthur rolls over onto her side and presses her cheek against the couch cushions. On the television screen, Pierre and Maria have gotten into a fight, because Maria thinks that Pierre is cheating on her with her sister, but it’s all a wacky misunderstanding involving an engagement party and a self-locking broom closet door. Arthur grabs the remote and punches the buttons savagely, flicking through the channels.
There is absolutely nothing to do. No paperwork to be filled out, no calls to be made. Arthur thinks she might go crazy is she has to spend much more time in her apartment, but she also isn’t entirely sure what she’d even do if she went out and about.
She never really realized before how much of her life was devoted to her work. It wasn’t a depressing realization, exactly. It was more frustrating, because what the hell was she supposed to do now, when she didn’t have any work to do and felt too exhausted and bloated and gross to go walking the streets of Paris?
Arthur flicks through each channel slowly and finally settles on the news.
She has a vague, morbid hope that there will be some disaster that will occupy the news (and her attention) for at least the next few hours, but it seems that nothing is happening at the moment. The main story in the news is about some bus drivers who are on strike, and that is not interesting at all.
She turns off the TV.
The apartment is silent. Arthur stares up at the ceiling and then, finally, down at her stomach. Carefully, she pushes up her t-shirt and gives her belly an experimental poke.
Nothing happens, and she feels sort of stupid. She knows it’s way, way to early to for the baby to be kicking, but somehow she has it in her head that it should be more active by now or something. She pokes her stomach again.
The baby is, allegedly, between the size of an olive and a small strawberry. Arthur knows this, because she spent several hours looking up things about fetal development on the internet. It was actually sort of interesting, and she was sort of getting into it, reading about when the legs developed and when the baby could start to hear and things like that. It was kind of nice.
Then she made the mistake of clicking a link about pregnancy complications, and was immediately immersed in a sea of stories about miscarriage, chromosomal abnormalities, umbilical prolapse, and emergency c-sections, and she had to shut her browser before she started hyperventilating.
There was evidently a lot that could go wrong. Arthur had already known this, intellectually. When you had cells dividing and internal organs forming and a whole human being created from basically nothing, obviously things could go awry.
But it was one thing to know that things could go wrong for some hypothetical nameless pregnant woman out there in the world. It was another to know that things could go wrong for her, go wrong with her body. The very thought made Arthur queasy.
She runs her fingers carefully over her stomach, slowly pushing down the waist of her sweatpants. She can sort of see where she’s getting bigger, right in between her hipbones. There’s a little swell of flesh rising, and she traces it with a fingertip.
Her butt is also getting bigger, and that is not really okay with her. At least the fact that she’s getting bigger in the stomach makes sense. The olive-strawberry baby has to grow somewhere. She’s not sure why it’s apparently decided to also give her a fat ass, though. She pokes her stomach again.
“Hey,” she says, quietly. She feels extremely foolish, but continues. “Hey. You in there. Knock it off.”
The magazines and blogs and things all say that you’re supposed to talk to the baby. It’s supposed to encourage bonding, and also apparently the baby can hear now.
Some people apparently think you should play music for the baby too, or so the blogs say. Arthur is dubious, but she also doesn’t want the kid to be musically challenged later in life because she failed to properly stimulate its mind while it was in utero. So she’s thinking about digging up one of her classical music CDs and giving it a try, just in case.
Arthur stares at her stomach and bites her lip.
She still doesn’t feel like she has any idea what she’s doing, even after she scanned the internet for information. She doesn’t feel particularly…attached to the baby, either. It’s just sort of a thing that’s there, in her stomach, apparently growing kidneys and developing a nervous system, but she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do with it.
She wants desperately to not fuck this up. It would be huge thing to fuck up, and she knows it. She knows that it would put every other fuck-up in her life to shame and brand her as an entirely worthless excuse for a human being. So she can’t fuck it up. But she still doesn’t know how to move forward with this whole thing.
She’s had nightmares twice this week, and they completely threw her off balance. It‘s been months since the last time she dreamed naturally, maybe even over a year. She’s been using the PASIV steadily for nearly a decade, and she thinks she probably shouldn’t still be dreaming naturally at all anymore.
But she is. In fact, she’s dreamed twice in a seven-day span and both times they were dreams about losing the baby or having the baby taken away because she wasn’t any good at being a mother.
Both times, she work up in a cold sweat, her heart in her throat, wanting to vomit. Then she turned to the internet for refuge.
It has always been a deeply held conviction of hers that every problem can be solved if she just has enough information. But the information she’s found so far isn’t reassuring, so much as contradictory and terrifying. She’s beginning to think she might be better off on her own. And that isn’t reassuring either.
She clears her throat and studies the little bump on her stomach. She’s supposed to say something now, she thinks. Something productive and useful, something good parents would say to their unborn child.
She can’t think of anything. She touches her stomach again, carefully.
“Sorry,” she says, quietly.
She tries to picture the baby, a blobby little thing with stubby arms and legs, floating around a pocket of amniotic fluid. She saw pictures like that on the internet. They were also not very reassuring. The babies in the picture looked horribly fragile and mostly made her afraid she was going to squish the baby if she put too much pressure on her stomach.
