inception fic: i strive (1/5)
I Strive
Inception: Dom/Mal, Mal/Arthur, Arthur/Eames
Rating: R - sex, violence, rock and roll.
25,532 words
Love means something different to Dom, to Mal, to Arthur.
Thank you to kittyzams, who went above and beyond. <3 Arthur quotes an uber-random portion of The Brothers Karamazov, and the stupid-long cut-tag quote is from the Völsunga Saga. Pretension! Let me show you it.
The dream of artists-which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified-is to plant themselves in other people's heads. Tad Friend
Dom’s waiting in the hallway, when she comes out of Professor Miles’ office. They look up at the same time, and he's startled to find that they’re both operating to the same rhythm, so much so that he says, "Hi." Automatic, as if she'd pressed a button.
"Hello," she says, smiling politely.
"Is the professor in?" he asks. He realizes he's slouching, still, against the wall and scrambles to his feet, to his full height.
Her smile warms. "Yes. The professor is in."
"Oh. Good."
She nods, amusement on her face. She’s waiting, he knows, but he can't find another thought to verbalize. "Okay, then," she says, and turns to go.
"Wait," Dom says. He aborts an attempt to touch her arm. "What's your name?"
She turns halfway, stopped in the middle of the hall, looking at him from the corner of her eye. Assessing. "What's yours?" she asks.
"Dom," he says. "Dominic."
"Mallorie," she replies, then, glancing down at a watch, "I'm so sorry. I'm late for a class."
He watches her take a step, then another away from him, and he can't stop himself from calling, "Mallorie!"
She turns around, again, the beginning of exasperation in her shoulders. She raises an eyebrow.
"You have an accent." He finds he's been swinging his arms, back and forth. He puts his hands in his pockets.
She laughs. "Oh, no," she says.
****
He's decided on one of two places to take her on their first date. He can't take the leap beyond that, to make a choice between the two.
The professor had asked Dom to call him Miles and Dom can't figure out if it's because he knows that Dom is neck-deep in lust bordering on-something, something else-for his daughter, or if it's because Dom has agreed to teach one of his sections next semester.
He toys with asking the professor-Miles-if Mallorie is the kind of girl who expects candlelight and linen tablecloths. If she'd think being taken to eat ribs on a first date screams of over-posturing.
He knocks on her door instead, hours and hours before they're scheduled to meet. When she opens the door, he says, "I don't mean to be early. This isn't the start of our date."
She nods, taken aback. "Okay."
He sighs. It occurs to him that he might have been heavy-handed with his cologne this morning. "I wanted your input for dinner." He drags a hand across his brow. This might have been a bad idea. "I've narrowed it down to a couple of choices."
She opens the door fully. Framed in dark jeans and a v-neck. "Which restaurant wouldn't require a change in clothing?" she asks, with what might be affection in her voice, and Dom smiles, feels a knot in the back of his neck loosen.
****
He takes her hand after dinner, in front of her building. Night air heavy with heat, sweat beading at his nape. Her face lit by the cold fluorescent light illuminating the steps.
"You're beautiful, beautiful," he tells her.
She's standing a step above him. She traces his hair line. "Gorgeous." She cups his cheek. "Ravishing." She touches his bottom lip. "A face to break a woman's heart," she tells him, dancing eyes belying her grave tone.
It’s late. I don’t know you at all, he thinks. He is upon a precipice.
He wonders what it would be like to kiss her.
****
They're engaged, quick. "Lock that down," his roommate told him, and he did.
His parents throw a party in his hometown, at the community hall he knows from countless high school sports team dinners, debates. Elizabeth is there. Dom had prayed against her, when they'd sent out invitations, but her parents were old family friends, so there was no getting around it.
She keeps her distance, but after dinner, and drinks, she comes around and hugs Dom, takes Mal's hand. "So this is you," she says to Mal.
Mal nods. "It's nice to meet you."
Elizabeth narrows her eyes. Her smile is brittle. "You should really know who I am," she says, then walks away.
Fucked, Dom thinks when Mal turns to look at him, cool and calculating.
****
He tells her as they're getting ready for bed. The reasons Elizabeth has to be angry. The very short overlap between relationships. When he's finished, Mal is sitting on the bed, cross-legged, wiping the polish from her nails in short, savage strokes. "Damn it, Dominic. I'm embarrassed for you."
"I didn't do anything wrong," Dom says, stung. "Not really."
"Then why look so guilty?" she asks, throwing a hand in the air in his direction. "Why, if you believe that?"
She's waiting but he has nothing to say. She looks him straight in the eye but he breaks her gaze, looks to where the wallpaper is peeling in his parents' guest bedroom.
"Shit," she says.
The silence drags on. Dom steps into the adjoining bathroom to brush his teeth, spitting, rinsing. When he comes back into the bedroom, Mal is in bed, the covers pushed down to her ankles, sheets twisted around her form. "So," he asks, casually, like he doesn't care one way or the other. "What? Should I call the couch into service? Has its number come up already?"
She pushes up onto one elbow. "No. Get into bed."
He obeys. He feels unsure of what he's allowed, but after he turns off the lamp at the bedside, he dares to touch her wrist.
"I'm still so angry at you," she says, a voice in the dark.
"I know. I'm sorry. I should have told you before."
The sound of her breath. "This is not who I wanted to be," she says, finally. She curls around him. "It's not who I thought you were," her mouth against his shoulder.
****
They have a wedding under a tent. Every time they kiss, the sound of ringing glass.
"Mallorie Cobb," she whispers in his ear between toasts. "It sounds so American."
During the maid-of-honor’s speech, Mal buries her face in his neck, hiding the blush that creeps along her cheeks at some story from her misspent teenage years, and he thinks, I was a man who didn’t know love, once.
****
During that first year, he'd wake up some mornings with her beside him, her back to him. He'd press up against her, impatient for her to open her eyes.
She'd turn her head, and he'd kiss her cheek. "Good morning," she'd say.
"Good morning," he'd reply, and then slide a thigh between her legs, a hand low on her belly. "And what should we do today?" he'd ask. All his hope replaced by certainty.
****
Mal speaks four languages, one of which is Arabic. She’s intelligent to a near-intimidating degree, and perhaps the most capable person he knows. He tells her she should consider the offer, that it isn’t a total surprise. That dismissing a job out of hand for its ties to the Department of Defense is short-sighted. “The funding alone-you could do great things. Imagine the stories you’d have to tell,” he says.
“But I wouldn’t be able to tell those stories,” Mal says. “I don’t like it. Everything so shadowy.”
“The cloak and dagger is the majority of the appeal,” Dom says.
“How revealing,” Mal says dryly.
****
She recruits him after their second fight over her distance. “This is not worth sacrificing our marriage over,” she tells him.
“You could quit,” he points out.
“And do what? Have a four-course dinner waiting for you on the table when you get home?” She rolls her eyes. “Besides, I think you’d be perfect for this phase of our project. Something new.” She emphasizes the last word, drawing out all the specific allure it holds for him.
“Do you need someone extremely competent? A structural genius? An architect to rival all other architects, dead and living?” Dom pulls off his socks, cursorily examines a hole in the heel of his left one.
“Yes, and debonair, too.”
“Well,” Dom says, putting his hands on his thighs. “I’d say you’ve found your man.”
Mal leans back against their bedroom wall, her hands crossed behind her. “So humble a heart,” she says.
He blows out a long exhale, holds her gaze. “We’ll be together. Will I be working in one wing and you in another, two floors away?”
“No,” she says.
“Then yes,” he says.
****
She shows him the PASIV device on his fourth day, after orientation. The security surrounding the project is-to be generous-frustrating. It takes him fifteen minutes to get from the door leading into the building to his office. “No wonder the covert operations in this country fail to achieve their best. Efficiency is being sacrificed at the altar to the false idol that is confidentiality.”
“Another well-considered Cobb opinion,” Mal says, opening what looks like a briefcase.
“Good as gold,” Dom says.
