you're too young & eager to love

Inception bits! Because writing is a bitch after a lazy day on the couch.

--


“It’s never just a dream, is it?” The honeyed melodies of her voice, near him again. “Dom?” Like a strike against his face. Mal brushed her fingers against the solid square of his jaw, swept her hand up and almost touched his hair. She was a fleeting, ethereal thing. Bound to him by guilt but uncontrollable. (Not real. A projection of his, a creation, kept secret and confined. But real enough, so much more than the bones in her coffin, the grave he could not legally visit. Mal knew what her husband knew; Ariadne was a skilled girl, but she saw the architect-in-training as a threat, an enemy. Ariadne who represented forgiveness, and forgiveness was liberty.)

“I thought you might be missing me.”

-

He was sleeping again.

Mal had her fingers over his eyes, and she smelled like the Chanel perfume his father had bought her for Christmas before the kids were born. A classic, clean smell. Her skin was soft against his eyelids, her slender form pressed against his back, the wisp of her dress brushing his legs from behind. Real but not real.

“You know where to find me,” she murmured, affectionate, close to his ear yet somehow faint, muzzled by sounds nearby. A gasp that was almost painful, the shred of expensive fabric, laughter like a gun in the night. When she slid her fingers away, there were pictures all along the walls – her in little dresses as a girl sitting near her mother, pictures of her walking along a river, on a bench, with friends when she was in college. Pictures of her with men, with women. Of her laughing, smiling. Pictures of her in black and white where her eyes are haunting, her lips painted pale grey.

-

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.

--



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.