Bada', Part 2
Title: Bada'
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Arthur, Cobb, Mal, Miles
Summary: Arthur never went for the internship under Stephen Miles. Never went back to Paris. Never met Cobb. Years later, when Stephen Miles shows up again, Arthur finds himself heading down a path he didn’t choose. (It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.) Mild Arthur/Cobb.
Note: First fic of the Ṛta series.
Cobb’s eyes narrowed at the almost-hostile rejoinder. A part of Arthur’s mind was already noting that he wasn’t too far off his game, for a man who was grieving. That was the suspicious voice that said that they knew too little about Limbo, and there was no way to prove it. That it was far more likely to believe that the man had pushed his wife out of that hotel window, and they both knew it.
Physically, at least, Cobb’s clothing was rumpled and he carried himself with the air of a man who was emotionally numb and running entirely on autopilot. Grief lodged like a sliver of ice in blue eyes, and Arthur was reminded, somehow, of sunlight on ice. He shifted, just a little on the chair. Relaxed. Comfortable and in command. The children were off playing under the watchful eye of their grandmother. Arthur supposed that beat the girl asking to see his badge, his gun, did all the people he work with wear suits too, did he go around catching bad people?
He did not mention that there was a distinct possibility her father could be one of the ‘bad people’.
“In my dreams?” Cobb echoed, almost rhetorically. “She’s my wife,” his voice cracked on the last word, flooded with some emotion that was almost frightening in its intensity as whatever composure Cobb had slipped. His eyes glittered; the eye bags gave them an almost sunken appearance. Cobb’s fingers raked through his hair. “Christ. You think I did it, didn’t you? That I worked up to it. I…killed her in dreams, again and again, until it became easy to do it…here.”
Arthur leaned forward, fingers interlocked. He committed statements to memory, but this interview was more to get a feel for Dominic Cobb, to see how to proceed from there. His aim wasn’t to get Cobb’s hackles up so soon. (Not yet, his mind whispered. But he might have to do it later.)
“You must admit it’s possible,” Arthur stated, neutrally.
“No,” Cobb said quietly. “I’d never want to harm her.”
Harm her, the suspicious voice whispered. There was nothing about a denial of how he hadn’t killed her. It was time to bring in the big guns. “When you gave your statement to Officer Larkin, you are aware you said you killed her?” Sharp tone, hit him hard. Watch his reaction.
Cobb flinched. Something vulnerable flashed in his eyes.
Go for the kill.
“So you killed her,” Arthur pressed. “You were angry. It was some fight; whatever it was about, it didn’t matter. It made you so angry that you weren’t thinking. You just shoved her, right out the open window.”
Cobb was shaking his head. “No,” he retorted. The moment of vulnerability was past. Wrong theme, the trained part of Arthur’s mind took note. “She was standing on the opposite ledge. She’d wrecked the room, created signs of a struggle. She…threatened to jump, if I didn’t go out to her. I went out on the ledge. She’d…she’d been trying to kill herself, since Limbo. This…wasn’t the first time. I’d never done it with her. She wanted to make me jump too. She left a letter with our lawyer, framing me. So I could feel no guilt about killing myself along with her.”
He bit back frustration. There was a flicker there, along the edges of the living room. A woman, for a brief instant, and then she vanished. No. Nothing.
“But you didn’t.”
Cobb’s mouth twisted into a bitter, mocking facsimile of a smile. “Yes,” he agreed softly. “I didn’t.”
“So you went deeper,” Arthur recapped, taking the pressure off Cobb again. “In your dreams.”
Cobb nodded. He didn’t visibly relax, but his tone grew more modulated, and more professional. The dark, haunted look didn’t leave his ghost-blue eyes. “Yes,” he agreed. “I wanted to...to see how far we could go. You know what dreaming is like. Pure inspiration. I was…” he laughed quietly. It was an unpleasant laugh; nothing happy about it. “I was an idiot. I wanted to see what Limbo was like. I wanted to try dreams within dreams, and then three layers.”
Arthur narrowed his eyes. “That’s too unstable,” he said, pointedly.
Cobb shrugged. “Mal was a chemist,” he countered. “A licensed chemist. We simply tweaked the standard somnacin cocktail. Laced it with a heavier sedative to lend stability to the dream. It’s not impossible.”
“Three layers?”
“Three is the furthest,” Cobb explained. He drew himself up, with the air of someone just barely holding himself together, latching onto the discussion as if to a life buoy. “Limbo is right after that. You know what Limbo is?”
“Raw, infinite subconscious,” Arthur said, throwing his instructor’s words back at Cobb.
A ghost of a smile flickered across Cobb’s lips. “I know,” he said. “Miles taught you, didn’t he?”
“Some of what I know,” Arthur agreed.
“Ever got a ‘rubbish’?” Some semblance of life returned to the man’s eyes. A flicker of probing humour. Arthur decided that wasn’t a bad thing.
“I’ve had my share,” he said, casually. “A great deal of ‘good god, what were you thinking!’ scribbled all over as well. He really goes all out when you screw up, doesn’t he?”
“Generous with praise too,” Cobb mentioned. He took a deep breath. “Right. Limbo. The time factor increases exponentially as you go down. We…built plenty of things.” An almost embarrassed look drifted across his face. He looked down at his hands. “We built from memory. Cities, buildings, things we’d remembered…only in the end, she didn’t want to wake up. Didn’t want to stop believing it was real. I…talked her into it. Only when she woke up…she continued to believe our world wasn’t real. That’s when…” his throat worked, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence.
She killed herself, Arthur filled in, in his head. He didn’t see the point in driving the knife in any further. For now. He reminded himself to ask Cobb for any samples of the compound that remained, see if he could ask Jase or the labs to run an analysis on it. The more evidence he had, the easier it would be to piece together a thorough picture of what had happened that night.
Something seemed just a little off. He narrowed his eyes, certain that Cobb was concealing something. He thought about it again, hesitations, the way Cobb’s eyes had flicked briefly to the side when he’d said, ‘I talked her into it.’ There was something there; something more Cobb wasn’t saying. That much was obvious. How had Cobb ‘talked’ her into it? How had she been convinced? And that was some convincing, Arthur realised, if Mal had gone from believing the dream was real to believing the real world was a dream.
No. It didn’t quite make sense. Not yet.
For that matter, he needed Cobb’s PASIV. Ralph hadn’t taken it, hadn’t been eager to consider the dreamsharing angle. But the PASIV would have details of its last usage saved in the settings - and Arthur had been trained to retrieve what he could from them.
The sounds of the children playing outside had gone quiet. Arthur kept one eye on Cobb’s emotional state, kept guessing. Night rolled in along the edges of the living room, and the yellow lighting gave everything a soft, gentle touch. Calming. Lulling. Forgetful. Oh, Cobb was good. Very good.
He checked his watch, made the quick estimate in his head. Enough time, he decided, to see what the only other person in the room that night could remember. The waves beat at the shore outside, tide after tide pounding in an endless, driving rhythm. Cobb’s eyes went back to the small brass top, spinning endlessly on the living room table. The light was dark fluid, absorbed by the endless rotation of the metal. Almost mesmerising, in its consistency. How long had it been spinning for?
