Chairs, Quilts, and Orgasm Lasagna

Word Count: 1006
Fandom: Inception/Juno
Pairing(s): Arthur/Ariadne
Warnings: Mentions of relations of the sexual nature, with nonexistant allusions to past teenage pregnancy I guess.
Summary: Arthur starts to notice that Ariadne may not be all that she seems.

Disclaimer: I don't own Inception or Juno. Sadly. :(

It starts with a chair. It always has with her.

The first time the team comes over to her apartment to taste her famous, supposedly world class three-cheese, super-meaty, artery-clogging super lasagna, Arthur's gaze is immediately drawn to the worn but comfortable looking armchair in the corner. However, it's not really the chair he's looking at.

It's the utterly tacky, tasteless quilt thrown over the back of said chair that ultimately draws his attention. And it's not so much the garish colors or the obviously hand-stitched dog embroidery or the fact that it utterly offends all his sensibilities in both taste and fashion that really catches his notice. It's the name that is painstakingly sewn into every corner of the admittedly well-loved blanket that does.

"Juno?" he asks quietly, thumbing the soft fabric.

But either Ariadne hasn't heard him or she is just ignoring his soft question, because she suddenly laughs raucously at something Yusuf said and is now informing him that Minnesotans actually thought up the Wave in order to create and excuse to get up and move around so they didn't freeze at sports games.

The lasagna turns out to be just as horrible as Arthur as expected, which means he was the only one not having an orgasm from sheer delicious pasta overload. He doesn't think any more about the perplexing, visually offensive quilt because Eames has decided that it is the best thing he has ever seen in his entire life and has monopolized both the quilt and the incredible chair it sits in, and Arthur ends up leaving the apartment feeling strangely unsatisfied.

The next time Arthur visits the apartment is the next day, and he is by himself this time. The chair and the quilt are still there, still proclaiming the word Juno in loud, obnoxious pink letters. Both look strangely out of place against the tasteful, moderate décor, which is the best furniture that Ariadne could afford, considering her rather abysmal funds. Nobody ever becomes a graduate student-slash-dream architect to become rich after all. But, upon further observation, there are small little knick-knacks that seem to come from a universe similar to the one that produced the chair and quilt—wacky picture frames that held colorful photos, college pennants that came from the University of Minnesota, a strange framed Japanese comic that featured a pregnant superhero, a…hamburger with a cord.

So caught up in his thoughts, Arthur nearly jumped when the hamburger suddenly started ringing.

Ariadne was in the kitchen, scooping the last of the Orgasm Lasagna into a container for Cobb, who had sent Arthur to fetch it. Arthur usually disliked being demoted to an errand-boy, but Ariadne was still an excitingly new puzzle for him to figure out, and Arthur would have been lying if he said he minded her company.

"Can you get that for me?" Her strong voice sounds strangely far away from the kitchen. "Just flip it open and say hello, I'll be there in a sec."

Arthur reaches for the hamburger and flips it open, looking dumbly at the number pad laid into the plastic cheese. He puts it up to his ear and resists twirling the faded cord around his finger like a teenage girl.

"Hello?" he greets cautiously, feeling somewhat ridiculous for talking into a plastic sandwich.

"Hello? Hello? This my June-bug?" a boisterous male voice practically yells from the other end, "Hello? Can ya hear me, Juno?"

The flurry of speech that comes after that is hurried and sounds to Arthur almost like a foreign language. The man just keeps talking despite Arthurs repeated affirmations that this isn't who the person thinks it is, and after a while he just gives up and holds the still-open phone slash fast-food staple awkwardly in front of him, unsure of what to do.

Ariadne hurries in with a container of lasagna and quickly takes the receiver from Arthur, sending him a bemused, almost pitying look which he certainly doesn't appreciate.

"Sorry," she says, putting down the lasagna and giving the phone a few good shakes, "this isn't the best communication device in the world, but it's better than a walkie-talkie."

"Not by much," Arthur replies sardonically, but he is drowned out by the fact that the loud man can miraculously hear Ariadne now, and Arthur is almost amazed by the sarcasm that the grad student's voice adopts the instant she starts talking with the man on the other end.

The third time Arthur visits is right after the Fischer job, and this time he is being forcefully pushed down into the chair that is home of the quilt that has become the focal point of the puzzle that is Ariadne. This time, however, he isn't focused on the chair, quilt, or the hamburger phone. The universe has narrowed down to her and her alone; to the way she straddles his lap and attacks his neck with her pretty lips, her small hands deftly unbuttoning his crisp, starched dress shirt and shoving it off his shoulders. And all Arthur can do is choke and gasp and try to unbutton her trousers while dumbly admiring the novelty of making love in an armchair.

"I've never done this—h-had sex in a chair, I mean," he chokes out, almost purring as she massages his scalp and runs her fingers through his slicked-back hair. As an afterthought, he says, "You seem quite adept at it. Have you done this before? "

Ariadne—Juno?—gasps as Arthur latches on to that one spot, and she is overwhelmed by sensation and oh, this is so much better than Paulie Bleaker and all of her other one-night stands combined.

"Maybe once, in a past life," she says, sounding just as breathless and choked as Arthur, if not more so. Her hands trail down the now bare expanse of his long, pale torso, only to stop at the clasp of his belt. She looks up, and, with utmost seriousness in her eyes, asks, "You have protection, right?"

End.

A/N: -facepalm-

WAT IS PLOT. WAT IS GRAMMAR. WAT ARE THESE THINGS?

I wrote this in between the hours of midnight and 1 a.m. I'm sorry for the copious amounts of grammatical errors I know are in there.

I have this strange headcanon where Juno wants to start fresh with her life after high school after her romance with Paulie Bleaker didn't quite work out. So, she went to France and used her middle name, Ariadne, in order to create distance in between her life in Minnesota and her life now as a responsible, autonomous adult. That happens to build dreams.

So yeah.

All I think I wanted out of this fic was a meeting between Arthur and the infamous hamburger phone—I mean, to see what would happen if the Juno and Inception universes collided but didn't really affect one another. Thus, this fic. I guess.

Read and Review this strange piece of literature?