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Aug. 27th, 2012 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rapacityinblueTitle: Can't take The Farm Outta the Girl
Fandom: Inception
Spoilers: None
Rating: G
Summary: Ariadne's POV on cooking and family.
Pairing: Implied Arthur/Eames; Ariadne/Food
Word Count: ~1750
Warnings: None
Notes: 500 Themes #23 - Remember Me. Written fornotjustathief. Did you guess sloppy, unbeta'd nano fic? You'd be right!
They lived out of hotels, worked from airplanes, rented out empty warehouses. it was a lifestyle that came with the job, and if anyone minded it, they didn't say so. Certainly money wasn't an issue for any of them; In a year, Arthur spent on clothes what some people spent on rent; Eames gambled far past reasonable limits (although, as he pointed out, when one cheated liberally and forged their own chips, "reasonable" took on a new definition.)
But Ariadne was at root a small town girl, and, well, you know what they said about taking the girl off the farm. Her family hadn't frequented restaurants, or ordered takeout. pizza, sometimes, or Chinese at the Cantonese tiki bar in the strip mall -- but not the dizzying array of foods Arthur and Eames laid out like a banquet.
Thai. German. Ethiopian. (She didn't want to ever eat bread that could be described.as "spongy" again.) It was interesting. It was very frequently delicious. “Arthur, she's never had pho. We could take that job in Hanoi--”
But it wasn't home. Ariadne had lived in Paris; of course, she'd grown accustomed to baguettes and crepes. Heavy cream sauces and coffee served in tiny cups. But that wasn't home, either.
Home was meatloaf, with Heinz ketchup basted on top. Home was spaghetti with hot dogs chopped up in the sauce. Ariadne wasn't ashamed of her roots, humble as they were, and she'd never had an eclair that could rival her mother's home made donuts.
She didn't say anything, though, because at first it was a matter of pride. Not enough, that she'd been accepted to one of the most prestigious international programs for architecture. Not enough, to be recruited into an occupation so exclusive that most people didn't even know it existed. She'd grown up in a world where okra was it's own food group and sushi was referred to as "bait". She'd decided long ago to see more of the world than Oklahoma made available, and that included eating every outrageous dish Eames and Arthur set in front of her. Except the octopus: it was still moving, and there were lines.
And even then, when she felt she’d had enough: she’d tasted a dozen different kinds of cuisine, could order with fluency at almost every restaurant. It wasn’t pride, then, but there wasn't much point, because they couldn't cook even if they wanted to. They moved too often, worked impossible hours, and lived off the minibar and coffee runs. it was just the world of dreamsharing.
But then came the London job. The London job was different from the start, when Eames looked speculatively at Arthur and said, “You’ve still got the flat there, haven’t you?”
She would have thought Eames, if anyone, would maintain ties, but no. In retrospect, it was a little silly. Neither of them were sentimental, and if they held onto a property, it was because it was safe and untraceable back to them, not out of any fond reminiscences. She made a mental note to cancel her lease in Paris.
But, as it happened, Arthur did have a flat. It was small, but they’d worked out of worse. Ariadne was tiny and neat; if she had to sleep in the living room, she folded her blankets neatly in the morning, stashed her pillow in the closet. Arthur and Eames shared the bedroom. She didn’t ask, there were some things she just didn’t need to know.
The flat was small, but it had a kitchen. So during the day they spread out: coffee shops, parks, the like. They needed something more natural for this mark. Fancy hotels and secluded hospitals weren’t going to do the trick, so Ariadne wandered Royal Parks for inspiration. Eames trailed his forgery, working as hired muscle. Ariadne bought it, and it kept him away for days on end, sometimes. Arthur just didn’t like working in the same place he slept. He could, he stressed, he could work under almost any condition. But this wasn’t some secluded backwater, it was London, and he would damn well work where he wanted.
But they had a kitchen. So when Eames texted them: “home late, curry?” she texted back: “cooking. ur plate in oven.”
It had been a long time since Ariadne’d cooked for herself or anyone else. And home, well, home was the kitchen. Home was kids underfoot and the smell of fresh pie in the ovens, home was cursing and yelling through the house. Home was cutting vegetables with slow, careful precision under her mother’s watchful eye, learning to handle a knife right.
That first dinner wasn’t big, by any means. She bought fresh vegetables at the market, scored them and basted them with olive oil and herbs, stuck them under the broiler. She was a business woman these days, after all. She needed time to sketch while they cooked. They came out sunken and charred. Wrinkled and crisp on the outside, stewed soft inside. She tossed them with pasta, more oil and fresh herbs, stuck the whole thing back in on low heat beside a store-bought loaf of thick-sliced, flaky-crusted bread. It was a perfect meal for them, easy to eat one handed, able to be kept warm indefinitely as they wandered in and out of the flat, eating when they thought about it.