Rain and salt mingled in the air, sharp in his lungs as he breathed. Or not quite rain, and not quite brine, but the memory of an ocean, the memory of rain.
The memory of the night that Arthur needed to see.
He stood up. Cobb hesitated, and then roughly scooped up the top and slipped it into his pocket. Cobb had agreed to this. Cooperation, at least, was a point in his favour. Arthur didn’t need to feel for the gun to know where it was, but he guessed that there wasn’t going to be a problem.
“Show me,” Arthur said.
“Show you?” the woman asked incredulously. She shook her head, laughed. “Do you dream, Arthur?”
He almost started, and then caught himself. He wondered when he’d borrowed a plastic clip-on and slipped his identification inside. Arthur turned his head to watch the passers-by, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. “Sometimes,” he said, finally. “Everyone dreams.”
“Vivid dreams?”
Arthur accidentally knocked over the cup of coffee, and cursed at the sudden splash of brown all over the grey-and-black of his newspaper. He checked his clothing; coffee was dripping from the edge of the table, but he didn’t seem to have stained his clothing. That, at least, was a relief. Coffee stains were a bitch to deal with. He stood up to go to the counter and get a handful of paper towels but she was already thrusting some at him. “Here,” she said softly. Arthur took them, glanced at the thick ropy scar on her upturned wrist.
There was a strong feeling of déjà vu surrounding this whole thing, and he tried to remember how he’d gotten here. He tried to remember if he’d left Cobb’s house. Thick, ropy scar from wrist to elbow, along the vein. There was only one way people got such scars, and it did not involve accidents.
Still, he didn’t let go of his grasp on her wrist, thumb pressing firmly into the scar as he examined it and tried to think why it seemed so familiar. He felt a trickle of wetness then, and sighed. The coffee had dripped onto the leg of his pants. At least it wasn’t going to be visible, not against the black cloth, but he was going to have to get it out later. He took the paper towels, and dumped a handful on top of the mess and watched as they grew soggy. Damage control.
She leaned forward, across the table, and said, in a confidential whisper, “Some things can’t be shown. You know them, or you don’t.”
“You’re talking about intuition.”
“No?” she wanted to know, evidently surprised. She stirred her coffee with her left hand. Milk swirled, white against black until it flooded the cup with streaks of brown that eventually spread, outwards. “Dreams are messengers of the subconscious, are they not? And intuition…perhaps it comes from somewhere else.”
“Subconscious knowledge?” Arthur asked, sceptically. He considered buying himself another coffee, and decided against it.
“Perhaps,” the woman said, with a nonchalant shrug, a wry tilt to her head. “Or perhaps dreams come from the same place as intuition…as how you know what’s sad and what’s happy. Or even…what it means to love. To be complete.”
Arthur tipped his chair back, frowning. For a moment, he thought he caught the faint tang of salt spray in the air, heard the sound of waves eating away at sand. Eroding the footprints. Tugging away at the figures knee-deep in the water. A boy drawing lines in the sand.
The thoughts slipped through his mind; he blinked, and tried to grasp them. The café seemed insubstantial. Indistinct. Was he supposed to meet Jase here? Or Seth? Tides. His head pounded, and he dimly realised that he had a headache.
She smiled at him, distantly, from across the table. “Have you ever,” she asked innocently, “Had a dream so real that it floods your senses, waking and asleep? You can feel it, Arthur. Pressed against your closed eyelids, imprinted like an obsession written in vivid splashes of colour.”
Coffee puddled on the ground. In it was reflected the vague shapes of pedestrians, moving cars from the road. He glanced back up at the woman. “Let me tell you a secret,” she said, capturing his wrist with her hand. “What is reality, Arthur? A dream so real it consumes your waking mind. Until that’s all you have to go on with. You’re drowning and you don’t even realise it.”
Arthur glanced at his spilt coffee, and then at her. Her eyes were the washed out blue-grey of the sky. Any touch of blue was faint. He looked up. There were no clouds in the bleak expanse of sky, and barely any sun. The air was dry, but the faint smell of ozone lingered.
The sky was grey, with the promise of rain.
“What was that about?” Ellis wanted to know. Arthur took his gaze off the window, and back towards his superior. It was going to rain, he thought. At least he was driving back home.
“Mindcrime,” Arthur said, simply. Ellis didn’t blink.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“That’s Cobb’s story, at least,” Arthur pointed out neutrally. “I felt that it deserved at least an investigation. McKinney alone was worrying. But two cases of apparent insanity?”
“Your report mentioned that she was declared sane by three different psychiatrists. Give me a good reason to give you the case. If you went around picking up every person who claimed dreams made his wife go crazy, you’d have a caseload to match any LAPD homicide detective.”
Arthur paused. “Actually, it’s not a very common claim,” he countered, sticking to his guns. “And in this case, the man and woman in question are licensed. So they did, in fact, have access to a PASIV. Which was something that Jackson didn’t have.”
Ellis narrowed his eyes. “Cut to the chase.”
“I’d be inclined to consider either case,” Arthur said quietly. “Too many things don’t fit in comfortably with either story. Why she had the forethought to leave a letter but went to confront Cobb. Yes, it’s not uncommon behaviour, but she did have children to consider. Certified sane by three psychiatrists right before the letter? One psychiatrist is understandable. The timing is very convenient. And three? Pathologist didn’t find signs of abuse. Perps normally work up. Anything premeditated or even a crime of passion with an implied history of domestic abuse doesn’t come out of nowhere. But there’s no sign of that history. A quick check of their PASIV did indicate relatively recent use.”
“Alright,” Ellis said, “You’ve made your point. But mindcrime?”
“First,” Arthur said dryly, “I think you’d want to know if there was something about dreamsharing that drove both victims crazy, increased their paranoia, and led to suicide. Second…” He’d tipped the chair back, and now he brought the legs of the chair to the ground again as he shifted his weight and leaned forward. “There’s a possibility he did it to her himself.”
That was the last, most frightening idea. He didn’t have a handle on Dominic Cobb, had no feel for what the man was capable of and was not. Even if the dream hypothesis was right…
They only had Cobb’s word for what was going on in the dream. Was he good for it?
That was anyone’s guess.
“Induced paranoia?”
Arthur shrugged wordlessly. He didn’t quite buy it. Induced behaviour was only one or two steps down the stairs from inception. While Arthur was quite certain inception wasn’t possible, he wasn’t so sure about induced behaviour.
But the possibility was there, and very real. Perhaps more chilling than the picture of the usual domestic-conflict-leading-to-murder with a little abuse mixed inside.
You believe him, he’d said to Miles. Because Miles had believed Dominic Cobb, even when he had no reason to. The man with the desperate haunted eyes, but who was lying or keeping something back. There was something smooth and compelling about Cobb, Arthur would grant him that. Did he believe Cobb’s version of events?
“Damnit, Arthur, do you, or don’t you?”
“Sir?” Arthur asked reflexively. He’d completely missed what Ellis had said, and his SAC was scowling at him, right knuckle tapping against his desk impatiently.
