The Scars Left Forever

The hardest thing he'd ever had to do was leave him in the van. The white van, riddled with bullet holes and shattered glass, which sunk into the ice cold water dangerously fast. But Arthur was the point man, the one that didn't lose his cool, the one that would stick to the mission even if no one else would. He had to leave Cobb behind to the murky depths of this river that, while it did not actually exist, certainly felt real under the crushing tons of water that currently pressed him down. What if Cobb couldn't wake up? What if he couldn't manage to kick himself through this level, and was instead stuck in limbo forever? After all this time, he couldn't go insane right as he could be getting back to his kids, that just wouldn't be right. Arthur stayed as the others swam away, trying to pull Cobb out, but then he felt a small hand on his arm, shaking him, trying to force him to leave. So he did, he abandoned the van, and watched it sink to the bottom, with his best friend sound asleep inside.

Sometimes, after the job, Arthur woke up, sharply, sitting straight up in bed, breathing hard, panicking about that moment. He could still feel the crushing water, he could still see his friend limply sinking to the bottom of a river. Before Arthur's fingers could reach for his phone to call, just to make sure he was still alive, he would remind himself that Cobb woke up with the rest of the team. And Cobb went through customs as a free man, moving on from extracting to fatherhood, completely lucid and unscarred from what Arthur felt like he had done. And now, after all this time, Arthur understood the breathtaking pain and confusion that Cobb had felt all that time.

End.