"I'm here to bring you back."

"No you're not."

They both looked up; Ariadne's mother was stood in the hallway a few metres from them. She still had the bottle in one hand, but in the other she now held a golden chess piece.

"M-my totem." Adriadne's hand went to her pocket out of instinct, even though the bishop was clearly not there. This was the first time she'd thought about since…since…. "Arthur, she's touching it, you said no one can touch-"

"It's alright," Arthur's voice was firm, calm. An anchor. "She's a projection, Ariadne. She's not real."

"I'm her mother," Ariadne winced at the drunken slur, recoiling away from her. "Of course I'm real. What did I tell you about men, Ariadne? They lie, don't they? Like daddy lied. That's why I said we'd never have another one in this house!"

On the word 'house' she launched the bottle at them; Arthur only just managed to pull Ariadne to the ground before the bottle shattered above their heads against the doorframe. Ariadne cried out, putting her hands above her head to shield herself from the falling glass, but when she saw Arthur pull the gun from the holster beneath his coat she screamed louder.

"Don't-" She put her hand on the barrel of the gun, forcing it down.

Arthur stared at her in alarm, every so often glancing back to the drunk woman in the hallway, who was now sat on the floor, leaning against the stairs with her eyes shut, chest heaving, mumbling in a voice too low for him to hear.

"She's my mom." Ariadne's voice broke and squeaked, staring at him pleadingly. She only let go of the gun when it became plain that Arthur wasn't going to shoot – she kept a hand out just in case. "Y-you can't. She's my mom, Arthur."

"She's a projection." Arthur's tone was firm, but not harsh. He wasn't heartless, merely focused – Ariadne knew this, but still.

"She's harmless." The girl (because that's how she felt then, a young girl surrounded by adults) shakily got to her feet, putting her hand down on the glass to steady herself but not really caring about the tiny shards that pricked her palm.

Arthur got to his feet too; Ariadne saw that he didn't relax his grip on the gun, or holster it, but left it at his side. His wariness flooded through to Ariadne, and she took a step closer to her mother with extreme caution. The fact that she felt so on-edge around her own mother planted a cannon-ball of guilt next to the one made of nerves in the pit of her stomach. It might not have been uncalled for, but it wasn't right.

"Mom…" She spoke softly; Arthur kept close behind her. His presence was reassuring. "Mom…?"

"You lied to me…" The whine was tearful and nearly incoherent, but it was there. The woman looked up at Ariadne from the floor with red-rimmed eyes. "You lied to me, baby. You promised you'd look after me. Then you ran away."

Ariadne could feel Arthur's eyes on her; he was getting an insight in to her history that she hadn't told anyone about. "I couldn't, mom. I couldn't look after you. You were too…too…"

"Too what?" Came the reply, as sharp and as cutting as the glass on the floor. "Too what, Ariadne? Too lonely? Too heartbroken? That's what men do to you, baby, that's all they do. I told you to never, never let them get to you."

The drunken woman slowly got up from the floor; Ariadne looked at the bishop in her right hand to avoid looking at her reproachful glare. She didn't notice the large shard of glass in her left.

"And now you're leaving me for one!" The older woman lunged, stabbing the glass point towards Ariadne's face.

Ariadne didn't have time to react; Arthur had an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him and turning her away from her mother in one swift motion. Then the gunshots resounded bleakly in the broken hallway; one, two, three. Ariadne flinched with each shot and then there were tears brimming in her eyes; her heart was pounding like she'd just run a mile in a minute.

The silence was almost as deafening as the gunshots once it settled in around them; Arthur let go of Ariadne after a few tense moments, moving away from her completely and stepping further in to the house. If Ariadne wasn't so reluctant to turn around and see the corpse, and if her hands hadn't been shaking so much she would have reached for him, terrified that he was going to vanish as quickly as he'd come.

She put one hand over her eyes, preparing to slowly turn around, but a hand came down on her shoulder. A warm, comforting weight. "Go outside, Ariadne."

She didn't need telling twice. The door was still open, she stumbled out of it and down the steps from the porch to the soft lawn where she all but collapsed. Breath was still hard to come by. Putting her head between her knees and wiping her eyes on the backs of her hands, she tried to remember where she'd gotten lost.

Arthur came outside around two minutes later, walking over to where she was sat with his hands in his pockets. He dropped something on to the grass beside her without saying anything; the golden bishop rolled to stop beside Ariadne's foot. She looked up at him, about to ask why he'd touched it, only to see him removing the leather glove he'd used to pick it up.

She quickly grabbed it, crawling to the cement path up to her house and setting the chess piece on the smooth surface. She tapped it with enough force to tip it in the real world; it only wobbled, finding it's balance again. Ariadne snatched it up and bounced it in her palm, before tucking it in to her pocket. Arthur had been watching her carefully.

Their gaze met and Ariadne had to look down again. She was embarrassed. Embarrassed by what had been revealled, embarrassed of how easily her dreams had tricked her in to thinking she was in reality. Embarrassed by how, for a half second when she'd answered the door, she hadn't recognised him.

"What happened?" She broke the silence. "What happened to Fischer? What happened to Cobb – did he find Saito? How…how did I get here?"

Arthur checked his watch, saying nothing. His reluctance to answer made her go cold.

"Arthur, you've got to tell me."

