Disclaimer: don't own, don't sue.
...
Readjusting is easier than she expects. She wakes up each morning, buys a croissant and coffee from that café round the corner, attends her classes, laughs with her friends. She goes back to designing buildings and bridges and everyday sorts of things, and walks past city blocks she once made turn on their heads, and streets that once led up to the sky. She still dreams when she sleeps. Here in real life, she knows, there are no hospital safes, no freight trains to tear up the road, no life-sized dollhouses filled with secrets. Probably it's better this way.
...
"The professor's not taking questions right now," Caroline tells her in French, when she goes to knock on his office door. "His son-in-law is visiting."
"He has a son-in-law?" Ariadne almost asks, but then remembers a rumor she heard a few years ago, vaguely, something about his daughter falling off a building. Jumped or pushed, that was the big debate, before newer news caught the attention of the university's ever-fickle gossip mill. Suddenly the pieces fall into place and she realizes that Mal was his daughter: lovely Mal, insane Mal, Mal who tried to sabotage inception. Which means Cobb is here, in Paris, and she thinks, foolishly, fleetingly—a job? But of course not, Cobb is only here to visit his father-in-law le professeur, and perhaps to bring news of James and Phillipa—just a social call—nothing more.
She has homework to finish, anyway.
...
She wonders, a little, what they're all up to. Arthur with his tailored suits and his paradoxes; Eames off god-knows-where, doing god-knows-what (something illegal, that's all she's sure of); Yusuf back in Mombasa; Saito taking over the world. And then there's her, boring old Ariadne, not quite grown up yet, still in school. She wonders, a little, if they ever think of her.
...
The year goes by, uneventfully.
...
At graduation, she wears a new dress bought finally with the money she'd been too afraid to touch, just in case it (like everything else) was a dream. She tosses her cap high in the air like the rest of her class, knowing she's got enough from inception to never work another day in her life. When she catches a flash of paisley in the crowd, she thinks her eyes are deceiving her, until Eames makes his way through with a grin and Arthur in tow. (She can't believe they remembered.)
"Cobb sends his congratulations, love," Eames says in a way that is so very Eames, British but hardly prim and proper, "but he couldn't be here—it's Phillipa's birthday, and he's got years to make up for."
Arthur nods, and adjusts the tie he's wearing even though today's scorching sunshine is certainly not tie weather. "We have a proposition for you, actually. We need an architect. A good one. And you're the best."
"See, Ariadne, you must be," Eames laughs, chewing on a toothpick. "Darling Arthur here never willingly gives praise."
She's breathless and giddy from the day's excitement, and half-thinks this can't be real—is it? could it be?—but yes: the bishop rests heavy in her palm. "Are you offering me a job?"
"Are you accepting?"
She thinks of the mazes she once constructed, the worlds where the impossible turned possible with a wave of her hand. She thinks of how she'd like nothing more than to do it again.
"Yes. God, yes."
Perhaps she'd never really readjusted after all.