Mal holds up a Trocar needle. She has a look in her eye, a secret she’s eager to tell lighting her up. “Do you trust me?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. “More than the ground I’m standing on.”
Her gaze goes soft. She kisses his temple, hands searching for a vein, murmurs, “Now. You’ll feel a small pinch.”
****
He wakes up in a campsite. It’s night, and through a hole in the crowd of trees above, the stars are slowly fading in and out. Clouds pulling apart around them. Like the shadow of a colossus who tears at cumulus is falling, shifting across the sky.
“It’s quiet,” he says.
Mal’s arms wrap around him from behind. They’re sitting on a fallen tree, and with every shift he makes, he can feel the bark dropping away from the bone-trunk underneath. “No,” she says into his ear. “Listen.”
And she’s right. Crickets. Twigs snapping under the feet of an animal that calls this forest home.
“Build me something,” she says. She points to a clearing in the near distance. “There.”
“How?” he asks.
“You know how.”
“I couldn’t. We’d need to survey the land. Assess the environmental impact. I’d need a project manager I can rely on and a contractor-”
She laughs. “Close your eyes,” she says, then puts her hand over his lowered eyelids. She wraps one leg around his waist. “You’ve called the contractor. You’ve filed plans with the appropriate regulatory bodies. You watch them level the earth, the foundation setting.” She hums. “Do you see it? Tell me when it’s ready to build upon.”
He lays his head back on her shoulder. “It’s ready,” he says.
“Intuit the structure. Every intention fulfilled. See the foundation laid.” She takes his hand and holds it up in front of him. “Feel the beams rising.”
He can feel the place where his heart would be beating, the pounding pace of it.
“Can you do it more quickly?” she asks.
A stream of lumber. Paint flooding up walls. Dust filling the air with an uncountable number of motes, suspended in the sun. Through his wife’s hand, through the pluckable-thin skin of his eyelids, blackness turning to a hazy, glowing red. “It’s there, isn’t it?” he asks.
He can feel her smile against his neck. “It looks like a house a wolf would try to blow down.”
“I’m sweating,” he says.
“You’ve made it very hot,” she agrees. “Would you like to see?” She pulls her hand away, and the instant he opens his eyes, he has to close them again, pupils shocked into dilating by the brilliance of vision. When he opens them again, he sees a house you could pull on like a sleeve, there on a flat-topped hill. Matchsticks held together by twine, so tall it could block out the sun, a breeze sending sheer curtains fanning out like banners.
“I'll huff and I’ll puff,” Mal says.
****
It’s exhilarating. He coaxes spires out of the ground. He moves mountains. He carves cliffs, then houses into those cliffs, every filigree and molding in layered sandstone.
Mal knits landscapes together, bare-branched trees adopting faces, a different profile from every new angle.
Their projections tolerate each other's presence. Dangerous, still, when provoked-Dom has looked for bruises upon waking that are never actually there-but manageable.
"The same isn't true for other minds," Mal warns him.
"No?"
"You seem to tolerate invasion."
"Hm," he says. He pulls at her hair, gently. "You occupy my thoughts."
****
Miles comes to America; a move he'd justified with a stint guest-lecturing at Georgetown. In the car on the way home from the airport, he says, "It's unfathomable to me that you have yet to enter a dream without Mallorie. You are developing an altogether skewed vision of what construction within a foreign mind is truly like."
"Dad," Mallorie says, twisting in her seat.
"You're hobbling him," Miles insists.
"So good to see you," Dom says.
****
Men in uniform seem to multiply in the halls, rapidly. "Jesus Christ," Dom says. "One day you have two, and the next sixteen."
"The problem was allowing in a mating pair," Mal says, lowering the back of a sleeping chair.
The soldier in the chair grips the armrests, settles back into the deep cushioning. "What is this, ergonomic?" He looks up at the ceiling, no sign of a reaction when Mal slides the needle into his arm. "Who paid for this?"
Mal tears a piece of tape off with her teeth, delicately secures the soldier's line. "The army," she says, concentrating.
"Ah," the soldier says. "The army."
"Incredible, the point on that comment," Dom says, closing his eyes. "And with such little inflection."
"Men," Mal says. Then: "Good night, Arthur." And: "Remember, peace and calm. You're walking into an empty plaza. Buildings unpeopled. The sun is setting. You are untroubled and not alone..."
Arthur's eyes close.
"Little dreamer," Mal says. The last thing Dom hears before he sleeps.
****
They're in an empty square, the architecture speaking a common, yet unspecified language. Shadows are pooling at the bases of buildings, waiting out a fiery, blowing-out sun.
Arthur has his back to Dom and is dressed all in black, not an identifying mark on his clothing. Lean, and corded. Dom imagines a rope, wet, fibers contracted, hemp ready to sting-and without prompting, it coils into physicality, braiding around the perimeter of the plaza. It sinks into the cobblestones.
Arthur turns sharply, searching for the hand behind the act of creation, and Dom sees a glint in the clock tower above, a rifle rising, a split second warning before a bullet slams into his shoulder. He falls back onto his ass, his hand flying up to pat at the blood, the tearing pain. "You've got to be fucking kidding me," he roars.
The sound of soles against pavement echoes, and Arthur sprints toward Dom, arms knifing through the air. He barely slows to loop an arm under Dom's good shoulder, dragging him to his feet and getting him to move.
Dom shoves him away. "You fucking shot me."
"Come on." Arthur slips under Dom’s arm again, taking some of his weight. "We need to get through that gate."
"This hurts, you son of a bitch," Dom says, jogging. He winces in pain at the impact of each footfall, his vision hazy at the edges.
"To be fair," Arthur says coolly, "you did play with my toys without permission."
"You're a fucking psychopath."
"I don't do things by halves, no," Arthur says.
****
In Arthur's dreams he is an efficient machine. Gears humming everywhere, just under the surface. His projections run on a schedule. Mal built a train for him and it's a favorite setting: ten cars, each with their designated purpose, doors and compartments. Always headed toward a destination.
Dom and Mal are walking down a hallway together. Mal seems to enjoy Arthur. She presses her hand to each door they pass by. "In compartment two, your parents. In three, your brother. In four, a child. Not yours, I don't think, but sweet, all the same. In five, a girl." A rundown of the reconnaissance she has done.
Arthur keeps forging ahead in front of them.
"She's very lovely," Mal whispers to Dom, taking his arm.
"Your prying is not appreciated," Arthur says, pushing his way into the dining car.
"And yet you never get shot," Dom whispers to Mal.
She turns to the first booth on the right as they step into the dining car. “Bonjour, Monsieur Costello," she says, deliberately provocative, but the projection only stares after her, grips the edge of the table until its knuckles are white. "Very good, Arthur," she calls.
He grunts.
****
The work is fitted with seven league boots, leaping ahead with every day. They have new recruits, all the time.
"It's exciting, isn't it?" Mal asks. She turns in bed, onto her stomach, looking down at Dom. "This woman they've brought in, she's fascinating. She's someone completely different in her dreams. Androgynous, or-or...I don’t know. That’s not quite the right word. Not herself.”
"Don't bite your nails," Dom chides.
She makes a noise of protest. "Did you hear what I just said?"
"Yes," Dom says. He takes her hand and kisses the back of it. "Maybe we're more of ourselves in our dreams. There's no real reason to expect the reflection in your mind's eye to match the one in the mirror."
"I didn't-" Mal chews at her lip, staring at nothing as she thinks. "God!" She drops her head into his shoulder, voice muffled by the pillow. "How could I have dismissed so many thoughts as mere curiosities?”
"No harm's been done," Dom says.
"What happens if you die, do you think?" Mal asks. "In the dream."
"Let's not find out," Dom says.
She groans, rolling onto her back, away from him, but he follows her, lays his head on her chest. He curves his hand around her hip. "Do you think you're different, in your dreams? Do you feel the same as you do awake?"
She's quiet for a while, thinking. Her hand in his hair. "I feel unleashed," she says finally. "And you?"
"Heady with power and control."
She snorts. "You only think you're joking."
