fic: the seasons turn and the years go by but the dark continues on.
Title: the seasons turn and the years go by but the dark continues on.
Rating: G
Summary: Inception/Sandman crossover.
Notes: Original prompt and fill can be found here.
Author's notes: This was absolutely smashing to write. I held off posting the last part for about a week because I loved writing this story so much. I've been a fan of the Sandman comics for years and allowing myself to flesh out the characters, giving them my own spin- it was the most wonderful experience. I hope you like reading this as much as I liked writing it.
Ariadne has a favourite singer. Foxglove. She remembers catching her show once in Paris, before the singer came out as a lesbian and disappeared into Los Angeles suburbia. There is one song in particular she loves- Donna's Dream. She finds herself singing it one stuffy afternoon in Marrakesh on a job with three other people- an extractor/chemist named Sexton and a forger named Rose who changes her hair colour ever so often, and a teenager named Coraline who was the point of the team. It's Ariadne's first time working without Arthur or Eames or Yusuf, and she feels a little alone.
Sexton stills as Ariadne sings the song, a finger tracing over the tattoo on his left wrist. Ariadne's seen it before, of course- a name in cursive script. Didi. She had asked him about it the first time she saw it and he acquired a distant look in his eye.
"A girl," he said, rubbing at the tattoo. She strongly suspects that his totem was the tattoo, but does ask. Everyone has their own totems. Though, Ariadne is pretty sure Coraline's totem- a stone with a hole in the middle- is a little odd in the dreamshare universe. Rose's totem is a scrap of paper with the word 'Morpheus' written on it. Ariadne continues singing the song under her breath as she maps the layout of the first level, an intricate park complete with a maze. This is just a simple extraction to be performed on one of the lesser diplomats and will go without a hitch, but Ariadne puts 110% into her work.
"And I wonder what you're doing tonight, in my cold place underneath the world. And there's worms inside my eyes, and my bones are getting dry; but I still love you, girl." Sexton walks over and it strikes Ariadne that he's not conventionally good-looking, his dirty blonde hair falling into his eyes as he works, but there's something about him that appeals to the hipster in her.
"You know," he struggles for words. "I heard that song. With Didi. It was the last night she was alive."
"Oh my God. I'm so sorry. I'll-" Sexton talks over her apology.
"This song was written my my mom's restaurant's chef's girlfriend. She was cool. She performed it at some underground club and Didi liked it. And I remember every single word of that song, like you do." He smiles tentatively. "It's funny how we're all connected by it, huh?"
"Yeah," Ariadne breathes. "Funny, huh?" Sexton goes back to work and Ariadne gazes at him, filling up the PASIV tubes with runny, silver-tinted Somnacin, and feels a little less alone for the day.
+
Eames likes London and its pavement artists. They're as much a part of life as the pigeons and old ladies with stale breadcrumbs. He stops to gaze at the drawings. One of them is chalking a beautiful rose-coloured sunset on the concrete, magnificent and boundless with pale pink spiderwebbed threads of light crawling up the brick wall beside it. Eames drops a two-pound coin in the cap lying just beside his box of crayons and walks on, humming as he turns around a corner. There's another pavement artist on this street, and he's drawn stick figures walking around. He's in the middle of drawing a fifth one with crazy red hair and a dog.
"Nice drawings."
"Thanks, mate," the artist says, looking up and grinning. "There's a chap just around the corner you came from, he's loads better but I'm just drawing what I'm familiar with." His accent sounds old and foreign, heavy and curling with unfamiliar vowels, but with each word it becomes more modern and British. Eames squats beside him and drags a finger through the dusty black halo around a white stick-figure's head, smearing it.
"It's alright, if you like homesteads and dramatic scenery and things like that. So you're familiar with random people?" The artist is a solidly-built man with his long red hair in a ponytail, and he laughs at that, drawing out a green crayon to colour in an eye on the red-haired stick figure.
"Of course I am," the artist says honestly. "I can't help it."
"You say it like it surprises you." Eames points out, studying a figure that looks like a brown cloak and nothing else. "Is this a monk?"
"No, that's my oldest brother." The artist sighs and thumbs over the dark gray-brown square next to what looks like the sleeve of the cloak, rubbing it out. "I don't even know why I'm drawing them today of all days." Eames raises his eyebrows, and thinks over his next few words.
