Incpetion Kink Meme - Gen, maternal Mal
Title: Untitled
Pairing: Gen
Rating: PG
Prompt: Pre-limbo. Mal is like a mother to Arthur.
“You’ve met my daughter, haven’t you, Arthur?”
Arthur looked up from his notes, letting his pen go still halfway through a line, and shook his head, “No, sir.”
“Ah, well, come down from there and let me introduce you.” Professor Berkeley gestured at him from where he was standing down near the chalkboard, and Arthur frowned a little as he stood. He liked the professor well enough-he had always seemed to take an interest in Arthur’s studies-but he wasn’t sure he wanted to indulge what looked like it could be an attempt at matchmaking.
“I really needed to finish copying down these notes, professor…” he said, gesturing to the papers spread out on his desk. The final was coming up, and he needed a good grade for his scholarship to be renewed. Without it, there was no way he would be able to afford a school in Paris, and although he was fairly certain he wasn’t in any real risk of failing Introduction to Urban Design, he was aiming for an A.
Plus, the woman standing next to Professor Berkeley was very pretty, and he really didn’t have time for distractions two weeks before the end of the year.
“Now, don’t be shy,” the professor said in a tone that left no room for argument, “Mal, this is Arthur Darling. He’s the student I was telling you about the other day.”
“Darling?” the woman said, and Arthur could tell from her voice that she was smiling. He felt himself flush and wondered again how hard it would be to get his name changed to Jones. Reluctantly, he left his things are started down the stairs on one side of the lecture hall. “What a sweet name.”
Arthur noticed the light French accent, and as he took her outstretched hand he said with a slight smile, “Bonjour.”
“Bonjour, Arthur,” she returned, with a smile that made her whole face light up. She was a bit shorter than Arthur, but carried herself with a regal sort of grace that made her seem to float as she leaned forward on tiptoe to kiss him on each cheek. He returned the gesture as gracefully as he could. His time in France had taught him how to keep from knocking heads with people, but he didn’t think he’d ever learn completely how to shake his awkwardness.
Mal didn’t seem to mind however, and she was still smiling when she released him.
“Pleased to meet you,” Arthur said, glancing over at his professor for a second before going on, “Uh, is there any particular reason-I mean, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
He felt himself flush again, and stuck his hands in his pockets. He realized he was just wearing his most comfortable clothes-an old t-shirt and pair of jeans-while she was dressed in a lovely yellow sundress with heels. He felt thoroughly outclassed, and was glad that she at least had the manners not to look down her nose at him.
“Mal wanted to talk to you about a job,” Professor Berkeley said, putting a hand on Mal’s shoulder, “It’s something that we’ve been working on together for several years, but I only recently handed over control of the project to her and her fiancée.”
Fiancée. That put at least one of Arthur’s worries to rest, but he couldn’t help a little twinge of disappointment.
“I already have a job. I work in the library,” he said, cautiously.
“I think you would like this one much better,” Mal said, smiling and offering him her arm, “Come, we can walk and I will tell you about it.”
“I really should finish my notes…” Arthur protested weakly.
“Nonsense,” Professor Berkeley said, “You needn’t worry. You’re one of my best students, Arthur. You’ll do fine.”
“I-“ Arthur wanted to say something further, but Mal put her arm firmly through his and tugged him towards the door, her heels clicking lightly against the linoleum.
“Come on, and we can talk. I assure you, you will be glad that we did.”
-------
The first time Arthur shared a dream, he found himself in the house he had moved away from when he was seven. It was deserted, except for Mal sitting at the large dining room table, and seemed empty without the sounds of his siblings reverberating throughout the narrow halls and too-small rooms.
“You’re dreaming,” she told him immediately, and he realized it was the case. As he stared, he realized that everything was too big, too tall for reality, as if it was the world stretched and warped to fit the perspective of a child, “Try not to let it fall apart.”
Only then did the walls explode outwards in a flash like a firecracker, and Arthur found himself awake suddenly, lying across a cot set up in what looked like a disused office.
Mal’s hands were cool around his, helping him to sit up, and though his heart was racing and he breathing was far too fast, he felt… Well, giddy. Excited.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” said the man Mal had introduced to him before the dream, her fiancée. His name was something like Colby, and he was an American.
