Inception: I built a city of you
More in the "stories I will never completely finish so I'll just say 'fuck it' and post it" series.
I built a city of you
Almost 4000 words. Cobb/(projection!)Arthur. And it's just one more city that will collapse into the mud. Vaguely NC-17.
In limbo there is no first dream. It is just one long continuous dream until you leave. Cobb doesn't remember if the first time was when he woke up to the shoreline, sand and salt in his mouth, with Arthur trying to shake him awake, or if that was the fourth, or fifth, or it never happened at all.
And then he thinks, no, at first, he was alone.
He's still alone now, of course. He knew that with Mal too. It had never been a question about reality, only ever a question about desire.
"Cobb," Arthur says, irritated, nudging his bony shoulder into Cobb's arm. "Are you listening?"
I'm listening, Cobb tells him, because he is.
*
Once when they were under, Cobb had lost Mal in limbo. When he found her again, she had been building enormous pillars of salt in an ocean so still it was glass under their feet. I did put a sheet of glass under the water, she had told him when he asked, her throat white and gleaming as she laughed, and they had danced to imagined strains--Cobb's--of Billie Holiday singing, if it's a crime, then I'm guilty-- guilty of loving you.
In regular dreams you can always feel it when a shared dreamer changes the dreamscape. Even if the dream built is huge, spanning continents and seas, you can feel it when something alters, shifts, diverges, from a window being built to a city being folded in half. It feels like a limb falling asleep-- something forced and outside your control.
In limbo, you can still feel it, but everything is numb, just too hazy to be definite, and Cobb isn't sure if that's a function of time being stretched too thin or the dreamer being too deep. Everything is less immediate, less vivid: food, tactile contact, even hurt. Cobb remembers when Mal had accidentally cut her foot running with him in the cleft of the Grand Canyon. She bled all the way back up, and hadn't felt a thing until Cobb pointed it out. The trail she had left behind glistened like metal, dark and unreal, but everything in limbo was dark and unreal.
"How big is limbo?" Arthur had asked, three years after Mal's death, and Cobb had wanted to tell him it wasn't that limbo was large. Limbo could be very small. After Mal hid her totem away, limbo had shrunk into the few blocks of their childhood homes, their apartment, the school they had built for the kids. At first they built restaurants and butcher shops and boutiques in the outskirts, but eventually they just started tearing down and rebuilding one spot. A hole in the wall pizza place Mal remembered from Naples on Sunday, their favorite gyro place in New York on Monday. One building constantly demolished and resurrected and demolished again, under the weight of their desires. That was limbo.
But before that, when Cobb had lost Mal, he had only managed to find her by sitting absolutely still, for what felt like days and weeks, eating and drinking and doing nothing, only waiting until he felt her tug. Limbo was too vast to cross on feet, and every dreamer could make it bigger, simply wishing a desert or the Himalayas into existence. And he and Mal, they had wanted more than just to be dreamers. They wanted to be dreams. They had made themselves infinite.
Love brought you here to me, Mal had said gravely when he, barefoot, crossed to where she was coaxing out a salt statue of the Eiffel Tower, and that was kind of a joke between them because that's how he had started his proposal, but he thinks about it now, how he was so sure he only found her again because she wanted to be found and because he loved her so much he was hungry for every lick of her presence.
He tries to concentrate now, waiting for Saito to do something, anything, the tingle that will let Cobb draw closer. When nothing happens, he thinks out loud, I need to try harder.
And because Cobb doesn't want to be interrupted, Arthur doesn't say anything. And because the silence between them gets oppressive, Arthur gets up and leaves.
He'll be back, Cobb knows.
He always is.
*
Cobb doesn't remember the first time he saw Arthur in limbo. In a way, he thinks Arthur has always been here in limbo, maybe even before Cobb was.
"I came in here after you," Arthur tells him, smiling with a mouth like the edge of a knife. It's a smile Cobb could cut himself against, and he has, many times. Like this time, like how Cobb wants to ask, which 'after me' do you mean? But Arthur would only tell him with that funny brand of tender severity, "You know what I mean," and that was something Arthur would have said even up top, with the same slow, careful blink.
The thing about projections, Miles once taught them, was that you merely shaped them. You don't create them. They were made of the same kind of unadulterated dream stuff as limbo itself. It was only that you formed it into a person when you encountered it. In a dream, a regular controlled dream, if a piece of unadulterated dream intruded, you could feel it. Without form, it was too ferocious and unstable to remain. The dreamer feels like they have tame it with a shape and face, make it something they could comprehend. And so they would make it into a projection.
And that was the danger with limbo, Cobb had discovered, is discovering again, this time without Mal. When it was all uncontrolled dreaming, everything was wild and untamed. Everything was so close to that layer of memories and feelings that created the dream world that you could no longer feel yourself making the dream into anything, whether it was a building or a person. Things simply were.
So no, Cobb doesn't remember the first time he saw Arthur in limbo. He can't tell exactly when limbo became too much, too overwhelmingly lonely and sparse, so empty that he lost control and made Arthur.