She clears her throat again.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” she ventures cautiously, then stops.
She feels stupid. Even if the baby can hear her, she knows it can’t understand, so it probably doesn’t matter what she says. She could read the phone book, recite Beowulf, or sing rap songs. It wouldn’t know the difference. Still, she feels compelled to at least try
Bonding, she reminds herself. Fetal development. It’s what good parents are supposed to do. She studies her stomach critically.
“Um. I hope you like it in there?” She thinks. “Can you please stop making my ass so big? I mean, I know you need room to move, and that’s fine, but I don’t understand why I have to put on weight everywhere.”
Unsurprisingly, the baby doesn’t have a response for that one. Arthur rolls her eyes and squints up at the ceiling.
“Uh. I’m Arthur, by the way. Your mom.”
She feels utterly ridiculous, talking like this to a little barely-sentient bundle of cells like it can understand her, but it’s sort of weirdly comforting. Or maybe just weird.
It’s really, really weird to be calling herself a mom. Arthur still has a strange yet deeply-seated feeling that she isn’t actually a mother, because mothers are supposed to be competent people, well versed in the art of childrearing.
Which, clearly, she is not. She knows how to change diapers and give bottles and things because of James and Phillipa, but she doesn’t know anything about raising children so that they are intelligent, productive human beings and not raving lunatics.
Arthur thinks that’s probably the sort of thing that’s important to know.
She drums her fingers on her stomach. “So. Yes. I’m Arthur. I…don’t know what your name is yet?”
It’s the first time she’s actually thought about that. She’s going to have to pick a name. She stares at the ceiling and thinks.
“I’m not going to name you anything weird. Don’t worry. No celebrity baby names.”
That, she feels, is a promise she can keep. She is absolutely not going to name the poor kid anything like Jairyn or Zeila. Normal names, she thinks. Something normal.
Not that her own name is particularly normal, but that‘s fine. She likes it. And it is normal, actually, just not for a girl.
She heard the story from her parents once, back when they were still together, back when they were alive, back before she ever heard about dream-sharing or Somnacin or government studies. They told her that the ultrasound said she was a boy, the horoscopes said she was a boy, everyone was absolutely sure that she was going to be a boy. So her mother and father had only picked out one name. And then she’s slipped out, whole and healthy but very definitely lacking a penis. Her parents had apparently looked at each other, shrugged, and decided that she looked like an Arthur anyway.
It was a nice story. Arthur was never sure that she entirely believed it, but it was nice. And it marked a time before her father left and her mother crawled into a bottle and drowned inside it. So it was a memory worth holding onto. The earlier memories were the only one Arthur particularly wanted to keep, anyway.
Given her own origin, she’s already decided that she isn’t going to much emotional energy into trying to find out whether the baby will be a boy or a girl.
Apparently this is weird, because the last time she went to a doctor, with Ariadne clinging to her side like a barnacle, the nurse had asked whether she wanted a boy or a girl. Arthur had said, I don’t care, and the nurse had looked at her like she’d just kicked a puppy.
Arthur had the feeling that was not the answer Good Parents were supposed to give. But she didn’t really see what it mattered. It wasn’t like the baby would be any better, or any easier to raise, if it was a boy or girl. So she really doesn’t care.
But she guesses that she should at least try to think of some names, or the nurse is going to keep glaring at her, and then Ariadne will probably buy some of those baby-name books and make Arthur go over them with her. So she should pick something out, probably.
She tries to think about that, but she’s interrupted by the doorbell. For a minute, she doesn’t react, just stares at the door.
It must be a mistake, because she didn’t order anymore takeaway, and all her mail is delivered to the desk downstairs. And Ariadne wouldn’t ring the bell. She’d knock on the door and call out, so that Arthur knew it was her. So that Arthur wouldn’t just ignore the bell, like she’s thinking of doing now.
But then she thinks that she might as well check and see who it is, just in case Ariadne’s ordered something and a delivery person is bringing it up. Given the way Ariadne’s been eyeing the catalogues, it’s definitely within the realm of possibility.
Arthur hauls herself off the couch and shuffles over to the door. She stands to the side out of habit, a habit drilled into her by several unfortunate jobs where projections or real people kicked down the door or shot through it. After a few seconds, she leans over and peers through the peephole.
In the next second her hand shoots to her pocket to fumble for her totem- but it’s not there, because her sweatpants don’t have any pockets, and she left it on the beside table. She thinks about running to get it, but she doesn’t, mostly because her feet are frozen to the spot. She actually thinks she might throw up all over her doorstep.
Eames. Eames. Oh fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Arthur stares at the closed door numbly and think about locking herself in the bathroom. Except she knows that wouldn’t work, because Eames obviously knows she’s here, and if she doesn’t open the door, he’ll probably just pick the lock.
He’s did that before, almost a year ago, when they did a job together and then she went back to her hotel and decided not the let him in when he knocked. She had thought (hoped) that he would just go away after a while, but he somehow found a way to open the lock, and came in anyway, and then they had sex on the awful floral-patterned hotel couch.
