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He hasn't been asleep for so very long.
"Should you be keeping him at the house?" her father asks. "It can't be what's best for the children."
She furrows her brow, surprised by the question. She slowly pulls the razor over Dom's chin, keeping him clean-shaven the way she's learned to like him best. He looks young, underneath it all. "This is his home," she says. "I wouldn't want him to wake up somewhere sterile."
Miles goes to the window, looks out at Phillipa and James. He doesn't say anything, but she can almost hear him gnawing at the inside of his cheek, the way he has since she was a child, making her first important decision. "Make a choice, love," he'd said, then nothing more at all.
"Would you miss me very much?" she asked, holding on to his hand. She was six, and her mother had promised her a room of her own--a whole floor!
"Mallorie," he said. "Heart of my heart."
That's how he was for years. Holding silent, or as good as.
Once, in her third year of college, she'd said, "I'm asking you to tell me. Just tell me what you think I should do."
He'd sighed, pulled the glasses off of his face, rubbed at the bridge of his nose.
"Tell me," she'd said, slapping the ring down onto the desk, the little gulp of a diamond scratching into the soft sheen of polished wood.
He'd looked up at her. "You would have my blessing if you decided to say yes."
She'd scoffed. "I'd have it if I said no."
He smiled a bit, nodded, rueful.
"Does he love me?"
He laughed at that. "Do you ever ask a question you don't know the answer to?" Then the lapse into a familiar rhythm of breaths, his cheek nipped in where his teeth bit.
The way he's composed his face now.
Mal wipes the blade of the razor on a towel at her side, puts everything in its place, sponges excess foam off of her husband's jaw. She touches Dom's dark brows. "Does he scare them?" she asks, and holds her breath.
****
Arthur is very busy, but in the course of professional duty, their paths do cross. In Nice, at an alley cafe, she finds him sitting at a table, cross-legged, a half-eaten order of socca in front of him. He watches her walk toward him, a quirk at his lips that she likes to call a smile.
She sets her bag on the table, sits in the chair across from him, and leans forward, tucking errant hair behind her ear.
When she's settled, he says, "You're wearing shorts."
She rests her chin in her hand, smiles at him happily. She nods at the torn socca, his very well-cut suit. "I see crumbs."
When he glances down, she laughs.
****
They order another socca, and it arrives piping hot. You can see the air above it shimmer.
"You'll burn your fingers," Arthur warns, but Mal is already absorbing the pain, forgetting it for the taste of food on her tongue.
"Wonderful," she says.
****
He finds her, the next day. He seems to stumble across her, there in the place du Palais, but one can never assume with Arthur.
"How long are you in Nice?" he asks.
"Oh, not very long. I'm flying home tomorrow."
"And how's Dom?" he asks, no change in his demeanor, no adopted stoicism. As if it's the next question in a natural sequence of questions to ask. She loves him very much for that.
She reaches out, unbuttons the top button of his crisp, white shirt. "We are in Nice," she whispers conspiratorially. "In the summer." She rests a palm on his chest, smiling."He's sleeping," she says. "I suppose I've worn him out." A little joke.
"The best things in life require so much effort."
"Do they?"
He nods. "Love's exhausting enough. It's why I make do with just-short-of-best."
She laughs. "For shame, Arthur. If Eames heard you describe him in such a way."
"He'd be thrilled," Arthur says drily. "Just-short-of-best is an achievement miles above his highest aspirations." He kisses her cheek. "Make sure to call me when he wakes."
"I will," she says, without a break in her voice.
He walks away, strides brisk. Halfway gone, he turns, calls, "I met a girl who asked about your husband. On this job. My job. Do you know her?" and then he's disappeared.
****
She likes to be home. To make lunches in little brown bags for her children. To read Philippa to sleep. To watch James sweep the kitchen floor with his toy broom, a cape around his neck.
But just the other day, when she went to pick James up at 2, she'd scooped him into her arms only to have him wriggle away so quickly, she'd had to stoop to make sure he didn't fall far. She knelt in front of him, ran a hand over his head, cupped his cheeks. "Would you like to walk?" she asked.
"Yes," he said, then ran.
She was sad through the night. For one reason or another.
In the morning, she laid down next to Dom, a needle in her arm. She doesn't like to enter his dreams, truthfully. She almost never has enough time to see him, killed too-quick by a phantom who wears her face.
And what if she stays?
****
She should have killed him. That is her greatest regret.
On the first level of his dreaming, she is lucky if she gets a glimpse before she is shocked awake by a knife or bullet. Dom's projections are well-trained. She is upset with her lack of ability as a forger.
"You're monolithic," Dom told her once. "Mal, through and through."
Sometimes, though, if his consciousness is sleeping, she can find the time to slip next to him, to sink down to his second level.
He has a whole team with him. Arthur, of course, more solemn, more silent than the one she knows. Eames, of whom Dom has only seen pictures and heard stories about; but the stories Arthur had told couldn't help but leave an impression. A lasting one, it appeared.
Saito who had introduced her to Dom on their first job. She'd built a world in Saito's head of white cloth and gray stone. Trees towering with branches bent. "Beautiful," he said.
"Am I ready?" she asked.
"You could not have done better," he said, offering assessment and affirmation in one double-edged sentence.
Yusuf, whom she's loved terribly since the moment he sat next to her at the Acadamie Montessori in Montreal and asked if she would mind very much if he placed a container of horse urine on their shared laboratory desk. "I'll keep it on this corner here," he'd assured her.
"Not so close to the edge," she'd chided.
Her brother is the mark in Dom's latest scheme. Poor Fischer.
All the faces most loved by her, Dom keeps at a close but safe distance.
