Cause I Can't See the Sun [Inception, for i_reversebang]
Title: Cause I Can't See the Sun
Fandom: Inception
Art: Untitled by dwn1s0ul
Characters/Pairings: Mal, Arthur, Eames, Ariadne [Mal/Cobb]
Rating/Warnings: PG (other than a lot of thoroughly obscene language.) Mentions of suicide on par with canon; also may be a bit triggery if you know (or have known) someone in a coma.
Written for: i_reversebang
Wordcount: 7100 words
Author's Notes: Title and epigraph are from the Thriving Ivory song "Angels on the Moon." Also, my sincerest thanks to dwn1s0ul for creating such a gorgeous prompt and being so kind about my typical last-minute approach to deadlines, and most especially to fae_boleyn for her incredible spur-of-the-moment beta.
Don't tell me if I'm dying,
cause I don't want to know.
If I can't see the sun,
Maybe I should go.
Don't wake me, cause I'm dreaming
of angels on the moon,
where everyone you know
never leaves too soon.
She wakes to the hissing of PASIVs echoing against the blank white walls.
No one else is awake, and the sleepers around her are all strangers; fundamentally, she is alone.
Her hands are shaking as she pulls the PASIV line out; then, figuring to hell with it, she detaches all the monitoring lines as well. They leave sticky circles of gel on her skin; the detail bothers her too much, more than the noise, the empty blankness, the antiseptic reek, more even than the fact that she’s proposing to wander about this place in her clinical black underthings until she finds someone offering an explanation. She wants a totem, wants one desperately, for the comforting familiar shape of it if nothing else, but - yes, sorting through the memories, she didn’t think of the things until she was in the first level of this experiment.
This fucking experiment.
The memories are hazy, dim, but that’s only to be expected after - God in His heaven, how long was she down there? For a moment she can’t remember anything, not a single one of all the histories that she’s built up for herself; her head spins and swims and she clutches at the blankets, the hard metal edge of the bed, the lines still in her hands, anything and everything that she can possibly verify as close enough to real to be present.
The memories solidify; yes. Her time under is still hazy, but that’s all right; that, at least, is undeniably unreal. You can’t wake into a deeper level. And this current level, yes -
The government testing. They’d agreed. Three months out of their lives, enough money to make ends meet for years. To set up on their own, to make a life for themselves, for her and Dom together and Arthur helping them with the dreaming. Arthur suggested it -
Arthur. Yes. She remembers him, too. He was under there, is under there. He always had the best memory, all his obsessive love for little details; maybe he can help sort out the bits and pieces of what’s going on here.
I should wake up Dom first, she thinks, and panic clenches in her stomach, sickening and heart-stopping and tight around her breath; she hasn’t felt like this since college and she almost doubles over.
All right, she thinks to herself, all right, I’ll wake Arthur up first.
That might be easier said than done. She wanders through the rows of sleepers, searching aimlessly; if there was any system of organization down here, ever, she has forgotten it. The quiet padding of her bare feet only emphasizes the terrifying quiet; more than once she presses her hand over a stranger’s lips or wrists to verify that she is at least not the only one breathing.
Sheer luck leads her to a computer station at the end of a row, touchscreen embedded in the wall. By some miracle, it isn’t password-protected, or some fool has left it logged in. She doesn’t take the time to investigate that, just brings up the Subject Database - so clearly and conveniently labeled - and types in Arthur Morgan.
The correct Arthur is first on the list; once she puzzles out the numbering system he isn’t hard to find. Getting there is a different story; her legs tremble traitorously with every step, and she is breathing hard far sooner than she should be. She has never been this feeble in her life, not even when she was pregna -
Oh God, she never was. That’s - that’s going to take some adjusting. Everything is going to take some adjusting right now, she is currently adjusted to absolutely nothing, not even goddamn walking, and -
Breathe. Breathe. It will be okay. She will find Arthur, and wake him up, and then they will sort everything out. She will not be the only one awake, and she will have someone to listen as she sorts through everything aloud, and she will acclimatize to the world again.
She makes her way to Arthur and collapses onto the edge of his cot, pulling the crackly paper sheet back. He’s even thinner, somehow, every rib bare under just the skin; she realizes suddenly that she’s in the same state, but doesn’t dwell on it, just looks at him. He looks so incredibly fragile asleep, always has, and even more so now with his skin so pale it’s translucent and his hair loose and dry against his face. She remembers him older, collected and cool, but more than that she remembers him even younger in a place that smelled like chocolate and soda, remembers his hands and hers against the gleaming silver spouts and other people in pink-and-white uniforms calling her a mother hen. The second memory feels more real, more strong; yes, she taught him to work somewhere - yes, it was an ice-cream parlor. Of course it was, and a few moments later it’s hard to believe the memory was vague at all.
She pulls the PASIV line out of his arm. He stirs, squirms - God, yes, she definitely knew him when he was ridiculously young, although she knows just as well that she’s never seen him waking up half-naked and scrawny before, let alone with half a beard - and then he’s exploding out of bed in a burst of ripping paper and she can’t catch up to what’s going on until he’s crouched somehow combat-ready and glaring on the far side of the cot from her, and when and where and how did he learn that?
“Arthur!” she says, holding out her hands; her own sheet slips off her shoulders and they stare at each other over the hard frame of the bed, every goosebump visible. “Mon ami, relax, it’s just me.”
“Mon ami,” he says slowly, mangling the French, and straightens slightly, still bitter, still wary. “Did you really just call me that?”
“I always did,” she says. “I always do. Ri - yes. I do.”
“You do. Oh my God, Mal,” he says, and then he staggers forward and drops onto the edge of the bed, twisting around to stare at her, awkward and gangly as a teenager with those too-long absurd stick legs tangled beneath him, and she stumbles forward to sit too because her own legs are truly trembling. “Oh my God, Mal, it’s really you.”
“Of course it is,” she says, grabbing at his hands, hugging him in spite of the nakedness and the cold and the strangeness and everything because, God, it is so good to have her family close to her again; the dream is still fuzzy, still vague, but she knows that it wasn’t like this. “Arthur, do you remember anything about where we are?”
“The experiments,” he says, burying his face in her hair and trying to shake his head at the same time; she rubs his shoulders, shivering. “The fucking experiments, and that horrible fucking contract, and - oh my God, Mal, it’s really, honestly you.”
“Who else would it be?” she gasps, leaning against him, holding him, and then he stiffens.
“Mal,” he says quietly. “Do you know how long you’ve been dead?”
“What?” She blinks, once, twice. Oh. Of course. They were all sharing a dreamworld together, of course she’d seem dead, she must have woken up by being killed. But -
“A - a few hours here, so…”
“Two years. Two fucking years.”
“Oh my God.” She shudders convulsively, clinging to him. “Oh my God. I - I must seem -”
“I - it’s going to take a while to believe this,” he confesses, pulling back a little bit; he tries to look at her and ends up doing that shamefaced thing he does, eyes on the cement floor. It’s so damn him. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, mon ami,” she whispers, squeezing him again. “I understand. I’m real, I promise.” To her surprise, he freezes over under her.
“Mal,” he says quietly, prying her off. “Mal, how much do you remember about how you died?”
It’s a surreal question, but he’s staring at her like he did when he asked her whether she was in love with Dom, staring at her like the entire world rides on her answer. So she tries, she digs through her mind and struggles to remember - trains, no, trains and waking, and - a knife, and a high black heel tumbling to the ground, and the air rushing around her, and -
“Dom. Oh my God.” She opens her eyes. “Arthur, what did I do to Dom?”
“Well, he -”
“No, Arthur, what did - oh God, in front of him, and I tried - oh God,” she whispers, shuddering again, pulling away to bury her face in her hands. The gesture feels ridiculous, pointless, but she doesn’t know what else to do.
“We have to wake him up,” she whispers. Arthur touches her shoulder and she flinches away. “I have to apologize to him.”
“Mal, he owes you an a-apology as much as you owe him one,” Arthur says; she can hear his teeth chattering, and God, she doesn’t want any kind of touch right now but it’s the only way she has to keep him warm. She leans listlessly against him, eyes closed, while he explains something about tops and reality and lawsuits and inception. She doesn’t want to believe it, but she and Dom - yes, they would do anything to save each other from themselves. It’s an ugly sort of truth to discover, and she finds herself staring at her spindly grub-white fingers while he explains.
“We still have to wake him up,” she says dully, once Arthur has finished. “We just - we have to, Arthur -”
“I know, I know,” he soothes, and she forces herself to breathe, if he feels the need to be soothing her. “And Ariadne, and Eames -”
“Eames -” she says, “I think I met him once or twice, yes, that friend of yours.”
“Yes, you probably wouldn’t remember him, we - God, yes, we mostly got to know each other in the dreamscape.” Arthur’s struggling to his feet, now, and she does the same, clinging onto his arm first to get herself up and then because everything feels childish and raw and it doesn’t feel like there’s any reason not to hold on to him. “How did you find me?”
“There’s a computer terminal open,” she says, gesturing. “We can find them.”
The two of them retrace her steps (except for the parts where she got turned around), stumbling and clinging to each other like - “Arthur, did we ever get drunk together?” she asks dully, as she almost falls again.
“Oh, God, yes,” he says. “All the time, for a few years. You were the first person to ever get me drunk, actually,” he says, stopping.
