Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the Inception plot or characters. The only one I can claim is my own Daneda Marlett.

A dark city street after heavy rains.

Traffic lights flashed red for the few cars which, at such a late hour, passed vacantly through. Although closed, the red and yellow lighted shop signs glowed in the glistening blackness, casting pooly reflections on the wet asphalt. There was very little noise, only the faint, ghostly rushing of cars many blocks away. A figure stepped out of an alley.

He was a reasonably handsome man, tall, thin, clad in a well-fitted blue-gray suit. He carried a silenced black handgun with both hands. Vague colors from the washed reflections of light danced across the gleaming black barrel. His hair was perfectly slicked back; his expression blank and focused. Looking for something.

He rounded the corner and peered into the blackened window of a hardware store as if expecting to see something. Then, lowering the gun, he retrieved a small, circular metal object from his pocket and suctioned it to the glass. Just as his hand moved to activate the device, a voice hissed at him from across the street.

"Arthur!"

The man's eyebrows rose slightly in surprise and he lifted his head to peer around him. There was no one on the street.

"Arthur!" The hiss came again. "Over here."

Squinting into the alley it came from, he replied,

"Ariadne? What?"

The smooth face of a small, brown-haired young woman poked out from the blackness. "Of course it's me," she whispered feverishly, glancing from side to side. "Don't do that," she added, nodding her head in the direction of the window.

Arthur looked puzzled, and for a moment his cool, expressionless face showed signs of irritation. "Why not?"

Ariadne leaned forward to throw her voice across the wet street. "Because, it's the wrong store. It's the next one over."

"Oh."

It was a robbery of sorts, everyone involved was aware of that. Cobb had taught them robbery. This kind, though, was different — important, even — different from any other crime on the planet. For Arthur, Ariadne, Eames, Yusuf and the others, the only kind of robbery worth the trouble involved sitting still, hooked up to a device, fast asleep. Inside the world of imagination, of dreams. A robbery of the mind.

But Dom Cobb was through with the business, through with dreaming, through with that sort of life. They almost stopped when he did. The group broke off, scattered to their respective places — no one saw each other for nearly a year. Of course, Arthur was the first to bring it back up. He couldn't stand being without the urgency, without the rush, without that fascinating link to the topsy-turvy dream world. He especially missed the levels Ariadne created. One in particular — a beachside city, he thought — had stuck with him ever since it bloomed inside his mind. It was like one of those dreams you never want to lose the image of.

Ariadne jumped right on the opportunity as soon as Arthur mentioned it, too. They were able to pull off a grand total of two jobs before they began to ask for help, and only because both of those jobs involved generally simple extraction. They called up old friends. Eames, modestly, declared that he was up for it, and Yusuf shrugged and said simply, "Why not?"

Chemist, Forger, Architect, Point Man — no Cobb. To an extent it felt very empty.

But they were back.

This job added slightly more complexity to the extraction. The subject was a psychologist, actually, specializing in dream-based mental disorders. Her name was Dr. Laura Fiske.

"Doesn't sound like a big deal," Arthur had said as the group discussed their mission. "She probably thinks doing what we do is impossible."

At first, it was true. None of them considered Fiske's subconscious a threat. They were mostly just a bit apprehensive about the fact that the extraction was taking place in someone so closely linked to their field. A dream specialist.

Then Eames had laughed. "She's probably well prepared for what we do, actually," he said, giving Arthur a look of warning disbelief. "S'probably had her subconscious trained to blow the daylight out of us."

Eames was spot-on.

Arthur had just escaped a large horde of Fiske's projected bodyguards, thanks to a shortcut in Ariadne's labyrinth city, and had arrived at the seemingly harmless spot where the idea was to be stolen. It wasn't a hardware store, after all; it was a record shop.

