Title: Five Times He Asked
Rating: T
Pairing: Arthur/Ariadne
Summary: Arthur proposes to Ariadne in five different settings.(It's up to the reader to decide if they are all in the movieverse or each is a slightly different AU.) Romantic fluff with a shade of angst and a pinch of humour.
Notes/Warnings: Originally written for a prompt at the LiveJournal community inception_kink: Arthur purposing to Ariadne, cuteness/fluff/lemonade :) The T rating is for a mild gun and a mild sex reference.
The characters, setting and story of Inception are the property of Christopher Nolan and no cash is being made from this story.

"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact..." (A Midsummer Night's Dream, V.1.4-8)

1. Paris
Paris is the city of love, and at night doubly so. The velvet sky sports diamonds at her throat, forehead and across her slender fingers with all the casual elegance of a King's mistress. Winking and giggling to her belle amie, the inconstant Lady Moon, she throws herself lazily over the Seine at sundown and flounces her skirts around her, all the better to the bedeck the evening with her secret glamour. She is the scent of roses and jasmine clinging to a satin bodice or a faded lace handkerchief. The dark fall of curls over pale shoulders. The airy grace of the Eiffel Tower picked out in tiny lights. She runs giggling across the Pont Neuf, snatching the warmth of your breath as she rushes by, but you only hear the echo of her steps as she vanishes into the Ile de la Cite. She can enchant you with gilded reflections and dreams of romance but she will break your heart, leaving you in the grey sting of morning with just a napkin bearing her lipstick mark. Yet you will forgive her the next night, every night, as she peeks over Montmartre, just so she can show you her secrets again.

Ariadne wonders sometimes if this is why she stays in Paris. It's a city full of dreamers, what notice will be given to one more? She wants her degree, of course she does. But since she broke open the worlds beyond number and felt herself soar across rivers of steel and over towers of snow, the mundane world tastes more and more of wormwood spiked ashes. She wants only to fly, dancing on the needle fine point of the present in blood red shoes, blowing raspberries at the future and the past. Who needs them anyway? Not her. She can open her hand and make mountains rise, spin clouds with a puff of air from her lips. She has been Kali, shaping creation and destruction to the beat of her own drum. She is touched with fire and drunk on honeydew, giggling and careening through the streets of her mind, blind to the world beyond. Only when she hears his voice: "Come back, Ariadne," does she dare to let it go.

She opens her eyes to find Arthur waiting for her. He brought her back here, she recalls, and he stayed. He had been her anchor, holding the strings of her swooping kite with a sure hand as she raced the wind, never letting her slip wholly away yet never forcing her down. The life she wakes to is quiet and rhythmic, marked with the passing of solar days rather than the adrenaline shot of dream ones, and him. He talks to her in his quiet voice, stories about his work, his life and Cobb, Eames and Mal, huge adventures that seem too big for the people she knows, impossibly glamorous and tinged with danger. He feeds her, soup and sandwiches mostly since she craves them. He even washes her hair, combing it out and humming softly "Curly locks, curly locks, wilt thou be mine?"
She was surprised to find he had so much tenderness in him and that she would come to relish it so.

In the end he sends her back to Professor Miles so she will finish school, because she needs to have the choice where she builds he insists, and for once she listens.
The night she graduates they climb the Butte and peer up at the heavens. His kiss tastes of champagne and his jacket smells faintly of cedar, and when he sighs "Marry me" into her hair she mouths "Of course," against his neck.

She's not so stupid as to believe this is happy ever after. Life isn't that simple. But she hears the sound of Paris' enchanted night and hopes, fiercely, that a little glamour will wrap itself round them and keep the mundane world at bay just a while longer.

2. London
Sometimes London has all the joy and beauty of the inside of a plug. Low, shabby grey and brown boxes cluttering the horizon from Ealing to Lewisham, smeared with drizzle or cowering under sudden bolts of sunlight in a panorama of flaky paint and boarded up windows. But sometimes London will gift you with her charms. The unexpected beauty of Hyde Park. The shining shock of The City shooting out of the meandering, haunted East End. 's emerging from the mist into the autumn sun as you gaze out from the Tate Modern. The Gothic fantasy of The Houses of Parliament or the delicate surprise of Fortnum & Mason's pale green shell. London is a tidal city; washing in and drawing out, leaving who knows what on the river banks. Regardless, London quietly changes the water's offerings into its own stones, the restrained, the mannerly, the worldly weary under its own long history. She takes all who come to her and says "You are of me now."