"Okay. I'm Eames, you're a shite artist and a nice guy. How about a pint?" The artist gives Eames a crooked smile, cramming the green crayon back inside the box and pulling out a blue crayon to draw in the other eye on the redhead figure. Eames bites his lip to stop himself from asking, someone in your family has heterochromia? It's only professional interest: Eames has never forged anyone with heterochromia before.
"It's not even five yet," the artist says hopefully, dusting off his arse as he stands up.
"Yeah, well, tell that to the pubs in London." The artist chuckles at that and packs his crayons up, jamming the coin-free tweed flat cap onto his head.
"Thanks. But I'm going to have to turn you down. I'd best be on my way before six, you know?" Eames watches as the artist pushes his crayon set into a red polka-dot handkerchief. The box disappears into the folds of the cloth before it is unceremoniously stuffed into the back pocket of the artist's trousers. They walk down the street together, and the man fidgets a fair bit. They stop near a deserted alley, one that leads off into several doorways and tapers off into a dead end. The artist clears his throat and Eames looks at him curiously. There are crinkles in the corners of his eyes as he smiles.
"You've got the smell of The Dreaming about you. I don't know much about you, but- regularly penetrating that realm isn't good for mortals that aren't naturally asleep, yeah? Get out of it fast. My new brother may be kinder than Morpheus was, but I wouldn't cross him all the same. Thanks, Eames. Goodbye." The artist goes down the alley and turns. Eames is too stunned to react- the smell of the Dreaming?- but he runs down the alley even though a small voice in the back of his head tells him there won't be anyone there.
He's right.
+
"Hello, Yusuf." Yusuf jumps a little at the voice, but turns around with a smile. She stands there, tapping her fingers against the counter of his shop, round spectacles firmly in place. She looks exactly the same as he remembers from ten years ago, voice with the same humourless inflection. The person who'd gotten him started in dreamshare.
"Hi, Thessaly. What brings you here to my humble shop in Mombasa?" Yusuf does a small sweep of the place with an outstretched hand and she surveys the place apathetically. He knows it's just for show- she's probably already inspected the place with her mysterious powers of mysteriousness.
"I go by Larissa now," She says, a vague smirk quirking up the corners of her mouth. "And I'm here to collect on a debt."
Yusuf winces, remembering the last time she had called on him to collect a debt. He still has fleeting nightmares- slaughtering black lambs and sitting in the room with a blood-stained knife while she presses a ceremonial kris to a victim's throat is not his idea of a fun night. She sees it and the smirk grows wider before vanishing under her calm demeanour.
"Nothing so crude this time," Larissa says mildly, dragging her hand over the counter as she leans on it to study the liquids in the medicine bottles behind him. Her gaze sharpens on a certain section, and he knows exactly where she's looking. The Somnacin, carefully disguised as ordinary medicine but with blank labels, sit on the third highest shelf behind him slightly to the left of his head. He knows she's studying the colourless ones- the brighter the colour, the less potent- and calculating it in her head.
"I require Somnacin. Would it work if ingested orally?"
"These versions, no. I am working on a water-soluble pill form, though. Probably won't be ready till next year."
"How about dust to be snorted?"
"You were the one who taught me all I know about these mixes, Larissa. If anyone could come up with the alternative forms of any mix, it would be you." She gives him a look that says don't flatter me, boy but they both know that it's true. Larissa hasn't survived this long on just haruspecs and a pinch of knowledge about the natural world. Yusuf is sure she knows a lot more than she shows. He's heard of the freak flood caused by the moon in America.
"I don't have the time. Give me your strongest and best." Yusuf shuffles around, clinking the bottles as he measures out the drug. As Larissa picks over the formula books he left open and hums as she reads them, Yusuf quietly draws out the packet of money from under his cash register and counts out the money he can spare and slips them into the same paper bag the drugs are in.
"Where are you now?" He asks as he steps out from behind the counter to grab spare bottles and adds in a small tub containing an unorthodox mix of green honey and the flesh scraped from the inside of a hydnora africana for a sedative. Larissa uncorks the bottle and sniffs appreciatively.
"Hmm, that's a good substitution. I'm based in Skopje at the moment- St Kliment Ohridski has a good library with extensive materials on the Macedonian culture." Yusuf nods and hands her the packet. She drops the tub into the bag and takes it gingerly, hefting it. She narrows her eyes.