“Mindcrime. Do you actually believe that man attempted to induce paranoia in his wife?” Ellis’ tone conveyed his doubt superbly. “Or that the wife set up the husband?”
“I don’t know. I’ll need to wait for the lab results. Ask around, and take a look at things.” It was a perfectly noncommittal statement, and one that neatly dodged the question with the textbook ‘I will believe what the evidence shows me, sir,’ involved.
Bullshit. Ellis didn’t call it this time. It wasn’t as if Arthur had a history of going off on wild goose chases or massive screw ups. And it wasn’t as if mindcrime had a habit of being patently useful. He’d probably get a commendation if he was able to get a solve rate of what, upwards of ten a year? Maybe a dozen. There were probably several hundred jokes about how Feds got too tied up in paperwork to solve cases. Anyone who thought that had obviously never tried mindcrime. Finding admissible evidence was a headache and a half. Made things even more difficult than they should have been.
Mindcrime. White collar crime. One was a subset of the other. He wasn’t supposed to be getting the violent psychos. He was supposed to be getting the sneaky employees who got extractors to go against their licenses and enter people’s minds and steal commercial information. Maybe budgets. Or expansion plans. Not that he was complaining.
“I want to see the report,” Ellis said, finally. “You know which forms. Fill them in properly and I’ll approve it.”
Dismissed. Arthur gave Ellis a nod, and headed for the door. “Your shoulder better?” Ellis asked, just before Arthur left. Oh, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t as if Gardner had shot him.
The raw scar still hurt a little when Arthur flexed it. “Mostly okay,” Arthur said. “On the mend.”
“Keep it that way,” Ellis informed him, and Arthur nodded in acknowledgement and shut the door firmly behind him.
Post-it after post-it. Arthur crumpled one or two of them out of sheer frustration and tossed them away. The rest, he stuck in order to the fresh corrugated poster board. Suspicions. Possibility. Avenues to explore, or to look into. He’d hit a block on McKinney, and he knew it. What was more important was that Ellis knew it too.
Everything led him back in circles. Strictly speaking, the dream factor meant that a great deal of their evidence did not exist physically. Sure, ideas never entirely vanished. There was always some trace of them, somewhere. But extraction wasn’t admissible evidence (well, it depended), and questionable when it came to the Daubert standard. Which was probably ironic since polygraphs were widely considered to be pseudoscience. And there was no way in hell he was getting anywhere near Cobb with a PASIV unless it was by permission.
In that sense, extraction was bound far more stringently than the use of a polygraph test.
All of which boiled down to the fact that Arthur had little reason to pick one theory over the other. It certainly looked like Mallorie Cobb had been pushed. But Cobb had placed her on the opposite ledge. A credit card trace had shown nothing they didn’t already know, except that either Mal or Cobb had gone as far as to book a room in the other building of the hotel, directly opposite the suite. Which added a lot more credence to the idea of premeditation but wasn’t in any way useful.
Why?
He loved her, Miles had said.
It didn’t say anything. By itself. You’re supposed to put them together, Arthur. You’re supposed to be able to put all those little pieces of information together. That’s why you’ve taken point, lead investigator on all of those cases. You’re good at this. But he wasn’t seeing anything conclusive, anything definite, in the way he was usually able to make all the little connections out of disparate bits of information.
Frustrated, he slammed his knuckles hard against the desk, glared at the pieces of post-its stuck haphazardly all over the board. Information, given shape, given form by words written on cheap pieces of blue paper. There was supposed to be some pattern to the chaos, some order underlying the disorder. Form out of nothingness. His mind didn’t pick up on anything. Absently, he rubbed at his smarting knuckle with his thumb, and tried to force himself to take things one thing at a time.
Focus, he told himself sternly. Since he was stymied by the how and the why, Arthur found himself considering the who again. He’d done some basic research, pulled up some information about Dominic Cobb. Summa cum laude undergraduate degree in architecture from USC, went and did a masters overseas in Paris. He’d been highly commended for that too. He’d studied under Stephen Miles. Spent some time working somewhere that Arthur hadn’t the clearance to access, though he’d put in a request and would see when his ASAC approved it. The only thing was, that suggested maybe the original Project Somnacin itself. Arthur frowned and pulled out his timeline. No, the dates didn’t quite match up.
Very bright. Cobb had written part of the instructions manual on the theory of dreamsharing, and had taken some other sections and rewritten them. Dominic Cobb. Stephen Miles. Mallorie Miles. Later, Mallorie Cobb. The three names appeared sufficient times in citations for Arthur to feel impressed.
The neighbours painted a picture of sufficient domestic bliss. Arguments, of course. But a young couple, very much in love.
Arthur stared at the photograph of Cobb, arm curled around Mal’s slim waist. Smiling at the camera. A bridge. Paris, shortly before they’d gotten married. “What happened, Cobb?” he asked aloud. Blue eyes haunted now, and desperate. Surprisingly translucent when the light struck them, as if the light was disappearing through them and into…somewhere, somewhere deep within. Eyes ringed with dark circles, sunken and hollow. Shoulders slumped, his fingers interlaced. Playing with a brass top. Glancing up sharply as he felt Arthur’s gaze on him. Furtively slipping the top into his pocket.
Was the top important?
Was the pain real?
Numb. Aimless. Purposeless.
Talk to me, Cobb.
“Arthur?” A hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Warmth at back, a presence. Light blue eyes, a faint frown. Concern. A flash of gold through the open window. “Hey, Arthur. Talk to me.”
Arthur’s attention snapped back to his surroundings at once. Home. No, wait. This was his office. He shook the hand away, and then realised it’d been the wrong shoulder with a flash of pain. How long was it going to keep hurting?
“Yeah?” he croaked. His mouth felt dry. Had he fallen asleep? He tried to remember the last time he’d gotten some rest. Last night, maybe. Or the night before. He couldn’t be too sure.
Seth Waters glanced at him, concern written all over his features. “Hey, Arthur. Talk to me,” he said. “You okay there?”
“Yeah,” Arthur said slowly. He found the glass of water on the table, picked it up and touched it first. Felt the cool glass against his fingers. As if whatever feeling of transparency, insubstantiality that plagued him could be washed away by tactile sensations. He was feeling much more aware and much more like himself by the time he gulped down some water. “What do you want, Seth?”
His head was throbbing lightly. He winced. Maybe he could grab an aspirin or something on the way back. Did he keep any in his office?
Why was remembering so hard?
Seth shrugged. His body language screamed casual and defensive. “Hey, just thought I’d check up on you. Haven’t seen you around since yesterday or the day before, when Foster was trying to find someone to take with him to check out a lead.”
“Foster wanted me?”
Seth looked briefly at the corrugated plastic poster board, taking in the series of Post-its stuck haphazardly all over its surface. Two boards, side by side. The McKinney one was organised. The Cobb one was all over the place. “You’re on another one?” he asked, incredulously. So soon? Arthur completed, even though Seth hadn’t quite said it. “And yeah,” Seth added, off-handedly. “Foster was wondering if you were up to it.”
