to be alone with you
To be alone with you
Mal/Saito. Lost in time.
Note: for this prompt on the kinkmeme: "I just want these two together lost in time."
He had Dominic Cobb investigated before hiring him, of course. The picture of his wife was just a bonus. But--
"You don't know what I sound like," she muses, her hair suddenly curling around the base of her neck, lifting up, becoming shorter, a little halo around her face. Elegant like a magazine spread. It suits her. "That's what this is, isn't it?" she says, tossing her head. One hand goes to a curl by her ear. She smiles slowly, petting her hair like it was something removed from her, like it was someone else's arm.
"I heard it," he says. He thinks maybe she'd look better with blue eyes. A grey blue, a soothingly old color. She does, and he keeps them that way. He says, "In the dream. Cobb's dream of what you sound like. I heard it."
He gets her accent wrong though. He makes her sound almost Russian, and her Japanese is too perfect. But laughter has no accent, and so when she reverts back to the Mal that first found him in limbo, the difference is almost imperceptible. The same white throat, the same hardened quirk of her lips, the same low, trilling notes as she moved towards him, fully formed and perfect as a dream.
And of course that's what she is: a dream.
*
He builds his childhood home. He builds his first apartment. He builds Sonia's apartment, but then the vertigo is so strong that Saito has to destroy it. He builds the Proclus office. He builds his daughter's high school. He builds the noodle shop arcade, and he builds Tokyo-- compressed into Saito's high school, the bars he went to as a college student, the computer sales corporation that gave him his first job, all the streets he remembers, and even some that he doesn't.
"You can build more, you know. You can build things you don't know," Mal says. "Are you lonely? You could build your wife."
"What about you?"
"Oh," she laughs, "I'm different. You didn't build me."
Her breasts heave as she hops off his desk, uncrossing her legs and making her way to the windows overlooking the harbor. She is wearing a dark red dress, slim and flared like an upside down champagne flute, with a back that plunges to a point right above the swell of her ass. It matches the color of her lipstick. He makes no attempts to hide the intensity of his stare, and he thinks that's why she smiles at him over her shoulder before wiping the landscape completely.
"You remembered me," she tells him.
He puts his hand on the small of her back. She leans into it, just slightly. He can't tell if it's the silk or her skin that's cold. He doesn't really care.
*
He has her stab him in the gut, just to know what it felt like. "But you don't know," she tells him, twisting the knife a little further, the sweat curling above her lip as she draws out one last half-turn. The pain is excruciating, so he can only grunt his objection. "You don't," she says. "You've never been stabbed in the stomach before."
"So?" he gasps, managing to lift an eyebrow. It must be the dream that makes every feeling so clear, he thinks. He can feel the internal bleeding and the knife tip, sharper than the rest of the knife, lodged like a pin against his side.
"But Dom has," she murmurs, mouthing over his forehead, a slight whisper of her hair against his cheek. "So this is just a little bit of Dom's dream broken off," she tells him as he passes out.
When he wakes up on the sand of the shoreline, she is still hunched over him, but knifeless now. Backlit from the sun, she is black and amorphous, almost monstrous. "I didn't go back up," he rasps.
She flashes her teeth at him. "You're still under sedation and your body is dead in all three levels. There's nowhere for your subconscious to kick back up. Of course it didn't work."
He kisses her. She tastes like the bitterness of tea after it has mellowed on the tongue, like salt spray, like something his mind screams at him is honeycomb. Honeycomb and gunsmoke. That too, he guesses, is merely a piece of Cobb's dream broken off.
*
He brings in crowds of projections, which she regards with a fond superiority that makes him laugh. Once he builds a ballroom he saw in a house in Moscow. She wears the black lace in which he first met her and drinks wine the color of blood with her bright eyes fixed on him. When she dances with one of the projections, he swears he can smell her perfume.
Or, he reasons, what he imagines is her perfume.
Or, he suspects, what Cobb remembers is her perfume.
He threads his way over to her as the dance ends. His projection--a nervous accountant that was part of a fleet Proclus hired last month-- hands her off without a word or a bow, and she smiles cheekily at him as he takes her hand. "What's the most resilient parasite?" she says, curtsying.
He touches her on her arm, slides his hand all the way down to her wrist, then draws back. "You are," he says.
Her smile drops, and she turns away, face blank and closed.