He smiles against her breast. "What will they do with the woman?" he asks.
"I'm not sure, yet," Mal says. "I don't think we know which question to ask first."
Dom flicks through a half-dozen, until he settles on one. "How mutable is she?" He breathes in the smell of her: his wife, whom he would know if blind, if deaf, if dumb.
****
He meets the woman, Kit, on a Sunday. He wakes up in a forest she's dreamed up. Thick and overgrown; it’s strictly by instinct that he knows that the sun is high up in the air, shining bright, only the petals of its light sifting down to the floor where he is. Trees so tall he can't see where their branches begin.
Kit comes striding, slipping between trunks, around shrub and bush.
"Hail, Brynhildr," Dom says. He can't help it, a greeting that occurred in his mind too strong to keep from saying.
She stops, looking at him. "You must be Dominic," she says.
"I'm sorry," Dom says. "I don't know why I said that."
She shrugs. "You've been spending a lot of time in Arthur's head. He calls me that."
"Why?"
She laughs. She's standing in jeans and a t-shirt that she holds gathered up in one hand, turning it into a makeshift pouch. The smooth, tanned skin of her thickened waist. "I made the mistake of telling him the nickname my high school volleyball team gave me. He promised to tell me his, but here we are, 18 months out of Kandahar, and I still only know to call him Arthur." She sits, and lets down her shirt a little, revealing fruit. She flips him a strawberry.
Dom sits across from her.
"So do you know what exactly we're doing today?” Kit asks. “I just heard tests."
"That's what I hear."
"Like what, though?" She takes a piece of her hair, and he watches the dark brown shift toward black, so subtle it could be a play of light.
She's nervous, he realizes. "I'm not sure," he says honestly. "Nothing major, I'd bet." He holds on to the strawberry.
"Your wife," Kit says. "I can probably trust her, right?"
"Yes," Dom says.
"She's got a little bit of badass in her, you know? She’s got intent behind that face."
Dom laughs. “Not an inaccurate reading." He looks around. He digs his hands into the rotting leaves blanketing the ground underneath him. The wet mulch. "This is an interesting construction. The details are strong."
"I used to daydream about a forest like this," Kit says. "One that’s all old-growth. Trees thousands of years old that knew what California looked like before it was strip malls and Spanish-style homes." She laughs. "I was probably a weird kid."
"Why forests? What would you imagine doing here?"
She looks up, and up. High enough to get lost. She says, “Climb.”
****
Dom slips away to peek in on Mal's debriefing with Kit. Kit is striking in person, too, her shoulders held confidently. The shape if not the details recognizable. "I appreciate your desire to understand, ma'am," Kit says. "But it would serve us both best if we had this conversation sleeping. I could be more helpful to you."
Mal mirrors Kit's posture, her pen tap-tapping. She jots a quick note, then uncrosses her legs, leans forward. "Can I be honest with you?" At Kit's raised eyebrow, Mal sits back in her chair, wipes the air in front of her clean with both hands. "Truly honest."
"Fine. Yes, I’d appreciate that."
"I'm worried," Mal says. "I mean to say...I'm thankful that you've given so much of your time to us. You've been accommodating in every way a person in your situation could be." She puts her hands, palms up, on the table. "But we've already asked you to spend so much of your time in the dreams. We've had you sleep for days. The technology is still so new."
"What is it that you're afraid of, ma'am?" Kit asks.
Mal clasps her hands together. "I'm worried that you won't want to wake up. I understand that. I want to ask, sometimes, for a few minutes more."
Kit looks down. When she looks up again, Dom can't quite see her eyes, but Mal straightens suddenly, struck. "Would it be so wrong?" Kit asks. "I'm who I want to be when I dream. And every time I wake up, to look down and see-these hands again." Her voice shudders under the weight of her words. "These arms and legs. Is it so wrong, not to want to wake up?"
Mal takes her hands. She grips them tight. "No," she says, firmly, her eyes earnest. "No, of course not. Of course."
Kit bows her head, shakes it back and forth. "Can I have just one minute, ma'am?" she asks.
Mal stands. She puts a hand on Kit's shoulder as she passes.
"I'm sorry," Kit says. She shakes her head, pulls away from Mal’s hand. "God, I'm fine, really." She chokes on a laugh. "I'm not usually like this."
"I'll be right outside," Mal says, then crosses, quietly, to the door. She closes it behind her, watching the latch click, and when she looks up to find Dom, waiting, she makes this broken noise.
"Hi," he says.
"I'm crying." She laughs, wet. "I don't know why." She steps close and touches the lapels of his shirt, straightens his collar.
He wipes the tears from her face, the one clinging to her jaw.
She drops her forehead to his chest. "But won't she be lonely?" she asks.
****
Dom sees Kit more now than he did when she was counted among the awake.
He's waiting for Mal to finish up so they can go home when he walks past Kit's room. A body nourished to keep alive her mind. Arthur is sleeping next to her, and Dom thinks, 'What the hell,' rolls up his sleeve.
He wakes up in a city of neon lights, buildings sizzling with color: Shinjuku and Times Square and Blade Runner scissored together. He'll need to get lucky, to find Kit and Arthur. He turns in place, once, then again, and sees them standing at a food cart.
Arthur stabs the air with his hand, anger on his face, and as Dom muscles through a crowd of Kit's projections, he hears him say, "It's self-aggrandizing, major."
"Arthur, did you come here just to yell at me? That’s fine, but I’d like to know if I’m riding this out in hopes for an eventual shared drink, or if I should really buckle in," Kit says. She accepts a bowl of noodles, wields chopsticks. She's tall here, taller than Arthur and she takes advantage of it, looks down upon him.
Arthur holds her gaze, no sign of intimidation. "You're static. You used to call that the kiss of death. We learn, we educate ourselves, we adapt or die."
"I'm not adapting?" Kit says. "Do I need to show you more of my tricks?" Her features blurring, variations on her face, one after the other as she whistles a circus theme.
Arthur is not amused. "It's a closed feedback loop, Kit. Who's going to challenge you?" He grabs a projection walking by, a man in black tie. "Him?" He shoves him away to point at a Harajuku girl walking past. "Her? You'll be raving to yourself. There's no one but you here."
"And you," Kit points out, obstinate.
The projections shove against Dom harder. He's having a hard time getting closer than this, just outside the circle of their argument. "Kit!" he calls, and the projections near him turn to look at him as one.
Arthur grabs Kit, up high on her arms. He shakes her. "This isn't real. This role you're acting out here is not who you really are."
"Arthur, stop," Kit says, her projections turning toward him.
"Don't kid yourself-"
"Stop!" she shouts, and a mob swarms Arthur, tearing at his clothes, at his limbs, so sudden he can't get another word out, going down in a whirl of fists and knees.
Wake up, Dom thinks. He sees not a scrap of Arthur. Wake up, wake up, wake up, panic in his belly, shuttering the sky into day, the square of street beneath him erupting high. He has wandered into a hostile land.
"Dom."
When he looks down, he can see Kit there at the base, a speck. Her clothes, too, torn.
"Dom. Don't tell me I killed him," she says, her voice far away. "Please don't tell me that." The city plunged into a mourning black.
****
Dom wakes up with a jerk, sees Arthur standing in front of him with tubing hanging in his hand, the cannula that had recently occupied one of Dom's veins dripping onto the floor. Dom hisses at the sting in his arm. "There's got to be a better way to wake someone up than that," he says. "You're alive," he says.
"Ta-da." Arthur's smile is grim.
"She'll want to know." Dom looks at Kit's sleeping face. "Arthur, you know how impossible it is to control your projections, even with other minds at their most unobtrusive."
"I was particularly un-unobtrusive," Arthur allows. He hasn't let go of the tubing, a puddle forming underneath the needle. He's digging his nails into his palms, Dom notes.
"Arthur," Dom says, careful. "Maybe you should sit down."
Arthur nods. "Maybe."
"At ease, soldier," Dom says, adopting a more familiar language under the guise of jest.