Arthur looked surprised, but ate his portion quite happily. Eames grinned and said, “Cheers, then,” downing his with relish. She didn’t think much about it.
They went on like that with no one commenting on it for some time. Ariadne liked to cook, and she didn’t think much of it, especially not when dishes magically disappeared of food appeared in the pantry. Grits and pancakes for breakfast, salads and fresh made sandwhiches at lunch. For dinner, baked chicken, casserole, quiche. Anything she could pop into the oven and leave there. She attempted her mother’s gumbo recipe with passable results, but mostly she experimented with whatever she found in the market, or whatever Eames or Arthur snuck into the pantry.
It was just food. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal . It definitely wasn’t supposed to lead Arthur and Eames into a complete, guilt-ridden melt down, but apparently it did. For the first time, Ariadne began to realize what her mother had meant when she said, “A woman can rule the house without ever leaving her kitchen.”
The first sign was a pan. It wasn’t a pan Ariadne had used, but she found it in the sink, it’s bottom crusted with black char. She shrugged, squirted dish soap into it, and got started on her pork roast.
Things started disappearing from the pantry. She didn’t notice, at first, until she went to reach for a package of sirloin only to find it missing. You didn’t just misplace a pound of ground beef, right? And then she started noticing little things missing. An apple. A bag of frozen peas. The last of the olive oil. If it had been any one thing, she would have written it off, but it wasn’t. There was an unavoidable conclusion, here, Arthur or Eames had stashed someone in the closet and they were sneaking out at night to cook themselves food.
Or, more likely, they’d been cooking it themselves.
It was a simple equation, to Ariadne’s mind. Raw ingredients disappeared, completed meals appeared. That was just how it worked, or at least, that was how it had worked in Oklahoma. And yet, as more and more food vanished from what she was quickly starting to think of as “her kitchen,” no new meals appeared.
Dreamsharing was all about trust, wasn’t that what she’d said to Dom when she wanted him to tell her about Mal? So she decided to leave it alone. Whatever Arthur and Eames were doing with the food, yeah, she was better off not knowing. She really believed that.
So she let it slide, and she let it slide, and then one thursday, she walked into hell. It happened without warning, she just came in the back door of the flat, stepped into the kitchen, and there it was. There was batter on the ceiling. She really had no idea how they’d gotten it up there, because as far as she could tell, they didn’t have the stand mixer out. They didn’t even have the egg beaters out. She remembered, briefly, baking with her mom, all of the kids holding their hands palm-in around the mixing bowl to prevent splashes, licking cake batter off her fingers afterward.
This was kind of like that, only she wasn’t going to lick the ceiling. And she was going to leave licking Arthur to Eames, because his perfectly coiffed hair was spattered with batter. So was his sweater and trouser-fronts.
“Do I want to know?” she asked finally, looking between them.
“Probably not,” Arthur said, at the same time Eames said, “I really doubt it, love.”
“Why were you trying to make a cake?” Because there was no other reason for them to have out the baking powder and the baking soda, cocoa and bittersweet chocolate, eggs, flour, sugar. Olive oil. Why the hell did they have olive oil out? She was amazed at how calm her voice sounded.
“I thought we weren’t discussing it,” Arthur said, and Eames said, “Tell you, have to kill you, you know what they say.”
“I’m going into the living room,” Ariadne told them, nodding her head slowly.
“Grand,” Eames said. Arthur said, “We’ll clean this up, don’t worry.”
She wasn’t worried. She knew they’d clean it up, because she sure as hell wasn’t. There was a tiny, almost irresistible desire to ask. Have you been trying to cook this entire time? Her sirloin. She’d been planning to make burgers, real actual burgers with cheddar in the middle. The charred pan. It was all starting to make a certain, twisted, terrible type of sense.
She wasn’t going to ask. Not even if they put a gun to her head. There was not a force in the world that could make her ask.
“Finish up so I can make dinner,” she said finally. “We’re having lasagna.”
She left the kitchen as quickly as she could. Behind her, she heard Eames whisper something. She couldn’t hear the words, but the laughter was evident in his tone. Arthur, mild as ever, said, “Shut up and wipe down the stove or I swear to god I’ll shoot you, Eames,” and yeah, she wasn’t asking. You could take the girl off the farm, and she knew better than to get in the middle of a kitchen dispute.
