you're too young & eager to love

Inception warm-up/snippet thing.
Mostly because I couldn't get some of the lines out of my head and they had to be jotted down.

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What took God six days to do, they did in thirty seconds - while resting.
Mal had been an extractor then too, skillful and heartbreaking in her renditions, and a dream-builder of talent.


Now, Dom’s dreams are full of freight trains and thundering, shaking tracks. Unstable screws and feeble iron. The Chanel perfume she used to wear (a scent her mother had always liked) building the air. Every time, he says, “I’ll come back for you” and she stares at him with her doe-eyes and saddened mouth. Her hair in small curls near her cheek, the pearl earrings, the sway of her hips beneath the fabric of her dress.
Seeing that it isn’t her. Seeing, instead, all that his grief and rage has made her. It’s almost worse than reality, than remembering what happened to his wife and why it happened. Why his guilt is a choking hallucinogen, sabotaging his dreamscape. His brain feels like mush, feels like hell, feels like falling.


She touches his face, tenderly spreading her fingers across his jaw. The two of them, sitting against a long window seat in a house that doesn’t exist. She breathes him in, their foreheads close to touching, and he knows – he’s so painfully aware that this, here, is not real. This is all he can make of her. There’s a world waiting for him, children that he misses, but he wants to be where he can still see her, feel her, taste her. The plum flavor of her mouth and the flutter of her eyelashes against his neck when she leans into him.
“I thought you might be missing me.” How affectionate the French accent makes her sound; he’d always loved it. And Dom knows this is why he cannot work anymore, because he does miss her, misses her terribly, like half of his insides have been severed. It’s the missing that calls her forward like a sylph. It’s his guilt that makes her malevolent, how he tries to harbor and cage her.
Here is a box and she can’t see the edges.


Dom can feel her gaze on him at odd moments, feels her tugging his wrist lightly after his eyes open, and there’s nothing to face but a desperate wakefulness.