Vampires Are Creeps | Inception/BtVS | PG13 | Gen, Ariadne/Cobb
Title: Vampires Are Creeps
Fandom: Inception, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Gen, with Ariadne/Cobb and Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG13
Spoilers: For the movie and for Buffy the Vampire Slayer through the season 2 finale.
Summary: Dom dreams that the cast of Inception are members of the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Warning for absolute, ridiculous crack.
A/N: So, a long time ago in a fandom far, far away, I requested an Ariadne as Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic at the inception kink meme. And it was handsomely rewarded with an AWESOME FILL (see later in the thread). I was going through my documents earlier today and I came upon this file called "btvsinc.doc" and I wondered, curiously, what was inside.
Oh, boys and girls. THE HILARITY CAN NO LONGER BE CONTAINED. I wrote eleven pages of A Very Buffy Inception fic.
I hope you all enjoy the insanity. This fic should probably not be read if you haven't seen all of Buffy seasons 1 & 2.
It all begins innocently enough. The inception job finishes miraculously cleanly, and Saito makes the phone call that sets Dom free. They all tell him to keep in touch (Ariadne almost begging, Eames with a grimace and a wave, Arthur saying little only because he knows exactly where Dom lives and could quite easily kick down the door if Dom ever decided to go too MIA on them). Cobb reunites with his kids: his beautiful son and daughter, his James and Phillippa. Dom gets to be a dad again, gets to be a part of his children’s lives again. Life is blissfully simple for Dom Cobb.
For the rest of the team, life goes on. Arthur takes on new jobs, some in the dream world, some outside of it. Cobb had been aware upon hiring the young upstart that his ex-point man had a colorful background in terms of his experiences in the workforce… his references were the main reason he had sought Arthur out over a handful of other, fully competent potential point men. Arthur was the best, and Cobb had been unsurprised to hear that he had found success in a world without thieving Dom Cobb to lead him astray. It made him a little proud, actually, to hear that Arthur (occasionally) strayed upon the path of the straight and narrow.
Ariadne goes back to university, though Cobb is certain that the institution could never truly satisfy her now that she’d experienced building in the dream world. Cobb receives a call from his youngest companion a few months post-inception.
“I don’t dream on my own anymore,” is how she opens the conversation.
“I haven’t done that in a long while,” Cobb murmurs, resting the phone in the crook of his neck while carrying a sleeping James to bed.
“I need to go back, Dom,” Ariadne pleads.
“I’m out, Ariadne,” Cobb says curtly. “I suggest giving Arthur a call.”
“Dom, Arthur wants you back, we all do-“
“It was nice hearing from you, Ariadne. Keep in touch.”
Click.
She moves to L.A. a few months after graduation. Cobb sees her and the rest of the team on occasion, but always casually and never for very long. He supposes that he’s hurt their feelings. How bizarre.
Saito goes on doing whatever the fuck Saito wants to do. Cobb doesn’t even guess what the billionaire tycoon was getting up to in his time after the Fischer conglomerate’s demise. Probably rolling around in a bath filled with money on a private island somewhere.
Eames is the one member of the team that Dom doesn’t think too much after getting back home. It is funny enough that our story begins with one Mr. Eames, who will deny his connection to the following… er, incidents, with extreme fervor.
-
Dom admits that being a stay at home dad leaves him with a lot of down time. He reads a lot, catching up on years of books that running from the law had deprived him of. He reads Dan Brown. He decides that he hates Dan Brown. He picks up James Patterson and promptly throws the novel across the room around page fifty. The only modern book he can seem to stand is that Harry Potter series that he reads to Phillippa before she goes to bed.
Dom doesn’t watch much television. Mal had only just bought a DVD player a few weeks before they had entered limbo, and Dom was afraid to touch the little contraption, wary that it might still be infused with her aura.
When Dom’s birthday rolls around, he doesn’t expect anything: maybe a call from Miles, or a card from Arthur. He’s fully disassociated himself from the only people in the world he cared about outside of his own insular family. Sometimes he questions himself, asks why he needed the distance.
