Epilogue

Gradually, things seemed to settle down. Miles was in hospital for some months recovering, though he had made his mind up; he was retiring from teaching and spending the rest of his life writing up his memoirs. They would be a far-and-away bestseller, people would pick them up out of curiosity, intrigued by the great mysteries of extraction they loved to marvel at. One day, when it was safe, when enough time had passed between now and then, Dom could profit on his past too, write up the inception affair and publish it. Someone would make it into a heist movie with a twist. It'd make millions.

In his life, what would this chapter be called? What title would he retroactively give it when he was an old man filled with regret?

'Dream, of the Endless Variety'.

That was that, then.

Dream.

They'd all stuck to the story Constantine had given them, except the traumatised Kincaid who'd screamed the truth to whoever did or didn't want to hear it. Unsurprisingly, she had been committed to a psych ward, as you would inevitably be if you started shrieking about the personification of dreams fighting a monster with fish-hooks for fingernails. Poor woman. She had been trying her best, to fight against dreams and to fight against death. Her failure had left her destroyed.

It had ended Rever too, after the complications with the much-lauded procedure came to light. Dom and Arthur had reintroduced dreams to the patients, reopened their basic connection to the Dreaming so Dream of the Endless could do the rest. Everyone was returned to normal.

And Miles was in hospital, and it was likely he would lose a leg.

He didn't. The one in one hundred chance paid off. Luck was smiling on them.

Miles formally retired, and his university called Dom, offering him a temporary position. Apparently, the idea had 'come to them in a dream'.

Payment due. A legitimate job. No need to run extractions. The whole family could move to Paris, and James and Philippa would grow up in the city their mother had loved most. Why not? They were already bilingual. This was the next natural step.

"What about me?" Arthur had asked. "What do I do?"

"You've got Eames, haven't you, and Ariadne's one of the best architects I've seen. The three of you will make a great team." Dom smiled. "Good luck."

‡

For Ariadne, working within the Dreaming again was everything she had wanted. Secretly though she loved designing her own work and seeing it built, running jobs with Arthur and Eames who were, frankly, amazing, what she loved most was walking the real Dreaming, not their cheap mimicry. The castle, with its beautiful contradictions, the forests and mountains and rolling hills.

She wasn't sure how she managed to visit so often, but she found herself dreaming of it more and more, then waking to immediately attempt to sketch it, try to put those impossible lines down on paper.

Their payment had been the freedom to keep working jobs, but Ariadne was at times unsatisified with it. She had no idea what it was, but it felt like this wasn't her path. Something else was written for her in the book of Destiny.

"Okay, so Ariadne? You keep guard and administer the kick when the alarm goes. Eames...Eames, are you paying attention?"

"What?"

"I thought not. Eames, your part of the plan is…?"

Eames rolled his eyes. "Important. Yes, you've said. I need to yell loudly in incoherent German. Fortunately for us, I'm fluent."

"Really? Berlin, '99?" Arthur raised an eyebrow.

"I thought it...prudent to learn, after that debacle."

"Just as well," muttered Arthur. "For the record, I hate government jobs. They assign us neo-Nazi nuts, and then suddenly the best plan you have is 'pretend to be Hitler'. I hate this plan. Also, please stop hamming Hitler up. I mean I know he was a caricature, but we need to fool an actual fanboy. Not going to work if you z-snap like you did in rehearsal during the real thing. I can't believe I actually have to say this, but Hitler was not a sassy black woman."

"Jawohl," Eames muttered, sarcastically. "You're no fun, Arthur."

"Yeah. I know."

"Guys, I know how much you love arguing constantly but this job is time-sensitive so…" Ariadne cut in.

"Oh, of course." Eames nodded. "Well then, put us under."

The job ran smoothly. They got in, they got out. This was their payment, the freedom to run jobs, and it was enough for Arthur and Eames who made an exceptional team when they weren't at each other's throats. Who appreciated it. For Ariadne, she still wanted more. There was a restlessness in her. She'd seen something more.

She'd seen the Dreaming. The real thing. Not cheap mimicry.

Leaving Eames and Arthur to whatever it was they did when they were unaccompanied (Ariadne wasn't sure), Ariadne decided to call in a favour. Her payment.

