A/N: Hey there, new story as you can all see. I hope you enjoy it as I shall while I write it. Inspired by Imogen Heap's song 'Speeding Cars'. There was no beta and please review! Hopefully this will go far, the chapters, will vary in length because longer chapters are more time consuming to write and update, so hopefully by keeping the chapters slightly shorter, I'll be able to upload a new chapter more frequently. But be warned, I'm awful at it.

Speeding Cars

Chapter 1: Just Run

She couldn't believe it. It had been two years, two long years of complete solitude. She had disappeared off the map, laid low, stuck to the plan. And now? She held the card in her hand, re reading the onyx script on the blue and gold plated paper. Her mouth was agape and her brown orbs were wide.

Dear Ariadne,

This must be an unexpected surprise. Hopefully you are doing well, and the past few years have been beneficial. However, I would like to invite you to a formal dinner. I suspect you will recognize a few more of my guests. We will be having dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in California, the address in on the following card. I hope you will be able to attend.

Sincerely,

Saito.

The reunion was scheduled in a weeks time and was located in northern California. She contemplated this and stared at her calendar. Surely she could take off a few days for this dinner and spend some time out of town. Since she had been living at home, she had hardly left the small town. Ariadne had developed a schedule. Monday through Friday she worked a standard nine to five day job at a small architecture firm which specialized in making community buildings such as schools, churches, and orphanages. On Saturday and Sunday she would relax at home, go grocery shopping and swim in her mind of beautifully vivid memories.

This invitation blew her schedule to pieces. Surely this dinner was not an act of spontaneity. It was almost like a summon rather than a casual reunion dinner amongst colleges. There was no doubt in her mind that her company would consist of the previous dream team, no pun intended. Cobb, Arthur, and Eames would be there, she knew. Did Saito have a new job for them? Did something go wrong with Inception? Did Fischer finally find out about Saito's intrusion on his mind? Ariadne couldn't help but think further into this, but had to halt her train of thought before it went into overdrive. All she knew was that: she was going to this dinner.

After performing inception on Fischer they had landed in the United States. Suddenly, they became a team of strangers, all skillfully, but casually taking no notice to each other. It was essential that they show little relation between them, just in case something had gone horribly wrong and they needed to disappear.

Ariadne's life had fallen slowly into place. She returned to school for her final year and graduated successfully. Her mother passed away of disease shortly after, leaving her home and property to Ariadne. There she settled, packing family things away and turning the home steadily into her own. She became an adult, and no longer completely naïve of the surrounding world.

She enjoyed her work…to an extent of course. It was almost maddening the antagonizing slow process of building a new structure. Budgets were needed, laborers were required, time was wasted - in her opinion- constructing the building. They no longer appeared like sprouting weeds on a lawn, nor did they defeat the laws of physics which she had to re-teach herself after her deep involvement in the dream world. Ah, the dream world. Ariadne relished in it, fantasized about it, wished to bring it upon herself once again. She relapsed into her fond memories of near impossible creation and discovery which all seemed to real to her, it had taken her two years to ground herself and still every morning and every night, Ariadne would tip over her bishop totem allowing the light 'thunk' of the wood hitting a flat surface resonate off of her surroundings. Would she ever be able to forget the dream world? No. Did she want to? That was a new question for which she dared not to answer. While her experiences during her slumber were marvelous and often fond, they continued to leave a haunting feeling, a chill that would tingle slowly up her spine as she would remember the terrifying details of her personal occurrences.

Do you know what it's like to be a lover? Half of a whole….

Mal's voice stuck with her for months upon months. She haunted her in a peculiar way, as if to remind her that what she did was very real, almost too real. Every time Ariadne would recall the gorgeous woman who toyed within her colleague Dom Cobb's dreams, her lines of reality and dreams were blurred and meshed uncomfortably.

And each time Mal's famous words would echo through her head, Ariadne couldn't think of another answer other than the single word ' No.' She had sat with her totem for two days straight, never leaving the house, attempting to redefine what the dream was and was not. But that was two years ago. Before she had adapted to her new ways of life. However, there was an underlying fear bubbling deep within the architect. A feeling buried in an abyss of emotion within herself which made her want to vomit of mental and physical sickness. It left a daunting and obvious question running through her mind ever since she had received the invitation. That, if she were to enter the dream world yet again, would she be able to escape it?