“I’m not overworking, Seth.”
“Tell that to the eye bags,” Seth shot back. “Hey, I’m just the messenger, man. Don’t shoot the messenger.”
Arthur glanced at him questioningly.
“Foster thought you were overworking,” Seth explained. “Thought you should give it a rest, or something. You only just came back in off medical leave.”
“I’m fine,” Arthur said testily. “I’m just trying to get a handle on this case.”
“Do it tomorrow. You don’t look like you’ve got any rest. I’ll bring in Foster or even Ellis if I have to.”
Arthur sighed. “You would, wouldn’t you?” He sorted through the sorted stacks on his desk, and slipped the ones he needed into a folder. Maybe a walk would clear his head. Or a drive back, without thinking about any element of this mess. Why had he taken it, anyway?
“You don’t look too good, you know,” Seth added. “Hey remember, man. You need to talk to anyone, I’m there.”
Maybe, Arthur thought. He wasn’t sure if that counted. He tipped the last, errant paper into the folder and nodded to Seth. “I know,” he said. He tried to smile. It came slightly harder than he remembered. “Don’t worry, Seth. I just need some rest, I guess. You were right.”
As he left the office, he felt Seth’s eyes on his back. He wondered what Seth saw, what Seth was thinking.
He didn’t see her cross the road until what was almost the last possible instant. Arthur hit the brakes sharply; the car came to a halt much too close for his liking. He was jerked forward, except for the seatbelt, but managed to hit the back of his head against his seat.
The world slowed down, almost ground to a halt.
She turned, smiled at him for a moment.
No more grey in her eyes, now, just blue.
Stunned, Arthur watched as the large truck tore through the intersection, right where he should have been. If he hadn’t stopped.
Abruptly, time and sound came flooding back; the driver in the car behind him sounded his horn irritably. “Sorry,” Arthur muttered. He looked around, shaken, but the jaywalker must have melted back into the crowd that pressed around them, and swept her away.
Grey.
Raindrops against his windscreen as he drove. It was a light drizzle. The lightless sky was overcast. No sign of clouds, but there was barely any sun.
Yesterday, he thought, had been a day without rain.
If there was any colour left in the sky, it must have been washed away, so that the only hue left was endless, faded, undecided grey that was neither quite white or steel-grey. Translucent, like glass frosted from his breath on a cold day. Strangely not-quite opaque at the same time, like a curtain of grey rain had pulled tight across the expanse above, and someone had rolled it back just a little. Broken; fractured and with little thin cracks running in places with the faint wispy white of fragile clouds.
The walk, or the run was supposed to clear his head. There was something almost hypnotic and simple about the wide empty stretch of sky. As if the clean sense of calm could engulf him, maybe as sharp and crisp as breaking ice. The sounds from the street faded away, as he drowned in the immediacy of the moment, in the feel of the air, the steady rhythm of his breathing, the regular movement of his shoes against dull grey pavement. Faces glanced at him, some of them increasingly indistinct. Just part of the crowd, part of the traffic that surged and moved through the city’s arteries.
The purely physical repetition was supposed to help. As the world narrowed down to pavement and sky and heartbeats, Arthur tried thinking about the problem again. He knew the statistics were against him. Likely as not, there wouldn’t be a clean solution to this. He never liked the thought of that. Not quite.
He caught sight of the flicker of movement first, and then the slim figure in a dark, navy-blue dress. Something about her struck him with a powerful sense of familiarity. Had he shown her to Radiology and how to get back to the cafeteria? That day in the hospital seemed so indefinably long ago. Funny how the mind could blur the passage of the days. She looked up then, and then right at him. Their eyes met, hers the light, pale blue of the sunlit sky.
She paused. Her lips moved; she mouthed something. Dreams? We all have scars?
Arthur blinked, and hesitated. Time bent, sticky like blu-tack, and stretched. We all have scars. Do you dream, Arthur?
Talk to me, Arthur.
She turned and walked away, about to melt back into the crowd. “Hey!” Arthur called out. He dodged a man carrying a heavy crate and tried to follow her. She didn’t stop, kept walking, and he found himself following her, all the way to the Metro.
He almost lost sight of her once, as a group of tourists got in his line of vision, and he slipped past them and cast about again.
The navy-blue figure paused at the edge of the platform, watching the trains come in. Stood far too close to the tracks for Arthur’s liking. He made his way closer. Still no sign of recognition, no registering of his presence. “Excuse me!” he called out.
Dominic Cobb turned, an almost-guilty look in his bright blue eyes. As if he could have taken a step off that platform any moment, and sat on the tracks and waited for the train to come. Arthur brushed that thought aside as Cobb took a step back. Towards him. Away from the tracks.
The sharp glimmer of recognition. Awareness and time came flooding back, along with sound as the train pulled into the station. A moment later and Cobb would have…what would Cobb have done?
They stared at each other. Light sky-blue eyes into dark-brown. If there was a curtain, it was peeling back now, a mask cracking and Arthur only wondered at what he was glimpsing at in this burst of clarity.
We all have scars.
He was sharply aware of the wound, mostly-healed, on his back, around his right shoulder-blade. Could feel the cloth of his shirt sliding across the stiffened skin when he turned too quickly. Could feel the movement tug at the edges of the wound, almost a scar. It would be a scar when it was fully healed.
Arthur’s scar was hidden by his shirt. Cobb’s scars were hidden somewhere so deep that Arthur couldn’t have guessed at them…until now.
He almost took a step towards Cobb, in that moment. He’d felt lost, when he wasn’t working. Purposeless. He didn’t know what he should be doing. He hated feeling aimless. He saw Cobb’s pain, sharp and still fresh, the sense of loss written across his profile, the same question: what do I do now?
Don’t talk about it. Don’t mention the scars. He didn’t even know where to begin. Instead, Arthur said, hesitantly, “C’mon. I’ll drive you home.” His place was a lot closer than Cobb’s was. He wasn’t sure if Cobb was going to make it all the way back. He looked as if he was half-somewhere else, and that somewhere else was lying deep inside his head. Layers and layers of consciousness deep.
Blankly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here, Cobb stared back at the tracks again. He was too silent for a long period of time. Abruptly, his shoulders dropped in surrender. He looked back at Arthur, as if realising he was there for the first time. Took another step towards him. Closed the distance between them. Arthur wondered if he should reach out. Human contact. Was that what Cobb needed?
“Yeah,” Cobb said, distantly. “Thanks.”
Okay, Arthur thought. He glanced at the figure in the passenger seat. Cobb leaned back. His eyes were closed. Maybe pretending, so they didn’t have to make awkward conversation. But there were some things that didn’t need words.
Maybe sleeping. Maybe dreaming.
He listened to the sound of Cobb’s breathing. The radio was switched off. And he thought, about a grey sky, a case that didn’t have to make sense today, and about a pair of children who needed their father safely home tonight.
About an ocean, and a beach. About two men wading knee-deep into the water, against the undertow. About a lightless sky, grey and swollen with the promise of rain. About a small boy with dark eyes, drawing line after line in the sand.
In the end, it was always written. Had always been written. Was always being written.
