for the commentary meme, The Manor House; roughly the 500 words preceding ""The next level down," she says, "this would be a cage."" (I could not really carve out a good starting place before that was 500 words!)
The door. It's locked, but Arthur knows a thing or two about locating keys in this house, and besides: it's still a door. He could kick it down, he could shoot out the lock. He feels faintly sick at the thought, as though he's drunk again, as though half a lifetime's defences could be dismantled in a heartbeat and leave only the raw dregs of a person who bears no resemblance to Arthur at all. How do you guard yourself, when the guarding is who you are?
His hand falls to his side and clenches into a convulsive fist which he then has to release again, painfully, finger by finger. With wrenching effort he turns his back on the door.
"I'm not opening it," he says.
"I didn't ask you to," Ariadne says, so beautiful in her fierce poise. "That's not what we're asking for. That's not why we're here."
Arthur bites down on the obvious question because that’s her script, just as this is her design, and it's his fucking skeletons that are being doorknocked here so he has the right of mastery over his own words. If nothing else.
When he's silent, Ariadne's mouth thins with purpose. "The next level down," she says, "this would be a cage."
(not c&ping all 500 words but JUST FOR ILLUSTRATION)
Brief moment of hilarity for the importance of ‘this is her design’ long, long before that particular motif reared its head in a Hannibal context.
This is one of those fics where the more I talk about it the more weird I feel because it’s so, so obviously some of the DEEP BARREL-SCRAPINGS OF MY SOUL, and this scene is the emotional crux of the whole story. It’s a story about letting people in; it’s a story about how the fear that build walls also traps you within those walls (yes. a cage.) but that this doesn’t mean you have to let people smash them down. The guarding CAN be who you are, and can be important to you, and even people who love you don’t have the right to demand entry before you’re prepared to give it.
(It’s a callback, obviously, to the central question that Arthur has about Eames’s own self: How do you guard yourself if you aren't yourself?)
AND THAT’S WHAT THIS SCENE IS. Arthur thinks that he is being asked to reveal his secrets, because the whole damn point of mind-heist work is to build a design around someone’s secrets and get them to open the door--the safe--whatever--and reveal the thing they don’t want to reveal. And both Eames and Ariadne have stripped down to their vulnerabilities in their own mental architecture. It’s Arthur’s turn. That would be fair.
Not opening it is terrifying because he feels like he’s failing. And he hates to fail.
But what Ariadne and Eames are ACTUALLY doing with this piece of personality architecture is saying: we have seen the thickness of this door, and we have seen how important it is to your structural integrity. And we want you anyway.
