Yusuf is aware on some level that it borders on racism, this weird obsession with how pale Ariadne is, this fetish for an inadvertent artefact of ethnicity. He knows she does not do it purpose, that she tries to catch the sun when she can, but theirs is the business of sleep, of quiet, dull rooms, away from the world so that now, when he holds her slim, soft arm to slide the needle in, he can't help noticing how luminous, how translucent her skin is. When he's mixing chemicals, altering the concentration of the reactants one crystalline drop at a time from a thousand dollar burette -- when he's swabbing the arms of his sleepers in his basement of dreams -- when he's two layers down with his foot on the accelerator and a box of sleeping friends between the prongs of his forklift truck -- he catches himself thinking of synonyms and similes. Pale, he thinks, and fair; creamy; snowy; like ice; like marble; like light.
When he touches her -- and he does, now, not just in their mutual hideaway of sweat and sex, but as often and as casually as possible, making their fingers glance when he hands her drinks and pens, maps and models; brushing her hair back when it falls in dark waves across the winter expanse of her face; oh-so-idly patting her knee when she snuggles beside him in cold warehouses, watching Cobb and Eames argue to the metronome click of Arthur's pen. When he touches her, he sees them in chiaroscuro, as if they have stumbled out of the dream of some long dead grand master, a renaissance of light and dark made flesh, her in him in pleasant contrast, in perfect juxtaposition.
His hands are tan, mortal, dust held upright only by that tiniest spark that is an immortal soul; hers are angelic, divine, immutable. He is the Poisoned Dreamer, she his Great Architect (or perhaps they are Gnostics, and she is Satan or Prometheus to his Man). She raises him up even as he lays her low, (or he falls down and she flies up, because it's not the directions themselves that have meaning, only their inevitable intersection) so that they come together in exquisite opposition, in excruciating harmony and it is not kisses, nor cunt, but contrast that makes him come.
Re: Yusuf/Ariadne - skin kink
When he touches her -- and he does, now, not just in their mutual hideaway of sweat and sex, but as often and as casually as possible, making their fingers glance when he hands her drinks and pens, maps and models; brushing her hair back when it falls in dark waves across the winter expanse of her face; oh-so-idly patting her knee when she snuggles beside him in cold warehouses, watching Cobb and Eames argue to the metronome click of Arthur's pen. When he touches her, he sees them in chiaroscuro, as if they have stumbled out of the dream of some long dead grand master, a renaissance of light and dark made flesh, her in him in pleasant contrast, in perfect juxtaposition.
His hands are tan, mortal, dust held upright only by that tiniest spark that is an immortal soul; hers are angelic, divine, immutable. He is the Poisoned Dreamer, she his Great Architect (or perhaps they are Gnostics, and she is Satan or Prometheus to his Man). She raises him up even as he lays her low, (or he falls down and she flies up, because it's not the directions themselves that have meaning, only their inevitable intersection) so that they come together in exquisite opposition, in excruciating harmony and it is not kisses, nor cunt, but contrast that makes him come.