"You gave me money again." He smiles and steps back, tapping the Somnacin shelf.
"You gave me my livelihood, Larissa." She pushes her glasses further up her nose and gifts him with a rare smile.
"You have a good head on your shoulders." She leaves the shop without a backward glance and is swallowed up by the crowd. Yusuf sighs and gets out a damp rag to clean the counter. He polishes an empty bottle absently, staring outside as the afternoon falls away into evening.
+
Cobb scrubs a towel roughly over his face before he sits down on the bed, pulling out a box of mementos from underneath. The night outside is cool and balmy, the autumn wind rustling through the trees. Pippa and James are having a sleepover at their neighbour's. He trusts Hazel will take good care of them. Besides, the kids have never taken to anyone as quickly as they took to Alvie, Hazel's son. Cobb doesn't think he's ever seen Pippa so animated since Mal's passing.
Dom, mon loup, the first line reads, Mal's elegant script sprawled generously all over the paper. Cobb smiles a little at the nickname as he holds the letter. Mal's handwriting is achingly lovely, cursive and unbridled but calm. It always has been. He'd noticed that the way people wrote showed what kind of person they were. For example, Arthur gripped his pen tightly and pressed it down onto the paper. It was not an ideal writing style for a fountain pen enthusiast. Arthur had a stash of spare nibs for his fountain pens and had switched to ballpoint sometime after the fifth broken Parker Duofold (the red-and-black marbled one). And there was Eames, who liked pencils with proper erasers. Cobb can remember evenings on the Fischer job when Ariadne and Eames swapped stories about encounters with erasers of crap quality- stories that ended with lurid descriptions of abraded papers and ArtGum erasers and frank discussions of electric erasers. Cobb supposes that any forger with nothing solid about his identity would strive to maintain the same capriciousness with his written words.
I hope this letter finds you in good health. I miss you dearly, but I know you will be back soon. We were at a club yesterday- my friends and I celebrating Papa's promotion in the University- and there were all sorts of shady interesting characters there that wouldn't look out of place at a dreamshare convention if there should be one in future. There was one figure that caught my attention in the crowd. Someone of your height and build but slimmer, streamlined, with skin as pale as smoke.
Cobb tries remember what he was doing as Mal encountered the stranger. Probably knocking out the belligerent projections of a particularly unscrupulous businessman. He'd left France that month to take on a job in San Buenaventura.
Do you remember last year when we were at the summer house near the Coteaux du Lyonnais? It was late August. Papa said the wine-makers had a gift for us: a small basket of pêche de vigne. You were unimpressed by its exterior, but pleasantly surprised by the deep red flesh inside. Sweet yet tart with a whisper of cinnamon. It was so delicious that you ended up having three when you usually have an aversion to ordinary fruits. That was what the person smelled like. A gentle whiff of summer peaches. I followed the person through the crowd and all the while, I was reminded of you. Eyes all over the place were drawn to that person as he or she moved, hungry eyes that devoured and caressed over the person's form.
Cobb can see the way Mal saw the scene- he remembers building a city for her as Mal filled it with her subconscious. There was a figure in a well-cut suit, androgynous and beautiful, strolling away from them. No matter how they walked or ran, the person remained a few feet in front of them, maintaining the same walking speed.
And the person turned around for the most fleeting moment and caught my gaze, then vanished into the crowd. The eyes, his or her eyes, were tawny in the dark of the club, sharp and cunning and sly. I went back to Papa's side after that, and he said 'where've you been, chérie?' and I could not say a word.
It happened the same way in the dream. Cobb can remember- almost taste the air of the dream-city as he and Mal charged down the street after the person, laughing. The person had glanced backward and with a hint of a smile, disappeared up a staircase or into the doorway of a shop. Cobb remembers eyes as sharp and sly as yellow wine, glinting in the gloom.
We have a word for it. L'esprit d'escalier. Thinking of the things we could have said when it is too late to say it. To that person in the club, I still do not know what I could have or would have said had they turned around and stopped to say hi. But to you, mon cœur, who is so far apart from where I am right now, I know exactly what to say.
I love you.
Yours always,
Mallorie Miles.
The letter was never delivered to him. She had kept it in her diary for years, and only after her death did he unearth it amongst her possessions. Cobb folds the letter back into the same creases it came in. The letter was dated a month before he had the dream of the both of them growing old together, spending the rest of their lives in love. The forgotten towel has soaked a damp patch onto his bed and he sighs, pushing it off onto the floor. He puts the letter back into the box and places it gently under the bed and climbs under the covers.
