Disclaimer: All hail Christopher Nolan! I am but a dreamer.

Reclusion

Chapter 1: The Filter

They're an official team now.

Of course, there's nothing 'official' in the world of dreams and extraction. It was the first thing Arthur had firmly impressed upon her when she cornered him in the airport shop at LAX, demanding in a low but adamant voice to be part of the next job. He told her they had been lucky Saito had enough political leverage to clear all the security checks for them. He told her they had been lucky the inception resulted in a situation with no real losers that would plague her pristine conscience. He told her she might as well thank her lucky stars now and walk away while she still could, fly back to Paris, and become a real, honest architect.

She told him to shut up.

Eames, who had been hidden behind a rack of postcards silently perusing the latest issue of Penthouse magazine, chuckled and told Arthur he might as well hire her, seeing as she was the best damn architect he'd ever met and they'd have a fucking hard time finding one who could suit their needs after being spoiled by her. Arthur didn't dignify this crude statement with an answer and strolled out of the shop with The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm.

The three of them left the airport that afternoon in three separate cabs that drove to three separate hotels. But by the next morning, they were all back at LAX with new names and passports, flying coach to Rome.

They left Cobb in suburbia with his children and parents-in-law. (Catching a glimpse of Professor Miles when they had landed, Ariadne had had to glance at her phone to remember that summer vacation started two weeks ago.) The scrolling news ticker on CNN had told them that Saito had just inked a lucrative deal that morning, even as his former rival was being laid to rest. Yusuf was newly arrived in the city of sin, having rented a car upon landing and braving the Los Angeles rush hour traffic to start his drive to Las Vegas.

Squished between Eames and Arthur in the middle section of the plane, smirking over the former's attempt to chat up the woman across the aisle and enduring the silence of the latter, Ariadne mentally began to compose the letter she would send to the department of student affairs at the university, regretfully informing them of her desire to discontinue her studies at their esteemed institution.

It was a letter she never sent. The Rome job wasn't nearly as clean as the Fischer inception had been. Even though it was a simple extraction, so simple that Eames had scoffed when Arthur outlined the situation for them, things had gone very wrong.

Their employer had been an art collector whose drive for acquisition bordered on the obsessive. The Mark had been some young Italian prince, and the information was over the whereabouts of some priceless piece of art. They found out in the middle of the dream that he had no clue where the painting was, had hardly any recollection of it other than being yelled at for touching it when he was a child.

With Eames swearing up a storm and Arthur white with anger, they had prepared to exit the dream. But the memory continued. The Mark's mother swooped in, defending her little boy against the rage of his father - who turned out wasn't even his father. Arthur and Eames shot the Mark, but they weren't fast enough.

When he woke up, the Mark fully remembered the suppressed memory. He remembered he wasn't really the heir of all the modest but comfortable wealth around him. He remembered his father wasn't really his father, but he was the result of the incestuous rape of his mother by his grandfather.

Arthur, Ariadne, and Eames, exiting the villa from the servants' entrance, all looked up just in time to see the Mark hurl himself to his death from the top of the villa.

When they went to the airport the next morning, separately but all destined for the same flight to Brazil, Ariadne stopped at the ticket counter and changed her flight for one to Paris. She thought she could leave without either of them noticing, but just as she was handing in her ticket at the gate, she saw Arthur watching her from across the terminal. A large group of high school students on holiday blocked her vision of him, and when they had passed, he was gone. She boarded the plane.

Her apartment and the Paris heat proved to be too boring after two days, so she enrolled in classes for the summer term, trading in her freedom for the air-conditioned university libraries, trying to make up for all the work she had missed. After giving it one last flick, she put away her totem. She sold to the thrift store down the street the scarf she had bought in Italy, destroyed her two fake passports, and changed her phone number. She knew it would be no problem at all for the Point Man to find out her new number, but hopefully it would deter Eames from calling when he got drunk, begging her to come back, especially since Arthur had been unbearable since she left.

By fall, she was back on track to graduate at the end of the school year, which is exactly what she did, with honors. She accepted the only job offer she got at an upcoming but upscale firm in New York City and began her career as a real, honest architect. She was interviewing a couple that had just bought land near the Hamptons. They were new money but trying desperately to look like old and failing miserably. The woman, especially, was having a difficult time keeping up the act. Her clothes might be designer, but her vocabulary and education hadn't been. She peppered her sentences with architects and buildings that had no business being mentioned in the same speech.

But she hadn't made her money without being shrewd, so she finally paused, took in Ariadne's patient but carefully schooled expression, and said plainly she didn't want her home to be a maze but something easily seen as big, grand, and rich.

