Disclaimer: I have no claim on Inception, lovely thing that it is.

Note: This chapter overlaps with chapters 3 and 4 of "Life Goes On." You don't need to have read the entire fic, but it will make a great deal more sense if you have read those two chapters before reading this one.

At first it was just sex. Well, if they were being honest about it (which, at the beginning, there weren't), it was never just sex. But the amount of sex being had made it a fairly reasonable thing to believe.

Anuli worked for the United Nations as a non-profit manager, which meant she was responsible for keeping tabs on non-profits operating in and aiding areas of the world where the UN had active goodwill missions. The night she had met Julian, she had just returned from two weeks in a refugee camp in Sudan. She hadn't been at her best.

Over the next months, she found herself passing through Mombasa with greater frequency, a not-quite coincidence that neither she nor Julian ever commented on. If her office noticed her preferred layover, they said nothing of it, either. They made no arrangements. She would show up at the bar, and he would be sitting with a bottle of Malbec on the table, sipping a drink or writing in his notebook. She never asked what he did for a living, mainly because she assumed it was nothing. A writer or artist, perhaps. It didn't matter, not at first, because their relationship was all about escape.

The first inkling she had that he might be more than he seemed was when she arrived at their bar to find him absent, but that he left their customary bottle with Vincent, along with a note. It was a simple apology for his absence, but it indicated he might be absent for several weeks. Which was…odd for a writer or artist, she thought.

His return to Mombasa coincided with the successful charging and subsequent incarceration of a man who had been running a fraudulent adoption agency. Her office had suspected him of it for month, but hadn't been able to get anything concrete on him. Suddenly, they were pointed to the location of his primary records by an anonymous source, which gave them everything they needed. She didn't make the connection, not then.

She stumbled in through the door, dusty and hot, and found him absent. Vincent gestured her over, and in low tones indicated that there was a car outside which would take her to a nearby casino, if she would consent to go. She found Julian at the roulette table, losing, though not terribly upset by it. They stood at the bar and spoke of nothing in particular. With one hand, he played with the poker chip he always seemed to have on hand, and then flipped it back into his pocket in a move she had come to learn meant he had reached a decision about something.

"Come back to my place?"

She glanced at him. It was a step they hadn't taken. She knew he had to have a place somewhere in the city, but they had always gone to her hotel. She considered. Here was this man she was essentially having an affair with despite knowing very little about him. He had somehow become the person she spoke to most, though they only saw one another every few weeks. It was an odd arrangement, to say the least. She got the impression that he was as wary of changing their arrangement as she was, and yet…

"Yes."

He lived within walking distance of the casino. His apartment took up the top floor of a building, which surprised her. Despite the fact that he regularly paid for a nice bottle of imported wine, he generally gave the impression of living within fairly meager means. And while the apartment wasn't nice, per se, it was secure, and decorated in a manner that indicated someone who was familiar with recognizing quality.

She surveyed the main room, surprised to see original art on the walls. She approached one painting, a street scene. "Where did you buy these?"

She sensed his shrug. "Here and there."

She turned from the wall to watch him. He stood against the far wall, relaxed and looking entirely at home where he was. Suddenly, she got the sense that he would look at home wherever he was. "You are a puzzle, Mr. Eames."

"I know."

"You do?"

He nodded, and seemed to consider what he was about to say. "Being unpredictable has saved my life," he said, finally.

"Has it? Whatever from?"

He shook his head, and sauntered over to stand before her. He ran a finger down her braid. "What happened to the ghost in your story?" he asked, and she understood what he was saying. Be sure. Discovering this bit of information would and could change everything.

Rather than deciding, rather than answering, she started unbuttoning his shirt. He took the hint and shrugged out of his jacket. Soon, she'd revealed the black tattoos which swirled over his shoulders. The design reminded her of Maori body art. They fit him perfectly, emphasizing the width of his shoulders. She loved the way they played over his muscles when he moved. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to one swirl, and felt his clever fingers find the side zipper of her dress. She loved Africa, she really did, but the heat took its toll on her.

She dropped the dress, kicked off her shoes, and jumped him. He caught her reflexively, and she wrapped her legs around his lean, muscled waist. "Where's the bed in this place?"

He smiled, and shifted his grip on her. "Why, Ms. Laurant, since you've asked me so nicely…"

She was gone when he woke. He knew that most men who had reason to believe their lives might be in danger at any given moment were light sleepers, but he'd never been able to master it. After an afternoon with Anuli, he slept especially deeply.

He folded his arms behind his head and regarded the ceiling above him. He thought he might have been able to walk away from her, no harm, no foul, but that point had been passed weeks ago. He knew he'd reach a place where he either had to put his cards on the table or leave the game. He knew what he wanted to do, but he also knew he held really fucked-up cards. And even if the whole dream-sharing revelation didn't send her running for the door, could he ask her, in good conscience, to take part in his life? He had the money to retire, certainly, and he'd been taking fewer jobs since the Fischer gig, but he couldn't ever see himself resting on his laurels. He thrived on the game, and he knew it.