“Oh dear, was I a horrible influence?” It feels strange to be smiling, but then, everything feels strange.
“Horrible,” he agrees. “Corrupted my youthful innocence to no end.” And then she’s laughing, first truly and then borderline-hysterically, and he’s no better, just clinging to her and wheezing slightly because they’re both already out of breath. “And then you did it all over again,” he chuckles, “just when I could actually not make an ass of myself after two beers, because you wanted to impress Dom with the good stuff -”
“I remember,” she manages, winding down. “God, we were so happy.” They were, too; she remembers that first, but the rest floats to the surface; laughing, holding hands, spreading out the most glamorous things she could find on her budget, wanting to do anything to get Dom to give her that look, the one that meant he was at least a little bit enchanted.
“We should hurry,” she says suddenly. She grabs Arthur’s hand and pulls him on, cursing her sleep-atrophied muscles in three languages.
Arthur goes straight for the computer screen once they reach the terminal, and Mal lets him, because - yes, he did the research. In the dreams. She leans over his shoulder, staring.
“Here he is, it looks like he’s on the next floor, and - oh. Mal, listen -”
UNRETRIEVABLE is stamped across Dom’s file.
“What - what does that -”
“I’m looking.” His fingers fly across the pull-out keyboard, the clatter echoing over the background PASIV hiss. “It looks like - Mal.”
“Stop saying my name.” She can see over his shoulder, she can guess, but the screen is blurring and she just needs him to tell her.
“I don’t think we can bring him back, Mal. If we unhook him, he’ll be vegetative.”
She slumps to the ground.
She isn’t fainting, isn’t unconscious; she flaps a hand at Arthur as he asks something about that. She just doesn’t want to stand anymore. She rests her forehead against the nubbly pale skin of her knees and stares at the speckled tiles of the floor.
Arthur kneels next to her and strokes her hair, softly; she’s confused for a moment until she remembers doing the same thing to him. For some reason, that’s the part that hurts, and it wakes her up. She stands.
“We - we have to find your friends, then, don’t we? Mr. Eames, and - Arianne, you said her name was?”
He hesitates, touching her arm. “Mal - I’m sorry. But listen, I know that you…”
“I will find him,” she finds herself saying. “I will go back under and find him, or I will find a doctor or a technician who can bring him back out. But first we need to get out of here ourselves, and we need to find your friends.” Her fingers fly across the keyboard, searching. “Is this him?” she asks, pointing.
“An Eames - yes, yes, that’s him.” Arthur pauses, touching her shoulder again. “Mal, honestly, are you okay?”
“No,” she says flatly. “No, I am not. We are going to find your friends anyway. How do you spell her name?”
He takes a deep breath. “A-r-i-a-d-n-e.”
“Well, that should be easy,” she mumbles.
Click-click-click-click-click-click-click. Pause. “I’m not getting anything. Last name?”
“Silver.”
Click-click-click, click-click-click. “Arthur, she isn’t showing up.”
“That’s impossible,” he says instantly. “I knew her.”
“There were projections down there, Arthur,” she says slowly, searching and re-searching. “She might have been one.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think she was mine, I couldn’t come up with her.”
“She could have been anyone’s,” Mal says, but she finds a page of headshots and moves aside a bit so he can see the screen.
“There,” he says immediately, pointing at a shaggy-haired girl in the third row down. “I think that’s her.”
June Hadley’s page has glaring red text: SIDE EFFECT and a string of numbers. She clicks again and again, shoving Arthur away when he tries to take the keyboard. At last she looks up.
“I think it means that she’s amnesiac. That she’s lost everything she remembers about reality.”
“Well,” he says, quietly.
“Do you still want to wake her up?” Mal asks, staring down at the keyboard. She realizes that her hands are trembling.
“I’m not sure,” he says, collapsing against the dull white wall. “On the one hand, it isn’t real down there, but on the other hand…”
“She thinks it is.”
“Yeah. It’s the only real life that she knows.” He looks at her, and she half-remembers the first time he came to her for help. She has no idea when or where or what about, but she remembers his voice cracking: I don’t know what to do, Mal. She remembers that look.
“Should we wake your other friend up first?” she asks, because she doesn’t have an answer for him this time.
“That might be best,” he says, running a hand through his hair. He tugs at the ends of it, curling around his ears, as if he’s not sure what it’s doing there.
“He’s in the next row,” she says.
“Yeah, I saw.”
They move as quickly as they can; by the time they reach him, Mal’s legs are aching as if she’s just hiked ten miles. (She realizes that it’s a precise comparison, that she knows exactly how that feels.)
Eames looks vaguely familiar once she sees him; she suspects he would look even more so clean-shaven and clothed. Arthur stares at him for a moment, biting his lip, then jerks the PASIV line out.
“Jesus fuck,” Eames gasps, eyes flickering open, “Jesus fucking -”
“Eames, relax,” Arthur says quickly, squeezing his shoulder. “Relax, breathe, it’s all right, you’re safe, you’re awake now.”
“I’ve heard that speech before,” Eames says dazedly, propping himself up on one arm. “Bloody fucking Christ, where am - holy fucking shit, it’s her.”
“Me?”
“Relax, Eames, she isn’t a threat this time. That’s the real her.”
“What the fucking fuck,” he mutters, scrubbing at his face. “What the - and you. You. You’re supposed to be dead.”
Arthur winces. “Well, as you can see, I’m not. We’ve been asleep for a while, it seems.”
“Asleep? Wait, what - experiments. Jesus bloody Christ, those fucking experiments. God, right. God.” He glances down. “Shit, I’d forgotten I was ever this young.”
“If it helps, you may never have been this scrawny,” Arthur says, letting go of his shoulder. “I think we’ve all lost weight down here. But, listen, you remember all this, right, how we got here?”
“Yes, I - I think so. Bloody hell, this really is reality, then, isn’t it?”
“Seems that way.”
“I didn’t actually have to watch them pull your half-rotted corpse out of the river, then?” He catches sight of Arthur’s expression and adds quickly, “Just checking. You understand how a man might want to be sure of that sort of thing.”
“I take it this was an unpleasant experience?” Arthur asks, drumming his fingers against a gun he isn’t wearing. When did he start doing that - dammit, why does she recognize that?
“No, it was a day at the fucking carnival,” Eames snorts. “Honestly, darling, you ask the stupidest questions.”
“Darling?” she asks, crossing her arms in brutal defiance of the fact that Arthur is in his twenties now and also that frankly this is the least of their problems.
“Verbal tic, think nothing of it,” Eames says casually, leaning over to hold out a hand. The gentlemanly gesture is out-and-out surreal against his tattooed bare skin and scruffy beard and the paper sheet still crumpled around his legs, but she shakes it anyway. “I must say, Mrs. Cobb,” he continues, “it’s a pleasure to meet the genuine article at last.”
“Don’t expect him to be this polite in future,” Arthur warns, “these are his company manners.”
“And a fat lot of good they do when you go around announcing the fact, asshole,” Eames says, twisting around to roll his eyes at Arthur properly, and Mal chokes on a twisted laugh.
“Are we really -” she starts, and collects herself; it’s probably better not to think about where they are, really. “Are we going to find your friend, June or Ariadne or whoever she was?”
“Oh God, that’s right, where is Ariadne?” Eames asks, glancing around as if he’s expecting her to coalesce out of the shadows. Arthur winces.
“There’s… a bit of a complication. According to the database down here, there was some kind of problem with the Somnacin, and…”
“Get to the point, Arthur.”
He sighs. “It looks like she’s got no memory of anything outside of the dreamscape. So waking her up…”
“May not be fair, right.” Eames rubs at his eyes. “I might say you have a point, except that both of us were looking at ten years maximum security if we were lucky, and luck was looking unlikely, so…”
“Changes things. She’s three rows over,” Arthur says, jerking his head.
The girl looks like the victim of the week in a court procedural, a stark contrast of uneven brown hair and frozen paleness. The effect is more than a little unsettling, almost elfin. Eames taps the eyebrow studs with the back of his fingernail, shaking his head ruefully.
“I can’t help but feel I’m the Dom Cobb in this situation,” he says. Arthur gestures murderously at him, at him and he cringes: “Shit, sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she whispers, squeezing the girl’s shoulder. Ariadne’s.
For a moment they all stare at each other, and then - without anyone touching a needle - the silence is broken by a husky desperate “Fuck.”
“Ariadne?!” Arthur demands, grabbing her hand.
“Fuck fuck fuck.” She blinks. “So much for atheism. Is this the afterlife?”
“Relax, relax,” Arthur orders. “You’re not actually dead.”
The look she gives him is so dubiously unimpressed that Mal has to fight back a slightly insane laugh. “The last thing I remember is an electric chair.”
“What?” That’s Eames, boggling at her. “I thought you couldn’t get a death penalty for extraction.”
“You couldn’t. They thought I smothered you, though, and compound second-degree and extraction was enough. They didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know what happened to you.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Which makes sense.”
“I see,” he says, quiet. “Listen, though, you’re not dead. This is a dreaming facility -”
“Huh?” She twists; catching sight of Mal makes her shriek, scrabbling backwards and off the cot, fumbling at her bare hip for a gun. “What’s she doing here?”
“Relax, relax, it’s okay,” Arthur spits out, staggering slightly as he catches all of her against his arm. “She’s real, she’s not dangerous, it’s okay, you’re safe.”