At the time, she’d found Eames’ persistence and blatant disregard of her personal boundaries irritating and amusing in equal measure. Now she can’t quite think past the fear the clogs her throat.
She has to open the door. The only other option is jumping out the window onto the fire escape and making a run for it, and that would be so undignified that Arthur refuses to even consider it. No matter how much she wants to.
There is nothing else to do, so she reaches for the knob and flings the door open.
Eames is there, standing on her doorstep. He stares at her and doesn’t say anything.
Right away, Arthur knows that he knows, fucking bastard, she can tell because he’s not smirking at her, not giving her crumpled sweatpants an amused glance. He’s just looking at her, with absolutely no levity whatsoever in his expression.
She thinks it might be a little bit better this way, maybe, because if he didn’t know, if he’d just dropped by on a social call, she’d have to explain why there were pregnancy magazines scattered across her apartment, and that would be bad. But this isn’t much better.
He stares at her, and she stares right back at him, because fuck him, he came all this way without so much as a phone call to warn her, so he can be the one to talk first.
Finally, he gives her the same up-and-down lingering stare that he always gives her. But it’s not the same at all, Arthur realizes, because this time it’s not flirtatious or exaggeratedly lecherous. Instead, he looks almost apprehensive.
When he’s done examining her, he meets her eyes again, but this time she darts her glance away and stares at the door frame. She’s gripping the doorknob so hard that her hand is cramping.
“Right,” he says, eventually. His voice is surprisingly calm. “Can I come in?”
She wants to say, no, you may not. But that wouldn’t dissuade him at all, and she knows better. Besides. She knew she would have to tell him eventually. It’s her own fault that she put it off so long that he found out on his own.
She takes a step back, opens the door wider, and lets him it.
He looks around the apartment carefully, maybe checking for weapons or explosives. Then he just stands there in front of her, his hands shoved in his pockets.
Arthur shuts the door and locks it automatically.
She’s expecting Eames to say something, because he always has something to say. But he doesn’t say anything.
She folds her arms over her chest. She’s just remembered that she’s not wearing a bra, and the t-shirt she’s got on is so thin that Eames is probably getting a eyeful, but she supposes it’s a little late in the game to be worried about modesty.
“Ariadne told you,” she says, eventually.
She’s pleasantly surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. She doesn’t sound at all like someone who was thinking about jumping out of a fire escape to avoid this conversation.
“Yusuf, actually,” Eames says, rocking back on his heels.
That doesn’t make any sense. Arthur crinkles her brow.
“Ariadne told Yusuf?” She knows she shouldn’t actually be surprised, but she honestly sort of thought Ariadne wouldn’t tell anyone but Cobb.
“No.” Eames shrugs. “Cobb told Yusuf, evidently.”
Well, Arthur thinks. Fuck. She might as well take out a full-page ad in the paper, at this point.
“I don’t suppose,” Eames continues evenly, “That you were intending to give me call yourself, were you?”
He doesn’t exactly sound angry, and Arthur knows that she has no reason to feel defensive. Objectively speaking, she must admit that he would probably have the right to be angry that she didn’t tell him sooner. She bristles a little anyway.
“Eventually,” she mutters.
She doesn’t mention the times when she stared at his number in her phone, late at night, and tried to work up the nerve to call him. It’s better he thinks she’s a selfish bitch than a coward.
“Ah.” Eames doesn’t particularly sound like he believes her, which is probably fair.
Arthur stares at the walls, the carpeting, the windows. Everything but him.
“Help me out here, darling. Can you give me an exact time frame for ‘eventually’? Before the birth? Before kindergarten?”
He sounds very, very calm, not very angry at all, and Arthur has no idea whether that’s a good thing or not.
She shrugs, which is not an acceptable answer at all. “I was still getting my head around it,” she says, tightly, and stares at her bare feet.
Eames doesn’t say anything.
After a few moments, she hears a shuffle and a creak as he sits on her couch. She looks up, and sees that he’s plucked a pregnancy magazine off the coffee table and is studying it with an unreadable expression. She swallows, and works on keeping her breathing even and slow.
“I suppose,” he says slowly, “I should ask- don’t shoot me for this, darling, it’s a legitimate question- that it’s…” he waves in her direction expressively, “mine?”
She could say no. She could tell him it absolutely isn’t his, she’s sure of it, and he would probably leave. But that would be an unspeakably shitty thing to do, and odds were that he wouldn’t believe her anyway. She was never a very good liar.
So she nods, somewhat jerkily, and says, “Yes.”
Eames exhales heavily, almost a sigh.
“Right. Well. We should talk about this, then, I think.”
He is being unaccountably reasonable, and it’s sort of pissing Arthur off. She’s used to being the reasonable one. But there’s no way she’s going to let him out-reasonable her, so she crosses over to the armchair across from the couch and sits.
Talking. Yes. She can handle this. They can talk about this like reasonable adults. Of course.
Eames is looking at her steadily. She thinks she misses his careless smile, his refusal to take their strange non-relationship seriously. His nonchalance was infuriating sometimes, but it was also a relief, because serious relationships are dangerous. It was better that they weren’t serious about anything that happened between them.