When he enters his home to find his old team standing there, James on Arthur’s shoulders and Phillippa in Eames’s arms, all wearing party hats and smiling jubilantly, Dom only for a millisecond considers drawing the weapon concealed beneath his shirt. He still had his old training, under the surface. It still showed up sometimes. And that’s when he remembers why the distance was necessary: you can take Dom Cobb out of the extracting business, but you can’t take the extractor out of Dom Cobb. And extractors don’t belong around children.
Yusuf makes a toast with a stolen bottle of Crystal. They drink.
After the cake has been cut, the team doesn’t stay long… they do, however, all heap gifts upon him in turn: Ariadne gives him an expensive looking pen along with an expression of utter horror (“I panicked!” Cobb overhears her telling Arthur before leaving. “Then I remembered that pens are nice gifts.” Arthur coughs and only pauses for a moment before agreeing whole-heartedly with her); Arthur wordlessly hands Cobb a garment bag that Dom is sure holds what is to be an incredible (and incredibly expensive) suit; Yusuf merely passes along a small bottle that it simply labeled “For Dreaming” (Cobb gives him a look full of thanks). Finally, Eames (whom Cobb is surprised to see there at all) hands him an old shoebox.
“I figured you might be getting a bit bored around here,” Eames shrugs as Cobb opens the lid to reveal what looks like a library of small compact discs. “You do know how to work a DVD player, old man?”
Arthur smacks the back of Eames’s head so that Cobb doesn’t have to (“I can teach you how to use it later,” Arthur mutters to Cobb in a short moment before the party dissolves, and Cobb nods thankfully).
Eames has left him instructions:
Start with season 1 of Buffy.
He slides the first disc in and devours the first season before he goes to bed that night.
-
“Tell me,” Cobb asks Eames over the phone one afternoon, now fully immersed in the finale of season two of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, “don’t I remind you of anyone on the show?” He had gotten back in touch with the forger for the express purpose of discussing the television Eames had given him.
“Who, Giles? Yeah, I could see that-“
“No, you idiot. I’m clearly Angel.”
“What? Well, let’s see… you’re tall, mysterious… have certain homicidal tendencies, and are insanely old?” Eames pauses, thinking it over. “Yeah, you do fit the bill, actually,” Eames laughs. Dom hangs up on him and holds back manly tears when Buffy kills Angel.
That night, he takes a few drops of Yusuf’s new mixture and falls into a deep, dream-filled sleep.
-
“Well this is different,” Cobb says to the crowd of very familiar projections surrounding him. “Projections?”
“Sorry to disappoint yeh, love,” Eames drawls. “But we’re in here, as real as you are.”
Ariadne, Arthur, Eames, Yusuf, and Saito are standing around, looking pointedly at Yusuf. Yusuf is looking at the ground.
“Tell me this has nothing to do with you, Yusuf,” Cobb growls, prowling toward him.
“I didn’t know the addition of cyanotoxins would do this!” he pleads, gesturing at their surroundings.
“So you decided to test it out on us? What, did you slip it into our drinks at Dom’s party?” Ariadne squeaks, looking horrified.
“I am definitely killing you when we get out of here,” Arthur growls. Yusuf looks terrified.
“I’m not sure how long the effects are going to last,” Yusuf says in little more than a whisper. “We should be fine upon waking, but the toxin stays in the body for a while… and it appears to have had a delayed onset effect. We all, er, ingested the compound at Dom’s birthday party-in, er, that bottle of Crystal-and that was weeks ago…”
Arthur looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head and begins shouting expletives at Yusuf.
Cobb looks around and realizes that they’re in the library at Sunnydale High.
“You guys,” he says, effectively silencing them. “We’re in Sunnydale!”
Arthur wears a confused expression and paws at the band of his slacks, reaching for a non-existent gun.
“Right… we are,” says Eames, a bit in awe himself.
“You’ve got a stake in your hand, Ariadne,” Arthur points out. Ariadne looks at her right hand and indeed, a pointy looking object rests happily within it. Arthur is suddenly wearing a tweed jacket and large, square glasses.
“Arthur, you’re Mr. Giles,” Dom says softly. Eames’s jaw drops to the floor and Dom hears a faint choking noise coming from Eames’s vicinity, as if the hotness of Arthur dressed as Rupert Giles from Buffy could literally melt his brain.