But he does remember the first time he killed Arthur in limbo.
*
You can die in limbo as many times as you want, and still not leave. It's only if you want to leave that killing yourself sends you back up.
"That's what you told me, anyway," Arthur says, stirring soy milk into his coffee.
When did I tell you this? Cobb asks. Where did you find soy milk in an Italian café? he doesn't ask. When will I stop forgetting this isn't reality? he doesn't ask. When will you leave me alone? he doesn't ask.
"Last week."
Cobb shivers. Last week, he'd told Arthur to meet him on the roof of a hotel he remembered from Taipei. Then he'd collapsed the building from the bottom up, so he wouldn't be able to see Arthur's body in the rubble. The smoke had been restless and formed shapes in the air, and Cobb thought for a minute that through it, he could see a slim, tall figure picking through the rubble for something, like a nightmarish heron reaching in the water for fish you couldn't see but knew were there.
Now, Arthur frowns as he leans over his coffee, looking closely at Cobb. How wonderful memory is, Cobb thinks, when you are in a dream. The way little gaps are patched over by the soothing hand of imagination. He would never, when conscious, be able to describe the perfect way Arthur moved, sharp shoulders and agile spine. But here he can reproduce everything, even the twitch of Arthur's eyebrow when he asks, "Cobb, are you okay?"
I’m fine, Cobb tells him.
"Besides, it doesn't matter. The dying, I mean," Arthur continues. He draws back nonchalantly, drinks his coffee, licks his upper lip. "Since we're under sedation."
I'm under sedation, Cobb reminds him.
"Right," Arthur says, and there's that smile again, feral and lithe, quick enough to cut.
"That's what I said."
*
The first time was in the dark, in a claustrophobic tent on a mountain Cobb was sure Saito had created. Or maybe Cobb had created it without knowing, maybe he had merely wondered what Saito would have made, and this mountain was his imagination, was his attempt to understand Saito. He'd done that a few hundred miles back, created this idyllic seaside village full of fishermen speaking what he imagined to be Japanese, before he realized it was his subconscious creating the projections. It was a village filled with his memories of Japanese calligraphy scrolls in art museums in New York City.
Maybe, Cobb was beginning to think, this was all a cruel joke. Maybe he would wake up and he'd be in Mombasa, in Yusuf's dream den, and they'd still have the whole Fischer job ahead of him. He would wake up, and call Arthur, and demand, Fischer's subconscious, is it militarized? Are you sure?
That's when Arthur unzipped the flap and crawled in, all cold fingers and warm voice. "Cobb," he murmured, lips pressed against Cobb's ear, hands digging into Cobb's bare shoulders. Cobb could see his wrists flex, so strong under the skin, and there was a moment of fear before Arthur leaned down to kiss him.
Cobb had shot him without thinking. Arthur had tasted and felt like Mal, and there was no blood when he disappeared, and Cobb didn't sleep that night, too afraid of the loneliness he could feel, like bile, in the back of his mouth, the loneliness that in limbo could make anyone and anything.
*
The next Arthur had claimed to be real. "The team was worried," he had said, his brow furrowed. "So I volunteered to go under." But his face in the reflection of Cobb's glass of water was Cobb's own, and at first it was okay, but then Cobb remembered Mal, and he knew he could never trust himself when it came to limbo, especially when it came to projections.
The one after that didn't bother pretending.
There was the Arthur who appeared with his hand on the back of a woman who looked shockingly like Mal from far away. The Arthur who took a bullet for Cobb when Saito had hidden himself, once again, with a screen of militant projections, not wanting to be found. The Arthur that woke him up as if they were still on the Bosque job, wry and snappy and so real that for a minute Cobb doubted himself, before he saw out of the corner of his eye Arthur's face flickering in and out, like a dying lightbulb. The Arthur that looked like when he was younger, just out of the military, hair cut too short and posture too tight, and that one had broken Cobb so badly, just the thought of how long ago it had been, and how it would never be quite like that, that he actually ran from Arthur, forgetting he could simply will Arthur away.
And then, the Arthur who had come to Cobb at night, his eyes bright, running his tongue nervously over his bottom lip when Cobb wrestled away from his touch and pressed a gun against Arthur's forehead, forcing him to his knees.
What do you want? Cobb had demanded, taking the gun off safety.
"What do you want?" Arthur whispered, and, eyes never leaving Cobb's face, took the gun in his mouth. His throat kept moving, as if he wanted to swallow the gun all the way down, and the gun kept moving in Cobb's hand with the workings of Arthur's tongue, bobbing in a rhythm Cobb couldn't mistake. For a delirious moment, Cobb imagined he could feel Arthur's mouth wrapped around him, Arthur's tongue moving against him, hot and slick and wrong.
