"Hey, didja see the latest on Frank Abagnale?"

"No. What'd he do this time, steal the Queen of England's tiara right off her head?"

"Believe it or not, he's working for the FBI. Check fraud department."

"Well, you can't get anyone better qualified. They trust him?"

"I mean, it's prison service. His sentence isn't over yet."

"Oh, alright. Y'know, I'm glad they finally got him, but you have to give the kid credit."

"No one else is going to anymore, that's for sure."

"Haha. That reminds me: management is complaining about us showing those news stories. They say it's too upsetting."

"I don't see the harm. But 's fine, I don't give a damn."

In 1999, former mercenary Danny Archer was imprisoned in Freetown, Sierra Leone for smuggling diamonds into Liberia. He had intended to use them to pay South African Colonel Coetzee, also a mercenary. In the same prison, Solomon Vandy, a native fisherman, and the rebel Captain Poison talked about a particularly valuable diamond that Solomon found in the fields of Shenge. Archer overheard them, and they all set out in search for the diamond, Solomon hoping to find his lost son in the process.

They came across Maddy Bowen, an American journalist, who was able to locate Solomon's son. However, the press convoy came under attack. Archer, Solomon, and Maddy Bowen escaped to the South African mercenary camp. They arrived and met up with Coetzee, where they learned his plan for a military strike on Sierra Leone. While Maddy flew to safety, Archer and Solomon continued on foot to Kono, where they discovered both prizes waiting for them, as well as the rebels. Coetzee and the mercenaries attacked, and in the battle, Solomon killed Captain Poison. Coetzee tried to force Solomon to uncover the diamond, only for Archer to kill him. Archer was shot in the process, but he still managed to get Solomon, his son, and the diamond to an airstrip before he finally died.

Dominick Cobb awoke, not in Sierra Leone, but in a flat in South Africa. Rutendo Zehir sat upright in his chair, though both Mal and Solomon Vandy were still asleep.

"Did he find the diamond?" Zehir asked.

"He did." Cobb described exactly where it had been buried.

"Where is it now?"

"He has it. His projection of Coetzee is gone, so he's safe with Mal."

"You have done good work," said Zehir. "I'm impressed."

"Yeah," said Cobb. "That's even considering you chose 'Captain Poison' as a codename."

"Where else but a dream can I go by such a ridiculous name? In any case, Mr. Vandy did not seem to notice."

"He killed you with a shovel, so he must've noticed something."

Mal stirred and woke. Cobb trotted over and held her shoulders. "Did you get him to give it to Simmons?"

"I did," she answered, still groggy.

"Good."

"Why does that matter?" questioned Zehir.

"Simmons was my projection," Cobb said. "As soon as Vandy wakes up, the projection'll disappear from his mind entirely. And if the projection has the diamond―"

"Vandy will forget it ever existed," Zehir finished.

"Exactly. He'll know nothing, and you can let him go."

"Well." Zehir pulled out his checkbook. "I think that takes care of everything." He scribbled for ten seconds, then ripped the check out. "Thank you for your services, Mr. and Mrs. Cobb."

Cobb took the check and confirmed the amount. $200,000. His eyes wandered to Zehir's signature, and he absently noticed it was of a type easy to forge. "Glad to help," he said. As they walked out, Cobb noticed his wife's lowered eyes.

"Mal?"

"I didn't like that," she said. "I don't want to do it again."

That was Cobb's last dream extraction for a long time. Mal was uncomfortable with digging through a person's mind against their will (even though she had no trouble keeping and spending the money, he noticed), so she wanted to simply experiment on their own instead. That's what they concentrated on for five years.

Cobb did do one more job without Mal's knowledge. He flew to Boston allegedly on business, though he had really been approached by a captain of the Massachusetts State Police, Oliver Queenan, who wanted Cobb's help finding a "mole" in the police force. Queenan and Sergeant Dignam followed Cobb, who adopted the pseudonym of Billy Costigan, into the dream of Colin Sullivan, a confirmed rat. Cobb essentially allowed Sullivan to play out the scenario as he believed it would go, which would, in theory, cause him to generate the other rat he subconsciously knew. Cobb eventually confronted and arrested Sullivan directly, which forced him to respond to the threat and bring the "mole" to the forefront: a certain Trooper Barrigan. The projection of Barrigan killed Cobb and woke him up. Queenan woke next and told Cobb that Sullivan had taken care of the rest by exposing Barrigan to the rest of the police force, thus informing the two real cops. In the dream, Dignam shot both Sullivan and himself, bringing them both back to the world. Cobb received a check for $10,000―hopefully low enough to stay out of Mal's notice.