Ariadne promised she would work something out and scheduled an appointment for them to come in next week, when she'd have some preliminary sketches done for them.

Later that evening, as she sat in her office, her client's words echoed in her head. Not a maze. She looked down at her sketch of the most boring building she had ever designed and knew she couldn't do it anymore. Her client might not want a maze, but she did. She wanted impossible mazes that defied physics, mazes you could get lost in with a fun Forger whose outfits were defiantly rumpled and a professional Point Man whose outfits defied wrinkles. She wanted five-star hotels, run-down motels, and airport terminals around the world, not this cutting-edge, glass-walled office with her name spelled out on the door and boring clients who wanted increasingly boring homes to fit their boring lives.

Ariadne blinked. She could just make out a figure across the street. Surely it couldn't be Arthur, sacrificing his pressed Armani suit in the unforgiving downpour? A car turned the street corner, illuminating him for a moment.

Ariadne was out of the office before the car had completed the turn. For the first time, she was glad the entire building had glass walls. She didn't tear her eyes off his figure as she raced through the empty office, not caring if the glass doors she burst through bounced alarmingly against the glass walls.

She was soaked by the time she stood in front of him. Of course he hadn't sacrificed his Armani suit. He was standing beneath an overhang, perfectly dry. As for her, there was no more trace of her carefully curled curls, and she dreaded to think of the state her suede Louboutins were in.

Arthur would tell her later he thought she never looked more beautiful.

The city streets and torrential rain reminded her so much of the first dream level of the Fischer inception that she wished she had her totem with her just to make sure. Then Arthur kissed her, and she knew it had to be reality since she never could have dreamed it that well.

Awhile later, she was wrapped in his jacket, which dwarfed her even though he was far from broad-shouldered. She looked up at him and informed him she would be his architect for the next job and all jobs thereafter.

He told her that wasn't what he expected. He told her she couldn't give up her New York office, $75,000 a year, and growing reputation in the architecture world. He told her they could work it out if he cut back on international jobs and tried to stay around the city. He told her he didn't want extraction to ruin her, to ruin them. He told her he didn't want them to end up like Mal and Cobb.

Eames, having abandoned his spot in a doorway a few feet away when they started their make out session and having just completed his fifth circuit of the block, told him to shut up.

Pointedly ignoring him, Arthur asked her why she wanted to go back to extraction now.

Half a dozen answers came to mind. Architecture in the real world was boring. She didn't like New York City. Her office had glass walls. The headboard of the couple next door was always banging against her wall. Any paycheck paled in comparison to the one she got from Saito. She missed getting shot at by projections of someone's subconscious.

She settled on the one that was actually, sadly the most true.

The dress code at work didn't allow scarves.

At 9 o'clock the next morning, Ariadne marched into her boss' office and quit. By eleven, she had cleared out her office, and by three that afternoon, she had cleared out her apartment. She tossed out all her business formal attire, even though she knew she could match Arthur perfectly, and packed her old university clothing: jeans, tanks, sweaters, and scarves. By six o'clock, she was dining with Eames and Arthur at Masa, the most expensive restaurant in the city, and by nine o'clock, she was flying sandwiched between them on a red-eye to L.A. for a quick visit to Cobb before continuing on to Tokyo for their next job.

Tokyo was followed by Moscow, which was followed by Johannesburg, which was followed by Rio de Janeiro and a dozen other cities Ariadne never though she would visit. Arthur bought her a new scarf at each one. Eames said he'd never seen Arthur so romantic.

Saito sent them clients who faced similar predicaments, and in the dog-eat-dog world of business, Ariadne's conscience barely prickled as they helped one company gain an edge over another. Through old contacts, Eames and Arthur also heard about other, more personal jobs. They rarely took these, however, especially after what had happened in Rome.

They visited Cobb whenever they had a stopover at LAX, and there were always visits to Yusuf in Mombasa when they needed the Chemist's concoctions for anything more involved than a simple extraction. But as Cobb stayed in Los Angeles with Philippa and James, and Yusuf with his new and growing family in Mombasa, Ariadne sat squished between Arthur and Eames in coach or stretched out beside them in first class on a flight to their next job.

They were an official team now. Arthur acted as Point Man and Extractor, researching and extracting efficiently and thoroughly, like he did everything else. Ariadne built mazes of increasing difficulty and, after letting slip that she had been particularly good at chemistry in high school, acted as a makeshift Chemist if they couldn't make it to Mombasa between jobs.

Once, when Arthur tersely told her to stop showing off after he got lost for an hour in one of her mazes, she retaliated by dreaming him in sweats. He hadn't commented on her work after that.

Eames continued being a Forger and overall Support Man, with a bit of Comic Relief on the side.