Arthur likes London. Ever since he first came here he has felt an affinity for it's sense of being pulled between the past and the future. It is still a city where he can buy a bespoke three piece suit, a hand measured shirt with two button cuffs and shoes from a gentleman who keeps wooden lasts of his feet tucked in a neatly labelled box in his workshop. Yet it's also running headlong towards the silicon age in a blaze of brushed aluminum and white lights, careless of what that might mean. Even the bus stops sport LED arrivals displays, while Piccadilly Circus has become a burning whirl of digital screens and glaring advertisements. Still, underneath it all it remains a brisk, buttoned up place that speaks in quieter, more clipped tones than it's cousins.

He and Ariadne are working with Eames somewhere out of the East End. It's still blessed with its fair share of empty workshops and warehouses and doesn't come without its own charms even if they are disguised sometimes in a pall of smog. At night they eat Bengali curry or smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels, hiding in the new money seeping into Brick Lane, then slip home down the tiny, worm carved streets, tumble into bed and sleep until the pale white morning. Every day he wakes to the smell of Ariadne's hair on the pillow next to him and he buries his face into its minky darkness, relishing the fact he is here, now. The future can be planned for. The past doesn't matter except as a lesson. But the present is caged in moments like this, when she is suspended between dreams and him, mumbling his name and turning in his arms. When he doesn't worry about what came before or after, simply warmth, kisses and her.

It's about this time that he realises that this is what it feels like to be in love. That for all the ways she is unlike him, she can grant him more flair, more creativity and more joy. And he can give her foundations to draw up from, he is her boundary, her safety and her happiness. He would ride into battle for her without thinking, carrying only a sword of flame and a lock of her hair, yet he knows she would never expect or ask him to: He had always half expected love to rage through him, turn the world over and make the sky into the sea, but instead he finds that it is quiet, deep and tide flecked. He can transmit it to her through such small things, a word or a touch, and she returns it to him, over and over. He knows that all this time they have been loving each other, making each other better, becoming more than the sum of themselves.

And then he laughs to himself, shakes his head and wonders when he became a poet.

It's a Sunday morning, and they're prowling around a deserted Bond Street with takeout coffee and a paper bag of warm, butter rich, croissants. Ariadne presses her nose to the store windows, sipping her latte and snatching pastry morsels from the bag. She's taking notes, like she always does, finding the feel of the world so she can imitate it later and he is watching her, pointing out the lines of the buildings or the height of the roofs. Somewhere in this morning, he realises, his perception has shifted. It's as if he is discovering this world, rather than planning it three steps ahead, and it is incredible. So he barely even notices that he's stopped by Asprey and Garrard (the Queen's jeweller no less)or that he's only an inch of glass from exquisite diamond solitaire when he takes her hand. He feels weightless as the words leave his mouth, like they had always been there, waiting for this second to come.

"Hey, Ariadne,"

She turns, tilting her head and frowning slightly, quizzically.

"Marry me."

Her eyes widen, her mouth drops in an o of surprise and he wants to laugh at how stunned her face is.

"...shouldn't you be kneeling down or something?" She finally manages.

"Does it matter if I ask on my feet or on my knees?"

"No! No. Oh my god," Her eyes are still wide with shock, "You want to marry me...I never thought..."

He cuts her off. "Yes, I want to marry you. Will you marry me?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes, I do." Her smile is huge and full of surprised joy.

Love, it occurs to him later, is tidal too. It rises and falls, washes ashore treasure and dross, it pulls with all the force of immeasurable tons of water, it takes you in and changes you as gently as a ripple or as devastatingly as a tsunami. And sometimes it will take you just where you need to go.

3. Limbo
"This isn't real." Her voice sounds brittle in her own ears.
"No. And we can't live here, not like we do up above."
"I know." She inhales the salt spray and feels the wind whip her hair, a ragged ensign signalling to an empty world. "How long do we wait?"
"A year or two, perhaps. That should be long enough for someone to notice that we need help."
"And then?"
He takes out his gun and puts it in her hand. "Then we try the alternative."