Arthur hisses out a breath. He laughs, angry. He lifts an arm, points at his wrist. "I could feel the bones here, grinding. Twisting just the wrong way. All I could think was that this was my shooting hand. That was my trigger finger, splintering."
"Let's speak with whatever professional you're supposed to speak to." Dom stands, puts a hand on the span of Arthur's shoulders. "I know there's some overpaid asshole on staff. Come on. Mal, too. We can talk to her."
Arthur wets his lips. His throat bobbing. "Yeah. Mal will want to know," he says, and Dom can see him force himself into action, into movement. The careful detaching of needle from tube. "Now we know what happens when we die during a dream." He disposes of the cannula in the biohazard waste bin, winds the tubing around his fingers in efficient circles.
"Utilitarian as always," Dom says.
Arthur glances at Kit in repose.
"She had no intention," Dom says, gentle.
Arthur pretends not to hear. "Maybe I was wrong," he says. "The pain felt real enough. More than real."
"Hey," Dom says. He squeezes Arthur's shoulder. "You're fine. You're okay."
"Sure," Arthur says easily. He smiles with serrated teeth. "But when I first woke up, you could have fooled me. Easy to think otherwise." He wiggles his fingers in front of his face. "Look, ma," he says.
****
Mal starts to spend more time with Kit, down there. "There's an opportunity to learn," she says. "What it feels like to sleep for so long."
"A silver lining," Dom says.
"Something like that," Mal says, and she looks-far away, for a moment.
****
"She doesn't believe me, not completely in any case," Mal says. She's hissing, a tone of voice that makes Dom note the placement of every exit. He stops, half through the door, cranes forward a bit to see the unfortunate target of Mal's anger.
Arthur is standing stock-still, chin lifted. Mal is finishing the knot in his tie and makes a gesture as if to pull it over-tight, when Arthur captures her gaze, raises an eyebrow.
She throws her hands up. "You do it, then! You're right to think I might choke you."
Arthur rolls his eyes. "Mal, would you give me a break?"
"Just dip under, that's all I'm asking you to do," she says. "Show her your handsome and unbearable face."
"If she wants to know I'm alive," Arthur says, "she can wake up and see for herself."
"She's made her choice. The best one she could make," Mal says. Her arms crossed. "I don't want to fight about this with you."
"So we won't fight."
Mal scoffs, but a smile plays around her mouth. "I hate when you retreat so fully into this persona," she says, gesturing at his suit. The clothes a new affectation Dom has openly wondered about.
Arthur tugs down on the tie knot, pulls his mouth as he tries to get a good look at it. "Ugh," he says.
"Problem?" Mal asks.
"No, nothing." Arthur tightens the knot, squares it away at his collar. "Windsor knots are for dicks," he amends.
"How fortuitous, then, to have accidentally tied a knot appropriate to the man."
"I let you have that one," Arthur says. He reaches for Mal's arm, squeezes it. "You say she's made her choice. So let her deal with the consequences."
"I would never have thought you petulant-"
"She chose to live in a world where nobody else exists, Mal. Not you, not me," Arthur says, raising his voice, at his very limits.
"Arthur-"
"Don't push me," he says.
"Why not?" Mal, full of flame.
****
They have the argument frequently. To the point where one or the other will pick it up at any opportune moment, a disagreement carried around in back pockets.
Cobb's dream. A cemetery, rows and rows of crumbling headstones-here lies Cobb-at-16, Cobb-at-17 and so on, just short of Cobb-at-31, currently strolling-among grass a well-fed green. One minute Mal is studying epitaphs, the next she says, "It makes me feel as if you would tear me out, too, if I made such a mistake."
Arthur strides with back bent, hands held behind his back. "You wouldn't make that kind of mistake."
"I make mistakes all the time," Mal laughs. "I do a new thing wrong every hour."
"I'll vouch for that," Dom says, and Mal looks up at him, narrows her eyes, digs fingers into his side.
"I wouldn't tear you out," Arthur says quietly. “Anybody else, maybe. But not you.”
Mal sighs, leans her head against Dom's shoulder, a hand worrying at her lips. "Oh," she says, soft, and watches Arthur pick up his pace, put distance between them.
Dom presses a kiss into her curls. "If I should bow out gracefully now," he whispers, "would I be rewarded with the privilege of giving you away at your wedding to Arthur?"
"I couldn't guarantee," she says, immediately. She pulls his face to hers, kisses him ardently. When she pulls away, she pinches, hard, at his waist. “I don’t like this place,” she tells him. “I want to dig up all your graves.”
****
Dom goes in with Mal to see Kit after that. As often as she asks Arthur, Dom goes.
The first time, they find themselves walking up a stairwell, and when Mal pushes open the door, they walk out onto a tall building's roof. It's a bordered square, three large steps in any direction, and a fourth to send you soaring. The wind grabs at his hair and his clothes, in a hurry to strip him to his skin.
"Kit," Mal calls, and the figure leaning against the edge's railing turns, Arthur's borrowed lips saying, "Hi, Dom."
Dom stops. He slides his hands into his pockets. "Kit," he says.
"Do you like the new look?" She shakes out Arthur's cuffs, straightens his jacket-a perfect simulacrum wearing the suit she last saw him in.
"He'll hate it," Dom says, flat. He doesn’t know why he’s so angry, and it’s the sudden flood of it, as much as the strength, that tests his self-control.
"Dom!" Mal says.
"I wish I could change this," Kit says. She scrubs her face with her hands, exhausted. "Believe me." Every surface going matte.
****
"I need a vacation," Dom tells Mal over breakfast. She's made two perfect poached eggs. Orange yolks quivering.
"Me too." She picks toast out of the toaster, quick-steps it onto their shared plate then blows on her hot fingertips. "You are not allowed to buy Wonder Bread anymore," she says. "There isn't a crumb of wonder involved."
"Vacation," he repeats.
She breaks her yolk, dips the edge of her toast in it. "I wish we had time," she says.
Dom nuzzles her neck. "I hear dreaming’s nice this time of year," he says.
She stills. Then: "Maybe." She puts down her fork. "Maybe."
****
They sleep, and then sleep again. Two levels under. Kit had shown them how. She'd said time passes even slower, in the second level. "We could reduce it to a crawl, maybe, one more level down."
"Not yet," Mal says.
"I think we can be bolder," Kit says. "We've yet to face any truly troubling complications."
"You're not Arthur anymore," Dom says. He lights a match easily, leaning against a bit of statue, scuffing his shoes.
Kit looks over at him, her mouth tightening a little bit. "The sun sets," she says.
They wade into dreaming for their vacation, just his and Mal’s. Nestled into a low valley. A fog tumbling, slipping across their feet. He can feel the wet on his bare skin.
"We'll go down in history, eventually," he tells Mal. "They'll want to know our story." They are giants in a landscape made to hold the weight of their bodies.
"What comes first?" Mal asks. "Will they ask you to write a book?"
"We'll all write books," Dom says. "Bestsellers, every one." He hums. "Maybe not Arthur's."
Mal laughs. She pulls his arms around her, steps up onto her toes to look him in the eye. "And who will you dedicate your story to? It's very important."
"To my wife."
She drops onto her heels. She wraps her arms around his waist, smiles into his chest. "It's short."
"Is it?"
"But not lacking sentiment." She touches his belt.
"To Mal, of whom there never was-" He clears his throat. "Of whom there never was, there never will be, there is no other."
"That one's nice, too," she says. Swaying.
"To you. Today it's raining a little. Wear a coat. I love you."
She grips his shirt in fistfuls. She looks up at him, in the way that had first made him love her. Reading the lines of him, as if there was much to learn. As if there were more to him than the parts that make up his body, more than the feet under him that keeps him standing.
"And yours? Who would you dedicate yours to?" He raises an eyebrow, an exaggerated displeasure clouding his face. "Arthur?"
She lets go of the cotton of his shirt. She smoothes her hands over him, her fingertips questing, Braille rising on his skin. "To my husband. Whose every good morning stirs my heart," she says, her voice unraveled at the seams.
