Disclaimer: Any characters belonging to Inception and Christopher Nolan are of course, not mine.

A/N: So this idea was rattling around in my head almost immediately after seeing Inception. I know that the film hinted at a possible relationship between Arthur and Ariadne but I was more interested in the possibility that Arthur's life wasn't his work and he did know other people outside of his team, including potential romantic interests. So consider this an Arthur/OC one-shot for now, as there might be more one-shots in the same vein sometime in the future.

Arthur wasn't surprised when he arrived at his hotel room, only to find someone else already there. It was her job to know the intimate details of people's lives so she could accurately recreate them within the dream world... and besides, he never made it that hard for her to find him when she wanted to.

Casting his eyes from the sleeping figure on the bed, he toed off his shoes and shrugged out of his suit jacket, draping it over a nearby chair. Settling onto the blankets beside her, he allowed himself to watch her sleep for a few minutes, deliberately choosing to ignore the large silver case that lay between them and the rubber tubing attached to her arm.

A fragment of white poked out from between her small fingers and he gently opened her sleep-clenched fist, revealing a scrap of paper and a key attached to a brass tag. He knew the key would be some kind of clue for him because it was an old one, the kind that hotels never used anymore since they'd all moved to the fancy swipe-cards but more important right now was the note. In her inky black scrawl that was only partially legible (he never let her live down the fact that she had what Mal had once dubbed 'chicken scratch handwriting') were two words:

Find Me

Chuckling he picked up the key, noting the numbers stamped onto the brass tag (725) before lying down on the bed, so his head was resting next to hers and then picked up the second needle, tapping into his vein. Arthur closed his eyes, seemingly calm but also secretly willing time to move faster and then he felt the fall...

Opening his eyes within one of her worlds for the first time was always a bit of a head-rush because he was never sure what he would find. Sure she had her trademarks like all architects but hers were always changing, influenced by whatever caught her fancy that week. This time it was a hotel caught somewhere between 1920s Chicago and British Orientalism with red silk covered walls but lots of art deco fixtures.

Climbing the grand staircase in the centre of the lobby, he had to laugh as he looked towards the ceiling. Stairs stretched as far as the eye could see, going in every direction like an MC Escher drawing. While he was fond of paradoxical buildings, she always liked what she termed her 'labyrinths' or buildings that seemed so similar, one could spend weeks wandering the halls, passing from floor to floor without ever noticing how far they'd gone.

As Arthur reached what he had approximated was the seventh floor, he double-checked his pocket to make sure both the key and his die was still there and then closed his eyes. She'd revealed to him once that the reason why her labyrinths worked so well was because people only trusted their sight to guide them and therefore never noticed the subtle differences implanted within the dream world.

Feeling his way along the hall, he noticed a small shift from the raised silk walls to a flatter, rougher wall covering. He kept his eyes firmly shut, even though he wanted to check how far he had actually travelled as one of the rules of her game was he had to play it her way or else she would change the dream and he would be stuck wandering about until the sedatives wore off and he woke up alone and frustrated.

Suddenly the silk walls changed to what felt like firm wood beneath his fingertips and without opening his eyes, he ran his fingers up and down the door, checking for the doorknob and the small brass plate he knew would be affixed at eye level, which was stamped with the number 725.

It wasn't until Arthur had unlocked the door and closed it behind him, did he open his eyes to see her sitting on the couch like she always was. For some reason, no matter how many times the dream world changed, the room always stayed the same, looking like an exact replica of her college apartment, the location of their first and only real world tryst years earlier.

She smiled at him but didn't take her eyes from her totem, a ring of metal about the size of a silver dollar with a small hourglass filled with black sand suspended in the middle. The hourglass was currently spinning at a dizzying speed, the way it always did within the dream world. Spin it hard or soft, the hourglass would never stop spinning and never properly empty as long as she was dreaming.

"You found me quickly this time."

"Wasn't sure how much time we had."

She unfolded her legs from underneath herself and walked over to him, sliding her hands across his chest and under the collar of his jacket.

"Enough," she whispered. "We always have enough."

Arthur pulled her close then, his hands tangling in her long, red locks, his mouth tightly pressed to hers. With the way their jobs worked, it always seemed like they were functioning on a sort of half-time, where things were never entirely real and it became difficult to remember how long it had been since he'd last been here. The only thing that stayed constant though was the desire he felt for her within the dream world. Sure, in real life he was calm, collected "stick in the mud" Arthur who rarely showed really any outward emotions but here, in their world, he could feel and act however he wanted to.

She pulled away then, laughing softly as she slid his jacket from his shoulders and began loosening his tie.

"Dance with me."

Practical Arthur overtook him then, before he could stop himself.

"There's no music."