“I think its name is Mr. Pointy,” Ariande says to the stake, perturbed. Music suddenly begins to blare in the background that sounds all too familiar to the theme song from Rocky.
“Is that infernal racket subtly trying to tell us that we need a training montage?” Arthur asks, his voice growing higher and higher pitched. He pushes his oversized glasses up his nose and hugs an old, dusty book to his chest. “This is all some sick, cosmic joke.”
“I have this urge,” Ariadne says to no one in particular. They all gawk at her. “To, er, make with the stabbing. I mean, slaying.” She moves her free hand up and down in an oddly sexual fashion and Arthur flushes, while Eames merely laughs at her uproariously.
-
“So… you’re supposed to be really old?” Ariande grins at Dom. They’re at the Bronze (the Bronze! Dom might actually pee himself), leaning next to each other at a high table nearly as tall as Ariadne. Ariadne’s looking at him under lidded eyes.
“Apparently centuries old,” Dom concedes. “Apparently I have retained my good looks and mysterious charm. Apparently.”
“Apparently,” Ariadne agrees, and she flushes bright red instantly. “I mean, well…”
They hear screams outside and blessedly escape the awkward moment for a much appreciated fight scene. Ariadne has an effortless, smooth way of dancing from one vampire to the next, lunge-stab, lunge-stab, whereas Dom just likes to throw the vamps to the ground, make them easier for Ariadne to slay.
“That was excellent foreplay,” Ariadne says, backing Dom up against the wire fence she had just used to hurl an enemy vamp against. Ariadne’s got this womanly confidence about her that apparently came along with the Slayer strength.
“You know what they say,” is all Dom gets out before Ariadne begins kissing him hungrily, pressing her body into his, yearning for a closeness never allowed in reality. He pulls her away as he feels himself vamp out, game face on. He puts a hand to his face in horror.
“Shit, Dom, I’m sorry,” Ariadne is shaking, eyes full of horror and tears, “it’s just this stupid dream, I can’t control my own feelings!” She runs off, leaving him alone, staking the last remaining vamp on the way as an after-thought.
-
“You realize this is your bloody subconscious, mate,” Eames tells Dom one afternoon, both settled in at the crypt. “Not that I’m complaining.” He smoothes the folds of his long leather jacket down. “Spike’s one of my favorite characters. Just wait until you get to season seven. He’s also amazing in Angel, season five-”
“Eames!”
“Oh, right. Spoilers.”
They brood.
“So… have you had sex with her yet?” Eames asks casually.
“What?!” Dom balks. “Of course not. Don’t be an idiot. She’s a child.”
“Like that stopped Angel,” Eames murmurs in a huff. “Anyway, I think to end this fucking nightmare, you need to die… you know. Good and proper. The way Whedon wrote it.”
“I need to lose my soul, torture and kill my friends and family, regain my soul, and finally, get sent into a hell dimension?” Dom growls.
“Well…” Eames sighs. “You’re the one that wanted to be Angel. Those are the breaks.”
They brood more.
-
The rain is torrential, soaking both Dom and Ariadne to the bone. They finally make it back to Dom’s apartment, both shell-shocked and worse for the wear. It isn’t until they’re both sitting on the bed that Dom realizes where in the story line they are.
“Ariadne,” he murmurs, forehead pressed against her brown hair. “I don’t think I can do this to you.”
“You’re not,” she whispers, turning to him. “It’s just a dream, right?”
She leans in and kisses him, lifting her shirt as she approaches. “Just a dream.”
He makes a soft sound in the back of his throat and embraces her, tugging the last part of her shirt off above her head and flinging it sideways, so that it makes a wet mark on the opposite wall.
“Just a dream,” he repeats, but he knows that to her, it won’t be just a dream. He knows that to him, it will never be just a dream.
He doesn’t stop.
-
Losing his soul at first feels a lot like a brutal kick: as if someone’s shot him in the chest a few times for good measure. Then it just feels like nothing at all.
“You look… soulless,” Eames appraises. Dom grunts.
“Wanna go kill someone?” Dom asks. Eames puts him game face on.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
-
It feels like the dream goes on for months. Being soulless suits Dom: the guilt is gone, for one, which is freaking fantastic. Eames serves as a good second in command, and with no Drusilla to fight over, the two get along swimmingly.