Mal just stands there and tries not to shake, tries not to process that they’re somehow terrified of her.
Explaining everything to Ariadne takes a while, especially because she makes them sort out several things that they’re still hazy about. The odds are good that this is reality - everyone but Ariadne has a past, projections would do more than sleep - but with everything so vague Mal is only half-convinced herself.
Finally Ariadne shakes her head, perching awkwardly on the cot’s edge. “So, now what do we do?”
“I’m not sure,” Arthur admits, sinking next to her. They’re both shivering, slightly, Mal notices; all four of them are coated in goosebumps. “I was thinking find Yusuf.”
“No, don’t.” She hunches closer in on herself, shaking, and Mal finally drops to a seat. The cot creaks. “He and Christiana finally got married -”
“Wait, who’s Christiana?” Arthur wants to know. “Hold on, how long was I -”
“About a year,” Eames says, just as Ariadne says “Year and a half.”
“This isn’t adding up. Mal, check my timekeeping here. It took us at least an hour to find Eames, right?”
“At least,” she says, ripping up the corner of Ariadne’s paper sheet. “A bit more, I think it was.”
“Exactly. But finding Ariadne took ten minutes at the most. You’re certain that was six months?”
“Six months, three days, four hours. I’m sure.”
“So the time in the dreamscape isn’t stable. Mal, how long did it take you to find me?”
“About an hour,” she tells him, trying to keep her focus steady on the numbers, the beds, the exact level of tension in the tendons of his neck, the angle of Ariadne’s shoulders, the way the muscles are moving in Eames’s jaw. Focus on anything. “And that was two years, you said.”
“So it isn’t accelerating.” That’s Ariadne. “The change isn’t steady. How would that happen?”
“Yusuf mentioned something, once,” Eames contributes, wriggling into an empty patch of vinyl mattress. “Too many dreamers hooked up to one PASIV network, it can start to destabilize things.”
“Is this Yusuf a reliable source?” Mal wants to know. “We aren’t even sure whether he was a projection or not.”
“Check the database,” Arthur says, dragging himself to his feet. The four of them stumble through the rows of sleepers, trying not to touch anything. Eames glances at one comatose body and shudders slightly; Ariadne shakes off Arthur’s arm when he rests it over her shoulder. Her stubborn semi-whisper, “I’m fine,” is the only thing anyone says.
Everyone simply assumes that Arthur will take control of the keyboard, and he does, the casual confidence outrageously out of place on his scrawny naked shoulders. Everything about this feels out of place.
“Yusuf is real,” Arthur confirms a few clicks later. “Ah, I can’t seem to find a way to confirm this, there’s no Internet connection, but it looks like he goes by his full name in the dreamscape - ah, Oxford professor, originally involved in a supervisory capacity. No further details available, but I think we can trust any technical information we have as long as we’re absolutely sure it comes from him, as opposed to invented by our subconscious and ascribed.”
“I’m fairly sure that he did mention the instability thing,” Eames objects, “and since it tallies with what we’re observing -”
“I wasn’t questioning you, Eames.”
“Can you look up my mom?” Ariadne asks, leaning closer. “Or, I mean, not my mom, but Amelia Silver. I just want to know.”
Arthur glances from her to Eames and back again; Mal thinks he looks at her, but she has no idea what factors into this. “On it,” is all he says, clicking away, and then “This looks like her.”
He moves aside before Ariadne has to shove him, which gives Mal a glimpse of a plain picture: a thin-cheeked woman with pulled-back hair and, even in a government picture, a distinctly impish grin. The seconds stretch out, an endless time of hissing and the increasing speed of Ariadne’s blink, and then she steps back, one step, two. She clears her throat.
“Right, that’s definitely her. Do we, uh, do we know why I might have latched on to her, if we’re not actually related? I mean, psychologically speaking, is that a documented effect?”
“Not sure,” Eames says, shifting his weight from one splay-toed foot to the other. “Often a dreamer will assume an at least semi-ongoing relationship with a forged character, fed the right cues, but that’s always a very casual thing, never a deep-seated emotional connection. I’m not sure what would lead to that.”
“But there definitely wasn’t an actual connection on the surface world, as far as you can tell. I mean - never mind, how would you tell? No external connections on that, you said?”
“There don’t seem to be, no. You don’t share a last name, aren’t listed as relations -” Arthur frowns, and Mal wonders again how old he is just now, counting dreamtime.
“About that,” Ariadne interrupts, reaching for the air by her shoulder. It takes Mal a second to realize that she’s trying to twiddle a strand of hair that isn’t present. “What is my name, actually? You never told me.”
“Ah, it’s June. June Hadley.”
“Should we start calling you that, then?” Eames is the one to ask.
“Uh - no. No.” She shakes her head. “Stick with Ariadne.”
Mal folds her arms tight, trying to hold back a shiver, as all of them stare from wall to wall.
“Checking for doors might be a good idea,” Arthur says at last. “Follow the walls around.”
“Sounds wise,” Eames says. “Maybe see if anyone else is down here. How big is this place, anyway?”
“Fucked if I know,” Arthur said. “Count the beds by row. You two stick together, and Mal, come with me?”
They don’t have any way to measure the length of the blank white walls, twisting around a room that Mal first thinks is L-shaped, then Z-shaped, and rapidly comes to conclude is some sort of zigzagged hieroglyphic, although fortunately one without any lengthy forks. With walking suddenly a draining procedure and everything deceptively featureless, estimating size turns into a tricky proposition. She tries to do it by counting steps.
Arthur touches her shoulder three times as they walk, the gentleness strange with the military precision of his walk. (And goddammit, she shouldn’t think of that at all, she knows perfectly well that he was never near the military. At least not here.) Every time he does, it’s harder to shrug him off, but if she lets herself crumble it will take months to pick herself that up, and this is not the time or the place for any of that. He, of all people, ought to understand.
They catch sight of Ariadne and Eames, inching along in identical poses of abject shivering misery, moments before spotting the door. Mal tries to run and barely makes it two feet; the others grimace and step up their pace as much as they can. All four of them reach it at almost the same time.
“This place is hideous,” Ariadne says with offended finality, eyeing the perfectly symmetrical rectangle of blank steel.
“I doubt they were building it for aesthetic appeal,” Eames grumps, kicking at the edge.
“Well, yeah, but it doesn’t cost much to think about proportions for three seconds, and if you don’t even try to pay attention to that you shouldn’t even be an architect.”
“Mal, I present our most dedicated architect,” Arthur says with a half-smile and a dry, distinctly Arthurian take on a mock-courteous breed of joke that he didn’t learn from Mal. Eames’s rolled eyes lead her to suspect the source, and she shakes her head, unnoticed. Picking up habits in two hours, and now they’re so ingrained he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Anyway, can we break it down?” Ariadne asks, eyeing the door. “I don’t see any hinges, so…”
“Could go either way, though,” Arthur says. “It looks like they built it with hinges hidden intentionally, especially since there isn’t a knob.”
“Someone didn’t want us getting out.” Somehow Ariadne manages to keep it from sounding portentous, a skill that Mal has never had. She decides to like her.
“Solid steel as well, I’m guessing,” she says, tapping a nail against it. “With us in the state we’re in, I don’t think we can do much against it.”
“No other doors?” Arthur asks, shoving at the door, testing. Eames shakes his head.
“Nothing that looked like cameras, either, which doesn’t make sense. They should be monitoring us.”
“Through the IV setups?” Ariadne guesses, biting her lip. Mal nods.
“Probably. Perhaps someone will come to investigate, if they notice we’re no longer connected.”
“So we wait,” Eames says, throwing up his hands and slumping against the wall. “Perfect.”
It’s Ariadne who voices what they’re thinking:
“Well, fuck.”
Mal glances from Arthur to Eames, trying to work out whether she should be surprised. The quirk to Arthur’s eyebrows answers in the affirmative; Eames’s halfhearted smirk says this is perfectly normal.
“We’re going to be here for a while,” Arthur says at last, slumping against the wall and then continuing to slump until he’s settled on the floor, the awkwardness exacerbated by the shreds of dignity that he’d clung to until now, in spite of near-nudity and goosebumps.
Eames is the next to move, dropping an arm around Ariadne with a grimace. “Sorry about this, pet,” he says; she squirms.
“What are you doing? I’m fine.”
“Yes. You’re also significantly warmer than the surrounding air, and I’m cold.”
“So I’m your hot-water bottle?”
“He’s actually got a point,” Arthur says from the floor. “It’s pretty cold down here, and body heat is going to be our best way to alleviate that.”
“So you get over here and warm him up,” Ariadne mutters. She sounds irritated, but she’s leaning her head against Eames’s shoulder. Arthur eyes them both balefully.
“I know you’re both going to mock me for this, but my legs hurt. A lot. I am not standing up again.”
“Mine hurt too,” Ariadne admits, tugging at Eames. “We should all sit. You too, Mal.”
“Ah - thank you.” She slides to the ground, leaning against Arthur reflexively, as Eames and Ariadne drop to his other side. Arthur lets them half-crush him as if he’s comfortable in spite of nudity and cinderblocks, and Mal wonders when he ended up part of a family in which she has no place.
“Penny for your thoughts, Mrs. Cobb,” Eames requests, twisting his neck into an agonizing-looking angle to squint at her. She blinks.