Part Two
Inception: Dom/Mal, Mal/Arthur, Arthur/Eames
Rating: R - sex, violence, rock and roll.
25,532 words
Love means something different to Dom, to Mal, to Arthur.
Thank you to kittyzams, who went above and beyond. <3 Arthur quotes an uber-random portion of The Brothers Karamazov, and the stupid-long cut-tag quote is from the Völsunga Saga. Pretension! Let me show you it.
The dream of artists-which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified-is to plant themselves in other people's heads. Tad Friend
Dom’s waiting in the hallway, when she comes out of Professor Miles’ office. They look up at the same time, and he's startled to find that they’re both operating to the same rhythm, so much so that he says, "Hi." Automatic, as if she'd pressed a button.
"Hello," she says, smiling politely.
"Is the professor in?" he asks. He realizes he's slouching, still, against the wall and scrambles to his feet, to his full height.
Her smile warms. "Yes. The professor is in."
"Oh. Good."
She nods, amusement on her face. She’s waiting, he knows, but he can't find another thought to verbalize. "Okay, then," she says, and turns to go.
"Wait," Dom says. He aborts an attempt to touch her arm. "What's your name?"
She turns halfway, stopped in the middle of the hall, looking at him from the corner of her eye. Assessing. "What's yours?" she asks.
"Dom," he says. "Dominic."
"Mallorie," she replies, then, glancing down at a watch, "I'm so sorry. I'm late for a class."
He watches her take a step, then another away from him, and he can't stop himself from calling, "Mallorie!"
She turns around, again, the beginning of exasperation in her shoulders. She raises an eyebrow.
"You have an accent." He finds he's been swinging his arms, back and forth. He puts his hands in his pockets.
She laughs. "Oh, no," she says.
****
He's decided on one of two places to take her on their first date. He can't take the leap beyond that, to make a choice between the two.
The professor had asked Dom to call him Miles and Dom can't figure out if it's because he knows that Dom is neck-deep in lust bordering on-something, something else-for his daughter, or if it's because Dom has agreed to teach one of his sections next semester.
He toys with asking the professor-Miles-if Mallorie is the kind of girl who expects candlelight and linen tablecloths. If she'd think being taken to eat ribs on a first date screams of over-posturing.
He knocks on her door instead, hours and hours before they're scheduled to meet. When she opens the door, he says, "I don't mean to be early. This isn't the start of our date."
She nods, taken aback. "Okay."
He sighs. It occurs to him that he might have been heavy-handed with his cologne this morning. "I wanted your input for dinner." He drags a hand across his brow. This might have been a bad idea. "I've narrowed it down to a couple of choices."
She opens the door fully. Framed in dark jeans and a v-neck. "Which restaurant wouldn't require a change in clothing?" she asks, with what might be affection in her voice, and Dom smiles, feels a knot in the back of his neck loosen.
****
He takes her hand after dinner, in front of her building. Night air heavy with heat, sweat beading at his nape. Her face lit by the cold fluorescent light illuminating the steps.
"You're beautiful, beautiful," he tells her.
She's standing a step above him. She traces his hair line. "Gorgeous." She cups his cheek. "Ravishing." She touches his bottom lip. "A face to break a woman's heart," she tells him, dancing eyes belying her grave tone.
It’s late. I don’t know you at all, he thinks. He is upon a precipice.
He wonders what it would be like to kiss her.
****
They're engaged, quick. "Lock that down," his roommate told him, and he did.
His parents throw a party in his hometown, at the community hall he knows from countless high school sports team dinners, debates. Elizabeth is there. Dom had prayed against her, when they'd sent out invitations, but her parents were old family friends, so there was no getting around it.
She keeps her distance, but after dinner, and drinks, she comes around and hugs Dom, takes Mal's hand. "So this is you," she says to Mal.
Mal nods. "It's nice to meet you."
Elizabeth narrows her eyes. Her smile is brittle. "You should really know who I am," she says, then walks away.
Fucked, Dom thinks when Mal turns to look at him, cool and calculating.
****
He tells her as they're getting ready for bed. The reasons Elizabeth has to be angry. The very short overlap between relationships. When he's finished, Mal is sitting on the bed, cross-legged, wiping the polish from her nails in short, savage strokes. "Damn it, Dominic. I'm embarrassed for you."
"I didn't do anything wrong," Dom says, stung. "Not really."
"Then why look so guilty?" she asks, throwing a hand in the air in his direction. "Why, if you believe that?"
She's waiting but he has nothing to say. She looks him straight in the eye but he breaks her gaze, looks to where the wallpaper is peeling in his parents' guest bedroom.
"Shit," she says.
The silence drags on. Dom steps into the adjoining bathroom to brush his teeth, spitting, rinsing. When he comes back into the bedroom, Mal is in bed, the covers pushed down to her ankles, sheets twisted around her form. "So," he asks, casually, like he doesn't care one way or the other. "What? Should I call the couch into service? Has its number come up already?"
She pushes up onto one elbow. "No. Get into bed."
He obeys. He feels unsure of what he's allowed, but after he turns off the lamp at the bedside, he dares to touch her wrist.
"I'm still so angry at you," she says, a voice in the dark.
"I know. I'm sorry. I should have told you before."
The sound of her breath. "This is not who I wanted to be," she says, finally. She curls around him. "It's not who I thought you were," her mouth against his shoulder.
****
They have a wedding under a tent. Every time they kiss, the sound of ringing glass.
"Mallorie Cobb," she whispers in his ear between toasts. "It sounds so American."
During the maid-of-honor’s speech, Mal buries her face in his neck, hiding the blush that creeps along her cheeks at some story from her misspent teenage years, and he thinks, I was a man who didn’t know love, once.
****
During that first year, he'd wake up some mornings with her beside him, her back to him. He'd press up against her, impatient for her to open her eyes.
She'd turn her head, and he'd kiss her cheek. "Good morning," she'd say.
"Good morning," he'd reply, and then slide a thigh between her legs, a hand low on her belly. "And what should we do today?" he'd ask. All his hope replaced by certainty.
****
Mal speaks four languages, one of which is Arabic. She’s intelligent to a near-intimidating degree, and perhaps the most capable person he knows. He tells her she should consider the offer, that it isn’t a total surprise. That dismissing a job out of hand for its ties to the Department of Defense is short-sighted. “The funding alone-you could do great things. Imagine the stories you’d have to tell,” he says.
“But I wouldn’t be able to tell those stories,” Mal says. “I don’t like it. Everything so shadowy.”
“The cloak and dagger is the majority of the appeal,” Dom says.
“How revealing,” Mal says dryly.
****
She recruits him after their second fight over her distance. “This is not worth sacrificing our marriage over,” she tells him.
“You could quit,” he points out.
“And do what? Have a four-course dinner waiting for you on the table when you get home?” She rolls her eyes. “Besides, I think you’d be perfect for this phase of our project. Something new.” She emphasizes the last word, drawing out all the specific allure it holds for him.
“Do you need someone extremely competent? A structural genius? An architect to rival all other architects, dead and living?” Dom pulls off his socks, cursorily examines a hole in the heel of his left one.
“Yes, and debonair, too.”
“Well,” Dom says, putting his hands on his thighs. “I’d say you’ve found your man.”
Mal leans back against their bedroom wall, her hands crossed behind her. “So humble a heart,” she says.
He blows out a long exhale, holds her gaze. “We’ll be together. Will I be working in one wing and you in another, two floors away?”
“No,” she says.
“Then yes,” he says.
****
She shows him the PASIV device on his fourth day, after orientation. The security surrounding the project is-to be generous-frustrating. It takes him fifteen minutes to get from the door leading into the building to his office. “No wonder the covert operations in this country fail to achieve their best. Efficiency is being sacrificed at the altar to the false idol that is confidentiality.”
“Another well-considered Cobb opinion,” Mal says, opening what looks like a briefcase.
“Good as gold,” Dom says.