The future is always in motion.
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Arthur, Cobb, Mal, Miles
Summary: Arthur never went for the internship under Stephen Miles. Never went back to Paris. Never met Cobb. Years later, when Stephen Miles shows up again, Arthur finds himself heading down a path he didn’t choose. (It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.) Mild Arthur/Cobb.
Note: First fic of the Ṛta series.
Cobb’s eyes narrowed at the almost-hostile rejoinder. A part of Arthur’s mind was already noting that he wasn’t too far off his game, for a man who was grieving. That was the suspicious voice that said that they knew too little about Limbo, and there was no way to prove it. That it was far more likely to believe that the man had pushed his wife out of that hotel window, and they both knew it.
Physically, at least, Cobb’s clothing was rumpled and he carried himself with the air of a man who was emotionally numb and running entirely on autopilot. Grief lodged like a sliver of ice in blue eyes, and Arthur was reminded, somehow, of sunlight on ice. He shifted, just a little on the chair. Relaxed. Comfortable and in command. The children were off playing under the watchful eye of their grandmother. Arthur supposed that beat the girl asking to see his badge, his gun, did all the people he work with wear suits too, did he go around catching bad people?
He did not mention that there was a distinct possibility her father could be one of the ‘bad people’.
“In my dreams?” Cobb echoed, almost rhetorically. “She’s my wife,” his voice cracked on the last word, flooded with some emotion that was almost frightening in its intensity as whatever composure Cobb had slipped. His eyes glittered; the eye bags gave them an almost sunken appearance. Cobb’s fingers raked through his hair. “Christ. You think I did it, didn’t you? That I worked up to it. I…killed her in dreams, again and again, until it became easy to do it…here.”
Arthur leaned forward, fingers interlocked. He committed statements to memory, but this interview was more to get a feel for Dominic Cobb, to see how to proceed from there. His aim wasn’t to get Cobb’s hackles up so soon. (Not yet, his mind whispered. But he might have to do it later.)
“You must admit it’s possible,” Arthur stated, neutrally.
“No,” Cobb said quietly. “I’d never want to harm her.”
Harm her, the suspicious voice whispered. There was nothing about a denial of how he hadn’t killed her. It was time to bring in the big guns. “When you gave your statement to Officer Larkin, you are aware you said you killed her?” Sharp tone, hit him hard. Watch his reaction.
Cobb flinched. Something vulnerable flashed in his eyes.
Go for the kill.
“So you killed her,” Arthur pressed. “You were angry. It was some fight; whatever it was about, it didn’t matter. It made you so angry that you weren’t thinking. You just shoved her, right out the open window.”
Cobb was shaking his head. “No,” he retorted. The moment of vulnerability was past. Wrong theme, the trained part of Arthur’s mind took note. “She was standing on the opposite ledge. She’d wrecked the room, created signs of a struggle. She…threatened to jump, if I didn’t go out to her. I went out on the ledge. She’d…she’d been trying to kill herself, since Limbo. This…wasn’t the first time. I’d never done it with her. She wanted to make me jump too. She left a letter with our lawyer, framing me. So I could feel no guilt about killing myself along with her.”
He bit back frustration. There was a flicker there, along the edges of the living room. A woman, for a brief instant, and then she vanished. No. Nothing.
“But you didn’t.”
Cobb’s mouth twisted into a bitter, mocking facsimile of a smile. “Yes,” he agreed softly. “I didn’t.”
“So you went deeper,” Arthur recapped, taking the pressure off Cobb again. “In your dreams.”
Cobb nodded. He didn’t visibly relax, but his tone grew more modulated, and more professional. The dark, haunted look didn’t leave his ghost-blue eyes. “Yes,” he agreed. “I wanted to...to see how far we could go. You know what dreaming is like. Pure inspiration. I was…” he laughed quietly. It was an unpleasant laugh; nothing happy about it. “I was an idiot. I wanted to see what Limbo was like. I wanted to try dreams within dreams, and then three layers.”
Arthur narrowed his eyes. “That’s too unstable,” he said, pointedly.
Cobb shrugged. “Mal was a chemist,” he countered. “A licensed chemist. We simply tweaked the standard somnacin cocktail. Laced it with a heavier sedative to lend stability to the dream. It’s not impossible.”
“Three layers?”
“Three is the furthest,” Cobb explained. He drew himself up, with the air of someone just barely holding himself together, latching onto the discussion as if to a life buoy. “Limbo is right after that. You know what Limbo is?”
“Raw, infinite subconscious,” Arthur said, throwing his instructor’s words back at Cobb.
A ghost of a smile flickered across Cobb’s lips. “I know,” he said. “Miles taught you, didn’t he?”
“Some of what I know,” Arthur agreed.
“Ever got a ‘rubbish’?” Some semblance of life returned to the man’s eyes. A flicker of probing humour. Arthur decided that wasn’t a bad thing.
“I’ve had my share,” he said, casually. “A great deal of ‘good god, what were you thinking!’ scribbled all over as well. He really goes all out when you screw up, doesn’t he?”
“Generous with praise too,” Cobb mentioned. He took a deep breath. “Right. Limbo. The time factor increases exponentially as you go down. We…built plenty of things.” An almost embarrassed look drifted across his face. He looked down at his hands. “We built from memory. Cities, buildings, things we’d remembered…only in the end, she didn’t want to wake up. Didn’t want to stop believing it was real. I…talked her into it. Only when she woke up…she continued to believe our world wasn’t real. That’s when…” his throat worked, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence.
She killed herself, Arthur filled in, in his head. He didn’t see the point in driving the knife in any further. For now. He reminded himself to ask Cobb for any samples of the compound that remained, see if he could ask Jase or the labs to run an analysis on it. The more evidence he had, the easier it would be to piece together a thorough picture of what had happened that night.
Something seemed just a little off. He narrowed his eyes, certain that Cobb was concealing something. He thought about it again, hesitations, the way Cobb’s eyes had flicked briefly to the side when he’d said, ‘I talked her into it.’ There was something there; something more Cobb wasn’t saying. That much was obvious. How had Cobb ‘talked’ her into it? How had she been convinced? And that was some convincing, Arthur realised, if Mal had gone from believing the dream was real to believing the real world was a dream.
No. It didn’t quite make sense. Not yet.
For that matter, he needed Cobb’s PASIV. Ralph hadn’t taken it, hadn’t been eager to consider the dreamsharing angle. But the PASIV would have details of its last usage saved in the settings - and Arthur had been trained to retrieve what he could from them.
The sounds of the children playing outside had gone quiet. Arthur kept one eye on Cobb’s emotional state, kept guessing. Night rolled in along the edges of the living room, and the yellow lighting gave everything a soft, gentle touch. Calming. Lulling. Forgetful. Oh, Cobb was good. Very good.
He checked his watch, made the quick estimate in his head. Enough time, he decided, to see what the only other person in the room that night could remember. The waves beat at the shore outside, tide after tide pounding in an endless, driving rhythm. Cobb’s eyes went back to the small brass top, spinning endlessly on the living room table. The light was dark fluid, absorbed by the endless rotation of the metal. Almost mesmerising, in its consistency. How long had it been spinning for?
