Disclaimer: I have no claim on Inception, lovely thing that it is.
It was raining in Paris. It was also raining in her kitchen. Anuli switched out one overflowing pot for an empty one and eyed the crack in her ceiling warily. No one would know to look at her place that she had millions of Euros in a trust fund she refused to touch. Her godmother was the only person from her former life with her father with whom she had stayed in touch. On the rare occasions she deigned to visit Anuli in her flat, Ann-Marie would sweep in, take in the place with a single, withering glance, shudder in her fur stole, and then sweep out again, her goddaughter in tow. Ann-Marie was an actress, and Anuli knew it was all part of the game. She loved her for keeping it up, even after all these years.
Her own salary was nothing to scoff at, and she had money from her mother's estate she had no problem spending, but she clung to the significance of this tiny flat like a child with a security blanket. It had been the first place she lived after finally escaping her father's home, when she was a student at university, determined to make her own way. At the time, it had seemed like a palace, and, she thought as she surveyed the stained and drooping crown molding in her living room, in a way it still did.
Paris was fully in autumn, and the rain did nothing to warm the already cool air. She had a fire built in the little potbelly stove that occupied the far corner of her parlor, and a cup of chocolate to keep the chill off. Her sweater was threadbare and wasn't terribly effective at keeping off a chill, but it had been her mother's and so it warmed her in other ways. She was settling down to an evening of paperwork when there was a knock at the door.
She frowned. She had no friends outside of work, save for a few old university girls, but they were not the sort to come knocking unannounced. She thought briefly of Ann-Marie, and then dismissed the thought. Ann-Marie might make unplanned visits, but she always managed to announce them in such a way that Anuli knew she was present long before the older woman reached her door. Wary, she kept the door latched and pulled it open to peer into the hall.
"Julian!" She snapped the door shut, unlatched it, and then swung it open again. He was standing in the hallway, soaked to the skin and dripping. She knew his showing up was a possibility; she'd left him her address after all, but had expected him rather sooner. "What are you doing here?"
"Dripping. Can I come in?"
"Oh, yes, of course. Come, there is a fire. Would you like a chocolate?"
"Sounds heavenly." He followed her in, looked around, and, while she knew her flat was not what he had expected—it was never what anyone expected—he said nothing, just moved to stand by the squat little stove. "Anuli, love, it seems to be raining in your flat."
"Ah, yes," she replied, mixing cocoa and milk in a pot on the kitchen stove, "just my way of bringing the outdoors in."
"Easier than keeping a plant alive, I s'pose," he said, and she laughed.
"Yes, quite." She poured the steaming chocolate into a chipped china mug and carried it over to him. "Please, sit down."
He sat, but on the ground rather than on any of the parlor chairs.
"Julian, I do have furniture."
"I'm a bit damp here. This'll do me."
Her furniture was far from fine, but she didn't argue. "Take off your jacket, anyway, or you will catch a chill." He obliged, spreading the garment on the ground before the fire so it could dry. "What brings you to Paris?"
He gave her a quiet, unreadable look. "You."
Her heart jumped. Mentally, she told it to stop being such a ninny. "You flew from Mombasa?" She really looked at him, and realized that he was wearing a suit that fit him for the first time in their acquaintance. In fact, it was a very fine, tailored suit, in grays and blues rather than his customary bright prints.
He followed her gaze down to himself. "No, from Buenos Aires."
Her eyes flew to his. "You were in Argentina? Whatever for?"
"Anuli, I'm going to tell you what I do for a living. Afterwards, you can tell me to go or ask me to stay, but if you do ask me to stay, I'm going to ask you why you live in a dump and have a portrait of Ife Dubois on your wall."
She understood that this was the moment where everything changed. Her ninny heart kept leaping, but there was no going back because he was already speaking.
"I am a crook, Anuli. I have been for as long as I can remember." She nodded, because she'd begun to suspect as much. "As a lad, it was thievery. Little things. I was a pickpocket, and a good one, as I was fast-fingered and quick on my feet. I almost never got caught, and when I did I discovered that I could convince nearly anyone of anything.
"I went to school, and loved it. I loved knowing new things, but that wasn't the best bit. The best was discovering that I had a knack for writing. I could make my script look like anyone else's even if I'd only seen it once."