Mal holds up a Trocar needle. She has a look in her eye, a secret she’s eager to tell lighting her up. “Do you trust me?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. “More than the ground I’m standing on.”
Her gaze goes soft. She kisses his temple, hands searching for a vein, murmurs, “Now. You’ll feel a small pinch.”
****
He wakes up in a campsite. It’s night, and through a hole in the crowd of trees above, the stars are slowly fading in and out. Clouds pulling apart around them. Like the shadow of a colossus who tears at cumulus is falling, shifting across the sky.
“It’s quiet,” he says.
Mal’s arms wrap around him from behind. They’re sitting on a fallen tree, and with every shift he makes, he can feel the bark dropping away from the bone-trunk underneath. “No,” she says into his ear. “Listen.”
And she’s right. Crickets. Twigs snapping under the feet of an animal that calls this forest home.
“Build me something,” she says. She points to a clearing in the near distance. “There.”
“How?” he asks.
“You know how.”
“I couldn’t. We’d need to survey the land. Assess the environmental impact. I’d need a project manager I can rely on and a contractor-”
She laughs. “Close your eyes,” she says, then puts her hand over his lowered eyelids. She wraps one leg around his waist. “You’ve called the contractor. You’ve filed plans with the appropriate regulatory bodies. You watch them level the earth, the foundation setting.” She hums. “Do you see it? Tell me when it’s ready to build upon.”
He lays his head back on her shoulder. “It’s ready,” he says.
“Intuit the structure. Every intention fulfilled. See the foundation laid.” She takes his hand and holds it up in front of him. “Feel the beams rising.”
He can feel the place where his heart would be beating, the pounding pace of it.
“Can you do it more quickly?” she asks.
A stream of lumber. Paint flooding up walls. Dust filling the air with an uncountable number of motes, suspended in the sun. Through his wife’s hand, through the pluckable-thin skin of his eyelids, blackness turning to a hazy, glowing red. “It’s there, isn’t it?” he asks.
He can feel her smile against his neck. “It looks like a house a wolf would try to blow down.”
“I’m sweating,” he says.
“You’ve made it very hot,” she agrees. “Would you like to see?” She pulls her hand away, and the instant he opens his eyes, he has to close them again, pupils shocked into dilating by the brilliance of vision. When he opens them again, he sees a house you could pull on like a sleeve, there on a flat-topped hill. Matchsticks held together by twine, so tall it could block out the sun, a breeze sending sheer curtains fanning out like banners.
“I'll huff and I’ll puff,” Mal says.
****
It’s exhilarating. He coaxes spires out of the ground. He moves mountains. He carves cliffs, then houses into those cliffs, every filigree and molding in layered sandstone.
Mal knits landscapes together, bare-branched trees adopting faces, a different profile from every new angle.
Their projections tolerate each other's presence. Dangerous, still, when provoked-Dom has looked for bruises upon waking that are never actually there-but manageable.
"The same isn't true for other minds," Mal warns him.
"No?"
"You seem to tolerate invasion."
"Hm," he says. He pulls at her hair, gently. "You occupy my thoughts."
****
Miles comes to America; a move he'd justified with a stint guest-lecturing at Georgetown. In the car on the way home from the airport, he says, "It's unfathomable to me that you have yet to enter a dream without Mallorie. You are developing an altogether skewed vision of what construction within a foreign mind is truly like."
"Dad," Mallorie says, twisting in her seat.
"You're hobbling him," Miles insists.
"So good to see you," Dom says.
****
Men in uniform seem to multiply in the halls, rapidly. "Jesus Christ," Dom says. "One day you have two, and the next sixteen."
"The problem was allowing in a mating pair," Mal says, lowering the back of a sleeping chair.
The soldier in the chair grips the armrests, settles back into the deep cushioning. "What is this, ergonomic?" He looks up at the ceiling, no sign of a reaction when Mal slides the needle into his arm. "Who paid for this?"
Mal tears a piece of tape off with her teeth, delicately secures the soldier's line. "The army," she says, concentrating.
"Ah," the soldier says. "The army."
"Incredible, the point on that comment," Dom says, closing his eyes. "And with such little inflection."
"Men," Mal says. Then: "Good night, Arthur." And: "Remember, peace and calm. You're walking into an empty plaza. Buildings unpeopled. The sun is setting. You are untroubled and not alone..."
Arthur's eyes close.
"Little dreamer," Mal says. The last thing Dom hears before he sleeps.
****
They're in an empty square, the architecture speaking a common, yet unspecified language. Shadows are pooling at the bases of buildings, waiting out a fiery, blowing-out sun.
Arthur has his back to Dom and is dressed all in black, not an identifying mark on his clothing. Lean, and corded. Dom imagines a rope, wet, fibers contracted, hemp ready to sting-and without prompting, it coils into physicality, braiding around the perimeter of the plaza. It sinks into the cobblestones.
Arthur turns sharply, searching for the hand behind the act of creation, and Dom sees a glint in the clock tower above, a rifle rising, a split second warning before a bullet slams into his shoulder. He falls back onto his ass, his hand flying up to pat at the blood, the tearing pain. "You've got to be fucking kidding me," he roars.
The sound of soles against pavement echoes, and Arthur sprints toward Dom, arms knifing through the air. He barely slows to loop an arm under Dom's good shoulder, dragging him to his feet and getting him to move.
Dom shoves him away. "You fucking shot me."
"Come on." Arthur slips under Dom’s arm again, taking some of his weight. "We need to get through that gate."
"This hurts, you son of a bitch," Dom says, jogging. He winces in pain at the impact of each footfall, his vision hazy at the edges.
"To be fair," Arthur says coolly, "you did play with my toys without permission."
"You're a fucking psychopath."
"I don't do things by halves, no," Arthur says.
****
In Arthur's dreams he is an efficient machine. Gears humming everywhere, just under the surface. His projections run on a schedule. Mal built a train for him and it's a favorite setting: ten cars, each with their designated purpose, doors and compartments. Always headed toward a destination.
Dom and Mal are walking down a hallway together. Mal seems to enjoy Arthur. She presses her hand to each door they pass by. "In compartment two, your parents. In three, your brother. In four, a child. Not yours, I don't think, but sweet, all the same. In five, a girl." A rundown of the reconnaissance she has done.
Arthur keeps forging ahead in front of them.
"She's very lovely," Mal whispers to Dom, taking his arm.
"Your prying is not appreciated," Arthur says, pushing his way into the dining car.
"And yet you never get shot," Dom whispers to Mal.
She turns to the first booth on the right as they step into the dining car. “Bonjour, Monsieur Costello," she says, deliberately provocative, but the projection only stares after her, grips the edge of the table until its knuckles are white. "Very good, Arthur," she calls.
He grunts.
****
The work is fitted with seven league boots, leaping ahead with every day. They have new recruits, all the time.
"It's exciting, isn't it?" Mal asks. She turns in bed, onto her stomach, looking down at Dom. "This woman they've brought in, she's fascinating. She's someone completely different in her dreams. Androgynous, or-or...I don’t know. That’s not quite the right word. Not herself.”
"Don't bite your nails," Dom chides.
She makes a noise of protest. "Did you hear what I just said?"
"Yes," Dom says. He takes her hand and kisses the back of it. "Maybe we're more of ourselves in our dreams. There's no real reason to expect the reflection in your mind's eye to match the one in the mirror."
"I didn't-" Mal chews at her lip, staring at nothing as she thinks. "God!" She drops her head into his shoulder, voice muffled by the pillow. "How could I have dismissed so many thoughts as mere curiosities?”
"No harm's been done," Dom says.
"What happens if you die, do you think?" Mal asks. "In the dream."
"Let's not find out," Dom says.
She groans, rolling onto her back, away from him, but he follows her, lays his head on her chest. He curves his hand around her hip. "Do you think you're different, in your dreams? Do you feel the same as you do awake?"
She's quiet for a while, thinking. Her hand in his hair. "I feel unleashed," she says finally. "And you?"
"Heady with power and control."
She snorts. "You only think you're joking."
He smiles against her breast. "What will they do with the woman?" he asks.