Then came the fateful day when the experiments went wrong. It was Mal's idea first to go to deeper levels. Deeper within the mind. But they died at too low a level, and they ended up in the alternate plane of limbo. The space was entirely empty; but in their experience, they lived there for fifty years, so they spent that time to build a home for themselves. They had fun in the beginning; perhaps their most memorable experiment was building a replica of Verona, which they'd once visited, and acting out the play, Romeo and Juliet, in a modern setting. As time went, on, though, they settled down, keeping a consistent structure and growing old together.

There was a crucial divide, however. Cobb's perception of reality was different from his wife's. She believed they lived in reality, and he did not. To convince her in the most direct way possible, he broke into the deepest recesses of her mind. In there was her totem, the means by which she distinguished dream from reality. He took her totem, a metal top, and set it spinning indefinitely in her subconscious. It planted one idea: that the world she inhabited wasn't real. The idea stuck, and they killed themselves to escape. They woke up only hours since they'd fallen asleep.

But the idea Cobb had planted was so embedded that it could not be moved. Mal was convinced their current plane was also a dream. As in limbo, to reach reality, she believed they had to die. Up against Cobb's resolute denial, she arranged a scenario where, by all the evidence, he had flown into a rage and killed her. It was her attempt to detach him from this world she thought false. "I freed you from the guilt of choosing to leave them," she said. "We're going home, to our real children." And then she jumped to her death.

It was his fault…his fault….

After that, he had to leave his children and flee the country. He found work doing what he did best: extraction. He would see his children in dreams constantly, but they would always be facing away from him, and he could never reach them. Mal also was consistently present, often playing the role of saboteur.

For a full year, he went around doing odd jobs and making connections before finally coming across someone who could do something about his situation. Japanese energy conglomerate CEO Saito recruited Cobb to perform the opposite of extraction, inception, on his business rival to get him to dissolve his father's company. Despite the skepticism of his colleague, Cobb knew inception to be possible because of what he'd done to Mal. In return, Saito would arrange for Cobb's murder charges to be cleared.

Knowing this job meant everything, Cobb gathered the best team available. For the most part, his relationship with the team remained professional. It was Ariadne, the graduate student from Paris, who wriggled her way under his defenses. He was the one to teach her; she trained using his mind as an arena to be an Architect of the dream, as he had once been. One of the first things he told her was, "Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange." He later encouraged her to create a totem to help her with this, like his top.

What she discovered later forced him to make personal clarifications. After admitting everyone believed he had killed his wife, he said, "Thank you…for not asking whether or not I did." Ariadne became his supportive companion throughout the mission.

They all boarded a plane with the rival CEO, Robert Fischer. In a private cabin, they sedated him and descended into his dream state. True to the experiments of the Cobbs, their plan called for them to go three levels deep. Along the way, the team manipulated Fischer into believing that his father would have wanted him to abandon the company and be his own man. Unfortunately, both Fischer and Saito died on the third level and dropped into limbo, just as the Cobbs had done. Ariadne and Cobb were forced to follow. There, Cobb confronted Mal once and for all.

"What do you feel?"

"Guilt. I feel guilt, Mal. And no matter what I do, no…no matter how hopeless I am, no matter how confused, that guilt is always there, reminding me of the truth."

Ariadne was able to rescue Fischer and bring him back to complete the mission. Cobb left Mal behind to search for Saito and bring him back to fulfill his end of their deal. Everyone awoke, inception had been successfully performed, and Cobb was clear to go home.

Cobb passed through U.S. customs without any hindrance. He met his father-in-law at the airport, who drove him to the house he hadn't seen in a year. In a moment of timid, vulnerable disbelief, he tossed his totem onto the kitchen table and watched it spin. Then, he spotted his kids outside in the backyard and heard them giggling, and everything else flew from his mind. He rushed to them and lifted each of them in his arms, and they both screamed in delight. In the midst of their excited voices trying to fill him in on everything, he let the tension melt from him for the first time in years. He didn't need to hold it anymore. He turned to bring them into his home, their home―

The top was still spinning.

The smile should have left his face. It should have dropped right into oblivion. But it stayed stuck there, held by congealed packets of muscle and flesh on his cheeks. It had been a full thirty seconds since he'd started the top. It should have fallen. He kept staring at it, but it only continued its revolution. So perfect, so pristine that it was invisible.

His body felt light, and he realized he wasn't holding his son anymore. He looked down; his daughter was gone, too. He spun around again, and there they were: skipping through the lawn, looking just as happy as ever. But from the moment he'd entered, they had been laughing, chatting, clapping, something. Now, they were silent. They didn't even make a sound when they compressed the grass with each step.

They ran over a rise and out of sight downhill. Immediately, he went after them; but strangely, it took much longer than it should have for him to reach the rise. He panted as though he was running up a steep hill. As he neared the top of the growing hill, he finally heard something, a voice coming from every direction.