Arthur applied a pair of the circular glass-cutters to a new window and watched them etch a precise opening in the glass. They were perfectly synchronized, he thought, like this kick had to be. He knew that outside this dream of a dark street, he was actually sitting in a musty-smelling office with a string tied to the back of his chair. Ariadne and Eames were on the same system. The chairs were set on a timer which, if they worked quickly, would tip them over as soon as they had retrieved the idea. Arthur bent over and stepped into the dark shop. He could barely see the gleam of a metal box in the very back, and began to advance, cautiously, toward it.

"What are you doing?"

He turned with a start, stiffly pointing his gun in the direction of the disturbance. Through the window he saw the silhouette of the subject, solid and spectacled, peering at him through the darkness. The gun's barrel gleamed as it caught the light, and Dr. Fiske stepped back.

Arthur lost view of her as she turned and sprinted away from the window, whisking out her cell phone and punching 911. He caught pieces of her frantic words as she fled down the street. "Robbery... record store... –fifth street..."

He heard police sirens in the distance almost immediately. "Shit," he breathed. He turned and sprinted toward the safe, nearly tripping over the CD racks multiple times. The sirens climbed closer. His brow wrinkling with focus and frustration, he tapped in the code Eames had tricked out of Dr. Fiske. He was perpetually glancing over his shoulder now. The sirens were closing in. Suddenly, a bright spark from a ricocheting bullet pinged off the top of the safe.

Arthur leapt back and, retrieving a larger gun from a strap on his back, fired erratically into the black from which the shot came.

Which happened to be from within the store.

He ducked beneath a long rack of CDs. No backup. Ariadne must have been with Eames. He reloaded his gun and listened to the sirens growing in volume. Other than that, silence fell on the dark shop. Arthur breathed for a moment, formulating a plan of attack, when he heard the unmistakable sound of someone yanking open the safe door.

Someone else was taking the idea.

Arthur jumped. Incredulous, he popped up his head to see who it was.

Blue and white lights flashed across the street now. The flashes illuminated the shop fitfully like a damaged strobe, and Arthur was able to catch a momentary glimpse of the willowy figure trying to stuff a stack of papers into a charcoal trench coat. A thin, white pillowcase of a mask was draped over the figure's face. His expression hardening again, Arthur leapt up from behind the CD rack and raised his weapon to fire.

A spray of synchronized bullets shattered through the store's windows like a wide, riveted wall. Arthur dropped to his stomach and covered his head. The shots cracked against the concrete walls and wooden shelves in every direction. He held his position and waited for the tinkling of glass to settle. Urgent shouts echoed from the street. The strobe continued to flash. Grasping the metal leg of a shelf with his left hand, Arthur swung his body around to aim at the open windows, still lying on his side. From the ground, he fired a steady ribbon of bullets across the entire opening, taking out the entire first line of projections. Gunfire scattered and ricocheted all around.

Then, as if from some silent, automated launcher hidden in the shadows behind him, a round grenade soared through the air toward the police cars. A second of stillness passed. At last, a large and rather disproportionate explosion erupted through the street, heaving waves of heat into the store's windows.

Uncoiling from his defensive position, Arthur army-crawled toward the back of the store. He lifted his head to check the open safe. Everything was gone.

Arthur turned his gaze to the right. It was then, in the light of the blaze left behind by the grenade, that he could clearly make out the tall, thin thief beside him. A sparse, crudely drawn frowning face decorated his/her white mask. He or she wore fitted slacks and carried two pitch black weapons: a silenced pistol (like his own) in the right hand, and a heavy grenade launcher in the left.

He squinted for a split second in disbelief. It looked as if — and he could be mistaken — it was a woman.

When he finally looked away and rolled onto his side, he heard the tiny, sharp sound of a single silenced shot. Whoever it was, they had just shot themselves in the head.

Arthur fired a few more sprays of shots toward the windows, then pulled a small microphone that was pinned to his collar up to his mouth.

"Ariadne, Eames, wake yourselves up." His eyes didn't move off the flames outside. "We failed. I'll explain later."

And he brought the handgun to his temple and pulled the trigger.