Author's Note: I really, really don't like this and it feels really incomplete. So I thought I'd put it up and see what y'all thought so I can take your advice and then expand on this. I WILL be rewriting this, there is no doubt in my mind. I started it thinking it was going to be an Eames/Ariadne story and then I thought it might be a Fischer/Ariadne story, but then it turned out to be this. So. Tell me what you like/dislike/think I should change, so I can rewrite this into something that works, please!

Try to remember how you got here.

Three days after they land in LA, the media is abuzz with news of Robert Fischer dismantling his father's empire. Ariadne watches the television in her hotel room, studying the pretty blonde news anchor as she shoves a microphone into Fischer's face.

"We all know what this means for the corporate world, Mr. Fischer, but what does this mean for you?" she asks. Fischer just shakes his head, politely pushing the microphone away from his mouth.

Ariadne shuts off the television.

Try to remember how you got here.

Ariadne can't remember when she chose to be an architect. She can't remember choosing her prestigious Parisian school or even filling out applications for all the scholarships she had needed to win to be able to study there. She can't remember ever not wanting to be an architect.

What she can remember, though, is the comfort that the idea of working towards this goal had always brought her. It was what she thought of at night, when she was alone, and her freshmen-year roommate was out with friends. It was what she thought of when she was in junior high and her parents didn't show up to her soccer championships. It was what she thought of when she didn't have anything else to keep her warm in the dark of her empty apartment.

She wondered, hours after turning off the news, just what, exactly, Fischer planned to do now that he had given up the only thing that had ever meant anything to him. Surely, she thought, running a multi-billion dollar energy corporation probably wasn't his dream as a child, but it had become his goal slowly, over the years. She had seen it in his eyes before they had put him to sleep; she had seen the determination and the ambition that people must have seen in her. This corporation was to him what architecture had always been to her. It was comfort and warmth. It was what he had when no one else was around.

She had taken that away from him.

Try to remember how you got here.

Four years later and Ariadne has finished school and resumed working with Arthur and Eames. Yusuf disappeared after the Fischer job and even Arthur couldn't trace him, Cobb's body had gone into protective custody and Saito had been flown back to Tokyo to, no doubt, be put into the best care money could buy.

She watched the news in the morning, just like she always did. She put on coffee and brushed her teeth, pulling on jeans and a t-shirt. They were in Dubai, meeting with some CEO of a company she had never heard of. Today, the news was about Robert Fischer.

"Robert Fischer, 33, died today, four years after dismantling his father's multi-billion dollar energy corporation, of a drug overdose," the news anchor reported. "According to friends of the young billionaire, he became distant and abusive after his father's death. A source close to the deceased claims he became self-destructive and harmful to those around him. The death has been deemed a suicide."

Ariadne fell to the floor, open-mouthed.

She had done this to him; she had killed him.

And she couldn't remember why.