Stop it, Cobb whispered, hoarse, his hand trembling as he jerked the gun out of Arthur's mouth. A string of saliva, silver in the dark, extended between the gun and Arthur's bottom lip, and Cobb felt himself go hard as Arthur watched him hungrily through half-lidded eyes. Please, just go away, he managed, voice breaking with the effort.
"Love brought me here to you," Arthur murmured, leaning into the gun and smiling as Cobb shot him in the face.
*
After that, Arthur was everywhere.
*
Shooting is always the easiest. Cobb has done it other ways, of course-- knives, grenades, driving into Arthur with a car. Throwing off cliffs or buildings is always risky, because Cobb would start torturing himself with thoughts of whether or not it worked, or whether or not he was leaving Arthur to die slowly, of starvation and broken limbs, and thoughts meant Arthur would come back more quickly.
The worst is when he wakes up with his face pressed into the carpet, surrounded by broken glass and rose petals and the remains of a lamp shade, smashed, beside his head. It occurs to him when he sits up that this is--was-- his and Mal's anniversary suite, and he holds his breath, willing himself out of it, but then Arthur's voice calls to him from outside the balcony, and he knows he can't escape.
Arthur is perched on the ledge, one shoe already dangling from his foot, and Cobb has to grab at the balcony railing to keep himself from vaulting over to Arthur, strangling him with every ounce of blind fury he can summon. "We're really high up," Arthur tells him without a hint of emotion. "I don't know if Mal told you, but it's a lot higher up when you're sitting on the ledge."
Fuck you, Cobb screams. Why are you doing this to me?
"Do you really want me to go away?" And it's sick, how innocent he sounds, how much like Arthur he sounds, the Arthur who once asked Cobb, when he first met him, are you really going to teach me how to do that? like Cobb was offering him the moon.
Yes, Cobb snarls, tearing blindly at the iron railing with his nails. Yes, goddamnit, just leave me alone--
Cobb doesn't see Arthur jump. Something like the sound of glass breaking from the hotel room makes Cobb turn around and for a brief instant, in the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees the hint of black lace dress, and maybe curled hair, and maybe he catches a familiar smell of cloves and vanilla. Oh god, he thinks frantically, stop this, I don’t want this at all--
When he turns back around, Arthur is already gone. The shoe he had toed off sits, abandoned, on the ledge. After a few minutes, there's a sound of a car honking, then the sound of sirens, and then the noise swells and expands until it swallows everything.
The next time Cobb sees Arthur is in a pachinko parlor filled with anonymous Japanese salarymen-- Saito's projections, Cobb thinks, because he's close, he can feel it. Cobb's getting up to hunt Saito down, but then Arthur sits down next to him with a bucket of pachinko balls in his hand, smiling opaquely, almost casually, and Cobb's mind goes blank. When he comes to, he's fucking Arthur against the pachinko machine, Arthur pushing back into Cobb's cock with wild, hungry movements, his knuckles white against the plastic dispenser of the machine, and Cobb is hissing, this isn't real, this isn't--
"Dom, please," Arthur gasps, tightening around Cobb, and Cobb comes so hard it tastes a little bit like pain and a lot like desperation.
*
Things go badly after that.
Cobb loses track of the number of times he and Arthur fuck, the number of times he kills Arthur because the disgust overwhelms him, the number of times he makes Arthur go away only to summon him back again, tearing at Arthur's throat and clothes like he wants to drown in the illusion and surrender. He loses track of Saito completely. When he remembers Saito and the self-loathing stirs, Arthur is there to kiss him, blow him, sometimes fuck him until he can't think about anything but Arthur's cock in him, perfect and brutal and relentless. It becomes a cycle and Cobb can't break through.
It gets so bad that once, Cobb shoots Arthur in the back of the head as Arthur brushes his teeth, watching Cobb from the mirror, and Arthur actually walks right back in through the door.
"You want this," Arthur says, taking Cobb's gun and pushing him down into the bed. "Stop pretending."
You're not real, Cobb tells him, hating himself. There's nothing to want, because you're not real.
Arthur grins. "It's all real," he says. He kisses Cobb's collarbone, his neck, the space right above his heart. "That's what scares you the most," he says, lips and tongue weightless above Cobb's skin. "The idea that not everything in a dream is a dream," he says and moves his body against Cobb's, moaning.
Cobb growls, you're wrong, and uses his weight to flip them over. He leans all of his weight down on Arthur's wrists in a way that, up top, would leave bruises. But it's all pointless, because this Arthur isn't something he can hold on to. This Arthur will never be pinned down, never be smothered, never disappear. This Arthur will wake up in the morning with skin pristine and white, and maybe in the afternoon, if Cobb wants it enough, if Cobb needs the delusion enough, the bruises will blossom as Cobb fixates on Arthur's hands lying slack against his laptop keyboard, and when it happens, Arthur will look up, his smile cruel for how familiar and loving it will be, and--
Arthur laughs. The sound is dark, thin, mocking. It doesn't sound anything like Arthur's real laugh, but Cobb doesn't parse the difference until afterwards, when Arthur is asleep and Cobb is trying to count the number of times he's heard Arthur laugh since Mal's death. It scares him that he could overlook something so fundamental. It scares him even more than the feel of Arthur's body, lithe and naked, against his, because it means that he is forgetting.