He starts to destroy all the projections, leaving them alone in the center of the dance floor. Instead he imagines ice sculptures in the shape of swans. Black globules of caviar quiver in puddles of melted water on the backs of the swans, but when she presses a pinch of it to his mouth with a hum of amusement, her fingers are even colder.
"You have to go back up. You can't stay here forever," she tells him.
"Just a little longer," he promises her. "When the time comes, I'll go with him, but just a little longer."
She doesn't want to dance. The heat and the wine goes to her head, she says, and should they go night-swimming? He doesn't want to, but he follows her to the shoreline anyway. It is never far away. She hands him her heels, then wades out into the water. When it comes up to her waist, she strips away her dress, leaving it trailing after her like a hideous inchoate creature trying to grab hold and failing. That feels important, heavy in his mind, so he starts to wade in after her. The water is colder than ice. He can't bear to go any deeper than up to his ankles. Little mermaid in reverse, he thinks. Here, I am the one who walks on knives.
She is in to her neck and still going. He thinks she will walk until the water covers her head, and then she will still keep walking. Walking, and walking, and walking, all the way to where the heart of limbo is submerged in water too frigid to let him in. She doesn't turn back, and he keeps watching. The water is so placid; so too, the two of them, lost in their own separate ways.
*
He tells her that he gets it now, how limbo seduces its dreamers. It makes her silent, then angry, then frantic. "Dom is coming for you," she tells him. "You need to stop waiting. You need to give him a sign, something so he knows how to find you."
He tries to kiss her. She wrenches free. He doesn't try again.
He asks her, "What if I don’t want him to find me?" He doesn't ask, what if I just want to stay here with you?
"You want to find him. You want the two of you to go back up together. That's why you dreamed me up. But that's all I am. I'm just your attempt to draw Cobb closer to you."
He touches her eyelids with the rough pads of his fingers. She doesn't flinch. When she closes her eyes under his caresses, her skin is so pale he can see every vein. Blue blood, he thinks admiringly. He imagines ripping her apart to see it on his hands. It happened once, long ago, in a warehouse in Paris, while he dreamed with Cobb. She would do it if he asked, because she wasn't completely real. But even then, he couldn't bear to do it.
"So what does it mean when you appear in front of Cobb?" he breathes.
She opens her eyes. He doesn't know how to read the look he sees in them, which strikes him as unfair. But then again, Cobb was never a man he understood either. When she finally speaks, each word is slow. "He can't see me anymore, Saito," she says.
In the distance, the mountains are lush, green, something out of a folktale or a painting. She lazily flicks her hand in the direction of one, and it flattens to the ground like wet paper being crushed under a foot. She watches it with satisfaction. He thinks of how she is iron and foam, like wet flowers blooming over jagged rock, the cut of a small stream across a mountain face.
"Now," she says simply, "let's start building."
*
He is sure: they are using each other.
He thinks: it is not just about him. She also wants him to save Cobb.
He wonders: if Cobb doesn't understand his own need for salvation.
He dreams: that there is no reality to kick back up to. In this dream she is every woman. She is his wife, his mistress, his daughter, his mother, even his strict paternal grandmother who never spared him more than a dozen words at one time. She takes his hands, folding them together like a knot made of stubborn tendons, and pulls him in close. She takes his hands into her chest, all the way into her chest, where the cavity of bone and heart should be. There is nothing. She looks at him, smiling. Sadness burns in him like the last red gasps of a bonfire starved for fuel. For a moment it is so vibrant.
Then, it smolders out.
*
He doesn't remember what the castle looked like in Arthur's dream. But she does, of course. Together, they build it perfectly. And by the time Cobb appears, she is long gone.
*
Afterwards, he wonders if a stranger wandering through his limbo would find them still on the beach, washed up and mere echoes. Did dreamers leave a shadow behind when they died in limbo, just a faint trace to tend that garden of half-formed dreams in their owner's absence? He hopes so. He hopes for her laughing, throat gleaming in the sunlight, a curl of her salt-slick hair in her mouth. Her pressing him down to the sand with hands made powerful by his imagination. Her kissing him him in a way he neither was nor wasn't accustomed to.
Him tasting in her a longing that was and wasn't his, a longing he had dug up only to bury again, made richer by its multiple realities and unrealities, a longing so rich that it almost became happiness, one that could only be achieved in dreams and so, in this way, doubled back into longing, always longing, the longing that was at the heart of limbo.