"I've missed you…."

At the top, he could finally look down at the lake. The kids lay in there, both of them, with another boy, face down in the water as though they were diving for seashells or brittle fish bones. His blood rushed with a tearing speed through his veins. He sprinted just as fast toward the lake. He blinked, and he was at the shore, as though to make up for his earlier sluggishness, now, when it didn't matter anymore. James (Simon), Philippa (Rachel), and the other boy, the older one (Henry)―he pulled them out one by one. All their faces were cold. All their legs were still, stiff. Philippa's hair was a lot darker than it had been.

"I told you not to come here. I told you this would be the end of you."

He turned them onto their backs and lined them up in a row, carefully and neatly placing their hands over their chests. He wiped at the hot, blurry mess of his eyes but only replaced the hot and salty with the cold and tasteless.

(NO, NO! PHILIPPA, JAMES, NO, WE WERE SO CLOSE, SO CLOSE―!)

(It's always the same, every time the same. They're dead, they're always dead, they're still dead….)

"Let's put them at the table, Andrew."

He felt the hands cup his jaw tenderly. "Mal?" he muttered, and looked up. There was no black there. So much yellow: yellow hair, yellow dress. The flowers on her dress seemed to mock the real ones.

"We'll dry them off," Dolores reassured him. "We'll change their clothes. They'll be our living dolls."

"No." His cheeks shook violently against her palms. "I can't do this again, can't do it again."

"I love you. I love you so much."

He usually got to say it back. He was usually spared that much. Not this time. He felt his finger strain on the trigger, heard the crack of the gun, and saw her face go slack. She fell backward, toppling farther than the ten of the tallest mountains. His body went numb, and then he was falling, falling with her, following her white and gaunt face to the grass and into the dirt.

"You…you set me free."

"Andrew Laeddis, born Andrew Buchanan, son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan of East Egg, Long Island. Institutionalized for the murder of his wife after she murdered all three of their kids." The man with the black bowler hat snapped his chart shut. "And you said he did what?"

"Um…he uh…." One of the two orderlies nervously rubbed at his chin with his thumb. "He…he's been using up all the toilet paper. He signed his name on all the sheets, and then he threw them at the other patients."

"An-and when he was doing that," the other cut in, "he said, he was saying, 'I don't have the diamond, it isn't here! This should cover everything.'"

"You idiots!" the man with the bowler hat barked. "You called me down for this? You made me miss shooting practice."

"Sorry."

"Fuck it. Was anyone hurt?"

"Laeddis was, almost. Some of the other guys got pretty ticked, but then he started blubbering and ran to his room."

"So there was no reason you had to bring me in here."

"I don't know! We thought Dr. Shaheen might want him moved to Ward C."

"The man's been lobotomized for fifteen years, moron. He might be accident prone, but malice is beyond him, now. Ward C is no place for him."

The orderlies shifted their feet. "Well…sorry we wasted your time."

"Me too. I've still got to file a report, though, and I have to check his status. Let me through."

The man in the bowler hat walked past the scattered insane and into the long halls of Ward A with a guard. He looked into the rooms as he passed them. There was a young, cheaply dressed man drawing a figure on the floor. Down further, on the right, there was a man with well-combed hair pointing a flashlight to the wall, flicking it on and off before his unending stare. Further, a man singing to the ceiling. Then, someone trying to dig his way out of the concrete. In the room before Laeddis', its occupant, rather anticlimactically, slept on top of his bed. The man with the bowler hat stopped at the last room on the left, and the guard unlocked the door.

Laeddis stood in the middle of the floor. His posture was relaxed, and he stared at the man with an easy, cocky smile. The man in the black hat stood opposite him.

"I met Tom Buchanan once, you know," Black Hat said after a while. "You ain't his son. There ain't no way."

He thought Laeddis might have shrugged, but nothing more.

"How far do your delusions go?" he went on. "Are you content to toy with history in your mind, or do you have to rewrite it entirely?"

Grin.

"Never happy with yourself, never happy with your lot in life…so you create. Am I right? You make masks, try to hide. But there's only one reality. You're the same man. Live with your mistakes, deal with your problems. All of them. And don't expect anyone to come along and do it all for you. They are your responsibilities. Your roles to fill."

The man with the bowler hat turned and walked from the room. He paused. "Trust me, kid," he said, somewhat warmly. "It's better that way."

He disappeared into the hall. Andrew Laeddis was no longer smiling. He only stood, stood isolated in the middle of the room, situated on an island isolated in the middle of the bay, in a time and place isolated in a singularity, when and where there was no movement forward or back―only a static change of accident.

Straightening, he adjusted his coat, walked through the threshold, and bridged the gap.

THE END