“Want a bit?” Dom offers Eames, tossing an unconscious teenage girl to Eames, who snags the girl by the hair.
“Eh, I’m not really feeling brunette tonight,” Eames says casually. Dom raises an eyebrow. “Funny, how we’re not going after the Slayer right now. Some people would call that weak.”
“I am not weak,” Dom pouts.
“Did I say that?” Eames protests. “I’m just saying, some people might take offense at the idea that you still, you know, love her. A little.”
“WHAT,” Dom squawks.
“It’s only a theory,” Eames starts.
“We’re killing the Slayer tonight,” Dom growls.
“And that settles it,” Eames says with a grin.
-
“You know what sucks?” Dom asks Ariadne, whilst simultaneously parrying her sword. “Getting your awesome Judge blown into smithereens by a bazooka. That blows.”
“You know what else sucks?” Ariadne growls, thrusting her sword with one hand and jabbing her stake with the other. “Losing your boyfriend’s soul just because he was happy.”
“Having a soul just wasn’t fun,” Cobb growls, kicking her in the belly and sending her flying across the room toward the statue that was slowly, but surely, opening up a gateway to a hell dimension. He stalks over to her crumpled form as the ultimate predator.
It is at that very moment that Yusuf, grand bastard that he is, manages to re-stuff Dom with his soul.
“Oh,” Dom says, voice full of emotion. “My heart. It-it hurts. The pain of existence. WHY DO I FEEL THE NEED TO BROOD?”
“Dom!” Ariadne shrieks. “You’ve gotten your soul back!” She hugs him tightly.
“I’m so confused,” Dom sighs.
Ariadne stiffens in her embrace. She pulls back slightly, tears streaking down her face.
“I want you to close your eyes,” she breathes. Dom does so obediently.
She kisses him gently, then promptly stabs him with a sword and pushes him into the gateway of the hell dimension.
“CAN I STILL CALL YOU?” Dom yells as he tumbles into the abyss.
-
Dom Cobb wakes up.
“Well SHIT,” he growls, turning off the television before him.
Fandom: Inception, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Gen, with Ariadne/Cobb and Arthur/Eames
Rating: PG13
Spoilers: For the movie and for Buffy the Vampire Slayer through the season 2 finale.
Summary: Dom dreams that the cast of Inception are members of the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Warning for absolute, ridiculous crack.
A/N: So, a long time ago in a fandom far, far away, I requested an Ariadne as Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic at the inception kink meme. And it was handsomely rewarded with an AWESOME FILL (see later in the thread). I was going through my documents earlier today and I came upon this file called "btvsinc.doc" and I wondered, curiously, what was inside.
Oh, boys and girls. THE HILARITY CAN NO LONGER BE CONTAINED. I wrote eleven pages of A Very Buffy Inception fic.
I hope you all enjoy the insanity. This fic should probably not be read if you haven't seen all of Buffy seasons 1 & 2.
It all begins innocently enough. The inception job finishes miraculously cleanly, and Saito makes the phone call that sets Dom free. They all tell him to keep in touch (Ariadne almost begging, Eames with a grimace and a wave, Arthur saying little only because he knows exactly where Dom lives and could quite easily kick down the door if Dom ever decided to go too MIA on them). Cobb reunites with his kids: his beautiful son and daughter, his James and Phillippa. Dom gets to be a dad again, gets to be a part of his children’s lives again. Life is blissfully simple for Dom Cobb.
For the rest of the team, life goes on. Arthur takes on new jobs, some in the dream world, some outside of it. Cobb had been aware upon hiring the young upstart that his ex-point man had a colorful background in terms of his experiences in the workforce… his references were the main reason he had sought Arthur out over a handful of other, fully competent potential point men. Arthur was the best, and Cobb had been unsurprised to hear that he had found success in a world without thieving Dom Cobb to lead him astray. It made him a little proud, actually, to hear that Arthur (occasionally) strayed upon the path of the straight and narrow.
Ariadne goes back to university, though Cobb is certain that the institution could never truly satisfy her now that she’d experienced building in the dream world. Cobb receives a call from his youngest companion a few months post-inception.
