snowdarkred

Title: flying limitless
Author:

snowdarkred
Word Count: ~450
Pairings.Characters: gen; Ariadne, Miles.
Rating/Warnings: G, none
Author's Note: Went to see Inception again. Came out and wrote this at three in the morning. And after some quick edits, here it is! :D

Summary: When Ariadne was little, she used to build cities out of Legos.

flying limitless

When Ariadne was little, she used to build cities out of Legos. Her mother bought her dollhouse after dollhouse, but she didn't want to play with someone else's vision. She wanted to build her own, create her own worlds, with no limitations from flimsy plastic walls and painted furniture. Her father used to sit with her, when he came in from work, and watch her pull life from the lifeless. Her structures were towering, spiraling, beautiful, and she could live forever within the endless labyrinths of her own creation.

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When she dreamed, she dreamed of bricks and wood and dirt. She dreamed of impossible buildings that jutted into the sky, that pierced the very nature of everything that was known. She walked through deserted streets made of cobblestones, asphalt, gold. She saw cities rise from the sea and crumble just as easily. In her dreams, she was creation, and it was intoxicating.

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She had always known that she would be an architect. Her father had sat her on his knee and shown her perfect drawings in perfect straight lines on perfect blue paper. He told her about Carlo Scarpa and Eliel Saarinen like they were bed time stories, showed her pictures of their creations like it was a picture book. The elegant lines and revolutionary ideas drew her in like a moth to flame. This was what she wanted to do with her life.

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The more she learned of physics, the more they limited her. Her teachers taught about Newton's Laws. They talked about gravity and force and the fabric that held the universe together. Only Ariadne's universe wasn't made of something so flimsy as fabric.

Her universe was made of clay, and she longed to shape it with her own hands. To bend and mold it to her desires and vision.

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Dreams came and went, and there were days that she just spent sketching, sketching, sketching, an endless stream of impossibilities that reality would not let her build. Her teachers praised her ingenuity, but she wanted to go higher, always higher. She wanted to turn nature on its head.

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One of her professors pulled her aside one day after class.

“Tell me, Ariadne,” he asked, looking at her with old, old eyes, “do you dream?”

“Yes, of course,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing,” he said, turning away. “You just remind me of a young man I used to know.”

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In her dreams, she could build anything. In her dreams, she could mold her surroundings to her own liking, make them hers. In her dreams, she was not bound by physics or logic. She was limitless.