Mal/Saito. Lost in time.
Note: for this prompt on the kinkmeme: "I just want these two together lost in time."
He had Dominic Cobb investigated before hiring him, of course. The picture of his wife was just a bonus. But--
"You don't know what I sound like," she muses, her hair suddenly curling around the base of her neck, lifting up, becoming shorter, a little halo around her face. Elegant like a magazine spread. It suits her. "That's what this is, isn't it?" she says, tossing her head. One hand goes to a curl by her ear. She smiles slowly, petting her hair like it was something removed from her, like it was someone else's arm.
"I heard it," he says. He thinks maybe she'd look better with blue eyes. A grey blue, a soothingly old color. She does, and he keeps them that way. He says, "In the dream. Cobb's dream of what you sound like. I heard it."
He gets her accent wrong though. He makes her sound almost Russian, and her Japanese is too perfect. But laughter has no accent, and so when she reverts back to the Mal that first found him in limbo, the difference is almost imperceptible. The same white throat, the same hardened quirk of her lips, the same low, trilling notes as she moved towards him, fully formed and perfect as a dream.
And of course that's what she is: a dream.
*
He builds his childhood home. He builds his first apartment. He builds Sonia's apartment, but then the vertigo is so strong that Saito has to destroy it. He builds the Proclus office. He builds his daughter's high school. He builds the noodle shop arcade, and he builds Tokyo-- compressed into Saito's high school, the bars he went to as a college student, the computer sales corporation that gave him his first job, all the streets he remembers, and even some that he doesn't.
"You can build more, you know. You can build things you don't know," Mal says. "Are you lonely? You could build your wife."
"What about you?"
"Oh," she laughs, "I'm different. You didn't build me."
Her breasts heave as she hops off his desk, uncrossing her legs and making her way to the windows overlooking the harbor. She is wearing a dark red dress, slim and flared like an upside down champagne flute, with a back that plunges to a point right above the swell of her ass. It matches the color of her lipstick. He makes no attempts to hide the intensity of his stare, and he thinks that's why she smiles at him over her shoulder before wiping the landscape completely.
"You remembered me," she tells him.
He puts his hand on the small of her back. She leans into it, just slightly. He can't tell if it's the silk or her skin that's cold. He doesn't really care.
*
He has her stab him in the gut, just to know what it felt like. "But you don't know," she tells him, twisting the knife a little further, the sweat curling above her lip as she draws out one last half-turn. The pain is excruciating, so he can only grunt his objection. "You don't," she says. "You've never been stabbed in the stomach before."
"So?" he gasps, managing to lift an eyebrow. It must be the dream that makes every feeling so clear, he thinks. He can feel the internal bleeding and the knife tip, sharper than the rest of the knife, lodged like a pin against his side.
"But Dom has," she murmurs, mouthing over his forehead, a slight whisper of her hair against his cheek. "So this is just a little bit of Dom's dream broken off," she tells him as he passes out.
When he wakes up on the sand of the shoreline, she is still hunched over him, but knifeless now. Backlit from the sun, she is black and amorphous, almost monstrous. "I didn't go back up," he rasps.
She flashes her teeth at him. "You're still under sedation and your body is dead in all three levels. There's nowhere for your subconscious to kick back up. Of course it didn't work."
He kisses her. She tastes like the bitterness of tea after it has mellowed on the tongue, like salt spray, like something his mind screams at him is honeycomb. Honeycomb and gunsmoke. That too, he guesses, is merely a piece of Cobb's dream broken off.
*
He brings in crowds of projections, which she regards with a fond superiority that makes him laugh. Once he builds a ballroom he saw in a house in Moscow. She wears the black lace in which he first met her and drinks wine the color of blood with her bright eyes fixed on him. When she dances with one of the projections, he swears he can smell her perfume.
Or, he reasons, what he imagines is her perfume.
Or, he suspects, what Cobb remembers is her perfume.
He threads his way over to her as the dance ends. His projection--a nervous accountant that was part of a fleet Proclus hired last month-- hands her off without a word or a bow, and she smiles cheekily at him as he takes her hand. "What's the most resilient parasite?" she says, curtsying.
He touches her on her arm, slides his hand all the way down to her wrist, then draws back. "You are," he says.
Her smile drops, and she turns away, face blank and closed.
