Title: She Walks In Colours Everywhere
Author: Red Fiona
Fandom: Inception
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise, Warner brothers and the Nolan brothers do. No money being made from this.
Characters: Arthur, Dom Cobb and Mal
Rating: PG-rated gen
Warnings: Canonical character death, canonical violence, spoilers
Summary: The first time Arthur sees Mal in Cobb's dreams
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They're in Seville (actually, they're in Hong Kong). It's a warm September evening (May).

Arthur had never considered using the rows of bitter oranges in front of the cathedral as the base of a maze, but now he's experiencing it, he can see its potential. A repetitive pattern, a reason to have people milling about, waiting for the cathedral doors to open. It's the perfect place to wait for their mark to appear, following the loose thread Cobb had deliberately left for him to follow.

The whole thing feels like a memory, half hazy heat and soft edges. The closest Arthur has been to Seville is looking at other people's photographs but he feels like he's been here.

He's not near the front of the crowd of people sitting waiting, instead, he's merged into place a little off to the left, where he should be able to see and follow the mark, without being noticed himself. It's a good place to wait.

He almost doesn't see Mal, she was short enough to be missed in a mostly dark-haired crowd. He wouldn't have noticed her if it wasn't for the way all of Dom's other projections turned towards her. Of course they did, they were Dom's.

Arthur stills, trying to give his body the time and space to react, without alerting the projections.

He knows why he's surprised, Mal is dead, oh so very dead, but he knows enough about dreams that he probably shouldn't be surprised; Dom's the architect of this dream and some of his subconscious has to seep through. Arthur's spent enough time in the back of lectures about the psychology of dreaming and dream-sharing to know anyone who says they can keep themselves out of their dreams is lying, to themselves or to everyone else and themselves. If anything of Dom was likely to seep through it was his love for Mal. It's what's brought them here, isn't it, half the world away from home and on the run. What Arthur hadn't expected was the rush of joy at seeing Mal, skipping past the fact that he knows logically this is not Mal, just a projection of her.

Arthur decides to do his best to ignore Mal, treat her like any other projection. Because that's all she is really, whatever else some foolish part of Arthur hopes, she's not Mal, just an image that looks like her. You have to ignore projections, or rather pay them no more attention than you would a random stranger in the real world, otherwise the mind notices you and that's a one-way ticket to getting your ticket punched.

It's hard though, because she's Mal, and the real one had the skill of attracting your attention. Then there's her effect on the projections round her, it's like those scenes in musicals, where the backing dancers move around the leads like water.

Mal parts the sea and walks to him.

It's interesting to compare the differences between his memories and Dom's. Arthur's never seen her in those earrings, for instance, but as she's wearing them, he knows Dom had.

Dom's memory of Mal is slightly shorter than Arthur's, probably due to their differing relative heights.

"Hello Arthur."

"Hello Mal." Arthur expects it to end there. You can't have conversations with projections, not more than the sort of half conversations you have with strangers you pass in the street. They're shades of people that never were.

"Who are you here for?"

Arthur feels his own defences tightening, is this just one of Dom's projections, or is someone being very clever and running a reverse dream robbery on them? There's very few forgers good enough to play Mal, and play her convincingly, and he might not like any of those three or four people, but none of them would play Mal, he knows that much.

He's also got to keep calm, to avoid siccing Dom's projections on to him. He can feel a couple of them starting to turn at the edge of the crowd.

There's nothing for it but to smile and turn to the thing that isn't Mal and answer with a half-lie that's all truth. "I'm here for Dom."

Mal smiles back. "You always are, aren't you?" Something in her smile changes, almost imperceptibly.

And then she turns. "Why are you protecting my murderer?" Mal rips his throat out with claws she never had in life.

It is not one of Arthur's more elegant awakenings. There's screaming and arms waving, and he suspects if he'd been foolish enough to eat anything before going under, his stomach would have actually rebelled rather than just threatening to.

Chan, their man on the surface for this job, stares at him. The mission has most definitely gone wrong, and they need to get Dom out of there. Thankfully, they've only gone one layer down and they can (and do) kick him early.

Yes, the mission's a bust, and, as always since they've been on the run, they can't afford this setback, but Arthur will come up with a work around and they will go again.

Now he's back in his hotel room, there is a bottle of reasonably decent whiskey that Arthur is deliberately not drinking. Three fingers of it and some rocks in a glass, and he swears he's getting more out of the sound of the ice against the glass than the alcoholic fumes from the liquid.