It wouldn't be permanent. She knew what had happened to Dom when he stayed too long in Limbo. This would be different. She was physically moving from one place to another, crossing over between worlds. There would be no body asleep on the floor. She would be somewhere else.

The Dreaming.

Ariadne left the Waking World and stepped into the Realm of Dream.

‡

In the castle at the centre of the Dreaming, a new set of suites come into existence. Its design is discussed with and agreed upon by the new guest.

She is a qualified architect, and she has all of impossibility to play with. That was what had drawn her to extraction. And it is now what draws her deeper, down the rabbit hole like Alice, following a black raven instead as a white rabbit.

The raven turns to the librarian and says " Lucien. Look, we've gotta tell him. It's our duty. This's all gonna end in disaster, we both know that. We've seen this before..."

"Ah yes, we have, with our previous Lord, however. Regardless, Matthew, I never thought I'd hear the day you started going on about our duty. We are his servants."

"And I'm his friend." Matthew emphasises. "It's possible to be both. I'm gonna tell him."

"Then he will listen. He values your advice. Tell me, Matthew, do you think we ought to protect him at all costs? To what end do we go? He is the Lord of Dreams. I know, you call him 'the kid', but you forget. One day everyone needs to make new choices, experience things, adapt. If you protect someone from everything, when the time comes, how can they survive?"

Matthew sighs. "I never thought I'd see the day you started to approve of this."

"Oh, I don't," Lucien replied. "I think he is capable of finding these things out for himself."

"You're still too reluctant to contradict him."

"And you are too eager," the librarian replies. "Now, I have a selection of volumes to file. We both have work to be getting on with. Rather than speculating on what might be, I suggest we leave that to our Lord's eldest brother, and get along with our own business."

"If you're telling me to stay in my lane, just say it. Jeez." The raven flies off, muttering slightly. Ariadne, who was listening to the conversation, ducked behind a bookshelf to avoid him spotting her. She headed back to her rooms to work on some new designs she was thinking of.

Nothing changed.

The Dreamcatcher was set to herding stray nightmares, devouring them when they misbehaved. So long as it kept in line, it would be allowed to live. It had a function. It was no longer incomplete, no longer a jigsaw piece of a hivemind. The Dreamcatcher was an individual.

Everything changed. Everything, and nothing.

Change or die, that had been its choice. It had chosen change.

Unlike certain parties, it was capable of that.

‡

John Constantine's payment came a few months later. He'd been having a low patch, which happened, more frequently than he liked to admit sometimes, when the nightmares stopped abruptly. Gary, Hell, Cheryl, the guilty, agonising dreams he was plagued by suddenly ceased. That wasn't to say he stopped having nightmares altogether, they were just different now. The dreams he'd lost were those he felt most ashamed of. Those that remained were of things like demons tearing him limb from limb, which wasn't ideal, but at least he didn't feel personally responsible for the fate of someone else. He dreamt of things that might happen. He dreamt of monsters under the bed.

What he didn't dream of was his own numerous failures. And this was probably the best balance possible. Keeping the useful dreams, part-exchanging the self-loathing for simpler things, nasty noises in the night and eldritch abominations in the cupboard. His ghosts started to drift, and some of them moved on. He wasn't sure if that was part of the arrangement now, or just a coincidence. His ghosts always vanished when things started to pick up. Eventually he knew they'd be back. They always were.

Getting himself together, he decided what the hell, he'd meet up with Chas. It had been a few months since they'd spoken, just after the Rever debacle. They'd arranged to go out for drinks and John had never showed. Once again he'd vanished. That had been several months ago now.

And Chas' normal life would have resumed as always. Maybe, John wondered, maybe it was time to stay gone. Chas didn't deserve dragging back into this. Maybe he should just let Chas be. At least then Renee would be happy, if that bitch ever was. She'd be overjoyed that John was out of the picture. And Chas?

Chas'd be out with those stupid mates of his, the ones who were thick as two short planks and presumably inbred, judging by everything else about them. They hadn't changed since they were teenagers, which was why they had been left behind on the evolutionary ladder along with monkeys and the average footie supporter. And this'd be fine and dandy but bloody boring. Also, from prior experience, John was getting the hint most people liked to know if their best friend was alive or not.