As the days pass they keep the words alive between them: It isn't real. We will go home. But they also begin to play, laughing like children when he manages to build a wobbly cartoon shack complete with a stove pipe sticking out of the bright red roof. Or when she makes them a house stranded in a tree, complete with branches thrusting through the walls, floors and out of the windows. At night they sleep in a nest woven from thought stuff and silk, or they make love and relish the sound of each other's heartbeats. For all that this is an unreal country, his hand in hers is a reminder that they are together on the shores of the unconscious.

Getting married is another mock serious game. On a hill above the sea she builds a cathedral of glass with wooden windows, engraving it with flowers, stars and waves then filling it with candles. He draws two gold rings out of the air like a magician and they say soft, silly, old words and kiss each other numb. When the morning comes they stand on the cliffs wrapped in a white sheet and each other and she sighs "This isn't real. We are going to go home." She holds his hand in hers up to the weak morning sunlight so it catches the ring on his fourth finger, then covers it with a kiss. "But I will still feel the same about you."
He smiles and kisses her forehead, tucking her neatly against him. "I know."

Their first child is born six months later, their second ten more after that. Alice and Peter grow up dark and strong minded in the little house in a tree, and sometimes Ariadne wonders if they are the meld of her consciousness and Arthur's hiving off in a new direction or just sheer wish fulfillment. She surprises herself by being the kind of mother who can let them go free, perhaps reasoning that they are dream children in a dream land, but who will relish their returning hugs. Arthur smiles more. He talks them through science, mathematics and languages while they sit big eyed in concentration. Or he teaches them how to make kites, bows and arrows or fishing rods, then they roam dream's country in search of games. Their childhood is a long, golden morning, filled with sharp happinesses.

"This isn't real. We are going home." He whispers to her every night, and every night she says "Yes. But I won't forget them."
"Neither will I."

Yusuf is the one who comes for them. His smile is gentle when he sees Alice clinging to Arthur's leg, peeking out at the stranger. It stays gentle when he climbs into the tree house and sees Peter's dark curls bent over a book. It never wavers when he explains that it's been five minutes for their bodies and that they are about to switch from a sedative to a stimulant, preparing for the kick that will jolt them upwards to the waking world. At the end of it all he looks at them, at the little life they have made, and asks placidly if they're sure they want to come back.

Arthur takes her hand and she grips it tightly. "This isn't real." He answers and she finishes, "We're coming home."

When she wakes, the first thing she misses is the weight of her wedding ring on her left hand. Then she's up, out of her seat, and Arthur has her crushed to his chest. She knows they are both crying, but isn't sure if it's from joy or grief. Her totem digs into her palm and she can feel him clutching his die through the closed fingers of his right hand, both checking with the compulsion of those too long gone.

When he finally lets her go he regards her for a second and his smile is heartbreaking in it's raw sweetness, before he bends, then kneels at her feet. He takes her bare left hand and puts his lips over the spot where she still feels the ghost of a gold band.
"This is real. We're home. Marry me."
Her voice cracks and stupid, hot tears glaze her cheeks. "Yes, I will."

In the background she hears Eames mutter "Oh, flaming hell, they've both gone bonkers. That's all we need."

And she doesn't care.

4. New York
They call New York the city that never sleeps. The fact Arthur has the closest thing to a home here, in a place where what he does for a living is positively discouraged, never ceases to make him smile wryly. His apartment is high over the city, an aerie of glass, wood and stone, gazing down onto the ruler sharp lines and green patches that make up the land below. At night it vanishes into a neon smear on the brown of the polluted darkness. It carries on, never ceasing, never stopping, creating and redrawing itself even as you watch.

She brought him back here, since he said it was home and that was where he wanted to go. Even for a dreamer there has to be somewhere to wake up to.
Ariadne's sitting in the window seat, and the morning sunshine is making her hair bronze, gold and copper under its rays. The shirt she's wearing (his shirt, he realises, and his heart lurches against his chest in possessive pride) covers her to her knees. She's absent mindedly eating an apple and the morning paper is spread over her lap. Her frown is hidden by her glasses, glasses which it occurs to him she only ever wears in front of him, as if he's somehow allowed to know that underneath it all she has some small vanities, some small secrets that only he can share with her. Like the birthmark on her scalp or the trick she has of being able to bend her fingers back ninety degrees from her palms or his ticklish knees or his baby photos. The web they have woven between them of fierce mutual need and trust seems so insubstantial, but he knows if he were to try and disentangle from it it would cling like blood and hold like iron.