Arthur nodded at him, unable to find the words, and then asked, “Can I try that again?”
-------
Mal seemed to be determined to feed him every single time they met to talk, and Arthur found himself taking a seemingly endless supply of baked goods and homemade dinners back to his dormroom with him in the coming weeks. The shared dreaming was being used for therapeutic purposes, Mal explained over a plate of snickerdoodles, to help those who were unable or unwilling to participate in traditional therapies. It was particularly effective for those suffering from PTSD, they’d found, and were using it mainly with soldiers.
Mal and her fiancée were some of the best at what they were doing. Dom would create the world, and Mal (who was halfway through her doctorate in psychology) would use the controlled environment of the dream to try to reach the patient.
“So where do I fit in?” Arthur had asked almost at once, and Mal had smiled and taken his hand.
“We need someone who’s smart and who can help us do research on the people before they come in. My father said you were trustworthy,” Mal had explained, her hands folded neatly in her lap, her expression earnest.
“That’s not all, though,” Dom had said, coming over to where they were sitting near a window in the library, “The subconscious projections of a subject can often turn violent. We need someone to watch our backs while we’re working. To protect me to maintain the dream state and to keep Mal from getting hurt before she can get through to the subject.”
“You need a bodyguard?” Arthur had said, “You could have anyone do that. There’s plenty of muscle for hire.”
“No, sweetie,” Mal had said, “We don’t need a bodyguard. We need someone with more innovation than that, someone we can trust.”
“A point man,” Dom had told him, “Someone to warn us when there’s danger, someone who knows as much as we do about the subject, if not more, and can pick up the slack.”
Arthur had asked for a couple of days to think about it, but he’d called back almost as soon as he’d gotten home to say yes.
-------
Arthur had fallen in love with the work instantly. There was something impossible to resist about seeing worlds unfold in an instant, unbounded by the constraints of reality. The first few dreams were simply training. Dom taught him how to use a gun (“In the dream, it behaves basically how you think it should,” he explained, “In reality they’re a lot louder, and there’s a lot more kick when you fire.”) and Mal took him through the motions of creating a dream world, though she assured him that Dom would be doing that, for the most part.
The first real job he did went smoothly. He sat across the street with Dom while Mal approached the subject to talk, and the dream ended without anything going wrong. The next job went almost as well, though Mal was disappointed that she wasn’t able to get through to the man that they’d been treating.
The third job didn’t go quite so easily, and Arthur found out first-hand just how aggressive the projections could be.
They were in a restaurant, and Arthur and Dom were both in three-piece suits. Mal had been thoroughly delighted by that, and had spent several minutes towards the beginning of the dream gleefully re-adjusting Dom’s pocket-handkerchief and Arthur’s bowtie before they went inside. The subject was a woman with short-cropped blonde hair whose entire unit had been killed in a surprise attack, and halfway through the time they had in the dream, Arthur saw her reach for a steak knife off the table and get to her feet. Her chair toppled over backwards, and Arthur could hear the anger in her voice even though he couldn’t make out the words.
He reacted on instinct, relying on reflex to lunge across the space between them and grab her wrist, twisting hard and reaching for the knife. He felt something hot across his palm, but managed to force her down and away from Mal, his fingers biting into her wrist until the knife clattered to the ground.
Everyone in the place was looking at them. There was silence except for the little whimpers coming from the woman as Arthur kept her arm twisted up, immobilizing her.
“Arthur-“ Mal said in a very calm voice, “Let go of her slowly and come back over by me.”
Arthur obeyed, keeping his eyes on the diners around them. They were staring impassively, as if they weren’t really seeing what was in front of them. He realized his hand was slick with blood from where she’d cut him.
The sense of someone behind him made Arthur turn quickly, but it was only Dom, his face set in a harsh frown.
“They’re going to go for me,” he said, keeping his voice low, “Arthur, there’s a gun-“
Before he could finish, they moved. They were silent, a single entity surging up out of their seats, across tables towards him. Dom dropped to the floor, grabbing Mal and pulling her down with them, and for a second, Arthur hesitated, feeling everything go blank and slow.
