⥼ the shade's tale ⥽⥼ inception, 1115 words ⥽

[bombyx]

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It's like the age-old riddle: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? What happens to our dreams when we are awake? Do they evaporate like mist hanging over the early morning surfaces of our minds? Unravel like so many lengths of unneeded string, abandoning name and face and shape to sink back to the primordial ooze of our subconscious?

Or do they continue in our waking? Do they dream of being awake?

⥽ ⥼
The Shade knows that she is unique, in that she persists, she remembers.

Her name is Mallorie Cobb. She is thirty five years old. She was born on November the 23rd and married on July the 18th and has gone through the act of childbirth twice, which (in her opinion) is not enough. For a time, she built buildings for men in grey suits and after that she built buildings for men in drab uniforms. None of them had had much vision, could only think at right angles and in one-way reflective glass, and so she had detested them for their small minds. Her father is a professor, her mother a lawyer. Her husband is a visionary, full to brimming with so many dreams. She loves these dreams, she loves the man who made them, and she is loved in return.

(my god, she is loved)

If the Shade knows anything at all, she knows that.

⥽ ⥼
It's three in the afternoon and she's in Paris. Or rather, someone is dreaming of Paris and Dominic has brought her here.

She can tell the difference between his mind and someone else's. Dust fails to collect on all the surfaces the way it does in real life and there's a pointed lack of logic to the way light illuminates even the farthest corner of every room. She at least knows where the later comes from; it's fear. As if the dreamer's afraid of what might creep in the shadows beyond their own perception -- the implication of incompleteness, of things that go bump in the night; nevermind the fact that the waking world is full of dark places. Once, Mallorie believed that this made the world beautiful, it made the world whole in its perfections and its imperfections. But that was before she was put in a dark place herself and left caged like a hungry tiger pacing behind iron bars.

Those bars have come to define who she is. She loves Dom for them and she hates him.

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They're not allowed to build from real life. That's what Dom tells them because he knows she will follow him wherever she goes -- a shadow sewn to his very heels, one that he pinned there himself (as unruly as Peter Pan's). This means the places she knows, she knows; the places he knows, she knows too.

Arthur is very careful to avoid this, moreso than anyone else, but the Shade suspects that is because Arthur dislikes her in a way he could never imagine disliking Mallorie Cobb in real life. A festering sort of disdain that crawls onto his face and tightens his features down, holding them in a stone-like stillness whenever she's around. His pain is nothing like Dom's, pressed down deep inside of himself where he hopes no one (not even himself) will see it. But the Shade sees it, and whenever his expression grows cold and detached she smiles in the wake of its obviousness, plain as day and sharp as winter light glinting off ice. Bright enough to make her go blind.

She's glad to know that Arthur suffers. Because suffering is what love is and her existence is proof of that.

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The past is an inconstant thing. Painfully clear and effulgent in some places and smudged beyond recognition in others, there are cracks and holes and redactions but the Shade knows that all memory is imperfect, not just in dreams.

Sometimes when she walks through a space she can recognize the bits and pieces stolen from real life. Recollections picked apart into swatches of breeze and the distant sounds of traffic; a door handle, a mail slot, the letter 'L' worn off a street sign. The worlds the dreamers create are cobbled together and only the Shade can see all the seams, the joints where the waking and the dreaming are forced together; they're marvelously ugly things.

Scavengers, all of them, is what she thinks. And she, she knows, is the scavenged.

⥽ ⥼
The sun dapples and fragments into a thousand glittering shards across the gently lapping surface of the Seine. There's someone here, the world is changing and much like the way shavings of iron will twist and turn to align and repel from the ends of a magnet, so too are the projections gathering. There, by the river: the bridge. White blood cells search for the clot that forms over cut, looking to wipe out infection, and though the Shade is unique she still finds herself compelled. She knows that he will be there and that he is waiting for her. And so she follows.

There is a woman with him, she discovers, young and pretty and terrified. She should be, the Shade thinks, and then shows her why -- a bloody knife gripped in bloodless hands, nails clean and trimmed and perfectly oval in a way they never were when alive.

Dom screams, he begs and so the knife twists. And Mal, she laughs.

⥽ ⥼
"Mal, this isn't the way."

Dom squirms, his whole body rising and falling with effort of trying to break free. There is no use, really; the projections hold tight and the dream is collapsing. It's only a matter of time now.

"You don't have to do this, I'll come to you, you know that." He looks so old and so very tired, helpless in the wake of what's to come. The Shade almost pities him; with a hand she touches his cheek.

"Tell me: what else do you think I know?" she purrs, barely audible over the sound of Paris coming apart at its very seams. Dom's belly offers only the slightest resistance before yielding (soft and pliant) to the blade. He gurgles quietly (not quite surprised) as the bridge collapses down on top of all of their heads in a cacophony of sound and white pain and waking.

Quiet. And then emptiness. Mal smiles in the darkness that follows.

"Come to me, my love," she tells Dom and knows, even without dreams, he listens. "Do you remember what I promised you? I'll build us a more perfect world."