How did this happen? How did she ease into his life so neatly that he finds himself wondering when he'll see her each day or squirreling away tidbits of stories for her? That when he plans he plans for two, not one and he can't recall when he started doing so. It's like he woke up and found his life has enlarged for her and he doesn't mind it one bit. He wants her to be there, with her hundreds of hair care products, her handfuls of pencils and her habit of wearing his clothes. He wants her smell and her voice and her touch and even when he wants to curse himself for the weakness, he still finds the need burning away at his core as if she's found her way there too. He has never wanted anything like this, went out of his way to avoid it in fact. That even though he knows that he should send her away from him to keep her safe, he can't.

And so the days pass, the two of them high above the city or striding it's streets, gradually blurring into each other, stories mingling until he's not sure where she starts and he ends.

Eventually they are offered another job, in Rome. On the day before they leave he sits down at their dining table (not his, not any more) and places a small, pale blue box on the pile of sketches that she's made in front of her. She looks up with her huge eyes and his words fall into the quiet like pebbles dropping into a pond.
"Will you marry me?"
Her eyes sparkle with unshed tears as she reaches out and takes his hand, clinging to it as if she never wants to let go.
"Yes. Yes, I will marry you, Arthur."

As he gathers her tiny frame into him he realises that is what he wants too. To never let go. To never remember what his life was like when it was too big for one.

5. Los Angeles
If this is the City of Angels, Ariande decides, then she may just have landed in Eden.

Dom Cobb's beautiful house is hidden away behind Sherman Oaks, stranded in an impossibly green garden. "You know that this used to be a desert, right?" She jokes with him as she gazes from the balcony down at the mature trees, soft grass and trails of ivy. "Courtesy of a very expensive watering system, " Dom smiles. "Besides, Mal loved growing things. Vegetables, flowers, the kids..." He lets the words hang as he takes a sip of his beer. On cue she hears Phillipa's voice chiding Arthur, who had agreed to play tea party with her only five minutes beforehand, that he "just can't!"
"Would you like me to see what that's about?" She asks with a wide grin, imagining just how much trouble a stubborn seven year old girl colliding head on with the world's best point man might be.
"Would you mind? After all, I said I would cook for you guys and I really should be in the kitchen by now."
"Sure, go and create." Ariadne pushed herself up from the rail where she was leaning, "I'll see if he's refusing to drink afternoon blend or eat oatmeal cookies."

The trouble, it turns out, is of a more titular nature. She finds Phillipa, hands on hips, fuming at a perfectly placid Arthur.
"I said he can't be one because he's not a girl!"
"He can't be what?" Ariadne sits down cross legged next to her partner and peers at him curiously. He takes a sip from his pink teacup and answers her evenly.
"A princess."
"Well, I think Phillipa might have a point. They are usually girls. Or female at least."
"See! I told you, Arthur! You're not a girl so you can't be a princess."
"But this is a pretend game, right? So I could be a princess if I wanted, couldn't I?"
Phillipa's bottom lip starts to wobble "But that's not how it works!"
Sensing the impending tantrum, Ariadne jumps across her rising wail. "How about if I was a prince? I could pretend to be a boy, Arthur could pretend to be a girl and then you'd have both." The girl looks unconvinced.
"But...you're a girl."
"Well, girls play boys in some plays, don't they? It could be like that." Deciding a change of subject is required, she asks quickly, "May I have a cup of tea?"

When Phillipa scurries off for another cup she elbows Arthur in the ribs. "Did you have to do that?"
"What? I was playing. Besides, I like the idea of being the one who gets rescued, fought over or ransomed for the kingdom for a change."
She rolls her eyes. "You'd hate it, all that sitting about, looking pretty. Plus you'd be the kind of Cinderella who made a dagger out of her glass slipper and took the pumpkin coach for a joy ride around the city."
"Would you still come and rescue me though?"
She let out an amused huff of a laugh. "You wouldn't need me to."
"That's not what I asked." His eyes find hers and hold them.
"Yes, I would. Even if you were the most unconventional princess Grimm never thought of."
"And I'd be pretty, wouldn't I...?" He leans down towards her.
"Very, very, very pretty." She agrees, letting him steal the end of the word in a kiss.

"Ewww!" They jump apart guiltily to find Phillipa regarding them with more amusement than real distaste. Ariadne feels her face burn and looks everywhere but towards Arthur. Its almost as bad as being caught necking in the back seat of her car by her father.