*
A year ago, during a job in Helsinki, Eames had made a rude joke about pointmen and Arthur and Cobb that had ended in Arthur giving him a bloody lip and Eames giving Arthur a black eye and the three of them getting kicked out of a bar. That was the last job they had done together before the Fischer job, and Cobb still winces a little when he remembers the icy way Arthur had said Eames' name when they met again in Paris, shaking Eames' hand like he was imagining it was Eames' neck and he was choking it.
This is the truth: Cobb has never wanted Arthur up top, or at least, if he has, it hasn't been consciously.
This is the truth: Mal had been the one who had pointed out Arthur's good looks, and Cobb had been the one who had protested, saying Arthur looked so young, how could anyone ever--? And Mal had laughed, swatting Cobb with the morning paper, something she had learned from Miles, and she had said, open your eyes once in a while, Dom.
This is the truth: After Mal's death, Cobb had only Arthur to rely on. Arthur helped him with the funeral, and the kids, and the lawyer, and eventually the escape and the first extraction job. It was Arthur who kept Cobb together, Arthur who stayed even when Cobb manifested every sign of being a lunatic with a death wish on the run, Arthur who was the first one not to ask did you? when Cobb said, they think I killed her. It was Arthur who didn't turn around and leave even when he didn't believe in inception.
But limbo, Cobb knows, isn't about reality. Limbo is about perversion, mutation, corruption. It is about taking what you want or think you want and giving you too much of it, until it becomes something you don't want, until it drives you crazy and you no longer knew the lines.
This is the truth: Once during an argument nominally about payment and really about how Cobb could no longer control his projection of Mal, Cobb had snarled at Arthur, if this is about me dragging you down as an extractor, then leave, go ahead and leave, because I don't need you either. Arthur had jerked back then, like Cobb's words had slapped him in the face and he no longer knew what to do with himself. He had gone absolutely still and then, like an accordion sagging under its own weight, he fell back into a chair, his face so shocked that Cobb almost couldn't bear looking at it.
This is the truth: Arthur had put his face in his hands, not crying, but his shoulders trembling as if he were, and he had whispered, his words more breath than sound, I only want to do what you want, Dom.
This is the truth: They are in limbo and Arthur is naked, twined around Cobb. Cobb has his hand pressed against Arthur's face. He is trying to look into Arthur's eyes. He is trying to understand what he sees there. Arthur nuzzles against Cobb's palm. "What do you want?" he murmurs, his words more breath than sound. "Just tell me, and I'll do it."
*
Cobb drowns Arthur in a canal behind Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Arthur doesn't struggle when his head breaks the water's surface, when Cobb keeps pushing until the water comes past his neck, all the way to his shoulders. Arthur doesn't ever struggle anymore.
After a few minutes, Cobb relaxes his grip. Part of him expects Arthur to sit back up and shake the water from his face, but instead Arthur's body falls, head first, into the canal, sinking until Cobb can no longer see it in the water. Cobb doesn't feel anything. He never feels anything, anymore.
When he stands up, he notices that the water is bubbling. He opens his mouth to say that was fast, but then he realizes it isn't Arthur at all. It's just a leather jacket. Arthur's leather jacket, he realizes with a start. The brown one that he bought in Tokyo, the first time they were there. It is limbo, and a dream, so the familiarity is instinctual and has nothing to do with real knowledge.
Cobb sits back down at the edge of the dock, waiting for the jacket to float closer so he can rescue it from the water. But as it lazily drifts towards him, he sees that there's more-- a silver watch, a maroon tie, even what looks like a metal PASIV case. A notebook, spread-eagled so the pages are soaking in the water and unreadable. An Escher print that Cobb recognizes from Arthur's first apartment. A wallet, open to the driver's license. Three passports, all from different countries. More of Arthur's clothes. Even Arthur's Glock, almost invisible in the murky, dark water.
Across the canal, Cobb can see shapes moving, rearranging themselves in a crowd. They are shaped like people, even though Cobb knows they aren't quite people yet. They have no faces, and when Cobb stares at them, their outlines blur and flicker, like the view of the road behind windshield wipers in a heavy storm. Eventually one of them jostles its way to the front. As if hesitating, it quivers slightly, sketching in the beginnings of clothes and skin. Then it starts putting on Arthur's appearance.
"Arthur," Cobb says. The name is heavy in his mouth.
And he waits.
*
A/N: Title and summary is a bastardization of Baxendale's "I Built This City", yet oddly enough, it's Joy Division's "Shadowplay" that I mentally set the fic to. As an aside, this story was inspired by a single scene in Colm Toibin's The Master where Henry James has to help drown a woman's belongings into the Venetian canals after her death, and he muses on how they had to keep pushing the dresses down because they insisted on floating back up. Which, in my mind, is like the perfect horror that must be limbo.