But that’s not an option anymore, and Arthur knows it.
She folds her hands on her lap, business-like. “What do you want to know?”
She strives of a professional tone, as if she’s briefing him on a job. She can do that.
His hands spasm a bit where they’re resting on his knees, like he wants to grip something.
Arthur knows the feeling.
“How long?” he asks.
“Nine weeks.”
Eames nods, like this makes sense. Of course it does; no doubt he can count back to that night in the hotel.
“Right. And you’re,” he pauses delicately, the same way Ariadne had when she’d asked this question. “You’re keeping it, then?”
Arthur feels like her stomach has turned to a block of ice. She nods.
She doesn’t know what she’ll do if he says he doesn’t want this, if he tries to get her to have the abortion. When she’d thought about it before, she’d thought that might make things easier, because then she wouldn’t have to deal with him, with their relationship. He’d just leave, and then she’s only have herself to worry about.
The idea doesn’t comfort her anymore. It wouldn’t be any kind of victory.
She nods, and Eames nods, like he’d expected this answer.
Neither of them say anything. Eames taps his foot silently against the carpet and Arthur watches it. She supposes this is the point where she’s supposed to say something about what she wants from him. Maybe he’s waiting for her to ask him for something, for money or support.
She might as well set his mind at ease.
“I don’t expect anything from you,” she begins, but Eames cuts her off with a sharp laugh.
“Of course you don’t.” For the first time, he looks almost angry, and Arthur stares at him.
But the anger vanishes from his expression quickly, and he rubs a hand over his face. He looks like she feels. Tired.
“Sorry,” he says shortly. “I…” he sighs again, and then smiles tightly. “It’s quite clear you don’t want me around, hmm?”
Arthur has absolutely no idea what to say to that, and she’s pretty sure it shows on her face. It isn’t exactly that she doesn’t want him around. It isn’t about what she wants at all. She thinks it would be easier for both of them if he wasn’t here. It would be easier, and maybe it would even be better. But she doesn’t know if it’s what she wants. She isn’t convinced that what she wants should even matter.
She really, really doesn’t want to talk about her feelings. So she shrugs.
“It’s pretty clear you don’t want to be around,” she says lightly.
“And what makes you think that?”
He looks angry again, and Arthur glares back at him. Anger is easy. She can do anger.
“You’re telling me you’ve always had secret dreams of settling down and becoming a family man?” Her voice is cutting, brutally sarcastic.
She watches as the anger evaporates again, and his shoulders slump slightly. He scrubs a hand through his hair and slowly shakes his head.
“No,” he says quietly. “No, I haven’t, but that doesn’t change what’s going on now, does it?” He looks at her almost gently.
She fixes her gaze on the coffee table. She can’t look at him. If she looks at him, she really will want him to stay.
“Do what you want.”
She gets up and goes to the kitchen. She needs tea.
Actually, what she really needs is a couple shots of whiskey, but tea will have to suffice.
She fills the kettle and turns on the stove. She can hear Eames coming up behind her, but she deliberately doesn’t turn around.
He puts a hand on the counter next to her, and she can feel his body heat against her back. She can smell his cologne.
Fuck, she thinks. This is not going well. This is the reason she wanted him on the other side of the planet.
“I always do,” he says, voice low. She stares at the kettle.
“I’m not going to keep you from being involved in your own child’s life.” She meant to sound calm, sharp, in control. Instead, she sounds confused, upset. She hates it when her voice betrays her like that.
He touches her hip. She stays still and does not move away.
She wants to tell him that this isn’t what she wants, but she can’t
She doesn’t know what she wants anymore.
Onto the next part...
So, I'm thinking we're past the halfway point here. Maybe six or seven parts left? (Don't hold me to that, I'm notorious for underestimating how long my stories will be.)
Arthur lies on her couch, staring numbly at the television.
She’s half-watching some sitcom, but it’s not really holding her attention. She can only follow about a third of the plot. She’s fluent in French, but several of the pop cultural references are flying over her head.
From what she can glean, the plot is pretty stupid anyway, so it’s probably not much of loss. She throws an arm across her face and sighs.
She’s feeling intensely sorry for herself today, and she doesn’t like it. Self-pity is indulgent and stupid, and she doesn’t want to succumb to it, but she can help it. She feels pathetic, particularly since she’s discovered that she can no longer go more than four hours without needing to take a nap.
She feels useless, and fat, and disgusting. She can’t fit into most of her clothes, so she’s reduced to wearing sweatpants and pajamas until she works up the energy to go shopping.
Yesterday, out of sheer desperation and a fervent desire to avoid actually putting foot in a maternity shop, she went online and ordered some new, bigger skirts and pants. But they won’t be delivered for a few days, and in the meantime, Arthur has decided that she would prefer to hide in her apartment and gorge herself on cookies and Italian takeaway, rather than try to scrounge together a decent outfit.
She plucks another cookie from the package lying on the coffee table and eats it slowly.
It doesn’t really help her feel better. In fact, she has discovered that binging like this mostly just makes her feel fatter and more repulsive. But since there’s no one around to see her, Arthur has decided that she does not care.
