Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet.
-East of Eden, John Steinbeck
With one hand he winds his fingers up in her dark brown hair. It seems as though, no matter how tightly he winds the strands around his fingers, they always slip out of his grasp. With the other hand he toys with a red die, rubbing the smooth surfaces and going over the notches on each side for what feels like the thousandth time. He doesn't really want to check on reality: if this isn't reality than he would much rather spend the rest of his days dreaming. He is fairly certain that he isn't imaginative enough to come up with the cold ivory hands that trace their way down his chest and the soft brown eyes that hover half open, blinking regularly, slipping into sleep. Although, maybe he could, because he doesn't need to see her actions to know that they happen. Tonight, though, he can't just let her slip off. He has delayed this conversation long enough.
"Do you still dream?" he asks. His whispered question hovers in the air. As silence fills the space between them, he wishes he could take it back; delay asking another couple of weeks. He doesn't really want to know the answer and as the time between his question and her response stretches he knows she doesn't want him to know. She doesn't want to tell him that she experiences the nightmare that he does every time that he drifts off to sleep.
"You said that I would stop dreaming," she says at last and it strikes him that her tone isn't admonishing, or even angry. She accepts it with her whole heart because, even knowing now what he had neglected to tell her then, she wouldn't change it. Lucid dreaming-creating whole cities, whole worlds-is worth the time spent lost to the place they go when they sleep. The little red die tumbles recklessly in his hand until she stops her tracing and reaches over to stop him. She props herself up on her other elbow. He looks pointedly at the ceiling tiles until she releases his hand and drags his chin down. He looks her straight in those brown eyes and hopes she can see the guilt in his, can see that if he had known how he would come to feel about her that he would never have let Cobb take her in. He wonders if she would be angry with him for his thoughts. The look in her eyes, the strong, resolved look, confirms what he heard in her tone: that she doesn't
care about the consequence he should have told her. He wishes she weren't so easy to read, wishes his guilt would dissipate because of it. But every time he tries to make that guilt leave, he thinks of her spirit: luminescent and trapped in a darkness so deep she can't see how brightly she glows. Every time, he sees himself blindly following a man ten years his senior and the promise he made himself when he discovered the truth. The promise he broke when she smiled at him and cornered him in a dimly lit elevator.
The die settles at last as he leaves it on the sheets so he can cup the dainty hand that lingers on his jawline. "If I had known then, what I know now, I would have done so many things differently," he whispers. She knows he isn't just talking about her anymore by the way he breaks eye contact. It shames him that if he had been told what he was going to be giving up, what the penalty would be, then the beautiful girl nestled in his arms would never have met him and he would have been content with his own, non-lucid dreams. He would have married a perfectly regular woman by the name of Susan or Patricia or Cathy and led a life considerably more boring. At least, that's how he imagines it. He certainly wouldn't be in the company of an exotic name like Ariadne or stealing corporate secrets for people who paid him entirely too much money to book hotel rooms and clean up the messes of his coworkers. No. If Cobb had told him what was waiting for him when he
slipped into his "dreamless" sleep, he would have left and never looked back-college tuition payments be damned. He thinks about telling her, but instead pulls her back down into the crook of his arm. He can't stand to have her look, with those accepting, lovely brown eyes, at him for another moment. Even if he refuses to look at them, he can feel her gaze as clearly as the hands that until moments-was it only moments?-ago were making asymmetrical patterns on his skin.
He would bet against his own die that she isn't afraid of sleep. She could never be as terrified as he is of those hours spent hovering: caged and alone and suspended in the one fear he can never seem to suppress. He wants to tell her about it, and she traces the scar that lines his chest knowingly. Her hands are so sure of themselves that, for an instant, he isn't sure if he has told her before and forgotten. He imagines telling her the story so often, but can never seem to actually make the words come together in reality. He remembers referencing a car accident when she asked about the scars that litter his skin the first night they were together. Before he can even think about opening his mouth, she extricates herself from his grasp and disappears into the closet. She pulls out the silver briefcase and sets it up, though her hands are considerably clumsy with sleep. She hands him a lead, "I think it will be easier if you just show me." A sad smile
reaches her face, as if she already knows where they are going. She sets the clock for an hour, too much time in his opinion, and curls up beside him.
The car is a four-seater sedan, tiny because his father wanted a fuel efficient car. The country road is dark, and they are the only people for miles. He only celebrated his eighteenth birthday a few weeks ago. His hair is loose, ungelled, and his bangs hang in his eyes. He is wearing a crappy band t-shirt and he has holes in his jeans. His mother is trying to cheer him up. He is sulking because his dad told him-at the very last minute no less-that he couldn't drive home. His mom is doing a good job, he is no longer looking out the window and there might even be the lightest hint of a smile on his face. He thinks he will be funny and look out the other window. His mother laughs at him, like she had that night so many years ago, but he doesn't do what made her laugh. There is a young woman belted in next to him and he remembers that this is just a memory. The dream plays on and he sits in his suit with not a hair out of place. His father says he is
sorry-he just had this feeling that it was a bad night to let his kid drive and then the headlights illuminate a car rushing straight toward them. There is no time to swerve, no time to do anything. There isn't even time to scream.