He starts to destroy all the projections, leaving them alone in the center of the dance floor. Instead he imagines ice sculptures in the shape of swans. Black globules of caviar quiver in puddles of melted water on the backs of the swans, but when she presses a pinch of it to his mouth with a hum of amusement, her fingers are even colder.
"You have to go back up. You can't stay here forever," she tells him.
"Just a little longer," he promises her. "When the time comes, I'll go with him, but just a little longer."
She doesn't want to dance. The heat and the wine goes to her head, she says, and should they go night-swimming? He doesn't want to, but he follows her to the shoreline anyway. It is never far away. She hands him her heels, then wades out into the water. When it comes up to her waist, she strips away her dress, leaving it trailing after her like a hideous inchoate creature trying to grab hold and failing. That feels important, heavy in his mind, so he starts to wade in after her. The water is colder than ice. He can't bear to go any deeper than up to his ankles. Little mermaid in reverse, he thinks. Here, I am the one who walks on knives.
She is in to her neck and still going. He thinks she will walk until the water covers her head, and then she will still keep walking. Walking, and walking, and walking, all the way to where the heart of limbo is submerged in water too frigid to let him in. She doesn't turn back, and he keeps watching. The water is so placid; so too, the two of them, lost in their own separate ways.
*
He tells her that he gets it now, how limbo seduces its dreamers. It makes her silent, then angry, then frantic. "Dom is coming for you," she tells him. "You need to stop waiting. You need to give him a sign, something so he knows how to find you."
He tries to kiss her. She wrenches free. He doesn't try again.
He asks her, "What if I don’t want him to find me?" He doesn't ask, what if I just want to stay here with you?
"You want to find him. You want the two of you to go back up together. That's why you dreamed me up. But that's all I am. I'm just your attempt to draw Cobb closer to you."
He touches her eyelids with the rough pads of his fingers. She doesn't flinch. When she closes her eyes under his caresses, her skin is so pale he can see every vein. Blue blood, he thinks admiringly. He imagines ripping her apart to see it on his hands. It happened once, long ago, in a warehouse in Paris, while he dreamed with Cobb. She would do it if he asked, because she wasn't completely real. But even then, he couldn't bear to do it.
"So what does it mean when you appear in front of Cobb?" he breathes.
She opens her eyes. He doesn't know how to read the look he sees in them, which strikes him as unfair. But then again, Cobb was never a man he understood either. When she finally speaks, each word is slow. "He can't see me anymore, Saito," she says.
In the distance, the mountains are lush, green, something out of a folktale or a painting. She lazily flicks her hand in the direction of one, and it flattens to the ground like wet paper being crushed under a foot. She watches it with satisfaction. He thinks of how she is iron and foam, like wet flowers blooming over jagged rock, the cut of a small stream across a mountain face.
"Now," she says simply, "let's start building."
*
He is sure: they are using each other.
He thinks: it is not just about him. She also wants him to save Cobb.
He wonders: if Cobb doesn't understand his own need for salvation.
He dreams: that there is no reality to kick back up to. In this dream she is every woman. She is his wife, his mistress, his daughter, his mother, even his strict paternal grandmother who never spared him more than a dozen words at one time. She takes his hands, folding them together like a knot made of stubborn tendons, and pulls him in close. She takes his hands into her chest, all the way into her chest, where the cavity of bone and heart should be. There is nothing. She looks at him, smiling. Sadness burns in him like the last red gasps of a bonfire starved for fuel. For a moment it is so vibrant.
Then, it smolders out.
*
He doesn't remember what the castle looked like in Arthur's dream. But she does, of course. Together, they build it perfectly. And by the time Cobb appears, she is long gone.
*
Afterwards, he wonders if a stranger wandering through his limbo would find them still on the beach, washed up and mere echoes. Did dreamers leave a shadow behind when they died in limbo, just a faint trace to tend that garden of half-formed dreams in their owner's absence? He hopes so. He hopes for her laughing, throat gleaming in the sunlight, a curl of her salt-slick hair in her mouth. Her pressing him down to the sand with hands made powerful by his imagination. Her kissing him him in a way he neither was nor wasn't accustomed to.
Him tasting in her a longing that was and wasn't his, a longing he had dug up only to bury again, made richer by its multiple realities and unrealities, a longing so rich that it almost became happiness, one that could only be achieved in dreams and so, in this way, doubled back into longing, always longing, the longing that was at the heart of limbo.