It's been a long time since he's dreamed, and even longer since he's wanted something like he wants Mal now.
+
Some nights, Arthur tosses and turns fitfully in bed. He closes his eyes but nothing works, even various versions of Somnacin leave him wide awake. On these nights, he pads out of bed and opens the wooden box that he always stashes in a corner of his suitcase, and retrieves the single cassette tape inside it. It weighs comfortably in his hand and he turns it over carefully, as familiar with it as he is with his die.
There is a cassette deck on top of his chest of drawers, and he switches it on and puts on the tape. Cassettes are a hassle, true, but they're worth the hassle. Arthur believes that the analog nature of the deck is worth everything, especially when it can play this single tape. A tape with just one recording on it. The tape starts and faint crackles are heard, and Arthur gets into bed. A voice starts up, a beautiful voice. A voice that brought a lover nearly back to life.
The voice of Orpheus.
Arthur does not know for sure that this is really Orpheus' voice. He remembers being in Greece as a child with his parents, shy and darting behind his mother's skirts whenever strangers stopped to say hello to the American tourists. They smiled and him and spoke in their strange tongue, majestic and full of curious words. He remembers when he was good and his mother had given him some money at the marketplace one hot afternoon as she went hunting for the freshest figs around. He carried the coin around smartly, jingling it about in his pocket with the other coins- a hundred drachma coin he had swiped from the table in the hotel, and a fifty drachma coin he'd found in the gutter. There was a man hawking his goods on the steps of a ruin- Greece was always full of old ruins, as much as Arthur could remember- and he gave Arthur a brief flash of a smirk, a cold twist of lips.
"Come here, boy," the man had said in English, words heavy with his thick Greek accent. Arthur had moved forward, transfixed, and watched as the man opened his basket of goods. There were curious things inside- cherries, redder than anything he'd ever seen, small chips of marble flecked with gold, and something silver swirling in a glass container. He'd reached for the silver, but the man snapped the basket shut.
"And what will you pay for it, child?" The man asked, stretching out a ready hand. Arthur hurriedly dropped his fifty drachma coin into the man's palm, shuffling his feet. The man took on a pained expression, reaching out for more.
"Fifty drachma for such a valuable item?" Arthur gave him the rest of his money quickly, and the man's hand closed around the coins, greedy and grasping.
"How do you listen to music in your home, boy?" Arthur scrunched up his face, wondering what the question had to do with the sale of the item.
"Cassette tapes, of course. Like everyone else." The man pulled out the silver jar and held it with two hands, then closed his fingers around it and opened them a second later. A shiny new casstee tape sat in his palms, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. Arthur took it gingerly- he knew how to handle them, because Father got mad when Arthur wasn't careful- and inspected it.
"How did you do that?" Arthur asked, wide-eyed. The man smiled.
"Magic. Now, it contains one song. The song of Orpheus. One of his many songs."
"Orpheus, like Orpheus and Eurydice?" The man nodded.
"The one and only. Guard it well, boy. My father would kill me if he knew-" the man appeared to go off into his own thoughts, the coins in his palm rubbing against each other.
"-but we are short of money at the temple now..." Arthur heard his mother calling for him in the distance, and bobbed his head shyly, remembering his manners. He pocketed the tape and looked at the man.
"Thank you, sir," he said quickly, and turned and dashed into the crowd. He bumped into someone that smelled familiar, of cloves and apples.
"There you are, Arthur. Where have you been?"
"Nothing, Ma. Just looking around." His mother was wilting in the heat, browl curls losing their bounce. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead, and even the hat seemed listless. She sighed, smiling indulgently at him. Her hand was cool and light on his shoulder, a gentle mother's touch.
"Let's go back now, Arthur. It's too hot to do any proper shopping." Arthur tried to look back at the man through the crowd, but the sea of people separated them, ebbing and swelling and pushing until Arthur and his mother were at the fringes of the market. The next day, when his parents were out, Arthur played the tape on his father's expensive portable cassette deck.
It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
_____________________________________________________________________
Notes: The song that Ariadne is singing was covered by my friend here. so yeah just to get a feel of it. It is an actual song from Death: The High Cost Of Living, a spinoff from the Sandman series about Death becoming mortal for a day.