“It’s Mal, please, and I was just wondering how you all got to know each other.”
“Ah,” he snorts, “funny story, that.”
“Share,” she says.
They do, all three talking over and around each other, and she shares everything she remembers about Arthur without considering whether the source is dreamscape or reality. He fills in the details of both with equal ease, and things quickly devolve into storytelling in general. Dom is happy asleep, she learns, and the children are thriving, the children that she doesn’t actually have. The others were geniuses, and Ariadne says that she’s a bit of a legend, one of the best and brightest who lost out on luck. It feels rather like getting all dressed up and finding a stranger in the mirror: a description that’s hard to apply to her.
Eames falls asleep midway through Ariadne’s story about Paris that matches up entirely with Mal’s childhood memory of the city, which makes her wonder if June Hadley ever spent any time in Paris. She doesn’t realize that she’s tired herself until she blinks awake in the same half-hearted fluorescence to find all the others snoring.
They wake a little after she does, or at least it seems that way as she examines space and wonders how much Dom has aged while they were on the surface. She wonders if he’s found someone else, remarried a stranger or a pretty projection girl, whether her imaginary daughter is old enough to have an imaginary boyfriend. Or a real one sleeping, and God, she hopes nobody under there will have to endure that one. She suspects that someone will.
Ariadne stirs, looking larger the instant she wakes, and the other two are only moments after her.
“How long have we been asleep?” she asks. Mal shrugs.
“There was a clock on the terminal,” Arthur says, shoving at the others until they let him stand. “Ugh.”
“Painful?” Eames asks, hauling himself up with his hand pressed against the cinderblocks. “Augh, fuck, clearly.” Ariadne’s cringing too, and Mal grudgingly forces herself to her feet as her legs explode in simultaneous muscle aches and pins and needles.
There’s another terminal nearer the door - in clear sight of it, at least, and close enough for them to be visible to any entrants - and it’s there that they find themselves. “Twelve hours,” Arthur reports tiredly, and all of them pretend that isn’t more than enough time for them to be noticed, to be found.
This computer doesn’t have Internet either. Nor does it have any other information, no means of contact, no clue about what has happened here.
“We could check for alarms,” Ariadne suggests. “See if we could set one off.”
It’s a good idea. They canvass the dungeon (Mal isn’t sure when it acquired that name, but it has already become embedded) inch by inch and square by square, with no luck. No security cameras that they can observe, no air vents (tiny holes near the ceiling, but that’s all), no sign of anything at all.
By the time they’re all back at the computer by the door - as good a meeting place as any - Mal feels dizzy and dry-throated, Ariadne has somehow contrived to look even paler, and Eames is rubbing at his forehead as if he’s trying to knead bread.
“We’re getting dehydrated, aren’t we?”
“We are,” Eames says, sounding exhausted. “No water in here, of course.”
“Can we hijack some of the IV tubes, or something?” Ariadne suggests, poking at the nearest one - each dreamer is hooked up to several. “Everything goes straight into the ceiling, though, and I can’t tell which is for Somnacin and which is for everything else.”
“Also, it’s probably designed as a steady drip,” Arthur points out, crouching next to her. “We’d have to leave them open for quite some time to get enough to actually drink.”
“And we don’t have the extra body fat to last for very long without food,” Mal says. She feels almost preternaturally calm, detached - not healthy, she knows, some psychology class echoing. She isn’t sure when she took it, or where, and doesn’t care.
“And we’ll be waiting for a while. Perfect.” Eames kicks the cinderblocks halfheartedly, careful of his toes.
“So, what, we’re done and that’s it?” Ariadne demands, nostrils flaring. “You’re all just going to give up and let us dehydrate to death?”
“We could go back under.” The possibility has been seeping through her consciousness in spite of her attempts to ignore it, guilt-tinged but alluring. “We all know how to insert the cannulae, yes? We can hook ourselves in to everything. Fed, hydrated, not waiting.”
“It’s still giving up on getting out,” Ariadne protests, but she doesn’t seem convinced.
“Is getting out even what we want?” Eames asks, dropping back against the wall with a thud. “Especially you, Ari.”
She bites her lip, shaking her head - not in denial, it looks like, more like she’s trying to shake something away. “I don’t like it. You’ve rebuilt identities, haven’t you?”
“Yes, and I don’t recommend doing it. Ever, if you can possibly avoid it.”
“Besides,” Arthur interjects, “it’s better than being dead.”
“So you agree?” Mal’s surprised to find that she sounds relieved. Going under would keep them alive, would save them from this ghostly empty place that is going to drive her mad (would let her apologize to Dom, see him again, would let her see her children and her mother, and if Arthur goes under with her then she can also keep her friend.)
“I think I agree,” he says, sighing. “Eames, didn’t you say you’d found a box of alcohol swabs?”
“I did, at that. Save us from rotting away in our sleep.”
“Thank you for that mental image, Eames,” Arthur sighs. “Where was it?”
“Three beds back. I’ll grab it.”
“No, stay. I can.” He pads off before anyone can respond, leaving the other three shivering and stiff.
“So, you’re going with them?” Ariadne asks, wary, disappointed.
Eames sighs. “Probably, yes. Quite frankly, I do not want to die, particularly not like this. I really doubt we’ll wake up back in prison, and building things up again down there won’t be any more difficult than up here. Possibly less so, depending on why we’ve been abandoned here.”
“Yeah, I see your point.” She’s tense, muscles in her shoulders knotted under the skin; clothes would hide it, or make it harder to see. Used to keeping her cool, this one. Mal clears her throat.
“None of us are going to force you into it, Ariadne.”
She blinks, glancing up. “No, I knew that, but I don’t really want to stay up here alone either. I’d say wait a little longer, but with the way that time was passing down there -”
“Yeah, excellent point,” Arthur says, rejoining them with the swabs in hand. “So, are we doing this now?”
“Better than waiting, I suppose,” Eames says, stretching his arms above his head. Ariadne nods grimly.
“Yeah, definitely.” She takes the swabs, flipping the box open, and stares around the clump of them. “So, who’s going under first?”
“I will,” Mal says, well aware of how selfish she’s being.
Somehow, they all end up accompanying her to her own empty cot. She wipes off the cannulae, wishing they had fresh ones to hand, and clears her throat as she rolls rests them in her palm.
“We’ll contact each other in dreamscape, yes?”
“Of course,” Arthur says, and she glances to the others. Eames nods first, then Ariadne, seemingly surprised, does the same.
“See you then,” she says, and slides the first of the cannulae into her wrist. Second, third, careful with the angles.
One of the earlier ones was the PASIV line, it seems; her eyes fall closed as she lets go of the last, ceiling turning dim. She thinks she hears Arthur say, “Sleep well,” but she isn’t entirely sure.
The living room is all bright colors and wide-spread windows, afternoon light splashing golden on the ground. She’s warm, truly warm. Still scrawny and shrunken, tired, but dressed now, graceful terra-cotta folds. She isn’t sure she’s ever honestly worn anything so fine, but it feels familiar here.
There’s a book open upside down on the coffee table, paperback spine crinkled. Science fiction, it looks like, modern and jazzy. 12 and up, according to the back. On the rug is something that looks a lot like a dog toy, and there are photos perched on the mantel.
School pictures, mostly, it looks like. James, Phillipa, cheesy grins and bright brushed sweaters. There’s a wedding picture, Hollywood-perfect, and right at the center, unavoidable, two familiar faces. Herself, younger and softer-boned, less starved, smiling with diamonds in her ears. Arthur, smiling resignedly with a window at his back and a mug of coffee in his hand.
It’s a strange feeling, finding that you’ve been mourned.
Behind her, she hears a sliding door creak.
“Mal?”
“Don’t be afraid,” she says quickly and almost laughs. So dramatic. “Don’t be. I’m real.”
“But you’re -”
“I was.” She forces herself to turn, and God, it’s him, a sheaf of papers in his hand and a pencil behind his ear, staring at her like - well, like she’s an angel, if you remember that the Biblical angels terrified everyone they met. “You’re not insane, Dom, I promise. I’m back. It’s really me.” She feels fragile, indistinct, as if the world could spin and flex and turn and it wouldn’t be strange at all. (Technically, the world could.)
She has no idea what she expects Dom to do, to say, but what slips out of him is “Christ, Mal, if it’s - I’ve missed you so much.”
Everything shatters; there’s a strange moment when she is entirely conscious of a strange cracked sound from somewhere she can’t name, and then he’s running towards her with the papers flapping all around him, managing to be close enough that she can half-fly into his shoulder as she realizes that she’s sobbing hard enough to shake. “Fucking God,” she whispers, “fucking God…”
“Hey,” he breathes, “hey, it’s okay.” Pause, his hands tangling in her hair, gentle. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she chokes out, “yes, it is, but - Dom, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry -”
“Why?” he asks, baffled and guilty, and God, but she loves him, and he lost her, she almost lost him, everything to pieces, and now this half-real thing -
“I love you,” she whispers, and he breaks down into her hair. His shirt is getting ruined under her, and she’s going to be washing salt and crusted snot out of her hair once they’re done, and he’s solid and hot as they crush each other close. And even if none of that is real, it’s close enough. The feel of it may not be real, but he is, whispering cracked half-finished “I love you”s into her cheek, the thought true even on imaginary sound waves. This is real enough.