The girl, the one he whispers to, she doesn't know.
****
She finds Arthur sleeping in Mombasa. She sweeps in through the door, pulls the glove off of her right hand and shoves Arthur's chair back, but before it can hit the floor, Eames comes in from the kitchen, catches the back of the chair and rights it.
"Jesus. Consider your entrance made, love," he says. He has a dish towel tucked into his pants, sleeves rolled up.
"I have a question to ask Arthur," Mal says.
"I do admire a woman of action. If you can hold for--" he checks his watch, "another ten minutes, I'd be happy to leave him at your disposal." He pats Arthur's cheek genially.
She sighs, then pulls the strap of her dress more firmly over her shoulder. She looks around the room. Waiting doesn't suit her.
"You're making me uncomfortable," Eames says.
"There's nowhere to sit," Mal says, an eyebrow raised.
Eames nods, puts one fist on his hip. "And Arthur's lap is so painfully bony. I wouldn't recommend it. Screams of a desperate measure."
She touches her lips, the pressure of her fingertips calming. "Do you know her?" she asks. "Did Arthur say something to you about a woman asking about Dominic?"
He studies her. Deciding whether it would be of importance to lie or not. "Ariadne," he says, finally.
She lets out a long breath. "Thank you."
He shrugs.
She settles on a way to soften him, to put them on an even keel. "Do you ever feel tempted to--" she wields an imaginary pen "--draw a little picture on his hand, or steal his wallet?" She meets Eames' eyes. "I used to paint Dom's toenails. He wouldn't even realize for days."
Eames doesn't say anything. He moves in front of Arthur, opens Arthur's jacket. The shirt underneath buttoned all wrong, just slightly askew.
Mal laughs.
"Tsk," Eames tuts, his lips turned up at the corners as he studies his handiwork. "Childish."
****
"Dom thought he had to convince me," she says. "But." She stops.
"But?" Ariadne asks. She's older than she was in Dom's dream, but her expression is equally untroubled. The smooth, well-assembled face.
Mal laughs. They're at the coffee shop around the corner from the university housing where she and Dom had first made a home. "But I was very old. We were both very old. Why not die for the chance at more life? It's so simple a decision."
Ariadne sips from her coffee. A dab of whipped cream left behind on her lip.
"And to know I truly had children waiting! It was like opening a treasure box of little, cherished secrets."
"So you knew it was a dream?" Ariadne says. "In limbo?"
Mal shakes her head, lifts the curls from the nape of her neck. "No." She smiles. "Yes."
"It's only when we wake up that we realize something is strange," Ariadne says. "I taught all my students that."
"Is it true?" Mal asks, suddenly curious. A little annoyed. "No suspicion at all, until we awake? My dreams have never been full of certainty."
"You don't agree."
"I have a question," Mal says. "About inception."
Ariadne winds her scarf around her neck. "We plant ideas in other people's heads in the course of a day. A turn-of-phrase we repeat. A song skipping from person to person in snatches."
"This is the strangest conversation," Mal says. She stands. "I'd like to wake up now," then steps backward into traffic.
****
"Well," Ariadne says upon Mal's waking. "That was fun."
"Do you insist on a dreamscape for every introduction?" Mal asks.
"No," Ariadne says. "But this way I got to be extremely mystical."
****
Ariadne has worlds all over her house. Snow globes. Scale models. "I used to want to design sets. I even did, a few times. But I'm not budget-minded."
"No," Mal says. She traces the long spire of a skyscraper in miniature with her finger. The sweep of a cable bridge. "You taught Dom?"
"My only real student. Before I divested."
"I used to think he sprang up, fully-formed." Mal turns to face Ariadne, her arms crossed in front of her. "He's teaching you now, you know. In his dream."
"Is he?" Ariadne asks, delighted. "Classic. And what else does he dream about?"
"Capers," Mal says. She laughs. "Work."
"And you?"
Mal closes her eyes. "I used to build magical things," thinking of fog and balled lightning, of her children, of staircases blooming and climbing ever upward.
****
She gets an e-mail.
Mal,
I'm happy we met, and sorry it was under poor circumstances.
I've been wondering how to wake a person up, someone who's lost to dreaming. One helpful thing is that Dominic wants to wake up. Or would want to wake up. It's a step further than other people in his situation.
You told me he dreams in work. In goal after ordered goal. He's set mundane parameters, to convince himself he's awake. That the dream is not a dream.
So make his world fantastic.
Ariadne.
P.S. How old would you say I am, in Cobb's dream? I hope 26.
In the background, she hears a song. Philippa and James watching their favorite movie. A song about bobbing along and beautiful briny seas.
She kisses her husband. The man she'd happened upon, once already, and claimed for herself.
****
In Dom's dreams, her specter is furious and possessive and destructive.
Mal builds their dream home. Dark wood, and a backyard with no fence, a long gentle slope down to a river, covered in grass made of green.
She does it in pieces, between little deaths.
She makes her father very kind to Dom. A fantasy if there ever was one.
She plants a magnolia in water.
She fills in the faces of her children, older, more beautiful. Philippa with her father's mouth.
She sets a top to spinning, spinning, spinning.
****
He took her to a concert on their first date. White lights in trees, acoustics awful, but there was a blanket and stars, and Dominic, holding her hand.
"What did you think of me, when we first met?" she asks, suddenly. She wants to demand the answer, feeling strong and very brave.
"I don't want to tell you," he says, laughing.
"Why not?" she asks. She straightens, hair a tumble. She looks at his profile, the angle of his brow. She knows. "You were scared of me!"
He sighs, laughing again. He looks down at their joined hands. "Is this perfect?" he asks.
The end.