I built a city of you
Almost 4000 words. Cobb/(projection!)Arthur. And it's just one more city that will collapse into the mud. Vaguely NC-17.
In limbo there is no first dream. It is just one long continuous dream until you leave. Cobb doesn't remember if the first time was when he woke up to the shoreline, sand and salt in his mouth, with Arthur trying to shake him awake, or if that was the fourth, or fifth, or it never happened at all.
And then he thinks, no, at first, he was alone.
He's still alone now, of course. He knew that with Mal too. It had never been a question about reality, only ever a question about desire.
"Cobb," Arthur says, irritated, nudging his bony shoulder into Cobb's arm. "Are you listening?"
I'm listening, Cobb tells him, because he is.
*
Once when they were under, Cobb had lost Mal in limbo. When he found her again, she had been building enormous pillars of salt in an ocean so still it was glass under their feet. I did put a sheet of glass under the water, she had told him when he asked, her throat white and gleaming as she laughed, and they had danced to imagined strains--Cobb's--of Billie Holiday singing, if it's a crime, then I'm guilty-- guilty of loving you.
In regular dreams you can always feel it when a shared dreamer changes the dreamscape. Even if the dream built is huge, spanning continents and seas, you can feel it when something alters, shifts, diverges, from a window being built to a city being folded in half. It feels like a limb falling asleep-- something forced and outside your control.
In limbo, you can still feel it, but everything is numb, just too hazy to be definite, and Cobb isn't sure if that's a function of time being stretched too thin or the dreamer being too deep. Everything is less immediate, less vivid: food, tactile contact, even hurt. Cobb remembers when Mal had accidentally cut her foot running with him in the cleft of the Grand Canyon. She bled all the way back up, and hadn't felt a thing until Cobb pointed it out. The trail she had left behind glistened like metal, dark and unreal, but everything in limbo was dark and unreal.
"How big is limbo?" Arthur had asked, three years after Mal's death, and Cobb had wanted to tell him it wasn't that limbo was large. Limbo could be very small. After Mal hid her totem away, limbo had shrunk into the few blocks of their childhood homes, their apartment, the school they had built for the kids. At first they built restaurants and butcher shops and boutiques in the outskirts, but eventually they just started tearing down and rebuilding one spot. A hole in the wall pizza place Mal remembered from Naples on Sunday, their favorite gyro place in New York on Monday. One building constantly demolished and resurrected and demolished again, under the weight of their desires. That was limbo.
But before that, when Cobb had lost Mal, he had only managed to find her by sitting absolutely still, for what felt like days and weeks, eating and drinking and doing nothing, only waiting until he felt her tug. Limbo was too vast to cross on feet, and every dreamer could make it bigger, simply wishing a desert or the Himalayas into existence. And he and Mal, they had wanted more than just to be dreamers. They wanted to be dreams. They had made themselves infinite.
Love brought you here to me, Mal had said gravely when he, barefoot, crossed to where she was coaxing out a salt statue of the Eiffel Tower, and that was kind of a joke between them because that's how he had started his proposal, but he thinks about it now, how he was so sure he only found her again because she wanted to be found and because he loved her so much he was hungry for every lick of her presence.
He tries to concentrate now, waiting for Saito to do something, anything, the tingle that will let Cobb draw closer. When nothing happens, he thinks out loud, I need to try harder.
And because Cobb doesn't want to be interrupted, Arthur doesn't say anything. And because the silence between them gets oppressive, Arthur gets up and leaves.
He'll be back, Cobb knows.
He always is.
*
Cobb doesn't remember the first time he saw Arthur in limbo. In a way, he thinks Arthur has always been here in limbo, maybe even before Cobb was.
"I came in here after you," Arthur tells him, smiling with a mouth like the edge of a knife. It's a smile Cobb could cut himself against, and he has, many times. Like this time, like how Cobb wants to ask, which 'after me' do you mean? But Arthur would only tell him with that funny brand of tender severity, "You know what I mean," and that was something Arthur would have said even up top, with the same slow, careful blink.
The thing about projections, Miles once taught them, was that you merely shaped them. You don't create them. They were made of the same kind of unadulterated dream stuff as limbo itself. It was only that you formed it into a person when you encountered it. In a dream, a regular controlled dream, if a piece of unadulterated dream intruded, you could feel it. Without form, it was too ferocious and unstable to remain. The dreamer feels like they have tame it with a shape and face, make it something they could comprehend. And so they would make it into a projection.
And that was the danger with limbo, Cobb had discovered, is discovering again, this time without Mal. When it was all uncontrolled dreaming, everything was wild and untamed. Everything was so close to that layer of memories and feelings that created the dream world that you could no longer feel yourself making the dream into anything, whether it was a building or a person. Things simply were.
So no, Cobb doesn't remember the first time he saw Arthur in limbo. He can't tell exactly when limbo became too much, too overwhelmingly lonely and sparse, so empty that he lost control and made Arthur.