A raised eyebrow, a smirk and then the sounds of Billie Holiday's sultry voice were coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Using his now undone tie to draw him in, she began to sway to the music until he wrapped an arm around her waist and caught her free hand in his, moving them both in time to the slow rhythm.

They kissed again as he dipped her low to the floor, the arm around her waist sliding up to undo the long zipper on the back of her dress so that it slithered down to pool around her heels. She smiled and stepped out of the material before pulling him down for another kiss.

"How much time?" Arthur whispered against her lips.

"Enough."

Falling asleep within a dream was always a slightly unsettling experience for Arthur because he was never sure at first if he was waking up within the dream or waking up for real. But as his eyes opened slowly, he noticed his die was on the bedside table, directly in his eye line as if someone had left it there for him. He picked it up, sheets pooling around his waist and rolled it across the blankets. Seven. Rolled it again. Seven again. Always seven, every time.

He could still smell her perfume, but he knew she wasn't there. That was unspoken rule #2 – she always arrived in the dream world before him and left before he did. He knew that people, his teammates and hers always wondered why if they took time out to have these dream rendezvous' with each other, they never acted upon their feelings in the real world. They had both been there though when Mal was still around, seen what existing together simultaneously in the dream and real life had done to Mal and Cobbs and sworn that no matter how much they wanted each other, they could only have it one of two ways. And since they spent more time working together within a dream, it was easier to have their relationship there and exist only as friends in the real world.

Arthur would never tell her how much this existence was killing him though. His fantasies in real life were rarely sexual in nature but they always deviated to something about her that he wasn't allowed to touch, like how he would often wonder what her hair felt like in the real world or if her skin was just as soft and unblemished. He could touch her, take her, do almost anything he wanted here but somehow even the slightest brush of a hand or smallest kiss was completely taboo outside of the dream.

Lying back against the rumpled sheets, he rolled his die around in his hand, feeling its familiar weight and wondering when the sedatives were going to wear off. Just then, he heard the familiar tones of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" emanating from a faraway place. Closing his eyes, he steeled himself for the reality of waking up alone in a hotel room, suit rumpled and mouth dry. 3 2 1 and then the fall...

Before Arthur opened his eyes, he realized there was something different about this awakening. The room was quiet like always, but this time there was a familiar warm weight pressing down on him. His heart did a double-beat but he was still hesitant to properly open his eyes, in case he was imagining this too.

A pair of small hands slid the headphones off his ears and then he felt a puff of warm air against his neck and the slightest brush of lips, as the person lying on him bent down to whisper in his ear.

"Time again, sleeping beauty."

Cracking one eye open, he found himself staring into a pair of laughing gray eyes, a curtain of long red locks surrounding them as she bent over him.

He reached up, twisting one of the long strands between his fingers. As much as he could check his pocket for his die right now, the feeling of her hair was enough to tell him he wasn't still dreaming as it always felt like pure silk in the dream world while here it was still smooth but a little more twisted and rumpled from sleep. Still he had to ask...

"Am I still dreaming?"

Putting a thoughtful finger to her lips, she fished around in the pocket of her skirt and pulled out her totem. Giving it a lazy flick, the small hourglass spun around one-twice-three times before stopping, all the sand slowly pouring from one end to the other.

"Guess not."

"Then why?"

She sighed, her cupid's bow lips twisting up in a small frown. "Guess I got tired of the having it one way but not the other. I'm selfish..."

"But I thought we agreed-"

She pushed herself back and made a motion to climb off the bed. "I can go. I'm sorry, this was a stupid idea-"

He pulled her down again, rolling them over so she was trapped underneath him, pinned between his arms.

"It's not stupid, Nick. I just wasn't sure what changed your mind."

Nick, his Nick he realized, shrugged and tangled her fingers in his tie. "I dunno. I guess maybe I keep feeling like I spend all my days in a world of what-ifs and maybes to the point where I sometimes forget what's real. And then I was thinking I should have something concrete, something more important than my totem to remind me that I'm still dreaming and the one thing I could think of that was concrete was this – a relationship – but my only proper relationship is still inside a maybe-world so what if it's just a maybe-dream too and then I don't really know what's real or not –"

Arthur cut her rambling monologue off by pressing a small kiss to her lips and then working his way over to her neck, where he could feel her pulse thumping underneath his mouth.

"This is real, Nick. The bed, the room, all of it could be a dream right now but you and me? We're real."

She smiled and pulled him into a deeper, proper kiss.

"Better than any totem," he heard her mumble softly.

A/N: So that was my first attempt at writing an Inception fic. Hopefully if you've read this far, you enjoyed it and you didn't mind me shipping Arthur with an OC instead of Ariadne or Eames. I have some more ideas about Nick and Arthur but I don't think it'll ever be a proper story as I seem to be kind of terrible at writing those lately, so it'll probably be more tenuously connected one-shots which I hope people will also enjoy.