“I don’t dream on my own anymore,” is how she opens the conversation.
“I haven’t done that in a long while,” Cobb murmurs, resting the phone in the crook of his neck while carrying a sleeping James to bed.
“I need to go back, Dom,” Ariadne pleads.
“I’m out, Ariadne,” Cobb says curtly. “I suggest giving Arthur a call.”
“Dom, Arthur wants you back, we all do-“
“It was nice hearing from you, Ariadne. Keep in touch.”
Click.
She moves to L.A. a few months after graduation. Cobb sees her and the rest of the team on occasion, but always casually and never for very long. He supposes that he’s hurt their feelings. How bizarre.
Saito goes on doing whatever the fuck Saito wants to do. Cobb doesn’t even guess what the billionaire tycoon was getting up to in his time after the Fischer conglomerate’s demise. Probably rolling around in a bath filled with money on a private island somewhere.
Eames is the one member of the team that Dom doesn’t think too much after getting back home. It is funny enough that our story begins with one Mr. Eames, who will deny his connection to the following… er, incidents, with extreme fervor.
-
Dom admits that being a stay at home dad leaves him with a lot of down time. He reads a lot, catching up on years of books that running from the law had deprived him of. He reads Dan Brown. He decides that he hates Dan Brown. He picks up James Patterson and promptly throws the novel across the room around page fifty. The only modern book he can seem to stand is that Harry Potter series that he reads to Phillippa before she goes to bed.
Dom doesn’t watch much television. Mal had only just bought a DVD player a few weeks before they had entered limbo, and Dom was afraid to touch the little contraption, wary that it might still be infused with her aura.
When Dom’s birthday rolls around, he doesn’t expect anything: maybe a call from Miles, or a card from Arthur. He’s fully disassociated himself from the only people in the world he cared about outside of his own insular family. Sometimes he questions himself, asks why he needed the distance.
When he enters his home to find his old team standing there, James on Arthur’s shoulders and Phillippa in Eames’s arms, all wearing party hats and smiling jubilantly, Dom only for a millisecond considers drawing the weapon concealed beneath his shirt. He still had his old training, under the surface. It still showed up sometimes. And that’s when he remembers why the distance was necessary: you can take Dom Cobb out of the extracting business, but you can’t take the extractor out of Dom Cobb. And extractors don’t belong around children.
Yusuf makes a toast with a stolen bottle of Crystal. They drink.
After the cake has been cut, the team doesn’t stay long… they do, however, all heap gifts upon him in turn: Ariadne gives him an expensive looking pen along with an expression of utter horror (“I panicked!” Cobb overhears her telling Arthur before leaving. “Then I remembered that pens are nice gifts.” Arthur coughs and only pauses for a moment before agreeing whole-heartedly with her); Arthur wordlessly hands Cobb a garment bag that Dom is sure holds what is to be an incredible (and incredibly expensive) suit; Yusuf merely passes along a small bottle that it simply labeled “For Dreaming” (Cobb gives him a look full of thanks). Finally, Eames (whom Cobb is surprised to see there at all) hands him an old shoebox.
“I figured you might be getting a bit bored around here,” Eames shrugs as Cobb opens the lid to reveal what looks like a library of small compact discs. “You do know how to work a DVD player, old man?”
Arthur smacks the back of Eames’s head so that Cobb doesn’t have to (“I can teach you how to use it later,” Arthur mutters to Cobb in a short moment before the party dissolves, and Cobb nods thankfully).
Eames has left him instructions:
Start with season 1 of Buffy.
He slides the first disc in and devours the first season before he goes to bed that night.
-
“Tell me,” Cobb asks Eames over the phone one afternoon, now fully immersed in the finale of season two of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, “don’t I remind you of anyone on the show?” He had gotten back in touch with the forger for the express purpose of discussing the television Eames had given him.
“Who, Giles? Yeah, I could see that-“
“No, you idiot. I’m clearly Angel.”
“What? Well, let’s see… you’re tall, mysterious… have certain homicidal tendencies, and are insanely old?” Eames pauses, thinking it over. “Yeah, you do fit the bill, actually,” Eames laughs. Dom hangs up on him and holds back manly tears when Buffy kills Angel.