"You are a forger." Her voice was expressionless, but he forged on.
"Aye, I am. There is more to what I do than some scribbles on a page, though they still call it forging."
"What do you mean?"
"Have you ever heard of shared dreaming?" She shook her head slowy, that bright braid slipping over one shoulder. "It was developed by the American military some years ago. Hook a bunch of blokes up to a machine, put them under, and they can slash, shoot, and kill to their heart's content without any harm coming to them."
"And that is what you do? Go into dreams and…slash and kill?"
"Sometimes. But it's not the point. In the years since dreaming was created, the criminal element has found new uses for it, as it does with most things. These days, the prevailing purpose of shared dreaming is something called extraction. An extractor goes into a mark's subconscious with the purpose of retrieving information from him."
"Stealing."
"Yes."
"How does being a forger fit in with this extraction?"
"Ah, well, perception is all in the mind. My specific set of skills involves being able to appear as other people. Forging their appearance."
At this, she showed surprise, the first sign of it he'd seen. "You can do this after seeing someone only once?"
"Not once. It takes a great deal of study and practice. It isn't easy, what I do, nor is it safe."
"Because it's illegal."
"In most places. Yes."
"So you steal ideas and, what, sell them to the highest bidder?"
"No, no. Extractors are hired and given assignments by their employers."
"You are good at this." It wasn't a question, but he answered it anyway.
"I'm the best," he smiled.
"I…do not know what to think."
"It's not so cut and dried as I've made it sound. The majority of jobs are in corporate espionage these days, and in those cases there's never really a good guy and a bad guy. And I've gotten pickier about the jobs I've taken in the last two years."
"What changed?"
"I took part in a very special job. Something that had never been successfully completed before, something called inception."
She considered that. "Inception versus extraction. So you implant an idea rather than taking it?"
"Just so."
"Did it work?"
He nodded. "It did. We nearly didn't make it out, all of us, but it worked, and we changed the course of one man's life forever. You remember when Robert Fischer broke up his father's empire after the old man died?"
Her eyes widened. "You…?"
"Yes. Robert Fischer was the mark. I wish I could say it had been a humanitarian mission from the beginning, but that's simply not true. I signed on for the challenge of it, and everyone else on the team had their own reasons. It nearly all went to hell and took us with it, but in the end not only did we succeed in convincing Fischer to break apart the company, but we did it in such a way that he convinced himself to do so, revealing his godfather's perfidy and breaking away from the yoke of his father's example.
"It felt good, knowing that I could use my skills for something that was actually beneficial to someone for reasons other than monetary ones. So I've been choosier since then."
"You work alone?"
"Sometimes. Used to be all the time. But these days, I primarily work with another extractor and an architect. Architects are responsible for designing and constructing the dream worlds we bring the mark into," he supplied before she could ask. "Both were on the inception team with me. They're good people, you would like them. In fact, Ariadne, the architect, the Fischer job was her first. She told me to tell you that you are welcome to go to her if you have any questions. They live in Paris, too."
"Wait. Mr. Saowaluk…"
"Yes, we did that. And I think you'll find tomorrow morning that your office has been provided with all the information you need to remove Senor Sosa from his position."
"Buenos Aires."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because your hands were tied."
She shifted in her chair, tucking her feet beneath her. "But you were not hired by anyone."
"Well…" he trailed off, rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, and then turned the movement into a loosening of his tie. "I hired us, basically. Though Arthur figured it out on this most recent job and wouldn't let me pay them."
"They did it anyway? For free?"
"They're good people, Anuli. Arthur's been in the business nearly as long as I have, but Ariadne has scruples that most of us blokes have long lost. She's ethical about the jobs she picks, and it makes her happy to do good things for people. And what makes Ariadne happy makes Arthur happy, so…"
"Ah. They are together?"
"They are. You'd like them."
"I think I would. I like you." His head snapped up at that. She was still curled in her chair, the light from the fire playing over her face. She wasn't smiling, but her expression had softened. It was a promising development.
"You haven't kicked me out, anyway."
"I have not. These things you have told me, they are not easy to understand, but I find them very easy to believe."
"Do you?"
