Tell me you'll miss me: Fight Club/Inception: R for violence

[katewrites]

adiva_calandia asked for Mal and Tyler having a drink and this is what came out.


I am the gun he's cleaning that goes off in his hand. I am the blood on his pinstriped Borelli shirt. I am Dominic Cobb's sense of self destruction.

I take a drink of bourbon. It tastes like nothing, but Dom was never into the details. He liked mazes and repetition in dreams, he didn't like the tastes or the way that in dreams colors are feelings, colors are scents, colors are what we use to replace our waking scents.

His bourbon tastes white.

I am Dominic's sense of inadequacy.

Around me the people are faceless, because when he's awake, when he thinks he's awake, Dom isn't just useless with color. He's useless with texture and reality and he forgets (always) that his awake is still a dream. He forgets that it was her totem before his and that he fucked the only person who ever thought he was useful as a partner.

The point is this: it was her totem before his, and she could plant ideas in his head as easily as he could plant ideas in hers.

If he uses her totem to check his reality, isn't he using a weighted coin to flip? Reality, reality, reality, if a coin lands reality side up 50 times in a row is that any more unusual than landing dream side up just as many?

I am Dom's sense of growing unease.

The bourbon is coloring my world gray and the people begin blowing away, dust in the wind, the Greek greats under acid rain. Dom must be involved wherever he is. Once he left me in a white, blank world for what felt like weeks.

Someone slides into the seat next to me.

"Beer," he says. No brand, but again, details aren't big with Cobb even when he's trying.

A brown bottle is put in front of him by a stock bartender. The bartender wears a uniform from the 1920's, all he's missing is a moustache, but he doesn't even have a mouth so I'll let it slide.

"Cheers," I say. I am pushing my glass up on its edge so that the liquid tilts and it's just on the edge, on the edge of falling, on the edge of something.

He doesn't say anything. He is staring at the people around him, then empties the bottle in one long swallow. Hefting the bottle by the neck, he slams it across what isn't there in the bartender's face.

It shatters like real bottles don't ever, but this is how they shatter on TV: explosive. The bartender suddenly has a face because Cobb's brain is catching up with the imperfection. It adds a face because a face is needed to have a bruise, to have a bloody eye.

"What the fucking fuck," the bartender is babbling, holding his face.

"You can always change the environment," the man says. "Pussy."

At first I think he's talking about my gender, but then I realize it's got nothing to do with that.

I tip over the glass and it spills, gray, over the bartop. The bartender is crying, I wonder if Dom feels uneasy wherever he is. I wonder if his face hurts.

"Are you from reality?" I ask him.

"Is anyone?" he says. "It's a pussy move to think that it matters at all what's real and what's not. You're not real."

"Mal," I say, holding out my hand.

He grabs the rag the bartender left on the counter and tears a strip off. Systematically feeding it into a half-full bottle of vodka, he lights it on fire. When he throws it at the nameless customers, they catch on fire, and suddenly have bodies, have faces.

"Tyler," he says. He takes out a cigarette.

"You're a figment of mine, aren't you?" I ask.

"Pussy," he answers.

I am Dom's self hatred housed inside his sense of self righteous hubris.

I am going to be Dominic's worst nightmare.