Luckily, the first one that hit him slammed his head hard enough against a table to break his neck, and he jerked awake gasping and clutching at his throat. Mal and Dom were still asleep, but Arthur saw the subject twitch and then come awake in a rush, lurching up and clawing at the needle in her wrist.
Arthur didn’t stop to think, he just threw himself at her and tried to pin her down.
She clobbered him in the face with her elbow and shoved him off her with ease, and Arthur heard a slight popping noise as stars exploded in his vision. By that point the technician and chemist Professor Berkeley had assigned to work with them had realized something was wrong, and Arthur saw through a bright wash of pain that the chemist was brandishing a needle and trying to block the exit.
The woman was a soldier, and Arthur saw her grab a paperweight off the desk without missing a beat, turning to face the chemist. He could feel something hot dripping across his face and tasted the tang of blood in his mouth, but she was turned away from him and he lunged again, getting his arms around her, forcing her to her knees.
The chemist was quick, and managed to stab the needle into the woman’s arm as Arthur struggled to hold her. Her flailing grew weaker, and suddenly she went limp. Arthur realized the person wheezing in pain was him, and let go, reaching up to clutch at his nose, which was throbbing with white-hot pain.
By then, Dom and Mal were awake, and Arthur felt cool hands on his cheek, heard Mal’s voice saying something soft and soothing in French too quick for him to follow.
He could hear Dom yelling at someone, but Mal was urging him to his feet, and he followed blindly as she led him out into the hall and made him sit.
“Lean your head back, sweetheart,” she said, and he obeyed on automatic, her maternal tone recalling all the childish habits, “Put your hands down, let me see.”
Her fingers were cold against the painful skin, and she was careful not to touch his nose, which felt like it was twice its normal size.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Mal said, her tone artificially chipper, but her words made Arthur feel better almost instantly, even if his face was still throbbing. There was just something about being reassured in that tone that made it seem like it couldn’t be all that terrible, “A little bit of ice and you’ll be just fine. Come on, let’s go to the doctor’s office.”
The university had a nurse’s station, and luckily they were in the right building and only a few floors away. Mal kept her hand on the small of Arthur’s back, guiding him gently as they walked and reminding him to keep his head tilted back. As the nurse found an ice pack, Mal started to wipe away the blood from Arthur’s face with a cool washcloth. Her touch was precise and gentle, and despite the pain Arthur found himself relaxing a little as she kept up a litany of encouragements in English and French.
“It’s a good thing you’re not really wearing that suit,” Mal said, sitting back on her heels. She was kneeling on the bench next to Arthur, the bloodied washcloth still clutched in her hand, “You would have completely ruined it-Your shirt is a mess.”
Arthur looked down, and saw that his grey t-shirt was spattered with blood. The bleeding from his nose had stopped, and the nurse had told him that as long as he didn’t re-injure it there was nothing to be done but put ice on it and let it heal.
“What should I tell people happened?” Arthur asked, reaching up gingerly to touch the bandages that the nurse had secured across the bridge of his nose.
“Tell them you were protecting a lady,” Mal said, a little smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, “It will make you sound dashing. Women love a rugged man.”
Arthur smiled, but stopped quickly when it made his face start to throb again.
-------
Mal got more protective of him after that. She insisted that he carry a gun into the dream, even when their subject was almost guaranteed not to cause trouble, and a few times she refused to take jobs because of the potential danger. Arthur could see it was a little exasperating for Dom, and if he’d had any say he would have tried to convince Mal not to worry about him so much, but she refused to listen to him when he tried to convince her he would be fine.
She also insisted he come over more often for dinner, and spending the evening at Dom and Mal’s apartment became a regular part of his life. It was a cramped, cozy space, but there was enough room for the all of them to sit together on the couch and humor Mal as she tried to inspire in them a love of black and white French cinema.
Dom would take up a position on one end of the sofa, and Arthur would sit on the other, with Mal between them. Her fingers would be twined with Dom’s, and more often than not she would hand her other hand in Arthur’s hair, combing it back absently. Occasionally she would tell him to get a haircut. It was comfortable. It was safe.