She scooted forward in her armchair, moving herself out of it until she sat before him on the floor. They didn't touch, but she was close enough that they could, if she wanted to. His shirt was still damp, but the fire, and her unexpected response, warmed him to the bone. He loosened his tie a little more.
"I have a portrait of Ife Dubois on my wall because she was my mother."
And suddenly her story about the ghost made perfect sense. He could have dug out the truth for himself, he wasn't a point man of Arthur's caliber, but he could do a Google search as well as anybody else, but he'd wanted to wait to hear it from her. He was glad he had. Ife Dubois had been a model in the seventies, the daughter of a French man and a Nigerian woman who had found great success in the French fashion scene. Her looks had been striking, dusky skin and bright blue eyes, and she had been much in demand for a few years before vanishing from the modeling world entirely.
Eames recalled now that she had married a wealthy industrialist, Guy Delacroix, and retired. She had passed away from cancer not ten years later. He could see the resemblance, now that he was looking for it. Anuli's skin was a shade lighter, and her freckles stood out in greater relief because of it, but the shape of her eyes was the same, and she had her mother's high cheekbones. He thought her height must come from her father's side of the family. She was long and lean of build, but nowhere tall enough to walk a catwalk. Which was perfect, in his opinion. She'd tower over him otherwise.
He scoured his brain for anything he could remember of Guy Delacroix, and came up with nothing beyond a vague impression of vast wealth. The man must be ruthless, he thought, if Anuli could so easily comprehend the lengths to which businessmen would go to steal information from one another.
"Why Laurant?" He couldn't see a man of Delacroix's standing taking kindly to his only child changing her name.
"It is my godmother's surname. Ann-Marie Laurant."
"The actress?"
"The same. She and my mother were great friends."
"I'm guessing you and father don't have the best relationship."
She moved to fold her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "That would be, as you English say, a gross understatement."
"I never knew my old man. Ran out on my mum when I was a baby. The story goes, my mother watched the door close behind him, said 'Good riddance,' and went back to making me a bottle."
Anuli smiled. "I think I would like your mother."
"You would. And the feeling would be mutual."
"Where does she live?"
"Outside of London. Same little house she raised me in. I've offered to buy her better, but she won't let me. Much like you and this apartment, I'd guess."
She colored a little beneath the dark of her skin and reached to play with the end of her braid. "Ah, yes. At first it was a way to spite my father, but eventually it just became comfortable."
He reached out to take her braid from her, pulled the band on its end loose, and watched as the fiery hair spread over her shoulder. He cupped her face in his hand, and leaned in, pausing inches away from her lips. He thought they were okay, but didn't want to assume. "I don't mean to push, but you do realize it's falling down around your ears."
"I do. Something will be done. But not today, I think." She closed the distance between them and pressed her smiling lips to his.
They were occupied thus for long, delicious minutes, until the rumbling of Eames' stomach brought them back to themselves. Anuli laughed and pulled her mouth from his. The fire had died down. His neatly spread jacket had been shoved to the far side of her little parlor, and they had managed to turn themselves so that he was leaning against the armchair she'd earlier been occupying. She was folded in his lap, a delightful armful of long limbs and bright hair.
"I don't s'pose you have any food about?"
She shook her head ruefully. "I was going to go to the market tomorrow. There is an all-night Chinese restaurant down the street. It is quite good."
"Would you allow a somewhat reformed criminal to take you to dinner?"
She smiled, and it extended all the way from her chin to her brow, showing her teeth and crinkling her eyes, a rare expression on her serious face. "It would be my pleasure."
a/n: Long chapter is long. And hard to write! It's difficult to explain extraction in such a way that it doesn't sound skeevy and awful. I hope I succeeded here. Anuli is convinced, anyway, but Anuli is a rare one. I think this is the first chapter I've written that has no smaller story breaks within it. Isn't that exciting?
The upside (for me) in writing fics based on a movie with such an international feel to it is that I've gotten to have fun with nationalities and names and it feels completely natural. Or I hope it does. I think it does. Anyway. Anuli is a Nigerian name, and it means "daughter who brings happiness." Her mother picked it out. "Ife" simply means "love," and it has the benefit of being short and stylish, giving it a sort of "Iman" supermodel feel.