Fandom: Inception
Art: Untitled by dwn1s0ul
Characters/Pairings: Mal, Arthur, Eames, Ariadne [Mal/Cobb]
Rating/Warnings: PG (other than a lot of thoroughly obscene language.) Mentions of suicide on par with canon; also may be a bit triggery if you know (or have known) someone in a coma.
Written for: i_reversebang
Wordcount: 7100 words
Author's Notes: Title and epigraph are from the Thriving Ivory song "Angels on the Moon." Also, my sincerest thanks to dwn1s0ul for creating such a gorgeous prompt and being so kind about my typical last-minute approach to deadlines, and most especially to fae_boleyn for her incredible spur-of-the-moment beta.
Don't tell me if I'm dying,
cause I don't want to know.
If I can't see the sun,
Maybe I should go.
Don't wake me, cause I'm dreaming
of angels on the moon,
where everyone you know
never leaves too soon.
She wakes to the hissing of PASIVs echoing against the blank white walls.
No one else is awake, and the sleepers around her are all strangers; fundamentally, she is alone.
Her hands are shaking as she pulls the PASIV line out; then, figuring to hell with it, she detaches all the monitoring lines as well. They leave sticky circles of gel on her skin; the detail bothers her too much, more than the noise, the empty blankness, the antiseptic reek, more even than the fact that she’s proposing to wander about this place in her clinical black underthings until she finds someone offering an explanation. She wants a totem, wants one desperately, for the comforting familiar shape of it if nothing else, but - yes, sorting through the memories, she didn’t think of the things until she was in the first level of this experiment.
This fucking experiment.
The memories are hazy, dim, but that’s only to be expected after - God in His heaven, how long was she down there? For a moment she can’t remember anything, not a single one of all the histories that she’s built up for herself; her head spins and swims and she clutches at the blankets, the hard metal edge of the bed, the lines still in her hands, anything and everything that she can possibly verify as close enough to real to be present.
The memories solidify; yes. Her time under is still hazy, but that’s all right; that, at least, is undeniably unreal. You can’t wake into a deeper level. And this current level, yes -
The government testing. They’d agreed. Three months out of their lives, enough money to make ends meet for years. To set up on their own, to make a life for themselves, for her and Dom together and Arthur helping them with the dreaming. Arthur suggested it -
Arthur. Yes. She remembers him, too. He was under there, is under there. He always had the best memory, all his obsessive love for little details; maybe he can help sort out the bits and pieces of what’s going on here.
I should wake up Dom first, she thinks, and panic clenches in her stomach, sickening and heart-stopping and tight around her breath; she hasn’t felt like this since college and she almost doubles over.
All right, she thinks to herself, all right, I’ll wake Arthur up first.
That might be easier said than done. She wanders through the rows of sleepers, searching aimlessly; if there was any system of organization down here, ever, she has forgotten it. The quiet padding of her bare feet only emphasizes the terrifying quiet; more than once she presses her hand over a stranger’s lips or wrists to verify that she is at least not the only one breathing.
Sheer luck leads her to a computer station at the end of a row, touchscreen embedded in the wall. By some miracle, it isn’t password-protected, or some fool has left it logged in. She doesn’t take the time to investigate that, just brings up the Subject Database - so clearly and conveniently labeled - and types in Arthur Morgan.
The correct Arthur is first on the list; once she puzzles out the numbering system he isn’t hard to find. Getting there is a different story; her legs tremble traitorously with every step, and she is breathing hard far sooner than she should be. She has never been this feeble in her life, not even when she was pregna -
Oh God, she never was. That’s - that’s going to take some adjusting. Everything is going to take some adjusting right now, she is currently adjusted to absolutely nothing, not even goddamn walking, and -
Breathe. Breathe. It will be okay. She will find Arthur, and wake him up, and then they will sort everything out. She will not be the only one awake, and she will have someone to listen as she sorts through everything aloud, and she will acclimatize to the world again.
She makes her way to Arthur and collapses onto the edge of his cot, pulling the crackly paper sheet back. He’s even thinner, somehow, every rib bare under just the skin; she realizes suddenly that she’s in the same state, but doesn’t dwell on it, just looks at him. He looks so incredibly fragile asleep, always has, and even more so now with his skin so pale it’s translucent and his hair loose and dry against his face. She remembers him older, collected and cool, but more than that she remembers him even younger in a place that smelled like chocolate and soda, remembers his hands and hers against the gleaming silver spouts and other people in pink-and-white uniforms calling her a mother hen. The second memory feels more real, more strong; yes, she taught him to work somewhere - yes, it was an ice-cream parlor. Of course it was, and a few moments later it’s hard to believe the memory was vague at all.
She pulls the PASIV line out of his arm. He stirs, squirms - God, yes, she definitely knew him when he was ridiculously young, although she knows just as well that she’s never seen him waking up half-naked and scrawny before, let alone with half a beard - and then he’s exploding out of bed in a burst of ripping paper and she can’t catch up to what’s going on until he’s crouched somehow combat-ready and glaring on the far side of the cot from her, and when and where and how did he learn that?
“Arthur!” she says, holding out her hands; her own sheet slips off her shoulders and they stare at each other over the hard frame of the bed, every goosebump visible. “Mon ami, relax, it’s just me.”
“Mon ami,” he says slowly, mangling the French, and straightens slightly, still bitter, still wary. “Did you really just call me that?”
“I always did,” she says. “I always do. Ri - yes. I do.”
“You do. Oh my God, Mal,” he says, and then he staggers forward and drops onto the edge of the bed, twisting around to stare at her, awkward and gangly as a teenager with those too-long absurd stick legs tangled beneath him, and she stumbles forward to sit too because her own legs are truly trembling. “Oh my God, Mal, it’s really you.”
“Of course it is,” she says, grabbing at his hands, hugging him in spite of the nakedness and the cold and the strangeness and everything because, God, it is so good to have her family close to her again; the dream is still fuzzy, still vague, but she knows that it wasn’t like this. “Arthur, do you remember anything about where we are?”
“The experiments,” he says, burying his face in her hair and trying to shake his head at the same time; she rubs his shoulders, shivering. “The fucking experiments, and that horrible fucking contract, and - oh my God, Mal, it’s really, honestly you.”
“Who else would it be?” she gasps, leaning against him, holding him, and then he stiffens.
“Mal,” he says quietly. “Do you know how long you’ve been dead?”
“What?” She blinks, once, twice. Oh. Of course. They were all sharing a dreamworld together, of course she’d seem dead, she must have woken up by being killed. But -
“A - a few hours here, so…”
“Two years. Two fucking years.”
“Oh my God.” She shudders convulsively, clinging to him. “Oh my God. I - I must seem -”
“I - it’s going to take a while to believe this,” he confesses, pulling back a little bit; he tries to look at her and ends up doing that shamefaced thing he does, eyes on the cement floor. It’s so damn him. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, mon ami,” she whispers, squeezing him again. “I understand. I’m real, I promise.” To her surprise, he freezes over under her.
“Mal,” he says quietly, prying her off. “Mal, how much do you remember about how you died?”
It’s a surreal question, but he’s staring at her like he did when he asked her whether she was in love with Dom, staring at her like the entire world rides on her answer. So she tries, she digs through her mind and struggles to remember - trains, no, trains and waking, and - a knife, and a high black heel tumbling to the ground, and the air rushing around her, and -
“Dom. Oh my God.” She opens her eyes. “Arthur, what did I do to Dom?”
“Well, he -”
“No, Arthur, what did - oh God, in front of him, and I tried - oh God,” she whispers, shuddering again, pulling away to bury her face in her hands. The gesture feels ridiculous, pointless, but she doesn’t know what else to do.
“We have to wake him up,” she whispers. Arthur touches her shoulder and she flinches away. “I have to apologize to him.”
“Mal, he owes you an a-apology as much as you owe him one,” Arthur says; she can hear his teeth chattering, and God, she doesn’t want any kind of touch right now but it’s the only way she has to keep him warm. She leans listlessly against him, eyes closed, while he explains something about tops and reality and lawsuits and inception. She doesn’t want to believe it, but she and Dom - yes, they would do anything to save each other from themselves. It’s an ugly sort of truth to discover, and she finds herself staring at her spindly grub-white fingers while he explains.
“We still have to wake him up,” she says dully, once Arthur has finished. “We just - we have to, Arthur -”
“I know, I know,” he soothes, and she forces herself to breathe, if he feels the need to be soothing her. “And Ariadne, and Eames -”
“Eames -” she says, “I think I met him once or twice, yes, that friend of yours.”
“Yes, you probably wouldn’t remember him, we - God, yes, we mostly got to know each other in the dreamscape.” Arthur’s struggling to his feet, now, and she does the same, clinging onto his arm first to get herself up and then because everything feels childish and raw and it doesn’t feel like there’s any reason not to hold on to him. “How did you find me?”
“There’s a computer terminal open,” she says, gesturing. “We can find them.”
The two of them retrace her steps (except for the parts where she got turned around), stumbling and clinging to each other like - “Arthur, did we ever get drunk together?” she asks dully, as she almost falls again.
“Oh, God, yes,” he says. “All the time, for a few years. You were the first person to ever get me drunk, actually,” he says, stopping.
