Resilience: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness
Even with Phillipa and James sleeping soundly just down the hall, Dom couldn't dream on his own. Sometimes it was too difficult just to fall asleep, and he would lay in the quiet chill, dreaming awake, trying to summon a convincing enough imagining of what it was like to have Mal sleeping beside him.
He hadn't managed it yet, and the loneliness was made worse by a conversation of nine days ago, a conversation that he couldn't keep out of his mind.
"Why didn't Mommy come home, too?" James asked. He and Phillipa sat together on the floor next to Phillipa's bed, drawing pictures with markers and crayons (Dom had just bought them new art supplies the previous day).
Phillipa set down the red-violet crayon. Dom watched unseen from the doorway, rooted by panic. "She can't come back," she told her brother, sounding calmer than Dom would have thought possible. "She died." And on that last word, her voice broke, betraying her pain.
James pushed himself up onto his feet. "No!" he yelled at her. Phillipa had her head down; Dom couldn't see her face. James stomped unsteadily out of the room, his face flushing as it was overcome by angry tears.
"James - " Dom started when his son almost plowed right into his legs. He reached down to scoop the boy up and wipe his tears away, but James glowered up at him so fiercely that Dom hesitated, giving his son just enough time to flee into the backyard.
Dom watched James toddle away and felt a sense of anxiety settle on his chest, the kind of nervousness that started when one realized one was helpless to save a loved one. Struggling to react to James' denial was a little like trying to fathom Mal's early detachment from reality. Even more strongly reminded of the outcome of the latter, Dom felt that much more powerless against it.
In his anguish, he almost failed to hear a tiny sniffle from behind him. He turned to see his daughter already in tears of her own. She hugged herself as her face crumpled under her father's scrutiny.
"Phillipa," Dom murmured as he walked over to her. Afraid she'd run away like her brother, he knelt down very slowly and cautiously beside her. As soon as he was seated on the floor among the half-finished pictures and art supplies, she crawled right onto his lap and clung to his shirt, sobbing.
In that moment, he wished he could disappear into the dream world again, taking his children with him, so he could build a home where his family was whole again. More than a constructed series of snapshots, it would be a paradise of his own design, where James and Phillipa could grow up happily with their father and their mother.
"She's gone," Phillipa cried into his chest, making Dom wonder for just a moment if he had said any of that aloud, but realizing just as quickly that the outburst was just more evidence indicating that it was as hard a truth for her to bear as it was for her brother.
"Yes, Phillipa, she's gone," Dom choked out, tenderly stroking his daughter's hair with one hand while the other held her close. "She's gone," he repeated in a whisper, trying to finalize the idea for the both of them.
If Dom could dream, he felt sure that his dreams would have been filled with Mal even now, for - like the ideas he'd planted in her and Fischer's heads - the memory of her and the desire for her presence were impossible to eradicate.