But he does remember the first time he killed Arthur in limbo.
*
You can die in limbo as many times as you want, and still not leave. It's only if you want to leave that killing yourself sends you back up.
"That's what you told me, anyway," Arthur says, stirring soy milk into his coffee.
When did I tell you this? Cobb asks. Where did you find soy milk in an Italian café? he doesn't ask. When will I stop forgetting this isn't reality? he doesn't ask. When will you leave me alone? he doesn't ask.
"Last week."
Cobb shivers. Last week, he'd told Arthur to meet him on the roof of a hotel he remembered from Taipei. Then he'd collapsed the building from the bottom up, so he wouldn't be able to see Arthur's body in the rubble. The smoke had been restless and formed shapes in the air, and Cobb thought for a minute that through it, he could see a slim, tall figure picking through the rubble for something, like a nightmarish heron reaching in the water for fish you couldn't see but knew were there.
Now, Arthur frowns as he leans over his coffee, looking closely at Cobb. How wonderful memory is, Cobb thinks, when you are in a dream. The way little gaps are patched over by the soothing hand of imagination. He would never, when conscious, be able to describe the perfect way Arthur moved, sharp shoulders and agile spine. But here he can reproduce everything, even the twitch of Arthur's eyebrow when he asks, "Cobb, are you okay?"
I’m fine, Cobb tells him.
"Besides, it doesn't matter. The dying, I mean," Arthur continues. He draws back nonchalantly, drinks his coffee, licks his upper lip. "Since we're under sedation."
I'm under sedation, Cobb reminds him.
"Right," Arthur says, and there's that smile again, feral and lithe, quick enough to cut.
"That's what I said."
*
The first time was in the dark, in a claustrophobic tent on a mountain Cobb was sure Saito had created. Or maybe Cobb had created it without knowing, maybe he had merely wondered what Saito would have made, and this mountain was his imagination, was his attempt to understand Saito. He'd done that a few hundred miles back, created this idyllic seaside village full of fishermen speaking what he imagined to be Japanese, before he realized it was his subconscious creating the projections. It was a village filled with his memories of Japanese calligraphy scrolls in art museums in New York City.
Maybe, Cobb was beginning to think, this was all a cruel joke. Maybe he would wake up and he'd be in Mombasa, in Yusuf's dream den, and they'd still have the whole Fischer job ahead of him. He would wake up, and call Arthur, and demand, Fischer's subconscious, is it militarized? Are you sure?
That's when Arthur unzipped the flap and crawled in, all cold fingers and warm voice. "Cobb," he murmured, lips pressed against Cobb's ear, hands digging into Cobb's bare shoulders. Cobb could see his wrists flex, so strong under the skin, and there was a moment of fear before Arthur leaned down to kiss him.
Cobb had shot him without thinking. Arthur had tasted and felt like Mal, and there was no blood when he disappeared, and Cobb didn't sleep that night, too afraid of the loneliness he could feel, like bile, in the back of his mouth, the loneliness that in limbo could make anyone and anything.
*
The next Arthur had claimed to be real. "The team was worried," he had said, his brow furrowed. "So I volunteered to go under." But his face in the reflection of Cobb's glass of water was Cobb's own, and at first it was okay, but then Cobb remembered Mal, and he knew he could never trust himself when it came to limbo, especially when it came to projections.
The one after that didn't bother pretending.
There was the Arthur who appeared with his hand on the back of a woman who looked shockingly like Mal from far away. The Arthur who took a bullet for Cobb when Saito had hidden himself, once again, with a screen of militant projections, not wanting to be found. The Arthur that woke him up as if they were still on the Bosque job, wry and snappy and so real that for a minute Cobb doubted himself, before he saw out of the corner of his eye Arthur's face flickering in and out, like a dying lightbulb. The Arthur that looked like when he was younger, just out of the military, hair cut too short and posture too tight, and that one had broken Cobb so badly, just the thought of how long ago it had been, and how it would never be quite like that, that he actually ran from Arthur, forgetting he could simply will Arthur away.
And then, the Arthur who had come to Cobb at night, his eyes bright, running his tongue nervously over his bottom lip when Cobb wrestled away from his touch and pressed a gun against Arthur's forehead, forcing him to his knees.
What do you want? Cobb had demanded, taking the gun off safety.
"What do you want?" Arthur whispered, and, eyes never leaving Cobb's face, took the gun in his mouth. His throat kept moving, as if he wanted to swallow the gun all the way down, and the gun kept moving in Cobb's hand with the workings of Arthur's tongue, bobbing in a rhythm Cobb couldn't mistake. For a delirious moment, Cobb imagined he could feel Arthur's mouth wrapped around him, Arthur's tongue moving against him, hot and slick and wrong.
Stop it, Cobb whispered, hoarse, his hand trembling as he jerked the gun out of Arthur's mouth. A string of saliva, silver in the dark, extended between the gun and Arthur's bottom lip, and Cobb felt himself go hard as Arthur watched him hungrily through half-lidded eyes. Please, just go away, he managed, voice breaking with the effort.