Ariadne keeps telephoning, trying to persuade Arthur to go somewhere with her, presumably to do some sort of shopping for baby-related things, but Arthur keeps putting her off. She’s not quite ready to leave the apartment and announce her pregnancy to the world at large by stepping into a maternity shop.
But she did finish the list of baby things to buy.
It didn’t take quite as long as she’d hoped; if she had to suck it up and actually buy baby things, Arthur had hoped that the whole process would at least provide several days’ worth of work. But she was good at collecting information, comparing prices, and making lists. It was what she did. And so Arthur found that she had compiled a fairly complete list in under thirty-six hours.
She emailed it to Ariadne so that she could do the actual purchasing. Arthur had decided that was for the best. For one thing, it prevented her from having to do spend several hours comparing colors of crib bumpers, an experience she dearly wished to avoid. It also had the added benefit of distracting Ariadne, so she wouldn’t start asking Arthur whether she ought to sign up for Lamaze classes yet.
Arthur fully expects that Ariadne will embellish the list; it ended up being a fairly bare-bones, practical collection of the absolute necessities. Crib. Baby monitor. Changing table. The basics.
Ariadne would, no doubt, pick out the stuffed animals and things like that. Arthur thought about that for a while, then decided she was fine with it. After all, she had never liked stuffed animals or dolls, even when she was a child herself. She wouldn’t even know what to pick out. It was better that Ariadne chose those things.
Arthur rolls over onto her side and presses her cheek against the couch cushions. On the television screen, Pierre and Maria have gotten into a fight, because Maria thinks that Pierre is cheating on her with her sister, but it’s all a wacky misunderstanding involving an engagement party and a self-locking broom closet door. Arthur grabs the remote and punches the buttons savagely, flicking through the channels.
There is absolutely nothing to do. No paperwork to be filled out, no calls to be made. Arthur thinks she might go crazy is she has to spend much more time in her apartment, but she also isn’t entirely sure what she’d even do if she went out and about.
She never really realized before how much of her life was devoted to her work. It wasn’t a depressing realization, exactly. It was more frustrating, because what the hell was she supposed to do now, when she didn’t have any work to do and felt too exhausted and bloated and gross to go walking the streets of Paris?
Arthur flicks through each channel slowly and finally settles on the news.
She has a vague, morbid hope that there will be some disaster that will occupy the news (and her attention) for at least the next few hours, but it seems that nothing is happening at the moment. The main story in the news is about some bus drivers who are on strike, and that is not interesting at all.
She turns off the TV.
The apartment is silent. Arthur stares up at the ceiling and then, finally, down at her stomach. Carefully, she pushes up her t-shirt and gives her belly an experimental poke.
Nothing happens, and she feels sort of stupid. She knows it’s way, way to early to for the baby to be kicking, but somehow she has it in her head that it should be more active by now or something. She pokes her stomach again.
The baby is, allegedly, between the size of an olive and a small strawberry. Arthur knows this, because she spent several hours looking up things about fetal development on the internet. It was actually sort of interesting, and she was sort of getting into it, reading about when the legs developed and when the baby could start to hear and things like that. It was kind of nice.
Then she made the mistake of clicking a link about pregnancy complications, and was immediately immersed in a sea of stories about miscarriage, chromosomal abnormalities, umbilical prolapse, and emergency c-sections, and she had to shut her browser before she started hyperventilating.
There was evidently a lot that could go wrong. Arthur had already known this, intellectually. When you had cells dividing and internal organs forming and a whole human being created from basically nothing, obviously things could go awry.
But it was one thing to know that things could go wrong for some hypothetical nameless pregnant woman out there in the world. It was another to know that things could go wrong for her, go wrong with her body. The very thought made Arthur queasy.
She runs her fingers carefully over her stomach, slowly pushing down the waist of her sweatpants. She can sort of see where she’s getting bigger, right in between her hipbones. There’s a little swell of flesh rising, and she traces it with a fingertip.
Her butt is also getting bigger, and that is not really okay with her. At least the fact that she’s getting bigger in the stomach makes sense. The olive-strawberry baby has to grow somewhere. She’s not sure why it’s apparently decided to also give her a fat ass, though. She pokes her stomach again.
“Hey,” she says, quietly. She feels extremely foolish, but continues. “Hey. You in there. Knock it off.”
The magazines and blogs and things all say that you’re supposed to talk to the baby. It’s supposed to encourage bonding, and also apparently the baby can hear now.
Some people apparently think you should play music for the baby too, or so the blogs say. Arthur is dubious, but she also doesn’t want the kid to be musically challenged later in life because she failed to properly stimulate its mind while it was in utero. So she’s thinking about digging up one of her classical music CDs and giving it a try, just in case.
Arthur stares at her stomach and bites her lip.
She still doesn’t feel like she has any idea what she’s doing, even after she scanned the internet for information. She doesn’t feel particularly…attached to the baby, either. It’s just sort of a thing that’s there, in her stomach, apparently growing kidneys and developing a nervous system, but she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do with it.