“Oh dear, was I a horrible influence?” It feels strange to be smiling, but then, everything feels strange.
“Horrible,” he agrees. “Corrupted my youthful innocence to no end.” And then she’s laughing, first truly and then borderline-hysterically, and he’s no better, just clinging to her and wheezing slightly because they’re both already out of breath. “And then you did it all over again,” he chuckles, “just when I could actually not make an ass of myself after two beers, because you wanted to impress Dom with the good stuff -”
“I remember,” she manages, winding down. “God, we were so happy.” They were, too; she remembers that first, but the rest floats to the surface; laughing, holding hands, spreading out the most glamorous things she could find on her budget, wanting to do anything to get Dom to give her that look, the one that meant he was at least a little bit enchanted.
“We should hurry,” she says suddenly. She grabs Arthur’s hand and pulls him on, cursing her sleep-atrophied muscles in three languages.
Arthur goes straight for the computer screen once they reach the terminal, and Mal lets him, because - yes, he did the research. In the dreams. She leans over his shoulder, staring.
“Here he is, it looks like he’s on the next floor, and - oh. Mal, listen -”
UNRETRIEVABLE is stamped across Dom’s file.
“What - what does that -”
“I’m looking.” His fingers fly across the pull-out keyboard, the clatter echoing over the background PASIV hiss. “It looks like - Mal.”
“Stop saying my name.” She can see over his shoulder, she can guess, but the screen is blurring and she just needs him to tell her.
“I don’t think we can bring him back, Mal. If we unhook him, he’ll be vegetative.”
She slumps to the ground.
She isn’t fainting, isn’t unconscious; she flaps a hand at Arthur as he asks something about that. She just doesn’t want to stand anymore. She rests her forehead against the nubbly pale skin of her knees and stares at the speckled tiles of the floor.
Arthur kneels next to her and strokes her hair, softly; she’s confused for a moment until she remembers doing the same thing to him. For some reason, that’s the part that hurts, and it wakes her up. She stands.
“We - we have to find your friends, then, don’t we? Mr. Eames, and - Arianne, you said her name was?”
He hesitates, touching her arm. “Mal - I’m sorry. But listen, I know that you…”
“I will find him,” she finds herself saying. “I will go back under and find him, or I will find a doctor or a technician who can bring him back out. But first we need to get out of here ourselves, and we need to find your friends.” Her fingers fly across the keyboard, searching. “Is this him?” she asks, pointing.
“An Eames - yes, yes, that’s him.” Arthur pauses, touching her shoulder again. “Mal, honestly, are you okay?”
“No,” she says flatly. “No, I am not. We are going to find your friends anyway. How do you spell her name?”
He takes a deep breath. “A-r-i-a-d-n-e.”
“Well, that should be easy,” she mumbles.
Click-click-click-click-click-click-click. Pause. “I’m not getting anything. Last name?”
“Silver.”
Click-click-click, click-click-click. “Arthur, she isn’t showing up.”
“That’s impossible,” he says instantly. “I knew her.”
“There were projections down there, Arthur,” she says slowly, searching and re-searching. “She might have been one.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think she was mine, I couldn’t come up with her.”
“She could have been anyone’s,” Mal says, but she finds a page of headshots and moves aside a bit so he can see the screen.
“There,” he says immediately, pointing at a shaggy-haired girl in the third row down. “I think that’s her.”
June Hadley’s page has glaring red text: SIDE EFFECT and a string of numbers. She clicks again and again, shoving Arthur away when he tries to take the keyboard. At last she looks up.
“I think it means that she’s amnesiac. That she’s lost everything she remembers about reality.”
“Well,” he says, quietly.
“Do you still want to wake her up?” Mal asks, staring down at the keyboard. She realizes that her hands are trembling.
“I’m not sure,” he says, collapsing against the dull white wall. “On the one hand, it isn’t real down there, but on the other hand…”
“She thinks it is.”
“Yeah. It’s the only real life that she knows.” He looks at her, and she half-remembers the first time he came to her for help. She has no idea when or where or what about, but she remembers his voice cracking: I don’t know what to do, Mal. She remembers that look.
“Should we wake your other friend up first?” she asks, because she doesn’t have an answer for him this time.
“That might be best,” he says, running a hand through his hair. He tugs at the ends of it, curling around his ears, as if he’s not sure what it’s doing there.
“He’s in the next row,” she says.
“Yeah, I saw.”
They move as quickly as they can; by the time they reach him, Mal’s legs are aching as if she’s just hiked ten miles. (She realizes that it’s a precise comparison, that she knows exactly how that feels.)
Eames looks vaguely familiar once she sees him; she suspects he would look even more so clean-shaven and clothed. Arthur stares at him for a moment, biting his lip, then jerks the PASIV line out.
“Jesus fuck,” Eames gasps, eyes flickering open, “Jesus fucking -”
“Eames, relax,” Arthur says quickly, squeezing his shoulder. “Relax, breathe, it’s all right, you’re safe, you’re awake now.”
“I’ve heard that speech before,” Eames says dazedly, propping himself up on one arm. “Bloody fucking Christ, where am - holy fucking shit, it’s her.”
“Me?”
“Relax, Eames, she isn’t a threat this time. That’s the real her.”
“What the fucking fuck,” he mutters, scrubbing at his face. “What the - and you. You. You’re supposed to be dead.”
Arthur winces. “Well, as you can see, I’m not. We’ve been asleep for a while, it seems.”
“Asleep? Wait, what - experiments. Jesus bloody Christ, those fucking experiments. God, right. God.” He glances down. “Shit, I’d forgotten I was ever this young.”
“If it helps, you may never have been this scrawny,” Arthur says, letting go of his shoulder. “I think we’ve all lost weight down here. But, listen, you remember all this, right, how we got here?”
“Yes, I - I think so. Bloody hell, this really is reality, then, isn’t it?”
“Seems that way.”
“I didn’t actually have to watch them pull your half-rotted corpse out of the river, then?” He catches sight of Arthur’s expression and adds quickly, “Just checking. You understand how a man might want to be sure of that sort of thing.”
“I take it this was an unpleasant experience?” Arthur asks, drumming his fingers against a gun he isn’t wearing. When did he start doing that - dammit, why does she recognize that?
“No, it was a day at the fucking carnival,” Eames snorts. “Honestly, darling, you ask the stupidest questions.”
“Darling?” she asks, crossing her arms in brutal defiance of the fact that Arthur is in his twenties now and also that frankly this is the least of their problems.
“Verbal tic, think nothing of it,” Eames says casually, leaning over to hold out a hand. The gentlemanly gesture is out-and-out surreal against his tattooed bare skin and scruffy beard and the paper sheet still crumpled around his legs, but she shakes it anyway. “I must say, Mrs. Cobb,” he continues, “it’s a pleasure to meet the genuine article at last.”
“Don’t expect him to be this polite in future,” Arthur warns, “these are his company manners.”
“And a fat lot of good they do when you go around announcing the fact, asshole,” Eames says, twisting around to roll his eyes at Arthur properly, and Mal chokes on a twisted laugh.
“Are we really -” she starts, and collects herself; it’s probably better not to think about where they are, really. “Are we going to find your friend, June or Ariadne or whoever she was?”
“Oh God, that’s right, where is Ariadne?” Eames asks, glancing around as if he’s expecting her to coalesce out of the shadows. Arthur winces.
“There’s… a bit of a complication. According to the database down here, there was some kind of problem with the Somnacin, and…”
“Get to the point, Arthur.”
He sighs. “It looks like she’s got no memory of anything outside of the dreamscape. So waking her up…”
“May not be fair, right.” Eames rubs at his eyes. “I might say you have a point, except that both of us were looking at ten years maximum security if we were lucky, and luck was looking unlikely, so…”
“Changes things. She’s three rows over,” Arthur says, jerking his head.
The girl looks like the victim of the week in a court procedural, a stark contrast of uneven brown hair and frozen paleness. The effect is more than a little unsettling, almost elfin. Eames taps the eyebrow studs with the back of his fingernail, shaking his head ruefully.
“I can’t help but feel I’m the Dom Cobb in this situation,” he says. Arthur gestures murderously at him, at him and he cringes: “Shit, sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she whispers, squeezing the girl’s shoulder. Ariadne’s.
For a moment they all stare at each other, and then - without anyone touching a needle - the silence is broken by a husky desperate “Fuck.”
“Ariadne?!” Arthur demands, grabbing her hand.
“Fuck fuck fuck.” She blinks. “So much for atheism. Is this the afterlife?”
“Relax, relax,” Arthur orders. “You’re not actually dead.”
The look she gives him is so dubiously unimpressed that Mal has to fight back a slightly insane laugh. “The last thing I remember is an electric chair.”
“What?” That’s Eames, boggling at her. “I thought you couldn’t get a death penalty for extraction.”
“You couldn’t. They thought I smothered you, though, and compound second-degree and extraction was enough. They didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know what happened to you.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Which makes sense.”
“I see,” he says, quiet. “Listen, though, you’re not dead. This is a dreaming facility -”
“Huh?” She twists; catching sight of Mal makes her shriek, scrabbling backwards and off the cot, fumbling at her bare hip for a gun. “What’s she doing here?”
“Relax, relax, it’s okay,” Arthur spits out, staggering slightly as he catches all of her against his arm. “She’s real, she’s not dangerous, it’s okay, you’re safe.”