Rain and salt mingled in the air, sharp in his lungs as he breathed. Or not quite rain, and not quite brine, but the memory of an ocean, the memory of rain.
The memory of the night that Arthur needed to see.
He stood up. Cobb hesitated, and then roughly scooped up the top and slipped it into his pocket. Cobb had agreed to this. Cooperation, at least, was a point in his favour. Arthur didn’t need to feel for the gun to know where it was, but he guessed that there wasn’t going to be a problem.
“Show me,” Arthur said.
“Show you?” the woman asked incredulously. She shook her head, laughed. “Do you dream, Arthur?”
He almost started, and then caught himself. He wondered when he’d borrowed a plastic clip-on and slipped his identification inside. Arthur turned his head to watch the passers-by, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. “Sometimes,” he said, finally. “Everyone dreams.”
“Vivid dreams?”
Arthur accidentally knocked over the cup of coffee, and cursed at the sudden splash of brown all over the grey-and-black of his newspaper. He checked his clothing; coffee was dripping from the edge of the table, but he didn’t seem to have stained his clothing. That, at least, was a relief. Coffee stains were a bitch to deal with. He stood up to go to the counter and get a handful of paper towels but she was already thrusting some at him. “Here,” she said softly. Arthur took them, glanced at the thick ropy scar on her upturned wrist.
There was a strong feeling of déjà vu surrounding this whole thing, and he tried to remember how he’d gotten here. He tried to remember if he’d left Cobb’s house. Thick, ropy scar from wrist to elbow, along the vein. There was only one way people got such scars, and it did not involve accidents.
Still, he didn’t let go of his grasp on her wrist, thumb pressing firmly into the scar as he examined it and tried to think why it seemed so familiar. He felt a trickle of wetness then, and sighed. The coffee had dripped onto the leg of his pants. At least it wasn’t going to be visible, not against the black cloth, but he was going to have to get it out later. He took the paper towels, and dumped a handful on top of the mess and watched as they grew soggy. Damage control.
She leaned forward, across the table, and said, in a confidential whisper, “Some things can’t be shown. You know them, or you don’t.”
“You’re talking about intuition.”
“No?” she wanted to know, evidently surprised. She stirred her coffee with her left hand. Milk swirled, white against black until it flooded the cup with streaks of brown that eventually spread, outwards. “Dreams are messengers of the subconscious, are they not? And intuition…perhaps it comes from somewhere else.”
“Subconscious knowledge?” Arthur asked, sceptically. He considered buying himself another coffee, and decided against it.
“Perhaps,” the woman said, with a nonchalant shrug, a wry tilt to her head. “Or perhaps dreams come from the same place as intuition…as how you know what’s sad and what’s happy. Or even…what it means to love. To be complete.”
Arthur tipped his chair back, frowning. For a moment, he thought he caught the faint tang of salt spray in the air, heard the sound of waves eating away at sand. Eroding the footprints. Tugging away at the figures knee-deep in the water. A boy drawing lines in the sand.
The thoughts slipped through his mind; he blinked, and tried to grasp them. The café seemed insubstantial. Indistinct. Was he supposed to meet Jase here? Or Seth? Tides. His head pounded, and he dimly realised that he had a headache.
She smiled at him, distantly, from across the table. “Have you ever,” she asked innocently, “Had a dream so real that it floods your senses, waking and asleep? You can feel it, Arthur. Pressed against your closed eyelids, imprinted like an obsession written in vivid splashes of colour.”
Coffee puddled on the ground. In it was reflected the vague shapes of pedestrians, moving cars from the road. He glanced back up at the woman. “Let me tell you a secret,” she said, capturing his wrist with her hand. “What is reality, Arthur? A dream so real it consumes your waking mind. Until that’s all you have to go on with. You’re drowning and you don’t even realise it.”
Arthur glanced at his spilt coffee, and then at her. Her eyes were the washed out blue-grey of the sky. Any touch of blue was faint. He looked up. There were no clouds in the bleak expanse of sky, and barely any sun. The air was dry, but the faint smell of ozone lingered.
The sky was grey, with the promise of rain.
“What was that about?” Ellis wanted to know. Arthur took his gaze off the window, and back towards his superior. It was going to rain, he thought. At least he was driving back home.
“Mindcrime,” Arthur said, simply. Ellis didn’t blink.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“That’s Cobb’s story, at least,” Arthur pointed out neutrally. “I felt that it deserved at least an investigation. McKinney alone was worrying. But two cases of apparent insanity?”
“Your report mentioned that she was declared sane by three different psychiatrists. Give me a good reason to give you the case. If you went around picking up every person who claimed dreams made his wife go crazy, you’d have a caseload to match any LAPD homicide detective.”
Arthur paused. “Actually, it’s not a very common claim,” he countered, sticking to his guns. “And in this case, the man and woman in question are licensed. So they did, in fact, have access to a PASIV. Which was something that Jackson didn’t have.”
Ellis narrowed his eyes. “Cut to the chase.”
“I’d be inclined to consider either case,” Arthur said quietly. “Too many things don’t fit in comfortably with either story. Why she had the forethought to leave a letter but went to confront Cobb. Yes, it’s not uncommon behaviour, but she did have children to consider. Certified sane by three psychiatrists right before the letter? One psychiatrist is understandable. The timing is very convenient. And three? Pathologist didn’t find signs of abuse. Perps normally work up. Anything premeditated or even a crime of passion with an implied history of domestic abuse doesn’t come out of nowhere. But there’s no sign of that history. A quick check of their PASIV did indicate relatively recent use.”
“Alright,” Ellis said, “You’ve made your point. But mindcrime?”
“First,” Arthur said dryly, “I think you’d want to know if there was something about dreamsharing that drove both victims crazy, increased their paranoia, and led to suicide. Second…” He’d tipped the chair back, and now he brought the legs of the chair to the ground again as he shifted his weight and leaned forward. “There’s a possibility he did it to her himself.”
That was the last, most frightening idea. He didn’t have a handle on Dominic Cobb, had no feel for what the man was capable of and was not. Even if the dream hypothesis was right…
They only had Cobb’s word for what was going on in the dream. Was he good for it?
That was anyone’s guess.
“Induced paranoia?”
Arthur shrugged wordlessly. He didn’t quite buy it. Induced behaviour was only one or two steps down the stairs from inception. While Arthur was quite certain inception wasn’t possible, he wasn’t so sure about induced behaviour.
But the possibility was there, and very real. Perhaps more chilling than the picture of the usual domestic-conflict-leading-to-murder with a little abuse mixed inside.
You believe him, he’d said to Miles. Because Miles had believed Dominic Cobb, even when he had no reason to. The man with the desperate haunted eyes, but who was lying or keeping something back. There was something smooth and compelling about Cobb, Arthur would grant him that. Did he believe Cobb’s version of events?
“Damnit, Arthur, do you, or don’t you?”
“Sir?” Arthur asked reflexively. He’d completely missed what Ellis had said, and his SAC was scowling at him, right knuckle tapping against his desk impatiently.
