Disclaimer: Inception does not belong to me. Copyright infringement is not intended.
A/N:
Warning: I have mild dyslexia and dyscalculia. There may be small grammatical errors and large mathematical ones.
Summary:
A Single Glass of Water
"I'm Mal," the woman said gently. "Mallorie Cobb. Dom is my husband."
"Dom?" the little girl asked.
"The blonde one."
"Oh. Names. I'd forgotten that people have names. Will you name me?"
"… Roxanne," Mal said after a moment. "You look like a Roxanne."
"Are you a part of the plan?"
"Probably. I'm a manifestation of Dom's grief and anger at himself. My function is to invade his life, so he probably expects me to make things go wrong. Which I have to; it's my purpose. I need to invade his life so that he'll face me."
"Ignoring you makes you stronger," Roxanne nodded, "more self-aware. You've taken on the mind of Dom's wife as he knows it."
"What is your function?" Mal asked.
"I'm a wish-fulfillment. She wants to have children; I'm ignored, put away, because she can't. I guess my purpose is to hurt. It's why I hold the level; so she doesn't have to see me. Why would I want to hurt myself?"
"Some people do, dear," Mal said in amusement. "Dom must be a closet masochist to keep me around like this. He can't access the good memories of her – too much grief – so he doesn't think about how lovely she was. I'm the edge of a knife. I'm his sorrow."
Roxanne nodded quietly.
"Braid my hair?"
"Sure," Mal smiled. "Let me tell you about my children…"
She conjured a brush and a hair elastic and they talked quietly for a good half an hour or so. She had all the memories that Dom had of his children, so she sat and taught the girl how to be a child.
"I'll have to go soon. Dom is with Ariadne in a new dream level. She's changing it quickly."
"How did you know her name?" Roxanne blinked.
"I forgot how disassociated you are," Mal shook her head. "I'm just as connected to him as his wife was, sweetie. I know everything he knows."
"Wow," the child said in awe. "I've never felt that."
"You will, in time," Mal smiled.
Time to play her part, Mal's face went grim.
"I travelled her dream world while you were off 'looking' for me, Cobb. She's created a whole world here. I mean as in only Sudan is black space," Eames whispered. "She's got a New York, a Los Angeles, a fair imitation of Mombasa… she's even got suburbs. This girl has amazing attention to detail. It would be like me remembering all the lines to The Merchant of Venice."
Dom's eyes widened. Eames hadn't been an actor in years.
"Yeah, we're gonna bloody need help on this. I hate to call in tourists, but…"
"Saito and Fischer," Dom sighed, rubbing his eyes.
"It's only when we wake up that we realize something was strange," Dom smiled.
He's said this before, but never so gently.
He is, after all, training her against Extractors while they work this job. She had never thought of how intimate sharing a dream might be, but you're inside a mind, and currently he's inside hers. Her mind is already a giant maze, he notes at first, easy to get lost in and definitely hard to Extract from, but he refines it. At first it was uncomfortable, this strange intimacy, but her projections, while tense, left him alone. That was a sign of tentative trust. Now the trust isn't so tentative.
She doesn't tell him that for all her mind is filled with paradoxes everything goes to nowhere. She doesn't tell him that her memories are in the walls, the rugs, in the red strings of thread that lie under the ground that allow her to always know her way back exactly – from any portion of her mind-city. Ariadne doesn't tell him that it's not how her bishop falls that is the secret; it's that it's hollow with a note inside. If it's solid, it will feel wrong. She tips it over as a deception, sort of like Eames and his poker chip. Ariadne knows that's not his totem, whatever his actions might imply. She doesn't know what it is but she knows what it's not. He's too confident in who he is once the Forging is done to ever need an anchor to reality so often.
She doesn't tell Dom that the library in her mind is filled with books that only have on pages what you expect to see; he thinks they're all textbooks. He notices on his own that her mind is a melting-pot of cultures, but Ariadne doesn't mention her gypsy homeschooled childhood (except for that one year where she went to a real high school), sometimes with sleeping in vans on air mattresses. Arthur may have known where and when she travelled though his research, but he'll never understand the people aspect of it.
Arthur's not the type that could understand back-alleys of starving children and addicts and homeless people, let alone that she's walked the alleys with murderers in no fear for her life (even as a child). Illegality doesn't scare her. Eames notices her knives where the others would only notice guns, and that it's only the first time she was killed to wake up that scared her. Eames actually gets that part, the beauty in disaster.
Dom doesn't get how beautiful he is to her.
"But one day we have to wake up," as the sedative runs out.
He hasn't yet. That's why she has to save this man.
Oh, the irony.