"Love brought me here to you," Arthur murmured, leaning into the gun and smiling as Cobb shot him in the face.
*
After that, Arthur was everywhere.
*
Shooting is always the easiest. Cobb has done it other ways, of course-- knives, grenades, driving into Arthur with a car. Throwing off cliffs or buildings is always risky, because Cobb would start torturing himself with thoughts of whether or not it worked, or whether or not he was leaving Arthur to die slowly, of starvation and broken limbs, and thoughts meant Arthur would come back more quickly.
The worst is when he wakes up with his face pressed into the carpet, surrounded by broken glass and rose petals and the remains of a lamp shade, smashed, beside his head. It occurs to him when he sits up that this is--was-- his and Mal's anniversary suite, and he holds his breath, willing himself out of it, but then Arthur's voice calls to him from outside the balcony, and he knows he can't escape.
Arthur is perched on the ledge, one shoe already dangling from his foot, and Cobb has to grab at the balcony railing to keep himself from vaulting over to Arthur, strangling him with every ounce of blind fury he can summon. "We're really high up," Arthur tells him without a hint of emotion. "I don't know if Mal told you, but it's a lot higher up when you're sitting on the ledge."
Fuck you, Cobb screams. Why are you doing this to me?
"Do you really want me to go away?" And it's sick, how innocent he sounds, how much like Arthur he sounds, the Arthur who once asked Cobb, when he first met him, are you really going to teach me how to do that? like Cobb was offering him the moon.
Yes, Cobb snarls, tearing blindly at the iron railing with his nails. Yes, goddamnit, just leave me alone--
Cobb doesn't see Arthur jump. Something like the sound of glass breaking from the hotel room makes Cobb turn around and for a brief instant, in the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees the hint of black lace dress, and maybe curled hair, and maybe he catches a familiar smell of cloves and vanilla. Oh god, he thinks frantically, stop this, I don’t want this at all--
When he turns back around, Arthur is already gone. The shoe he had toed off sits, abandoned, on the ledge. After a few minutes, there's a sound of a car honking, then the sound of sirens, and then the noise swells and expands until it swallows everything.
The next time Cobb sees Arthur is in a pachinko parlor filled with anonymous Japanese salarymen-- Saito's projections, Cobb thinks, because he's close, he can feel it. Cobb's getting up to hunt Saito down, but then Arthur sits down next to him with a bucket of pachinko balls in his hand, smiling opaquely, almost casually, and Cobb's mind goes blank. When he comes to, he's fucking Arthur against the pachinko machine, Arthur pushing back into Cobb's cock with wild, hungry movements, his knuckles white against the plastic dispenser of the machine, and Cobb is hissing, this isn't real, this isn't--
"Dom, please," Arthur gasps, tightening around Cobb, and Cobb comes so hard it tastes a little bit like pain and a lot like desperation.
*
Things go badly after that.
Cobb loses track of the number of times he and Arthur fuck, the number of times he kills Arthur because the disgust overwhelms him, the number of times he makes Arthur go away only to summon him back again, tearing at Arthur's throat and clothes like he wants to drown in the illusion and surrender. He loses track of Saito completely. When he remembers Saito and the self-loathing stirs, Arthur is there to kiss him, blow him, sometimes fuck him until he can't think about anything but Arthur's cock in him, perfect and brutal and relentless. It becomes a cycle and Cobb can't break through.
It gets so bad that once, Cobb shoots Arthur in the back of the head as Arthur brushes his teeth, watching Cobb from the mirror, and Arthur actually walks right back in through the door.
"You want this," Arthur says, taking Cobb's gun and pushing him down into the bed. "Stop pretending."
You're not real, Cobb tells him, hating himself. There's nothing to want, because you're not real.
Arthur grins. "It's all real," he says. He kisses Cobb's collarbone, his neck, the space right above his heart. "That's what scares you the most," he says, lips and tongue weightless above Cobb's skin. "The idea that not everything in a dream is a dream," he says and moves his body against Cobb's, moaning.
Cobb growls, you're wrong, and uses his weight to flip them over. He leans all of his weight down on Arthur's wrists in a way that, up top, would leave bruises. But it's all pointless, because this Arthur isn't something he can hold on to. This Arthur will never be pinned down, never be smothered, never disappear. This Arthur will wake up in the morning with skin pristine and white, and maybe in the afternoon, if Cobb wants it enough, if Cobb needs the delusion enough, the bruises will blossom as Cobb fixates on Arthur's hands lying slack against his laptop keyboard, and when it happens, Arthur will look up, his smile cruel for how familiar and loving it will be, and--
Arthur laughs. The sound is dark, thin, mocking. It doesn't sound anything like Arthur's real laugh, but Cobb doesn't parse the difference until afterwards, when Arthur is asleep and Cobb is trying to count the number of times he's heard Arthur laugh since Mal's death. It scares him that he could overlook something so fundamental. It scares him even more than the feel of Arthur's body, lithe and naked, against his, because it means that he is forgetting.
