Strange Inception Fic

[icarus_chained]

Sort of for a prompt on comment_fic ('reality'). Just something that's been niggling me for a while. I've never really written for this fandom before, so be wary, yes?

Title: Gates of Horn or of Pearl
Rating: R
Fandom: Inception
Characters/Pairings: Yusuf, Mal, Cobb. Yusuf & Mal, Mal/Dom
Summary: Yusuf and Mal, a layer above. Where does death stop, and the dream begin?
Wordcount: 1279
Warnings/Notes: Discussions of death and dreaming, afterlives and reality. If Mal was right. Where does she go then?
Disclaimer: Not mine

Gates of Horn or of Pearl

It horrified many people. The dreaming rooms, the silent halls full of sleepers. Those who believed they were still awake, they were often horrified.

Or tempted. Many were tempted, too. That was the nature of dreaming. Horror and longing all at once, in the soft dripping of a needle. Worlds within worlds, the ultimate freedom, or the last of all cages, locked behind flickering eyelids.

He watched her, from the doorway. The pale, dark-haired woman, sitting beside one of the still, slumbering figures. In the last hall, the last room of this subterranean palace. The room for those whose quests did not have an end. At least not here, not on this level of reality. In this place, this final hall, lay those who would not come back, sleeping a sleep unnatural, until someone could brave the worlds behind their eyes and bring them home. Beside one of those figures, the woman sat, dark to the sleeper's light, waking to his slumber.

"Yusuf," she said, softly. Looking over her shoulder to smile tiredly at him, familiar and worn, beckoning him over. Beautiful, in a different way to dreaming. "I was thinking. Don't you think it is strange?"

He smiled back, a tired greeting. Coming over to stand beside her. To look down at her husband's slack face, the narrow lines of dreaming graven into it. And rest, just lightly, his hand on her shoulder.

"Don't I think what strange, Mal?"

"Death," she said. Softly, not harsh, with only a wistful musing. "Dreaming, and death." She shook her head, smiled bright and broken as her hand curled around her husband's. "While we are in there, death is what frees us to come back. Or casts us down instead, into the deepest dreams of all. We live by death. We believe it is not real, that it will not destroy us altogether, yet we still fear it, still believe it has consequences." She brushed her hand over Dom's face, cupped it gently around his cheek. "It is the last fear, and the only escape."

Yusuf said nothing. Only watching her, for a long moment, while she looked down at the man she loved. While she asked silent questions that didn't really have answers. If they did, people would not come to him, wouldn't ask him for the drip of needles into their veins, sending them down to seek what partial answers could be found.

And she knew that. This woman who had gone seeking, and found both answers and questions in the death that brought her back. She knew. So Yusuf said nothing. Not yet.

"Is that what we seek?" she asked. Still so soft, her hand so tight around her husband's. "Is that what we look for? A death that cannot stop us?" A pause, while she held on, and wondered if she should not. "Or do we seek the one that will? Is that what dreaming is for?"

Horror and longing, all at once. Because the dreaming changed you, whether you came back or not, whether you lived or died, or knew the difference between them. Because that was what the dreaming was.

"... If you died now," he asked, her shoulder thin and narrow as a wing under his hand, "would it stop you, do you think?" He shook his head as she looked at him, a small, tired smile creasing his face. "He thought it would, when you died before him. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps he still lives, somewhere down there, and you and I are dead, somewhere up here."

She blinked at him. Narrowed her eyes, a small, half-disbelieving smile creeping slowly out to play on her lips. "Do you believe that?" she asked him then, and Yusuf thought the question ... oddly hopeful. A request to be saved, perhaps. Or to be damned.

"I don't know," he answered, simply. Tilting his head to look around him, at these halls where people came to dream. Or to die. Or to live. Watching them, his people. "I have never really known. That is, I think, why I do what I do. To give people ... a way to find out."

What was he, for what he offered? Was he the devil, or the saviour? Or simply the chemist? He offered them the means to seek their dreams, and there was power in that, and maybe guilt, too. But he believed they had the right. The right to seek whatever answers they could find, the right to see what level of hell they lived in, and whether there was a way out. The right ... to find their dreams, and decide if they were worth bearing.

"Maybe we are the dream," he said, looking around, lingering on those who now belonged to him, in some small way. "Maybe what they find is reality. Or maybe all of it is a dream, and we are simply a level above, or below. Maybe you died when you jumped from that building. Maybe we died when we were born. Maybe we die every time we fall asleep, and live again somewhere else, only thinking we have woken." A small smile, the question they all asked themselves, sooner or later. "Maybe we send them to hell, when they sleep. Or ... maybe we live in it, and what they find is heaven."

She looked at him. Mal. Stood up, slowly and carefully, to stand beside him over the sleeping body of the husband she could never wake. His hand fell from her shoulder as she stood, and Yusuf simply looked at her, as she looked at him, and let her see his hope. His curiosity. His salvation and his damnation, in this world where it was so hard to tell the difference.

"Maybe they think I am the devil," he whispered, as she smiled at him in a worn, distant kind of wonder. "Down there where they are sleeping. The one who damned them, or the one who saved them. Maybe they think I'm the real one. Or that I am foolish, or dead, and what they have is the true reality. Maybe they think I am damned." He smiled, quicksilver. "Maybe I think I am, too."

"... Are you?" she asked. Turning to him, her shoulders wings of bone, where she had leapt into death and maybe flown. Beautiful, and terrible, and brave. And maybe not so different from dreaming, after all. "Are we? Damned? Or dreaming?"

Yusuf smiled. "I don't know," he said, because he didn't. Because there was no totem that could tell dream from reality, not when all the world lied to itself, and there was no way to tell if death was the end or just the gateway, except to step through it. "But I think the question really is ... how do we find out?"

She laughed. Hard and bright, her smile pressed soft around sudden tears. She laughed, her shoulders like wings of bone and her eyes so very bright, as she looked down once more at the one she loved, and took his hand tight in hers.

"Will you help me?" she asked of Yusuf. Asking for salvation, or maybe damnation. Or maybe just a needle, and the chance to decide for herself. "If I want to find heaven in my dreams, and see if death can stop me after all. Will you help me find out?"

Yusuf looked at the pale tightness of a hand that would not let go, at the light shining in eyes that would quest into death and defy it too. He looked at Mal. And he smiled.

"I will," he said.

And wondered if the Devil could love the damned, and envy them too.