Fandom: Inception
Spoilers: None
Rating: G
Summary: Ariadne's POV on cooking and family.
Pairing: Implied Arthur/Eames; Ariadne/Food
Word Count: ~1750
Warnings: None
Notes: 500 Themes #23 - Remember Me. Written for
notjustathief. Did you guess sloppy, unbeta'd nano fic? You'd be right!They lived out of hotels, worked from airplanes, rented out empty warehouses. it was a lifestyle that came with the job, and if anyone minded it, they didn't say so. Certainly money wasn't an issue for any of them; In a year, Arthur spent on clothes what some people spent on rent; Eames gambled far past reasonable limits (although, as he pointed out, when one cheated liberally and forged their own chips, "reasonable" took on a new definition.)
But Ariadne was at root a small town girl, and, well, you know what they said about taking the girl off the farm. Her family hadn't frequented restaurants, or ordered takeout. pizza, sometimes, or Chinese at the Cantonese tiki bar in the strip mall -- but not the dizzying array of foods Arthur and Eames laid out like a banquet.
Thai. German. Ethiopian. (She didn't want to ever eat bread that could be described.as "spongy" again.) It was interesting. It was very frequently delicious. “Arthur, she's never had pho. We could take that job in Hanoi--”
But it wasn't home. Ariadne had lived in Paris; of course, she'd grown accustomed to baguettes and crepes. Heavy cream sauces and coffee served in tiny cups. But that wasn't home, either.
Home was meatloaf, with Heinz ketchup basted on top. Home was spaghetti with hot dogs chopped up in the sauce. Ariadne wasn't ashamed of her roots, humble as they were, and she'd never had an eclair that could rival her mother's home made donuts.
She didn't say anything, though, because at first it was a matter of pride. Not enough, that she'd been accepted to one of the most prestigious international programs for architecture. Not enough, to be recruited into an occupation so exclusive that most people didn't even know it existed. She'd grown up in a world where okra was it's own food group and sushi was referred to as "bait". She'd decided long ago to see more of the world than Oklahoma made available, and that included eating every outrageous dish Eames and Arthur set in front of her. Except the octopus: it was still moving, and there were lines.
And even then, when she felt she’d had enough: she’d tasted a dozen different kinds of cuisine, could order with fluency at almost every restaurant. It wasn’t pride, then, but there wasn't much point, because they couldn't cook even if they wanted to. They moved too often, worked impossible hours, and lived off the minibar and coffee runs. it was just the world of dreamsharing.
But then came the London job. The London job was different from the start, when Eames looked speculatively at Arthur and said, “You’ve still got the flat there, haven’t you?”
She would have thought Eames, if anyone, would maintain ties, but no. In retrospect, it was a little silly. Neither of them were sentimental, and if they held onto a property, it was because it was safe and untraceable back to them, not out of any fond reminiscences. She made a mental note to cancel her lease in Paris.
But, as it happened, Arthur did have a flat. It was small, but they’d worked out of worse. Ariadne was tiny and neat; if she had to sleep in the living room, she folded her blankets neatly in the morning, stashed her pillow in the closet. Arthur and Eames shared the bedroom. She didn’t ask, there were some things she just didn’t need to know.
The flat was small, but it had a kitchen. So during the day they spread out: coffee shops, parks, the like. They needed something more natural for this mark. Fancy hotels and secluded hospitals weren’t going to do the trick, so Ariadne wandered Royal Parks for inspiration. Eames trailed his forgery, working as hired muscle. Ariadne bought it, and it kept him away for days on end, sometimes. Arthur just didn’t like working in the same place he slept. He could, he stressed, he could work under almost any condition. But this wasn’t some secluded backwater, it was London, and he would damn well work where he wanted.
But they had a kitchen. So when Eames texted them: “home late, curry?” she texted back: “cooking. ur plate in oven.”
It had been a long time since Ariadne’d cooked for herself or anyone else. And home, well, home was the kitchen. Home was kids underfoot and the smell of fresh pie in the ovens, home was cursing and yelling through the house. Home was cutting vegetables with slow, careful precision under her mother’s watchful eye, learning to handle a knife right.
That first dinner wasn’t big, by any means. She bought fresh vegetables at the market, scored them and basted them with olive oil and herbs, stuck them under the broiler. She was a business woman these days, after all. She needed time to sketch while they cooked. They came out sunken and charred. Wrinkled and crisp on the outside, stewed soft inside. She tossed them with pasta, more oil and fresh herbs, stuck the whole thing back in on low heat beside a store-bought loaf of thick-sliced, flaky-crusted bread. It was a perfect meal for them, easy to eat one handed, able to be kept warm indefinitely as they wandered in and out of the flat, eating when they thought about it.