She wants desperately to not fuck this up. It would be huge thing to fuck up, and she knows it. She knows that it would put every other fuck-up in her life to shame and brand her as an entirely worthless excuse for a human being. So she can’t fuck it up. But she still doesn’t know how to move forward with this whole thing.
She’s had nightmares twice this week, and they completely threw her off balance. It‘s been months since the last time she dreamed naturally, maybe even over a year. She’s been using the PASIV steadily for nearly a decade, and she thinks she probably shouldn’t still be dreaming naturally at all anymore.
But she is. In fact, she’s dreamed twice in a seven-day span and both times they were dreams about losing the baby or having the baby taken away because she wasn’t any good at being a mother.
Both times, she work up in a cold sweat, her heart in her throat, wanting to vomit. Then she turned to the internet for refuge.
It has always been a deeply held conviction of hers that every problem can be solved if she just has enough information. But the information she’s found so far isn’t reassuring, so much as contradictory and terrifying. She’s beginning to think she might be better off on her own. And that isn’t reassuring either.
She clears her throat and studies the little bump on her stomach. She’s supposed to say something now, she thinks. Something productive and useful, something good parents would say to their unborn child.
She can’t think of anything. She touches her stomach again, carefully.
“Sorry,” she says, quietly.
She tries to picture the baby, a blobby little thing with stubby arms and legs, floating around a pocket of amniotic fluid. She saw pictures like that on the internet. They were also not very reassuring. The babies in the picture looked horribly fragile and mostly made her afraid she was going to squish the baby if she put too much pressure on her stomach.
She clears her throat again.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” she ventures cautiously, then stops.
She feels stupid. Even if the baby can hear her, she knows it can’t understand, so it probably doesn’t matter what she says. She could read the phone book, recite Beowulf, or sing rap songs. It wouldn’t know the difference. Still, she feels compelled to at least try
Bonding, she reminds herself. Fetal development. It’s what good parents are supposed to do. She studies her stomach critically.
“Um. I hope you like it in there?” She thinks. “Can you please stop making my ass so big? I mean, I know you need room to move, and that’s fine, but I don’t understand why I have to put on weight everywhere.”
Unsurprisingly, the baby doesn’t have a response for that one. Arthur rolls her eyes and squints up at the ceiling.
“Uh. I’m Arthur, by the way. Your mom.”
She feels utterly ridiculous, talking like this to a little barely-sentient bundle of cells like it can understand her, but it’s sort of weirdly comforting. Or maybe just weird.
It’s really, really weird to be calling herself a mom. Arthur still has a strange yet deeply-seated feeling that she isn’t actually a mother, because mothers are supposed to be competent people, well versed in the art of childrearing.
Which, clearly, she is not. She knows how to change diapers and give bottles and things because of James and Phillipa, but she doesn’t know anything about raising children so that they are intelligent, productive human beings and not raving lunatics.
Arthur thinks that’s probably the sort of thing that’s important to know.
She drums her fingers on her stomach. “So. Yes. I’m Arthur. I…don’t know what your name is yet?”
It’s the first time she’s actually thought about that. She’s going to have to pick a name. She stares at the ceiling and thinks.
“I’m not going to name you anything weird. Don’t worry. No celebrity baby names.”
That, she feels, is a promise she can keep. She is absolutely not going to name the poor kid anything like Jairyn or Zeila. Normal names, she thinks. Something normal.
Not that her own name is particularly normal, but that‘s fine. She likes it. And it is normal, actually, just not for a girl.
She heard the story from her parents once, back when they were still together, back when they were alive, back before she ever heard about dream-sharing or Somnacin or government studies. They told her that the ultrasound said she was a boy, the horoscopes said she was a boy, everyone was absolutely sure that she was going to be a boy. So her mother and father had only picked out one name. And then she’s slipped out, whole and healthy but very definitely lacking a penis. Her parents had apparently looked at each other, shrugged, and decided that she looked like an Arthur anyway.
It was a nice story. Arthur was never sure that she entirely believed it, but it was nice. And it marked a time before her father left and her mother crawled into a bottle and drowned inside it. So it was a memory worth holding onto. The earlier memories were the only one Arthur particularly wanted to keep, anyway.
Given her own origin, she’s already decided that she isn’t going to much emotional energy into trying to find out whether the baby will be a boy or a girl.
Apparently this is weird, because the last time she went to a doctor, with Ariadne clinging to her side like a barnacle, the nurse had asked whether she wanted a boy or a girl. Arthur had said, I don’t care, and the nurse had looked at her like she’d just kicked a puppy.
Arthur had the feeling that was not the answer Good Parents were supposed to give. But she didn’t really see what it mattered. It wasn’t like the baby would be any better, or any easier to raise, if it was a boy or girl. So she really doesn’t care.
But she guesses that she should at least try to think of some names, or the nurse is going to keep glaring at her, and then Ariadne will probably buy some of those baby-name books and make Arthur go over them with her. So she should pick something out, probably.
She tries to think about that, but she’s interrupted by the doorbell. For a minute, she doesn’t react, just stares at the door.
It must be a mistake, because she didn’t order anymore takeaway, and all her mail is delivered to the desk downstairs. And Ariadne wouldn’t ring the bell. She’d knock on the door and call out, so that Arthur knew it was her. So that Arthur wouldn’t just ignore the bell, like she’s thinking of doing now.