*
A year ago, during a job in Helsinki, Eames had made a rude joke about pointmen and Arthur and Cobb that had ended in Arthur giving him a bloody lip and Eames giving Arthur a black eye and the three of them getting kicked out of a bar. That was the last job they had done together before the Fischer job, and Cobb still winces a little when he remembers the icy way Arthur had said Eames' name when they met again in Paris, shaking Eames' hand like he was imagining it was Eames' neck and he was choking it.
This is the truth: Cobb has never wanted Arthur up top, or at least, if he has, it hasn't been consciously.
This is the truth: Mal had been the one who had pointed out Arthur's good looks, and Cobb had been the one who had protested, saying Arthur looked so young, how could anyone ever--? And Mal had laughed, swatting Cobb with the morning paper, something she had learned from Miles, and she had said, open your eyes once in a while, Dom.
This is the truth: After Mal's death, Cobb had only Arthur to rely on. Arthur helped him with the funeral, and the kids, and the lawyer, and eventually the escape and the first extraction job. It was Arthur who kept Cobb together, Arthur who stayed even when Cobb manifested every sign of being a lunatic with a death wish on the run, Arthur who was the first one not to ask did you? when Cobb said, they think I killed her. It was Arthur who didn't turn around and leave even when he didn't believe in inception.
But limbo, Cobb knows, isn't about reality. Limbo is about perversion, mutation, corruption. It is about taking what you want or think you want and giving you too much of it, until it becomes something you don't want, until it drives you crazy and you no longer knew the lines.
This is the truth: Once during an argument nominally about payment and really about how Cobb could no longer control his projection of Mal, Cobb had snarled at Arthur, if this is about me dragging you down as an extractor, then leave, go ahead and leave, because I don't need you either. Arthur had jerked back then, like Cobb's words had slapped him in the face and he no longer knew what to do with himself. He had gone absolutely still and then, like an accordion sagging under its own weight, he fell back into a chair, his face so shocked that Cobb almost couldn't bear looking at it.
This is the truth: Arthur had put his face in his hands, not crying, but his shoulders trembling as if he were, and he had whispered, his words more breath than sound, I only want to do what you want, Dom.
This is the truth: They are in limbo and Arthur is naked, twined around Cobb. Cobb has his hand pressed against Arthur's face. He is trying to look into Arthur's eyes. He is trying to understand what he sees there. Arthur nuzzles against Cobb's palm. "What do you want?" he murmurs, his words more breath than sound. "Just tell me, and I'll do it."
*
Cobb drowns Arthur in a canal behind Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Arthur doesn't struggle when his head breaks the water's surface, when Cobb keeps pushing until the water comes past his neck, all the way to his shoulders. Arthur doesn't ever struggle anymore.
After a few minutes, Cobb relaxes his grip. Part of him expects Arthur to sit back up and shake the water from his face, but instead Arthur's body falls, head first, into the canal, sinking until Cobb can no longer see it in the water. Cobb doesn't feel anything. He never feels anything, anymore.
When he stands up, he notices that the water is bubbling. He opens his mouth to say that was fast, but then he realizes it isn't Arthur at all. It's just a leather jacket. Arthur's leather jacket, he realizes with a start. The brown one that he bought in Tokyo, the first time they were there. It is limbo, and a dream, so the familiarity is instinctual and has nothing to do with real knowledge.
Cobb sits back down at the edge of the dock, waiting for the jacket to float closer so he can rescue it from the water. But as it lazily drifts towards him, he sees that there's more-- a silver watch, a maroon tie, even what looks like a metal PASIV case. A notebook, spread-eagled so the pages are soaking in the water and unreadable. An Escher print that Cobb recognizes from Arthur's first apartment. A wallet, open to the driver's license. Three passports, all from different countries. More of Arthur's clothes. Even Arthur's Glock, almost invisible in the murky, dark water.
Across the canal, Cobb can see shapes moving, rearranging themselves in a crowd. They are shaped like people, even though Cobb knows they aren't quite people yet. They have no faces, and when Cobb stares at them, their outlines blur and flicker, like the view of the road behind windshield wipers in a heavy storm. Eventually one of them jostles its way to the front. As if hesitating, it quivers slightly, sketching in the beginnings of clothes and skin. Then it starts putting on Arthur's appearance.
"Arthur," Cobb says. The name is heavy in his mouth.
And he waits.
*
A/N: Title and summary is a bastardization of Baxendale's "I Built This City", yet oddly enough, it's Joy Division's "Shadowplay" that I mentally set the fic to. As an aside, this story was inspired by a single scene in Colm Toibin's The Master where Henry James has to help drown a woman's belongings into the Venetian canals after her death, and he muses on how they had to keep pushing the dresses down because they insisted on floating back up. Which, in my mind, is like the perfect horror that must be limbo.