Half a dozen blind dates after Mal first started trying to set him up with a nice girl, Arthur met a young lady who charmed him completely, and they started dating. The time he spent with her cut in to his work with Dom and Mal in the dreams, as well as what little free time he had left over, and eventually the relationship fell apart because she kept insisting that Arthur keep his mind grounded in reality, while he wanted her to think outside the box.
Mal was there for him then, too, with homemade soup and a bottle of wine and stories of her insane ex-boyfriends. It hadn’t really made things better, but sometimes when you were drunk enough and someone was telling you in a gorgeous French accent that you would get over the unimaginative little bitch, it was easier to pretend it would be.
“You’ve got Dom now, though,” Arthur had pointed out over his fourth glass, and Mal had nodded, allowing him to top off her own glass.
“Yes, and I’m lucky I do. He’s just wonderful.”
“You’re wonderful,” Arthur said, waving a hand in the air, “You’re like… You’re like… You make me food all the time and you’re really just great.”
Mal leaned over and kissed him sloppily on the forehead, and he laughed.
“I think you’re pretty lovely yourself, Arthur Darling,” she said, and he felt content.
Dom and Mal finally set a date for the wedding, and Dom asked Arthur to be a groomsman. Arthur ended up spending most of his time on the day-of running errands for Mal while she tried to get into the elaborate contraption that she kept insisting was a dress.
Arthur got the third dance with the bride, after her husband and father, and she cried on his shoulder the whole time, and told him he looked wonderful in a tuxedo.
Mal was the first person to kill him in a dream. She shot him from point blank range after an overturned car crushed his legs, and he was there to reassure her when she woke up two minutes later in near hysterics.
When Dom had to go out of town to work with a group of dream-sharers in Berlin trying to crack down on the budding underground rings of illegal extractors, Arthur was the one Mal called to buy her a burger at 4 A.M. to satisfy her pregnancy cravings.
He sat with her until dawn, half asleep on the couch with his ear pressed against her swollen belly, listening to the baby kick.
“You’re going to babysit,” she’d said firmly, “And you are going to like it.”
“Do I at least get to be godfather?” he’d asked.
Mal had laughed, her fingers resting across her pregnant stomach, and said, “Why not?”
In the summers, when classes were out and he had little else to do but follow them around in dreams, Arthur found himself spending long hours in the house they’d moved in to once Mal had gotten pregnant. Little Phillipa was a gorgeous baby, but seemed to cry continually, and Arthur got used to taking her when he saw signs of strain showing on Dom or Mal’s face. He knew they appreciated it, though they never really needed to say it.
Mal started talking about learning more about the limits of dreams a few weeks after she got pregnant for the second time, probably because both Arthur and Dom agreed that it wasn’t safe to expose an unborn baby to Somnacin and she had little else to do but work on her thesis and think. She came up with the idea of totems, then, and of a musical cue to tell the dreamers that their time in the dream was coming to an end.
Dom was in Los Angeles when Mal went into labor, and Arthur drove her to the hospital, knuckles white on the steering wheel the entire way. He hated hearing her in pain when there was nothing he could, and he wasn’t able to stay in the room for more than a few minutes at a time until they’d given her the pain medicine and the agony had eased a little.
She nearly broke his fingers as he held her hand, but the healthy baby boy was named James Arthur Cobb, and Arthur stayed with her until Dom finally stumbled in a little after nine in the morning, leaving his suitcase by the door and running to her side.
Arthur wasn’t jealous when Dom took his place; he was only relieved that Mal had who she wanted with her.
The ideas that had intrigued Mal throughout her second pregnancy didn’t leave her, and she kept insisting they try more and more elaborate stunts in the dream. At first, Dom and Arthur would go along with what she suggested, trying different methods of building worlds and interacting with projections. When she suggested they try to induce a dream within a dream, they humored her. When she insisted they go deeper, Arthur had thought that he and Dom were in agreement, that it couldn’t be done and would be too dangerous to attempt.
-------
Dom called him the day after everything changed.
He said, “We need to talk. Can you come over?”
Arthur barely recognized them. They seemed so utterly different. Mal was faded, Dom was cold. He could see the PASIV sitting in one corner of the living room, like a monster.