So he called Chas, who told him to piss off initially and wanted to know where the fuck he'd been, but eventually relented and soon enough they were on speaking terms again.

The worst nightmares were gone, and the ghosts had cleared off. Life could get back to what resembled normal, as close to it as he could hope for. Briefly he considered quitting magic altogether and living through cons instead, but no. That had never worked in the past.

Magic was his lifeblood, as dreams were for other people. Normality didn't get much of a look in. Except of course, when he went out for drinks down the pub, and there was a match on the background and no Lords of Hell on his back, and he was just that bloke in the funny coat at the end of the bar, and everything was coloured by the light at the bottom of the glass. That was when things were good. It never lasted, but it didn't need to.

It just was.

At least, until he started a fight with some local yobs and got himself and Chas kicked out after glassing one of them and 'putting a spell' on another that made him believe he was vomiting razor blades (there was no real magic in it, he tried to explain that but they were all too pissed off with him to listen), at which point he'd taken a punch to the face and gone down, would have a right old black eye in the morning. Chas had managed to drag them out, kicking the shit out of two of the bastards in the process. They'd made it onto the street, the landlord had yelled after them that they were banned, and now they were making their way back to Chas' cab. It was like many times. This wasn't deja vu, it was something that actually had happened before. And it would inevitably happen again, at a different pub, with different yobs, maybe he'd get a punch in himself, maybe he'd be the one to get glassed, whatever sequence of events, nothing really changed.

"What the fuck'd you 'ave to do that for, Constantine?" Chas muttered. "Why'd I bother? Yer always like this."

"I know," he smirked "You should get yourself some better mates."

Chas thought for a moment. "Nah. Bit late for that. I should get home anyway, or the missus'll kill me. See you."

Then he was off, and there was just John, walking down the street alone. He looked up at the sky and remembered a time when he had been able to see the Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime, the coloured swirls and whorls in reality. Was there an aspect of Dream of the Endless manning that Dreamtime? Did they change when Morpheus did?

He looked up at the sky, and for a moment he saw the big picture, and then before he could put it into words it was gone, replaced with the beginnings of what promised to be a monstrous hangover. Brushing the feeling off, he lit a cigarette and walked off into the darkness of the London streets until he was gone.

‡

And in his garden, Destiny of the Endless turns the page of his book. Another story begins, somewhere, but it always does.

In Manchester a burning cat terrorises the streets of Chinatown, yowling in agony each night. Its eyes shine with a thousand-year-old anger. It burns, and it shrieks, in a permanent cycle of death and life, living and dying and burning, always burning. There are videos on youtube shared as warnings about animal abuse. They are not. And still the cat burns.

Somewhere as yet unnamed, the last three survivors of a tribe are driven by something, forced to wipe themselves out, in an act of brutal ritual cannibalism that will puzzle the anthropologists who find them for generations to come...

...in Kingston, Jamaica, a young boy vomits up his own parasitic twin, who promptly assumes his brother's identity and starts living his life instead. The original child is seen only twice after this, before he vanishes, replaced by his superior sibling...

In London, John Constantine, a man all too familiar with the better twin thing albeit via annoying haunting and manipulation from his alternate universe sibling, wanders the streets aimlessly, putting one foot in front of the other, going wherever the world takes him. There's a theory about this called synchronicity, but that is the realm of the Laughing Magician, and technically he isn't that person. Technically. The world had, and still has other ideas.

in Paris a plane lands and Dom Cobb and his family get off, and set about making a new start. The start they should have had long ago

in Texas two extractors enter a neo-Nazi's dreams, one of them posing as Hitler. They find his plans for attacks on Jewish and Muslim places of worship and sell the information to the government. Eames and Arthur emerge, and wonder where Ariadne is

in the Dreaming, Ariadne is busy. In the Dreaming, the Dreamcatcher cleans up superfluous ideas. In the Dreaming, there is a raven, and a writing desk, at which sits a librarian whose task it is to catalogue unwritten books.

In the Dreaming, the Prince of Stories has work to be done.

And in the Dreaming, in those shifting sands right on the edge, only memories remain.