There is just this awful screech as the car crumples around them. Glass shatters with the force of impact and his body flies forward until his seat belt cuts into his chest, breaking a couple ribs. Ariadne gasps for breath in the seat next to him, her ribs broken in the opposite direction. "Mom? Dad?" He hears his own desperate words but it feels like they are coming from someone else. He reaches for the door handle, unable to stop the memory from unfolding exactly as it happened. The door is jammed. The light from the headlights flicker and die and he is alone in the dark. He shuts his eyes, hating this. "We are going to be here for a couple of hours," he whispers to Ariadne, even as his more panicked younger screams at his mom and dad and struggles with the door handle. He tries to break the window, but he doesn't have the strength with his ribs.
She sits through it with him: the screaming, the crying, the darkness.
For hours.
It still terrifies him, but her hand in his is enough to keep him sane.
The sky is just starting to get light when someone finds the mangled mess of machine and the young man huddled in the backseat. its another half hour before the ambulance makes it out. The sun has just risen when the jaws of life rip the door off and EMTs take him to the ambulance. Ariadne and the other Arthur watch the sirens light up and the ambulance pull away and he changes the scenery. A bright hotel lobby that is eerily familiar to the two slowly builds around them.
For a moment, he can't make himself look at her, but then her hand is on his arm. She's facing him, but he's looking anywhere but at the understanding eyes right in front of him. She sees the tears on his face, knows that that moment still cuts at him like the day it happened. Fear like that just doesn't go away. For a moment he is the scared little boy, alone in the dark with his dead parents crushed in the front seat. "I don't like to be helpless," he says after a moment, his voice a little thick. He wipes his eyes and looks at her. He sniffles once and looks away again. "Cobb didn't tell me," he continues, "about being aware, in the dark. You know it isn't the dreaming that stops: it's just the ability to create that you can't do without help. I think he knew I would have walked away, the instant he told me. Mal got close to telling me the first night I went in, but he stopped her. I didn't know what she was on about until after. I hated him for a
long time, because everything he did was a contradiction." He comes to the end of his babbling rant, wondering how much longer he has until the end of the dream. He is tired of her seeing him this weak. He wants to go back to being strong, in control of everything. But first he has to tell her, because now that the words have started, he can hardly stop them from coming out.
Of all the people he has ever met, she is the only one he trusts with the whole story.
He takes a seat finally and pulls her down with him. She seems to understand that he needs to get this out and stays silent. "In my first dream, he killed me with a tree, and, for some reason I will never understand, that is a fond memory for me. I wanted to create like that, like my father had before me. I didn't even stop to think that there would be consequences to playing God. And he and Mal became like replacement parents in a way, though of course that didn't last long because Cobb has this knack for breaking irreplaceable things. I just couldn't understand why he would make a dream as violent as my first and then keep the loss of dreaming from me." He is cut off as the dream starts to break up, the building she designed crumbling around them.
And then she is lying next to him, her eyes even with his. And for the first time since he took her in, she says something, "I have a secret too." She reprograms the clock for another ten minutes and they are plunged back into the dark.
"Shit!" he hears her yell, but its so dark that he doesn't know whether or not it's her or a projection of herself. And he wants to go find her in the dark, but he can't and he has to. "Arthur!" She is crying now-how can he not go to her? He grits his teeth and calls out to her. Why can't she hear him? She is still crying, and he can't stand it. He forces himself to crawl forward on his hands and knees, though it scares him halfway to hell and back. He doesn't want her alone and frightened. He stumbles around in the dark for several minutes before he feels her soft hand.
"Arthur is that you?" she whispers, her voice brimming with hope.
"It's me," he whispers back. He is gripping her hand so tightly, he can feel the bones move. He wonders vaguely if he is going to break her hand, but she doesn't mind. With her other hand, she reaches down and strikes a match.
The scent of phosphorous is like a breath of fresh air, reminding him that this is just another dream. "Why are we here?" His breath is abnormally fast, but it's slowing. Just the sight of her and the light calms him. He notices that the flame is holding steady and not fading like a normal match would.
"Because I was scared the first time. And I called for you," she whispers, "And I figured out that though you can't fill up a dream, you can call up a projection. You get me through every night alone, even if I know it isn't really you."
And then they are lying in their hotel room, completely wound up in each other. They pull the needles off their wrists, but leave the briefcase at the end of the bed to clean up tomorrow. They are too tired to deal with it tonight.
He pulls her in tighter.
Her breath is a lullaby.
A/N: Gosh, was it really only a month ago that Inception blew our minds? It feels like forever ago, doesn't it? Since my first viewing, I've convinced different family members to take me two more times and I still can't quite say that I'm done with the canon film. My poor muse hasn't seen something with this much fanfiction possibility since Harry Potter (which unfortunately is all on a different site and I'm not planning on letting you know where it is cause I think it's all crap) and she is flipping out. She is so twitterpated with different ideas, that I have had issues focusing. As is the case with this little author's note. ;) Anywho, thought I'd let you all know that I love you for the response Collapse got and that this is actually a companion piece to that fic. It doesn't need to be read first, but I figure I'll let first time readers know its there.