“What happened?” Arthur asked, and Mal looked at him but didn’t see.
Pairing: Gen
Rating: PG
Prompt: Pre-limbo. Mal is like a mother to Arthur.
“You’ve met my daughter, haven’t you, Arthur?”
Arthur looked up from his notes, letting his pen go still halfway through a line, and shook his head, “No, sir.”
“Ah, well, come down from there and let me introduce you.” Professor Berkeley gestured at him from where he was standing down near the chalkboard, and Arthur frowned a little as he stood. He liked the professor well enough-he had always seemed to take an interest in Arthur’s studies-but he wasn’t sure he wanted to indulge what looked like it could be an attempt at matchmaking.
“I really needed to finish copying down these notes, professor…” he said, gesturing to the papers spread out on his desk. The final was coming up, and he needed a good grade for his scholarship to be renewed. Without it, there was no way he would be able to afford a school in Paris, and although he was fairly certain he wasn’t in any real risk of failing Introduction to Urban Design, he was aiming for an A.
Plus, the woman standing next to Professor Berkeley was very pretty, and he really didn’t have time for distractions two weeks before the end of the year.
“Now, don’t be shy,” the professor said in a tone that left no room for argument, “Mal, this is Arthur Darling. He’s the student I was telling you about the other day.”
“Darling?” the woman said, and Arthur could tell from her voice that she was smiling. He felt himself flush and wondered again how hard it would be to get his name changed to Jones. Reluctantly, he left his things are started down the stairs on one side of the lecture hall. “What a sweet name.”
Arthur noticed the light French accent, and as he took her outstretched hand he said with a slight smile, “Bonjour.”
“Bonjour, Arthur,” she returned, with a smile that made her whole face light up. She was a bit shorter than Arthur, but carried herself with a regal sort of grace that made her seem to float as she leaned forward on tiptoe to kiss him on each cheek. He returned the gesture as gracefully as he could. His time in France had taught him how to keep from knocking heads with people, but he didn’t think he’d ever learn completely how to shake his awkwardness.
Mal didn’t seem to mind however, and she was still smiling when she released him.
“Pleased to meet you,” Arthur said, glancing over at his professor for a second before going on, “Uh, is there any particular reason-I mean, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
He felt himself flush again, and stuck his hands in his pockets. He realized he was just wearing his most comfortable clothes-an old t-shirt and pair of jeans-while she was dressed in a lovely yellow sundress with heels. He felt thoroughly outclassed, and was glad that she at least had the manners not to look down her nose at him.
“Mal wanted to talk to you about a job,” Professor Berkeley said, putting a hand on Mal’s shoulder, “It’s something that we’ve been working on together for several years, but I only recently handed over control of the project to her and her fiancée.”
Fiancée. That put at least one of Arthur’s worries to rest, but he couldn’t help a little twinge of disappointment.
“I already have a job. I work in the library,” he said, cautiously.
“I think you would like this one much better,” Mal said, smiling and offering him her arm, “Come, we can walk and I will tell you about it.”
“I really should finish my notes…” Arthur protested weakly.
“Nonsense,” Professor Berkeley said, “You needn’t worry. You’re one of my best students, Arthur. You’ll do fine.”
“I-“ Arthur wanted to say something further, but Mal put her arm firmly through his and tugged him towards the door, her heels clicking lightly against the linoleum.
“Come on, and we can talk. I assure you, you will be glad that we did.”
-------
The first time Arthur shared a dream, he found himself in the house he had moved away from when he was seven. It was deserted, except for Mal sitting at the large dining room table, and seemed empty without the sounds of his siblings reverberating throughout the narrow halls and too-small rooms.
“You’re dreaming,” she told him immediately, and he realized it was the case. As he stared, he realized that everything was too big, too tall for reality, as if it was the world stretched and warped to fit the perspective of a child, “Try not to let it fall apart.”
Only then did the walls explode outwards in a flash like a firecracker, and Arthur found himself awake suddenly, lying across a cot set up in what looked like a disused office.
Mal’s hands were cool around his, helping him to sit up, and though his heart was racing and he breathing was far too fast, he felt… Well, giddy. Excited.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” said the man Mal had introduced to him before the dream, her fiancée. His name was something like Colby, and he was an American.