“Mindcrime. Do you actually believe that man attempted to induce paranoia in his wife?” Ellis’ tone conveyed his doubt superbly. “Or that the wife set up the husband?”
“I don’t know. I’ll need to wait for the lab results. Ask around, and take a look at things.” It was a perfectly noncommittal statement, and one that neatly dodged the question with the textbook ‘I will believe what the evidence shows me, sir,’ involved.
Bullshit. Ellis didn’t call it this time. It wasn’t as if Arthur had a history of going off on wild goose chases or massive screw ups. And it wasn’t as if mindcrime had a habit of being patently useful. He’d probably get a commendation if he was able to get a solve rate of what, upwards of ten a year? Maybe a dozen. There were probably several hundred jokes about how Feds got too tied up in paperwork to solve cases. Anyone who thought that had obviously never tried mindcrime. Finding admissible evidence was a headache and a half. Made things even more difficult than they should have been.
Mindcrime. White collar crime. One was a subset of the other. He wasn’t supposed to be getting the violent psychos. He was supposed to be getting the sneaky employees who got extractors to go against their licenses and enter people’s minds and steal commercial information. Maybe budgets. Or expansion plans. Not that he was complaining.
“I want to see the report,” Ellis said, finally. “You know which forms. Fill them in properly and I’ll approve it.”
Dismissed. Arthur gave Ellis a nod, and headed for the door. “Your shoulder better?” Ellis asked, just before Arthur left. Oh, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t as if Gardner had shot him.
The raw scar still hurt a little when Arthur flexed it. “Mostly okay,” Arthur said. “On the mend.”
“Keep it that way,” Ellis informed him, and Arthur nodded in acknowledgement and shut the door firmly behind him.
Post-it after post-it. Arthur crumpled one or two of them out of sheer frustration and tossed them away. The rest, he stuck in order to the fresh corrugated poster board. Suspicions. Possibility. Avenues to explore, or to look into. He’d hit a block on McKinney, and he knew it. What was more important was that Ellis knew it too.
Everything led him back in circles. Strictly speaking, the dream factor meant that a great deal of their evidence did not exist physically. Sure, ideas never entirely vanished. There was always some trace of them, somewhere. But extraction wasn’t admissible evidence (well, it depended), and questionable when it came to the Daubert standard. Which was probably ironic since polygraphs were widely considered to be pseudoscience. And there was no way in hell he was getting anywhere near Cobb with a PASIV unless it was by permission.
In that sense, extraction was bound far more stringently than the use of a polygraph test.
All of which boiled down to the fact that Arthur had little reason to pick one theory over the other. It certainly looked like Mallorie Cobb had been pushed. But Cobb had placed her on the opposite ledge. A credit card trace had shown nothing they didn’t already know, except that either Mal or Cobb had gone as far as to book a room in the other building of the hotel, directly opposite the suite. Which added a lot more credence to the idea of premeditation but wasn’t in any way useful.
Why?
He loved her, Miles had said.
It didn’t say anything. By itself. You’re supposed to put them together, Arthur. You’re supposed to be able to put all those little pieces of information together. That’s why you’ve taken point, lead investigator on all of those cases. You’re good at this. But he wasn’t seeing anything conclusive, anything definite, in the way he was usually able to make all the little connections out of disparate bits of information.
Frustrated, he slammed his knuckles hard against the desk, glared at the pieces of post-its stuck haphazardly all over the board. Information, given shape, given form by words written on cheap pieces of blue paper. There was supposed to be some pattern to the chaos, some order underlying the disorder. Form out of nothingness. His mind didn’t pick up on anything. Absently, he rubbed at his smarting knuckle with his thumb, and tried to force himself to take things one thing at a time.
Focus, he told himself sternly. Since he was stymied by the how and the why, Arthur found himself considering the who again. He’d done some basic research, pulled up some information about Dominic Cobb. Summa cum laude undergraduate degree in architecture from USC, went and did a masters overseas in Paris. He’d been highly commended for that too. He’d studied under Stephen Miles. Spent some time working somewhere that Arthur hadn’t the clearance to access, though he’d put in a request and would see when his ASAC approved it. The only thing was, that suggested maybe the original Project Somnacin itself. Arthur frowned and pulled out his timeline. No, the dates didn’t quite match up.
Very bright. Cobb had written part of the instructions manual on the theory of dreamsharing, and had taken some other sections and rewritten them. Dominic Cobb. Stephen Miles. Mallorie Miles. Later, Mallorie Cobb. The three names appeared sufficient times in citations for Arthur to feel impressed.
The neighbours painted a picture of sufficient domestic bliss. Arguments, of course. But a young couple, very much in love.
Arthur stared at the photograph of Cobb, arm curled around Mal’s slim waist. Smiling at the camera. A bridge. Paris, shortly before they’d gotten married. “What happened, Cobb?” he asked aloud. Blue eyes haunted now, and desperate. Surprisingly translucent when the light struck them, as if the light was disappearing through them and into…somewhere, somewhere deep within. Eyes ringed with dark circles, sunken and hollow. Shoulders slumped, his fingers interlaced. Playing with a brass top. Glancing up sharply as he felt Arthur’s gaze on him. Furtively slipping the top into his pocket.
Was the top important?
Was the pain real?
Numb. Aimless. Purposeless.
Talk to me, Cobb.
“Arthur?” A hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Warmth at back, a presence. Light blue eyes, a faint frown. Concern. A flash of gold through the open window. “Hey, Arthur. Talk to me.”
Arthur’s attention snapped back to his surroundings at once. Home. No, wait. This was his office. He shook the hand away, and then realised it’d been the wrong shoulder with a flash of pain. How long was it going to keep hurting?
“Yeah?” he croaked. His mouth felt dry. Had he fallen asleep? He tried to remember the last time he’d gotten some rest. Last night, maybe. Or the night before. He couldn’t be too sure.
Seth Waters glanced at him, concern written all over his features. “Hey, Arthur. Talk to me,” he said. “You okay there?”
“Yeah,” Arthur said slowly. He found the glass of water on the table, picked it up and touched it first. Felt the cool glass against his fingers. As if whatever feeling of transparency, insubstantiality that plagued him could be washed away by tactile sensations. He was feeling much more aware and much more like himself by the time he gulped down some water. “What do you want, Seth?”
His head was throbbing lightly. He winced. Maybe he could grab an aspirin or something on the way back. Did he keep any in his office?
Why was remembering so hard?
Seth shrugged. His body language screamed casual and defensive. “Hey, just thought I’d check up on you. Haven’t seen you around since yesterday or the day before, when Foster was trying to find someone to take with him to check out a lead.”
“Foster wanted me?”
Seth looked briefly at the corrugated plastic poster board, taking in the series of Post-its stuck haphazardly all over its surface. Two boards, side by side. The McKinney one was organised. The Cobb one was all over the place. “You’re on another one?” he asked, incredulously. So soon? Arthur completed, even though Seth hadn’t quite said it. “And yeah,” Seth added, off-handedly. “Foster was wondering if you were up to it.”
“I’m not overworking, Seth.”