Arthur looked surprised, but ate his portion quite happily. Eames grinned and said, “Cheers, then,” downing his with relish. She didn’t think much about it.
They went on like that with no one commenting on it for some time. Ariadne liked to cook, and she didn’t think much of it, especially not when dishes magically disappeared of food appeared in the pantry. Grits and pancakes for breakfast, salads and fresh made sandwhiches at lunch. For dinner, baked chicken, casserole, quiche. Anything she could pop into the oven and leave there. She attempted her mother’s gumbo recipe with passable results, but mostly she experimented with whatever she found in the market, or whatever Eames or Arthur snuck into the pantry.
It was just food. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal . It definitely wasn’t supposed to lead Arthur and Eames into a complete, guilt-ridden melt down, but apparently it did. For the first time, Ariadne began to realize what her mother had meant when she said, “A woman can rule the house without ever leaving her kitchen.”
The first sign was a pan. It wasn’t a pan Ariadne had used, but she found it in the sink, it’s bottom crusted with black char. She shrugged, squirted dish soap into it, and got started on her pork roast.
Things started disappearing from the pantry. She didn’t notice, at first, until she went to reach for a package of sirloin only to find it missing. You didn’t just misplace a pound of ground beef, right? And then she started noticing little things missing. An apple. A bag of frozen peas. The last of the olive oil. If it had been any one thing, she would have written it off, but it wasn’t. There was an unavoidable conclusion, here, Arthur or Eames had stashed someone in the closet and they were sneaking out at night to cook themselves food.
Or, more likely, they’d been cooking it themselves.
It was a simple equation, to Ariadne’s mind. Raw ingredients disappeared, completed meals appeared. That was just how it worked, or at least, that was how it had worked in Oklahoma. And yet, as more and more food vanished from what she was quickly starting to think of as “her kitchen,” no new meals appeared.
Dreamsharing was all about trust, wasn’t that what she’d said to Dom when she wanted him to tell her about Mal? So she decided to leave it alone. Whatever Arthur and Eames were doing with the food, yeah, she was better off not knowing. She really believed that.
So she let it slide, and she let it slide, and then one thursday, she walked into hell. It happened without warning, she just came in the back door of the flat, stepped into the kitchen, and there it was. There was batter on the ceiling. She really had no idea how they’d gotten it up there, because as far as she could tell, they didn’t have the stand mixer out. They didn’t even have the egg beaters out. She remembered, briefly, baking with her mom, all of the kids holding their hands palm-in around the mixing bowl to prevent splashes, licking cake batter off her fingers afterward.
This was kind of like that, only she wasn’t going to lick the ceiling. And she was going to leave licking Arthur to Eames, because his perfectly coiffed hair was spattered with batter. So was his sweater and trouser-fronts.
“Do I want to know?” she asked finally, looking between them.
“Probably not,” Arthur said, at the same time Eames said, “I really doubt it, love.”
“Why were you trying to make a cake?” Because there was no other reason for them to have out the baking powder and the baking soda, cocoa and bittersweet chocolate, eggs, flour, sugar. Olive oil. Why the hell did they have olive oil out? She was amazed at how calm her voice sounded.
“I thought we weren’t discussing it,” Arthur said, and Eames said, “Tell you, have to kill you, you know what they say.”
“I’m going into the living room,” Ariadne told them, nodding her head slowly.
“Grand,” Eames said. Arthur said, “We’ll clean this up, don’t worry.”
She wasn’t worried. She knew they’d clean it up, because she sure as hell wasn’t. There was a tiny, almost irresistible desire to ask. Have you been trying to cook this entire time? Her sirloin. She’d been planning to make burgers, real actual burgers with cheddar in the middle. The charred pan. It was all starting to make a certain, twisted, terrible type of sense.
She wasn’t going to ask. Not even if they put a gun to her head. There was not a force in the world that could make her ask.
“Finish up so I can make dinner,” she said finally. “We’re having lasagna.”
She left the kitchen as quickly as she could. Behind her, she heard Eames whisper something. She couldn’t hear the words, but the laughter was evident in his tone. Arthur, mild as ever, said, “Shut up and wipe down the stove or I swear to god I’ll shoot you, Eames,” and yeah, she wasn’t asking. You could take the girl off the farm, and she knew better than to get in the middle of a kitchen dispute.