"I'm not sure, yet," Mal says. "I don't think we know which question to ask first."
Dom flicks through a half-dozen, until he settles on one. "How mutable is she?" He breathes in the smell of her: his wife, whom he would know if blind, if deaf, if dumb.
****
He meets the woman, Kit, on a Sunday. He wakes up in a forest she's dreamed up. Thick and overgrown; it’s strictly by instinct that he knows that the sun is high up in the air, shining bright, only the petals of its light sifting down to the floor where he is. Trees so tall he can't see where their branches begin.
Kit comes striding, slipping between trunks, around shrub and bush.
"Hail, Brynhildr," Dom says. He can't help it, a greeting that occurred in his mind too strong to keep from saying.
She stops, looking at him. "You must be Dominic," she says.
"I'm sorry," Dom says. "I don't know why I said that."
She shrugs. "You've been spending a lot of time in Arthur's head. He calls me that."
"Why?"
She laughs. She's standing in jeans and a t-shirt that she holds gathered up in one hand, turning it into a makeshift pouch. The smooth, tanned skin of her thickened waist. "I made the mistake of telling him the nickname my high school volleyball team gave me. He promised to tell me his, but here we are, 18 months out of Kandahar, and I still only know to call him Arthur." She sits, and lets down her shirt a little, revealing fruit. She flips him a strawberry.
Dom sits across from her.
"So do you know what exactly we're doing today?” Kit asks. “I just heard tests."
"That's what I hear."
"Like what, though?" She takes a piece of her hair, and he watches the dark brown shift toward black, so subtle it could be a play of light.
She's nervous, he realizes. "I'm not sure," he says honestly. "Nothing major, I'd bet." He holds on to the strawberry.
"Your wife," Kit says. "I can probably trust her, right?"
"Yes," Dom says.
"She's got a little bit of badass in her, you know? She’s got intent behind that face."
Dom laughs. “Not an inaccurate reading." He looks around. He digs his hands into the rotting leaves blanketing the ground underneath him. The wet mulch. "This is an interesting construction. The details are strong."
"I used to daydream about a forest like this," Kit says. "One that’s all old-growth. Trees thousands of years old that knew what California looked like before it was strip malls and Spanish-style homes." She laughs. "I was probably a weird kid."
"Why forests? What would you imagine doing here?"
She looks up, and up. High enough to get lost. She says, “Climb.”
****
Dom slips away to peek in on Mal's debriefing with Kit. Kit is striking in person, too, her shoulders held confidently. The shape if not the details recognizable. "I appreciate your desire to understand, ma'am," Kit says. "But it would serve us both best if we had this conversation sleeping. I could be more helpful to you."
Mal mirrors Kit's posture, her pen tap-tapping. She jots a quick note, then uncrosses her legs, leans forward. "Can I be honest with you?" At Kit's raised eyebrow, Mal sits back in her chair, wipes the air in front of her clean with both hands. "Truly honest."
"Fine. Yes, I’d appreciate that."
"I'm worried," Mal says. "I mean to say...I'm thankful that you've given so much of your time to us. You've been accommodating in every way a person in your situation could be." She puts her hands, palms up, on the table. "But we've already asked you to spend so much of your time in the dreams. We've had you sleep for days. The technology is still so new."
"What is it that you're afraid of, ma'am?" Kit asks.
Mal clasps her hands together. "I'm worried that you won't want to wake up. I understand that. I want to ask, sometimes, for a few minutes more."
Kit looks down. When she looks up again, Dom can't quite see her eyes, but Mal straightens suddenly, struck. "Would it be so wrong?" Kit asks. "I'm who I want to be when I dream. And every time I wake up, to look down and see-these hands again." Her voice shudders under the weight of her words. "These arms and legs. Is it so wrong, not to want to wake up?"
Mal takes her hands. She grips them tight. "No," she says, firmly, her eyes earnest. "No, of course not. Of course."
Kit bows her head, shakes it back and forth. "Can I have just one minute, ma'am?" she asks.
Mal stands. She puts a hand on Kit's shoulder as she passes.
"I'm sorry," Kit says. She shakes her head, pulls away from Mal’s hand. "God, I'm fine, really." She chokes on a laugh. "I'm not usually like this."
"I'll be right outside," Mal says, then crosses, quietly, to the door. She closes it behind her, watching the latch click, and when she looks up to find Dom, waiting, she makes this broken noise.
"Hi," he says.
"I'm crying." She laughs, wet. "I don't know why." She steps close and touches the lapels of his shirt, straightens his collar.
He wipes the tears from her face, the one clinging to her jaw.
She drops her forehead to his chest. "But won't she be lonely?" she asks.
****
Dom sees Kit more now than he did when she was counted among the awake.
He's waiting for Mal to finish up so they can go home when he walks past Kit's room. A body nourished to keep alive her mind. Arthur is sleeping next to her, and Dom thinks, 'What the hell,' rolls up his sleeve.
He wakes up in a city of neon lights, buildings sizzling with color: Shinjuku and Times Square and Blade Runner scissored together. He'll need to get lucky, to find Kit and Arthur. He turns in place, once, then again, and sees them standing at a food cart.
Arthur stabs the air with his hand, anger on his face, and as Dom muscles through a crowd of Kit's projections, he hears him say, "It's self-aggrandizing, major."
"Arthur, did you come here just to yell at me? That’s fine, but I’d like to know if I’m riding this out in hopes for an eventual shared drink, or if I should really buckle in," Kit says. She accepts a bowl of noodles, wields chopsticks. She's tall here, taller than Arthur and she takes advantage of it, looks down upon him.
Arthur holds her gaze, no sign of intimidation. "You're static. You used to call that the kiss of death. We learn, we educate ourselves, we adapt or die."
"I'm not adapting?" Kit says. "Do I need to show you more of my tricks?" Her features blurring, variations on her face, one after the other as she whistles a circus theme.
Arthur is not amused. "It's a closed feedback loop, Kit. Who's going to challenge you?" He grabs a projection walking by, a man in black tie. "Him?" He shoves him away to point at a Harajuku girl walking past. "Her? You'll be raving to yourself. There's no one but you here."
"And you," Kit points out, obstinate.
The projections shove against Dom harder. He's having a hard time getting closer than this, just outside the circle of their argument. "Kit!" he calls, and the projections near him turn to look at him as one.
Arthur grabs Kit, up high on her arms. He shakes her. "This isn't real. This role you're acting out here is not who you really are."
"Arthur, stop," Kit says, her projections turning toward him.
"Don't kid yourself-"
"Stop!" she shouts, and a mob swarms Arthur, tearing at his clothes, at his limbs, so sudden he can't get another word out, going down in a whirl of fists and knees.
Wake up, Dom thinks. He sees not a scrap of Arthur. Wake up, wake up, wake up, panic in his belly, shuttering the sky into day, the square of street beneath him erupting high. He has wandered into a hostile land.
"Dom."
When he looks down, he can see Kit there at the base, a speck. Her clothes, too, torn.
"Dom. Don't tell me I killed him," she says, her voice far away. "Please don't tell me that." The city plunged into a mourning black.
****
Dom wakes up with a jerk, sees Arthur standing in front of him with tubing hanging in his hand, the cannula that had recently occupied one of Dom's veins dripping onto the floor. Dom hisses at the sting in his arm. "There's got to be a better way to wake someone up than that," he says. "You're alive," he says.
"Ta-da." Arthur's smile is grim.
"She'll want to know." Dom looks at Kit's sleeping face. "Arthur, you know how impossible it is to control your projections, even with other minds at their most unobtrusive."
"I was particularly un-unobtrusive," Arthur allows. He hasn't let go of the tubing, a puddle forming underneath the needle. He's digging his nails into his palms, Dom notes.
"Arthur," Dom says, careful. "Maybe you should sit down."
Arthur nods. "Maybe."
"At ease, soldier," Dom says, adopting a more familiar language under the guise of jest.
