I don't own any of the characters mentioned below - I'm just liberally borrowing them, as with the lyrics to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Chapter One – Unreality Bites

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality…

- Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen

Later, when she searches back in the recesses of her memory, it occurs to Ariadne there had been a rainstorm the first time they met. Recollection of this detail was a careful rewinding; she the bloodhound sleuth crouching, combing and sometimes using a machete to cut through the thick vines of perception and imagination. It had been raining outside because she had come in with soaked clothes and hair. The place Cobb had directed her to show up at could only be described as decrepit, even by the most optimistic of realtors. She stares at the dirty brick building, with its tall chimneys dusted black from years of grime and it takes all her willpower not to turn around and walk away. It is only her implicit trust in Miles Laraby that propels her through the rusted gated entrance that is so cheerily framed in barbed wire. Walking the stretch from the sidewalk to the entrance, she looks around the dirt yard and imagines small children in Dickensian garb batting around a ball with their chimney brushes during the few moments they're not sticking their little hands into dangerous, Industrial-era machinery.

Then she's at the front doors – two of them, wooden, standing at three times her height. She makes a fist and knocks before noticing the buzzer. He must have heard her, though, because it is altogether too soon after she presses the smudged white button that Arthur opens one of the doors. He gives her a full once over with his eyes before stepping aside. He doesn't say a word as she passes him while simultaneously wringing the rainwater from her hair. He's gone before she can say anything. For a few minutes, she stands alone in the large abandoned reception area and moves to shutter the door from letting in any more wind and rain.

After a few minutes pass and he has not returned, Ariadne wonders if he is Cobb's poorly trained manservant. Though she's only met with Cobb the one time for no more than 15 minutes the previous day, she somehow doubts he possesses that kind of pretension. Then Arthur materializes from around a corner, carrying a white towel in one hand. By this point, she has pulled the elastic band from her wrist to twist her hair into a pony tail, a futile attempt to curb the fine baby hairs on her temple from curling around her face. "Here, you'll catch a cold if you don't dry up first. I'm Arthur." He holds out his hand, and she uses the towel to wipe the moisture from her own before taking his. "You must be Ariadne, the architecture student."

"I am. Where's Cobb?" She refrains from asking his position, and he doesn't divulge any more about himself as he leads her up a flight of stairs.

Cobb is sitting in a large, cleared workroom and staring intently at a laptop screen. At the sound of their footsteps, the laptop screen clicks down and he pushes himself away from the desk, straightening his posture. "Good, you're on time. That's important." He shakes her hand and then nods at Arthur. "You've met the point man, too." He raises an eyebrow. "And you passed."

"With flying colors", Arthur murmurs, hands in his pants pockets while he rocks gently on his heels.

She turns to look at both of them. "You mind sharing?", she asks and while they are all just standing there, almost in size order, she can imagine them as schoolboys, shirts untucked and armed with glass marbles and magnifying glasses on the playground during recess.

"It's hard to explain, but it's an instinct. In our line of work, you come to rely on it. A lot. Who you can trust, who you can't. It almost never lets me down", Arthur explains, unhelpfully.

"O-kay…", she says, protracting the "o". "And what line of work are we talking about here? Professor Laraby mentioned you were in something like construction." Not normally her choice of an internship, but if it came from the professor, then there had to contain some element of challenge.

Cobb and Arthur share another look and then Arthur moves away. "He wasn't off the mark about that, although it's not the conventional construction most people are accustomed to. We don't build buildings – at least, not real ones."

"You build imaginary buildings?" She meant to be facetious but is taken aback by Cobb's nod.

"Amongst other things. We need someone to construct environments, interiors and exteriors. Here, drink this and we'll talk some more." Arthur, handing her a glass of clear liquid.

Ariadne brings it to her nose and sniffs. There is no odor, but it doesn't stop her from asking, "What is this?"

Cobb smiles faintly. "Water. It's a little too early for anything stronger, don't you think?" He also has a glass in his own hand. "You're starting to look a little peaked." He sips and she does the same. She guesses that was the last stretch of uninterrupted reality for her because the next thing she knows, things are exploding in slow motion around her, she's folding her adopted city into her own personal pretzel and experiencing the unique and not exactly pleasurable sensation of having a knife rammed through her lower abdomen.

Suddenly, she is awake. Arthur is directly in her line of vision, his hands hovering just above her shoulders. Before they can descend on her, though, she is out of the lawn chair (lawn chair?), her eyes swinging like a drunkard's fists. "What the hell was that?"

He's trying to corral her away from the big EXIT sign that her body automatically wants to run under. Then Cobb's up too from his equally questionably clean lounge chair and as they try to calm her down, she is suddenly aware of her petite stature in the presence of two male strangers. Maybe they see that on her face because they let her go, and they don't chase after her. She knows this, because she looks back at them when she makes it to the staircase. They remain standing in the same spot where she left them. They don't look flustered – in fact, they probably make that same facial expression if someone were to walk up to them and express displeasure at the spot of weather they were experiencing. Nonetheless, she can't seem to help looking over her shoulder when she's finally out of the warehouse and every fifteen minutes until she is back in her flat. Her hair is wet again.