Arthur nodded at him, unable to find the words, and then asked, “Can I try that again?”
-------
Mal seemed to be determined to feed him every single time they met to talk, and Arthur found himself taking a seemingly endless supply of baked goods and homemade dinners back to his dormroom with him in the coming weeks. The shared dreaming was being used for therapeutic purposes, Mal explained over a plate of snickerdoodles, to help those who were unable or unwilling to participate in traditional therapies. It was particularly effective for those suffering from PTSD, they’d found, and were using it mainly with soldiers.
Mal and her fiancée were some of the best at what they were doing. Dom would create the world, and Mal (who was halfway through her doctorate in psychology) would use the controlled environment of the dream to try to reach the patient.
“So where do I fit in?” Arthur had asked almost at once, and Mal had smiled and taken his hand.
“We need someone who’s smart and who can help us do research on the people before they come in. My father said you were trustworthy,” Mal had explained, her hands folded neatly in her lap, her expression earnest.
“That’s not all, though,” Dom had said, coming over to where they were sitting near a window in the library, “The subconscious projections of a subject can often turn violent. We need someone to watch our backs while we’re working. To protect me to maintain the dream state and to keep Mal from getting hurt before she can get through to the subject.”
“You need a bodyguard?” Arthur had said, “You could have anyone do that. There’s plenty of muscle for hire.”
“No, sweetie,” Mal had said, “We don’t need a bodyguard. We need someone with more innovation than that, someone we can trust.”
“A point man,” Dom had told him, “Someone to warn us when there’s danger, someone who knows as much as we do about the subject, if not more, and can pick up the slack.”
Arthur had asked for a couple of days to think about it, but he’d called back almost as soon as he’d gotten home to say yes.
-------
Arthur had fallen in love with the work instantly. There was something impossible to resist about seeing worlds unfold in an instant, unbounded by the constraints of reality. The first few dreams were simply training. Dom taught him how to use a gun (“In the dream, it behaves basically how you think it should,” he explained, “In reality they’re a lot louder, and there’s a lot more kick when you fire.”) and Mal took him through the motions of creating a dream world, though she assured him that Dom would be doing that, for the most part.
The first real job he did went smoothly. He sat across the street with Dom while Mal approached the subject to talk, and the dream ended without anything going wrong. The next job went almost as well, though Mal was disappointed that she wasn’t able to get through to the man that they’d been treating.
The third job didn’t go quite so easily, and Arthur found out first-hand just how aggressive the projections could be.
They were in a restaurant, and Arthur and Dom were both in three-piece suits. Mal had been thoroughly delighted by that, and had spent several minutes towards the beginning of the dream gleefully re-adjusting Dom’s pocket-handkerchief and Arthur’s bowtie before they went inside. The subject was a woman with short-cropped blonde hair whose entire unit had been killed in a surprise attack, and halfway through the time they had in the dream, Arthur saw her reach for a steak knife off the table and get to her feet. Her chair toppled over backwards, and Arthur could hear the anger in her voice even though he couldn’t make out the words.
He reacted on instinct, relying on reflex to lunge across the space between them and grab her wrist, twisting hard and reaching for the knife. He felt something hot across his palm, but managed to force her down and away from Mal, his fingers biting into her wrist until the knife clattered to the ground.
Everyone in the place was looking at them. There was silence except for the little whimpers coming from the woman as Arthur kept her arm twisted up, immobilizing her.
“Arthur-“ Mal said in a very calm voice, “Let go of her slowly and come back over by me.”
Arthur obeyed, keeping his eyes on the diners around them. They were staring impassively, as if they weren’t really seeing what was in front of them. He realized his hand was slick with blood from where she’d cut him.
The sense of someone behind him made Arthur turn quickly, but it was only Dom, his face set in a harsh frown.
“They’re going to go for me,” he said, keeping his voice low, “Arthur, there’s a gun-“
Before he could finish, they moved. They were silent, a single entity surging up out of their seats, across tables towards him. Dom dropped to the floor, grabbing Mal and pulling her down with them, and for a second, Arthur hesitated, feeling everything go blank and slow.