But then she thinks that she might as well check and see who it is, just in case Ariadne’s ordered something and a delivery person is bringing it up. Given the way Ariadne’s been eyeing the catalogues, it’s definitely within the realm of possibility.
Arthur hauls herself off the couch and shuffles over to the door. She stands to the side out of habit, a habit drilled into her by several unfortunate jobs where projections or real people kicked down the door or shot through it. After a few seconds, she leans over and peers through the peephole.
In the next second her hand shoots to her pocket to fumble for her totem- but it’s not there, because her sweatpants don’t have any pockets, and she left it on the beside table. She thinks about running to get it, but she doesn’t, mostly because her feet are frozen to the spot. She actually thinks she might throw up all over her doorstep.
Eames. Eames. Oh fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Arthur stares at the closed door numbly and think about locking herself in the bathroom. Except she knows that wouldn’t work, because Eames obviously knows she’s here, and if she doesn’t open the door, he’ll probably just pick the lock.
He’s did that before, almost a year ago, when they did a job together and then she went back to her hotel and decided not the let him in when he knocked. She had thought (hoped) that he would just go away after a while, but he somehow found a way to open the lock, and came in anyway, and then they had sex on the awful floral-patterned hotel couch.
At the time, she’d found Eames’ persistence and blatant disregard of her personal boundaries irritating and amusing in equal measure. Now she can’t quite think past the fear the clogs her throat.
She has to open the door. The only other option is jumping out the window onto the fire escape and making a run for it, and that would be so undignified that Arthur refuses to even consider it. No matter how much she wants to.
There is nothing else to do, so she reaches for the knob and flings the door open.
Eames is there, standing on her doorstep. He stares at her and doesn’t say anything.
Right away, Arthur knows that he knows, fucking bastard, she can tell because he’s not smirking at her, not giving her crumpled sweatpants an amused glance. He’s just looking at her, with absolutely no levity whatsoever in his expression.
She thinks it might be a little bit better this way, maybe, because if he didn’t know, if he’d just dropped by on a social call, she’d have to explain why there were pregnancy magazines scattered across her apartment, and that would be bad. But this isn’t much better.
He stares at her, and she stares right back at him, because fuck him, he came all this way without so much as a phone call to warn her, so he can be the one to talk first.
Finally, he gives her the same up-and-down lingering stare that he always gives her. But it’s not the same at all, Arthur realizes, because this time it’s not flirtatious or exaggeratedly lecherous. Instead, he looks almost apprehensive.
When he’s done examining her, he meets her eyes again, but this time she darts her glance away and stares at the door frame. She’s gripping the doorknob so hard that her hand is cramping.
“Right,” he says, eventually. His voice is surprisingly calm. “Can I come in?”
She wants to say, no, you may not. But that wouldn’t dissuade him at all, and she knows better. Besides. She knew she would have to tell him eventually. It’s her own fault that she put it off so long that he found out on his own.
She takes a step back, opens the door wider, and lets him it.
He looks around the apartment carefully, maybe checking for weapons or explosives. Then he just stands there in front of her, his hands shoved in his pockets.
Arthur shuts the door and locks it automatically.
She’s expecting Eames to say something, because he always has something to say. But he doesn’t say anything.
She folds her arms over her chest. She’s just remembered that she’s not wearing a bra, and the t-shirt she’s got on is so thin that Eames is probably getting a eyeful, but she supposes it’s a little late in the game to be worried about modesty.
“Ariadne told you,” she says, eventually.
She’s pleasantly surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. She doesn’t sound at all like someone who was thinking about jumping out of a fire escape to avoid this conversation.
“Yusuf, actually,” Eames says, rocking back on his heels.
That doesn’t make any sense. Arthur crinkles her brow.
“Ariadne told Yusuf?” She knows she shouldn’t actually be surprised, but she honestly sort of thought Ariadne wouldn’t tell anyone but Cobb.
“No.” Eames shrugs. “Cobb told Yusuf, evidently.”
Well, Arthur thinks. Fuck. She might as well take out a full-page ad in the paper, at this point.
“I don’t suppose,” Eames continues evenly, “That you were intending to give me call yourself, were you?”
He doesn’t exactly sound angry, and Arthur knows that she has no reason to feel defensive. Objectively speaking, she must admit that he would probably have the right to be angry that she didn’t tell him sooner. She bristles a little anyway.
“Eventually,” she mutters.
She doesn’t mention the times when she stared at his number in her phone, late at night, and tried to work up the nerve to call him. It’s better he thinks she’s a selfish bitch than a coward.
“Ah.” Eames doesn’t particularly sound like he believes her, which is probably fair.
Arthur stares at the walls, the carpeting, the windows. Everything but him.
“Help me out here, darling. Can you give me an exact time frame for ‘eventually’? Before the birth? Before kindergarten?”
He sounds very, very calm, not very angry at all, and Arthur has no idea whether that’s a good thing or not.
She shrugs, which is not an acceptable answer at all. “I was still getting my head around it,” she says, tightly, and stares at her bare feet.