It's three o'clock in the morning and she's tried everything – watching nature shows in French, listening to Yanni, and even staring at her digital clock. It's not as if her eyelids don't feel heavy (they could crush a man running underneath at this point), but each time she is about to drift off, she has a memory – no, a dream – of Mal Cobb stalking up to her and she jerks awake, her heart louder than the Kentucky Derby.

Her cell phone starts to ring. She grabs it and checks the caller ID – "Unknown". Given the bizarre spree of events in the last ten hours, her gut is telling her only two people would find it reasonable to ring her up in the middle of the night. Should she be frightened? Yes, but she's not. "Hello."

"It's Arthur." She hears him pause. "We met earlier today."

She barely manages to keep the bubble of sarcasm from escaping. "Yes, Arthur. I remember. What do you want?" She doesn't, however, bother suppressing her annoyance.

"You stormed out. I'm checking up on you." It's almost sweet, except that it's three o'clock in the morning and she never gave either of them her phone number.

"I'm fine. I'm trying to sleep."

He disposes of the small talk immediately. "Cobb seems certain you're going to find it difficult staying away."

"Cobb also has a crazy wife living inside his mind."

She hears Arthur cough, and then clear his throat. "Well, that's also why I'm calling. I don't think you realize the magnitude of what Cobb's offering you."

"What is it, exactly, that Cobb's offering me? What could possibly exist in there that would induce me to go back?" She sits up in bed, expectant.

She doesn't know it then, but later on, she'll know his response is, as Eames puts it in that melodious voice of his, simply Arthurian. "Pure creation." He is nothing if not succinct, efficient.

"I… I have to think about it." It's the best she can come up with, because her mind has already started to run away from her. It is leaping at those two words of his, bulldozing her rationale, even her fear, to make way for coliseums, playgrounds, acoustic halls, landscapes and multi-dimensional skyscrapers.

"Of course", he says, smoothly. She wonders if he looks like the Cheshire cat on the other end of the line. "Good night, Ariadne."

"Good night, Arthur." She is more than halfway through completing Ariadneville's thriving downtown area when the shrill sound of her morning alarm goes off and she doesn't feel a bit tired at all.

She has Professor Laraby's class the next day; it could just be her sleep deprived mind playing tricks on her but there seems to be a speculative light in his eyes when she enters the lecture hall. She chooses to sit towards the back and proceeds to pour the hot contents of her coffee thermos down her throat. It's the second night in a row that she has gone without sleep. The good news is that she is more than caught up with her school assignments. There's been no further late night outreaches from Arthur, but her sketchbook is now filled with fantastical ideas. Even now, while the professor is speaking, the pencil in her hand is doodling something which would be impossible to sustain in reality. In dreams, she could literally build a castle on a cloud. She blinks, sitting up straighter and wonders when she started delineating reality and unreality in such a concrete manner.

The doors in the back of the hall open and Arthur settles in beside her. Professor Laraby is facing the projector, marveling at the architectural wonder of Gaudi. Ariadne opens her mouth to shoot a sharp retort at him, but it is silenced by the placement of his hand on her forearm. It is warm and oddly enough, rough and callused. She would have expected soft hands from the likes of him.

"What are you doing here?", she hisses loud enough to earn looks of admonishment from neighboring classmates. Childish, yes, but she's tired and retaliates by baring her teeth at them.

He raises an eyebrow, and on the opposite side of his face, a corner of his mouth tilts up.

"I told you I needed to think on it!" She hates the dark circles under her eyes that she didn't bother to cover with concealer; she hates that she decided running a hand through the bird's nest on top of her head was sufficient; and she most definitely hates how one of his long fingers has landed on her top page of doodles and he is looking at it like a father admiring his child's finger paintings.

"Ariadne, did you hear me?", Professor Laraby calls out from the front of the room.

For some reason, this upsets her even further and she rises, ready to point an accusatory finger at Arthur. Everyone's suddenly tittering and the professor's face is strangely contorted in distaste. "What in God's name...", the professor says.

"Ah, Ariadne", Arthur finally says. He seems to be staring at some distant spot past her shoulder.

"What, Arthur? What do you want from me? And for God's sake, what are they staring at?"

He makes a motion with his hand, his eyes still averted. "It probably has something to do with the nakedness."

She looks down at herself and sees the flush of embarrassment traverse its way from below her chest to her face. Oh no. She begins to slap herself, hard, chanting, "I'm in a dream, wake up. I'm in a dream, wake up."

Her head flies up from the spot on the desk it was resting on. A ribbon of drool has trickled from her mouth and down an arm. She glances around her, bleary eyed – her classmates are mostly focused on the lecture, but she's now become a part of that errant population which uses class time as nap time. She rubs a palm into her eye. A naked dream, how trite.

After class, her hope of an unnoticed exit is quashed when the professor calls out in a not-to-be-trifled-with tone, "Ariadne, a moment, if you will." Her shoulders slump and she drops her head until her chin is almost to her chest before she stands up and jogs down the steps to meet him at his desk.

