Dom Cobb, 85 years old, smiled out at his little home, nestled in the hillside, a beautiful, wooden reminder of good taste. Ugly steel and concrete houses, even a few apartment buildings, showed that the wonderful L.A. sprawl had focused attention on the little neighborhood, and was slowly devouring it with the tireless force of a never-ending tide of lousy real estate agents.

But he didn't care about the city today. He was out in his private little garden, the great-grandkids had just been over, and he had recently realized that he was going to die before his next birthday. It had been a full life, bitterness and regret mixed in with the sweetness, but that was just the way things went. He still missed Mal, he could never imagine a world in which he didn't, but he had long ago decided that he would be happy for all the precious years they had together and not depressed for the decades they missed.

As he nurtured his fragile little plants, trying to remember if Saito was coming over for a game of poker this or the next Thursday, his heart suddenly stopped. He fell to his knees, clutching his chest, spluttering a little, knowing full well what was happening and that he would die. The fact didn't upset him, and he was already laughing as he imagined the obituary- died flopping around in his garden like a fish. His nerves, worn out from a subjective 140 years of experience, could no longer really sense the pain he should have felt, and all there was to bother him was a mildly annoying stinging.

"I'm coming home, Mal…" He whispered, eyes closing as he felt a soft blackness envelop him, like the softness of a pillow or a blanket…

It was a pillow and a blanket. On the floor. In a motel room. With something sharp poking into his wrist.

Cobb opened his eyes. Beside him, Mal was sitting up, yawning. The perfume he had not smelled for well over half a century filled his nose. He could see clearly. His arthritis was gone. It was all just a dream.

"Shit." He said, blinking his bleary eyes. "Shit." He repeated, for good measure.

Mal laughed a little. "Let's not go that deep again." She said quietly, planting a small kiss on his forehead.

"Mal… Oh, Mal." He said, suddenly desperate, clinging to her arm like it was a lifeline.

"Dom? Dom!" She said, shocked, "What's wrong?"

"Just a dream… It was just a dream… We still have our whole life together…" He said, weeping tears of joy.

"Dom, what's wrong? You didn't stay down there… I mean with me gone… Oh, no, Dom, how long were you stuck there?" She said, suddenly horrified.

"I died of a heart attack at eighty-something," He said with a grin, tears streaming down his face, a century of memories disappearing in the manner of a half-remembered dream, "I thought it was real… I went on the run… I got some wealthy Japanese businessman to bribe the FBI or something, oh Mal! You're alive Mal!"

Mal was horrified. "How could I be so stupid?" She cried, "How could I expect you to commit suicide on the chance it was a dream? How could I think that?"

"Don't worry about it Mal," Dom said, his voice cracking with emotion. "We do stupid stuff in a dream."

For a few blissful moments, they just held each other, bewildered at how they had just barely escaped with their sanity. It was enough to just be there, with each other, savoring life and the future.

"I remarried, you know." Cobb said awkwardly.

Mal shot him a look of horror, shock, jealousy and not a little anger to see Cobb grinning. They broke down laughing, and that's when Cobb knew he was back. That horrible, insane eternity of the dream was over, and they were already laughing over it. It would all be alright.

Four piercing points of pain interrupted his joy. He turned in shock to see that Mal had become a werewolf and was biting into his neck, when Eames burst into the room firing a machine gun off at random, Saito's head appeared in the mirror cackling maniacally, and the entire world heaved up and down like the deck of a ship, as a slow, heavy voice kept repeating his name: "Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom-

"-Dom! Wake up! Wake up, it's just a dream!"

Cobb opened his eyes, panting heavily, to see that he was lying in his bedroom. Mal had turned the lamp on the bedside lamp, and the little, annoying green numbers on the clock told him that it was three forty four in the morning.

Mal rubbed her eyes with the bottom of her palm. "You were screaming in your sleep." She said tiredly.

"Oh my God, I was freaking out. I had this crazy dream… I had a job were I went in other people's dreams and stole secrets, and… You jumped out a window, but it turned out I was only dreaming… And you were a werewolf, and there was these… and a Japanese guy…" He mumbled, trailing off.

"Mm-hmm." Mal said, turning off the light and lying back to sleep. "You have that presentation today. Go back to sleep.

Cobb nodded, and laid back down, already forgetting the dream. And so, Dominic Cobb, thirty-two year old architect from Maine, went back to sleep and never remembered a thing about that dream for the rest of his life.

For the remainder of that night, he dreamt that he was Larry King trying to host a show without letting anyone figure out he wasn't wearing pants.