This is meant to be the last chapter. It's also the chapter I wrote this whole fic for. Perhaps I'll do more with this in the future, but we'll see.

They awoke in cold sweat. Jimmy, first, then Cindy. They were on a couch in the lab, with wires attached to their arms and heads. Things came into focus very slowly. Goddard tucked away in the corner, on sleep mode. Soda cans. Boxes of spare parts. Jimmy gazed at his watch, out of the corner of his eye, not registering the time right away. His mind felt hazy, weighed down.

He avoided looking at Cindy, who still seemed to be getting her bearings as well. Oh God, Cindy.

After a few minutes had passed again, he looked at his watch, this time a little more equipped to do the basic math in his head. They had begun the dream about twenty minutes earlier.

But he'd caught on faster than he should have that they were in a dream. He wasn't sure what had tipped him off exactly. All he knew was that when Cindy had said, I just wanted to grow old with you, something had clicked. The culmination of a week's worth of anxiety in dream-time, that something was incredibly off.

Maybe it was the simplicity of the statement itself. Surely Cindy wanted more from life, right? Surely she had bigger dreams, bigger hopes? A boy couldn't be the end of her life. Cindy wasn't easy to please, she demanded more from herself and from others at each waking moment. She couldn't fade into obscurity growing old with a childhood crush on an island.

He'd taken the plunge (literally), thinking he knew Cindy better than she knew herself. But maybe he didn't really know what she wanted. That she'd said yes to being a guinea pig for his experiment (after lots of insults and references to past failed experiments, of course), and then proceeded to design a dream built around their time on the island...he couldn't say he'd expected that. Truth be told, the island had never even been on his radar. But he'd chosen to stay in the dream. What did that mean?

Even thinking about that question was too much. He finally snuck a glance at Cindy, who looked like she was about to cry. He hoped she didn't cry. He'd had little experience with female tears, or the act of providing comfort.

Cindy had seen him looking at his watch. However much time had passed in the real world, be it ten minutes, or fifty, she knew that they had spent a lifetime together in the dream. And now the dream had collapsed, and they were back to the metallic underworld of his lab, and she felt more heartbroken than she ever had before.

When Neutron had proposed his experiment to her, she'd had reservations at first. It had been smart of her. But then, an idea began to grow in her mind like a virus and she couldn't let go of it.

Neutron was playing around with dreamscapes and time dilation. It was his latest obsession. His latest invention allowed him to build a world, enter it in a dream for a set amount of time, and then return to reality. He'd needed someone as smart as him to be able to test things out. It had to be someone with imagination. If there was anyone who had an imagination, it was Cindy. She excelled in the liberal arts. She was able to grasp the intricacies of poetry and fiction with ease. She knew her way around the whimsical, around the beautiful.

He'd asked her to use her imagination to be a dream architect for his experiment. She still remembered laughing mirthfully at the initial suggestion.

"I think you've finally lost it, Neutron. Is screwing up reality not good enough for you, that you have to resort to messing around with dreams as well?"

"Very funny, Vortex. You know, I'm providing you a golden opportunity."

"And what exactly would that be?"

"Unrestricted creative power. What can't be in our world-well, it can, in the world of a dream."

At first, she'd blown him off. However, as the weeks passed, she couldn't help but think about what he'd said. So she'd agreed, on the condition that he wouldn't be allowed to know what kind of world she was building.

Surprisingly he'd gone along with it, offering some scientific mumbo jumbo about how it was actually better that way.

Once they'd entered the dream world, it was all smooth sailing. It was impressive how much of the island she'd committed to memory after just a day and a half there when they were only eleven years old. Whatever she hadn't committed to memory, she designed. She'd done an exceptional job of it. Well, except for the part where their time together on the dream-island had felt so real that he'd woken up feeling like he'd really spent a lifetime with her, when in reality, they'd never even been in a relationship.

Cindy had gotten so into it all.

Deep in her subconscious, she had locked away a single blue hibiscus.

She'd kept it locked away in a small wooden box under their shared bed for thirty whole years of dream time.