Arthur hisses out a breath. He laughs, angry. He lifts an arm, points at his wrist. "I could feel the bones here, grinding. Twisting just the wrong way. All I could think was that this was my shooting hand. That was my trigger finger, splintering."
"Let's speak with whatever professional you're supposed to speak to." Dom stands, puts a hand on the span of Arthur's shoulders. "I know there's some overpaid asshole on staff. Come on. Mal, too. We can talk to her."
Arthur wets his lips. His throat bobbing. "Yeah. Mal will want to know," he says, and Dom can see him force himself into action, into movement. The careful detaching of needle from tube. "Now we know what happens when we die during a dream." He disposes of the cannula in the biohazard waste bin, winds the tubing around his fingers in efficient circles.
"Utilitarian as always," Dom says.
Arthur glances at Kit in repose.
"She had no intention," Dom says, gentle.
Arthur pretends not to hear. "Maybe I was wrong," he says. "The pain felt real enough. More than real."
"Hey," Dom says. He squeezes Arthur's shoulder. "You're fine. You're okay."
"Sure," Arthur says easily. He smiles with serrated teeth. "But when I first woke up, you could have fooled me. Easy to think otherwise." He wiggles his fingers in front of his face. "Look, ma," he says.
****
Mal starts to spend more time with Kit, down there. "There's an opportunity to learn," she says. "What it feels like to sleep for so long."
"A silver lining," Dom says.
"Something like that," Mal says, and she looks-far away, for a moment.
****
"She doesn't believe me, not completely in any case," Mal says. She's hissing, a tone of voice that makes Dom note the placement of every exit. He stops, half through the door, cranes forward a bit to see the unfortunate target of Mal's anger.
Arthur is standing stock-still, chin lifted. Mal is finishing the knot in his tie and makes a gesture as if to pull it over-tight, when Arthur captures her gaze, raises an eyebrow.
She throws her hands up. "You do it, then! You're right to think I might choke you."
Arthur rolls his eyes. "Mal, would you give me a break?"
"Just dip under, that's all I'm asking you to do," she says. "Show her your handsome and unbearable face."
"If she wants to know I'm alive," Arthur says, "she can wake up and see for herself."
"She's made her choice. The best one she could make," Mal says. Her arms crossed. "I don't want to fight about this with you."
"So we won't fight."
Mal scoffs, but a smile plays around her mouth. "I hate when you retreat so fully into this persona," she says, gesturing at his suit. The clothes a new affectation Dom has openly wondered about.
Arthur tugs down on the tie knot, pulls his mouth as he tries to get a good look at it. "Ugh," he says.
"Problem?" Mal asks.
"No, nothing." Arthur tightens the knot, squares it away at his collar. "Windsor knots are for dicks," he amends.
"How fortuitous, then, to have accidentally tied a knot appropriate to the man."
"I let you have that one," Arthur says. He reaches for Mal's arm, squeezes it. "You say she's made her choice. So let her deal with the consequences."
"I would never have thought you petulant-"
"She chose to live in a world where nobody else exists, Mal. Not you, not me," Arthur says, raising his voice, at his very limits.
"Arthur-"
"Don't push me," he says.
"Why not?" Mal, full of flame.
****
They have the argument frequently. To the point where one or the other will pick it up at any opportune moment, a disagreement carried around in back pockets.
Cobb's dream. A cemetery, rows and rows of crumbling headstones-here lies Cobb-at-16, Cobb-at-17 and so on, just short of Cobb-at-31, currently strolling-among grass a well-fed green. One minute Mal is studying epitaphs, the next she says, "It makes me feel as if you would tear me out, too, if I made such a mistake."
Arthur strides with back bent, hands held behind his back. "You wouldn't make that kind of mistake."
"I make mistakes all the time," Mal laughs. "I do a new thing wrong every hour."
"I'll vouch for that," Dom says, and Mal looks up at him, narrows her eyes, digs fingers into his side.
"I wouldn't tear you out," Arthur says quietly. “Anybody else, maybe. But not you.”
Mal sighs, leans her head against Dom's shoulder, a hand worrying at her lips. "Oh," she says, soft, and watches Arthur pick up his pace, put distance between them.
Dom presses a kiss into her curls. "If I should bow out gracefully now," he whispers, "would I be rewarded with the privilege of giving you away at your wedding to Arthur?"
"I couldn't guarantee," she says, immediately. She pulls his face to hers, kisses him ardently. When she pulls away, she pinches, hard, at his waist. “I don’t like this place,” she tells him. “I want to dig up all your graves.”
****
Dom goes in with Mal to see Kit after that. As often as she asks Arthur, Dom goes.
The first time, they find themselves walking up a stairwell, and when Mal pushes open the door, they walk out onto a tall building's roof. It's a bordered square, three large steps in any direction, and a fourth to send you soaring. The wind grabs at his hair and his clothes, in a hurry to strip him to his skin.
"Kit," Mal calls, and the figure leaning against the edge's railing turns, Arthur's borrowed lips saying, "Hi, Dom."
Dom stops. He slides his hands into his pockets. "Kit," he says.
"Do you like the new look?" She shakes out Arthur's cuffs, straightens his jacket-a perfect simulacrum wearing the suit she last saw him in.
"He'll hate it," Dom says, flat. He doesn’t know why he’s so angry, and it’s the sudden flood of it, as much as the strength, that tests his self-control.
"Dom!" Mal says.
"I wish I could change this," Kit says. She scrubs her face with her hands, exhausted. "Believe me." Every surface going matte.
****
"I need a vacation," Dom tells Mal over breakfast. She's made two perfect poached eggs. Orange yolks quivering.
"Me too." She picks toast out of the toaster, quick-steps it onto their shared plate then blows on her hot fingertips. "You are not allowed to buy Wonder Bread anymore," she says. "There isn't a crumb of wonder involved."
"Vacation," he repeats.
She breaks her yolk, dips the edge of her toast in it. "I wish we had time," she says.
Dom nuzzles her neck. "I hear dreaming’s nice this time of year," he says.
She stills. Then: "Maybe." She puts down her fork. "Maybe."
****
They sleep, and then sleep again. Two levels under. Kit had shown them how. She'd said time passes even slower, in the second level. "We could reduce it to a crawl, maybe, one more level down."
"Not yet," Mal says.
"I think we can be bolder," Kit says. "We've yet to face any truly troubling complications."
"You're not Arthur anymore," Dom says. He lights a match easily, leaning against a bit of statue, scuffing his shoes.
Kit looks over at him, her mouth tightening a little bit. "The sun sets," she says.
They wade into dreaming for their vacation, just his and Mal’s. Nestled into a low valley. A fog tumbling, slipping across their feet. He can feel the wet on his bare skin.
"We'll go down in history, eventually," he tells Mal. "They'll want to know our story." They are giants in a landscape made to hold the weight of their bodies.
"What comes first?" Mal asks. "Will they ask you to write a book?"
"We'll all write books," Dom says. "Bestsellers, every one." He hums. "Maybe not Arthur's."
Mal laughs. She pulls his arms around her, steps up onto her toes to look him in the eye. "And who will you dedicate your story to? It's very important."
"To my wife."
She drops onto her heels. She wraps her arms around his waist, smiles into his chest. "It's short."
"Is it?"
"But not lacking sentiment." She touches his belt.
"To Mal, of whom there never was-" He clears his throat. "Of whom there never was, there never will be, there is no other."
"That one's nice, too," she says. Swaying.
"To you. Today it's raining a little. Wear a coat. I love you."
She grips his shirt in fistfuls. She looks up at him, in the way that had first made him love her. Reading the lines of him, as if there was much to learn. As if there were more to him than the parts that make up his body, more than the feet under him that keeps him standing.
"And yours? Who would you dedicate yours to?" He raises an eyebrow, an exaggerated displeasure clouding his face. "Arthur?"
She lets go of the cotton of his shirt. She smoothes her hands over him, her fingertips questing, Braille rising on his skin. "To my husband. Whose every good morning stirs my heart," she says, her voice unraveled at the seams.
Part Two