Disclaimer: I do not own Inception. It belongs to the genius Christopher Nolan, whom I much admire and envy.
Gravity: The undeniable pull of one object to another.
i. falling
Ariadne knows that she is dreaming. The bishop clutched in her hands tells her so; it is weightless, impossibly light. She tries to relax, to force herself to breathe and gain control of the dream, like Arthur taught her.
But her heartbeat is muchtoofast in her ears and her blood surges in her veins and fear spikes, her breath coming hard and fast.
She's terrified but at the same time exhilarated, and she knows why. She's sitting on a window looking into a shattered hotel room, at tossed tables and broken glass, and there's a sense of freedom and release rushing in her chest that's almost like a drug.
Tonight is the night she and her husband break out of the dream and into reality.
(Husband? Says Ariadne to herself. No, I'm not married.)
She swings her legs idly and she doesn't have her bishop anymore but that doesn't bother her, because there's no need for it—she knows she is dreaming because this reality is not real. (It's a half-truth—something once known but forgotten, locked away in the recesses of her—Mal's? Ariadne's?—mind. )
Across the gap between the two buildings, she sees the door swing open and her husband steps in, his happy face sliding onto the glass-strewn floor and the flowers toppling from his hands.
"Mal?" Confusion, accompanied by the crunch of glass underfoot and the sound of panic.
Dominic Cobb comes into view, immaculate in his crisp suit, ready for his anniversary with his other half.
"Mal!" Definite panic now.
(I'm not Mal! Ariadne shouts, but she's trapped, silenced, and fuck, where's the bishop?)
Ariadne sits and listens, horrified, as Mal and Dom talk—Mal tells him of her plans and what she's done and his face is so shocked, so sad. He understands, finally, that she's ready to jump and he's going down with her. He staggers onto the ledge and he's so scared of her falling that he's close to falling himself.
"You are waiting for a train." She says, and Aridane knows that she's not Ariadne now, she's Mal, or Mal is her, and Mal is talking to her husband, preparing to shatter him like the glass on the floor.
"Mal, no. Think of the children!" Dom's eyes (his beautiful eyes, she's always loved them) pleading, scared.
"You do not know where the train will take you, but it does not matter." That's strange—her fear is evaporating, dissolving, leaving only fierce joy and wild exhilaration. "Why doesn't it matter?"
Something in Dom crumples like paper and his face falls and she can see his heart break in his eyes. "Mal!" It's the wounded cry of animal, of prey that's been hunted and hurt and knows that its death is coming and that there's nothing it can do to postpone that death, to get away—
(No no no don't jump don't jump can't you see you're killing him! Ariadne screams but Mal doesn't, or can't hear her because her blood is singing in excitement.)
"Come with me." She says and Dom is shaking his head, tiny little fractures cracking open his heart, his chest, and she can almost see him bleeding, dying.
"Mal." And it's begging, it's pleading, it's fucknoIloveyousomuchdon'tdothistome.
And Ariadne can feel her face (Mal's face, Mal's, because she could never ever do this to her friend-teacher-maybe-something-more, never ever) lift in a grin. "It does not matter." She coos. "Because you are going together."
Dom reaches out, one last act of love desperation pleading, but it's too late, it's far too late, because Mal-Ariadne is on her feet, is coiled, is tense, is shoving off and then she's falling—
Mal laughs, once, freedom at last, she's going home, and Ariadne hears Cobb's anguished cry and sees him reel back, sag against the window frame because his legs can no longer support him, because his heart is torn out and fractured and smashed into the pavement at terminal velocity.
Ariadne and Mal hit the pavement and Cobb is weeping—!
And she woke gasping, jerking upright, her heart and lungs and blood thundering and her eyes leaking. She fumbled, ripped the IV from her arm. She dug almost frantically in her pocket and then felt the warm familiar weight of her golden bishop—a hasty test sent it toppling to the left, and she breathed again.
It had been a dream.
She swiped her arm across her face and wiped away the terror and tears, and by then Arthur noticed that she was awake and he was at her side in seconds.