Since about half of their jobs didn't require a Forger, he kept his hand in it by imitating either Arthur or Ariadne to the other. To his disappointment, Ariadne always seemed to figure out it was him after a few moments, and to his horror, Arthur had tried to kiss him once when he was disguised as Ariadne, putting an end to that experiment.

They were in Alaska a year after Ariadne had left her job in New York, researching the life of a recluse who had shuttered himself away more than two years ago, giving up a promising career in science when he was on the verge of a great breakthrough. The engineering organization that hired them was the recluse's former employer, and they wanted to know what it was that he had discovered, in the hopes that it could save their floundering enterprise.

Unfortunately, access to the recluse was hard enough in itself, and Arthur's research indicated that the man had had extensive training in dream defense. Trying to take on his heavily armed mind would be quite futile, especially with just three of them fending off the highly militant projections.

After a moment's silent thought, Arthur suggested they pass up on the job, especially as they had several offers on the table that they could complete in the time it would take to pull off this one. The looks on Ariadne's and Eames' faces ended that discussion.

"Even if – even when we find a way to get into the Mark's home, his mind will be a fortress. There will be a highly organized army waiting for us the second we go under. And with his experience and intelligence, I doubt even your best maze could distract them for long, Ariadne."

"Would it help if Cobb and Yusuf went in this one time?" Ariadne suggested, rubbing her gloved fingers together to generate some warmth.

They were in an empty storage unit with a table, three chairs, and a lamp as their only source of light. She was wearing a down parka that made her look like a miniature version of the Michelin man and several scarves wrapped around her neck. Arthur looked dapper as ever in a wool trench coat over his usual three-piece suit, leather gloves, and a Burberry muffler. Eames, who had had some choice comments about that last article of Arthur's clothing, was wearing a leather jacket with his collar unbuttoned despite the cold.

"I doubt we could convince them to come out, and it's not how many people we have with us, it's the kind of people." Arthur wasn't looking at Ariadne but at Eames, who had walked a couple steps away from them and stood with his back toward them. "We need a Filter."

"What's a Filter?" Ariadne asked, filling the silence that followed.

"A Filter is someone who suppresses the Mark's subconscious," Arthur explained. "With someone of little or no training, a Filter would enable us to run around a Mark's mind and build the strangest things without the projections attacking or even noticing. With someone like this Mark, the projections wouldn't be completely neutralized, but they could be held at bay with enough time to perform the extraction."

"Why doesn't every extraction team have a Filter then? It would make every job so much easier."

"Filters are very rare. You have to train a Filter from a very young age, while the brain is still developing. The distance between conscious and subconscious grows as we grow older. That's why children's nightmares always seem so much more frightening to them. A Filter is trained to control - for lack of a better word - their subconscious, and this carries over to another's subconscious in dream sharing."

Ariadne looked shocked. "But who would do that to a child?" she demanded. "Who would choose a life like this for a kid, before they could choose for themselves?" she added, when Arthur raised an eyebrow at her.

"That's why they're very rare. Only someone who knows very well what he's doing can train a Filter without damaging them. It's frowned upon now, which is as close to regulation in the extraction world as you can get. But twenty, thirty years ago, when the technology was being developed, the handful of extractors experimented often."

"Mal," Ariadne gasped. "Is that what Mal was? Did Professor Miles train her to be a Filter?"

"Yes, she's one of the success stories," Arthur said. "Miles knew what he was doing. So many more became deranged, clinically insane, or vegetables when their subconscious was damaged or worse, took over. She was one of two Filters I ever met."

Arthur was looking at Eames again. Ariadne slowly looked from him to Eames, who was still facing away from them, standing outside the circle of light their lamp afforded.

"We don't know if she's still in the business," Eames finally said, not a trace of his usual humor in his voice. "It's been years –"

"Filters don't lose their touch. It's invariably part of them, whether they like it or not. She can still do it even if the last job she did was the Chicago one."

Another long stretch of silence answered Arthur's words, and even though Ariadne was burning to ask questions, she didn't break it.

"Fine," Eames snapped. "But I'm not going to contact her."

"I wasn't going to ask you to," Arthur said neutrally, the definition of professionalism. "I'll track her down, and we can go from there."

"She was living in London a month ago," Eames said grudgingly. "I can give you her contact information back at the hotel."

And without waiting for them, he stalked toward the door and slammed it behind him. They heard the car start but thankfully Eames didn't drive away. Ariadne helped Arthur gather all the notes and documents scattered on the table.

"I'll explain to you back at the hotel," Arthur promised, flicking off the light and plunging them in darkness. Somehow, his hand found hers, and he guided her out into the glaring Alaskan sunlight.