“Tell that to the eye bags,” Seth shot back. “Hey, I’m just the messenger, man. Don’t shoot the messenger.”
Arthur glanced at him questioningly.
“Foster thought you were overworking,” Seth explained. “Thought you should give it a rest, or something. You only just came back in off medical leave.”
“I’m fine,” Arthur said testily. “I’m just trying to get a handle on this case.”
“Do it tomorrow. You don’t look like you’ve got any rest. I’ll bring in Foster or even Ellis if I have to.”
Arthur sighed. “You would, wouldn’t you?” He sorted through the sorted stacks on his desk, and slipped the ones he needed into a folder. Maybe a walk would clear his head. Or a drive back, without thinking about any element of this mess. Why had he taken it, anyway?
“You don’t look too good, you know,” Seth added. “Hey remember, man. You need to talk to anyone, I’m there.”
Maybe, Arthur thought. He wasn’t sure if that counted. He tipped the last, errant paper into the folder and nodded to Seth. “I know,” he said. He tried to smile. It came slightly harder than he remembered. “Don’t worry, Seth. I just need some rest, I guess. You were right.”
As he left the office, he felt Seth’s eyes on his back. He wondered what Seth saw, what Seth was thinking.
He didn’t see her cross the road until what was almost the last possible instant. Arthur hit the brakes sharply; the car came to a halt much too close for his liking. He was jerked forward, except for the seatbelt, but managed to hit the back of his head against his seat.
The world slowed down, almost ground to a halt.
She turned, smiled at him for a moment.
No more grey in her eyes, now, just blue.
Stunned, Arthur watched as the large truck tore through the intersection, right where he should have been. If he hadn’t stopped.
Abruptly, time and sound came flooding back; the driver in the car behind him sounded his horn irritably. “Sorry,” Arthur muttered. He looked around, shaken, but the jaywalker must have melted back into the crowd that pressed around them, and swept her away.
Grey.
Raindrops against his windscreen as he drove. It was a light drizzle. The lightless sky was overcast. No sign of clouds, but there was barely any sun.
Yesterday, he thought, had been a day without rain.
If there was any colour left in the sky, it must have been washed away, so that the only hue left was endless, faded, undecided grey that was neither quite white or steel-grey. Translucent, like glass frosted from his breath on a cold day. Strangely not-quite opaque at the same time, like a curtain of grey rain had pulled tight across the expanse above, and someone had rolled it back just a little. Broken; fractured and with little thin cracks running in places with the faint wispy white of fragile clouds.
The walk, or the run was supposed to clear his head. There was something almost hypnotic and simple about the wide empty stretch of sky. As if the clean sense of calm could engulf him, maybe as sharp and crisp as breaking ice. The sounds from the street faded away, as he drowned in the immediacy of the moment, in the feel of the air, the steady rhythm of his breathing, the regular movement of his shoes against dull grey pavement. Faces glanced at him, some of them increasingly indistinct. Just part of the crowd, part of the traffic that surged and moved through the city’s arteries.
The purely physical repetition was supposed to help. As the world narrowed down to pavement and sky and heartbeats, Arthur tried thinking about the problem again. He knew the statistics were against him. Likely as not, there wouldn’t be a clean solution to this. He never liked the thought of that. Not quite.
He caught sight of the flicker of movement first, and then the slim figure in a dark, navy-blue dress. Something about her struck him with a powerful sense of familiarity. Had he shown her to Radiology and how to get back to the cafeteria? That day in the hospital seemed so indefinably long ago. Funny how the mind could blur the passage of the days. She looked up then, and then right at him. Their eyes met, hers the light, pale blue of the sunlit sky.
She paused. Her lips moved; she mouthed something. Dreams? We all have scars?
Arthur blinked, and hesitated. Time bent, sticky like blu-tack, and stretched. We all have scars. Do you dream, Arthur?
Talk to me, Arthur.
She turned and walked away, about to melt back into the crowd. “Hey!” Arthur called out. He dodged a man carrying a heavy crate and tried to follow her. She didn’t stop, kept walking, and he found himself following her, all the way to the Metro.
He almost lost sight of her once, as a group of tourists got in his line of vision, and he slipped past them and cast about again.
The navy-blue figure paused at the edge of the platform, watching the trains come in. Stood far too close to the tracks for Arthur’s liking. He made his way closer. Still no sign of recognition, no registering of his presence. “Excuse me!” he called out.
Dominic Cobb turned, an almost-guilty look in his bright blue eyes. As if he could have taken a step off that platform any moment, and sat on the tracks and waited for the train to come. Arthur brushed that thought aside as Cobb took a step back. Towards him. Away from the tracks.
The sharp glimmer of recognition. Awareness and time came flooding back, along with sound as the train pulled into the station. A moment later and Cobb would have…what would Cobb have done?
They stared at each other. Light sky-blue eyes into dark-brown. If there was a curtain, it was peeling back now, a mask cracking and Arthur only wondered at what he was glimpsing at in this burst of clarity.
We all have scars.
He was sharply aware of the wound, mostly-healed, on his back, around his right shoulder-blade. Could feel the cloth of his shirt sliding across the stiffened skin when he turned too quickly. Could feel the movement tug at the edges of the wound, almost a scar. It would be a scar when it was fully healed.
Arthur’s scar was hidden by his shirt. Cobb’s scars were hidden somewhere so deep that Arthur couldn’t have guessed at them…until now.
He almost took a step towards Cobb, in that moment. He’d felt lost, when he wasn’t working. Purposeless. He didn’t know what he should be doing. He hated feeling aimless. He saw Cobb’s pain, sharp and still fresh, the sense of loss written across his profile, the same question: what do I do now?
Don’t talk about it. Don’t mention the scars. He didn’t even know where to begin. Instead, Arthur said, hesitantly, “C’mon. I’ll drive you home.” His place was a lot closer than Cobb’s was. He wasn’t sure if Cobb was going to make it all the way back. He looked as if he was half-somewhere else, and that somewhere else was lying deep inside his head. Layers and layers of consciousness deep.
Blankly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here, Cobb stared back at the tracks again. He was too silent for a long period of time. Abruptly, his shoulders dropped in surrender. He looked back at Arthur, as if realising he was there for the first time. Took another step towards him. Closed the distance between them. Arthur wondered if he should reach out. Human contact. Was that what Cobb needed?
“Yeah,” Cobb said, distantly. “Thanks.”
Okay, Arthur thought. He glanced at the figure in the passenger seat. Cobb leaned back. His eyes were closed. Maybe pretending, so they didn’t have to make awkward conversation. But there were some things that didn’t need words.
Maybe sleeping. Maybe dreaming.
He listened to the sound of Cobb’s breathing. The radio was switched off. And he thought, about a grey sky, a case that didn’t have to make sense today, and about a pair of children who needed their father safely home tonight.
About an ocean, and a beach. About two men wading knee-deep into the water, against the undertow. About a lightless sky, grey and swollen with the promise of rain. About a small boy with dark eyes, drawing line after line in the sand.
In the end, it was always written. Had always been written. Was always being written.
The future is always in motion.