He rolled to face the side of the bed she'd been laying in hours before. Sunlight glinted off a single, long strange of red hair curled on the pillowcase. He reached out to pick it up, and studied it in the natural light. She was someone he could get addicted to. He was a little afraid he already was addicted to her.

A corner of white caught his eye, and he retrieved a piece of paper from where it had slid underneath her pillow. Elle est ici, it read, and beneath it was a Paris address.

He felt a grin make its way across his face. Well. It appeared she'd made her decision, anyway. Arthur and Ariadne seemed to be making their whatever-it-was work pretty well. They had an upcoming job together, another one he'd arranged on information Anuli had inadvertently given him. This one was targeting a man her office suspected of embezzling from his charity but, again, hadn't succeeded is finding the money or a paper trail. Perhaps he'd see what advice the little architect had to give.

Two weeks later, he was in Argentina.

He had a black eye, which he wasn't thrilled about, and had lost more money than he'd planned to at the casinos in Monte Carlo out of sheer boredom while waiting for the airline strike to break.

It was good to see Ariadne, and even Arthur, again. He'd spent his career working alone, joining teams only for the duration of a single job, but he found as he got older he enjoyed the time spent with teams, and this team in particular. The inception job had been something out of the ordinary, and it had united them in an odd and unprecedented way.

He sat in a chair in their hotel room, regaling them with the tale of his evening in Monte Carlo. Arthur sat on the bed, and Ariadne was at his feet, leaning against the mattress, with one hand curled idly around his ankle. The presented a unified front, and had a comfort and ease with one another that he envied.

After finishing their pot of coffee, Arthur demanded his true motives behind the jobs targeting non-profits he'd been suggesting of late. Eames never forgot how clever his colleagues were, but sometimes it made his life easier to pretend he had. Arthur honed in on his lie by omission, and Ariadne called him on the woman angle. The development seemed to perturb neither of them. Arthur nodded as if his suspicions had been confirmed to his satisfaction, and Ariadne looked like she was about to explode with delight.

He left Arthur to deal with her. His face hurt, and he needed sleep. He still dreamed naturally, though not very often. These days, they were all of freckled caramel skin and fire red hair. Oh, he was addicted.

Ariadne held her silence for a week, and then couldn't handle it anymore. He'd wandered over to admire the model she was constructing. "You should tell her," she said, without preamble.

So he took the opportunity to ask her what he'd been musing about—how she and the point man maintained what appeared to be a massively healthy relationship while living and working in such an odd, dysfunctional world.

"It really works for you, huh?" he asked, studying the knife she'd laid on her table.

"My…knife?"

"What? No, you and Arthur. The thing you two have."

"Oh! Yes. Yes, it really does. Julian, sit down. You're giving me a crick in my neck."

He was still standing next to her work area, and he thought for a moment before deciding that yes, he did want to have this conversation today. So he stole Arthur's chair and settled in.

She talked a little about the beginning of her and Arthur's relationship, how difficult the adjustment had been, how they'd nearly walked away from it, and then confirmed something he'd long suspected: that their mutual stubbornness had won the day.

"Julian." The sound of his name pulled him from his thoughts and he looked up at her. She was leaning forward in her chair, one small white hand resting on his larger tanned one. "What you've chosen to do with your life isn't the easiest thing for someone who's never heard of dreaming to wrap their head around. You know that. But having someone you care about, who cares about you? Having a place to come home to, a routine to fall into, a goddamn cat with the brain of a pickle? It is so worth it. It's scary as all hell, but if you care about Anuli, if you want more than whatever relationship you have now, you need to tell her the truth. Unless…you don't think she wouldn't understand?"

He shook his head. That was the least of his concerns. "No. No, she's as sharp as your knife there. It's not her I'm worried about."

Ariadne squeezed his hand with hers. "Well, I'm not. Worried about you, that is."

He smiled at her. "No?"

"No. Tell Anuli that if she needs to talk to someone who was recently in her shoes, confronted with an impossible world she'd never conceived of, to give me a call. You always know how to contact us."

No wonder he liked working with these two so much. They were good people, both of them. Well, Arthur was a challenge, but he provided Eames with plenty of unintentional laughs, was the best at what he did, and was attached to the best architect in the business, so needs must.

"Thanks, Ari. I should have done this months ago."

Then Arthur was back from his fact-finding mission, and Ariadne's demeanor changed from shrink to architect, and then quickly to embarrassed girlfriend when she realized she'd revealed something that Eames could, and would, use to tease Arthur mercilessly. She fled the scene, and Eames lost himself in the simple joy of irritating the point man.

By the end of the job, he'd made his decision. He had no idea what would happen when he got there, but the plane he boarded out of Buenos Aires was not destined for Africa. It was headed for France.

a/n: Clearly, there's a fair amount of overlap with chapters 3 and 4 of "Life Goes On," but I felt the conversations needed to be repeated for the sake of this story, and it was fun to look at them from Eames' perspective. I didn't copy/paste them in their entirety, so hopefully that will help you not feel like you were having fanfiction déjà vu over here.

I have no idea whether the job Anuli has actually exists in any agency, UN or otherwise, but it seemed to make sense. Anyway, it's what she does. "Elle est ici" means "she is here" in French.