Luckily, the first one that hit him slammed his head hard enough against a table to break his neck, and he jerked awake gasping and clutching at his throat. Mal and Dom were still asleep, but Arthur saw the subject twitch and then come awake in a rush, lurching up and clawing at the needle in her wrist.
Arthur didn’t stop to think, he just threw himself at her and tried to pin her down.
She clobbered him in the face with her elbow and shoved him off her with ease, and Arthur heard a slight popping noise as stars exploded in his vision. By that point the technician and chemist Professor Berkeley had assigned to work with them had realized something was wrong, and Arthur saw through a bright wash of pain that the chemist was brandishing a needle and trying to block the exit.
The woman was a soldier, and Arthur saw her grab a paperweight off the desk without missing a beat, turning to face the chemist. He could feel something hot dripping across his face and tasted the tang of blood in his mouth, but she was turned away from him and he lunged again, getting his arms around her, forcing her to her knees.
The chemist was quick, and managed to stab the needle into the woman’s arm as Arthur struggled to hold her. Her flailing grew weaker, and suddenly she went limp. Arthur realized the person wheezing in pain was him, and let go, reaching up to clutch at his nose, which was throbbing with white-hot pain.
By then, Dom and Mal were awake, and Arthur felt cool hands on his cheek, heard Mal’s voice saying something soft and soothing in French too quick for him to follow.
He could hear Dom yelling at someone, but Mal was urging him to his feet, and he followed blindly as she led him out into the hall and made him sit.
“Lean your head back, sweetheart,” she said, and he obeyed on automatic, her maternal tone recalling all the childish habits, “Put your hands down, let me see.”
Her fingers were cold against the painful skin, and she was careful not to touch his nose, which felt like it was twice its normal size.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Mal said, her tone artificially chipper, but her words made Arthur feel better almost instantly, even if his face was still throbbing. There was just something about being reassured in that tone that made it seem like it couldn’t be all that terrible, “A little bit of ice and you’ll be just fine. Come on, let’s go to the doctor’s office.”
The university had a nurse’s station, and luckily they were in the right building and only a few floors away. Mal kept her hand on the small of Arthur’s back, guiding him gently as they walked and reminding him to keep his head tilted back. As the nurse found an ice pack, Mal started to wipe away the blood from Arthur’s face with a cool washcloth. Her touch was precise and gentle, and despite the pain Arthur found himself relaxing a little as she kept up a litany of encouragements in English and French.
“It’s a good thing you’re not really wearing that suit,” Mal said, sitting back on her heels. She was kneeling on the bench next to Arthur, the bloodied washcloth still clutched in her hand, “You would have completely ruined it-Your shirt is a mess.”
Arthur looked down, and saw that his grey t-shirt was spattered with blood. The bleeding from his nose had stopped, and the nurse had told him that as long as he didn’t re-injure it there was nothing to be done but put ice on it and let it heal.
“What should I tell people happened?” Arthur asked, reaching up gingerly to touch the bandages that the nurse had secured across the bridge of his nose.
“Tell them you were protecting a lady,” Mal said, a little smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, “It will make you sound dashing. Women love a rugged man.”
Arthur smiled, but stopped quickly when it made his face start to throb again.
-------
Mal got more protective of him after that. She insisted that he carry a gun into the dream, even when their subject was almost guaranteed not to cause trouble, and a few times she refused to take jobs because of the potential danger. Arthur could see it was a little exasperating for Dom, and if he’d had any say he would have tried to convince Mal not to worry about him so much, but she refused to listen to him when he tried to convince her he would be fine.
She also insisted he come over more often for dinner, and spending the evening at Dom and Mal’s apartment became a regular part of his life. It was a cramped, cozy space, but there was enough room for the all of them to sit together on the couch and humor Mal as she tried to inspire in them a love of black and white French cinema.
Dom would take up a position on one end of the sofa, and Arthur would sit on the other, with Mal between them. Her fingers would be twined with Dom’s, and more often than not she would hand her other hand in Arthur’s hair, combing it back absently. Occasionally she would tell him to get a haircut. It was comfortable. It was safe.