"I thought we should have a new game." The blonde girl beams. "A fancy dress ball!"
"But we're not in fancy dress." She hears herself say stupidly.
"I made you some." From behind her back Phillipa produces two daisy chains and plops one on each of their heads. "Princess Arthur and Prince AiryAddKnee. Come on, we have to dance. Daddy put my music on." She grabs their hands and starts pulling them to their feet. "Come on, it's starting!"

From the house comes a faintly metallic guitar twang, backed by up by the hint of an country flavoured violin.
"May I have this dance, princess?" Ariadne bows to Arthur, extending her hand with a flourish, then grabbing her daisy chain as it slips.
"Of course you may." He holds out his arms. She slips her hands around his waist and his rest on her shoulders.
"Letting me lead?"
"You're the prince." His smile is teasing.
"But you're the better dancer."
"Sssh." He puts a kiss on top of her curls, "Just lead, already, Prince Charming."

We were both young when I first saw you... A young woman's voice trills out over the garden. Arthur rolls his eyes and she swats his behind gently. "Quiet. Phillipa likes it and this is her party."
"Did you ever do things like this?"
"Not much. I think I liked books and Lego more. Did you?"
"Sometimes, I think. Not nearly so elaborate though."

Phillipa waltzes past them wrapped in a curtain and singing in her best drawl: Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone...

"Would she mind very much if I told her Romeo and Juliet is not the best relationship model in the world?" Arthur's eyes follow the girl looping around them. Ariadne laughs against his chest.
"You're so phlegmatic. She'll learn it in time. After all..." Mal, she doesn't say; Dom and Mal, doubly star crossed. The wound that may never heal.
"I know."

Perhaps that's the impulse that jumps her next words out of her, thinking of Mal and Dom, trapped inside their foile a deux; thinking about all the things she's not said but suddenly seem desperately urgent: "I would always come and rescue you, no matter what happened. You know that, don't you? You don't need me to, I know, but I would never give up on you." Her throat tightens, "I wouldn't let anything stop me if you needed me, not even losing myself, I would do anything... " He cuts her off gently, not asking where this has suddenly come from or trying to shut her up, instead pulling her close to him and smoothing her back with warm, gentle strokes.

I keep waiting for you but you never come. Is this in my head? I don't know what to think!

"It's alright, " he says quietly, "I know."

He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said "Marry me, Juliet. You'll never have to be alone, I love you and that's all I really know. I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress. It's a love story, baby, just say yes." Phillipa's voice yodels over the garden like Dolly Parton on helium.

"I know you're the prince, and really you should do the asking, " his voice is rough in her ear, and she laughs gently, "but...Will you marry me, Prince Charming? I can't promise we'll always be safe or happy, but I think we'll both do our best, won't we?"
And she feels, she knows, that he truly means what he's saying, not simply saying what she wants to hear. This is Arthur after all, a man who never does anything without thinking it over twice, telling her he wants to be with her in the entire world's eyes. That, even though he can't promise her a happy ending, he wants to try. A man who even when he makes his grand gestures they are are quiet and sober; standing there with a daisy chain on his head asking her to be his wife.
"Yes." Her voice feels small against his shirt, as if he's soaking her up. So she looks up at him and smiles with a hint of her usual humour in an effort to reassert herself. "But you might have to ask for my father's consent."

"OK," he turns towards the house and shouts,"Dom!"
"Arthur, no! I wasn't serious..."
He appears on the balcony with a dishtowel over his shoulder. "Dinner won't be long. What's up? Phillipa's music giving you a migraine already?"
"No, although now you mention it, " Ariadne swatted him again, "No, I wanted to ask if you would let me have Ariadne's hand in marriage."
"Me?" Cobb manages a rueful half smile, and then shakes his head. "God, Arthur. Yes, you can. And she can have yours, before she asks."

"So." He turned back to her.
"So?"
"Will you?"
"Yes. On one condition." She smiles and bites her lower lip.
"Oh?"
"I get to be the princess next time."

("Just kiss, will you? The sauce is probably burning!" Dom's voice nudges them from above, tinted with laughter, and Phillipa whoops in agreement.)

So she does, because he's her prince/ss in shining Paul Smith and daisies.

A/N: Love Story by Taylor Swift is copyrighted to Taylor Swift/Universal Republic records. No infringement is intended and no money being made from it's use.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it.