Rating: G
Summary: Inception/Sandman crossover.
Notes: Original prompt and fill can be found here.
Author's notes: This was absolutely smashing to write. I held off posting the last part for about a week because I loved writing this story so much. I've been a fan of the Sandman comics for years and allowing myself to flesh out the characters, giving them my own spin- it was the most wonderful experience. I hope you like reading this as much as I liked writing it.
Ariadne has a favourite singer. Foxglove. She remembers catching her show once in Paris, before the singer came out as a lesbian and disappeared into Los Angeles suburbia. There is one song in particular she loves- Donna's Dream. She finds herself singing it one stuffy afternoon in Marrakesh on a job with three other people- an extractor/chemist named Sexton and a forger named Rose who changes her hair colour ever so often, and a teenager named Coraline who was the point of the team. It's Ariadne's first time working without Arthur or Eames or Yusuf, and she feels a little alone.
Sexton stills as Ariadne sings the song, a finger tracing over the tattoo on his left wrist. Ariadne's seen it before, of course- a name in cursive script. Didi. She had asked him about it the first time she saw it and he acquired a distant look in his eye.
"A girl," he said, rubbing at the tattoo. She strongly suspects that his totem was the tattoo, but does ask. Everyone has their own totems. Though, Ariadne is pretty sure Coraline's totem- a stone with a hole in the middle- is a little odd in the dreamshare universe. Rose's totem is a scrap of paper with the word 'Morpheus' written on it. Ariadne continues singing the song under her breath as she maps the layout of the first level, an intricate park complete with a maze. This is just a simple extraction to be performed on one of the lesser diplomats and will go without a hitch, but Ariadne puts 110% into her work.
"And I wonder what you're doing tonight, in my cold place underneath the world. And there's worms inside my eyes, and my bones are getting dry; but I still love you, girl." Sexton walks over and it strikes Ariadne that he's not conventionally good-looking, his dirty blonde hair falling into his eyes as he works, but there's something about him that appeals to the hipster in her.
"You know," he struggles for words. "I heard that song. With Didi. It was the last night she was alive."
"Oh my God. I'm so sorry. I'll-" Sexton talks over her apology.
"This song was written my my mom's restaurant's chef's girlfriend. She was cool. She performed it at some underground club and Didi liked it. And I remember every single word of that song, like you do." He smiles tentatively. "It's funny how we're all connected by it, huh?"
"Yeah," Ariadne breathes. "Funny, huh?" Sexton goes back to work and Ariadne gazes at him, filling up the PASIV tubes with runny, silver-tinted Somnacin, and feels a little less alone for the day.
+
Eames likes London and its pavement artists. They're as much a part of life as the pigeons and old ladies with stale breadcrumbs. He stops to gaze at the drawings. One of them is chalking a beautiful rose-coloured sunset on the concrete, magnificent and boundless with pale pink spiderwebbed threads of light crawling up the brick wall beside it. Eames drops a two-pound coin in the cap lying just beside his box of crayons and walks on, humming as he turns around a corner. There's another pavement artist on this street, and he's drawn stick figures walking around. He's in the middle of drawing a fifth one with crazy red hair and a dog.
"Nice drawings."
"Thanks, mate," the artist says, looking up and grinning. "There's a chap just around the corner you came from, he's loads better but I'm just drawing what I'm familiar with." His accent sounds old and foreign, heavy and curling with unfamiliar vowels, but with each word it becomes more modern and British. Eames squats beside him and drags a finger through the dusty black halo around a white stick-figure's head, smearing it.
"It's alright, if you like homesteads and dramatic scenery and things like that. So you're familiar with random people?" The artist is a solidly-built man with his long red hair in a ponytail, and he laughs at that, drawing out a green crayon to colour in an eye on the red-haired stick figure.
"Of course I am," the artist says honestly. "I can't help it."
"You say it like it surprises you." Eames points out, studying a figure that looks like a brown cloak and nothing else. "Is this a monk?"
"No, that's my oldest brother." The artist sighs and thumbs over the dark gray-brown square next to what looks like the sleeve of the cloak, rubbing it out. "I don't even know why I'm drawing them today of all days." Eames raises his eyebrows, and thinks over his next few words.