Half a dozen blind dates after Mal first started trying to set him up with a nice girl, Arthur met a young lady who charmed him completely, and they started dating. The time he spent with her cut in to his work with Dom and Mal in the dreams, as well as what little free time he had left over, and eventually the relationship fell apart because she kept insisting that Arthur keep his mind grounded in reality, while he wanted her to think outside the box.
Mal was there for him then, too, with homemade soup and a bottle of wine and stories of her insane ex-boyfriends. It hadn’t really made things better, but sometimes when you were drunk enough and someone was telling you in a gorgeous French accent that you would get over the unimaginative little bitch, it was easier to pretend it would be.
“You’ve got Dom now, though,” Arthur had pointed out over his fourth glass, and Mal had nodded, allowing him to top off her own glass.
“Yes, and I’m lucky I do. He’s just wonderful.”
“You’re wonderful,” Arthur said, waving a hand in the air, “You’re like… You’re like… You make me food all the time and you’re really just great.”
Mal leaned over and kissed him sloppily on the forehead, and he laughed.
“I think you’re pretty lovely yourself, Arthur Darling,” she said, and he felt content.
Dom and Mal finally set a date for the wedding, and Dom asked Arthur to be a groomsman. Arthur ended up spending most of his time on the day-of running errands for Mal while she tried to get into the elaborate contraption that she kept insisting was a dress.
Arthur got the third dance with the bride, after her husband and father, and she cried on his shoulder the whole time, and told him he looked wonderful in a tuxedo.
Mal was the first person to kill him in a dream. She shot him from point blank range after an overturned car crushed his legs, and he was there to reassure her when she woke up two minutes later in near hysterics.
When Dom had to go out of town to work with a group of dream-sharers in Berlin trying to crack down on the budding underground rings of illegal extractors, Arthur was the one Mal called to buy her a burger at 4 A.M. to satisfy her pregnancy cravings.
He sat with her until dawn, half asleep on the couch with his ear pressed against her swollen belly, listening to the baby kick.
“You’re going to babysit,” she’d said firmly, “And you are going to like it.”
“Do I at least get to be godfather?” he’d asked.
Mal had laughed, her fingers resting across her pregnant stomach, and said, “Why not?”
In the summers, when classes were out and he had little else to do but follow them around in dreams, Arthur found himself spending long hours in the house they’d moved in to once Mal had gotten pregnant. Little Phillipa was a gorgeous baby, but seemed to cry continually, and Arthur got used to taking her when he saw signs of strain showing on Dom or Mal’s face. He knew they appreciated it, though they never really needed to say it.
Mal started talking about learning more about the limits of dreams a few weeks after she got pregnant for the second time, probably because both Arthur and Dom agreed that it wasn’t safe to expose an unborn baby to Somnacin and she had little else to do but work on her thesis and think. She came up with the idea of totems, then, and of a musical cue to tell the dreamers that their time in the dream was coming to an end.
Dom was in Los Angeles when Mal went into labor, and Arthur drove her to the hospital, knuckles white on the steering wheel the entire way. He hated hearing her in pain when there was nothing he could, and he wasn’t able to stay in the room for more than a few minutes at a time until they’d given her the pain medicine and the agony had eased a little.
She nearly broke his fingers as he held her hand, but the healthy baby boy was named James Arthur Cobb, and Arthur stayed with her until Dom finally stumbled in a little after nine in the morning, leaving his suitcase by the door and running to her side.
Arthur wasn’t jealous when Dom took his place; he was only relieved that Mal had who she wanted with her.
The ideas that had intrigued Mal throughout her second pregnancy didn’t leave her, and she kept insisting they try more and more elaborate stunts in the dream. At first, Dom and Arthur would go along with what she suggested, trying different methods of building worlds and interacting with projections. When she suggested they try to induce a dream within a dream, they humored her. When she insisted they go deeper, Arthur had thought that he and Dom were in agreement, that it couldn’t be done and would be too dangerous to attempt.
-------
Dom called him the day after everything changed.
He said, “We need to talk. Can you come over?”
Arthur barely recognized them. They seemed so utterly different. Mal was faded, Dom was cold. He could see the PASIV sitting in one corner of the living room, like a monster.
“What happened?” Arthur asked, and Mal looked at him but didn’t see.