"Are you okay?" There was a note of concern (emotion! From Arthur!) in the Point Man's voice and his usually smooth face was crinkled slightly. He took in her red eyes and blotchy cheeks and wounded glare and he knew, like he knew when Cobb had staggered in, two years ago, his eyes wild and his heart in pieces at his feet.
"Mal?"
The look on her face was enough, and his eyes softened into sympathy. "We've all been dreaming about her." He confided, patting her back. "Since the mission. She's dead, Ariadne. She's a projection. She can't hurt you."
And suddenly it was too much and the bishop was so tightly clenched in her hand that it left marks. "But she can hurt him." She gestured wildly, her control (which she learned from Arthur) gone, towards the pale, prone man lying on the chaise, an IV in his arm and an air of decay hanging about him.
Dom Cobb had been sleeping for two weeks, trapped in limbo, unable or unwilling to wake. And Ariadne blamed herself, because she had left him there, had left in the vastness of limbo with nothing to guide him out but the half-remembered images of his children's faces.
It was her fault that he probably would never see them again.
After the plane landed, they took him away, got him out before the bops descended, though Saito had woken and cleared Cobb with Customs. They fled to a warehouse, and there they stayed, lost and sad and confused.
And they dreamed, too. They hooked themselves up to the PASIV and tried to dream away their troubles.
When they weren't dreaming, Arthur, Eames, and Yusuf all spent their days in or around the warehouse, leaderless, unwilling to leave Cobb but itching to get away, almost unable to bear the sight of the once-strong man broken.
(But Cobb had been broken long before the Fischer job. He had been broken the second his wife kicked off her shoe and followed it to the earth. Ariadne knew this. She had seen him topple, like her bishop, unable to resist the pull of is gravity, of his wife plummeting towards the earth.)
"Cobb—" Arthur blinked and his mask slammed into place, the mention or thought of his best friend too much to bear . (When it was too much, he shut off his emotion. How Ariadne envied him. She'd kill to shut of her emotions, to shut down her heart, to silence the cries ringing in her ears.) "He's strong. He'll pull through."
"You don't know that."
Arthur looked at her in the sad sort of way he had—the resigned way, the moving-on way. "No." He conceded. "But he came out last time."
"He had Mal last time!" Ariadne was all anger and despair and guilt and Arthur was resignation, was defeat and sorrow. "Do you know what it is to be a lover? To be a half of a whole?"
Arthur blinked, drawing back ever so slightly, his comforting hand withdrawn. "No. Do you?"
The Parisian stopper mid-rant, confusion flooding her anger, watering it down. Then she felt sick to her stomach, every part of her rebelling against what she had just said.
(You're just a child!)
The conversation with Mal—God, had it only been a few weeks?—rang in her ears and Ariadne was almost floored by the memory of it and of Cobb crumpling, screaming as his other half fell to their deaths.
"Ariadne, Mal isn't real. She's dead and she's just a projection." Arthur tried to reason with her, once again far softer than she ever remembered him being (except on the plane, watching Cobb with her, his knuckles white against the leather seats).
"You don't understand." Ariadne groaned, cradling her stomach and her bishop, refusing to look at the sleeping dead man sprawled in the lawn chair. She herself barely understood. She was too young, she'd never loved like that, like the other was her sun, was her reason for drawing air, and yet she had felt it, had felt that wholeness, that completeness that only came with another person. And Arthur didn't know, couldn't know. He was only a few years older than her, and he just couldn't—
"Don't understand what? That you feel guilty? That you're scared of Mal?" Arthur's brow furrowed and she knew he was upset, hurt, angry, bitter, missing Cobb and Mal and the glory days. "She's terrifying, and we've all dreamed about her, when we've dreamed at all. It's normal to see her—it's a nightmare."
"I didn't see Mal, Arthur." Ariadne looked up and met the Point Man's eyes. She licked her lips. "I was her."
And behind them, on the chaise, the unconscious Dominic Cobb twitched.
If you have any questions, review!
~WSS