That night, he takes a few drops of Yusuf’s new mixture and falls into a deep, dream-filled sleep.
-
“Well this is different,” Cobb says to the crowd of very familiar projections surrounding him. “Projections?”
“Sorry to disappoint yeh, love,” Eames drawls. “But we’re in here, as real as you are.”
Ariadne, Arthur, Eames, Yusuf, and Saito are standing around, looking pointedly at Yusuf. Yusuf is looking at the ground.
“Tell me this has nothing to do with you, Yusuf,” Cobb growls, prowling toward him.
“I didn’t know the addition of cyanotoxins would do this!” he pleads, gesturing at their surroundings.
“So you decided to test it out on us? What, did you slip it into our drinks at Dom’s party?” Ariadne squeaks, looking horrified.
“I am definitely killing you when we get out of here,” Arthur growls. Yusuf looks terrified.
“I’m not sure how long the effects are going to last,” Yusuf says in little more than a whisper. “We should be fine upon waking, but the toxin stays in the body for a while… and it appears to have had a delayed onset effect. We all, er, ingested the compound at Dom’s birthday party-in, er, that bottle of Crystal-and that was weeks ago…”
Arthur looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head and begins shouting expletives at Yusuf.
Cobb looks around and realizes that they’re in the library at Sunnydale High.
“You guys,” he says, effectively silencing them. “We’re in Sunnydale!”
Arthur wears a confused expression and paws at the band of his slacks, reaching for a non-existent gun.
“Right… we are,” says Eames, a bit in awe himself.
“You’ve got a stake in your hand, Ariadne,” Arthur points out. Ariadne looks at her right hand and indeed, a pointy looking object rests happily within it. Arthur is suddenly wearing a tweed jacket and large, square glasses.
“Arthur, you’re Mr. Giles,” Dom says softly. Eames’s jaw drops to the floor and Dom hears a faint choking noise coming from Eames’s vicinity, as if the hotness of Arthur dressed as Rupert Giles from Buffy could literally melt his brain.
“I think its name is Mr. Pointy,” Ariande says to the stake, perturbed. Music suddenly begins to blare in the background that sounds all too familiar to the theme song from Rocky.
“Is that infernal racket subtly trying to tell us that we need a training montage?” Arthur asks, his voice growing higher and higher pitched. He pushes his oversized glasses up his nose and hugs an old, dusty book to his chest. “This is all some sick, cosmic joke.”
“I have this urge,” Ariadne says to no one in particular. They all gawk at her. “To, er, make with the stabbing. I mean, slaying.” She moves her free hand up and down in an oddly sexual fashion and Arthur flushes, while Eames merely laughs at her uproariously.
-
“So… you’re supposed to be really old?” Ariande grins at Dom. They’re at the Bronze (the Bronze! Dom might actually pee himself), leaning next to each other at a high table nearly as tall as Ariadne. Ariadne’s looking at him under lidded eyes.
“Apparently centuries old,” Dom concedes. “Apparently I have retained my good looks and mysterious charm. Apparently.”
“Apparently,” Ariadne agrees, and she flushes bright red instantly. “I mean, well…”
They hear screams outside and blessedly escape the awkward moment for a much appreciated fight scene. Ariadne has an effortless, smooth way of dancing from one vampire to the next, lunge-stab, lunge-stab, whereas Dom just likes to throw the vamps to the ground, make them easier for Ariadne to slay.
“That was excellent foreplay,” Ariadne says, backing Dom up against the wire fence she had just used to hurl an enemy vamp against. Ariadne’s got this womanly confidence about her that apparently came along with the Slayer strength.
“You know what they say,” is all Dom gets out before Ariadne begins kissing him hungrily, pressing her body into his, yearning for a closeness never allowed in reality. He pulls her away as he feels himself vamp out, game face on. He puts a hand to his face in horror.
“Shit, Dom, I’m sorry,” Ariadne is shaking, eyes full of horror and tears, “it’s just this stupid dream, I can’t control my own feelings!” She runs off, leaving him alone, staking the last remaining vamp on the way as an after-thought.