"Okay. I'm Eames, you're a shite artist and a nice guy. How about a pint?" The artist gives Eames a crooked smile, cramming the green crayon back inside the box and pulling out a blue crayon to draw in the other eye on the redhead figure. Eames bites his lip to stop himself from asking, someone in your family has heterochromia? It's only professional interest: Eames has never forged anyone with heterochromia before.
"It's not even five yet," the artist says hopefully, dusting off his arse as he stands up.
"Yeah, well, tell that to the pubs in London." The artist chuckles at that and packs his crayons up, jamming the coin-free tweed flat cap onto his head.
"Thanks. But I'm going to have to turn you down. I'd best be on my way before six, you know?" Eames watches as the artist pushes his crayon set into a red polka-dot handkerchief. The box disappears into the folds of the cloth before it is unceremoniously stuffed into the back pocket of the artist's trousers. They walk down the street together, and the man fidgets a fair bit. They stop near a deserted alley, one that leads off into several doorways and tapers off into a dead end. The artist clears his throat and Eames looks at him curiously. There are crinkles in the corners of his eyes as he smiles.
"You've got the smell of The Dreaming about you. I don't know much about you, but- regularly penetrating that realm isn't good for mortals that aren't naturally asleep, yeah? Get out of it fast. My new brother may be kinder than Morpheus was, but I wouldn't cross him all the same. Thanks, Eames. Goodbye." The artist goes down the alley and turns. Eames is too stunned to react- the smell of the Dreaming?- but he runs down the alley even though a small voice in the back of his head tells him there won't be anyone there.
He's right.
+
"Hello, Yusuf." Yusuf jumps a little at the voice, but turns around with a smile. She stands there, tapping her fingers against the counter of his shop, round spectacles firmly in place. She looks exactly the same as he remembers from ten years ago, voice with the same humourless inflection. The person who'd gotten him started in dreamshare.
"Hi, Thessaly. What brings you here to my humble shop in Mombasa?" Yusuf does a small sweep of the place with an outstretched hand and she surveys the place apathetically. He knows it's just for show- she's probably already inspected the place with her mysterious powers of mysteriousness.
"I go by Larissa now," She says, a vague smirk quirking up the corners of her mouth. "And I'm here to collect on a debt."
Yusuf winces, remembering the last time she had called on him to collect a debt. He still has fleeting nightmares- slaughtering black lambs and sitting in the room with a blood-stained knife while she presses a ceremonial kris to a victim's throat is not his idea of a fun night. She sees it and the smirk grows wider before vanishing under her calm demeanour.
"Nothing so crude this time," Larissa says mildly, dragging her hand over the counter as she leans on it to study the liquids in the medicine bottles behind him. Her gaze sharpens on a certain section, and he knows exactly where she's looking. The Somnacin, carefully disguised as ordinary medicine but with blank labels, sit on the third highest shelf behind him slightly to the left of his head. He knows she's studying the colourless ones- the brighter the colour, the less potent- and calculating it in her head.
"I require Somnacin. Would it work if ingested orally?"
"These versions, no. I am working on a water-soluble pill form, though. Probably won't be ready till next year."
"How about dust to be snorted?"
"You were the one who taught me all I know about these mixes, Larissa. If anyone could come up with the alternative forms of any mix, it would be you." She gives him a look that says don't flatter me, boy but they both know that it's true. Larissa hasn't survived this long on just haruspecs and a pinch of knowledge about the natural world. Yusuf is sure she knows a lot more than she shows. He's heard of the freak flood caused by the moon in America.
"I don't have the time. Give me your strongest and best." Yusuf shuffles around, clinking the bottles as he measures out the drug. As Larissa picks over the formula books he left open and hums as she reads them, Yusuf quietly draws out the packet of money from under his cash register and counts out the money he can spare and slips them into the same paper bag the drugs are in.
"Where are you now?" He asks as he steps out from behind the counter to grab spare bottles and adds in a small tub containing an unorthodox mix of green honey and the flesh scraped from the inside of a hydnora africana for a sedative. Larissa uncorks the bottle and sniffs appreciatively.
"Hmm, that's a good substitution. I'm based in Skopje at the moment- St Kliment Ohridski has a good library with extensive materials on the Macedonian culture." Yusuf nods and hands her the packet. She drops the tub into the bag and takes it gingerly, hefting it. She narrows her eyes.
"You gave me money again." He smiles and steps back, tapping the Somnacin shelf.