Mal just stands there and tries not to shake, tries not to process that they’re somehow terrified of her.
Explaining everything to Ariadne takes a while, especially because she makes them sort out several things that they’re still hazy about. The odds are good that this is reality - everyone but Ariadne has a past, projections would do more than sleep - but with everything so vague Mal is only half-convinced herself.
Finally Ariadne shakes her head, perching awkwardly on the cot’s edge. “So, now what do we do?”
“I’m not sure,” Arthur admits, sinking next to her. They’re both shivering, slightly, Mal notices; all four of them are coated in goosebumps. “I was thinking find Yusuf.”
“No, don’t.” She hunches closer in on herself, shaking, and Mal finally drops to a seat. The cot creaks. “He and Christiana finally got married -”
“Wait, who’s Christiana?” Arthur wants to know. “Hold on, how long was I -”
“About a year,” Eames says, just as Ariadne says “Year and a half.”
“This isn’t adding up. Mal, check my timekeeping here. It took us at least an hour to find Eames, right?”
“At least,” she says, ripping up the corner of Ariadne’s paper sheet. “A bit more, I think it was.”
“Exactly. But finding Ariadne took ten minutes at the most. You’re certain that was six months?”
“Six months, three days, four hours. I’m sure.”
“So the time in the dreamscape isn’t stable. Mal, how long did it take you to find me?”
“About an hour,” she tells him, trying to keep her focus steady on the numbers, the beds, the exact level of tension in the tendons of his neck, the angle of Ariadne’s shoulders, the way the muscles are moving in Eames’s jaw. Focus on anything. “And that was two years, you said.”
“So it isn’t accelerating.” That’s Ariadne. “The change isn’t steady. How would that happen?”
“Yusuf mentioned something, once,” Eames contributes, wriggling into an empty patch of vinyl mattress. “Too many dreamers hooked up to one PASIV network, it can start to destabilize things.”
“Is this Yusuf a reliable source?” Mal wants to know. “We aren’t even sure whether he was a projection or not.”
“Check the database,” Arthur says, dragging himself to his feet. The four of them stumble through the rows of sleepers, trying not to touch anything. Eames glances at one comatose body and shudders slightly; Ariadne shakes off Arthur’s arm when he rests it over her shoulder. Her stubborn semi-whisper, “I’m fine,” is the only thing anyone says.
Everyone simply assumes that Arthur will take control of the keyboard, and he does, the casual confidence outrageously out of place on his scrawny naked shoulders. Everything about this feels out of place.
“Yusuf is real,” Arthur confirms a few clicks later. “Ah, I can’t seem to find a way to confirm this, there’s no Internet connection, but it looks like he goes by his full name in the dreamscape - ah, Oxford professor, originally involved in a supervisory capacity. No further details available, but I think we can trust any technical information we have as long as we’re absolutely sure it comes from him, as opposed to invented by our subconscious and ascribed.”
“I’m fairly sure that he did mention the instability thing,” Eames objects, “and since it tallies with what we’re observing -”
“I wasn’t questioning you, Eames.”
“Can you look up my mom?” Ariadne asks, leaning closer. “Or, I mean, not my mom, but Amelia Silver. I just want to know.”
Arthur glances from her to Eames and back again; Mal thinks he looks at her, but she has no idea what factors into this. “On it,” is all he says, clicking away, and then “This looks like her.”
He moves aside before Ariadne has to shove him, which gives Mal a glimpse of a plain picture: a thin-cheeked woman with pulled-back hair and, even in a government picture, a distinctly impish grin. The seconds stretch out, an endless time of hissing and the increasing speed of Ariadne’s blink, and then she steps back, one step, two. She clears her throat.
“Right, that’s definitely her. Do we, uh, do we know why I might have latched on to her, if we’re not actually related? I mean, psychologically speaking, is that a documented effect?”
“Not sure,” Eames says, shifting his weight from one splay-toed foot to the other. “Often a dreamer will assume an at least semi-ongoing relationship with a forged character, fed the right cues, but that’s always a very casual thing, never a deep-seated emotional connection. I’m not sure what would lead to that.”
“But there definitely wasn’t an actual connection on the surface world, as far as you can tell. I mean - never mind, how would you tell? No external connections on that, you said?”
“There don’t seem to be, no. You don’t share a last name, aren’t listed as relations -” Arthur frowns, and Mal wonders again how old he is just now, counting dreamtime.
“About that,” Ariadne interrupts, reaching for the air by her shoulder. It takes Mal a second to realize that she’s trying to twiddle a strand of hair that isn’t present. “What is my name, actually? You never told me.”
“Ah, it’s June. June Hadley.”
“Should we start calling you that, then?” Eames is the one to ask.
“Uh - no. No.” She shakes her head. “Stick with Ariadne.”
Mal folds her arms tight, trying to hold back a shiver, as all of them stare from wall to wall.
“Checking for doors might be a good idea,” Arthur says at last. “Follow the walls around.”
“Sounds wise,” Eames says. “Maybe see if anyone else is down here. How big is this place, anyway?”
“Fucked if I know,” Arthur said. “Count the beds by row. You two stick together, and Mal, come with me?”
They don’t have any way to measure the length of the blank white walls, twisting around a room that Mal first thinks is L-shaped, then Z-shaped, and rapidly comes to conclude is some sort of zigzagged hieroglyphic, although fortunately one without any lengthy forks. With walking suddenly a draining procedure and everything deceptively featureless, estimating size turns into a tricky proposition. She tries to do it by counting steps.
Arthur touches her shoulder three times as they walk, the gentleness strange with the military precision of his walk. (And goddammit, she shouldn’t think of that at all, she knows perfectly well that he was never near the military. At least not here.) Every time he does, it’s harder to shrug him off, but if she lets herself crumble it will take months to pick herself that up, and this is not the time or the place for any of that. He, of all people, ought to understand.
They catch sight of Ariadne and Eames, inching along in identical poses of abject shivering misery, moments before spotting the door. Mal tries to run and barely makes it two feet; the others grimace and step up their pace as much as they can. All four of them reach it at almost the same time.
“This place is hideous,” Ariadne says with offended finality, eyeing the perfectly symmetrical rectangle of blank steel.
“I doubt they were building it for aesthetic appeal,” Eames grumps, kicking at the edge.
“Well, yeah, but it doesn’t cost much to think about proportions for three seconds, and if you don’t even try to pay attention to that you shouldn’t even be an architect.”
“Mal, I present our most dedicated architect,” Arthur says with a half-smile and a dry, distinctly Arthurian take on a mock-courteous breed of joke that he didn’t learn from Mal. Eames’s rolled eyes lead her to suspect the source, and she shakes her head, unnoticed. Picking up habits in two hours, and now they’re so ingrained he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Anyway, can we break it down?” Ariadne asks, eyeing the door. “I don’t see any hinges, so…”
“Could go either way, though,” Arthur says. “It looks like they built it with hinges hidden intentionally, especially since there isn’t a knob.”
“Someone didn’t want us getting out.” Somehow Ariadne manages to keep it from sounding portentous, a skill that Mal has never had. She decides to like her.
“Solid steel as well, I’m guessing,” she says, tapping a nail against it. “With us in the state we’re in, I don’t think we can do much against it.”
“No other doors?” Arthur asks, shoving at the door, testing. Eames shakes his head.
“Nothing that looked like cameras, either, which doesn’t make sense. They should be monitoring us.”
“Through the IV setups?” Ariadne guesses, biting her lip. Mal nods.
“Probably. Perhaps someone will come to investigate, if they notice we’re no longer connected.”
“So we wait,” Eames says, throwing up his hands and slumping against the wall. “Perfect.”
It’s Ariadne who voices what they’re thinking:
“Well, fuck.”
Mal glances from Arthur to Eames, trying to work out whether she should be surprised. The quirk to Arthur’s eyebrows answers in the affirmative; Eames’s halfhearted smirk says this is perfectly normal.
“We’re going to be here for a while,” Arthur says at last, slumping against the wall and then continuing to slump until he’s settled on the floor, the awkwardness exacerbated by the shreds of dignity that he’d clung to until now, in spite of near-nudity and goosebumps.
Eames is the next to move, dropping an arm around Ariadne with a grimace. “Sorry about this, pet,” he says; she squirms.
“What are you doing? I’m fine.”
“Yes. You’re also significantly warmer than the surrounding air, and I’m cold.”
“So I’m your hot-water bottle?”
“He’s actually got a point,” Arthur says from the floor. “It’s pretty cold down here, and body heat is going to be our best way to alleviate that.”
“So you get over here and warm him up,” Ariadne mutters. She sounds irritated, but she’s leaning her head against Eames’s shoulder. Arthur eyes them both balefully.
“I know you’re both going to mock me for this, but my legs hurt. A lot. I am not standing up again.”
“Mine hurt too,” Ariadne admits, tugging at Eames. “We should all sit. You too, Mal.”
“Ah - thank you.” She slides to the ground, leaning against Arthur reflexively, as Eames and Ariadne drop to his other side. Arthur lets them half-crush him as if he’s comfortable in spite of nudity and cinderblocks, and Mal wonders when he ended up part of a family in which she has no place.
“Penny for your thoughts, Mrs. Cobb,” Eames requests, twisting his neck into an agonizing-looking angle to squint at her. She blinks.
