Disclaimer: I do not own Inception, not now, not ever.
"Have you come to kill me?"
That question again. That single, godforsaken question. He wonders how many times he's asked it. How many times he's imagined that one of his teammates have come to kill him.
He's more comfortable with that idea than he thinks he should be.
Every time he wakes up, he wonders if this is it. If this is the reality he tries to come back to. And sometimes he thinks it is. Sometimes he thinks he's finally out of limbo. And then reality bends a little too easily to his will and the realization hits him hard in the chest and gut like the bullet that shot him out of the dream into this world of quasi-nightmares.
Then he begins again. As the plans of his subconscious unfold, he remembers one of the few things that Cobb said to the team. Death was the one escape. When you died, you woke up.
He dreams of death.
Sometimes it's Ariadne. She's the gentlest in his eyes. His deaths by her hand are always the easiest. And he can see the acceptance in her eyes that it is her duty as a friend to do this, to set him free.
Arthur's kills are always efficient. Quick, clean, no fuss. And sometimes the hardest to bear. That one last moment of hope before waking up into the dream cuts into the soul like ice.
Eames is always elaborate. Always sits down to chat first. Always makes sure that, "Saito, you know what you're choosing, right?" And he imagines that there's always pity in Eames' eyes right before the bullet goes through his head.
After a while he stops dreaming of his death. Hope is for the young, not for the old man that he is now. He sits now at a table in a room that he created from memory. A room from an almost forgotten dream.
They bring in a waterlogged man and he knows at once that this man is not his. An anomaly in a world created exclusively around his subconscious.
The man spins a top that never falls and he remembers another man, filled with radical notions.
Hope is for young men, but the question is out of his mouth before he can remember that he's old and forgotten.
He never hears Cobb's answer. But he wakes up in the first class seat of a plane with a remembered arrangement and a phone call to make.
Later, when he looks at the young face in the mirror, he wonders when he became an old soul, forever stuck in limbo.
AN: Review Please!