#igrpdc

[flosculatory]

One day I'll create and post these in a timely manner, but here is @hideyseek 's prize from IGRPDC 2023 :)

[onebulletkill]

title: i remember my first love

rating: t

pairing: one sided arthur/cobb, cobb/mal

summary: Arthur is in love with Cobb. Cobb is not in love with him.

ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30456762

Arthur is tired of talking about the first time he met Dominic Cobb; he’s tired of the second-hand embarrassment that still manages to grip him through the years. He’s tired of Cobb’s easy-going smile when the man recites it—like an old poem, like an almost-love song—to the beautiful woman across the table that Arthur doesn’t know.

Her name is Mal, short for Mallorie. Wrong, Arthur thinks to himself. His Quebecois French is still enough to know what the name means. He feels shame in the spiteful way he stares at her. She is fantastic, he knows. He knew it from the moment she held his face in her adoring hands.

Still, his fingers keep working at the loose thread in his tie, hands trembling with the force it takes not to unravel completely.

“I really wanted you to meet her,” Cobb says. His voice is smooth and pliant and warm in a way that Arthur has never really heard before, and it feels like death; feels worse than that, even. “You’re the most important friend I have, and—well—”

Arthur has an eye for detail, an acute sense of attention and observation that goes unrivaled in most cases. He had seen the ring on their fingers from across the room when he first walked in, but he allows Cobb to introduce the concept to him anyway. He tries to go someplace else, numb himself to the growing grief that builds in his chest, clawing its way up his throat to sit bitter on his tongue.

Once upon a time ago, Arthur imagined sharing space with Cobb; he imagined fingers intwined across mahogany and shoulders brushing and silent, searching looks. It was a finely crafted fantasy; in reality, one dark-haired, dark-eyed face substitutes for another, and it makes him want to cry.

Get over it, he tells himself. Cobb gets married in California, and Arthur drinks alone in New York.