"You gave me my livelihood, Larissa." She pushes her glasses further up her nose and gifts him with a rare smile.
"You have a good head on your shoulders." She leaves the shop without a backward glance and is swallowed up by the crowd. Yusuf sighs and gets out a damp rag to clean the counter. He polishes an empty bottle absently, staring outside as the afternoon falls away into evening.
+
Cobb scrubs a towel roughly over his face before he sits down on the bed, pulling out a box of mementos from underneath. The night outside is cool and balmy, the autumn wind rustling through the trees. Pippa and James are having a sleepover at their neighbour's. He trusts Hazel will take good care of them. Besides, the kids have never taken to anyone as quickly as they took to Alvie, Hazel's son. Cobb doesn't think he's ever seen Pippa so animated since Mal's passing.
Dom, mon loup, the first line reads, Mal's elegant script sprawled generously all over the paper. Cobb smiles a little at the nickname as he holds the letter. Mal's handwriting is achingly lovely, cursive and unbridled but calm. It always has been. He'd noticed that the way people wrote showed what kind of person they were. For example, Arthur gripped his pen tightly and pressed it down onto the paper. It was not an ideal writing style for a fountain pen enthusiast. Arthur had a stash of spare nibs for his fountain pens and had switched to ballpoint sometime after the fifth broken Parker Duofold (the red-and-black marbled one). And there was Eames, who liked pencils with proper erasers. Cobb can remember evenings on the Fischer job when Ariadne and Eames swapped stories about encounters with erasers of crap quality- stories that ended with lurid descriptions of abraded papers and ArtGum erasers and frank discussions of electric erasers. Cobb supposes that any forger with nothing solid about his identity would strive to maintain the same capriciousness with his written words.
I hope this letter finds you in good health. I miss you dearly, but I know you will be back soon. We were at a club yesterday- my friends and I celebrating Papa's promotion in the University- and there were all sorts of shady interesting characters there that wouldn't look out of place at a dreamshare convention if there should be one in future. There was one figure that caught my attention in the crowd. Someone of your height and build but slimmer, streamlined, with skin as pale as smoke.
Cobb tries remember what he was doing as Mal encountered the stranger. Probably knocking out the belligerent projections of a particularly unscrupulous businessman. He'd left France that month to take on a job in San Buenaventura.
Do you remember last year when we were at the summer house near the Coteaux du Lyonnais? It was late August. Papa said the wine-makers had a gift for us: a small basket of pêche de vigne. You were unimpressed by its exterior, but pleasantly surprised by the deep red flesh inside. Sweet yet tart with a whisper of cinnamon. It was so delicious that you ended up having three when you usually have an aversion to ordinary fruits. That was what the person smelled like. A gentle whiff of summer peaches. I followed the person through the crowd and all the while, I was reminded of you. Eyes all over the place were drawn to that person as he or she moved, hungry eyes that devoured and caressed over the person's form.
Cobb can see the way Mal saw the scene- he remembers building a city for her as Mal filled it with her subconscious. There was a figure in a well-cut suit, androgynous and beautiful, strolling away from them. No matter how they walked or ran, the person remained a few feet in front of them, maintaining the same walking speed.
And the person turned around for the most fleeting moment and caught my gaze, then vanished into the crowd. The eyes, his or her eyes, were tawny in the dark of the club, sharp and cunning and sly. I went back to Papa's side after that, and he said 'where've you been, chérie?' and I could not say a word.
It happened the same way in the dream. Cobb can remember- almost taste the air of the dream-city as he and Mal charged down the street after the person, laughing. The person had glanced backward and with a hint of a smile, disappeared up a staircase or into the doorway of a shop. Cobb remembers eyes as sharp and sly as yellow wine, glinting in the gloom.
We have a word for it. L'esprit d'escalier. Thinking of the things we could have said when it is too late to say it. To that person in the club, I still do not know what I could have or would have said had they turned around and stopped to say hi. But to you, mon cœur, who is so far apart from where I am right now, I know exactly what to say.
I love you.
Yours always,
Mallorie Miles.
The letter was never delivered to him. She had kept it in her diary for years, and only after her death did he unearth it amongst her possessions. Cobb folds the letter back into the same creases it came in. The letter was dated a month before he had the dream of the both of them growing old together, spending the rest of their lives in love. The forgotten towel has soaked a damp patch onto his bed and he sighs, pushing it off onto the floor. He puts the letter back into the box and places it gently under the bed and climbs under the covers.