Smell is a good sign and so is sound. Dreams never sound like real life, they sound bigger, clearer, more distinct, the Hollywood version of sound. These ice cubes would tinkle if he was still in a dream. They don't.

Arthur has checked his totem six times since he woke up, which is five times more than he usually does. Once after each dream, and he knows that patterns make them easier to attack, but he also knows what will keep him going (and not turn into Mal).

There are three inevitable moments of horror for every dreamer. The first time you die in a dream. The first time a friend kills you to wake you up. The first time you kill a friend to wake them up. Which of them messes you up the most probably tells you something about you.

But it happens and you deal, or you accept you won't be able to deal with it and you stop. Or at least that's what you tell yourself, and everyone chooses to ignore the number of dreamers with drug and alcohol problems because they can no longer escape into dreams.

A projection that looks just like your friend, and acts damn like her too, a friend you know is dead, that's probably not a new one, but it's new to Arthur. Having that entirely dead, for-goodness-sake's-you-were-her-funeral-dead, friend rip your throat out with claws is likely to be new to everyone.

He hasn't spoken to Dom, but his spooked reaction is strong enough that it's broken through the wall of misery that's surrounded Dom ever since Mal died.

"Why didn't you warn me?" Arthur asks Dom.

"It's not every time." That means it's every time, because Dom's a terrible liar. "I didn't think anyone else could see her."

"I could see her alright," and feel her, and her nails growing into knives piercing through his throat.

What Dom hadn't told him, what he hadn't told anyone, because who'd go under with him if he had, is that Mal appears to Dom when he dreams. Dom had thought that she was his problem alone, and that, as long as she was only haunting him, that was somehow okay. Now that he knew that Arthur had seen her too, he is curious, uncomfortably so, about what Mal had said and done, with insufficient focus, as far as Arthur is concerned, with the part where she'd killed Arthur. But that was Dom, and Mal, and Mal and Dom together, slightly too wrapped up in each other for anyone's comfort. But loving, endlessly loving. Hell, even Mal's mother didn't think for a moment that Dom had had anything to do with Mal's death.

Arthur is close enough to Dom that Mal doesn't just kill him the way she does some of the others they dream with, people who don't know who this woman was and think she's just a remarkably detailed projection. She stops and chats, before killing him.

He wants to stop time when she does, because this projection is so much like Mal, and when she smiles he wants to relax and chat the way they used to because it has been too long. She'd be amazed by how much James has grown and Philippa, she's terrifyingly clever and curious. There's all these things that Mal has missed.

But Arthur was also close enough to Mal to be able to tell this wasn't her. It wasn't a "true" projection, no, there was far too much to her, able to respond to what was said to her, different environments and, frustratingly, their plans, and she remembered what you'd told her, at least as long as the dream lasted, but she wasn't Mal. She was some terrifying amalgam of Dom's memory of Mal and his guilt.

So Arthur did speak to her, told her things, things he thought the real Mal would have wanted to know, things that Dom ought to know about what was going on at home, but doesn't seem to take in while he's awake. Arthur wondered if that was what this was, the part of Dom that wondered if he ought to have stayed and argued his case rather than running away. Arthur can see the arguments for staying, and he can see the arguments against staying. Arthur would have supported him either way, because Dom was his best friend.

Arthur hoped some of the information was sinking in, because getting through to Dom topside was difficult. Arthur has no idea what happened between Dom and Mal, they always were a mystery together, a strange loop where no matter what was visible outside, there was even more inside, but he's terrified that whatever it was will claim Dom too.

Who he has with him now isn't Dom, not the way Arthur remembers him, no more than the projection is Mal. There's parts of him, they mostly come through with Mal, and the way reality in dreams bends around her, but there's so much missing in all the sadness.

Arthur's trying to hold Dom together, and their life on the run, and now he's got to find an architect, or become a better one himself. Arthur doesn't believe in false modesty - he's not a bad architect, but he's aware when he builds a place it feels like an architectural drawing, not real and lived in. Sometimes that's good enough, sometimes it's not. Arthur's sets lack that feeling of real that Dom brings, that fact that he thinks of them as sets probably doesn't help, but Dom's places always feel like somewhere next door to where you've really been. Mal's places hadn't been like that, they'd felt like somewhere you'd wanted to go all your life, now here you were.

But Arthur's a problem-solver, best at making do with what tools they have so he'll learn.

They're treading water, and this isn't fixing anything about the underlying problem, but head above the waves is better than drowning.