drabbles20in20 FIC: Themes Part Two: Technical

[matrixrefugee]

Pandora's box. The myth came back to Cobb, every time he unlatched the PASIV device and started setting it up for a dream sharing session. The box of wonders and horrors, of dreams for some and nightmares for others, including him. The box that brought the monsters out of the deep corners of his sub-conscious, bringing them right into the same space as the dreamers, where they could be attacked at will by the shade which he had tried to suppress.

And yet, thanks to Ariadne, he had found the hope that lay hidden deep at the bottom of the box.




Arthur and Eames were two of the best dream-sharers Cobb knew, but that expertise came at a price:

Enduring their near-constant jabs and their tendency to one-up the other. Granted, Eames did most of the one-upping, while Arthur calmly refused to play along, but that never discouraged Eames.

Occasionally, this friendly rivalry escalated into fraternity pranks. Eames created forgeries intended to get Arthur's goat, Arthur retaliated by sending projections to torment Eames. At least they reserved their antics for the design phase: during the actual job, they were as canny as two cats, which was why Cobb put up with their shenanigans.





He found Ariadne as he should have expected her, aged, crouched beside a rock on an island covered in ruins, surrounded by heaving waves. Ariadne on Naxos, but he was no Theseus to abandon her.

"Thought you'd be busy down here," he said.

She shook her greying head. "I did, but it wasn't the same, not like it was with you, with Arthur and the others. She gazed at the crumbling Grecian structures unseeingly.

He took off his jacket, wrapping it around her bent shoulders, then unholstered his pistol. "Time we both woke up." And he held it out to her, stock first.





The job in Salem, Massachusetts reminded Cobb of a time when he would likely have been marked as a warlock and his team hanged or burned at the stake, rather than merely being arrested, tried and sent away to minimum security for mind-crime. These days mind-crime was hard to prove since the laws no longer recognized spectral evidence, or things seen in dreams as viable evidence. But back then, inception would have been easier to pull off, since people regarded things seen in dreams as the word of God or an angel, wise words that brooked no argument or resistance.





Ariadne had once lead him through the labyrinth of his own mind, to face the monster at the heart of the maze. Now it was his turn to save her. The subject's projections had turned on her, the least trained of the team, the one with the least amount of experience. He and Arthur should have seen this coming and he kicked himself for it. But none of the team was going to be left behind if he could help it.

And so he descended into limbo to rescue the damsel who had once rescued him from his own self-created distress.