Eames doesn’t say anything.
After a few moments, she hears a shuffle and a creak as he sits on her couch. She looks up, and sees that he’s plucked a pregnancy magazine off the coffee table and is studying it with an unreadable expression. She swallows, and works on keeping her breathing even and slow.
“I suppose,” he says slowly, “I should ask- don’t shoot me for this, darling, it’s a legitimate question- that it’s…” he waves in her direction expressively, “mine?”
She could say no. She could tell him it absolutely isn’t his, she’s sure of it, and he would probably leave. But that would be an unspeakably shitty thing to do, and odds were that he wouldn’t believe her anyway. She was never a very good liar.
So she nods, somewhat jerkily, and says, “Yes.”
Eames exhales heavily, almost a sigh.
“Right. Well. We should talk about this, then, I think.”
He is being unaccountably reasonable, and it’s sort of pissing Arthur off. She’s used to being the reasonable one. But there’s no way she’s going to let him out-reasonable her, so she crosses over to the armchair across from the couch and sits.
Talking. Yes. She can handle this. They can talk about this like reasonable adults. Of course.
Eames is looking at her steadily. She thinks she misses his careless smile, his refusal to take their strange non-relationship seriously. His nonchalance was infuriating sometimes, but it was also a relief, because serious relationships are dangerous. It was better that they weren’t serious about anything that happened between them.
But that’s not an option anymore, and Arthur knows it.
She folds her hands on her lap, business-like. “What do you want to know?”
She strives of a professional tone, as if she’s briefing him on a job. She can do that.
His hands spasm a bit where they’re resting on his knees, like he wants to grip something.
Arthur knows the feeling.
“How long?” he asks.
“Nine weeks.”
Eames nods, like this makes sense. Of course it does; no doubt he can count back to that night in the hotel.
“Right. And you’re,” he pauses delicately, the same way Ariadne had when she’d asked this question. “You’re keeping it, then?”
Arthur feels like her stomach has turned to a block of ice. She nods.
She doesn’t know what she’ll do if he says he doesn’t want this, if he tries to get her to have the abortion. When she’d thought about it before, she’d thought that might make things easier, because then she wouldn’t have to deal with him, with their relationship. He’d just leave, and then she’s only have herself to worry about.
The idea doesn’t comfort her anymore. It wouldn’t be any kind of victory.
She nods, and Eames nods, like he’d expected this answer.
Neither of them say anything. Eames taps his foot silently against the carpet and Arthur watches it. She supposes this is the point where she’s supposed to say something about what she wants from him. Maybe he’s waiting for her to ask him for something, for money or support.
She might as well set his mind at ease.
“I don’t expect anything from you,” she begins, but Eames cuts her off with a sharp laugh.
“Of course you don’t.” For the first time, he looks almost angry, and Arthur stares at him.
But the anger vanishes from his expression quickly, and he rubs a hand over his face. He looks like she feels. Tired.
“Sorry,” he says shortly. “I…” he sighs again, and then smiles tightly. “It’s quite clear you don’t want me around, hmm?”
Arthur has absolutely no idea what to say to that, and she’s pretty sure it shows on her face. It isn’t exactly that she doesn’t want him around. It isn’t about what she wants at all. She thinks it would be easier for both of them if he wasn’t here. It would be easier, and maybe it would even be better. But she doesn’t know if it’s what she wants. She isn’t convinced that what she wants should even matter.
She really, really doesn’t want to talk about her feelings. So she shrugs.
“It’s pretty clear you don’t want to be around,” she says lightly.
“And what makes you think that?”
He looks angry again, and Arthur glares back at him. Anger is easy. She can do anger.
“You’re telling me you’ve always had secret dreams of settling down and becoming a family man?” Her voice is cutting, brutally sarcastic.
She watches as the anger evaporates again, and his shoulders slump slightly. He scrubs a hand through his hair and slowly shakes his head.
“No,” he says quietly. “No, I haven’t, but that doesn’t change what’s going on now, does it?” He looks at her almost gently.
She fixes her gaze on the coffee table. She can’t look at him. If she looks at him, she really will want him to stay.
“Do what you want.”
She gets up and goes to the kitchen. She needs tea.
Actually, what she really needs is a couple shots of whiskey, but tea will have to suffice.
She fills the kettle and turns on the stove. She can hear Eames coming up behind her, but she deliberately doesn’t turn around.
He puts a hand on the counter next to her, and she can feel his body heat against her back. She can smell his cologne.
Fuck, she thinks. This is not going well. This is the reason she wanted him on the other side of the planet.
“I always do,” he says, voice low. She stares at the kettle.
“I’m not going to keep you from being involved in your own child’s life.” She meant to sound calm, sharp, in control. Instead, she sounds confused, upset. She hates it when her voice betrays her like that.
He touches her hip. She stays still and does not move away.
She wants to tell him that this isn’t what she wants, but she can’t
She doesn’t know what she wants anymore.
Onto the next part...
So, I'm thinking we're past the halfway point here. Maybe six or seven parts left? (Don't hold me to that, I'm notorious for underestimating how long my stories will be.)