The box that contained a truth she had once known, but chose to forget.

How desperately she wanted to cling to the idea that the dream was reality, that he really had chosen to stay with her.

But the guilt began to eat at her, and it only drove him away, until he finally realized that none of it...had been real.

She was supposed to want more of herself and of the world. But at heart, she was just like any other girl.

He couldn't stop himself. He reached out for her hand. She flinched away. He could catch the faintest look of betrayal in her eyes. He was shocked. This was too much.

"Why the island, Cindy?" His voice came out soft, cracked at the edges.

"Neutron, you...you said what couldn't be in reality, could be...in the world of a dream. So I thought-" She paused to collect herself and swallow the lump in her throat. "I was afraid. That the island was the only place where we worked. Where we could be together."

"Cindy-" He stared at her speechlessly. He couldn't process any of this.

"I knew going in, that I would need something to ground me. Something kind of totem to signal to myself that it was still a dream. That if I looked at this totem, I would be aware that I wasn't in reality. But I-" She looked down at her hands. "I hid the totem away so I couldn't ever tell."

Jimmy's first thought was that she was far more brilliant than he had ever given her credit for. The idea of a totem was such an elegant solution for keeping track of reality.

Jimmy's second thought was that she had to really, really want to be on this island to lock the totem away. Why?

"You and I-we built a life together on that island." The words quivered as he said them.

She looked even more betrayed by this statement.

"Well, we didn't, did we? You chose to have us shock ourselves out of it all. You chose to leave." There was an accusatory tone in her voice, there was no mistaking it.

"How could we stay? You wanted to stay? It wouldn't have been right. I knew the minute you faced that it wasn't reality, you'd want to leave."

"That's James Isaac Neutron, boy genius, for you!" She mocked, throwing up her hands. "Thinks he knows what's best for everyone!"

"We couldn't waste away forever, Cindy." He said, quietly.

"Waste away?" There was a sadness in her emerald eyes like he'd never seen before.

"Okay, maybe that was not the right way to put it-" He scrambled for the right words. Would he lose her for good, if he couldn't come up with the right ones?

"If I had wanted to leave right away, I would have." He tried. "But I didn't. I stayed for thirty years."

She mulled this over.

She had trusted him. Their whole time on the island, she had done nothing but love and care for him. She would have done anything for him. And he had taken her to the edge and betrayed their partnership, their love, by making her jump back into a reality she was not ready for.

"I wasn't ready to leave."

"You might never have been if I hadn't made the choice for us." He pointed out.

She couldn't shake the pain away. None of it had been real. None of it had been real. None of it had been real. In chasing what hadn't been real, had she cut off all possibility of there being anything real?

"What now?" She didn't dignify what he'd said with a response. She didn't think she had it in her to admit that he was probably right.

He sat there, with a vacant expression on his face. After a second, his sapphire eyes settled on her.

"We'll figure it out. We always do. I believe in us."

"You do?" She asked shyly.

"I do." This was a different kind of vow than the one they had made on the island, but it meant more in reality.

Cindy's mind flashed to the image of the totem. That perfect, fresh blue hibiscus.

Better wilted to pieces in the real world than eternally dewy in a dream world, right?

FIN

I'm not entirely satisfied with how this turned out! Especially given that it was heavily inspired by Inception, which is easily one of the best movies I've ever seen. I only saw it for the first time recently (I know, I live under a rock!) Obviously Christopher Nolan did a far better job than I did. I also listened to the soundtrack on repeat the whole time I worked on this.

Here's a little context if the story ended up being confusing: the first three chapters were set in the dream world of the island. They spent 30 years there, starting from when they were 11 in Stranded. After Jimmy shock-wakes them up by having them jump, they wake up in the lab, with only 20 minutes having passed in the real world. I didn't think about what age they were in the real world, but maybe I'll say somewhere between 18 and 21. I kept it kind of ambiguous.

Anyhow, thanks for reading! I have a few more low-key one shots I'd like to put out while my JN re-obsession lasts, so look out for those.