It's been a long time since he's dreamed, and even longer since he's wanted something like he wants Mal now.
+
Some nights, Arthur tosses and turns fitfully in bed. He closes his eyes but nothing works, even various versions of Somnacin leave him wide awake. On these nights, he pads out of bed and opens the wooden box that he always stashes in a corner of his suitcase, and retrieves the single cassette tape inside it. It weighs comfortably in his hand and he turns it over carefully, as familiar with it as he is with his die.
There is a cassette deck on top of his chest of drawers, and he switches it on and puts on the tape. Cassettes are a hassle, true, but they're worth the hassle. Arthur believes that the analog nature of the deck is worth everything, especially when it can play this single tape. A tape with just one recording on it. The tape starts and faint crackles are heard, and Arthur gets into bed. A voice starts up, a beautiful voice. A voice that brought a lover nearly back to life.
The voice of Orpheus.
Arthur does not know for sure that this is really Orpheus' voice. He remembers being in Greece as a child with his parents, shy and darting behind his mother's skirts whenever strangers stopped to say hello to the American tourists. They smiled and him and spoke in their strange tongue, majestic and full of curious words. He remembers when he was good and his mother had given him some money at the marketplace one hot afternoon as she went hunting for the freshest figs around. He carried the coin around smartly, jingling it about in his pocket with the other coins- a hundred drachma coin he had swiped from the table in the hotel, and a fifty drachma coin he'd found in the gutter. There was a man hawking his goods on the steps of a ruin- Greece was always full of old ruins, as much as Arthur could remember- and he gave Arthur a brief flash of a smirk, a cold twist of lips.
"Come here, boy," the man had said in English, words heavy with his thick Greek accent. Arthur had moved forward, transfixed, and watched as the man opened his basket of goods. There were curious things inside- cherries, redder than anything he'd ever seen, small chips of marble flecked with gold, and something silver swirling in a glass container. He'd reached for the silver, but the man snapped the basket shut.
"And what will you pay for it, child?" The man asked, stretching out a ready hand. Arthur hurriedly dropped his fifty drachma coin into the man's palm, shuffling his feet. The man took on a pained expression, reaching out for more.
"Fifty drachma for such a valuable item?" Arthur gave him the rest of his money quickly, and the man's hand closed around the coins, greedy and grasping.
"How do you listen to music in your home, boy?" Arthur scrunched up his face, wondering what the question had to do with the sale of the item.
"Cassette tapes, of course. Like everyone else." The man pulled out the silver jar and held it with two hands, then closed his fingers around it and opened them a second later. A shiny new casstee tape sat in his palms, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. Arthur took it gingerly- he knew how to handle them, because Father got mad when Arthur wasn't careful- and inspected it.
"How did you do that?" Arthur asked, wide-eyed. The man smiled.
"Magic. Now, it contains one song. The song of Orpheus. One of his many songs."
"Orpheus, like Orpheus and Eurydice?" The man nodded.
"The one and only. Guard it well, boy. My father would kill me if he knew-" the man appeared to go off into his own thoughts, the coins in his palm rubbing against each other.
"-but we are short of money at the temple now..." Arthur heard his mother calling for him in the distance, and bobbed his head shyly, remembering his manners. He pocketed the tape and looked at the man.
"Thank you, sir," he said quickly, and turned and dashed into the crowd. He bumped into someone that smelled familiar, of cloves and apples.
"There you are, Arthur. Where have you been?"
"Nothing, Ma. Just looking around." His mother was wilting in the heat, browl curls losing their bounce. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead, and even the hat seemed listless. She sighed, smiling indulgently at him. Her hand was cool and light on his shoulder, a gentle mother's touch.
"Let's go back now, Arthur. It's too hot to do any proper shopping." Arthur tried to look back at the man through the crowd, but the sea of people separated them, ebbing and swelling and pushing until Arthur and his mother were at the fringes of the market. The next day, when his parents were out, Arthur played the tape on his father's expensive portable cassette deck.
It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
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Notes: The song that Ariadne is singing was covered by my friend here. so yeah just to get a feel of it. It is an actual song from Death: The High Cost Of Living, a spinoff from the Sandman series about Death becoming mortal for a day.