-
“You realize this is your bloody subconscious, mate,” Eames tells Dom one afternoon, both settled in at the crypt. “Not that I’m complaining.” He smoothes the folds of his long leather jacket down. “Spike’s one of my favorite characters. Just wait until you get to season seven. He’s also amazing in Angel, season five-”
“Eames!”
“Oh, right. Spoilers.”
They brood.
“So… have you had sex with her yet?” Eames asks casually.
“What?!” Dom balks. “Of course not. Don’t be an idiot. She’s a child.”
“Like that stopped Angel,” Eames murmurs in a huff. “Anyway, I think to end this fucking nightmare, you need to die… you know. Good and proper. The way Whedon wrote it.”
“I need to lose my soul, torture and kill my friends and family, regain my soul, and finally, get sent into a hell dimension?” Dom growls.
“Well…” Eames sighs. “You’re the one that wanted to be Angel. Those are the breaks.”
They brood more.
-
The rain is torrential, soaking both Dom and Ariadne to the bone. They finally make it back to Dom’s apartment, both shell-shocked and worse for the wear. It isn’t until they’re both sitting on the bed that Dom realizes where in the story line they are.
“Ariadne,” he murmurs, forehead pressed against her brown hair. “I don’t think I can do this to you.”
“You’re not,” she whispers, turning to him. “It’s just a dream, right?”
She leans in and kisses him, lifting her shirt as she approaches. “Just a dream.”
He makes a soft sound in the back of his throat and embraces her, tugging the last part of her shirt off above her head and flinging it sideways, so that it makes a wet mark on the opposite wall.
“Just a dream,” he repeats, but he knows that to her, it won’t be just a dream. He knows that to him, it will never be just a dream.
He doesn’t stop.
-
Losing his soul at first feels a lot like a brutal kick: as if someone’s shot him in the chest a few times for good measure. Then it just feels like nothing at all.
“You look… soulless,” Eames appraises. Dom grunts.
“Wanna go kill someone?” Dom asks. Eames puts him game face on.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
-
It feels like the dream goes on for months. Being soulless suits Dom: the guilt is gone, for one, which is freaking fantastic. Eames serves as a good second in command, and with no Drusilla to fight over, the two get along swimmingly.
“Want a bit?” Dom offers Eames, tossing an unconscious teenage girl to Eames, who snags the girl by the hair.
“Eh, I’m not really feeling brunette tonight,” Eames says casually. Dom raises an eyebrow. “Funny, how we’re not going after the Slayer right now. Some people would call that weak.”
“I am not weak,” Dom pouts.
“Did I say that?” Eames protests. “I’m just saying, some people might take offense at the idea that you still, you know, love her. A little.”
“WHAT,” Dom squawks.
“It’s only a theory,” Eames starts.
“We’re killing the Slayer tonight,” Dom growls.
“And that settles it,” Eames says with a grin.
-
“You know what sucks?” Dom asks Ariadne, whilst simultaneously parrying her sword. “Getting your awesome Judge blown into smithereens by a bazooka. That blows.”
“You know what else sucks?” Ariadne growls, thrusting her sword with one hand and jabbing her stake with the other. “Losing your boyfriend’s soul just because he was happy.”
“Having a soul just wasn’t fun,” Cobb growls, kicking her in the belly and sending her flying across the room toward the statue that was slowly, but surely, opening up a gateway to a hell dimension. He stalks over to her crumpled form as the ultimate predator.
It is at that very moment that Yusuf, grand bastard that he is, manages to re-stuff Dom with his soul.
“Oh,” Dom says, voice full of emotion. “My heart. It-it hurts. The pain of existence. WHY DO I FEEL THE NEED TO BROOD?”
“Dom!” Ariadne shrieks. “You’ve gotten your soul back!” She hugs him tightly.
“I’m so confused,” Dom sighs.
Ariadne stiffens in her embrace. She pulls back slightly, tears streaking down her face.
“I want you to close your eyes,” she breathes. Dom does so obediently.
She kisses him gently, then promptly stabs him with a sword and pushes him into the gateway of the hell dimension.
“CAN I STILL CALL YOU?” Dom yells as he tumbles into the abyss.
-
Dom Cobb wakes up.
“Well SHIT,” he growls, turning off the television before him.