“It’s Mal, please, and I was just wondering how you all got to know each other.”
“Ah,” he snorts, “funny story, that.”
“Share,” she says.
They do, all three talking over and around each other, and she shares everything she remembers about Arthur without considering whether the source is dreamscape or reality. He fills in the details of both with equal ease, and things quickly devolve into storytelling in general. Dom is happy asleep, she learns, and the children are thriving, the children that she doesn’t actually have. The others were geniuses, and Ariadne says that she’s a bit of a legend, one of the best and brightest who lost out on luck. It feels rather like getting all dressed up and finding a stranger in the mirror: a description that’s hard to apply to her.
Eames falls asleep midway through Ariadne’s story about Paris that matches up entirely with Mal’s childhood memory of the city, which makes her wonder if June Hadley ever spent any time in Paris. She doesn’t realize that she’s tired herself until she blinks awake in the same half-hearted fluorescence to find all the others snoring.
They wake a little after she does, or at least it seems that way as she examines space and wonders how much Dom has aged while they were on the surface. She wonders if he’s found someone else, remarried a stranger or a pretty projection girl, whether her imaginary daughter is old enough to have an imaginary boyfriend. Or a real one sleeping, and God, she hopes nobody under there will have to endure that one. She suspects that someone will.
Ariadne stirs, looking larger the instant she wakes, and the other two are only moments after her.
“How long have we been asleep?” she asks. Mal shrugs.
“There was a clock on the terminal,” Arthur says, shoving at the others until they let him stand. “Ugh.”
“Painful?” Eames asks, hauling himself up with his hand pressed against the cinderblocks. “Augh, fuck, clearly.” Ariadne’s cringing too, and Mal grudgingly forces herself to her feet as her legs explode in simultaneous muscle aches and pins and needles.
There’s another terminal nearer the door - in clear sight of it, at least, and close enough for them to be visible to any entrants - and it’s there that they find themselves. “Twelve hours,” Arthur reports tiredly, and all of them pretend that isn’t more than enough time for them to be noticed, to be found.
This computer doesn’t have Internet either. Nor does it have any other information, no means of contact, no clue about what has happened here.
“We could check for alarms,” Ariadne suggests. “See if we could set one off.”
It’s a good idea. They canvass the dungeon (Mal isn’t sure when it acquired that name, but it has already become embedded) inch by inch and square by square, with no luck. No security cameras that they can observe, no air vents (tiny holes near the ceiling, but that’s all), no sign of anything at all.
By the time they’re all back at the computer by the door - as good a meeting place as any - Mal feels dizzy and dry-throated, Ariadne has somehow contrived to look even paler, and Eames is rubbing at his forehead as if he’s trying to knead bread.
“We’re getting dehydrated, aren’t we?”
“We are,” Eames says, sounding exhausted. “No water in here, of course.”
“Can we hijack some of the IV tubes, or something?” Ariadne suggests, poking at the nearest one - each dreamer is hooked up to several. “Everything goes straight into the ceiling, though, and I can’t tell which is for Somnacin and which is for everything else.”
“Also, it’s probably designed as a steady drip,” Arthur points out, crouching next to her. “We’d have to leave them open for quite some time to get enough to actually drink.”
“And we don’t have the extra body fat to last for very long without food,” Mal says. She feels almost preternaturally calm, detached - not healthy, she knows, some psychology class echoing. She isn’t sure when she took it, or where, and doesn’t care.
“And we’ll be waiting for a while. Perfect.” Eames kicks the cinderblocks halfheartedly, careful of his toes.
“So, what, we’re done and that’s it?” Ariadne demands, nostrils flaring. “You’re all just going to give up and let us dehydrate to death?”
“We could go back under.” The possibility has been seeping through her consciousness in spite of her attempts to ignore it, guilt-tinged but alluring. “We all know how to insert the cannulae, yes? We can hook ourselves in to everything. Fed, hydrated, not waiting.”
“It’s still giving up on getting out,” Ariadne protests, but she doesn’t seem convinced.
“Is getting out even what we want?” Eames asks, dropping back against the wall with a thud. “Especially you, Ari.”
She bites her lip, shaking her head - not in denial, it looks like, more like she’s trying to shake something away. “I don’t like it. You’ve rebuilt identities, haven’t you?”
“Yes, and I don’t recommend doing it. Ever, if you can possibly avoid it.”
“Besides,” Arthur interjects, “it’s better than being dead.”
“So you agree?” Mal’s surprised to find that she sounds relieved. Going under would keep them alive, would save them from this ghostly empty place that is going to drive her mad (would let her apologize to Dom, see him again, would let her see her children and her mother, and if Arthur goes under with her then she can also keep her friend.)
“I think I agree,” he says, sighing. “Eames, didn’t you say you’d found a box of alcohol swabs?”
“I did, at that. Save us from rotting away in our sleep.”
“Thank you for that mental image, Eames,” Arthur sighs. “Where was it?”
“Three beds back. I’ll grab it.”
“No, stay. I can.” He pads off before anyone can respond, leaving the other three shivering and stiff.
“So, you’re going with them?” Ariadne asks, wary, disappointed.
Eames sighs. “Probably, yes. Quite frankly, I do not want to die, particularly not like this. I really doubt we’ll wake up back in prison, and building things up again down there won’t be any more difficult than up here. Possibly less so, depending on why we’ve been abandoned here.”
“Yeah, I see your point.” She’s tense, muscles in her shoulders knotted under the skin; clothes would hide it, or make it harder to see. Used to keeping her cool, this one. Mal clears her throat.
“None of us are going to force you into it, Ariadne.”
She blinks, glancing up. “No, I knew that, but I don’t really want to stay up here alone either. I’d say wait a little longer, but with the way that time was passing down there -”
“Yeah, excellent point,” Arthur says, rejoining them with the swabs in hand. “So, are we doing this now?”
“Better than waiting, I suppose,” Eames says, stretching his arms above his head. Ariadne nods grimly.
“Yeah, definitely.” She takes the swabs, flipping the box open, and stares around the clump of them. “So, who’s going under first?”
“I will,” Mal says, well aware of how selfish she’s being.
Somehow, they all end up accompanying her to her own empty cot. She wipes off the cannulae, wishing they had fresh ones to hand, and clears her throat as she rolls rests them in her palm.
“We’ll contact each other in dreamscape, yes?”
“Of course,” Arthur says, and she glances to the others. Eames nods first, then Ariadne, seemingly surprised, does the same.
“See you then,” she says, and slides the first of the cannulae into her wrist. Second, third, careful with the angles.
One of the earlier ones was the PASIV line, it seems; her eyes fall closed as she lets go of the last, ceiling turning dim. She thinks she hears Arthur say, “Sleep well,” but she isn’t entirely sure.
The living room is all bright colors and wide-spread windows, afternoon light splashing golden on the ground. She’s warm, truly warm. Still scrawny and shrunken, tired, but dressed now, graceful terra-cotta folds. She isn’t sure she’s ever honestly worn anything so fine, but it feels familiar here.
There’s a book open upside down on the coffee table, paperback spine crinkled. Science fiction, it looks like, modern and jazzy. 12 and up, according to the back. On the rug is something that looks a lot like a dog toy, and there are photos perched on the mantel.
School pictures, mostly, it looks like. James, Phillipa, cheesy grins and bright brushed sweaters. There’s a wedding picture, Hollywood-perfect, and right at the center, unavoidable, two familiar faces. Herself, younger and softer-boned, less starved, smiling with diamonds in her ears. Arthur, smiling resignedly with a window at his back and a mug of coffee in his hand.
It’s a strange feeling, finding that you’ve been mourned.
Behind her, she hears a sliding door creak.
“Mal?”
“Don’t be afraid,” she says quickly and almost laughs. So dramatic. “Don’t be. I’m real.”
“But you’re -”
“I was.” She forces herself to turn, and God, it’s him, a sheaf of papers in his hand and a pencil behind his ear, staring at her like - well, like she’s an angel, if you remember that the Biblical angels terrified everyone they met. “You’re not insane, Dom, I promise. I’m back. It’s really me.” She feels fragile, indistinct, as if the world could spin and flex and turn and it wouldn’t be strange at all. (Technically, the world could.)
She has no idea what she expects Dom to do, to say, but what slips out of him is “Christ, Mal, if it’s - I’ve missed you so much.”
Everything shatters; there’s a strange moment when she is entirely conscious of a strange cracked sound from somewhere she can’t name, and then he’s running towards her with the papers flapping all around him, managing to be close enough that she can half-fly into his shoulder as she realizes that she’s sobbing hard enough to shake. “Fucking God,” she whispers, “fucking God…”
“Hey,” he breathes, “hey, it’s okay.” Pause, his hands tangling in her hair, gentle. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she chokes out, “yes, it is, but - Dom, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry -”
“Why?” he asks, baffled and guilty, and God, but she loves him, and he lost her, she almost lost him, everything to pieces, and now this half-real thing -
“I love you,” she whispers, and he breaks down into her hair. His shirt is getting ruined under her, and she’s going to be washing salt and crusted snot out of her hair once they’re done, and he’s solid and hot as they crush each other close. And even if none of that is real, it’s close enough. The feel of it may not be real, but he is, whispering cracked half-finished “I love you”s into her cheek, the thought true even on imaginary sound waves. This is real enough.