A/N: Nonlinear timeline. Bounces between dreamscape and reality.

"There's an Einstein quote about this."

He covers her mouth with his, smiling.

She rumples his suit.

He goes to find her in Paris a year and two months after the end of the Fischer job.

Her apartment is small, scattered with crumpled pieces of paper and drawings of half-finished buildings, of impossibilities.

How did you find me?

There's a job.

I don't need the money.

He turns on his heel and leaves.

It doesn't take much. He's been in this business longer than a lot of the new faces on the scene, but the key to understanding people, the key to unlocking whatever it is that holds what the client wants is simplicity.

Rube Goldbergs never work. This isn't a Scooby Doo episode.

He drops the bait and leaves.

It takes two weeks.

"It wasn't because of you," she says, heel digging into his calf, sheets pulled up to her collarbone.

He smiles against her bare shoulder. He needs a shave.

"Sure."

She curls her toes. "Honestly."

But he already understands.

They recruit an extractor, and that's that.

It's like hitting the beats; they understand how they work already and they don't speak. In the new warehouse, in the dreamscape, she carves out a space and builds a world; everything seems familiar.

She closes her palm and whole cities rise up out of the desert.

Her heart still beats fast every time she does it.

It wasn't like the first time they kissed. It isn't like the movies.

They aren't ambushed by a mob of '20s gangsters, there's no need to duck into dark alleyways, he doesn't end up falling on top of her in some sexually suggestive position.

There's something but there isn't something.

It was almost two years ago.

There's no use pretending it was some epic love affair.

They kissed. Once. And it wasn't even real.

(They push the emotions down to simmer.)

In a cottage straight out of Provence, resting on stilts over the beach, near the city, they sit on the aged hardwood floors of the living room and listen to jazz albums on vinyl, the scratchiness of jazz singers and the scratchiness of vinyl meeting the distant drumbeats of the waves crashing against the shore.

She smokes a cigarette, her bare feet resting by his lap.

He's left his suit jacket folded on the floor.

The sun outside peeks through the windows; everything is warm and a faded gold.

She doesn't ask him to dance, just leaps to her feet and shoots him an expectant look.

His hands are big and warm;

they move in small circles around the tiny cottage.

It gets harder to sort the real from the dream, the choice from the ordained, the avoidable from the inevitable.

He forgets how their second kiss goes.

The job doesn't go smoothly.

She ends up running through the paradoxical sleek office building she remembers constructing, her dark green silk dress rustling with her movements, bare feet loud against the floor.

She can't remember if she called for him.

They met up, that's the important part.

"We have to get out," he says.

He pulls her by the hand, and she almost looks back.

He gives a sharp tug on her hand. "Come on!"

They turn down another hallway.

He has to kill her.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"I know you have to."

His mouth is hot, his tongue sliding along her bottom lip; the cold muzzle of the gun presses against her temple.

She gasps -

He comes out of it and shifts toward her even before he's fully disconnected, his hand on her wrist.

"Are you all right?"

She grips the underside of the lawn chair and turning away from him, gives another loud dry heave.

He hands her a bottle of water.

The extractor they hired asks Ariadne out.

That isn't it either.

Or maybe it is. Like a gradual thing, but.

There are no growled threats, no fistfights.

Maybe a little glaring.

-

She has his lapels crushed up in her fists, her entire body pressed up against his.

The dress is shorter this time, simpler, black. He slips his hands under it, covering the act with his body. She's pressed up against a door.

He pushes two fingers inside her and her mouth opens and closes a few times as she exhales, trying not to make noise.

"Arthur..."

A city cafe:

She stirs at her coffee. "Better?"

It seems like it could be French or Dutch, someplace European.

They walk outside.

"Good enough."

He takes her hand;

the building rumbles.

"I'll fix it," she says.

They go in a second time.

Everything is smoother.

He cracks the safe, they make bank.

The sums go in the accounts, he pays them all, and now they leave.

This is how things work.

"We could be a team," he says.

"What, like Mal and Cobb?"

His jaw tightens but she doesn't take it back.

This is not without its risks.

"Well," he says, "that's really up to you, isn't it?"

It's unclear whether or not he knows what she's going to do.

(To be honest, he probably knows.)

She shuts the door in his face.

The plane lands at LAX and she hails a cab.

Fischer job's finally done, money in the accounts.

"Silver Lake," she tells the driver.

She locks her door, she doesn't look back.

She lives in LA for three months, San Francisco for six.

She lives with her parents for one.

Nothing feels like home anymore.

She's the Dorothy that wasn't.

(And she is not going to try Kansas - nobody's that desperate.)

"Fine," she says. "A team."

Her lips are chapped.

Everything else is soft.

It's his apartment this time, and their clothes hit the floor intermittently; she gasps against his mouth and he chuckles against hers.

His thumbs brush against her bare breasts, and she rolls her hips against his.

She slides her hand into his hair just to piss him off.

He flips them over and she laughs. He pushes into her, she licks the shell of his ear.

They move together.

He turns on the radio and she rolls over to face him, his hand resting on her bare back.

"I thought you would have had some old records or something."

"Why?"

She shrugs. "Seems like your style."

In the kitchen, she burns the waffles, dressed in his discarded button-down from the night before.

He says, "Next time, I'll make them."

Word gets out.

Eames sends a message by proxy: what's this i hear about a shotgun wedding?

(It is not a shotgun wedding. It is not a wedding.)

She says, "There's an Einstein quote about this."

The shutters on the beachside cottage are a rustic blue this time. The day is warm, the waters are still freezing. It feels like New England. A warmer New England.

"What?"

The waves wash up to her ankles.

"Nothing."

He buries his face in her hair.

A man walks into a bar.

"I hear you're the best in the business," he says into a tumbler of scotch.

The woman raises her glass of wine in a mock toast. "I'm Ariadne," she says. "What's your offer?"

They change warehouses, countries, cities, towns.

They visit Paris pretty often, New York less so, Cobb rarely.

The shutters on the seaside cottage stay the same color.

She gets tired.

"If you ever need a break..."

She presses a kiss to his forehead.

"There's an Einstein quote about this," he says.

They're walking hand in hand on the beach.

The tide washes away their footprints.

A man walks into a warehouse.

"I'm looking for Arthur and Ariadne?"

She learns how to shoot a gun.

He learns how to make baguettes the real way (the Julia Child way).

On the beach, in a house with blue shutters, she prods his leg with her foot. Nat King Cole sings in the background.

"What do you know about Einstein?"

He shrugs.

She laughs.

"Fine," he says. "A team."

(They're not quite Bonnie and Clyde.)