Undreaming (II)
Title: Undreaming (II)
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13, just to be safe.
Characters: Arthur
Summary: The inability to dream; a relief, a lack of catharsis, and like all blessings, its own horror. Ficlets; drabbles, and vignettes. Part II: Sometimes, the multiple deaths get to Arthur. Particularly right after they happen.
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The pain never goes away.
It never remains either. It happens, and then it goes away so suddenly after he’s plunged out of the dream that he cries out sometimes, when the pain is suddenly ripped away. He’s not Cobb, not the extractor, he’s just their point man, and that means he holds the line when necessary for the extractor to get to the subject.
The inability to dream is a relief; he wakes up, and then the memories crowd him, surrounding him, and he gasps, licks his lips and fumbles with sweaty palms for his loaded die. No. Not a dream.
He doesn’t remember how many times he’s died, in how many painful ways. He’s been tortured before, but not as badly as Sean. He’s been shot, stabbed, once decapitated, and once bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher and each time, he remembers vaguely screaming and the pain, oh, the pain before he jolted awake.
Pain is part of the job. But he still can’t recall the pain, only that it hurt like blazes. And the bullets seem routine now, like the prick of sticking an IV into his veins to deliver the somnacin. Its just another thing extraction teams have worked out, like shoot your team member if he’s writhing in agony, for the love of -
This is what he remembers, in waking nightmares, because he can’t dream, can’t scream, can’t cry out. He doesn't dream, and so doesn't have nightmares, but sometimes, the memories break free when he's awake, trapping him in a kind of living nightmare. The pain, the feeling of a bullet entering his head, desperate mortality, because even getting killed so many times, to struggle for life is a reflex Arthur isn’t quite rid of and worries it’ll end.
You’re dead - the instinctive feeling, and panic, almost entirely smothered by trained calm. There is no nightlight, just the eerie silver of moonlight; this is unreal, he thinks, but the die doesn’t lie but he fingers it anyway just to make sure. This is not a dream, but this is unreal.
Staring at interlaced fingers, sitting up in bed, because there is no relief, he thinks and wonders why he chose extraction, holding the sharp memories and the emotions they bind themselves to at bay with thoughts. You could have been a doctor, he thought. Or maybe an engineer. Or a lawyer.
He’s always been good at patterns, and order, and numbers and rational things. But dreams are hardly rational, even when he imposes order onto disorder with his will.
You chose this, he thinks. He doesn’t reach for the cup of water on the table to dunk himself, to break himself out of the reverie. He can sleep, but not dream, but that means he can’t have nightmares either.
(It’s addictive, the freedom, the ability to impose any kind of logical paradox in a dream, the control, and the wide expanse his world becomes. Once you’re in, you can’t leave. You don’t want to.)
Like all things, it comes with a price. He’s paid it, and is paying it now. (Sometimes, shooting him in the head is the only way to break the dream, and it haunts him after, just another entry on the list of the things he’s gone through.)
He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night, even when the first shafts of morning light stream into the dim room, head bowed, still staring at his interlaced fingers, setting their exact contour, shape, and hue against the memory of a bullet.
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