"Yes, Professor?", she assumes the most innocent tone she can muster up and makes her eyes extra round.

He looks at her, then away, then back again and sighs. "Allow me to feel a measure of guilt", he says. "You see, I knew what you would be getting into when I introduced you to my son-in-law. So when you show up for class in, shall we say, less than pristine condition, I can only deduce it's because of whatever Dom revealed to you earlier this week."

She's prepared to deny, make excuses, lie outright; instead, she crumbles under the genuine concern in his blue eyes. He's always reminded her of her own grandfather. "Professor, I'm... I'm not sure what to do. Building in dreams? The possibilities are endless. But to use it to manipulate a person's mind? It's risky and unethical."

He nods, his expression never wavering. "It is indeed all of that. This dream sharing business has caused more grief to Dom than can be mentioned. I would no more recommend anyone intentionally seeking it out as I would be in promoting recreational drug use."

On the one hand, she feels a degree of sanity and normalcy return - dream sharing, extraction, it's madness. Of course she should stay away from it. She should pretend the whole ordeal never happened. She would be grateful if she never had to imagine Mal again. But on the other hand, part of her wonders, with some irritation, why, if the professor was so emphatically against dream sharing that he would introduce her to Dom in the first place. To sic Cobb on her, seducing her with the unspoken promise of being a living god, without any warning. She wants to know why the professor would think that makes any sense.

But of course it doesn't. She focuses on his expression again. There's something more than a mixing of sorrow and guilt there. Her eyes narrow. "What's your angle in all this?"

He doesn't so much smile as his lips curve up in a grimace. "It doesn't take long for you, does it? You're my most clever pupil, Ariadne. In many ways, you're my true protege."

His compliments only serve to increase her anxiety. "Just say it, Professor", she says, tightly.

"I can't make the decision for you to join or not join Dom's scheme. But I'm asking you to consider taking on the risk. There's more at stake than money, fame or reputation." He pauses, and removes his glasses in the silence. She suddenly notices his resemblance to Mal. It's the shape of their eyes and the nose. "You see, I think you can save Dom."

"Save Dom? From what? He looks like he's more than capable of taking care of himself. He would do better if he spent more time looking out for others, in fact."

Professor Laraby is suddenly holding his wallet out and sliding a shiny piece of paper that is wedged underneath his driver's license. He hands it to her; she peers at it a long time before she speaks. "They look so happy. I didn't know they had children."

He points to each child and names them as he does. "Philippa. James. This was taken two years ago. That's the last time these children saw their father."

"Why does he stay away from them?"

"Because Dom is filled with regret. He will die with it by his side if someone doesn't shake him free."

The silence ticks by as she stares at the wallet sized photo. "You think I can do it? Professor, I'm not a psychology major."

"No, you are better than that - you are the version of him that he has always wanted to become but has failed to achieve. You are the future and enthusiasm and possible possibilities wrapped into one. You are him without his ever present shadow."

She keeps looking down at Mal, all glossy, innocent beauty. "Do I want to know what happened to her?", she asks, slowly.

She watches her mentor age ten years in under five minutes. The instinct within which Arthur relies so heavily on is loud like a church organ. Though she is merely a novice in the theories of dream sharing, she is certain that Cobb's projection of his wife is abnormally malevolent. There is a reason why Cobb would engage an inexperienced grad student in a deal which must surely be worth more than four years' worth of tuition. There is a reason why both he and his father-in-law would place so much responsibility on her shoulders. There is no one else. There is no Mal. She feels, rather than sees, Professor Laraby take the picture away. "No," he finally says. "No, you don't want to know what happened to her."

Maybe that's what does it for her. She stands, clenches her hands into fists. "Thank you, Miles. You've helped me tremendously. I will see you at our next class." She turns and leaves the man older and sadder than she ever remembers him.

She allows herself one night more. She shuts off her phone, takes a sleeping pill and tells herself she will not see Mal when she falls asleep. She doesn't. She dreams instead of swimming in a sea of grapes, wearing a gypsy costume.

In the morning she wakes up, feeling calm and clearheaded for the first time in 72 hours. She has no problem finding her way back to Cobb's and Arthur's headquarters. This time, she doesn't even make it more than a few feet past the gate before the door is swinging open and he is leaning against the frame. He looks much the same as the day they first met; and she's glad she no longer looks like a used mop. She breezes past him, but lets him lead the way back to the second floor. Neither of them make any attempt to say any words until they are back in the room.

"So, what made you come back?" He is truly baffled.

A million things run through her mind. She thinks about her safe, quiet and unassuming life. She thinks about the path which lies ahead of her; about hot fromage crepes during cold Parisian winters; about spending hours through the Louvre and holding her mother's hand the first time she saw the Mona Lisa. She thinks about building houses of cards on Sunday evenings with her grandfather and then progressing on to popsicle sticks and shoeboxes. She smiles up at Arthur and thinks about Miles, Philippa and James. "Pure creation", she responds, succinct and efficient.