"None of you woke up." Arthur muttered bluntly, looking anywhere but at her. "From what I've gathered…the kick you gave yourself and Fischer sent you both off further in to limbo, your own personal limbos. You were too late to catch on to the kick going through the other dream levels."

"What about Cobb?" Ariadne hugged her knees to her chest, staring at Arthur in spite of how he couldn't face her.

"He went in after Saito, and he didn't wake up. Neither of them did." Arthur's tone gave away nothing regarding his emotions. He sounded like a computer, an automatic, unfeeling response. "They're both lost. Fischer, too."

Ariadne took a moment to process this information, rubbing her eyes once more even though they were already dry. She felt hollow, sick. It seemed that the floor was tilting again; she put her hands out to steady herself and felt the cuts from earlier sting against the grass.

"With the amount of time we had, the amount of people, the amount of sedatives left… We could only go back for one person." Arthur finally looked at her, and her eyes widened with horror and comprehension. "So-"

"Me? You came back for me?" She shakily got to her feet, staggering slightly; he faced away from her so that she was left staring at his perfect profile. "Why would you come back for me, Arthur? Cobb…Cobb has kids, a family, and Saito has a wife and a company to run. And what about Fischer – he was the whole reason we did all of this! Why the hell would you come back for me?"

Anger flared like a fire in her chest; it was just so wrong. There was no reason to save her, some scrawny little student with no friends and no one who would miss her a couple of bottles down the line. She was so infuriatingly insignificant, in the eyes of everything, and they'd chosen to come back for her? Arthur met Ariadne's glare with a level, controlled expression.

"Ariadne, you didn't let me finish."

Those six words cut through her anger and made her feel very, very childish. And yet, there was a deflating feeling accompanying the thought that they might not have wanted to come back for her after all. That Arthur might not have wanted to come back for her.

"We went in to find you, but we couldn't. And we ran out of time." Arthur carried on, a little more hurriedly, probably fearful of Ariadne interrupting and jumping to conclusions again. "The plane landed and the four of you were unconscious. If it wasn't for the fact that Saito told the airline staff to follow our orders, I doubt any of us would have gotten out of there. The four of you…you looked like you were dead. Being so deep in limbo…it must have slowed down all your bodily functions; it was almost impossible to find your pulse. You looked like a coma patient…or a corpse."

Arthur's voice was hollow, shaken. Ariadne glanced at him, but he was staring in to space. "What happened then, Arthur?"

"Well, we had to run. I tried to sort some things to see that Cobb's 'dead' body would get back to Miles…if it hasn't worked then he's in the hands of the US authorities as a wanted criminal, or with Cobalt Industries as an defenceless extractor who didn't get the job done. I'm not sure which is worse. If he's with Miles, Miles will know that he's in limbo; if he can't get Cobb out himself, he'll find someone who can." Arthur sighed, running a hand over his hair. "Fischer is with his people. Saito is with his. They're both trained to resist extraction, so…hopefully the people who taught them are going to be able to realise they're not actually dead."

"Hopefully?"

He nodded, sparing her a fleeting glance as the message sunk in. Unless the people who had them knew that they were in limbo, Cobb, Saito and Fischer were being treated as corpses.

"I took you and the suitcase; Saito's people managed to get us on to a plane that was just leaving the airport – we had to hide in the luggage hold. That's where we are now." Arthur glanced upwards, almost as if he was expecting to see the steel belly of the plane they were in. "Thankfully there's been no turbulence. Eames and Yusuf got separate flights out of there as well, but barely. We were lucky it didn't come to blows."

Ariadne let out a sigh of audible relief at the fact that Eames and Yusuf were okay; something had gone right.

They looked at each other; her eyes found his at the same moment his searched for hers. His gaze was almost apologetic; Ariadne remembered the way he'd looked and sounded when he'd spoken about how she'd appeared dead. Horrified. Empty.

He looked away just as she was about to speak, talking over her. "So, now we're running. Hiding. Three people presumed dead were found on that plane, and now the four of us – you, Eames, Yusuf and myself – are suspects. Not to mention, Eames and I are wanted for other offenses, completely unrelated to this."

Ariadne nodded, hugging herself slightly and looking at the floor. She'd expected as much. They'd all prepared for what to do if the job went awry – fake IDs, fake passports; Saito had transferred half of the money he was paying them each to these especially made accounts before they'd left for the airport in Sydney. It was a good job, too, now that Ariadne thought about it. She'd never have thought in her wildest dreams that things could've gone so-

There was the distinctive clicking of someone thumbing back the hammer on a gun.

"Do you want to do it, or shall I?" Arthur asked, ever the professional and the gentleman, offering Ariadne the gun.

The looking glass, so shiny and new,
How quickly the glamour fades.
I start spinning, slipping out of time;
Was that the wrong pill to take? - Rabbit Heart, Florence + the Machine

Author's Note: Right, I'm off on holiday on Monday and I'm gonna be out of action for four weeks. Two in Crete with the family, and two in Greenwich (London) straight after. By myself. On this apparently amazing acting course I auditioned for earlier this year. I'm going to be living in a house with a bunch of other dramatic teenagers, none of which I know or have met before, with little to no adult supervision apart from when we're doing the workshops.

Oh, the possibilities.

But alas, there will be no internet. I probably wont get another chapter in before I leave, so this is goodbye for four weeks!

Hannah

P.S. I LOVE ALL YOU LOVELY LOVES WHO TAKE THE TIME TO REVIEW. YOU'RE LOVELY.