Christi's eyes opened and she found herself on a seat on the plane from before. She looked over at Eames and they made eye contact with each other. Christi began blushing furiously as she smiled and looked away from him. She saw with delight that everyone in the plane, including Cobb and Saito, were once again awake.

Her fingers started playing with her necklace. She looked down at the stone and saw that the design was back to its original form. She was back in reality.

The flight attendant walked over to her. "We'll be landing in about 20 minutes. Do you need immigration forms?"

"Um, I guess," Christi said, taking a form from her. She filled out the form and it wasn't long until the plane landed.

Saito made a call in order for Cobb to walk into the country a free man, and another one for Christi to be able to get on another plane to go home, seeing as she did not have anything with her from the time she had been kidnapped.

Christi and Ariadne got off together to get into the country and then go book another flight to get them back to Paris so they could return to their classes.

As she was about to go with Ariadne to find a flight, she felt a hand on her arm and turned to find Eames.

"Look, Christi," he began. "What happened while we were on the plane…we may have been in a dream, but what we felt was real."

"Eames…"

"You have serious potential to be a forger. And with your nursing skills, you could be extremely helpful if someone gets injured. You were incredible back there with Fischer and Saito."

"Look…all of this just…isn't my world. I don't want to be a forger, and I don't want to go inside people's dreams. I just want to get back to school in Paris, become a nurse, and forget that any of this ever happened. I'm sorry."

She briskly walked off before he could say anything more. Sure, she had feelings for the guy, but how was she supposed to act on them? They were from completely different worlds. He was some poker-playing forger, and she was a hard-working nursing student. How could it work?

As the two friends got their plane tickets for a flight to Paris, Ariadne noticed that Christi seemed really out of sorts.

"You okay?" she asked.

"I'm fine," Christi responded, though her tone suggested just the opposite.

Ariadne decided not to push the issue any further, but she was pretty concerned at her friend's attitude.

For the entire time they waited for the flight and during the flight itself, Christi barely said ten words to her.

As soon as the two girls got back to the apartment, Christi didn't even eat anything, but just went straight to her room and locked herself in.

Ariadne knew that the whole experience couldn't have been that traumatizing. It had to have been something else and she had a pretty good idea of what it was.

For the next week, Ariadne basically lived with an anti-Christi. She was hardly ever in the apartment except to sleep. She was always out at classes or going for a run. In fact, she was running twice as much as she used to, and that was saying something. She would come back in beet red and dripping in sweat, then she would eat something, take a shower, and lock herself in her room.

She certainly wasn't the perky girl Ariadne was used to living with. It was extremely worrying.

If this was how Ariadne acted after she found out about the whole job to begin with, it was no wonder Christi was worried about her. This had to stop.

"Christi," Ariadne said, grabbing her by the arm when she came back from her daily run. "What's going on with you?"

"Nothing," she said shortly.

"We both know that's not true. It wouldn't have anything to do with Eames, now would it?"

Christi sighed. "I never could keep anything from you."

The two girls sat down at their kitchen table.

"What happened between you two?" Ariadne asked her.

"To be honest…I'm not sure. I mean, I was with him the whole time we were under. He taught me how to forge properly and I told him about Mom and Dad. And we, uh…we kissed twice."

"You did what?! Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because we can't be together. It's not possible."

"Why not?"

"Because…we're just too different."

"What makes you different?"

"He plays poker for a living, and I'm studying to be a nurse."

"But you're both forgers. You're both fun to be around. You're both able to handle yourselves. And you both have feelings for each other."

"But…"

"What, Christi? Stop denying it. You have feelings for him and he has feelings for you. So what's the problem?"

"He's not part of the plan."

"Last time I checked, you can't plan in life. I didn't plan on studying Architecture in Paris so I could create dream layers to perform Inception. Life throws you curveballs and this is one of them." She smiled at her friend's silence. "Go find Eames. Tell him how you feel."

Christi thought a little then she sighed and smiled. "You win. I'm finishing up classes in a week, and then I'll be an official nurse. Then…I'll travel to Mombasa and see if I can find him. But if I'm going to find Eames, then you have to find Arthur."

"Excuse me?"

"You think I didn't see the chemistry between you two?"

"Well, he did kiss me…"

"What?! And you were getting on me for not telling you about my kiss?!"

"Well, it was just a way of trying to get the projections to stop looking at us."

"Oh, sure it was. Arthur obviously has a thing for you. The deal is if I go find Eames, you have to find Arthur."

Ariadne sighed. "Fine. Deal."

Christi aced all of her final exams the next week and finally, after years of classes and tests, became a certified nurse. After a couple more days of getting her bearings straight, she bought a plane ticket to Mombasa.

The place was huge and crowded, and she had no idea how she was ever going to find Eames in such a large city. She now wished she'd talked to him more about where exactly he would spend all his time or at least specifically where he lived. Remembering that he played poker all the time, she started by looking in all the casinos, and asking around to see if anyone knew who she was talking about.

After several days of no luck, she was just about to call it quits.

But then her luck turned around.

"Excuse me," she said to the thousandth person in the city. "Do you know anyone who goes by the name Eames? He's usually found in casinos playing cards."

"Yeah, he just left out that door a couple minutes ago," the man said to her.

Christi's heart nearly stopped. Someone finally actually knew who she was talking about? She raced out the door and attempted to follow his supposed path.

"Eames!" she called. "Thomas!"

"Christi?" a familiar voice said behind her.

She turned around and there he was, just a few feet away from her.

"What are you doing here?"

"I haven't been able to stop thinking about you," she said to him. "About dreaming, about everything."

"Really?"

"I tried to forget it all, but…how could I forget what it's like to completely change my appearance and be able to control it? How could I forget someone who helped me face what happened with my parents and reminded me why I wanted to become a nurse in the first place? How can I forget…that kiss?"

"You can't."

"I don't want to anymore."

She ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck as her lips crashed onto his in a forceful yet loving kiss. When she released him, he gently pressed his forehead to hers.

"I fell for you from the first moment I saw you," he said quietly.

She smiled and kissed him again, cherishing the moment as much as she could.

"You were right. I could be useful as a forger and a nurse in the dream state."

"And I'll be there to teach you everything there is to know."

Hand in hand, Christi and Eames set off to prepare for the next dream project, whenever it would be.